Dec 29 2022

As promised, here's a continuation of the last blog post! This Christmas weekend, my husband and I spent the holidays with his family, so more DnD! Unfortunately, one of our players was sick for the first day we were in the area, and I didn't want to continue my campaign without her. (She did get better after a day or two, thankfully.) So, my husband offered to run a shorter campaign with the remaining players for the weekend, then we would go back to my campaign the next time we were in town. After some brainstorming, we came up with a simple scenario: defend a town from a band of orcs.

For this campaign, we had most of our party from mine in this one. Our Dragonkin and Gnome sat this one out, but my youngest sister-in-law joined this campaign. So, this party consisted of Milo played by me, a Human Animal Lord played by the Half-Orc from my campaign, an Elf Cleric played by one of the Elf twins from my campaign, a Human Paladin played by the other Elf Twin, and a Tabaxi Druid played by my youngest sister-in-law. Despite this being her first time playing DnD, our Tabaxi caught onto how the game worked pretty quickly, being able to roleplay and do combat with minimal help after the first session. I'm quite proud of her for that :)

We also had two NPCs join our party: a Human Barbarian which my husband played in a campaign run by a friend of ours a few years back and a Warforged Knight named Steve. Let me just say: I fucking LOVED Steve. He was a good tank for combat and I loved his personality. Here's a small conversation Milo and Steve had, just to get a taste of what he was like:

Milo: Oh, you're a goody-two-shoes, then.
Steve: ... Doesn't everyone wear two shoes?

Anyway, our first session consisted of us gathering info on the orc problem and prepping for the upcoming battle. The Tabaxi and Elf helped the church by brewing healing potions, Milo brainstormed plans, and the Animal Lord obsessed over swords in the armory. Good start. But no seriously, we actually did get a good start early on because the well in the middle of town had a Sword of Orc-Slaying. How convenient! Turns out my husband added that in since we kept checking the well and one of us had a good Search check when investigating it. He didn't intend to make the well significant in the first place. To be honest, I just found it strange that he labeled the well on the town map along with other key buildings, so I thought the well would be important from the beginning. It's probably the game developer in me that led me to that train of thought.

Later on in the campaign, my husband pointed out that everything in the first 3.5e Players Handbook would be in stock in the town's general store. That included Sunrods. Since Orcs are weak to sunlight, that gave me/Milo the brilliant idea of using those in the upcoming Orc battle. In order to test if it worked, Milo had the Barbarian tag along to sneak on over to where the band of Orcs was camping, lure one of them out, then assault them with some solar goodness. The plan was a success, so we ended up using Sunrods as a key part in our strategy.

The Orcs were a day out from town, so our Paladin proposed to have everyone attack the Orc camp before they could reach it. We all agreed, prepped for battle, and set off. Not only did we have our party, our Tabaxi also used Animate Wood and Animate Fire to give us a little tree stump and a couple Fire Elementals to help out. We joked about how she basically a whole party on her own. Anyway, we managed to kill off almost twenty Orcs during that first skirmish and caught a glimpse of one of the generals of the band before we hightailed it out of there. Though we managed to lower their numbers a bit, there were still a good amount of Orcs to take care of. So, one more day passed, and we prepped for the actual Orc raid.

Our Tabaxi casted Briar Web outside of the town's northern perimeter which helped damage a good number of Orcs before they managed to reach the town. She also created three Boguns to help out the party as well. Milo, Steve, the Barbarian, the Elf, and the Animal Lord defended the northern part of town where most of the Orcs would be attacking while the Paladin and the Tabaxi stayed at the southern side of town just in case some Orcs decided to attack from that angle.

Unfortunately, since we were short on time, we had to stop in the middle of this encounter. We're going to pick things up again when my husband and I are in town again, then we're going to continue my campaign after that. I'm glad that everyone had fun with this campaign, and I definitely enjoyed being a player again. Also, our Tabaxi wants to join my campaign when we get back to it, so that's cool!! Anyway, I didn't expect to make a Part 3 for this saga, but that's just how things go sometimes. My husband and I will be in the area again around March, so y'all can expect another DnD blog post then.