This is sort of long...sorry.


Alrighty, I am going to attempt to chronicle my first dungeons and dragons campaign in over 20 years.  I am calling it Dies Irae or day of wrath.  We will be using AD&D second edition in a slimmed down form.  Many of the players wanted to bring in their favorite specialty books once they found out the format was going to be second edition.  For those of you that don't remember, there were MANY MANY supplements to 2nd edition.  So many that I felt a bit overloaded and decided to just have the players role play whatever specialty class they wanted to use and I figured after we got a few sessions under our belts I could transition characters over to those specialty classes.  We will see how that goes.

Player creation.  I wanted the characters to roll up something that would be playable.  I figure we are doing epic heroic fantasy so we should get some characters with good stats.  Roll playing an epic fighter with a strength of 8 may be humorous, epic it probably wont be.  So we rolled 4d6 discarding the lowest die seven times and discarding the lowest set and arrange to taste.  Further I allowed a 2 for 1 bump letting characters add 1 to a single stat if they removed 2 points from another stat with the assumption that you would roll play any deficiency that you created.  So if you made CHA a dump stat you would be expected to role play that stat.  All of this to say we ended up with some fairly good stats to be assigned.  We ended up with the following classes.
Gorson- Human cleric of lathander played by Jim
Orderor Tigersoul a human monk played by Dave
Ravan the Elf Ranger played by JJ
Carlos the Human Paladin of Tyr played by Justin
Tharquin the half elf cleric magicuser played by Ryan
Torn the Human fighter played by norm
Spitz the human wizard played by Marcus
Fjords Ulfson the human barbarian played by Jef

The setting in forgotten realms over 1000 years after the War of the Gods or the Time of troubles.  For those of you that don't know, the war of the gods had the gods of the realms walking the earth and waging a war of good vs evil.  Good triumphed but at a horrific cost.  What the players see around them are the temples of good falling into disrepair as fewer and fewer attendees worship at their temples.  The gods of neutrality are flourishing and the gods of evil are also seemingly absent.  The Paladin is a follower of Tyr which is a lawful good god but what he finds is that his "order of the sword" is really made of fighters who follow the old rituals of paladin hood but are not actually able to cast spells, detect evil or turn undead.  They know the rituals but the power from their Deity just doesn't seem to flow.  The town of waterdeep is falling into decay.  About half of the buildings are abandoned and those that are occupied are mostly run down and ill repaired.  The lords of waterdeep long ago were swept aside for a single lord who rules by decree.  Picture the soviet bloc during the cold war and you have an idea of what I was going for.

The party met in the Yawning Portal Inn.  This Inn was once an entrance into a vast dungeon beneath the city of waterdeep. That dungeon called the under halls was long ago swept clean and sealed up by an ancient archmage named Roland.  The Portal or well in the center of the inn is still there but a few meters below ground level there is a barrier of radiant energy that the party was warned to not try to touch.  Anything dropped into the barrier vanishes in a puff of smoke and vapor.

The party learns it is illegal to be homeless within 50 miles of the city and they will have to come up with about 1 gold piece per day to survive.  The Yawning portal inn is the home of the adventurers guild and as such they have access to many sources of work.  They could hire themselves out as caravan guards or perhaps as guards to any of the local merchants.  After a few days of getting their gear together they are approached by someone who identifies himself as Old Pete.  Pete has been told to get the party to come see Blackbart.  Bart is a merchant prince who lives in a mansion shaped like a sailing ship.  They are also approached by a hugely fat eunuch who is a servant of Hlethveg, another merchant prince in the city.  After a series of conversations with the two merchants they decide to take a job with Hlethveg.  He requires them to take a book to a distant monastery to be illuminated by the monks.

It was going to  take 10 days of travel to get to the monastery.  On the 7th day they were overrun with small animals they were fleeing from what could only be described as a zombified cougar.  Gorson bravely presented his holy symbol in an effort to turn the creature but nothing seemed to happen.  The cougar slammed into the warrior Torn and proceeded to chew on him..After a successful bite on the warrior I asked Norm to roll a saving throw which he failed.  The party dispatched the cougar and proceeded on the way to the monastery.  A few hours later Torn begins to get sick and feel generally ill.  Realizing he has been poisoned or diseased by the cougar the Paladin attempts to cure the disease.  Remember that the gods have seemingly turned away from their worshipers and no paladin has successfully cured anything for centuries but I allowed the attempt.  I rolled to see if his attempt was possible and I got a 00 on percentile dice.  I figured this should be a good omen and allowed the cure to go through but with some ailing side effects.  Torn lost a d4 from his constitution but he would now live to fight another day.

The party approaches a small village that is on their line of march to the monastery and they begin to smell smoke.  As they come out of the woods they see the village of Homily is burning.  There are shadowy figures moving around the burning buildings with a large cluster of them surrounding one of the few buildings that is not on fire.  They appear to be battering on the door and boarded up windows trying to get in.  At this moment rushing out of the darkness are 4 humans that appear to be wounded.  They are sliced and burned and badly mauled by something but they are charging the party at a frightening speed howling some inhuman wail.  The party wades in with the clerics both attempting to turn what they fear are zombies.  Now in AD&D zombies are the slow moving classic monsters.  If these creatures are zombies they are more of the 28days later version.  They clerics boldly presented their holy symbols expecting the flash of the power of their deities smiting the undead but nothing happened.  The 4 creatures crash into the party and begin to attack with tooth and claw.  On each successful bite hit the player has to make a saving throw versus poison.  Everyone that gets bit makes their saves this time.  The monsters once killed begin to regenerate and rise back up to continue the attack.  Orderor the Monk decides to use his sickle and slice open the head of one of the creatures and this time it does not rise after it falls.  Now they have decided these are some sort of 28 days later biological zombie rather than a magic creature of undeath.

The party makes their way around the town to a small hill that has an unfinished tower that looks like it was under construction but is now burning and collapsing.  Scattered around the hill are many slain humans that look like they were caught by surprise.  Some have only partial armour on and many have no armour at all but appear to be warriors.  There are scattered weapons around and as they search the tower area they are attacked by another wave of the blighted humans.  They dispatch this group quite easily and bash the brains of all but one in.  One of the creatures they take the head and stuff it in a bag.  It continues to snap and chew at anything it can get its teeth in even disembodied as it is.

Here ends the first play session.  The party is left discussing what to do about the Inn at the center of town that is besieged by the creatures.