Thursday, April 2, 2015

A to Z of How I Learned to Love D&D: B is for Bard

Here is the next installment of the A to Z of How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Dungeons and Dragons!

While my first DnD (ADnD Second Edition) character was a fighter named Garamond, I think I only played him one session.

This is the story of my first REAL character which I played  in Todd's Spelljammer/Ravenloft game.  I made a Bard, mostly because my stats weren't great, and in 2E it was a good way to use weapons and cast arcane (wizard) spells with the benefit of thief skills, to boot.  You were essentially, a jack of all trades.

And it sounded cool.  The icing on the cake is that Todd has just purchased the Complete Bard's Handbook and I chose the Blade kit.

If you don't know, when making a character, you choose a race and a class.  This basically lets you know what you can do (especially in ADnD).  The second edition of the game introduced kits to further specialize and distinguish yourself in different ways.

The Blade kit was basically that dude who whirled blades threateningly toward Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Except he used a katana, or at least was supposed to.  You see in Todd's games, if your name wasn't Kurt, you didn't catch any breaks--so no katana!

Overall, we had a ton of fun.  My Bard was an elf from Greyhawk (one of the many DnD worlds) named Kelvin tel'Rannitar Meticuli Verdell or Rann for short.  He was a good bloke with terrible luck and couldn't hit the broad side of a barn to save his life.  He was saddled with my buddy Barry's character, a red wizard from Krynn with an 18 Strength and a 13 Intelligence.  He summoned his familiar in Ravenloft, a murderous frog that nearly drowned us.  

Every now and again, I'm tempted to bring him back.  Maybe some day!

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