Episodic D&D Campaign - Episode 1

Saturday night saw the kickoff of Chuck's episodic pseudo 3.5 D&D campaign. What does all that mean?

Well, Chuck wanted to run something lighter than 3.5 but not quite old school. His unique character generation had given us all a mix of skills, and some basic class/career abilities but nothing like a true D&D class. I, for example, was a Novice. A sort of proto-cleric, I had knowledge skills and a good ability at healing through craft rather than magic. Other characters had natural fighting talent or movement skills like sneak and such.

Anyhow, as our character were all still youngsters aged 13-16, our first foray into adventure was really a single large, involved situation. We were on our way to the county fair and came across the ravaged remains of one of our village caravans. We followed the clues to a nearby ruin that we all knew from our childhood where we discovered the survivors of the caravan and the goods it had been carrying being held by bandits.

The encounter went on with us discussing various ways to get the drop on the bandits or to spread out their numbers.  My character and the Adept (proto-wizard) in the group went to explore the ruins some and discovered that there were more capable, threatening people in there up to no good. The Adept went off to reconnect with the rest of the group and left me with a small keg of pitch and a flint and steel ready to block the entrance to the ruins if needed.

In the end, I lit the pitch and ran and the rest of the party surprised the villains by bum-rushing them. We were hopelessly outclassed by them, that much was obvious, and so it was either be chased down by their dogs or make a fight of it. I hid and watched as several streaks of dice luck rendered the villains to bloody messes. One villain was pushed into a brackish pool where he was devoured by some hidden but waiting menace.

The final nail in the coffin of the bandits' resolve was one of our party calling out, "That's it, come and get them boys! We've found them!" The bandits were convinced they had been found and attacked by the county levy and fled, terrified, into the surrounding forest. We had won the day and had our first, childhood tastes of adventure.

The next episode will revisit our character at 5th-level.

Stay tuned,

-Eli