DMO's New and Improved Story Hour (Excellent Source of Whole Grain!) [Updated 8/17]

[DMO]

Hi to those giving this story hour a glance. Welcome, and thanks for your interest. (Okay, I'll settle for your curiosity.) Please drop a note to mention what you like or why you're leaving. Heck, even Crothian's gotta prop up his post count every now and again.

I'm reviving the story hour I began here many moons ago, and which slipped into inattention (though not for lack of interest!). The alligators are once more below my eyeballs, and I'm looking to whip this thing back into shape. I hope you'll forgive a bit of repackaging for the sake of more digestible reading. (The marketing department assured me this would sell more units.) There wasn't a huge volume of material produced in the first place, so you can count on new stuff in short order.

I want to acknowledge my gaming group at the outset. Andy, Phil, Ron, Kevin, Steve, Matt, Neil, Justin: you guys are princes and outlaws, heroes and scoundrels, all. I can't imagine a better group of people to explore worlds with. Thanks for the good times!

And thanks also to the EN World community. This place is the best thing to happen to D&D since polyhedral dice.

 

[DMO]

Zadkiel

The half-formed dreams began to slip away.

The crescendo of light. The tumult of color. A communal song conspiring against the silence. He stretched after them, but they retreated ever more quickly. Impossible trees, tall as authority, towering over the stars. A conflagration that consumed the sky. Some awful noise, like the groaning of a mountain suffocating under its own weight. He became agitated, scrambling after the ephemera but finding no purchase. A child weeping. Vertigo. Howling wind. The bewildering silence of doubt. Echoes of a low voice murmuring words into the darkness, diminishing, then gone. Desolation. At last, he quit struggling and surrendered.

There was a muffled rumble of thunder. He opened his eyes.

He looked down to find that he was standing upright, naked. At his feet were markings graven into stone, a diagram circumscribing the area in which he stood, its nested silver bands populated with strange characters. Breaking the continuity of the circle was a thin trail of water that had streamed from a nearby puddle collecting upon the floor. A slow drip fed the puddle through a crack in the ceiling.

The walls of this space were close. At one end of the room narrow steps rose from the floor and into the wall, hemmed in by more stone. An old wooden chair stood nearly within reach, and atop the chair rested the remains of what had once been a man, skin tight and shriveled, with long beard and bald pate. In the corpse's lap lay an open book.

He stood there taking stock, his face expressionless, gazing about: self, circle, water, chair, body, book, exit. At last, he tentatively raised his leg and stepped across the silvered boundary. With both feet outside the circle he suddenly sprang like a startled cat, leaping away and landing in a crouch. Looking back and finding nothing changed, he gradually, warily, straightened.

He went to the corpse in the chair. Cupping its bearded chin in his hand, he gazed at the face. As though from across a great distance, he could hear the ever-present murmuring, the voice from his dreams. His head cocked, and his face grew intent. But the words were not discernible and quickly faded; the only sounds were the muzzled complaints of a storm. He let the chin down and reached for the open book. Flakes of aged ink dusted off the parchment at the upset, and the words on the cracked pages fell away.

There was a sudden cry of anguish -- at first he didn't realize that he had produced the sound -- and he quickly slammed the volume shut, sending more ink flakes and crumbled bits of parchment fluttering into the air. He clutched the book to his chest and hurriedly walked to the stairs. With a final, lingering look about the room, as though trying to memorize every detail before it too disappeared into the shadows of his mind, he ascended the steps and exited through a door at the top.

Beyond the door was a world oscillating madly between dark and bright, as jagged streaks of lightning tore at the night sky. Thunder boomed loudly -- he could feel the immediacy of the storm in his chest -- and stinging rain came down in torrents. Stone slabs and copper monuments littered the field. They gave way at the ruins of a large building, where he could spy the shifting, sputtering light of a fire.

He strode through the rain, stepping barefoot across the stone rubble that skirted the ruin. Only old, rusted hinges remained of the doors to the structure. Proceeding through the arched doorframe, he found himself in a space vaulted by souvenirs of stonework and timber. Glass remained in only a few of the windows, but not a single pane was whole. Water streamed through the vacancies in the ceiling.

Two figures sat beside a struggling fire in the looted cavity of the building's interior. They had been eating meat off daggers held over the flames and laughing bawdily, but now they sat in stunned silence, regarding him as if an apparition of death stood in their midst. At his continued approach, one of them reached hastily for his sword upon the floor.

"That's plenty far right there. Any closer and I'll cut you down."

The other one gave a nervous snort and took a swig from his wineskin.

Closing the few remaining steps between them, the interloper reached out suddenly to snatch the wineskin and take several long swallows himself. The drink dribbled down his chin, and a fiery warmth flared in his stomach, followed by a sharp prick. He lowered the bag to find the tip of a sword pressing against his belly. The man who lost his beverage scrambled to his feet and brandished a knife-skewered rabbit.

"Bloody fields, man, are you mad," he cried, wielding his supper, "chasing naked after death!"

The nude figure seemed to taste each word before responding. "I do not understand you." He gazed piercingly at the man, who recoiled as though struck.

"What are you?" the man hissed.

He pondered for a moment. "I am Zadkiel. What are you?"

 

[DMO]

Zadkiel is played (and masterfully so) by Kevin. Kevin goes by Blitzsniffle around here, so you'll know to recognize him.

Kevin and I started gaming together back in 1987. These days he's a high energy physicist and without a doubt the rules lawyer of our group. That shouldn't be taken in any kind of derogatory fashion. We rely heavily on him to keep us honest. Without Kevin, I'm pretty sure our gaming sessions would devolve into a series of over-or-under rolls. Mechanically anyway.

Kevin, incidentally, used to claim the title of character-death king, though that crown has since passed on.

As you start to see here and hopefully will continue to, Zadkiel's a bit ... off. He's based on some concepts I had put together for an aborted campaign I'd been cooking up prior to this one. Ironically, Kevin was one of the principal reasons that campaign never went anywhere; he wasn't interested in the approach I planned to take towards PCs. Go figure.

I went against the strong and vocal consensus on these boards that warned about allowing a player to use this particular character build (exclusively from WotC products). I just liked the character too well to balk over balance concerns. We have, however, made some revisions along the way to improve long term playability and balance, and I hope that Kevin will share those at an appropriate time.

 

[DMO]

Kylax

Kylax sat at his desk, a cluttered affair with scrolls stacked like firewood about the perimeter and several towers of books tilting threateningly over the scatter of writing implements, charcoals, lenses, inks, and parchment sheaves strewn across the surface. The desk was tucked into an alcove in the labyrinthine halls of the Academy of Maps and Measures, for all intents and purposes lost to the world. An aggravated rumble came from the young man's considerable midsection. His hand felt searchingly about the desk while he squinted at a sheet of vellum hanging from the wall.

Kylax frowned.

By the Book! he thought. Did Tyrinek draft from atop a trotting ostrich? His map of Marsk Stig looked for all the world as though it had been penned by a man having a fit.

Kylax tore the vellum from the wall and wadded it with disdain. Then, brushing the crumblings of a block of cheese from the topmost sheaf of parchment, he proceeded to re-draft the Stig's expanse -- properly, from memory, and without ever having visited the location. Or set foot in the fields beyond Brigade for that matter.

When he completed the task, the shadows across his alcove had grown long. Satisfied, he set the new map aside. His stomach grumbled and he dug about his desk, but only crumbs remained. The next growl was almost menacing in its insistence. Not one to dispute such a stern authority, the rotund cartographer shuffled the chaos of documents in a perfunctory fashion and set off in search of food.

 

[DMO]

Kylax, cont.

Within civilized society, there is a class of people to which self-sufficiency comes naturally -- hard-working folk, the salt of the earth, who by nature are disposed to provide an honest day's work for an honest day's wage. To such people, the company of others is appreciated on its own merits, and when an interest is extended in their lives and concerns, it is done so out of fraternity. Because they are self-sufficient, they needn't harbor ulterior motives in dealings with their neighbors.

Kylax could not rightly be counted among these ranks.

This is not to say that he was manipulative or disingenuous, necessarily. But at the same time, it is true that for all his hours spent in the Palace of Magistrates, the young mapmaker did not know the chandler or his apprentice, would not recognize the master of the stables, had never spoken with a sentinel or chambermaid, and yet knew each and every person in the service of the mistress of kitchens by name, including the scullions.

Following yet another impromptu feast courtesy of Rebecah and her cooks, Kylax decided to join several of his colleagues from the Ministry of Science for their regular evening haranguing over metaphysics. With a stomach full of food, he leisurely made his way across the palace lawns towards Tangye-Lean's chambers. The night air was cool. Feeling contented, his mind naturally turned to more abstract thoughts.

So it was that he was caught entirely unprepared when he was accosted from out of the shadows in the darkened lee of two buildings. Before Kylax quite knew what was upon him, his assailant had clamped a firm hand over his mouth. Another hand clutched him painfully by the arm. Caught in mid-stride, Kylax found his trajectory altered, and momentum dumped him into the alley and against the coarse stone wall. He struggled but was held fast.

"Have you told anyone?" the attacker demanded urgently. "Have you spoken to anyone of your tutelage?"

In the confusion of the moment, Kylax did not immediately place the voice.

"Have you mentioned my name?" There was a hint of desperation in the query.

His eyes were adjusting to the darkness, and his brain at last was catching up with events. Kylax tried to speak. The hand over his mouth lifted, but he was still pinned to the wall by another upon his chest.

"Troferian?" he asked, puzzled.

"Yes, boy, it's me. I am sorry if I've given you a fright, but you must answer my question and you must be truthful about it. If you are not, things could soon go quite poorly for the both of us."

Kylax gave a short huff of laughter and visibly relaxed. "You scared the stew out of me. I was someplace else. I was thinking about progressions and wondering if the total span of an infinite number of infinitely small spans is itself an infinitely small span, a span of finite size, or a span that is infinitely large. I can make an argument for any of the three. The implications could be--"

Troferian cut him off. "No time for folderol now, lad. I must know: have you given confidence to anyone of your studies with me?"

"Sure, several know."

Troferian's head bowed, and his shoulders sagged.

"They know that you lecture me at nauseating length on the principles and methods of the Ministry of Science, and that you put me to thankless tasks such as inspecting the ever-living, never-ending Canon for transpositions and other monk-minded goofs." His mentor looked up, and Kylax grinned conspiratorially.

"You have said nothing of the verve*?" Troferian asked, insistent.

"Your instructions on the matter were clear."

"And you've not been injudicious? You've made no public display?"

"Certainly not."

Troferian appeared as though a weight had been lifted. He removed his hand from Kylax's chest and tousled the young man's hair in a gesture of approval. He patted him on the shoulder and leaned back against the wall. "Ah, good lad. Your discretion has perhaps saved us both; though, I fear things will only get worse from here on."

Kylax frowned in the darkness. "What in the world are you talking about? What's got you so agitated?"

"Then you've not heard?" Troferian asked.

"If I had, I guess I'd be the one ambushing you in the night."

Troferian sighed. "Gloriund Majestica, our exalted sovereign, has in his infinite wisdom seen fit to make proclamations concerning matters he does not begin to comprehend. Seeking to safeguard the moral virtue of his subjects from the dubious threat of the occult, he has issued an edict against all arcane pursuits."

"That's of some concern," Kylax observed.

"Indeed. Anyone found to be in contravention of Majestica's decree is to have his property seized by the empire and be remanded into the custody of the Holy Church. I doubt I need tell you how unpleasant our lives would become should either of us wind up in the cloister."

Kylax was silent; he was beginning to find Troferian's agitation infectious.

"A register of offenders has already been assembled and delivered to the Ministry of Order's Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Oh yes, there is such an ensemble, and it is every bit as awful as you would imagine it to be. For the moment, neither of our names is on that list, and we should both suffer great pains to keep it that way."

Kylax nodded his agreement with an abundance of vigor. "Don't worry after me. I would gladly avoid any risk of my name appearing on such an index."

Troferian held an awkward pause.

"Then you will not be happy to hear what I say next, my boy, for it is just such a risk I must ask you to undertake." Kylax's head snapped about to look on Troferian in stupefaction. "I do not ask this lightly. I would make the journey myself, but it would be far too suspicious."

"Journey?" Kylax shifted uncomfortably. He was a mapmaker; he was familiar with scale. It was a very large world out there. He did not need to have seen any of it first-hand to appreciate its capacity for danger.

"A person whom I hold in high esteem has been identified to the Virtue and Vice Committee, and I can't imagine she knows of the edict or of the bearing it has upon her. I would not see her or her family come to harm while I still have means."

Kylax considered for a moment. "We could send pigeons," he suggested.

"And risk their return under watchful eyes? I think not."

"You could whisper to her upon the wind ... like you showed me."**

"No, Kylax, I wish it were so simple. The winds go whither they will, and I can not know whose ears are in the skies or whom they serve. This whole affair may not begin or end with Majestica. Until we know, we dare not chance it. Our best bet, the best hope for Proulx Longwell and her family, is to send a rider swiftly by horse. One who can be counted on to keep his wits should the world turn to madness. One who can be trusted to accomplish the utmost of tasks." Troferian glanced at his protégé significantly.

Kylax felt the four walls of expectation closing in around him, squeezing off his options. He was no adventurer, to be galloping off in the middle of the night to rescue people from imminent danger. For that matter, he didn't even have a horse.

It was a timely epiphany.

"Troferian, I'm sorry. I would very much like to help, but I'm afraid I don't have a horse. I'd go it on foot, you know, but I don't think I could manage to run from here to the Treganz Gate," he said, gesturing at his girth. "Even if it were my own life at risk!"

A smile lit across Troferian's face. "Excellent, lad! Don't worry about the horse. I'll send you off with the best of mine."

------------------------------

* Magical arts.

** Troferian taught Kylax the cantrip Message. In my campaign, cantrips are acquired in the same fashion as other spells (i.e., you don't automatically know how to cast them all), though more readily. Clearly, Message is insufficient for covering the distance, and Kylax presumably knows this. In point of fact, Whispering Wind doesn't have sufficient range either. It's not clear whether Kylax was unaware of this, thought his destination closer, or had more potent magic in mind.

 

[DMO]

That's right, Matt: 'folderol'.

 

[blitzsniffle]

Matt, I'm glad to see you're bringing this back. I enjoyed reading your first start, but I thought it was too bad that you never got beyond the character introductions. I enjoy reading all the backgrounds, especially knowing as I do how it all works together to produce perhaps one of the most disfunctional parties I've ever been a member of . . . and strangely enough, one of the most enjoyable. I hope you can push on past the introductory material so we can move on to the great catastrophies our early adventuring attempts proved to be!

 

[DMO]

Thanks for the thoughts, Kevin. I hope you'll be able to continue to offer a player's perspective as events unfold.

Just yesterday I was thinking about how ineffectual the party was during those formative sessions and laughing at some of its early disgraces. After the previous decade-long campaign with you guys playing a bunch of unstoppable juggernauts -- and my always needing to scale up the difficulty of an encounter -- it was astonishing how little this party was ready to handle. I'm not sure a DM's ever supposed to feel so perpetually nervous about the prospect of a TPK, but (as I'm sure you remember) there were so many close calls, and there was so much time and energy invested in these characters and the start of the campaign, that I absolutely was.

At the same time, I think a lot of the fun that resulted from those sessions was directly connected to the prevailing sense of peril and always managing to survive by the skin of your teeth. (I'm really looking forward to relating the "marathon" encounter between Kylax and Bladdeczth, for instance.)

I'm so pleased that, across the board, you guys all put character concept ahead of stat optimization. Without doubt, it made for some truly memorable characters ... and catastrophes.

And dysfunction doesn't even begin to cover it....

 

[DMO]

Kylax is the product of Neil's quirky imagination. Neil's a civil engineer / construction manager here in Chicago. We met in 1992 and became fast friends in no small part because of our mutual interest in motorsports. These days, in addition to gaming, we also participate in several high performance driving events each year. Neil has gamed with our group on and off over the years, but became a regular member around the time this campaign was starting up.

Historically, Neil has gravitated towards rogues and characters that are generally bent on mischief. The throw-open-every-door-in-the-complex kind. The pilfer-from-party-members-kind. The morality-how-quaint kind. He was interested in playing a wizard in this campaign, and I'll admit to having some misgivings. What kind of character would he produce? Could he craft a character he'd be attached to enough to curb that kind of recklessness? And could he sustain interest in it in a low-level campaign where magic is not so flashy and commoditized? All of these concerns proved unfounded.

Neil's concept for Kylax is roughly: poorly-socialized, technology geek genius with a self-wrought weight problem, only replace 'technology' with 'magic'.

Brilliant!

Neil/Kylax was the MVP for several sessions running, managing to consistently hold it together through the right combination of wits, cool calculation of risk, and always knowing the right moment to lace up the Nikes and hit it. He's saved the party's bacon on more than one occasion. They know it. And we're all in awe of it.

But, then, he's got a weakness for bacon!

 

[DMO]

Naja

Misja, who learned medicine* from Valya, who learned medicine from Deyja, who learned medicine from Nagian, who learned medicine from Maia, who tricked medicine from Vizsascha the Wyrm, watched Naja slowly shrink into the horizon -- the first of many horizons on the journey that lay ahead.

Misja was an old man. He was old and weary, and there was but one horizon before him now. Soon, when he too diminished across that boundary, he would rest with all the suns that had labored across the sky, and he would make at cleverness with the many serpents who had shed their last skins beneath those blazing orbs.** Misja was a revered elder of the Sn ah'Han. He had protected his people from each lurking menace of the world. He had imparted words of hope when they were fearful, had healed their maladies when they were sickened, had tended to their bodies when their spirits wandered beyond his care. He had done these things for more seasons than he could well recall. He was old, he was tired, and soon he would rest.

But not yet.

Old and tired, Misja worried still for his people. Throughout his many years of ministering to their needs, he had found them a good people who made a good life in a hard land. Their industry centered them. Their pride buoyed them. Their respect for tradition knit them together as a family. But of late there was discord, a growing unease within the family of the Han. Misja could not identify its root, yet the weed of division was plain to him: jealousy where there had been sharing, suspicion where there had been trust, scorn where there had been regard. Not in every glance or in every word, no, but in too many to ignore and in more every day. He perceived a sickness beginning to fester in the heart of his clan. It was unlike any malady he had yet beguiled, and all his medicine was fruitless against it.

So it was that Misja sent Naja forth, his most promising pupil, on a very different horizon quest*** than the young medicine man might have expected. This would be no mere journey to retrieve the feather of an eagle, or the tooth of a snake, or the claw of a bear.

"Naja, take this," Misja had said, handing him an old bow whose significance Naja knew only too well. "It was fashioned by Maia the Clever when she hunted Old Wyrm Vizsascha, in the dark days when our people were dying under the heels of the powers that roamed the land."

Naja had taken the bow with reverence. Only the elders of the Sn ah'Han had ever drawn its string.

"It is Longfang. In the hands of one who has learned its ways, it can strike across the breadth of the sky or pin a beast to its shadow. These are dark days for our people once more, Naja. You must draw Maia's bow and follow the arrow where it lands. You must do this again. And so again. You must follow the track of the arrow wherever it leads, until it leads you to the medicine that will save your people. You must be clever like Maia and learn the medicine and come back to the Sn ah'Han. Then you will be their revered elder, Naja, and old Misja will rest at last."

------------------------------

* The usage here is akin to that in Native American traditions. Frequently misused, "medicine" is best understood as "mystery". Misja and Naja are, thus, mystery men; they are men of wisdom. In point of fact, they both are capable of bringing herbal knowledge to bear in doctoring the ill/injured, but that's not the important sense of 'medicine' in this context.

** The Sn ah'Han, or Serpent Clan, wisdom tradition holds serpents as sacred -- the embodiment of numinous entities as they journey across the material frame. In the view of the Han, the serpents' (and the Han's) power owes to their guile as much as their sting (clerics take both the Trickery and War domains). Their myths describe cosmic forces at war, great winged serpents and scaled angels clashing. These forces the Sn ah'Han both fear and respect. But in their myths, it is the "low bellies" (a term of endearment for snakes) that directly involve themselves in the affairs of the Serpent Clan and intercede with the powers of the warring cosmos. Snakes are therefore considered harbingers, sometimes offering guidance, sometimes bringing judgment.

*** Similar to a Native American vision quest, this is a rite of passage that ordinarily involves a journey alone into the wilderness, time spent seeking personal growth and spiritual guidance from clever serpents. Some representative item is typically retrieved to serve as a reminder of the insight gained. (It's also a good excuse for young Han to go out and meet up with adventuring parties!)