After a longish break while half our group moved houses, we finally resumed our campaign this past weekend. To add to the fun, we played Dungeons and Dragons by candlelight. Yeah.

*

We resume our campaign in the middle of some woods after a mighty battle — three of our party levelled up after the last session (including me — woo hoo), so we are in great spirits. It doesn’t take us very long to check out the creature village, shimmy down a tunnel into a dark chamber, deal with a trap or two and retrieve the stolen statue… We also pick up some cool items:

• A short sword (+1) — which Ash appropriates (lucky me!)
• A magic ring (+1 Strength stat, +4 Climbing) — which is also ultimately given to Ash, although it won’t work immediately
• A gemstone (onyx)

Ergosh, our lizard man cleric host for whom we retrieved the statue, is so happy with us that he even cooks us dinner once we return to his tower.

After we rest up and heal, we decide to tackle a stone staircase leading up out of the valley. We haven’t made it too far before we encounter…

A giant four-legged chicken

My ranger skills can’t persuade it to let us past, so we have to fight it. Problem is, we are stuck in single file on these stairs, and we keep missing the cursed thing! Our paladin takes first line of attack, but he goes down, so Ash steps up and promptly rolls a 1, which sends her hurtling down the stairs, leaving our cleric to face the creature. She goes down too. (The ‘chicken’ has two mean claws and an even meaner beak.) Ash eventually manages to slay the chicken, but by this time both our healers are unconscious.

Excellent — taken down by a chicken

Cal, our ‘innkeepers son’, goes back to get Ergosh, who heals the two with potions. After that, we have a little discussion about battles and who should engage with creatures and in what order. We return to Ergosh’s tower to rest a bit longer… and promptly get various degrees of food poisoning from eating the cursed chicken.

The stairs again, another chicken

Eventually we set off up the stairs again and meet a second giant four-legged chicken. We dispatch this one a little more efficiently and continue up the stairs, through a tunnel, until it opens out in a magnificent balcony, jutting out on the other side of the mountain, and looking out over a broad valley.

This balcony is inhabited by — you guessed it — more chickens.

We fight two adult chickens and Ash is viciously hen-pecked into unconsciousness… The others manage to dispatch the creatures quickly and stabilise Ash, who would have been dead in another round. Close shave. Would not have wanted to write in that vale notice: Killed by a ‘chicken’.

Our party is out of healing spells by this point, but Ash is saved by a fortuitous scroll hiding among the bird rubble, which has two ‘cure serious wounds’ spells. (I think the DM was being kind to us at this point!)

Treasure chest

In a small room off the balcony is a treasure chest, which (once the trap is disabled) turns out to contain:

• A suit of mail armour (+2) — Used to belong to Richard Deathmaster and instills in the wearer certain traits, including a tendency to act in a random cavalier manner.
• A backpack containing, among other things, an everburning candle (cool!)
• A magical purse — Our rogue discovers three gems inside, which remain invisible when within the purse. (Currently she’s keeping this a secret…)

Our paladin claims the armour, puts it on immediately and charges down a newly discovered stone staircase in the corner of the room, promptly triggering a pit trap and impaling himself on stakes. There goes the other ‘cure serious wounds’ spell.

And finally a wraith

To cap off our evening (and a very late night), we encounter a wraith in a magically sealed chamber at the bottom of the stone staircase. Ash is instantly in the thick of it from the start, mainly because she is standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, and cops three direct attacks from the wraith.

Her sword has no effect on the creature (turns out she should have used that short sword +1 she obtained at the beginning of the night), and I don’t do well on the fortitude saving throws so Ash loses a whole three constitution points. (I have a really bad feeling they’re a permanent loss, which kind of sucks.)

In the end Ash flees the engagement, leaving Cal to use his secret magic skills against the wraith. He manages to defeat the thing more or less single-handedly while the rest of us cower at a distance. Our cleric tries to turn undead a few times, but doesn’t seem to have enough grunt. The paladin gets in a successful ’smite evil’ attack, but otherwise it is all up to Cal.

The serpent’s eye

Our final act for the evening is to search the sarcophagus from which the wraith emerged and retrieve a magic rod which holds a message about the serpent’s eye — the powerful gem we’re hunting for. (Ash and Alix (the cleric) have been brought into the quest for the eye of Varrien now.)

So it seems we’re on the right trail. The next challenge is going to be food rations, I suspect. We know we can’t eat the chickens — although Ergosh fed us a nice fish and pig-like creature, which seemed nutritious enough. So perhaps we’ll have to put my ranger skills to the test soon! I’ve certainly beefed up my ‘survival’ skills for this very event.

So there we are, running around in the wilderness, up and down staircases, through tunnels, avoiding traps and other pitfalls, battling creatures, almost dying… searching for a magical gemstone. It’s so much fun!

My new D&D character is a ranger called Ash. She is a northern plainswoman, a ‘pale-skinned barbarian’ in the imaginary world of our game. Hailing from a remote plains village that has recently been raided by thieving goblins, Ash and the village cleric (Alix) are the only surviving members of a party that set out in pursuit of the goblins… and they found themselves stranded high in the mountains, having lost the goblins’ trail.

This is the scenario the two of us whose characters carked it last time came up with to explain our new characters’ presence in the vicinity of our original party. They came across us in a cave and begged to share our very warm fire… they weren’t in very good shape, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised they wouldn’t help us chase off/kill the three wolves outside the cave gnawing on our last remaining companions from our village.

Gifts — or manipulation? — from the DM

We had to, you see, because our DM decided to embellish our scenario and load up the dead bodies with several magical items and a spellbook.

In the end, we managed it rather well, the two of us… we defeated the wolves, retrieved the objects, generously shared them with our new companions — who in my opinion were rather demanding of two strangers they’d just met… and not nearly as open and forthcoming. In fact, I found it really disconcerting for Ash to be suddenly distrusted by these characters I actually knew quite well.

More bouts of unconsciousness

After some verbal fencing, we eventually agreed to join forces (as if we wouldn’t) and continue the hunt for… whatever we find. Our route took us down below the snow line, through skirmishes/ambushes by blood hawks, poisonous snakes, mini-orc things… until we encountered a lizard man, who saved my life with a potion in return for us retrieving an artifact the mini-orc things had stolen from him.

Somehow we seem to keep going into debt to save my life. Hmm…

And so our band of five went off to track the mini-orc things… which attacked us in the forest. They surrounded us and there was a mighty battle. But in the end we defeated them all, although three of our party ended up unconscious and it was a miracle no-one died.

The final showdown: Ash versus the mini-orc thing leader (aka Skeleton with scythe)

Overall it was a really fun night. Despite the fact I rolled THE WORST EVAH!

Still, given how badly I rolled, I managed to finish the final battle still standing and defeat the leader. And after one session I somehow gained enough XPs to level up for the next session. Yay! As a level 2 ranger, I’ll be a much more potent force.

Interestingly, I played with far less caution than normal, because I hadn’t had time to become too invested in this character. It wouldn’t have worried me greatly had she died — although now I’m level 2 I’ll probably start exercising caution again. But it was fun to play with violent abandon!

1.

Poor Rhi — my ranger — is dead for good this time. (sniff)

She was taken out on a snowy ledge by three ghouls, which paralysed and devoured her without her even swinging a blow. My party tried to preserve her body in the snow, but Rhi showed up later as a ghoul herself and was decapitated.

I’d been playing Rhi since July and she had this really cool backstory that I never really got to use and she’d just made it to level 3… I’m officially in mourning.

Vale Rhi

Rhi was the infamous Dharian spy/assassin, Felharia, sympathetic to the persecuted Vahdrim mages. The trail of bodies she left in her wake down south caused the Lawbringers of the priests of Testerris to put a price on her head. She was lying low in the north under the assumed name of Rhiar to avoid the Testerris Lawbringers, and teamed up with a small group of adventurers to earn some coin and pass the time. Her prowess with the longsword was legendary. 

2.

Rhi wasn’t the only one to meet her maker last night. Our Level 3 Cleric, facing water orcs, misjudged the depth of the lake and plunged in wearing full chain mail armour. She sank like a stone.

The rest of the party watched in horror, then defeated the enemy and tried to rescue Pasquale to no avail. They hauled her dead body out of the icy water, and are now stranded in a snowfield on low hit points with no healing. They’re not in a good place.

I told you our DM was trying to kill us.

3.

On the upside, we gained a fifth party member — a young Paladin with impressive statistics. He acquitted himself admirably in his first session, taking the lead attacking role after Rhi’s demise.

4.

At the beginning of the session we did brave the vertical wind tunnel, after a few tests. It could have ended in disaster, but the five of us negotiated the chute without irreparable damage. It whooshed us up several thousand feet to the top of the Giant Steps we would otherwise have climbed for an estimated 10 days… a most excellent shortcut — although both routes turned out to be very perilous… which we should have expected given our DM is always trying to kill us!

We emerged from a tunnel onto an icy ledge, which wound around the mountain to a series of cascading valleys of ice and snow — which is where Rhi and Pasquale met their demise. Aside from ghouls and the water orcs the party battled a snow leopard. Their mission is two-fold: collect knowledge for the cleric back in town who spotted the cash for Rhi’s resurrection; find a suspected gemstone named after one of the gods…

5.

“Shit happens… and then you die” was the most apt inscription on my coffee mug last night.

I’m still somewhat numb.

I’ve rolled up a new character for our next session. I haven’t named her yet, or prepared a backstory, but she’s another ranger. I figure I’ll stick to the one character class while still learning how to play this game. The next session is in three weeks and will be rather interesting, I think.

Commiserations will be gratefully accepted. (sniff)

Our DM is trying to kill us.

No matter where we go, what we do, death lurks around every corner. In the last two sessions since I’ve chronicled, we’ve battled giant beetles, a massive wolf, multiple orcs and goblins, enormous crocodiles, dog-sized venomous spiders, and scary vampire bats that sucked our constitution points away…

And my character Rhi is just newly resurrected! For several traumatic moments as the creepy beetles nearly took us all down about a day into my second life, I thought it had all been for nothing.

Tackling the goblin mine

We were doggedly still trying to penetrate the mysterious mine the goblin caravan led us to a few sessions ago. Given our back door entry hadn’t worked (that’s when Rhi was killed), we reluctantly decided to approach the front door. (Rhi wanted to return to the Giant Staircase, but she was overruled.)

We survive the beetle attack, barely, and scope out the front of the mine. The approach is a narrow ravine so it’s impossible to creep up undetected. The goblins attack, we retreat and are pursued by a giant wolf — which we slay in admirable fashion and take a goblin prisoner, who confirms the mine has many many fighters.

We ask ourselves what the hell we’re doing! Clearly the DM is trying to lure us into a trap just so he can kill us all.

Ha! We’ll have none of that! So we retreat back to town, battling some orcs along the way. More brushes with death abound.

To the Giant Staircase!

The Giant Staircase it is, then. It might well spell our doom, but we have to go to repay the debt of my resurrection coin. And, dammit, I want to know what’s up there!

Cal comes up with the bright idea of taking a ladder to help us climb the massive staircase, and we spend a few days recuperating and provisioning. (Last time we almost starved to death!) Then we head off upriver, first west and then north when it forks, while the rain pours down.

The Giant Staircase is located up a valley on the western side of the river, so crossing the raging torrent from the eastern side becomes an issue. We attack and defeat a band of orcs on our way north, but when we reach the ford near the Staircase we cannot cross.

The DM tries to kill us again (and partially succeeds)

We camp by the river — when we’re attacked by mega-crocodiles, one of which kills our trusty NPC, Betha. Our Cleric is down too, so we have to hang around a couple of days to recuperate…

Rhi decides to scout around and find somewhere better to camp. I roll something like a 24 for my survival roll — which is just about as high as I could roll — and find a cave.

And this is where the DM proves he wants only to kill us, for despite my brilliant roll, he populates the cave with venomous spiders, and I’m only saved from getting poisoned by some great saving throws…

When we’re all up and about again (minus the poor, dead Betha, who got eaten by the crocodile), we decide to head further upriver to see whether there’s somewhere else to cross, and we’re rewarded by a fallen tree spanning the torrent. We only lose one pack as we safely negotiate this with only two of our number falling into the river (secured via a rope, fortunately).

Up, up, up…

And then we’re at the foot of the Giant Staircase. Up, up, up it goes, 5-6 foot stone steps leading up and around the side of the mountain. We estimate it could take us 10 days to climb it, based on our previous attempt… although this time we have plenty of food. And a ladder.

We begin to climb.

It goes without saying that we’re attacked by some random enemy, this time winged bat/giant mosquito creatures that fasten on like limpets and start sucking my constitution points away…

Whatever. (All this angst is becoming so passe!) We climb, camp, sleep… and then on Day 2 of the climb (the ladder working admirably) Saffir our rogue finds a giant door in the cliff face.

Mysterious doors — and a choice

A door. Which Rhi manages to open with a well-timed strike on the pressure plate with our hammer. Inside (for of course we enter) is a short tunnel with no obvious exits and entrances… until we find two more pressure plates on the far wall…

We broke the session here, and now we have to make a decision. Beyond is a vertical tunnel with what appears to be wind rushing up and down it. We speculate it’s something like a wind-elevator. We want to go up…

Does our death lurk beyond in the possible wind-elevator?

There’s a real good chance of it. What will we do?

What would you do?

Here’s the thing.

I died on Saturday night.

That is, my D&D character did. She stepped on a pressure pad when trekking down a dark tunnel, fell into a pit and was defeated by a giant centipede.

Excellent! Not.

We’d all been traipsing up a river, looking for a back way into the goblins’ secret mine (much to the disgust of our game master, who had expected us to approach via the front entrance), when we encountered a small band of goblins. They ambushed us actually, but we saw them off and then, after considerable perseverence, found a secret entrance to a tunnel.

So we’re creeping down this tunnel, and it turns out that rangers aren’t supposed to lead the way in tunnels — that’s the rogue’s job…

because the rogue can find the traps before the fool ranger steps on them…

So there am I in the pit, the roof closes over and I’m battling a giant centipede in the dark. I get a good hit in actually — huzzah! — but my euphoria is short-lived because next thing I’m unconscious and totally dependent on being rescued.

My companions do a valiant job. They have to figure out how to re-trigger the trap without falling in themselves and keep it open so they have enough time to rescue me… Unfortunately, it all takes a bit too long and I’m dead by the time they get down to me, and they end up nearly being picked off by the critter one by one, until Saffir our rogue shoots it dead with an arrow.

I’m sitting there with my head in my hands while all this is going on. Noooo! I don’t want to be dead!

And then the unthinkable happens.

They start talking about resurrecting my character.

I stare, unaware this is even an option. I’m not allowed to comment because I’m dead (our GM is very strict on these things), but I think they’re a little mad. After all, they have to drag me, all my stuff (and I’m carrying four additional swords to sell), all the way back to the town, which is about a 3-4 day journey.

Their reasoning, however, is that they can’t really go on without Rhi (that’s my character) because she’s the main fighting machine of our little party. I could of course roll up another character (which I do in fact start doing), but that character would be inexperienced and not nearly as useful.

So, in a show of touching loyalty, they drag me back to the town and see about getting Rhi resurrected. It costs a fortune, and Cal (our mage) pledges our service to an enigmatic cleric for part of the sum required. So now we’re more or less broke and badly in debt… but I get resurrected.

They make me roll the dice to see how effective my resurrection is.

Holy firetruck! You mean this could all be for nothing? I could roll a ’1′ (which I’m rather prone to doing) and stay dead? Yes… but that’s where the ‘benny’ (a single replacement roll I’ve been saving for an important moment) could come in handy.

Hyperventilating, I close my eyes and roll the D20. I can’t look at it. There’s silence. Oh god, what have I rolled? Still silence. I have to open my eyes and look at it. It’s a ’7′. My heart stops. Is it enough?

Turns out it was enough for me to be resurrected with the same constitution points, although I lost a heap of experience points, meaning I fall all the way back down to early level 2, instead of nearly level 3. Oh well. Better than being a whole new character on level 1.

So, an interesting evening. I spent much of it shaking — it’s weird how caught up in these things you can get. I would hate to be a gambler, pinning all hope on the roll of a dice. It’s really stressful! But Rhi lives to embark upon another campaign, and I will have to try harder not to get killed next time… although I’m not sure I could have done anything much differently.