Sol 328
AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 333
ARES III SOL 328
“Well, look at the bright side,” Cherry Berry said. “No one’s died yet.”
“Death would be a relief,” Fireball rumbled, but quietly.
The four of them- Cherry, Fireball, Mark and Spitfire- sat or leaned by The Stump, watching from a distance as Starlight Glimmer focused her full concentration on enchanting the seven remaining jumbo mana batteries. Dragonfly, as usual, stayed as close as she could to the battery projecting the magic field required for the operation, soaking up all the magic her still-weakened system could absorb.
Spitfire growled softly and said, “Don’t know how long I can take this.”
“I don’t know about you,” Mark said, “but I’m enjoying myself. I’m learning so much about your home world with every game session.”
“But it so stupid!” Spitfire protested. “Go to pirate town, there Rainbow… I mean Mo-No-Chrome. Stupid name. Go to sea-ponies, there Pinkie. Go to griffons, there Rarity. Go to big city, give up quest, get regular job, and Zoe the Great and Powerful, not Tricky oh no of course not, shows up and burns city down. No escape!!”
“Like I said,” Mark said, “I’m learning so much about your world.”
“Death would be better,” Fireball said. “So she never lets us die. She embarrass us all every session until we do what she wants. Remember the changeling pirate ship? How many things broke?”
“Dragonfly and I were winning that one until the canopy ropes snapped,” Mark said. “Starlight couldn’t break things fast enough.”
“The sea-pony synchronized swimming initiation thing?”
Mark blinked. “You remembered how to say synchronized swimming?”
“The shame is burned on my soul forever,” the dragon replied darkly. “And the day of work she put us all through?”
Mark and Cherry Berry both looked blankly at Fireball. “What about it?” Cherry asked.
Fireball looked a little confused. “All the stupid customers… the bad, horrible, rude ponies… the boss abuse…”
“Hate to break it to you, Fireball,” Mark said, “but low-end day jobs are all like that.”
“The job in the game was better than several I really had before the space race,” Cherry said. “Let’s just say Ponyville isn’t always the bright, shiny, smiling friendly face the tourist board makes it out to be.”
“Oh,” Fireball muttered. “I’m so glad I’m dragon. No day job.”
“That game put my retire off five years,” Spitfire struggled to say.
“But she’s just not getting the message,” Cherry said. “I’m not going to order her to make a new campaign, but you’d think she’d get the idea that we don’t want to do a campaign with ponies we know as the bad guys!”
“All right,” Mark said. “I admit she’s building plot rails faster than a bullet-train company. But she’s not bad enough to justify going Old Man Henderson on her.”
Four ears and a pair of scaly eye-ridges popped up. “Old Man Henderson?” Cherry asked. “Who’s he?”
“Ooooooh, no no no,” Mark said. “I am not giving you Old Man Henderson to use as a weapon against Starlight. Old Man Henderson drove the DM he was used on out of the game, it was that bad. We have to live together for the next two hundred and twenty sols. No Old Man Henderson for you!”
Spitfire and Cherry Berry slumped in disappointment, but Fireball grinned. “Old Man Henderson character who wreck game?” he rumbled. “That gives me idea.”
“Oh, no,” Mark muttered. “Oh, no, no, no. Don’t do this, guys, whatever it is.”
“Dawn Light stands between you and the statue,” Starlight Glimmer said, unconsciously wiping sweat off her forehead. "‘I shall not let you unleash the demon of the past,’ she says. ‘My queen shall reign FOREVER!’ And she surprises you all with a magic blast. Roll to dodge, everyone.”
“Seventeen.”
“Twenty-one.”
“HA!” Fireball bellowed. “Natural 20! I duck past Dawn Light and stand next to the statue!”
“Wha-bu-but you can’t!” Starlight gasped. “Dodge doesn’t work like that!”
“Also tell me,” Fireball said, grinning a most draconic grin, “how much chaos does it take to let Entropy out of statue?” He leaned forward and added, “What die roll?”
“Um… er… let me check my notes…” Starlight scrolled frantically through the document on her own computer, finally finding the notes she’d made on the strange statue in the abandoned garden of the former Royal Palace of Skykeep. “Um… critical success for those trying to revive him, critical fail for those trying to keep him sealed. Nothing else.”
“Grm.” Fireball looked at the others. “Don’t think I get another natural tonight. You?”
“What about bonuses?” Cherry Berry asked. “Isn’t there some kind of ritual we could perform to improve our chances?”
“What? No! No, no ritual!”
“But this is Entropy! Chaos! Disorder!” Cherry insisted. “If we make more chaos, he must get stronger, right? He has to!”
“But he’s held in place by the Elements of Harmony!”
“You mean the piles of dust we carry in our saddlebags?” Dragonfly asked. “I don’t think they’re holding anything anymore.”
“Quick, we need a ritual!” Cherry Berry said. “Something, anything, so wacky, so stupid, so nonsense that it can’t help but break the seal!”
Mark had been mostly silent up until now, having been outvoted three to one (and then four to one when Dragonfly had been brought up to date) on the whole plan. But, as the other players looked to each other in vain hope of inspiration, he began to smile, as an old, old song popped into his head. Without warning he slapped the table four times- whap whap whap whap!- and begin singing on the fifth beat:
I told the unicorn we had to defeat you (whap whap whap whap!)
I told the unicorn your evil days are through (whap whap whap whap!)
And with this simple spell we’re gonna make you blue
And his voice jumped two octaves into a horribly strained and pinched falsetto as he sang:
Ooo, eee, ooh ah ah
Ting, tang, walla walla bing bang
Ooo, eee, ooh ah ah
Ting tang walla walla bang bang
The others pitched in at once, singing the “Ooo-eee” chant through again as Starlight’s jaw threatened to knock a hole in the tabletop. Then, with four more sharp beats to the table, Mark delivered another lyric:
I told the unicorn it’s time for Entropy
I told the unicorn we’d wake him, wait and see
To beat the unicorn everybody sing with me (here we go)
The players jumped up from the table and began dancing around, stepping lightly through the Hab’s potato plants and chanting the silly, squeaky witch-doctor chant twice more, before Mark shouted, “Now the bridge!”
You know that you’re railroading us just like you were a choo-choo
And I admit we are not very brave
But if you keep on going then we’ll have to make it silly
Because we have another world to save
I told the unicorn the world is at an end
I told the unicorn she’ll need a new campaign
But because it feels like fun let’s sing the chant again
The players didn’t need to go through the sixth repeat of “Ooo, eee,” and so forth before Starlight’s magic made a tiny holographic white flag appear over her head, but they did it anyway, because it was fun.
And then, after a bit of laughter and some words about how a D&D campaign had to be fun for everyone involved, Mark told them the legend of the sixth force of nature: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force, the weak force, magic, and Old Man Henderson.
Starlight listened, and took the lesson to heart…
… but she also took notes.
Stats
Page generated in 0.036 seconds
Total duration
957 users online
1,250,915 hits today, 1,822,946 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
I wanna know about old man Henderson
Finally a song appearing in a story that I am ok with!
9021787
He exploded a Call of Cthulhu campaign. In every sense of the word.
9021787
If only we had some sort of divination spell for the internet.
9021787 Short-short version: Call of Cthulhu campaign, PCs v. Hastur. DM was a dick and the players were going through character sheets at the rate of about two per night and getting sick and tired of it. One player decided he was done with the DM and that he was going to blow up the whole campaign... and created Old Man Henderson, who through lucky dice and sheer effrontery proved to be much more successful than anyone could have predicted.
He, of course, killed the campaign- and the DM's interest in the game.
He also killed Hastur.
Thus was born the Henderson Scale of Campaign Derailment, where anything above a 1 has to be classed as multiversal destruction.
For the longer story, Google is your friend.
9021787
Summary: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fanfic/OldManHenderson
Details: https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Old_Man_Henderson
Inventory, eh? That's quite literally what I do for a living... it sucks balls, but that's neither here nor there.
BTW... you just brought back so many marching band memories with that song. Ooo, eee, ooh aah aah. Ting tang, Walla Walla bing... ... ... BANG!
Barrett's Privateers?
9021810
Best part, in another story here on the site he ended up as Santa... and that was one of the saner events in that story.
9021302 There is nothing civil about political correctness.
Especially when it's used to vilify people and get them fired for jokes. Which has happened. Many times. And yet those same people who weaponize political correctness are usually immune from consequences for their own slew of insults.
Well, until now, since people are finally waking up and discovering they hate the politically-correct SJW people more than they hate ISIS.
Only thing I hate about Old Man Henderson is that the legendary character backstory isn't around anywhere, as far as I know. I'd love to see that tome of creative insanity.
9021824 The only one I know is from the Jolly Rogers at KC Renfest.
Given what we know about her, Starlight defaulting to the extreme railroad side of DMing makes way too much sense.
Good Old Man Henderson. I fear the day I have to see a game suffer that fate, but I know I won't be able to look away from the flaming wreck it'll be.
9021824
That was a damn good version, Mitch
Barret's Privateers!
9021855
You and I have VERY different ideas of what political correctness means. And that is all I will say on the topic, as long as we can agree "treating people with respect is a good thing".
9021787
9021814
9021881
Maybe because I heard it first but I prefer this live performance.
9021863
Well to be fair the guy who wrote was wary that he was possessed by demons or something of that ilk when he wrote the thing. I mean it makes sense that the backstory of the character that completely broke a game Call of Chthulu would be written in a fit of eldritch inspiration but I can't fault someone for questioning how they wrote a story in a language they don't even know...
9021863
As I recall the player burned it at the conclusion of the campaign. Said he didn't properly know where the character had come from, and he didn't want to know.
In the same vein as Old Man Henderson see the Ballad of Edgardo where a Old School Classic Shonen Hero ends up in a forum RPG full of amoral anti-heroes and smashes an Evil Empire.
You know Starlight will learn from this. Some of that is good.
But by telling her about Old Man Henderson she now she knows about Call of Cthulhu....And that's...
I feel like a universe where the players regularly go insane due to knowledge that is incomprehensible to the human or pony mind would appeal to her.
9021916
Nails on the chalkboard to my Grammar Nazi mind.
(Why must people choose the most grammatically broken way to attempt to unify "by accident" and "on purpose"?)
Huzzah! Another song! Let's sing along to this instrumental I made seven years ago:
9021792
You weren't okay with "Home (Martian's Lament)"?
By the way, here's the full version:
Yes, I made this, and I'm very proud of it. Even if it is seven years old.
Which rhythm did Mark tap at the beginning of his song? 2023 edit: I'm sure it's the first one.
i.imgur.com/FA4a3QZ.png
9021814
Oh....OH. We had a much less campaign derailing version of omh at our table. First response to threats was gunfire and actual fire. Great guy.
Hopefully this should start Starlight down the path of taking things a bit easier, and going with the flow. At least in her GM-ing.
After all, all the best gaming stories are the ones where Discord himself would stand slack-jawed at the pure pandemonium one or two innocent little dice caused.
Case in point for both of you that haven't seen it yet:
I think the closest I ever got to OMH was playng 40K one day, as a Psyker, and due to a certain combination of critical fails including a Nat 20 where you really didnt want it, the GM rolled back the whole how to have a drink in the pub scene, just so the planet wouldnt collapse into a new Eye.
The GM Always makes Notes.
9022182
>Single line percussion notation
Not gonna lie, that stuff always has and always will drive me insane... of course, this is coming from a dude who spent way too many years reading snare drum music that was written using the the C space on a standard 6-line staff...
I had an Old Man Henderson campaign once. Sort of. I was running a campaign for a group of my brother's friends, just to show them what D&D was all about. The first few sessions were fine, but I kept warning them there would be enemies too powerful for them to brute-force their way through. I don't think they took me seriously. So, being the
-hole I am, I tossed a level 15 werewolf at a group of level 5 players. Put simply, this wolf should've turned them into confetti. He was halfway through doing that, in fact, when the team druid turns to me and asks, "Can I use Summon Nature's Ally Two?"
Sure, I think, summon whatever piddly critter you want. He'll keep Wolfie occupied for a turn, maybe. It might give you guys a second to come up with a clever way to either beat him or get away. Then the druid throws me for a loop by asking, "I can designate the spot my summoned creature appears in, right?" Yeah, so you'll put him opposite the fighter so they both get a flanking bonus, right? Wrong. The druid smiles and says, "Actually, I summon a black bear twenty feet above the werewolf's head."
Turns out, there is, in fact, a rule in the Dungeon Master's Guide (3.5 E) that tells you how much damage a falling bear would deal. I checked, and it's a lot. I tried to weasel out of it by making the druid do an attack roll with his "improvised thrown weapon." He got a natural 20. Somehow, our druid got a critical hit with a falling bear, wounding the werewolf enough that it ran away with the bear still on top of it, hanging on for dear life.
I thought (hoped) the madness would end there. I was wrong. Beating the werewolf gave them enough XP to level up quite a few times. Half the party multiclassed into anything that would let them cast Summon Nature's Ally. The druid? He upgraded to dropping great white sharks on people, then killer whales, then blue whales. Do you have any idea how much damage a falling blue whale does? Enough to kill most things in the Deities and Demigods handbook.
The group changed their organization from "the Knights of the Azure Pass" to "the Squadron of Falling Animals," or SoFA. They hired clerics to go forth and teach the purity of the SoFAtic doctrine. They defeated entire armies by throwing whales at them. One guy killed a literal god by strapping 153 magical grenades onto himself and bellyflopping the deity from three stories up, screaming "SOOOOFFFFAAAAAA!" as he fell.
I gave up on maintaining the original story, and we spent most of the campaign conquering the world because ... well why not? Other highlights included a perpetually naked guy trolling our fighter, the Dental Plan of Doom, and the main villain getting defeated by a rock. I set out to show these guys what D&D was all about, and I think most people would agree I succeeded.
9022288
Don't worry, this is just something I whipped up in two minutes to help me ask Kris my question about how the song should begin. I'm going to make the actual song much better-looking.
9021787
He's a legendary figure among the Call of Chuthulu/tabletop communities. Basically a GM who railroaded things so hard that one of his players created a character with a 108 page backstory that was basically a Vietnam vet who believed the cult of Hastur had stolen his garden gnomes and went on a rampage to try and get them back. It ended with him eventually actually killing the Old God Hastur, causing said DM to flip the table and storm out.
I'd advise looking him up and reading the stories, especially the director's cut version, it's an amazing trip.
And so I had to read up on Old Man Henderson.
Damn... That's pure awesome
9022296
Quick! Someone draw Cthulhu mashed up with Pikachu!
9022290
The whole story was awesome...
...but this bit I'd deeply wish elaborated on.
9022290
There's a reason why most DM's have specific house rules about how summonings work. I myself had to set up a "summons only work as rituals" rule to counter a wizard who discovered the usefulness of weaponized livestock.
This old man Henderson sounds like a swell guy.
9022296
Don't forget the part where he lost his remaining sanity with the Necronomicon. No, not by reading it. Smoking its pages.
9022290
That's hilarious! Great story.
9021966
Specially since Twilight's probes have proven that "if It exists in human fiction, it exists somewhere".
So yes, drawing the attention of Nyarlathotep or Tzeentch is a possibility.
9022290
You missed a rule. DC 15 reflex save to avoid free-falling objects. Would have cleared that right up for you.
Only applies if there is a space within a standard movement increment that won't get hit by the object, though (usually 30 feet). Creatures with a Dig or Flight speed can move in those directions; dig is usually the best way to avoid whales.
... Yeah. This has come up for us before.
Edit: Actually, the worse part is when someone realizes a greatsword counts as a "medium" object (like a person) and they can therefore strap dozens of them together and drop them on someone's head for ludicrous damage.
And then Discord popped out of the game, "Here I am, all you lovely ponies, you! Wait... this isn't Ogres and Oubliettes. And why do I keep hearing 'I'LL KILL YOU ALL!' in the background?"
"SEE? I told you I wasn't crazy!" Dragonfly piped in. "Also, hello terrifying Chaos Demon."
9022403 Given what I've seen on e621... that is a truly horrendous notion.
9022296 Vietnam Vets are so hard-core, they can kill Old Gods.
Today's kids get their butts handed to them by Cupid.
9022290 This sounds amazing...
Aqua Man shows up suddenly, "WE COULD USE WHALES, GUYS! WHAAAAAAALES!"
Then Napa, "I sunk their battleship! And then their whales."
Aqua Man, "Nooooooooo!"
(Did you get your dose of DBZ:A today?)
9022182
Witch doctor
Heh heh heh.
9022321
You are way behind the curve. People have not only made art of that they've gone ahead and made PLUSHIES of cthulhachu.
https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--xEHvTC5T--/c_scale,f_auto,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/18j2400kh0udkjpg.jpg
9022264 We had a tarrasque around my home in the NJ Pine Barrens.
It was making too much noise so I punched it and it died.
conectica.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/badass-meme.jpg
I feel Mark's pain. I too have a bad habit of giving my playgroup ideas whenever I open my mouth. Just last week, I accidentally got one of the other players addicted to possibly supernatural energy drinks.
9021865
Agreed. At least she can't afford to use actual mind control to make the players behave.