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You guys will have to forgive me–it’s been over two months since this game as real-life cropped up between then and now, so getting this post written is going to take some effort, as I’ve forgotten a lot since then. And, if you’ve been keeping up with this blog, you’ll know that this game has since ended. I’d recommend skimming over the last installment prior to reading this; I know I had to. But a quick recap: We left Iema, Natalia, and Sunshine in The Dump, a place full of wood “bushes” that turned out to be the corpses of children. We were then attacked by their killers (splinterwaifs) and after a long, difficult fight, we manage to kill most of them and run the remaining off. And now for the last game…

Icetor the 15^th (continued)

Iema, Natalia, and Sunshine are still standing in the wood pile, exhausted after their fight. Iema casts Detect Magic and find a glowing “pot” of money–and a dead body. It is not a body like one of those wood “bushes” that we had found earlier, though. Jim says the body is decayed, has nice clothes, and a necklace that has the symbol of St. Barius society, which was bigger during the Godstorms. There aren’t as many people wearing this symbol nowadays, and when you did see it, they were mostly found on guards.

Iema and Natalia try to figure out what they know. Most of the murder victims were crushed, shredded…murdered by something very powerful. These splinterwaifs, though, are more for shooting, well…splinter-things, things that some people mistook for arrows. Obviously, the splinterwaifs, as terrible as they are in their own right, are not responsible for the murders we’re investigating.

We consider that one of the victims that was nearby The Dump had both an “arrow” in him and had his arm torn off. We conclude that the man had the misfortune of getting between both the splinterwaifs and whoever was killing everyone. Damn, talk about rough luck.

We walk back to the Burning Inn. On the way, Iema takes off his herald’s cloak. He’s decided to stop pussy-footing around with Burne Layward, and if the only way to make the guy talk is to put aside his symbol of his service under Julium, then that’s what he’s going to do. We get to the Inn. Iema sits down. Natalia remains standing, watching Burne warily.

Iema sits down, tells Burne that his story doesn’t add up, there is no way he had made such a huge mistake about what was in The Dump, and blantantly accuses Burne of knowing what was really going on. Burne at first tries a lame attempt at blaming the Corporal, then tries to change his tune.

“You know what?” he says. “Let’s start over. C’mon, I’ll buy you drinks.”

Iema, ever the polite bard, accepts his offer; Natalia, ever the rude druid, flat-out declines. Good thing because Iema takes a sip–and starts choking.  Fortunately he makes his Fortitude save, so the poison doesn’t kill him.

Combat! (My favorite part.)

The place breaks out into a frenzy. Four guys pull out longswords and flip over tables. Before she can react, Natalia gets hit by four arrows. She yells for Sunshine, who is nearby outside, hoping that her dire hawk will hear her. I don’t even remember if she does, though. What I have in my notes is that Natalia turns into a dire bear (of COURSE) while Iema starts hacking away at enemies. Eventually, we’ve bloodied several and run the rest off, but we managed to get Burne held down. While he’s being held, Iema goes around and calmly starts straightening up the bar, remembering to give the bartender 15 gold to go toward the damages.

Finally, Iema dispels whatever it is that’s keeping Burne held. Burne decides to tell us what he knows. The kid that we had heard died was actually the fourth murder. There was another murder even before what others knew about, but it took place outside of town. We get a name and an address for a contact named Al’menna from Burne, he admits that everything he’s said about the Corporal is a lie, and he begs us not to turn him over to Corporal Murstas.

We head off to this new contact, who confirms the rumor of that the first murder actually took place outside of town. Iema asks if anyone new was coming in, and Al’menna confirms there was a very nice family who came had been fleeing their old town because of–get this–some unresolved murders taking place. But these aren’t any old murders. Whatever is doing it could crush animals.

Iema and Natalia surmise that the killer could either be someone in the family or someone following the family. I remember at this point, having a weird feeling of déjà vu, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Al’menna then tells us that the child victim actually knew the family’s little girl. In fact, he had a crush on her and teased her all the time.

Natalia perks up. “Little girl?” She glances at Iema, who seems to be thinking the same thing she’s thinking.

We got back to visit Madwyn, who seems surprised in our sudden interest in this family, telling us they were very nice people. Still, she hands over the address. On the way, Natalia and Iema try to figure out what it could be. Let’s assume they are, indeed, “very nice people.” How were the murders tied to this family? Natalia suggests poltergeists. Of course, I don’t even know if poltergeists exist in D&D and thought maybe I was being dumb for even suggesting it, but if Jim and Phil thought it was dumb, they kept it to themselves.

Good thing. I’m usually the one getting their drinks for them. Yeah, stay on my good side, boys, ha.

So we get to the home of the girl and her family. The house is dark. The door is off the hinges. This doesn’t look good. Iema has a new ring that he uses to light up the area around us.

“I smell blood,” Sunshine offers.

Based on the damage, we can tell whatever it was was bipedal. It’s obviously huge because it’s crushed through the door. Natalia turns into a wolf, and she smells that same smell of blood and fecal matter. There are human parts everywhere.

We go back outside. Again, the smell is everywhere. We can overhear the Corporal nearby, and we call him over, explain what we’re doing.

This entire time, something is nagging me. Something about all this feels very familiar. I remember someone thinking this was the ghost of “Druid Jack.” Whatever it is, it’s big, super-strong, bipedal, crazy-protective, enough where it could mistake a little boy’s teasing for something more serious–

“OH,” I say. “OH. I bet this is–I bet–it’s–ARGH. What’s the word? What are they called again? IT’S A GRAY RENDER.”

Phil is impressed that I figured it out; Jim admits that he thought I would have figured it out sooner.

 In character, Natalia voices her suspicion, and then we’re all really moving because you don’t want a gray render running around loose in the town. We spread out. Natalia casts Greater Magic Fang on Sunshine because we really can’t afford for her to miss. We start roaming through town, trying to figure out where something as large as a gray render could be hiding. We’re go through alleys littered with small, dead animals–no doubt, leftovers from the render’s meals–and end up standing by a statue.

A bum sees us. “You outta be careful.”

We turn. “What?” one of us asks.

He scoffs. “Statues around here come to life.” We look at each other. He insists, “They do! I just saw one in the park.”

We remember something: Aside from blood, Natalia kept smelling fecal matter when she was shapeshifted. The park the bum is referring to houses a large stone vent that goes to the sewers. Iema calls for the Corporal, and we race toward the park.

Sunshine flies high up overhead to see into the tall vent, then lands by us. “Yup,” she says. “The fan inside is busted.”

I don’t even remember how we call got up and over. I mean, I assume Natalia and Sunshine flew, but I don’t know about Iema and the paladin. Once inside, though, we find some weird things. We see symbols with lines radiating from the center. Jim says it looks like the moon eclipsing the sun, which is the symbol for Tharix, god of crazy people and doomsday cultists. We go through a lake of poop (that’s my oh-so-poignant description in my notes, ha), and we notes that it looks like there’s been a fight. Two cultists are dead. One is still alive, but there are entrails behind him. His eyes are gouged out. Behind him, there is a message written in blood: I have seen death, and it is mine own.

Leave it to doomsday cultists to be drama queens.

Iema spots the little girl. She is freaked out. Jim asks Phil if Iema is going to calm the girl down. Phil sighs, mumbling that he has a feeling that he’s going to regret this…Attempting to comfort the little girl, he puts a hand on her shoulder.

Whoosh. That would be the sound of speedy, angry gray renders coming to attack us, by the way. Yes, gray renders, as in plural, as in one very large one and one smaller one.

Okay, that, we didn’t see coming.

Natalia immediately shifts into dire bear form, then starts a spell to summon an earth elemental. Meanwhile, Iema is fighting like crazy, and poor Sunshine is being smashed by one of the renders.

Suddenly, we hear a grinding sound. “What’s that?” Natalia asks.

We crane our necks, while trying to keep an eye on our attackers. Finally, we spot bricks that are starting to pop out of the walls. Jim reminds us that Natalia had summoned an earth elemental. Well, the elemental is coming from the walls. We watch in horror as a brick-man pulls himself from the walls. The ceiling above us starts to groan.

“Shit, shit, shit!” Natalia says, kicking herself for not predicting this. Iema scoops the little girl up and starts to run.

Natalia is hard-pressed to leave a fight and Corporal Murstes behind. The smaller render charges the earth elemental. Natalia’s creation then faces off both it and the larger render.

“Get to the tunnel!” Murstes yells.

The larger render is still fighting the earth elemental. Natalia grabs Sunshine and start to head out. Before she can turn around and find out if Murstes is behind us, she sees that Murstes has summoned a glowing wall between himself and us, effectively keeping the render and elemental from getting out–and locking himself in with the two.

“What are you doing?” Natalia demands.

“Go.”

She hesitates a moment. Iema has already gotten the girl out; after a moment, Natalia and Sunshine flee as well, and they get out just before everything collapses. The little girl is in shock. We decide what she needs is someone familiar, so we go back to her house, pick up the money in the safe that we found there, then take her to Madwyn’s, give the woman the money and the girl, and explained what the culprit was.

Next, we go to the guardhouse to let them know what happened to Corporal Murstes. They seem busy. I don’t remember what exactly they were doing; my notes say they’re “caught [doing something] revolutionary.” Don’t ask. I’m sure if the game continued, we would have found out. I can guarantee you that Jim’s got all worked out, and it probably will have an effect somewhere in Valt and the next game.

At any rate, we don’t care too much about it right now because suddenly, somebody breaks into the room, yelling that there’s a monster in the street. Natalia is surprised. That thing survived the cave-in?

The desk guard runs out to start ringing warning bells, and they start closing the town gates, effectively shutting down the town. We’re about to run out, but we’re suddenly halted by fire coming through the door. Men with black sacks on their heads burst in with firey swords, Burne in the lead. Why the hell did we let him go? Burne yells to burn the place down.

ARGH, WE DON’T HAVE TIME FOR THIS. Natalia quickly gets back in her dire bear form because that’s the form that gets shit done. Iema casts Improved Invisibility on himself and joins the fights. One of the guards jumps up on the desk, downs a potion, and starts breathing fire on the attackers for max damage. While Natalia is grappling one of these idiots, she hears a thunk outside as something hits the window.

“Ow,” she hears Sunshine’s muffled voice from outside it.

Oh, geez. That bird.

Iema, still invisible, sneaks to one guy and guts him, but he isn’t getting past everybody. Jim rolls for one of the female attackers and announces that she has made her listen check. So she figures out where Iema is and attacks. Luckily, she misses. Natalia kills one of the other attackers when Sunshine suddenly bashes through the window.

Iema swings around on the woman who had pinpointed him and manages to kill her. Other guards swoop in around him to surround Burne, grab him, and throw in a jail cell.

Finally, with Burne out of the way, we can focus on our main concern: The very large gray render that’s on the loose. Around us is chaos. Aside from the fight we just had, one guard is yelling to block the gates to keep the render from escaping, and another has just run in to call out that it’s on one of the docks. We hurry that way.

There is a brief debate among some as to whether or not to let the little girl die, figuring that once she’s gone, the threat will be gone, too.  And we picked…what do you THINK we picked? We’re not letting a little girl die! It’s not her fault this crazy thing is attached to her! Are you freakin’ nuts? Iema starts heading out toward the boat and gets about 10 feet before the render starts hurling iron at him. A piece strikes the bard’s shoulder. His whole arm goes numb. Iema gets hit a second time and drops. Both Natalia and a guard make a beeline toward Iema, but the guard gets there first and heals him, enabling Natalia to refocus on the boat, the gray render, and the little girl. She proceeds.

We see that it’s worse than we thought. We thought at least the smaller render had died. It, in fact, had not. Both the renders were on the boat. The smaller one charges at Natalia. Iema quickly manages to grab the Wand of Cure Serious Wounds from Natalia because he’s just about out of spells–and because Natalia, seeing that she’s about to get attacked, is going to shift back into dire bear form. (Quick thinking on Phil’s part, by the way.) So Natalia shifts and starts clawing, Sunshine sweeps in and does her thing, and the lieutenant fighting with us manages to get the killing blow in on the little render.

Everyone then turns to focus on the larger gray render. This fight is much uglier. Iema is killed during it, his legs torn off. Natalia manages to finish off the gray render, collects her friend, and then goes to find a cleric to resurrect him.

Easier said than done. It turns out that not all clerics are willing to just resurrect people. This cleric wanted a good reason to  resurrect Iema, and when Natalia failed to provide one (aside from “he’s my friend and I’ll claw your eyes out if you don’t”), the cleric refused to help.

So Natalia has to use her reincarnate. She was hoping not to have to do that because the chances of him coming back as an arcling were pretty slim. Still, better alive…So she casts. Iema comes back as an owl.

Sunshine eyes the owl hungrily and hops toward him.

“SUNSHINE,” Iema says. “It’s ME! Iema! YOU CAN’T EAT ME.”

“It’s really a drow pretending!” she says, hopping closer. “I’m not falling for your drow tricks!”

Natalia gets in the middle and orders Sunshine to back off. Sunshine reluctantly obeys. We had back to Julium’s, give our report, and go to bed.

Now here’s where I really have to rely on my memory because I didn’t take any notes beyond this point. I believe it was the next morning when Raelan finally comes along and transforms Iema back into an arcling. (Wizards are so handy to have around. When they’re not being annoying.) We go to find Madwyn to discover that when the renders found her with the little girl, that they had torn her arm off. Natalia feels guilty about that (after all, we’re the ones who left the little girl with her, assuming that the renders had died, and thus, had made her a target), so we find someone to try to fix her arm with a spell. Unfortunately, the dice gods were not with him when Jim rolled for that NPC; it went horribly wrong, and her arm ended up growing out of her side. She, of course, is horrified. Determined to get her arm fixed, we go to Raelan, since he has surgery skills. He teleports us to his castle and fixes her arm to some kind of monster arm. It’s not as nice-looking as her old arm, but this arm can do all sorts of things that her original one couldn’t do. To her credit, Madwyn doesn’t complain. Instead, she admires Raelan’s work.

And that’s where the last game ended: Us standing around a woman with a monster arm, and a young wizard throwing his arms up in the air, declaring himself a genius.

It’s as good an ending as any, I suppose.

This whole post is going to be about gaming. You’ve had fair warning.

As I (very briefly) mentioned a couple posts ago, Jim had confessed to me, while we were out on a drive, that he felt that our game was in its final stretch, and it was probably about time to lay the game to rest. At this point, Natalia and Iema are well-known enough in Derrikol Forest that people aren’t going to give them trouble. Jim told me that those mountain giants that were giving people problems before would, if running across us, rather jump off a cliff now than deal with us. They might survive the fall. They wouldn’t survive us.

Jim had also said that if I wanted to continue playing, he could do it. We could push on, Natalia could go off to other parts of the world and be more ambitious and powerful, but truthfully, Natalia was never an ambitious druid. Her big ambition was to be done with the adventuring and return to her forest. The running joke throughout the game was Natalia saying she just wanted to live in her treehouse, and while we joked about it, it was true. If I had been playing a character like Raelan, I could see where we could have pushed the game further. But Natalia? No, especially after she discovered that both her efforts and even her existence were resulting in deaths without her realizing it.

(If you’re confused, it’s probably because I don’t think I’ve posted that game yet. No worries. I will.)

So, last night, Phil came over, and before we even started playing, Jim asked if we also thought it was time to wrap up game. It was a pretty short discussion. We could all feel it winding down. So we didn’t actually play D&D. (We actually started the warm-up to a werewolf game Jim’s going to run next, but that’s another story.) Instead, Jim gave us summations of what happened. There were a couple points where we could pick what our characters would have chosen, and he would tell us how it worked out.

Eventually, I am going to post up the last game we had, the one from two months ago that I barely remember. Might as well; then, I will have had the whole thing documented here. And at some point, I’m going to ask Jim to write the official summary here. I didn’t write a single thing down because I wanted to soak it all in. And I had a big debate with myself on whether or not I wanted to post the big reveals and what happened because there were some things we were blown away by like, oh my god, THE PERSON WHO BETRAYED US TO THE DROW. But I’ve decided that I really want all the details in one post, and I really want Jim to be the one to write it.  Here’s hoping I can convince him.

I don’t remember where exactly I left off on the blog with what was going on in Valt, but I think I did write it down here that when Iema and Natalia came up from the Underdark, they had found out that the towns of Devies and Stilldale were suffering from plagues. Before I found out the game was going to end, I had already talked to Jim about how Natalia wanted to fix this. She had worked hard alongside the towns, particularly Stilldale, and had finally won some amount of respect from the people there–no small feat, considering how much they hated druids in the beginning. Just as Stilldale referred to her as their “local witch,” she thought of them as her town–or, as much as any druid would claim a town. She didn’t want them to all die.

What I was going to have her do in the next game was have her create her first unique spell, one that combined the properties of an insect swarm spell with a type of anti-contagion spell, so that she could release a swarm of mosquitos into the town to heal the people. While wrapping up the game, Jim says that Natalia is successful in creating the spell, but she has limited success, only because by the time it happens, most of the people in the towns have died from the plagues.

Glossing over the summary: Natalia had already had a hint of some of the “bloodletting” that was unknowingly released by herself and Iema that the earth weird had alluded to while we were playing. Jim will finally reveal just how MUCH damage had been caused by Natalia’s choices, actions, and even her own resurrection from when she died fighting the black dragon, ALL those games ago. Jim said there’s a lesson here: Be careful how you use magic.

I’ll tell this part because it’s already been alluded to in the “Homebrewed” posts, so it’s not a shock: Beta does, in fact, become evil. In fact, he creates a monster mess–literally–in Derrikol Forest, to the point where even Natalia doesn’t stay anymore. Instead, Natalia goes off to retire on a boat. A really cool boat. You’ll find out in the summary, despite who finally writes it.

After I agreed that Natalia would do this, I backtracked and asked Jim if Natalia fought Beta before she retired. He said I could if I wanted to, but she would have to had become the leader of the Spruce Circle and gotten herself and all the other druids killed in the process of “cleansing” the forest from Beta and his new groupies. Jim asked if I wanted to change what I had agreed to with Natalia’s fate.

But, at this point, I had already agreed to have her go away, and I’m a big “no cheating” fan and didn’t want “backsies” to rewrite her story, so to speak. Still, it seems very out of character for Natalia to not try to fix the problem that she, in fact, created. I mean, if she had never Awakened Beta, this whole mess wouldn’t be. So I justify her fleeing from Derrikol Forest this way: Natalia would have fought anyone she thought needed to be put down, including Iema. (Sorry, Phil, but that’s just the way it rolls.) But the idea of fighting Beta, her first and most beloved companion, after finding out just how much she contibuted to the downfall of the area, coupled with finding out which of her friends had sold her to the drow…well, it was too much. Besides, what if she just caused more damage? Rather than risk it, she leaves the forest she loves so much and had so much hope for. Yes, it’s sad, but it is what it is.

Unsurprisingly, Iema and Natalia will separate. Phil will reveal things to me on his character sheet that I had suspected (Iema finally moved from chaotic-good to chaotic-neutral), but the source of the slippery alignment will be a complete surprise to me. Iema, as it turns out, has been keeping some mighty big secrets from Natalia, and for good reason. Had she known, there’s a very good chance she might have killed him. I think she would have done that as a last resort, but yes–it probably would have come to that.

Iema has his own ambitions that are quite big, and in fact, I suspect he’s going to be one of the catalysts in an upcoming world-changing event in Valt. I totally want to write about his plans because they’re really cool, but I don’t trust my memory and would rather Jim give all this away. As to what will become of Iema’s ambitions…we shall find out in the next game.

That’s the other thing that surprised me: Although we have no plans yet to start another D&D game, Jim already knows that his next game will be set 17 years in the future of Valt, after Julium has ruled for some time, so Iema and Natalia will both still be alive. What Phil has chosen for his bard’s fate is pretty big, and I would be shocked if Iema doesn’t come up as an NPC. Natalia, though, has become pretty secluded, so I think it will be hard for the next group of players to run across her, unless they’re specifically looking for druids. But seeing as to WHICH boat she retires on, I think it will be very difficult for them to find her, even if they wanted to. Sad that I probably won’t see my first character again as an NPC in a later game? Well, yes. But, truthfully, it seems right for her.

All I’ve got to say about the next set of players–and who knows, I could be among them–is that wow. This campaign ended on a very dark note, and some very big things are on the horizon. Hope you’re ready.

Anyway, enough about all that. The reveals and summary will come later, after I post the last real “Homebrewed” game. Upon concluding my first D&D game, I wanted to touch on some things I learned, things that would be perhaps be useful to others just learning the ropes:

• Have a fully-fleshed out character concept in mind before you start your character sheet. Mine was pretty vague, and I seriously think that’s what took SO long when I filled Natalia’s sheet out the first time. (Seriously, it was something like 3 1/2 hours.) Phil knew exactly what he wanted to play and had his sheet done in minutes. Granted, he’s also been filling sheets out way longer than I have, but I think knowing exactly what he wanted to do helped a LOT.
• Unless you have a natural aptitude for acting, create a character that is pretty much just you if you were in a D&D world. I had no issues figuring out how Natalia would feel or do things because, honestly, if D&D was real-life, I would probably be a druid.
• At the same time…druids are probably not the best class to play for a first-timer, or at least, not in 3rd edition. Unless you have a fabulous memory (which I do not), it can be very tricky keeping track of not only all your spells, but all your forms and the abilities you have in those forms, PLUS all your animal companions’ stats and abilities.
• For your first game, play with people with loooooots of patience. Preferably friends that you feel very comfortable with. I would not recommend starting out with strangers at a convention, that’s for sure. 
• Sad fact: Make fun of it all you want, but role-playing really does make the game better. It breathes life into it. As much as I make fun of people who LARP, I can at least see where they’re coming from. In our games, I tend to just tell Jim, “Well, Natalia does this or that.” My scenes are always way less dynamic than the ones between Phil and Jim, where they actually role-play it out.
• If you’re “of the shy sort” (as Jim describes me in one of his first posts about this game), the best thing I’ve found (aside from alcohol, heh) is to prepare for games. Know what you want to do before the game starts. If you’re like me, you’ll be like a deer in headlights if you’re put on the spot regarding what you want to do next. I wish I had taken my own advice on this one more often.
• Related to that (as well as the first bullet point): Character backgrounds. I now realize why veteran gamers get so freakin’ detailed with their character backgrounds. I knew Natalia’s past, but I didn’t really know what I wanted her future to be. It made it harder to figure out what I wanted to do, and I wasted a lot of time in-game trying to figure it out spur of the moment.
• This might be obvious, but the more dice, the better. Try to get different colors, too. One thing I saw Phil do a lot was say something like, “White die is this kind of damage, black die is that kind” and roll. He was way more efficient than I was.
• Next time, I’m also going to hunt down a box top to roll my dice in, so I can be as enthusiastic as I wanna be in my dice-rolling–without losing them all over the floor and creating a mad cat-chase as they scramble after them.
• Another thing I saw Phil use a lot was something called “bardic knowledge.” Any time Jim mentioned anything, he would say, “Jim, can I roll a bardic knowledge on that?” Then he’d roll, and if he succeeded, Jim would tell him what Iema would know. Keep in mind that your character knows things that you do not, and if you suspect you’re running into something that fits that criteria, ask the DM. Granted, unless you’re rolling a bard, it won’t be a bardic knowledge check, but it will be something.
• If I had to do it all over? I would have secretly swiped Jim’s Monster Manual and taken a look at some of the things we could run into. Be careful not to metagame–I’m proud that I’m very good at not doing this, especially for a first-timer–but still, I see nothing wrong with actually familiarizing yourself with the types of critters your character would know about.
• While you can play without reading the handbook, it certainly helps to skim over it. I actually did read the druid section of ours a couple of times, and actually knew things about druids that Jim had forgotten.
• Index cards! They’re the best. In hindsight, if I had to do it over, I would have put all the new spells Natalia had learned on index cards and separated them by level. I did eventually write them down on paper so I wouldn’t have to ask to see the book every time I needed to change her spell list, but index cards would have been better.
• Also, index cards for magic items: Jim took this idea and ran with it. He even had a way we could keep track of charges on wands. DMs should really consider doing this. It was easier for me to remember I had items when I had cards in my hands than when I had it written on a part of my character sheet I never paid much attention to.
• If you play for any length of time–our own game had been been running for maybe a little over a year now–don’t be surprised when, upon ending the game, you’ve discovered you’ve grown attached to your character. I still don’t get people who cry over their characters dying (that’s just nuts), but I was surprised to realize that I was pretty bummed about shelving Natalia, never to play her again. Even more so, I was disappointed how sad I was for Natalia, seeing how hard she tried to make the world better, and how the world actually had become darker for it. 
• RESPECT YOUR DMs. Holy crap. The amount of work and even themselves  that they invest to give you something this awesome is nothing short of amazing. Come prepared and don’t be a jerk. Repect what they’re doing because they’re doing it for you, and they certainly don’t have to.

That’s all I can remember for now. In my very first post about this game, I had posted Natalia’s stats. I figured I’d end it the same way. She ended the game at level 14, only points away from 15. (For the curious, I believe Iema was at level 16.) In her human form, she was sitting at 133 hit points and an AC of 18. And for her abilities, they were as follows:

Strength: 13
Dexterity:  13
Constitution: 18
Intelligence: 8
Wisdom: 19
Charisma: 13

Funny how, through all that, her intelligence never went up, heh. But she did get wiser and hardier. I guess that’s all a druid can really ask for, especially in a world like Valt.

Oh, and Jim? Thank you for a great time. I had a blast. And you’ve finally convinced me:  D&D is better than Warcraft. You win.

For those who celebrate it, I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving.  I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t want to spend the day after shopping.  Let’s talk Jim’s D&D game instead!  And I’ll tell you what Natalia is not thankful for:  Drow.  And if you recall from the last game, that’s exactly we left her, Iema, Corin, and Sunshine–about to bunk with some evil elves, admittedly Iema’s and Natalia’s worst kind of enemies.  Confused why we’re living out what seems to be a like bad episode of “Friends”?  (But, Spring, they were ALL bad episodes!)  Kidding aside, you can refresh your memory here.

Usually, when we start our games, it takes us a few moments to remember exactly where everyone was and what everyone was doing.  Although, admittedly, I think my “Homebrewed” series helps us all remember it, but even with that, there is some amount of refreshing to be done.  This time, however, we all remember very clearly:  There are drow, we’re going to a drow city, and Natalia is refusing to sleep in the same camp with drow.  I (firmly) tell Jim that yes, I’m aware that this means Natalia won’t get new spells, but I don’t care.  Once bitten, twice shy.

Or, in Natalia’s case, twice as likely to punch you in the face.

Figuring that he might as well take advantage of Natalia’s self-imposed insomnia, Iema announces he’s not going to bother with watch then and finally get straight eight hours sleep.  Makes sense.

So Corin, Iema, and Sunshine sleep for the night.  The drow do not go to sleep, but do go into a strange meditative trance a little further away from the group.  Like Natalia, though, they’re also wary, and they take watches.

Something odd is happening, though.  As the night goes on, Natalia gets colder and colder.  She knows it’s not the temperatures, though.  It’s her.  By morning, she’s so cold her teeth are chattering.

Sterror the 9^th

Iema wakes up, freezing and feverish.  Apparently, both Iema and Natalia are suffering from a disease (the shakes) and in Iema’s case, two diseases (the shakes and mindfire).  This is when Jim tells me and Phil that our characters take -2 to our dexterity.   Phil also had to take -5 off Intelligence for Iema.  We check with Corin and Sunshine, who seem fine.  At first, I’m all whiny about the new stats on Natalia’s character sheet and I’m saying there is no way she’s going to a drow city feeling like this and they probably had something to do with this anyway and I’m pretty sure they’re at fault for the bad economy too and GRRR BOO HISS.  Thankfully, Phil is way more knowlegable about all of this that I am, and he kindly reminds me that I have an item that will help fix this.  That shuts me up.

I flip through the notecards of the items Jim had made for us.  Aha!  I have some kind of Staff of Healing.  Natalia uses that to remove the diseases.  As I roll the dice, Jim roleplays the drow priestess.

“What are they doing?” she asks Hadrazain in almost a disgusted voice.

(Incidentally, Natalia can’t understand a damn word they say, so luckily, I get to ignore everything this bitch says.)

The Master of Arms isn’t sure himself, so he asks Iema.  Iema tells Hadrazain that he and Natalia weren’t feeling well, so Natalia was healing them up.

Hadrazain frowns.  “What exactly did you fight yesterday?  Describe it.”

And so we do.  Well, Iema does.  I feel so sorry for Phil sometimes because when it comes to talking, he does all the heavy lifting.  If I do it, I babble.  Seriously, I’m taking Jim’s advice next time I roll a character: My next character will have taken a vow of silence.

Wait…did Jim just say that to shut me up?  (Note:  Kick Jim’s ass.  Later.  Um, after game tomorrow so he doesn’t take it out on Natalia.)

The drow cleric quickly recognize one of the last things we had fought the day before.  “Pox walkers?” she exclaims.    “You guys fought pox walkers and you didn’t cleanse yourself afterwards?  Are you stupid?”

I glance at Natalia’s character sheet, her intelligence at 8.  Um, honestly…yes.  By the way, great thing for noob D&D players to hide behind is a dumb character.  Gives you an excuse for really dumb mistakes.

The drow priestess marches straight to Natalia and gets in her face.  “You infected us, now heal us,” she demands.  I don’t remember if this was translated for Natalia, but it wouldn’t matter–Natalia gets the gist.

Natalia looks at her Staff of Healing.  She wonders if it could still heal the drow if it were shoved in the woman’s eye.  But, of course, Natalia is a good (kinda) little druid, and would do no such thing.  “Fine,” she says evenly.  And I cringe for every charge I waste on them.

So now the drow priestess and wizard go off to prepare spells.  Meanwhile, Natalia and Iema hang back to talk to Hadrazain.  “Well,” Natalia says, “they’re off to prepare how they’re gonna kill us.”

Hadrazain grins.  “Probably.  Hell, they’ve been trying to kill me for two weeks.”

“Really?” Iema seems surprised.

“Oh, yeah,” Hadrazain says.  “Of course, they’re not gonna be up front about it.  They’re trying to make it look like an accident or something like that.”

Natalia grows thoughtful.  “Do either of them know any kind of mind control or anything like that?  Because what would be really perfect for them is to mind control us to attack you.  Takes care of two birds with one stone.”

Jim suddenly announces that one of us looks over to see the wizard, who we didn’t think could understand us, looking at us with sudden interest, and then turning back to his book, frantically flipping the pages.

“Shit,” I say.  “Don’t tell me that I just gave him that idea.  The one time Natalia says something semi-intelligent, someone’s actually listening?  I didn’t think he could understand Common!”

“Maybe that’s what he wants you to think,” Jim says.

Too late now.  We start rolling for encounters.  When we finally hit one, Jim says that very suddenly, the three drow split up in different directions, like what fish do when the bigger fish comes along to eat them.  And, me being paranoid, I think THOSE FREAKIN’ DROW SET US UP.  But I don’t say that.  None of us say that, although I’ll bet we’re all thinking it.  Instead, one of us says, “Well, this can’t be good.”

And it isn’t.  A nine-foot tall troll-looking thing rolls right up to us.  Jim says his arms are as long as his body with claws at the ends.  The thing has a long face, tannish-gray skin, and bat ears.  In other words, it’s ugly.  Later one of the drow will call it a dusk giant.

Oh, yeah.  And there’s four of them.

Phil must have rolled the best for initiative because he gets to go first.  He says that Iema is going to try Hold Monster.  It fails.  Instead, they charge.  Iema’s nifty boots give him a ten foot reach, so he ends up taking attacks of opportunity, and suddenly, the light on his sword dims.  I don’t know what this means, but I don’t like the sound of it.  Apparently, these giants have some kind of aura that dims light sources around them.

Quickly, the things attack Iema and Natalia.  The drow priestess and wizard start casting.  I secretly wondering if they’re going to blast us or the dusk giant.  To my surprise, Jim says that Natalia and Iema now get bonuses, and we’re filled with strength–albeit unholy strength.

Still, a pleasant surprise.

When Natalia’s turn comes about, she casts Greater Magic Fang on Sunshine and then shifts into her Dire Bear form.  But none of this is quick enough.  While she’s shifting, Corin jumps in, swings his mace around, punges it in troll-like thing’s guts, then yanks it out, swings it back around, and buries it in its head.

The dusk giants all turn on Corin, now determining him to be the biggest threat.  And what they did to him was awful:  They grab him by his arms and legs and rip him to pieces.  Literally.

Suddenly, one of the dusk giants freezes.  Apparently, the drow also tried Hold Monster like Iema did, except that theirs worked.  (Incidentally, Jim just now admitted that the wizard did try to do something similar to Natalia to get her to kill Hadrazain for him, but luckily, I had made her will save.  I KNEW IT.)  There is another one that is severely injured; Natalia finishes it off by ripping off its face. 

At least she gets to take some agression out.

Iema, on the other hand, is still swinging away.  He kills another one, then whacks at the remaining–and then something weird happens.  Jim says something the thing holds its fist up to Iema and a black ray comes out and hits him.  Oh, and guess what?  Iema gets a negative level.  As you can imagine, Phil is none too pleased about this.

Next up:  The drow wizard.  He lets a lightening bolt rip–right into Hadrazain’s back.

Except, as it turns out, the spell doesn’t actually hurt the Weapons Master, since drow have spell resistance.  Instead, it goes through him and into one of the monsters.  The wizard looks at his superior and shrugs.

The priest decides to step in.  She takes out her weapon, which has snakeheads on it.  I vaguely remember something similar in Homeland, so Jim and Phil catch me up:  Common for priestesses of Lolth, scary, and the more snakeheads on it, the more, uh, “dedicated” they are to their evil goddess.

“You mean the more fanatical they are,” I clarify.

“Yes,” Jim says.  He pauses for dramatic effect.  “And she has six.”

“Holy shit,” Phil says, immediately getting it.  It isn’t until Jim explains that three is about average before I understood:  This priestess is, as Jim puts it, “Out of her goddamned mind.“

Ew, and her dirty buffs are on me!

Okay, okay, okay, let’s wrap this up.  She kills one of the troll-giant-thingy with it.  Her little fight scene didn’t last nearly as long as our conversation about her weapon.  And with that, it’s over.  We gather pieces of Corin up, Natalia casts Reincarnate, and–get this–he comes back as a wolf.

Corin-the-wolf looks down at his new form and sighs unhappily.

The drow wizard, on the other hand, points at Corin and laughs and laughs and laughs. 

Natalia considers for a moment biting off that stupid finger, but instead, she asks Corin if he wants to stay a wolf.  Hey, you never know.  Unsurprisingly, though, Corin does not want to be a wolf .  The drow wizard offers to change Corin back–for 450 gold and Corin’s mirror.  Although I didn’t realize it at the time, according to the book, that’s a friggin ridiculous price to pay for a fourth level spell.

“His mirror?” we wonder aloud.

Hadrazain explains that in the Underdark, mirrors are rare.  Iema checks with Corin, who quickly agrees to give him the mirror, stating it wasn’t anything special.  Just turn him human, damn it.  We get that taken care of, and then Iema talks to Hadrazain about restoring his negetive level.  Of course, Iema doesn’t actually say that because, in-game, it makes no sense.  But I don’t remember how Phil roleplayed this.  What I remember was us looking over and catching the stupid wizard and priestess going through our shit.

SIGH.

We don’t confront them, though.  I don’t think we had much loot, anyway.  Instead, Hadrazain is saying, “You want some help, huh?  You talking willing help or unwilling?”

Phil is desperate for his character.  “Either.”

Hadrazain strokes his chin.  “Well, unwilling would be cheaper.”

“Then let’s go with that.”

The normally holier-than-thou, stick-up-her ass Natalia isn’t going to argue.  More than likely, it’s going to involve screwing another drow over.  Like she cares.

Hadrazain brightens.  “I’ve got an idea.  C’mon.”  And so the drow Weapons Master leads us to his hometown of Fenzybyl, to a building.  After we reach a gate outside a building, Hadrazain says, “Wait here.”

We wait, eyeing the other drow warily.

The doors to the building open.  Drow wearing robes come pouring out.  Hadrazain is leaning against the wall, arms folded.  Finally, he stands up and approaches one of the younger female drow, stopping her.  Not hard to do.  If you recall, Hadrazain is supposed to be very handsome.  So she stops.  He whispers in her ear; she giggles.  Finally, he leads her to us.

“Which one?” she says. 

Hadrazain points to Iema.  She casts, and yay!  Iema has his level back!

The girl turns to Hadrazain.  “So…ready to go back inside…?”

At this moment, Natalia was like OMG, LIGHTBULB, HE WAS OFFERING HER SEX.

“You know,” Hadrazain says, “I’ve changed my mind.  You’re not really my type.”

And we quickly leave, the female drow cursing up a storm behind us.

“Hey,” Hadrazain says, “why don’t you come to my place for dinner?”

“We wouldn’t be dinner, would we?” Natalia asks suspiciously.

Hadrazain waves his arm at her in dismissal.  “Nah, of course not.”  And so, stupid or not, we go with him because, well, what else are we supposed to do?  Hadrazain leads us to his house, where we are quickly greeted by a female drow priestess in armor.  Apparently, she’s one of Hadrazain’s sisters.

“You can’t bring them here,” she hisses at him.  The two of them start fighting.  Jim impresses on me the big deal that a male drow is beating up a female since females are superior in drow society.  Jim’s description of the way that Hadrazain is also punching his sister also reminds me that, yes, Jim is definitely a big brother.  He has big brother antagonization down to a freakin’ science.

Suddenly, we hear an older female drow’s voice asking about us in whatever language drow speak.  (Um…drow?  Ha.  Maybe?)  Suddenly, Hadrazain and his sister quit fighting before they get caught.  Natalia doesn’t understand what they’re saying, but Iema does:  The older female (Hadrazain’s mother) is commenting that we would make great sacrifices to Lolth; Hadrazain says he just wants to bring us to dinner.

She turns her back on her children, who immediately go back to punching each other when she’s not looking, and the matron mother inspects us.  Finally, she says, “Very well.  You are welcome at our table.”

Natalia leans over to Iema.  “I’m glad to hear she said at our table instead of on.”

“I noticed that, too,” Iema whispers back.

So we go inside.  At first, Hadrazain tries to talk Natalia into meeting his little brother, but she flat-out refuses.  “I’m staying with Iema and the others,” she says flatly, staring him down.

Iema, at this point, seems to be getting embarrassed by Natalia’s rudeness and apologizes on her behalf.  “We’ve had some really bad experiences with drow,” he explains.  “You know, trusting them, trying to help them, and then getting sold into slavery…”

Natalia doesn’t feel the need to explain herself.  Stupid drow.  She keeps staring at him.

Hadrazain, though, is unconcerned.  “Aaaaah, I see, I understand.”  He shrugs.  “That’s fine, then.  I just thought my little brother would really like to meet another druid, that’s all.”

For a moment, Natalia pauses.  Another druid?  she repeats to herself.  No way.  Damn it, do we not have standards?   She can’t deny her curiousity, though, although she doesn’t admit it aloud.

Instead, we go to Hadrazain’s weapons room.  At first, Iema is distracted by something calls the gythka–something that Natalia remembers being conjured by thri-kreen when she was fighting the Gith in the Astral Plane.  (Jim is quick to let me know, though, that there isn’t necessarily a connection between Gith and githka.)  After Iema admires the weapon, he tries to locate the companion to his weapon.  He keeps his hand on his weapon, hoping it will direct him.  He doesn’t want to pull it out for better help, though, for fear that Hadrazain will figure out that Iema’s weapons aren’t just any weapons.  They’re sentient.

 Finally, Hadrazain, realizing that Iema wasn’t finding the weapon, suggests that we check out his secret room.  He opens a door via a statue (a statue, I might add, shaped like Lolth that he makes out with in order to get the secret door to open–Phil and I had a laugh at that one), and we start downstairs.  There are voices in various languages, yelling and pleading.  At first, I’m worried that Natalia and Iema are being led into some sort of dungeon, until I realize that there are no people down here.  The voices are coming from the weapons.

Well, guess Hadrazain figured it out.  I half-expect the drow to jump us, steal Iema’s weapon, and lock us, but he does no such thing.  “Try here,” he suggests instead.

Iema looks and looks and looks, but he’s just not having any luck.  Finally, Iema comes clean and tells the whole riddle regarding the companion to his weapon.  Hadrazain says, “You know, it says ‘the son.’  Maybe it’s not referring to me.  Maybe it’s talking about Dineth.”

Hadrazain locates the nearest servant and asks where Dineth is.  We notice that he’s actually very polite to the servants; however, none of them know.  Finally, after looking around, Hadrazain finds another one of his sisters, yanks her hair, and start bullying her to tell him where Dineth is. 

“I don’t know!” she says.  “And I’m gonna tell Mom!”

Hadrazain laughs.  “No, you won’t.”

She gives up.  Dineth, she says, is in the wine cellar.  She sneers when she talks about him.  We leave, and later we find out why:  Dineth is a little, uh…”slow.”  The rest of his family had wanted him to be sacrificed to Lolth, but Hadrazain and his father put a stop to that. 

We also learn the secret to Hadrazain’s success in how he gets away with beating up drow women.  He doesn’t get caught.  He explains that as long as he doesn’t get caught doing it, he won’t get in trouble.  And none of the girls will tell because they’d be embarrassed to admit they keep getting their asses kicked by a boy.

Finally, we get to where Dineth is.  One side of his face is pulled back, like he’s had a stroke at some point in the past.  He’s crouched down, looking at rats.

“Hi,” Iema says gently.  “What are you doing?”

Dineth ignores us–until Natalia repeats it in druidic.  Then his head snaps up. Natalia and Dineth go into a long conversation about rats, what he’s doing with them, how he takes care of them, and (most importantly) how he’s protecting them from all the spiders.  Natalia asks to see what weapons he has that he’s protecting them with.  As you can guess, this was all a round-about way to find out if the child had Iema’s weapon.  Imagine our surprise, though, when Dineth proudly holds up a book covered in squashed spiders.

Natalia sighs.  “How about cats?  Something bigger?  Do you have a bigger weapon for something like cats?”

Dineth rocks a little bit.  “There–there no cats here.”

Eventually, Dineth decides to take us to what Hadrazain calls the boy’s “sanctum.”  Hadrazain groans and asks to sit it out.  “You guys will probably like it, but it’s really uncomfortable for me.”

We agree and leave him behind, following Dineth into a room.  We quickly understand why it would be “uncomfortable” for a drow:  It’s a room full of trees, grass, and most of all, sunlight.  It’s obviously a creation of magic, rather than an exit out of the Underdark but still, Natalia LOVES it.  Iema, really, doesn’t seem to care much. He just wants his companion weapon, but we look everywhere, we cannot find it.

Natalia keeps trying to find out if Dineth has anything else, but finally she grumbles to Iema, “I feel really bad, manipulating a retarded kid.”

“I don’t.  I want that weapon,” Iema says.

Natalia turns to walk away.  “Well, I’ve tried.  Sorry.  It’s not working.”

Suddenly, Dineth mentions a “secret” brother–one they’re not supposed to talk about.  We try to get him to talk, but he won’t.  We give up and leave the sanctum.  The original priestess had been waiting for us outside.

“Well,” she sneers at us, “I see Hadrazain didn’t waste time in telling you all our dirty little secrets.”

Hadrazain suddenly shows up, chases his sister away, and apologizes.  He had been called away by the matron mother, which, of course, was probably a ploy, so the priestess could get at us alone.  We ask him about having a “secret brother,” but Hadrazain has no clue what Dineth is referring to.  Out of character, I struggle to remember the crazy thing that drow can wind up becoming, and finally I get it.  “Drider!”  I say.  “Is it possible that your secret brother is a drider?”

Again, Hadrazain has no clue about a brother, but he does admit that if there is one, then the drider-route is a distinct possibility.  Finally, realizing that everyone is waiting on us, we go upstairs to dinner.  Not without some trepidation, I might add.

And it isn’t as bad as I thought it would be.  I guess it is a good thing we came with Hadrazain, one of the few male drow with some status.  Because he doesn’t want us messed with, we’re not.  Instead, we’re introduced to everyone: Matron Nisieth; her consort and Hadrazain’s father Pinic, who is a wizard; Zilla, the priestess we came with; Balath, one of Hadrazain’s other sisters; a middle-aged drow named Jaerac, who was the spymaster; and the captain of the house guard, Kynon.  Matron Nisieth finishes introductions by saying, “The House of Teldabazz welcomes you.”

We start eating.  From the sounds of it, dinner is actually good: Mushrooms and roth steak.  Hey, I might be vegetarian, but Natalia is not.  She loves it.

“So!”  Hadrazain says cheerfully to his mother.  “How many kids did you have?”

Iema and Natalia nearly spit out their food.  But, to our surprise, she’s forthcoming about the other child.  She even tells us about the ceremony where she sacrificed her newborn child, which is god-awful, and then she finally asks Hadrazain, “Don’t you have to prepare?”  I presume she’s talking about one of his tournaments or something.

“Oh, yeah,” he says.  He excuses himself from the table. 

I expected the worst.  Luckily, although haughty, none of the drow really want to piss Hadrazain off (well, I don’t understand why the Matron didn’t kill us–maybe she figured we weren’t worth the effort), so nobody, like, jumps up on the dinner table to run over and slit our throats or anything.  Thankfully.  Eventually, one by one, everyone leaves, until we’re left alone with Pinic.

Here, we find out a few things.  One thing we knew about ahead of time was that Pinic was a very powerful sorceror or wizard or something to that effect.  What we didn’t know was that he knew about Iema’s weapon Cruagh, and his quest for the companion weapon Rukh.  Another thing we didn’t know:  Once Iema gets the set, it isn’t going to work outside of the Underdark.  The weapons were made to kill Underdark creatures.

“Excuse me,” Iema says.  “I’m going to take out my weapon, but I’m not attacking, okay?”

Hadrazain’s father nods.

Iema pulls out Cruagh.  “Is that true?” he asks it.  Jim says the weapon flashes pictures that quickly confirm the drow’s claims.  Iema sheaths Cruagh.  “Well, damn.”

Natalia shrugs.  “Maybe it was meant to be down here.  Maybe you can give it to Hadrazain.”

Pinic agrees that Hadrazain will probably do a trade.  Finally, why the mage is hanging around to talk to us becomes clear.  The drow leans forward.  “I can get you out of the Underdark.”

“You can?” Iema asks, surprised.  “I didn’t think teleporting worked down here.”

It doesn’t quite work like that, we find out.  He plans on sending us to the Astral Plan where, of course, we’re going to have to find our way to the Prime Material.  “I will do this for you,” he says, “in exchange that you something for me in the future.”

Iema hesitates.  “I’m already indebted to another–”

“I’ll do it,” Natalia interrupts.  And, yes, I know what you’re thinking.  SPRING.  OMG.  It’s drow!  They’re evil!  He’ll have you do something EVIL.  Yes, I know.  I also knew Natalia wasn’t going to get out of the Underdark without something like this happening.  And you know what?  Natalia doesn’t want to flounder around the Underdark for a FREAKIN’ YEAR.  She’ll take the deal and figure out how to wiggle out of it later.  And if she can’t…

Well, let’s not talk about that.

“It’s something that you’d all have to be involved in,” the mage says.

“I guess I can’t get the same deal I got with the other guy, where it won’t be against my morals?” Iema asks.

“No.”

“I’ll do it,” Natalia says again.  Seriously, boys, evil or not, I just wanna go home.

So it’s agreed.  First, we need to say goodbye to Hadrazain.  The Weapons Master agrees to trade Iema Cruagh for the Fencer’s Friend, which sucks the life out of the victim and into the weilder.  Iema apologizes to Hadrazain for cutting out early.  “I know I said I was going to be your twos partner…”

Hadrazain waves him off.  “Don’t worry about it.”

Iema shakes Hadrazain’s hand and thanks him for everything.  “You’ve been nothing but good to us,” he says.

Natalia can’t deny that’s true.  Still, she doesn’t say it aloud.  She pauses for a moment.  “Thank you,” she says stiffly.  That is about as nice as she’ll probably ever be to a drow.  We all agree this is progress for the druid. 

They’re about to leave, until Natalia remembers something.  She turns back around.  “The drow that captured us…Vaelika and Zerich.”

“Ooooh, those guys are wanted,” Hadrazain says.  Although they are from a different city, he knows the history on those two:  They come from Houses of differing political stances, and they really did fall in love, which really did cause tension in their homes.  It sounds all very Romeo and Juliet–until the part where they tried to assassinate the heads of their Houses by calling them to a peace meeting, then pumping the room full of poison gas.

“Do you know where they are?”

“No idea.”

Damn.  Natalia says, “Well, if you’re looking for them, they seem to be deeply involved in the slave trade with Fasset.”

He nods, and then ushers us out.  “Better not keep him waiting,” Hadrazain says to us.  With that, we leave.

We meet Pinic upstairs.  The mage leads us outside, through many locked doors that, oddly enough, seem to automatically know who he is and unlocks themselves for him.  We finally stop at a portal.

“Now,” Pinic says.  “You agree to the terms?”

We do.  He gently prods us toward the portal, but not before we feel a weight of some kind in the back of our necks before we go through.

Phil exhales a deep sigh.  “Geas quest.”

Jim nods.  “And because you agreed to it, there’s no save.” 

The enormity of the grievous error that we committed–worse, knowingly committed–sits on us for a moment.  But there’s nothing to be done now.  The deal is done, and we’re in the Astal Plane.  Weary, we camp for a period that we assume is a night.

Sterror the 10^th

Iema loves being in the Astral Plane because, with flight speed being dependent on Intelligence, he’s way faster than Natalia.  Poor Sunshine, whose Intelligence lags even behind Natalia’s, flaps her wings as hard as she can, but she still doesn’t get very far.  We’re both frustrated.

After getting berated by Iema the day before (at least, we think it’s been a day–there’s no way to tell time in the Astral Plane) about not having Find the Path prepared, Natalia casts it immediately once they’re ready to leave.  They fly along for a while until the spell wears off.  After the spell wears off, we’re floundering in the darkness again, dependent on others for directions.  And, sadly, the Astral Plane is lacking in those as well.  We only run into an elf with fire eyes (actually a celestial called a firre) on patrol for demons, but he can’t tell us where the Prime Material is either.

We keep flying along.  Up ahead, we see Gith.

Natalia immediately attacks.  Jim will later laugh at me to tell me he can’t believe I quickly made a deal with evil drow but attacked neutral Gith.  Whatever.  All I remember about Gith is them kidnapping poor little girls and using their brains as a power-source.

Turns out, these Gith aren’t those Gith.  And when these Gith hear Iema say aloud to them, “I didn’t want to attack you anyway” in the middle of the fight, they turned away from Iema, attacking Natalia, telling him that they would free them from her control.  Quickly, realizing the mistake, Iema stops everyone and explains that 1) Natalia attacked them because she mixed up the Gith, and 2) she’s not a psionicist, he’s not under her control, he just meant that he didn’t want to attack them but was only doing it because his friend was. 

Natalia still gives them dirty looks.  She’s not apologizing for shit.  She really is a stubborn, pain in the ass.

The Gith reluctantly agree.  We ask for help getting to the right portal.    We exchange the Helm of Disguise for their help, and we’re careful to explain that we want to get to Numbrar.  Don’t send us back to Fasset!

The Gith agree, lead us to a portal, and I swear to god, they were snickering as they shoved us through one.  Because we landed in a city, a huge city, biggest one we’ve seen yet, even bigger than Fasset.  None of us recognize this place.

It seems nice, though.  There people hustling past us on the streets.

“Are there any, like, kids…?” Phil asks Jim.

“Tons.”

“Iema stops one and asks where we’re at.”

The boy Iema has stopped looks at the arcling strangely.  “Numbrar.”

“Northern, Central…?”

“Numbrar City.  You’re at the capital.”

We’re taken aback, and then Iema says, “One more question:  What day is this?”

Now the kid looks at Iema like he’s really crazy.  “Today?  Why, it’s Sterror the 15th!  It’s Frost Feast Day!”  Jim of course pulls off his best British waif impression for this because this is Valt’s version of Christmas.

“Wow, we were in the Astral Plane for five days?” Natalia mumurs.  But they don’t have much time to reflect on how time works differently in the Astral Plane.  Because suddenly, we hear a commotion at the emperor’s place, where a feast is being prepared and townspeople are rushing off to join the festivities.

“And now,” a voice booms, “presenting the Emperor of Numbrar…Julium Colsus Numbra!”

And out stops our old friend, in emperor’s clothes.

Don’t worry.  Our jaws dropped, too.

So, Natalia, Iema, Corin, and Sunshine are in the Underdark, part of their maybe not-so-smart plan to escape their lives as prisoners in Fasset.  Iema has just suffered his first death and reincarnation.  Luckily, he came back as an arcling, and just in the nick of time–our encounter has caught the attention of some more bad guys who are coming our way.  Not sure how we got here or what the hell we’re doing?  You can get caught up with the previous installment of “Homebrewed” here.

Sterror the 7^th (continued)

It’s still Sterror the 7th, although I’m not sure how any one of our characters can even keep track of time anymore, being that we are in the Underdark and never see the sun.  Luckily, Phil and I do keep track of it in our notes.  Unfortunately, we didn’t keep track of something very important.

Did we heal after our last encounter?

We debate.  We flip through our notebooks and try to remember.  Keep in mind that there was a three week gap since our last game, due to sickness.  Finally, Jim gets fed up with us and tells us that we’re going to assume we’ve healed up and are at full hit points.

I’m not sure if I’ve ever mentioned this, but Jim does not like to waste time when it comes to gaming.  Oh, sure, he’ll put up with some small chit-chat and the fact that I always take at least 10 minutes prior to make myself a pot of coffee and get all the snacks and soda ready for everyone, but when he’s ready to go, he’s ready to go. 

Needless to say, Phil and I are happy with the decision that Jim’s made because what we do remember is that our last encounter attracted another, so we’d like to be as full up on health as possible.

And it’s just in the nick of time.  We hear tapping.  That’s the most ominous sound, by the way, tapping.  And poor Iema.  Since he has been reincarnated back into an arcling, his drow transformation is gone, which means so is his darkvision.  Now, he’s totally blind and has no idea what’s going on.  Luckily, his magical sword casts light, but, as you can imagine, that kind of calls attention to ourselves.

Nonetheless, the man needs to see, so Iema draws his swords and it bursts into flames.  Now we can see the source of the tapping.  There are two creatures on either side of us that look a little like scorpions.  I tried to find a picture of them online to show you guys, but I was unable.  I wish like hell I could remember Jim’s descriptions, which are always detailed.  Needless to say, they’re called stonesingers.  (Not sure if that’s one word or two.)  Jim warned me that I probably wouldn’t be able to find a picture, as they’re not very popular monsters, and he’s right.  I keep pulling up S&M pictures instead, although I’m not sure why.  Dude, that’s not the kind of role-playing we’re doing.  So, at any rate, if you wanna know what they look like, you’re gonna have to get a D&D book and look ‘em up yourself, heh.

Anyway, Iema, as usual, is very polite.  I always think that Natalia could take a page from his book.  Maybe I’ll play my next character that way, but for now, I kinda like Natalia as anti-social and a bit on the grouchy side.  Iema says, “Can I help you?”

One of the stonesingers screeches and then goes back to tapping.  We start to shuffle back to get around them, and they move to block our way.

“Screw this,” I say, “Natalia’s going into dire bear form.” 

“And now we’re in combat,” Jim announces. 

Good.  Let’s kill these mofos and run. 

I was more brief in my notes regarding combat than I have been in past, namely because I feel like taking so many notes makes me lose place of what’s going on when it’s happening, but I do have here that Iema starts the battle with a trick I’m not sure I’ve seen him do before, which is Hold Monster.  Jim rolls will saves for the creature Iema his trying to hold.  It makes its save.  The other stonesinger makes a screechy noise that, surprisingly, sounds like it’s mimicking the sound that Iema is making.

Huh.  Now isn’t that interesting.

One of them also does 47 points of subdual damage to Iema.  Now, in hindsight, I should have been, like, Wait–why is it doing subdual damage to Iema?  That should have told me that they weren’t necessarily out to kill us.  But, hell, I didn’t think about it.  It’s the freakin’ Underdark.  I planned on having Natalia kill everything in sight down here.  Of course, I’m sure that will call attention to ourselves as well.  Whatever.  When it’s my turn, I have Natalia charge and claw at a stonesinger, only to do very little damage and to find out that–surprise!–it feels like I’m trying to tear up stone.

Keep in mind, though, that I had no idea what these things were when we started this, no less the names of them.  Jim likes to describe what we’re about to encounter, but he often does not like to tell us what they are.  I only find out after the fact, usually when I’m writing these posts.  But I digress.

Sunshine is up next and she fares better.  Luckily, after the last game when she accused Natalia of not loving her anymore because she never “magicked” Sunshine anymore, Natalia remembered to cast Greater Magic Fang on her this time around.  Which is exactly what she needed to do some damage to these things.  Note to self:  Remember to “magic” myself next time!

So, one by one we’re attacking, but when it comes to the stonesingers’ turns, one of them starts singing itself, and stone walls shoots up all around Natalia.  I’m disheartened when it comes to my turn.  I’m not very imaginative, after all.  Had I my spell to soften stone, that would work nicely, but I almost never list that spell.  “Is the wall all the way up to the ceiling?” I ask hopefully, thinking I can just Wild Shape into a bird or something and fly over it.

“You’re in the Underdark,” Jim points out.  “The ceiling is low.  Pretty much everything is going to go up to the ceiling.”

SIGH.  Well, Natalia is a dire bear.  Let’s see if she can’t just bash her way out of this.  And so Natalia starts bashing with her great dire bear paws.  I think I had to do a strength check on this, and I must have rolled well (kinda hard not to when your strength is massive) because Jim tells me that she’s managed to knock out a five-foot section of the wall–enough to learn that, thankfully, the wall isn’t very thick.

Meanwhile, Corin plunges his mace into one of the stonesingers.  It shatters, bursting into nothing but air and screeching sounds.  Iema jaunts on over to examine it, to see if perhaps he can do something interesting with its corpse, like, say, make a musical instrument out of it.  He’s disappointed to realize that he cannot.

“It seemed like they wanted something,” Corin muses.  “Maybe they wanted to hear a song or something.  I think Iema’s song is what attracted them.”

“If that’s true,” Iema says, “then I feel a little bad about killing them.”

“I don’t,” Natalia says.  “What happened to the other one?”

We look around, but we don’t see it anymore.  Iema plays an instrument, trying to lure it out, but it’s not stupid enough to fall for that trick.  We’ve lost it.

Or so we think.

And we go back to rolling the die 10 for encounters.  I don’t even remember how many we have to roll for a day.  Plenty though.  At any rate, we get an encounter on the third roll.

This time, we hear something that sounds like eep.  Iema brings out his sword to get enough light to see by again.  We don’t see anything around us.  We look up.  There, we see a column of light coming down towards us.  As it comes closer, we see that it’s some winged things that almost look like they’re on fire.

“A…phoenix?”  I guess.  But I already know I’m wrong.  Let’s face it, I do not know D&D monsters.  But a girl can hope.

One of them bites onto Natalia and latches on.  The druid immediately catches on fire.  Two more of them move on to Iema and bite, causing 11 points of damage.  Another breaks away to attack Corin and Sunshine.

“Icestorm!  Icestorm!”  Phil says.  And I can’t really think of anything better to do, so I agree.  Natalia casts Icestorm, but we didn’t think about how Iema had subdual damage from before.  He quickly keels over.  Luckily, he’s not dead.  He’s just…out.

Corin, Sunshine, and Natalia all take damage, too, but hell, it worked:  The fire bird things are gone.

One of the cool items that Natalia got from the dwarven thieves guild was the staff of healing.  She uses that to bring everyone back up to full health.  And we start rolling D10s for encounters again.

We get one on our tenth roll.  Jim says we see two things that look like roths.  (Assuming I spelled that right.  Like I said, I don’t know D&D monsters.)  Jim describes them to me as something that looks like a cross between a buffalo and a cow.  Natalia, however, being a druid and all, knows a little something about roths, and she knows that what we’re seeing is too loud.  She surmises that it’s an illusion.

“Well, since the others don’t know, I guess Natalia tells them,” I say.

Dumb idea.  “Do you say this aloud to them?”  Jim asks.

“Uh…’Corin and Iema, that’s not really a roth–’”

“We’re in combat.”

D’oh!

Now, when Jim said that Natalia knew it was an “illusion,” I thought he meant the see-through kind.  You know, like the will-o’-wisps we ran into in the last game.  So I decide not to waste spells like I did the last time around and announce that Natalia is going to chuck a rock at it first, just to see if it’s solid.  Jim looks at me like I’m completely stupid, but he agrees.  Natalia throws.  It hits it with a thunk.

Oh.  So Jim meant that it was an illusion as in a trick, not as in a mirage.  Well, hey, I didn’t know!

Sunshine zooms in to attack the roths.  Something very decidedly inside the roths yell.  AH.  THEY’RE DISGUISES.  I get it now.  The illusions fade, and we find different creatures standing before us.  Slimy ones.

Natalia casts Creeping Cold on one of them.  Jim says that some of its slime freezes over but it doesn’t seem to hurt him much.  DAMN.  Luckily, Iema and Corin step in and take care of business, quickly killing the creatures that Iema will later identify as bearded devils.

I grumble to myself that Natalia was completely useless in that fight, and we prepare to camp for the night.  We’re trying to decide how to do it now, though, since Iema, no longer having darkvision, is kind of pointless to use as watch.  We decide that Sunshine will take a watch.

Hoo boy.

So we roll for encounters during watches.  And we get one–on Sunshine’s watch.  Here’s how that went down:

Natalia, Iema, and Corin are sleeping, when they wake up in the middle of the night to hear Sunshine talking.  “And this one time,” she’s saying in her usual cheerful manner, “we fought some gnomes!  But they wouldn’t let me eat the fingers.”

We hear laughing as a response.  It sounds male.  “Too bad!” the stranger replies, catching his breath.  “I love fingers!”

The three of us get up and peer at Sunshine and her new friend.  Her friend, it turns out, is a bugbear, which sounds cute and cuddly.  I assure you, they are not.  Jim showed me a picture one time.  This particular bugbear is more ripped than other bugbears and is covered in tatoos. 

“Sunshine,” Natalia says, eyeing the thing warily, wondering if she would even have a chance in hell in taking him on.   ”Who’s your new friend?”

“He’s a bugbear!” she says.  “He’s fun to talk to!  He knows lots of stuff!  Mostly about hitting things.”

That little tidbit of information does not make Natalia feel any better.

We greet the bugbear, who introduces himself as Bastus Glastus, the Mage of Boom.  Secretly, I’m thinking Aren’t bugbears evil?  And then I kick myself for never reading Jim’s Monster Manual, but I’m pretty damn sure that bugbears are usually evil.  This guy, though, seems awfully happy for an evil guy.  Then again, who says evil people can’t be happy?  Hell, for all I know, they could be the most well-adjusted people on the planet.

“How are you doing?” Iema says politely to Bastus.

Bastus replies cheerfully, “I’m fine, although I haven’t gotten to hit anyone in a while.”

“If you don’t mind,” Iema continues, “I can’t see without my sword.  So I’m going to pull it out, but I just wanted to let you know that I’m not bringing it out for a fight or anything.”

Bastus Glastus brightens up.  “Are you sure?  I’ll even give ya a free one!”

We laugh nervously, and Iema declines.  He brings out his sword, and the area brightens around us.  “Tell us,” he says to the bugbear, “what brings you here?”

“Well,” Bastus says, “I was blowing things up, and I saw you guys.  I can tell you’re lost.”

Hm.  A friendly, helpful evil non-cuddly thing?  I frown, ready to have to put Natalia in action.  But I don’t need to.  Iema explains to him that we’re heading to the drow city of Fenzybyl because we want to locate the Master of Arms, who has Iema’s companion weapon.

“Ooooh, that guy!”  Bastus says knowingly.  He doesn’t look pleased.  “I fought him once.”

Natalia’s curiousity wins out.  “And?” she asks.

“We came to a standstill.”

We talk with him some more.  Sunshine is right–he is a pretty fun guy to talk to.  Jim will later tell me that we were lucky:  This was a character that we had to roll to see what his response to us would be like, and as it turns out, it was pretty friendly.  He might not be so friendly the next time we meet him, depending on how we roll.  But for now, he’s full of good information, such as the drow that we so easily killed our first night in the Underdark was part of an order that refuses to fight back.  We can recognize them because they usually wear all white.  Once again, Iema feels a little guilty, until Natalia reminds him that sympathy for drow is how we got here in the first place.  He gets over it.

And then we part.

Sterror the 8^th

We wake up and continue our now dreary existence of just walking in the dark all the time.  It reminds me of a book of poetry I read as an undergrad, written by someone who worked in some caves.  I wish I could remember the name of it.  I remember that it was good, but after a while, each poem sounded the same to me because the topic was the same thing, day after day, really.  Yup, just like the Underdark.

On the third roll, we get an encounter.  Jim says we hear a vzzzt!  There’s an arrow sticking out of Iema.

So we know somewhere, there is someone with a bow and arrow nearby.  I mean, duh, right?  We roll for initiative.  I got a stinkin’ 2.  (Natalia’s initiative bonus is 1, so guess what I rolled?)  Iema moves in closer to the source, while Sunshine swoops in.  After Natalia casts Greater Magic Fang on her, that is.  I’ve learned my lesson.

The archer ahead of us tries to summon another archer like himself and, luckily, fails.  Natalia gets close enough so she’ll be in range her next turn and then stops to start casting Summon Nature’s Ally.  What is she summoning?  A dire wolverine!  Why?  Well, why not?

Sunshines swoops in on the archer again, biting.  The archer, however, has his focus on Natalia and hits her three times for a total of 13 damage.  Luckily, a long time ago, when we first started this game, Jim recommended that I put a shit-ton of points in concentration, and I’m so thankful I took his advice.  (Let me pass that one to all spellcasters out there!  LOTS of points in concentration when you’re doing your skills!)  I succeed in my concentration check, and Natalia pulls off her summon, regardless of being shot by arrows, heh.

Wish I could concentrate like that.

So, we have a dire wolverine now, and Natalia Wild Shapes in to a dire bear.  My favorite form, if you couldn’t tell.  She gets a partial charge in; Wolvie attacks and misses.  Natalia also attacks the archer, but he suddenly disappears.  Unfortunately, Corin and Iema don’t know this and attack the area he was in to no avail.

Because Natalia and Sunshine can tell with their spidey-sense (haha) where the archer is, they immediately whirl around and attack where he know he’s at and hope that Iema and Corin will figure it out rather than think we just went crazy.  (Luckily, Iema and Corin have wicked-high intelligence; they always figure this stuff out.)  Natalia and Sunshine don’t get to have any fun, though, because the dire wolverine gets there first and rips the archer apart.

Fourth roll.  Another encounter.  Will the fun ever cease?

No sooner than we finish off our fight with the archer, we hear skittering.  Iema lights up a torch–or was it his sword again?–and we see needletooth lizards at our feet.  And I don’t mean a couple. I mean hundreds.  And finally Natalia gets to be handy, since she’s the animal expert here.  (Notice I said Natalia is the expert; I sure as hell am not.)  She whispers to Corin and Iema not to worry.  The lizards have just eaten, so they’re sleeping and won’t wake up.  Just move on through and don’t worry.

We do.  They don’t wake up.  Thank god, because although Natalia might not be afraid of needletooth lizards, Spring sure as hell is.  I wanted to get the hell out of there.

More rolls, another encounter on the 6th.  At some point, I announce that I’m going to find a New Age book and learn how to freakin’ BLESS my dice or something because I’m starting to think my dice are cursed.

And maybe they are because our next encounter isn’t as harmless as the needletooth lizards.  Natalia spots a group of 6 creatures coming towards us.  She’s not sure what to make of them at first, except that they’re humanoid.  Jim tells me that they’re not hurrying, they don’t seem particularly concerned about us, and they’re walking toward us very casually.

And, stupid me, I didn’t think to do anything about it.  I thought, Eh, maybe they’ll just walk on by.  DUMB ME.  Because, oh yeah, they were very casual and relaxed–they very casually sauntered up to us, split up, surrounded us, and started to attack.

“I can’t believe that worked!”  Jim says, howling with laughter.

If any of you guys ever have a chance to play with Jim (since I know that more than one person that reads this lives in Illinois, so who knows?  Maybe one day you will), here is my advice:  DON’T TRUST JIM.  Jim is a very good DM–and a super-sneaky one.

The first thing they do when they attack is trap Natalia in a globe of ice.  Again, no luck with being able to just shift and fly out.  Sunshine quickly flies off and away.  We don’t know where she’s gone or why.

Iema, surprised by all this because he couldn’t see them coming and because Natalia stupidly didn’t alert anyone, is even more surprised when he suddenly takes damage.  He looks down to see that both he and Corin have bony tails embedded in them.  He looks back up to identify our accosters as devils of some sort.

Natalia, on the other hand, is stuck in a block of ice and, at the moment, doesn’t really care who it is who has done it.  I secretly grumble to myself that whatever they are, they must be MEN because only MEN want to IMPRISON WOMEN LIKE THIS, just like the STONESINGERS, who probably were also MEN, and, rather than saying of this, because I doubt that Natalia is the closet-feminist that I am, I instead tell Jim that Natalia is (grumpily) casting Produce Flame to get through the freakin’ ice.  It seems to be working, though, so that cheers her up a little.

Suddenly, Sunshine, who had flown off, is back in the picture, flapping her wings furiously as she charges for the devils.  She swoops at them, all of them, right down the line, doing some nice damage.  Iema jumps into the attack.  Poor Corin tries, but Jim, when rolling for him, fails the tumble check, which means that Corin falls prone.

Uh oh.

Four of the devils see the boy on the floor and take the attacks of opportunity.  If that wasn’t bad enough, they decide to encase him in ice, too.  But here’s where Natalia gets really annoyed:  Natalia was just about to bust out of her ice cage, right?  Well, Corin happened to fall next to where she was stuck, so when the devils cast the ice wall thing again, they hit us both in a nice figure-8 ice cage, so it would catch both us, but each in our own cell so we couldn’t get to each other.

Which means, of course, Natalia can’t heal Corin up.

And, oh, yeah, Sunshine and Iema are outside alone.

Iema backs up against the ice cages.  He’s surrounded and starts getting hit.  Natalia, luckily, still has her Produce Flame still active and goes at her ice cage again.  It’s slow going, though.  So far, she’s managed to melt away a five foot section of ice.  She tries to hurry, not wanting to leave Iema alone–or to leave Corin dying in his own cage.

Sunshine is doing splendidly, thank you very much, and she continues to attack the devils.  And then Iema finally decides he’s had enough of getting picked on.  He opens his mouth.  Wail of Doom.

Natalia finally melts through her cage and stumbles out.  When she looks up, all the enemies are gone.  I have to admit, both Natalia and myself are disappointed.  “What happened?”  she asks Iema.

“Wail of Doom,” he replies.

Hmph.  This bard is proving damn useful.  We get Corin out and everyone up and running; Phil and I go back to rolling for encounters.

We get one on the 8th roll for the day.  Again, we hear ticking noises.  Familiar ones.  More stonesingers.  Two of them.  Natalia growls quietly.  Remember what I said about the Underdark?  Same shit, different day.

Iema, remembering our last encounter with stonesingers, decides to try a different approach.  He whips out a violin (or fiddle or something to that effect) and starts playing.  The tapping stops.  They listen.  We start to move forward to get past, but again, they get in our way.

Finally, Iema stops playing.  One of the stonesingers approaches him.  We hold our breath.  It doesn’t attack, though.  What it does do is simply take Iema’s fiddle–and walks away with it.

“Hey!”  Phil/Iema says.  “Wai–oh, well.” 

I look at Jim, incredulous.  “What?  It’s stealing Iema’s fiddle?  Seriously?”

“Yes.”

Phil shrugs.

“WHAT?  We’re just going to let him take our stuff?”  And then I declare a first-ever for me:  “THAT’S IT.  I’M INITIATING COMBAT.”

But, sadly, I roll a lousy 3 initiative.  I don’t even know why I have to roll initiative if I’m telling everyone that I’M STARTING THIS FREAKIN’ FIGHT.  But there you have it. 

Unfortunately, the fight doesn’t go so well.  Iema, figuring that Wail of Doom was so awesome in the last fight, decides to try it again.  So he opens with it.  And it works.  They run.  With his fiddle.  And they don’t come back.

After we realize that we’re never going to catch up to them, we decide to bunk down for the night.  Natalia is unhappy about the loss of Iema’s fiddle, but he reassures her, telling her it wasn’t one of the nicer instruments he has.  She feels a little better, but still, not much.

Right as we’re getting ready for camp, Iema, while adjusting his bedroll, looks up in time to spot a hovering, translucent rat.  “Um,” he says aloud, “I’m not used to rats being translucent.  Or hovering, for that matter.”

Really, Iema?  Wasn’t it fun to see one?  How about more?  Because lucky for you, this guy brought BUDDIES.  More heads pop out all around him.  Their eyes go red, and before we know it, we’re right back into combat. 

The rats swarm all over us, nipping and biting at our skin.  Their bites are cold, so we know we’re not dealing with ordinary rats here.  Jim says our characters take 2 points of strength damage.  We groan.  It’s gonna be one of those kinds of bad guys.  I’d rather just lose hit points.

We also have to roll fortitude saves.  Both Natalia and Corin fail theirs, so they both lose a turn.  This is getting more and more awful.

Iema, remembering that he has a fire necklace of some sort, takes it out of the bag of holding and yells to get ready for lots of stinging.  He yanks a jewel off the necklace and throws it on the ground.  However, it doesn’t do a damn thing to help our phantom rat infestation.

When Natalia finally does get a turn again, she does Flamestrike, knowing that she could hurt herself and her friends in the process.  Still, she’s out of ideas.  As it turns out, she’s the one who fails the reflex save, and she does 47 points of damage–to herself.  Quickly, she starts healing herself up, but she’s still at 6 points of strength damage.

Iema looks over in time to see a ghost rat jump through Natalia’s mouth as she’s trying–and failing–to cast a spell.  Before he can do anything, though, three drow appear.

Aw, shit.

Instead of attacking us, though, the drow swoop in and quickly kill off the rats.  I don’t know how, but we’re glad they did.  Once the rats are gone, we get a closer look at our “saviors.”

Jim tells us that there are three drow.  One is a very annoyed-looking priestess.  Another is a wizard.  The one heading them–and the one who saved us–wears his head in pigtails.  We instantly recognize him from the description we’ve heard.

The Master of Arms.

Jim describes the Master of Arms as striking.  “You mean for a drow, right?” I mutter.  Meanwhile, I was frantically looking for my index cards for my healing stuff.  “By the way, Natalia’s in the back, keeping an eye on them, trying to heal herself up as quickly as possible.”

Jim responds to the first part of my statement.  “No, this guy is striking for anyone.  Very handsome.”‘

Whatever.  I find it hard to take seriously any man that wears his hair in pigtails.  I frantically roll my dice to determine how much healing I’m doing to whom.  Meanwhile, in-character, the drow talk amongst themselves in Undercommon–unaware that Iema can understand everything they’re saying.

The priestess sighs in exasperation.  “Look, they’re healing themselves,” she says in almost a bored tone.  “Let’s just kill them and sacrifice them to Loth.”

The Master of Arms waves his hand at her dismissively.  “We already gave her a sacrifice.”

“Rats?”  The priestess looks at him, dismayed.

“Listen,” he says, rolling his eyes, “Loth can take that sacrifice and like it.”

Iema tries to keep quiet but can’t help but chuckle at the exchange.  Jim stops at this point in the game to remind me that the fact a male drow is talking to a female in this manner should be shocking to us, since females are considered superior in drow society.  (And Jim actually didn’t have to point that out to me.  I remember this from when I read Homeland: The Legend of Drizzt.)  Jim’s point, though?  This guy is very well-respected among drow to be able to talk to the priestess–and about Loth–that way.

Iema immediately starts chatting up the pigtailed Master of Arms.  “Thank you for taking care of those rats for us,” he says.  “Are you the Master of Arms of Fenzybyl?”

“I am,” the drow says proudly.  “My name is Hadrazain.”  He claps his hands together and looks around.  “You guys haven’t seen a bugbear around here by chance, have ya?”

“Bastus Glastus?”  Iema says, sounding surprised.  Natalia looks up, recognizing the name, frowning because her usual tactic is never to admit knowing anything or anyone.  Still, Bastus is probably evil anyway.  She goes back to what she’s doing:  heal, heal, heal, trying to get everyone back to full health, just in case we end up fighting drow.

“That’s the one!”  Hadrazain seems happy.  “Have you seen him?”

Iema admits that we have, points where he went.  Then Iema quickly addresses what he’s interested in from this exchange.  “I’ve been wanting to find you.  I believe you have the companion weapon to mine.”  He describes it.

Hadrazain frowns and tilts his head.  “It doesn’t sound familiar, but I have many weapons.  You can come back to my place and look to see if you can find it, if you want.” 

“Okay,” Iema agrees.  He and Hadrazain chatter about fighting and such, and they even agree that they should be twos partners for some kind of fighting game.  Meanwhile, out of character, I’m hissing at Phil, Dude, didn’t you read Homeland?  You know that drow turn on their partners, like, all the time, right?

And Phil is blowing me off because of course he knows this, he knows way more about drow than I ever will, so STFU, noob.

Finally, Hadrazain asks about the druid that is so frantically healing everyone and giving them dirty looks.  “Oh,” Iema says.  “That’s Natalia.”

The priestess returns Natalia’s scowl.  “What is that?”

Iema doesn’t understand her question at first.  “She’s a druid.”

“I know that she’s a druid.  But what is she?”

“Um…human.”

The priestess stares at Natalia.  Hadrazain turns to Natalia and, to her surprise, addresses her in druidic.  “Nice to meet you.”

Natalia pauses.  “You speak druidic?”

He nods.  “I picked up some, yes.”

When?  I think.  When you were ENSLAVING SOME DRUID?  Except I might have said that aloud because I remember Phil laughing at me and telling Jim that I was such a suspicious person.  DAMN STRAIGHT, BARD.  Er, Phil.

“I don’t wanna leave Natalia out of this,” Iema tells Hadrazain, and then he turns and translates everything for Natalia.  (Not before Corin makes a snarky remark that maybe Natalia should learn some other languages.  Sometimes, I think that boy needs a good dire bear paw-smack across the face.)  So Iema translates, then asks, “So!  Wanna go with them to Fenzybyl?”

“No,” I-as-Natalia say very decidedly.

But I’m out-numbered.  Both Corin and Iema point out that we’ve gotta go into the drow city, anyway.  At least nobody will mess with us when we’re with the Master of Arms; better to go with him than go in there alone.  My point that he’s going to stab us in the back as soon as he can–or lead us into a trap–is also dismissed.  They say they know.  But this is the best way.

So it’s decided.  Natalia doesn’t feel good about it, but they do bring up valid points.  Finally, after we’ve bickered a bit, Iema turns and says, “Well, we need to get some sleep.”  The drow agree they’ll camp with us.

“I am not sleeping,” Natalia says.  Iema shrugs.  I ask Jim if Natalia can do this.  Sure, Jim says, but he reminds me that Natalia won’t get new spells.  Whatever.  I don’t care.  I’m not sleeping.

So that’s where the game ends:  Iema, Corin, and Sunshine getting ready to bunk with some nasty, ol’ drow, and Natalia, sitting back, arms crossed, glaring at the newcomers, and vowing not to sleep for the night so she can watch them.

Yeah, like she’s not bitchy enough in the mornings already.

I suppose I should pop in here and say hi once in a while, especially while I can.  As I’ve mentioned before, November is National Novel Writing Month–or NaNoWriMo–and I’ve managed to convince Jim to participate.  With only the one laptop, though, it means I’ll have less time on it.  And, no, I’m not complaining.  This will tear me away from the computer to try to finally hammer out Jim’s Lego Pirate Ship Blanket–especially since I think after I’m done with it, I’m going to dust off my knitting needles and make a blanket for my dad.

Although Jim just requested a new crocheted dice bag.

Jim has gotten excited about the contest.  He’s been throwing around ideas and ran two of them past me last night.  I like both and hope that he writes about both eventually.  Unfortunately, the conversation about what he plans on writing turned into a conversation about what I’m not writing. 

Not long ago, I had told Jim that I wanted to write some sort of fantasy story.  I even asked him for short stories or novels so I could get a better feel for the genre.  (It might come as a surprise to you, but I’ve read way more sci-fi books than I ever have fantasy, so I wouldn’t say I’m very knowledgable in it.)  Jim happily recommended books.  And then last night, I announced I didn’t want to do it anymore.

Jim was disappointed.  And then I got defensive.  And then I got psychoanalyzed about how I don’t do things that are easy for me, which, incidentally, includes drawing, which Jim (I can tell) gets a little bugged that I’m not more into, yadda, yadda, yadda, and I don’t think Jim gets it.  Writing literary fiction is easy for me.  That’s just what’s in me.  I don’t think I have what it takes to write a fantasy story.  So if the argument is that I only want to do things that are a challenge for me–bzzzt!  WRONG.

I think writing a fantasy story would be the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write.  And keep in mind that I used to have independent study poetry classes with Judy Jordan.  (Hint:  She’s made people cry in her class before.  I was not one of them.  I was lucky–she named me as the best writer in both the undergrad and grad departments.  Huzzah!)  So my point?  I don’t wanna write a fantasy story because I work all week, I need to do more overtime, and I don’t think I’m gonna have time to do something that I think it going to be very difficult for me.  I cannot tell a lie:  I don’t think I’d be good at it at all.

In all honesty, though…if I ever do write something in the fantasy genre, I think I’m going to set it in Jim’s world of Valt.  I’ve asked Jim, and he seems happy with this.  He actually thinks because I haven’t read a plethora of fantasy books or participated in a bunch of D&D games, I could put a fresh perspective on it.  We’ll see.

Okay, seriously?  Let’s quit talking about writing.

So, I thought about posting earlier this week, but honestly, I don’t have a lot to say.  My life is fucking awesome.  Oh, there are a couple problems.  The student loan people are trying to tell me I make too much money to defer my loan any longer and want me to pay over $400 a month.  Which, HA.  HA.  HA.  Yeah, that’s not going to happen.  I sent them more current payment info that clearly shows that, no, I do not make enough.  We’ll see how that turns out.

Also, in not-so-cool news:  Something is up with my cats.  Not one, not two, but three accidents in a week.  And I think it’s Emmy, which is weird because Emmy just doesn’t have accidents.  She acts fine, but I’m starting to worry if it’s because she’s so old and she just can’t hold it like she used to.  Poor girl.

Work has been great.  I seriously like my job now.  Before, I wanted to try to get rid of bills and find a way to get my master’s degree ASAP.  Despite how much I love southern Illinois, I wanted to find a way out of here.  Now?  Now, I want to pay off my bills, get married, have kids (er, maybe, I don’t know about that one), buy a house, and stay here because I don’t see a point in quitting a job I like that pays well. 

And things with Jim, of course, are awesome.  The other day, he sneaked a little love note in my purse; the other night, he suggested I light a candle when I went to take my bath, and I found that he had carved “I love Spring” in it.  I laughed so hard, but honestly, it was the sweetest thing EVER.

If I could just figure out why I’ve had nearly constant stomach problems for the last week and a half and get bills squared away, I’d say I have a perfect life.

Anyway, I’m going to run.  Hopefully, there will be another “Homebrewed” post up sometime next Friday.  So far, we’ve missed three weeks in a row, and I’m hoping we don’t miss tomorrow’s game, too.  I’m actually looking forward to it–it’s been too long, and I feel bad that we just left Natalia, Iema, Corin, and Sunshine hanging in the Underdark.  Right after Iema had died and been resurrected, no less…

Until then!

In this “Homebrewed,” Natalia, Iema, Corin, and Sunshine are being led by their dwarven friends to the entrance to the Underdark.  Doesn’t sound friendly, does it?  Yeah, we asked for it.  Yeah, we’re crazy.  Unfortunately, we’re stopped by some NPCs that, as it turns out, are the bane of Phil’s gaming existance.   Not sure how we got here?  Then get caught up here.

Huskyr the 28^th

If you recall from the last game, we left off on Huskyr the 28^th, late night, travelling with a dwarven thieves guild, whose members are leading Natalia, Iema, Corin, and Sunshine out of Fasset and to an entrance to the Underdark.  We were stopped on the bridge by people accusing us of being “smugglers.”  Before we know it, we’re surrounded by Halflings with crossbows, ogres with shields as large as walls, and your standard human guard stock.

Before I go further, I’m going to stop to mention something:  Jim and I were talking about how Natalia’s and Iema’s trip through the Underdark is going to contain a lot of combat, which are both boring to write and boring to read.  (Fun to play, though.)  We agreed that I would just gloss over most of the battles.  However, I want to specifically mention this one because it marks the return of two of Phil’s most-hated NPCs.

No, I had never run into them before, but in one of Jim’s previous games, Phil has.  Their names are Jakyl (whom Phil calls “Dick”) and Cogar.  I guess they’re a couple of undead guys who have clerics paid off to resurrect them when they die, so Jim torments his players with these guys from time to time.  Or, at least, he tortures Phil with them.  Phil says the worst thing about them is that you think you’ve killed them, only to find out that no…no, you didn’t.  They just keep coming back.

“Give up, Gurdren,” Jakyl yells.  “We’ve got you surrounded.  No more surprises.  It’s over.”  Jim says that the stitches in his body—yes, he has stitches in his body, ew—start glowing blue.

Gurdren raises his hands, but he smiles.  “No more surprises?”  And suddenly, with the flick of his wrist, he whips out the fancy gun that we had given him, and he shoots one of the humans.  The man falls, instantly killed.  “Surprise!”

I could totally learn to like Gurdren.

Of course, we go into combat at this point.  Both Iema and Natalia are hit with crossbows, but we make our saves, so Jim says that we hear buzzing noises but manage to shake it off whatever came along with those crossbows.  None of the dwarves, though, seem to fare as well, and they go deaf.

Sunshine, though , is a little slow to catch on that they’re deaf.  “OH MY GOD, GUYS,” she yells.  “YOU GUYS ARE ALL MUTE.”

Phil and I both got a chuckle out of that.

Iema does his Haste, does some flicking thing with his hand (everyone’s just flicking everyone off in this game), and some ram image comes out and knocks a Halfling off of the bridge.  Don’t ask me.  I guess it’s some spell Iema has.  Or a magical item.

Cogar, the other one Phil hates so much, yells that we’re all guilty of some sort of conspiracy to riot.  What the hell are they talking about?  I thought we were pretty sneaky and quiet.  Isn’t that exactly opposite of what you’d expect from a riot?  No matter; Cogar hocks a loogie at us that explodes in a gout of rancid seawater which pummels us for subdual damage.  And this, by the way, is when I started to dislike Jakyl and Cogar, too, because explosive loogies?  C’mon.  Even nasty D&D baddies should be drawing the line somewhere.

Anyway, I won’t bore you with all the details of this fight.  In-game, it was fun, but it was long.  I’ll give you the highlights:  Explosive loogie knocks out most of the dwarves who failed their reflex saves, Natalia does a bunch of damage with Ice Storm (great AoE spell, for any other druid-lovers our there) and gets down and dirty in her dire bear form, Sunshine gets her two cents in with a “dragging bite” (I had “Dragon Bite” in my notes, but Jim corrected me—I like “Dragon Bite” better), and Iema impresses us with his Wail of Doom.  Yeah, there’s more, but what you need to know is that we won—Jakyl and Cogar jump off the bridge and run away.

Oh, yeah.  They’ll totally be back.

It was a nasty fight.  We move along.  There’s some small talk.  Gurdren says Jakyl and Cogar have been coming after him for a while.  Guess Phil isn’t the only one they like to harass.

We move along.  Jim says we’re not at the Underdark yet; we’re walking along the overground or something like that.  Not really sure what that means or what that is.  I assume that it’s the ground over the Underdark, but hey, what do I know?

So, of course, we’re rolling our dice for encounters, and we get the doozie of encounters:  We walk smack into a city dotted with fires.

And Hobgoblins.

Like, 300 Hobgoblins.

“Oh, shit,” Gurdren moans.

Iema groans.  “Can’t we just…walk around them?”

Gurdren shakes his head.  “They’ve already seen us.”

Phil rolls a bardic knowledge for Iema.  Incidentally, that is a REALLY handy thing to have.  Phil is constantly rolling bardic knowledge for Iema and finds out all sorts of shit.  But I digress.  My point is that Iema knows that these Hobgoblins are nomadic, lawful-evil, and they’re more about survival than anything else.  They’re also extremely sexist and tend to like formalized duels.

Natalia actually knows about the duel part, even without the bardic knowledge; after all, she’s witnessed Hobgoblins demanding duels on more than one occasion herself.  Of course, she also knows that, being sexist, they won’t duel her.

Too bad.  I’m pretty sure she could tear one up, easily.

Several of the sentries come up to us and stare.  Iema sighs heavily.  “You’re not going to let us pass, are you?”

The Hobgoblins shake their heads.

“Let’s just get this out of the way,” Iema says, warily.  “No, you cannot use them”—he waves at Natalia and Corin—“as slaves.  You want to duel, right?”

Of course.  So Iema duels with a Hobgoblin.  Natalia watches with interest.  She feels a little bad making the bard fight, but like I said…the Hobgoblins are sexist.  And, as it turns out, Iema can take care of himself.

The Hobgoblin charges.  While he’s doing so, Iema quickly uses his Haste.  He then waits until the Hobgoblin gets close enough, then he does a spring-forward attack and then quickly springs back while slashing him.  Sounds cool, doesn’t it?  I think this is thanks to some of the super-cool gear that Iema got from the dwarves in the last game session.

Iema kills the Hobgoblin easily.  Once the fight’s over, he beheads the hobgoblin with its own sword.  He knows enough about Hobgoblin culture to know beheading it is a respect thing.  Iema bends next to the decapitated opponent to leave the sword with him.

When Iema stands up, the crowd of Hobgoblins part to let us pass through.  Say what you want about them, they at least fight fair.  We pass through.  Behind us, we can hear Hobgoblins pulling their weapons out on each other, ready to fight one another for the sword that Iema had left behind.

And so we move along.  A couple rolls later, we get another encounter.  Jim says that something like an angel appears in front of us.  It’s wearing dark gray mithril, gold, and silver armor.  Gurdren halts and stares, looking shocked.

“Is it an angel?  Is it an angel?” I ask excitedly.  Admittedly, I was thinking of the angels on Supernatural.  I like Castiel.  Hell, I want to name my first born son after him.

The Angelic Poser glances at Natalia.  “You and your bat may leave.  But I want the others.”

“Is it an angel?  It is an angel?”  I keep asking.  If Natalia was asking it, I imagine she’d be jumping up and down over the boys, trying to see it better.  Although I don’t know why I would imagine that.  Natalia is pretty tall at her 5’9”, and hell, one of those boys is a freakin’ dwarf.

Phil finally answers me to shut me up.  “No.”

Well, then, WHAT THE HELL IS IT?

And I cannot tell you.  Because Jim did not tell me.  Phil did, but I don’t remember.  What I do remember is that Jim said that Natalia felt an urge to leave, but I made my will save (not surprising, since Natalia’s will save is awesome), so she stuck around.

“I feel weird about fighting an angel,” I announce.

“It’s not an angel,” Phil says, probably secretly adding to himself that he was going to send me to meet some real angels if I didn’t shut the hell up. 

Okay, so it’s not an angel.  It’s something that I find out later doesn’t like anything with a chaotic alignment.  Apparently, I—er, Natalia—is the only one with a non-chaotic alignment.  (She’s neutral-good, if you recall.)

Again, I won’t go into the fight.  We won.  Yay.  But I will tell you say this:  Remember Gurdren’s glove?  You know, the one that turns things into stone?  Well, at a pivotal moment, Gurdren grabs at Angelic Poser and the thing turns into stone, wings spread out, looking very cool.

We’re all impressed.  Iema jokes, “Do you do all your art deco that way?”

“It is nice,” Gurdren agrees.  “Hell, I’m taking that with me!” 

So we lug it with us.  There are no more encounters for the day. Finally, we camp with no incidents until morning comes.

Huskyr the 29^th

New day, new person rolling for encounters.  I’m pretty sure it was me rolling this time.  When I finally get an encounter, Jim says that Natalia hears singing.  She stops.  “Do you hear that?”

Iema, Corin, and Gurdren listen.  “No,” they say.

Natalia turns to her dire hawk-turned-bat.  “Sunshine, do you hear that?”

Sunshine cocks her head to her one side.  “I hear it!  It’s PRETTY.”

Jim explains to me that, as a druid, Natalia knows of various things that sing, some good, some bad.  She can also discern that the singing is coming from the north.  We debate checking it out, until Corin points out that if it’s something that lures travelers off the road to their deaths…well, yeah, we should probably take care of that.

Natalia is secretly on board from the get-go—she’s gotten where she enjoys the fights—but the others look hesitant until Corin points out, “Also: Loot.”

Suddenly, everyone is feeling agreeable.

So we follow the sound off-path.  We go along the cliffs.  We can feel the air getting warmer.  Finally, we reach the mouth of a cave.  Strangely, wind is coming from the cave.  Natalia and Sunshine still hear the singing, but now, they can tell it’s in Sylvan.

“Does Natalia know Sylvan?”  Jim asks me.

I check her character sheet.  “No.”  I’m disappointed.  Natalia’s lousy intelligence score means she can’t speak a lot of languages.  Sadly, she still speaks more than I do.  D’oh.

Phil saves the day by pointing out that Iema does know Sylvan, so Natalia rattles off the words she hears in the song to Iema and Iema translates.  “It’s just a song about past things,” Iema summarizes, shrugging.

Iema and Corin decide to sneak into the cave while Natalia, Sunshine, and Gurdren hang back.  Unfortunately, there are stone giants right inside the mouth, and they instantly spot the bard and his apprentice.

The giants loom over the two, trying to scare them away.  And it would have worked—if they hadn’t started talking in Druidic, which Natalia can speak.  One says to the other, “Give them a chance to run.  They might not know what’s in there.”

Natalia steps forward.  “What’s in there?” she asks in Druidic.  They look surprised at being understood.  Trying again for privacy, they switch to Terran.  Which, JOKE’S ON THEM, because Iema speaks that too!

Some rock creature bounds up to the giants.  At first, I think that they’re going to unleash this thing on us, but Iema understands that they’re telling the stone dog to sit and stay.  It jumps around them happily, very much like a kitten.  They keep chatting to each other, and finally, they decide to tell us.

Inside the cave, they say, is an earth weird.  Iema immediately asks if we can get a vision from her.  I guess earth weirds have prophesies.  Awesome.

They agree to let Iema and Natalia inside; Corin, Sunshine, and Gurdren have to wait outside.  We’re led to the earth weird and ask again if we can be honored with a vision.  She asks us what we have to offer.  Iema double-checks with Natalia to make sure she doesn’t want to draw from the Deck of Many Things (HELL NO), and he hands the deck over.  The earth weird must be pleased with it because she offers us each one prophesy for ourselves and one for another.

You’d think when you get an offer like this, you’d be ready for what you want to know.  Well, maybe you would, but I was not.  I know what I secretly wanted to ask:  Is Iema going to betray Natalia?  IS IEMA GOING TO BECOME EVIL?  I’m totally suspicious.  I’m wouldn’t put it past Jim to slip Phil notes to pull shit over on me.  In fact, I know Jim does that.  I wouldn’t be shocked if Phil did the same thing.  If they haven’t yet, they probably will at some point.  This could be how I find out for sure.

But…Natalia really doesn’t have a reason to doubt Iema, so she has no reason to ask that question.  So, in keeping with the whole “role-playing” aspect of D&D, I chose not to ask that.  Yeah, I was disappointed.

So I have to mull over that one for Natalia.  Luckily, Phil is having difficulties, too.  Since it’s taking a while for Natalia and Iema to decide, they’re invited to stay for dinner.  Over dinner, they talk about possible questions they can ask.

Finally, after dinner, they’re ready.  Natalia decides to ask who betrayed Julium—and the rest of us—and what Beta’s future holds.  By that last question, she’s hoping to get insight on whether or not he actually has plans to get her, Iema, and Corin.

So she asks the first question:  Who betrayed Julium?  The earth weird concentrates, then her eyes widen in horror.  I don’t know if she’s telepathically linked to those around her, but there was a collective gasp within the room.

I’m on the edge of my seat, ready to hear the answer.  And, admittedly…a little fearful to hear the answer.

“I cannot answer that,” the earth weird says.

What.  The.  Hell.

“Which means,” she continues, “that the person who betrayed Julium and the rest of you is a worshipper of Tantori.  They are protected by their god.”

Ooooh, Tantori…I read Jim’s blog.  That’s a nasty god.  I had a feeling a Tantorite was going to show up in this game sooner or later.

So that leaves one other question for Natalia.  She was going to ask about Beta, but that would only affect her own future.  Julium’s fate is tied up with most of Valt.  Sigh.

“What does the future hold for Julium Caesus Numbra?” she asks.

The earth weird is quiet for a moment.  Then she speaks.  “There shall be no hand before him that can stop him,” she begins.  “And he will succeed in his mission.  He will unite everyone.  But history will forget this, and he will be known as the most blood-thirsty tyrant in Valt.  That is the price of unity.  That is the price of his vision.”

Natalia mulls over her words.  Iema’s turn.

“I have a weapon, Cruagh,” Iema starts.  “But it’s missing its companion weapon, Ruke.  Where can I find the companion weapon?”

“In Fenzybyl,” she answers.  “The hand that clasps it is the son of a matron house and does not know of its power.  Cruagh hungers for his blood.”

“And what about my apprentice, Corin?” Iema asks.  “What does the future hold?”

After she answers, I cannot help but think that his fate is possibly worse than Julium’s:  “Pain.  Knowledge.  Betrayal.  Death.  He will stand against the unstoppable, do the unthinkable, and he will never quit,” she says.  “But he will know great pain, and when the unstoppable comes to him, he will be destroyed.”

Damn, does this woman—do weirds have genders?—know how to spoil a party.  Sensing this, she pauses, then says, “Since I could not answer your first question, I permit you one more.”

Natalia looks at Iema.  He’s the smart one.  Let him ask it.

And he asks a pertinent one.  “Will we survive the Underdark?  Will we survive to see the sun over our home?”

“You will,” she answers.  “But a great evil is loose in your homelands, crafted by your own hands.  You have already influenced the blood-letting.”

God, we can’t win.  With that fun information, we eventually leave the weird and find Corin, Sunshine, and Gurdren.  We don’t mention the prophesies we were given.  Instead, we walk with the others until we reached our original destination, the one before we got distracted by fates.  Finally, we arrive at some cliffs.  Rock doors slide open; we’re greeted by dwarves, who exclaim over the stone Angelic Poser we’re lugging along.

They offer us a place to crash for a night, and we take them up on it, quickly falling into a troubled sleep.

Huskyr the 30^th

The next morning is full of activity as we prepare to finally enter the Underdark.  Some of the dwarves wake us up.  Gurdren is not one of them—he’s off doing something else.

One of the dwarves tells us that the elders are very appreciative of the things we’ve brought back.  (I secretly substitute “stolen” in my mind, but who am I to correct them?)    The elders specifically want to talk to Natalia.  However, another man wants to meet up with Iema.

Iema goes to meet the man.  The man has one eye, a burn scar on half of his face, a peg leg, and he’s missing a hand.  All in all, I’d say he’s had a rough life.

He’s knows something about the Underdark.  He explains that most of the Underdark is damp because it’s carved out by water.  It’s also very linear in design.  The first city we’ll come to is Fenzybyl.  This is good, since Iema wants to find his companion weapon there.

He gives us more directions that I won’t bore you with.  In general:  Keep down and east.  He also noted not to be fooled by anyone claiming anything related to Ziniel—those claiming they’re creatures of redemption, who were evil but don’t want to be.  Everyone down there is evil, period, end of story.

Yeah, I think we already learned that lesson the hard way.

The man also gives tips on drow.  And here’s the scariest thing I’ve heard so far.  Now, I don’t know if this is the case in other D&D games, but in Jim’s world, there aren’t very many psionicists because almost all of them are kidnapped by the Gith.  Nobody escapes.  The fact that Allista is up and around is a very unusual circumstance.  (A circumstance that, if you recall, was brought about by Natalia and her friends when they went to the Astral Plan and rescued her.)

The drow, however, actually do have psionicists among themselves.  Several.  Because they’re strong enough to fight off the Gith.  GULP.

I have a feeling that by the end of this little trip, I’m gonna hate drow as much as Phil.

Other things to note, the man says.  Drow don’t flinch.  Ever.  And there will be spiders everywhere.  Ignore them.  If we even take a little notice, they’ll know us as frauds in a moment’s notice.

While Iema is gathering information from this man, Natalia is whisked off to see the dwarven elders, whom, she is surprised to discovered, are druids!  They offer to answer any questions.  And, of course, she can’t think of a damn thing.  I have a feeling this is one of those times when Jim was setting something helpful up for me, and then I failed him miserably.  The only thing Natalia can think to ask is if they know which spells would be the most helpful in the Underdark.  I had her ask this because right before it was time for me and Jim to do our little “scene,” I had been flipping through the other D&D books Jim has and reading up on the spells that Natalia doesn’t have.  Asking the druids for helpful spells was my sneaky way to try to get them to teach Natalia some new stuff.

Sadly, they had nothing to teach me, no spells to recommend.

Sterror the 1^st

The first day of the new month, the first day in the Underdark.   A mere four hours into it, and we’ve already run into our first drow.  However, Iema kills the drow easily.  A little too easily, we think.  We hurry off.

A little later, we have another encounter from a creature that just PLOWS right into us, bonking Corin with his club.  There’s scuffling, of course, but we manage to kill it and find its lair.  There we find magic rings—glowing in poop, I might add.  Again, we don’t want to stick around, so we force march to get a little further away before finding a place to sleep.

Sterror the 2^nd-5^th

Phil and I trade off who rolls for different days, and these were the days we were lucky.  Normally, I like to have SOME encounters, but since Jim has told us it’s going to take about a year (game-time, of course) to get through the Underdark, I’m actually hoping for less.  It’ll make it go by faster.

The only thing to note is that on the 3^rd, we finally got to the split in the path that Iema’s coach told him about.  The path goes up and down.  Because the man told us to keep going down, we opted for that route.

We’re going to find out later that we made the wrong decision.

Sterror the 6^th

I’m pretty sure I was rolling when we started having bad luck with encounters.  The first one was when the percentage was 21% (eek) and Jim says we hear tapping.  Four shelled things with hooked claws and beaked faces are clattering toward us.  Jim says that they’re hook horrors.  Upon seeing us, they immediately charge and bite Iema.  Then they look disgusted and horrified.  It takes us a moment to understand why they’re acting all shocked, until they start clattering in Undercommon the word for “drow.”  I guess drow is NOT the other white meat.

They’ve also attacked Corin, who never seems to fare well these days, as the boy-turned-drow is down to 0 hit points.

Natalia heals Corin right up, only to find that they’ve brought Iema down. So she heals him up, and he tries talking to the things in Undercommon, trying to explain that we’re not there to kill them, as they believe we are.  They don’t believe Iema, and quickly wrap their hooks around Iema’s and Corin’s necks.  I guess somewhere along the way, Natalia must have shifted to her dire bear form for the fight because the hookworms demand that she not be a bear.  Or else, they say, wrapping their hooks tighter around the boys.

She shifts back.

At first, they debate eating us.  Then they decide against it.  Then they decide to steal our water and shove us in a cavern.  And this is the scene were Jim becomes all happy because while we didn’t die in this encounter, this is the first one where we’ve completely lost the fight.  In fact, he was so pleased, he wrote a whole post about it.

Hmph.  What kind of man gets off on seeing his fiancée and best friend getting beat up, I ask you?  See how long it is before I make him cookies again. 

Anyway, once the hooked assholes are gone, we go out the way we came.  This is where we realize that where the path split, we should have gone up, not down.  So now we have to backtrack.

Re-roll encounter!  And…it’s a 20.

This time, we run into a group of big, flabby guys –athaches—that look like they’re actually looking for the hook horrors.  And, of course, because everyone down here is a complete and utter DICK, we fight.  Here, Iema shows off a really cool trick, Wail of Doom, and he sends four guys off running.

Not to be outdone, Natalia casts Ice Storm.  Well, okay, Iema did outdo Natalia—Natalia’s Ice Storm is nothing new; we’ve all seen it a million times before.  Still, the Ice Storm is impressive, doing 22 points of damage on the remaining 8 assholes.

Sunshine decides to jump in, biting, winging over and out.  When it’s my turn again, I decide I’m going to summon something.  When Natalia casts any Summon Nature’s Ally spell, by the way, it’s something we all like to jump in on.  I always make the final call, but I definitely take Phil’s advice, since he’s a much more experienced player than I.

Although, admittedly, I’ve never summoned that orca whale that he wants to see in action so badly.

For this encounter, I decide on the Tendriculos again.  Natalia’s only summoned it once before, and she never really got to see it in action.

I’m much happier with it this time around.  Once she’s summoned it, it does tons of damage.  We’re disappointed, though, that even with all the dings we put into these things so far, they still have 102 hit points.  Sheesh!

Sunshine—poor Sunshine!—is still doing her best in her bat-form, but finally, at some point, she yells, “NATALIA, WHY DON’T YOU LOVE ME ANYMORE?”

Natalia stops long enough during the fight to say, “What?  I do!”

“WHY DON’T YOU LOVE ME?” she keeps hollering.  “YOU NEVER MAGIC ME ANYMORE.”

Oops.  Because Iema had mentioned wanting Poison on his weapon, Natalia swapped the Greater Magic Fang spell out for the Poison.  Her lack of Greater Magic Fang is what Sunshine is referring to.

Natalia tries to stammer out something that sounds half like an apology and half an explanation, but Sunshine keeps yelling, “YOU NEVER MAGIC ME ANYMORE! WHAT DID I DO WRONG?”

I felt really bad about this.  And then I felt really stupid.  Because I’m FEELING BAD FOR A CHARACTER THAT IS NOT REAL.  Okay, done feeling guilty now.

At any rate, the fight is nasty, everyone does their own thing, and eventually, we’re left with one that runs away.  We search the dead athaches, and WOOT.  Magical jewelry!  Just what a girl wants:  Natalia gets a new ion stone!  She promptly places it around her head, and it goes into orbit.

I hope that’s not indicating that my head is so big that it has its own gravitational pull…

Natalia also gets a ring and Moon Bracers.  She gets over her loots pretty fast, though, and settles in on removing the poison from Sunshine with a wand she has.  Meanwhile, Iema’s going through some things as well.  He finds a necklace that looks crappy until he puts it on.  Upon examination, he determines that the jewels can be used as explosives.

He also digs up a tin crown.  “That’s funny,” he says.  “It seems like it looked fancier on the athach that was wearing it.”

We all take turns trying it, but we can’t figure out what made it different when the bad guys were wearing it until Sunshine says, “Let me try!”

We shrug, then put it on her.  It just looks like a tin crown.  “Do you feel any different?” Iema asks cautiously.

“No.  Maybe if I think real hard!”  Sunshine squeezes her eyes shut.  And then, right before our eyes, we see it turn into a gaudy crown.  “Now I feel different!”

“That’s a Hat of Change Self!” Corin exclaims.  We’re all impressed with this item.  Of course, Natalia doesn’t need anything like that, since she changes herself more than I imagine she changes her underwear (sad but true), so that item stays with Iema.

And so concludes just another day in the Underdark.

Sterror the 7^th

Good grief, only 7 days since we’ve been here?  Natalia’s getting stir-crazy for some freakin’ SUNSHINE, and I don’t mean her animal companion.  The Underdark is depressing.

And disgusting, as I’m about to find out with this next encounter.

Some spectral creatures step out in front of us and cast a spell.  Phil immediately asks to do a check, but I assume he failed it because Jim announces that Iema can’t identify the spell the things are using.  Nonetheless, we take damage.  Iema attacks the thing, but he just goes right through it.

Aw, crap.

The spectral things disappear.  Jim, incidentally, has the layout drawn on a battlemap:  It’s a tunnel with several smaller U-shaped rooms off to the sides.  Natalia walks into one passage way, sees an elf of composed of light.  Sweet, right?  Natalia (overall) doesn’t care for elves, and here’s one sitting for her to kill.  She casts Produce Flame and gets ready.

Iema is still somewhere along the main hallway.  Unlike Natalia, he’s figured out that there’s someone behind this, and he’s looking for a spellcaster.  He hears where the spell is being cast from and inches towards it.  One of his items has some sort of dimension door ability to it, which he uses.

He ports his ass right into some liquid.

I’m very proud of myself—as soon as Jim said that, I figured out what it was.  No, I’m not just saying that to make it out like I know everything.  I’m saying it because I usually have no clue what the hell we’re fighting, and this is one of those few times I figured it out right away.  Only, of course, because I’d seen the things in action before.

I kept my mouth shut, though, just in case I was wrong.  I wish I had been.

In her location, Natalia hurls two produce flames at the glowing elf in front of her.  The flames seem to bounce off some kind of shield.  Natalia frowns.  The elf grins and flips her off.  Sunshine tries to fly in behind the elf and bite, but, of course, it goes through the elf.

Jim now say that at this point, Iema’s “in” some creature.  When Jim said this, it confirmed my suspicions: Gelatinous cubes.  Iema dimension doors out of it.

Natalia, hell-bent on getting the ghostly elf, chases it, but it disappears behind another gelatinous cube.  How many of these things are there?  She runs around the opposite way of the U-shaped room to get to the main hall, spots the elf, and before she can think, she casts Produce Flame and hurls it at him.  It, of course, goes through the elf and hits Corin smack on the back of the head.

“OW!” he yells.  He turns on Natalia, annoyed.  “IT’S AN ILLUSION.”

Oh.  Well.  Yeah.

Remember when I asked earlier how many gelatinous cubes are in this hallway?   Well, the answer is a LOT.  Here’s what’s worse:  They’re working with will-o’-wisps, who taunt us, then we walk into the cubes, the wisps feed on our torment.  Apparently, they also took levels of sorcerer, since they are casting Dancing Lights.  And the cubes are on all sides.  Iema and Sunshine pretty much get stuck and paralyzed right away; Natalia dodges it for a while, gets stuck but not paralyzed, then gets out of one to walk right into another cube again.  The only one who manages to stay out of the gelatinous cubes is Corin.

There are will-o’-wisps right in front of Iema, taunting him as he’s paralyzed in his gelatinous cube.  “Shall we kill him?” one asks the other.

Natalia starts for them.

“Stop,” they order.  “Come any closer, and we’ll kill him outright.”

Natalia stops, undecided.

Not Corin, though.  “DEATH TO TYRANTS!” he yells while running to save his master.

But, despite all his agility, he isn’t fast enough, and the will-o’-wisps kill Iema and turn invisible.  Corin and Natalia kill off the cubes that are around them.  Iema’s body lays on the floor.

Jim has us roll for another encounter.  Wouldn’t you know it, we roll a 1, so yes, we’re going to get another encounter.  “Shit,” I say.  “Are we going to have to fight something else with Iema lying dead over there?”

“No,” Jim says.  “They’ve heard you and are coming, but you’ve got a little bit of time to pull off a Reincarnation.”

So Natalia casts.  As I roll for what Iema comes back as, I say a quick prayer that he’ll come back as something useful and not a toad or something.  I read the number to Phil, and he looks it up.

“Human!” he reads, surprised.

“Awesome!  Wait—so he’s human now?”  I ask.

Jim shakes his head.  “No, it’s just a baseline.  When you roll human, it means you get to go back to whatever you were originally.  So he’s an arcling again.”

So that’s cool.  Next, Phil rolls on the “what went wrong” table.  Jim reads the results and tells him that Iema is now vulnerable to weapons of death.

I don’t really get that—isn’t EVERYONE vulnerable to weapons of death?—but I don’t have time to figure it out.  Already, we can hear someone approaching…

Of course, we’re not going to find out what it is until next game.

It’s a rare night with Jim out of the house, so I thought I’d update and talk about my plans in the upcoming month.  I had meant to do this earlier, but I was waiting for Jim to get out of the house.  Of course, Jim didn’t leave when either one of us thought he would, so that’s kind of messed up my plans for tonight.  This is the second time that has happened in the last week, by the way:  I count on having some “me” time while Jim’s out with a friend (or friends, as is the case tonight), and then he’s barely gone, and I get nothing done, no me time.   There are just some things I like to do alone.  Writing is one of them.

Speaking of writing, I’ve been seriously contemplating in participating in NaNoWriMo this year.  Lately, I’ve been feeling the itch to write again.  Fiction.  Seriously.  I haven’t really written anything since I was an undergrad in the creative writing program.  I just don’t write crap unless someone makes me do it.  That’s why I think NaNoWriMo would work for me.

A couple of issues with it, though:  I’m really in the mood to try to do fantasy, and I don’t know if I could do genre fiction.  My stuff always comes out literary fiction.  I don’t even mean to do it.  My brain spews out metaphors and symbolism without even meaning to, which lends itself wonderfully to literary fiction, but I think it would just slow genre fiction down.  Admittedly, I think Jim would be better at the genre stuff than I would.

Also, I’m more of a short-story person.  I don’t think my writing style would lend itself to a novel, but I don’t know if fantasy would lend itself well to the short-story.  I haven’t read any short fantasy stories, anyway.  Unless anyone wants to recommend something to me…?  (Hint, hint.)

The other issue?  The time spent writing 175 pages for NaNoWriMo would be taking away time from “Homebrewed.”  Poor Jim’s still patiently waiting for me to get it caught up.  Luckily, I’m only one game behind now, but still.  I feel bad when I ask him what he wants, and he says he would really like for me to finish up “Homebrewed.”

Also, I’ve been toying with some joint projects with Jim in the back of my head, also writing-related.  So maybe NaNoWriMo isn’t a good idea.

Hm, what else?  Oh!  My sister got me the name and number of a pastor who is actually looking for couples to marry off for some extra money.  WOOT.  I think Jennifer (my sister) said that this woman marries people off in a vineyard…?  I haven’t made the call yet (that was something I was going to do earlier tonight and didn’t), but dude, that would be COOL.  If not, well…whatever.  In the end, I just wanna marry my man.  I don’t care where we do it.  And I want to celebrate afterward in Giant City Park.

So, so far, I’ve mentioned that next month, I’ll be debating participating in NaNoWriMo and attending to (small) wedding details, including (I hope!) getting my engagement ring resized.  What else?  Oh.  Next week, I’ll be leaving work early for a couple days.  One day will be to return to the dentist for my permanent crowns.  I’ll be glad to have them; right now, I can’t bite into things with my front teeth because I could break them off.  Watching me chew can be interesting.  I have actually been tearing my sandwiches into bite-sized pieces at work.  It’s goofy.

The other appointment, I just made yesterday.  As anyone who knows me is aware, last summer, I had some major medical stuff going on.  I would start shaking like crazy, had constant headaches, nausea, and vomiting, all of which prompted me to go to the doctor.  They confirmed that my blood sugar kept dropping low–like, dangerously low–but they told me that I was not diabetic.  I did need to start eating snacks.  (Oops.  I kinda quit doing that.)  Still, they never did tell me if I was hypoglycemic either.

Well, other things have cropped up.  I have a permanent blur in one eye; one doctor had mentioned that it could be due to “diabetic changes,” although no eye doctors I’ve gone to have pinpointed for sure what it comes from one way or another.  And then the latest:   Sores on my foot.  Sores that I have no idea where they came from.  Sores that have been there for well over two months.  Sure, they look better, but they’re taking forever to heal.

Another symptom of diabetes.  So I’m going to go back to get checked again.  Keeping my fingers crossed that I don’t have diabetes, although I know it’s just a matter of time.   I’d really like to eat cake on my wedding day, damn it.

I’m so annoyed about the foot thing, just so you know.  The recent roller derby craze got me interested in picking up skating again.  (Er maybe it’s not a craze, and I’m just hyper aware of it because one of our supervisors is on the local roller derby team.)  As I’ve mentioned before, I used to be good at skating.  I doubt I am anymore, but once upon a time, I loved to roller skate.  Granted, I’m not so interested in roller derby, but I kind of miss my old past time.  Now, with all my foot problems, I don’t think that picking up skating again a good idea.  Last thing I need to do is introduce blisters to the foot-trouble equation.  *Sigh*

Moving on!  Meagan (I hope!) this weekend while she’s in town for a wedding.  She said she would like to meet Jim, to give her “approval” before we get married.  I had to laugh at this. 

“Well, I mean, of course, I’m going to approve,” she admitted.  “I mean, it’s pretty obvious that the guy is crazy about you.”

Oh, yeah.  You guys don’t even know the  HALF of it.  Of course, I’m pretty crazy about the guy myself.  But Meagan wants to meet him to give her “official” approval; I think Jim’s looking forward to meeting her as well.  I’m not surprised.  I’ve talked her up to him quite a bit.  

Also on the social calendar, a birthday party.  Maybe.  I was invited, but I haven’t done anything like that in so long, I’m now anxious about the idea of being around a lot of people.  The last birthday party I went to was…Nestor’s.  In 2008, about a month before I met Jim.  Damn, has it been that long?  I guess that’s probably a sign I should get out of the house more.

And the best way to start?  Getting off this damn laptop.  Signing off!

*poof*

I’m just kidding.  I’m not going out.  I’m just off to make my lunch, take a shower, and probably head to bed.  HA.

Back with another “Homebrewed,” which I’ll try not to ruin too much with my epic exhaustion.  In the last game, we left off with Natalia, Iema, and Corin in the middle of robbing a museum.  Hey, don’t look at me like that–you’re supposed to be rooting for us, remember?  Besides, we wouldn’t have to do this if they hadn’t stolen everything from us and enslaved us in the first place.  Unfortunately, the heist has had a couple of hiccups.  Natalia and Iema are in a world of hurt, and Corin…well, Corin’s dead.  Don’t remember that happening?  Well, go refresh your memory here.  Otherwise, read on.

Huskyr the 17^th

We pick up right where left off in the last game:  Corin lying dead on the ground, with Natalia, Iema, and Sunshine standing around him. 

“Hey, Natalia,” Iema says, “do you have Reincarnation prepared?”

“Yeah.”  She didn’t say what we were all thinking:  Wonder what he’ll come back as, though. 

Then we both notice Sunshine hopping closer to Corin, eyeing the boy’s fingers.  “No, Sunshine!”  we say.  “You cannot eat Corin’s fingers!”

“Why not?” she asks, confused.  “He’s not using them.  And he’s already missing some.”

Natalia decides not to address that question.  Instead, she focuses on Corin, casts Reincarnation, and Corin comes back.  And it’s not as bad as it could be.  Sure, he doesn’t come back as human, but he comes back as a Halfling.

At this point now, Natalia has only one healing spell left, only 80 hit points left while in bear form (keep in mind that being in bear form add somthing like 40+ to her hit points), and Iema’s down to a mere 17.  Since Iema is worse for wear than Natalia, she uses her last healing spell, Remedy Moderate Wounds, on Iema, and then we go snooping around the room we’re in.  We find a Deck of Many Things.  This is another one of those things where Jim has an actual “game prop” ready for us.  This one, though, I had known about ahead of time because Jim needed my Tarot cards to create the deck.  Since he explained what the deck was before the game, I already knew what it was and didn’t need to ask–and I had already known that there was no way Natalia was going to touch it.

“Ooooh, a Deck of Many Things,” Corin says.  He reaches out to touch it, yanks his hand back, reaches for it again…

Iema has already decided that he’s going to risk it, but we want to finish looking around for anything else that we can find to either use or sell.  Good thing we didn’t stop looking:  We find an ornate gun that we think we can sell for a lot of money, some keys (always good to have keys), and a wooden head in a box.

As it turns out, the head can talk.  It immediately starts yelling, “Thieves!  Thieves!”

Iema, ever suave, shuts the head up.  And, as usual, he gets the head talking, even gets the head’s name.  (Rintharios, if you were curious.)  And it doesn’t take long for Rintharios to start complaining.  He says that he’s been in the box for two and a half centuries and would like help getting the rest of his face back.  (I guess he’s missing some of it.)  Natalia says she’ll thinks she can help; between the skill points she has in woodworking along with her druidic spells, she’s got mad skillz.  So we chat with the head while continuing to loot the place, which also turns up a Hammer of Dwarven Kings. 

Impressed by the weapon, Iema tries to pick it up.  Immediately, he feels an overwhelming urge to drop it.  Neither Natalia nor Corin have any problems, though.  Natalia eyes Iema suspiciously.

And I’m not subtle about her suspicion, by the way.  In fact, I announce it:  “Natalia is SUSPICIOUS of Iema!”

“She should be,” Phil laughs.

I totally am, particularly because of what I know out of character.  In a nutshell:  Phil has told me and Jim that he’s not going to necessarily be so hellbent on keeping his character good.  I guess he’s played lots of straight and narrow characters in the past; now, he’s trying for a character that toes the line on occasion.  And the other night, when he came over just to hang out, I overheard him talking about lichdom with Jim.  Shocked?  YOU GUYS.  HE THREW ROCKS AT BIRDS IN THE LAST GAME.  OF COURSE HE’S GOING EVIL.

Actually, I don’t think he is going that way.   Not yet.  I just know he’s open to the idea, heh.

Okay, shut up, Spring.  Back to the game!

So, at this point, we’ve found all that can be found, and we’re debating whether or not to go into the next room or quit while we’re ahead.  We’re low on both health and spells.  And here is where Spring is not like Natalia:  Spring would play it safe, quit now, go home.  Natalia figures we’ve come this far and has confidence that she and her buddies can pull this off. 

Also, Corin and Iema really want to draw from the Deck of Many Things.  Understandably, though, they’re nervous.

“I can draw some cards for you,” Rintharios suggests.  We hand him the deck; he uses his mouth to select a card, although the cards seem to work with whomever’s drawing from the deck, as the cards he’s drawn float up in front of him on their own.  I can see that he’s drawn  The Magician and the 10 of Swords.  Those are the Tarot cards, of course; I’m not sure what they “translate” to in the Deck of Many Things.  But I do know that Jim says that the wooden head in the box now feels less lucky.  Nobody can figure how he can get any less lucky, but I digress.

Iema screws up his courage.  Phil-as-Iema draws The Sun.  Jim says that Phil gets 50,000 XP and a sable cloak..  Iema also feels luckier.  But his luck is short-lived when Phil draws 10 fo Swords and gets -1 to saving throws.  He also draws a 2 of Swords, which will automatically move him to the next level, provided that he can kill the next monster on his own.

We pause the game here to adjust Phil’s sheet.  Now, if we went based on the XP Iema was supposed to get, Iema would jump up something like four levels.  We were excited.  Then Jim did some research and found that the rule is you can’t go beyond one level.  I think you’re supposed to advance to the next level and be 1 point shy of the one after that.  I tried to argue the case that we overrule the book.  Natalia, I said, wouldn’t touch the cards; shouldn’t Iema gets rewarded by taking such a huge risk?  He could have keeled over flat if he had drawn the wrong card.

In the end, Jim laid down the law:  For game balance, he would go by what the book says.  We were disappointed, but we both knew Jim was right.  Still, it would have been cool.

Once Iema’s character sheet is updated and Phil has picked his new spells, Corin is next up to draw from the deck.  He draws the 4 of Cups, a card that allows him to reverse past events.  He then draws 10 of Swords (popular card, it seems) and he immediately uses the 4 of Cups card to reverse his drawing of the 10 of Swords.

“You sure you don’t want to draw from the deck, Natalia?” one of them asks.

I back away from the deck.  “Hell, no, Natalia’s not touching that.”  Jim and Phil look at me like a party-pooper.  “Well, SOMEONE here has to have common sense!  Natalia may not have high intelligence, but she’s got a ton of wisdom, remember?”

They shrug me off and we decide to move on to the next room.  Natalia leads the way.  Inside, there are many boxes scattered about.  We see a creature inside the room.  It has pointy teeth, pale white skin, and is wearing brown linen.  Phil groans as Jim describes it.

And because I have no imagination, I ask, “What?  What?”

“It’s a vampire,” Phil tells me.

Oh.  A vampire?  So what?

Yeah, I’m about to learn that D&D vampires are way more bad-ass than the glittery kind in Twilight.  (Although, admittedly, the Twilight vampires would make way better disco balls.  I’m just saying.)

The vampire lunges for Corin, sinking his claws into Corin’s new Halfling body.  Iema draw his sword.  Immediately, the sword tries to signal something to Iema.  Currently, there is a map of the Jade Islands on it, but Iema doesn’t know what that’s supposed to mean.

And the fight is on:  Natalia in her bear form, Sunshine doing her whole fly-by attack thing, Iema with his sword.  And we’re failing miserably.  For one thing, the vampire is grappling Corin, which is making the boy take Con damage.  I didn’t realize how crappy that is until this little fight, when I got to see it in action.  That’s when I remembered Jim’s post that he had written not too long before this game called “No More Kid Gloves.”  Damn.  So this is what he was talking about.

I confirmed it when Natalia tries attacking the vampire and consequently 1) takes -2 to all checks and rolls, and 2) accidentally heals the vampire.  Aw, crap.

Corin can’t break from the vampire’s grasp.  Sunshine and Natalia keep clubbing away at the vampire, although Natalia’s learned that trying to grapple him isn’t a good idea.  Meanwhile, Iema’s sword is frantically trying to communicate him him, changing the pattern on its blade to a flames.  Still, Iema isn’t sure what the weapon is trying to signal to him and instead just attacks with it.

Eventually, the vampire drops Corin.  Corin is out again at -5 hit points.  Natalia tries her Produce Flame along with her regular claw and bite attacks.  The bite fails, but finally, her claws manage to get through the monster’s damage reduction.  Jim says that she leaves a flaming hand scar on him.  WOOT.

The battle continues; so does Iema’s sword.  It keeps flickering  from gold to silver to copper and back, faster and faster.  Iema realizes he needs to say a command word.  He struggles to think of what it could be.  Then, he comes up with it:  “RUGOS.”

It’s the Jade Island word for fire.  Unfortunately, Phil has a bad roll for his attack, so it doesn’t do him much good.

The vampire steps back during the fight.  Jim says Natalia, Iema, and Sunshine hear scratching through the walls.  Soon, dire rats are swarming around us.  We start hacking away at rats until it’s Iema’s turn again.  At his turn, he yells the command word again, but this time, with much better success:  He lops the vampire’s head off.

Still, we have the dire rats to deal with, although they don’t seem too bad.  We’re killing them off easily until only a couple are left.  Once outnumbered, the remaining dire rats run away.  Iema looks to Natalia to see if she wants to chase them and kill them; she shakes her head no.  They’re just rats being rats, after all.

Iema starts singing and I roll some heal checks on Natalia; together, the two of them manage to stabilize Corin.  Once they do, they look for anything in the room.  We find some wizard’s staff.  Neither Natalia nor Iema can hold this one, though–we immediately drop it.

Natalia comes up with the idea of using Corin to try to pick it up.  “Just use his hand to grab it,” she says.

We do so.  Suddenly, Corin wakes up gasping and sits up.  “It’s talking to me,” he says in an awed voice.

“It’s talking to you?” we ask.  Is that bad or good?

“It says you already have soul weapons,” he continues.

Oh.  So that’s why we couldn’t pick it up.

Looking around the room, we find some sort of necklace made out of teeth.  Natalia was going to take that, but when Corin read the card and found that it was a magical weapon made by giant owls, we realized it would be better suited for Sunshine.  We put the necklace on the hawk, clasping it to her feathers.  She grins (as much as a hawk can grin, anyway), and bounces up and down, making her new necklace make a satisfying cha-ching! sound.  She looks good and she knows it, heh.

We also find a spellbook.  There’s information nearby (remember, we are in a museum) that says this spellbook was carried by an enemy of the state.  If you look at it, though, it just looks like a fashion designer’s sketchbook.  The theory is that it’s a code, so you have  to break it to find out what it all really is.

Nearby, we also find some spell component pouches that had been used during the centuries.  Don’t mind if we do…we also snatch up scroll and wand organizers that we have found, along with potion belts.  How handy!

Our work here is done.  We slip out of the museum (much easier than getting in, let me tell you), and we head back to the dwarven thieves’ guild place.  Gurdren greets us; Iema gives him the run-down on the monsters.

“Oh, there was a vampire?  THAT explains the death of the flower girl and the dwarven brewer,” Gurdren says.  He sees the look on our faces and explains:  “You can use a rose to kill a vampire–”

“–and dwarves brew their beer with holy water,” Iema chimes in, getting it.

I did not get it.  I mean, I get the holy water, although I didn’t know dwarves brewed their beer with it.  But I had never heard of the rose thing before.

Once we’re done gossiping about the monsters, we show Gurdren what we’ve scored.  Gurdren shows a particular interest in the hammer and the gun.  He seems a little too interested.  Suddenly, Natalia’s trust in this short guy wavers.

Still, it’s late, and when he says we can stay for the night to rest up, we agree.  We plan on locking ourselves in, but Gurdren beats us to it.  He tells us goodnight, closes the door, and we hear locks click from the outside.

Huskyr the 18^th-Huskyr the 27^th

And on these days, we rested. Hey, if it’s good enough for God…

Huskyr the 28^th

Opposed to what the prior date entry might indicate, we weren’t captured or held against our will or anything; we really were resting up.  We might have done other stuff, but if we did, I apparently didn’t think it was important enough to make note of.

Moreover, the day before, on the 27th, Jim says that the dwarves give each of us, save Sunshine, a wooden box with cool gear in it.  At this point, Jim handed me and Phil index cards with all the gear information on it.  The gear is awesome and tailored to our characters.  Phil and I oooh and aaah over our new loot.  Sadly, I can’t tell you everything I got because Jim took the cards back after the game and I don’t know where he’s keeping them.

Of course, the dwarves aren’t giving us these things out of the goodness of their hearts.  In exchange, they want those items that we stole from the museum.  To sweeten the pot, they say that while we can probably get more information about the Underdark from Dirtgut of the ogre thieves guild, the dwarves will lead us to the entrance.  Sounds like a deal to us.  We hand over the hammer and the fancy gun.

So now today, on the 28th:  The ogre thieves guild.  We disguise ourselves and go.  However, once we get there, we find out that “password” is no longer the password.  Somehow, we manage to let the guy at the door to let us in.  Kind of crappy security, if you ask me.  Then again, it’s full of ogres inside, so who really needs security, anyway?

Inside, the usual ogre stuff is going on.  You know, things like a dolphin eating contest.  There’s also a table with ogres taking turns stabbing each other.  Finally, one makes a small noise.  The others throw their arms up in the air and yell “Awwwww!”

These are some strange games they enjoy here.

Eventually, we find Dirtgut.  We show him the club, offer it to him in exchange for information.  He’s skeptical of the club, though.

“Hey, Mushok,” he calls to another ogre.  “C’mere.”

Mushok strolls over.

“Hold up dat shield,” Dirtgut orders.  Mushok complies.  The shield he holds up is impressive, being made of adamantine.  Dirtgut swings the club over his head, then plunges down in a swift, sure  motion.  The sheild cracks.  Dirtgut looks satisfied.  “Dat good club.”

Damn straight, Dirtgut.

So Dirtgut agrees to tell us what we need to know about the Underdark.  He says what the humans have on line, the drow have underneath.  We need to keep in mind that everyone lies there.  Everyone.  While the drow city is dangerous, the Underdark wilderness is even more so.  He says there’s a waterfall down there; if we find that and follow the river from there, it will lead us to the drow city.  He also adds that disguising ourselves as drow will give us an air of arrogance.  Our biggest problem, though, will be the lack of food and water.  We should stock up while we can.

Luckily, Iema thinks ahead and asks if Dirtgut has a bag of holding we can purchase to put food in.  Of course Dirtgut has a bag of holding!  He’s part of a thieves guild, isn’t he?  He sells the bag to Iema for 5,000 gold.

We get ready to leave, to go to the “barber” to get transformed into drow.  Dirtgut, though, has a few things to say about that.

“To be drow, must have air of arrogance,” he reinstates.  He points to Iema.  “You, I think can fool them.”  Then he points at Natalia.  “Not sure ’bout you.”

Natalia gets huffy.  “Why not?”  (Secretly, though, out-of-character, I was thinking there is no way I could pull this off.)

Dirtgut explains.  “Drow females bossy–”

“Oh,” Natalia interrupts him, understanding.  Neither Natalia nor myself are very good at being bossy.  So we come up with another plan:  Iema and Corin will be the drow, and Natalia will pose as Iema’s slave.  Sunshine’s awesome eyesight as a hawk won’t do well in the Underdark, so we decide she should be transformed into a bat.  We go off to the Barber’s to do that, go back to the dwarves to tell them of our plan, get a fake prisoner neck coller to sell the Natalia-as-a-prisoner thing more convincingly.

During the night, we slip out with several of the dwarves from White Stone Masons.  We go with them through the east gate, through some wilderness and some mountains, and start crossing a bridge.  But suddenly, some guards step out from behind rocks in front of us.

“Well,” one of them calls to the other cheerfully.  “Looks like we got some smugglers!”

And he calls the guards.

To be continued in the next game…

Woot!  Back already with the 22nd installment of “Homebrewed”!  This one will be shorter than the last because it’s (mostly) the first half of a fairly short dungeon.  I think it’s a dungeon, anyway.  At any rate, Natalia, Iema, and Corin just finished their last job and are eager for another, as they’re trying desperately to scounge up money to afford a nice all-expenses paid trip through the Underdark.  Can’t remember what their newfound chosen career paths were?  Refresh your memory here.

Huskyr the 16^th

We pick up right where we left off, on the night of Huskyr the 16^th, right after we’ve killed off the gnome thieves guild.  We got back to the dwarven thieves guild, which, incidentally, is called White Stone Masons, let them know that we’ve completed the job, and then start trying to brainstorm for other jobs to raise money.  Oh, and we finally learn the guild leader’s name, the one that turned Iema and Corin into stone to make sure that they weren’t found by people who would be looking for us.  (For further explanation that I skipped in the last “Homebrewed,” see Jim’s comment here.  You can also read about the glove that turned them to stone on Jim’s blog here.)  The leader’s name is Gurdren Whitecowl.  Gurdren overhears us trying to figure out what job to do next and admits that our idea about robbing the museum would be the best bet for some fast cash.

Interestingly enough, Gurdren says that he thinks the best time to rob the museum would be during the day because of the way the security is set up.  He says that the first and third floors have traps on them, so that if anyone comes onto those floors, they would automatically have the temporal stasis spell cast on them.  Still, the best stuff is on the first and third floors.  The second floor, he says, doesn’t really have anything worth stealing.  He recommends talking to the Dirt Children thieves guild, a guild consisting of ogres, for more information on how to break into the museum.

Iema, understandably, is reluctant to just go knocking on the door of an ogres-only thieves guild to ask how to rob a museum.  “Is there any way we can get an escort, someone to introduce us?” he asks.

Gurdren, seeing Iema’s point, says, “I’d recommend Durthak.  He’s a half-ogre.  I’ll have him take you in the morning.”

Speaking of morning, it’s getting late, and we all are tired after a long day of killing off short people.  (Thank god I’m not in this D&D world, right?  Otherwise, I’d be toast.)  We agree to go with Durthak and pay the Dirt Children a visit in the morning.

Huskyr the 17^th

After we wake up and eat, Iema gets busy trying to disguise us so we’re not recognized in the city.  Gurdren catches him doing this and suggests we go see a wizard that they call The Barber to cast polymorph on us rather than having Iema disguise us all the time.  It would be easier, he points out.

Corin likes the idea.  “Actually, we should go see him to polymorph us into something that has dark vision before we go into the Underdark,” he says.  “It could be cheaper than buying items to help us with dark vision.”

We all agree this is a great idea.  Before we go leave to pay the ogre guild a visit, we decide to give The Barber, Fezus, a visit.

Fezus runs his business in the poorer section of town.  Boards cover the establishment’s windows.   A sign is nailed to one of the planks.  It reads BARBER.

We go inside.  It’s dark.  We hear what sounds like something dragging across the floor.  After our eyes adjust to the dim lighting, we finally spot the source of the sound:  A gravekin coming towards us, dragging his leg across the floor.

“Hi,” Iema greets him.  “We’d like haircuts.”

Fezus pulls out his scissors.

Iema looks at the blades, then back at Fezus before he clarifies.  “No.  The expensive kind.”

“Ah,” Fezus says.  “I see.” 

He goes about transforming us, although I can’t remember what our new forms look like.  I just remember Jim saying to Phil, “Phil…you’re a black guy!”

“Sweet!” Phil laughs.

[Edit:  As Jim has pointed out in the comments, this is a reference to Family Guy.  Unsurprisingly, since I really don't like that show (shocking, I know), I didn't catch it, but I thought I'd include it here, because it IS pretty funny:

Lois Griffin: [Lois and Peter wait for a pregnancy test] God, I can’t believe we weren’t more careful. This probably happened that night we tried role playing.
Lois Griffin: [flashback] Oh, I need a spankin’. I’m a bad, bad girl.
Peter Griffin: I’m a paladin with 18 charisma and 97 hit points. I can use my Helm of Disintegration and do one D4 damage as my half-elf mage wields his plus-five Holy Avenger.
Lois Griffin: Paladins can’t use the Helm of Disintegration.
Peter Griffin: Oh. Then, I’m a black guuuuy.

Even dumb shows have there moments, but I digress.]

As for the rest of us, I don’t remember what Jim says we looked like.  I think Sunshine stayed the same, though.  But enough of our new identities, we’re off to go chat with some ogres.

We head off to where we’ve been told we can find Durthak.  We find him leaning against the wall.  He looks as though he has no legs below the knee.

Naturally, Iema is the first to speak to him.  “We want some information,” he says.

Durthak, probably knowing that we were coming, doesn’t give us too hard of a time.  It turns out that his legless appearance was just a trick, as he unfolded his legs from beneath him and stands up to his full height.  My own legs hurt just thinking about it.  He indicates we should go elsewhere.

We head to a door.  Durthak knocks.  An ogre opens a window to peer out.  “What’s the password?” he asks gruffly.

“Password,” Durthak responds.

We laugh.  Jim says we all go inside and see a place of “ill repute.”  (Jim’s words.)  Ogres are tossing coins and making bets.

“Betting on if it comes down heads or tails?” Phil guesses.

“No,” Jim says, “betting on whether or not it comes down at all.”

We laugh again.

Durthak takes Natalia, Iema, and Corin to an ogre they call Dirt Gut Maneater.  He’s a scary-looking mofo covered in tattoos.  The tattoos are testaments to Dirt Gut’s past, each one an image depicting some god-awful thing he’s done.  Durthak leaves us alone with Dirt Gut.  Natalia thinks that personally, she would rather deal with Durthak.

Iema tells Dirt Gut that we would like information.

“Then you need give me money,” he says.  “Either dat, or I shake money from you.  But if I do dat, den I be tired, den cranky.  I don’ like dat.”

We agree that we’ll just give him money.  We’d prefer he not be tired or cranky either.  So we fork over the change, and we’re told the following:

There are a couple of guards outside one of the floors.  He calls them “collaborators,” although I’m not sure what he means by that.  He says not to bother trying to bribe them—it can’t be done.  He claims the first and third floors cannot be touched.  He also tells us about devices set up to cast temporal stasis on intruders.  There’s an animal of some kind on the second floor, but he doesn’t know what.  Dirt Gut says he once sent a thief to go check it out, but the thief never came back.

Also in passing, he mentions that there’s a flower shop owner down the street who was killed in her sleep, but nobody knows why.  If that’s not weird on its own, then this will drive the point home:  About a block away, there was a dwarf that brewed his own beer, and he was also killed.  Both of these people had shops within a block radius of the museum.  We wonder if it’s connected.

Iema decides to ask Dirt Gut about entrances to the Underdark from the Emperor’s palace.  That, Dirt Gut doesn’t have any knowledge on.  But Dirt Gut quickly brings us back to the topic at hand, telling us that people deliver food the museum during the day.  He suggests we check that out.

We thank him for the information he’s offered and leave.  Before we go do our little heist, we decide to check out the shops.  Guess what?  We’ve got nothing.  We cannot find any reason for anyone to kill those shop owners.

Next, we plan on how to take care of the guards.  The plan is this:  Iema makes Natalia invisible.  Then he will put a guard to sleep while Corin fascinates the other.  Natalia will kill them as an invisible tiger.

Or something like that.

We go into the alley for buffs:  Invisibility on Natalia, Barkskin on Corin (I’m proud that I actually remembered to do this), Mage Armor on all of us, as well as Cat’s Grace.  Natalia also remembers to cast Greater Magic Fang on Sunshine. 

Our plan to take care of the guards goes off without a hitch.  After we kill the guards, we go into the museum.  We have to make checks (dexterity?) as soon as we go in.  Phil succeeds; me and Jim-as-Corin fail.

“Okay,” Jim announces, “Phil, Iema remembers the pit that is right inside the door.  You immediately step around it when you walk through the door.  Spring, Natalia and Corin forget and step right into the pit.”

Luckily, it’s only a five foot drop.  Granted, that’s just above my head in real life, but Natalia’s taller than I am at her 5’8”.  She falls right into a coffin.  When she gets herself together, she looks around and sees that there are bones scattered about.  She scurries out of the coffin, and she and Corin pull themselves out of the pit.

It doesn’t take us long to get into combat.  As soon as Natalia and Corin have climbed out, a blue-gray wolf comes padding out.  Jim says it would be considered a magical beast called a Tugren.  I guess this is something Jim made up, so let me give a quick explanation:  Jim says it’s just a wolf with a template added to them.  Its history in the world of Valt:  Tugrens are originally from Shoten.  They’re bred from storm elementals and normal wolves.

“Where can I get one of these wolves?” Natalia wonders aloud, impressed.  She doesn’t have a chance to be impressed for long, as we’re jumped by more of them.

Quickly, the wolves trip Iema and Natalia.  Sunshine, a little slow on the uptake, whips around.  “WHAT’S THAT?!  IT’S A WOLF!”

Seriously, she pretty much yells everything.

Corin, luckily, doesn’t get tripped, so he’s still standing.  Sunshine jumps into battle, attacks a wolf, and immediately gets shocked.  Natalia morphs into her brown bear form.  No dire bear here—she’d go through the floor.  Natalia then attacks the wolf that attacked Sunshine, but alas, even though she gets some nice swiping and biting in, she takes lightning damage.

Again, Natalia totally wants one of these wolves.  How freakin’ awesome.

Iema gets up and maneuvers himself behind the wolf attacking Natalia, putting himself in a flanking position.  He attacks, but again, he also takes electrical damage.

During the scuffling, Natalia is knocked prone.  I’m surprised by this; Natalia’s bear forms are usually difficult to trip.  So, naturally, I wasn’t sure how to attack from my position on the floor.

“Getting up takes a move action or partial action or something, right?” I ask Jim.

“You can always attack from your position on the floor.”

I frown.  “While lying on my back?  Like a desperate hooker?”

Jim starts laughing.  “Well, I was thinking more like when Gremlin rolls on his back and start attacking Emmy with all his claws.”

“Like a desperate hooker…I would have never thought to put it like that,” Phil adds.

Okay, so something apparently wrong with me and my analogies.  Nonetheless, I decide not to waste any kind of actions and stay in my desperate hooker position, attacking wolves above me.  It works: Natalia manages to kill off the wolf that she and Sunshine had been working on earlier.

Meanwhile, Jim says that Sunshine “goes to town” biting another wolf.  Iema also attacks, takes more damage, but manages to get himself over to Natalia to heal her up.  Natalia keeps her back on the floor, clawing at wolves around her.

Sunshine now does something a little different:  She flies away, flips over, and then flies back.  She attempts a bite but misses.  We’re still impressed by the flipping action.  Phil asks Jim if he can do a bardic knowledge check to see if he can identify what Sunshine just did.  He rolls well, and Jim says that Iema recognizes it as an aerial tactic normally used by dragons.

Wolves’ turn.  One of them attacks Corin and bounces off him.  Turns out that he just ran into Corin’s Protection from Evil spell.

“They’re evil!” Corin yells. “Kill them!”

We’re trying, Natalia grumbles inside her own head.  Of course, she can’t say that, being in bear form.  Secretly, she’s sad to find that these super-awesome wolves are evil.  I guess that dashes the chances of her ever getting one.  Wah.  But she gets over it, crits, and kills off the remaining wolf.

We all brush ourselves off and Iema compliments Sunshine on her flipping-maneuver.  She says thanks him, but says it make her look silly.  “I look like a turkey,” she complains.  “I am not a turkey.  I am a hawk!”

Yes, Sunshine, yes, you are.

Next, we move into what’s known as the War Room.  Jim immediately has us do reflex saves, which Sunshine fails.  The door explodes and she goes flying.  She seems okay, though.

Okay, that is, until we spot what’s within that room:  A creature with a stretched mask over its face, carrying a braided whip with pieces of glass in it.  Oh, shit.  And here we are, not knowing the safe word.

We roll for initiative.  For once, I kick ass, and Natalia gets to go first.  She charges in to do 52 points of damage.  Iema’s next, then Sunshine, who does her “turkey dance” again.  The creature gets to go soon, though, and whip-stuns Natalia.  He tries to use his whip to yank Iema’s weapons out of his hands, but luckily for us, he doesn’t do so well.  He does better with Corin, managing to yank the boy’s weapon out of his hand and throw it behind him.

Iema manages to finish off the S&M guy, and we enter the War Room.  There are locked cases, which Corin gets to work on.  He manages to get two of them open.  One has a wooden shield.  The other object is a belt with two clips.  One clip says RUKE, but whatever weapon is supposed to be in that is missing.  On the other clip, there is a sheath attached that says CRUAGH.  In it, there is a rapier with CRUAGH written on that as well.  Both the shield and the rapier are magical.  We decide to keep these items.

Next up:  The Hall of Artifacts.  We pop our heads in, but it doesn’t look like anything’s in there.  Corin does some snooping around, and he says it looks like there’s a ward.  Suddenly, red smoke spirals up, and something like a demon appears.  (Jim once told me what exactly it was, but I don’t know these things, people.  So I’m going with demon because it sounded demon-like to me.)

The demon thing looks at us, looks at the red smoke circle around himself, and sighs.  “Very well,” he says.

Because I’m demon-retarded, Jim has to explain to me that the demon can’t get out of his circle.  Hey, how should I know that?  I was a good girl growing up; I spent most of my time doing my homework and watching TV as opposed to summoning Beelzebub.  I wasn’t that bored as a teenager.

So, this demon tells us we’re going to play a little game.  (Yay, a game!)  The game consists of answering riddles.  (Boo, riddles!)  He has a box that has keys to all the other boxes in the room, but that box is protected by a prismatic sphere.  We proceed with the riddles, which I won’t go into, but Jim has them here if you’re interested.  (And you totally should be—Jim had some good ones ready for us.)  I personally don’t care much for riddles.  I’ve never done much of them and don’t really have the patience for them.  Phil, however, is pretty good at them, and got us through the trickier ones.

The last riddle, incidentally, is a trick.  This is how the last riddle plays out:

Demon: Three of one and one of another,
four from a sister and one from a mother.
Take away two when you visit the Hells,
and tell me out loud what your plundering spells.

Sunshine:  “Eat me”?  What kind of answer is that?

Demon [stepping out from the circle]:  Don’t mind if I do.

Yup, that’s right, people.  The answer to the last riddle is “eat me”—and, incidentally, the key words to free the demon from his little circle cage.  Curse you, Sunshine!

So we go into combat.  Once again, I roll highest for initiative.   I tell Jim that she’s casting Handfire and shifting into her brown bear form.  Sunshine attacks but only manages to get one bite in.  Iema starts buffing people. Natalia and Corin attack the demon-guy, but sadly, he resists Natalia’s Handfire.  Damn, I hate blowing a good spell.

The demon tries for Corin, but Corin’s Protection from Evil spell burns him.  The demon looks surprised.  “You brought a paladin on a thieving mission?  Are you guys crazy?”

Note that Corin’s not exactly a paladin; he just has some ranks in it or something, I guess.  At any rate, we’re not exactly in the mood to correct him, since we’re all bleeding from his stupid claws.

When it’s my turn again, I tell Jim that Natalia is going to summon a dire wolverine.  Sadly, I rolled a nat 1 and fail miserably.  Luckily, when it’s Phil’s turn to do something, he rolls much better than I and manages to successfully cast Improved Invisibility on Corin.

Soon, it’s my turn again, and this time (with Phil’s help), I decide I’m going to summon a Tendriculos.  Of course, Jim and Phil have to show me pictures from the book and explain its abilities because I barely could pronounce it, much less figure out what the hell a Tendriculos was.

While Natalia is summoning whatever it is, the demon casts a mirror image spell.  Sunshine nabs one.  “I KILLED ONE!” she yells excitedly as the mirage disappears.  Iema and Corin jump in, taking out images left and right.  Finally, the Tendriculos appears, and we’re like, HELL YEAH, IT’S GONNA KICK THIS DEMON’S ASS.

Except it doesn’t.  It misses all its attacks.  Damn.

So, whatever a Tendriculos is, it makes the demon nervous because he casts an invisibility spell on himself to hide from it.  We all start trying to guess where he’s at and are swinging wildly, only to hit air.  Finally, the demon appears behind the Tendriculos and summons more mirror images of himself.  Gah!  Again, we start furiously popping mirror images left and right.

Then the demon, succeeding on a spell to see invisibility, turns his sights on Corin.  Swiftly, he kills Corin outright.  “That’s what a paladin gets,” he sneers.

How awful.  Natalia’s come to like Corin a lot; I can only imagine how Iema feels about the loss of his companion.  However, we don’t have time to mourn.  Natalia keeps working on mirror images.  Iema has to do a will save, which, luckily, he succeeds at because something outside of his mind was trying to get at his newfound rapier.  The bard manages to fight it off.

However, whatever the demon does is enough to drop Iema.  Natalia casts Healing Circle, which, while it doesn’t get him up to a lot of hit points, it is enough to get Iema back up.  Which is great because Iema really steals the show here:  He draws his rapier.  On it, he notices that a map of the Jade Islands with fire behind it is glowing on the weapon.  He can feel that the rapier is willing him to do something.  Does he give in to it?

“Yes,” Phil answers Jim quickly.  We’re eager to see what the rapier wants Iema to do.

Jim says that Iema’s eyes suddenly turn all blue.  The rapier glows, then something happens—

The demon is gone.  The rapier has cast banishment on it.  HOW AWESOME.

Except, of course, Corin’s dead, and we still have another room to go…

And that, of course, will be continued in the next game.

I’m taking a moment’s pause from Warcraft to update.  Not that I have much to update.  I mostly wanted to whine.  My vacation is nearly over.  Wah!  Back to work on Monday, and on the new schedule to boot.  Instead of working 9 AM – 5:30 PM, I’ll be taking calls at 8 AM – 4:30 PM.  I’m excited about the change, but in reality, as long as there is overtime, my schedule won’t look very different.  Currently, I go in early at 8 to get in an hour of overtime before getting on the phones at 9.  Now, assuming I’ll still be given the opportunity to do overtime, I’ll just be doing it at the end of my shift, from 4:30-5:30 PM.

Still, I like that I have the option of going home an hour earlier. 

And, good god, I hope I can still get overtime.  Recently, overtime’s gotten limited, so you have to put in for it, but not everyone gets selected.  And right now, I’m gonna need it.  After bills, including the dentist bill that I wasn’t quite expecting (and that I sure as hell didn’t budget for), I have maybe $30 to last me until next Friday.  Thankfully, Jim’s doing pretty well with his bank account, partially because we’ve been particularly awesome in the frugalness department as of late, so it’s not like we’re gonna go hungry or anything.

Let’s see, what else?  Speaking of money, I’ve been stashing money away since July for Jim’s birthday in November.  There’s a little part of me that’s like, Spring, if you REALLY need money, you DO have some, you know…I have to tell that voice to shut up.  No, Evil Spring Voice.  That money is for Jim’s birthday present, which is going to be SUPER AWESOME, and I’m so excited for his birthday to come.  No, I’m not telling you what it is because he reads this blog.  Pretty religiously, actually.  The other day, when I mentioned I needed to update my blog, he said, “Yeah, you haven’t updated since September 4th.”

Damn.  Even I didn’t know that!

On the subject of blogs, Jim updated his yesterday, and he plans on putting another post up today.  (If you’re not savvy to the subject of Jim’s blog, it’s about his D&D world of Valt, which is where our D&D game, a.k.a. “Homebrewed,” is set in.)  He wrote about how he didn’t expect for Phil and me to decide that escaping Fasset via the Underdark was our best solution.  I love it when we do shit he doesn’t expect.  Jim’s a very good DM and just plain clever in general, so he’s usually pretty good at thinking of all angles and figuring out what people are going to do.  Still, he always seems pleased when his players come up with a solution that he hasn’t thought of.  I remember, for example, when Natalia ended up getting thrown into jail–this was waaaay back, in the beginning–and instead of having her try to capture a guard who passed by and getting the keys, like he thought I’d have her do, I had her use her Soften Earth and Stone spell to get through the building and then Obscuring Mist to cover her and Grugor as they escaped.  It was quietier and didn’t even involve combat.  Also, it was a little more understated, which is definitely Natalia’s style–and my own.

Also, Jim is pleased with himself for making Fasset seem so awful that we’d be willing to go through the Underdark.  Keep in mind that Phil hates drow with a passion, similar to my severe hatred for cockroaches.  At least he doesn’t have to ever deal with his nemesis in real life.  Although, admittedly, I don’t have to deal with mine either.  For an apartment full of college kids, this place is surprisingly bug-free.

Speaking of gaming, Jim and I talked about going to a gaming convention yesterday.  I think he’s a little hesitant about DMing a game at a convention, but he said if he did, he would want it to be a bigger convention.  So we’re thinking about going to Gen Con next year.  Part of me is kinda reluctant because, well…people.  Lots of people.  Ugh.  Also, I already know that while I’m on the geeky side, I’m never “geeky enough” for conventions.  I had that issue at ACen, too.  I mean, I watched and enjoyed anime, but I wasn’t running around, speaking Japanese or claiming Pocky was the best food ever.  (Incidentally, Pocky is way freakin’ overrated.)  I was not one of those anime fans who thought just because it was Japanese, it was better.  I just liked good TV, period.

But, still, I’m gonna do this because I’m excited to see Jim in his element.  I hope he does decide to run a game there–I want to show him off.

Something I haven’t mentioned too much lately:  The Lego Pirate Ship blanket.  I’m not sure how happy I am with it.  I’m still progressing, but this is 1) the first non-scarf I’ve ever crocheted, 2) the first thing I’ve ever crocheted where it involved a lot of color-switching, and 3) the first thing I’ve used a pattern for.  Well, sorta.  The pattern is actually for the latch-hook that I did, so I’ve made some alterations to it to make it big enough for a blanket.

Because I’ve never done crochet where I switch colors in the middle of a row, I wasn’t sure how to carry the yarn.  At first, I did what everyone says to do:  Crocheted over the old color while working with the new.  Guess what?  It shows through.  And that looks fine in the section that’s supposed to be water, but that’s not going to work when I get to the part where I do the moon.  The blue yarn will go right through it.  So I decided to hell with what everyone says, I’m going to cut it and weave in the ends.  Painstakingly slow, yes, but better result.

And some parts of it look really good.  Others, I think, are starting to look messy, and I think it’s because of another issue I have:  You’re supposed to know which side is the “right” side and weave in the ends on the “wrong” side, and I’ve no clue which side is which.  See, I started to crochet it, turned my work a couple times, and then realized, “Oh, yeah, I’m left-handed, which is why I’m about to do it backwards.”  So I fudged the pattern a bit to make it match, and now, I’m left confused as to which side should be the “right” side. 

I explained to Jim that this won’t be the best thing ever.  I knew this before I started it.  I’ve never attempted anything other than a striped scarf (oh, wait, once, I made my mother a lingerie hanger, but that was very small and only involved one color), so this is new to me, but hey–we gotta start somewhere.  I figured it wasn’t going to be perfect.  Luckily, Jim doesn’t care, thinks it looks great, and is excited about it getting finished.  I guess that’s really what matters.

Also, it’s a blanket.  What really matters is that it keeps him warm.

Interestingly enough, I already have a couple other projects planned after this blanket gets done.  One is a hat for Jim to go along with the scarf that I made him last winter.  (Which, I have to admit, looks damn good.)  I’ve never done any circular crocheting before, save for the coaster that’s in my bedroom.  That, incidentally, wasn’t intended to be a coaster–I was just trying to practice making circles and decided it made a great coaster, heh.  But my point?  Yeah, that hat will probably be another learning curveball.

Especially when you’re left-handed, learning this stuff on your own, and all the patterns are backwards for you.  Grrr.

Anyway, I do have pictures of what I have on the blanket so far.  Unfortunately, the batteries in my camera have died, so posting pictures of the work in progress will have to wait.

Oh, shoot, I probably should go wake Jim up.  He’s gotten to where he doesn’t like to sleep in too late on weekends either.  My guess is pretty soon, I’ll have to give the laptop up so he’ll can work on his next post.  Make sure to look for it at his blog now, ya hear?