some rpg highlights!

okay, so remember how i said i would come back and finish up that writeup of "a hole in the sky" like, a year and a half ago? i didn't exactly lie ... i mean, i meant to come back and finish it. but you know me and finishing things -- there's only a few i am really good at sticking with to the end.

which means some time went by and some time went by and some time went by, and then i was like, "oh s---! i really have to finish that," after which i was like, "oh. well, s---. i don't remember a damn thing about how it wrapped up."

well, i remembered a bitty bit: my peasants "leveled up" to become real characters after getting their 10 x.p., and they kept climbing those ladders and fighting stuff, and the monster pumpkin came at us but now we were awesome and could actually fight it ... uh, i thought. it whacked some more of my guys and good old fanansiver spellflinger the chaotic elf had to use up gobs of luck. but we killed it! and then we had to, i dunno, climb into some kinda cage at the very top of the giganto pine-cone and let this magic whozamawhatchit loose, which required some climbing and jumping, and fanansiver being chaotic jumped out to try it first, and he rolled bad, and burned the last of his luck, and rolled worse, and aaaaaaaahhhh!!! fell to his splatooski end. three characters made it out alive: claire the cleric, joe average, and grumpus mcgoof. so the creeptastic statue-head crazylady rewarded us with her magical extradimensional spinning fortune wheel, and most everybody got some better stats, and claire's boobs got a little bigger, and joe turned into a girl and was no longer average so i renamed her "joan plussome."

now like i said these rpgs usually don't encourage you to play more than a character or two at once, but msg says if we want to play some more modules, three guys isn't going to hack it, so i rolled up another ten nobodies and got most of them killed in a different funnel dungeon and then all the survivors got together and were enough of a gang they might stand a chance as an adventuring party.

the second set of guys included:

• a lawyer elf chick i called "plieda twelf"
• a halfling gypsy, "tiny tina tealeaves"
• a beggar whose luck was so good i called him "wheedle charmedlife" and turned him into a cleric
• and a thief who i thought was gonna be a loser when i rolled his stats until i got to the last one and it was luck and he got a 14, which is pretty good, so i had to call him "nada lieusure." (only he kinda was, cause he ended up dying a few adventures later.)

here's some of the funnier stories that happened in the two or three adventures after that.

we're traveling along this road and msg rolls the random encounter for the day and something shows up. he rolls some more dice and it's a pterodactyl! i was like, "a pterodactyl? just out of nowhere, in the middle of the woods on the road from one town to another. rando ..." and msg says, yeah, that's why they call them random encounters. it swoops down and tries to make off with tiny tina our halfling good luck charm, so we toast it, and then notice it's wearing a saddle. "any saddlebags?" i asked, since some of my characters are all about the loot. but no, no saddlebags, just the saddle, which is too scorched and slashed up for us to resell even if we could find someone with a pterodactyl the same size as this one.

a little while later there's this dude with a staff limping along the road, and we say hi and ask what's the matter because he looks pretty banged up, and he says "i am looking for my pterodactyl that nekros the grotesque caused to dump me in the middle of this godsforsaken wilderness." did i mention wheedle charmedlife was "lawful"? well, he was, so he just out and says, "i believe we killed that pterodactyl." of course the dude gets mad, and he says, "oh no, not beaky!" and then his eyes start glowing and shit and he's obviously a bad-ass wizard who's way badder-ass than our wizard, grumpus, and we're like, "hey, look, what can we do to make it up to you?"

so he sends us on a mission i don't remember too much about except some vomiting cave-cats and a giant pile of guano and these silvery bridges over a giant leech-lake that joan kept falling off of and would have been killed by giant leeches except we'd tied a rope to her and kept dragging her up from whichever bridge she fell off of.

big-time piece of advice if you play dungeon crawl classics, do not wear armor when you're trying to cross narrow bridges or planks over something hazardous (which in this game means pretty much over anything at all). your butt is gonna fall.

oh, and another piece of advice: if you get in a situation where you'll be perfectly fine as long as you don't roll a 1, then whatever you do, do not think or say "oh, i'll be fine as long as i don't roll a 1." the very g.d. second you think or say it, you are doomed a.f. i swear to god the only times i roll a 1 are when i think, "as long as i don't roll a 1 ..."

after that we climbed this glacier that had some kinda time-travel headquarters in it with a t-rex and yetis and crazy robots, and then we chased this ape-man to an underground city where nada lieusure bought the underground fungus-farm, and then we took, i dunno six or eight months off. not because i was sad about nada lieusure or anything cause he was kind of a dick or maybe she was kind of a dick, i honestly can't even remember if he was a she or she was a he. you know what i mean. when you've got seven characters it's hard keeping track of them.

but more recently, we have been on a binge! i mean, like playing a module or two a week and now my guys are 4th level and let me tell you, 4th level is bad ass in this game. except when you think, "i'll be fine as long as i don't roll a 1."

anyhow, i'm feeling pretty proud of myself for blogging like, a couple days in a row, so thanks for reading and here's hoping your new year's resolutions are going as good as mine!

hasta la pasta,

claire