Speaking of which, I remembered something the other day about playing Alron, and this was something of the inspiration to drop the reformat, as I wanted to post about this now!
So, it was early on in my adventures with Alron. We had cleared out the smuggling ring in the "haunted house" in Saltmarsh. We'd mistakenly killed a lot of lizardmen, then made peace with them, and helped them destroy the Sahuagin threat. Then we moved on to other adventures. I'm not certain if we were told about the Caves of Chaos, or if we just discovered them, but we decided to go in and clean them out. They were infested with goblins, hobgoblins, kobolds, orcs, gnolls, and a few other nasty creatures. I mentioned some details of this
We had made some good progress through the goblins and hobgoblins, and then there was one session where only Steve and I could show up, but we decided to continue anyways. Boy, was that a mistake. We had cleaned out the goblin and hobgoblin parts of the caves, then exited out and went further up the ravine and into another cave, that turned out to be inhabited by humans... evil demon-worshiping cultists, it turned out to be. We made our way around around there, encountering some zombies and skeletons, finding a collapsed tunnel (apparently leading off to another cave system, "The Cave of the Unknown", that the Dungeon Master can develop on his or her own, according to the module text), a door that was nailed shut all around (we made unsuccessful attempts to open it... all the for best, actually. There was an undead Wight inside that room! Nasty beast! Probably would have made short work of us!), found that Medusa that Aubry killed (see the link at the end of the previous paragraph), and then we happened upon a temple, with a lone worshiper kneeling at an altar. Room #55, there on the left.
This is where everything went to pot.
Given that it was just one cultist, Alron stopped everyone at the entrance to the temple, lined up a shot with his bow and fired. He hit the cultist in the back, but only did a couple of points of damage... not enough to kill him... and the cultist started screaming bloody murder! We silenced him, but it was too late. The high priest cultist showed up with a bunch of others, and they were clerics, so they started casting spells at us... including "Cause Blindness", which Alron was hit with. Blind, unable to fight effectively, Alron surrendered.
This led to the group being chained up in a large cell. They were questioned by the high priest, and me playing Alron (still alone, so it was only me to answer questions and such), I continued with the cocky bullshit, and this ended with Alron being taken down, dragged off to a torture chamber, where an orc torturer used every method of dealing pain he could on him. I had Alron make an attempt to break the chains holding him down, and it was damned close, but the rolls didn't work out, and he was there for the duration. When the orc was done, Alron was dragged back to the cell and chained back up, this time, upside-down. One thing Steve had me rolling for every time the orc did something new was whether or not Alron screamed. He never did. Not even once. He never gave the torturer the satisfaction. Of course, this likely prompted the torturer to be even more evil when he tortured my elven bard (Aubry, the one that slew the medusa).
Now, they did escape from this... I think Alron broke his bonds (finally), then released everyone else, and we beat a hasty retreat out of the caves, back to Saltmarsh to lick our wounds. I believe this is when the whole "Alron runs off and becomes a wereboar" adventure happened.
However, the reason this whole incident popped up into my head is the idea of trends. It seems like certain characters of mine end up with trends that they get themselves into. With Alron, he had two... torture and blindness.
After Alron got back from his adventures as a lycanthrope, he was at the house in Saltmarsh for only a day or so when it was attacked during the night. He woke up, and was trying to find a torch he could light, to see what was going on, when Merlin reported to him that he already had a lantern lit... and Merlin was standing right next to him. He was blind. Again! Great. This blindness turned out to be very persistent too, if I remember correctly.
The trend for my current D&D character, Randall Forrester, is Dominated. He's been Dominated twice by opponents. First time the wizard forced him to throw away his cool magic sword (it was a Paired sword, so with his Quick Draw feat, he could draw the sword AND separate it into two identical swords, one in each hand, all as a free action), and he wasn't able to retrieve it when the rest of the group grabbed him and we made our escape. The second time, the opponent just made him attack his friends, and I think I missed (heh), but still... Dominated is becoming a trend for him.
