Category: D&D

Party On

Our D&D campaign has really hit its stride lately. Our duo of Orphan Witches, Joy and Emma, accompanied by Zoe, a rogue with a heart of gold, arrived at the Keep on the Borderlands and joined forces with a trio of Dwarves (because Dwarves always travel in groups whose count is a prime number). They are Grimli, son of Groin, and his kinsfolk Glumli and Chumli, of the Redshirt clan. I added them to the party since they were light on fighters, and playing NPC’s it gives me a chance to fight on the side of the good guys and provide some (grim, Dwarvish) counsel to the players. I’m having fun with the NPC’s, and am planning on having them come and go as need warrants, to help the party on various stages of their quest. The party still needs a healer, since they’ve already used up most of their stock of healing potion after the first major combat. I’m going to provide some kind of Elvish Druid I think, maybe named Elvis.

In any even the combat went really well, with Zoe mixing it up in melee combat, Lizzy summoning a dire spider and Michelle wielding both acid and frost, and even stepping up to slay a goblin with her dagger.

I’m playing under 3.5 rules, and so far it’s worked fine just substituting the 3.5 version of the monsters in the Monster Manual for the ones in the. We’ve been fighting alot of Orcs and Goblins of lately, which is confusing for me as DM because I’m also reading the Lord of the Rings on the train these days (more on that in a separate post), and in Tolkien’s world “orc” is the Elvish word for “goblin”, from the orcish word “urak” which is what they call themselves. Meanwhile in Gygax’s world, Orcs and Goblins are two distinct creatures.

Also, we’ve now got proper minis for the party and a host of monster. We’re using lego minifigs, which are a bit larger than your standard mini, so I’m thinking of redrawing our battlemap at an inch and quarter per five foot square rather than an inch.

Game On

This last weekend we started our D&D campaign in earnest, with actual adventuring. Still a lot of backstory to fill and NPC’s and world to flesh out, but I think we can do that as we go. This session we did our first actual combat, with our part of two witches and a rogue being waylaid by four goblins on the road. It turned out to be a pretty exciting and well-matched melee, with our heroes killing three of their foes in the end and chasing of the last one. I’m reading the player handbook on the train these days, and only after the session did I review the section on combat, so I see there are a few things I didn’t do correctly, but I’ll get there next time. I kinda winged it thru Lizzy’s Summon Monster I spell, and I forgot that a character can run to double-double their movement rate. Ah well.

My other train reading these days is The Hobbit. I reread LotR a few years back just before the movies came out, but I don’t think I’ve read the Hobbit since high school. I’m happy to say it still holds up, and even thought I remember the story, the telling is full of surprises. The writing style is just great. Witty, gripping and evocative all at once. The nature of magic is much more subtle and nuanced than say Harry Potter. Plus it’s given me a lot of ideas for little things to work into my campaign. I’m also surprised at what a quick read it is because I remember LotR being, well, epic. I started it on Thursday and will finish it tomorrow. My last book before this was a biography of Thelonious Monk, which took over a month.

The Saga Begins

Things are progressing nicely these days. We’ve settled into a good routine with the new school year. It’s a whole different bag now with the kids being older. Looks like Jeannie and I made it thru the baby and little kid phase, and now we have a bit of a breather before the teenage thing starts. Everyone has been telling me how difficult middle school can be, but to me it’s great. I can leave the kids home alone for a few hours, or have them go with their friends and not worry about it. I can pick the kids up from school on the days I work at home, and they do their homework and make dinner. We’ve started checking out high schools for Lizzy the last few weekends. Sort of a mind-blowing experience. How the time flies!

I’ve been working alot on music. In alternation to practicing piano for the rock thing with Blick, I’ve been playing tenor sax every other day for a good hour or more, getting back into shape for the show tunes show. It’s going quite well and feels good, however working the music out is not that easy. I’ve been working off of recordings, but we’re doing different arrangements in different keys. I finally got the charts to most of the songs on Friday, and some are more detailed than others. Hopefully it’ll all come together when there’s a rehearsal.

Meanwhile, Michelle has been good at getting me to spend quality time with her lately, mainly by figuring out what I like to do and then asking to do it with me. Michelle and Lizzy have also been getting into chess again lately and I’ve been playing again too. I guess they’ve been playing at school, and they’ve been playing each other at home too. I’m still giving them lots of pointers about tactics. They’re both good enough now that they have a sense of strategy, and can beat me now and then if I’m not paying enough attention and make a careless mistakes. Good fun.

A couple weeks ago Michelle had me sit down and work out a piano accompaniment for a song she wrote called “Now and Forever”. She wrote it for Jeannie, just a lyric and melody, and it’s very sweet. The song is basically a ballad, and I gave it some structure and cool jazz chords. Last weekend we recorded a demo, just piano and vocals. I’m tempted to mix it down and share it, but I think I’ll wait. My thing now is to really play the song rather than using proTools as a word processor for audio, so I’m just gonna put together the real version and let you hear it when its ready. I’m going to build it around a live performance on the piano, which means playing rubato over a click track. I’ll probably program tempo changes in to the click track, practice along and adjust it until it feels right. This means Michelle will have to sing all the vocals over again, but that’s okay. I’ll round out the arrangement with drums and bass, and Michelle asked Lizzy to do a flute solo.

Now the man point of this post: Michelle said to me the other day “Remember when you used to play Dungeons and Dragons?” I’m amazed she remembers this because we stopped maybe two or three years ago. We used to play on Friday nights, ostensibly after the kids were in bed, with a party of friends on Long Island and in Carolina. We would use our computers to run an audio conference and have software for maps and dice. The campaign eventually died when the DM and half the players got turned on to Warcraft.

Anyway, Michelle asked me to teach her how to play D&D. Lizzy and Jeannie are on board too. So I dusted off my old dice and books. The girls both want to be witches. Jeannie is going to be a rogue with a heart of gold. I’m DMing, so I’m putting together a world for them. I haven’t DM’d since middle school, but I have a lot of good ideas for a scenario and specific things for this campaign and these characters. I’ve been having fun working out the backstory and settings. The first module will be Keep on the Borderlands. This is a very old module I know, but one of the few I have around. Friday we rolled up our characters, but we still need to complete their skills, spells and starting equipment. And I need to flesh out some NPC’s. Still it was good fun. Next week the adventure begins in earnest. Watch this space for future updates.

Lastly, the kids have been clamoring to go apple picking and pumpkin picking this fall. Michelle even used it as a topic for a paper at school. We’ve been so busy it’s been hard to make the time. But today was the day, and we had a blast. Best of all we up with met Martin, Kathleen and Charlie.

Subterranean Home Repair Blues

One day last week I came home from work and Lizzy greeted me with a copy of the new Lego magazine, and showed me a contest they’re having where you can win a weeklong cruise for your family by building a Lego cruise ship. This post is not the story about that, since that story involves pictures. Instead, it’s more boring stuff about home repairs.  Friday evening I got started on patching the hole in my ceiling, the aftermath of the leaky pipe. My friend Peter gave me a scrap of sheetrock, which was nice of him. I prepped the hole and put some plywood up in there to screw into, and cut the piece to size, only to discover that piece was too thick: it was 5/8″ and I needed 1/2″. So I declared we were S.O.L. and we were done for the day, and would figure out what to do the next day.

Lizzy: What’s “S.O.L.” Daddy?
Me: It means we’re out of luck, honey.
Lizzy: Oh. Hey – wait, wouldn’t that be O.O.L.? What does the S stand for?
Me: Uh, nevermind. Do you wanna play Legos?
Lizzy: Ya!

Later that very night Jeannie and I were playing D&D online with some friends online (yes we’re total geeks I know, but the campaign has gotten really interesting. She’s a Sorceress with some pretty kickass spells, and I’m a Barbarian with an axe who can deal ludicrous amounts of damage, and our party includes another fighter specializing in whirling two swords around at once, and a Cleric who is the Prophet of Holy Mysteries, the motivating McGuffin for the whole quest. Anyway, we’ve been in the castle fighting wave after wave of nasty undead, and then we found a magic blue key, and — oh, yeah I’m getting off topic here. I’ll probably blog about it again soon, as we’re coming up on the end of a major chapter.)

Getting back to the home fixit thread, I left the garage door open a few inches because earlier I had patched a few holes and rough spots on our garage floor with the leftover patching cement from the foundation project, and the biggest of these was under where the door came down. So at the end of the night I went down to shut the door and I hear a noise in the garage. Critter trouble! I spotted a skunk in the corner, hiding behind a pile of stuff. He looked pretty scared and didn’t want to come out of his hiding spot, so it took a while to *very* carefully unstack the things around him until I could get a broom in there and coax him to make a run for the outside. Whew!

Saturday we spent a good part of the day running around on errands including looking for a piece of 1/2″ thick sheet rock. We went to the dreaded Home Depot, which was a complete and utter zoo. They refused to cut a piece of sheet rock for me, even thought I was willing to buy a whole piece just to take home a bit. So we left without buying anything. Went to our neighborhood True Value to get paint, even though we knew they wouldn’t have sheet rock. They recommended a place called Pelham Lumber, who were fantastic. They wouldn’t sell me less than a full panel either, but would be happy to cut it. Better still, when I got there, they said I could take a look around the yard and if I found a piece of scrap I could use I could just have it. So problem solved, and I put the piece up there and did the whole tape and joint compound thing.

Sunday I sanded it and put on another layer of joint compound, and took the rest of day off to do stuff like go mountain biking, have one last barbecue and play legos with my kids. Last night it was time to paint over the patch. The paint matched perfectly cuz we brought a piece of the old ceiling to the hardware store and they matched it with a machine. Amazing what they can do lasers or spectrographs or whatever they use these day. While I was at it, there was a spot in the hall I thought I’d touch up. It was then I realized that the ceiling of the laundry room is the same color as its walls, not the rest of the ceilings. Everything in our house is shades of white and off-white, you understand, except the ones that are bluescreen blue. The bad news is we’re gonna need to paint the ceiling of our bathroom after we do the tiles in there, and it would’ve been good to have a match on that paint.

The good news is that it’s the same color as our family room, so I suddenly was able to touch up the spot where there was water damage from a crazy thunderstorm once, and where the futon crashed into the wall as someone was opening up into a bed once, and the place where my nieces drew on the wall once, and so on. One thing kind of led to another and I ended up doing a substantial amount of touch up, a random task that’s been on my todo list for a long time. Finished that up tonight and am enjoying a well-earned beer. Next up: lego cruise ships!