D&D, oh how I miss thee!

[walkertexasdruid]

I did play a Fey'ri sorcerer named Ahlren, who was a guy that was actually a girl that thought she was a guy. His/her shape-change ability was used so often that he/she was not sure what he/she was. I will not go into all of Ahlren's exploits, but lets just say was very close at times with most of the PCs and NPCs. He/she did eventually befriend a cleric of a long-forgotten diety so that he/she could gain power over the world. Ahlren was probably the closest to a villain that I ever played.

[tacticslion]

So, I've not been around for a while, mostly because I've been really busy (and I'm still likely to be more lurking than anything else), buuuuuuuuuuuuut...

I'm currently running a solo game for my wife. This is for several reasons:

1) I'm now the proud owner of an extremely rambunctious, running (literally) 15-month-old. He's terrific... and everywhere.

2) There are approximately zero people in Ocala we know - asides from ourselves - who are interested in playing or have time to do so.

3) My wife currently had too much on her plate to run our other solo campaign in which I was the player, considering how much work it's been to get her classes sorted out and her drama shows prepped (she's a teacher).

4) I suck, badly, at any sort of long-term online gaming. Like, very badly. Short term, I'm pretty good with, but long term: nope.

Anyway, I'm still busy plotting and planning and prepping for possible future games, but here's some memories I've got of ye old games:

* In one game I was running, there was a sorcerer who was... not a team player, let's say. Named himself "Cheezecake the Venerable" (later shortened to just "Cheeze") and had a Yak as a familiar that he later Awakened and permanently polymorphed into a human obsessed with the fact that she was actually a cow (this would prove excessively useful to the group later, for... rediculous reasons).
- The actual player himself was accidentally invited into our group, because everyone thought he knew someone else, and only after he left were we all like, "Hey, who's that guy?" and everyone went, "Wait, you don't know, I thought he was your friend!")
- That fun memory aside, his character was certainly Chaotic (note the capital "C"). For example: he died and was reincarnated so often (and was proving so draining on the party funds, yet still turning out shockingly useful and people were having fun), that finally I just decided that he eternally reincarnated every time he died. Further oddness arrived when he kept reincarnating into the same creatures over and over again, to the point where I just ruled he had a specific cycle (in order): Duergar, Troglodyte, Halfling, and Half-Orc (repeat). The first time he'd reincarnated as a Troglodyte, his stench inhibited his own companions, until the other mage managed to petrify him, later in that session throwing the statue into a room with reversed gravity and unpetrifying him in the middle of a bunch of drow (which worked like a charm).
- He kept attempting to hit all the characters except my wife's character with fireball, but, as she was the only one who didn't have spell resistance, and she didn't have evasion, she was the only one that ever got hit (he was apparently terrible at rolling to overcome spell resistance against his own party). He would then "make up" for it with use of prestidigitation to creature fake flowers and chocolate (that instantly vanished if you actually tried to eat it or do anything with it).
- Or that one time he thought he could "help" the poor, slaughtered clerics of Lathander (god of sunlight and healing)... he had a spell that could "fix that"... called animate dead.
With all of this, he was valuable (and fun) enough that we enjoyed having him in the game. Good memories.

* Same game, the other mage, a wizard named Cervan. Fervent Worshiper of Mystra, had a Shadow Weave version of Spellfire for some reason, and eventually became a Shade (he wanted Mystra to have the Shadow Weave instead of Shar). Ah, the Shenanigans. He started off true neutral.
- That one time he opened up a sex-change shop with use of Polymorph Any Object.
- That one time he got laws forced through in a particular city that required a festival in Mystra's honor, and attempted (though not terribly successfully) to get an orgy going.
- That one time he decided to make an underwater base, and - after making the necessary preparations on himself - teleported to the bottom of the ocean, and opened up a gate on the floor of it... without first remembering to create an actual base. He then immediately teleported away with little more than a "Whoops!", forgetting - again - to close the portal (dumping out huge amounts of the Inner Sea into the elemental plane of air).
- That one time he got Geased/Atoned by the ruler of Halruaa (a country) and spent ten years in a swamp negating the Shadow Weave. He became lawful good. Then he traveled back in time to before he did anything in Halruaa, but left well enough alone, afraid of what might happen if he interfered with himself.
- That one time he successfully level drained a female cleric of Shar to death and burned the body with fire, and then had her reincarnated (as a wood elf), and had her magically and mentally tortured and mind-altered by some Thayans until she became a fervent worshiper of Mystra ("Mystra is the Better One"). She eventually became his cohort (he had the leadership feat). He later had a child with her. And then simply forgot about all the people he was leading, teleporting away one day never to return.
- That one time he attempted to take over the castle of the Kesson Rel after it had been dropped into the material plane (and Kesson had been apparently "killed" by Erevis Cale and Drasek Riven - they left shortly thereafter). This was, of course, shortly after he'd become straight-up chaotic evil and decided to worship Cyric. He was shortly thereafter intimidated (and diplomacied) by the rest of the group into surrendering a powerful evil artifact he'd stole (the "Crown of Horns"), and was shortly thereafter chased away by the not-really-dead Kesson Rel.

* Or then there was the time the svirfneblin (a kind of ugly underground gnome) psion managed an epic psionic power to gather 1 million svirfneblin in the Raurin, and then get all of them to use their summon elemental feats at the same time, effectively summoning the Raurin desert itself, which then, at his direction, walked through the inner sea and out at the Vilhoun Reach (half a continent away), before heading into the Astral Sea.

* Or then there was the time that the half-giant barbarian kept dying in probably the most ridiculous ways. Seriously. I swear I really, really wasn't trying to kill him: in fact, the opposite! He just kept dying! (I'm pretty sure my dice at the time hated him... also he kept being the first - and only - to walk into instant death traps, that weren't initially supposed to be instant death traps, but because of the actions of all the players together, had become so).

* Or then there was the time that the party found an old malfunctioning teleportation device and decided, "hey, let's hit buttons randomly and see what happens"! One run-in with a randomly rolled 12-or-more* (I've forgotten now - I want to say "24-headed", but I'm not sure they go up that high, and I really can't recall for sure) pyrohydra later, and the party was mostly dead, only able to live because my wife's character had invested in a greater ring of fire protection (due to the fireballs that had kept hitting her and no one else), and managed to grab ashes of each of her dead comrades into little labeled vials and flee before she could be finished off.

* Or the time when they created a god with epic magic, blacked out, woke back up in the world with no idea what, exactly, had happened, and went "huh, that was weird" and proceeded never to investigate again.

There were so many memories from that one campaign alone, I'd take forever recounting them, but those are just a few that spring to mind. Those guys were crazy, but great, and it was a fantastic campaign all-round. Oh! I almost forgot!

* Or that time when that one guy (who was a friend of a friend) showed up for, like 2-3 play sessions (I can't recall now) and played a happy-go-lucky human Rogue for one of 'em, but quickly changed up for a super-thief Halfling Harper. Ever since that day, not one person who ever played in that campaign can ever see a Halfling again without saying, "I check my pockets!" immediately and frequently afterwords.

(Crowning moment of Awesome for Alton, the Halfling Harper and thief extraordinaire who couldn't roll less than 20 on a d20 if his life depended on it [when he woke up after being knocked unconscious and was temporarily caught and stuck upside down in a bag of holding, after having robbed most of the NPCs, party, and town blind]: "Gah! Wuh? Where am I! Agh! I check my pockets!" *big grin slowly dawns* Cheerfully: "Oh! It's all the stuff I stole!" He proceeded to get out shortly thereafter, and was never seen again.)

[Professor Smarmiarty]

Returning home I have been having chats with my friends about all their crazy concept campaigns they have been running in a mega-world of Sigil (a live action '24' campaign, a series of Christmas tales- the 12 slays of Christmas, adventures of the Christmas friends- a Hairy Mcclary style rhyming tale where every DM description was in whismical rhyme, and Adventures in Radio- a journey into sonic) so I've been inspired to start work on a Cthulhu campaign (spoiler: Cthulhu eats everyone) which I'm going to run till I head back to Britain. Also a new campaign world in case I ever get proper internet again.
Cthulhu campaigns are the best. Currentely they are all Private Eyes in 1920s, busting normal cases with the odd strange things behind closets they havne't found yet. But they are spending lots of times running newspapers and writing fake newspapers is the best- I have running stories about a two-headed girl and a dispute over river naming running in the background which allow me to put light luaghs in a heavy game. Also you can hide clues for future campagins in the background of the paper and see if they notice- so far none.

E: Also trying out Google Hangout, its pretty good actually with all the DnD add ins.

[Magus]

I'd love to play it but lack any real life friends to play it with, plus I'm basically not going to spend any money on the materials.

Doing it online would be great, I know you guys do some of that in the chat, right?

[Professor Smarmiarty]

If I ever get not-deported then yes.

[Tev]

I've been helping my girlfriend with a game she's running for a gamer girl coven she formed from classes when she went to go get her Masters in Library Science.

Basically the party is part of a secret society based out of something akin to the Library of Congress and Warehouse 13 that is tasked with finding lost tomes and artifacts of great power and cataloging them within the library's secure confines. She's been trying to slip in references to various popular book series like Fable Haven, H.P. Lovecraft, and even some Twilight (sparkly vampires are too funny to fight sometimes).

[CABAL49]

I won a Cthulhu game once because of a technicality.

[Professor Smarmiarty]

Was the technicality you burnt all the books and hid the dice?

[tacticslion]

(Or is it Necro-foo-foo? That one just sounds strange...)

Anyway, it's appropriate, because this is about that one time when my character became worshiped as a living god because he created a Well of Life with a 5,000-plus caster level (and thus was able to raise up to 25 people at a time, who've been dead for up to over 50,000 years by using magic item chicanery, and creating infinite wish machine, by using relatively low-level chicanery. Note that though I linked to the PF rules site, we were running under the 3.5 rules at the time, where this worked better.