Lacking Natural Simplicity

Attending

Clockwise round the table starting with the Labyrinth Lord.

• T.K.B., the Labyrinth Lord.

• M.A., playing James the Cleric and Jeffrey the Monk.

• T.A., playing Glen the Strategist (a wizard) and Dooley the sly (a thief).

• E.A., playing Curufin the Elf and Drusilla the Ranger.

Attack in the Dark

Once the kids had gotten their characters completed we only had about 30 minutes to play before I had to be elsewhere. [1] While they were finishing their characters, I finally decided to start with B2 — Keep on the Borderlands, so I started with them approaching the keep entryway. We spent a little time in the keep, talking to people and then left to find the monsters we'd heard were plaguing the area. The characters followed the road north where they'd heard merchants had been attacked, looking for trouble. They hadn't found any by the end of the day, so they camped in the bend of the road and set watches through the night, with no campfire or lights burning. During Jeffrey's watch he was surprised by a volley of javelins from the dark He couldn't really see what was going on, but he woke the others, and Curufin could see that they were being attacked by orcs. Jeffrey started lighting a torch for the humans to see by, Curufin started shooting his bow at the orcs, Dooley charged up to the orcs to fight them hand-to-hand, and Drusilla also headed up to the orcs to right. Despite the penalties for fighting in the dark they were able to score some hits, and once the torch was light things got easier. They finally killed all the orcs. Pretty much everybody had been injured, but nobody had been killed. They decided to start a campfire to finish out the night with some light.

Aftermath

There were 6 orcs, with 8 sp, 11 sp, 12 sp, 12 sp, 9 sp, and 12 sp, respectively. Each orc had 2 javelins, a short sword, and tatty leather armor.

[This is an after-the-fact entry; I could have sworn I'd written something about this already, but if so I've lost it. I'm not sure what date and time this actually happened. Sigh. I think it was nap time for the youngest kids.]