Midnight

Maija Baerngard - drawing by Todd Lockwood, coloring by wraith2099, hair removed by my dear husband, with help from Gimp

Last night was the end of Maija - my ridiculously awesome barbarian in our Midnight D&D campaign. A little background - in 4 or so years of my D&D playing experience, I've mostly played casters of some sort. They do some damage, give a few buffs, and are fun to play (like my halfling druid with the dire badger for a pet!).

Enter Carl, and Midnight. The world in a nutshell: gods took to fighting, the arrogant evil one got banished to earth, where he stuck out his tongue at the rest of the pantheon - and sundered the mortal plane from everything else. Evil god Izrador now has his own little playground with the rather unlucky folks left on earth.

Result: a pretty depressing place, where magic is illegal (unless you work for Izrador), being fey is illegal (unless you work for Izrador), reading is illegal (unless you work for Izrador - sensing a theme yet?), weapons are illegal (yup, same thing), and so on and so forth. Also, no extraplanar anything, and no contact with any deity but - can you guess? - Izrador.

I decided to break out a bit here, and played Maija, a Dorn female barbarian. Midnight gives PCs (heros like we should be!) heroic bloodlines, so Maija is a Northblood. Anything to do with cold - she likes! Not to mention the bonus Con...

So by the time we played last night, our characters had advanced to 18th level (raging, I had 366 HP, 34 Str and 34 Con), gained a second bloodline, been sacrificed by the elf queen to save the world and shatter the barrier enclosing the mortal plane, and ascended to demigodhood (no, it's not sacrilegious. It's a made-up world. We can do that and it's perfectly okay!), and were ready to square off against Izrador's demigod minions.

Which we did, rather successfully. I rather liked the full-round attack (3/4 hit!), Smite Evil, Power Attack, Hunter's Strike, 270 points of damage blow that Maija did to the other barbarian. And the fact that she's immune to negative energy drain (perk of the second bloodline) and sort of smiled when he tried it on her. Or the part where our halfling shapeshifted into a felhound, grappled the sorcerer, and proceeded to chomp on it for 4 rounds. Plus taking bits of the world, buffing them insanely, and running over Izrador's troops.

All in all, this campaign setting is amazing (ok, so playing a barbarian who can soak up - and deal out - that much damage helped!). Izrador is a jerk, so rather easy to unite against, and there's so much background in the book that it feels very real. Plus Carl is an awesome DM. If you like 3.5e, try a Midnight campaign sometime! You will not regret it (except, perhaps, when Izrador's legates are beating you to a pulp...).