You Take 14d10 Psychic Damage From Stupidity! · 11:23pm Aug 1st, 2020
Howdy, folks! First and foremost, as always, Adorable Applejack:
Maximum overfloof!
Now then...
It's odd the things that grab you, isn't it? I have no less than six stories gathering dust in GDocs in various stages of completion. Hell, one of them only needs less than a thousand words to finish! Yet, I haven't touched them in years.
And now I wrote a 21K self-indulgent shitpost in eight days.
Huh.
So, a bit of backstory. A bit over two years ago, a very dear friend of mine approached me on Discord and asked if I was interested in a game of Curse of Strahd that he was going to DM. I had been curious about D&D for years, but just never got the chance to play, mainly due to me being an antisocial fuck. SO when one of my best friends asks if I want to play from the comfort of my own home, I was all over that like shit on Velcro. He already had one player, another former fanfic dude TheNumber25, as well as another guy whose name I forget for reasons I'll get into a minute. But we needed one more for a full party, and the DM asked me if I knew anyone who may be interested. My first instinct was one of my other best friends, Captain Unstoppable, who surprisingly was totally on board. SO he joined the game... and promptly stole the Paladin class before I could claim it.
Still, everything was ready, and we began our journey through the cursed land of Barovia. Severax the cleric, Selivar the sorcerer, Gamliel the paladin, and Marbas the rouge... who died after the second session. Yeah, IRL stuff came up and he had to bail. So he tripped as we were trying to escape a house doing it's best Poltergeist impression, and went poof. This left us with a problem: DM really didn't want to run a three party game, so we needed a fourth. We needed someone who was nerdy enough to be willing to play D&D online. Naturally, Cap suggested frat boy jock Aquaman.
Who said yes.
Huh.
And so, with Arrin the bard, we continued our quest to defeat the evil vampire lord Strahd von Zarovich. A journey that would take us just over two years. Granted, we didn't play every week. In fact, I think we took a month and a half off at one point because DM was finishing school. But it was something of a constant during some of the most tumultuous two years of my life. And through grit, determination, and just a metric fuckton of luck, we pulled it off. Strahd was dead, the sun returned to Barovia, and the party disbanded on the best of terms to live lives of either excitement and adventure or simple contentment. It was... really fucking emotional.
Seriously, as DM read through the epilogues for our characters—as well as Ireena and Ezmerelda, NPCs who took the journey with us and were the most competent members of the party probably because DM was playing them—I was on the verge of tears. Even though I knew what happened, as I helped DM write it, he is such an amazing wordsmith that it was almost painful due to how powerful it was. We had lived these characters for more than two fucking years, helped them grow and mature, achieve goals, suffer deep losses, and felt them on their journey. And now it's over. The ride ended on the most positive note possible... but it ended nonetheless. We would never see these characters again.
Or rather we wouldn't have, if it hadn't been for one unassuming moment during the After Action Review of the campaign, when Cap asked a simple, joking question: "Hey, what do you think would happen if our party wen to Equestria?"
Shit, don't tempt me with a good time.
Now, this was originally supposed to be just a quick little thing I was gonna whip up and share amongst ourselves.
>glances at 21K word count
Yeah, it, uh... it got away from me a bit. There were just so many things I wanted to see and ended up writing that it ballooned into some kind of monster. Still, I was very proud of it, and once I shared it with the party to see if they approved of how I wrote their characters, they loved it, as well. This left me with a bit of a conundrum: Should I publish it?
I mean, the story itself is a bit janky in places, some plot points just happen out of nowhere. But more importantly, literally everyone aside from the five of us would be completely lost during the character moments. And not just DM's big speech at the end, but any time the characters referenced some big important event or character, general readers would be Lima Lima Mike Foxtrot.
But it goes even further than that. See, we weren't playing Curse of Strahd RAW, Rules As Written. We were playing Curse of Strahd: Reloaded, a fan made mod that makes some pretty significant changes to the lore of the module. Like for example, in RAW there isn't really a "happy ending." Like, even if you kill Strahd and escape Barovia, it ends with a sort of "The cycle continues, He will return" vibe. Go check out Puffin Forest's fantastic retelling of his CoS campaign to see how bleak it can get.
But it goes even further than that! DM tweaked a few things here and there to tailor it more to our specific tastes and sensibilities. Most notably, he made it so if we played our hands right, we could achieve a true "Happy Ending," which we did. Other things, too. In the story I mention characters named Sigrid and Kaldur and a place called Yaedrag. I'm pretty sure those don't exist in Reloaded, and DM added them as a hook for me, which worked as I became pretty attached to Kaldur, the young Dragonborn boy. And shipped myself with his human aunt Sigrid in the story because I'm a slut for happy relationships
So, why post a story if most readers are going to be confused for a good portion of it? As I thought about it more, I decided to go ahead and publish it. I came to the conclusion that there was enough D&D action, humor, and general heart that at least some people would enjoy it. I'm sure I could make it so things are explained a bit more clearly, but that would likely require several thousand more words to do organically, and truth be told? I just don't feel like it. I'll just have to hope I did the action and Mane Six interactions well enough to entertain. Still, like I said in the comment of the story, you probably have a lot of questions if you even give a shit. Ask away if you want clarification.
In the end, despite it expanding and inflating so much that someone is probably jacking of to it, I accomplished what I set out to do: pay homage to what had been the highlight of my week for years, and give one final sendoff for these characters we adored. Here's hoping some other retarded idea grabs me by the short 'n curlies and makes me enjoy writing again.
Never forget that I fucking love you all. Till next time stay safe, stay free, and stay metal! Jake The Army Guy out!
Aww. This was such a touching blog! It was the best two years! I hope we can play another game soon!
...
I don't think you understand the level of giddiness/how freaked out I am right now, Jake. I'm playing a D&D campaign in five minutes (marked as I finished writing the comment). And we are playing the Curse of Strahd.
I can't really recall the levels of detail that I could remember, as my DM writes down all the campaign notes every week, but in my party we have Jade Thackray the half-elf bard, Klüs Knüdsen the human cleric, Narkul T'hews the dragonborn paladin, and me, Arlen Belword the half-elf ranger, with my white wolf companion Brutus.
I could give you some major plot point checkpoints: our DM homebrewed the shit out of Strahd's wedding. He had 42 NPC guests, all with their own back stories. Strahd ended up successfully marrying Ireena, but Von Richten attempted to murder him with holy water disguised as a bottle of wine. When it didn't work, he threw a freakin' fireball instead. Strahd survived, but Ireena was killed in the process.
Over the course of the reception, one of the NPCs (
I don't remember which, but it wasn't a randoArrigal, Luvash's brother— apparently on Strahd's behalf) beckoned for me to follow him to one of the inner rooms to show me something. Being the dumb fuck that I am, I did. And I brought Brutus with me which he was not particularly thrilled about. When we reached the inner area that he was taking me to, long story short, he attempted to poison me. I caught on to the trick, but neglected to switch the wine glasses—an opportunity my DM had given to me plain as day but of course THAT I didn't catch. Since I was unarmed due to being stripped of my weapons and armor, Brutus and I were both killed.I've been playing Ezmerelda for a little while, but we had reached a point where we need to find something crucial (though I can't remember what now, that's how long it's been), and we need a RANGER. Cue us searching for Arlen's body, which we found about 2 sessions ago after a huge friggin' battle with a wraith and shitloads of specters. We've now made our way back to Krezk, and hopefully by the end of the session I'll have my own character back. And hopefully Brutus shortly thereafter.
Welp, now I need to go or I'm gonna be late, but you bet your ass I'm gonna be reading this story of yours.
I've been playing with much the same group of idiots for over thirty years now, plus or minus some players. Ye gads, some since 1984. We had a GURPS fantasy game that ran on and off twenty, through three GMs in turns, Werewolf games, Vampire games, etc. Curse of Strahd and the Litch King's Tomb were both modules we bought but passed on, because *as written* they're just unplayable. Kill the characters, shred the sheets, let' s go get pizza kind of unplayable.
So consider this group, and consider the time I got arm-twisted into running something for their 4th level characters. What do I find but Keep on the Borderlands, suggested level 1-3. Hm... So I go through the module with a pencil in the half-hour of pizza time we have before the game starts, making a few 'adjustments' to the map. After all, the kobolds have been fighting the orcs for several months, so it only makes sense for them to have a runner-based alarm system, wicker barricades in every corridor intersection, squads of javelin-tossing kobolds to cover any attempt to breach them with shield bearers for cover, squads of runners with javelins to flank behind the attackers going after the barricades and stab the unarmored characters like mages and priests viciously to death, etc... Then of course the inevitable night ambush outside when the group retreated in order to recover spells and hit points, in the dark where the kobolds can see just fine.
They loved me.
5326994
Yeah, I told our DM after the game, and after he told us how much he changed for Reloaded, I told him that if we had played RAW, I would have been friggin' miserable.
5326994
5327016
Damn... This lot takes me back to the ONE campaign my group of friends and I actually completed. (Military families.) ... I miss Trigger, my little semi-intelligent slightly maniacal Tarantula.... Never give that little bastard an Iota of power... Ever. He runs away with it and it just... Yeeaaah. I just wish I could remember what campaign it was. (3rd edition campaign... I still have the books buried in my closet!)
Customising the published adventure to fit the players is exactly the right way to play D&D. So is weaving the PCs into the story so they feel like it matters.
Sounds like you have a really good DM. Show them some appreciation, it's hard work doing all that.
5327169
Oh, believe you me, we spent about ten straight minutes just heaping praise upon him. We did everything short of sending a hooker to his door, and that was only because he has a boyfriend.
5326966
42 you say?
5372788
Yep. Unfortunately it wasn't the answer to everything.
5372921
How sad. Oh well...