Sometimes a Symbol's What My Mind (Makes Up) Of It

I mentioned in Monday's post that I thought some of Ferry's page layouts were kind of odd, and possibly were done to represent symbols or something that might relate to tabletop games, since the cast were stuck in one.

Kelvin asked if I could post an example, since I went with the enjoyable sight of Clea walloping Mordo mid-villainous spiel, rather than actually showing the thing I spent a paragraph of the review discussing.

I don't want to post too much stuff from a comic that came out just last week. Don't need to get Peter David on my case like he was after scans daily back in the day. So we'll stick to the page I mentioned first, seen above. This is the one that made me wonder if Ferry was making deliberate reference to something, because it really feels like something I've seen before. Circle atop three narrow (I suppose the middle one isn't so narrow) panels, though the image I see in my mind may have wings on either side of the circle.

None of the others produced as strong a reaction as this one, but that could just be a product of my upbringing, assuming there's anything to any of this. Or I could just be seeing things.

House of Danger

I hadn't realized there were board games based on Choose Your Adventure books, but here we are. It's not a competitive game, as there's only one character. So whether you play by yourself or with others, you control the same character.

The game is split into Chapters, each of which has a goal you have to achieve before you can move to the next Chapter. The story is written out on numbered cards, with the old, "If you want to do {x}, go to Card 27. If you want to do {y}, go to Card 14." When you reach the Chapter's end, you are given the option to go back and investigate places you didn't in the Chapter. The risk being you might be killed. We tried backtracking once in Chapter 1, and were torn apart by Dobermans controlled by a violin-playing chimp.

We didn't backtrack any more after that.

The game gives you two cards that have items on them that can help you. It's always the same two items, but there are many others you can collect as you move through the game. Some of those are one-offs, others can be used as much as you want. The board has two scales on it, Danger Level and Psychic Level. When faced with a Challenge, you have to roll a die and get equal to or higher than the Danger Level to succeed. Psychic Level will enable you to find extra Clues that could come in handy. If you fail a Challenge, the game will tell you to raise the Danger Level a certain number of spaces, and try again. It isn't a 1:1 that the Danger Level increases by, more like 3 spaces to increase by 1. But that could certainly complicate things in a hurry.

I think, if there's more than one person involved, you're supposed to take turns on who rolls the die and who decides which options to take. I was playing with a friend, it was their game, and they handled all the die rolling, and we largely discussed which options to take. It is possible to get a bad ending, as you might expect. In our case, we needed to do more exploring and risk-taking, because we ended up not having some key items.

But it's a fast, easy to learn choice if you want to play something cooperative, or just kill some time solo.

Bring An Inner Tube For This Adventure

While visiting a friend two weekends ago, we played a card game she'd gotten for Christmas called Forbidden Island. The goal is for the players, working cooperatively, to recover four treasures from an island before the island sinks.

The island is made up of tiles that you shuffle and then lay out in a particular pattern. So where locations are in relation to each other will change each time (The art on the tiles is nice. The locations make me think of Myst, a little*). For each artifact, there are two locations where it could be collected. Each player draws a card that determines what role they are. There are six, I think. There were only two of us; I pulled the Pilot, my friend got the Diver. Each player gets up to three actions, which can involve moving to adjacent tiles, sharing cards with your teammates, or shoring up flooded portions of the island.

Because at the end of each player's turn, after their actions and after they draw from the treasure card deck, they have to draw two cards from the Flood Deck, and those two tiles become flooded. You can still navigate through them, or collect treasures from them, but if their card is drawn again, before you shore that tile up, it sinks below the waves and is lost. If that was the last place you could collect the Chalice of Waters, well, you lose. If it was the last tile that connected you to a place you could collect a treasure from, you lose. Within the same deck as the treasure cards are Waters Rise! cards. These make you put all the locations you'd already drawn from the Flood Deck back on top of the pile (so you're certain to grab them soon), and makes you increase the water level one notch (which may increase the number of cards you have to draw from the Flood Deck).

So within your turn, you have to keep in mind what tiles you have to keep above water, and how likely they are to be in danger. And who has the best chance at grabbing a particular treasure (which requires having four cards from the treasure deck of that treasure). So you have to use your actions wisely. We ended up lucking out because the Diver can deal with flooded sections easily enough, and the Pilot is able to fly anywhere on the island he wants for an action, rather than move one adjacent tile at a time. And the game wants you to work together, and encourages other players to offer suggestions to whoever's turn it is on what would be best. I expected it was an every man for himself thing going in, so that was a pleasant surprise.

It's also a game that claims to be relatively quick that actually was. There are so many games that say it'll take an hour to play, but that first time through you have to keep checking the rules, trying to decipher the order of things, and it takes three times as long. This one is supposed to take less than an hour, and I think we ran pretty close to that.

I'd be curious to see how it goes with more players. It would give you more people to go for treasures, but it also means more tiles are getting flooded in each round, and the treasure cards probably ended up more dispersed, which makes it harder to get four of the same one to a single player.

* I mentioned that to my friend, then admitted I had only played the game once, at a different friend's house, and he got me trapped in a book on purpose.

An Inconclusive Conclusion

When we last left our merry band o' dungeon crawling fools, they had managed to kill a couple of grumpy trolls, and found the king's birth certificate. Now, they just need to get out of this labyrinth. Fortunately, they already found the exit during their earlier wandering. Unfortunately, there are more of those light-hating wraiths.

The battle is a mess. Nobody on either side can score any hits, although Taug at least avoids hitting himself this time. Thandril provides Mage Armor for everyone except Will, a decision that isn't going to endear the Wizard to the Ranger any time soon. Taug manages to finish one, as the wizard decides to summon bats, to little effect. Will has run out of arrows, but is having more luck hitting the Wraiths with his sword, anyway. Roric finishes the second wraith, only for a Death Wraith to emerge. The battle drags on, both sides still struggling to score hits. Thandril decides now is the time to experiment with summoning a giant beetle, even though he doesn't know how to use it. Eventually, the Wraith falls under the assault of whatever the team can manage to throw at it. At least nobody takes much damage.

Sunlight, wonderful sunlight. They've escaped the labyrinth! The party is supposed to head for Cranville to meet their contact, but encounter some farmers along the way, who warn of recent problems along one of the roads to town, something to do with strange voices. The party, low on supplies, opts to avoid unnecessary fighting and take the other road. This results in a mostly uneventful trip into Cranville. The only thing of interest is Will is befriends an osprey, and the William/Oswald duo lives again.

Immediately on reaching the edge of Cranville, a Mrs. Lushin steps out of a tavern offering food and rooms. The team enters, but Rory is eager to find himself a workshop, where he can craft some upgrades. Will is suspicious of this helpful innkeeper, and uses the excuse of needing some arrows to leave with the alchemist. It doesn't take long to find a blacksmith, who is happy to rent a workshop to the gnome for a while. Will inquires about arrows, and is told to check with the fletcher next door. Will feigns stupidity, and wanders the town, looking unsuccessfully for a house belonging to "Fletcher". This keeps him out of whatever might be going down at the tavern, but makes a poor impression on Oswald, who is questioning being a Companion to an idiot.

The orc and the bard, on the other hand, decide now is a good time to get into a drinking contest with some pleasant red-bearded guy sitting in the corner. Thandril at least tries to interrogate the innkeeper, who claims to be their contact. Which is funny, since they're supposed to be meeting a Mrs. Pierce. Thandril decides it's time to go, but Mrs Lushin has other ideas. Taug and Bart break off their drinking to swagger up and intimidate her, to no effect. Unless you consider Taug catching a Magic Missile in the face an effect. The bard does better, actually managing to hurt her, which prompts a lot of cursing. Thandril uses Shocking Grasp, and while he dodges a Fireball sent his way, he can't avoid a barrage of Magic Missiles. He's badly hurt. Taug tries charging to the rescue, but is too drunk and only succeeds in injuring himself. Things look bad for the trio, but as a last-ditch move, Thandril summons spiders. Mrs. Lushin apparently is afraid of those, and flees.

It turns out the friendly red-bearded guy is the actual owner of the tavern. He didn't question why Mrs. Lushin wanted to pretend to be owner for a while, because at least it would be something interesting. He isn't too worried about the damage to his place, either. As he starts to explain some of the more interesting features of the town, like the tourism industry built around nymphs living in a particularly excellent cherry tree, Will and Rory return. Will did finally buy some arrows, and Roric made him a better bow, as well as some chainmail for Taug. Pity it won't protect the orc from self-inflicted damage.

Which is pretty much where we ended. The field season concluded, and the crew scattered to the four corners of the Earth. The campaign wasn't bad for someone who had no experience with the game whatsoever. I wish I'd asked Jo what else she had planned. I do feel like we might have needed to start at a higher level. The battles seemed like a fumbling mess, possibly because we were so limited in our abilities. Or maybe it was just bad dice rolls. Or we're just bad at the game. I appreciated that Jo gave Rory the chance to use some of his crafting skills. In that previous campaign, I know some of the players felt they'd wasted their time putting points into Skills they thought would be good, and then never got to use them.

Anyway, that's it for this feature.

An Irritating Variable Joins The Party!

The last time I discussed my third D&D campaign, our crew had narrowly survived fighting some wraiths in a labyrinth, and decided to take a rest, since there was no one to do any healing. We awoke 8 hours later to the sound of approaching footsteps, which belonged to a bard who introduced himself as Bart. Bart claimed to have been sent by the king who hired us, though Will and the elf were both skeptical. Still, he was allowed to come along, although his love of dumb, raunchy jokes meant we were reconsidering that almost immediately.

Much wandering in the labyrinth resulted in us finding a chest, which we were able to open, netting each of us 100 gold pieces. Ka-ching! When we came upon a door, the bard kicked it open, but we were just back at an earlier crossroads. Taug heard distant stomping, but couldn't tell where it was coming from. So we tried another hallway and found another chest. With a shadow lurking behind it. Thandril couldn't detect any magic involved and approached the chest, which was naturally alive. The bard shows what he's worth by running off to blow his nose, while Taug charges right in. Between the four of us that stuck around, the mimic didn't pose much trouble.

Continuing through the maze, we found a hidden door. All right! But whatever is behind it was the source of the loud thumping. Moving on then. Taug uses those half-orc senses and detects basilisks somewhere up ahead. Will knows enough about basilisks to know he doesn't want any part of them, so the group tries a different direction. We see a light in the distance that might be the way out, useful to know for later, although there are more wraiths between it and us. Still wandering, we find another door, but the stomping is just as loud behind it as it was behind the hidden door. Peering in, we see two trolls who seems trapped in the room, the door we're using being too small. For lack of better options, we rush in.

Will immediately scores a hit to the eye on one of the trolls, seriously wounding it. It responds by lashing out and swatting the bard, nearly killing him. Given the bard had spent the entire time we were searching goading Taug to the edge of violence, only to back down each time, we weren't exactly worried for him, but as long as he was alive, he might serve as a distraction. So Thandril summons the Celestial Dog again and lets loose with Magic Missiles. Rory had Lightning Touch in a bottle (accept no substitutes) and unleashed that against the troll as the bard picked himself up, healed a little and ran away.

Meanwhile, the other troll is after Will, so Taug charges in. The two of them are letting the troll have it from both directions, but he's holding up well under the onslaught. So Taug goes into Enrage to up the ante, and finishes that troll off. Thandril's finding himself in enough trouble to don Mage Armor, but can still take time to clap sarcastically when the cowering bard finds the birth certificate on the ground in the far corner of the room. The troll he's fighting, perhaps confused by this, turns to attack Will instead, only to run up against Taug. Everyone takes their shots, and the troll falls.

At which point the wizard marches up to Bart and takes the certificate. The bard tries to intimidate Thandril, and fails. He's still able to throw in a few snide remarks about the wizard's mama. With most of the crew having taken at least a little damage, we opted to make camp for a night.

This King Must Have Been Desperate

The third, and thus far final, D&D campaign I played in started a year after the previous one. I was still in the boonies, as was my friend who played as Taug. She'd been trying to convince me to run a campaign, but I was not interested. Still, she'd drummed up interest between a few other members of the crew (all the other people from the previous year were gone), and eventually convinced one of them to run the campaign. Considering the person had zero D&D experience, possibly a risky choice, but I wasn't getting off my ass to do it, so better than nothing.

So Taug was back in action, along with Will the Ranger, but the DM opted to start us at Level 3, which was even weaker than where we started the previous campaign. So, because I have to overthink these things, and because I wanted to do something with the "all my loved ones were merged into a flesh golem" development from the very first campaign, I decided that Will had, at some point after the campaign concluded, tried to find a way back in time to fix things, and instead wound up in a parallel timeline. Close to his, but not quite. His memories overlaid on whatever Will existed there already. The body isn't trained up to do the stuff he could manage as a Level 15 Ranger, which is why he's fairly limited (I stole that part from GrimJack).

The main goal was for Will to be more cynical and much slower to trust. He had agreed to take part in that campaign, and it got everyone killed. The campaign prior to this, the cleric turned out to be a doppelganger who robbed them and later tried to kill people. So Will's not taking anything at face value. Except maybe Taug. He trusts Taug, who seems pretty much the same as the one he remembers, if a little bigger, as much as he trusts anyone.

Anyway, beyond those two, the team initially consisted of just two other characters: Thandril, an elf wizard, and Roric, a gnome alchemist. We're hired to help a usurped king recover his birth certificate, so he can prove he is supposed to be ruling. We head for an old fortress, the interior of which is a maze. One tunnel leads to a dead. The next leads to a room full of wraiths. They don't like the light of our torches, but it doesn't harm them. Only sunlight will do that, and it's in short supply inside this stone tomb.

What ensues is, calling it a "fight" might be giving it too much credit. All four attack Taug, but all of them miss. Taug, Will, and Rory all score hits, but then the half-orc and the gnome start taking damage. Taug critical misses an attack of opportunity, then does it again. The wizard summons a clone version of the wolf goddess Amaterasu, but everyone is missing with their attacks. Amaterasu manages to do a little damage before the spell ends, and the wizard works off that to finish it with a Magic Missile, but another of them attacks Will. Taug manages a critical hit to kill one, and Will is able to finish the one right in his face. Taug scores another critical hit, and Will ends the fight.

And for all that, we got a map scroll. Credit to our DM, who actually drew a map and rolled it up like a scroll. Props were a nice touch. Still, the party is pretty beat to hell, and once again, we failed to get any sort of healer in the mix. The best we could manage was to sleep for 8 hours in a room full of wraith corpses. And when we awoke, we had a visitor.

A Party of Fightin' Fools

Last time on Calvin's Second D&D Campaign, the party reached a fortress on a distant island. And at the entrance, we encountered a delightful quartet of two Minotaurs, a flesh golem, and a wizard.

Given that most of the campaigns I've been involved in were being played by newcomers to the game, it won't surprise you to learn our parties generally sucked at any sort of cohesive strategy. We never really sat down and tried to figure out how our abilities could mesh and overlap in fights, which may have made things more of a trial than strictly necessary. Basically, everyone picks a target and starts attacking.

Something Power Attacked Will, doing enough damage he used the magic carpet to get a safe distance away. The monk killed the Minotaur, and with the benefit of those Acid arrows that came with his nifty quiver, Will melted one of the golems. Our wizard had some trouble with the opposing spell-slinger, taking a Fireball to the face and having her invisibility dispelled. Some Flame arrows dispatched the other Minotaur, and with seven foes closing in, the wizard tried flying away. A combo of Frost and Fire arrows brought him to the ground, and Taug dealt the finishing blow.

Inside the fortress, the walls are lined with mirrors. OK, interesting decorating choice, definitely not ominous. Cora can sense an imprisonment spell, but can't undo it. She continues down the hall and promptly steps into an abyss hidden by an illusion. Fortunately Nylis' griffin makes the save. Using the griffin and the carpet to get past it, we find one room with two chests, labeled 1 and 2, and another hallway, filled with more mirrors. Fearing a repeat of our last experience with chests, we ignore them and continue down the hall, to a door. Which opens on a room with more mirrors. This doppelganger's a freak. There are also a bunch of cages on the ceiling, full of people, including the missing cleric.

Obviously a trap, right? Taug removes one of the doors so we can't be sealed in, and he and Will both stay in the hall as everyone else steps inside. It doesn't help as reflections of each member of the party - including the osprey and the griffin - emerge from mirrors on the opposite wall. So it's on. Since we're each directly opposite of our reflections, that's who most of the initial attacks are directed at. Mirror Will scores one hit on me, the Mirror bard dodges a Fireball. Will scored three hits on his opposite, which was almost enough to kill him, but not quite. The next moment, Will finds his mind under control of the mirror bard, which compels him to go into the hall (this does take him away from the griffin that was about to try and eat him) and smash one of the mirrors. Out pops a flesh golem, which promptly attacks Will. This leaves his poor osprey stuck fighting a griffin.

Things start to turn as our griffin kills Mirror Will, and the team begins targeting the mirrors the reflections emerged from. In quick order the mirror versions of the griffin, monk, barbarian, and wizard vanish. Leah and Nylis, having no luck with ranged attacks, decide to Charge the flesh golem together, and the halfing thief gets hammered. Crulin and Oswald jump in, and Oswald nearly finishes the golem, but not before the monk gets badly crushed. The griffin destroys the mirror of the evil osprey, even as the reflection of Leah does a surprising amount of damage to Taug. Will's mind is his own by now, and he's back firing arrows everywhere, downing the golem. Cora smashes the last few mirrors to end the fight.

That done, all the prisoners are freed from their cages, and we use the flying carpet and the griffin to get them out of the fortress so they can go back home through the portal. Before venturing any further, we go back to open one of the chests. We find some healing potions and a lot of cash. One way or the other, we're covered for medical services. Hooray! Especially since Ordai decided to bail on us. I understand he might be traumatized, but his freaking sister is staying to help, you'd think he wouldn't abandon her. Still, 7 of us against one doppelganger, and it doesn't have the element of surprise (although after all the shouting a mirror-smashing, neither do we). We got this. Into the crypt!

Turns out the doppelganger has a couple of henchmen, both of them more powerful than any of us (we're about Level 7 at this point). Will once again hits with 3 of 4 arrows, which is just enough to piss off one of the goons, who Curses Will, neutralizing several of his attack bonuses. Cora tried a multi-target fire spell against Milo and Temperance, but it turned out to be a lot weaker than she expected. Taug, meanwhile, is finding little success with a bow. With the two lackeys as a shield, the doppelganger moves towards some of the corpses in the corner. Will scores another 25 points of damage, which gets Temperance mad enough to charge. Will's life flashes before his eyes, but Taug gets attacked instead, and loses at least three-quarters of his hit points. Crulin attempted to vault on top of a coffin, and only succeeded in crashing into a pedestal, leaving him open to an attack from Milo (though Milo hit himself with the other attack). The rest of the team is finding it extremely difficult to even hit any of these enemies, and the best damage dealers are about one more good attack each from being dead. Oh, and the doppelganger has succeeded in raising the dead. The odds are dimming.

At the point, Ordai returns. This doesn't signal an immediate reversal of fortune, as Nylis hits herself, but Sage is able to wound Milo, and Leah kills Temperance. Will deals 54 points of damage to Milo, and Crulin destroys one of the undead, although he's now in the doppelganger's crosshairs. And it's started a spell to revive Temperance. After that, it starts teleporting around, making us chase it, stalling for time. Vera is at least able to heal the monk up a little, but Temperance revives. Cora drops an Ice Storm hammer on her, and Will adds a couple of arrows, but it isn't enough. This time Will is the one Temperance smacks the hell out of, and he barely survives it. But with her focus on the Ranger, she doesn't see the monk coming, and Crulin makes her second stint on this plane a brief one.

At that point, two threads of action take place. One is that Leah and Vera work together to get the relic out of the cage the doppelganger is keeping it in. That whole thing I described last time, about the bag and wishing ring and the overly complicated way we got the relic from the thieves? Yeah, that actually happened here. I should have read ahead more in my notes. While the two of them were busy with that, the rest of us were trying to deal with the doppelganger. Which took a long time, because we were having a hard time landing enough hits. Its defense was just too high. I scored 1 out of 4 hits once, and expected to be killed the next round. Instead, the doppelganger settled for blinding me. So I summoned a hippogriff. I don't think it scored a single hit, but what the hell, you have the chance to summon a griffin based on a hippopotamus, why wouldn't you? The team did eventually kill the doppelganger, Crulin dealing the finishing blow. We were Big Damn Heroes.

Then we looted the corpses.

We were named champions, and given the chance to enchant the hell out of everything. I don't know what that means exactly, whether we gained the skill, or could show up on the door of someone who does that and demand service, or what. I just wrote, 'can enchant the hell out of everything.' I just wanted to learn to make explosive arrows, go full Hawkeye with this thing.

So that was the second campaign. You can tell it was run by someone new to being DM, and that most of the players had no clue what they were doing. A lot of us spent a lot of time deciding what skills to put points into, like Sneak, or Heal, Intimidate, whatever, but a lot of that never came up. I'm pretty sure our thief wanted a few more opportunities to do some sneaking and stealing.

I suspect we were meant to investigate that swamp we heard about, and to level us up a bit before the end. It felt like, especially in the final battle, we weren't strong enough for it. We went from crushing pitiful bandits and kobolds, to hanging on for dear life against Minotaurs and flesh golems. The DM clearly recognized Will was the one doing the most damage, but the enemies passed up opportunities to deal fatal damage, opting to cast curses or blind him instead. I'm not complaining; there wasn't anyone in our party who knew Resurrect (unless the bard knew it, or maybe Ordai), so death would have been the end of it for me. But playing it, you could tell she was pulling her punches. Which was at least a nice change of pace from that first campaign, where everyone died constantly.

Those last few battles took forever, because we'd all try and attack the doppelganger, but its defense was so high compared to our attack values that we might only score a couple of hits total. With it having 120 or so hit points, it was death by a thousand paper cuts.

Still, our DM rolled with our peculiar approaches pretty well. We tended to over discuss our options, but she outwardly kept any impatience under wraps. Even if she didn't always seem to understand what the hell I was doing, she didn't get irritated with my playing Will as at least slightly off-kilter. Of course, she was the one who threw in an hippie elf orgy, so she established off-kilter as the baseline. And the party was pretty into it. A lot of the time we were just screwing around (and not just in terms of what went on at the hippie elf party.) Deciding to just open all three chests, deciding Nylis was too busy eating cupcakes to dive for cover, discussing try to hide a wolf in the Bag of Holding for surprise wolf attacks. Everything was on the table, and people seemed to respond positively to that.

Griffins and Cupcakes and Bullshit and Puzzles

In the story of my second D&D campaign, I left off at the point where we had killed some members of the thieves and were preparing to storm their stronghold. We knew the members of the group each had a tattoo, and were able to draw a facsimile on our arms, but didn't know if there was a password. So once we reached the fortress, we stood in the shadows debating what to do. We eventually decided to try bluffing our way in, but it turned out to be unnecessary. We had the tattoo, nothing else was required. The sentries couldn't figure out why we stood there awkwardly chatting them up. Well, overthought that one.

Inside, there was a maze we made our way through without incident until reaching a room with three chests and a sign that says "Evens and Odds". We opened one chest, and a panel in the wall slid open, revealing 5 kobolds (lizard people). We had heard from someone along the way there were some lizard people among the bandits (whoever we talked to also told us about a swamp to the west with possible treasure but lots of monsters, which we decided was a distraction from our quest and ignored). When a Ranger hits Level 5, he can choose a Favored Enemy, which he gets bonuses against. So I picked "humanoid - reptilian" with that intel in mind.

And so I opted to try Bluffing the kobolds, specifically by lamenting that the "bourgeois" thief bosses made the poor, proletarian kobolds sit in a cramped room behind a wall with no food or drink. The DM responded, 'They have no idea what you're talking about.' They also couldn't or wouldn't tell us how to solve the puzzle, so we got impatient and opened all three chests at once. Five more panels opened, 10 more kobolds and 15 goblins entered the room. So it's a fight. I made an impassioned plea for the first 5 kobolds to rise up and help us, but they opted to go back in their room and close the wall.

So the Marxist rhetoric failed to gain traction. At least I got five enemies off the board.

The fight wasn't much trouble, even with the numbers. The monk took some slings to the head, but was crushing enemies left and right with attacks of opportunity. Our wizard had taken the Fireball Wand we found in the spider cave, but wasn't having much luck with it. Magic Missile fared better, and Nylis busted out a Flaming Spear attack that killed at least 4 enemies. In all, it was a slaughter, but left us no closer to finding what we were after.

OK, I don't have any notes from our recovery of the relic. I remember there was a different room, and the relic was within some sort of cage. The thief couldn't find her way through, so I think we used the Ring of 3 Wishes to get her inside the cage, grab the relic, and then get her back out. The Sack of Holding was involved somehow as well. I'm sure we made it infinitely more complicated than it needed to be, but I frankly hate that aspect of D&D where you have to declare you want to inspect something, then roll to see if you noticed anything when you inspected, and hope your character is intelligent enough to understand what they see, if they see anything. If you roll crappy, then what are you supposed to do? Shrug and throw up your hands? Oh well, quest over, we're too dumb to figure out this trap.

Anyway, we got the relic, and fled the bandit's fortress, which was remarkably easy. I think the leader was away at the time, but you'd think thieves would be more alert to theft. I can't talk, though, since that night, as we camped on our way back, it was stolen from us. By Ordai the cleric, who turned out to be a doppelganger. Apparently, the DM was worried we would figure out something was up with him earlier because he used Death Touch, and a cleric shouldn't do that. But most of the players wouldn't have any experience to know that, and I'd watched a cleric in my only previous campaign kill one of our own party in a fit of pique sooooooo. . .

I assume clerics are basically crazy, violent religious fundamentalists. Like the Crusaders, basically. Spread your religion of peace and tolerance by killing people different than you. Maybe that's actually paladins, I haven't played in a campaign with one of them yet.

Now we had to return to the village and explain we'd let the relic be stolen a second time, and maybe question why we were assigned a cleric that wasn't actually a cleric. Along the way, we revisited the elf commune, only to find it devastated by the doppelganger. Many were wounded, and the chief was dead, although his son had survived his injuries (and was happy to see Taug, which embarrassed the barbarian, though he was still kind enough to be friendly). We continued on and were caught up to by the leader of the thieves and some of his men, on horseback. Fortunately, we heard them coming with enough time to dive off the road into the bushes. Unfortunately, Nylis was too busy eating a cupcake and was caught flat-footed in the middle of the road when they rode up. But she served as an excellent distraction for when the rest of us jumped out to attack.

The fight itself wasn't terribly competitive. Oswald dealt the finishing blow to two of the lackeys, I killed a couple, Taug used Cleave so hard one guy basically exploded (27 damage, he might have had half that many hit points). Crulin was able to use Stunning Fist on the leader so we could have a chat with him.

Will once again volunteered to do the talking. The team, having not learned their lesson from last time, let him. Will tried being pleasant while crouched over the thief, who was tied up on his back. When that failed to produce results, he became angry and cut his hand with the head of an arrow, dripping blood on the very intimidated boss' face, while pretending not to notice he was doing this. The leader confessed the doppelganger had hired his crew to take the relic (though he may not have know he was dealing with a doppelganger), and must have mentioned something about an island far to the east. Will opted to cheerfully ask if the thief had considered accepting Pelor as his savior. Leah incredulously pointed out the guy probably worshipped the same god she did. Well, by that point Will was just messing with the guy for kicks. You may have heard, kicks, they just keep getting harder to find.

We let the guy live, because he promised that, even if he kept stealing, he wouldn't hurt any people. As Leah had pointed out, we already had a thief on our team, who had proved in the tavern she wasn't above (attempting) robbing anyone she pleased, so I suppose Will didn't see that we could throw stones. Or he was uncomfortable killing another helpless foe.

Back in town, we reported what happened, and learned there really was an Ordai, though no one could figure when he'd been replaced. It turned out he's the brother of Vera, the flirty bard we met in the tavern at the start, and she was interested in finding him, and offered her help. Which included hooking all of us up with Legacy Weapons of various types (Will got himself a quiver full of special arrows, and the quiver boosted a couple of his abilities), and a flying carpet. Also, Nylis must have leveled up to the point she unlocked some nifty bonus, because rather suddenly, a griffin showed up to be her companion. She named it Sage. Vera also knew, from her extensive travels, that there was a portal in a village to the east which might lead to that island.

Looking back over this, I'm starting to suspect the DM put the bard back in because she realized we'd never figure things out on our own in time to finish the quest before the field season ended and we scattered to the four winds.

We went east and found the village full of nothing but children. They told us monsters had come, killed all the adults, burned the women, and carried the monsters off through a portal. There was some debate over the next step, because some people wanted to help the kids before proceeding, and others (Will included), did not. Will likes kids about as much as he likes squids, OK? Even among the "leave 'em" camp, there was debate between just leaving them, or seeing if the griffin was hungry. But the kids were ultimately transported to a nearby village where the people agreed to look after them. Then it was back to the ruined village, and through the portal.

We exited the portal on an island, and were immediately confronted with a massive fortress of grey, forbidding rock. Oh, and two flesh golems guarding the entrances. And a minotaur. And a wizard. But we spent too much time playing Child Services, so I'll tell you how things wrapped up next time.

A Party O' Fools

My 2nd D&D campaign was 7 years after the first one, during one of my stints in the boonies. The nice thing here is I took notes during the campaign, though they're a little limited earlier. Either way, this is going to run a couple of posts, at least.

It was a more manageable party of six characters this time, pretty much all newbs, considering I constituted one of the more experienced players. Of the other 5, 4 had never played before, and the other hadn't played in years. The DM had played a lot, but never run a campaign of her own. She wisely started us at Level 4, on a campaign she thought would only take 3 or 4 sessions. Just a quick trial run.

It lasted six weeks, and probably over a dozen sessions. We tended to deliberate a lot before doing anything, and battles, as in the first campaign, took a while. If my first campaign had been your standard Big Event comic - the fate of the world at stake, everyone dying - the second one was more like the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League, in that there was a lot of comedy, and none of the heroes seemed to know what the hell they were doing.

I dusted the cobwebs off Will the Ranger and Oswald the osprey, for a tale set earlier in their careers. Still favoring the bow, just an ordinary one at the start, and a rapier. No whip; we only had space for two weapons. Besides myself, there was Crulin, the half-elf monk, Cora, a wizard, Nylis was an elf druid, Leah was a halfing thief, and Taug was a half-orc barbarian. How we formed a team, I don't know, we opted to not worry about it. This franchise doesn't need an origin movie!

We were hired to recover a missing relic of Pelor, your standard god of goodness and light, or maybe just Order, I forget. He wasn't my god. The DM played as a bard named Vera - who my notes describe as "flirty", I don't recall that - to clue us in on a large band of thieves that likely took the relic. I do recall Leah trying to pick some drunk's pocket during the exposition dump and being caught by her would-be victim, although he was too inebriated to get sore about it. Still, hardly an auspicious beginning. As we were entirely lacking in healers - though I grabbed a First Aid kit as a special item - the guy who hired us provided a drow cleric to keep us upright (also played by the DM)

We fought some goblins early on, no trouble. That night, we set up camp, and kept being attacked by wolves. The third time around, Cora was rendered unconscious, or else slept through the whole thing. We found out eventually our mistake was in not having a fire going. You could question whether that's the sort of thing to expect your mostly inexperienced players to know, but we survived, so no harm, no foul.

We wound up at the village of a bunch of elves, situated on a lake. They provided some helpful information about the thieves, such as that their ranks included a bunch of lizard-men, and their base was further north. Also, there was an interesting cave in some mountains nearby. As it turned out, it was time for some celebration the elves had every year, and they invited us to join in frolicking in the lake. A lake which was either enchanted, or laced with some sort of drugs. Taug, Cora, Nylis, and Leah jumped in, the first three immediately succumbing to the effects of whatever the hell is in the water. At which point they get involved in the orgy taking place. The thief complains at being left out, since her will was apparently great enough to shrug off the effect, so the DM rolled and stated that four elves approach the thief, which made her very happy.

Traveling together teaches you new things about people.

Crulin and Will both opted out. I don't know the monk's reasons, I was operating under the idea that a) Will had a girlfriend back home, and b) I don't know what kind of STDs elves might have, or if they do, but if they do, anything that could hang around despite the immune system of a race that lives centuries would probably cause a human's entire lower half to rot off.

Ridiculous logic? MAYBE.

The next day, with everyone basically recovered, we decided to check that nearby cave. The chief's son was only too happy to guide us there, as he was quite smitten with Taug after the night before. Taug insisted he had not slept with the 'pretty man-elf', so the DM rolled, and stated plainly, 'Yes you did.' So there you go.

The trip to the cave resulted in a fight with a giant spider and some of its babies, which went easily enough. It was at this point the DM possibly made a mistake. She rolled to see what loot we'd find, but didn't think to scale the results to characters of our level. So there was a Fire Staff, a Sack of Holding, and a Ring of Three Wishes. Which, if we'd been smarter might have ended the campaign right there, but we were leery of messing with wishes. Also, one of the corpses had a Longbow with +5 Frost, which Will grabbed immediately, turning Will into the biggest damage dealer. Taug could do more with a single hit, especially combining Berserker Fury with Cleave, but once I reached the point I could do two attacks per turn, and fire two arrows per attack, with Frost damage tacked on to every hit, I was racking up a higher cumulative total. Downside to that was, in later battles, the DM knew it, and Will became the primary target every time. But that's later.

Suitably powered up, we bid the elf farewell and continued north, eventually stumbling upon a small group of bandits. I don't have extensive notes, but some members of the party killed some of the thieves while helpless. However, they had a wizard in their ranks, who "decked" Crulin and Leah, which I'm assuming meant they were simply knocked over, since I know nobody died this early in the campaign. He turned invisible, but Cora cast See Invisibility, plus Oswald pretty much landed on his head. I had my bow drawn, but hesitated to kill a surrendered opponent, despite my teammates urging. Then the wizard admitted he would go on hurting people if we let him live, so I let fly.

Critical hit, instant kill. At least he got a quick death. Better than the poor thief the cleric used Death Touch on.

Next time: We actually reach the bandit fortress! Will we have any patience for puzzles? Will our thief be of any use whatsoever? Is Will, like Hawkeye Pierce, going to deal with the grim realities of the world he finds himself in by resorting to absurdist humor at inappropriate moments?

Then Everybody Died. Again.

The first D&D campaign I took part in was in college, starting about 9 months before this blog. Papafred and some of his friends had been running campaigns each semester, and I finally decided to take part.

I went with a Ranger, a human, who in my mind looked a bit like Spike because I was watching a lot of Buffy reruns at the time. Used a bow mostly, or else a combo of a bastard sword and a whip. Because I thought it looked cool when Indiana Jones ran around with a sword and a whip simultaneously in Temple of Doom. I was informed after the fact it was a bad idea not to pick a two-handed sword to be proficient with, because you're more likely to find awesome, enchanted versions of those. Sure enough, we found one and had no one in the party who could use it who didn't already have a better weapon.

Anyway, Will did the Ranger bit to pay the bills to support his family, because his father's maritime shipping business had run afoul due to, it was either because he bet on calamari and the market wasn't there, or giant squid attacks. I hated squids, because they were responsible for the failure somehow. So I knew a bit about boats and such, even though I know nothing about boats in real life. Which made it awkward when the game was on a ship and I was supposed to be able to give orders or know what to do. We were told to pick two magical items to have, I picked Odin's Bow for one, the DM promptly nerfed the shit out of it, something I was informed he always did. Except to his girlfriend's meat shield character, who picked an awesome sword that stole the souls of those killed with it and released them as extra damage. Which worked well for us, but was still some bullshit favoritism.

Especially once the party swelled to nine members, five of which were newbs, including me. There was always confusion in battle, because you had too many people who barely understood what their characters could do, let alone how to work cooperatively with anyone else. And it was a 15th Level campaign, so we were kind of thrown in the deep end. Result being, people died a lot. We had two elf clerics who knew Resurrection, plus a goblin shaman with a wishing orb (handy for the people killed so completely Resurrection wouldn't work on them), and we needed all of them. Every character in the party except Papafred's fighter-thief died at least once. Every character other than his and mine died at least twice. I had an osprey as a companion, it died. So did Papafred's dog companion, and the ninja girl's ferret.

Some immensely powerful being told us to recover a stone from a castle on an island. We land on the island, a dragon appears, and the newb elf cleric is reduced to ash. The goblin wishes him back, but not precisely enough (and I'm sure his deity wasn't happy being asked to bring back an elf). He still hadn't returned by the next day when we reached the castle, and half the remaining party was immediately enthralled by the singing of harpies from within. The rest of us - me, the mage, the ninja, and Solomon's lady elf cleric - rush after them, and find ourselves up against 11 harpies. The other cleric appears suddenly, and attacks the goblin. He's been brought back from earlier in his life, doesn't remember us, doesn't know anything about an elder telling him he needed to be on this quest. We got it sorted eventually.

Then he got turned to stone by a Beholder about an hour later, and shattered by a troll. Because we were all focused on the wooden door at the end of the hall, and nobody checked the open passageway off to the side first. Lack of coordination. I was surviving, but struggling with 2nd edition's rules for archery. Meaning I couldn't use my bow, because the odds were as good I'd hit someone 40 degrees to the left of what I was aiming at as that I'd hit my target. At Level 15, even if I'm not Clint Barton, shouldn't I at least be Speedy, or Kate Bishop? I died because the goblin was fighting a troll, and I had to help in close combat. Because I was too bad a shot to be sure I wouldn't hit the 4 foot tall goblin while aiming at the 10 foot tall troll. I have used a bow for exactly one day in my real life, and I'm pretty sure I could manage that. So we both walked in the Beholders' line of fire and got Death Beamed.

We got through that, found the stone, the meat shield got mind controlled by a cloaked wizard, badly injured Sol's cleric before we could kill the wizard. We grabbed the stone, the castle collapsed, a huge stone hit the lady cleric, she got pulped. We had to leave the unconscious meat shield behind. When they were both resurrected, Sol cast Destruction (or Destroy, something like that) on the meat shield. To be fair, she did have the meat shield hitting on the cleric nonstop the entire game. Though I had my character also clumsily trying to court the cleric's favor as well. Don't know why, same reason I had Will needle the meat shield constantly. I decided it was in character. The goblin had to wish him back again, which was dicey since removing the stone cut our plane of reality off from all others. He couldn't contact his deity, so there was a chance the orb would explode. A chance that increased every time he used it. Good thing we weren't routinely dying in horrible, massively damaging ways that required wishing to undo.

And people just made curious decisions. Ralph told us that about the Orb outside the game, but the goblin kept it secret inside the game. As we returned to port (having been relieved of the stone earlier by the same guy who sent us after it), a meteor shower emerged, which smashed the ship, killed our pets, and left Luc's awesome sword on the bottom of the bay. I volunteered to cast Breathe Underwater on myself and get it. No, the sword will possess you. Fine, get the meat shield in a boat with me, we'll row out, I'll cast it on him, and he can swim down to get it himself. Nah, let's just wish it to us. And the goblin complies. No wonder we died so much, we were fucking idiots.

The campaign didn't get much further. We found an inn, it was a trap by a demon who was pissed we'd trapped him here before he could return to conquer his dimension. He turned all our loved ones into flesh golems and set them on us, plus he rained fireballs on us. He eventually flew off, promising more revenge. I think Andy realized he needed to stop the fight because he'd killed everyone but me, Papafred, and the male cleric. If the cleric had died, I was considering what would happen if my character tried to use the Wishing Orb. Probably one more dead character. Or I was going to say screw it, shake the fighter-thief's hand farewell, and either head to a safe inn to get hammered, or try and track down the demon.

After that fight, I played Will as steadily distancing himself from the rest of the party, being focused on revenge on the demon. I'd resolved killing him was all that mattered. If we caught sight of him, I was just going to start firing arrows, let the DM handwave some bullshit for why I'm not triggering a fight scene before he was ready. We came across a badly injured knight asking for help with a giant monster, I wanted to ignore him. But the monster was on the way to the demon. As it turned out, the monster could only be harmed by +3 or better weapons, and was immune to magic, which ruled me out. A bunch of us had to just sit and watch that fight, completely useless, as it dragged on for, shit two hours? The thing had 1000 hit points, and once you got it down to 1 HP, you had to Wish it dead. That would have been great, survive that thing, then get blown up trying to finish it off.

That was where things ended, so any revenge remained purely hypothetical, along with any resolution of the story. It ended up factoring in to a later campaign I played, but not the next one. I don't suppose it put me off the game entirely, but it was kind of a mess. The party was too large and unwieldy, and the number of times everyone was dying and having to be wished back was ridiculous. Battles seemed to take forever, although this was not something that would change in later campaigns, even with different editions, DMs, and other players.

Next time, whenever that is: The only campaign that actually was completed. Also probably the most absurd.

Man, There's Nothing To This Saving The World Stuff

Another board game, this time Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the game. You select a Big Bad from the various options, and try to stop them from bringing about the Apocalypse. Which requires defeating three Monsters of the Week, and protect the Townies from various generic Baddies.

Defeating Monsters requires having the appropriate items, so the players have to spend parts of their turns moving between locations in town, collecting the right items (Weapons, Tomes, Magical Ingredients, Crosses, etc.) You can also spend time defeating the generic Baddies so as to protect the Townies, since Townies getting eviscerated brings the end of the world ever closer. Each player picks one of the Scoobies to use, who have advantages and special abilities and such. But using the Special Action forces you to draw an Event Card, which usually places more Baddies and Townies on the board to kill/protect. So judicious use is advisable. Probably.

The game said it could be played in 30 minutes to an hour, but it took us closer to two, since we had to keep going back and checking the rules on when certain things had to be done, or what the monsters could do on their turn. Given how easily we ultimately cruised to victory, we both suspect we were doing something wrong. It wasn't clear if the Big Bad was supposed to have certain powers taking effect before it was "revealed" or not. The way the rules read, we thought he wasn't activated until he was revealed, and so no on powers, but maybe we were wrong. It did help that the first Monster of the Week was The Judge, who wouldn't get active at all until we were already 4 of the 12 steps to the Apocalypse. I was able to kill him before he ever did anything. And we kept drawing Event Cards that put Baddies on the board, but no Townies for them to attack. And we were careful to stay away from them, so they couldn't get any shots at us. Maybe Spike (me) and Giles (her) are just that outstanding of a duo.

So, fun enough, not reinventing the wheel among games, but the rules were unclear at times. My guess is, if you aren't a fan of the show, you can find other games which offer similar gameplay, and do it better. But if you do have a fondness for the Buffyverse, this might do the trick for ya.

You Have Died Of Insufficient Spending On Infrastructure

A friend came to visit over the weekend and brought some board games, including the Oregon Trail card game. Where you try to reenact the frustration of the simulation of the pioneer's life, without the hassle of an ancient computer.

You lay out the Start and End cards a few feet away, and then each person in your party takes turns laying out a Trail Card. Each card is supposed to be turned so that the section of Trail drawn on it lines up with the end of the Trail on the previous card laid down. This caused the greatest amount of difficulty for us, because we almost got to the end, and there were multiple players with no cards that lined up, and none left in the draw pile. So we lumped all the remaining cards together and just drew through them until we found one that worked, rather than die because these pioneers, having traveled to at least somewhere in eastern Oregon, had decided they weren't going to forge any further..

If you're lucky, the Trail Card doesn't cause any trouble. But most of them require you to "hit spacebar", meaning draw a calamity card. And then your party has to fix the calamity, if they have the resources, and if they want to. The game does give you the option to, for example, let someone die of cholera if you don't wish to expend your supplies on them. We tried not to go that route, but one member of the party did die of cholera. Most of the Calamity Cards are the type that could kill the whole party if not resolved, though. Sick oxen, busted axle, but they typically give you one round to fix it, or until the next time you draw the same Calamity Card. We did need to shuffle them better, that's how our party member died. We drew back-to-back Cholera cards, and that was it for Mary.

I imagine with more actual players (we created a team of 6, but it was two of us controlling three characters each), it'd be a little more interesting. Lots of complaining and bribes to get people to give you what you need to not die. Even with two people, it was entertaining, and not difficult to pick up once it got going.

Willingly Declining Wasn't Easy To Grasp

Originally, I was supposed to me Alex for brunch, but he overslept. So it turned into a "hang out, eat chili and play board games" plan instead. Not a bad fallback, although most people seemed more into playing Overwatch. Which I have to admit looks kind of cool, but the fact it's nothing but online player vs. player is so unappealing. I need a story mode, not to mention single player. Screw this interacting with people noise. People on the Internet are terrible, I know you know this, because you're on the Internet right now.

We did eventually get a few people together to play this board game Small World. There's a map divided into regions, each player selects a race - elves, halfings, wizards, stuff like that - which come with some ability, and you get another special power along with it, and a certain number of your people to serve as your forces. Then you conquer places, and get money for how many you regions at the end of each turn, plus any extra money the special powers might grant.

Which seems fairly bog-standard for a lot of games. What seems to be the trick here is the ability to go into decline. The number of your forces can't increase from what you start with, so there's a limit to how much you can conquer. I started as the Sorcerers, I had 10 of them, you have to have at least one in each region you conquered, so there was going to be a point I couldn't extend any further. Especially since the other players would be aiming to attack my weaker points and take them. So at that point, when your turn comes around, you declare you're going into decline, and that's your turn. The next turn you select a new race and a new special power from those available. However, any of the forces from your previous race that are still alive stay on the board, and you still get money for any regions they hold (so don't conquer places held by your in decline race).

The game is only meant to last 8 rounds, so it should probably take less than an hour. This one took over 90 minutes, but only one person was really familiar with the game, and a couple of the others seemed to have trouble grasping what they were supposed to be doing.

Cards Against My Tranquility, Is More Like It

Got roped into playing Cards Against Humanity again last night, this time by drunk coworkers, rather than drunk acquaintances of my best friend. However, I still don't enjoy playing games with drunk people. They're easily distracted, and we could hardly go one round without someone getting up for more snacks, or getting up for more booze, or getting up to go to the bathroom.

Cheez, you'd think they were just playing the game as a way of spending time with people they like. I should appreciate that, but I guess I tend to be tunnel vision about these things. If we're going to hang out and chat, then let's just sit around and chat. If we're going to play a game, then let's play the game. That's what I came over here for, because they asked me to play, so let's do it.

I'm still not that good at the game, incidentally, though it's still very much luck of the draw. What cards do you have at the time a particular question is asked, who's doing the asking, what does everyone else have, how does the person asking decide to weigh things. You could probably kill everyone with alcohol poisoning if you did a drinking game for each time someone complains about their bad cards, or exclaims that the new card they picked up would have been just perfect for the previous question. I seemed to keep falling into a situation where I'd pick a card I thought was a sure winner, only to have it come in second to something I felt was far inferior. That happened at least 3 times, which was kind of irritating. I like to win, even at things I'm not good at (a few months back, a coworker asked if I had a friend who was too over-competitive about video games, and I replied I was that friend).

One thing I think I kept forgetting was that when the person who asks the question reads the responses, they aren't supposed to know who offered each one. A couple of times I picked a response I thought was funny about me, and they read it as being about them. I don't think that affected the outcome, but it's possibly something I should be taking into account.

The Weekend Has Thrown My Sleep Schedule Off Completely

Hope you all had a pleasant weekend. I spent mine visiting with Alex, as is standard for the 4th. We didn't blow anything up this year. Alex was not at his house when I came in, and his phone was dead, so I had to kill a couple hours wandering around town until he did get in touch with me. Then it was time for a surprise visit to a quarry a different friend of his owns, for swimming, and more sun than was probably advisable. He had a gig, so that's how we spent the evening and the early morning hours. There was supposed to be a eg in the middle of the dance floor, but they changed their mind about that. Which might explain why it was such a well-behaved crowd. I've never seen the bouncers have it so easy getting people to leave at the end of the night. It was nice, I got a couple of decent photos (including one where his attempt to look cool is likely undercut by my throwing a thumbs up next to him like a goober), though the lighting in the club makes it hard to find the right balance. No flash makes everything too dark, but the flash washes out all the lasers and smoke machines.

Saturday was pretty slow. Hung at one of his friend's houses and watched movies. I'm gonna save Seven Psychopaths for tomorrow, but what the heck, we can discuss Spielberg's 1941, which I'd never seen. Is there a term for movies with lots of disparate threads that eventually tie together in implausible fashion? That's kind of what 1941 is. All the characters just happen to come together in the same place at the same time, even though they were scattered all over California. Everyone's in a panic after Pearl Harbor, so there's a crazy base commander in the desert seeing Japanese forces everywhere, John Belushi is flying a P-40 chasing Zeros that don't exist. There is a Japanese sub off the coast, commanded by Toshiro Mifune, with a German officer in tow, completely lost and incapable of even outsmarting Slim Pickens. There's a family with an artillery piece on their lawn, with a daughter dating a guy who hasn't enlisted, and they both want to win a dance contest, but Treat Williams is playing a jerkass enlisted man who won't take "No" for an answer. He could have gotten run over by Dan Ackroyd's tank and I would have thought he deserved more pain. What a tool. It was an OK film, Belushi was pretty funny, but it went too long. It took them forever to finish up the submarine plotline.

Sunday was a little more running around, though not until after 3 p.m., since it took Alex that long to wake up. We went to a short-notice birthday party where the birthday boy almost didn't show up, and we never did get around to cutting the cake. We also tried to playing Cards Against Humanity version of Apples to Apples, but geez, I hate playing games with drunk people. They aren't paying attention, they keep forgetting to grab a new card after they set one down, it's a mess. Plus, the only cards that ever win are the filthy ones, and frankly, there aren't that many funny ones. Complaints about a lack of good cards were frequent. Apples to Apples is better in its basic version. But there was a lot of good music at the party, and some nice fish.

I really wanted a piece of that cake, though.

Wherein I Fill Time Discussing D&D

I saw this list of questions on Siskoid's blog. As I need blog content - I'm in the midst of a book that'll take probably another week to finish, and while my comic guy swears he put the books in the mail Thursday of last week, I have no idea where the hell they are now - so I'm utilizing it myself. Given I've only participated in 3 D&D campaigns, only one of which was actually finished, this could be a mistake, but blog necessity trumps all other concerns.

Day 1: First person who introduced you to D&D? Which edition? First character?
I think my cousin let me see a role playing guide for a DC Universe version when I was still in elementary school, but I had no idea what it was I was reading. I think I envisioned it as something like the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe or Who's Who. So the first time I understood what I was looking at would be college, from my roommate at the time, Papafred. I'm going to guess 2nd edition. 3rd may have been released recently, but he and his friends were not fans. First character is also only character, a human Ranger named William.

Day 2: First person YOU introduced to D&D? Which edition? Their first character?
It was one of my coworkers last year, maybe Kyle. Or Jo (in retrospect, making someone with no experience with D&D dungeon master was possibly a mistake). So, 3rd edition. Kyle was a drunk, lecherous bard, prone to badmouthing our half-orc barbarian's intelligence, and making comments about the elf wizard's mom.

Day 3: First dungeon you explored as a PC or ran as a DM.
It was some castle on a cliff at the highest point on an island. There were a lot of monsters, and a large stone that we stole, which cut our dimension/plane/universe off from all the others, with hilarious consequences. Did I say hilarious? I meant dire.

Day 4: First dragon you slew (or some other powerful monster):
The first real battle of that first campaign with Papfred and his friends was against a red dragon. We were 15th level characters, which was little encouragement to the 5 newbies including myself in the party (there were 4 veterans, not counting the DM). I hit it with at least one arrow, and we killed it, so that counts, right?

Day 5: First character to go from 1st to 20th level (or highest possible level in a given edition):
Never happened. The first campaign I was 15th when we started, and at the time we left off because the semester ended, I was almost about to reach 16th level. Second campaign I started at 4th, ended at 8th. Third campaign, started at 3rd, was up to 4th when the field season ended and everyone scattered.

Day 6: First character death. How did you handle it?
There's only been one. In the first campaign, we had a bunch of trolls come bursting through some wooden double doors at us. I saw the goblin in trouble, and because of some stupid rule about archery in at least that edition of D&D, I couldn't be certain I wouldn't hit the 4-foot goblin shaman if I aimed for the 8 foot tall troll. So I ran over with me sword. There was a column jutting out from a wall to the side, with an open entryway. No one had thought to check it before approaching the double doors. The were Beholders in there, and one Death-Beamed me and the goblin both. I was pissed, because if the archery weren't so screwed up, I wouldn't have been in the line of fire. I'm 15th level; if I'm not Clint Barton at that point, I ought to at least be Kate Bishop. But that was the only time I died in that campaign, which was better than every other character except Papafred's fighter-thief.

Day 7: First D&D product you bought. Do you still have it?
I bought a couple of resource guides a few years ago for Hellsing and Tenchi Muyo themed games, on a whim more than anything else. They're still in my bookshelves.

Day 8: First set of polyhedral dice you owned. Do you still use them?
I found one when I moved out of my first grad school apartment, probably left over from that first campaign. I've never actually used it in a game. We bought a big bag of them for last year's campaign, I technically own some of them, but I haven't collected as yet.

Day 9: First campaign setting (homebrew or published) you played in.
I assume the DM made it up, based off characters from 2nd edition. The settings were pretty standard, isolated castle full of monsters, ruined city, devastated countryside.

Day 10: First gaming magazine you bought.
None so far.

Day 11: First splatbook you begged your DM to approve.
I have no idea what a splatbook is. Based on Siskoid's response, I'd say not applicable to me, but the 1st campaign had a newbie who wanted to be a ninja, so maybe that counts. (Note: I'm starting to worry these questions are going far beyond my experience).

Day 12: First store where you bought gaming supplies.
Not applicable, I guess. All those dice were bought online, I have no idea from where.

Day 13: First miniature used for D&D.
Something the DM had. It was probably an elf, but he had a bow, and that was my preferred weapon, so there you go. The last two campaign, we used Star Wars Monopoly pieces. I grabbed Boba Fett.

Day 14: Did you meet your significant other while playing D&D?
No. Or not yet.

Day 15: What was the first edition you didn't enjoy. Why?
Limited options, 2nd or 3rd. Looking back, the issues with archery (where Papafred and Solomon had to ask the DM to relax the rules so I didn't feel completely useless in the frequent battles) sours me on 2nd edition. Otherwise, it's been so long since that campaign (it predates the start of this blog) I barely remember the specifics, other than that they're different.

Day 16: Do you remember your first edition war? Did you win?
I'm guessing I haven't had that yet, though I may be in for one of Papafred reads that previous answer.

Day 17: First time you heard D&D was "Evil".
I would guess that if I ever heard it, that I didn't know or understand what D&D was, so it didn't mean anything to me.

Day 18: First gaming convention you attended.
Strictly gaming? Never. Cape-Con usually has gaming stuff, Heroclix or Magic tournies.

Day 19: First gamer who just annoyed the hell out of you.
The ninja in the first campaign had a friend who played as a bard, but did almost nothing. Didn't cast useful spells, sing encouraging songs, fight, nothing. I also got frustrated with the DM promising we could each have two really awesome pieces of equipment, then nerfing the hell out of them once we made our selections. The exception being the sword his girlfriend at the time chose for her fighter/meat shield. That pissed Papafred off, because he'd asked for the same weapon in an earlier campaign, only to have the DM nerf it badly on him. Kyle's bard was a little annoying simply because Kyle insisted on playing him as a constant pain-in-the-ass. At a certain point I just wanted him shut up and play. Or for his character to die horribly. Whichever.

Day 20: First non D&D RPG you played.
None yet.

Day 21: First time you sold some of your D&D books - for whatever reason.
Hasn't happened yet. I'm more likely to give them away if it gets to that point. I don't have the interest or energy to haggle.

Day 22: First D&D based novel you ever read.
I'm not sure I have. I'm assuming since Tolkein predates D&D The Hobbit wouldn't count. I don't read a lot of fantasy, more sci-fi (which is why there's an Asimov label for posts, obviously).

Day 23: First song that comes to mind you associate with D&D. Why?
If we'd listened to music while we played, there'd probably be something, but the thing that popped into mind just now was The Legend of Zelda theme. I guess that sort of fits my conception of it, with the questing, monsters, dungeons, and such.

Day 24: First movie that comes to mind you associate with D&D. Why?
Um, the Dungeons and Dragons movie? I never saw it, but I know it exists. I don't know. Unless it's the Lord of the Rings films. I should have read all these questions through before starting.

Day 25: Longest running campaign/gaming group you've been in.
Well all three campaigns have had almost entirely different people. I'm the only common denominator for all three, plus one other person who's been in each of the last two. The second campaign was the only one to finish, but it took about 6, 7 weeks (which surprised the DM, who thought it was a 3-day campaign, tops. We were more deliberate (or slow on the uptake if you prefer) about things than she expected, I guess. The first campaign ran two-and half months, from the start of March through Finals Week. It was only halfway done. Dangers of only playing 2 or 3 hours once a week, and of having so many people dying. Seriously, the meat shield and one of the elf clerics each died at least 3, maybe 4 times. Everyone except myself and Papafred died at least twice. The other other cleric was reduced to ash by the red dragon, Wished back by the goblin, only to be turned to stone and shattered in that same fight I got Death-Beamed. Which meant he had to be Wished back again.

Day 26: Do you still game with people who introduced you to the hobby?
They might still be gaming, but we're not geographically close enough to play together.

Day 27: If you had to do it all over again, would you do anything different when you first started gaming?
I probably would have taken Papafred up on his offer to join a campaign sooner. Though if I did that, I might not have been in these last two campaigns, which were much sillier (drinking contests! search for royal birth certificates! hippie elf communes with a drug lake!), but also more fun in a lot of ways. They were both 3rd edition, so I might have been entrenched against it, if the 2nd edition believers indoctrinated me sufficiently.

Day 28: What is the single most important lesson you've learned from playing Dungeons & Dragons?
Don't trust that anything is as the DM presents it. It's human nature to want to hoodwink people, so expect surprise reveals and double-crosses constantly.

This Time You Find Everything But Waldo

Scrutineyes is a game that plays to my strengths because it's largely about observation and knowing words.

The game comes with several laminated sheets with pictures on both sides. One side will be labeled as "Objects beginning with the Letter . . .", the other will describe some specific place or setting, like "School supplies". There are two teams, and each team chooses a picture. One member of the team names as many things in the picture as they can in the time limit, the other records. Then the teams swap pictures, and go again.

After that, both teams rattle off everything they came up with for both pictures. If both teams named something, neither side gets points for it. If you named something the other team didn't, you get a point. Simple.

Round 2 is the same as Round 1, except observer and recorder switch roles. The trick is not to name anything that was named by either team in Round 1, or you lose two points. The pictures are large enough that only half is used at a time, and since it can vary from top and bottom, or left and right, any given picture can be used in several games. Plus, there are different ways players will describe things. One might opt for the noun, another for the verb, but they're looking at the same part of the picture, and both are valid. There's some replay value there.

There will probably be arguments about whether certain answers can count or not. On a "Holiday" themed picture, the other team objected that my partner kept adding the word "Christmas" in front of whatever he was describing to make it count. Which makes sense when he's trying "Christmas fireplace", or something equally questionable. I'm not allowed to help him come up with stuff, just to write what he says.

My team cruised to easy victory, but whether that was due to my keen intellect, or the fact I was the only completely sober player, I don't know. I might advise, if any of the players have questionable hearing, that you get a larger table, or some space where the teams can sit farther apart. That way the observer can speak loudly enough the recorder can hear them without worrying whether the other team can hear it as well (since they could write it down to deprive your team of points).

I Forget I Have A "Board Games" Tag Sometimes

We tried a game called Name 5 on Saturday. You try and get your piece around the board, and when it lands, you take a card. The card has five topics on it, and you have 30 seconds to list five things for the topic which is the color of the space you landed on.

There are also Double Downs, where you have to get five things each for two topics in 30 seconds, though at least you get to look at the topics on the card and pick two. If you succeed, you get to move double your dice roll. My team had someone very good at rolling 5s and 6s, so we let her handle that (I, unfortunately, am a low roller). At one point, we settled on "Mystery Writers" and "Disney Princesses", because my teammates assured me they could handle the latter, and my dad's books have offered plenty of opportunities for me to get acquainted with the former.

So naturally they froze after being told "Sleeping Beauty" didn't count, because that isn't her real name. Time was ticking away, so I had to blurt out "Ariel and Jasmine", which the rest of my coworkers found hilarious. Whatever, we won that Double Down, and the game. Suck failure, freaks!

Anyway, besides the Double Down, there's also an All Play, which isn't really accurate. That space has two colors. Without looking at the card, the team that lands on it has to pick which color they want. One of the other teams gets the other color. One person from each team looks at the card to see the topic, then they tell their respective teams simultaneously. First team to hit five for their topic get to keep rolling. Our team lost our one brush with that when we had "Motown singers/groups", while the other team got "George Clooney movies".

What? I don't know which groups qualify as Motown.

The finally twist in the game is Flip Flop, which taught us a valuable lesson about following the rules. You take the topic, and each team has 10 seconds to name something that fits. It keeps going round until one team can't answer. We threw out the time limit, which was a bad idea when the Flip Flops started lasting 10 minutes. Eventually, teams would just surrender so we could move on. Always follow the rules, kids! Or Iron Man will throw you in a Negative Zone Prison! But only if you're unpopular.

Us ignoring the rules for Flip Flop aside, I think my biggest problem with the game is that if you succeed in naming 5 things in the allotted time, you get to roll again, up to 5 times. With Double Downs, this meant my team had essentially reached the end of the board before one of the other teams even got to go. I understand the idea of sticking to the "5" theme, but in that case, 2 might have been better. That way it'd be less likely to have one team go on a run and essentially eliminate the others from winning.

That's not exclusive to Name 5, though. We played Cranium earlier in the evening, and in that case it was my team that hadn't even gotten to start before another team was at the end challenge.

Saturday Was Wild, So It's Good The Rest Of The Weekend Wasn't

Hi everybody, how were your weekends? Good, I hope. My was fun, but tiring, so normal for a visit to Alex'. Friday was about getting there, then killing time while Alex worked. By the time his weekend started, two more of his friends arrived. Alex and I watched the first 4 episodes of Ninja Scroll: The Series, which was my Christmas gift to him. The attrition rate on the villains was as high as I remember from those crappy quality fansubs I saw back in 2003.

Saturday was the long day, since Alex was one of several DJs playing at the Complex that night. He was nervous, which is normal for him, but his time slot had been switched, as he went from playing at 9 p.m. on the 2nd stage, to midnight on the newly set-up third stage. That didn't help his anxiety. I drove us there, and we were initially unimpressed by the exterior (seeing it, Alex declared he was probably going to be playing in a bathroom), but it was better inside. Eventually, everyone else decided they were hungry. Which lead to me driving around for an hour because none of them had any strong feelings about where they wanted to go, nor did they have any clue what eateries were in the area. I wasn't even hungry, you know, but still wound up driving allover creation while they hemmed and hawed about what to eat. Wound up at a place three buildings down from the Complex.

Less than six hours before the show, Alex and I are off to his friend Bitcrusher's, as Alex has decided he needs different music for his set. Bitcrusher hooked Alex up, then left to go eat, so Alex fiddled with the setlist, while I conversed with the temporary roomie about whatever, including his time spent teaching English in Bosnia. We left, went back to the Complex, and the show kicked off.

Alex says they started promoting the show too far in advance, because they had way too many people show up. There was a line ten wide stretching for two blocks waiting to get in when the place opened, and there was still a line 3 hours later. The upstairs, where the first and second stages were, was heavily crowded by 11:30, to the point you could hardly move anywhere. Until Alex started playing, I had adopted a roaming strategy, making a loop past all the stages, and periodically out onto the patio to get some air. It was easy to see how much worse it kept getting. The last time, I started to wonder if I'd make it downstairs without resorting to stabbing. There was a pathway with a bar on one side, and a row of stools looking out over the dance floor in front of 1st stage on the other. In the middle of the path, there was a couple dancing, not oblivious to all the people who wanted to get by, just not caring. My last stretch on the patio, I observed people hopping the fence to get in that way, followed by rousing cheers from those folks waiting in line. I don't know why, if they were going to cheer, they wouldn't do it themselves, but it seemed a limited phenomenon.

Alex' set started poorly because his equipment was sharing the table with that of other DJs, and one of his turntables didn't get plugged in properly when it was his time. This meant his first song ended, and things went quiet for a few moments as things were straightened out. After that, it went beautifully. He had that room jumping more than any of the previous DJs. He told me afterward he'd abandoned the play order he set up hours earlier, opting to choose which song to play next on the fly. Seemed to work really well. His dancers were having a good time*, all the customers seemed to be enjoying it (and were rushing up to compliment him after). . . and then the fire marshal butted in. Seems the club was already 500 people over capacity, and they shut everything down. I'm not clear on all the specifics, but the upstairs crowd chanting "{Expletive deleted} the police!" apparently put the cops accompanying the fire marshall in bad moods. So the party was over** before the headliner of the night could even get on stage. We waited an hour for the parking lot to clear out, which gave us time to pack everything up, and to see several people try to talk their way back upstairs, ostensibly to find keys or coats. Then we loaded up and started back to Alex'. The upshot of the show ending early was we made it home earlier. I got to sleep at 3 a.m. instead of 5, whoo!

After that it was more relaxed. Sunday we tried to recuperate, and played poker and drinking games with some new friends of his. Judging by this experience, I'd say it's a bad idea to play a drinking game after you've already been drinking for several hours. It didn't take long for things to get chaotic, at least from my perspective. Monday we tried cleaning his apartment, with moderate success. We did find his checkbook, lost since Friday night. We played some TimeSplitters 2, watched more Ninja Scroll. This morning I woke up and came back here, and Alex went to visit some other friends. Which brings us to the present.

* There were several small groups of girls wearing outfits dancing at the show. I don't know if each group was working with a particular DJ, as Alex' were, or if they just felt like wearing unusual matching outfits and dancing.

** I can't confirm the reports the cops pulled their batons and started shoving people down the stairs towards the exit. Didn't see the SWAT team some folks said came in to help, either. Can't rule out those things happening, either.

Yes, I've Returned

I'm not as addled as usual when returning from one of these weekend jaunts. Strange considering how off my typical sleep schedule I was. Still, I'm sure waking up for work at 7 tomorrow will be loads of fun.

The weekend itself was OK, though filled with both predictable and unpredictable stupidity. There was a party in the middle of nowhere. Alex bought a keg, made back maybe half his money, and considered that fine. I was less enthused since a bump caused the bucket to spill ice and water in the back of my vehicle, and I was sprayed with beer while he tried to tap the keg. Plus he lost the new phone he'd received as a replacement for his last one four days earlier, one of those predictable acts I mentioned. The disorganization of the party with regards to the DJ schedule and who was bringing equipment was similarly unsurprising to me. We reached his home to find ourselves locked out by his sister, whether because she's an idiot or an ass, I don't know. Probably both. I ended up entering through a window, then Alex passed out on the floor, leaving me to haul everything in. The urge to drop the keg on his head was fortunately not overwhelming.

We visited his coworker's home again, at her request, and like the time back in July, she started arguing with her spouse while we were there, making me desperately want to be elsewhere. The visit to his aunt and uncle's place went better; no one gave me grief for not wanting an alcoholic beverage. We played a card game called Quarters that netted me a couple of bucks, and played several rounds of pool, though every game was won when one team scratched while trying to sink the 8-ball. Victory by default. I played my usual sorry game, interrupted by occasional impressive shots I'd like to say I planned, but were luck.

Sunday, I was reminded Alex and I have very different philosophies on life. His is "No regrets"; mine is "There's no mistake so far in the past I can't still beat myself up over it". His is probably more conducive to a happy life, but I think it explains why he makes the same mistakes repeatedly, as I think he's combined not regretting past choices with not learning from them. Speaking of poor choices, we both ate far too many White Castle burgers yesterday, which I've been regretting all day. I think Alex got most of his regretting over last night, so perhaps he does regret, but only for a limited time. I don't think I'll be wanting any of those for several months, so that's something.

Driving back this morning, had a truck with a camper on it, that was also hauling a trailer, cut in front of me at a turn. Why they were in such a hurry to get on that road I'm not certain. They drove no faster than 40, when the speed limit was 55. If they'd let me go ahead of them, I would have left them in the dust easily, leaving them free to drive the speed they liked. Instead I was trapped behind them for several miles until I found a passing opportunity. Which lead to me being trapped behind another truck hauling a trailer, albeit at a slightly faster speed (more like 45). The problem with this one was a tendency to take its half out of the middle of the road, especially in straightaways. When I went to pass, I had to wait for them to register that, and get back in the proper lane, rather than having their driver's side three feet into the oncoming lane.

Regardless of the annoyances that come with sharing a world with other people, I'm here. My comics weren't waiting for me, so I may need to call Jack. I thought we sorted this out last week, but apparently we did not. We'll find something to discuss to fill the time, so don't worry about that.