Playing D&D Again... After Months of Warhammer 40K

We haven't played D&D in a while, but we got the opportunity again this week when Matt took the DMing seat. His first DMing experience with more than one player ended with an interesting twist of fate... but I'll get to that in a bit.

The party consisted of the following:

• Alagos, a half-elf bard (me)
• Raziel, a revenant assassin (Eric)

We began with a simple mission: travel to Winterhaven, see if a death cult exists there, and kick some tail if you find it. On the way, we were ambushed by a pack of kobolds.

Kobolds! Ha! Easy XP! Right?

Wrong...

We fought a good fight, but ultimately fell to a pair of little buggers that we just couldn't seem to put down. One was even bloodied already. We were... so... close... but failed.

What kind of pathetic moron players lose to kobolds in the first encounter of the adventure, anyway? Apparently, Eric and me. While we were casually making fun of ourselves for getting beaten by kobolds, Matt seemed to be suffering from a mixture of shock and disappointment. "I ran it straight out of the book," he commented, referring to the Keep on the Shadowfell adventure.

That's when the lightbulb went on in my head. Whoah... we almost won a fight that was intended for five PCs. Perhaps we weren't as pathetic as we thought. Once I explained to Matt what had happened, he used a healthy dose of deus ex machina to put the adventure back on track. Dead? Of course not! We were rescued by a good Samaritan and dropped off at the tavern in Winterhaven.

By the end of the session, we still hadn't found the death cult, but we did manage to secure a contract to kill some kobolds. Revenge is coming next session... oh yes, revenge is on its way.