Metharel Velenaedasr, elven conjurer

With Cincinnatus in tow, we went to visit the home of our initial contact, Kendra Lorrimer, who wanted to introduce us to somebody new. He was Metharel, an elven wizard from the university of Lepidstatd, who was interested in finding out who'd broken into the university and stolen the artifact (a plot hook for this particular adventure).

He proved his worth in our investigations of a burned asylum, and later at the raid that cost Edge his life. During this raid, he suffered nary a scratch from what we assumed was the protection of his robe of deflection (which are, in reality, completely mundane robes and he was just suffering from chronic luck). More luck for him as we later found a scrimshawed tusk among the loot in the place we were raiding, containing some quite powerful spells.

He's played by the same guy who made Tark, and has an absurd INT score of 23 (21 plus a headband of intellect).

NNNNNNEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD


Special hello-hello to the folks at Paizo that may be looking at this blog and a special thank you-thank you for the Carrion Crown campaign. We're currently in the tail end of Trial of the Beast and enjoying it immensely. Here's to hoping that our DM runs the next part too.

Cincinnatus Tiberio, Oracle of Battle

When Tark died, we buried him at Lepidstadt's temple of Pharasma. Spackle was especially broken up about this, since it was partially her fault that he died (the wraith wouldn't have returned to attack if she hadn't taunted it with an illusion).

So one of our main front liners died and we went around looking for somebody who could fill his slot, and this one weird gravedigger seemed about strong enough. Enter Cincinnatus, whose charming black war-mask makes an appropriate addition to our for-real-we're-not-evil party.

Cincinnatus is unusual in that while he's technically a caster, many of his abilities are geared towards battle. He liked to big himself up and throw swords and axes at people (yes, I'm quite disappointed that his shovel isn't a weapon, but whatever). As a worshipper of one of the war gods, he's all about dealing as much damage as he can whenever possible in order to please his god. Even if what he's fighting is a misguided yet weak angry town mob. Needless to say his Chaotic Bloodthirsty lethal tactics against people who don't stand a chance against him grate with Spackle's Neutral Nice nature.

I can't even use any bardic abilities properly against him since he's deaf. However, if that means that he can't get the benefit of my inspire courage to whale on some mostly-harmless villagers well then that's not really my fault, is it Mr Deaf.

Also, Edge is dead. He got eaten by a frankenstein dog when we were going on a raid. So now it's just me and Cassimara left as members of the party who have been there since Day 1. We're getting a little paranoid about that.

Wraith (formerly Tark Skulltaker, human barbarian)

Tark Skulltaker was our party's barbarian. Due to an unfotunate set of attacks involving wraiths, he died. Also unfotunately, when you're killed by a wraith, you rise as one seconds later, so that meant we had to double kill his evil spirit.

Wraiths are one of your standard D&D monsters for horror campaigns, when you want things to get a bit dangerous. We found one that had been killing kids and slew it dead, but not before withering away Tark and my pony Butterbutt. These monsters are extra dangerous because they not only hurt you when they attack you, they also drain the life from you (in D&D language, Constitution drain, the deadliest of drains). They have an aura around them that spooks animals, making it difficult for rangers, druid or just anyone who fights from horseback to engage in combat. Third, they're not solid, making them super difficult to hit. Spackle was pretty useless in that particular combat until I remembered I'm the one with the wand of holy magic and started whacking the wraith with it.

RIP Tark.

At least this means that the guy that played him is gonna get a second character portrait now. But not for a while, so that means I get to go back to doing regular monsters!

Valenmar (human cleric) and Edge (tiefling rogue)

Like most parties, we have a rogue and a cleric. Our rogue is a tiefling (supposedly, since he doesn't actually show any quasi-demonic abilities or traits) who specialized in knife-throwing, and the cleric is a human optimized for destroying the undead. Like, literally, we'd walk into a room filled with skeletons, he'd flash his holy symbol and boom. Everything's dead. The guy playing the cleric recently left the group due to the amount of stuff he's been doing, so that's gonna make things a little more deadly. We use my pony to detect when there are undead stalking us.

One more character to go now!

Tsar'goth Nou'ara, Half-Orc

Tsar'goth is one part team muscle, one part divine warrior. He's our paladin, and despite the half-orcness and the black armor, he serves Iomedae, the good goddess of Justice and Courage (her Greyhawk D&D equivalent would be Heironeous), and comes from the same temple our cleric. His thing is that his face is always in shadow from either his helmet of his hood, so nobody actually knows exactly what his face looks like, but we're banking he's either exceptionally ugly or mindblowingly beautiful.

Half Orcs are one of the core races of D&D, despite certain implications regarding to the conception of the creature. People normally play them as barbarians, since it fits so well, but I really like to see exceptions.

He's like 7ft tall, so Spackle quite often hitches rides on his shoulders to look around further or just because. One time we were looking for this woman that'd gotten lost in a moor and we had to roll Stealth checks to avoid being noticed by an interdimensional teleporting spider with a woman's face (I love this game). I scored a 30 on my roll, so I like to think that the spider didn't get a good look at me and thought Spackle was a tuft of blue feathers on Tsar'goth's helmet.

Also he's got a halo because Spackle is in the habit of casting light on his helmet whenever we need a light source. Why? Becuase she done gots herself a sense of theatrics, that's why.


Aaaaand with this one I'm totally back on schedule in terms of weeks skipped. Let's see how long this who being on schedule thing lasts.

Cassimara Raventhorn, Dhampir

Cassimara is the archer of our team, with an unusual combination of classes (ranger/rogue/inquisitor, I think). She hunts for undead with our team. What makes her unusual is that she's a dhampir, i.e. her dad was a vampire. Our team cleric is an "expert" undead killer who didn't notice this until she revealed it to us like three sessions into the game. It makes for an unusual team member since our cleric is pretty prone to accidentally hurting her with her energy channels, and always has to give her a heads up before he starts blasting things.

For healing, the first part of our adventure was pretty useful. We got these things called haunt siphons that are used to trap ghosts (think the traps for Ghostbusters). So we've got these bottles filled with unfortunate souls that she sometimes uncorks when she needs a little pick-me-up. She's never shown the whole "bloodlust" thing that dhampir are occasionally supposed to have, but I guess eating souls balances it out.

The closest thing to a dhampir in D&D is the Half-Vampire template, which is still a little bit annoying because of level adjustment things. D&D is rife with templates. I think Dragon magazine had a special issue dedicated to various templates for the offspring of the living and dead. Paizo did the Dhampir race, a much less powerful version of the Half-Vampire, so that you can play them from the get-go.

Spackle Thrush, Gnome

Spackle Thrush is a travelling juggler/joker in Ustalav, and friend of the now deceased Professor Lorrimer. She's still a young gnome, but her race is naturally inclined to travelling and seeking thrills the second they reach adulthood. She's not a combatant and is a firm believer that if you're nice to people, they'll be nice to you.

Spackle Thrush is my gnome bard for the current game I'm playing. Technically this is cheating for the Dungeons and Drawings blog, since it's a Pathfinder game. But Pathfinder is also known as D&D 3.75 on the internet, so I'm gonna let it count. I normally play super serious characters, so I decided to play a really comical, super friendly character. Maybe not such a good choice, since we're playing the Carrion Crown adventure path, which is supposed to be horror.

I really like the gnomes in Pathfinder. The problem I found with gnomes in classic D&D was that they weren't much different from halflings. They were both quirky short races, with halflings being a little more sneaky and gnomes being a little more magical. In Pathfinder, they definitely made gnomes their own thing; they're former fairies that got stuck in the mortal world. I'm not sure if Wizards did a similar thing to gnomes in 4th edition, but I know they removed them from the core player races (they've since been added again).

My favourite things about Pathfinder gnomes is that they're essentially immortal. They don't die of old age, but of boredom. Literally. They have something called The Bleaching, which means that if they don't regularly experience fantastic and exciting stuff, they begin to lose their colour and perky personalities until they fade away. Boredom is to gnomes what heart disease is to humans.