Author: John Payne

Hopefully a full write-up is forthcoming.

GM’d my first game of anything in a long time. Used DW and my venerable copy of Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth.

The characters were a Nephilim, Cursed Armor, and a Hobgoblin.

My favorite scene was:

The party was fighting a troll that I created. In short, the Troll had a move that it could regenerate the last wound it took. This means that on a 7-9 roll, it could regenerate the damage caused unless it was caused by fire.

Believe it or not, they had enough 10+ that they almost offed this thing, but then the bad rolls started coming. At this point they opted for Defy Danger rolls instead of Hack-n-Slash/Volley.

Before they made it to the troll cave, they suspected that a giant eagle or manticore was following them.

The Hobgoblin rolled a 2. The party discovered that they were dealing with a Griffon Lord that was charging at them from high above.

Faced with the prospect of two unbeatable monsters, the Nephilim character came up with the epic idea of the night. He got between the Troll and the Griffon. When the troll charged at the Nephilim, the Nephilim went to the void. This left the troll face-to-beak with the griffon.

As the two of them fought, the party calmly searched the interior of the troll cave for loot.

We all enjoyed that scene. 1 XP for the Nephilim.

Now for the fun parts:

I am a Good Cleric. The thief poisons a guard and I watch him die by interrogating him. I realized at the end of the session that I did not fulfill my alignment as I watched an innocent person die while I interrogated him.I have Cure Light Wounds as a Rote spell. No XP for alignment. (See the backstory in the previous post.)

In my defense, my cleric worships a god of knowledge and secrets, yet has a INT 9. I guess I am the Maxwell Smart of Clerics.

*

After we were freed, the captain of the guard says to the Dwarven Paladin, “I don’t like you and I don’t trust you. I will not give you even an inch!”

The Paladin replies, “An inch of what?”

It took me 10 minutes to stop laughing.

*

The thief spent all night attempting side quests to retrieve her tiger.

*

The Dwarven Paladin kept asking everyone, including the King(twice!) about the presence of other Dwarves in town.

*

I have a bond with the Paladin that I implicitly trust him. When I got a sword as a gift from the captain of the guard, I refused to tell him its powers.

No XP for the bond. Yup, it’s me, Maxwell Smart of Clerics.

*

Yes, the Dwarven Paladin has a harpoon gun stored in a bag of holding that the Thief stole from me. I remark about the similarity of the bag and harpoon gun constantly.

*

The king asks if we know anything about a Black Dragon attacking the northern lands. Apparently, the Dwarven Paladin was an old friend of hers. Unfortunately, the Paladin’s old friends couldn’t resist steeling from her treasure trove and the dragon blames the Paladin.

We told the King that we didn’t know anything about the Dragon.

*

The Paladin convinced the Thief to make a shiv out of her chamberpot in an attempt to pick the lock on her cell door. She decided not to use it. (The shiv, I mean.)

Tonight’s session:

Keep in mind that tonight’s session was supposed to be the journey’s end of a very long quest. We had been “dropped” into another world and thanks to the giants, they were casting a ritual spell to teleport us back home.

We appear inside the King’s Ballroom of our world. Immediately upon arrival, one of our non-player companions charges for the King and wounds him.

The Dwarven Paladin attacks him with a harpoon gun and hits. The harpoon goes through its target and sticks in the diaz just below the King’s throne.

A partygoer then begins throwing knives at the queen. I take him out only to find one of the King’s Guards is now charging the King. I figure out that our foe, whatever it is, possesses different people with the goal of killing the King and Queen.

Our human thief (with a pet tiger) uses her poison arrows to dispatch with the guard. I catch up with him to interrogate him, but he dies after my third question.

We are arrested and left to rot in our cells for 10 days. Although we are questioned, we don’t feel any closer to freedom. One of the guards is possessed by whatever-the-bad-thing is and threatens to kill me.

One day, the castle is racked with explosions. They are close enough to knock us off-balance. The thief’s door opens. She lets us out after finding all our stuff.

The dwarven paladin finds a barbed devil upstairs destroying the King’s guards. He harpoons it and the thief and I come up as reinforcements. The thief performs a series of spectacular acrobatics only to fail at the end. As the last of the guards are slaughtered, I get knocked across the room. Despite this, we defeat the devil only to watch it evaporate into mist.

Then the captain of the guard appears. So does the possessed guard.

Fortunately, the captain of the guard saw the demon, so he knew what we had done.

The king gives us his thanks, but he is still very wounded. The thief begs the King to let me heal him. He agrees over the objections of the captain of the guard.

Our reward is to be sent on a quest. It was a very fun evening.

No pictures, but a fun sesstion last night.

We (the chracters) are searching for artifacts. Those artifacts are identifying by runes in the Giant’s Language. To search for these artifacts, we find ourselves in a place of endless doors. Usually, a session begins with opening a door. We get our bearings, encounter something to talk to and generally attempt to figure out what we can gain.

This time, we find ourselves in the hold of a ship. There’s lots of creaking and shouting from the deck above. So far, so good, right?

I do not remember the exact sequence of events, but simply attempting to gather our bearings and discern where we were this time generated multiple critical failures.

Multiple.

How many times can we roll a 2?

A sea serpent is attacking a ship in the middle of a tremendous storm. Fire eels ooze on deck. Many of us are clamoring to go back through the door that brought us to this cursed place, especially when finding out that the sea serpent is attacking the ship because of us.

Our brave Dwarven Fighter decides that he is going to rip a harpoon gun off its mooring, climb the serpent, and fire at point blank range. Rolling a critical success, he actually rips the harpoon gun off its moorings and it still works. The rest of his plan did not quite work out as planned.

I decided that my Cleric should actually contribute whereupon a critical fail in my attack with a harpoon gun. I decide to attack fire eels and leave the heavy lifting to my little dwarven friend.

To cut to the chase, the ship had 1 hit point left. Most of the sailors on the boat were swept overboard. Our mage spent most of the battle being seasick. One character died, but made a bargain with Death to return with a different profession. The cursed shapeshifter alternately changed into a werewolf (the moon), a ghost (dead creature), and a host of other things. The captain and crew were grateful for our assistance.

My dwarven friend even got to keep his harpoon gun. The captain, however, said that he could spare no harpoons. Undeterred, he strips down to his skivvies and dives overboard. He retrieves a tooth and a scale from the slain sea serpent for the two slayers as well as nine harpoons.

Thanks to my bag of holding, we will soon be dungeon crawling with a harpoon gun. I haven’t laughed so hard in a very long time. 🙂

So I played my first game of DW last night. It was awesome. Great time had by all despite the fact that I was quite easily the oldest guy in the room.

Two things of note:

Playing a Cleric that serves a God of knowledge and secret rituals is not that hard for a toon with INT 9.

Being so used to OD&D and similar games, I realized that I kept waiting for my turn. :S The GM had to bail me out more than once by saying, “What are you going to do?”. I’ll get used to it.