Chaos. Pure Chaos, Man.

This guy should work at Guantanamo.

Well. At least now we all know which one of our directors will, faced with a relatively straightforward decision to politely question two tied up prisoners or, you know, head directly to TORTURE, will bust out his inner Dick Cheney and go for broke...

Then again, dragonborn paladin is chaotic neutral.

So, um. Well played?

Except the character is also bleeding out of several places and is down to three hit points, having taken the vicious brunt of our first encounter with... wait, I am not going to tell you what we were attacked by, just in case somebody reading this blog would like to play the Starter Set. Which should make it very interesting trying to blog the adventure...

Suffice it to say if I were a wounded dragonborn paladin, my first order of business might have been to ask the dwarf cleric (who is also suffering from a few slashes and hacks herself, as she was too close to the front of the fracas) for a round of healing before I went diving for implements with which to start yanking on fingernails.

You know.

Just in case a few more of those devils were to emerge from our surroundings and come at us.

It's not out of the question. It's not like we're in a safe place.

And the prisoners we're interrogating (my team's wizard hit them with a Sleep spell, yay! successfully! and got them tied up, thus ending the battle before anything fatal happened) has more or less told us there are more of them out there.

Lots and lots more.

The campaign begins

I will say this; I'm glad the 5th edition rules are lean and mean. Because Lord of Rings, this was a room full of noisy, confused pizza-eaters!

"OK, I get that you're telling a story," said one colleague to the DM as he was establishing the scene in which we are hired and sent out on the first leg of the adventure. "But why?"

"It's like choose-your-own-adventure," answered another.

(I beamed inwardly.)

We had ensnared a new player just that morning. So for this week, we were up to 13--but we're losing a player already, to an inter-company transfer to a different department, at the end of next week--thus validating the criticality of team character play.

Our characters had no sooner been assembled, hired for their first gig and left town, it seemed, than they were being attacked. (Swift, nimble play is important when you've got only 55 minutes).

The human fighter, who really should have been out front, had decided to stay behind to stand guard over something, leaving the paladin out ahead of the rest of us dealing with two enemies and the cleric with two others.

The paladin got hit before he got a chance to turn his two antagonists into popcicles with dragon breath. (They both failed their saving throws--whew.)

The cleric technically also should have fallen over into a nice deep slumber when our wizard cast Sleep, but the DM let that slide. Next time, though? Probably not.

Having pried some useful information out of our prisoners even without prying out their fingernails, including that our employers have probably been kidnapped and are being held somewhere other than our original destination, we ended the hour still debating what to do next.

Somebody might have suggested, "Hey, we should split up..."

I might have screamed, "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" in actual horror-movie slow-mo voice.

And then, the hour was over.

This could be a long six months.