We finished up with Agony on Sunday morning.. Bill W. ran for us, which is cool, since it was fun playing with him on Saturday. We only had four players – me, Susan, Jimmy, and Amanda. This is just about right for a Sunday morning game; keeps it from being over-lengthy, and it’s nice to play with familiar people. I loved the way this mod brought together almost every Dalelands plot to date, with a sprinkling of Dragon Coast material to boot. I really, really loved the use of Kira and Dayan Nenthyn. Reed happens to be one of my PCs who hasn’t played The Prospect, which is a shame, so he didn’t have the emotional hooks some of my other characters would have found, but it was still cool stuff. ...

J.D. McCoy ran First Strike for us on Sunday evening; the players were the now familiar cluster of me, Susan, Jimmy, and Amanda plus Brian S. as our fifth. Brian played a warforged fighter who did the meatbag schtick, which let’s just say I’ve seen warforged doing it before, but his build was interesting. Lots of focus on defenses. 30 Will at level 14 is quite good. He gave me some stuff to think about with Collin. ...

I didn’t sign up for The Blinking Eye of Fire (original), but there were in theory two open slots and no defender playing, so plenty of room for Collin. Also the experience would get him to level 14 and upgrade his bracers, so why not? Unfortunately, our prospective leader wasn’t feeling well, so he bowed out, which left us with Kerwin running for me, Bennet O., George O., and Joe G. No leader. If they’d had a fifth player I would have bailed, but without me, no table. I wasn’t too worried about Collin living through the mod, given his self-healing capabilities, but the bracers were a high tier reward and the vibe from the table was a bit weird… ah well. ...

Enemy of My Enemy is the sequel to Killing the Messenger. That was maybe the best paragon module play experience Susan and I had together so far. This run pretty much lived up to it. Rob B. GMed for us; Jimmy and Amanda played with me, Susan, and Bill W. Mustering was a pain in the butt because people kept overcomplicating it, but in the end I said “look, us four want to play together, we need one defender out of the two available, and Brian over there will play a leader at the other table. Problem solved.” And lo, it more or less was. ...

Our GASPcon (original) fun began with a My Realms on Friday night. I don’t mind admitting I was a little nervous about playing some random guy’s My Realms adventure, particularly at P2, but it turned out to be really good. The set up was the kind of thing you’d find in a heroic tier adventure, but the GM – Michael Grancey – really played up the slew of adventurers who’d tried and failed to solve the problem before. Our characters were Baldur’s Gate’s last hope. I liked that. ...

Ghosts of the Past: Dark Portal – possibly the longest LFR module name to date. I have not done a comprehensive study. Mark B. ran it; Jason B., Susan, Evil Tony, Alan and I played. The adventure has a rep for being brutal. It really is. We happened to have the right people in place for the stairs fight: I had good necrotic resistance, so I could easily stay static while the warlock disabled the big defensive ability of the problem monster. So that was one of the mean encounters handled. ...

Games & Stuff stays open till midnight on the first Thursday of every month so that people can get the early WotC releases as soon as possible. This makes it an excellent time to run those long paragon modules. I volunteered to run Wetwork, and Susan agreed to run Alone – she’d been wanting to GM down at G&S for a while. My players were Evil Tony, the Bradleys, Amanda, James, and Hudson. You’ll note that’s five out of six of the players I ran for the previous Sunday. Did I wipe the party again? Oh, crap, yeah. ...

Matt ran Killing the Messenger for me so that I could get Collin to level 13 before the weekend. (Anvil of Doom, yay!) I was joined by Eltherian, Jay Ibero, jbever, Eladar, and Zharm. Lotta new faces, which is cool. I don’t have a ton to say about the module, although this was the first time I saw the “destroy the supplies” path from either side of the GM screen. Eladar played his Intimidate-based bard. Very effective, but maybe not quite as satisfying as doing the combats the expected way. Still, I don’t begrudge him his fun. ...

Pain was our Halloween run at Games & Stuff. I ran it for Jimmy, Amanda, Hudson, the Bradley brothers, and Mike. Hudson had played it before but had an awful experience, so I figured I could improve on it some. It’s a great investigative adventure when run properly. The investigation went well! So that’s cool. Unfortunately, the plot branch I used has a final fight which went very poorly for the PCs. My monsters caught them in overlapping auras, and they didn’t really have any good way to handle it, which resulted in a sort of cascading failure effect. Not to spoil overly, but there’s a monster out there which creates new versions of itself when it kills a PC, and it’s not like you can decide not to use an aura. ...

High Infidelity was the first P2 game Susan and I played since Gencon. We needed a little extra experience before GASPCon, plus we always like tuning up our characters a bit. The always-reliable Matt ran (I owe him a run or two), and Eltherian, jredgiant, and misterjester played with us. By some miracle, we had a pretty balanced group: defender, two leaders, and two strikers. The lack of control hurt a bit, but since Matt’s pretty reliable about focusing on the leaders, it’s always good to have two of ‘em. Reed performed quite well and got a +4 weapon out of the deal. I’m feeling good about the upcoming P2 play.