DnD
I had a blast Saturday with my DnD buddies. One of the guys brought a ton of junk food and nearly killed us all. I'm going to attempt to describe some of our adventures. Please be aware that if you are not into DnD, you should not read the following paragraphs.
When we met up.
The first thing that happened was meeting the other characters. Normally this sort of thing is mechanical and not much attention is paid to detail. The group tried to open a portal to another place, and instead, I popped out. At that moment, a Time Elemental popped out and we had a battle. I spent most of the time trying to put on my armor.  In the process I nearly got waylaid by one instance of the Time Elemental., oh, and I got aged by nine years. To a half dragon , that is not too big a deal.
Adam (the DM) and i made up this story about how I was from a Parallel  universe and a tryst one of the current characters had with a dragon lead to, well, me. I bribed some genes to
"Dad!"
"Son."
A teary scene.
That was it. No more was said about it. I suppose DnD is like reality that way.
Pack Ice and Legions of Undead
We are in an arctic area looking for a dragon we have been trying to kill for a long time. This is due to Adam getting a book that has all the rules on freezing to death in it. We meet the evil Half Orc horde. They want to kill a bunch of humans in some settlements. We are fallowing them to find the settlements. We are trying to establish trade routs. Meanwhile, we are freezing. Not me, I’m a half dragon of the white (as in snow) kind. This orc we are following has a dire bear (poler) that we are going to have to kill. I just know it.  The term Dire means it is about three times bigger than a normal bear. Think the size of a school bus.
We are hauling a sled around that is made of gold. Solid gold. We are on a “sea of ice”. We have a group of dragon ken flying around, trying to carry it for the group of traders we are working with. They are tethered to the sled and trying to stay out of the way..
Well, you just can’t trust those damn half orcs. Our guide  turned on us and is throwing us all in the icy sea. He summons a group of sperm whale to attack us. I have to say, I've never fought a sperm whale before. They swim below the ice and come up through the sheet under us to attack. It’s amazing, we have to make a listen check to be in the first round. The glacier is cracking all around us, so how the hell are we supposed to hear these things coming?
A group of killer whales shows up. The orc ranger must have summoned those too. It is pretty rare to have a random encounter in the middle of  a planned one, but sometimes the DM will try to keep you on your toes. The debate is weather or not the killer whales would be able to come through the ice, attack and then descend back under the ice in one round.
Did I say dire bear, the orc ranger just enlarged it to, get this, gargantuan in size. It is the size of a house.
Another debate springs up. Is dimensional door a standard action or a full action? Dimensional Door is a standard move, so you can move after, not attack.
Bryan’s slaad will zap the gargantuan bear with a lightning bolt. It will hit two of our other members. That’s OK, he is distracting the bear so we can kill the caster. The bear is an animal companion, so it will fight to the death for it's dead master. The enlargement will stay in effect for the same amount of time regardless of the caster being alive.
The gargantuan bear has a 5 touch AC. Can you say broad side of a barn? The gargantuan bear has a +43 grapple check. Basically, this thing can grab people at will. Then, walk around with them in it's clutches, fighting other people.
I just did my first damage. I did 39 points of damage to the half orc cleric. Hopefully the whales will go away. This is my first damage inflicted with my new character. Not bad. It looks like the whales are sticking around for a while. The haven’t had a chance to escape yet. Maybe we can feed  the bear to them and escape.
We are trying to decide if the Druid was able to communicate to the whales before he died. There are a bunch of jokes floating around about the Finding Nimo scene where the fish claimed to talk to the whale.
Slaads can cast identify at will. I did not know that.
Our Paladin is stingy with the healing. It is an issue. I have got to figure out how to heal myself. I cannot depend on the whims of the lawful good, but stingy paladin. (she’s not lawful good, she’s an incarnation of Jubalex!  That comment was from Alexis. I must lock the laptop when I go back for more Twinkies.
We find our way off the ice flows in a couple of days wondering around. In Dungeons and Dragons high level characters don’t get any experience points for low enough level encounters. We just bypass several bullshit encounters. Now, we are being hit by some undead snow monster of some kind. They have a cold-suck-life ability. They are eating our pack characters. These things suck your dexterity away. That makes your AC go down and makes you less likely to live as long. For the next several hours we battle about half a dozen random encounters. The majority of them are either karibu, or undead dexterity sucking frozen waste bunny rabbits.
It is not even 10:00 yet. I'm already tired. I'm a light weight these days. We have only been playing for eight hours. I blame the ho-hos.
We got a Apparatus of Qualsh. The thing is, we don’t have a use for it. One of our party has been contracted to find a bag of demis-litch eyes in some cave somewhere. She is a thief and tried to steel the Qualsh thing. She got busted and told she must complete her task in eight months.
We hit another random encounter. This time we are fighting some ghost type creatures. You have a 50% chance of missing them every time you take a swing. It is depressing. You have to have a ghost touch weapon to bypass the miss chance. Not silver, not magic, not blessed ... It seems like you need a special weapon for every monster in 3.5.  Even fireballs have a 50% miss. If you don’t have ghost touch armor, it is a touch attack when they come after you. (that means you are allot easier to hit). It seems like we never fight people any more. We need to stock up on remove curse and neutralized poison. I suppose it is all part of DnD. I miss first level. It's all about killing Goblins at first level.
We keep rolling the undead monsters. This time we are up against some kind of frozen warier.
I have to remember to keep my eyes open for boots of speed.
The House with a Mirror
So, we are in town looking for trouble. We find this guy in a bar who says "The eye of Veckna is in the house down the street. You should go check it out." We are instantly on edge. The Eye of Veckna is a classic adventure in DnD where you are tricked into placing your hand into a device, thinking your are going to receive some great reward. Instead, you loose your hand.
We head over to the house the whole time getting snickers from the crowd of people following us. Somewhere the whole town has found out about the group of outsiders in search of the <echo> Eye of Veckna. </echo>
We enter the house with the guy in tow. as we round the first corner there is a room with double doors. the guy says "Go for it!" Two of our party do. The doors swing open and the party members see ... themselves staring back. It is a mirror . Not just any mirror. It turns out to be a Mirror of Opposition.
Mirror of Opposition: A device that appears to be a normal mirror in a frame. When a character looks into the mirror, the reflected image takes life and climbs out of the mirror hell-bent on killing the character that is it's opposite. The reflected image will attack other party members as needed.
In this case, it was really a joke. The town had rigged the building to hold any reflections inside and if your reflection killed you (the original) you became the reflection. As it turns out,  my character dove out a window and bought a hot-dog to watch the events along side the laughing towns people. There was no point on him staying because two of the characters there had dragon as their favored enemy and might have killed him over their reflections. I'm not sure how the magic would have worked if you are killed and you had no reflection. No point in finding out.

So , how was that? Does it make you want to play?
My character's name is Azile. He is nothing special, but fun to play. Now I have to level him up one. Hopefully that will be a trend.