Attronarch's Athenaeum

RPGaDAY2022

#RPGaDAY2023

Rarder Brete, a level 5 fighter I've been playing for several years now, remains my favourite character. I've written about him during #RPGaDAY2022:

A lot has happened since then! Rarder died whilst fighting a horde of hobgoblins and cultists. The party charged into the throne room, expecting to face little resistance (since we've killed a hundred or so goblinoids in the dungeon by then). That assumption was of course, wrong.

Rarder pressed on, toppled the throne, and belowed out the challenge to the Speck, a nickname he has assigned to the King Under the Mountain. He was greeted by a dozen or so large hobgoblins, cultists, and what not. The fighter stood there for rounds, keeping attention on him while the others fought numerous other adversaries in the room.

Rarder, meanwhile, continues to face off against his multiple assailants. Striking here, there and everywhere, he drives them off time and again, but eventually the numbers take their toll, and he's struck by the cultist leader bellowing her warcry to Erkrou, the hairless one clasping a hand around his wrist, and finally the King Under The Mountain, roaring his outrage at being labelled alongside pitiful 'men', strikes out with his spear into the doughty warrior's side...

Speck drives his spear through Rarder's torso. The warrior, unaware of his fate, drops the shield, grabs the shaft with his left hand and pulls himself forward. His sight dims and figures start dancing around. But it is not sweat nor blood that cloud his sight. One last swing. One last act of defiance against the world. He leaves the world just like he came into it. Yelling and thrashing about.

The party recovered Rarder's corpse, fell into a pit trap leading through labyrinthine caverns, found their way out, killed a dragon (with Alf dying in the process), galloped to the nearest metropolis, and got bot raised for a hefty feet and debt to Gods.

Lawful characters have to vanquish an undead foe of equal or greater HD than their level. For Rarder that meant hunting down a 5HD undead; for Alf a 4HD undead. Luckily, Barrowmaze just happened to be real close. And that's where we've been delving for months (of real time) now.

IdleDoodler has been keeping up with the session reports, and the above begins with Session 56 report.

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This year. I stumbled upon it on Timothy's The Other Side blog, and thought to myself “eh, why not try it.” And here I am, 31 days later.

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Perhaps find a way to pull all #RPGaDAY posts into one feed. I assume most people are posting on their blogs, therefore they have RSS feeds. So there could be a “master page” which simply pulls those feeds.

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Anyone who feels that blogging or sharing their thoughts and experience is difficult. Small writing prompts like the ones in #RPGaDAY can be good triggers. It's all about the habit—start small and persevere.

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Let's roll first:

Oh my. That'll be a lot of art to select. Like last time, I'll share my recommendations in this post, in no particular order. Also, I'll limit myself to the books on my shelf.

D&D Rules Cyclopedia
The Lost City of Barakus (d20 cover beats S&W cover)
Fight On! Compilation +4
The Palace of Unquiet Repose
Petty Gods
Return to the Tomb of Horrors (only because it comes with the reprint of the original)
Stonehell Dungeon: Down Night-Haunted Halls and Into the Heart of Hell
Old-School Essentials: Classic Fantasy Rules Tome

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Rarder Brete, a veteran warrior he is, hasn't undergone too many changes. It were mostly his near death experiences that shaped his fighting style.

P.S. There were in fact more journal entries where Rarder nearly died, but I got tired of linking them all. His full journal is available here.

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FOR GOLD AND GLORY!!!

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Rarder Brete has seen many places, most notably:

And he happens to have a lead for a never-ending library...

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I started playing Rarder in July 2021.

Here is his first diary entry:

Although keep folk were thin on any usable information about the missing merchant caravan, bailiff did inform me of an interesting opportunity. One that involves hairy hands. He also mentioned me a group of newcomers that've been venturing to the valley.

Intrigued, I set off with a map from the bailiff and some useful pointers from local guardsmen. It took me longer than I anticipated, as the Darkwoods were indeed dark and thick. I eventually stumbled upon a ragged trio causing a commotion in the valley. Shouting and screaming, they were followed by an unsavoury bunch of humanoid creatures.

After I joined the fray, we quickly forced the disgusting creatures into retreat, killing several in the process. And much to my delight, these creatures happened to have quite hairy hands… I had to clean both my spear and an axe in the evening.

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Rarder Brete, my level 5 fighter in an ongoing OSE game by Idle Doodler, just survived a situation. You see, we were delving (as we ought to!) into some ruin that ratfolk (the most trustworthy folk) told us has a statues with rubies.

Given our level (Rarder 5th, Alfredward 4th, and Koko 4th) and numbers (almost ten of us in total) we were mostly steamrolling through the dungeon... Until we entered a chamber with a large cyclopean statue.

As we edged closer and closer we suddenly heard sounds of leathery flapping, followed by the most sweet melody ever heard by man. Three damn harpies charmed everyone but the chaotic cleric Koko and Rarder's wardog Attila II.

Koko forced harpies to retreat, and then devised a plan to eliminate them. He convinced some local cretins, a horse-girl, and Attila II, to assist him in the rescue operation. All while our charmed characters stood at the edge of the chasm and heavily sighed for their lost loves.

His bold undertaking was a smashing success, and we were back to dungeon plundering, ehm, delving. It turned out that Ioun stone adorned the cyclopean statue! Our first one!

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