The stage is set:
It's Sunday afternoon. My laptop sits at my end of the dining room table, my spreadsheets open and ready to go. My dice bag, designed to act more like a bowl when it is opened, is near at hand, several of the colorful polyhedron dice sitting out on the table already. I've got the small battle-mat laid out, with dry erase markers and two cases of miniatures in case there's a fight today. A glass of Mountain Dew rests at my elbow.
I'm ready.
In small groups my players arrive. They are Shannon, Mark, Pam, Ed, Diane, Will and Sean…but only for a few minutes as we greet each other upon their arrival, and again when we say good-bye at the end of the night. For the next nine hours, however, they will be Ithein, Rix, Verena, Tuon, Elmas, Reillithan, and Basil…the names of the characters that they are playing in the world of Riniel.
"Well, I need a recap. Does anyone want to volunteer?" I get no volunteers, so after a silent count of 10, I roll a d8. That's a die with eight sides. Imagine two four-sided pyramids that are attached at their bottoms. I roll a 6 and count around the table to "Diane, thank you for volunteering."
"I don't have a lot of notes," she begins, looking hesitantly around the table. "We were in mountains with a lot of dead trees and we'd just rescued Shannon's character…"
"Ithein," Shannon replies to the unasked question.
"Right, we'd just rescued Ithein and Ed's new character from the drow (evil dark elves), but we hadn't gotten her name yet." She finishes with a sheepish look to the others, who all jump in and help her remember what happened the previous week. She becomes more animated as, with the others' help, she remembers more.
"That's right! We were walking in rocky terrain with very heavy fog and got ambushed by some skeletons…"
"Six," Pam chimes in.
"…and a zombie. Some of the horses ran away during the fight. Basil went after three of them and…Will went after one."
Will grumbles something about no one being able to pronounce Reillithan and everyone has a chuckle, since he has trouble with it himself.
"My horse fell in a crevice that it missed in the fog and broke its neck," she continues. "Then Verena's horse fell in another and was injured, but didn't die." She glares at me for rolling 2d6 and getting two sixes when her horse fell, and rolling two ones for Verena's horse. That's twelve points of falling damage to one horse and 2 points to the other, though they both fell 20 feet. "Basil finally caught up to Luc's horse with Luc strapped to its back since he was unconscious from the kobolds."
Luc, Ed's previous character, had been a little too free with his magic and almost burned an extremely young dragon under the protection of a small group of kobolds. Kobolds are small reptilian humanoids about the size of a typical four-year-old child. One of the kobolds had beaten him into unconsciousness for his carelessness.
Diane begins laughing as she recalls what came next. "So Basil is walking his horse and leading Luc's to avoid losing anymore horses when he hears wolves howling close by. He hears a horse running somewhere in the fog below him and realizes he's back at the last crevice he'd had to cross in the fog. Then he hears more howls, even closer than before, and has to let go of Luc's horse to keep his own under control. Luc's horse panics and races away from the howls and loses its footing, sliding and then falling into the crevice with Verena's horse. Unfortunately, it lands on its back and crushes Luc underneath. Basil can't see through the fog, but he hears the horses running, then the growls of the pursuing wolves, then the screams of the horses as the wolves growls turn to snarls…then silence."
"Basil gets back, empty-handed, and we set off to complete our rescue."
"Thank you, Diane," I say as the players turn to me expectantly. "Ithein, you were sitting on the ground exhausted. Elmas had just finished getting you cleaned up and had braided your hair for you. Reillithan was on the ridge keeping watch. Verena, Rix, and Basil were roguing the bodies while Kur-dan watched over the naked sea elf woman."
"Ed, you're completely naked except for Kur-dan's cloak. What are you doing?"
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