dungeons & dragons – dangermouse.net

D&D: Back to Thistlebrook, meeting Reynard Thorn

Friday I did my regular grocery pickup, then five critical thinking classes, and cleaned the house in preparation for hosting Dungeons & Dragons at my place. We had six players, plus me as the DM, which is a full house. Usually one or two can’t make it, but we play anyway and their characters just sit out. But it’s good with everyone.

They’d finished the dungeon exploration where they found the wizard flowers (see recap of the last session). Now they still had to get back to the town of Thistlebrook, but it was late, so they had to stop to make camp partway there. They chose a hidden location on a hill with a good view. The next morning they continued, but Fingers the thief scouting ahead came back to warn them of an approaching party of snake people. They hid and watched, and as the snake people passed, the minotaur Korm (who they’d tricked back in the dungeon) raced up to meet them. There was an animated discussion, and then one snake person in a cloak with a serpent lower half raised a finger and zapped Korm with a spell, blasting him away completely. The snake wizard lowered his hood and the party saw that it was Xiximanter!!! The undead snake wizard they’d met back in the Tomb of the Serpent Kings, way back in session 3 of this campaign, two years ago!

They knew better than to take on this guy, and let him pass by, heading towards the wizard flower dungeon. Korm said he’d been working for the snake people, so presumably Xiximanter was upset at what the party had done.

They headed back to Thistlebrook, where they had a few things to do. Settle up with the sage Thaddeus Vindle, who had hired them to retrieve wizard flowers. They decided to sell him three of the four they recovered and keep one for themselves. Then there was the matter of dealing with the curse of Spathio, the God of Swords. The High Priestess of Orendial, God of Peace had promised to remove the curse if they destroyed Orlugg Broadstaff, the giant-mage in the wizard flower dungeon. They had done so, so the Priestess removed the curse for them. But now the party are worried that maybe Spathio will be upset that they got out of completing his curse…

They did a couple of weeks of training to go up levels. Then Vindle contacted them for a dinner meeting, and told them what he’d discovered about the wizard flowers. And that he’d found information about another old wizard research location, in an ancient abandoned abbey a couple of days ride south of the town. Here they were doing research into extra-planar travel. He suggested they could mount another expedition.

But as dinner ended, a rowdy mob formed in the streets, booing members of the town guard who were dragging six captives through the streets. It was Reynard Thorn (a Robin Hood figure beloved by the poor of the town but wanted by the Reeve) and members of his “bandit” gang. Thaddeus suggested they were unlikely to execute them tonight, but rather wait for daybreak tomorrow to make it a public spectacle.

The party quickly decided they should try to rescue Thorn and his followers, tonight. They ran ahead to the town Watch House via back streets and arrived before the guardsmen with the prisoners. They observed them being led inside the only gate.

Fingers the thief drank a potion of invisibility that they’d found in the wizard flower dungeon, and then sneaked in to scout the watch house. He returned and said the gate led to a courtyard and the cells were underground, down a set of stairs open to the courtyard. As they discussed tactics, a mob of townsfolk arrived with flaming torches and most of the guardsmen ran out to defend the gate from them. This gave the party the opportunity to sneak around the back of the watch house, where Fingers (still invisible), climbed a wall and lowered a rope for the others to follow.

They left Mezza the wizard to guard outside, and Nogge the fighter on the battlement wall as a lookout, with Notgandalf’s magic eye so he could see if there was any trouble as he accompanied the remainder of the party into the cells. They passed a guard room and found the cells, but had to smash the locks open which made noise and alerted the guards. They made a stand at the door and managed to grab three guards and toss them into a cell. The fourth guard put up more resistance, and Reynard Thorn stabbed him with a dagger that the rescuers had given him.

They left the groaning guard all ran outside and manage to get back up the wall and over to the outside without being spotted. Reynard thanked them and suggested the city wouldn’t be safe for them this night after the guard reported the breakout and the other identified them, and they should accompany him to his forest hideout. They decided to do so, but left Mezza and Nogge to go back to their inn and collect their stuff, since they were outside and no guards saw them.

And there we left the game for the night, to be picked up next time!

Today was fairly lazy, except for going for a 7.5k run. I took advantage of the fact that it’s finally stopped raining, for the first time in six days. It was actually a very nice day, warmer and much drier than the past week. I also went for a walk with my wife and Scully and did some sketching. Not much else.

Scully in recovery mode

Scully is still getting over her tooth surgery yesterday. She was a bit out of all evening last night and today. She’s on some painkillers and is probably feeling it a bit in her jaw. But she ate a reasonable amount of food today, so hopefully she’s on the road to recovery.

The weather continued to be awful today, more heavy rain and very cold. We ended up with over 80 mm of rain yesterday, and the forecast was up to another 80 mm today, but so far it hasn’t been quite so bad. Its tended to be heavier overnight though, so it could possibly still get up there. The prediction is for the rain to begin easing off tomorrow, and some sunshine on the weekend, but it looks like more rain from the middle of next week again.

Besides stay inside today and try to keep warm and look after Scully, I worked a bit on prep for tomorrow’s D&D game. A bunch of PCs have reached the experience required to level up, but that’s been delayed by the urgency of dealing with the curse of the God of Swords, which required them to kill 9 people in 9 dies with 9 different sword, or die. So they didn’t have time to spend the few weeks of training required to level up. But they’ve now dealt with the curse (more or less) and so will have the chance to level up before the next adventure. So I’m updating and printing out new character sheets for them. I also did a bit of adventure planning, making notes on what loose threads there are for them to investigate and planning some new locations to visit.

Hopefully it will be a great session tomorrow night!

Collecting wizard flowers and booking European trains

Friday was very busy. I had a bunch of ethics classes on my “Let’s Design a Government” topic. In between I cleaned the house in preparation for hosting friends for Dungeons & Dragons in the evening. And did some last minute prep work for the game.

Once players arrived and we got underway, there was a discussion and the party figured that ticking off Spathio, the God of Swords, by getting his curse lifted by the god Orendial might be “better” than fulfilling the condition of having to kill 9 people in 9 days with 9 different swords. Basically thinking that pleasing the God of Peace might be better in the longer term than pleasing the God of Swords.

The party explored some other rooms in the dungeon that they were about half-way through exploring. Some rooms downstairs were shin-deep in rainwater. Then down more stairs was an old bedroom, fully underwater. They used a metal bathtub upside down as a diving bell to explore. There were some shenanigans where Nogge the fighter wanted to be in the diving bell with a lit torch so he could see underwater. Instead they ended up using the elf Timbriel’s mirror set on the steps under water to reflect some torchlight into the bedroom.

Here they found an iron ring, which magic-user Mezza put on, and her face melted off! And her flesh! But she was fine, it turned out to be an illusion, which went away when the ring came off again. And they found some crossbow bolts which seemed miraculously not to have rotted like every other wooden object in the water. They assumed they must be magical and gave them to Fingers the Thief (an NPC retainer, the only one with a crossbow). They also found some loot in the flooded bedroom: silver plates and a gold candelabra.

In another workshop room adjacent to the first (where they ended the previous session) was a minotaur-like creature working on making brass collar things with vertical posts, which turned out to be for attaching skulls to mechanical bodies made of wood, metal, and leather strips. The party fought a group of such constructs, and inside the skulls they found small wizard flowers – smaller versions of the coral-like crystal structures they’d seen in glass orbs earlier. And in the workshop was a giant-sized brass collar and post. And the minotaur, named Korm, said he was (the giant mage) Orlug Broadstaff’s servant, working to resurrect him. This was the giant whose skull they assuemd they’d found last session, and smashed into pieces, finding a giant wizard flower inside.

Nogge pretended to be another servant hired by the snake people, and lured Korm up to the catwalk while everyone else looted the workshop. They found a potion and a wand there. And then Nogge tried and failed to push Korm off the catwalk, and they had a fight, and Nogge ended up running for his life. He rejoined the others and then they had to figure out how to get out, with the wizard flower orbs, without running into Korm again. The session ended with the party fleeing the dungeon with the four wizard flower orbs, trying to avoid running into Korm again on the way out, since people were low on hit points and spells. They managed to get out without seeing Korm, and fled into the gloomy sunset under heavy rain.

Today I did a 5k run in the morning, despite the cold and some showers. I went to buy some new shoes to wear on our trip to Europe, since my current daily shoes are getting holes in them. I’ve had very bad luck with shoes falling to pieces while overseas, at least three pairs over the years. So I wanted some new ones to avoid it happening again!

This afternoon I booked a bunch of train trips around Europe: Berlin to Prague, to Vienna, to Budapest, back to Vienna, to Salzburg, and to Munich. I had an account with Die Bahn before, but it seems that in 2021 they updated things and old accounts vanished, so I had to register for a new one. I booked the German ends of the trip, and then started doing Austrian ones, which I discovered I could also book starting from Die Bahn, who processed payment and forwarded tickets from the Austrian train company ÖBB. I checked the prices on ÖBB’a own website and they were identical, so I figured I’d just book them all via Die Bahn. But then I tried to do another train and found that Die Bahn couldn’t process the best price ticket, while ÖBB’s site could. So I did the rest there.

Anyway, that’s another big chunk of trip organising completed. We leave in one week, next Saturday!

D&D prep minimisation; planning to sketch

Tomorrow I am running the next session of my current Dungeons & Dragons game, so I used some time today in between teaching online ethics classes to do some prep work. I’ve recently read a friend’s copy of Sly Flourish’s Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, which I found really awesome. It gives advice on how to prepare for a D&D session in a very fast but effective way, concentrating on things that will have high impact at the table and not end up being wasted effort. I liked the book and its advice so much that I went and bought my own copy.

As it turns out, I didn’t need to do a lot of prep anyway, as the party are currently partway through a dungeon, and I have the remainder of the adventure to get through, which will probably take up most or all of the session. But I also did a bit of work on codifying my own variant of Dungeon Crawl Classics‘ Mighty Deeds of Arms that I mentioned two days ago. And I glanced at another adventure which I’ll be ready to run in case the party gets through the current one in quick time (or potentially chooses to flee in fear and seek out something easier to do…).

The weather continues cold and dry. Scully was very insistent about lying in my lap for most of the day to keep warm. Normally she’s content to do her own thing, but not today.

I also talked with my wife about getting a sketchbook to take on our trip to Europe. She’s taking a watercolour book and some watercolour pencils and paints to do sketches and paintings, as she’s come to love her new hobby. I thought I may as well take a sketchbook and do some drawings of scenes in Europe while she’s painting – we can spend some time sitting al fresco at cafes or whatever and draw our surroundings. I said I could go to the art supply shop and buy one for myself, but she had some suitable A5 size books and gave me one. It’s 150 gsm cartridge paper, not watercolour paper, so is not ideal for her work – she uses 200 gsm watercolour paper now and has bought a book of that for her travel workbook.

I haven’t done much sketching in the past, but I think I’d be at least semi-okay at it. I guess we’ll see! Better to try things rather than die wondering. I’ll share some of sketches, maybe during the trip, or maybe when I get back home.

Designing a government

Tuesday means working on a new lesson plan for my ethics classes. This week I’m going to be teaching kids how to design a government!

The premise at the start of the class will be: Imagine we’re setting up a new country. We have land and a few million people, but we don’t have a government yet. It’s our job to decide what the government will be like.

We’ll go through various stages of selecting what sort of leader we want, how we’ll decide who the leader is, what powers should they have. And then think about how to make laws. Figure out what jobs the government should or should not do – should it provide health care, for example, or education, or food and water, Internet, should it regulate business, support the arts, etc. And then we’ll think about how we can ensure that the people in the government don’t become corrupt or authoritarian. This should be plenty for kids to chew on and debate about in class!

I took Scully for a walk at lunch, and again with my wife after she got home from work. It was very cold again today.

And I’m starting to plan for Friday night’s upcoming Dungeons & Dragons session. I’m adding a new rule, co-opted from Dungeon Crawl Classics (with some modifications), which is highly regarded by many gaming groups: Mighty Deeds of Arms.

When fighters or dwarves attack, they may declare a Mighty Deed of Arms, an additional effect of their attack. e.g. disarming opponent, pushing opponent back, tripping opponent over, grappling, headbutting, blinding attack (picking up and throwing sand, or aiming weapon at eyes), etc., or whatever cool manoeuvre you can think of, like swinging on a chandelier and kicking opponent in the face. You have a Deed Die (d4 at 1st level, increasing in size with levels). Roll your Deed Die with your attack die. If your attack hits and the Deed Die is 4 or more, your mighty deed succeeds! Score normal damage, plus a bonus effect depending on your declaration and the Deed Die result (better results for scores above 4).

The idea is to give fighter types something cool and interesting to do that scales up with level. (We’re playing 1981 Basic/Expert rules, not 5th edition, so we don’t have all the ridiculous bells and whistles of that edition.) Hopefully it’ll be fun!

Online Pathfinder and a busy Saturday

It’s been a busy two days. On Friday I had my ethics classes, and also had to squeeze in a meeting for photography standards with Standards Australia. I gave my report on the ISO meeting I attended back in February in Tokyo. We have another new project manager… we seem to go through those at a rate of two or three a year lately.

In the evening we played the second session of the online Pathfinder game that one of my friends is running. Picking up from the first session, we continued exploring the old Nana’s cottage, and ran into a ratfolk alchemist (a new player) exploring the cellar for ingredients. We also found a hand drawn map, but not much else, and left to explore the dark forest a bit more. We found a large plant with a translucent pod that seemed to be holding a human-shaped creature inside. After coming up with a plan we attacked it and cut open the pod to release the young boyfriend of the woman who had urged us to find him, much to her relief.

Back at the village, we explored a mysterious greenhouse where an old elf seemed to be semi-comatose in a strange way, but didn’t get to the bottom of that. Then we decided to follow Nana’s map, which indicated a place in the forest to the north that was labelled with the name of a god of undead. And there we found an underground complex which we began exploring. All this took up the session and we plan to pick up there next time.

Today I picked up the groceries in the morning, then I had an ethics class, held over from yesterday because it clashed with the standards meeting. And then I went for a 5k run, showered and changed, and worked on new Darths & Droids comics in the afternoon. My wife and I took Scully on a long walk, taking a ball thrower so Scully could do some ball chasing.

The roadworks outside our place continue. They’re remodelling and realigning a considerable section of the footpaths and guttering, and I think they rerouted a stormwater drain. So they’re doing a lot of stuff, other than just installing a pedestrian crossing. Access to our driveway is difficult, and when I went to get the groceries I had to dodge construction machinery that they had to move out of the way so that I could squeeze past.

One annoying thing is they removed the old footpath and relaid a new concrete footpath leading up the side of our place, where we walk a lot. And when it rained yesterday there was a large puddle, about 2 centimetres deep, in a place where there never used to be puddles before. So they screwed up the drainage. I also saw them hacking away at part of our property’s garden, destroying plants in beds along the footpath, as they were removing the old path.

I guess they needed to do some Pathfinding…

No water supply; D&D artwork

I’m sitting here wondering when our water supply will come back on.

Roadworks began out the front of our place yesterday—to replace the dangerously ineffectual speed bumps and pedestrian island, which I’ve commented on twice before. They carefully spray painted markings all over the road and footpaths to indicate buried phone lines, water pipes, drains, gas pipes, and so on. And then today they dug things up and promptly broke a water main.

I’ve had no water since at least midday, possibly earlier because that was when I tried using a tap and nothing came out. And it’s now just gone 8pm, so it’s been out at least eight hours. And with no notice before the outage, our supply of water is limited to what was in the kettle, and in the cold water jug in the fridge.

When I came back from walking Scully at lunch time I wanted to wash my hands, and squeezed some liquid soap onto my hands before realising there was no water to wash it off with. So I had to use paper towels to wipe the soap off. And I’ve wanted to wash my hands several times since, but have had to make do with some COVID-era hand sanitiser.

Ah…. as I write this the water just came back on! I could tell because the toilet cistern started filling up. Phew, that’s good. My wife did indicate when she came home from work that there were workers from Sydney Water outside trying to fix things.

In other news, one of my friends playing in my Dungeons & Dragons campaign drew this:

This is the entrance to the latest dungeon adventure. We play theatre of the mind – no pre-drawn maps or props. So my friend did the whole thing based on just my verbal description of the landscape during the game. I thought it was so cool I had to share.

More D&D and more election results

Today I continued writing up a log of the action from Friday night’s Dungeons & Dragons game. I finished it off, which is a nice achievement so soon after the game. Usually in the past I’ve neglected writing up the adventure until just before the next session, by which time I’ve forgotten a lot of the details and have to reconstruct events by questioning my players and trying to weave a coherent narrative out of their disparate recollections.

And this morning we had a much better picture of yesterday’s election results. The incumbent Labor Party have been returned with a greatly increased majority, in what several news outlets have called a “landslide” result. The conservative opposition has been decimated, losing several seats in the major cities, resulting in them having virtually no presence anywhere except rural seats. It was an unexpectedly strong repudiation of conservative Australian politics by the voters, and a welcome result for those fearing any potential Trump-like policies in this country.

This morning I did another 5k run, taking it a bit easier than yesterday. The weather has improved this weekend, with the week-long run of heavy showers finally giving way to sunny skies, but cool autumn temperatures.

My wife and I took advantage this afternoon by driving over tho Balmoral Beach to walk Scully along the beach front in the pleasant weather. In the way back we stopped off at a good-looking deli that my wife found online and checked out their products. It had a lot of European things. I ended up buying a chunk of Austrian cheese and a slice of apple strudel for dessert tonight.

The weather has definitely taken a turn away from summer and towards winter in the past couple of weeks. Leaves on some of the trees are changing colour and it definitely feels like autumn now. Although the previously forecast 26°C for mid-week has been increased to 27°C now!

D&D and Election Day!

Friday I had my usual ethics classes, and prepared for a night of Dungeons & Dragons with my friends. I had five of them over to my place and we played from 6pm to about 10:30.

In the last session they’d started to deal with the curse placed on them by the God of Swords: kill 9 people in 9 days with 9 different swords, or die! Now they had a lead from an old sage who wanted them to recover some magical artefacts from an ancient vault hidden in the hills a half day’s ride from the town they were in. He said there were rumours that the place was now overrun with snake people – suitable targets for despatching with swords if they got the chance.

They reached the hidden vault and found their way in via a ruined lookout tower, and discovered a large chamber almost filled with what looked like a black rectangular block of absolute darkness. They figured out it was solid and highly magical… and there was a giant horned skull resting on top of it. Needless to say there were plenty of shenanigans and some fighting against snake people and some cool magical things, and we all had a great time!

This morning I got up and collected the groceries from the supermarket. Normally I do this on Friday but for the third week in a row something was happening so I had to postpone to Saturday. I went for a 5k run, and I pushed myself and recorded a time of 27:02, which I’m very pleased with. I ran past a polling place, because…

Today is the federal election. We’d already voted back on Wednesday, so didn’t have to head out to a polling place today, which was nice. I read a story that for this election 47% of the electorate had already voted prior to today’s official election day. This is a record number of pre-poll votes. It’s good that we make it so easy for people to vote.

It’s now 2 and a bit hours after the close of polls in eastern Australia and in early counting it looks like our left-leaning Labor government is going to win with an increased majority. There’s a big swing away from the conservative Liberal Party, and it seems certain that their leader Peter Dutton will lose his own seat in Parliament. This is a big change from before Trump was sworn in as US President in January, when the conservatives were leading all the polls. Our swing back away from the conservatives hasn’t been as stark as in Canada at their election last week, but Trump definitely had an effect, causing Australians to react by also rejecting our own conservative party.

We shall see the full results in the coming days.

Board game learning night

Today was Good Friday, but unlike most people I didn’t have a day off work. I had two ethics classes in the morning, and two in the afternoon. But in between I got to do a long walk with my wife (who had the day off work) and Scully.

After the last class I went over to a friend’s place for our fortnightly board games night. But since most of our friends were off enjoying the long weekend with their families, there were only two of us present. We used the opportunity to teach each other some complex games that we’d been stalled on learning. I taught him Root, and he taught me Spirit Island.

I also spent some in between time writing up the log of our last Dungeons & Dragons session, in preparation for the next one, scheduled in two weeks time. I divvied up the treasure and awarded experience, and most of the characters will be going up levels… or at least they will be when they get time train! At the moment they’re too busy dealing with a death curse placed on them by the God of Swords to take time out to train, so they’re going to have to defer levelling up until they (or if they) manage to avoid dying from the curse.