"Greetings, uh, good sir." said the steely-eyed, crimson-armored unicorn. "I beg forgiveness for my insolence, but mine eyes spied thee at yonder table and I couldst immediately see that thou art a man with an heroic character. I am Red Banner, knight of the Holy Order of Protection. Wilt thou accompany me in mine quest for justice?"
"Okey-dokey." said the other pony. He was an enormous, grotesquely muscular earth pony. His bulges were covered with the scars of past battles and tattoos depicting his victories. He wore a horned helmet and sipped cider from a gigantic mug.
"Most excellent! Prithee, what be thy name?"
"Smash Stuff."
"'Smash Stuff'?" said Gilbert. "Is that seriously your character's name?"
"Well, he's a barbarian." said Hearty Hooves. "It describes him, and barbarians aren't real clever with names, right?"
"Let's try to stay in character." said Crag, peeking over the top of his giant GM screen. "And be nice about everycreature's character concepts, hmm?"
The four of them were gathered around a table in a group study room of ESM's central library. There were big windows with a pretty view of a nearby park, and a whiteboard for mapping and the division of loot. Gilbert and Hearty Hooves had never played Ogres & Oubliettes before and were excited to have the chance. Crag and Whisperwing were veterans, but had never been in the same group before.
"But I heard you giggling when I did my first speech." said Gilbert to Crag.
"I'm sorry." said Crag. "You're right, that was rude. I just… it's always a bit awkward when most ponies try to speak in early modern Ponish. Like, people think that 'thou' and 'thee' are more formal than 'ye' and 'you', but it's actually the opposite. And 'mine' is only substituted for 'my' before a vowel, like 'an' versus 'a'."
"Fine, I'll stop." said Gilbert. "Anyway." He cleared his throat and went back to his deeper Red-Banner voice. "Well, what are your adventuring skills, brave Smash Stuff? I, as a holy knight, am skilled in both sword and spell."
"Take a wild guess." said Smash Stuff. "I smash monsters and I smash the ladies."
"At this point," said Crag, "your conversation is observed by another unicorn. He's wearing a long black robe and carrying a knotted old ebony staff."
"Two unicorns?" said Hearty, laughing. "You guys got horn envy?"
"I wanted to play a wizard." said Whisperwing gruffly.
Gilbert shrugged. "I was going for a Shining Armor type. Well, but somewhat less of a dork."
"Imagine playing O&O and tryin' not to be a dork." said Hearty.
"I hear the call of adventure." said Whisperwing. It took everycreature else a moment to realize he was talking in character, since he wasn't using a voice. "I am Colure, master of the moon and stars. Perhaps you have need of my services. I understand that many great organizations of heroes and do-gooders have been conceived in taverns just like this one."
"Go easy on me, too, okay, guys?" said Crag, rubbing his eyes. "Grad school's a lot of work. I had to write up this whole one-shot in the space of two hours late last night. You're going to see a cliché or two. Clichés become clichés in the first place because they're narratively effective."
"All right, understandable." said Whisperwing.
"Let's go find some quests." said Gilbert. "I ask around and see who needs help from heroes."
"I hit on one of the tavern wenches." said Hearty Hooves.
"Of course you do." said Crag. "While I'm thinking of what to do with that, Gilbert, Red Banner hears from the innkeeper that the king of this country, Purple Raiment, wants some brave souls to investigate a lair of strange monsters."
"Awesome." said Gilbert. "Let's do it."
"I cast Moonlight Revelation on the innkeeper." said Whisperwing.
"So I say to the wench 'Wanna give my club a swing?'." said Hearty.
"One thing at a time." said Crag. "Hearty, I'm not going to roleplay with you while you try to seduce this NPC."
"So, fade to black?" said Hearty hopefully.
"Not in the middle of the day, no." said Crag. "Whisp, your spell shows that the innkeeper is telling the truth, so far as he knows."
"But the spell calls for more than that." said Whisperwing. He flipped to one of dozens of bookmarks poking out of his copy of the O&O Spellweaver's Guide and recited "'The moon's revealing light not only pierces lies but provides guidance towards your most pressing need.' So the spell should also provide a hint regarding Colure's 'most pressing need'."
"Like, directions to the bathroom?" said Crag. "Ponies put moons on outhouses."
"No, unless you're saying that my character has to urinate immediately or he will die of some hitherto completely unmentioned curse on his bladder. You need to answer in respect to what Colure needs most, from an omniscient perspective."
"Doesn't this spell only function at night, anyway?"
"Normally, yes, but I spent two leftover destiny points at character creation to make Colure be born under the Sign of the Owl, which—"
"All right, all right. The moon says that you should go see the king."
"In this steppe," said the white-mustached King Purple Raiment, "which you will find to the southeast of the buffalo kingdom, hunters and explorers have long trembled in fear of these creeping things. I charge you to encounter these creatures, learn what you can of them, and write a comprehensive report on their nature in close collaboration with my chief minister of wildlife, Vivium."
"You're giving us a quest to write a report?" said Red Banner. "Who are you, Princess Twilight?"
"Do you say that in character?" said Crag.
"Uh, I guess not." said Gilbert.
"But seriously, Crag." said Hearty. "I was told that this game only looks like homework."
"Calm down, guys." said Crag. "I'm not going to make you actually write a report. You'll roll for it once you have the knowledge and resources."
"Whatever." said Hearty. "Is there anything I can loot in the throne room?"
"The king and at least six guards are looking straight at you." said Crag. "Do you really want to steal from the king right in front of his nose?"
Hearty grabbed a dice cup in his mouth, shook it, and poured it out on the table. "There. Thirty-one. That's my Stealth test. Is that good enough, bro'flanagan?"
"It doesn't matter what you roll." said Crag. "They're looking straight at you."
"So then what's the point of havin' the skill?" said Hearty.
"I cast Worldly Ways." said Whisperwing.
Glad for the interruption, Crag said "All right. You feel… no, wait, that's a tier-3 spell, and restricted to diplomats. You shouldn't be able to cast that twice over."
Whisperwing replied "But I used Wandering Star when I woke up, before we met in the tavern, to count as being born under the Sign of the Dove, which lets me qualify for any diplomat perk so long as I have the normal minimum Moxie required plus two, which I do thanks to my Staff of Social Acumen."
"So then there's five problems." said Crag, counting off on his claws. "One, you didn't tell me that you used Wandering Star; two, Worldly Ways is a spell, not a perk; three, you can't use equipment to qualify for a spell; four, you're still on tier 2 in any case; and five, you already used a feature from a different starsign earlier in the day."
"So about this quest…" Gilbert began.
"How closely have you read the relevant language?" said Whisperwing. "Look, the passage about Wandering Star says nothing about losing access to your natural-born starsign. You, quote, 'gain', end quote, the abilities of the new sign; they don't replace anything. I know you're thinking of a ruling in that famous organized game in Canterlot, but that hasn't made it into errata, and for good reason. Likewise, the core spell rules don't—"
"While you nerds are arguing," said Hearty, "I whip my dick out."
Gritting his teeth, and fighting through the agony of the poison that was just now being pumped into his veins, Red Banner swept his spiritual halberd through the monster's closely packed row of limbs.
"Aw, yeah!" said Gilbert. "Seventy-two damage."
"You're looking at the slashing-weapon-versus-abomination table." said Crag.
"So?" said Gilbert. "Aren't I slashing an abomination?"
"Yes," said Crag, "but the ectoplasmic-weapon-versus-abomination table is what applies in this case."
"Ugh." said Gilbert, flipping through the rulebook again. "Sometimes this game feels needlessly complicated."
"That's because it is." said Crag. "Its heritage in wargames really shows. We're only using O&O instead of a better, more streamlined system because Hearty and Whisp insisted. You'd think that a handless race would prefer games that involved less page-turning."
"I don't wanna play diet O&O." said Hearty Hooves. "None of those other games even have rules for anal circumference."
Crag grimaced. "Third-party splatbooks that were officially condemned by royal decree are not allowed at this table."
Having slain and skinned several of the beasts and captured a live juvenile specimen, the heroes returned to the royal palace. Smash Stuff swiped a painting over Red Banner's strenuous objections ("Well, at least you didn't smash it."), and then they searched for Vivium. But the minister was nowhere to be found. She wasn't in her office, nor her laboratory, nor her quarters. Red Banner begged the king for help, but he told them scornfully that it was their job. Then Red Banner, with the help of a few threatening gestures from Smash Stuff, convinced the royal messenger, a purple baby dragon (Crag: "Did you think I'd miss a chance to pay homage to the most important dragon in Equestria?") to send a few tensely worded scrolls to Vivium, but no reply came. Even Colure's scrying spells proved ineffective. Finally, Colure forcibly teleported Vivium into her own lab with an original use of a body-swapping spell that even Crag had to admit was clever.
"Finally." said Gilbert. "Okay, we get to work writing that report."
"How do you try to persuade her to help you?" said Crag.
"Persuade her?" said Gilbert. "She's a royal minister and this in an order directly from the king."
"She's very busy with other projects, though." said Crag. "Or so she claims."
"Fine." said Gilbert. "This was a complete waste of our time. Let's just write it ourselves."
"The king made it clear that he would never accept the report without her stamp of approval." said Whisperwing morosely.
The heroes not only had to persuade Vivium to help them write the report, although, in the end, she did little writing. They also had to fight her attempts to slant the report's interpretation of their findings to make the monsters sound friendlier than they really were; Vivium kept insisting the report had to "tell a compelling story" and was not pleased by Colure's insistence that storytelling was quite a different matter from scholarship. And they were just about to deliver the report when they realized that Vivium had added another seven authors to it who weren't even NPCs they'd met yet, let alone had contributed to the report in any meaningful way. Smash Stuff was quick to point out that more authors meant an even smaller division of the reward for the PCs, so he turned right around and threatened Vivium for her insolence, as if he hadn't been trying to seduce her half an hour ago. Red Banner somehow managed to repair the situation, and finally they submitted the complete, somewhat over-authored report.
"The pleasure was all ours." said Red Banner. "How can you reward us, Your Majesty?"
"Reward?" said Purple Raiment. "I don't recall discussion of a reward."
"Are you bucking kidding me?" said Smash Stuff.
"Do you say that in character?" said Crag.
"Yes!" said Hearty.
The only reward they ended up getting was the request to help evaluate others' reports in the future. And that was the end of the game.
"And to think how you guys looked at me when I wanted to take his stuff." said Hearty Hooves. "Turns out this guy is an even bigger douchecanoe than the scientist."
"You know, Crag," said Whisperwing, "if you wanted to make a point about your working conditions, you could have just told us an anecdote or two instead of putting us all through an RPG allegory of it. Or, better, started a union."
"Where's the fun in that?" said Crag, grinning. "Now you all know how terrible academia is first-hand."
"So why not drop out?" said Whisperwing. "Seriously. I seem to enjoy reasonable success as a mathematician outside the system. Don't let an institution that's actively exploiting you fool you into sacrificing yourself to it."
Crag shook his head. "Whispy, you know I've always supported you, but I've always been afraid you're not going to get as far as you hope that way. And that kind of amateurism would be an even harder sell in history, where there's less enthusiasm for the idea of raw native genius. I decided to enter the academy because I saw the virtues of Equestria's more formal treatment of learning and research, through the university system, than the desultory scholarship of dragonkind. Those virtues are still real, even if everything was a lot less noble than it looked from the outside.
"And here's the thing." He got up and rose to his full height. "If everycreature who cares about scholarship gets up and leaves academia, then who will be left? Just the careerists, cynics, and posers. I know I'm a no-name, immigrant, trainee academic, but all that means is that I have less to lose. If I don't stand up for scholarship and say what needs to be said, who will?"
"Maybe somepony with less delusions of grandeur." said Hearty Hooves. "And, y'know, who makes his protests in effective ways instead of taking it out on his O&O group."