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.

No discussion topic this week, because I’m on vacation–camping with the family.  Please feel free to discuss whatever you like, and I’ll be back next week with a look at the Shadow Sorcerer.

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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=”The Montros Mansion”]

Annabelle had detected some transmutation magic around the silver bird statue we’d picked up from the jeweler’s shop.  She spent a few minutes over breakfast looking it over, and told us that it could turn into a living raven that we could use to send someone a message.  Tinka decided to hold onto the statue, and we stashed the rest of the diamonds and silver we’d purloined in a bank that Clo found down the street.  It seemed pretty secure.

With that business settled, we met up with our guide, Ginny Birch, and headed off to the Eldritch Groves. There was a guard post set up at the gates, and those two gnomes who ran the jewelry store were searching people as they left town. Luckily, Tinka had stashed the silver raven inside Androcles, so we got by without any trouble. I made some small talk with Gilliman, just to throw off the scent even more.

At any rate, we reached the Eldritch Groves without much trouble.  Ginny was a wonderful guide, and the Groves themselves were fascinating if a little disconcerting.  Some of the trees were blinding white, others were darkest black.  At one point on our trek, we looked up into the sky to see ourselves walking past in the opposite direction.  Ginny more than proved to be worth the cost to hire her when she led us around a sleeping hill giant.  And we had to climb up a cliff where a waterfall was flowing backwards.

After walking most of the day, we finally arrived at Montros Manor just around dusk. The place looked abandoned and dilapidated, and the front door was slightly ajar.  We knocked on the door, and announced ourselves, but there was no answer except for a group of ghouls who rushed out to attack.  We took care of them without too much trouble.  Annabelle was able to slow a couple of them down with her magic, and I carved one up with a Cloud of Daggers, while Clo shifted into something that looked like a giant squirrel with a peacock’s tail and wailed on another.  The whole group was on top of their game–the ghouls didn’t know what hit them.

Inside the foyer, we saw a chest, but when I went to see what was inside, it turned out to just be a statue of a chest.  Sort of a strange art piece, I thought.  We continued into the main hall, and the others all said the layout of the room was familiar from their shared dream.  But the place was an absolute mess, falling apart.  And there was an awful smell coming from a room on the east wing, which the others said was the music room, and we could hear something that sounded like animals inside.  I used my Mage Hand to open the door.

Inside was a pile of corpses, which appeared to have fallen through the ceiling from the upper floor, and more ghouls who were enthusiastically feeding on the dead flesh.  One of the undead creatures was bigger than the other and appeared to have snakes for hair–it also smelled worse than I’d ever encountered before.  The ghastly thing rushed to attack right away, while the other ghouls tried to circle around behind us through the house.  Wind was able to stun the undead medusa, allowing Tinka and I to surround it and chop it to pieces before anyone could be seriously hurt.  Annabelle, Shill, and Wind kept some of the ghouls busy, while Clo went to inspect the pile of corpses only to have two Carrion Crawlers spring out from the pile of bodies.  I was able cast Bane on the crawlers, which allowed Clo to avoid their attacks until the rest of us could put down the ghouls and help out.  Worked like a charm, and we got away from that fight with no one seriously injured.

Even though the battle had happened quickly, I suggested a brief rest before we searched more of this house.  In the main hall, Annabelle pointed out a blank wall where she said a door had been before.  In the dream, this door had to the dining hall, where they’d met Alistair himself.  Further searching the house eventually led us to a study, where a stone statue of a woman sat behind a desk, apparently frozen in the middle of writing a journal.  The page was dated over 20 years previously, and the woman appeared to be a member of a gang of bandits who tried to make this house their hideout.  The bandits were led by a medusa, who had slowly become obsessed with accessing the mansion’s hidden dining room in waking life.  We assumed that eventually the medusa had gone mad and killed all her followers, no doubt influenced by Alistair somehow.

With no way into the dining room, we continued to search upstairs.  In a bedroom near the top of the stairway, we came across the ghost of a young girl, Elaine Montros.  She didn’t seem to be aware that she was dead, but didn’t immediately try to attack us. After a few unsuccessful attempts at gleaning information from here we moved on.  Down the hall entered a study, with a large hole in the floor that we reasoned led down into the sealed-off dining hall.  However, as we went in another ghost appeared, this time apparently Alistair himself.  He freely admitted that destroying him would lift the curse my companions were under, but also claimed that he was in complete control of the ghosts of all the Montros Family. He didn’t seem to perturbed by us looking around the house–in fact, he almost seemed to find it amusing.  I found him to be quite smug for a dead man, but the idea of fighting 4 ghosts at once wasn’t too appealing.  We decided to try and find a way to put the Montros Family to their final rest before confronting Alistair.

In a small closet at the end of hall,  I found a dusty old dresser with locked drawers.  Shill was able to pick the locks easily, and we discovered 3 wooden carvings of the Montros family, clearly crafted by the same hand that left the wooden roses in my friends’ rooms after their dream.  Annabelle and Shirley surmised that these wooden figures might be Alistair’s way of controlling the ghosts, and that destroying them might set the spirits to rest.  We decided to test that theory by destroying the carving of Elaine and watching what happened to her ghost.  Shill lit a fire and through the carving in, and the ghost began screaming in pain.  Unfortunately, that wooden carving was taking a long time to burn to ash, and before too long the girl’s undead parents showed up to see what was going on.  It looked like we were about to fight some ghosts after all…

[/spoiler]