Geekery
I have recently realized that there is pretty much one thing keeping me happily in Louisiana (and not eager to move): our D&D group. Well, that and my book group, but since Brett and Sam just moved (both girls . . . never realized half our book group was so masculinely named) that already just feels sadder. So back to D&D--we'll be at two years playing in September, and are still only level 8. :) We play as much as we can, but with 8 people involved scheduling gets difficult. On a good month we'll get to play 2 or 3 times, and the sad months are 0-1. When we do play we'll go for 6-7 hours. I already did one entry on the basics of our group, so I won't rehash, but I really like the friends we've made through it. Jeff and Amanda are moving in July, so we'll be back to a normal sized group when they leave (7 party members is really way too many, but we've made it work), and I'm not sure what will happen when we have the baby in November--hopefully she'll be an easy baby and we can just take her along and keep playing. There is an end, however, which we all try not to think too hard about--Andrew and Joy are moving next summer, and at that point I think I'd be happy to move back west, with not much keeping us here (except Sarah finally moving closer to us . . . and the Mardi Gras parades). I wonder what the chances are of wherever we move to finding a similar group of closet D&D as well as BBC nerds.
Anyway, I've collected some pictures of our D&D exploits over the last few months, and just thought I'd share.
This is my mini for our main campaign, Rowen the rogue. Joy handpainted each of our miniatures with personal touches; my arrows are painted the same as the ones that Jeremy's character, Lander, a half-elven ranger, has on his mini, because Rowen always snitches Lander's arrows when she runs out. Joy also added the gold bracelet/jewelry later in the campaign because Rowen is always going for shiny things, and the bow is painted to look like an acid bow, since that was the first magical item I picked up.
This is Shelly, a baby black dragon, and a member of our party since early on. We found the dragon egg early in our campaign and decided to let it hatch. Then some dice rolls determined how the newly hatched dragon felt about each of us; she ended up bonding to Joy's character (Cora) and mine (Rowen). Black dragons will always turn evil, by the way, but we can't bear to let anything happen to Shelly . . . so we'll worry about that later. For now she adores us, especially if we give her treasure so she can have a hoard (and my rogue skills are good at acquiring treasure). Again with the personal paint touches--she's holding one of my arrows, and her toenails are painted (Cora is a happy-go-lucky halfling who likes to braid hair and paint dragon toenails).
This might be a quick aside because it's not actually from this campaign--she's from Jeff's campaign, which we played for several months whenever we couldn't get the whole group together, and which we finally completed last month (got to about level 5). But I figured as long as I was showing off Joy's painting skills . . . this is Aria. She's an elven bard/fighter (I multiclassed) who is aloof, cynical, and contrary. She was pretty fun to play. She had a happy ending, by the way--she ended up with a pet owlbear who loved her music that made her feel feelings again.
Back to our main campaign . . . just some action shots.
Half a castle that we stormed (the other half curves around the other side of the table). Each of those buildings had separate floors we could explore, and there were about a gazillion enemies. Much XP and treasure was acquired.
Not as visually impressive as a castle, but our first truly scary battle with a dragon. Jeff and Amanda couldn't come, last minute, so Andrew didn't have much time to scale it down back to the difficulty of fewer people. Currently the dragon is eating Lander. Somehow, we pulled through. This was inside an enemy ice castle; the alarm was raised while we were still there, just after we killed the ice dragon, so we pulled a Han Solo, slit open the side of it, hid in the corpse, and magically illusioned the side of the dragon to cover our tracks. After we filled our pockets with the dragon's hoard, of course.
An epic battle where we were saved by Wyverns, which Hans (played by Nathan) had somehow befriended earlier by feeding chained up wyverns dead bodies (we all grumbled at him for doing typically dumb things and wasting time)--and yet in this case it actually proved helpful.
This was the portion of my back story built in, since I was a sailor in my childhood. We ended up on a boat owned by my merchant family and convinced them to sail to where we wanted to go, but then we were attacked by a pirate ship . . .
And then a second ship appeared . . . followed by two more (not pictured). We were capsized by the mages on board who kept throwing tidal waves at us. Cora our druid cast water breathing on us and and we hid in the wreckage until they left, then washed ashore to an unknown somewhat abandoned island, all completely following my back story (off the module) for the next 3 sessions. It was pretty fun.
What we finally found on the island (after fighting through a pretty difficult dungeon) that allowed us to finally escape: an incredibly awesome new ship, which I named Boat II (which we call Boatii; Joy painted it onto the back of the boat as of our last session).
Inside the ship detail, top floor. There's also a map glued on the wall that you can't see that looks really awesome; there are details on each of the walls.
Second floor; eating, living, even a bathroom with tub and toilet. And check out the tiny tiny pots and pans on the table.
Bottom: sleeping and storage, and a place for Shelly's hoard.
And one more from Jeff's campaign, just to show that you don't need fancy minis to have a pretty great game. He doesn't have all the stuff, so he draws out most of his maps.
So, anyway, just some photos I've had kicking about. Jeremy and I decided for our anniversary presents this year we'd find D&D shirts (subtle is our preference--we're still looking for just the right ones). Twue wuv. I'm so glad he got over his prejudice of D&D and that it's something we both love playing.
Anyway, I've collected some pictures of our D&D exploits over the last few months, and just thought I'd share.
This is my mini for our main campaign, Rowen the rogue. Joy handpainted each of our miniatures with personal touches; my arrows are painted the same as the ones that Jeremy's character, Lander, a half-elven ranger, has on his mini, because Rowen always snitches Lander's arrows when she runs out. Joy also added the gold bracelet/jewelry later in the campaign because Rowen is always going for shiny things, and the bow is painted to look like an acid bow, since that was the first magical item I picked up.
This is Shelly, a baby black dragon, and a member of our party since early on. We found the dragon egg early in our campaign and decided to let it hatch. Then some dice rolls determined how the newly hatched dragon felt about each of us; she ended up bonding to Joy's character (Cora) and mine (Rowen). Black dragons will always turn evil, by the way, but we can't bear to let anything happen to Shelly . . . so we'll worry about that later. For now she adores us, especially if we give her treasure so she can have a hoard (and my rogue skills are good at acquiring treasure). Again with the personal paint touches--she's holding one of my arrows, and her toenails are painted (Cora is a happy-go-lucky halfling who likes to braid hair and paint dragon toenails).
This might be a quick aside because it's not actually from this campaign--she's from Jeff's campaign, which we played for several months whenever we couldn't get the whole group together, and which we finally completed last month (got to about level 5). But I figured as long as I was showing off Joy's painting skills . . . this is Aria. She's an elven bard/fighter (I multiclassed) who is aloof, cynical, and contrary. She was pretty fun to play. She had a happy ending, by the way--she ended up with a pet owlbear who loved her music that made her feel feelings again.
Back to our main campaign . . . just some action shots.
Half a castle that we stormed (the other half curves around the other side of the table). Each of those buildings had separate floors we could explore, and there were about a gazillion enemies. Much XP and treasure was acquired.
Not as visually impressive as a castle, but our first truly scary battle with a dragon. Jeff and Amanda couldn't come, last minute, so Andrew didn't have much time to scale it down back to the difficulty of fewer people. Currently the dragon is eating Lander. Somehow, we pulled through. This was inside an enemy ice castle; the alarm was raised while we were still there, just after we killed the ice dragon, so we pulled a Han Solo, slit open the side of it, hid in the corpse, and magically illusioned the side of the dragon to cover our tracks. After we filled our pockets with the dragon's hoard, of course.
An epic battle where we were saved by Wyverns, which Hans (played by Nathan) had somehow befriended earlier by feeding chained up wyverns dead bodies (we all grumbled at him for doing typically dumb things and wasting time)--and yet in this case it actually proved helpful.
This was the portion of my back story built in, since I was a sailor in my childhood. We ended up on a boat owned by my merchant family and convinced them to sail to where we wanted to go, but then we were attacked by a pirate ship . . .
And then a second ship appeared . . . followed by two more (not pictured). We were capsized by the mages on board who kept throwing tidal waves at us. Cora our druid cast water breathing on us and and we hid in the wreckage until they left, then washed ashore to an unknown somewhat abandoned island, all completely following my back story (off the module) for the next 3 sessions. It was pretty fun.
What we finally found on the island (after fighting through a pretty difficult dungeon) that allowed us to finally escape: an incredibly awesome new ship, which I named Boat II (which we call Boatii; Joy painted it onto the back of the boat as of our last session).
Inside the ship detail, top floor. There's also a map glued on the wall that you can't see that looks really awesome; there are details on each of the walls.
Second floor; eating, living, even a bathroom with tub and toilet. And check out the tiny tiny pots and pans on the table.
Bottom: sleeping and storage, and a place for Shelly's hoard.
And one more from Jeff's campaign, just to show that you don't need fancy minis to have a pretty great game. He doesn't have all the stuff, so he draws out most of his maps.
So, anyway, just some photos I've had kicking about. Jeremy and I decided for our anniversary presents this year we'd find D&D shirts (subtle is our preference--we're still looking for just the right ones). Twue wuv. I'm so glad he got over his prejudice of D&D and that it's something we both love playing.