I decided I really want to write about the current Dungeons and Dragons campaign I'm involved in. It's an old idea of J's, which has been attempted a few times over the last 10 years or so, but due to schedules and some people being rather unreliable and other things (like life) happening, the story has never been finished. We're attempting it again, and so far it's been a lot of fun and rather exciting, even if S's character, Alu'un, did have her finger (temporarily) removed during the first session.
Basically, and this is only what I remember J telling us before and during the first couple of sessions back in January or February, this is a world that J designed (there's even a world map he made himself that's slowly disintegrating that we really need to get laminated before it completely turns to dust) where there is no arcane magic. There are no wizards, sorcerers, magic weapons or items, or anything. Something happened (I don't remember what) that broke the magical plane away from the regular plane of existence about 1,000 years before the story begins, and no one was able to access it, and magic slowly became something that was thought to be a myth. Eventually, the plane repaired itself or something, because the god of magic, Boccob, has decided that the time has come to bring magic back to the world, because it does in fact exist. Prior to our meeting him, our characters (Alu'un (S), Emerald (A), and Lilyana (me)) were treasure hunters working for a rogue named Haldern (W), doing things that you do when you work for a rogue. Alu'un started the story as a scholar that did lots of research and knew places we could go to get treasure.
Anyway, we went to this temple in the middle of nowhere because Alu'un talked us into it, went through this really rigorous test involving duergar dwarves and drow elves, get teleported out of the temple, and discovered that Alu'un has been transformed from a scholar into a wizard with real magical powers. (And she got her finger back.) Then she used Magic Missile on Haldern like four times until he gave up and believed her. (That part was especially hilarious.)
After that, we had a lead on a magical item that we needed, but it was in this museum of ego owned by a lord. (We call him Lord What's-His-Butt because no one can remember his name.) Anyway, we pretended to be nobility and went on a personal tour of the museum (there were old weapons, statues, other magic items, and the scroll that we actually needed), cased the joint, then sat down to plot how we were going to get his stuff. At first, we were thinking of a heist, but we ended up visiting him again, and Alu'un demonstrated magic for him by conjuring a flower, handing it to him, and then watching him be amazed as it crumbled to dust. She had to do this about five times. Then we showed him the torches we picked up in Boccob's temple, which never go out and don't have heat, and he ended up paying us 400 gold for those and telling us we could have whatever we wanted out of his little trophy room in addition to the scroll we wanted. It was pretty funny, actually. Because we have a bag of holding, we took everything but the statues, so all he's got in his trophy room now are the torches and like three statues. Hilarious.
The last three or four sessions we went through involved killing off Emerald because A moved to New Mexico for awhile, and then going through a wonderful dungeon in which we could really have used a cleric (Emerald is a cleric), because my character kept almost dying every few battles. There was an especially grotesque one with a flesh golem that kept throwing me at the walls, at least until its arms fell off. And a deurgar dwarf nearly killed me just by chance. Fun stuff. Anyway, we survived the dungeon, fought an optional boss that was a surprise succubus (whee!), and Emerald tumbled out of a portal that was ripped open when we killed the succubus (she'd been trapped for several hundred (or thousand?) years or something, didn't even remember that she was a succubus at first because of the enchantments put upon her by the wizard that owned the dungeon originally, and all that energy was released when we killed her), because A moved back and it was a better solution than forcing her to reroll a new character and having to spend an entire session setting up how we meet her.
My character is a fighter, or a beatstick, as W likes to put it, and I love her. I like killing things. Because I have the two-weapon fighting feat, I use a longsword in my dominant hand and a shortsword as my off-hand weapon, and I cause lots of lovely death. In my head, my character fights like River Tam, twirling and jumping and destroying. I told W this and he looked at me like I was stupid.
Anyway, I got bored a few weeks ago and decided to start designing dungeon floor plans, because I love drawing floor plans. (I know this because I sometimes plan out in advance how I want to build a house when I play the Sims.) Turns out that I'm really good at that, I've made a buttload of them for J, and every subsequent one is, "This is your best yet," and as I've been drawing them, I've been making them more and more convoluted and complicated, so we're pretty much guaranteed to die if J is using two of them combined. Except we won't die, we just get bounced right back to life by Boccob because he wants us to complete our mission before we die.
Anyway, I'm all jazzed up about D&D and can't wait for Saturday to play some. And hopefully we'll get to play S's epic level game on Friday, so that I can get some practice in and not forget how to do everything again, like I keep doing. I don't know what's wrong with my brain, it's made of Swiss cheese, I swear.
I kind of want to DM a game sometime, but I'm really nervous about it because I'm not sure I'd be very good at making the game interesting.
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