Dungeons & Dragons Adventures With Ben

For their first session, I took the group to a tavern called The Laughing Lamia in Emon, the mighty city that proves to be the focus of many an adventure in Critical Role.

I explained it as if the group had been together on an adventure already and just come back from killing some Goblins and looting their gold. Suddenly, a Wizard from the Alabaster Lyceum burst into the tavern and asked for their help, noting their success in their endeavours outside of the city.

I have my old 4th Edition DM Screen up there but it would be neat to get my hands on the 5th Edition one soon. Elder Scrolls was also a great soundtrack to their general exploration whereas The Witcher is still my go-to fight music.

After accepting the Wizard’s quest they headed off for his tower and were let into the premises. He had told them that a teleporation spell had gone wrong and he had instead opened a rift to another place entirely. A band of Kobolds now were running around the place, ruining his sanctum!

They found themselves locked inside his tower and facing his warm and comforting looking study.

Unfortunately, the Animated Armour that served as Alonius Pallum’s (The Wizard) guardian had other ideas and even though they uttered the words to command him a dark force overtook his form and fought them alongside his Flying Axe!

After defeating the Guardian they found the portal to the next floor intact and went through it to find themselves in the chaos of a full-on Kobold invasion!

This encounter saw four Kobolds, two Winged Kobolds and a Kobold Inventor running amok amongst Pallus’ experiments.

They had a lot of fun with this encounter and I rolled so many 1’s that it was seriously like I was cursed!

Mundo the Rogue also managed to pilfer some of the leftover goodies from the body of the Kobold Inventor at the end of the encounter so it will be interesting to see what he does next with those…

The next encounter saw them find their way to the Vault of Pallus’ tower. Stuffing the floating eye that Pallus had sent with them into a bag they went about pilfering some gold from his stash only to find themselves facing off against a Mimic!

The Mimic nearly killed the Rogue in one go but they were able to join forces against the creature and bring it down with some seriously good spell attacks from Arial and a Backstab from Mundo.

Kavalios was very much keeping everyone going at this point with healing and of course a dose of tanking!

After defeating the Mimic they headed up to the next tower section. I, unfortunately, didn’t get a picture of this layout but they fought against a Spectator and two of his Kobold Cultists who had been summoned from the Underdark with him!

This was a close fight which left two of them very badly injured although they were able to cleanse the tower and head back to the tower.

Pallus was none the wiser for his little orb being stuffed into a bag and offered them some magical items as a reward for their trouble.

I then gave them three different options as to where they would like to go next. They could have worked for Gilmore’s Glorious Goods and retrieved some mushrooms, find out the source of some undead in a local village, or seek a monster in the sewers…

…they went with the job for Gilmore, so my next update is going to be about their adventures in some mushroom-filled caverns!

As a little gift to each of my role-players I thought I’d paint them up a character each. So, I went online and snagged some of the WizKids Unpainted Models as well as a Tiefling (Hellborn Paladin) from the Reaper Bones collection.

We start off with Kavalios, and I will stress that I had about four days to paint all of these models during the evenings when they weren’t in so I was pressed for time!

Next up we have Knil Mundo the Gnome Rogue (the model is the Halfling Thief). I thought he turned out alright although I think I could have done a better job on the smoke bomb in his hands.

The third character was Arial, Becki’s Aasmiar. She came out quite well I think and although I had to resort to a lot of block colours I reckon that as a whole these heroes actually turned out ok for a rush job!

With a bit more time I think I would have tried to pick out more of the details from their outfits, but with a wash and such I think these have worked quite well.

I will most likely go over the wings for Arial again with a drybrush of grey just to make them look a little less ‘toy’ like but otherwise, I was happy with the outcome.

Because two of my players were going to be veterans of Dungeons & Dragons I wanted to give them a chance to play characters that they could really get their teeth into and maybe try something different.

Shaun had played a lot of Barbarian types in games as well as Spellcasters so this was a perfect chance for him to do something different and build a Tiefling Paladin called Kavalios.

He went with a Paladin of the Allfather from the Tal’Dorei setting and since he is now Level 3 (this is the sheet after one dungeon crawl) he also chose to go down the route of the Oath Of Vengeance.

My second player, Alec, runs with a lot of different characters but his first love has always been Rogues. So, he went with a Rogue of the Clasp (a background from Critical Role) and a Gnome to boot.

Knil Mundo (the K is silent) is an Arcane Trickster Rogue and it has been fun seeing them get stuck into different builds than they would normally have pursued in games.

My final player, Becki, is the newbie of the group but she’s playing as an Aasimar Sorcerer called Arial.

She is a big fan of spellcasting and loved the idea of being an avenging angel so she has taken Fallen Aasimar.

I forgot to mention that this party includes two ‘Evil’ characters which is something new, and they’re hanging around with a Paladin who is inherently Good so this might lead to some interesting encounters further down the road.

Because Becki isn’t particularly familiar with voices and full-on role-playing I made the first encounter much more of a dungeon crawl than I’d normally do, but it was fun balancing an encounter again and really exploring the maths behind making a story work as well as the narrative.

Next time we’ll look at a special gift I created for each of the players.

The first step was to decide where the adventure was going to take place. Being as I love myself Critical Role I just had to base the adventure in Tal’Dorei.

I love the setting that Matt Mercer was able to create and as one of my friends is really getting into the show as well it made sense to try this out and throw them into a world which is very different to what they’ve seen before.

As well as the Player’s Handbook, Monster Manual and Dungeon Master’s Guide I also have Volo’s Guide To Monsters which is great for alternative character races…

…and I also have lots of digital downloads of the other books which allow me to throw in some great new options for adventures and more.

Xanathar’s Guide To Everything is a fantastic resource if you haven’t used that yet as it comes with some great ‘basic’ magical items which have already added some more narrative to proceedings.

So, with a setting chosen it was time to get the characters created!