The girls are all into playing D&D whenever they can pry me out of my comfy chair and will run to get books and dice. They will then stand expectantly with puppy dog eyes till I (sometimes) acquiesce. I’ve created a bit of a monster… but I guess that’s part of the point of D&D - slaying monsters, right? I’m using 3.5 rules since I have the core books and I never really got my fill from the very few games I played of it last summer. I’ve been using PCGen, a java based open source character generator which makes rolling up and equipping characters (in any operating system!) as well as maintaining them so very easy. So far not much has really happened in the game - the party is on a mission to find a youth who disappeared from a nearby village and the trail has brought them to a small mining town in the hills.

The group consists of a female Elven bard, a human wizard, and an NPC human cleric of Cuthbert. Making their way into the now Kobold infested silver mine, they have deftly managed to fall in a pit (though they did get out of it), then chase and kill a lone Kobold scout so noisily down a tunnel that the entire band waiting on the other side of a wooden door had enough warning to take up defensive positions behind over-turned tables and let loose a volly of crossbow bolts as the Wizard walked blithely in. After doing some character generation for an Exalted game this summer, I had forgotten how pathetically weak first level D&D characters can really be. Still, it’s a lot of fun.

Note: the gaming mat is something I inherited from a friend many years ago (it’s got a 1989 date on it) and I think the only reason it was gifted to me was that there was some ink stains on it that wouldn’t come off with any amount of scrubbing. As it turns out, if you’ve seen those “Magic Erasers” - the white sponge-like things that can supposedly take off any grit and grime - well, they work great on these old mats. Shortly after we broke up this game, a couple minutes with a wet magic eraser took off every last vestige of those 20 year old ink stains! The Mat looks brand new.