[D&D 40th Anniversary Bloghop] Day Four

Day Four: First dragon your character slew (or some other powerful monster).

Kobolds.

Yeah, you read that right. Kobolds. No doubt you were expecting to hear about the ancient red dragon that we slew, or the lucky crits I rolled on the half-fiendish fire giant. Instead, I give you: Kobolds.

Don't click away from the blog in disgust just yet, though. Let me explain.

This was back in my first 21st-century campaign, the DM was running Dragon Mountain for us. Now, since that time I've never once picked up the actual adventure to see what it was actually like, partly because I have fond memories of the entire campaign that I don't want to ruin. I say this as a preface because I genuinely don't know what was in the adventure as written and what was added by the DM. That's important because this particular DM was a fairly Evil Rat Bastard DM.

Nothing, I repeat nothing was normal. Stats were played with, traps enhanced. We even discovered--too late--that one of the NPCs he sent with us was actually the ancient red dragon we were trying to kill. Well, he filled the lower part of Dragon Mountain with kobold minions. And they were tough. And wily. They were almost Tucker Kobold-tough in their own way.

The biggest problem with them? They swarmed. On at least two different occasions we nearly lost players to the swarming kobolds of Dragon Mountain. The leader of them all turned out to be a polymorphed fire giant.

So, imagine my horror when my cleric (I wish I remembered what level he was at that point) kicked open a door and found upwards of 20 kobolds in a small room--a joint barracks/dining hall was how it was described. I was all alone. The kobolds all looked up in the same motion and locked eyes. I could have easily died in the next few rounds. So, I did the only thing I could think of: I threw my Hammer of Moradin (the only real magic item I had throughout that campaign)--a Rune hammer--and activated the fire rune. Then I slammed the door.

The dice were with me. I maxed out the damage roll from the massive fireball created by the rune activation. On top of that, and something I didn't know and hadn't bothered to ask, was that there were barrels of accelerant--moonshine in this case--stored in the room. My cleric actually took damage from the encounter. The resultant blast blew the door off its hinges and threw me across the hall into a stone wall, squashed between the door and the wall. But it also incinerated Every. Single. Last. Kobold. In the room. Did some significant damage to the walls and structural integrity of the room, even. Suffice it to say there was no treasure (or furniture, for that matter) to be found in the wreckage. The DM never did disclose to us whether I'd incinerated anything important.

But we all agreed: it was worth it. The guys in the group still talk about the event.