Tales From the Tabletop

[DancesWithWerewolves]

I do a roll20 game Friday nights with a group we used to play in person, but two of the people, primarily the main DM dude, moved too far away to be convenient to play in person. Its...okay. The rolling system is terrible. Everyone wound up in agreement when the roll generator just keeps rolling low (especially a lot of nat 1's) FAR too often.

I too like serious plot games with elements of silly. I don't think I could have fun with all-serious-all-the-time. So that sucks your group seemed like that.

[Slaughterhouserock]

Bummer. I'd use the shit we used when we played ages ago, but they don't have a way of finding players as far as I know. I'll have to check since I haven't been to the site in years.

They occasionally veered into a joke or two, but it would always be an "ok, but seriously, what are you doing?" type of thing. To each their own, but I want to be a goofy bastard when the occasion arises.

[Slaughterhouserock]

That’s a shame dude. Loved the game thread and some of the fun stuff you got to do. Here’s hoping a good game comes along.

Thanks. I may post some old shit in here at some point, just to reminisce about the good old days. I'm such a grumpy old bastard.

[Reign in Blood]

I have to say, I was watching the NeverEnding Story for the first time in ages the other day, and it drudged up memories of the epic time I had with you guys, and Slaughter as the best DM ever. All the elements combined, and that Phantasmique ending. Beautiful. I long for simpler, funner times. They're gone now, but I'll always have Seamus and Falkor and all you beautiful bastards.

[Foo]

RIP Smoochy.

[showa58taro]

GROND! Still one of my best memories of my little room in South Korea.

[Slaughterhouserock]

I'm glad you guys enjoyed it. I'd run another game, but I know everyone's too damn busy with life to make time for it these days.

[showa58taro]

I'm glad you guys enjoyed it. I'd run another game, but I know everyone's too damn busy with life to make time for it these days.

It was an ideal scenario for me living alone in Korea, and therefore having all day to just horse around.

In theory if we ran it a Saturday afternoon so I can jump in 8/9PM my time I could do 4-5 hours without excessive difficulty I reckon. But others may feel very differently. harder to yield afternoons for you guys.

[DancesWithWerewolves]

Unfortunately, Saturday afternoon is my in-person game lol.

[DancesWithWerewolves]

As far as nights go, I'm pretty open Sunday through Thursday.

[Slaughterhouserock]

Another reason I have trouble finding a group is my shitty schedule. I'm in bed by 7:30 EST on weekdays due to my job, and Fridays I'm generally too tired from work to stay up, so that just leaves Saturdays open for me as far as nights are concerned.

[Slaughterhouserock]

Seamus McManus was one of the more oddball characters I made. He was a human Dread Necromancer with bright red hair. It was a gestalt game, so he had his fingers in a ton of classes, but Dread Necromancer was taken at every level. For anyone that doesn't know, gestalt means you pick two classes at level up and take the best stats of both and all of the features of both. It leads to some extremely powerful characters without even trying, and I was trying. One side was straight Dread Necromancer, the other was filled with any class that would get me the best stats and increase my necromantic powers. I started this campaign as Chaotic Neutral, and ended up as Neutral Evil. The whole game I played as if I was the good guy and it was everyone else that was insane.

The setting was a homebrew world that my buddy made. There's one city, and it's massive. At some point in the past, some bad shit happened and everyone congregated together to survive, so anything beyond some miles from the city was the unknown. The city itself was sectioned off by "jobs". There was the military section, the religious section, the arcane section, the literal underground for the rogues, and so on. I don't remember the exact details of the other players, but there was a psion(hereafter referred to as the psion), a Charisma-based douche(the douche), his sidekick that was basically useless(the sidekick), and the meatbag that got killed at every opportunity(the moron). We started off in some gladitorial type games in the hopes of making some cash, which is how we all were introduced to each other. Here's a quick breakdown of what happened.

After a couple levels, we all started to make our own agendas. The psion wanted to find his people(there were no psions in the city), the douche wanted to run for mayor, the sidekick just followed the douche around, and the moron was always looking for a fight. Meanwhile, I was going door to door asking people if they were interested in joining the undead. I had a good pitch. No more worrying about food, breathing, sleeping, death, just enjoy life without all the hassles of being alive. I had joined up with the Rogue's guild to help me collect corpses to play with and was on my way to converting everyone. The douche was against all of this, since it would interfere with him becoming mayor, so he was trying to raise the people against me. This built up for the rest of the campaign.

The psion found a village outside of the city of barbarian psions. Sounds weird, but it worked. He eventually ended up in charge of them and was somewhat neutral on the politics of the city. We also discovered a group of chaos mages. They were all mental, so they were easily converted to the undead. Meanwhile, the moron decided to fuck with me, so I killed him. Enter character number two for him. Moron #2 was a caster of some sort. His first day playing we ran into a hydra in a cave, which he decided to melee....enter character number three. I don't remember this one or the next, but I killed the third because he said he made him specifically to combat me. I think moron #4 lasted the rest of the campaign, but I could be wrong as this was about fifteen years ago.

We eventually started to uncover the history of the world and what had caused the city to come to be and why everything else was abandoned. There was this crazy necromancer that had basically taken over and was killing everyone and everything. His tower wasn't too far from town. Anyway, survivors just started banding together to fight him which lead to the massive city. The world was filled with the necromancer's creations, so everyone just stayed in the city for protection. Enter me...a crazy necromancer bent on turning everyone undead. I got with the DM and we decided I could be the "second coming" of the necromancer. And so began my journey into becoming the bad guy of the campaign.

This all went on for quite some time. There was a lot of political intrigue and surprisingly no metagaming. Eventually it was everyone else coming together to take me on. Little did they know that I had raised an army of undead by that point. We play with miniatures, and since I knew something like this was coming, I bought a couple hundred zombie minis. When the war broke out, I literally dumped all of them onto the table as my army rose from their graves. The look on the other players faces was priceless. Unfortunately, the game ended there since there was no winning for either side. I had the numbers, and the ability to raise any fallen enemy troupes to fight on my side, so there wasn't much they could do. Only one of them was built for fighting as the douche was purely a face character, and the sidekick and moron were useless. It was mental, and I hated to end the game, but that's the way the story took us.

Some of my hijinks that I can remember:

We killed a beholder at some point which I raised as a zombie to be my mount. I would fly around town on this thing and no one would bat an eye, because I was that crazy necromancer that was always doing wacky shit.

There was a tower we were trying to get into that had a trick door. It would close whenever anything tried to pass through. It was a thick stone door and swung open/closed. I found a couple local kids and paid them to test it out(separately). I asked each to lie down in front of the door, just enough to get their heads in. Both were decapitated. I ended up using their heads as sock puppets for a few sessions after that.

Each of us had a specially made Rod of Wonder. These rods normally do just some random thing(you can see the normal effects here), but ours were made by the DM to be specific to our natures. I used mine at least once a session. I remember it raining flesh, summoning a group of zombies that did the Thriller dance, shooting out blood, and various other fun stuff. I would use this in the middle of town to great effect.

I had a feat called Necromantic Cyst which allowed me to implant a cyst into someone and control it to do a variety of things. I could mind control the host or even cause them to explode. This is how I killed the moron once. I tried to get everyone in the group, but we were all so overpowered, I wasn't able to get the rest.

There's more I'm forgetting, but I basically did some of the most fucked up stuff I could think of for shits and giggles. Most of the time the rest of the group would look at me in horror as a I joked about butchering people and whatnot. Was good times.

[DancesWithWerewolves]

Oh yeah, Gestalt. Can be fun, can also be a headache, lol.

I'm actually in a Gestalt one right now on Roll20. I went the Fighter/Vigilante (pathfinder class) combo so it wouldn't be as much of a headache, but since it's a city based game, there's a lot of usually lame Vigilante "talents" that will actually come in handy. We're only 3rd level, so nothing's gone nuts yet. (they get cool stuff too, but half of their levels are dedicated to these lame "social" talents where only about 3 are actually any good, at best, but you have to pick up to 10 if you get to level 20)

I'm also using the classic non-nerfed Spiked Chain. And the type of Fighter I am uses the Archetype that exploits combat maneuvers, such as Trip, so I'll be having fun with that when I get the chance.

[DancesWithWerewolves]

Oh, and i LOVED Necromantic Cyst. Damn that Libris Mortis such a great book.