Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Catching up with Althea and Company

I don't know if you caught my small blog post fest last year about Dungeons and Dragons, but I tried to start up a new blog about it, and it kinda died: Althea and Company.

Writing out our adventures to that level of detail and trying to remember everything that happened (and finding the time and passion to do it), was a bit ambitious.  Anyway, we continue to run through our adventures, and I actually started hosting my own game with the same "Althea and Company" crew -- only this time Jeff Toney is the player, and I'm the DM . . . AND . . . Uber wife is also playing with us. yay!

Instead of working through an official Wizards of the Coast production like the Lost Mine of Phandelver, I'm using a lot of one-shot dungeons strung together with narrative. The first two we've run were Giantslayer and King of the Cats by MT Black. Both were excellent, and I think everyone had a great time . . . they slayed the giant and they rescued the King of the Cats. yay!

So next I have my group set to do one of two things. Either they will take on another MT Black one-shot, Wizard in a Bottle, or they will head down an adventure of my very own make. I'm interested in seeing which they take on and how they do. I definitely don't want to kill my friends and family in a dungeon, and I know I typically build things too difficult, but this is a party of five I'm dealing with here, and they actually have the potential to really dish out the damage . . . or really have a bad day with bad dice rolls . . . or, as we found out last week, get completely distracted and not hear that the bad guy just cast the shield spell and start using magic missile.

The Giant adventure was fun, but the only thing that gave them any real challenge were giant crabs. Oh man they struggled on that one.

The King of Cats final battle was pretty fun, and I think I scared 'em a bit when they discovered their weapons were pretty ineffective vs. a wererat, which you need silver weapons or spells to fight.  They were never really intended to fight the wererat anyway. I may have to bring her back at sometime to torment the party, so they can finish her off (especially if they spend the 100 gold it takes to silver their weapons).

Anyway, instead of scribbled notes for my dungeon, I've been typing it out like it's a one-shot, and if all goes well with the group, and they survive the adventure and have fun with it, I may actually try to publish it on a site like Dungeon Masters Guild and see what happens!

I'm not going to type much about my adventure I have planned for them just yet in case one of 'em stumbles upon this blog post, but . . . it's got a couple nasty surprises waiting for them.

Happy Dueling!

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