The Dusty Tome of D&D Stories: Chapter Four

For the love of....

It was the very-early 90's. It was after "Don't have a cow, man" but before "I bent my wookie".

We were tearing our way through Palladium's many games, partly because they all used the same rules, which were all strikingly similar to AD&D 2nd edition, a system we were very familiar with. Despite the love for the Marvel RPG color charts, we tried out Heroes Unlimited, the Palladium super-hero RPG.

 Unleash the Kraken

Our crack team of superheroes assembled in a castle or something. I was a heroic guy with long blonde hair in a pony tail. I was The Sentinel! And my friend, the quiet guy, had made a lady character. I can not remember her powers. But I remember her name. She was The Kraken.

As we are setting up in our HQ, we discuss maybe having a slogan to shout. Some of you younger people may not know this, but The Avengers used to scream "Avengers assemble!" when it was time to get beat up by Ultron.

We suddenly realized we had a slogan: "Let's get Kraken!" We all laughed, and quiet guy was not amused. So of course, we kept yelling it until he made a new character.

His new character was a spy kind of guy. Or maybe an Agent of Shield type of fellow. We knew in advance that his code name was Icebreaker.

The new hero arrives at our castle. He approaches us. We stare at him, saying nothing. He stares back.

Finally he says, "Why are you guys staring at me?"

We responded in unison: "We're waiting for you to break the ice!"

He made another character.

The Manhole Cover

It slices! It dices!

There was another Heroes Unlimited campaign where only myself and the quiet guy were characters. We were both aliens for some reason. I was an alien bounty hunter. I couldn't think of a name, so I just called him "Bounty". Quiet guy made... a junkion. It's from the 80's  transformers cartoon movie. I can't express to you how much I loathe them.

The junkion was a robot who lived... in a garbage dump. He mas MADE OF GARBAGE. Why the hell would you want to make a transformer who lives in garbage? And he talked like an idiot. See how much of this you can suffer through.

These robots talked all in commercial-lingo. "Don't wait - order now!", that kind of thing. But the quiet player couldn't pull it off. Who could? All that ever came out of his mouth was: "It slices! It dices!".

I suspect that Quiet Guy might have wanted a little payback for the whole "Icebreaker" incident. He kept saying, "Bounty - The quicker picker upper." OK. Haha. Got it. A reference to a commercial. He kept doing it. All the time. All I ever heard was "It slices! It dices! Bounty - the quicker picker upper!".

I had a huge gun. I calmly told my trash-compacting transformer pal that if he said that "bounty" thing one more time, I was going to kill him. As in, shoot him until he was dead.

A little while later, aliens are shooting lasers at us as we are in the middle of a street. Junkion runs over to a manhole cover. He can't lift it, it's heavy. He shouts: "Bounty! Quickly pick this up!"

Was he messing with me? Was it just on the tip of his tongue and came out in the heat of the moment? I don't know and I don't care. I opened fire and killed that junkion son of a bitch in one shot. Campaign over!

I have no regrets.