The Gaming Den

An anonymous individual made a request, I'm easily encouraged to do this and I had some half plans about it for ages. Then suddenly conveniently there was that half sick day and NOW work is basically off due to a heatwave and a bushfire so I don't have anything to do in between patrolling for freak spot fires and convincing my Fiancee she doesn't need to evacuate the guinea pigs yet.

No wait, I gotta go patrol again...

Since nothing important caught fire on my walk now for my secret alternative story stash...

My Own Favourite Edition Was 3rd Edition...
Stories from games I ran

I think I have run out of stories of playing in RPGs. In the past I mostly ran games rather than playing them and NOW I almost exclusively run games. Not everything can be turned into a fun, or even briefly coherent, story. And like hell I remember enough of it, it’s been good lord something like 24+1d4 years since I was manselling it up unconscious in my first bloodthirsty girl filled KO caves and the fictional concussions don’t seemed to have helped with the detailed recall.

But there is one well of stories I haven’t tapped and that’s games that I have actually run. There may not be much there, I would like to imagine I run things too well and thus produce not especially crazy story worthy results… but actually I’ve done a bunch of dumb stuff over the years, especially, but not limited to, the earlier years. It’s just not as easy turning it into a funny story when you are personally responsible and the other players involved are more likely to be your closer friends. But I should be able to scrape together SOME fun stories of my own failures or my own player’s achievements, or something… right...?

So that's where we are going next. Starting with back in the day when I was running various 3.x D&D games and stuff. Being mostly old sources with less consecutive viable content (mostly on memory loss) it will be a bit more broken and rocky...

Reluctant Return To The Temple of Elemental Traveler Safety Advisories
A story I have certainly told some shorter variant of somewhere around here…

A… number… of my earlier stories one way or another somehow spring from an attempt to get someone else to GM a game so I could have a go as a player.

In this one I bought a large canned adventure product for 3rd edition. I think it was “Return to the temple of elemental evil”. I’m all “hey you know YOU should run this, I mean you’ve been playing for years, you know the rules, I can help you with that, and this thing has all the content and stuff, it would be EASY”.

I ended up running it. Briefly. It was pretty shit, the earlier content in it was REALLY bad, so basically it was a one off session before going back to my more popular non-canned content.

Anyway the sort of entry point for the adventure is kinda a clusterfuck, I don’t remember the details but instead of actually returning to the temple of elemental evils that happens to actually contain encounters and stuff… you sorta maybe if you are lucky get some vague direction to maybe check out a windmill or something that is close enough to nothing but a basement full of empty rooms and a somehow secret doored or hidden encounter somewhere in there with maybe a low level Dragon encounter that the players do not know to look for.

The canned adventure has a solution. Of sorts. If the players travel to the windmill by the most direct route (because screw em if they don’t) some sort of useless old peasant woodsman or something with either no or next to no combat stats will meet them and the instructions are very clear. He WILL tell the players “there be dragon” at the windmill. Thus apparently ensuring the players will scour every wall of a large number of empty rooms multiple times until someone finds the “here be dragon” secret door. Because surely there faith in random guy who tells them this and their patience for finding a dragon they absolutely believe in knows NO limit.

Anyway. The players response to said peasant woodsman rustling on his way out of the woods onto the track in front of them isn’t surprising. They decide he is probably a dangerous bandit encounter (there may have been something about bandits in the area, I don’t recall, but regardless, why WOULDN’T they imagine he might be a bandit encounter. Or a monster. Or a cultist. Or a windmill dragon.

They fortunately do not murder him before seeing him. But even on seeing him they are not ruling out anything other than “obviously nonhumanoid monster without shapechanging or illusions”, and why would they? Even on seeing him not be remotely aggressive and attempt a friendly approach with an “Ooh Aar good travellers, I be a simple peasant woodsman, and I…”, well… the response from the usual group of bloodthirsty girls (and the one male gamer they brought along who always tried and failed to argue for restraint and talking things out) was along the lines of…

“He moved towards us! That’s a sign of aggression you all saw it!”
“Do you think he has anything worth taking?”
“He speaks words of peace, surely he is trying to deceive us and eat our brains!”
“Yeah actually I’m pretty bored with the way this adventure has been going about time a combat encounter turned up!”
“Well, it’s decided then guys…”
“Actually I think we should tal…”
“Quiet boy gamer you don’t get a vote”
“LETS GET HIM!”.

It didn’t take long, they miraculously didn’t murder him outright, barely, but despite absolutely no hostile resistance and basically no hit points, no items of value and no anything they beat him to 0 or less HP, stole ALL his stuff, stripped him naked, tied him up, and debated whether to kill him. However, the canned adventure WAS pretty adamant about him DEFINITELY providing the PCs with an important travel advisory about a secret windmill dragon the group would not otherwise know about.

“Well fine then by a margin of 1 vote we will NOT shank him to death right here on the road.”
“Should we interrogate him or something?”
“I have information and I am willing to talk!”
“No lets not interrogate him, he is either a peasant with nothing of value or a monster full of lies and talky magic”
“I have information and I am willing to talk!”
“Ugh he keeps trying to talk it’s freaking me out, can we do a recount on that vote”
“Lets just all agree to throw sticks and stones at him until he stumbles off naked and tied up into the wilderness, that should shut him up.”

Then that happened. But out in the bushes off the path the peasant woodsman pops his bruised and battered head up out of the bushes.

“So anyway, you guys seem like nice people…”
“He’s still trying to talk throw more rocks!”
“...I JUST THOUGHT YOU’D LIKE TO KNOW THERE BE A DRAGON AT THE WINDMILL, OOH AAR”
“I get out my long bow”
"OOH AAaaaarrrr"

He just cared about providing travel safety advisories THAT MUCH.

They never found the dragon.

So anyway, there I was all "And now I will pause briefly to organically permit a post or two of banter and commentary to break up my story posts."

...a week ago...

I was going to insert a smiley there, but none of them seem right, so I'll use this one because I like it and don't ever get an excuse to use it.

I'm going to assume that several people have read it, they just haven't posted any response yet.

I haven't read it. Christmas prep and stuff has kept me from reading up on a ton of threads I need to catch up on.

A week ago I'd say those couple of posts are good enough punctuation and put up another story. Right now I'm recovering from an exhausting holiday season (that isn't entirely over) so it might be a little while before I continue.