highlights from the night's dnd
Jul. 23rd, 2017 06:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sciatrix...for context, I'm currently playing a Baby's First Campaign in which I (and nearly all of the players) are playing D&D for the first time, which would probably be going a little bit less chaotically if we didn't also have around fifteen players. It keeps fluctuating. My partner T is our longsuffering DM, who is doing an admirable job writing a party that contains (among other things) Teddy Roosevelt If He Was a Really Classist Half Elf, a turkey vulture that ate something it shouldn't have done and acquired sapience, an accidentally sapient sixty-foot birch tree that doesn't much like humans, a very cheerful and totally deaf bard, Blair Sandburg If He Was a Bard, and a half-elf ranger who is quickly developing the reputation of being The Only Sane One In This Whole Damn Crew.
...I'm a very unfortunate artificer named Badger who has recently been informed by the gods that it's his destiny to be our druid. We're doing a "gods summoned you all and you're saving the universe whether you want to or not dammit" game, for semi-obvious reasons--when asked if they wanted to save the world, most of the characters asked whether they could perhaps go home and take a nap instead, and Badger spent so much time asking if there had been a mistake that our Deus Ex Machina hit him repeatedly with the magic taser. He's not having a great day.
So far, T has accidentally had the friendly barkeep mix up a "Smaan Island Lice Tea" for our quiet, sensible half-elf ranger, who stared at it in some horror and drank it anyway.
We have a new player who effectively fell into the world from a sound sleep, and in a quest for a bed to nap in accidentally got shanghaied into an (entirely fictional) orgy almost immediately.
Pertinent quotes for reminding the unwary at future dates:
"He's very insistent on consent even for unicorns!"
"She's always drunk!"
"The cat meows very loudly."
"...the unicorn pees."
"Okay, what gender are you?!?" [our trained druid has a strangely deep accent]
"[sings] Everybody wants to be a cat!" [everyone else joins in] "because the cat's the only cat, who knows what's at..."
I didn't do very much this week, because Badger started out hiding in a turnip cellar casting Detect Magic while his most detested teammate (Elven Teddy Roosevelt, as it happens) distracted our McGuffin holder with sex. He finds this personally horrifying on a deep, painful level, so as he's Detecting magic he's also focusing pretty hard on how much he doesn't want to be there.
Last week he got his first level in druidism, which he has not actually realized he has... but which also has given him the ability to shift into animals he's seen before.
So he sees, as the spell completes, a glowy spice rack, a glowy mouse hole, and a glowy mushroom. He lets go of the focus he needs to make the magic detecting go and makes note of the really magicky shit, which frees up his attention...
And then as his focus snaps entirely into "oh my god oh my god oh my god I can see Teddy's butt and I don't want to be here", he... accidentally turns himself into a little brown mouse. (Because my friends are trolls, it's apparently a singing mouse like the ones I work with, which matters not at all unless I decide to actually sing.) And he scampers, because mice don't think so good and he doesn't have a great control on all that, and he just wants to be away, so...)
He scurries into the hole and immediately vanished from the rest of the party for the remainder of the game. So hey! Badger continues to be the Worst Druid, finding out important information and then accidentally removing himself entirely from the story before he can actually tell anyone.
Sounds about right.
Currently, Bland Stairburg (actual name) is trying to read Abyssal out of a book while one of our actual trained druids screams and tries to stop him, while our tree Dorkwood is weeping tears of sap and trying to lay to rest the contents of the tavern library. It turned out they were all made of skin, which Spleen the turkey vulture informed us (along with his opinion that the skin smelled kind of tasty). Dorkwood immediately stopped caring once informed it was all flesh-bodied skin, but everyone else is pretty fuckin' grossed out.
Cue some more discoveries of terrible things that the Dread Bob might or might not be doing involving demons and corpses, and everyone gets all alarmed and tromps down to the basement... which means that fifteen or twenty people just tromped down to Bob mid-coitus with Teddy.
He shrieked and clutched at his chest, and then immediately tried to claim he'd just put fake romance novel covers on the Abyssal lettering because it was creeping out his boyfriends, but he really wasn't using them. The best perception checks anyone can come up with indicate he's telling the truth about it, and then Teddy got around to explaining that Badger had vanished, and the shrieking really started then. (He left his clothes behind when he transformed, apparently, which is going to be real entertaining when he turns back into a guy who is inherently a kind of persnickety, nervy, twitchy guy who really wants to be left alone for a while.)
Someone got the idea to hunt for Badger via smell and successfully noted where he'd gone, whereupon our own personal Groot started trying to follow him with a root... which promptly became stuck. Teddy chose this moment to interrogate Bob about his dead grandmother and how she'd died, since he claimed to have gotten the book from her, and then people started asking him the nastier questions...
Somewhere in all of this, our half-dwarf decided to try to eat the mushroom to see what happened while the trained Druid, in cat form, panicked and refused to give them access. The cat clawed the shit out of several people, the half dwarf loudly demanded to eat the mushroom and had to clear up claims that he was suicidal, and the cat wound up having to fight the goddamn tree--who whomped the shit out of everyone holding it and gave it to the half-dwarf barbarian so he could lick it.
It made everything shiny, apparently, but did not help otherwise. Our drunken Bland Stairburg also went and licked it before anyone could forcibly stop him, which means he is now probably sensing magic and definitely drunk as shit, which is definitely going to help everything now.
They tried the weird drink on the tree, who became extremely small and extremely angry. We have independently created baby Groot. My god. This is delightful.
Half the party came in after me, having shrunken themselves in order to run into a bear-sized mouse who is busy overgrooming himself into a slightly enraged panic; everyone else went out to interrogate the drunken unicorn who is the only one who knows how to lead everyone
The unicorn is a maudlin drunk and had to pee, but refused to do so while anyone was looking. And then she burst into tears because some asshole's horse broke a leg and had to be put down. She continued ugly-crying for some times until, overwrought, she started requesting more booze. Additional questions kept derailing into more horrible weeping. (It does not help that this unicorn is a very foolish unicorn with a very short attention span, and several of our questioners were rather short on fucks by this point.)
Meanwhile, the orc tavernkeeper is sobbing half-naked in the corner of his basement outside the void with only Spleen the turkey vulture and a very awkward, quiet thief for comfort. This is definitely not his day any more than it is Badger's.
(I'm not sure it's ever Badger's day.)
...I'm a very unfortunate artificer named Badger who has recently been informed by the gods that it's his destiny to be our druid. We're doing a "gods summoned you all and you're saving the universe whether you want to or not dammit" game, for semi-obvious reasons--when asked if they wanted to save the world, most of the characters asked whether they could perhaps go home and take a nap instead, and Badger spent so much time asking if there had been a mistake that our Deus Ex Machina hit him repeatedly with the magic taser. He's not having a great day.
So far, T has accidentally had the friendly barkeep mix up a "Smaan Island Lice Tea" for our quiet, sensible half-elf ranger, who stared at it in some horror and drank it anyway.
We have a new player who effectively fell into the world from a sound sleep, and in a quest for a bed to nap in accidentally got shanghaied into an (entirely fictional) orgy almost immediately.
Pertinent quotes for reminding the unwary at future dates:
"He's very insistent on consent even for unicorns!"
"She's always drunk!"
"The cat meows very loudly."
"...the unicorn pees."
"Okay, what gender are you?!?" [our trained druid has a strangely deep accent]
"[sings] Everybody wants to be a cat!" [everyone else joins in] "because the cat's the only cat, who knows what's at..."
I didn't do very much this week, because Badger started out hiding in a turnip cellar casting Detect Magic while his most detested teammate (Elven Teddy Roosevelt, as it happens) distracted our McGuffin holder with sex. He finds this personally horrifying on a deep, painful level, so as he's Detecting magic he's also focusing pretty hard on how much he doesn't want to be there.
Last week he got his first level in druidism, which he has not actually realized he has... but which also has given him the ability to shift into animals he's seen before.
So he sees, as the spell completes, a glowy spice rack, a glowy mouse hole, and a glowy mushroom. He lets go of the focus he needs to make the magic detecting go and makes note of the really magicky shit, which frees up his attention...
And then as his focus snaps entirely into "oh my god oh my god oh my god I can see Teddy's butt and I don't want to be here", he... accidentally turns himself into a little brown mouse. (Because my friends are trolls, it's apparently a singing mouse like the ones I work with, which matters not at all unless I decide to actually sing.) And he scampers, because mice don't think so good and he doesn't have a great control on all that, and he just wants to be away, so...)
He scurries into the hole and immediately vanished from the rest of the party for the remainder of the game. So hey! Badger continues to be the Worst Druid, finding out important information and then accidentally removing himself entirely from the story before he can actually tell anyone.
Sounds about right.
Currently, Bland Stairburg (actual name) is trying to read Abyssal out of a book while one of our actual trained druids screams and tries to stop him, while our tree Dorkwood is weeping tears of sap and trying to lay to rest the contents of the tavern library. It turned out they were all made of skin, which Spleen the turkey vulture informed us (along with his opinion that the skin smelled kind of tasty). Dorkwood immediately stopped caring once informed it was all flesh-bodied skin, but everyone else is pretty fuckin' grossed out.
Cue some more discoveries of terrible things that the Dread Bob might or might not be doing involving demons and corpses, and everyone gets all alarmed and tromps down to the basement... which means that fifteen or twenty people just tromped down to Bob mid-coitus with Teddy.
He shrieked and clutched at his chest, and then immediately tried to claim he'd just put fake romance novel covers on the Abyssal lettering because it was creeping out his boyfriends, but he really wasn't using them. The best perception checks anyone can come up with indicate he's telling the truth about it, and then Teddy got around to explaining that Badger had vanished, and the shrieking really started then. (He left his clothes behind when he transformed, apparently, which is going to be real entertaining when he turns back into a guy who is inherently a kind of persnickety, nervy, twitchy guy who really wants to be left alone for a while.)
Someone got the idea to hunt for Badger via smell and successfully noted where he'd gone, whereupon our own personal Groot started trying to follow him with a root... which promptly became stuck. Teddy chose this moment to interrogate Bob about his dead grandmother and how she'd died, since he claimed to have gotten the book from her, and then people started asking him the nastier questions...
Somewhere in all of this, our half-dwarf decided to try to eat the mushroom to see what happened while the trained Druid, in cat form, panicked and refused to give them access. The cat clawed the shit out of several people, the half dwarf loudly demanded to eat the mushroom and had to clear up claims that he was suicidal, and the cat wound up having to fight the goddamn tree--who whomped the shit out of everyone holding it and gave it to the half-dwarf barbarian so he could lick it.
It made everything shiny, apparently, but did not help otherwise. Our drunken Bland Stairburg also went and licked it before anyone could forcibly stop him, which means he is now probably sensing magic and definitely drunk as shit, which is definitely going to help everything now.
They tried the weird drink on the tree, who became extremely small and extremely angry. We have independently created baby Groot. My god. This is delightful.
Half the party came in after me, having shrunken themselves in order to run into a bear-sized mouse who is busy overgrooming himself into a slightly enraged panic; everyone else went out to interrogate the drunken unicorn who is the only one who knows how to lead everyone
The unicorn is a maudlin drunk and had to pee, but refused to do so while anyone was looking. And then she burst into tears because some asshole's horse broke a leg and had to be put down. She continued ugly-crying for some times until, overwrought, she started requesting more booze. Additional questions kept derailing into more horrible weeping. (It does not help that this unicorn is a very foolish unicorn with a very short attention span, and several of our questioners were rather short on fucks by this point.)
Meanwhile, the orc tavernkeeper is sobbing half-naked in the corner of his basement outside the void with only Spleen the turkey vulture and a very awkward, quiet thief for comfort. This is definitely not his day any more than it is Badger's.
(I'm not sure it's ever Badger's day.)
