It’s getting late in the summer, which means soon the kids will be off to college. This year it’s not just Lizzy, but my two nieces Katie and Valerie. What this means for me is that we had to hurry up and finish our D&D campaign.
You’ll recall that last year while on on a cruise, I started a D&D campaign with Michelle and my four nieces and nephews to alleviate the boredom of days on end at sea trapped on a boat and inevitable insanity or worse that’s sure to follow. Well would you believe they all wanted to continue the campaign? And so it came to be, back by popular demand.
The module we played last summer was The Isle of Dread. This summer, in keeping with the theme of adapting 1980’s original AD&D to 5th edition rules, we played White Plume Mountain, in which the party explores a semi-dormant volcano seeking to recover stolen relics, and perhaps learn the whereabouts of the powerful and possibly undead wizard Kerpatis.
Some of the party kept their characters from the previous adventure and some developed new ones. In particular Katie is now playing a Dwarven Paladin, who is a good partner and foil for Carmine the Invincible, Lou’s straight-up Dwarven fighter. Meanwhile Michelle had a really interesting character in a cleric who worshiped Thor, with lots of thundering and hammering special powers, but she traded that in for a Halfling Rogue specializing in burglary in the classic Baggins mode. However Valerie was a new Cleric, and Abbie was an edgy Elfin Bard, chaotic neutral. Phillip kept on with his wizard, and leveled up enough to get spells like Fireball and Lightning Bolt, and so is coming into his own as a force to be reckoned with.
We did the first session back in July, combined with a barbecue. Then this last session was out on Long Island, and we had to get to the end by the end of the night, so it ended up being a pretty long night.
I moved the story along pretty fast; we jump cut straight from the seaside tavern where the party accepted the adventure straight to the smoldering foot of White Plume Mountain, hundreds of miles away. The dungeon is full of tricks and traps, lava and geysers, strange magic and unusual creatures, so there was much more than your typical hack’n’slash and the party needed to keep their wits. They rose to the occasion admirably and wreaked major havoc while keeping their hides alive. Michelle in particular figured out how to effectively burgle in the middle of combat and more than once the party escaped with the treasure and their lives rather than fight it out to the bitter end. Still the monsters were pretty tough and more than once a party member fell and required extreme instant healing. As a DM I must say there’s an inherent disadvantage when you’re the final boss such as a giant decapod (look it up) or vampire: even if you have alot of hit dice you only get a few attacks per round, while there’s six of them all trying to kill you at once.
The quest of this module was to recover three powerful magic weapons. The first one was a strangely cursed sword, which Abbie kept. The second and third were a mace and axe, great for a cleric and a dwarf respectively. There was also a fake ring of wishes, which piqued the party’s avarice. Richly and predictably, the party fell to arguing whether they should return said relics to the patrons who hired them on the quest, or keep them for themselves and return to the city by some circuitous route. Katie pointed out that she and Lou are lawful good, so there’s potentially a test of alignment in the offing. I have a few ideas as to what may happen next. Hopefully we’ll pick this up over Thanksgiving.