Category Archives: D&D

This week continued the trend of super busy weeks, with a Sounders game on Monday evening and D&D on Thursday. While still a lot to handle, both were fun escapes from all the learning and deadlines at work. I was cracking up at the D&D session this week, and I was not alone. 

Mad Mage – Continuing Level 2

Nothics informed the group of a locked door to the west in the prior session, so they planned to address that door first. Well, it turned out that the door in that room was not locked, and it opened just fine into a hallway heading off in multiple directions. They already promised the revenant, tagging along with them to get some healthy revenge, that they would go after his former partner after addressing the door. So, they turned around and headed east instead. 

It ended up being a riskier situation than they previously thought, as they ran smack into a fight with a fiend who could cast cloudkill. That is enough damage from one spell to drop a couple of the party members in one turn. If they had known this upfront, they might have retreated and adjusted their strategy. Unfortunately for them, they found out about the cloudkill after two of their party had already charged forward, and the revenant ran in shouting accusations of betrayal at the human in the room. Backing out? Not an option anymore for some of them. 

Two people went down more than once. They threw a ton of party resources into that victory, but everyone survived. The combat took a long time (real-time), but it did not feel like it dragged because there was so much going on that the dynamics and sense of dread it conveyed kept you invested. I’m happy with my revised combat note page, as it helped me keep track of all the special monster abilities. It all adds to the atmosphere. 

We had time for one more room after the first big battle. They decided to take the remaining hallway to the east in that same section and heard muttering as they moved down a hallway. 

“Does this sound like the same kind of muttering we heard from the first gibbering mouther?” they ask. 

“Why, yes. Yes, it does.”

“I prepared silence,” the cleric noted during their planning. 

So they plan to go in, the cleric casting silence on the mouther when he sees the monster so that its muttering won’t drive them insane. The PCs will be deafened in the radius too, but that shouldn’t be a problem. Plan in place, they charge boldly forward…it turns out there are three mouthers this time. 

Okay. No problem. I allow the cleric to catch two of them in the zone of silence. They can deal with those first. This plan will still work. 

As they are charging in, the mouthers shoot off these phlegm-bombs of flash-spittle that can blind you. Now they are in the room, right next to a blob-like mass of mutely muttering mouths, and they can’t see or hear them. Even better, the ground sucks them in, so they can’t move away. 

I’m rolling really well with this flash-spittle reload and can shoot it off every round, while they are rolling poorly and are continuously blind at this point. The mouthers are not doing much else, honestly, but the fumbling around is pretty hilarious. 

To be fair, rules-as-written for blinded and deafened means that they can attack and move around with the knowledge of their player. A character simply has disadvantage to represent the impact. I think this is dumb and makes no sense with stacked status effects like this, but some of my players get rules-grumpy. It is my game, and I can overrule them, but I did not think it was worth it this time. Instead, I told them to play it how it made sense to them. 

(Two of my players did end up playing the situation more realistically how I would have. Guess who is getting inspiration in the next session!?!)

Once they dealt with the two in the zone of silence, there was one left, and now the muttering madness came into play again. Most people only lost their turn when hit by the insanity, but one of my newer players got hit by it where she would end up attacking a random person. 

“Go ahead and make an attack,” I tell her.

“I’m going to use feinting strike,” she replies.

Everyone else at the table groans while I laugh maniacally. 

“What?”

Ashe is now chuckling as well. “Nothing. Do what you are going to do. This will be entertaining.”

“Does an 18 hit?”

“I don’t know,” I say with another laugh and evil grin. “Ashe, does an 18 hit you?”

It did hit him, and she ended up doing more damage in one strike than all three mouthers had managed the entire combat. We were all in stitches by that point. 

It was a good night. 

Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you found some humor here as well. Until next week!