All right, I have been lazy again. I haven’t been keeping up on the blog posts. For good reason, I am sure, such as I have been watching movies on TV and hanging out with the dogs.
Well, those reasons may not be good reasons, but they are my reasons.
I did watch some pretty cool movies though.
Trying to remove my conscience, er conscious from the ongoing shit show that is the Kavanaugh hearings was a good reason.
Yup. Right into the diatribe.
Nope. I am going to leave that alone. I am going to focus on the adventures. At least, what I remember of the adventures. We spent a lot of time adventuring, but also spent a lot of time talking.
Long story short, it was a nail biter. Well each session was a nail biter. I like to run a game so that the players are softened up prior to meeting the big bad. That way, they have some difficult decisions to make. If the party approaches the big bad and they have all of their spell slots, potions, heals all ready, things are no too tough on them. Usually, it is six players on one big bad. The party gets lots of attacks, the big bad may have one or two attacks per round. So if I can weaken the players, and make them think twice, that makes it more interesting for everyone. Or so I think.
The reality of it is, either the players agree with me, or I am not pissing them off enough to make one of them want to run the game instead of me. That is probably the dividing line. At what point do I push them so hard that they are not having any fun and they want to take over the reigns.
So far, that hasn’t happened. Sometimes, Mike wants to run some GURPS, which I am OK with, since I like playing GURPS a lot more than I live running GURPS. Collin has run some Toon, which is also good, another game I like playing more than running. Bill ran some D&D 5e for a while, but I think we all broke him. Eric, Shari and Sue are interested in playing, not running games. That is OK. I actually like running the game. I can really equate with Harvey Korman in Blazing Saddles…
Where was I? Oh yeah, The party was reeling from Rocky, the earth elemental now lawn gnome. Well, actually, it was just Bill that was reeling.
The party leaves the hallway, and goes back to the entrance room, and spikes all of the doors and takes a long rest. They really needed it. This group is more of an American football team than a European football team. In American football, the players line up, and have about 15 seconds of action, then need to stand around to get their strength back. Then they are ready for another 10 seconds of action. Meanwhile, the European foot ball teams have people running full speed all around the field for an hour without taking a break.
After their long rest, they head through the only door that is left, the one to the east. They go through the door and find themselves in another hallway. It is very similar to the hallway on the other side of the entrance room. There is a portcullis at the southern end, complete with an iron bound door, and two glowing specters of dwarven ghosts hanging around grinning and motioning for the party to approach.
They seem friendly enough, after all, what could go wrong with some undead dwarves?
The party hangs out in the hallway, unsure of what to do. There are three doors to the north end of the hallway, and one door at the south end of the doorway, where the dwarven specters are smiling and motioning that the party should approach.
More party members enter the hall, and the dwarven ghosts pop through the door, out of sight, then the ceiling crashes down on the party. Those dwarven bastard ghosts sprung a trap on the party, attempting to crush them.
This goes to define what is wrong with dwarves. They are dicks. Not as dickish as elves, but they are fucking dicks. I don’t know why anyone would ever want to play a dwarf. After all, you drink, a lot, lust for gold, stand around looking at ever other player’s crotch, and as a player, you are required by the game to speak in a crappy Irish accent. “Oooch, Aye feels root layk anooother ale” and “By Grinthorn’s hammer, Aye will avenge yee”. What a bunch of crap.
Now I don’t hate dwarves. Well I don’t hate dwarves as much as I hate elves. Now elves, they are a fucking waste of space. Dwarves, well, meh. I did play a good dwarvish character once. It was a half orc, half dwarf. A Dwork. He was the love child of a male dwarf who secretly lusted for the strange of an orc woman. The best part was that the Dwork was built to be a barbarian fighter, high strength and constitution, low intelligence. I built him as a wizard. He sucked eggs as a wizard, but that was OK. He refused to melee combat, since that was below him, he was a mage, after all.
Where was I? Oh yeah, the dwarven ghosts and their friends then started shooting crossbow bolts through arrow slits at the party.
This is where Collin came into his own. He raised his mighty holy symbol and cast them out. Now Collin had a holy symbol of the weeping anus.
Maybe it wasn’t a weeping anus. But there definitely was some sort of anal wink thing going on.
Note that at the end of the short video, there is a notation that the entire video is 103 minutes long. 103 minutes of anal winking….
Where was I?
You ask, why is there a picture of an anal sphincter, and discussion of anal winking on a blog related to Dungeons and Dragons. Well, I only report what goes on, and where the party takes the conversation.
I don’t know that Collin initially wanted his holy symbol to be a sphincter, but that is where it ended up by the end of casting out the dwarven ghosts. The anal wink discussion was from three sessions later.
Why, you ask, why? Why would a group of professionals, all college educated, most over 50 sit and joke about anuses? Because it is really God damn funny. I mean, come on, who can sit around and not crack a smile when they see something like this.
and then there is this.
I mean, what bigger asshole is out there than this dipshit anus?
But I digress.
Collin scares the dwarven ghosts away with his holy symbol of the weeping anus, and a lot of faith. They flee.
The party then spends quite a bit of time trying to figure out what they should do. They are torn, after all, these dwarves are not evil by nature, they are stuck here, or so they think. Mike slips on his ring, makes a cons save, and goes through the door. He finds four dwarven ghosts shivering in fear, cowering even. It is almost as though Pat Robertson is praying for their destruction. No, worse, they have been attacked by the faith of the weeping anus.
Mike tries to distract the ghosts by throwing a gold piece at them. They alternate between fighting among themselves for the gold piece and screeching hideously about being exposed to the wrath of the weeping anus.
Do the words “weeping anus” ever stop being funny? Nope. Don’t look on Google for pictures of it. That isn’t funny.
The prospect that a cleric uses this as his holy symbol is… funny. If you don’t agree, well, that is OK. I was surprised that there were no hits on Google for a punk band named “weeping anus”. I figured that would be taken already.
That hasn’t stopped companies that produce high end chocolates from getting in on the action.
Yes, ladies and germs. Edible anus chocolates. They are solid milk chocolate. IT seems that they should be caramel filled, not solid chocolate. I mean after all, if you are going to bite into a chocolate anus, shouldn’t it goosh a little brown fluid?
OK, that is probably more than enough about the lowly anus. Maybe not.
I am sure that when I was 15, I figured that those things that I found humorous would no longer be humorous when I was an adult. You know, farting, farting jokes, jokes about farting, making wet farting sounds with my mouth and hand… Nope, still funny. Getting older hasn’t made me more mature. I still love Troma movies, Evil Dead movies, Blazing Saddles. I even still like watching Jackass.
Where was I?
Oh yeah, the party decides to leave the ghosts alone, and investigate the other rooms. As they progress north in the hallway, they open the doors on the left and right. The door on the right is an ore storage room. Both Sue and Eric are entranced by the large amounts of gold ore in the bins in this room. Unfortunately for them, the ore is not processed, and there is really no value to take anything from the six full bins of ore.
The door to the left is a storeroom. They party pokes around in this room and doesn’t find anything useful. Unfortunately for them, they didn’t look very hard, as there were some good things in the room. Also, some danger. They left prior to the danger manifesting itself, but they also didn’t get anything good.
They continue north in the hallway and open the door at the far north end of the hallway. It opens… you guessed it, to another hallway, with two doors, one to the east, one to the west.
Inside this room is a dais topped with a shattered idol occupying the far end of this room. The idol appears to have once been a massive stone hammer, but the head is now broken off and lies in pieces beside the still-upright shaft. Standing before the dais is a small, three-tiered fountain. Liquid gold streams from the fountain, flowing down each of its three levels before filling the fountain’s shallow basin. Another door stands in the western wall to the north of this chamber’s entrance.
Now, the party, or some members of the party who will remain unnamed (but their names rhyme with Pollen, Mique and Derrick) proceed to hoot and holler about the shaft, the long hard shaft. Meanwhile, the two female players at the table are looking down in embarrassment and trying not to make eye contact with anyone. It was kind of strange, but then, it was Saturday, and normal is not in.
The gold fountain is interesting. IT was like a chocolate fountain, but with gold. The fountain should have been very hot, but it was actually room temperature, and the gold flowed as though it was liquid. Did the magic user test for magic? Nope. It could have been pretty bad, but no dice.
Fortunately for the members of the party, nothing bad happened with the gold fountain. It was magical, anyone who interacted with the fountain needed to make a constitution saving throw, or be turned to gold. Luckilly for everyone in the party who interacted with the fountain, everyone made their saving throw. They convinced Rocky to jump into the fountain, which he did, and now he is a gold plated lawn gnome.
Nothing much happened. Sue dropped a rock into the gold fountain, and gold poured out, like the Archimedes principle. The gold solidified as soon as it hit the floor. Sue picked up a bunch of gold.
They opened up the door and looked inside. This plain room contains a bed, a wardrobe, and a writing table, all of which are covered by an undisturbed blanket of dust. On the table beneath the grime are a candle in a pewter dish and a scroll of beaten metal.
The scroll wasn’t magic, so they party pretty much put it in a pouch and wandered off.
They continued on, trying to get away from the bad things behind them, both real and imagined.
This room had a tremendous derrick and winch dominate this large, 20’ high-ceilinged chamber. Suspended from the derrick is a huge iron bucket measuring 20’ in diameter. A section of the bucket’s side is hinged and stands open, allowing easy entrance and egress. Beneath the dangling bucket is an open shaft some 25’ wide. A slight draught blows from the hole, carrying with it the mephitic smell of minerals and the subterranean world.
The party decides to get into the bucket and use Mage Hand to operate the bucket lift. They lower the bucket down and eventually, the giant bucket stops as it hits the floor of the chamber below it.
This chamber is quiet. Some of the party members get out of the bucket and are attacked by wormlike creatures who bite and spit acid.
Now this is how I see the grubs, all friendly and wanting to snuggle.
No matter how I describe these nice little guys, the party insists that they actually look like this:
I am pretty sure that the party is biased, and thinking that all monsters actually look like this:
To be fair, the weeping anus shithead in the picture above is pretty fucking scary. Not just in the fact that he is a sexual predator, but more in that he now is one of the most powerful people in the country who will most likely single handedly undermine the last 40 years of forward progression that this country has accomplished.
In case you don’t understand how I feel about Brett Kavanaugh, let me be very clear. This man is a dangerous person who was enabled by President Trump and 51 weak senators who chose to pander to their minority voters instead of doing the right thing.
To be clear about the comment “minority voters”, consider this. Mitch McConnell, from Kentucky won the 2014 election by gaining 56% of the votes. Sounds pretty good, no? The popular vote was 806,787 for McConnell, and 584,698 for the opponent, Alison Lundergan Grimes.
According to the State of Kentucky, there were 3,310,738 registered voters on January 1, 2017. Check it out for your self.
https://elect.ky.gov/Resources/Pages/Registration-Statistics.aspx
OK, they didn’t have online statistics for November 2016, but the online records do go back to January 2017, which is pretty close to November 2016.
So, out of 3.3 million voters, 800K voted for McConnell. Only 584K voted for McConnell’s opponent, but that means that only 1.4 million people in Kentucky bothered to get out of their comfy chairs to vote. That is under half of the total people who could vote actually voted at all, and of that, only 800K people of the 3.3 million who could vote actually voted for McConnell. So McConnell actually took less than 25% of the overall eligible votes and gets to steer the country in the way that he thinks it should go.
WAKE UP PEOPLE.
OK, where were we?
Oh yes, we were talking about horrible acid spitting grubs and how the players thought that the grubs looked like Kavanaugh.
The grubs were pretty nasty. They not only bit and spit acid, they also exploded in an acid bath when they were killed.
The party got softened up pretty good.
Then round two.
Six specters popped out and started draining life from the party. It was pretty horrible. The party tried to do what they could to scare the specters off, but the weeping anus didn’t work. Well, it did, until the two specters that did make their will save turned the other four specters back into the battle. They harsh the party until the party ends up killing them all off.
Then Greedyguts, the dwarf cleric comes out and starts messing with the party. By this time, most of the party is pretty harshed. They are ailing a lot. People are going down like flies.
Greedyguts casts command on Mike, and mike runs in fear as fast as he can away. Mike gets his composure later and starts back. Pretty much everyone is just about glicked, and Mike stands back and performs firebolt over and over, eventually weakening the evil dwarf cleric. The killing blow is when Shari sneaks over the edge of the barrel and stabs poor greedyguts in the skull. IT was kind of like watching Gerrard Butler doing the head commie stab porn thing in Olympus has Fallen.
Greedyguts is dead. Long live Greedyguts. The alter cracks and inside are several large gold nuggets. Now I won’t tell you how many there are, as Collin took them all, and then doled out some to the party.
The party is exhausted. They decide to go back into the bucket and raise it up about five feet and rest. They need a long rest.
Strangely, nothing happens during their long rest. Some of the players expected me to throw something at them, just to mess with them. Nope. I figured that since Kavanaugh was voted in about the time the long rest started, there was nothing that I could do that would top that. Fuckers. Not the players. I am calling the weak minded fuckface assholes in DC who put this type of trash on the Supreme Court fuckers.
For those government minders who are looking at this.
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
I am peacefully speaking my mind. I am not calling for armed insurrection. If you don’t like what I have to say in my blog, go somewhere else.
And Kavanaugh is still a sexual predator and a complete fuckface, even though he was given a pass on all things honorable and right by 51 senators. Shame on you.
Where was I?
Oh yeah, nothing happened to the party during the long rest. America was undermined and is likely going to regress for 3 generations, but nothing happened to the party.
Note to government minders and anyone who disagrees with that last paragraph. See the portion above referencing Amendment 1. I copied it and put it into the blog so that it didn’t require you to look it up. I also included the entire text of the 1st Amendment, so that we are clear that I am not cherry picking any portion of it. And, go fuck your self. May you give yourself painful anal fissures in the process.
Where was I?
The party wakes up and things are going swimmingly in the Underdark. Things don’t look so bad to the players. Yes, they are being pursued by Drow, stuff is trying to kill them, a relentless horror is following them. But at least they don’t have to deal with Kavanaugh. Lolth, maybe, but not Trump or Kavanaugh.
Lolth doesn’t seem so bad right now.
The party continues down the path, and eventually comes to a ginormous crevasse. When I said this, Mike and Collin thought I said “a ginormous ass” No, IT was a huge crevasse, with spider webs all over.
The party was not sure what to do. Go forward? Go back? Neither seemed like a good idea. Collin was pretty sure that he heard scraping coming from behind the party, inside the passage. As everyone was looking back, someone came up, touched his shoulder and asked what was up?
The party turns around and sees two goblins, Yuk Yuk and Spiderbait. They are extremely agile and able to run around on the webs.
The party wants to hire Spiderbait and Yuk Yuk to guide them to safety. Yuk Yuk is the brains of the operation, and demands 2 gold pieces per day per person. He counts the people (6 total) does some math, and determines that it will cost 5 gold pieces per person per day. It should take about 10 days to cross the webs, to the total trip will cost 12 gold pieces.
Yuk Yuk is really good at math.
The party moves onto the web. Things go badly pretty soon, as they are attacked by six large spiders. The spiders spit webs out of their butts and try to bite the party. Things go well for the spiders, until they don’t. The party kills all of the spiders off, but not before several of the party members are bit and are sickened by the poison.
Now I am caught up.
whew.
robrpg 