Welcome back to the weekly D&D and Tabletop Gaming thread! Here’s a place where we can talk about Dungeons & Dragons or any other tabletop games that you nerds might be into. Tell us about the games you’re playing, speculate about future expansions, recruit your fellow Avocados into new groups, whatever you want.
Today I’d like to discuss Clerics of the Trickery Domain. Clerics who worship gods of mischief and trickery, such as Loki, Tymora, or the Traveler, are not necessarily evil, but they’re generally agents of chaos as opposed to order. 
The list of Domain Spells that the Trickery Cleric gains access to includes Charm Person and Disguise Self at 1st level, Mirror Image and Pass Without Trace at 3rd, Blink and Dispel Magic at 5th, Dimension Door and Polymorph at 7th, and Dominate Person and Modify Memory at 9th level.
Starting at level 1, a Trickery Cleric can use an action to bestow the Blessing of the Trickster upon an ally. This blessing grants advantage on all Stealth checks for the recipient for a period of 1 hour.
At 2nd level, the Cleric gains the Channel Divinity ability. In addition to the base Turn Undead, the Trickery Cleric can use their Channel Divinity to Invoke Duplicity. As an action, you cause a perfect illusion of yourself to appear in space within 30 feet of you. The illusion lasts for 1 minute (or until you lose concentration), and you can cast your spells as if you were in its space. You can also move the illusion 30 on turn as a bonus action, though it has a maximum range from you of 120 ft. Finally, if you and your duplicate are both within 5 feet of another creature, your weapon attacks against that creature have advantage.
At level 6, you gain a new use for Channel Divinity–the Cloak of Shadows. Using this allows you to use your action to become invisible until the end of your next turn, or until you attack or cast a spell.
At 8th level, the Trickery Cleric’s Divine Strike allows them to add 1d8 of poison damage to a weapon attack once per turn. This extra damage increases to 2d8 at level 14.
Finally, at level 17, your Invoke Duplicity gets a boost with the aptly named Improved Duplicity ability. Instead of creating a single illusory duplicate of yourself, you can create up to 4 duplicates. You can move any or all of them up to 30 feet during your turn with a single bonus action.
I like this subclass because it substantially changes the play-style of the class. The Trickery Cleric is not a healbot in heavy armor, or even an undead-targeted missile. Instead, it’s a got a lot more of a Rogue feel, though of course it’s still able to provide some much needed support. Casting spells through your duplicate is a great way to deliver touch-range spells like Cure Wounds or Inflict Wounds, and provide a great distraction for the monsters as long as the DM plays it right.
I took over the GM’s chair once again, this time running the group through the D&D 5e adventure “Forge of Fury,” found in the Tales From the Yawning Portal book. The PCs are:
- Gash the Furious, a Half-Orc Totem Warrior Barbarian (played by Otto)
- Slowclap, a Kenku Kensei Monk (played by Josephus Brown)
- Seraphina Lathander, an Aasimar Light Cleric (played by The Wasp)
- Oona Maku, a Half-Elf Hunter Ranger (played by Wafflicious)
- Fritzi Flickerfling, a Gnome Evoker Wizard (played by The Hayes Code)
- Edith Stitch, a Gnome Forge Cleric (played by Spiny Creature)
Josephus wrote this week’s recap, from the journal of Slowclap, the Kenku Monk. Thanks, Josephus!
[spoiler title=”The Glitterhame”]After sleeping in the orc barracks, Gash found a hidden door. It led back to the entry, so we headed to the hallway we hadn’t explored yet.
Someone found a tiny secret door, we pried it open, and found what Fritzi said looked like a magic-user’s quarters. It looked like they’d packed up in a hurry, probably after we smashed our way through the rest of the dungeon, so she couldn’t find anything interesting. I picked the lock on the door leading out and we found a long, narrow room, with a door at one end surrounded by charred orc skeletons, and a stairwell going straight down in the middle.
Stirges burst up out of the stairwell in the middle of the room. They swarmed us, and several of us got spiked by the stirges as they tried to drink our blood. 
Oona found that the door at the far end was trapped, and the dead orcs definitely backed that up. Fritzi got it open from a distance, and the far end filled with liquid fire. Once it cleared we could see that behind the door was just a small chamber with a mechanism that was resetting the trap and closing the door.
Gash rammed herself into the doorway to keep it open, and i dove and slid past her and cut the rope holding the counterweight up. We heard the mechanism inside the walls crash and it didn’t reset. Turned out to be a dead end. Damn clever dwarves.
We head down the stairs and find the tunnel opens up into a vast chamber with a stream cutting through it.
I get swarmed by stirges attracted by my candle. It’s terrible being the only humanoid without dark vision. We fight them off and Gash and Fritzi decide to see if the stream is the same one that crossed the stairs before. Fritzi makes a little boat out of ice, and sends her familiar down the stream in it. She says there’s a little alcove in there. The two of them head in and after a moment we hear lots of orcish swearing and Gnomish screaming. Turns out there were more stirges. Seraphina charges in, but we hear a splash and she immediately comes floating back down. A few of us manage to get up the swift running stream to help. Fighting in that tiny tunnel with a stream running through it is awkward as hell.
Pressing on we find what looks like maybe some kind of Dwarven crypt? It’s on a big ledge overlooking some kind of mushroom forest or something. Seems like a weird place to stick corpses, but I’m not gonna judge.
Some of us manage to make out some of the inscriptions on a few of the sarcophagi. They’re:
- Borgol the Old
- Gharin Orc-Doom
- Numik the Unlucky
Some of the less religious of us decide to poke through the coffins. Gash is incredibly disappointed to only find Dwarf bones at first, but they come away with a very special looking axe and a few pieces of jewelry. Edith seems really excited by these finds. Me, I mostly look out over the cliff and enjoy the view. Kenku get enough stereotyping as being obsessed with shiny things as it is, so I’d rather not get involved unless the skeletons decide to try something.
Next we head into the mushrooms. We check out a small side tunnel. While everybody else is mapping out where we think it might lead, I damn near slip on some moss and end up in the stream again. We find stairs down, but figure we should probably explore the rest of this place first.
We head for a big iron door at the end of the mushroom forest room. Suddenly a bunch of gross tentacled things that had been camoflagued against the stone of the cliff above us attack. Someone yells “Gricks!”
Seraphina summons a big hammer and smashes one, and Oona squeezes off a good shot with an arrow. Most of them are up too high for me to hit so I lash at one with my whip and just barely catch it, then I climb up the cliff after it, and nail the thing hard right between the… Do they have eyes? I dunno. It definitely looked like I kicked it somewhere important. Fritzi pops one good with a blast of fire, killing it, and then Gash comes bounding up the cliff after me, looking surprisingly nimble. Then she dives down at one of the other monsters on the cliff face, swinging her axe and screaming. She misses and just sails past to the ground, though she manages to take a big chunk out of the floor.
The remaining two come after us now. One of them charges me but misses, and the other dives down after Gash.
Seraphina and Oona mange to take some pieces out of them, but not much, I land a few hits and punches on the one fighting me but it just seems so damn hard to break through their hides. Meanwhile Edith and Fritzi let loose with a pair of giant blasts that completely miss but leaves the cliff charred and smoking.
It’s looking bad when both of them manage to catch me and Gash with their tentacles. Especially when they follow that up with taking a giant bite out of each of us. But I’m a much smaller meal than Gash so its looking like I’m not gonna make it. Oona and Seraphina do their best to bring them down but the horrible things keep hanging on. In desperation I lash out at the one fighting me and manage to punch right through its hide. I’m dizzy, I’m bleeding out, and I’m on the edge of a cliff. Down below, the last one has its tentacles around Gash.
I decide to dive down after it. I definitely didn’t just get vertigo and lose my footing and come down on it, killing it with sheer luck. No sir. Long story short, next thing I know is the thing is dead. Everyone decides that maybe we should pack up and get some rest before we press on. At least, I think that’s what they decided. Mostly I could just hear my own heartbeat in my ears before I fell over.[/spoiler]