#getting a player head as loot when you kill somebody is like super fucked if you think ab it

[valeriapryanikova]

goretober 23 : decapitation | hermithorrorweek 1 : game mechanics

[queer-dnd-misadventures]

diners, drive-ins, & dragons: session 1

the cast: soren @transgirlthor as tove, half-orc hexblade warlock lex @fareexa as shel, orc barbarian dean @queerjew as screech, kenku bard  avia @patrexes, DM

the source material: princes of the apocalypse & blatant disregard for PotA’s actual intended plot

we begin our scene in red larch, a small town several days journey from waterdeep, in a bar. tove, shel, and screech—being, as they are, late-teen queer and trans kids—have been here for many, many hours, they’ve been loud, and they’ve been really fucking cheap. so they’re quietly asked to leave.

they get a room at the local motel, sleep off their hangovers, and wake up to a Fantasy Continental Breakfast with some alarming components. tove just starts eating eggs whole. just swallows them. she just vores the goddamn eggs. why not?

the proprietor of the inn, a widowed middle aged woman who’s a bit… well. she senses auras, and she thinks there’s something shady going on. a few of her chickens have gone missing, and she’s pretty sure there’s a nefarious plot at hand. she heard the tarnlar kids were talking about a plague, too, and not to be Fantasy Racist but she’s pretty sure there’s some kinda warlock or wizard to blame.

the trio heads out to the tarnlar house and meet mrs tarnlar, rynessa, who’s a little transphobic but it’s….whatever. her kids have, in fact, been talking about a plague out by lance rock, but they heard it from somebody who heard it from somebody who heard it from somebody, and you know you can’t really trust anything that innkeeper says. she’s not right in the head, you know. in any case, the trio asks to talk to her kids, and they’re waved over to anna, age 7. anna has a very high dex and dreams of becoming a thief one day. she pickpockets one of tove’s daggers.

now, a quick bit of scene setting: tove is a 6 foot tall half-orc with a horrifying str of 22. shel is 8’5” and has the highest wis of anyone in the party but also has 4 int and 1 cha, so that’s where she’s at. she’s really just a farm girl who wants a girlfriend. screech, the kenku, has 2 str. They literally can’t hold themself up on their own legs. they ride on the Tall Girls’ shoulders in turns.

tove tries to grapple the child. fails. screech casts mage hand, gets a nat 20 on a sleight of hand roll, and deftly plucks the dagger out of anna’s hands and lets it hover in the air out of her reach. she jumps for it a bit, unsuccessfully.

tove goes to retrieve it. screech lets it hover a bit higher. tove jumps for it, unsuccessfully.

anyway, anna is enamored by the fact that they’re adventurers and also by the fact that tove and shel are very, very tall. she tries to trade information for the dagger, but is ultimately way too excited and explains that she and her brother kai heard from the milliner that there’s a curse and/or plague out at the cliffs by lance rock. the crew takes some “you’re not chicken, are you?”ing from the seven year old before they eventually decide to bite the bullet and head out to lance rock.

there are a lot of warning signs at lance rock. unfortunately, the only person in the party who can read common is the kenku, who can’t talk, so they continue onwards more or less unknowingly. at this point, your humble DM makes the horrible, horrible mistake of introducing a swarm of spiders as a low level, easy battle to introduce these new d&d players to the mechanics of attack rolls.

tove had to make a death saving throw. shel at one point barrel-rolled and somehow not one single spider got caught under her 8’5”, 450lb frame. screech somehow makes it through this unscathed.

the zombies in lance rock are pretty boring. the crew makes it through well, killing two zombies and very pointedly avoiding waking up any of the rest of them. tove shows off how strong she is by picking up an entire sacrifical altar for literally no reason. they find the signet ring of a noble household from waterdeep on a severed arm and pocket it for a sidequest somewhere further down the line. they sneak past some zombie furries cosplayers. tove tries to convince shel they should put screech in an iron trunk and leave them.

then they get to the endgame of this tiny tiny little encounter casually borrowed with a few changes from princes of the apocalypse and are sneaking up on the mad wizard oreioth in his workshop. how they managed to sneak up on him in the first place? we just don’t fucking know. in any case, screech decides to start this encounter off by using mage hand to knock over a jar on a shelf on the opposite side of the cavern.

your humble DM makes their second mistake: letting dean describe the jar’s contents. it apparently contains a faintly glowing purple liquid, very thick and viscous. 

i shrug. it falls on the floor, the jar shatters, and where the contents fall, a portal to the outer planes opens up. think the spell black tentacles. blackness seeps into the room. everything goes cold. a zombie gets grabbed by a few of the undulating, many-eyed tendrils, and pulled in, disappearing fucking instantly. the wizard oreioth screams, very loudly, and takes a couple uncertain, worried steps forward.

roll initiative! or, wait, don’t, i guess, because halfway through shel’s preparation to throw her javelin, tove gets the grand idea to talk to the guy. “hail and well met!” she doesn’t actually say in her vaguely-british accent, but absolutely does in my head since she’s soren @transgirlthor’s baby and is pretty much what it says on the tin. “i’m a warlock too and that totally wasn’t my fault, and um, anyway, we’re kind of? lost?”

tove is nobility. oreioth is also nobility. they’re also both trans, which you had to see coming from a name like oreioth, let’s get fucking real. they knew each other in high school! oreioth is super offended that tove would suggest he was a warlock, like he was anything like her family… doesn’t she remember him?

tove rolls for it. apparently she does.

(screech and shel, who know absolutely nothing about tove’s background, look on in confusion)

the conversation goes downhill! turns out summoning an eldritch abomination and then trying to play innocent doesn’t really tend to... work out. shocker. also, three zombies are shambling their way down the corridor some 60 feet away, and there’s a goddamn eldritch abomination. the DM, very aware at this point that they almost died fighting fucking spiders, is more than a little worried. but hey! maybe it’ll work out!

remember when they rolled initiative, like, ages ago? yeah, so shel rolled 17, the eldritch abomination rolled 16, and tove rolled 14. none of the other numbers matter.

shel throws her javelin. hits oreioth for an amount of damage i no longer remember. as a reaction, oreioth shouts a command word and awakens four more zombies! DM casually begins preparing to five-second foreshadow a deus ex machina while desperately trying to find a spell an eldritch abomination would cast that wouldn’t be a completely inescapable TPK.

dean raises their hand.

dean: talking is a free action, right? avia: yeah dean: cool! i say hello avia: um dean, whose kenku has the haunted one background and some experience with great old one cults: in primordial

so after a mostly-telepathic round of bargaining with a great old one that deals psychic damage to everyone in the room save screech themself (they have a haunted ring of mind shielding, which will absolutely not come up later, definitely not), a deal is struck: the GOO kills everything here, except for the party. in return, screech’s soul? ha. hahahaha. when they die, that’s getting fucking eaten, no take-backsies and no getting brought back.

they are still, at this point, level one. two hours ago they couldn’t even kill spiders.

the eldritch abomination casts, like, a modified version of incendiary cloud. every undead drops, instantly. oreioth is on fire and will be dead by the next round because he has like four HP left. tove’s next in the order, and casts eldritch blast.

oreioth dead in miami

the eldritch abomination pulls their dimensional portal shut with some truly alarming physics that sounded pretty damn cool when i described it three hours ago and don’t really know how to repeat. the crew are left alone to explore the workshop and study. they loot everything, obviously. tove even takes the curtains.

but we’re not quite finished yet. there’s a bloody shrine in the study, see, with a sigil tove recognizes but can’t quite place carved into it. also some severed limbs, which are carefully removed and any jewelry looted, including a beaded friendship bracelet. it’s got two heart-shaped beads and between those, letter beads spelling out the name jemma. screech puts it on their ankle immediately and then splashes some holy water on the shrine. then all three of them touch the fucking thing, in unison, and like—?

listen. i know i’m the one who put it there in the first place, specifically for this to happen. but i didn’t think they’d actually, like, do it.

anyway, screech hasn’t taken any damage this whole time. tove and shel very much have. their wounds, now, reopen. their blood, seemingly of its own accord, finds its way into the engraved sigil. and when the bloody sigil is complete, they drop to the floor. dead? unconscious? simply unoccupied? who knows. 

at least they’re level 2 now. and screech is—probably—fine.

a raven crows behind them. shel and tove, in their astral forms, turn around. they roll insight. shel, not particularly quick on the uptake, recognizes something is very, very wrong about the prepubescent half-elf with the raven perched on her shoulder, not there only seconds before. tove recognizes her baby sister.

“mother’s going to kill me,” says lothar.