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’s discussion topic is the Great Old One Patron for the Warlock class.  If you’ve always wanted to commune with the unfathomable  elder gods that exist beyond space, gaining forbidden knowledge of eldritch secrets that would drive the professors at Miskatonic University completely insane, then this is class for you.  The GOOlock is a character that has come to some kind of arrangement with such unknowable entities as Tharizdun, the Chained God; Dendar, the Night Serpent; or Great Cthulhu itself.

As part of that pact, the list of spells you can choose from is expanded adding a handful of additional spells at each level.  Those spells are: Dissonant Whispers and Tasha’s Hideous Laughter (level 1), Detect Thoughts and Phantasmal Force (level 2), Clairvoyance and Sending (level 3), Dominate Beast and Evard’s Black Tentacles (level 4), and Dominate Person and Telekinesis (level 5).

Beginning at 1st level, the Great Old One has gifted you with an Awakened Mind.  This allows you to communicate telepathically with any creature within 30 feet of you.  As long as the creature is intelligent enough to understand any language, you can establish a link to its mind.  You don’t even need to have a shared language between you and your target.

At level 6, your patron protects you with an Entropic Ward.  If a creature attacks you, you can use your reaction to impose disadvantage on the attack roll.  Should that attack then miss, you gain advantage on your next attack roll against the same creature before the end of your next turn.  Note that this includes spell attack rolls, for things like Eldritch Blast.  You can only use this feature once per short or long rest.

At level 10, your mind is further protected by a Thought Shield.  Your thoughts can’t be read by telepathy or any other means unless you choose to allow it, and you gain resistance to psychic damage.  If a creature deals psychic damage to you, that creature also takes the same amount of psychic damage that you do.

Finally, at level 14 you gain the ability to Create a Thrall of your own.  You can use an action to touch an incapacitated humanoid, causing that creature to become charmed by you.  There is no saving throw involved, and the charm lasts until it is removed by a Remove Curse spell or some other means.  You can only have one thrall at a time, and you can communicate with your thrall telepathically over any distance, as long as you’re on the same plane of existence.  While the charmed creature isn’t forced to obey your commands, you do have advantage on any ability checks you make to interact with the thrall socially, and it can’t attack you or target you with harmful magic.

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This week, we returned to the world of Eberron, where The Hayes Code is running a homebrew campaign for us.  We’re playing as members of a traveling carnival, who are also known to do a little investigation or espionage work on the side.

[spoiler title=”Cast of Characters”]

• Tinka, the Warforged Battlesmith Artificer, who performs tricks with the mechanical animals she creates (The Wasp)
• Wind Over Sand, a Tabaxi Open Hand Monk and contortionist (Wafflicious)
• Clo Fullia, a Shifter Battle Master Fighter, a bearded lady who also has a tendency to shift into strange beasts (Otto)
• Tano Lyrimasyl, a blade-juggling Elven Bard of the College of Swords (TheCleverGuy)
• The Shill, a Changeling Trickery Cleric who works the crowd looking for easy marks for the rest of the carnies (Josephus Brown)
• Annabelle and Shirley Fredricks, conjoined twins, one of whom is a Human Divination Wizard (Spiny Creature)

[/spoiler]

[spoiler title=” Research and Robbery”]

As we discussed this strange dream that everyone in the group experienced (except for Tinka and myself), the barmaid at the Freckled Frog overheard us talking.  She told us that Alistair’s mansion appears in people’s dreams every few years, and and those that have this dream invariably sicken and die within a month or so.  Suddenly, this strange experience seemed a lot more serious.

Annabelle and Shirley went to a local library and was able to dig up records of mysterious phenomena in and around the town.  They discovered a document about a mansion outside of town that vanished without a trace sometime during the Last War, apparently swallowed by the Eldritch Groves just outside of Arcanix. The house was owned by Edmund and Virginia Montros, who lived there with their daughter Elaine, and one butler by the name of Alistair.   The Eldritch Groves themselves were said to a rather dangerous place, full of strange beasts and shifting reality.

In the meantime, if any of us were to die, The Shill said that they could probably bring us back–but it would require the acquisition of some diamonds and other spell components.  Wind and I accompanied Shill to a local jeweler.  Shill and I went inside (Shill in disguise as a halfling nobleman) to get a look at the security measures in place, while Wind scouted the outside of the building to look for a less obvious entry point.  The Gnomish jeweler, Gilliman, kept all his merchandise locked away, even when we asked to inspect certain pieces.  Instead of taking them out of the case, he just conjured up a magnified illusion of the item in question–quite impressive actually.  I never even had a chance to swipe any actual items.  We decided that it would be best to return at a later time, perhaps when the proprietors were unavailable.

Our next stop was to visit an expert on oneiromancy, and with the Arcane University hovering over our heads, we were able to find such an expert with relative ease.  Dr. Pelling, a halfling researcher from the University was only to happy to talk to us about our shared dream.  It seems she’d been studying the Alistair Mansion phenomenon for years, and was quite thrilled to have actual victims to study.  Dr. Pelling told us that some of the previous victims had ventured into the Eldritch Woods in search of the mansion, assuming that if they could find this Alistair he’d be able to end the curse.  But none had ever returned.  She said if we decided to pay our own visit there, she would reward us for any information we brought back–if we came back at all, of course.  She also advised us to hire a guide through the woods themselves–one Ginny Birch, a dryad ranger.  As luck would have it, this ranger was a frequent visitor to the inn we were staying at.

With nothing else to do before nightfall at least, we finally went to interrogate that dragonmarked elf girl we’d pulled out of the University, Merryt Amastasia. I kept her talking while Annabelle used her magic to read the girl’s mind–which made it quite simple to discover that the girl was indeed a Thuranni agent.

After nightfall, we paid another visit to that jewelry store.  Wind led us to the back entrance she’d found earlier, and Shill used Pass Without Trace and picked the lock. I looked around for any traps, and didn’t see anything obvious–luckily Annabelle stopped me from setting off an Alarm spell she detected on the inside of the door.  Shill was able to dispel the alarm and we were in.  We opened a few cases, and gathered up a handful of diamonds that Shill thought would be enough to use for their Revivify spell, as well as a handful of silver rings and bracelets and one carved silver raven statuette.

I was briefly questioned by the police the next morning, as I happened to in the shop at the same time as the prime suspect, a certain halfling nobleman.  It was nothing for me to convince the police that I was just an innocent bystander though.  Luckily, the police left before the Shill showed up, with the animated head of the Flesh Golem we’d destroyed the other day following along behind him.  Apparently, Shill had done some graverobbing in addition to jewel theft after the rest of us had turned in.

We spent the next day performing at various places in town, trying to drum up business for the carnival.  I apparently need a little more practice withe the whistles attached to my blades, because I didn’t have much luck.  But Wind and Annabelle made some decent coin.  That night, we met with Ginny Birch, the dryad ranger, and the bound earth elemental in which her tree was planted, and hired her as a guide through the Eldritch Groves.

[/spoiler]