Writeups

[gallery] They let me in this elevator even though I’m only level 6!

Yay, Pain! By which I mean yay, the second part of the Pain and Suffering major quest! Getting this in for Reed and Faral before Gencon and hitting P2 was a big deal for us, so I’m glad it was offered at Dexcon. This was our Friday afternoon game – we drove up Friday morning, checked in, and hit the gaming room. There was more than a little confusion in the LFR area, since everyone had signed up with Warhorn but the signups weren’t carried over to Dexcon’s registration system. All we had was blank signup sheets, and everyone had to reselect their games. This kind of pissed me off, and I was pretty worried about getting bumped. It worked out OK in the end but left a bad taste in my mouth. ...

I have no idea why I played Master and Servant with Alesk. This is what I get for getting slack about my updates. It was an online game, run by jredgiant. I think I may have been feeling a little LFR deprivation, plus Kazordan was playing and I like playing with him a lot. Other players: logopolis, darksydex, Ekilinaar, and Xalcairn. Hm, maybe I noticed that they needed a leader and stepped up. Oh, or maybe I wanted to push the Conspiracy of Ravens major quest. ...

This was the second game in our Scepter Tower of Spellgard (original) run. For this one, Jason B. took over the GM job and Mark B. returned to the player side of the table; we also added Tom B., plus of course me and Susan and Hudson. The full explanation of the shuffle is here, for those confused. Cine remained awesome fun, and he hit level 3 at the end of this section, which meant I got a ranged AoE at-will. I really felt the lack of that for the first two levels. I had high hopes that his effectiveness would increase as a result.

I was pushing Alesk a bit to get to level 7 so I could do some retraining after the cleric nerfs, and Eltherian was kind enough to run Through Twilight Boughs for me. This was an online game; Kazordan, Maelwys, Eklinaar, EWInsight, and darksydex were my fellow players. I wanted to sneak this in so Alesk could keep progressing on that questline, as well. It was fun, Alesk hit level 7, and someday he’ll go do the pain in the butt final module in this major quest.

A couple of thoughts on his future: There are plenty of good fighter paragon paths, but I was looking at Bear Warrior the other day, and it’s surprisingly good for fighters. The key is the +1 AC and free second wind while raging. OK, so at level 20, you get one rage (and it’s a good one). But is that worth the multi-class feat and the out of class paragon path? ...

For our second module of the evening, I ran Songs of the Heart for Jimmy, Amanda, Hudson, Mark B., Jason B., and Susan. It’s a really fun roleplay module that I’d never encountered before – I ran it at Jimmy’s request, since he’s on the major quest it advances. Conveniently, this is one of those major quests that you can start halfway through. Thus, everyone’s on it now. I liked running it. Any time I can do a lot of quirky NPCs, I’m pretty happy. The first fight was a breeze for the players, which is fine. The second fight was stone cold tough and I think it’s worth rambling on about it for a bit. But beware spoilers. ...

Last Sunday, Susan and I trekked down to Jimmy and Amanda’s place to play a couple of H3 modules with them, plus Hudson and Mark B. and Jason B. Jimmy was a module away from paragon, so that was a totally worthwhile effort. He started out by running Shell Game for the six of us. I played Collin, of course. This was my first time playing with Jimmy as GM and I had a great time. He’s got a great hand with combat. Our party mix was a bit light on damage but heavy on healing, which worked out fine. Collin is definitely hitting his sweet spot: I can spend three rounds marking everything next to me, and by that time I usually don’t have more than two monsters left anyhow. He can keep two monsters marked indefinitely. ...

Seems like everyone’s played The Prospect (original), although looking back, it’s been a while for me. I wanted to get in a game or two with Kevin before bringing him to Gencon for Peter’s Nixie Queen adventuring company, and this one was convenient, in any case. Darksydex GMed; Logopolis, Swiftshade, Eltherian, Gadunge, and Trident played alongside me. Online, as you may have surmised. It was a nice speedy game. That final battle was very quick, thanks to a lot of skilled buff stacking. The fight against the bandits took a while, since they bottlenecked us. Kevin used up three heals in that fight and still finished it flat on the ground; he’s definitely a glass cannon. Fun to play, though. I also managed to contrive to give Eltherian’s battlemind the chance to use Mind Spike twice, so I felt like I’d done my job. ...

Man, I keep getting behind. Gotta keep up! Next scheduled LFR is maybe Thursday, and if not then on Sunday, so I will try to post in a more timely fashion once I’ve played. Anyway, last Sunday (see?) Susan and I went down to Glen Burnie again to play Scepter Tower of Spellgard (original) with Mark B. Jason B. and Hudson were the other two players. It seems that Mark and Tom were stuck at the beginning of part 2, so if we played a catchup game we’d be able to slide into their adventure, Jason would slide over to GMing, and everything would be good. Since three lazy afternoons of Spellgard equals level 5, that seemed like a good deal, and now the project is underway. ...