Many a time have I spoken loudly about my negative feelings towards Dungeons and Dragons. I’ve insisted quite brashly from a rather high pedestal that no matter the level of nerdy I may have reached, that was something I would never touch with a ten foot pole. Guys… I caved. I caved hard. I even bought my own set of pretty speckled purple dice with gold numbers. Now I’m looking at knit dice bag patterns on Ravelry. If you aren’t interested in my entertaining account of how tonight went, by all means, stop reading. However, I’m going to try to make this an awesome post, so I recommend you keep going. Also, as incentive, I’ve posted pictures and a video at the end.

Everyone, I’d like you to meet Iglanialethalia the level 2 Eladrin Paladin. At first I named her Igs, but I was told that elves favor names with more vowels, so I added a few. She goes by Igs for short, of course, because her name is pretty ridiculous and impossible for the silly non elves in my party to say. (That’s right, people, I’m roll-playing the hell out of this thing!) Igs worships the Raven Queen because, well, she’s the goddess of death and winter and how cool is that? She probably writes poetry in a dim, candle-lit room when she isn’t kicking bad guy ass, and I’m pretty sure if you looked, she would have pretty, black painted finger nails.

Tonight Igs and her band of boys (and one kinda scary demon girl played by Kevin) got pressed into the military. It seems that they have been taken onto an airship to help defend wherever they are from pirates! (Pretty much the minute I found out that the campaign that Gordon put together had airships, I was sold.) Igs tried to play it cool and remind people that she was a super religious type, and she ended up being type cast into the kitchen where she made biscuits. Deciding to play up the innocent she made cookies for her kidnappers to get better, less rusty armor, but in the long run they still threw her overboard with the rest the kidnapees into a pit of kobolds. (For those interested, I totally wanted to take all of their candles. If I had been thinking, I should have seen if I could have done that as an action.) At least they were given functioning parachutes for the fall. The battle raged and Igs spent most of it immobilized and on fire. It was kinda lame. During the battle, Ued[something-or-other], a rogue played by Josh, decided it would be a good idea to jump off a cliff into a burning room. For anyone wondering, it is never a good idea to jump off a cliff into a burning room. You generally catch on fire. He did survive though. Even with Igs being not mobile and Ued[something-or other] jumping into flames, the bad guys met a terrible fate. I think it had something to do with the other people in our party. Maybe the magic people with their big scary magic spells.

About then, the people in the room with jobs got whiny about the late hour and we decided to leave our poor characters alone in a now empty cave. However, one of the little bad ones got away and ran down a hall screaming, so, when we get back, they will probably be dead or something…

The absolute truth is, I enjoyed myself. Creating a character got a little tedious, and I’m glad I won’t have to do that again for a while, but the story telling was good and the game play went smoothly. I was pleasantly surprised. Tonight I took a leap and decided it was time to give the game a fair shake instead of snubbing it for no reason, and I’m truly glad I did.

These are my dice:

This is my character sheet:

This is my little character dude standing next to my dice:

This is James creating his character on Kevin’s character creating program (it’s kinda nifty):

This is the game board (ie: the Kobold Cave of Doom):

These are (most of) the guys:

Kevin thought it would be a good idea if there was proof of my playing do to my assertions that the game was bullocks in the past. (Just to be clear, I do not currently believe the game to be bullocks at all.)