Wednesday, April 26, 2023

Wild Magic

Inspirational song: You Light Up My Life (Debby Boone)

Finally, after something like three months off, we got back into our D&D campaign. It took a good minute to remember what we had done last, but we got there and prepared for the evening. The first thing that happened was we started to explore caves behind a waterfall. Our unpredictable magic user, who lost his spellbook in the shipwreck that kicked off this campaign in the pre-pandemic days, has a tendency towards accidentally creating wild magic when he attempts to do things that should have been super easy (if only he had had his book). Tonight, he tried to create light, so we could see in the tunnel behind the waterfall. The first time, the light he made was sputtering and dim...and he barely noticed that he had gone from half his original height (previous wild magic chaos) to seven and a half feet tall, taller than my Amazonian woman Miriam. He tried again on the basic light spell, and got it. We then realized he had turned into a bizarre reptile man, with scaly black skin and a forked tongue. Best of all, the rest of us barely shrugged. We've seen Boone mess up in such spectacular ways, that this one just seemed somewhat helpful. He is now big and strong, so Miriam isn't the only tank in the group. I'm grateful for that, at least, and the fact that his alignment didn't change. Miriam the lawful good paladin wouldn't have been so sanguine if he had suddenly turned into an evil type character.

It took us two full hours to explore one tunnel that was a narrowing dead end, and another that lead to a hot room with a hissing steam device powered by a dozen or so large men. We figured out a way to sneak past them to the continuation of the passageway, which ended up being a staircase where each step was about a meter high. It's going to be a long trip up it, considering two of our group (the two who moved to Minnesota this month) are characters no taller than each stair. Miriam will have to lift them up each step, one at a time. 

It felt good to be back in the groove. I was worried that it had been so long I'd forget how to play. Okay, not really, but I did think it. We played at my kids' house, so when it was time for Dmitri to go to bed, they just carried his sleeping body into the bedroom and tucked him in. Valerie stayed up a bit past her bedtime, but she was having too much fun to quit. It was a huge day for her, having ridden the city bus for the first time to the library, also first time, where she saw model trains and got her first library card. She ate at a restaurant and stopped for an ice cream cone on the way home. To then have her parents' friends and her grandparents come over for dinner and games was the cherry on top. That kid is living a magical life right now, and I am 100% here for it.

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