It is I, the MadCapMunchkin, with a brand new segment called "Tabletop Tales". I've made it no secret that I'm an avid player of quite a few RPGs, the most common that I've referenced being the legendary Dungeons & Dragons. In what is not a shameless rip off of The Spoony One's "Counter Monkey", I wanted to bring in this segment to share my experiences with the world of tabletop, maybe entertain and inform others.
...I said it wasn't a shameless rip-off, I never promised the premises wouldn't be suspiciously similar...
So, on Thursdays - if I have something funny or insightful to share - I will and happily do so. And here comes the first edition of Tabletop Tales, where I'll share a tale from one of the first campaigns I ever played through to completion - the Apophis Campaign.
...I said it wasn't a shameless rip-off, I never promised the premises wouldn't be suspiciously similar...
So, on Thursdays - if I have something funny or insightful to share - I will and happily do so. And here comes the first edition of Tabletop Tales, where I'll share a tale from one of the first campaigns I ever played through to completion - the Apophis Campaign.
You'll likely hear me referencing this a lot and with good reason - it was one hell of a campaign. We started out in the most clichéd way possible and ended up kicking all the asses on our way through the world. I'll have to hammer out all the details again some day, but basically put it was a great campaign, I absolutely loved it and it had an immensely satisfying conclusion. The best part, of course, being that we earned it. The DM probably gave us a few more breaks than we deserved, but ultimately never gave us anything. We fought tooth and nail and eventually we came out on top. Certainly no cake walk, I can say that for certain.
This story, however, comes from early in the campaign, not too long after we had already started. We had a group of about three of us - protecting the innocent with alternate names - myself, Keith, and Eugene and our DM Ripley. This was Ripley's first campaign as a DM, and we had started up with our characters. Keith ended up pulling a Sorcerer/Ranger (which ended up working quite well for him), Eugene had made your stereotypical dwarven fighter, and I had made my first bard - Aion Moonblade.
Bards were a class I had never played before. We were going by 3.5 rules and I was thumbing through the player's manual and I kind of dug the whole aspect of "jack of all trades, master of none", being able to fight, do magic, or sneak around without having to be stuck doing just one of those things. However, when one tends to look at Aion Moonblade they...didn't really get that impression from him. Or, at least, that was my intention.
I believe "Bunny Ears Lawyer" is the correct trope to define Aion Moonblade. He's often off in his own world, thinking to himself and working out things, never his mind on where he was and what he was doing, all that mess. This is one such story of Aion's (and, coincidentally, my own) scatterbrained antics. Luckily, this one wasn't particularly lethal to anyone, but in any other situation I imagine it really would have been.
To set up the actual campaign, our group had been brought together by a priest wanting to get his daughter out of a mausoleum. We faced some low-level monsters and even a couple of undead before we faced the "Man in Black", an antagonist we'd been introduced to early on, and ended up finding a portal to another plane...which might have been one of the Hells, though I'm not certain that we ever got confirmation on it. Journeying around the placed we'd slid out of the vortex into, we eventually faced some of the local residents and got some tasty magical items off their corpses - namely Aion scoring a Lyre of Building.
For those of you who don't know, a Lyre of Building is a magical stringed instrument that...well, builds. With the right combination of chords, a player can do things like make ditches, mines, tunnels, and even full buildings depending on how long the playing goes on. And Aion having Perform (stringed instruments) pretty much saw it as perfect for him, so he yoinked that right away and didn't even look back. It made a nice replacement to his common lyre anyway...or so I had intended.
But, I made a rookie mistake. I had Aion put it in his pack...and then completely forgot it was there.
It's a good idea to remember what you have, regardless of the class you're playing. You never know what might come in handy. While I wasn't the guy who kept track of who had want and how it would be useful in practice, we had Keith who absolutely excels at that sort of thing, and it's a skill that I appreciate a good bit more even if it's a wee bit intrusive. But Keith remembered, and Keith kept that little nugget in the back of his head for a bit.
And I think I used the Lyre in one other instance, but Ripley came to realize he might have given a third-level character a bit too powerful of an item. Eventually we ended up coming back out of the Hell Dimension and got back into a lower level of the mausoleum, finding ourselves face to face with a trap that made the ceiling lower and the floors rise to crush anyone without the Reflex save to avoid them. Your standard Indiana Jones trap.
Unfortunately, none of us had a bag of sand to swap out for the Idol, and the bard is the one reigning authority on picking locks and disarming traps...neither of which he does well...so we're stuck at an impasse...until Keith suddenly has an idea and taps me in the shoulder, telling me "Dude, use your lyre". And sitting there as I was, lost in thought of what we could do, I didn't realize what he was talking about so I looked over at him...and completely confused by the statement, I asked...
"You want me to throw my lyre at it?"
And I sit there for a minute...and I'm looking around the table as this awkward silence passes over us. Keith's eye has started twitching like his rage is about to break, and both Eugene and Ripley are laughing their asses off. We finally decided it was an in-character moment, since Aion is rather a left-handed monkey wrench, but it was just hilarious incompetence on my part that I'd completely forgotten I even had the item.
And inevitably, it didn't work for one reason or another - as I said, Ripley had caught on that he had probably let an item that was too powerful fall into my hands too soon (which will be kind of hilarious later on, but that's another story) - but now I pretty much take it as a lesson to remember what I have on me and keep that in mind. Even for characters that wouldn't do that as a rule, I usually will just to be able to tell other players that would do that and have them sort of tip me off in character about that.
Even to this day, we still occasionally tease Keith with it and "Throw a lyre" has been a recurring in-joke in our games every now and again. But yes, if anyone who games takes anything away from this - remember what you have. It can save your life.
Or it can save your fellow adventurers a brain aneurysm. Either way, it's a win-win.
For the latest from the MadCapMunchkin, be sure to follow him on Twitter @MadCapMunchkin.
This story, however, comes from early in the campaign, not too long after we had already started. We had a group of about three of us - protecting the innocent with alternate names - myself, Keith, and Eugene and our DM Ripley. This was Ripley's first campaign as a DM, and we had started up with our characters. Keith ended up pulling a Sorcerer/Ranger (which ended up working quite well for him), Eugene had made your stereotypical dwarven fighter, and I had made my first bard - Aion Moonblade.
Bards were a class I had never played before. We were going by 3.5 rules and I was thumbing through the player's manual and I kind of dug the whole aspect of "jack of all trades, master of none", being able to fight, do magic, or sneak around without having to be stuck doing just one of those things. However, when one tends to look at Aion Moonblade they...didn't really get that impression from him. Or, at least, that was my intention.
I believe "Bunny Ears Lawyer" is the correct trope to define Aion Moonblade. He's often off in his own world, thinking to himself and working out things, never his mind on where he was and what he was doing, all that mess. This is one such story of Aion's (and, coincidentally, my own) scatterbrained antics. Luckily, this one wasn't particularly lethal to anyone, but in any other situation I imagine it really would have been.
To set up the actual campaign, our group had been brought together by a priest wanting to get his daughter out of a mausoleum. We faced some low-level monsters and even a couple of undead before we faced the "Man in Black", an antagonist we'd been introduced to early on, and ended up finding a portal to another plane...which might have been one of the Hells, though I'm not certain that we ever got confirmation on it. Journeying around the placed we'd slid out of the vortex into, we eventually faced some of the local residents and got some tasty magical items off their corpses - namely Aion scoring a Lyre of Building.
For those of you who don't know, a Lyre of Building is a magical stringed instrument that...well, builds. With the right combination of chords, a player can do things like make ditches, mines, tunnels, and even full buildings depending on how long the playing goes on. And Aion having Perform (stringed instruments) pretty much saw it as perfect for him, so he yoinked that right away and didn't even look back. It made a nice replacement to his common lyre anyway...or so I had intended.
But, I made a rookie mistake. I had Aion put it in his pack...and then completely forgot it was there.
It's a good idea to remember what you have, regardless of the class you're playing. You never know what might come in handy. While I wasn't the guy who kept track of who had want and how it would be useful in practice, we had Keith who absolutely excels at that sort of thing, and it's a skill that I appreciate a good bit more even if it's a wee bit intrusive. But Keith remembered, and Keith kept that little nugget in the back of his head for a bit.
And I think I used the Lyre in one other instance, but Ripley came to realize he might have given a third-level character a bit too powerful of an item. Eventually we ended up coming back out of the Hell Dimension and got back into a lower level of the mausoleum, finding ourselves face to face with a trap that made the ceiling lower and the floors rise to crush anyone without the Reflex save to avoid them. Your standard Indiana Jones trap.
Unfortunately, none of us had a bag of sand to swap out for the Idol, and the bard is the one reigning authority on picking locks and disarming traps...neither of which he does well...so we're stuck at an impasse...until Keith suddenly has an idea and taps me in the shoulder, telling me "Dude, use your lyre". And sitting there as I was, lost in thought of what we could do, I didn't realize what he was talking about so I looked over at him...and completely confused by the statement, I asked...
"You want me to throw my lyre at it?"
And I sit there for a minute...and I'm looking around the table as this awkward silence passes over us. Keith's eye has started twitching like his rage is about to break, and both Eugene and Ripley are laughing their asses off. We finally decided it was an in-character moment, since Aion is rather a left-handed monkey wrench, but it was just hilarious incompetence on my part that I'd completely forgotten I even had the item.
And inevitably, it didn't work for one reason or another - as I said, Ripley had caught on that he had probably let an item that was too powerful fall into my hands too soon (which will be kind of hilarious later on, but that's another story) - but now I pretty much take it as a lesson to remember what I have on me and keep that in mind. Even for characters that wouldn't do that as a rule, I usually will just to be able to tell other players that would do that and have them sort of tip me off in character about that.
Even to this day, we still occasionally tease Keith with it and "Throw a lyre" has been a recurring in-joke in our games every now and again. But yes, if anyone who games takes anything away from this - remember what you have. It can save your life.
Or it can save your fellow adventurers a brain aneurysm. Either way, it's a win-win.
For the latest from the MadCapMunchkin, be sure to follow him on Twitter @MadCapMunchkin.
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