My first miniature purchase

I snagged this mini from a local tabletop and hobby store when my cousin Hive account@lacking invited my wife and I and one of our friends to join a game he wanted to run for himself and his wife. That was back in 2016 I think, and we ran that game sporadically for... I'd like to say a year? Being all in our 30s and having jobs and such makes for hard schedule matchups, so eventually, the game fizzled out.

This mini was for my necromancy wizard, Kain Ecksal. I generally prefer playing casters, and Lacking's game was the first time I'd played D&D since way back in the 2.5e days something like 20 years prior... so I thought I'd get my feet wet this time with a character I sort of knew how to play already and that I knew had some great potential for both damage and useful support spells.

My first character sheet suffered a critical failure in a dex save against a coffee spill...

So I transitioned to a second sheet for the rest of the game!

We ended the game at 8th level, but it was a TON of fun throughout and it definitely sparked the love of TTRPGs again in me and introduced the others to it.

These days, I'm just trying to get a few leftover jobs from our home purchase out of the way, and then I'll be kicking off my own game as a DM for the third time since Lacking's game ended. As you can see from the photos, we prefer to play in person when we can, so the new game will be introducing a friend of mine to the hobby, and returning my wife and one of our best friends to my table.

I'm excited for it, as it's been the entire pandemic since I last played, and the itch to roll some dice has never been stronger.

Thankfully, I do a lot of worldbuilding and map making which has definitely done a bit to help tide me over. I've also reconsidered how I want my world to work and how I want to play my games... I was going for the Very Serious Gritty World kind of theme when last I DM'd for Lacking and our friends, which was okay... but as we're none of us super serious people, I should have been a little more comical and loose.

So, with this next one, I plan to be. Rule of Cool is going to win the day, and I'm not going to worry about if things happen that add a comical weirdness to my world because at the end of the day, I think it's better to let the wild chaos happen than to try and shoe-horn my players into a tone of gameplay that they're not interested in.

I'm sure I'll update here when we get started playing.