Yes Virginia, there ARE giant spiders…

Well, at least CAT-SIZED spiders. That’s what my half-elf paladin and my fellow gamers ran into at the start of our latest Wednesday Night C&C game at All Things Fun! Rich the GM (I need to get used to using the term Castle Keeper/CK, I guess!) took a cue from a bit of text on his map of the sewers that read “spider god.”

Quick disclaimer: the old memory these days isn’t what it used to be, so I am probably not getting every single cool detail down. If anyone from Wednesday night reads this and sees I missed something glaring, please chime in and comment!

Anyway, Sefa the Druid cast her calm animals spell, and that stopped, oh, about eight spiders in their tracks. That left, oh, about 20 more that were still approaching. So we got ready for a fight. For the foppish illusionist in our party, Struan, that meant dumping wine out of his wineskin and filling it with lantern oil. You know, so he could use it as a flame thrower. Of course. Guess how that turned out.

So, while Struan wasted his time, the rest of us managed to kill off the spiders, then we got out of there fast. Once back at our base of operations, the Silver Eel Inn, we discussed our next move. The druid and barbarian (with his awesome bearded axe that does 3d4 damage, for the love of Torm) proceeded to talk to their rescued tribeswomen. They told us that the scumbag who once owned them didn’t have many guards at his home. Just a handful of some very weasel-looking and scrawny guys with silly hats.

Encouraged by that news, we decided to use the following day to go out into the city and gather some intel on the slave trade as well as how things were faring with the city guard and the abolitionists, not to mention the rioting citizenry in the City State of the Invincible Overlord.

The illusionist and I have very good Charisma scores (and mine, at least, is also a primary attribute for me, in C&C parlance…meaning it’s much easier for me to succeed at charisma-based checks). So I gathered up info on the city guard, and to see if our shenanigans had caused any more discord between the city’s two major houses now jockeying to put their respective candidates on the Overlord’s seat. As it turns out, there was some scuttlebutt among the guardsmen that there was some tension, but no indication if any nobles were getting their panties in a bunch.

Meanwhile, Struan decided to make himself look like my paladin, thanks to his magic. And he got some good intel on the slavers as well as the jerk who once owned the tribeswomen (and who still held a good number of additional female slaves). We learned that the jerk’s wimpy-looking guards hung out at a tavern not far from his house. So we went there to check them out, test their mettle, and generally cause trouble and knock some skulls together (I guess Drance the paladin is not your stereotypical holy warrior, as he’s into the bashing heads as often as possible…as long as those heads belong to evil types).

We went to the tavern that night, after Sefa and Struan rested and regenerated their spells. Struan actually took the time to make himself less useless, and picked a different spread of spells. About time. The tavern we went to was pretty much a haven for evil types, so for me it was clobberin’ time. We spotted three of the weasel-looking guards easily in the crowd. They wore floppy hats and garish clothes, and all of them carried rapiers. Yeah, they looked pretty lame to us.

Struan actually did some good spellwork and convinced an ogre bouncer that one of the wimps said something about his mom. That started the melee. We sort of watched for a while, letting the ogre do as much damage as possible before we waded in to combat. Eventually, I just got tired of waiting and charged in with longsword swinging. It didn’t take too long to discover that these guys were more capable than they looked. They were hard to hit, but were hitting us pretty easily. Especially me. Even with my benefit to armor class that I get from fighting evil types. Ouch. Thanks to Sefa the druid’s abundant supply of healing goodberries that she kindly conjured up, I didn’t bite the dust.

Towards the end of the fight, one of the weasel wimps whipped out some weird weapon and pointed it at us, and there was a deafening boom. Yes, firearms made an appearance. The guard with the arquebus, or whatever it was, went down before he took more than one shot (I think). Struan was good enough to scoop that little oddity up. As we were beating down the last guard, his features started to shift and become more rat-like. Yep, were-rats. Hate those things.

After making the three “were-rat musketeers” dead and stuff, we decided to head right over to the jerk’s house and take him and the rest of the rat-men out ASAP. But not before we gathered up all of our NPC buddies at the Silver Eel. So we were “rollin’ thick” as the kids say these days. We barged our way into the jerk’s house. Said jerk was rumored to have a very bizarre nose, and rumors were true. It looked like a pear hanging off his face. And he was playing with little silver miniatures when we came in. Alrighty then…

More fighting, spelling, and general stabbing-type stuff ensued. I was getting my ass handed to me not long into the melee, as one of the were-rats took me down to one hit point. But eventually we won the day, thanks to Wulfgar the barbarian’s mighty axe cutting a swath through the enemy. We killed the baddies and freed the rest of the slaves. And of course, gathered up whatever loot we could find (that’s Struan’s specialty). Yours truly actually got ahold of a nice longsword +1, gods bless the CK! That’s about where we wrapped it up for the evening.

In summation, this campaign that Rich is running gets better every week. We all get along well, and we have lots of hearty laughs while also having time for some serious challenges in the realms of combat and intrigue.