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Some friends put together a D&D one shot game, fourth level characters, and I took a break from playing characters with twisty-turny minds to play a character who thinks in very straight lines. The party:
Thremma, minotaur barbarian
Aya, elf cleric
Simon, human/cat wizard
k̓aʔk̓aʔ, kenku rogue (the name is Lushootseed for crow)
We are hanging out in a bakery run by a trio of tieflings (waiter, baker, owner/manager) in our various ways - the wizard and the cleric being reasonably sensible, the barbarian with an entire table covered in pastry and a second tray sitting on a nearby chair, the rogue hanging out and eyeing the crumb generation from the minotaur obsessively, when...
... a bunch of hired goons with crossbows show up, with an obvious flashy mage in charge, and tell everyone to put their hands up as they nab the waiter.
Various more squishy player characters go under the furniture or what have you. Thremma does not. One of the goons comes over to threaten Thremma with a crossbow. "Get up, put your hands up." Thremma gets up.
Thremma is two feet taller than the guy with the crossbow. Thremma looks down at him. "Thremma. Was. Eating."
Bad guy spends a minute recalculating his life choices until his boss demands he go off with the rest of them and they vanish into the back room.
Aya, I think: "We're going to go rescue them, right?"
"Thremma is fighter. You are all fighters?"
General consensus was established that yes, we are all fighters.
We follow the sounds of mayhem into the back room and find a bunch of smashed-up stuff and everyone but Thremma is perceptive enough to spot the stairs down in the back corner. Simon figures out that the emblems and stuff on these people indicate they belong to a local noble family who is basically thinly veiled capitalist organized crime who tend to deal Severely with people who irritate them, which apparently includes our favorite bakery's staff.
The party sneaks down the stairs for values of sneak but the guy in question is busy trying to pick a lock on a box (he has broken his lockpicks in it) which means the rogue can put an arrow through his knee (he was an adventurer once!) and then Thremma can loom at him until he explains some of the plot. Rogue opens box, trades mace inside to the cleric for a shiny object. Aya gives the bad guy first aid and tells him to go do penance at her local temple; Thremma growls, "GET BETTER JOB."
Then we get a hilarious sequence in which the rogue, checking for traps and things, rolls a one on every perception check and gets distracted by dust baths, interesting gravel, and basically everything other than the ongoing plot. k̓aʔk̓aʔ is absolutely having a fabulous time investigating the bakery basement, though! The dust is amazing here.
Despite k̓aʔk̓aʔ's distraction, we manage to spot a guy at a fork preparing to blast someone who goes down passage A. The party is actually in passage B, which comes out behind him. (k̓aʔk̓aʔ is in Passage A having a blast.) Simon turns into a cat, goes to distract the guy who spends a while going puss-puss and who's a pretty kitty and how the pretty kitty needs to go because he's totally going to blast anyone stupid enough to come down here. until he gets slammed into by a minotaur who flings him across the room with a horn toss.
Thremma, proudly: Thremma stupid enough to come down here!
k̓aʔk̓aʔ remembers that we have things to do and winds up perched on the guy's chest with beak aimed at one eye while Thremma looms; we interrogate, Aya patches up a little, and "GET BETTER JOB" again.
k̓aʔk̓aʔ once again fails a perception check, gets distracted by how this carpet in this hallway would be great to shred for nesting material, and this time hits a dust bath that happens to be a dagger trap, but when the spike goes off manages to evade it and thus spends a quick minute taking apart the trap for the shiny sharp things inside. We proceed further down, into increasingly "What Ankh-Morpork was built on was mostly Ankh-Morpork" bits of depth, which we have, by this point, determined from interrogation and Simon's memory of history, may have at one point been a necromancer's castle.
Thremma: What is ... neck romance?
The rest of the party: ....
The rest of the party: Bad magic. The dead rise.
Thremma: Oh.
Thremma: Fix with axe?
We proceed into a hallway where we encounter a heavy door with someone weakly calling for help on the other side. Fortunately, one of the keys we lifted from previous bad guys opened said door so we did not have to apply a minotaur to it repeatedly; we opened up the space and found a poison gas cloud (which dissipated onto k̓aʔk̓aʔ and Thremma) and the owner of the bakery, who had apparently been deemed surplus to requirements and left in the gas cloud to die. We shooed him upstairs, raided the room he was in to find a shield that protects against magic, which was given to Thremma who is bad at resisting magic. (This process involved k̓aʔk̓aʔ failing to open a chest, getting Thremma's help, pointing at the hinges of the chest, Thremma asking if this involves using the axe there, and then getting instruction on how to use a crowbar.)
Consider this appropriate foreshadowing.
We hear the sound of fighting, fail to sneak spectacularly, and encounter a guy who shouts "we're under attack" before Thremma bounces him off a wall. As we round the corner we encounter a bunch of bad guys engaged in combat with the pastry chef. Simon scares them off with eldritch whispering voices saying things like "you ... will never make rent ...." and k̓aʔk̓aʔ shoots the last, rescuing the injured chef. Then k̓aʔk̓aʔ finds a box containing a Spooky Bow and wishes to pose with it.
Thremma, being a professional gladiator and thus familiar with how to pose with weaponry, helps k̓aʔk̓aʔ workshop dramatic poses with spooky bow. They are now besties. (k̓aʔk̓aʔ thought they were besties before because Thremma drops a lot of crumbs, but Thremma had not previously noticed k̓aʔk̓aʔ's existence.)
We have at this point determined that the third tiefling's magical power has been deemed the most suitable sacrifice for a dark ritual and so we are trying to make it through this mess. We round a corner, see a Bottomless Pit [tm], and a guy on the far platform of the pit. k̓aʔk̓aʔ shoots him because what good is a new spooky bow if you can't test it out?
Someone throws a switch, presumably to shift around the platforms around the bottomless pit, and when we get to where we can see properly we see a U-shaped set of balconies with the crowd of bad guys on a platform flanked by five-foot gaps. ("Fireball formation!" I say. Not that anyone has third list spells.)
k̓aʔk̓aʔ shoots the remaining bad guys. Sami, the GM, says, "... okay I think you shoot that hard enough to go through multiples of them because otherwise I have no explanation for how that damage plus what Simon did to them earlier finished off the swarm...."
Thremma: [solemn grunt] Good bow.
We are left with solving the jumping puzzle, which begins with Thremma flinging k̓aʔk̓aʔ over the first gap (Cretan bull-leaping style) hard enough to also go over the second gap, though k̓aʔk̓aʔ bounces back to try to work the levers (deciphers the mechanism, lacks the capacity to fix it). Thremma offers to throw the rest of the party across!
Simon: "... wizard squishy. I have misty step."
The misty step was precisely enough to dump him in the second gap, but if Thremma throws him and he steps in midair he can make the distance. So that's what we did. (He crashes into the wall on the far side due to timing miscalculation.)
(SFX: [the GM absolutely losing it laughing]
Me: C'mon, Sami, you can't say you didn't expect this nonsense.)
Combination of safety rope and flinging gets Aya across, and then Thremma jumps the gaps.
We found somewhere in here a chest containing a vorpal greatsword, which, after some dithering, was given to Thremma, who gave the no-longer-usable-due-to-insufficient-hands shield of protection against magic to Aya, a decision the party might wish to reconsider. We proceed to hurry into the final confrontation.
(ETA: The vorpal greatsword, by the way, was explained to Thremma as "skinny axe".)
Here in the throne room or what have you we see the third member of the bakery staff tied down in an evil ritual circle in front of the evil mage, who proceeds to stalk closer to the party to monologue.
Me: ... she's inside my range to hit her with horns now....
k̓aʔk̓aʔ shoots her for the surprise round, I didn't have enough range to charge, but I'm top of the initiative order so I totally get to charge her and knock her back. (If I dash in, which would normally be my action, I don't get a weapon attack, but I do get a gore attack. This was a very ridiculous character.)
So. Thremma hits her. k̓aʔk̓aʔ shoots her. She gets up, looks at Thremma, says, "You're a strong one. Your strength would be better on my side!" and hits a charm effect.
Which, of course, Thremma fails. (Even though I had advantage to save on it, I rolled middling.)
"Kill them all!" howls the enemy.
Simon, being a sensible cat boy, casts levitate on the confounded minotaur, and fortunately for us all I failed that save too. Then Aya darts in and unleashes a clerical power that ... cures the charm.
Bringing us back to the top of the round and:
"Thremma DOWN?"
(Yes, that came out in the same cadence as Ludo from Labyrinth.)
The spell released, we then proceeded into: "Thremma MAD."
If you are an evil mage it is probably best to not piss off a minotaur barbarian within ten feet of you, particularly not one armed with a vorpal greatsword. Thremma's rage effect comes with the sound of the ocean and crackling electricity: lightning strikes the enemy mage as the greatsword also strikes the enemy mage and then, just because THREMMA MAD, Thremma horn-tossed the resulting body across the room.
Unfortunately the bloodspatter activates the magic circle and some eldritch monster from beyond emerges, attempting to devour the third tiefling.
k̓aʔk̓aʔ shoots the thing. It life-drains the victim in its jaws, healing itself, then takes a thwack at Thremma, who is basically too angry to care. Simon hits it with a chilling touch, which keeps it from being able to heal more, and which does double-damage because it's weak to that kind of magic. Aya casts sanctuary here? I think? To protect the tiefling, and then blasts the monster with a guiding bolt (doing massive damage because it was also weak to radiant). The tiefling escapes the thing's jaws and darts to the side, as Thremma, whirling the greatsword, with a rush of electricity-crackling sea, plows into the side of the thing and just keeps carving away at it until it dissipates.
The victim gives Thremma a hug. Thremma, perplexed, pats them and tries to calm down. Aya heals them, and gets a hug of her own.
k̓aʔk̓aʔ collects proof of the nefarious targeting of people doing charitable works from the body of the evil mage, and Thremma declares "Thremma wants more pie."
The tiefling proceeds to have a hilarious meltdown about how the pastry chef has really good pie that goes into a really awkward attempt to not sound like they're trying to fix the minotaur up with the pastry chef which is 100% lost on Thremma, who said, "Thremma is confused now. Thremma wants pie."
Simon investigated the magic circle and told Thremma which bits of the floor to smash. Then we all went in search of more baked goods and celebration of victory and survival.
Thremma, minotaur barbarian
Aya, elf cleric
Simon, human/cat wizard
k̓aʔk̓aʔ, kenku rogue (the name is Lushootseed for crow)
We are hanging out in a bakery run by a trio of tieflings (waiter, baker, owner/manager) in our various ways - the wizard and the cleric being reasonably sensible, the barbarian with an entire table covered in pastry and a second tray sitting on a nearby chair, the rogue hanging out and eyeing the crumb generation from the minotaur obsessively, when...
... a bunch of hired goons with crossbows show up, with an obvious flashy mage in charge, and tell everyone to put their hands up as they nab the waiter.
Various more squishy player characters go under the furniture or what have you. Thremma does not. One of the goons comes over to threaten Thremma with a crossbow. "Get up, put your hands up." Thremma gets up.
Thremma is two feet taller than the guy with the crossbow. Thremma looks down at him. "Thremma. Was. Eating."
Bad guy spends a minute recalculating his life choices until his boss demands he go off with the rest of them and they vanish into the back room.
Aya, I think: "We're going to go rescue them, right?"
"Thremma is fighter. You are all fighters?"
General consensus was established that yes, we are all fighters.
We follow the sounds of mayhem into the back room and find a bunch of smashed-up stuff and everyone but Thremma is perceptive enough to spot the stairs down in the back corner. Simon figures out that the emblems and stuff on these people indicate they belong to a local noble family who is basically thinly veiled capitalist organized crime who tend to deal Severely with people who irritate them, which apparently includes our favorite bakery's staff.
The party sneaks down the stairs for values of sneak but the guy in question is busy trying to pick a lock on a box (he has broken his lockpicks in it) which means the rogue can put an arrow through his knee (he was an adventurer once!) and then Thremma can loom at him until he explains some of the plot. Rogue opens box, trades mace inside to the cleric for a shiny object. Aya gives the bad guy first aid and tells him to go do penance at her local temple; Thremma growls, "GET BETTER JOB."
Then we get a hilarious sequence in which the rogue, checking for traps and things, rolls a one on every perception check and gets distracted by dust baths, interesting gravel, and basically everything other than the ongoing plot. k̓aʔk̓aʔ is absolutely having a fabulous time investigating the bakery basement, though! The dust is amazing here.
Despite k̓aʔk̓aʔ's distraction, we manage to spot a guy at a fork preparing to blast someone who goes down passage A. The party is actually in passage B, which comes out behind him. (k̓aʔk̓aʔ is in Passage A having a blast.) Simon turns into a cat, goes to distract the guy who spends a while going puss-puss and who's a pretty kitty and how the pretty kitty needs to go because he's totally going to blast anyone stupid enough to come down here. until he gets slammed into by a minotaur who flings him across the room with a horn toss.
Thremma, proudly: Thremma stupid enough to come down here!
k̓aʔk̓aʔ remembers that we have things to do and winds up perched on the guy's chest with beak aimed at one eye while Thremma looms; we interrogate, Aya patches up a little, and "GET BETTER JOB" again.
k̓aʔk̓aʔ once again fails a perception check, gets distracted by how this carpet in this hallway would be great to shred for nesting material, and this time hits a dust bath that happens to be a dagger trap, but when the spike goes off manages to evade it and thus spends a quick minute taking apart the trap for the shiny sharp things inside. We proceed further down, into increasingly "What Ankh-Morpork was built on was mostly Ankh-Morpork" bits of depth, which we have, by this point, determined from interrogation and Simon's memory of history, may have at one point been a necromancer's castle.
Thremma: What is ... neck romance?
The rest of the party: ....
The rest of the party: Bad magic. The dead rise.
Thremma: Oh.
Thremma: Fix with axe?
We proceed into a hallway where we encounter a heavy door with someone weakly calling for help on the other side. Fortunately, one of the keys we lifted from previous bad guys opened said door so we did not have to apply a minotaur to it repeatedly; we opened up the space and found a poison gas cloud (which dissipated onto k̓aʔk̓aʔ and Thremma) and the owner of the bakery, who had apparently been deemed surplus to requirements and left in the gas cloud to die. We shooed him upstairs, raided the room he was in to find a shield that protects against magic, which was given to Thremma who is bad at resisting magic. (This process involved k̓aʔk̓aʔ failing to open a chest, getting Thremma's help, pointing at the hinges of the chest, Thremma asking if this involves using the axe there, and then getting instruction on how to use a crowbar.)
Consider this appropriate foreshadowing.
We hear the sound of fighting, fail to sneak spectacularly, and encounter a guy who shouts "we're under attack" before Thremma bounces him off a wall. As we round the corner we encounter a bunch of bad guys engaged in combat with the pastry chef. Simon scares them off with eldritch whispering voices saying things like "you ... will never make rent ...." and k̓aʔk̓aʔ shoots the last, rescuing the injured chef. Then k̓aʔk̓aʔ finds a box containing a Spooky Bow and wishes to pose with it.
Thremma, being a professional gladiator and thus familiar with how to pose with weaponry, helps k̓aʔk̓aʔ workshop dramatic poses with spooky bow. They are now besties. (k̓aʔk̓aʔ thought they were besties before because Thremma drops a lot of crumbs, but Thremma had not previously noticed k̓aʔk̓aʔ's existence.)
We have at this point determined that the third tiefling's magical power has been deemed the most suitable sacrifice for a dark ritual and so we are trying to make it through this mess. We round a corner, see a Bottomless Pit [tm], and a guy on the far platform of the pit. k̓aʔk̓aʔ shoots him because what good is a new spooky bow if you can't test it out?
Someone throws a switch, presumably to shift around the platforms around the bottomless pit, and when we get to where we can see properly we see a U-shaped set of balconies with the crowd of bad guys on a platform flanked by five-foot gaps. ("Fireball formation!" I say. Not that anyone has third list spells.)
k̓aʔk̓aʔ shoots the remaining bad guys. Sami, the GM, says, "... okay I think you shoot that hard enough to go through multiples of them because otherwise I have no explanation for how that damage plus what Simon did to them earlier finished off the swarm...."
Thremma: [solemn grunt] Good bow.
We are left with solving the jumping puzzle, which begins with Thremma flinging k̓aʔk̓aʔ over the first gap (Cretan bull-leaping style) hard enough to also go over the second gap, though k̓aʔk̓aʔ bounces back to try to work the levers (deciphers the mechanism, lacks the capacity to fix it). Thremma offers to throw the rest of the party across!
Simon: "... wizard squishy. I have misty step."
The misty step was precisely enough to dump him in the second gap, but if Thremma throws him and he steps in midair he can make the distance. So that's what we did. (He crashes into the wall on the far side due to timing miscalculation.)
(SFX: [the GM absolutely losing it laughing]
Me: C'mon, Sami, you can't say you didn't expect this nonsense.)
Combination of safety rope and flinging gets Aya across, and then Thremma jumps the gaps.
We found somewhere in here a chest containing a vorpal greatsword, which, after some dithering, was given to Thremma, who gave the no-longer-usable-due-to-insufficient-hands shield of protection against magic to Aya, a decision the party might wish to reconsider. We proceed to hurry into the final confrontation.
(ETA: The vorpal greatsword, by the way, was explained to Thremma as "skinny axe".)
Here in the throne room or what have you we see the third member of the bakery staff tied down in an evil ritual circle in front of the evil mage, who proceeds to stalk closer to the party to monologue.
Me: ... she's inside my range to hit her with horns now....
k̓aʔk̓aʔ shoots her for the surprise round, I didn't have enough range to charge, but I'm top of the initiative order so I totally get to charge her and knock her back. (If I dash in, which would normally be my action, I don't get a weapon attack, but I do get a gore attack. This was a very ridiculous character.)
So. Thremma hits her. k̓aʔk̓aʔ shoots her. She gets up, looks at Thremma, says, "You're a strong one. Your strength would be better on my side!" and hits a charm effect.
Which, of course, Thremma fails. (Even though I had advantage to save on it, I rolled middling.)
"Kill them all!" howls the enemy.
Simon, being a sensible cat boy, casts levitate on the confounded minotaur, and fortunately for us all I failed that save too. Then Aya darts in and unleashes a clerical power that ... cures the charm.
Bringing us back to the top of the round and:
"Thremma DOWN?"
(Yes, that came out in the same cadence as Ludo from Labyrinth.)
The spell released, we then proceeded into: "Thremma MAD."
If you are an evil mage it is probably best to not piss off a minotaur barbarian within ten feet of you, particularly not one armed with a vorpal greatsword. Thremma's rage effect comes with the sound of the ocean and crackling electricity: lightning strikes the enemy mage as the greatsword also strikes the enemy mage and then, just because THREMMA MAD, Thremma horn-tossed the resulting body across the room.
Unfortunately the bloodspatter activates the magic circle and some eldritch monster from beyond emerges, attempting to devour the third tiefling.
k̓aʔk̓aʔ shoots the thing. It life-drains the victim in its jaws, healing itself, then takes a thwack at Thremma, who is basically too angry to care. Simon hits it with a chilling touch, which keeps it from being able to heal more, and which does double-damage because it's weak to that kind of magic. Aya casts sanctuary here? I think? To protect the tiefling, and then blasts the monster with a guiding bolt (doing massive damage because it was also weak to radiant). The tiefling escapes the thing's jaws and darts to the side, as Thremma, whirling the greatsword, with a rush of electricity-crackling sea, plows into the side of the thing and just keeps carving away at it until it dissipates.
The victim gives Thremma a hug. Thremma, perplexed, pats them and tries to calm down. Aya heals them, and gets a hug of her own.
k̓aʔk̓aʔ collects proof of the nefarious targeting of people doing charitable works from the body of the evil mage, and Thremma declares "Thremma wants more pie."
The tiefling proceeds to have a hilarious meltdown about how the pastry chef has really good pie that goes into a really awkward attempt to not sound like they're trying to fix the minotaur up with the pastry chef which is 100% lost on Thremma, who said, "Thremma is confused now. Thremma wants pie."
Simon investigated the magic circle and told Thremma which bits of the floor to smash. Then we all went in search of more baked goods and celebration of victory and survival.
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It's important to stay focused on the essential things in life.
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*dies* All of it, but especially this and the Ludo bits.