New year, new campaign. Woot woot! This time, since the next homebrew campaign our DM was planning wasn’t nearly ready yet when he brutally murdered us all, we are running (or, should I say, the plan is to be running, since you never can be sure what’s going to happen in a D&D campaign) through a number of D&D modules, starting with Lost Mine of Phandelvar. Naturally, that means this new campaign is set in the Forgotten Realms, and specifically, we are (starting, at least) in Faerûn.
Since our campaign doesn’t have a name, nor does our party since we’ve been together for all of five minutes, I’ve decided to name these adventures after my character (spoiler, his name is Cardigan Black). For anybody keeping score, I don’t have the best track record with keeping characters alive, so to say that’s a bold move is an understatement. Only time will tell if I’ve jinxed myself, or if the five session curse still has me in its clutches.
Let’s get to it, shall we? Our party, which has been together for at least one pre-campaign job so far (hence saving us from the whole ‘you meet some randoms in a tavern, come up with a reason for travelling with them for the next significant portion of your life’), consists of four individuals. First, we have Airina Rockseeker, our dwarf cleric. She is the cousin of our current employer, Gundren Rockseeker. Next comes the dynamic duo of Mercenary, the mysterious fighter who wears a mask at all times, and his companion (they’ve been together longer than the party as a whole) Parvus, an albino minotaur paladin. Both are followers of Tempus. And finally, we have yours truly, Cardigan Black, copper-skinned tiefling rogue, master with the fiddle, suspenders wearer, wielder of daggers upon daggers, and all around never-shutter-upperer. I’m going to pretend that last bit makes sense, which is very much in character.
We began on the road, on the way to deliver supplies to the town of Phandalin, when we found the dead horses of Gundren and his companion, Sildar Horwinter. We fought through the subsequent goblin ambush, capturing one of them and interrogating him. Stig the goblin told us of their camp, that Gundren had been sent on while Sildar was still being held at that camp, and that their capture was at the orders of the ‘Black Spider’, whomever or whatever that is. We then had Stig lead us to the camp, tied him up nearby, killed their sentries, and slipped inside. I would say we sneaked inside, but with a trio of heavy armour wearing stompers, I don’t think sneaking will be in my vocabulary for this campaign.
To cut what was a pretty standard dungeon encounter short, we were spotted a mile off, Parvus was washed away in a massive raging water torrent trap not once but twice, Mercenary cut off the head of the third-person-speaking hobgoblin leader, and his grisly trophy plus my ominous fiddling led to us retrieving Sildar without having to cut our way through the last seven or eight goblins. We then completed our journey to Phandalin while Sildar explained that Gundren and his brothers had discovered the famous and mystical Wave Echo Cave, and that Gundren had a map with him which was also taken.
In Phandalin, we dropped off the supplies, and also some other supplies we found in the cave (for which we given fifty, I mean, forty gold pieces. Yep, definitely only forty. Ten each. Totally fair. I also, definitely, only got ten as well.) We also learned of a group of bandits that had been making havoc in town, the Redbrands, and were asked by the innkeeper’s wife to look into their murder of the local woodcarver and the disappearance of his wife and children. Our session actually finished with my unnatural 20 Persuasion check failing to get us into the tavern they have claimed as their base of operations and the four guards outside beginning to draw their swords.
All in all, it was a good first session. It was technically a session 0, as we created our characters first before kicking things off, so a lot of it was flavoured with everyone finding their feet. The highlight was definitely on the night in Phandalin, when I convinced the innkeeper’s son, Pip, a small boy of about 8, to offer Parvus, whom he’d been staring at, a carrot in exchange for a pat. The carrot got thrown at me, but Pip got his pat (and earned another hour of minotaur play the next morning when he gave me some information that may or may not come up next week). Trolling party members is fun, and there shall be much more of it. And best of all, we didn’t die.
Tune in next week for the continued adventures of Cardigan Black.