Jimmy’s got this fun adventuring company called Hellfire Engine or Infernal Combustion Engine, depending on who you ask: it’s a bunch of tieflings who’ve made a deal with a devil. All members must be paragon tier and they must be able to do fire damage at-will. Easy for some classes; others require a flaming weapon. It’s a fun premise. I cheated and made up Ceptse, who is a dead tiefling assassin, which is to say a revenant. I like her a lot. She’s letting me get out all my horror roleplaying urges. Her paragon path is Soul Thief, which has the ridiculously cool feature Soul Killer: “A creature killed by you cannot be restored to life except by a creature of a level higher than yours.” That’s flavor. ...

I know why I played this one; someone grabbed me on Skype and said “hey, can Alesk come play?” I assumed it was because they needed a leader or a fourth player; in retrospect I think they just assumed I’d want the free spot. Alas, I’d played Dancing Shadows before and I wasn’t that interested in doing it again. By the time I figured out what was going on, it was too late to back out politely, though. C’est la vie. ...

I have good notes for this session as well, which implies that by this time I knew I was a mile behind so I was trying to ensure I could catch up someday. I probably didn’t mean for it to be a month later. Ah well. Still pretty good thinking for a Saturday morning. Jay B. filled in to run for us, as the theme of chaos continued. David, Peter, Tyrek, Susan, Kai and I played. Sibilant Whispers debuted at Origins and got some bad press for a) being a four fight module and b) having some nasty dominate effects. We pretty much breezed through it, as we had a heavily optimized group and Jay’s a good GM. David ran a barbarian, Kai had a two weapon Stormwarden ranger, Tyrek had a very solid fighter, Peter had a nearly invulnerable swordmage/battlemind. Reed and Faral continue to be reasonably competent. I don’t think any fight lasted more than three rounds. Maybe four. Smackdown. ...

Our Friday evening game at Dexcon was The Undumor Connection (original). My records for this are better than my previous ones: I know that Katie, Peter, Tyrell, and Steve played along with Susan and I. I believe Robert N. was our DM but I’m not 100% sure. It was reasonably fun. The other four at the table were all from the Fair Lawn, NJ LFR group, so they knew each other really well. They definitely had a far more collaborative style than most Baltimore players: lots of suggesting moves and so on. The emphasis on tactical play meant that they naturally worked better with each other than with us; after all, they knew their characters better than ours, so were more able to make plans based on each others’ capabilities. ...

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. ...