High Adventure Wednesday

I'll start with Wednesday. We hit D&D and started up the Savage Tide path. The crew is as follows:
John (both humans of course)
Satanos - a young goth lad. Warlock. whipping boy of John's other character and pseudo adopted ward of one of Wendy's.
Bill Grimm - a huge fighter. modeled somewhat after Caramon Majere and a little of Ben Grimm (The Thing). Trouble is, Bill's one of the smartest in the group. His "low Charisma" of 10 means John plays him as an uncouth brute. Too bad, he could be the teams unofficial leader otherwise.

Wendy
Kima - an elven archer fighter type. She's a wiz with a shortbow. Not your typical elf, this girl has a bad case of ADD and eats a lot. I mean A LOT.
Oreana - human spirit shaman. she's the big sister of the group. Looks out for Satanos and likely keeps everyone from arguing.

Me
Nyfel - Nyfel is the fat kid everyone forgets about, which is great, because he shouldn't do too much as a a DM PC. He's a wizard/cleric, and I'm trying out the "booster" archetype from Complete Mage. His only offensive spell is magic missile.

*Spoiler warning*
The first job given in the Savage Tide is to board a ship and recover a signet ring for the party's soon to be proprietoress. The group does some good research, comes up with a good plan, and then hire the loudest boatsman in the world. Bribing him to be quiet solves the problem, but their ability to be incognito is nil. They eventually do sneak up to the ship, though.

Unfortunately, both of the armored fighters get hung up in the ships rigging trying to board. A fight begins before they're even aboard. There's 7 pirates and a leader aboard. The party makes pretty quick work of the underpaid pirates thanks to low morale. When it comes time for the pirate boss, though, and the monster that's loose in the hold, things go awry.

No amount of buff spells can counter not rolling above a 12 for a group of level 2 adventurers. Bill's sword got stuck in the mast, and he had to use his javelins as melee weapons. Took him a little time to take care of the pirate boss. Kima stayed up top to help him, which left the three support characters in the hold to take on a melee brute; a rhagodeesa. Given tactical options, the story might have gone differently. Unfortunately, they were stuck in a 20 by 20 hold with one tactic available: hit it with everything you have.

Oreana cast shillelagh and Nyfel used enlarge person on her. In retrospect, he should have used it on Bill up top to end that fight quicker. Satanos couldn't hit jack with his eldritch blasts, and his other abilities are more utilitarian. Once we have a little down time, Nyfel will probably make a dozen or so magic missile scrolls for Satanos to use with his Use Magic Device skill. Unfortunately, the rhagodeesa needed a 5 or higher to grab Oreana with it's tentacle things and a 7 to bite her (which dropped to 3 if she was grappled). She was doomed if her back up crew couldn't come up with something. They didn't.

Oreana died.

Her scream finally elicited help from Kima, and she made short order of the rhagodeesa, but it was still too late.

We stopped after the team found the ring. We didn't role play out the encounter with Lavinia, but we will. The group took the money they earned and had Oreana reincarnated. She came back as an elf. Too bad, I was hoping for a bugbear or gnoll.

Overall, good fun.

• Bill's a strong character.
• Satanos needs something, but I'm not sure what yet.
• Kima can hold her own in, and, like Bill, she excels when things are right.
• Oreana has potential, but she's hampered by a low strength. With no range weapon her AC is pitifully low. To her credit, we were cutting produce flame short. She should have been getting two attacks with the spell, not one. Overall, though, she either needs a bag of holding or bracers of AC.
• Nyfel's just what he's meant to be, although I doubt he lives long. He's the type of character that picks the magic items last, and his AC will lag behind because he'll be pumping out scrolls whenever possible. With all of his buff spells, I'm gonna need to come up with some means of tracking when the effects end.

Should be interesting. Hopefully, the game stays fun. It's meant to be our goof off distraction so that we can maybe be a little more serious in the Cthulu campaign. We'll see if that effect works out.