As some of you may know, I’ve been spending my Wednesday nights for the last couple of months taking part in a fun bit of participatory storytelling with thousands of others across the country via Wizards of the Coast’s “D&D Encounters”. Encounters is a promotional organized play program that Wizards, the publishers of Dungeons and Dragons, run in gaming and comic shops to promote their game and show off their latest products through beginner-friendly mini-campaigns that play out one scene at a time over the course of anywhere from 8-15 weeks. The setting and obstacles are the same for everyone playing, though outcomes for each group can be remarkably different based on the characters they play and the decisions they make.

I have a bit of a unique perspective on this phenomenon, as my travel schedule for work has me splitting time between two different groups in different cities depending on the week. I’m able to keep up with the ongoing plot as the parties of adventurers face the same challenges, but the experience is different for everyone.

This week marked the beginning of a new session, Council of Spiders. This session’s a bit different that most in the fact that rather than playing a group of heroic adventurers out to save the world from the forces of evil, players are taking the roles of the bad guys. While the group’s overall goal is the same, each character is alligned with one or more factions, each with it’s own agenda toward reaching the endgame, which is often at odds with those of the other party members.

I thought I might try something with this session and post short summaries of each week’s events, both to entertain myself (and perhaps you the reader), as well as keep track of events from encounter to encounter.

To set the stage, all player characters are representatives of various noble houses within Drow (dark elves – often the big bad guys in most D&D settings who live in vast underground cities) society. In this story, three factions have allied (however temporarily) to challenge a larger house in a race to obtain a source of arcane magical power hidden in a lost underground temple.

For this season, I’ll be playing Imogen, a human slave affiliated with House Melarn (inquisitors for the church of Lolth, the evil spider queen goddess). She’s also a wizard specializing in enchantment, which focuses on controlling and manipulating adversaries; she’s built around the general concept of “Hey, let’s you and him fight!”. Being a slave, she’s likely got personal grievances along with her expressed loyalties. Levels upon levels, but that’s really what a campaign of courtly intrigue among the bad guys is all about, right?

On to the summary!

The party begins it’s trek toward the hidden temple, on the heels of another expedition affiliated with other houses set with the same task, but have seemingly disappeared. The goal is to overtake or disrupt the other group (assuming they’re still operating), and be the first to perform a specific ritual at a specific altar in the temple, in order to channel it’s arcane power. As a member of house Melarn, my character (and her two “allies” in Melarn) has been given a secondary, hidden goal by her masters to first annoint this altar with “unholy water” to remove the taint of the other factions before the ritual is performed. I assume this will tilt the balance toward our faction over the others.

The party is made up of Imogen, two drow hexblade warlocks (offensive magic types with summoned melee weapons), each affiliated with a different rival house, a drow cleric (combat medic priestess), and a drow blackguard paladin (heavy armor and heavier blade), both sworn to house Melarn. The party dynamics are tense, though all the drow, regardless of their house afiliation, agree that the fact that they’ve been saddled with a lowly human slave is an insult to their abilities.

Following the path laid out for us, we found ourselves in a large cavern, dimly lit by luminescent mushrooms. The place is littered with the long-dead bodies of previous adventurers. As we proceed further into the space, we’re set upon by monstrous creatures – a colony of cave fishers (large arachnids with long adhesive “tounges” they use to capture prey) and an ochre jelly (a giant amoeba-like subterranean scavenger with acidic excretions).

Thanks to their excellent combat reflexes, the party gets the jump on this very old-school group of monsters. The warlocks and paladin launched charge attacks against the jelly, doing some serious damage (Xune, the mercenary warlock took the time to taunt the jelly first with an infernal commentary, sadly failing). the cleric dropped one small fisher with a spear thrust, and Imogen hung back and took out three small fishers with a single casting of beguiling strands (thanks to some cross training from the illusion school). Having eliminated the entire front line of minions in the first round, we were feeling pretty good about ourselves. Little did we know that there was a larger threat hiding in the shadows…

While the jelly was locked down in combat with the paladin, cleric and one of the warlocks, that threat came out of hiding, a much larger cave fisher, who quickly appeared from above and grappled Xune, suspending her above the floor of the cavern. Imogen fired her eerily accurate magic missle into the fray, doing a small amount of damage to the big fisher. The snagged hexblade managed to escape the grab via clever three-dimensional application of the drow’s cloud of darkness, covering the enemies in an obscuring mist, preventing them from seeing us.

The big fisher swung wildly in our direction but missed, and quickly disappeared from view, (it’s natural defenses allow it to become invisible), while the severely injured jelly quivered, and split into two smaller, more maneuverable copies of itself and pressed the attack, though the cleric and warlock quickly dispatched them. Imogen, for her part, cast a powerful spell blindly in the direction the cave fisher was last seen, and managed to overcome the creature’s camoflague and mental defenses, dazing it and leaving it still invisible, but more vulnerable to attack; a condition the rest of the party quickly took advantage of in order to gain the victory.

After clearing the monsters, the party follows a trail of blood to find the group of adventurers they were following, dead or dying from injuries sustained in a fight with the monsters we’d just overcome. Thanks to a silver-toungued bluff, a warlock convinced the survivors (victims?) we were a rescue party. They told us that just as they were set upon by the monsters, one of their own betrayed them, charging ahead and leaving them to their fates. After they shared their information, Imogen’s brutal drow compatriots put the injuried party out of their misery for the glory of their masters, and pressed on toward the goal.

And that’s it until next week!