roll-for-stupidity

[roll-for-stupidity]

5E (Take 2) Recap #3: Grungeons and Dragons (Day 2 of 2)

Alright so if it wasn’t apparent by the “Day 2 of 2″ above, the party got done with this conflict pretty quick in game time (but fuck if it ever took forever in real time. I think even I, the person who came up with this shit, was sick of these little froggies by the end of it. But let’s break down what happened.

I think I’ll start with the green group (even though when we played we started with blue, and we actually held different sessions with only the players in the group present, which now that I think about it was better than the two alternatives which were either one group doesn’t play and just sits there or I bounce back and forth and go insane. So yeah, different sessions).

Oa, Thespin, and Debbie all followed Ea to a hunting party and introduces them to Snuck, the de-facto organizer for dividing up hunting groups and explains that this is their first day out. He divides up the other groups, then takes the four greens (get it? cuz they’re newbies? green? I love hate myself)

Side note: you might be thinking, 

“In a closed society of grungs surely they all know each other and an outsider would be really fucking weird and unusual. Also how do they continue to find stuff to hunt in this forest? Wouldn’t there be a case of overhunting? This world and society are not sustainable. Obviously not much thought or effort was put into the creation of this world. In this essay I will...” 

In response to that: I honestly didn’t think of it, so fuck you for asking. DMing shit is hard. I forget stuff. Remember that time I forgot to mention a very crucial detail that would tip @baumguy off to the fact that a door might be trapped? It happens.

Back to the action

Snuck shows them the territory they hunt in, bringing them all the way out to the edge of the treeline on the northern part of the forest. Stretching out in front of them, and in an arc to the east and west circling back towards the mountain is that giant gorge Oa spotted from the cave at the top of the mountain.

Up close, this gorge is massive, even for the party at their normal sizes concealed by Bahamut’s magic. It’s easily 100 feet across and so deep that the bottom is indiscernible, the shadow of the far wall casting its full blackness before the bottom is visible.

The only interesting feature this gorge contains is veins of a red, clay-like material woven into the grey stone composing the walls of these cliffs. The only thing Snuck can tell them about it is that it’s in the wall all the way around the gorge.

The party then engage in some hunting themselves, and whether it was due to their larger size, good rolls, luck, or a combination of the three, both Thespin and Debbie brought down a large buck each, easily meeting the green grungs’ quota for the day.

Back at the green camp, the grungs all celebrate the good haul, some going to bed early for probably the first time in awhile, others enjoying some of the meat from the previous day’s job Tak’erak and the other guards didn’t bring back with them. Around a campfire as the sun began to set, Thespin plays a tune as bards tend to do, and Debbie and Thespin settle in for the first (relatively) calm evening both of them have had since this whole thing began.

Oa had other ideas. Using his aasimar ability to grow wings for a short span once a day, he decides to make me as the DM improvise shit as he flies across the gorge. 

Which is great, it’s honestly fantastic when my players do that, because I think it helps me to get better as a DM (and it definitely helped prepare me for something coming up soon). And it plays into why I love D&D so much. Sure for a lot of people, it’s just a game, something to do that’s a little more involved than a board game or even some video games. But as a writer and a storyteller, the allure of D&D to me is to be able to tell a story collaboratively, and I think the collaboration aspect only makes the story better because it gives my players a sense of agency that it’s really, really easy as a DM to take away out of a desire to control the story, and I try my hardest to refrain from doing that.

Sorry, tangent, I know. But it’s an important tangent for me. But moving on

In my design of this world, I did not have anything important across the gorge, and I think in hindsight, the only thing I was thinking there was, I didn’t want my players to think that they had to search an entire world to find what they were looking for, just search the area I presented them with.

But, having to think on my toes, I think I came up with a way to give my player a clue without feeling like I was trying not to reward a good solid play. On the other side of this gorge, Oa found a bit of that red clay, kind of balling it up in his fingers a bit. After feeling the consistency, he dropped a ball of it, deciding to move on until he heard a sort of sizzling behind him, followed by a loud “POP,” and where the ball of clay fell, a small crater lay smoking in the ground.

With this strange discovery, Oa pressed on, until he reached where the gorge intersected the mountain. The gorge didn’t pass through, but rather just ended, with a sheer cliffside preventing any discernable way to climb up to the more snowy region down which the party sled after their entrance to this world.

He did however see a small square hole that he couldn’t quite see into, but he could see a faint, flickering light inside. And then another hole, twenty feet away, and then another hole twenty feet away from that hole. 

These holes continued a good way down the side of this cliff face at regular intervals until for about sixty feet there were no holes. Then the holes began again, and just as Oa was about to turn back, he realized he could hear voices. Very faint ones, but voices nonetheless. And the voices were quite familiar, because they were the voices of Sunflower and Ramen. But we’ll get to that in a sec.

Our other grung friends, the blues, which

Another side note: the SECOND I divided them into two groups, they each started talking shit about the other group SO hard. Which like, was perfect because that’s literally what both groups do anyway when they’re not trying to meet their quota so their groups don’t fall apart

Anywho, Ramen, Riker, and Sunflower made their way with the blue grungs to the mining camp, where they talked to the grung in “charge,” Ragga-Bom

Another side note, I say like “leader” and “in charge,” but really there is no top dawg on either side. Every grung is just as likely to be picked for each day’s Weigh-In, except for the elders. Any grung who lives to a certain age (I can’t remember the actual number, but just think senior citizen but in grung years), is exempt from being chosen. The only other way to gain immunity is to either win the Rite of Ascendency (something I’ll get to), or be directly related to someone who did.

Ragga-Bom doesn’t question the blue grungs he’s never seen before rolling up because I’m a dummy, but he gives them a tour of the mine, which consists of a long straight tunnel into the mountain, with side tunnels to either side every 20 feet or so. 

The three follow past some of the tunnels deeper where it seems the majority of the grungs are working, then they come to a tunnel that has been closed off with rubble making any attempt at passage almost impossible. Ragga-Bom explains that there was a mining accident that caused the tunnel to collapse after an explosion, and they decided to refrain from digging in that area. 

Past the closed tunnel a little ways, the mining tunnels start back up again. Riker pops inside this one to investigate while the other two make their way towards the current back of the main shaft. Inside, he sees torches casting flickering light on the walls, and he can see veins of red clay snaking across the wall, something that was not in the mine tunnels close to the entrance.

Before he gets the chance to investigate further, an explosion from a few tunnels back from the closed shaft shakes the mine, and running back with his party members and Ragga-Bom, he and the others can see two blue grungs limping out of the tunnel.

Ragga-Bom orders an evacuation until they can get a handle on the situation, and when everyone is outside, Ragga-Bom asks one of the injured miners where the third member of their three-man party is (grungs always mine and hunt in threes), and the two just shake their heads.

With that harrowing note, the party are horrified to see the uninjured grungs make their way back into the mine because, despite the tragedy that just occurred, they know things will be much worse if they cannot make up for the lost time and resources caused by this accident before tomorrow.

Sunflower and the others decide to make their way back into town, and when they do, they see a curious sight. A blue grung, but hunched over with his fingers drumming against his lower lip beckons the party to follow him.

They do so, cautiously, and he takes them to a tent, ratty and probably insufficient cover for any rain or any other sort of force of nature. But he darts inside and rustles around until he finds what he’s looking for: three round balls, probably the size of golf balls, of that red clay.

He tells the party with a crazed raspy voice that his name is Taka, and these things he is holding are called Taka Bombs (a very clever and original grung, this Taka), and when the party asks him what they are, he giggles excitedly and jumps up and down then throws one at a tree not far from where the party stands.

At first, it doesn’t seem to do much, sticking to the bark, but other than that appears to be a ball of clay sticking to a tree. But then the clay starts to fizzle, spreading out until the clay itself is almost paper thin wrapped around the trunk, and then the clay explodes, knocking down the entire tree in the process.

The party, absolutely gobsmacked (gobstopped? idk, their gobs were doing something that means they were blown away (heh, get it? no, I won’t stop, you can’t make me)) immediately want to purchase a million of them, but Taka explains he only has the two now, and demands a million gold for each. Ramen explains to the crazy little fella that he has a “special gold” worth all that and more, and he’ll give it to him for the balls of clay

The small blue grung mulls it over, stroking his chin and muttering to himself before finally grabbing the “special” gold excitedly, and stowing it in his tent, the party carefully storing the bombs in their pack.

Sunflower takes Taka aside and asks him about the Weigh-In ceremony, and his eyes kinda light up a bit, before looking downcast suddenly, muttering to himself again, mentioning how “you can go up, yes, up. but you can also go down, down, down....” and kind of trails off, looking dejected.

Sunflower then cautiously asks, “Did you come down, Taka? From the trees?”

Taka spasms and yells out “I was red in the trees but now I am blue on the ground” and howls, sounding absolutely heartbroken.

The party seem genuinely concerned for this little frog, but he runs inside his tent and closes the flap, and they can hear him muttering softly. They decided to head back, the sun quickly setting behind the trees.

Before they go to sleep, Sunflower tries to speak with one of the grungs just beginning their shift about Taka. He tells Sunflower that he personally didn’t know him that well “before the accident,” but they could talk with “the twins” when they got off at midnight. And with that, the grung walked into the mine, and Sunflower and the others went to sleep.

At midnight, Sunflower catches the twins, who introduce themselves as Ching-a-Ting, and K’Boom (don’t roll your eyes at the names, the MM literally says that grung names are onomatopoeia for various things, so bite me lol). She asks them about Taka, and they kinda sigh, telling Sunflower that Taka had been brought down from the castle, transforming him from a red grung to a blue, and the process had driven him a little insane.

But even that did not result in the way he was today. After weeks of trying to adjust to life as a blue grung, he finally decided to start mining. But he refused to work with anyone else, and no one really wanted to work with him anyway. They explained that they had kind of taken him under their wing and genuinely grew to like the guy.

But then he had a major accident when the shaft he was mining exploded. He pulled himself out of the rubble, but from that day he was completely batty.

Taking all that in, Sunflower asked about the bombs Taka had “sold” them, and when they saw the clay ball and confirmed that she knew just what that did, they tell her that she needs to speak with Ragga-Bom immediately.

Sunflower wakes Ramen, but is unable to rouse Riker, and so the two party members followed Ching-a-Ting and K’Boom to Ragga-Bom at the mouth of the cave, who looks absolutely exhausted. But when the twins explain what Sunflower has, he instantly is wide awake.

He explains that he’s been trying to keep his miners away from the stuff by having them dig in the tunnels closer to the entrance as that area seems to be more free of the stuff, saying that the explosion today should be all the explanation he needs for that. But he also motions for the four blue grungs to follow him into the mine.

They pass the main area, pass the closed off tunnel where they now know Taka had his accident, deeper a ways until they reach one of the deeper tunnels. This one is lit with only a few torches and inside is a single mine cart. But the walls of this shaft are filled with the red clay, which the twins explain that they have called tak after the grung who essentially discovered how it works.

Inside the mine cart are small balls of the clay that the grungs have seemingly taken great caution to gather. Ragga-Bom explains that when tak takes nearly any physical force, either colliding with something or being hit with something, it reacts by spreading to nearly flat, then causing an explosion. The larger the surface area after it spreads, the larger the explosion.

Ragga-Bom gestures to the mine cart and chuckles, saying that if anything will destroy the Weigh-In and the grungs who oversee it, it’ll be this. The party are horrified for a second, but slowly come to realize that this might be the only way to get to Nangnang, and the two present slowly begin to work with the twins, who despite having just finished their shift, seem eager to fill this cart and gain a second wind.

And it is these voices that Oa hears as he is making is late night stroll past what you all now know are air vents for these mine tunnels (if you didn’t figure that out, don’t worry, my party didn’t either).

Oa takes a good bit of the tak and throws it against the outer wall of the tunnel and the explosion blows the tunnel right open. Ching-a-Ting and K’Boom are speechless, and Ragga-Bom instantly steps in front of them and the mine cart as he witnesses an absolutely confusing sight: a green grung entering from outside of the cave, where the grungs cannot go due to how cold the mountain is where the tunnels end. 

(See, sometimes you just gotta accept that there are rules about a world that make no sense. Like gravity! Ask any scientist how gravity works instead of what it does and they’ll throw their hands up in the air. Why don’t grungs mine through? Maybe it’s cuz there’s no ore out there! Maybe it’s cuz it’s too cold! Maybe they don’t want to! Mystery hour)

Oa basically pulls the, “it doesn’t matter how I can do what I can do, I can do it. Next question” and I honestly don’t know if they stayed and helped mine out more tak or if they went somewhere else, but they were doing something until dawn which is where we catch up with our other two favorite half-elves.

Thespin and Debbie wake up and decide to take their remaining time until the Weigh-In to talk to some of the other green grungs in the camp, specifically a very elderly couple whose names were Hooel and Cricka. They ask about the Rite of Ascendancy, and the couple explain it only happened once in their lifetime. An aunt of theirs, Thwippip, went out and killed a bear and brought it back, and the purple grung was so impressed, he invited the green grung up with them back to the castle.

Cricka explains that they never saw Thwippip again, but that she and her family were granted immunity from the Weigh-Ins, allowing her to grow as old as she has, her husband Hooel surviving on pure luck.

Debbie instantly decides that they have to go get a bear, and she and Thespin remember exactly where they found bears: on the mountain. Debbie’s enthusiasm was matched in equal measure by Thespin’s incredulity, but when Debbie met the rest of the party coming back from the tunnels, all six of the party got on board

I’ll save you the literal HOURS of combat this fight took (literally I think it spanned two sessions), but the party got some bears, the Weigh-In started, they dragged out the bears, and Tak’erak looked amused, but invites all six of them up to the dais where the ceremony took place. Before they could leave, the twins and Ragga-Bom shout to hold the show and bring up their offering, a mine cart seemingly full of gold from a “vein they just hit last night”

Tak’erak, perhaps in an attempt to avoid any confrontation, allows them to bring the minecart up, and leaving the bears and the minecart on the dais, knowing no grung would dare touch them, the six party members, three blue gruns, Tak’erak and three orange grung guards ascended the tree on the spiders that bring them up and down (yeah I think I forgot to mention these. If I had maybe the party’s not immediately attacking the grungs at the Weigh-In day one would have made more sense)

And from THIS point on, I fucking pulled everything out of my ass because I honestly genuinely did not think we would make it this far in the session we did so I had not planned it yet because I was busy as hell and just assumed it would take fucking forever to do the shit leading up to this. Like I said, DMing is hard

BUT, like I also said before, improv only gets better the more you do it, and I am pretty proud of how the entire rest of this arc went down.

Tak’erak brings them into a hanger of sorts where the spiders going up and down are kept, and explains to them that before they can see Nangnang, they need to go through the transformation ceremony, as Nangnang refuses to see the lower castes.

He then takes them into a large chamber with a long desk with three chairs facing the entrance, behind which are five large tubes of liquid. The first and second tubes have quite a bit, blue and green respectively. The next two have less, being red and orange. The final tube has very little liquid, but the liquid is purple.

The party soon realizes that the liquid drained from the grungs at the Weigh-Ins is what is in these tubes, but they don’t have time to process this thought as Tak’erak clears his throat and announces, “Welcome to the transformation chamber. I, as you probably know, am Tak’erak, and my fellow grungs here, Captain Brack,” gesturing to the orange grung to his right, “and Master Soong,” gesturing to the red grung on his left, “are here to realize your true potential. Obviously you all are very qualified to bring in the work that you have. Soong and Brack will explain to you their castes so that you can make an informed decision.”

Soong explains that the red caste is in charge of the arcane, dealing with various magicks and the like. Brack tells the group that the orange grungs not only protect the Weigh-Ins, but are the militia should any of the lower groups revolt.

Tak’erak gestures to the assembled grungs and says, “There you have it, you may choose, otherwise a caste will be chosen for you.”

The three blue grungs instantly request orange, while Thespin, Oa, Sunflower, and Riker each pick various colors (tbh I don’t remember who chose what because it isn’t important after what happens next).

Ramen and Debbie haven’t chosen, and when Tak’erak sees this, asks, “Are the two of you wanting us to choose for you? We can conduct a short assessment to see which would be the best fit.”

Both Ramen and Debbie find this agreeable. Ramen goes first.

Brack approaches Ramen and asks: “Would you rather lose a battle but have no casualties, or win and have your forces be nearly destroyed?” Ramen answered the second.

Soong approaches Ramen and asks: “Which appeals to you more, knowledge or power?” Ramen answers power

Tak’erak approaches Ramen and asks simply: “What does it mean to rule?” (And now I don’t remember this word for word but I think his answer was along the lines of:) To be the strongest of all those around you

The three take a seat and inform Ramen that they believe the orange class would be the best fit for him, and he undergoes the ceremony

Finally, they come to Debbie and ask the same questions.

To the first she answers that she would rather lose and have no casualties, to the second she answers that power appeals to her more. And to the last question, she answers (again, paraphrasing to the best of my ability): to have unquestionable authority

Now as another aside, I would like to remind everyone that this ENTIRE interaction was improvised. Transformation room, grung leadership, the damn questions, all of it. So like if you take ANY issue at all with this making sense or being cohesive or whatever I don’t wanna hear it lol. Flying by the seat of your pants is terrifying and once you say something those vocal chords don’t unvibrate.

The council take a seat again, and Tak’erak clears his throat and says, “This is something that has not happened since I took over my predecessor’s position many years ago taking this very assessment, but I believe it is time for me to pass the torch. We are giving you my current position as Nangnang’s voice by proxy, the highest position that can be afforded a grung of our standing. No one else can bear this title,” he says the last part looking right at Debbie, his purple eyes unblinking as he finishes this sentence

Every grung in the room save Soong and Brack are stunned. The party is horrified at the prospect of having to spend any more time in this wretched plane of existence. The three (formerly) blue grungs are furious that this grung they have never met has just taken something they didn’t even know was a choice and that their one opportunity to bring this whole caste system crashing to the ground seems to be quickly fading

Tak’erak does not take in any of this however, as he requests all of the assembled grungs to give him a moment with Debbie (who had a different grung name, I just can’t remember it). Once the doors close behind the grungs though, (and Debbie’s player and I walked where the rest of the party couldn’t hear) Tak’erak turns to face Debbie and says simply, “You can drop the disguise Princess Debdelaena”

I’m pretty sure Debbie’s player squeaked. But Tak’erak continued, “No? I can always drop them for us.” And when Tak’erak waves his hand, Debbie’s grung form disappears, along with Tak’erak’s. And standing in the room before a very half-elf Debbie is Frulam Mondath.

Now you may be asking yourself, who the hell is that? It’s been like a million years since we’ve even read that name it’s taken so goddamn long for you to tell this stupid frog story. Well, my rude obnoxious reader with a terrible memory, Frulam Mondath is the lady Sunflower witnessed disappearing through a portal in the temple devoted to Tiamat’s black dragon head

Frulam blows right past Debbie’s gobstamped (at this point I don’t even wanna know what the real word is) expression, and tells her that Nangnang isn’t here. She was looking for her as well, but for the months that she has spent ingraining herself in this society of frogs, Nangnang has not once been here.

She also tells Debbie that despite the fact that she knows Bahamut is trying to stop her, she doesn’t see Debbie or the others as enemies. She tells her that as long as she and the party stay out of her way, she doesn’t need to have anything to do with them. She even offers Debbie this world to rule now that her chance at royalty in Thultanthar is impossible. Her offer to be a purple grung and rule Niik still stands.

After all of this, Frulam waves her hand again and their two grung forms return, this time both of them purple. When the doors open again, Debbie fervently gestures the party over and explains what she was just told. While this is happening however, Tak’erak, quietly slips away.

When the party realizes what has happened, the dash through the castle to the hanger where they see two spiders missing, one of which was just starting to descend with the orange grungs on it.

The party rush into the hanger and Debbie, now a purple grung and in charge, grabs an orange guard and orders him to have all the grungs assemble at the base of the mountain, wanting to make an announcement. Then she runs after the party who all descend down to the ground.

On the ground, Thespin works with the guard to get as many grungs as they can to the mountain for the speech, Oa and Ramen look around furiously for Tak’erak but cannot find him anywhere. Also, the bears are still on the dais, but the minecart has disappeared and the orange grungs are nowhere to be seen.

In the throng of grungs making their way to the mountain, Sunflower spots Taka and scoops him up onto her shoulders and everyone makes their way to where Debbie has set herself up on a rock to be fully visible to everyone.

When all the grungs have arrived, the party is still looking around for Tak’erak, but still see nothing as Debbie begins her speech:

“As you may know by now, I am your new ruler. And as your ruler I want to make a very important announcement that all of you deserve to know: Nangnang, your god, is dead.”

Almost as if timed by a very dramatic DM, there is an absolutely massive explosion.

Grungs run everywhere, not knowing where to go. Taka wriggles off of Sunflower’s shoulders and goes dashing for the mine. Riker and Ramen run after him as Sunflower runs, scoops up Debbie, and grabs Thespin and begins to run up the mountain. This mission is over.

Oa, seemingly unfazed by the events around him, just takes a seat at the base of a tree. Ea (who I definitely never forgot about), walks up to him, sighs, and just says, “You guys should probably get out of here. I’ll stay and run damage control as best I can. But y’all’s job here is done unfortunately.”

Oa kind of shrugs his shoulders and begins walking up the mountain.

Meanwhile, Taka bolted into the mine, dodging the grungs running everywhere, trying to figure out what made that explosion and what needs to be done to fix the damage. Riker and Ramen have a harder time getting through, and when they finally make it into the mine, Taka is a good deal in front of them.

He darts into a tunnel, and when the two pursuers reach that tunnel, they realize it’s the closed off tunnel where Taka had his accident. The two of them have to clear some of the rubble away, being bigger than grung sized. When they do, they run after the little grung who is now almost at the end of this tunnel.

As they do, they almost trip over something, which on closer inspection, is the shriveled up body of a dead grung. And this grung is wearing a cloak and underclothes identical to the Taka who has now turned to face Riker and Ramen, and they realize this is Taka. Or at least it was.

And they know this for certain when they see the figure at the end of the tunnel begin to transform as they shout a single word: “Nikek!” And as white flames begin to lick up the body of this changing form, they realize the Taka they knew is becoming a woman with dark purple robes, jet black hair, and purple eyes. Taka is Frulam.

Right as Frulam is about to disappear, Riker charges after her and the two of them disappear in a bright light, leaving only a rune that Ramen recognizes as the same rune they used to bring them here.

Ramen drops to his knees, his world shattered. And he probably would have remained that way for a good bit longer, were it not for the fact that the rune began glowing again. But it wasn’t taking anyone away this time. It was bringing something back.

That something was a giant wave of water that nearly washed Ramen out of the tunnel, and in this water was a giant orange shark, which snapped at Ramen until the water settles and the shark flops helplessly until it cannot anymore. And Ramen cries.

Ramen and Oa march back up the hill together, and when the party is together again, they say the command word to bring them back to Bahamut: “Nogoorsa.”

So now we’re all caught up! This post alone literally took me uhhhh 3 hours to write, but now y’all know what your favorite characters have been up to. We’ll be starting back up again very, very soon, so stay tuned for the recap of our first session back! Till then, I’ve got a few more posts planned. Ciao for now!

P.S. Thanks to my handy dandy queue schedule, I know this will post on my birthday!! Now if a police officer busts down our door while we’re drinking and playing D&D all he can do is say “fucking nerds” and go away instead of arresting me!

[roll-for-stupidity]

Bonus Post: Argus Lee Chantelle’s Rap

I mentioned in an earlier recap that Argus had some pretty cutting and revealing things to say about members of the party. Well, for your reading pleasure, here is what was rapped, to the beat in this video:

Now I’m not here to battle, I’m just here to tell a story

About this Thespin Creede, oh so recently raised to glory.

You see, my name for reference is Argus Lee Chantelle,

But I wonder if for Thespin that name rings a bell.

The two of us attended the same secondary school

He’d walk the halls of Thultan High, rambling like a fool

About how one day his name would be known around the world

While he practiced tricks and rhymes and played his lute and twirled.

Little did he know that I was interested as well

In the art of bardship, so I in secret honed the thrill

Of crafting clever rhymes and jabs at character and skill

Coming to the realization that indeed, mere words can kill.

Then finally a chance to prove myself and my worth

A bardic battle just like this for merriment and mirth

And who to my surprise was my final preliminary match?

This very Thespin Creede, MY victory he’d attempt to snatch.

I opened with a careful build, my words nipping at the seams

Of his carefully constructed front, dismantling it with ease

Before my words, I could see his defenses begin to fall

And by the time I hurled my final jab, I could feel I’d win it all

But somehow it seemed his initial crushing doubt faded away

He turned my words all on their heads, then threw them back as if in play

Without breaking a sweat, he deftly rhymed his way to win

Eliminating my name from the tournament we were in.

I’d put that day behind me, I thought I had moved on

Until one night at a royal banquet I caught on

To a scheme I realized unfolding before my very eyes

As one Callow “The Bull” Scander, the jester, began to rise

Now Scander was to host the annual Thultanthar Awards,

A night for celebration where the king recognizes the swords,

The men and women tasked with defending Thultanthar.

But on this night, I believe old Callow went too far.

See, as I sat enjoying the jokes and the royal feast,

Our jester friend threw out a joke that ended the party.

The banquet hall grew silent as all eyes on the human fell,

After he casually mentioned the Princess looked kind of like an elf.

Chaos erupted as Callow was quickly ushered from the stage,

He passed right by my table and in the smirk at the king’s rage,

I saw another, not the human Scander claimed to be,

It was the smirk of the half-elf who long ago had beaten me.

Now I don’t pretend to know exactly just what happened next,

But I do remember the next morning feeling quite perplexed

That the very day my former foe in disguise says the name

Of Princess Debdelaena, she mysteriously slips away.

No one has seen heads or tails of the lovely princess since

But I think to question this half-elf would make a lot of sense.

I hope my throwing all this out doesn’t accidentally upset him

But either way, I would just like to say, Guards! GET HIM!!

[roll-for-stupidity]

5E (Take 2) Recap #2: Grungeons and Dragons (Day 1 of 2)

Yeah, you heard me right. I used the fucking grungs.

These bois.

When Bahamut sent the party on their merry way to the magical world of Niik, home to the Goddess of Grungs, Nangnang, he cast a helpful little spell on all of them. 

Bahamut knew that for an aasimar, three half-elves, a human, and a Yuan-ti to all show up in worlds that have no such races, it would raise a couple suspicions if not eyebrows. His solution? Magic. (Duh, it’s a fantasy world, magic is awesome). 

Basically the intention behind the spell was to do everything within the spell’s power to have the minds of the observers of these six non-grung beings fill in the gaps as much as possible for what they are seeing. What that boiled down to in Niik was that, to the grungs of this world, as well as the rest of the party unless concentrating specifically on seeing the other party members for what they were, the party were grungs.

Physically they were still themselves, and they actually filled the same amount of space (which was amusing when the players had to interact with the more grung-sized items in the world). But as long as the party members were not doing something it would be impossible for a grung to do, the spell erased all shadow of a doubt in any grung’s mind that the party members were just like them. (I should also mention that the party still had all of their equipment). We’ll get to grung life in a sec. First, the party has to get down the mountain they have currently teleported to the top of.

Party instantly realized three things: they all look like frog people, three of them were green and three were blue, and lastly, it is cold as balls.

The teleportation rune was inscribed on the floor of a cave near the very top of a mountain. Peering down from the cave, the party could see a long snowy incline that ends in a treeline that extends for miles out to a massive gorge that arcs around to intersect the mountain at two points, leaving a large semicircle of forest between the mountain and itself.

In that forest, near the center and at the top of the canopy of trees which had to be several hundred feet in the air, was a giant white castle. The only other thing of note other than how breathtaking the view was, was that sticking up out of the snow were twelve very pointy orange rocks.

In the cave were two bobsleds with spears along the runners and tied to the inside of each of the sleds were two whistles.

Cue an intense bobsled action scene made even more intense by the revelation that the pointy rocks? Very angry bears. Fun times were had by exactly half of the party who made it to the bottom without a problem. Thespin, Sunflower, and Debbie did not have as much fun. They crashed. Hard.

But they were fine.

Then from around the trees, lo and behold, it’s Ea again, the rogue Oa ran with in Berdusk. She was still rocking Harper garb though, and she revealed that she not only was a real Harper after all, she was part of a secret task force developed by Shevarash to do the same exact thing Bahamut sent the party to do: recruit the Trickster Gods to fight against the threat of Tiamat, the only reason that she didn’t reveal this in Berdusk being that Oa’s deva supervisor would have overheard and Shevarash was trying to avoid conflict with Melora on this one. Sometimes intervention is necessary.

This led to another realization on Oa’s part: the constant presence of his deva that he can always acutely feel was not present anymore. As far as the gods were concerned, the party with Ea were alone.

With that potentially sobering realization, Ea led the party to the center of town where the grungs gathered.

Here’s the thing about Niik: it’s a caste based society that is kept in place by a strict ruling class with a fairly ingenious system. Blue and Green grungs comprised the bottom rung (heh) of the social ladder, followed by Orange (guards), Red (mages), Purple (highest ranking officials), and Gold (Nangnang). 

Once per day, at high noon, the Purple grung, who at the time of the party’s being there was named Tak’erak, would descend from the castle high above the trees and conduct a Weigh-In of both groups efforts of the previous 24 hours. Green grungs are tasked with hunting, trapping, and tanning to produce food for the grung population below, as well as the grungs in the castle above. Blue grungs were responsible for mining, smithing, and refining ore dug in the mines.

The Weigh-In consisted of a previously selected family from each color walking up to a platform containing two scales, one per family. The grungs would climb onto the scales under the watchful gaze of the orange guards, and the fruits of the previous day’s labor would be evaluated by Tak’erak and given a weight amount. A satisfactory job would result in more weight being added to the scale, whereas a lackluster job would result in much less. The goal for both grungs was to outweigh the grungs on the scale with the weight of their evaluated work.

There was one catch though: the grungs were not weighed against their own color’s work. Instead, the green grung family would be weighed against the work of the blue grungs and vice versa, effectively driving a wedge between the two groups and keeping both groups in line.

The Weigh-Ins of recent history have usually gone off without a hitch according to Ea, but on the day the party arrived, the green grung’s work didn’t make the cut. The party had to watch as the blue grungs endured the ultimate punishment: being drained. The orange grungs held each member of the blue family down as their color was literally sucked out of them into a tube, leaving nothing but a white, shriveled body behind.

The party watched on in horror, but most of the other grungs either looked on, indifferent, while those close to the family glared at the congregation of green grungs, seething at the caste that had allowed this to happen.

But as quickly and horribly as the event had happened, it was over. The purple and orange grungs retreated to their castle in the trees, the blue grungs buried their dead, and the rest of the grungs moved on. After all, there was work to be done if both groups were to avoid a similar tragedy the next day.

(Now on a meta note outside the game, one of the party members asked the question, why wouldn’t the other grungs retaliate by not producing enough to hurt the other grung caste? The answer is apparent if you think about it one step further. Once that cycle begins, the situation only becomes worse until both groups are decimated. So both the greens and the blues got to work)

Ea, posing as a green grung, informed the party that it would be best if the parties didn’t meet publicly as the two castes rarely interacted due to the nature of the tension between the groups, so my party split up 

*gasp* But D&D 101 is Never Split The Party!!

Hush now. I’m not trying to kill my players’ characters.

But yes, Sunflower, Ryker, and Ramen went off to the blue grung camp outside the mines dug into the mountain while Oa, Thespin, and Debbie made their way over to the green camp

Stay tuned for the third and final part of my recap coming soon! It completes the Grungeons and Dragons arc and puts us right where we will pick the story back up when we have our first session after getting back together later this month!!

[roll-for-stupidity]

The World of Faerun (According to My Specific Campaign)

So, like I said in a previous post, I’ve kind of taken the lore of Faerun and moulded it to fit my campaign. Some parts have been kept, others have been removed, and some have been changed entirely

That being said, let’s get right into the state of the world; at least as far as what my players know about it because I have players that follow this account lol

The War of the Gods

Around 300 years before the start of this campaign, the Gods were at war. I can’t remember if this was part of Faerunian lore, but even if it is, here is where the similarity stops

Nearly all of the deities entered the fray, and their followers either fought (and often died) for the cause of their patron or got caught in the crossfire

Following the end of this conflict, a Council was established. A force of neutrality comprised of Shevarash and Melora, two of the deities who stayed out of the conflict, and the Raven Queen, harbinger of death (hey, I know using the Raven Queen is cliché, but the reason she’s cliché is cuz she’s cool as hell, get off my ass). Melora’s ideology was that balance and harmony is something that will occur naturally, and that intervention is what caused this war in the first place. Shevarash held the opposite opinion that balance can only be achieved by intervention, which is what the Council was established to do: intervene when the gods were no longer safe for humanity. The differences of opinion kept the members of the Council in check, and many saw this as an agreeable alternative to the chaos that was pervasive while the deities had no governing body

This Council, with the support of many of the various mortal factions, gained the power of authority they needed to put the gods on trial for the atrocities preceding and during the conflict, and it was deemed by the Council of Neutrality that the only way to keep this from ever happening again, the gods needed to be sealed away for the safety of Faerun and its citizens

One by one, the Council cut the ties between the various gods’ outer planes of existence, effectively sealing away their power to make change in the prime material plane in which Faerun exists. The consequence of this was that, while worship of deities was not outlawed, the gods were no longer able to communicate directly with their followers

Present Day

Since that event, the world at large has come to accept the Council as the governing force in the world. Deific worship was relegated to temples and monasteries, and the more religious of citizens tended to be those who followed Melora or Shevarash.

Things were peaceful for the majority of the 300 years following the War, and the peace and security of the world only added to the Council’s support.

Melora’s angels were a major deterrence for anyone looking to disturb the natural order of the world, and Shevarash’s Harpers policed the major cities to help with minor conflicts as a glorified police force backed by the goddess.

The Major Factions and Players

The Harpers

Shevarash’s followers, gathered into a coalition of soldiers, informants, and guards that keep the peace in the world. The cities of Candlekeep, Neverwinter, Baldur’s Gate, and many of the minor cities across Faerun have a Harper’s Guild within them, and the cities have gladly accepted the help in policing the streets to keep crime rate low.

As of the current point in the campaign, the party has also discovered that there is an elite group of Harpers that Shevarash has sent in an attempt to recruit the Nine Trickster Gods of Chult, minor deities who took no part in the war, mostly because it was fought in Faerun and Chult saw very little of the conflict.

The Cult of Dragons

Not everyone in this world agrees with the Council’s decision to seal away the gods. The Cult of Dragons is a group dedicated to Tiamat, the Goddess of Chromatic Dragons. Their goal apparent is to break the seal holding Tiamat, and release her back into the world. The party has encountered the Cult on a few occasions, the first being in the invasion of Greenest.

The party followed the Cult back to their camp and discovered a cave that contained a temple to the Black Dragon head of Tiamat, as well as a nest of Black Dragon eggs. While exploring this cave, the party also encountered Frulam Mondath, a seemingly high ranking official in the Cult.

In working with Bahamut, the God of Metallic Dragons who used his power to bring the party to the true neutral plane, Nogoorsa, the party was recruited to assist him in recruiting the Nine Trickster Gods of Chult, unaware of the fact that Shevarash was already working to achieve that same goal. While attempting to recruit the first, the party discovered that the society of grungs that comprised the world was run in part by Takerak, who was revealed to be Frulam herself in disguise.

She managed to escape by disguising herself as another grung, Taka, who the party had come to like and care about, before making her escape through a portal to another plane

Bahamut

Bahamut is the God of Metallic Dragons, who believes that the releasing of his sister Tiamat would result in the apocalypse. He brought the party to the true neutral plane by using all of his magic and willpower to send a message to the Grand Master at the monastery dedicated to him. 

The Grand Master Yoda (my player who grew up in this monastery insisted that all the Masters be named after Jedi) assisted the players in making it to Nogoorsa, and once they were there, he informed them of his plan, and helped them to the first plane to recruit Nangnang, the Goddess of Grungs (who are super fun frog people that definitely don’t have an oppressive caste system)

The Nine Trickster Gods of Chult

These gods are seldom worshipped by citizens of Faerun, however, the citizens of Chult, a small country to the west of the Sword Coast, usually worship one or more of them.

Each of them has a varied relationship with the others, liking some and despising others. But for the most part they keep the peace in the country, and rarely have any sort of conflict.

The nine gods are as follows:

Nangnang - Goddess of Grungs

Wongo - God of Su-Monsters

I’jin - Goddess of Almiraj

Kubazan - God of Froghemoths

Obo’laka - Goddess of Zorbos

Moa - God of Jaculi

Shagambi - Goddess of Kamadan

Papzoti - God of Eblis

Unkh - Goddess of Flail Snails

Both Bahamut and Shevarash seem eager to recruit them to fight against the threat of Tiamat. In the world of Niik, the domain of Nangnang, it was revealed the Frulam was there as well, but the reasons for her being there are as of yet unknown. She did reveal the Nangnang was nowhere to be found and had been gone for longer than she had been there.

The Monastery of Bahamut

This is the monastery where Sunflower, one of the party members, grew up and trained to be a monk. She was left at the monastery as an infant, and the monastery raised her as their own. 

Very recently before the beginning of the campaign, Grand Master Yoda informed Sunflower that her master, Master Plokoon had been found dead. The cause seemed to be natural, but the Grand Master seemed to think there might be more at play and sent Sunflower searching for answers, thinking that the triplets, Leosin, Nesin, and Tesin, other fellow monks currently investigating the Cult near the town of Greenest, might have clues to helping her find out more.

Leosin fought in the invasion of Greenest with his brother Nesin. In the ensuing confusion, Leosin went to track the Cultists back to their camp, leaving Nesin in the care of healers after his leg was broken that night. 

After the party discovered him dead in the Cultist camp, and then found his soul trapped in a cage used to power Frulam’s teleportation to Nogoorsa, Leosin implored them to go back to the monastery to tell Grand Master Yoda everything that happened and that he would know what to do.

The party, with a distraught Nesin, rode back to the monastery together, where Grand Master Yoda used his magic to bring them to Bahamut.

Melora’s Angels

Not much is known (by the party) about this force of Melora. As an aasimar, Oa, a party member, has a deva enlisted to keeping him on the straight and narrow; a job that the deva finds very difficult to maintain.

Higher ranking angels such as planetars and solars make up the deterrence force Melora has as a way to keep those who would cause chaos at bay without having to directly intervene.

Thultanthar

A floating city in the country of Anauroch governed and whose citizens are almost entirely comprised of humans. The city keeps slaves brought in by the Yuan-ti as laborers, and is a major trafficker of slaves.

The king of Thultanthar discovered that his daughter, Princess Debdelaena (another PC), was not his biological daughter when she began to show signs of being half-elf as she hit puberty. He plotted to have her killed until his efforts were thwarted when Thespin Creede (4th PC of 5), was able to rescue her after being tipped off by his sister about the attempt on her life.

Thespin’s sister and father were high ranking officials in Thultanthar’s militia, his father having been captured for his tactical prowess despite being elvish and not human. Thespin and his sister were also allowed to grow up and live in Thultanthar, and his sister decided to follow in her father’s military footsteps while Thespin decided to pursue his dream of being a bard.

Yuan-ti

This serpentile race is the major slave trading race in Chult with a major presence in Faerun as well. The Yuan-ti society is a caste system, with the largest most powerful Yuan-ti are the ruling class.

Ramen (Final PC) was the son of the royal family, and when it came time for him and his two sibling to go into the ritual that would transform them into Yuan-ti Aberrations, the highest ranking caste, the ritual worked without a hitch for his sibling, but while his body underwent the physical changes, he did not grow to be the size of true aberrations, and was cast out for the disgrace.

Thultanthar is one of the Yuan-ti’s major clients, always needed to bring in new slaves to replace the ones who cannot bear the unyielding amount of work they are made to perform

[roll-for-stupidity]

5E (Take 2) Recap #1: Intrigue and Sorcery

Like I said in my previous post about these recaps, I won’t be going into great detail. Just give you the narrative bits so my posts Episode to Episode that’ll start back up soon will make sense

The party made their way through the cave, discovered a temple dedicated to the black chromatic dragon head of Tiamat, the goddess of dragons

Sunflower snuck inside invisible and overheard a conversation between Frulam, the apparent head of at least this sect of the cult, and Langdedrosa, the half dragon who kicked Thespin’s ass in Greenest. Frulam told Langdedrosa to buy as much time as possible while the rest of the cult moved out

She then proceeded to step onto a rune, speak the word “Nogoorsa” and disappear, the act of which caused sounds of agony to come from a spectral being caged above the dais on which the rune was inscribed

Sunflower related this to the party, who proceeded to take out Langdedrosa and the guards with an iconic line from a still invisible Sunflower when she delivered the finishing blow to Langdedrosa, “I’m Sunflower, bitch.”

The spectral figure turned out to be Leosin, the monk whose body they found outside the cave. He informs them that Frulam is trying to bring back Tiamat and had been using his life force to power the spell she used to activate the teleportation rune. He also tells them they have to go to the monastery he and Sunflower are from and tell their Grand Master what is happening. Leosin’s soul is released and he disappears. The party destroys the dragon eggs that were being held there

The party heads back to Greenest to report what happened, Nesin, Leosin’s brother and fellow monk, is distraught to hear the news and insists they all go to his and Sunflower’s monastery immediately, the party leaves

They make their way north, but along the way find out that Thespin’s name has spread beyond the town of Greenest after he and the party successfully defended the town from the cult. They also discover that Debbie’s father has put an extremely high bounty on her head. She begins to disguise herself everywhere the go as a small orc boy

The party stops in the town of Berdusk, Thespin is invited to a Bard-off, a rap battle essentially, that is being hosted the night after. In the meantime, Oa runs into Ea, a long time acquaintance/partner in mischief, who tells him she is posing as a Harper to gain information, the Harpers being the militia dedicated to Shevarash, one of the three goddesses on the Council of Neutrality formed after the War of the Gods three hundred years prior

All of those words that sound like gibberish are something I will get into in a separate post in great detail because to do it all here would make this post monstrous

Regardless, Oa and Ea engage in shenanigans

At the Bard off, Thespin’s opponent is a young bard named Argus Lee Chantelle, who reveals himself as a fellow alumnus from the Thultan High, the secondary school in Thultanthar that both he and Thespin graduated from. In his rap, he references how he was vanquished by Thespin in the Bard off held by Thultan High, but also that he suspects Thespin had something to do with Debbie’s disappearance

At the end of his rap, which I will also put up in a separate post, Harpers that Argus tipped off about Thespin beforehand move in to capture Thespin, but Oa and Sunflower handle the situation with some smokescreens and quarterstaffing.

Riker, a new PC and adventurer who met Sunflower at her monastery on a few occasions, joins the party

In the interim between this city and the monastery, I realized that random encounters really aren’t what I or my players want to do. We had a couple and they just weren’t that interesting. So fast forward to the monastery

Lo and behold, Lennithon, the blue dragon from Greenest is there, and the party hurry to tell Grandmaster Yoda (I know, but Sunflower’s player insisted all the Masters at the monastery be named after Jedi) everything that had happened

He takes them to a hidden room under his quarters where a rune like the one Frulam used is inscribed in the ground. He tells the party that Bahamut, the good dragon god and the toothpaste to Tiamat’s orange juice, is his patron and that he will help them stop Tiamat. He uses his life force to teleport them to Nogoorsa, the true neutral plane of existence

*deep breath*

I think that’s where I’ll stop for this post. Still got a lot to go.

And that’s a lot already I know, but that’s the condensed version. Left a lot out. I’ll have the next recap post up at some point. I might post the stuff about the council and the rap Argus performed before then, idk

But yeah, this is my favorite thing basically. I hope you all enjoy it

[roll-for-stupidity]

5E (Take 2) Episode 3: AKA Trial And Error

My errors, my players’ trials to be more specific.

First error was not calling the session early. It went on for a good 4 and a half hours or so and by the time we were finished it was really late. There was a perfect stopping point that I could have used, but I put it to the party instead and the next decent place to stop didn’t come for two hours.

Second was just some miscommunication stuff that led to some minor retcons. I can blame some of it on just how much is going on at any one time in these sessions, but I know that I can also be doing a better job of confirming what someone is choosing to do. I worked to be better about that in the last hour, but for this session it was kind of too little too late.

Idk, maybe I’m being too hard on myself. I did improve in a lot of other areas. My voices are much better than they’ve been the last two sessions, and I’ve gotten much more comfortable roleplaying NPC’s.

All that being said, I might as well recount everything that happened.

The fighting in Greenest had finally come to a head, and a scaly blue half-dragon came marching up to the keep, a platoon of kobolds escorting four prisoners behind him at spearpoint. Those prisoners turned out to be the nieces, nephew, and sister of the Sergeant of the archer platoon in the keep, Markguth.

The half-dragon introduced himself as Langdedrosa Cyanwrath, and demanded that unless a champion came out to face him in battle, he would slaughter the prisoners he held. Our party’s bard’s grandstanding throughout Greenest came back to haunt him though, when Cyanwrath demanded as well that the champion be the Thespin Creede he had heard so much about. He gave the keep one hour to send Thespin out and then retreated back to his improvised campsite deeper into town.

Meanwhile, Oa was able to notice that the rest of the army had largely left. The majority of the force left in Greenest were the kobolds guarding Cyanwrath’s prisoners. Thespin meanwhile hailed a kobold from the encampment and tried to get him to squeal, but this kobold liked where his skin was currently just fine, and ran back before he could give anything useful away.

Langdedrosa Cyanwrath marched his way back to the keep at the top of the hour, this time with only three of the prisoners. Thespin and LC exchanged some heated words in a really excellent roleplay segment, until finally the duel began. Let’s just say Thespin had like a .01% chance of actually winning and the odds did not work with him in the end.

He wasn’t dead, but his injury was so severe that he couldn’t get out of bed for almost two days, during which time he was looked after by a very protective dwarf woman. But the perpetrators of the invasion who ran from town after the duel had to be stopped, and the party quickly moved to track the enemy.

Before they could leave, however, a monk from Sunflower’s monastery approached the party and informed them that his brother, Leosin, had disappeared from town during the invasion, leaving only his choker and his broken staff behind. The party agreed to search for this monk as well.

After four hours of walking, they came upon the enemy camp and found it almost entirely abandoned, save for some hunters getting drunk around a campfire. These hunters informed the party that most of the camp left over a day before, and everyone else had retreated into a cave at the back of camp.

The only other person in camp was Leosin, but unfortunately it was too late. The party found his body dead near the entrance of the cave with a stab wound in his chest.

The party solemnly took his body down and said a prayer, then turned their attention to the cave. Before entering the camp, they all donned their stolen cultist garb, and because of this were able to talk their way into getting the guards to let them past.

After walking past, the party thought better of letting the guards live and swiftly took them out, making their way deeper into the cave.

In a section just a little further than the atrium, they found themselves with a choice: go down further into the main portion of the cave, or travel single file through a nearly hidden tunnel leading off to the side.

Sunflower and Oa, using the cultists’ robes they swiped earlier, snuck down this hallway leaving the other three in the main cavern

You might say they didn’t look like that, but they were wearing matching robes

The two infiltrated the barracks of the guards, posing as cultists themselves to glean as much information as they could without drawing suspicion to themselves before going to “relieve” the guards that, unbeknownst to the real guards in the barracks, were already dead

Meanwhile, the other three got jumped by a patrol of kobolds. And my players responded in kind by not fighting them, but instead getting into a five minute or longer two way rant about how the lowest ranking members always get the short end of the stick with a very frustrated kobold named Bol.

It was some excellent roleplay.

(Side note, I love finding gifs for these posts, I really do. Sometimes, finding one that fits exactly is DIFFICULT and it took me 20 minutes to find this one)

Anyway, because it was so good, I decided they had convinced the kobolds to join in the resistance, as it were, and with their help, they were able to (after a fight that ran way too long) take out the guards in the barracks, leaving the cave mostly free to explore.

Like I said above, things were learned, and honestly looking back at this six month old post I forgot to publish, I really can see how much I’ve grown as a DM. And it makes me even more excited for the sessions moving forward. Onwards and upwards, I never say!

[roll-for-stupidity]

5E (Take 2) Episode: It’s Been a Minute

So life (as well as many other things) got in the way of me being able to keep up with this blog as much as I would have liked to while still running this campaign. After a summer away, I’ll be starting it back up again, but I think it would be good for me to get down as well as I can remember what happened since way back in Episode 2 so I have a baseline moving forward

I’m not gonna be as in depth and thorough about every detail like I was in previous posts because to be entirely honest, I don’t remember the details. Just the overarching narrative and a few funny moments that stick out

(I’m also working on a novelization of sorts chronicling the entire story of the campaign so hold onto your butts)

I’ll probably still break it up post by post into little segments, say, 3 I think? Plus I have some new PCs I’ve made that I wanna share with y’all. Then it’s back to (hopefully) play by play recaps when we start back up in a couple weeks. Till then, go listen to @theadventurezone or something. It’s fantastic

P.S. I am going to try and come up with a name for this campaign because D&D (Take 2) ain’t gon’ cut it

EDIT CUZ IM A DUMBASS:

I had Episode 3 almost entirely written in my drafts and I NEVER POSTED IT

So basically that’ll go up as soon as I get my dumb ass to finish it in the next few minutes and I’ll recap the rest in a couple posts

Is anyone surprised? I know I definitely am not

[roll-for-stupidity]

5E (Take 2) Episode 2: AKA Debbie’s First Dong

As you might have been able to guess, the party named this session. I mean, the great and powerful DM? Making dick jokes? Improbable.

Being a fifteen year old forced shut in who has only been out in the world for 36 hours, I guess it makes sense that Debbie wouldn’t have seen a wang before, but here we are. The party decided to rob the robes from the dead Cultists in the Courtyard (which also happens to be the Faerun equivalent of Blood on the Dancefloor)

The party got an opportunity to take a short rest as well while everyone resolved level up stats now that everyone made it to level 2 (except our poor Yuan’ti, Ramen, who was still assisting the “injured” archers up top), recovering some much-needed hit points in preparation for the rest of the night ahead.

Governor Nighthill, who just sounds like a slightly-deeper Dow (only so much creativity to go around, folks), approached the party to request yet another favor: prevent the mill from being set on fire by the enemy, who had gathered outside with torches. So off they went.

The team of Oa, Debbie, Thespin, and Sunflower managed to sneak their way out the back tunnel and within about 100 feet of the mill, where they found four guards and one cultist. Thespin quickly alerted them to the party’s presence by extinguishing their torches, an act that may have temporarily spared the mill a blazing, but caused the enemies to swing around and spot them hiding in the bushes.

The guards weren’t the most accurate of cats, but they weren't the easiest to hit either, and so it took a few rounds to dispose of them. The battle wasn’t especially noteworthy, but in the aftermath, Thespin decided to make the few bodies look like a pile of them to encourage any potential attackers to think twice before messing with THE Thespin Creede.

How he thinks he looks (to enemies):

How he actually looks (to enemies):

He’ll still wreck their shit though.

After this little encounter, Debbie and Oa decide to investigate the mill while Sunflower and Thespin stand guard outside. Inside, the mill is still grinding, and the whole place is dark. Debbie’s player then made a very in-character decision that had immediate consequences.

From the loft above, three spears fly and impale Debbie through the chest, and she falls to the floor, dying.

Outside, all Sunflower and Thespin hear is *thnk, thnk, thnk* in rapid succession, a few seconds of silence, then an ear-splitting scream, followed by more silence.

Naturally, they run inside and are able to finish off the ambush, Oa finally flexing his casting might by blasting a few guards foolish enough to hit him with a melee attack with explosive lightning reactions. At one point, he even decided to let a guard hit him, who managed to crit and stab twelve points of health away, but died in the process, leaving an empty mill and a very injured Debbie.

She was quickly stabilized, and got three sick scars for her trouble.

This week was a shorter sesh because we were missing a member, and Sunflower’s player had to duck out early, but I’ve made steady progress planning the coming weeks.

I’ve stuck pretty close to the script so far for chapter 1, but starting chapter next, we’re gonna be moving into semi-uncharted territory. Got some plans that have been influenced by character decisions and backstories, and I’m super excited to see what the group thinks.

[roll-for-stupidity]

5E (Take 2) Episode 1: AKA Dragons Have Feelings Too

Considering how infrequently my other two campaigns are able to meet (through no one’s fault, life is just very crazy for a few of our players), it’s pretty refreshing to have a group that is free to meet once a week now. And so after character creation, we had a party of five all ready to go.

After meeting on the road, the party made their way to the village of Greenest, which, considering the fact that it was being invaded and was also partially on fire, was kind of a misnomer at the time of their initial spotting of it. Oh, and there was a big fucking dragon circling the keep, so there’s that.

Debbie, a half-elf sorcerer who just one day before had been rescued from being murdered by her father by another half-elf bard named Thespin (played by the ever-witty @baumguy​), was feeling justifiably uncomfortable at the prospect of entering a burning, dragon-guarded, overrun death hamlet, but not wishing to be left behind, she followed after the rest of the group, albeit reluctantly.

Things did not look any better up close. Patrols of kobolds and cultists were burning houses and causing as much chaos and destruction as they could in the process. In the chaos, the party makes their way to the center of town to the main road, where they found six cultists attempting to set fire to a larger house with torches that were definitely not fireballs because cultists definitely do not have magic like I definitely did not assume in game that they did. 

After some fog from Ramen, a Yuan-Ti ranger who also definitely does not have  spellcasting ability at his current level, some stabbing and punching, Debbie levitating 25 feet in the air on accident, and a pretty solid intimidate check from Thespin, the cultists were either no longer living or no longer present, and the party made their way towards the keep, where the majority of civilians seemed to be headed as quickly as they could get there.

On their way, they ran into a family running from a group of kobolds. Sunflower, our final half-elf of the party, a monk so named for the flowers she tended to at her monastery in the Sunset Mountains, tricked them by commanding them in draconic to fall into rank in the other direction - a kind of ventriloquistic hoodwink move that allowed the family to get away.

The party ultimately decided to escort the family through the town, darting from alleyway to alleyway to dodge patrols of enemies. Right before they made it to the keep, they were caught by a patrol of 4 cultists and a kobold, backed into an alleyway with no way to escape…unless you’re Thespin, of course.

Taking one step closer to the title of MVP of Episode 1, he blasted the patrol back with a thunderwave, causing them to fall into a big unconscious heap across the road.

From there, the party finally made it to safety, but there was no time to rest. The Governor of the town, Nighthill, informs the party that there is a group of civilians trapped in the village temple, and he doesn’t have the men available to go rescue them as the veritable army of invaders have now gathered to surround the keep.

The only way out is a never-been-used siege tunnel that ended in a storm grate. After Sunflower busted it down, Debbie took a peek outside, pulling a Tony Stark and then a Jennifer Lawrence in quick succession

This of course alerted the nearby kobold patrol, who attempted to hold her hostage, but kobolds are not known for being particularly dangerous, and the team made quick work of them, Ramen casting even more spells he swore up and down he definitely had (and totally did not).

At the temple, Thespin impersonated a cultist, got the hordes of enemies trying to bust their way into the temple to leave, and the party lead the civilians to safety.

Back inside the keep, the party had two very different ideas on how to proceed. Sunflower, Ramen, and Oa, the final member of the party who was an azimuth cleric, decided they’d like to try and talk it out with the dragon that had been circling the keep to this point. Thespin and Debbie, not wishing to die this day, chose to remain in the keep.

Sunflower caught the dragon’s attention and asked it quite politely why it was there, and in a moment of inspiration, I came up with the most dragon-sounding voice I could, drawing cheers from my players (DM, level up *slaps own ass*)

Lennithon, the adult blue dragon, informs the three heroes that if it was up to him, he wouldn’t actually be here. He didn’t really have a choice in the matter. He then rolled against a persuasion roll made by Sunflower to ask him to leave, and he up and left.

Meanwhile our bard and sorcerer were given some unfortunate news down below: a group of invaders had destroyed the front gate and were now in the courtyard. The gate could be repaired, but not until the enemies were disposed of. Thespin bravely faced the enemy group, and was quickly stricken down; all the times he had avoided death this session finally catching up to him.

Debbie was chilling in the keep watching this happen, and between her repeated casting of Create Bonfire and the four guards standing outside, the wave of attackers was dispatched. By this point, Oa and Sunflower had returned from the top of the keep (Ramen’s player had to leave early, and so he remained above to ensure the guards on the watchtowers were unharmed, presumably).

Oa quickly cast Spare the Dying, saving Thespin from an untimely end, while Sunflower and Debbie, the dynamic duo, beat and burned the shit out of the second wave of attackers who appeared.

^^now just imagine a five foot square spontaneously combusting every 6 seconds and you’ll have an accurate representation of what was happening.

Finally, the door was repaired, and our heroes made their way back inside the keep to rest for a short while. But the night is not over. What will our heroes do next? No seriously, I have no idea. What are they gonna do? They keep me on my toes. Guess I’ll have to wait and see.

Honestly, this session was so much fun. I’ve never DMed an official D&D session before as everything I’ve done until now has been some form of homebrew. But it‘s exciting to have such an energetic group and to try something new. I look forward to seeing what my players will come up with.

[roll-for-stupidity]

An Update

So a lot has happened since November, and I just wanted to share a quick post detailing some of the changes, at least as far as how they affect my D&D shenanigans:

First off, I had moved to Florida back in June to pursue an internship, but in November, things kind of fell apart and I was forced to move back to Texas. For a period of almost a month and a half, I didn’t have a home. I was hopping from couch to bed to couch, and that kind of existence doesn’t really lend itself to a regularly scheduled campaign.

Because of that, I had to withdraw from The Keep of Yeomanry. That’s the reason I haven’t posted any updates on that game and removed it from my list. That being said, I absolutely adore Cynnig as a character, and I fully intend to use her as a PC at some point in a future 5E game. Stay tuned on that one.

Secondly, I’ve really begun to develop my Naruto D20 game, and the plot has evolved much further beyond what I initially anticipated it to: I now have a two completely distinct storylines running that will EVENTUALLY crossover, but the overall plot has really outgrown the initial name I gave the game.

Therefore, I’ve decided to rename the game. Henceforth it shall be known as “Naruto D20: The Saviors and The Guardians.” I will be updating my tags to reflect this change.

Thank you all so much for being patient with me as I’ve worked out all this real life stuff. Trust me, I didn’t want to be focused on the real world when I could be working on my fantasy creations. But now that things are a bit more settled, expect to see more Naruto D20 coming your way. Session 2.2 is all planned out and I’m just waiting on a date everyone is available.

And maybe one day we as a group will find a time when we’re all free for @baumguy’s next RWBY Tabletop session, and when that happens, I’ll bring you guys the next episode of that adventure as well.

I have also decided to run a 5E campaign myself, for @baumguy and a few other close friends, so look forward to that coming up VERY SOON!!!

And lastly, I would just like to wish my DM, player, and friend who introduced me to this wacky pastime, @baumguy, the happiest of birthdays. All of this is happening because you assumed I was nerdy enough to role play a character in a world of a cartoon I hadn’t watched. And you were absolutely right to assume that. Thanks for all the laughs, love, and times you let my character make a questionably stupid decision. Here’s to many more!

(Wow two Tracer gifs? I don’t even PLAY Overwatch!)

[roll-for-stupidity]

That DM feel when

You wanna bounce ideas for your campaign off your friends but most of your friends are in said campaign

[roll-for-stupidity]

After Playtesting, I decided to re-work a lot of things with my Chronomancer Class. I took out the spell-casting and focused more heavily on time manipulations, and make the Base stat Intelligence.

I also decided to re-work the archetypes from scratch, as they felt too much like discount versions of other classes. This time around the archetypes are based around theories of time, and will hopefully feel more unique. It may require some heavy re-balancing. at this point, but I like the direction.

[roll-for-stupidity]

The Initiative Tree

I just showed up to my buddy’s house for our weekly D&D Night, and he pulled out this awesome creation that he built.

After we roll for Initiative, we each put on our clothespin to remember the order of our turns. I was so immediately impressed that I asked him if I could snap a pic and share with the rest of you. He graciously agreed.

[roll-for-stupidity]

Naruto D20 Episode 2.1: AKA Dow Catches Them On The Flipside

After MUCH too long a wait (and a bunch of scary irl stuff), I finally got back in the D&D saddle to run the debut session of my second team of ninjas!

Back when I made the decision to have two distinct teams (like four months ago lol), the only thing I knew right off the bat was that I wanted this team’s sessions to have a much different tone, and I wanted them to experience the plot from a vastly different perspective from our team of Leaf ninja.

If the ninja from the Leaf were raised in a society free from terror and conflict (due to the peace created by the 7th Hokage’s oversight and raw strength basically destroying any threat before it happened), the ninja from this team were raised in a society ravaged by infighting and turmoil; and what better setting than the village hidden in the Mist: Kirigakure

You know, the village that created the first major villains in the source material?

From there, I decided in order to achieve the tone I wanted, I had to throw my players right into the action. A simple delivery mission becomes a murder mystery then becomes, to their knowledge, an assassination attempt on their very lives.

Let’s start with the mystery. I knew that in order for this to be fun and entertaining, clever decisions made by my players had to rewarded with evidence or hidden secrets. And in that regard I really feel like I hit the mark. And my players did very well too. They found nearly everything I hid for them, and not for lack of difficulty. One of my players even decided to check what I thought would be one of the most obscure clues right off the bat: a trap door hidden under a rug.

Meanwhile, my other two players dutifully and thoroughly investigated nearly every other inch of the house for clues, discovering, to their shock and horror, a decomposing dead body: the very body of the man they were to make a delivery to!

From there, they discovered an object was missing, and an object was left behind, possibly incriminating a ninja from a village that isn’t so unfamiliar....

Then finally the three decided it was best to send someone down to check on what was under the trap door. The lucky player found himself at the bottom of a ladder with a torch to his left, as well as some flint and steel to light it. Upon doing so, I’m not entirely certain he was prepared for what he saw

A giant, triple masted ship with a gangplank leading from the rocky outcropping in which he stood up to the deck of the ship, and on that gangplank, a man with a harpoon gun now aimed at his head.

After a quick exchange of “who are you”s, the rest of the ninja team soon followed the first player down the rabbit hole

(I’ll let my players decide later who was Shaggy and who was Scooby in this scenario)

The players explained, quite unconvincingly, that the person the harpoon wielder was here to see was dead in his room up above. Upon ordering the three to remain where they were, the man, presumably the captain of that ship, climbed the ladder to see for himself, returning a few minutes later, looking sullen and in shock.

The man’s complete demeanor and approach to this situation had changed. He gave the trio no choice and demanded they come with him if they wanted to live, to which my players were like:

Then an explosion happened, and one of my characters attacked the dude and got knocked out which very quickly turned their answer to

But they hopped on his ship and are now on their way to the Land of Tea, where the man claims they can lay low until he can “get to the bottom of what’s going on.” And that is where we left our young heroes at the end of 2.1

Must admit, not my absolute best work, but I’m still pretty happy with a lot of what happened. Need to figure out the next step from here but a solid opening to what looks to be a promising side of the campaign.

If there’s a lesson to be learned from this session it would probably be to be willing to change the ultimate outcome on the fly due to unforeseen factors (like backstories that had not been finalized before the session), even if that means moving the campaign in a different direction than the one I initially planned or preferred. That being said, I’m excited to see where things go from here.

I’ll leave you with what I left my three players:

Ciao for now!

[roll-for-stupidity]

Naruto D20 Episode 1.25: AKA Dow Finally Does A Good

So at the end of session 1.2, I let the characters go off and “train,” which basically consists of the players selecting a jutsu that their characters have literally never even heard of, and rolling a die to see if they can “learn” the jutsu with no instruction or prior knowledge of the jutsu’s existence.

^^literally my reaction after realizing how dumb it is that that’s the process for learning techniques.

Like, I let it slide in session 1.1 because the players selected techniques that the characters could feasibly have heard of, and could practice on their own, but then my players selected some highly specialized techniques for session 1.2′s training time and it just felt…wrong? I guess? And it’s wrong for a few reasons:

One, there is no way that you can learn how to do something if you don’t know that something exists and you have no one showing you how the something is done. Like, that goes for everything. Allowing players’ meta-knowledge to affect gameplay is like DM cardinal sin number 4. Player knowledge and character knowledge should always be kept separate. No exceptions.

Two, you lose out on so much roleplaying ability. Like, the source anime and manga’s training sequences were arguably better than some of the fight scenes at times. Naruto spends like over half his time training, and the immense payoff that you get from watching him finally succeed only comes from watching the episodes of him struggling and working to get a new skill or technique to work. And the payoff was usually awesome.

So I decided to fix breaking DM cardinal sin number 4, by breaking cardinal sin number 3: I retconned the last third of session 1.2

^^Basically how I started this session.

Let me preface what happened next by saying that yesterday, I literally lost my job and became homeless so I did not have anything planned. I was fully expecting this to crash and burn. But it honestly turned out to be the best session we’ve had yet, and I would even go so far as to say I enjoyed DMing this session more than playing some of the sessions I’ve played. I know the two experiences cannot necessarily be compared 100%, but today’s mini-session was honestly so fun and very refreshing, and the two players I had with me today (the third is currently MIA and I just hope that he is doing ok) agreed.

Basically, my stipulation for learning techniques became that you had to roll high enough on a knowledge check for ninja lore to see if your character knows of the technique. In addition, you had to have someone who knew the technique teaching it to you, or you had to have had enough experience watching the technique being performed to try and learn it on your own, but the second way would come with a penalty to the learn check. Finally, instead of just rolling and you either got it or you didn’t, you had to put in the work to learn how to do the thing. In other words, you actually had to train your character. Roleplay over rollplay.

I’m gonna need to copyright that phrase.

And I mean, at the end of the day, the roll to learn the technique is ultimately what dictates whether or not the technique gets learned. But, regardless of the roll’s outcome, the character would literally be expending eight hours of their time trying to learn this new skill, and while I could just jump ahead eight hours, the chance for character development and interactions during that period would be completely lost.

Zaki, played by B (who has given me permission to tag him @baumguy), decided that he would spend his time training by going to his grandmother’s dojo to work on his swordfighting. His grandmother, Kisagana, who is the daughter of the Akatsuki member Kisame, has long since left her mentoring days behind her, but she does have Mutsumi, a young Chuunin who is working to take over for her when she does decide to step down as sensei of the dojo. @baumguy rolled well enough on a knowledge check that his character had heard of the technique he wanted his character to learn enough to ask about it by name, and Mutsumi had the necessary knowledge to train him to perform that technique, which meant that all the prerequisites I had set for learning a technique were met, and the roleplay began.

@baumguy kicked it off with a successful learn check, so from there it was just a matter of some good old fashioned sparring. Now, I hadn’t prepared any of what was going to happen, really. I just gave her one or two basic character traits. She began by demonstrating the technique, and then had him attempt to recreate what she showed him. He would practice for a bit, Taijutsu rolls indicating how well each attempt went, and when Zaki needed some pointers (rolled poorly on an attempt to perform an aspect of the technique enough times in a row), she stepped in and offered them.

It wasn’t by any means a necessary interaction. Poor rolls didn’t have permanent consequences, because he had already rolled well enough to perform the technique, but it gave a process that would normally just consist of a simple learning check much more life, and allowed Zaki and Mutsumi to grow as characters, playing off of each other and allowing different aspects of each of their characterizations to shine through.

By the end of it, Zaki had pretty well mastered the technique, but just to keep him from getting too inflated of an ego, Mutsumi let him know that he still had lots of room for growth and improvement:

Meanwhile, Tamotsu and Rin (played by J from the RWBY campaign in which I play Iris) shared a moment at Ichiraku Ramen, learning a bit about each other’s histories and Tamotsu was able to get a better idea of where Rin was looking to improve. The thing about Rin is, she has a bloodline that canonically in her backstory is difficult to control, but she knew no Chakra Control techniques at all. This simple fact not only made Tamotsu, a descendant from a clan also famous for an incredibly difficult to control bloodline (so difficult that only Tamotsu himself had mastered it, and even that required the chakra of Yamato, the last surviving host of Hashirama’s cells, to be introduced into Tamotsu when his bloodline activated years before), the ideal teacher for Rin to study under, but it also meant that he had to start with the bare basics of Chakra Control for Rin:

Tree Climbing Technique!

This training came quite naturally to Rin, so her training consisted of a simple explanation followed by a demonstration, after which she was free to practice as she pleased. Tamotsu had something to take care of, and left her to her training, promising to return in the evening to see her progress, which he did and found her sitting at the top of the tree, having mastered the technique, adding it to her repertoire.

For Rin, the roleplaying was more about establishing rapport between herself and the person she will likely spend a lot of time training under directly, not to mention go on missions for. So yes, there was a different learning style involved, but that also comes with the nature of the technique itself. Some techniques can be learned without extensive hands-on training, while others are learned best with someone to oversee the entire learning process.

I’m not going to pretend that I’ve in any way perfected the style of this campaign. I know I still have lots to work on, and I know that we’ve really only just begun. But I feel for the first time like I have a shot at creating a story and an experience for my players that is not only enjoyable and fun, but also deep, rich, and at times surprising. I know I surprised myself with how well this session went.

And while I know I still have to find out what our favorite squid boy Maindo (played by M, also from the RWBY campaign) got up to while Zaki and Rin were training, I’m much more confident moving forward in my storytelling ability and just general comfort level with not having every little detail fleshed out before a session. And even with these minor interactions that seem meaningless in the grand scheme of things, I feel like I’m still able to move the overarching plot forward. I’ve got some big things planned for my tiny ninja friends. I just can’t wait for them to see what’s in store.

So, I know I forgot my takeaways from 1.2, but as far as 1.25 goes, I’d just say I learned to relax. DMing does not have to involve nearly as much planning or stress as I was initially putting into it. While major characters do need to be developed fully for combat situations and such, minor interactions don’t necessarily require a lot of prior planning, and it’s quite possible that planning more might have made the interactions feel less genuine or fulfilling.

I’m still learning this whole thing. And probably will be the entire campaign. But hey, I know for a fact that both my players and I had fun this session, and in my book, that’s 99% of what matters.

Now thanks to the whole real life thing (you know, the unemployment and homelessness bit), I am very exhausted after driving so long with so little sleep, so my bed now calls. But I always feel the need to gather my thoughts on sessions before I go to bed, just so I can make sure I remember all the things I want to document. That now complete, I await the sweet gift of the Sandman until tomorrow morning (or afternoon, who knows, I’m exhausted)

(Can you tell I’m excited for Christmas?)

[roll-for-stupidity]

RWBY Tabletop Episode 8: Lasting Consequences

(As this is the first session we’ve played since I’ve started this blog, you won’t find Episodes 1-7 anywhere on my blog, just read Iris’s backstory and the analysis in my last post to get a sense of what’s happened until now. This also isn’t the 8th session of the whole campaign, it’s just the 8th that Iris has been a part of, as our parties are currently split)

We took an L tonight. Iris took a big one.

For some backstory for those just joining us on this RWBY-based Tabletop adventure, Iris is in a group of Hunters who are trying to take down an evil force in the world, a man known only to the group as Ludus (or Lupus, if you’re Iris).

Ludus, as we have learned, has three Naturals (or Nasties, as our furry fox friend likes to call them), Ormo (Orlando), Demens (Desmond), and Bellua. Our team has taken down Ormo, then we split up to fight the other two, one cell taking down Demens in Vacuo, the other (Iris’ cell specifically) rushing off to fight Bellua in Mistral.

Through a series of five sessions of play, Iris, Wally, and Kaia learned not only of Bellua’s abilities and influence over the people of Mistral, but also of another player in the world, a White Fang leader named Zemo.

Bellua’s power is a parasitic aura that controls the minds of up to three individuals, bending them to her will. Zemo’s power is the sapping of the life force of those around him.

Bellua was able to take control of Iris by means of deception and a misguided follower of Zemo, causing Iris to believe that Zemo and Bellua were working together. But after an subsequent encounter with Zemo where Bellua used her influence to cause Iris to release Zemo from captivity after our team had captured him, Zemo’s ability seemed to release Iris from Bellua’s control, leading her to then believe that the two were in opposition.

Finally it came time for the final confrontation with Bellua, Iris’ headspace as mentioned in the previous post was in quite a dark place, but she dove into battle regardless, during which Bellua was knocked out in one solid hit by our resident dust farmer Wally’s sneak attack.

In bursts Zemo and Clar, another one of Bellua’s mind-puppets, who begin fighting our team as well as the royal guard who had by then turned on Zemo and the White Fang members after Wally released the Mayor from Bellua’s control, the Mayor commanding his guards to take on the White Fang.

Iris, already feeling an unstable, clashing mix of emotions from her past encounters with Zemo, lets out a roaring question, “Why?” to which Zemo responds with a grin that causes Iris to fall to her knees, the emotions overtaking her and causing a few tears to slip down her cheeks.

After the adrenaline from combat kicks in however, she composes herself and zeroes in on Zemo, trying time and time again to put a dent in his seemingly untouchable armor, and time and time again failing, her desperation building to a fever pitch that culminates in her literally jumping out of a window and falling sixty feet to pursue him as he attempted to escape.

In chasing him down the mountain, she called out to him desperately, trying to understand, but received only cryptic answers to her emotionally charged questions until finally she revealed that she knew he was to blame for the riots that ensued on an island called Nausse, causing most of this conflict in the first place.

To this, he simply replied that he couldn’t allow her to live with that knowledge. Iris fought desperately against him, but wasn’t able to do anything, and was ultimately taken down.

Searches ensued for her body, but nothing was found, until Kaia entered the tavern at which the party stayed for a brief time, and was told that she had a visitor upstairs. Kaia raced to the room in which we had stayed and found an old friend-turned enemy-turned friend again, standing in the corner of the room, Iris loosely wrapped in a bloody blanket on the bed.

When the blanket was removed, Iris was missing an arm and a leg.

She was eventually stabilized by medical staff, but currently remains in a stasis chamber in a coma as the three of us fly towards Atlas, the rendezvous point for our two teams.

Atlas has the greatest medical technology in the world, so prosthetics aren’t off the table. But I do worry for Iris’ soul. Before this she didn’t care if she lived or died if it meant taking out the enemy. Now she might not want to live at all.

These are dark, heavy themes for a campaign that I never expected to become so serious. But I will do my faithful duty to this character and continue to see her to the end of her story, wherever or whatever that might be.

[roll-for-stupidity]

An In-Depth Study On Iris Currently

During our RWBY session tonight, towards the end, the question was posed: is Iris really acting in character?

And at first I was worried. I do my best to play my characters as closely to how they would act as possible, but I know it's possible for my characterization to slip when something I would like my character to do comes my way that doesn't necessarily make sense for them to do.

But, after carefully reviewing Iris' behavior (especially during this session), as well as talking to some of the other players afterward, I think Iris has acted exactly as someone who has had her experiences might act in her given situation.

Here is a character, who grew up surrounded by close friends, and even someone she cared enough for to consider loving beyond a platonic manner, and then was forced to abandon her teammates to death or worse when they were captured in Mistral.

Then came the betrayal she felt by the Hunter Academy who refused to send a hunting party after her companions, driving her to leave the only home she'd ever known to try desperately to find the only family she'd ever had.

Then years of isolation. Iris searched for years alone looking for her friends, unable to find any trace of the group that took them, until finally she was approached by Verra.

Then things bigger than the small world she had constructed for herself began to take place, webs of fate being woven together driving her back into a group she wasn't sure she was ready to be a part of.

Finally, the feeling of helplessness at having her own free will compromised, potentially leaving the option open for her to hurt her new traveling companions, becoming unable to even trust her own self and mind, until finally she snapped.

She no longer cared. About her own life. About her goals and aspirations she once had. About happiness.

So she became reckless. Even more so than her chance-driven nature already caused her to be. She became more willing to draw herself into fights, to be the sacrificial pawn, to literally throw herself to the wolves if it just meant that all of this would just. Stop.

None of her friends would be hurt again. No one would be left behind. She'd be alone. But the people she cared for would be safe.

She is in a dangerous place mentally. And sometimes it's hard for my fellow players (and their characters) to understand. But I will faithfully follow Iris along her journey. To have it any other way would be to do the character a disservice.

I know this post is heavier than my usual fare, so I'll leave you all with a more lighthearted highlight:

Iris entered a salon, dyed her hair and tail black, gave herself the nickname Onyx and played the violin so well that she earned herself an adoring fan, who is definitely not named Cindi. Onyx and Sterling will (hopefully) have a concert when this is all over