I would certainly appreciate any help anyone’s willing to give.
As the other resident hobbit in the party, if you need a hand PM me.
I certainly will. Us Hobbits need to keep the Big Folk honest, you know. 
I am already preparing to pull Brin, Miron and Elfstan out of the party. Though maybe **Glee **and **Malacandra **will opt to take them over for a bit while they are off training. Theogrim is off to lead the Domebo party. Speaking of which, I can still handle more players in that game if anyone is interested.
I would like Glee, **Malacandra **and **appleciders ** to think over what they want to do as a hiatus. **Appleciders ** was hinting that he might have Deor do some extra training which is a very good idea.
This option would also be open to any of the other players but I don’t see much need for it.
Aw, we’ll be sorry to lose them… their characters, if not their players. All for the best, though, I hope.
I’ve sent you a PM regarding hiatus. It’ll depend a lot on what the next adventure is.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the three of them go for training.
It will be quite different with them not around, but I’m sure they will come back all the better for it.
Just a reminder, we’re getting sloppy in the Game thread, me included. Let not rise to every typing error.
Let’s try to keep the player jokes here and minimize using reply instead of posting in context. I still hope this can read as much like a story as possible.
Sorry. I was just amused by the mental image of a middle-aged chess teacher popping up in our war camp. 
I could consider running one of the existing characters while GG is off training, but I do have another idea I want to think over. If I manage to think to some purpose, I’ll run it by you soon.
From the PM:
It sounds as though we’d be safe using it in a narrow passage since Fireballs emit more heat than pressure.
How straight does Deor’s arm and finger need to be to “point”? Can I sneak just the tip of a finger around, or just my hand? I realize that’d give a big penalty to accuracy, but we don’t need much accuracy because the goblins are only five feet back, right?
This is probably academic because I think it’s unwise to spend my only Fireball on such a minor group of goblins, but I’d like to know your feelings on it.
See the game thread but while I am here.
Don’t expect any large groups at this point and by placing the fireball in the intersections you will get both sides at the same time.
The way I’ve seen it refereed before is this: Exactly because it does not exert much pressure - and so cannot burst out a bigger space for itself - it squishes out until it has covered about as much volume as if it were going off as a sphere in an unconfined space. That means in the cliched 10’ high, 10’ wide dungeon corridor it will cover 330’ linear feet, often with amusing results for the caster. 3rd Ed, on the other hand, was at pains to point out that this didn’t happen in that version of the magic system. As this is a 1st Ed campaign I thought it best to ask, especially since the spell’s quite torqued-up damage-wise.
The spell’s blast pressure won’t do much to a wooden wall, but even thick planking has a lousy saving throw against being burnt to ashes by it - fireball is right up there with dragon breath in terms of destroying inanimate objects.
How much smoke will be produced, do you guesstimate?
Not much. At that temperature, you should be looking at a pretty clean burn. 
The last one is, uh, sorely missed.
The Dwarve names are all Old Norse Male names. (Yes there is a web site that has this.) It is the naming scheme that the Professor used for the Khâzad and so I did the same. I use to use an Icelandic-English Dictionary for this and games that included the Norse Pantheon. The Internet makes it so much easier.
There was some disappointment last time it seemed that the Dwarves were not named so I did the extra work. It wasn’t hard.
Certainly harder than my pun, though.
I certainly caught the Norse flavour and assumed that was what you were shooting for, and why, though I didn’t know about the online resource. Still, it comes as no surprise. One advantage of online DMing, and to think I remember back when we thought a pad of hex sheets was pretty cutting-edge.
Truth.
I remember the 10 sider, AD&D and the small 10 square per inch graph paper as Godsends for gamers.
Having my own carefully collected Elvish translation notes to go with the Icelandic and Latin dictionaries I had allowed me to add a lot of flavor to the game.
Now I can get it all and sunrise charts and on-line ME references all on the Internet. Many of us have the DMG & PH in PDF format and I have a spreadsheet with most of the 1st Ed Monsters collected on it.
Ah, it’s not the same as when the DM opened the Monster Manual 1 and the watching players would mutter
“Hey - he’s looking at names beginning with H - could it be a Hydra?!”