I played D&D again!

[dorchadas]

lisekatevans said that she and afschifler were going to participate in a game run by ansel.burch as part of TTRRG Pickup Con and said that I should join them, so I did! I went onto DND Beyond, whipped up a quick character--Shalsanressar Manishtusu, the silver dragonborn paladin--and joined up with Mango the halfling rogue, Jhor-Khal the elven monk, Reesa the half-orc paladin, and Prose the tiefling bard to save a village from the depredations of the local dragon.

The Dungeon of the Dragon
In the late winter, the group arrived at a sleepy village at the temple of the Horned Owl, its tutelary deity, to speak to the priestess Mother Enizio. She said that their village had been blessed with good weather and fair harvests by a local dragon in exchange for sacrifices of cows and sheep, but this year the dragon had requested a different sacrifice--a person. Mother Enizio believed that the dragon may be controlling the weather using an artifact of the Horned Owl, and asked the party to steal the artifact and, if necessary, to kill the dragon. After a rousing performance from the bard, accompanied by dragonborn throat-singing, the party boarded a cart who took them to the dragon's cave and left them there. Briefly examining the amphitheater that had been built outside the cave and finding nothing, they entered. The path split inside, with the right path having a strange blue glow and the left path leading into darkness, so Mango and Jhor-Khal scouted ahead. In a room further in, they came on a white-scaled kobold working over bubbling pots in a room filled with detritus, and after a brief battle, continued on to another room filled with kobolds! Though the battle (and the dice...) seemed at first to go against the party, eventually they killed or subdued all of the kobolds, and some questioning revealed the truth--the "dragon" was actually a puppet, and that plus some impressive acoustics had allowed a now-dead wizard to extort wealth from the town. The kobolds had taken over the caves after the wizard died, but were unable to maintain the puppet and had requested a "sacrifice" because they were hoping for help maintaining the scheme. The party, led Reesa, offered a counter-suggestion to come live in the village, where they could be accepted and wouldn't need to skulk in the caves. As they took some of the dragon's wealth and the wooden statue relic of the Horned Owl and made their way down the mountain, Shalsanressar turned to the kobold he had terrified into submission and said, "Tell me, have you heard the teachings of Bahamut?"

It was a bunch of fun! I haven't played D&D in over twenty years, since the days of 2e, and have mostly been out of caring about it since I spent the whole time playing World of Darkness and Call of Cthulhu and running Exalted and WFRP and Delta Green and Cthulhutech, so I'm glad that D&D Beyond exists and I could press the "make character" button and then tweak things afterwards. There were fewer weird rules and exceptions than 2e, and a much smaller focus on a humanocentric world with everyone else being a deviation from the norm (the example characters included two half-orcs, a changeling, and a goliath). I didn't have as much to do in the beginning, but mostly because I couldn't see in the dark! I appreciated how when Mother Enizio suggested we kill the dragon, the rest of the party looked at Shalsanressar to see his reaction...and I was going to be against it until I learned that it was a white dragon, since white and silver dragons are ancient enemies! That freed up my conscience to go a-dragon-killing, right up until we learned that everything was just tricksy kobolds.

There's another online con next month and I'm definitely going to go.

Comments

[corvi]

Hee, that sounds like a pretty fun adventure.