Dinosaurs, Zombies and Necromancers, Oh My! – Tomb Thoughts #3

Since my last missive, we’ve played three more sessions, bringing our total sessions to five. Some general thoughts first about playing a 5th Edition game again (as opposed to running it), followed by a break for spoilers and then session notes at the end.

Firstly, I’d like to say that switching from hand-writing notes to using my tablet and a Bluetooth keyboard has been fantastic. Eliminating the need to go through my notes and decipher them as I type them up has eliminated a major pain point. I remain a steadfast proponent of a shared player document, with a player or players taking notes as a great way to create an easy to reference record of the game. We play every two weeks on Wednesdays but skipped a date as it fell on Halloween and our intrepid DM’s birthday, but having the notes let me quickly recap the previous session when we returned to the game.

With our sixth session tonight, this is the longest I’ve gotten to play a single 5th edition character. I don’t know that 5th edition is my favorite edition to play, but I’ve still enjoyed it. Frankly, the best decision I made about my character was taking this Archaeologist Ideal: Death Wish: Nothing is more exhilarating than a narrow escape from the jaws of death. (Chaotic), which has served as a prompt for me that my character should be active and helping to push the plot forward when otherwise I might hesitate. Instead of giving in to the urge to protect my precious PC at all cost, the ideal reminds me that he should be taking risks, even, or perhaps especially, potentially deadly risks, which means Ordulin Bellweather is jumping onto the backs of Zombie Tyrannosaurus Rexs and rushing forward into trapped areas to test solutions instead of hanging back and watching everything from 120ft away to plink away at foes with Eldritch Bolt.

I’m enjoying playing a warlock, though the spell slots increasing in level rather than in quantity is slightly frustrating in one regard, which is that not every spell scales with level. It’s annoying to have to decide on using a second level spell slot on Shield, which gets no bump from a higher slot or taking an extra hit from a foe to save that slot for Branding Smite which does benefit from that increased spell slot level.

We played a session in a local brewery...

**Spoilers for Tomb of Annihilation Follow**

Crocodile Tears - Tomb Thoughts #2

Classic Axebeak illustration...

As previously mentioned, I'm getting the chance to play in a 5th Edition D&D campaign for the first time in a while. Thomas is being kind enough to run Tomb of Annihilation and I'm chronicling my thoughts here in "Tomb Thoughts".

We had our second session and I continued to strive towards being the over-achieving player that as a DM I want to see out in the world. Continuing from my player notes from last time, I also added an inventory spreadsheet for the group as I compiled my notes from our second session. Taking notes as a player reminds me that I really do need to set up my tablet and bluetooth keyboard and practice at typing on that as the most painful thing about taking notes has been transcribing them from a notebook to the google document.

Spoilers ahoy in the rest of my thoughts on the session, so if you don't want to take a chance of any Tomb of Annihilation spoilers, do not read past the break...

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You have been warned, spoilers follow...

Into Chult -Tomb Thoughts #1

Note: I have not read the book, so if my spelling of NPC names and/or locations is off, it is because I am taking my best guess at spelling them.

For the first time since the D&D Next Playtest back in 2012 or 2013 I've got the opportunity to play in a D&D 5th Edition campaign. Now, I've played a few 5e one shots, probably 2-3 a year on average, but I haven't had the chance to play the same PC for concurrent session in a 5th Edition D&D game since it was released in 2014. Since my darling wife wanted to play D&D with Dinosaurs (aka Tomb of Annihilation) but my DM'ing plate is full, we have tricked DM extraordinaire Thomas into running the module for us and three others. (PS. Thomas has an excellent new DM's Guild Supplement out, Mercy & Justice).

Since I've been spoiled with an excellent player in my online 2nd Edition games who takes detailed and copious notes, I decided that I should attempt to take notes for the group for our Tomb of Annihilation game. And since I'm taking the notes anyway, I figure I'll also include them here on the blog as well as giving my impressions as a player moving through the module and put it all together into these posts that I'm going to refer to as "Tomb Thoughts".

Photo of my character sheet for Ordulin Bellweather, sheet is Dyson Logos' Fifth Edition Character Sheets.

Now, since I rarely get to play 5e, I showed excellent restraint and only stated out a dozen or so potential PCs and only wrote up brief backgrounds for half of those. But since I can't recall seeing a Warlock PC in any of my 5e campaigns, I settled on Ordulin (Darvin) Bellweather, a Half-Elf Archaeologist Hexblade Warlock. I went whole hog on a terrible pop-culture archaeologist rip-off too, having Ordulin adopt the name of a Realms location that seemed the most like Indiana in my five minutes of quick wiki-searching and deciding to use a whip for a melee weapon despite the low damage.

Initial Thoughts after Session 1

I'll include my character and session write-ups below, in case you want to skip those. The first session went pretty well, we started in Port Nyanzaru and Thomas gave each of our characters a few hooks. We could have probably wandered around the city doing some exploration, but I probably pushed a little hard for our party to take the very first mission we heard about. In hindsight, as I wrote up the session notes, I could see how my DM experience led me to urge the party to take action and be decisive instead of dawdling, so I need to remember to try and keep some of that in check as we move forward. We managed to make it through the evening without fighting anything, instead diving into the factional intrigues of the Merchant Princes. We traveled from Port Nyanzaru up to Fort Beluarian and back, and so far the locations seem interesting and fairly memorable, though we have not seen much. The biggest thing that stood out, was that Thomas took the time to print out the Guide pitches for us, which made deciding on a guide much easier and quicker than it would have been otherwise. It was fantastic to have the guide portrait and their sales pitches to help us decide on the guide for us. We only played for about three and a half hours, but it seemed like we were able to accomplish quite a bit, visiting two major locations, having conversations with a half-dozen NPCs, getting into some potentially dangerous shenanigans and even plotting out our travels for quite a while.