Highlights of the D&D 5e Starter Set Misadventures!

A little over two years ago, Christmas-time 2016, I met up with Patrick Stuart and David McGrogan to have a meal, catch up and play something. Patrick suggested the D&D 5e starter set adventure. Dave and I had played a little 5e but weren't really familiar with the system. Over the course of a few hours things got weird...

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Patrick: "You're a couple of adventurers taking supplies to a village... Do you want more than one pregen each?"
Us: "We'll be fine!"
...five minutes pass...
Us: "Who else have you got?"

*

We kill some goblins. My goblin-hating elf desecrates the shallow graves that Dave's responsible dwarf digs. We head to town and promptly leave the wagon in the open with one guard, not knowing that a gang of brigands roams the town after dark.


Violence follows.

The mayor is concerned that adventurers have arrived in town and started murdering the locals. We suspect (wrongly) that he is in league with the brigands. My chaotic elf wizard fakes a weird holy symbol to try and force a (non-existent) confession out of him. We persuade a brigand to help us out, but then fake a curse on him to try and ensure compliance. We get caught out but kill him.

*

Moving on to an area we think is the real source of the problems we encounter a strange creature. We need to tell deep, dark secrets to get past it. We invent things, getting deeper into our characters. One of us is a thief, another killed their goblin-deity worshipping grandmother.

Things get dark.

*

We rush into a wizard's bedroom and seize the advantage. We hurt him and then put him to sleep. He's the head bad guy. We tie him up, gag him and break his fingers - "just in case" - then when he still raises the alarm we drag him along with us because he knows stuff.

Some impressive visual cantrips scare away enemies, but then we're cornered by three larger foes. We take out one, and then two of our party are slain. Our last PC runs into the night, escaping with no friends, no treasure and no XP. She lives to tell the tale, but barely.

*

All of this happened over the space of about fourteen in-game hours. A series of seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time choices, followed by instant regret, mayhem and disaster.

Maybe it was a mistake to desecrate the goblin graves.

Maybe it was wrong to push a prisoner down some stairs into a stone basement.

Maybe we should have thought through some of our plans more.

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Editor's Note, two years later: It was a really fun game. I found some of this in a G+ post I wanted to see archived, and it seemed like it might give some amusement to the general reader!

AP: Doom-Cave of the Crystal-Headed Children

Finally got a game in! noisms was visiting, Patrick was around and so was David W, so finally after many long months we sat down and played something.

The guys all knew that they were playing DCCHC, but hadn't read it. They rolled up new characters, two each (ending with a party of six, two fighters, two MUs, a cleric and a specialist) and then found themselves a little way out of the town of Rookwood (there was a steakhouse out of the window of the cafe we were playing in with the same name, and it sounded good). A series of women of all ages approached and *SPOILERS* (if you've not read or played DCCHC and don't want to spoil anything, then don't click through; I will try to refer to things as sensitively as possible to avoid spoiling, but cannot promise I won't miss something).

Click through!

Games Night: Otherpool, Session 1

Patrick has already done a great job of summarising what happened in last night's game. So really all I want to add are a couple of thoughts about playing Marvel FASERIP and then I thought it might be interesting to share my character's stats.

There are, I think, three things that jump out at me about the system. First of all, the random character generation really works. It might be spread out over a number of pages, and a lot of them are text heavy, but it is nicely directed. There is a good flow to it. I'd be interested to know what influenced some of the weightings with the random tables (particularly in the initial character class). Since this blog was initially set up with at least half an eye on the maths of tabletop RPGs, I'd also be curious to know just how many possible heroes one could roll up - or what the likelihood, say, of a person rolling the stats for Thor or Wolverine is.

Secondly, I found the dice rolling refreshing. Don't get me wrong: especially after this year of so much OSR and retroclone goodness I am a fan of d20s and having a gaggle of various Platonic solids in front of me each with their own place and time. But there was something neat about just using two d10s to get everything. And while the big table on the back of the book looks complex at first, in reality it isn't. It just works. Roll d100, compare the roll (row) with your ability level (column) and the colour in the box tells you how well you succeeded. Maybe look at another little table to tell you whether or not there is anything special. Done. Fast. Great.

Finally: I like the way little things about the system really support it being "comic book-y". Health is recovered, in general, very quickly. The class benefits and disadvantages are simple, but really strongly support the character types that you're trying to be (for example, mutants always increase one power by one rank, but they have to start with popularity of 0). Karma is a great way of steering things, and declaring the minimum spend required to use it works too - no abusing the system.

I've said a lot about the system there, and virtually nothing about the setting. We're planning to play on G+ next week, so assuming Patrick summarises the second session in a style similar to his first (please please please), I'll write something about the setting next week.

But after the jump... Sergeant Shoxx!

Somewhere South: The Plots Thicken

Previously: Patrick and David's characters hired some new staff for their bar, The Grotesque Cudgel, and spotted someone tailing them. Gorble of Corg, who is also blackmailing them, says he needs them for a job, and that he will be in touch. Orchard the magic-user kills a man in the street, but the party evade consequences by turning the dead body into gingerbread and distributing it to people... Later, they magically disguise Rowntree the Elf as a gingerbread man and sneak him into the house of a rich immortal. Destroying the painting that keeps the man eternally young, they then throw him out of a window with a fake suicide note in his hand, and "rescue" a former guest at their inn.

Somewhere South: Two Uses for Gingerbread Curse

Previously: the party (Patrick and David) killed Arvik Bleeve, the thorn in their side, and dumped his body in the river. Bleeve's relative attacked others in the party, but were then killed themselves. A retainer of the party ended up dead, and so they held a great wake in her honour. Towards the end of the street party an urchin approaches one of the party with a note from someone who saw the party dump Arvik Bleeve's body into the Weth...

Somewhere South: Living, Dying and Mourning in Wetham

The last few months have been quite patchy for gaming; fortunately I have only one week coming up when I won't be around to run/play something - until I become a father in September, and who knows how that will effect things then. But 'til then, let's see what sort of things have been happening recently in Wetham, shall we?

Patrick and David went to sleep after their trip to the warren of the Dread Rabbit, and woke to find themselves in a strange sugar-coated nightmare world - Lamentations of the Gingerbread Princess. Despite the machinations of evil stuffed toys and dastardly cherubs they were able to escape, bringing back some items with them that would probably prove useful...

Games Night: Of Mechs & Men

Last night I joined in my second session of Pendragon of Mars (noisms' homebrew mash-up of Pendragon and Mekton on Mars) on G+. We had a lot of fun, particularly when we got out into the Martian wilderness and were hunting down a fugitive knight

The story picked up a few months after the winter phase of the previous session, at the Easter Festival. Earl Roderick tasked the noble knights - Owain (me), Xyre (Zak) and Wiglaf (Patrick) to hunt down Sir Michael, a knight who had lost his honour when he slept with another man's wife. The other man is a rival lord from the south, and if Michael is not presented to him soon he may start a war with the Pendragons as he seeks justice. Not good.

Games Night: Veins of the Earth

So last night I rolled up a couple of characters to take through a dungeon based on Patrick's Veins of the Earth setting/sourcebook. This was kind of a playtest I guess - I don't know if I'm the first person to encounter some of these creatures and situations in the wild - but it was all new and different and weird to me.

AP: Pendragon of Mars

It's been a crazy topsy-turvy sort of week, but I couldn't let it end without talking about one of the highlights for me: my first chance to join noisms' game, Pendragon of Mars, which was also my first time playing anything over a G+ Hangout.

I'll talk about my character, Sir Owain the Red, and his mechs in another post, I just want to focus on what happened and what it was like playing with noisms, Patrick (Sir Wiglaf), David W (Sir Elias) and Zak (Sir Xyre).

The other guys had already had a couple of sessions to get used to things; I'd done most of the statting up beforehand, but there were a few things I didn't know about my character. As ever, as soon as the questions started flowing - What does he look like? What sort of family is he from? - the few details I had already brought together started mating like crazy.

A lot and a little happened in the session. So far, Pendragon of Mars is really unlike anything else I've played in the last two years: we spent ninety minutes playing through the events of a formal-ish ball, full of court intrigue, flirting with the Ladies of the court, being knighted, passing initiations and sometimes making asses of ourselves as we tried to impress women with knife skills or back tattoos (both techniques I tried, both of which failed). Finally we were formally knighted by the Earl (including being punched in the face and jumping over a sword to mount our steeds; that's how we roll on Mars).

And then the night of our knighting over noisms said "OK, so now it is winter and you are back at home. Here is what happens..." and each of us had some scenes back at our manors for the winter (passing judgement on commoner disputes, finding out what happened with our families, and just generally getting older).

Where things really got fun was seeing what the other players' characters were like, and how they interacted.We weren't trying to tag team fighting Martians or performing some mission. We were trying to help each other out at court. Brothers in arms!

The experience of playing over G+ Hangout was interesting. It was a lot of fun to be playing from home, and playing with people not just in different parts of the UK but different parts of the world. It also made me wonder about playing ViewScream, a game which I've read about and intrigues me...

Anyway! Lots of fun, and looking forward to this week's session. I have to stat up another mech! One final part of the character gen was rolling for an important family belonging. I got another charger, which in Pendragon of Mars means designing another 150 construction point mech under the Mekton Zeta rules...

Roll on Wednesday.

Somewhere South: The Warren of the Dread Rabbit!

Previously: Orve, Vaskin, Orchard (all Patrick) and Rowntree (David W) set out from the city of Wetham to investigate rumours of a Dread Rabbit, a big demonic creature that rises every thirteen years from slumber to wreak havoc. After a few encounters with a small Grogan, psychic rats and giant mucus worms, they retreat to the nearby town of Bilge...

Somewhere South: Wetham Days

GMing felt great last night - it had been far too long between games nights. Will have to think about that in the next few months, as there are still times when I'm going to be away. But anyway! On to the AP. I did a oneshot for Patrick a while back that started off in Tales of the Scarecrow and ended up in the city of Wetham. Last night continued the adventure...