Total Party Kill

Believe it or not, this is about Dungeons and Dragons and not the election

I’m not sure what the implications are with the joke in my subtitle, but I think what the Republican Party is doing right now is certainly akin to a TPK.

This is about D&D, where sometimes there is what is called a Total Party Kill—the player characters in a given group all die. It happens, perhaps not as often as you might think, but when it does happen there is often an hour or so of shock while everyone laments their inability to survive the Dungeon Master’s challenge. And this time the Dungeon Master (DM) was me.

Between writing gigs, which is sometimes months at a time, one of the primary ways I create an income is running D&D games, as a DM. Which I am lucky enough to have a substantial reputation for doing. And a couple of weeks ago, in a grueling boss fight, my group defeated a Bheur Hag (pronounced Bear, like the critically acclaimed comedy that everyone agrees is a comedy). Unfortunately for my players, despite my being paid to be there, I was a jerk. And lo, the Bheur Hag had a whole coven.

So the boss fight ended with the boss’ sister running into the room and ripping everyone in half.

By the way, this is a Bheur Hag—

Such a vibe, right? Being ripped in half by her? And a totally chill way to make a living.

A roadmap for nightmares

Luckily my group liked me enough that they accepted the afterlife quest I presented them— half of you are fungal zombies clinging to sentience, and the other half are little soul flames flickering in a hag’s lantern, let’s see if you can get out of this pickle!

Sometimes like on my podcast, which is a different adventure from the private hag adventure, I have to plan the adventure out in such a way that there is a clear path ahead. Here is a recent map I enjoyed drawing for said podcast, Nerd Poker, as sketched by my goblin Non-Player Character (Glibbles).

And when the players took time to sit down with Glibbles, they were able to have the map filled in a bit more for them, like this—

But when there are no listeners, the players tend to take a lot more of their own notes, and as such I end up crafting the road ahead to be much more ambiguous. No time for complex maps! I only sit down and spend time on those when I need a tool for herding cats (the cats being performers with wandering attention spans). Instead, I have to sketch out a dozen different directions everyone might run to based on their interests. Though I hand them a reference document for in-world geography, in a private game I usually only have time to prepare the various combat maps they may stumble (or charge) into.

And again this “everyone died” moment happened during a gig. I was incredibly aware of the possibility that they could all resent being straight-up killed instead of conquering the enemy.

By leaving so much up to chance, the odds that everyone will be wiped from the face of the Prime Material Plane become a little higher than they would be on the podcast. So, here’s what I was able to improvise, and how, in case you wondered how to de-pickle such a situation.

Death must have weight

There's the obvious thing I could have done—have a nobody dies rule—but instead, I trusted I could improvise well enough to keep oblivion fun. Judge for yourself if that was a good idea!

They all made their traditional “death saving throws”, rolls of the die to determine if they could hang onto life for the next twenty-to-forty seconds within the game. But one by one they were shredded by the hag, stunned by myconids (mushroom people) and they slipped into darkness.

They then all got to roll 100-sided die, the higher the number the more closely they would cling to their minds as they transitioned into the next “place.” Only two of the four rolled well.

So the two luckier heroes awoke to discover they were being made into myconid zombies, chained to the floor and with fungal growths piercing their own skin. They broke free of their chains to discover their other two friends as corpses.

They laid a trap in the room for the hag, who entered with the aforementioned lantern full of souls. The trap worked, and the cave’s entryway collapsed on the hag and trapped her.

Will they regain their original fungus-free forms? Will their two now rigor-mortis-dead friends be resurrected? We find out next sesh. But in the meantime I asked everyone to make a backup character and let me know who they prefer to play as going forward. The dice may continue to be unkind.