The next day we were scheduled for our weekly game. I half considered cancelling, but finally decided to stick with the game. Everyone I’d talked to about GMing said that once you get off schedule you’re kinda screwed. Especially if you start cancelling games. Basically you’re giving the players license to do the same thing, and they outnumber you.
I did spend a fair amount of time with the sorcerers in the document department trying to get the obfuscation magic off my father’s book. None of them could break the spells. One of them, a middle manager who hadn’t waved a wand in years but nevertheless insisted that his underlings were “incompetent dweebs” spontaneously combusted trying to dispel the magics, which meant I had to feel out a lot of forms. HR has seventeen forms that need to be filled out for workplace immolation, eighteen if the victim was a manager. Worse, I had to lie about the nature of the journal, claiming it was official business. This is the kind of thing that comes back to bite you. The wheels of pandemonium warehouse justice grind slow but fine.
Meanwhile, my dad kept his secrets.
***
We started the game with the wizard appearing in a puff of blue smoke.
I had a whole monologue planned out, but when the moment came, and the four players staring at me, all I could think of was what the wizard had said to me when I went into my dad’s old work.
“Fight the dominant topology,” I said, in my best faux Scottish accent.
This threw the players so badly that they spent the next 30 minutes trying to figure out what the wizard had meant. Eventually I had to prod them forward, or we would have spent the entire night rehashing this moment.
“It’s a puzzle,” I said, lying, “But you can’t solve it yet, you need more information.”
That got them going again (though Lou kept mumbling ‘topology’ under his breath for the remainder of the night, rolling the letters around his tongue as if placing different emphasis on them would unlock whatever riddle they contained) and they spent the next hour exploring the first level, which, eventually, led them to room 14b, and I prepared to release Phil the Twitchy, the Ogre behind the secret door, on my unsuspecting party. Sally asked to be able to roll her sense of the weasel, a rogue skill that allows you to smell monsters if they’re close.
As they were in fact within feet of Phil the Twitchy, I let her roll (successfully) and told her she smelled ogre. Actually I was going to say ‘unwashed ogre’ but realized that was redundant.
This kicked off an argument between Harry, who wanted to flee, and Phil’s (the player, not the ogre) fighter, who thought fighting an ogre would be the clearest path to getting gold and possibly magic.
“I want to replace Tim,” he said.
“Tim?” I said, flashing back to my father’s dungeon.
“My sword. My non-magic, boring sword. I’ve named it Tim.”
“I’ll make it magic for you,” said, Harry, and his wizard cast a magic mouth on the fighter’s sword. And then, to my horror, Harry put the words in its mouth.
“I am Tim! Slayer of Ogres!”
***
They defeated Phil the ogre.
I gave them the treasure, which was a wand of magic weasels with 2 charges left, which pissed Phil off but delighted Harry, who wanted to run before the fight even started.
***
Later than night, once I’d had a drink or three, I tried to wrap my head around the day.
I was able to accept that the module I was running the party through, the Dungeon of Descent, was modeled after my dad’s dungeon. That was at least possible.
That my dad had a journal called ‘Dungeon of Descent’ wasn’t totally crazy. The module was old, after all, so him knowing about it, especially if it was modeled on his work, also wasn’t crazy.
But the other stuff. Tim the magic sword. Eye gouger the arrow. That made no sense at all.
I suppose what was really bending my mind was wondering what came first. Was the dungeon shaping the behavior of my players, or were my players recreating the dungeon? Eye gouger happened in my player’s game before I went to the dungeon, and Tim after. So cause and effect wasn’t at all clear. Maybe they were interrelated in some way. My party and the dungeon were woven together?
It didn’t make a lot of sense one way or the other, and I decided that no amount of after work drinks were going to make it any more clear, so headed off to bed.
Of course, I thought, head on my pillow listening to the darkness around me, there was another possibility. I was going crazy. After a career at the pandemonium warehouse, that somehow seemed the most likely explanation. But it was also the one I really couldn’t do anything about, so it didn’t really bear thinking about.
