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.

This week, we’re talking about a new Druid subclass from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, the Circle of Wildfire. These Druids revere and harness the power of fire, both for its destructiveness and for the regrowth and renewal that it allows. They form bonds with powerful fire spirits, allowing them to channel and control flames.

As you level up, your Wildfire Druid will gain access to certain Circle Spells at specific levels. Like a Cleric’s Domain Spells, these are automatically prepared each day and don’t count towards the number of spells you can prepare. For the Wildfire Druid, these spells include Burning Hands and Cure Wounds at level 2, Flaming Sphere and Scorching Ray at level 3, Plant Growth and Revivify at level 5, Aura of Life and Fire Shield and level 7, Flame Strike and Mass Cure Wounds at level 9.

Starting at 2nd level, you can also Summon a Wildfire Spirit that is bound to your soul. You can use your action and expend one of your uses of Wild Shape to summon this spirit instead of transforming into a beast. The spirit appears in a space within 30 feet of you, and each creature within 10 feet of that space must make a DEX save or take 2d6 fire damage. The spirit lasts for 1 hour and has its own stat block. During combat, it always takes its turn after yours, and it can make a ranged fire attack that deals damage based on your proficiency bonus. The spirit can also teleport itself plus any willing creatures within 5 feet of it up to 15 feet away. After teleporting, creatures within 5 feet of the space the spirit left from must make a DEX save or take some fire damage, again based on proficiency bonus.

At 6th level, you have formed an Enhanced Bond with your wildfire spirit, which increases the power of both your destructive and restorative magic. While your wildfire spirit is active, when you cast a spell that deals fire damage or a spell that restores hit points, you can add 1d8 to the damage or healing roll. In addition, when you cast any spell that doesn’t have a range of self, that spell can originate from either you or your wildfire spirit.

At level 10, you can use the spirits of the recently deceased as Cauterizing Flames. Whenever a Small or larger creature dies within 30 feet of you or your wildfire spirit, a spectral flame appears in the dead creature’s space. When another creature enters that space, you can use your reaction to either heal or deal fire damage to that creature, to an amount equal to 2d10 plus your WIS modifier. You can only use this reaction a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus each day.

Finally, at level 14, your wildfire spirit can save you from death with a Blazing Revival. If the spirit is active and within 120 feet of you and you drop to zero hit points, falling unconscious, you can choose to have your spirit drop to zero hit points instead. You then regain half your hit points and immediately rise to your feet. Note that you can only use this feature once per day.

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[spoiler title=”Players and Characters”]Josephus took over as DM for a new adventure in Eberron. The newest recruits for the Clifftop Adventurer’s Guild in Sharn include:

• Sly, a Wildhunt Shifter Druid of the Circle of Dreams from the mysterious and exotic continent of Xen’drik (CleverGuy)
• Cherri Bomb, a pink Tiefling Rogue (Waffle)
• Uda Haserrea, a Summer Eladrin Paladin hailing from the Fairy Court of Thelanis (Wasp)
• Petie, an Earth Genasi Ranger, who grew up in mostly Dwarvish community underground (Spiny)
• Scylla, a Half-Elf Genie Patron Warlock, who a found a curious patron in a back alley market near Morgrave University (Hayes)[/spoiler]

Hayes once again gets credit for this week’s recap, writing as Scylla. Thanks, Hayes!

[spoiler title=”Daanvi, the Plane of Perfect Order”]So there I was, tottering around on a train and extremely hepped up on gooffrogs, when we stumbled into the next car, occupied by a bunch more bandits and one halfling with some little trained dinosaurs. Seeing us coming, one of the bandits tried to take the halfling hostage, which FREAKED OUT the dinosaurs, and they started attacking us, too. It didn’t help that we didn’t manage to take-down the hostage-taker in time, and the trainer got her throat slashed – lucky Uda was able to get there in time.

Actually, it was kinda funny how she got there, like she covered the whole train in a single step. Must be a fey thing! The trainer lady was able to get at least one of the dinosaurs calmed down, and Petie managed to talk down the other with a well-placed trick that let her talk to animals (although I think the goodberry I tossed it should get some credit, too.)

Meanwhile Sly boxed in one of the others with a huge flaming sphere at the end of the car. That poor bandit ended up fleeing into the bathroom, and the sphere chased right in after him! He managed to get himself out just in time for Uda to toss him through a window that I accidentally opened with a stray blast earlier.

As we left the car, we ran into a halfling with a top hat who took one look at the scene we left behind us and was… surprised, to say the least.

The next car was filled with passengers cabins and beautiful music. We went room-to-room, finding lots of interesting people, including a group of bugbears trying to get up the nerve to head to that bachelorette party, a very committed train enthusiast, and the drunken father of the bride-to-be. (He looked rich and was obviously asleep, so I pointed him out to Cherri as an easy target.) At the end of the train, we discovered the music was coming from a Warforged with extensive musical attachments. Kinda nice to get a little breather!

Especially because the next car was a nightmare. It was the steerage car, people packed in like sardines, AND there were bandits, who started firing on us with crossbows and started a panic. We nearly got trampled in the rush. I think Uda actually did (it was hard to see much with all those elbows in my face) but once we fought our way out of the crowd, we were able to take out these bandits too without much trouble – and one of them was carrying the stolen authorization crystal!

The next car was a cargo hold, big doors opened wide, and that Khoravar with the green scarf was just preparing to make the jump into the manifest zone. There was no time to stop him – we were almost there – so we held hands, grabbed the crystal, and jumped –

off the train, down towards the river, and for a second the waves on the water were frozen in absolute, perfect symmetry –

and then we were through, sailing through the air towards an enormous, perfectly cubic, snow-white building surrounded by endless, perfectly ordered fields, and we landed. Perfectly.

Except Cherri, who managed to land on her face, but at least that was something to break up the perfection.

We proceeded into a large domed building, where strange little semi-mechanical creatures were busily toiling away and doing… well, really, they were doing a lot of working to accomplish very little. Mostly cleaning things that already looked perfectly clean. Ahead of us was a great clock, and within the clock-workings we could see a sphere with more spheres inside, moving around on neat tracks – a device of perfect order. The Quintessence Engine! That’s what we were sent here to get!

Too bad Scarfy and his goons were here first. One of them tried to pry the engine out, bent a clock hand, and got himself tackled by the little creatures. He fought back, and that’s when some kind of searing light blasted him to dust. Apparently they REALLY don’t like violence here. I guess it’s a little too disorderly.

Thanks to that bent clock hand, which was quickly taken away and replaced, we were able to figure out that these creatures hate disorder so much, they would throw away anything that was even a LITTLE messed up. So I conjured a mage hand and used it to smear a little ink on the Engine, and sure enough, they pulled it out and sent it off for recycling. Would it have killed them to just let us have it? Now we had to deal with the bureaucracy to get it back. Ugh.

They sent us (and Scarfy’s party) down 35 flights of stairs to the 27 th door on the left to the form requisitions department, where we wait in line to pick up a recycled object requisition form which we can then take over to recycled object requisition department and requisition the old engine.

Too bad whoever got us this ID crystal didn’t know what they were doing, because it had a name attached to it – a ‘Formian’ somebody who was definitely not any of us – and they wouldn’t let us have the engine. Luckily, Scarfy’s party had crystals, and Petie and I worked together to make Cherri invisible and practically undetectable so she could borrow us another. With a little work, I was able to jury-rig it to assign it to ‘Scylla Miller of Morgrave University’ and we were allowed to requistion the Engine at last!

Well, okay, we still had to go get it, which involved going down hundreds and hundreds of flights of stairs to ground level. I guess I could use the exercise after sitting around that train for so long, anyway. When we finally got there, at least we didn’t have to walk – there was a shuttle out to the recycling department, which proved to be unbelievably vast and very, very neatly organized. The little creatures took us straight to the engine, and as I picked it up, I felt a rush of –

pure order! Suddenly, I wondered why I came so close to being kicked out of the University when I could have just buckled down and applied myself. I realized my underwear drawer was appallingly messy and that I really ought to organize it when I got home.

And that’s when Scarfy and his crew showed up again and tried to take the engine from us. I was filled with a torrent of mild displeasure at the thought of someone attacking us without first properly filing a Notification of Attempt to Initiate Violence Form, and after Sly wreathed these disorganized bandits with faerie fire, I struck back with all the powers of Order. We defeated the bandits neatly, totally, and most importantly, symmetrically, and made the long trek back to our point of origin, where we were able to pass back through the manifest zone to Eberron.

Our contact came by in a handcar and picked us up off the lightning rail bridge, and someone finally took the Engine away from me, thank goodness. I’m still having nightmares about showing up for tests I’ve studied for and receiving average grades.[/spoiler]