#I'm gonna miss that dramatic pink douchebag

[princelucivaryaslana]

It’s D&D and i’m bad at it and talk too much HEYOOOO

So Mercy is fucking dead forever.

Which I mean, he was an excellent character and the player i thought hated him actually enjoyed our character dynamic so it’s bittersweet, but god he was bad at things. Also, he’d officially died-died three times, the 13-year-old goliath that served as the party lil brother and the little purple kobald everyone loved that was the goliath’s best friend were dead-dead too, Mercy had found his mom in the afterlife after agonizing over her the whole year and a half he inhabited Prince Valafar’s body, and he was (as I have been) agonizingly cognizant that he was more of a hindrance than a help when it came to achieving party goals, so he didn’t really have a reason to come back (although he would have come back as an aarakocra and finally been able to fly again and that would have been cool but whatever I did this).

SO

I’ve started playing a Madness domain cleric named Ban (pronounced “Bahn”). 

       Backstory: Ban’s parents were a changeling trouper (who was open about their status as a changeling and used their talents for acting) and a changeling living in town disguised as an elderly elven weaver. The weaver excitedly met with the trouper in secret the night the troupe arrived, having not knowingly met another changeling in years, and the two had a short, secret romantic foray during the troupe's week-long stay in town before they parted ways.          The weaver ended up having Ban a little while later and kept them a secret until Ban was old enough to be taught how to shapeshift, whereupon Ban was taught how to look like an albino human child so as to be easily discernible from the other children in town, as well as to create a simple excuse as to why an elderly elven woman suddenly had a child (”I found him sleeping in an alley. His mother must have abandoned him due to his condition, poor thing.”).         The early years of Ban’s life were warm and happy. Ban was clever and quickly taught themself how to read, spending a lot of their time with their nose in a book when they weren’t out playing with the other children. Their parent taught them how to subtly age, about the art of acting, and about the cultures of the other races. They also taught Ban how to weave and sew, and they took great pains and pride in teaching Ban how to transform into the elderly elven weaver themself, a persona named Shi (short for Shilaena Nivarian) that had been passed down through the family for generations.         Unfortunately, it couldn’t last. Ban’s parent was very old, and they died in their sleep one night when Ban was about 8 years old, reverting back to their default form. Ban took their trade tools and as much of the most expensive wares as they could carry and ran north to the capital, as they’d been instructed to do if their parent ever died.         They lived on the streets in the capital of their country for almost 6 years, learning through practice how to quickly learn enough about other people to convincingly portray them, as well as how to sneak and steal. When they were around 14 years old they finally sold the last of the wares they’d taken with them from home (though they kept a small square of thread-of-gold cloth to remember their parent by), so they moved farther north, using the money they got from that final sale to rent a kiosk in the marketplace of the first big city they entered and play the part of Shi for the first time in years. When they made enough money to feed themself between cities while still having enough left over to rent a shopspace, they moved on, and they slowly traveled northward with that routine for about 2 years.         When Ban was 16, they were living in a city that claimed to guard the third of the Seven Seals, a group of massive monsters who, through magic runes kept in a tower built in the very spot where all the planes converge, were kept alive but controlled to seal away a powerful blood mage who threatened the entire world (it’s all very complicated and dramatic). The city had an annual tradition of selecting a child, usually an orphan, and throwing them into the cave where the Third Seal, Everbleed the Webbed, resides, to appease the beast and keep it in its prison.         Guess who got picked as sacrifice because they were young and new in town?         So Ban was caught, blindfolded, knocked unconscious, and thrown into the cave the spider-thing lived in. Whilst in the cave, they had a dream wherein a voice told them they weren’t going to die there. When they awoke, there was a gem embedded in the flesh of their throat, and the Seal was chewing on their shoulder. After slashing the beast in the face with a blade made of blood (i won’t apologize, it’s a rad weapon and is going to make me very useful as a tank) and getting out of its grasp, Ban ran through the cave, fumbling through webs covered in acid, pursued by Everbleed and other creatures that lived in the spider’s cave, their head full of the sound of powerful winds. Winds that screamed. Winds that never ceased. Winds that threatened to drive Ban mad.         Winds that succeeded.

Turns out, during Mercy’s character arc, we ended up killing the First Seal trying to get Prince Valafar’s girlfriend out of the dungeon, which initiated the decay of the other seals, so our party has been given the task of killing all of the rest of the monsters before they can start to run rampant again. Ban was called upon by the elderly archdruid Moody Blue, a PC from the first campaign and one of the founders of the Allegiance of the Nine, to give the party information about Everbleed so they can kill it and save the Warforged wizard’s creator, another first campaign PC (he’s a tortle gunslinger-turned-wizard who steals people’s bodies to stay alive like an asshole lol) who’s stuck in Everbleed’s rune seal. Apparently, he true-iced and then Sequestered himself on it after being mortally wounded by one of this campaign’s BBEGs, and he can’t get out to be healed until the seal breaks.

All that aside, lemme tell ya how I’m still real bad at D&D.

Ban and Rush (a really cute otterfolk paladin from Moody’s order of the Nine) joined the party after Moody sent out four letters asking for help. We were supposed to go fight Everbleed that session, but Moody let slip that there were rumors of weird goings-on in other parts of the continent, and Tome and Aliara (the Warforged transmutation wizard and the half-elf beastmaster ranger, respectively) were not terribly eager to go fight the spider without a few more allies in light of what they’d just gone through, so, despite Moody warning us that it might not go well, we set out to deal with the other issues in the realms and hopefully accumulate forces in the process.

We started with a town that claimed a bunch of portals were popping up everywhere with horrible monstrosities coming out of them. When we arrived, about four hours from sundown, the outer fringes of the town were on fire and the townsfolk were running about, boarding up their windows and locking themselves indoors. We managed to bully the town innkeeper into letting us inside his tavern, and after he tried to aggressively swindle us and failed, he told us about the whispy black ghosts and the lanky, bony, long-fingered abominations with glowing red eyes that were coming out of the portals and killing everyone.  We ended up finding such a portal in an alleyway across the street from the tavern, and we fought and killed 4 wraiths there, though not before they reduced our paladin’s hp maximum to 43 (that’s important for later). After we killed the wraiths, while I was trying to get up the nerve to have my literally crazy cleriboy stick their head into the portal to see what was up....the paladin stuck his head in the portal to see what was up. Inside the portal was a room made of smooth stone and tile with a giant purple eyeball chained inside of it and three of those white bony motherfuckers surrounding it. After alerting the bony bitches to his presence (he literally said “gross” out loud he was so stupid what a good boy), the paladin popped his head back out and told us what he’d seen. While the rest of the party was standing IN THE ALLEY trying to decide if they were going to run or stay and fight, Ban stuck their head in and saw the boneclaws were making their way to the portal already. Ban told them so just as the innkeep yelled at us to get inside, where he insulted us some more and started freaking out.  While the otter was trying to sleep to get his HP back, the boneclaws broke in and interrupted his rest. They attacked and we started to fight them, and we were doing pretty well after Tome turned the big one into a sheep. Unfortunately, just as the sheep ran outside of the tavern, Tome’s player forgot about the sheep (tbh all of us except the DM did) and had Tome cast Haste on himself, and the big one came back with a vengeance. I tried to get a Turn Undead off on it and failed despite the fact that the damn thing didn’t have advantage on its Wisdom save because of one of my domain features, and it ended up murdering the otter paladin before I could heal the damage he’d taken from the other boneclaws. We managed to kill it by remembering that oh, yes, of course, we intended to Polymorph the innkeep into something not a little bitch, and turned him into a giant ape to help us fight. We managed to kill the boneclaw priest pretty quickly after that, and the session ended there.

“But Winter,” you might exclaim, “you’re playing a cleric! Why didn’t you just use Turn Undead on the wraiths in the alley and prevent this whole disaster instead of waiting until the boneclaws attacked?” Well, you see, the thing is, I’m a fucking idiot and have also never played a cleric in a campaign with undead in it. Mostly though I’m an idiot.

I will say that I offered to fix it since it’s my fault the otter died (Gentle Repose is useful and I just need one more level to be able to cast Raise Dead), but the DM and the player have already moved on and made a different character.

Oh, also Ban’s god is Ghaunadaur, but they didn’t know that until after the boneclaw fight. Tome had done an Arcana check in the alley when Ban and Rush described what they saw in the portal and had told us all that what we described sounded a lot like a shrine of Ghaunadaur, also known as The Elder Eye. After the boneclaw fight, Ban had heard the voice that talked to them sometimes say, “You will make that up to me, child,” and had put two and two together and now has to keep yet another secret from their new buddies.

I love D&D