Current Activities in DnD #21
We had a very smol thirty minute session one week as we worked on disguising the ship from the nearby nation we stole it from. Changed sails, painted new colors. But at a certain point it became a bit too much. I mentioned very very early on, it quickly became apparent that my character and our Paladin are the two big thoughtheads on this party. Our Warforged is still just learning about the world (and beyond) one levelup at a time and our Bird is highly vibes based who often starts her turns with the line “I could be useful or I could do something really funny”. So that really just leaves Dakota and Zaria. And losing out on Zaria just left me holding the bag for which route to take towards our destination. The type of route would essentially dictate our detectability from our enemies. If they scried on us and just saw we were out to see in the middle of fuck-all nowhere, then that would reduce the chances of them knowing where to send their minions. Go into the coast and along the river, then they can attack us that way. And then we had to name our new ship. Among other smaller decisions. Having this whole thing on my shoulders made me too uncomfortable. I needed the other Team Mom present. So we all cancelled early and moved onto the next session.
With a full party, Zaria was able to identify the spoopy skull at the head of the ship as a Merrenoloth, which is a fancy Ferryman type devil. I also made an attempt to help Zaria discern the difference of… well. How words work.
This was in character. Dakota scrawled a quick little diagram to which the response was, as expected; “These are the same thing. That one’s red, this one’s red.”
Dakota ate the drawing in frustration.
Zaria mostly wanted to just immediately go inland, give up the spoopy devil boat and just go down the river with our Folding boat. However it was a coin flip, given to our Kenku who had a secret moment with the DM if she wanted to manipulate it in her favored route herself or not. As of this writing we do not know if she actually manipulated it at all or acted as a neutral, indifferent third party. It landed in my favor, so we did eventually go the route I had originally wanted to do.
So we spent five days at sea. Clank and I progress our respective downtimes. He’s still trying to get music proficiency and I’m learning Elven. I don’t have any grand plan for learning that, just that being a Tiefling rogue didn’t really start me with a ton of options. Just trying to add onto it.
I’ve also flipped a little bit on the magical brooch. It’s something we’ve all had very early in the campaign but I can’t recall how detailed I’ve gone on about it. It’s something we got back in session three or so when we took out that very first cave boss before leaving the first township. Every day people can feed it a couple of their hit dice and get various advantages like charms or portents, which are things that mechanically exist for other classes. Divination Wizards get portents, it’s what I always make Gale do in BG3 because forcing enemies to fail rolls multiple times a day is hilarious. I don’t know where charms are originally from. Every 10-20 charges we put into it, it also evolves and introduces new effects and choices.
The entire campaign I’ve always been incredibly sus of it, but as we’ve leveled up fairly rapidly in the last couple months worth of sessions, the hit dice we feed it didn’t change. So having it eat my ability to recover in short rests made me nervous as hell, but we’re level 8 now and I could just keep feeding it my lower rogue hit dice since I prioritize the higher d10 from my fighter subclass anyway to heal up, not to mention stuff like Second Wind… And then I got a 20 on it a few sessions back and the DM used it on my behalf for a free crit hit against a hag during a session I couldn’t attend. Basically in recent sessions I’ve been trusting the process a bit more, but I did make the mistake of forgetting the fact that it basically ate Whistle’s ability to cast Shatter, which is pretty useful. So I play the downtime like a drug addict, really jonesing for the next hit, especially after I cross the 10 dice threshold and actually get a Familiar.
Dakota now has an imp friend named Nott. Not named after the critical role character but the Norse personification of the Night. The narration was brief but the DM described it as an old servant of hers from her past, but the entity was stronger then, so there’s an implication that it got a bit forcibly demoted right alongside Dakota. Perhaps as punishment for being an ally of hers. But a lot of this is conjecture. But now with a useful imp familiar that will now travel in raven form, I became a meth addict to the brooch. I even got a nat 20 for a portent which might have been useful if anything happened.
So a couple more days of travel pass and I slingshot myself over the next threshold of how much I have fed into this brooch. Now, unfortunately. It eats two of my three racial traits in trade for an Infernal Calling. I can summon a CR6 or less devil, the strongest one I can do is a CR5 Barbed Devil. It’s a bit of a contest of wills though, as I need to continually pass intimidation checks versus its insight or it becomes hostile to -everyone-. So I lost a bit of my stealth kit utility, I can no longer Detect Thoughts or do Thaumaturgy. But I have a grenade now. Yay. Don’t do drugs, kids.
We make it a few miles out from our destination, and four entities come hurling at us from the city. Gargoyle-type fiends with tridents. It was a fun fight, pretty intense. The big one dropped a Darkness spell on us which forced some odd positioning, and even forced Whistle to burn a Dimension Door to get out of it as safely as she could, mostly to support our werewolf NPC from two of the adds before she got gunned down by them. Zaria pulled a good move by incurring a duel which saved us a round of being hit; but not herself. Clank’s flow was a bit broke, having to burn the first round just running up the deck to even get to the fight. I killed one of the adds which hurt his following turn, utilizing one of his star forms but still had to burn another action to get close enough to do anything. But he later popped a faerie fire which helped negate some of the darkness. I also rolled pretty well, including a couple of crits. I’ve stopped hitpoint counting at this point of our campaign, I just know they were beefy. Especially with the revelation that the DM doesn’t even have an exact HP count for some bosses, and just letting the fight go long enough where he goes “yeah that’s about right” and lets us kill a thing. Our Bard also got two very useful counterspells in, countering two Cloud Kills which are big aoe 5d8’s plus poison. All around, everyone was incredibly useful.
My fiendslayer trait came in handy, allowing me to do double damage a couple of times. I got a gnarly 66 points of damage against the main boss and I became a major target of ire, which becomes narratively important shortly. I actually almost go down, getting to THREE hitpoints. It might have helped if I remembered that I had uncanny dodge to save myself some pain, but we’ve only been level 8 for like two sessions so it’s a toy in my toybox that got buried a bit with all the other shit we can do. Considering I almost went down I’ll probably make an effort to remember I have it.
The DM considered nerfing my Fiendslayer to only activate if I crit on an attack. However Zaria did bring up some points that Dakota is sorta turning into the party’s main DPS with literally all other players being some type of buffbot. Zaria the paladin can do decent damage with Smites but that’s a limited in-combat resource and she’s largely taking defensive feats. Clank is a bit of a hybrid once he gets the ball rolling. Whistle’s base kit and bard subclass is very much geared for support but the player is trying to grab aoe damage stuff as she levels up, and is the holder of the dreaded bombstick. Like the other two she has the potential to do decent damage but only in limited bursts with resources… But Dakota, sneak attack is eternal and last session’s buff to her gun makes her an absolute machine against fiends. After that, some of our damage comes from the DM-NPC’s that the DM brings in, usually to close a gap in our capabilities. And they’re all some form of temporary anyway.
The DM accepted this as a reasonable datapoint and is currently letting me keep Fiendslayer as is with the potential story beat of fiend enemies who will take Dakota as a higher priority enemy in fights. So I get good fuckoff damage against fiends but they’re going to start recognizing me as a threat. The John Wick arc has begun.
We also level up to 9. We’ve finally hit the next prof bonus tier at 4 instead of 3, and I take a level in fighter and fucking finally get my first ASI, bringing my Dexterity up to 18, which has huge implications across my entire character sheet. It’s not a flashy level up but very useful. Will go into detail for what other people pick up on the start of the next session when everyone outlines their changes.
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