We are in the middle of our 6th lockdown.  looking for anything to do that keeps us in human contact.  With no gatherings of any sort allowed physically one of the Monday Knights offered to GM some D&D.   For me the last time I picked up D&D was in 3rd Ed. I sort of looked at 3.5 but didn’t play any of it. However I have a lot of AD&D from 2nd Ed, and everything for 3rd ed.    All the players at some point played 3rd ed as well, one had done some 3.5. so it is a very long time in-between drinks as it goes.  The thing to note is none of us had played 4th Ed.

Our task was to create characters for a one off for a Dungeon Dive, and we are doing it all online.

Firstly, let me say this the online tools are amazing.  D&D Beyond to managing your character sheet setting up party etc. is awesome.  no more paper and pen.   This tool alone makes it really enjoyable. With a free account you get the basic rules, as long as the GM has everything they need like in books you are good to go.

We are also using Roll20, because the GM has used this before it make it easier for him, and that is also what he purchased the adventure in.

These two are not the only two tools you can use, there are many more out there, but for me coming back it is amazing. I played in the time of describing everything and using imagination, I missed the maps and minis expansions.  Though some of  those mini’s do look amazing.

Now with everything being vertical it is far easier to get interested and quick and easy for us to get going.

So as we got organised created characters, and started to get setup we were off to white plume mountain.

White Plume Mountain – Our first Dungeon

Our first dive went for 4 Sessions.  Tasked with recovering 3 magic items for their owners, we were off and running.

The Party consisted of:

Fighter (mad keen archery skills, dealer of death and hater of halflings)

Rouge (we are still working out what they do best, hides and waits for backs to be turned)

Cleric (Keeping the Rouge alive, and fixing any problem along the way)

Druid/Barbarian (Myself tasked with taking all the damage, who is also a halfling)

Act 1: Blackrazor.

We didn’t mess around we followed the clues in the poem and started looking for weapons, first course of action as to always turn left. We had the ambush, of ghouls and tunnel that makes metal hot.  Finally the upside down Ziggurat. now instead of fighting our way down, we just smashed each level ontop of it’s self and let monsters fight it out, before we burnt what was left from far, far away.  We get to where Blackrazor is and recover it, that is where we meet our first boss, but at this time it was simply a halfling, which our trusty Fighter claims he accidently shot in the back of the head as the halfling was leading us to some sort of underground floating river. Well the fight was on, but it was a Big Blue Ogre Genie mage thing.  So we beat the snot out of it…

(Count Fighter Shooting a Halfling: 1)

Phew, we made it through the first part and well now we have part of the job done, we figure this was the only item on our check list in this part of the dungeon so we head back to our starting parts.

Act 2: Wave

This part things got interesting…   our Rouge fell in the water where some seaweed, siren song creature was making him thing he was fine, all while slowly drowning. When the cleric when to save him, he fell in.. Funny how a guy in armour can’t swim real well..  and two of us shooting arrows at everything.

We eventually won the fight, recovered our two hero’s and let them recover.  Stumbling along we found room full of globes that we smashed had some small fights, then found a giant crab…..

After some time of fumbling around we cracked him open and got out the butter sauce for a feast.. and we recovered the weapon….

Act 3: Whelm

On our way back from Wave, we did find the drain hole, and we drained the dungeon.  This was great, until we stumbled upon a Green Ooze.. when I say stumbled upon I mean our rouge who was looking for things in front of us and then waving us along didn’t see it….   then proceeded to cut bits off to make smaller oozes.   Moving on we ran into the Golems, where the puzzle was solved in a couple of seconds.   We find our selves at a boiling mud pit, where our acrobatic rouge though he could just jump across it all, however you can only win on so many dice throws.  So our rouge landed face first in the boiling mud..    The Druid takes to eagle form and flies on to save the rogue and then transports everything and body across the boiling mud lake.

This is where we find, a room that is dark, like magically dark…

The cleric pops in his head and well that is when it is discovered it is vamp…

The cleric retrieves him self with some clever use of spells, and the right starts, or it should but the fighter is focused on some rats that seem to have come from behind.  He misses the part where the vampire comes up to him, and charms him, where the fighter starts shooting at the halfling and not missing.

(Count Fighter Shooting a Halfling: 5)

Yep four turns of it… before the rouge worked out that the sword goes in it’s back, for a truly epic amount of damage, and then the cleric unleashed the wrath of what ever god he follows and the vamp is defeated, we recover Whelm and head on out.

However that is not the end, see we get asked to go to some centre of employment by the mad mage that runs the place.  We are not real keen so we end up fighting some Efreeti.  This took some time, the Druid when Bear, and out of bear from in a single hit, the cleric kept the healing up while he fought two, and the Rouge and fighter took care of one, then came back to fix the other two.

upon defeating them we got out, returned the weapons and got the gold.

Conclusion

Overall it was great to get back in to D&D, this reminded me why I like playing in the first place, however the power creep in 3-3.5 was terrible, 5e has kept a lid on that, I like the game for that.  We were clearly light on the roleplay more on the smashing things, but that suits our group. The online tools make it easy to get going and track everything.

We all like it so much that we are into the next dungeon. Dead in Thay, this is a truly epic looking dive.  I do have to remember to take more screenshots as we go, but sometimes I just forget.

I would thank our GM, Snowflake a fellow Monday Knight that runs our Battletech comps, for running this and the next dungeon.