Gaming Club - The Tower of Ugbard on Library

Ness McLeod

March 28, 2021 9:53 PM

Gaming Club - The Tower of Ugbard by Ness McLeod

The gaming club had grown last year. Or, at least had recruited enough people that it wasn't actively shrinking. It was a little weird, seeing new faces that were so much younger - ones that Ness felt Valentine probably got credit for recruiting. Sometimes, it felt more like Valentine's club. Ness was the oldest, but probably too old to be their friend, and Val was the one they were here to see...

Bertie, she knew from Around. Their families knew each other, though the age (and probably personality) gap meant they had never hung out a lot. He also had the advantage of being in Ness' house which bred a sense of familiarity and trust.

Ness was less sure what to think of Philippe. Jasmine was excessively princessy, and Anya didn't take studying at all seriously. Ness could only hope that left Philippe with being the good one, but the Aladren was still a little suspicious of Delachenes, given exposure to the two previous examples. Though Anya did have helping out with the McLeod charity booth firmly as a point in her favour. Overall, Philippe seemed to be turning out to be a decent player/human though. He was apparently cursed with bad dice, and had somehow spawned a druid that couldn't navigate a forest, but that really wasn't his fault. That the dice seemed to be trying to royally screw him over actually increased Ness' sympathy. They had all been there.

Ness had banked on seven regulars for the new term, though had made a couple of spare sheets just in case. It was odd, how just a player or two tipped the scales either way. Stanley had been an inconsistent presence last year, and Ness had had no reason to bank on him being back (and really hoped that he wouldn't be), ditto Henry (regarding consistency - Ness didn't actually object to him as a person. It was sort of hard to, when he'd been incredibly quiet and at another table most of the times he'd come...) and Heinrich had graduated. Suddenly, from definitely needing two groups, they could be either one large or two pretty small ones. Ness had decided to go with 'one large' for a couple of reasons - firstly, if people had to skip a week, the adventure wouldn't completely grind to a halt. Second of all, this was Ness' last big hurrah. Next term would be RATS, and due both to prep times and impending graduation, that meant smaller adventures and letting others share the load of leadership in order to try their hands at it.

As far as Ness was concerned, there was an obvious successor. But Gary's attempts at anything other than a fair and open democracy had not gone down well. Ness remembered, vividly, and had been determined to learn from that mistake. At the first meeting, the seventh year had announced that they would have open applications for the position of club president, but anyone interested would have to tell Ness before midterm, and be ready to run two to three sessions minimum in the spring term, either as one shots or as a mini campaign.

Tonight was the concluding chapter in a two parter Ness had written for them to get going. That had given them two weeks for any new people to come out of the woodwork and find out what they were all about, and for everyone to have their character plans approved, adjusted or helped with for the term's long campaign.

Ness lay several circular maps on the table, levitating them so they hovered one above the other. The top three levels were revealed, the traces of a vicious fight evident on at least one of them in the form of several scorch marks. The remaining layers were shrouded in darkness.

"As you may recall, last time, Ugbard the Terrible had trapped you in his wizard tower, and left you with the dire threat that escape was, naturally, completely and utterly impossible, and that to attempt it would be both futile and painful. You began on the seventh floor, and already fought your way down to the fourth." This had involved a combination of sneakiness and trap detection, brute force and fighting, and lateral thinking and puzzle solving. And there were four more layers of much the same to go.

"Ahead of you is a blank stone wall. Torches blaze, giving off an eery green light," Ness stated, nodding to the players' tokens on the edge of the map, and casting a quick charm so that the light around their table reflected the in-game description. "There doesn't seem to be any obvious door onto this level. Everyone give me perception check." Those who rolled well would notice a mechanical grinding noise, and the fact that the wall opposite them was very slowly creeping towards them...

OOC: Feel free to come up with whatever details you like about your characters, and about what happened during session one.

You may also assume an appropriate response to your roll based on the above info.

Subthreads:

Go Team! Go! by Valentine Duell

13 Ness McLeod Gaming Club - The Tower of Ugbard 1419 1 5

Valentine Duell

March 29, 2021 6:08 PM

Go Team! Go! by Valentine Duell

The opening meeting to the gaming club nearly brought tears to Val's eyes as she was reminded that this would be the last year she would get to play with Ness and Evelyn. It just wouldn't be the same once Ness wasn't around. She was also surprised by Ness' open invitation for anyone to apply to replace the seventh year as the new club President next year. She had figured it would go to the next oldest (and therefore) most responsible member of the group. There had been some sort of strangeness when Gary handed the reigns over to Ness during her first year, but she hadn't really known anyone that well yet and wasn't really sure what had been going on.

Now she potentially had the chance to replace Ness as president? Ness was the reason she was in the club to start with. She wasn't sure she knew the first thing about running a club. Valentine also wondered if Morgan would be hurt if she was passed over for a younger student. She didn't want to do that to Morgan either. Did she have time to be president of a club? She had more schoolwork this year already and she knew she probably already would need to drop out of at least one club. She knew it wouldn't be this one... but if she was in charge of this one, would she need more time and have to drop another club as well? Maybe she shouldn't apply. Ness could then hand the reigns over to Morgan and everyone would be happy...? Right?

But Valentine did love this club, she loved it when everyone around the table cheered on each other for their success, and even groaned sympathetically at each other's downfalls. She loved them encouraging each other onward to overcome terrible challenges and dastardly villains. She loved telling the stories, and helping others tell their stories. But... she didn't need to be in charge to do any of that, did she? Could she do it better if she was in charge? Maybe? Maybe she would need to find Ness and see what all presidency involved. She had time yet.

The game last session had been another of Ness' wonderful creations and Val was eager to get out of this cursed tower and deal with Ugbard. She greeted everyone, took her seat at the table and readied her implements; character sheet, dice, etc. The sparkly dice Papa had gotten her for her birthday last year had been rolling pretty well last time, hopefully they continued to do so or else she'd have to put them in the 'dice bag of isolation and punishment.' She didn't like doing that to her dice, but sometimes you had to do what you had to do.

Valentine watched and listened intently as Ness setup for the game. The floating map bits were awesome, as well as the effects Ness was expertly using. Someday maybe she'd be able to do things like that. She allowed herself to slip into her character, Ezmeri'lla the Elven Cleric of community and healing. She was a little tired after a few of the incidents upstairs, she had needed to use up a little more healing than she would have liked, if they still had half a tower to go yet. Still, she thought happily, everyone was still alive and doing well. Although, it seems that they had run out of doors. Well, they could do this, they were a team and...

Val tossed her die for the requested perception check, and cheered as it came up on a natural 20!" Whoo!" She wouldn't need to condemn them to a terrible fate. Yet. Also, maybe she'd found the door! Her expression changed to one of worry as Ness informed her of what she was hearing and seeing. Oh dear, that wasn't good.

"Shush, all of you!" Val called out to the rest of the group in character, "Ezzie holds her hands up to her long, sensitive elven ears as she leans a bit heavily on her staff. 'I hear something.. moving.' Her eyes scan in the direction of the noise and they open wide as realization strikes her. She turns back to the group. 'That wall is closing in on us! We need to stop it or find a way out!" Val scanned down over her character sheet again trying to find anything useful. "I have some climbing pitons for some reason," she suggested "Maybe we could hammer them around the edges to wedge the wall?"

2 Valentine Duell Go Team! Go! 1490 0 5

Philippe Delachene

April 02, 2021 5:35 PM

Playing along by Philippe Delachene

Philippe had joined the gaming club a year ago. He’d been in the market to join a club, and so he had asked Val to recommend which of hers she thought he’d like. He still wasn’t sure this one was exactly what he’d have picked for himself, or that it was a perfect fit for his interests, but it had been fun, and occasionally hilarious when the dice decided to go feral in either the best or worst way possible. Plus it was always good to try new things at least once, and meet new people. So he had, and he liked it, and now he was back this year, as a semi-experienced player, and with a few more friends that he probably wouldn’t have made without the club.

Still, he was nowhere near confident enough with how role playing games worked to even consider putting his name in the hat for club president next year. He was only just barely confident enough to make his own character without help.

After he’d tried a druid whose dice refused to let her successfully navigate a forest in his introductory game, the first character that he made for himself (with help that time) had been a fighter who was intentionally bad at giving or following directions, because clearly his dice didn’t get along with that skill.

Naturally, that fighter had sucked at athletics, too, despite it having the best modifier on his sheet, because dice hated him. But Philippe had come to understand pretty early on that this was half the fun of the club: commiserating over misbehaving dice and turning misfortune for the characters into hilarity for the players.

The other half was, of course, smiting the big bad of the adventure and earning the bragging rights to say you saved the world, or at least this corner of it.

Today, the corner of the world in question was just a single wizard’s tower, but that hadn’t made surviving the last session any less of a triumph. He hadn’t settled on a favorite class yet, and for this tower scenario, he was trying out a rogue, which he was pretty sure was a bad choice for the party as a whole given his dice’s history with skill checks, but he hadn’t killed anyone by catastrophically failing a disarm check on any of the traps in the previous session (though there had been the one where he took two HP of poison damage when he managed to trigger a hidden spike in a locking mechanism but that had been pretty minor), so maybe his luck was turning around. He was a third year now, and three was supposed to be a lucky number, right?

He rolled his perception check. “18 on the die!” Philippe declared in delighted surprise. “23 total!” Val showed him up with a natural twenty, but he figured it was a good omen for his dice today. Or it could just be trying to raise his expectations before cruelly crushing all their hopes and dreams to escape this tower alive. His dice were devious like that. Maybe that was why they liked the rogue so far?

Philippe checked his character sheet as Val told them about her pitons. “We can try that,” he suggested dubiously, “but with her 20, can we see any kind of panel that would let us access the mechanics of the wall? Or how hard would it be to make a hole through the floor? I have a couple acid flasks and a crowbar.”

1 Philippe Delachene Playing along 1489 0 5