Rowan Tree and Red Thread

and all we got was this potion of Dog's Breath. Sorry, Flame Breath.

Our Thursday night gaming group finished The Sunken Citadel last night, an introductory adventure for Dungeons & Dragons. It's a fairly standard romp against goblins, kobolds and the occasional bugbear until you get into the bowels of the dungeon and fight the Big Bad, a nutter druid who does nothing to fight the stereotypes of his character class.

This was sammywol's first brush with D&D and she's bearing up well, despite the pile of dice rolling, the peculiar rules and the endless listening at doors (she's playing the rogue). She has resisted asking the obvious question so far: why is my cunning rogue hanging out down a dungeon with this bunch of idiots instead of lifting purses from fat merchants in the nearest town?

Last week our merry band fought and defeated the nutter druid and made a nice haul of stuff, but we were reminded right at the end of the evening that we hadn't explored off down a side passage early on in the dungeon. We had the key from the kobolds and decided to check out what lay behind the big door covered in dragon carvings.

Lots of dust, and a troll. That's what we found. We could have left well enough alone, but no, we had to poke our noses in. We very nearly lost our fighter (played by marzut) to a freakishly lucky double critical claw attack rolled by the DM. 24 points of damage is not to sneezed at, even at 3rd level, and Bianca the fighter probably couldn't have taken another round of that. We had some luck of our own though, and my character, Grann Faloon the cleric, managed to cast a Hold Person spell that worked.

Looking at the rules after the fact, I see that a Troll is a 'large giant' and not a 'humanoid' and as such probably shouldn't have been affected by the spell. As it turns out he was really an elf who turned into a troll from some ill-advised magic dabbling so I feel justified in how it panned out.


Who knows where our adventures will take us next?