Chris's Invincible Dungeon-Crawl, Week 2

So tonight was my second session with Ben's D&D group, and while there are many words that could describe how it went, "swimmingly" is not among them.

That may be a little misleading. The actual game was a lot of fun, and went pretty well. But my poor guy who's running around in plate mail trying to smack something with his talking mace? He had a pretty rough afternoon.

Liam, whom you may recall as my character from last week's installment, had recently hooked up with a band of adventurers called The Iron Thorns, presumably because "Those five guys who get smacked around by dragons a lot" had already been taken by another party. Aside from my dude, there's Gareth the Phenomenally Ugly Psion, Raven the Monk (previously discussed as a certified badamadeuce), Oostmars the Wizard, and Legolas--er, Caelzaer the Ranger.

It's pretty safe to assume that I'm the only one named after a character from The Big Lebowski.

Anyway, my involvement with the party started with a Huge Red Dragon landing in front of me and breathing fire, taking out a good 70% of my hit points and requiring me to make a saving throw against immediately dying of massive damage. In case you missed that, that's the very first thing that ever happened to my character. Fortunately, he survived just in time to have it happen again this week.

To be fair, though, it was a completely different color.

We found ourselves tromping through a forest on the way to someplace, with Raven--who just recently gained the ability to speak with any living creature--chatting up the squirrels along the path. One of the little nut-fiends warns us about a big green monster coming up. I want to know if it's big relative to him, or big relative to us, but the little bastard's already down in his hole where he doesn't have to worry about his flesh being singed off by acid.

So we continue tromping, and it's when a centaur passes us going the oppsite direction that we decide something is up. Way up.

We thought that something was a group of Ettercaps--big purple monsters that throw webs at you and sort of remind me of my Uncle Jeff at Thanksgiving. We dealt with them quite handily despite a few of us (Liam included) getting entangled by their webs. We winnowed their number down to one, and then a Huge Green Dragon landed right next to me and breathed acid, taking a good 60% of my hit points and requiring me to save against death by massive damage.

The Red Dragon last week I didn't have a whole lot of antipathy for. I mean, he was just rollin' around breathing fire while a kung fu master tried to kick his teeth in. That's what dragons do. It's in their nature. But this guy... Between the turning invisible all the damn time and killing Gareth with two shots of acid breath, the Green Dragon was a total jerk.

I have to admit, I do feel a little guilty about that. Clerics are essentially in charge of keeping everyone else alive, so it's sort of a personal failing that Steve's character got aced on my second time out. Of course, he was floating 40 feet above the rest of us, which is a bit of a jump for a guy in a suit of armor, but still.

It was about this time that I decided that in lieu of the "stentorian tones" my mace speaks in according to the book, I wanted him to sound like Richard Pryor. Or at least Eddie Murphy's impression of Richard Pryor. "That dragon breathes acid again and you can tell him to suck my dick."

Fortunately, Raven busted a move to shatter some crazy powerful jewel he was carrying, and Oostmars dropped a ton of damage on him with a couple shots of a spell called Horrid Wilting, and I was able to finally pull of one of my spells, a little thing called Harm.

What does this mean to you?

I killed a dragon, and you bitches can suck it.