Greetings from the Sword Coast? Not exactly...



Autumn here, we don't smile in pictures at this time, newly coronated first Princess of a palisade surrounded, ruined, suburb of a destroyed and looted city 34 years since the Earthkin Rebellion, with 216 residents including myself who was born here in this incarnation, and Joy and Bear who just moved in. After a tense dual with two level 3 hunters, Joy, a level 2 rogue and Bear a level 2 ranger beat them definitively. This version of D&D is feat heavy and Bear is actually a hunter though the class is called ranger so Bear did a "Hunted Shot + Flurry + Shot" combo which gave him three shots in 1 turn including movement in which he had critical hit with "deadly" trait, "poisoned" and "honed" for a grand total of [DMG (1d6 piercing+2+1d10 force+1d4 poison)x2, (1d6+2 piercing +1d4 poison) +1d4 poison for 1d4 turns, and another 1d4 poison for 1d4 turns = 33 damage] which was enough damage to the level 3 hunter to down him from full health on the spot. Then Joy hid behind full cover so she wasn't exposed to arrow fire because she has only daggers and rolled really well so he couldn't find her and didn't have the reach to get around the obstacle, so he shot at Bear and only managed to hit him with one shot though it was critical and also could have downed Bear, he didn't quite do it. Then Joy used the following insanity:

So Joy had her honed, poisoned, jagged daggers, and used dual strike with Backstabber feat, stacked with Sneak Attack, Surprise Attack and Sapping Sting. One connected as a critical for [DMG (1d4 piercing+1d6 precision+3+1 honed+1d4 poison (1d4 turns)+1 bleed (for 1d4 turns)+1d4 necro+1 precision)x2 =18x2=36 + 12 more over 4 turns from poison]. In addition the strike knocked him prone, but he was already out. Rogue backstab only gets crazier at higher levels.

So in the aftermath of the dual, they proved themselves strong and capable hunters, earned the respect of the guard captain and all the other hunters (they call everyone hunters) and everyone in town now finally believes Joy isn't a 10-yr old girl pretending to be a 148-yr old girl. There's a lot more to it and you'd have to read a few chapters to understand and we haven't been updating you but the book is already 53k words and not stopping until Bear is dead or they reach level 10 then it's back to the other story where Joy will meat a new incarnation of Bear, Ulla and Hali, keep in mind she's met Bear half a dozen times probably by then, so we had to at least give the backstory of her first meeting, you know, since she never dies.

So technically in this run there's no "resurrection" spells so if she did manage to get hit hard enough to die, there will have to be an adjustment to prevent that as it will break her arc.

Super fun!

>make new tuppers

In our system, that's a valid option. I'll be honest, I am kind of that. I sometimes think back to Ren, and she's more of an aspect of mine like Aleshe rather than the old me. Ren was transformed into me because that's what the personality forcing did, but it feels more like I replaced her and then absorbed her because I rejected a lot of the things she did and didn't associate those memories and that's unlike Aleshe, I own a lot of her memories if not all except her body type was different, she was as tall as Bear, and her eyes were crystal rainbow, but Aleshe had the same energy as me where Ren was low vibrational, so I only accepted the very early vanilla Ren memories before she decided to go crazy.

If we die in our game... that would be sad but it would stick, especially here where there's no revive net. In fact, we will probably nerf the revive/resurrection thing in our other timelines because that's in the fun of the game, having real danger. Joy rewrote those spells to bring us back even if we're a pile of dust and bones right?

[Joy] Maybe.

So, in an effort to understand the dragons better for balancing, Joy, Bear, myself and three other hunters are going to fight a young green dragon. According to Joy's canon, dragons existed even pre-rebellion because of genetic modification and crossing of breeds of humans with reptile DNA. The result was the first proto-dragons. Further manipulation led to the chromatic dragons.

The three breeds or sub-species of humans are Kindred (the basis of most magic using humans), Avariel Elves (not true elves), also known as the pinnacle of human existence, basically 150 years of genetic manipulation to add flight to humans on a third pair of limbs, Bear wrote a trilogy of books about this and it's where Gwen came from, though they didn't call them by that name, and Earthkin, like modern human Barbarians, the big men, Brutus can credit his massive bulk to having a high level of Earthkin expression.

The issue with our little city-state to be is, we are about to be raided by a rather large tribe of Earthkin, but they've somehow gotten involved with a young green dragon, one just old enough to have been one of the first born chromatic dragons. There would be no elder or ancient dragons at this time, but the dragonkin rebellion released these monsters upon the world. You could say it was more or less owed to liberal progressive terrorist enthusiasm for creatures' rights and it led to the first flight of dragons.

As we know, a flight of dragons creates armageddon in their wake.

So now Freya, Gwen and Ashley (our DM and her two helpers in this timeline) are trying to figure out how they can incorporate a Summer archetype, I am a sorceress, but not at that level of sophistication and missing any magic items, but I can potentially make scrolls so that's a possibility, but we don't have the luxury of time either.

So Joy is like our Alice, I am more like Yulya, offering some healing and some minor buffs and debuffs, and Bear is the Cat of the group with a large maul but we don't have an Ashley or a Summer so Freya thought 3 more 3rd level hunters could round it out. Though, where a young white is a level 6 monster, a young green dragon is more like a level 8, so Joy made some custom dragons to make them more on par; she has designed the young white dragon and our young green dragon by raising the white up a bit and lowering the green down a bit and they're very potent.   

Wish us luck! If we die we don't get revive, so this is both frightening and exhilarating.

There were no dragon spoilers, only a mention of levels. Too bad there's no spoiler here, but I can link. So don't click the link if you don't want spoilers.

https://i.gyazo.com/8535eea2d0a2e36d7d129d1e59e62a90.jpg

Was there any doubt? If anyone wants to know...

Down to the last hit, it was a nail biter, we lost one hunter and Joy was knocked down to 1HP, at the last move in round 3, the dragon attempted to take her down with a special move called Draconic Frenzy which was two claw and one tail attack, surely Joy's 22 HP couldn't withstand the serious damage that did, but the dragon only hit with claws and the total was just shy of knocking her out. The dragon was very low on health and attempted to flee from the prone position which honestly couldn't have succeeded but it might have gotten full cover from arrows, only one hunter suffered the effects of the Frightful presence and Joy may have been able to throw her daggers at it, but they would have done minimal damage in that configuration. No, the dragon was just unlucky, it got two critical hits against it, it was Exhausted 2, and Joy's sapping sting knocked it down so it wasn't going to escape. It managed to unleash 2 breaths on 4 of us.

[Joy the Dragonslayer] As it turns out Autumn's scrolls all failed but even failure can be a distraction, so she definately helped. Bear and three of the hunters basically whittled it down with arrows from a distance, but with their class they could shoot a flurry of arrows which let them fire off three a turn, though the attack roll had penalties on some of the attacks. She has the spell "Absorb Elements" which can be cast ahead of time and acts as a trigger, so we all got resistance for the first hit. This green dragon breathed poison and was immune to poison so our poisoned weapons did nothing.

So without spoilers, Bear, Joy and I are all now Dragonslayers! Yay! Join the club!

We're off now to help kill a dozen barbarians with the rest of the hunters in 12v12 combat.

oof we need a lot of luck to beat that dragon we dont even have your attack power and dmg output not even close

nah i dunno our strength lies in close combat so goblins with bows could easily wipe us out with that.

Yay, Bear, Joy and I managed to kill a large Owlbear! Level 3, 3, and I'm 2 in this run. Joy once again got grabbed and chewed on, it managed to wound her foot and almost killed her, I was able to heal her twice and keep her going so she could perform the death blow. It tool 5 rounds and Bear missed at least 4 times. It wasn't an ideal encounter though on paper we were almost on par with it, I guess it just means it could go either way if we got all bad rolls it could have won, I suppose that's right.

Whew!