Session 1 of AD&D's I6 Ravenloft
AD&D 1e. First session of the module I6 Ravenloft, adapted to my campaign setting. Two of my regulars will be unable to join us, and we recruited two new players from friends, for a total of five...
AD&D 1e. First session of the module I6 Ravenloft, adapted to my campaign setting. Two of my regulars will be unable to join us, and we recruited two new players from friends, for a total of five players. One of them has only had experience playing and running D&D 5e, while the other has only touched D&D briefly, back in the 3e days. Funnily enough, he played through 3e's Ravenloft.
Module spoilers will be found ahead. Given that it's expecting mid-high level characters (six to eight of levels 5-7), I allowed the new players to create their PCs with 55k total XP, which is ~11k less than the next highest among my regular players, and rolled for magic items per DMG Appendix P. The full party is:
- Rowan, Human MU 7
- Henchman Freya, Human Fighter 5
- Henchman Rikka, Human Fighter 5
- Iskandar, Human MU 8
- Henchman Thorgisl, Human Fighter 2
- Bo'Bert, Human Cleric 7
- Elowyn, Elf Fighter 5 / Magus 5
- Nobar, Dwarf Fighter 5 / Thief 6
After introductions were made, we got right into it. They dismounted in the courtyard and their horses led to the stables in the back. They're led through the foyer, into the dining room, and begin to eat as they have a short conversation with the Count. After a few minutes, I kick the module proper off with the doors slamming shut, lights going out, and the Count disappearing.
A couple of them pull out glowing magic weapons while Bo'Bert removes an amulet of continual light from under his clothes. They set up a marching order and set out, heading up and discovering the accountant's office, where they have a rather befuddling, albeit cordial, conversation and push forward into the audience hall. After a little poking around, they find the secret door on the southern wall leading to a turret and a set of stairs, but they forgo these to move through some ornate doors into a large, 20'x70' hall.
As they move through the halls, they're set upon by a baker's dozen gargoyles, swooping in from above. Despite best efforts, several characters are whittled down, a spell is lost from damage, and general pandemonium is at hand. Iskandar uses knock to get the closest set of doors open, Elowyn tries to open with magic missile but a tail swipe knocks her off balance, Bo'Bert blesses the party, Nobar is attempting to train his crossbow on a gargoyle, and everyone else is fending them off with their weapons. On the second round, the party splits into two groups to try and mitigate attacks going towards the casters while Freya stands her ground and continues attacking. By the end of that round, Freya, Rikka, and Thorgisl have formed one group while everyone else formed a second group. The gargoyles ended up splitting between them in groups of 10 and 3, respectively. On the third round, Iskandar releases a monster summoning 1 as Elowyn successfully looses her magic missiles and Bo'Bert eases some of the damage taken by Rowan with a cure light wounds. Everyone else is doing their best to remain alive while in melee with these creatures. They managed to kill one of the thirteen gargoyles this round. On the fourth round, Rowan attempts to withdraw further away from his group while Rikka and Thorgisl do the same from theirs, both incredibly injured by this point. Iskandar looses his own magic missile and, with the efforts of others, kill another two gargoyles. At the end of the round, several manes demons form out of the shadows, and the gargoyles seem to break, choosing to flee from the fight.
Surprised to have made it through that endeavor without anyone dying, the party takes a few minutes to tend to their wounds and distribute a few magic items, before taking a set of stairs down to the chapel. After noting the age of the place and its apparent disuse, they strip the long-dead corpse of a cleric and Bo'Bert removes the Icon from the altar; being Neutral Good, he stands unsmote.
The party has decided to attempt to rest a few hours, just enough to get a couple of 1st level spells memorized. The general state of the chapel has led them to believe that this chamber is the closest thing they'll find to a... "safe"... room. Even if that simply manifests as a lower rate of encounters, it's better than nothing, in their eyes.
That's where we left off for the evening. I've not yet rolled the encounter checks to see if they make it through unbothered.
I recently finished my first run of Blasphemous (which took about 20 hours), a metroidvania with heavy Spanish Roman Catholicism influences. I'd been working on the game for a while on and off, distracted as I usually am by other games or my TTRPG hobby, but it was very entertaining, such that I immediately pivoted to Axiom Verge, another metroidvania with incredibly surreal sci-fi vibes. This run took me about fifteen hours, and was very much worth the $3 I spent on it. I really enjoyed the remote drone and how well the map traversal was integrated with the movement upgrades you got over the course of the game. That said, it felt significantly easier than Blasphemous and Metroid Dread, which was my first metroidvania, and I think it really needed some form of fast travel between either save rooms or bespoke rooms, because even when I knew exactly where I needed to go next there was a ton of backtracking; while my tracker says I died 20 times, at least a quarter of those were me using death as a form of fast travel to mitigate some of the backtracking.
Dispatch released a couple weeks ago. This is my first Tales type of game, but so far it's great, and the style of game is a logical evolution of the visual novel. I've got two runs of this game going simultaneously; one with a couple of friends as we sit in Discord and watch/collaborate with the friend playing it, and one with the wife that we sit and play an episode or two each week.
ARC Raiders also released, a game in which my friends and I participated in both the beta and the pre-release Server Slam event. In the time since release I've put in about 36 hours with them and we're having a blast. Even though I've never really been a fan of PvP (nor really all that good at it), extraction shooters like Escape from Tarkov have always appealed to me. ARC Raiders has a lot of nice casual QoL that fits the general vibe it's going for. I love the third person camera and how jank the guns are.
I have also been making some steady progress on Hades II, having defeated the final boss for the first time and working my way towards the actual ending of the game. Good iteration of the first game, well worth the money, though I'm a touch disappointed in the characterization of a couple people we'd seen in the first one.
While I've owned Vampire Survivors on PC for a long while now and have been chipping away at that one or two runs in a blue moon, I recently picked it up on the PS5 to play with my daughter, and she's been having a blast with it in both solo and co-op play.
Finally, I have reached Act 3 of Expedition 33, and... wow. This whole game has been a rollercoaster of emotions and is well worth the time and full price, in my opinion. Not sure how much I can properly convey without going into spoilers, but the gameplay knows exactly what it's trying to do and be; the exact kind of turn-based RPG iterating on the ATB system of Final Fantasy X I've been waiting for. Another game that comes to mind with a similar style of initiative is Othercide, a gloomy grid-based tactical RPG.