Sunday Respite - An Amassing Of Aggressive And Absolutely Anti-Ostentatious Assassins

Sunday Respite - An Amassing of Aggressive And Absolutely Anti-Ostentatious Assassins

In war, knowing is only half the battle. You can position your pieces all you wish, control the field down to the finest of grass blades, and have your little, black book brimming with a bevy of secrets held beyond human knowledge. However, the opposing face of this coin of conflict is resided over by one, solitary king, and he carries a keen blade in an iron fist.

The assassins of yore are painted with the romances of times gone by. Flawless grace. Effortless precision. The blessed foresight of a god and all her wisdom. A mere man looking upon the shadows she casts and the wounds she carves would swear upon his oaths that dread itself stalks the hallways, knife in hand. He cannot comprehend the machinations behind such brutality, for the trials of its efficacy are all too alien for him to even dare approach.

When one conjoins perfect knowledge with equaling execution, worlds will fall.

Fear the assassins.

Phantom Doppelgänger

Behind the late mayor’s daughter’s eyes shines a fear far truer than the wildman had ever witnessed amongst the outerlands between towns. She smiles with a weakness, every gesture as distant as her speech is hollow. She even walks as if pursued from table to cupboard by her own shadow. It is something the wildman saw only once before, a fleeting glimmer in his brother’s eyes as he bled out upon the turf of a slain hydra’s nest. His bounty-hunter friend has not yet seen it. Instead he downs his third glass of cranberry, each one he poured himself. Every body that he had seen was a clean kill, dead before it hit the ground. He would not be able to recognise a walking corpse if it was not rushing for his neck, rotten down to the gizzards. No. This woman is dead. A dead end? A dead lead? Whatever she is, this chain of witnesses, each last to see the former alive, ends with her, one way or another. The barbarian draws his finger through the dust upon the table as the young woman feigns business across the room, watching over her shoulder. Noone has lived in this house for days. He pads his companion’s thigh and slyly reaches for the hand axe beneath the table.

Thousand Legs

How, pray tell, could you convince another to act on your behalf? What if this ‘act’ is a spot of cruel and bloody work. The Thousand Legs took to this question ages ago, and their answer has not staled under nuanced approach just yet. In the dead of night, under dusty moonlight, the Thousand Legs centipede worms down a sleeper’s throat and goes to work. The parasite replaces half of the poor fellow’s spine and proceeds to pilot him about like a puppet, tendons and nerves instead of string and twine. The Thousand Legs often take these hosts as their payment once their jobs are done, walking their disguises about until their usefulness reaches an end. For a Thousand Legs never leaves just one corpse. There is always a second, treading about, seemingly blissfully unaware of what creature is coiled up beneath their skin.

The Hoods

Draped in thick, black cloaks upon their grey, boneless forms, are roving packs of killers for hire. The care not for comfort, and eat whatever crawls their way through the wilderness or catacombs. They are patient, ever-present, and are quicker than a loose rumour about the city streets. One arm is a hulking, heavy limb that slams and whips just as a hooked squid would at underwater prey. The other ends in a pincer of sorts, barbed upon the inner curve, shaped like an open manacle upon a far longer and thinner length of pulpish flesh. With this arm it can not only choke the life from a victim, but pull the dead back upon their limbs and walk them ahead in front of them. If you ever see a man, lumbering out upon heavy boots, a cloak of ink shouldered upon his back and over his face, leading a mangy dog down lonely streets on a grey leash, promise me nothing other than you will turn and run.

Mimicker

The Mimicker is a master craftsman. He sells chairs and rugs of olive and gold, burgundy and oak, gold and copper. His shop is quiet, save for the chiseling and tinkering he does behind the counter. No customers. No apprentices. Nothing but work. But when a customer does come by, they come alone, through the dead of an early morning’s haze, and carry enough coin to last a carpenter two years. The Mimicker sells them his chairs, each one loaded with a venomous needle within the seat, laced with enough toxin to turn blood to acid within the veins. He offers his rugs, fixed with an adamantine web throughout the thread that coil and crush bone down to papershreds when triggered by a wayward step. Doors are his most popular craft. So many opportunities for a man to put the art of death to work within something so naturally ominous as an opening portal. He has his standards though; his blood-soaked lines in the sand. One jealous and heart-broken nobleman once commissioned a boy’s rocking horse for his nephew - revenge for some family money that would never head his way otherwise. That rocking horse nor its owner never made it out of the city. It exploded into shearing splinters, halfway down the cobble road outside the shop in the nobleman’s hands before he could even think of his inheritance.

Crowd of Knives

Is there a performer whom you hate beyond words? A bard, perhaps? Maybe a preacher or poet? Is she getting too big for her boots? Does she need cutting down to size? Imagine the look upon her hopeless face the day she practices her craft before more people than ever before. Hundreds of cheering, smiling faces. Families out walking their dogs, a young couple enjoying a day free from work, a spinster selling roses now affixed with the beauty of what she sees and hears. All in awe of the wonders of the art before them. She would too be beyond words, wouldn’t you agree? Happy beyond hope and gleeful without fear, all until the hundreds of onlookers swarm about her feet, encircling her from all sides, their smiles turning to wicked glares, baskets of roses and dog leashes dropped for straight razors, kitchen knives, and switchblades. They then disperse, running off towards the guards, shouting high and haughty about the murderer that just fled the gory scene. They each offer wildly inaccurate and conflicting tales about the event without a single shared detail between two before each quietly leaving town within the week, never to be seen in the region again.

Enjoy.

Pixie x

I’ve started to only script the introduction and ultimate conclusion of my stories. Getting a narrative to neatly get from point A to point B is far, far easier than wrangling it through several dozen check-points on the way. 

Even then, the conclusion and introduction are entirely up to change if I feel that the need arises. The process is much more therapeutic than stressing over achieving those perfect moments.

Monday Night Dungeon Mastering - The Surrender Fallacy

Writers can find themselves itching with an idea. This singular concept of story and narrative sits sluggishly on their minds and teases them with a feather between the shoulder blades. The writer sees their idea as a defining moment of ultimate action that must be realised to be itched. It is where the story comes to climax and the reader is struck in their seat with the awe of it. It is so pure and divinely emotional that it rattles the nerves to even contemplate it, but, if only the writer could wrangle their story into getting there.

This obsession over one moment trivialises the story as it ducks and weaves through itself. The world and characters begin bending and straining to the point of collapse to somehow allow this one moment to take centre stage. It’s the ego talking. We believe our own hype, and consequences be damned. Resultantly, the narrative suffers to propagate this flawed ideal.

This issue is prevalent enough within an environment where the writer controls all input. In a novel or script the writer has sole authority over characters and their agency. The world buckles and bends to their command and reshapes as they see fit. Now, imagine a narrative setting where you,as the writer, don’t control the characters …

… not even close.

Spoilers: you don’t have to. The answer is being a Dungeon Master. Big surprise.

As a Dungeon Master (and trust me, I sympathise) you will have these grandiose concepts for story and player character narrative. You want the game to be exciting. You want your players to have fun. But … 

but.

You kinda, maybe, also might want to show off a little. Just once or twice. Y'know, put your best foot forward and give yourself something to be proud of once the session ends. You can’t let them have all the fun. Maybe its your world, or an NPC or villain you are particularly proud of. So you write that in, and you build the scene in your head. You will beautifully narrate the importance of the heroes’ quest, terrify them with the danger of your irredeemable - yet morally complex - villain, and show the best of the world you have poured countless hours over in your study. You have perfected every encounter, named every tavern and drink, statted every character down to the skill points and pettiest of equipment, and you are ready to blow your player’s minds.

BUT THEY WON’T

SIT

STILL.

The illusionist rogue kicks away from his seat and hurries to harass your chieftain-warlord of grotesque, inhuman rage. The barbarian flips her table and rushes your undercover, double-agent assassin with a maul without an inkling of provocation. The wizard casts a counter-spell on your sorcerer as he tries to dramatically teleport away, leaving him stuck in a sad, little cloud of expended, magical smog. The bard just WON’T STOP SEDUCING THINGS. 

So you snap.

You take your player characters, sit them down, tie them up, and force them to listen. For once. You become one of those nightmarish preschool teacher who duct tapes his students to their chairs.

You set your players up for defeat, stacking the odds against them to such an insane degree that they simply have no other choice but to surrender, or maybe you don’t even give them the chance to surrender and kidnap them as they sleep. Every action is batted down, every interruption silenced. You take a breath, and begin to tell your story in peace to your captives.

Do not do this. Please. It is unhealthy and can damage trust.

If you want a passive and silent audience, write a book. This just has the players feeling as if the DM has reached across the table and stolen their character sheet so she can play by themselves.

It manifests in many ways. Overbearing cut-scenes, NPC plot-armour, save-or-die mechanics, vetoed player actions, forced mulligans or redo’s. (Note how these are different from narrative or gameplay effects, like simply being taken prisoner, or getting knocked unconscious / paralysed in combat . The Surrender Fallacy is when the DM refuses player agency and does what he wants without allowing their input)

These are your players - your friends: people who have put aside their time and work to come to your game to play and have fun, not sit by and watch.

For one, they will hate it. They may behave like they accept it at the time, but their resentment will be immediate and sorely bitter. This is not a dynamic you want between your players and your game. If they have no control over their characters or their actions, then they will stop playing and do something else: play with their phones, talk about other things aside from the game. They will not be enjoying their time, no matter how happy you are, and eventually may just choose to not turn up.

To avoid this deathly circumstance you must do one, painful thing: you have to let go of your pride.

Your story will not be perfect - especially with players at the helm of it; it will be disastrous, chaotic, and downright sinister or even unheroic at times. But it will be their story. They will be in control of themselves. They will be acting. they will be playing, and they will be having fun in your world.

Learn to react to their shenanigans rather than demand something of them. Be happy with taking it slow, and do not get antsy when they are not chasing the plot about at breakneck pace. Don’t abandon narrative altogether; continue to keep things tense and the consequences real, but understand that a memorable story is always based off of character choice, rather than having none -  understanding that taking one road of a branching path makes their character unique with the knowledge that noone else would have done that same thing.

Respect your players and their agency, and they shall respect you, and your game.

And, most importantly,

Enjoy

Pixie x

Just an update; the record with Tango is 11 natural 1′s in a single session, with 3 of them happening in a row.

Just so People Know ...

I do have a special d20 that I exclusively use for bosses in D&D. It is a transparent and orange one with white lettering and I call him Tango and I love him.

…

He may or may not have single-handedly killed at least three of my major villains through critical failures, however.

I have a suspicion that he might not love me back.

Last week I went to a new city for a competition over the weekend. On the second day, a homeless man approached my friends and I to try and sell us this large, mustard-yellow Buddha statue and some packets of flower seeds. We refused the offer, but I can’t help feeling like we were some level 1 adventurers and just stupidly ignored the DMs side quest and sick magic items.

The Six Most Powerful Forces in Any Game of D&D

Luck

Gods

Magic

Spite

Sass

Sarcasm

In my new D&D setting, one goat is equivalent exchange for one gold piece.

Guess who’s giving out 200 goats as treasure next session.