Wednesday - D&D

Tonight we had our first session of our new D&D campaign at Josh and Megan's house. Justin is running the City of the Spider Queen.

I felt really bad because my character wasn't ready before I went over... but then I got there and nobody else's characters were ready either :)

Things are stabilized -- Cory is playing a rogue (with 2 levels of rangers), Mike is playing a half-orc monk (no joke), Josh is a badass fighter/cleric of strength&war, and I'm an eldritch knight. This is gonna be a great character because I have to figure out my instincts of wizard vs. fighter. In today's session I did a little of both... I mean I'm going around with essentially Greyhawk-Janthina's stats and equipment, down to the longbow and longsword and +2 elven chain. I was joking I should just name this character Janthina actually, but eh, that'd be silly. By my naming trend I think this character has to be Faustine because it's the most elven-warrior-sounding but I haven't quite decided. (So far used for characters: Calandra, Hannah, Janthina. Unused: Abigail, Faustine, Gardenia. If you know why, I will give you a cookie.)

Anyway we basically kinda just had the characters start off and we got into a fight against an undead wizard dude who basically cast improved invisibility and then we took 1.5 hours to defeat him. It got kinda ridiculous. I started off the battle shooting arrows, then went into combat casting mode and started counterspelling stuff. See, the undead dude kept casting lightning bolts and I had a few memorized so I was like "harr.. COUNTERSPELL!" Justin wasn't expecting that, but it worked really well, I countered the guy's lightning bolt and haste and TRIED to counter improved invis with a dispel magic but failed. Ah well. Still it was interesting to walk in as a fighter and walk out as a wizard. I may do that a lot.

I decided to specialize in Evocation, go figure (platypuslord would probly like this character really), nuking Enchantment and Necromancy. I haven't fleshed out my character's entire spellbook yet, but to give you an idea of her style, besides that she walks into a room in armor and carries a mighty composite longbow +2 and a longsword and looks like an elven army sergeant, my memorized spells were: 1 - (E) Burning Hands, Magic Missile, Feather Fall, Identify, Grease, Shocking Grasp 2 - (E) Scorching Ray, Invisibility, Levitate, Darkvision, Bull's Strength 3 - (E) Fireball, Lightning Bolt, Haste, Dispel Magic, Fireball 4 - (E) Ice Storm, Dimension Door, Lesser Globe of Invulnerability, Shout. Seriously... I'm telling you, this character likes to go out and blow shit up. If only they hadn't nerfed Spell Focus so it's only a +1... ah well. I'm thinking her alignment will be True Neutral, tending towards Chaotic Neutral. These guys have only seen me roleplay my wussy lawful good druid last campaign so it'll be a nice change. :)

Tuesday - Party at Yan's

So Tuesday evening I drove out to Issaquah to Yan's house. Yan is this guy who was in my group at Amazon... the Gurupa team, the group I really, really liked, that I worked in from May 2003 until I quit in March 2004. Yan's a French guy who started studying Chinese last year, and now he's quit his job at Amazon and is moving to Shanghai for a year. I'm really excited for him :)

But, the cool thing is, so he had this party at his house, and about half the guests were random French people, and the other half were Amazon people! So I get there and the first people I see in the backyard were Dylan and Colin! Yaaaay, and Hemant and Guido showed up a bit after that, it was so great to have the whole gang around. So basically I just stood there for at least an hour or so catching up with the guys, hearing what was up in their life, telling them about my trips and whatnot, etc. Colin made me drink a beer (he always does, this time it was Heineken and it actually wasn't so bad), and we talked about books and movies and stuff. Sigh. So yeah. There was some grilling, and there were some other people around (like this guy Ajit who apparently moved into the Gurupa team RIGHT after I quit... he's like "Hey, you're Deanna? I want to shake your hand - and ask you to come back to Amazon since nobody's updated your docs since you left!" and things like that. And Colin's like "Yeah man, we miss you! If you ever want to come back just tell one of us, we promise you won't have to see Dale again." Hehe.

Sigh... so yeah, I basically hung out at Yan's house for like 4 hours talking to the guys. My god, I didn't realize how much I missed them... just hearing Guido's voice ranting about politics and movies, or Hemant laughing, or just Colin being a goofball, etc, etc. I especially missed Colin I think, he always struck me as someone I should have been really good friends with. I guess I took it for granted way too much when I used to have lunch with the group at work every day, how goddamn cool they were and how awesome a group it was. So, yeah. Guido says he'll have a housewarming in a few weeks and invite us all, that'll be cool, but sigh. I guess I should try to be more proactive about seeing people sometimes. I did make an effort a few weeks back when I had afternoon tickets to the Mariners, but everyone was out of town that week. So, eh.