"And...you're sure they know what they're doing?" Sombra asked carefully as he walked between the two Royal Alicorns to the throne room of Crystal Empire castle. "I mean, I know they're your sisters, but that other one..."
"It's complicated," Shining explained quickly. "But trust me, with a little guidance from Radiant Heart, Twilight and Keira will have something built to track down the fragments of Princess Amore by the time we've retrieved the Crystal Heart. I'll even be sure to put you in a Dark Shield when it's put back so you don't get affected by its energies."
Cadence chuckled softly. "If Keira's as good with technology as you've made out, with how good Twilight is with magic I wouldn't be surprised if they found a way to supercharge such a device to summon all the pieces of Amore here and restore her even before we make it back. Especially with everything Radiant Heart has learned about crystal magic."
"Especially after you provided Twilight with the Royal Library's card catalog," Shining added. "You basically handed her all the knowledge of the entire Crystal Kingdom. She'll find a way." He frowned, tapping his chin. "All things considered, though, it's probably best if we're far away while they're experimenting."
Sombra nodded. "Alright. I suppose I'll have to take your word for it." He bit his lip nervously. "Umm...Radiant will be safe with them, won't she?"
"Absolutely," Cadence confirmed. "She won't come to any harm with them-"
"Physically," Shining corrected. "She might walk about a bit frazzled and with her brains melting out her ears." Seeing Sombra's horrified expression, he quickly corrected, "Metaphorically speaking. Twilight and Keira are probably the only ones alive who can keep up with each other on an intellectual level."
"Oh," Sombra accepted with a sigh of relief as they reached the Throne Room. "Now, I have my own way of reaching the Crystal Heart's hiding place, but it involves transferring through the Shadows of Umbrum. Not only do I not want to do that anymore, Princess Cadence would not survive the transfer, nor would the Heart survive being brought back that way. So we'll need to take the Adventurer's Path."
"Adventurer's Path?" Shining asked curiously, perking up at the name.
"I assumed I'd have some would be heroes charging in to try and get at the heart," Sombra explained. "Rather than having to rebuild the castle every time they came blasting through, I created a path specifically meant to lure them in and eliminate them since it would seem easier - at first - than blasting through hundreds of feet of solid crystal, especially when they didn't know where they were going." He turned to the throne. "The first step requires dark magic." Focusing his power, he shot a blast of dark magic into the crystal directly above the throne, causing it to cast a shadow onto the floor, revealing a stairwell leading down. "There are actually two castles here. This one, and its reflection in the Shadowlands. The Adventurer's Path requires swapping bits of the two castles around to progress safely." He calmly walked down the stairs, Shining and Cadence following.
Cadence grinned as she walked. "Feels a lot like one of those games you used to play with your friends," she whispered to Shining. "The kind Twilight always wanted to hear about."
"Beginning to," Shining admitted with a chuckle. At the bottom of the stairs was a single door built into the wall. When Shining approached it, however, the door swept along the wall of the circular chamber to evade him. Noticing another crystal like the one above the throne surmounting the door, he spoke up. "Shoot the crystal with Dark magic?" he deduced.
"You'd think so," Sombra offered with a chuckle. "However, doing so would lead deeper into the Shadowlands, specifically into the Lands of Fear. Doing so will cause the door to open into a nightmare scenario, forcing whoever stepped through to live out their worst nightmare."
"Then Light magic is what opens the path back to the regular castle?" Cadence deduced.
"Precisely," Sombra confirmed. "Shining, would you? While I was able to create the mechanism, there's a reason I never used it..."
"Of course," Shining agreed, shifting to the form of White Knight before firing a blast of Light magic into the crystal. The door blazed white and opened to a wide crystal pillar with a staircase running around the outside of it in the center of a massive circular chamber.
"And now we climb the stairs?" Cadence asked forlornly, staring up at them in dismay.
"Very carefully," Sombra cautioned. "The stairs are trapped in an irregular pattern, specifically designed to trip up anyone who tries to learn the pattern of traps. If you can't sense the magic of the traps - and they're made of my magic embedded in such a way that you need my magic to sense them - you'd have to check every stair as you go. And some of the traps are designed to be triggered by checking." He grinned widely. "Most of that type are the ones that turn the staircase into a ramp and send a flood of water down from the top, washing you straight to the bottom. And the last step always has a trap that does that whether checked or not."
"How...how many stairs?" Cadence whimpered.
"374,925, and the traps randomly kick in somewhere after the first 500 but before the thousandth," Sombra proclaimed proudly. "The tower's bigger on the inside."
Shining burst into laughter. "Okay, once we've found a way for you to live in the Empire without fearing the light of the Crystal Heart, you have got to GM an O&O session! That is positively wicked!"
"That's still around?" Sombra asked in shock. "Radiant and I used to play that while we were young...especially when I was too sick to go to the Crystal Fair."
"Well, the rules have changed over time," Shining pointed out. "Still, I don't think the basic concepts behind the game have changed all that much."
"Well, why don't you test me as a GM?" Sombra asked with a wide grin. "How would you climb this?"
Shining glanced around, examining the pillar and the stairwell from all angles to find an advantage. "Are the undersides of the stairs trapped?"
"What?" Sombra asked, confused.
"Well, the underside of the stairs kind of looks like a ramp," Shining indicated, pointing straight up. "If you cast a spell to reverse gravity and one to reduce friction, you could slide right up - or down - to the top. Unless you put traps there."
Sombra's jaw dropped. "...well blow me down. You can do that with magic now?"
"I'll take that as a no," Cadence giggled as she worked the gravity spell to send them to the top of the tower. As they slid along, Shining and Sombra continued to discuss Ogres & Oubliettes. She was glad to see Shining had found a 'gaming buddy' in the Crystal Empire. He hadn't had a good session since Spike and Twilight moved to Ponyville...
Sombra and Shining are now besties. This is the greatest thing ever.
7820209
Knowing how Tats goes with his stories, this is NOT the greatest thing ever........Not YET anyway.
I really wanna play D&D now
cue badass o&o game sessions in the future
7820244
You and me both... Though I was always partial to Planescape setting of D&D... And my last DM for that insisted that my namesake had a Deck of Many Planes, and one of the random possible planes to port to was Equestria...
Okay folks, 4d6 drop lowest, 5th edition, and somepony find me the new Ponyfinder link! I gotta get my groove on and download that sweet geekness! And remember, do not BLEEP with the Lady of Pain! We've got Cutie Mark Crusaders that need a fun crash course and I don't want them mazed in the first five minutes!
There comes a time in every nerd's life when they find a game that transcends time itself.
It's not too often they get to live 1,000 years in the future and hear that the game is still around.
... Now if a chapter on one of those sessions ever gets done I'm expecting to see First Edition vs whatever edition you feel the game would be on at this point, just see them butt heads on how to even play it.
7820211
Let's split the difference. Tats is the greatest thing ever, and all his PWNy fics are derived from that.
it would seem easier - at first - then blasting through hundreds
1. Than.
7820218 First thing that came to mind was actually Popeye the Sailor Man.
Dude, dont take this the wrong way but, i love you
If i may reminisce for a moment? I remember that I used to play Dungeons and Dragons (D20) back in high school. Fortunately OUR DM was incredibly generous and, since we were all n00bs, he gave us 18s for stats.
After that, (high school, that is) we did a World of Darkness campaign, one for Warhammer 40k... We got to doing a lot of that.
(Sigh.) The nostalgic and retro memories.
7820332
That works for me.
I am totally expecting a "locate city" spell at the very top of the tower so that if you don't roll the Dex save you are instantly dead seeing as you fall of a huge ass tower.
You have to write an O+O session with them now. You HAVE to.
Damn...trap-rigged stairs. That's brilliant
7820336 Same
7820493
Conversely, the last game I played had the DM pit a group of level 2 adventurers (The first warning sign should have been him starting us at level 2) against something with Level Drain. Guess which noob tried to use Holy Water on the thing, got hit down to level one, then discovered that his monk's dodge reflexes didn't mean jack against an AoO caused from simply backing away to a safe distance. I repeat, my character had his soul devoured in two turns, and after the fight the party had to decapitate the corpse because it was already transforming into another monster with Level Drain.
In short, any DM evil enough to set a Level Drain mob loose in the second session is a *** ****** ****** ****** who deserves to be ****** up the *** sideways with a rusty metal cheese grater!
Edit: In case you couldn't tell, there is a reason I haven't played the game since, despite having completed a nice enough campaign with this same DM before.
BEWARE THE STAIRS.
static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/4d7e1e92b4eb34d7e1e92b5686_6232.gif
7821105 I've heard of The Floor is Lava, but this is a whole different thing!
7821098 That reminds me of the time I was running games online for David Silver's d20 system MUCK and someone was DUMB enough to demand that I run it as an old-school Death Plot...with level 3 characters.
Rust Monster
Shadow
GELATINOUS CUBE
Everyone gave up on the shadow because nobody had any non-metal magic weapons to start with, and Rusty ate them.
7821114 We do not joke about "The Floor is Lava."
sandraandwoo.com/comics/2015-02-26-0662-the-floor-is-lava.png
7821125
Oy vey... I miss my old DM before he went evil. He used the fact that my first character had a bent for cat iconography (he was basically a worshiper of a 2e entity who was more or less The God of Cats) as an excuse to have random felines show up as a sign post saying "The plot is this way, idiots!", and turned an encounter with an enchanted fire poker into a flipping Boss Battle. No, seriously, that fire poker was kicking us to the curb. Sure, it wasn't doing much damage to us, but it had a hardness of 10! Most of our attacks were just bouncing off the thing! That is the kind of campaign I like, where the DM can be a dick, and we can all laugh about it later, rather than having the DM be evil and half the party has to roll up new sheets every session. It's kind of hard to role play when your avatar doesn't live long enough for you to grow attached.
7821144
On that note....
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derpicdn.net/img/2012/2/15/3102/thumb.jpg
Though, of the three, i'd choose Settlers of Catan.
7821196 No, it's The Arsonists of Catan. Big difference.
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7821229 My mistake.
I want to see Sombra do some GMing... with is imagination it will be great. I almost feel sorry for Tirek when he has to face 5 Alicorns, Sombra, and Jak.
7821187 I was generally a very kind DM with a creative mind. My dungeons were fun and mentally taxing for the most part.
Demanding that I do my level best to KILL characters instead of just challenging them means I will do just that...and MAKE IT BORING!
This is wonderful.
Stairs, why did it have to be stairs?
Have you guys heard of the story of the Five Fathers Adventuring Party? The story is epic as hell! Here is the link. Anyway, spoilers for people who haven't read or heard of the story: Basically, the DM of this group tries to give the characters a cruel choice scenario. So, during a session, the characters come across a group of items that would make them epic. But, they were chained to a little girl. Essentially, one of the characters, because the girl was adorable, got everyone to decide to destroy the items and get the girl. They became fathers to the girl, who was retconned into being a child of a god, and basically roleplayed interacting with her. A very cute story, that I happened to find on a certain webcomic called Friendship is Dragons
8407215
As good as I find that story, having read about it before...why are you posting that here?
I figured that since everyone was talking about DnD, I figured that I should tell everyone of a major story that I know about. Sorry if it was inappropriate.
8407886
If you'd tagged someone else telling a DnD story related to the chapter, then it might have been.
As it was, it had nothing to do with the chapter.
smart