Rumors of War

I’ve neglected to write much about our 5e campaign.

Which is not fair. I’ve been having a good time.

You may have gathered from what I’ve written before, that I’m playing a Necromancer. And that the 5e Wizard sucks. I find myself in much the same position as I did playing a 4e Binder. I’m playing — again — what is effectively a Controller, and my spell attacks scarcely if ever, connect.

My character is more openly villainous this time around.

In our first game session, we protected a village from a goblin attack. What with the villagers’ shock and all, I convinced them to let me handle burial of guards lost during the attack. I squirreled away the corpses in an abandoned shack.

*shrug* It’ll be easier than digging them up later.

I insisted that we needed henchmen to fill our ranks, and I spearheaded the search for some viable recruits. We learned of a hunting lodge some ways from the village, where we could find some gnome retirees willing to join us.

Along the way, we encountered a dull-witted ogre. Our fighter fast-talked the brute into wandering away rather than trying to eat us.

A little later, we got into a fight with some skeletons that were not interested in being fast-talked. I nearly died when I tried to engage the skeletons in melee. I had used up all my spells the previous week, defending the village.

Incidentally, I had also nearly died in the goblin attack.

We made it to the hunting lodge, and I convinced several of the gnomes to accompany us on an “ogre hunt,” as a sort of henchmen try-out. Our second session ended there, and we began with the ogre hunt the following week.

In our third session, we killed some ogre for sport (the henchmen performed admirably and so I hired them), and we finally set foot in our dungeon.

There was a wight waiting for us.

Actually, the wight put up a pretty good fight. It traumatized our fighter with its “bad touch,” I think the 5e rules have its life drain reduce a character’s maximum hit points (however temporarily) in addition to dealing damage.

Once we got into the dungeon behind the wight, we found another wight waiting. This one was more easily dispatched, I think in part because we were rolling a little better. We fought our way down a little hallway, and I think we closed that session with an ettin fight. Remarkably, no one was seriously injured.

Our fourth session was occupied entirely by one fight and the aftermath.

We stepped into a room where some dark elves were fighting a ragtag bunch of misfits: among them a tiefling, a ranger, a druid, a cleric, and an elf.

Our party ultimately sided with the misfits, and together we killed all but one of the dark elves — the survivor is now our fighter’s pet.

We then entered some pretty tense negotiations with the misfit group. I used the Thaumaturgy cantrip to signal to our cleric, who led the negotiations, since my character was the only one capable of discerning lies.

It all turned out in the end, we led the group to the surface and I had them eating out of the palm of my hand. I have plans for that tiefling warlock.

Then last week, we hammered away at three encounters: a couple of fights with animated suits of armor and helmed horrors, and an encounter with a couple of large water elementals. We were incredibly lucky in that last fight.

Either of the elementals could have swatted us down with one hit — the fighter being perhaps the only exception — but by that point we had found a strategy that gave our entire front line a defensive advantage.

Our fighter could impose a disadvantage on the elementals’ attacks to adjacent allies. The henchmen didn’t provide the most reliable damage, but they did occupy the elementals’ attention. Our characters hit 4th level.