(no subject)
In hopes of a break from general angst, I’ve decided to do something I‘ve wanted to for a while: start recording the weekly 3-hour-ish blocks of distilled weird that are the meetings of my DnD group. I considered running a poll to see who would be actually interested, but eventually said to myself, “Self, when have I ever consulted my poor Livejournal friends about what I should write in the past?” As previously stated, I’m sick of pointlessly whining here all the time and feel like a change of direction will do me some good. Besides, taking into account my track record with writing projects anyone who’s bothered too much can console themselves that I’ll probably lose interest in short order and things will be back to normal.
Anyway, in the interest of the obligatory exposition that Epic Tales of Fantasy are so famed for, this is a recap of the first game with the group of players that we’ve come to know and love.
-----------------------------------------
It all started, as many things do, with a giant globe-spanning conspiracy that we unknowingly stumbled onto after a complicated series of events beginning with a zombie attack at a street show performance. One of the major turning points into Weird Central came from a local armor company that had been driven out of business by the economic machinations of the conspiracy. Said conspiracy had been making commercial trouble for all over the country-for some reason they had been hideously unbalancing the economy in several countries by buying monopolies on all the yarn, metal and lamp oil in the country.
The armor company contacted us initially to investigate the cause of the sudden halt of production in one of their three (all defunct by then) supplying mines. We got more dirt on the conspiracy masterminds, we got the mine up and running again, and I’d like to flatter myself that there is where a run-of-the-mill DnD group would’ve stopped. But just not knowing when to quit, we used nearly all of our party treasure to buy out the armor company from the brink of closing and begin operating it ourselves.
It was at this point that the party’s resident purple spirit from the plane of nightmares stepped in with a strange and revolutionary idea. After a fairly minor amount of cajoling the DM… well, the upshot was that, as a result of running this company, we invented assembly line production. This was immediately followed by the invention of the business convention, which we used to create a huge gathering of all the adventurers the Realms could offer in the interest of not only giving them a forum for discussion of adventuring issues, a place to buy equipment and a way to connect with other groups, but also to potentially lure the conspirators there with a display of economic power.
Eventually the heads of the conspiracy met up with us, only to tell us the truth: they wanted to do the exact same thing we had done, namely pushing the world out of the Generic Medieval Age it had been stagnating in for so long. They, however, had one major difference in their plan: it involved the destruction of Waukeen, the goddess of commerce, by messing with her realm of influence enough (hence the stockpiling of goods) that eventually she would be weak enough for them to physically kill. Once this higher power had been taken down, the conspirators reasoned, there would be the usual sort of apocalypse that comes with the death of a god and they could emerge as saviors, helping to re-build the Realms from the ground up.
Needless to say, we objected to this on the grounds that it was a really freakin’ stupid plan that we had accomplished in a much more productive way with a minor infusion of Henry Ford. We pointed this out, along with the fact that you don’t kill gods just by… well, killing them, and that the Generic Medieval Age would eventually pass like everything else. They, however, refused to believe this and after negotiations became somewhat hostile they made a break for their escape route-which happened to be in the very same palace the adventuring convention was being held in.
This led to a vastly entertaining final battle which led to characters from just about every DnD campaign any of us had ever played in showing up in the fight amongst the con attendees and the conspiracy lackeys, as well as a cameo by the Ninth Doctor. (He helped us open a door they’d sealed with runes. It could be described no other way than ‘fantastic.’) We managed to stop them from teleporting away, only to realize one important fact: all of these people were about five levels higher than each of us. And they were really, really angry. We managed to escape from the twenty-foot-tall scorpion that one of their number had summoned (it immediately ran out and had an epic battle with a gold dragon visiting the con in human form) only to fall a couple rounds later from a horrible spell that killed us all except for Nightmare Guy and our pixie character.
However, Waukeen had not been ignoring our intervention on her behalf. When we all arrived in the afterlife, we came upon her laughing her head off at our sheer audacity and after minimal negotiation she agreed to bring us back to life-accompanied by six of the guys on the far right. We proceeded to kick major butt with their aid, ascended to level 15 and went on to make the Forgotten Realms campaign setting into a steampunk utopia.
In a month or so we’ll be starting a campaign set 100 years after all this. Complete with semi-automatic weapons, a departure of sucky DnD elves, and that consistent steampunk staple, the common, garden-variety airship or blimp. Starring an escaped voodoo-ish slave, a part-angel pirate captain, a very sneaky summoner of demons and a couple of other people who haven’t been determined yet. I doubt I have to tell you how psyched we all are.
Anyway, in the interest of the obligatory exposition that Epic Tales of Fantasy are so famed for, this is a recap of the first game with the group of players that we’ve come to know and love.
-----------------------------------------
It all started, as many things do, with a giant globe-spanning conspiracy that we unknowingly stumbled onto after a complicated series of events beginning with a zombie attack at a street show performance. One of the major turning points into Weird Central came from a local armor company that had been driven out of business by the economic machinations of the conspiracy. Said conspiracy had been making commercial trouble for all over the country-for some reason they had been hideously unbalancing the economy in several countries by buying monopolies on all the yarn, metal and lamp oil in the country.
The armor company contacted us initially to investigate the cause of the sudden halt of production in one of their three (all defunct by then) supplying mines. We got more dirt on the conspiracy masterminds, we got the mine up and running again, and I’d like to flatter myself that there is where a run-of-the-mill DnD group would’ve stopped. But just not knowing when to quit, we used nearly all of our party treasure to buy out the armor company from the brink of closing and begin operating it ourselves.
It was at this point that the party’s resident purple spirit from the plane of nightmares stepped in with a strange and revolutionary idea. After a fairly minor amount of cajoling the DM… well, the upshot was that, as a result of running this company, we invented assembly line production. This was immediately followed by the invention of the business convention, which we used to create a huge gathering of all the adventurers the Realms could offer in the interest of not only giving them a forum for discussion of adventuring issues, a place to buy equipment and a way to connect with other groups, but also to potentially lure the conspirators there with a display of economic power.
Eventually the heads of the conspiracy met up with us, only to tell us the truth: they wanted to do the exact same thing we had done, namely pushing the world out of the Generic Medieval Age it had been stagnating in for so long. They, however, had one major difference in their plan: it involved the destruction of Waukeen, the goddess of commerce, by messing with her realm of influence enough (hence the stockpiling of goods) that eventually she would be weak enough for them to physically kill. Once this higher power had been taken down, the conspirators reasoned, there would be the usual sort of apocalypse that comes with the death of a god and they could emerge as saviors, helping to re-build the Realms from the ground up.
Needless to say, we objected to this on the grounds that it was a really freakin’ stupid plan that we had accomplished in a much more productive way with a minor infusion of Henry Ford. We pointed this out, along with the fact that you don’t kill gods just by… well, killing them, and that the Generic Medieval Age would eventually pass like everything else. They, however, refused to believe this and after negotiations became somewhat hostile they made a break for their escape route-which happened to be in the very same palace the adventuring convention was being held in.
This led to a vastly entertaining final battle which led to characters from just about every DnD campaign any of us had ever played in showing up in the fight amongst the con attendees and the conspiracy lackeys, as well as a cameo by the Ninth Doctor. (He helped us open a door they’d sealed with runes. It could be described no other way than ‘fantastic.’) We managed to stop them from teleporting away, only to realize one important fact: all of these people were about five levels higher than each of us. And they were really, really angry. We managed to escape from the twenty-foot-tall scorpion that one of their number had summoned (it immediately ran out and had an epic battle with a gold dragon visiting the con in human form) only to fall a couple rounds later from a horrible spell that killed us all except for Nightmare Guy and our pixie character.
However, Waukeen had not been ignoring our intervention on her behalf. When we all arrived in the afterlife, we came upon her laughing her head off at our sheer audacity and after minimal negotiation she agreed to bring us back to life-accompanied by six of the guys on the far right. We proceeded to kick major butt with their aid, ascended to level 15 and went on to make the Forgotten Realms campaign setting into a steampunk utopia.
In a month or so we’ll be starting a campaign set 100 years after all this. Complete with semi-automatic weapons, a departure of sucky DnD elves, and that consistent steampunk staple, the common, garden-variety airship or blimp. Starring an escaped voodoo-ish slave, a part-angel pirate captain, a very sneaky summoner of demons and a couple of other people who haven’t been determined yet. I doubt I have to tell you how psyched we all are.