Player's Notes for Talian

Well, this is the first time I've ever tried writing up our roleplaying adventures this way, and it's been an interesting experience. One of the biggest things I've noticed is that my character doesn't always notice--or isn't always able to know--the things I notice myself. So I decided maybe some explanations or the weird stuff were in order--not to mention I want to tell you what happened behind the scenes in some places where that was more interesting that what Li actually saw. That's what this section really is, and if you're not interested, quit reading now. However, as I said, some if it really is pretty funny, so I hope you'll read on. If you've got any questions on anything that I've chronicled, drop me a line and I'll answer them in the Q & A section.

• Li started out as a very chaotic neutral thief. I didn't know this when I began playing him, I just had him down as a first-level ranger, and even when I realized it I never had him down as a ranger-thief. The logistics turned out to be that when we had a kender in the party and such things became important, I bargained with the DM to subtract a fourth-level thief's experience points from my total at that point and give Li thieving skills at fourth level. Mind you, he was a hell of a lot better than fourth level during the highlight of his career, but he hasn't used those skills in a hundred thirty years or so, so they kinda deteriorated.


• Li is quite fond of referring to things in terms of how short he is, rather than how tall. I don't know where he picked this up, it was just there as I was writing one day. He doesn't always tell me these things. *grin*


• Li has a tendency to be snide--well, I usually just refer to it is Li being an ass again, but snide might be more accurate, if less colorful. He usually gets like this when he doesn't really want to get explicit. I don't know when he developed this habit, either. It annoys the hell out of me, though, so if it distresses you occasionally, you're in good company. Deal with it.


• Li sees what he did for the thieves' guild, post-Habyln, as whoring. Okay, maybe you don't see it that way, but Li can't see is as anything else. Couldn't. Whatever. He kinda kept it in sight as one of those ugly things about life that makes you value the good parts more. However, if anyone had asked him, he would have called what he did whoring. He might know how to mince words like a lawyer, but when he was hurting, he was very blunt. And this hurt.


• To Li, all men are lords and all women ladies. He spent a long time being the poor boy in a crowd or rich kids while he was whoring, and he picked up that habit in speech. It serves him well in a lot of situations, and allows him to be quite formal and polite in word when his tone of voice indicates something else entirely.


• My poor character may have been a whore, but he was never a slut. The people he actually chose as lovers can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Not bad for almost two hundred years.


• Califer taught Li to worship Mielikki, and it's during his training with her that he went from chaotic neutral to neutral good.


• If a human in plate armor is a tin can, then a halfling in plate armor must be one of those little V8 cans. What sound does a halfling in full plate armor make? Ping, ping, ping. We had some even worse jokes about Turin's experience with plate armor, but I've mercifully forgotten most of them. They're even funnier when you realize that the guy who plays Turin is about 6'3" and so thin you can almost see through him.


• Thelamdaae is pronounced Thel-am-die-ay and is probably not spelled anything like I've spelled it here. I never got around to asking his player. I assume it's all one name, since he'd get quite upset if anyone tried to shorten it to something pronounceable. The result of this is that when he wasn't around in-game, he usually became "the 'merchant'," and out of game he was generally "merchant-boy." "Merchant?" He was a half-drow ninja, for crying out loud--but we weren't supposed to know that, in game, and we never got a chance to find out.


• We started out with about ten players. We're down to five or six, now. Of course, they didn't generally leave in game, so it's not mentioned. They just quit appearing. Likewise, when someone was gone for a session, they were just in our DM's pocket-dimension, collecting lint, and nothing the players who were present did could affect them.


• Our DM refers to us as the party that won't die. We killed a dark naga (I don't know quite how they're different from regular nagas, but they're nasty) at first-level, took second-level characters plane-hopping, killed a god's avatar at fifth-level, took sixth-level characters into the Underdark, etc., etc. None of which should really be possible, but it happened. Our DM swears that someday we're all going to be killed by a single, unarmed kobold (which has 1-4 hit points, for those who don't know).


• Li actually personally knowing Lady Alustrial was all my DM's idea, actually. I built his previous association with her from the fact that she knew why he'd left town in the first place, something I didn't even learn until the third session or so.


• Our DM told us early on that he has two characters who have to appear in every one of his full-fledged campaigns. Later we learned that Halfthere is one, and Chesintra Thilofar (in one of her many guises) is another.


• Our DM had this interesting tendency to roll up non-player characters and not name them, and then sit there gawking at as when we ask them what their names are. Which is how you wind up with silly names like Mularic the Cleric (it rhymes when you say it out loud) and almost "obvious" names like Darkaron, a half-drow guide (drow also being known as dark elves).


• Li never did and never will grasp the whole concept of planets and the fact that the world(s) he walks on are round.


• Grumpy the dwarf was one of the silly little characters who was only there for a bit (the boyfriend of Chantelle's player was there for one session) yet had some of the best lines. He wore a silly red had, and asked us not to say anything about it because Sleepy had bought them all red hats. He was also more than ready to go with us, because, as he said: "I hate heaven."


• Yes, we shoved two evil gods into a bag of holding. I think it was my idea originally, though I wouldn't swear to it. It was incredibly funny, at least at the time, because our DM was hamming it up over how pissed they were at getting shoved into a bag of holding.


• When Bane's avatar let go of Lady Alustrial, it's because Zola cast the a first-level spell called Command on him. The word she commanded was "release". There is a saving throw versus spell for Command, and the avatar of a god has a very small chance of actually being affected. He failed his saving throw.


• Our DM has an interesting scale of just how dead you are. At zero hit point, you are unconscious and bleeding to death. You lose one hit point each round from blood loss until someone bandages you. At negative five hit points, you're really truly dead. At negative ten hit points, they can't really tell it's you anymore, you're so mangled. (We always theorized that this is about the damage a safe falling on you would do in an Warner Brothers cartoon). At negative fifteen hit points, there's nothing left. You've been vaporized or otherwise obliterated. When Li's last attack hit the high priestess of Loviatar, she was at one hit point. (Non-player characters die at zero hit points). By the time that attack was finished, she was at negative twenty-two hit points.


• Chesintra Thilofar was a very high level wizard, and so became a very powerful lich. A paragon lich, we later found out. I'm not sure how exactly this is defined, but for all practical purposes, she was just short of a god--or maybe not so short after all.


• I don't think it's very evident anywhere in Li's chronicle, but he did not like Darkaron at all. Partly just because he was a mercenary (Turin had much the same problem), and partly because Li saw in him just how bad he himself could have turned out. Darkaron was half moon elf, and both he and Li fought with longswords, and it turned out they'd both been driven away by their families. The comparison was not heartening for Li, to say the least. He had a tendency to refer to Darkaron as "m'lord guide," usually in such a tone of voice that you had no trouble figuring out what he was really saying.


• Our DM doesn't allow guns. For whatever reason, gunpowder simply does not function in any campaign he runs, because he doesn't like to deal with it. When Zola's player ran the contents of her backpack by him at the beginning of the campaign, he somehow missed making the connection that a Colt was a gun. So when she pulled it on Mistress Everhate, all she got was a click. Zola's player, however, thinks very fast, which is how the bluff about poisoning got in there. I think it would have worked, too, if Mistress Everhate had been anything other than a drow, and so immune to most poisons.


• I still don't know why Li handed over his dagger to the svirfnebli. It was a spur of the moment decision. If he hadn't done so, we wouldn't have had svirfnebli aid in our misadventure with the drow. Basically, it's something our DM was able to use as an excuse, because if we'd gone in alone would would've gotten our asses kicked so bad.


• Chantelle had drow as her species hate from about the time they attacked her village, just before the campaign. Li has a tendency to reserve judgment, and didn't even have a species hate (odd for a ranger) at the beginning of the campaign. About the time of Open Day in Menzoberanzan, he couldn't take any more. That's when I marked it down. Up till then, it had just been building.


• Yeston Everhate, house Everhate's weaponsmaster, was a tenth-level fighter. When he and Li fought--and I think it was only Li who was within striking distance, but I could be wrong--Li was a sixth-level ranger. Li was down to eight hit points after that battle. If he'd missed his last attack, he would have been the dead one.


• Yet another almost-died. The thing that almost froze Li and succeeded in killing StarGazer in the battle in house Everhate was a cone of cold spell. But the room where the battle took place was a wild magic area. The spell actually hit at twice its normal strength. Maybe I'm nuts, but I've been known to be muttering "prayers" to Mielikki just before trying to save Li's ass (he almost never makes saving throws). He made this save by the absolute minimum he needed. If he hadn't, he'd have been at negative four hit points, and have died in the next round.


• The priestess of Loviatar who originally beat Li died of it. The first one died of a fractured skull she got when she hit the floor. The second's neck broke when Li clubbed her with the chains on his wrists. He didn't know his own strength.


• In the battle with Lord Soth, Li and Elvanchali were both down to ten or fewer hit points by the time Li is aware of the battle again. Elistraee demands that her priestesses heal others before themselves, so Elvanchali used her last healing spell on Li instead of herself, which is ultimately why she died.


• When True died, Li went battle-mad. He doesn't remember, but the first thing he did was to throw himself at Lord Soth, and his dagger was in his hand because of years of reflexively reaching to that spot for that dagger. When he hit Soth, he was moving at three hundred sixty feet a minute--from a standing start. His dagger went right through Soth's armor, and his momentum carried the two of them back ten feet and slammed them into a wall.


• Yes, True pulled Batman out of Entropy Chaosian's pocket. Worse, she had a thirteen out of twenty chance of doing so. Our DM was in a weird mood.


• About the time Elvanchali died, Li's alignment went from neutral good to chaotic good. I think what happened is that he just stopped giving a damn what people thought about him.


• When True got pregnant, her player got worried about playing her. (Among other things, the more pregnant a character is, the higher a chance of spell failure she has). So True went away, and Nyda appeared.


• Since we found out that Bane's soul seems to be in Laurianna's body, there've been a lot of jokes out of game about Bane refusing to eat her vegetables and such. The best one is probably Bane running around in her frilly pink armor with little black hearts painted on it.


• About the time we met Fizban, I realized that Li had become absolutely unflappable at some point. Flicker says, "I'd really hate to have to gnaw the flesh off your arm," Li says, "I'd hate that too." A pair of mated astral dragons appear on the citadel, Li wonders what they eat and if there's a proper term of address for astral dragons.


• When Li "almost" (by his reckoning) pulled the skeleton out of a minotaur--he actually did it, according to our DM. Our poor DM didn't know what to do with numbers like negative twenty hit points, so we wound up with these Mortal Kombat-style kills altogether too often. Fatality, Li.


• When Cuddles finished trouncing Li, Li was at negative two hit points. He lost two more while Nyda challenged Cuddles, and was one point away from truly dead when Zola used a cure light wounds spell on him. If Cuddles had missed, Li would have done about the same to him on the next attack.


• Joe got reconstructed out of Jello after Entropy Chaosian disintegrated him--but of course, Li couldn't identify it as Jello.


• One of my friends, Liz, spent entirely too much of a dinnertime singing Girl Scout songs at everyone. Granted, I know them too, but I wisely fear them and refrain from singing them. Our DM started making moaning noises and clutching his head in pain, and swore that Liz must be the Lord of her own Domain in Ravenloft, and it would be called GirlScoutia. So that's where the Girl Scout came from, and why Halfthere was threatening to kill Liz Gratton.


• When Chesintra brought Li and Nyda back from the dead, they each lost a point of constitution, just as if they'd been resurrected. But this put Li's con one point too low for him to remain a ranger. So when Silvanus showed up to argue with Chesintra, he also restored that constitution point to Li.


• Li met Bolten when he was about eighty. That's about seventeen for a human. And Bolten and Li get along just great most of the time. They're good friends. But Bolten still has a tendency to tease Li like Li's still a raw kid of eighty. Which Li puts up with, good-naturedly, all too often agreeing with Bolten.


• Zeke is the character Turin's player brought in when Turin chose to leave.


• The kobold statues in Nyda's room were once real kobolds. The beholder in the room was randomly trying its magic on them, at her instigation. Monster Summoning I is a neat spell, but if I ever play a mage and have to use it, I think I'm going to try to summon Girl Scouts from GirlScoutia (see above).


• We occasionally get into trouble when playing because, just as an example, I probably would have a slightly higher intelligence score than Li, and on the other hand, Nyda has a nineteen intelligence, which is pretty hard to match. So we sort of have mutual idea pool for the really smart characters, and the players whose characters who can't keep up with them have to be really careful about what they say in-game. An example of the idea pool is Nyda's choice to try and stab Takesis from the inside, and some of the related things, which originated at a lunch where a few or us were present, and everyone helped out--including the DM. The other part is more difficult, and our DM and Nyda's player both were not real happy when Li basically admitted to knowing Nyda was somehow involved with Chesintra. What it comes down to, and I accepted this, is that Li didn't really know for sure--but he was very suspicious because the connection with Alak, and he has a high enough wisdom score to put two and two together pretty fast. And Nyda's reaction was nicely confirming of that fact. *evilgrin*


• When Elda showed up with the swamp creature for the black paragon dragon, it wasn't really Elda. It was our old friend, the lich bitch. Score one for Li.


• For the record, Li is about forty years older than Windsong. When he called her and Nyda children (yes, Nyda's young enough she hadn't a hope of protesting it), he almost expected Windsong to argue. If she had, his refutation would have gone something along the lines of, "I was a thief for a score of years before you were born and a whore for a dozen after. If it doesn't necessarily make me wiser, at least stop to consider that it give me an unusual outlook on things and listen." I'm so well prepared. Someday I have to bring that up with Windsong and Nyda's players and see just what their reactions would have been.


• When we talked all the chromatic paragon dragons into withdrawing their--subjects?--from the flight of the dragons, we got experience as if we'd defeated a great wyrm of each of the chromatic colors. Of course, paragons would be worth more, but this is sort of the way our DM helps to equalize things when we're clever enough to talk our way out of trouble instead of fighting our way out.


• When Li refers to his dagger, he's referring to the one he carries at the base of his spine. It's basically his security blanket, and when he gets wary, his hand has a tendency to rest on its hilt. It's the dagger he used when he was thieving in Silverymoon. When the group got their weapons enchanted, it became a +1 dagger. It struck the killing blow to Bane's avatar. It punched a hole through Lord Soth's armor. This dagger has quite a history. When Li died, he left it to Chantelle, who knows this history. One of the things I sometimes wonder about is where the souls in intelligent weapons come from. Our DM's sense of humor is just odd enough I could almost see Li coming back as his own dagger. Ouch. *grin*


• I really don't know when Li decided to get himself killed. I'm still not entirely sure of the why of it, I guess because he wasn't himself. If that sounds strange, you have to understand that Li changed considerably from his original character concept, and after a certain point I quit trying to control it and just let him do what it was in his nature to do, I guess. I wish I could have come up with a way to bail Li out of this mess, and I would have loved to keep playing him all the way through the end of the campaign, but he had other ideas.


• The dice are fickle. Li has never been able to make saving throws. In the battle with Takesis, he didn't fail a single one. With all his bonuses against Takesis's negative fifteen armor class, he needed a nineteen or better to hit. I rolled nineteen. Twice. The other gamers found it very funny; they kept joking about Mielikki and Tymora having fun with my dice.


• The spell that Takesis finally killed Li with was chain lightning. It does a lot of damage, and the caster can cause as many lightning strikes as her casting level. Takesis hit Li with it forty times. By the time she was done, Li was at negative twenty-eight hit points. No, he was not wearing his Harper pin at the time. I decided, and the DM cleared it, that basically all that was left was a pile of ashes and some blood. Li's clothing was blackened and bloody and had little bits of charred flesh left in it. Not pleasant. Li wasn't there, of course, but you should have seen Chantelle's reaction when she opened bag Ariakan handed her and then Ariakan put Li's weapons and armor down next to it.


• What tripped Takesis after she killed Li was a batarang. In the continuing adventures of Batman, Batman clobbered a Knight of Takesis and was hiding out in that knight's armor, trying to find out what the hell was going on.


• Our DM's original plan was not to have the whole Knights of Takesis's invasionary force turn away from her based on her conduct during single combat with Li. He thought it would shake them, but that most of them would not believe the tale. No one counted on the fact that by the time the business with the chromatic paragon dragons was finished, the invasionary force was already over the ocean between Ansalon and Faerun. The only way he could think of for the battle to take place was on an island. Consequently, the entire invasionary force saw what Takesis did to Li, as it happened right in their midst. As our DM put it, "If they couldn't see, their dragons could, and would have told them." So there was no problem with the "tale" among the invasionary force, although the force still occupying Ansalon remains loyal to Takesis. As to why the Knights who left Takesis went to help the Heroes of Happenstance, I don't know for sure. My theories are two. One, I think they probably felt like Takesis had been taking advantage of them, and no one likes that, so they decided to fight against her. Two . . . Li honestly did like Lord Ariakan. I like to think maybe Ariakan likes the Heroes of Happenstance. Certainly the lengths Li went to to show them what Takesis really was must have gotten some measure of respect from most of the former Knights. Take your pick of theories, or form your own.

• Q: What does Li mean by going "hunting?"
  A: If you don't know, I'm not gonna tell you.


• Q: What's the business with Faerun and Toril and the Realms?
  A: Hell if I know. I think Toril is our planet, and Faerun is our continent, and the Realms is just another name for any or all of the above. I think. Maybe. Or it could be completely backward from that. I asked our DM, and he couldn't really say either.