The Road To Hell Is Paved With Randomly-Generated Content

So after sleeping through an entire session, Little Wing, the only guy in the party, awoke to discover that all his companions had been whisked off into a no-boys-allowed campaign that will, if the stars align, all be televised soon.

So there he was, alone in the sandbox.

He stepped out onto the street, and, by a miraculous coincedence (would you have played it another way?) ran into a bunch of new PCs being run by the same players as his old friends!

KK's got a carbon copy of her other half-elf barbarian, Rookia (this one dubbed Lady Smashalot). Frankie, after a very great deal of deliberation, decided on a dark elf cleric--of Titivilla . Mandy dug up a half-elf wizardette she'd used a couple times before.

They headed off to the local temple of Vorn. While Mandy and KK mucked around in the library, Wing cornered the High Priestess of Vorn and tried to use information he'd gathered in the campaign so far to try to negotiate with her.

...which ended up with Wing looking a lot like Brad Pitt in Burn After Reading, with John Malkovich playing the High Priestess.

..and with all the girls metagamily going "What the fuck are you doing in there, Wing? You're totally blowing it!" the whole time.

"I know what I'm doing, I know what I'm doing...Ok, I say to her-I have, uh, certain, information and, uh..."

"She casts a spell on you to read your mind, roll a Will save."

"D'oh!"

It would have all ended in tears if it weren't for the fact that lunatic D&D savant Wing then went and cast Charm on her and the august high-level cleric then rolled a fucking 3 on her save and thus was indeed charmed enough to not only let the party go off on their own business but also lend them some muscle in the form of one Sister Mildred (73 years old, 2nd level cleric, sounds just like me doing an impression of sister Wendy, the BBC art history nun).

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So then the party's like "Ok, so where do we go now?"

East, they decided, to the Isle of Oth. I think the main factor in the decision was the font I used when I wrote "Isle of Oth" on the map.

So the DM pulls out his random wilderness encounter chart and prays for something interesting.

(roll roll)

"White elf."

Well, of course. The pitiless and toothy White Elves have been chasing the party ever since I randomly made that dungeon out of tarot cards.

"So as the wizard and the cleric prepare to rest and you start hunting, you notice what appears to be a White Elf scout spying on them."

Cue fighting some elves.

The last elf begs for mercy and says if you kill him, more will pursue them later. The White Elves are worried about...

...well it's all terribly complicated. Point is, the Elves are worried the party's gonna fuck up their shit and the party actually has no intention of fucking up anybody's shit, actually, so they cut a deal:

Ok, Mr. Elf Scout, we cut off Sister Mildred's head, then send you back with it, as a sign of our good faith that we don't have any quarrel with all you White Elves.

(This actually makes perfect sense if you know the whole backstory about why the White Elves are chasing the party. I won't bore you by explaining it though.)

A charisma roll and 3 melee rounds later, the Sister M is headless and the deal is sealed.

The players admit to feeling kind of bad about offing Sister Mildred. In addition to calling everybody "Dearie" all the time she was awfully handy with the rain and rust spells.

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After a brief pause to stumble ass-backwards into some plot tucked in among Sister M's belongings, the PCs find their way to the completely randomly generated town of Olgrayne, where the beer is...(d6)...a 6!, the drunk who KK sleeps with* and then robs is...(d100)...a veterinarian!, the old lady that Frankie stabs in the back is...(d20)...a rich poet!, and the local temple Frankie has to go to to get healed after being mugged in the pub bathroom is...(d20)...a spider cult!

So then (after a trip to the real life bathroom where I basically just washed my hands and screwed with my hair while trying to think up what should happen next) comes a scene straight out of one of those "What do you, as a DM, do, to try to make a horror adventure truly scary?" articles you read around Halloween.

I narrate the spider-priests dragging Frankie's corpse onto an altar (with architecture by the same guy who did the Temple of Lolth in Vault of the Drow), and the whole congregation chanting an eerie chant that brings a small and innocent child out of the forest, and then sacrificing her to an albino drider, and thus...(roll roll)...Frankie, you get 4 hit points back!

Even before then, it was getting pretty clear that the PCs had gone way past Lovable Chaotic Neutral Rogue territory and were heading south fast, but I didn't feel we were in total Jack Chick country until the head Spider Priest explained that in exchange for this healing, the cult asked no fee, but only that the PCs convert to the Cult of the White Web, and Mandy and Wing immediately were like "Hey why not?"

So, yeah. The initiation ceremony turns out to involve chasing a puppet down a hole--long story. We'll see how that works out.



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*His opener: "Hey wanna come upstairs and see my collection of teeth?". Fans of KK's movies--especially the ones she directed and cast herself--will be in no way surprised to hear that she genuinely found this pick-up line intriguing.