No actual D&D this week, as our thief is out of town and we kinda need him to finish opening the chest, so we got together and played other games instead. Two of them I had never played before. The other, Othello, was a way to pass the time until the rest of the players arrived. Despite not having played against anything other than a computer for a very long time, I managed to win at Othello. It was a near thing, as I was nearly boxed in, and decided now might be the time to give up a corner in order to salvage something from the situation ... and wound up taking all the corners instead, as I was able to take the opposite penultimate corner slot and stop Fibonacci from getting the corner I had intended to give up.
Anyway, on to the games I hadn't played before. First, the Mad Magazine Game*, which is a Monopoly spoof where the object is to lose all your money. The spaces on the board have instructions like "everyone move one chair to your (left|right)", "switch money with a player", "roll the dice three times and go that many spaces backwards around the board", etc. It's a hoot. John/Allonar (since there's another John who comments here, I figure I ought to specify) wound up winning, due to fortuitous money shifting and landing on a space where he got to lose more money than he currently had.
Then John/Allonar also brought Munchkin**, and we played that. I'd never played it before, though I'd read some descriptions. It's basically a D&D parody. You start out as a classless human. If you draw a class or race card, you can choose to become that, at least until you get cursed out of it. Every time you defeat a monster, you go up a level. If you can't defeat the monster, you can get help from a fellow player ... but watch out, as they will only do so if it benefits them. The first person to reach Level 10 wins. John/Allonar won the first game, despite us valiantly trying to sabotage his last fight with as many curses as we could muster (cooperating to stop someone else from winning seems to be a given), and I squeaked in as winner on the second game. Amusingly, Andrew agreed to help with what seemed like it should be my last fight, expecting to sabotage me at the last minute with a "Drop 2 levels" curse card...except I had the wishing ring and made the curse go away. Something else had happened so I didn't win on that fight, but on my next turn, I was up against a Level 1 something-or-other, and everyone had used up nearly all their curse cards trying to sink other last efforts. Someone had a +3 to play on the monster, making it Level 4, and Abe had a "mate" card, so that put it to Level 8 total ... and I was sitting comfortably at 15 (17 -2 from another curse), including all the item modifiers I had.
Thus a fun time was had by all, but I suspect Allonar and I will be ganged up on the next time we have a non-D&D gaming night. ^!^
*The Mad game is out of print, but there are "collectible" versions for sale for $84 on up at the Amazon link if you really want a copy.
**There are over a dozen varieties of this at Amazon, but, afaik, we were playing the original card game version.
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After something of a hiatus, I'm back in a D&D group. For no particular reason, I decided to create a rather neurotic character: the half-elf wizard Dovra Lawyndro**, who used to be evil until she found* the Flute of Unbreakable Balance, which can "only be wielded by one neither good nor evil," and decided not to be evil any more. She's a poorly socialized half-elf, who is a bit like Anya from Buffy in that she doesn't quite "get" normal behavior. We've only just started the campaign, and she encountered the extant group of characters for the first time last Tuesday. She announced, "I'm not evil!" at least three times, possibly more. Then proceedings were interrupted by the DM for a duel between his character (from the campaign when he wasn't DM) and a goblin. At that point, it was time to quit, as they'd had to finish the old campaign before they could begin the new one.
I actually got to participate in the old campaign, albeit with a missing player's character, so that they'd have at least one wizard on board. Turns out it was a good thing I did. I/Galadriel (Yes, an elf-wizard named Galadriel; the actual player is a rather young girl, so go with it) managed to successfully cast a sleep spell on the big bad in the very last encounter. There was a lot of luck involved. I got higher initiative, so I was able to try before the big bad transported to his circle of power, where his stats would have been just out of reach of the spell. Even better, he had enough time just before the spell took effect to transport to the circle, which was right next to a portal which we'd been told would kill any living creature who passed through it, so rather than hack the big bad repeatedly for a dozen turns, they just had to drag him to the portal and push him in.
*I'd actually intended that Dovra just be looking for the Flute, but there was a miscommunication with the DM, and he thought she already had it, so I went with it. As she's not convinced yet that she's neither good nor evil, she's not going to try and play it any time soon, but she'll probably annoy the other characters by trying to play the ordinary flute that she bought, figuring that learning to play it will help her play the other one. I have no idea whether this is true, and Dovra hasn't the faintest idea what the Flute actually does. I doubt she even knows why she wants it. I can speculate OOC: she hasn't had a particularly happy life up to this point, and figures that anything that would "balance" that out must be a good thing. I'm leaving it up to the DM what, exactly, the Flute really balances, but it's probably not even close to what Dovra thinks.
**I'm lousy at coming up with names, so I've got a bot with several sets of syllables that can be combined in random order. The generated names were actually much longer than just "Dovra Lawyndro," but by removing a few I wound up with what I consider to be a decent name. It will be amusing if the other character try to call her "Dovi," as that's what I call the cat who adopted me, short for "Dovienya."
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Strange dream last night. Part of it was based on a game I played last week, Shadows Over Camelot, but the characters were more like the characters on Heroes than Arthurian knights. We lost the first round badly due to the Traitor; like Shadows Over Camelot, one person could randomly be assigned as the Traitor at the beginning of each round. The Traitor I'll call Madden (no names in the dream, but he was a creepy old guy who reminded me of Madden in one of Charles de Lind's books); if you picture him something like Donovan in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, that would be roughly right.
Unlike Heroes, people's powers didn't come out automatically ... or else came out horribly wrong. Madden was the only one who already knew how to use his power, and thus made a particularly troublesome Traitor. He supposedly showed Peter (looked like Peter in Heroes) how to make a "Seeing Eye" which would allow him to take over someone's mind, as Peter's power would allow him to make use of this. Naturally, Madden messed up one important detail in making it, so Peter was powerless, but didn't find out until it was too late. Madden's own Seeing Eye worked just fine ... mostly he seemed to enjoy using it to make people say things that they normally wouldn't.
The first round ended too quickly for most of us to learn anything at all about our powers. In the second round (essentially, a restart), we kept our memories of the little we did learn, and it didn't take long to determine that Madden wasn't the traitor this time, though Peter still wouldn't trust him, and wound up taking apart Madden's Seeing Eye to figure out how to get his own working. I was looking for the equipment I needed to get my power working (cutlery, mainly; no clue what I was going to do with it), and being followed around by a floating hag of a spirit who wouldn't shut up, but I must have succeeded in ignoring her as I can't remember anything that she said. While I was distracted by an oddly shaped knife (Imagine a mold for making very flowery tortilla salad bowls. Cut off one or two of the flowery folds and stick them on a knife handle. That was the knife.), and I think she must have then turned into a rather large, floaty, tarantula, with maybe an 8 inch body and 22 inch span total including the legs. The tarantula began attacking some random person, but I still hadn't found a decent knife. Someone else stepped in to get the tarantula off with his bare hands (looked like one of my 123 students).
That was about the point where I woke up, but there are a few other random details from Round 2 that I can remember. When we were in Madden's room, we found a sort of piano bench, but it wasn't rectangular. It was as if someone had tried to construct a perspective rectangle into a bench to make it look larger (so it was much narrower at one end than at the other). A whole bunch of cats kept gathering around the bench. Someone opened it (maybe me), and it was stuffed full of dead, almost mummified, rats, birds, mice, etc. The cats were quite happy about this ... I just wanted the thing closed again, and managed to slam it shut. This was yet another reason none of us wanted to trust Madden even if he wasn't the Traitor this time around.
Though I think I did get a glimpse of who the Traitor for that round was. He looked like Chris Sarandon (think Fright Night, not Princess Bride), and could apparently fly (or float, depending on how you look at it). During the quick glimpse I got, he seemed to be turning one of the other players into a green-skinned zombie.
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