The Dusty Tome of D&D Stories: Chapter Ten

K is for KILLING TIAMAT

I made a comment on twitter about how I hope that the upcoming "Tyranny of Dragons" story somehow acknowledges the events of the 4th edition Scales of War path. Tyranny of Dragons features Tiamat, who was meant to be killed in Scales. Tiamat died in my campaign.

Someone pointed out to me that Scales was set in the Nentir Vale setting, and Tyranny is in the Forgotten Realms. Two different "universes", I guess.

This isn't a big deal to me, but I'd prefer it if Wizards of the Coast went out of their way to explain how Tiamat came back. Otherwise, it feels a little like they are shrugging off the two years my group spent going all the way through the Scales path, as if it didn't "count" for anything.

We have arrived at the dark age of D&D. It was the year 2000. Everything was falling apart....

The Cat Guy

A... SALESMAN!

The Great DM and I decided to try to find a new group. We did a thing you should never do. We answered a "want ad" posted on a game store bulletin board.

The guy's apartment had a lot of Rush memorabilia hanging on the walls. He had this muscular cat that he stroked in a most erotic manner. He would ask the cat things like, "You like that, don't you?" It was terrifying.

I asked him what level our characters should be. His response was to wave a hand at a shelf full of adventures. "Pick one", he said.

Wow! He's read them all?! There was 30 or 40 adventures on that shelf! He read them all, right? I grabbed a cool-looking 1st edition adventure. We made characters. There was another player, a friend of The Cat Guy. He looked like he was on death row. He desperately didn't want to be there.

I had this nagging feeling that I refused to acknowledge. I was going to will this into being a good session!

The Cat Guy showed us a note book. He had been laid off, and in the ensuing months he had spent his days stroking his muscle cat and filling the notebook with command words for spells. For instance, if his character cast sleep, he'd flip through his notebook and read: "Sleepus Maximus!"

He proudly read out one for lightning bolt: "Sizzleonius Electrus!"

The Great DM was way ahead of me. He knew we were in for a long day. I held on to a shred of hope. Surely this guy had read the adventure in advance, right?

Nope. We made our characters. He grabbed the module. And began to read.We sat there. For five, ten, fifteen minutes, while he quietly read.

We did one encounter that day. We fought some bats that attacked a caravan or something. Most of the day was spent making characters, and sitting there at the table while he read the module. We left that apartment, never to return.

Truly these were the darkest of days.

The Shadowrun Watcher

She had to change into something more... comfortable

I had always wanted to run a Shadowrun game. The problem was that the rulebook was like hieroglyphics to me. But in the awful year of 2000 I sat down and forced my way through it. And then I tried to run a campaign.

I recruited a couple friends-of-friends, who, it turned out, didn't mesh with The Great DM at all.

One friend-of-friend showed up with a lady friend-of-friend, who "just wanted to watch". I have always hated that. Are you really going to just sit there and watch? You will be bored out of your mind! This was a bit of an etiquette breach to me, but whatever, I was desperate to run me some Shadowrun.

The lady friend seemed nice. She was dressed casually, jeans and a t-shirt or something. At one point, she declared that she had to leave for a bit.

Oh good! No more watcher! Now we can focus on our exploding dice pool of d6's.

But she came back. And she had changed her clothing. Gone was the t-shirt and jeans. She had actually left to change into sexy clothing. She was now wearing a low cut top, a ridiculously short mini-skirt, fishnet stockings and high-heeled boots.

What? Why? How?

She proceeded to continue to not play, and instead repeatedly interrupted the game to make a joke or get our attention.

Don't get me wrong, I thought she was really attractive. But my desire to run an epic game of Shadowrun trumped... well.. whatever she was trying to do.

This campaign was a dud from start to finish. I had a PC using a sniper rifle in melee (it did a lot of damage, you see), and I found the rulebook too difficult to navigate to figure out what the penalties were for that kind of thing.

My overall idea for the game was: The PCs are Hired Goons. But I wasn't able to execute the concept properly and the whole thing was just kind of lame.

I will be running Many Gates of the Gann tomorrow night. I'll let you know how it goes!!