Last weekend, finally got a chance to play Descent. I've been wanting to play this game for ages. Every time it gets brought up, we opt to just play dungeon, or do a cheap D&D dungeon romp instead. The rules were intimidating. Pretty weak excuse for not playing something you want to play for the past four years or so.
It's like a roided up version of Heroquest. Tons of plastic monsters and cardboard doors. In many ways, it is superior. One of which is the variety of characters you can be. The rules suggest randomly picking them, and that's what we did. I got a battle specialized minotaur, Jum got a magic/archery/battle mix female tiefling looking thing. With a tail. We stomped ass all over the dungeon. It took about three hours to play, but most of that time I think was just learning how to do everything. I want to play again. Right now!
So the Champions of Cauldron defeated a pyroclastic dragon. Not surprising, considering they have also killed a lich, a draco lich, a room full of mustache twirling villians, and eradicated an entire thieves guild. How they bested it was the shocker for me.
Going into this fight, I was pretty sure this bad mamba jamba was gonna kill one if not all of them. They decided to chat with it first, which was a good thing. Slight chance they might be able to achieve their goal by cleverly lying to him. Seemed possible, they did roll enough to change his attitude from hostile to friendly. The lying part though... well he had a sense motive of +31. Not so easy to fool. Especially when you come in telling him you are gonna kill his employers.
The fighting starts, and the party wizard tries yet again to disintegrate. On paper, disintegrate seems like whoop ass in a can. Never seems to work though, after the ranged touch attack roll, overcoming spell resistance and save, the baddies get at least one lucky roll. I roll a two on the save, which is still enough. Now my stomach drops, because I can tell I'm gonna have to kill characters now. Lots of them, unless the Champions get really really lucky. This thing has like 312 hp, and breathes superheated ash for 14d6. Its favorite tactic is to bull rush people into the lava, then grapple to keep them cooking. Painful, very very painful.
They try to banish it. Banish is turning out to be a super useful little spell, considering everything seems to be extra planar at high levels. Knowing that only a botched save on baddies part is gonna save them, I roll it right out in the open. I roll a one. It was kinda weird, it was like everyone was really too shocked to react. Plus it was like the first round of combat. I'm thinking if this had happened a little deeper into the combat, when like two or three cohorts had been toasted, there would have been whooping and cheering like in the commercial. It was more like "huh, wow, umm.. no fricken way... huh" Awesome, utterly awesome. I'm glad after like twenty years, the game can still surprise me.
Also, that's Jami Gertz and Cameron from Ferris Buehler in this commercial rocking it with the polyhedrals. I guess it originally aired only a couple of times, once of which was during Saturday Night Live. That table looks pretty damn uncluttered for a gaming session.
I bought a couple of boxes of Dungeons of Dread, the new DnD mini set. Lucky me! I scored a hook horror, not accurately represented on the left. No, that over there is one of the damn coolest toys ever. Meaning I never owned it, other wise it wouldn't be so cool. This is one I desired greatly, but never acquired.
The hook horror seemed to be one of the most important DnD monsters to me as a kid, for three reasons. It had a toy, a whole bunch of them were featured in the cartoon, and I had the stats in the only monster book I owned, the fiend folio. Having only the fiend folio and the players hand book (both scored in a bargain rack at Kaybee toys) gave me a strange, skewed vision of how to play DnD. I had to cobble together the rules from those two books, maybe one of the books from the basic set, and an adventure written for the expert rules (Quagmire!). Occasionally I would check out the dungeon masters guide from the library, but that tended to muddle and confuse more than help. When I finally started earning enough allowance to start to buy the needed books, seemed like all of the ones I needed were never in stock. Probably because they were out of print. Second edition was soon to be released!
Another critter the Champions fought was a farastu (tarry) demodand. That's the scrawny little critter on the left. Four of 'em exploded outta some zombies. Not much of a challenge, but sure evokes some nasty imagery, very Dead Alive.
Not a big fan of demodand, just kinda feel stuck on, because they needed neutral evil demon/devils. They excrete yuckiness, and in the farastu's case, it is tar. This tar makes weapons stick to them unless a relatively easy save is made, all saves were made so I couldn't use these scummy little boogers to take away some weapons.
In second edition, when they didn't want to call fiendish critters demons and devils, they changed demodand's name to ghereleth's. The decision to try to disguise demons and devils always pissed me off. In a weird way, the belief that D&D was devil worship gave it a little more credibility. Something you might play with metal heads, instead of a hobby exclusively enjoyed by dorks.
