D&D 5E So long and thanks for all the fish!

[BoldItalic]

As they relaxed on the magic carpet on the way back to meet Clone Fu, Hermione chatted to Solong. "It must be tough, being Archon all the time," she suggested sympathetically. "All that law-making and so on."

"Oh, I've hardly got started." ¹

"What do you do for κέφι ?

Solong sat up and became quite animated. This was clearly a subject he could talk about for hours, given half a chance. "There's this game we play every Zeusday evening at my house. We pretend to be heroes of legend and have battles with fearsome monsters. I have this level theta fighter called Odysseus and last week, ..."

"You should write it all down," interrupted Hermione smoothly. "People always like to hear stories like that."

At this point, Solong became rather embarrassed and, if they hadn't been 10,000 feet up in the air surrounded by impenetrable mountains he would probably have looked over his shoulder to make sure they weren't being overheard. "Actually, I do," he admitted, "But I use a pen-name, of course. I wouldn't want people to think it was all true. I write it secretly at home, so I use the pen-name ..." ²

---

¹ This was true, in 600BC
² Oh, come on. It's DC5. Try.^3
3 Doh!

 

[MoonSong]

As they relaxed on the magic carpet on the way back to meet Clone Fu, Hermione chatted to Solong. "It must be tough, being Archon all the time," she suggested sympathetically. "All that law-making and so on."

"Oh, I've hardly got started." ¹




"What do you do for κέφι ?

Solong sat up and became quite animated. This was clearly a subject he could talk about for hours, given half a chance. "There's this game we play every Zeusday evening at my house. We pretend to be heroes of legend and have battles with fearsome monsters. I have this level theta fighter called Odysseus and last week, ..."

"You should write it all down," interrupted Hermione smoothly. "People always like to hear stories like that."

At this point, Solong became rather embarrassed and, if they hadn't been 10,000 feet up in the air surrounded by impenetrable mountains he would probably have looked over his shoulder to make sure they weren't being overheard. "Actually, I do," he admitted, "But I use a pen-name, of course. I wouldn't want people to think it was all true. I write it secretly at home, so I use the pen-name ..." ²

---

¹ This was true, in 600BC
² Oh, come on. It's DC5. Try.^3
3 Doh!

Oh no. You didn't, did you?

 

[BoldItalic]

Oh no. You didn't, did you?

Yup.

 

[rgoodbb]

Doh. Is it ............a deer, a female deer?

Doh. Is it ............bread

Hang on! with bread ....you .....usually ....have ....butter or......MARGE!

It's Marge isn't it? Tell me I'm right!

 

[BoldItalic]

It's Marge isn't it? Tell me I'm right!

Even the worthy Homer sometimes nods ...

 

[MoonSong]

[MENTION=6777052]BoldItalic[/MENTION] are you aware that you just turned the Aeneid into Record of Lodoss war fanfiction and the Romans into Larpers? And historians would be... shippers?...

 

[BoldItalic]

@Bold Italic are you aware that you just turned the Aeneid into Record of Lodoss war fanfiction and the Romans into Larpers? And historians would be... shippers?...

Ah, a refreshing commentary. Thank you for paying my little effort such flattering attention. You indeed deserve a considered reply.

• I'm imagining that Solong secretly wrote the Iliad, not the Aeneid which was just an amateurish rip-off of his work, if ever there was one. It wasn't even in the right language!
• In 600BC Rome was still being run by two small boys and a she-wolf and the formation of the Legio Larpendum was hundreds of years in the future. Solong and his Zeusday friends, who were noblemen, dressed down as ekdromoi to add authenticity to their sessions but they were Greeks, not Romans, and they didn't wear polystyrene helmets.
• And as for historians, do they not pride themselves on their scholarship? Are they not scholarshippers?

Yrs, etc.,
έντονα πλάγια

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

 

[rgoodbb]

I'm imagining that Solong secretly wrote the Iliad, not the Aeneid

Marge being one of the most evil forces in history created not only the Odyssy but the Illithid.....

 

[BoldItalic]

"Solong, thank you for coming all this way. I'll be blunt. We have a problem," said Clone Fu after the intrepid travelers had returned and partaken of light refreshments and a Short Rest.

"I hope it's not the Golden Tripod," replied Solong. "If it is, just throw it back in the sea where it came from."

"Hey, that was my Mum's," objected Hermione, "You had no right to do that!"

"No, it's not that," explained Clone Fu hurriedly before things got out of hand, "But you are half right. It's gold. There's too much of it. It's making people unhappy."

"Go on. It is more important to be happy than to be rich. I've always said that. It really winds people up."

"We have these adventurers who keep finding hoards of lost gold and then realising there's nothing to spend it on. We've tried taxing them, but they just pay the taxes and then go out and get more gold. The city coffers are full and we can't keep up. The merchants are grumbling because when they charge ridiculous prices the adventurers just laugh and pay anyway, and that takes all the fun out of haggling with customers. Artisans are making so much money that they are buying up farms and retiring and now you can't get anything fixed. We've got alchemists working round the clock trying to turn gold into lead but they are next to useless. We've got blacksmiths trying to melt the stuff down but it just turns into more lumps of gold. You can't get rid of the stuff. We're at our wits' end."

"Hmm," said Solong wisely. "What you need is more laws. As it happens, you've come to the right man. But you have to make laws that everybody will agree to keep. That's the tricky part."

"So, what do you suggest?"

"A while back, there was this king of Lydia called Croesus. I met him once. Total idiot, but he kept a good table. He invented the whole idea of gold coins. Before him, there just weren't any. There's your problem."

Throg, who had until now kept quiet, spoke up. "So if we deal with this Croesus guy, as in terminate, it will solve the whole problem?"

"Alas, no," replied Solong sagely. "For one thing he is already dead. Came to a bad end, by all accounts, and all his gold did him no good at all. I tried to warn him, but he wouldn't listen. But that's by-the-bye. It doesn't make the coinage go away. It's still around, as you have discovered. No, we need a more Attic solution."

"We hide it in the roof? But that's what people do anyway, when we send the tax-collectors round."

"Not that kind of attic! What you need to do is ...