With the release of the fourth edition books, there has been a lot of interest in starting up a campaign. Well, the stars must have aligned or something because we actually played tonight. I dug my old D&D books out for nostalgia’s sake. I found out that I had a sixth printing of the Player’s Handbook and a fifth printing of the Dungeon Master’s Guide.

I procrastinated as usual and did not create a character yet. So I arrived an hour early and worked with Mike to create one. I decided on a Tiefling Scourge Warlock named Hrothgar.

We had 5 players in the party: Jeff, a Devoted Cleric; Joe, a War Wizard; Jon, a Two Bladed Ranger; Mark, a Scourge Warlock; Susan, a Brawny Rogue.

Our first encounter was easy. It was on the road on the way to a city. All the minions needed was one hit and they died. But we had to hit them, of course.

We took the optional side quest. This was much harder for us. One of the special monsters escaped and ran off into the waterfall. There were a lot of minions. And they would hit for four hit points each. This added up. But we persevered and moved into the water fall.

When we entered the dungeon there were a lot more minions and a couple of higher level monsters. We were able to defeat them. And then a whole new set of monsters came at us. At the end, it came down to a die roll. The big, bad, treasure guarding monster was slowly being whittled down. But then he became bloodied and enraged and started dealing out some harsher spells. There was one other special monster. Jon was down. Susan was down. We finally killed one of the monsters. But, by now, Jon and Susan had failed two of their savings rolls vs. death. Both Joe and Jeff volunteered to save their lives. This left me alone with the bad guy. I finally have a clear line of sight to cast my big spell: Flames of Phlegethos. It hits for a lot of hit points. But its not enough. I have to kill the monster before people die for good. Jon is stabilized. Susan is not and bites the big one. I finally kill the monster.

But the DM retroactively made our unhelpful Gnome revive Susan…