The problem, I think, was in my assuming that our first session, which was technically a session zero, counted towards the five session counter. I was so wrong, and have paid for any and all hopeful thoughts I had last week. Legitimately, I am cursed. Cardigan is dead.
The session began peacefully enough, with Gundren waking and our filling him in, followed by our return to Phandalin, a touch of shopping, and then our moving on to Wave Echo Cave. Inside the cave, we found the corpse of one of Gundren’s brothers, before we descended into the depths.
I offered to lead the way, being the quiet one, but that quickly ended when I was ambushed by an ochre jelly. Mercenary and Parvus sliced it into three smaller jellies, while I stabbed them to death. From that point forward, I was in the rear.
We proceeded through the dark until we found a room, inside of which were five bugbears. We killed them all with surprising ease, before heading up some stairs and encountering three more, along with a drow. The drow ran away, but the bugbears gave us some trouble, nearly bringing Mercenary down (a perfect example of a dice game, when three of a monster are harder to deal with than five of them). In the aftermath, we took a short rest.
The next room we entered, as it turned out, was the final boss room, which we had inadvertently fast-tracked straight to. We learned this when Mercenary, Parvus and Gundren were hit by a Web spell. A different drow appeared, having been the one that cast the spell, as four giant spiders descended from the ceiling.
After the surprise round where the spiders attacked the three in the web, I immediately dashed across the room, going straight for the drow (arguably the biggest threat). One of the spiders hit me on the way past, not a huge hit, but I’m hardly a bag of hit points, before I reached the drow. I went for a strike, and amazingly, critically hit. Unsurprisingly, all three damage dice I rolled were 1’s, so my critically hitting sneak attack did a grand total of nine points of damage. Now I was stuck in the middle of the room, wide open to attack.
The drow starting off by blasting me with Magic Missile. When the dust had cleared, I had lost 16 of my remaining 17 hit points. Yes, I had just 1 hit point left. If you know D&D, you can probably see where this is going.
Mercenary managed to get over to me, and kept me alive with her disadvantage imposing shenanigans long enough for a couple of my hits (including another critical hit where I managed to roll average and did a tonne of damage, as is proper of a rogue) to kill off one of the spiders, but then I ran to try and get away from the close quarters where Mercenary, Parvus and I were now clumped together. That proved to be a wise move (in a sense) as the drow, who had turned invisible to escape us, reappeared by casting another Web in that very area. He also sicced one of his pet spiders on me.
I knew I was going to go unconscious at that point, unless the dice gods decided to show me mercy. Turns out they hate me. The spider critically hit and got two hit points above what it needed to instantly kill me.
Thus, Cardigan died.
The others managed to finish off the fight, killing the drow and finding Gundren’s other brother, still alive. Then they settled down for a rest, and that’s where the session ended.
I don’t think I, or any of the others, made any poor decisions from a tactical point of view. Even my incredibly risky dash across the room could have paid off with a tonne of damage if I’d rolled more than 3 on my critical hit. Alas, the curse struck, and the dice weren’t on my side.
Now I have to do something I didn’t expect to have to be doing again so soon: create a new character. I have some rather disparate ideas, so we’ll see which direction I go. Maybe this next one will be the one that survives to break the curse, but I’m not holding my breath.