Friday Mad Science, D&D Style

Over at The Sellswords of Luskan, we’re running a little side-quest for our primary characters’ apprentices.  I set the side-quest up to give my Players a chance to step outside their regular roles, providing the following basic guidelines for the Apprentices’ creation:

1.       Each Player had to create an Apprentice.

2.       Each new Apprentice had to be in training with a different PC from the Player’s primary Character.

3.       Apprentices had to be of a different race and role than their primary character, and each had to have a different power source.

4.       Apprentices started at 2^nd Level.  Our primary characters are 12^th Level.

With that, we got some different stuff than I’d been anticipating.  For one thing, we came out with three girl PCs for a group that only includes one actual female Player.  And then, too, I’d been figuring we’d get at least one divine character, especially since we don’t have any in our primary group.

Instead we got:

-          HFLep, our primary physicist, normally plays Jaeron, an axe-wielding human fighter.  For his Apprentice, he chose to play Jarl, a half-orc monk in the training of Amata, the primary group’s psionicist.

-          TheHumanDynamo, our resident MMA fighter and all-around gaming badass, normally plays Ginagel, an undead dwarven barbarian who was cast out of his clan and raised by orcs.  He decided to playShai’uri, a sexy tiefling warlock (fey pact) who’s apprenticed to… geez, I can’t remember who Shai’uri’s apprenticed to.  Amata again?  I’m honestly not sure.

-           Foucault, our secondary physicist (i.e. physics post-graduate student), normally plays Vurkle, a goblin shaman.  His apprentice is Mikail the Wavemaster, a human wizard who again I can’t seem to place in terms of master-student relationship.  And I gotta say that I was surprised when we came up with a wizard in this group.

-          Relekorlagunis, our international mystery man, normally plays Amata the shardmind psionist.  For his Apprentice, he’s playing Doreen, a human druid with a pet black bear named Blackie.  The interesting thing about Doreen, at least to me, is that Relekorlagunis used the new Essentials ruleset to build Doreen as a Leader rather than a Controller, and most of his attacks actually go through Blackie.

-          Tila, our resident girl librarian, normally plays Miri, a human wizard/assassin hybrid.  Quite an interesting build, that.  For her Apprentice, Tila made up a character sheet for one of our longstanding NPCs, the heretofore homeless shifter waif Dewa.  Tila set Dewa up as a fighter/rogue hybrid and then broke my rules by apprenticing Dewa to her own Miri.  Eh.  What are you gonna do?  Still, it’s nice to have someone actually running Dewa now.  I’ve struggled for years to make her voice consistent.

I bring all of this up because our apprentice heroes are chasing a rogue goblin back to his hideout in the shallows of the Underdark, but the trail led them to a polluted and foul-smelling river teaming with dead bodies and human waste.  So they used a ritual to send Jarl across the water with a rope, built a rope-bridge, and now they’re trying to cross.  But then a giant tentacled river monster appeared beneath their bridge.

Can I just tell you how much I hope somebody falls into the water?