aqua fortis

Monday, June 21, 2004

Geeks Gone Wild, v. 1.1

There are folks out there for whom I promised I would chronicle my gaming adventures. In Geeks Gone Wild v. 1.0, there is an overview of our adventure party, but I hadn't quite gotten around to setting down our actual heroic exploits until now, so here goes.

For novices to the gaming world, we get together as a group on Thursday and Friday evenings for about four or five hours, probably two or three of which are in fact spent on gaming. The rest of the time involves primarily eating and bullshitting and, for the MJC employees, gossiping about work. Also, a not insignificant amount of time is spent quoting and/or discussing geeky TV and movies, but if you hang out with me at all you won’t be surprised by that.

Gaming-wise, though: Our little party resides in a town the dungeon master has dubbed Grontsberg (from an old Goblin name), on a relatively newly settled (and hence full of unknown adventures) continent called Transcatania. The first gaming session was devoted mainly to our characters getting to know one another and figuring out whether, say, my druid character Delyth ferch Gwydion—a somewhat asocial denizen of the nearby wilderness—would have been likely to have prior awareness of Rob’s character Dipsie Flashpowder, a gnome wizard alchemist (take off the evil horns and replace the little demon familiar with a toad, and there’s Dispie).

In any case, in our first adventure, the dungeon master informed us that a delegation of several Halflings (i.e., hobbits) have come to town, some wearing strange, ornate ceramic armor. While some of the party try to get to know the Halflings, others with more advanced spying skills unsuccessfully try to eavesdrop on what the Halfling leader is saying to the mayor of Grontsberg. After a local lout and known troublemaker steals one of the suits of armor, the party decides to chase after him to get it back. We trace him to an island in the nearby lake, and locate his cabin hideout with the help of my trusty eagle companion, Greywing.

But upon approaching his cabin, we disrupt the impending attack of a small horde of undead—zombies and skeletons. This is decidedly odd, but we have little luck figuring out where they might have come from (the so-called “creepy ruins” on the other side of the lake are a likely possibility) or why. Then, of course, we have to fight them, and I discover that every time I try to attack with my sling, I have the uncanny ability to roll a 4 and therefore miss. (Again for novices, you have to roll over a certain amount with your 20-sided die for the attack to be successful. This is the game part of the role-playing game. Otherwise we’d just all be invincible heroes, and where’s the fun in that?) I do discover that Summon Nature’s Ally is a bad-ass spell and sic a big black bear on one of the zombies. Rob, or rather Dipsie, discovers his rallying cry "protect the gnome!" at around this time.

The undead obviously want something inside the cabin—possibly the armor—which the local lout leaves behind as he flees in cowardice once we have kindly warned him that undead are at his door. Once the undead are dispatched—some escaping into the water from whence they emerged—we recover the armor and several other items stolen from the local townspeople. We return the armor to its rightful owners, who inform us that they have come to Grontsberg because they want to try to move in; a strange hybridized group of Mongrelfolk have taken over the Halfling village. We agree with the mayor that having Halflings move in on us is unacceptable, and so we accept the challenge of freeing their tribe’s land of Mongrelfolk, in exchange for (of course) payment and knowledge.

This is all way behind schedule. I’ll catch y’all up more on our adventures later, though.

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