This hand is my hand, this hand is your hand, from the books of Bigby, to the evil drow land

[dr4b]

I was awoken this morning by the sound of gusts of wind against my window, and the blinds thumping against the frame as the air pressure changed. Apparently we're getting into the season of Cold, Grey, And Rainy, which will last sometime until approximately late May.

Then half of my day was spent in "Golly, GE!" meetings, but I still managed to get some work done, at least.

We had D&D tonight. Josh made pork roast for dinner, which was pretty damn good. I brought my chocolate-iced chocolate cupcakes, which also went over well. Megan and Josh are currently dogsitting Ficus's brown lab puppy Oliver, who is, as I have previously mentioned, the cutest puppy on the planet. Oliver was very excited about our D&D session, and he spent a lot of time running around the dining room and coming up to try to chew on my sleeve, or alternately, lying down on my feet and staring up at me piteously with a look of "I am the cutest puppy on the planet! Play with me, infatuated human, play with me!"

Anyway, tonight's D&D session featured the only time our normally-noisy party actually used a Silence spell and it didn't backfire in our faces, and actually gained us something. As we finished clearing the main two towers of the drow castle last week, this week we were going to go investigate the auxiliary stalactite, which we have since discovered is a temple. So, we come up to the big doors, and Josh and Cory get this brilliant plan to cast Silence on an arrow, and we'll open the doors and fire in the arrow so spellcasters can't hit us. Great! Except... we open the doors, and thirty goblets come crashing down, because they were stacked up behind the door as an alarm. Now, normally they'd make a great clatter and wake up the guard, except we'd Silenced the area, so they didn't. Heh.

Then we go into the hall, and get a good surprise round to beat up on the drow guard there (turns out that he's the drow elf Jarrett's character has been hunting for all along -- his six-fingered man, if he were Inigo Montoya), who is named Kumar, which seems a little weird ("What, is he going to White Castle?" "I hate to break it to you, dude, but this castle is about as far from white as it gets."). Whoooosh. Well, all hell breaks loose, and we have a big ol' undead-bashing contest, which eventually ends in us winning and the undead losing, which is fortunate. We also cut off the reinforcement undead troop by disintegrating out the walkway floor and closing the door behind us. The evening ends with us fighting these three extremely large demonic nightshades or something like that. They were kind of kicking our butts for a bit, and so I had to unleash something big on the one that teleported right next to me. So I debated: Disintegrate, or Bigby's Grasping Hand?

I decided they should talk to the hand. It was a good choice.

Comments

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

My problem with the hand spells is that inevitably some ally (or sometimes the target themselves) will take it out in two swings of their [large weapon]. I think eventually I gave up on mine in favor of Summon VII--the djinni didn't have any more HP, but at least he had a greatsword.

[zml.livejournal.com]

I really like Summon spells in general. The ability to generate a monster that can immediately flank is nice. It's great for targetting enemy casters. The full round casting time can sometimes be tricky, though, if you're a caster who accidentally wanders into melee, or gets hit anytime during that round. There's a mechanical downside, too, of having to remember to actually use your summoned creature every round.

But basically, I try to summon when I can. That's also because I'm playing a cleric obsessed with the planes, so, hey, it's fun. (And for cleric spells, the Summon spells really do rock in combat).

[dr4b]

I should mention that Janthina *has* summon 5 and 6, but she doesn't *use* them, because we've spent the last few months in a drow castle protected by a Forbiddance. As a result, there's no planar shifting or travel or summoning allowed.

I like the summon spells too, although I like the "blowing shit up" spells a lot more.

[captain-squid.livejournal.com]

I remember back in the day, when we crossed "Taunt" out of the spell list and wrote in "Bigby's Middle Finger." Ah, to be that young again...

[dr4b]

Heh, we did something similar. It may have been called "Bigby's Obscene Gesture". Often cast after "Tasha's Irresistable Hoedown".