#stradh

I do some doodling every dnd session!

Hello readers! I’ve had a pretty good week, with a lot of D&D along with some time to enjoy Starcraft and Mob. I’m not going to tease you all a whole bunch. Let’s get into it.

Let’s talk about the homebrew campaign first, since that took place on Saturday. Our previous session took place in between adventures. In fact, our last combat encounter included one of the player characters losing a limb, through one of our DM’s house rules. Basically, if a character is killed (i.e. dropped to 0 hit points and fails three death saves) they can opt to lose a limb rather than be killed outright. And, surprisingly, that happened by chance to the one player who was wanting that to be a part of their character’s story from the beginning. But the ordeal left that character a bit scarred, and we ended up spending most of the session helping them back on their feet (err, foot). But then, this weekend, we got back to what is typically my favorite part of D&D: dungeon crawls! We’re in a tomb that has been occupied by some very angry lamias. The encounters have gone well so far. I’ve been able to keep my cleric in front to take most of the direct combat, and keep the allies away from the pointy sticks. We’re actually playing again tomorrow, and I’m hoping we can start to find some cool treasures and such.

Then, I’ll try to talk a little bit about our Castle Ravenloft game. I haven’t really talked about it before, so I’ll try to keep the background brief. There may be spoilers for the module to follow, but I’m not sure. Our DM has added some stuff that wasn’t originally in the module, and embellished other things depending on what our party decided to look in to. So, maybe spoilers. If you are currently playing, maybe skip the next paragraph.

Our group ended up aligned with the were-ravens who live in Barovia including both the family at Wizard of the Vines winery and Erwin, the innkeeper in Vallaki. We’d spent a fair amount of the campaign so far without a lot of interaction with Stradh himself, being mostly harried by one of his lieutenants, a vampire named Livius. Livius’s modus operandi was mostly to surprise us at night, and taunt us about what was going on, or summon us to Stradh’s presence. This last session he decided to stop playing softball with us. He and the Wotcher family in Vallaki kidnapped Erwin and his family, split them up in two different parts of town, and then killed the wife and kids. They also killed off the Baron, and had asserted control of the town. So, now one of our closest allies is distraught and there is a huge power vacuum in the town. Unfortunately, we left off on that cliffhanger. We’re going to have to clean this mess up in some way. I don’t know how, and I personally feel so torn about whether we should pursue Lady Wotcher (who escaped), clean out the rest of the Wotcher house (one of the players heard some people upstairs), chase down Livius to extract revenge, or take the fight directly to Stradh and hope that everything else will fall into place. We have one more session before convention season hits in full, so I hope we are at least able to push something forward.

Lastly, let’s talk about Mob in brief, cause I’ve already kept you here for a lot of D&D talk. I love the way Shigeo is developing, and I think he’s going to be a great hero by the end of the series. Even if he isn’t the one to take down the big bad, he’s learned so much about how to exist as a mature person! Agh, I love him so much and just wish for him to keep improving himself.