New Year’s DnD: Trouble at the Ten Penny Tavern

Some friends came into town, so my husband threw together a one-shot Fourth Edition Dungons and Dragons game. Husband Tim is an excellent Dungeon Master: he can do math, and he’s a great actor/roleplayer. He said to me earlier today that in D&D he really wants to min/max and be cosmic powerful, but he always remembers that the role-playing is the fun part.

And then I throw my flame seed onto my party on purpose.

Tim and I have both found the Dungeon Delve to be really helpful for coming up with one-shot sessions. I don’t really navigate math very well, so I really do need that support to balance combat and monsters and things. It also provides a loose structure upon which to improvise on short notice and provide gobs of fancy flavor. Because flavor is better than anything there is.

We gathered up a flockery of level twos and went at it.

Alex had a drow that Tim couldn’t remember the name of so called Zach-a-tron.
Out of Town Friend used my trusty, loveable douchebag Briggs the warlord, and performed him admirably douchily!
My brother Joe whipped out a really cool interpretation of a Shardmind. I would have never seen that coming from a Shardmind. He turned out to be pretty useful since he was the only one in the party with an Int higher than 12.
Fiancee Liz brought a snarky, I Love My Maul dragonborn fighter and proceeded to be an uppity-pants, which was nice.
I shared my shifter druid with another Out of Town Friend. He, more cautious, served as Iztak’s Shoulder Angel, and I, knowing that Tim wouldn’t dare kill us, played Iztak’s Shoulder Devil.

The party, who we decided had coalesced because we were the only people who could stand each other, were approached in our favorite tavern (which we dubbed Welch Ave Station) to investigate why the inferior Ten Penny Tavern (which we dubbed Mickey’s) was shut down and the owner missing.

After Briggs and Liz’s Dragonborn Fighter went nuts with their blunt objects on the back door with their only achievement being to wake up the whole town and dent the hinges, a city guard came and let us in. From that point, we fought some Basement Meat Locker Zombies and then took a break.

The break seemed abrupt. Turns out Tim had used the wrong page in the Dungeon Delve and we were fighting Level 5 scenarios and he’d been frantically not killing us behind his DM screen.

Tweets from the game last night:

Iztak says, “This may appear to be a normal acorn but all creatures in burst beware!” (That would be Flame Seed.)
I target Dr Tobias Funke… (Tim mentioned offhand that he hadn’t come up with NPC names yet, so I arbitrarily gave them all Arrest Development names.)
Maas the scion shardmind reminds everyone that weight is only an illusion. (Maas was Joe’s shardmind.)
The drow claims…”I have low wisdom; I’m going to be pulling levers!” (We come upon a room of levers. Discussion begins. Drow gets bored.)
Necromancer chef baddie’s dragon goes down! “no! My confection!”

The real inspiration to this whole mess was a little HusbandWife joke about some great new minis we got from Christmas. The box contained a bunch of little fellas, and then two big dragons – one made of bones, the other, in my perspective, chocolate. So we concocted a scheme that while fighting the dragon, the chocolate would fall off and reveal a bone dragon! Tim set the melting point at bloodied and we went at it. It was a fun surprise for the party, since I was careful to conceal the bone dragon until Tim could unveil it at the crucial moment.