Obtuse NPCs
Jumping the gun a little big there, aren’t ya Fiend Team? It isn’t even Devil’s Night yet, and here you are already trick-or-treating on the Material Plane!
What with all the recent comings and goings across planar boundaries, the barrier between the planes must be thin indeed this year! One can only surmise what perfidious recon mission our demonic dungeon delvers have undertaken at the behest of BBEG. More importantly though, one can only boggle at the improbability of Handbook-World having its own version of Scooby-Doo. Just as well. Had things gone bit different with this month’s voting, our Quest Giver patrons might have inflicted Muppets, Pokémon, or Disney on us. I’m not sure I could have dealt with Fiender dressed up as Elsa.
Any dang way, let’s leave the spooky season aside for a second and zero in on Priest. Dude is one of our oldest NPCs, and also one of the most put-upon. Everyone loves to mess with him, and that’s for the simple reason that players are creatures of chaos. It doesn’t matter what alignments their PCs happen to have. If you give players an organized structure like a church, they will instinctively add disorder. Give ’em a kingdom and they’ll start a revolution. Give ’em a ship and they’ll stage a mutiny. Roll out a Heavenly Bureaucracy and they’ll steal the Peaches of Immortality. It’s like showing your domino setup to a pyromaniac. Shit’s going to wind up knocked over and on fire.
So we derive a few nuggets of wisdom from this observation. We know that 1) Players bring a destabilizing tendency to our orderly worlds. We also know that 2) It’s our job as good GMs to help our players have fun. We can therefore discern that 3) Bending plausibility in favor of shenanigans might be a good idea.
That means a simple costume can disguise a marilith as an elf. It means that NPCs may be strangely credulous at the service of a gag. It even means that impossible bullshit gets a pass if it’s funny. I know that I’ve succumbed to cartoon logic on occasion, and I’m willing to bet that you have too.
So for today’s discussion, why don’t we swap tales of NPCs with shitty Sense Motive scores? What ridiculous hijinks have you got away with? Give us all your best lies, capers, and hair-brained schemes down in the comments!
I once saw a marvelous artwork of Mystery Inc as D&D-characters, although the artist did show some bias by making Scrappy a gnoll… I could easily see Scooby Doo catch on in Handbookworld. 😉
Fred the Artificer. Velma the Wizard. Daphne the Bard. Shaggy the Ranger, with Scoob as his animal companion and Favored enemy (food)…
And there’d be bound to be episodes where the gang gets possessed or transformed.
…
Marilith looks shockingly cute. Well done, Laurel!
I have seen that art, and I would 100% play in that game.
“Aww, Claire and Laurel, why didn’t you have Lumberfiend Implosion dress up like…”
(reads the alt-text)
“…as you were.”
Will take to Laur about finding a way to get the people what they want visually.
I was just about to ask what tier of Patreon I need to upgrade to for this art!
In all seriousness: If you do the big one you get to ask her to draw whatever you like once a month. There are some examples hiding on the Discord somewhere.
https://discord.gg/cCuZJgeQ
No, no, no. This is entirely consistent with how the Handbook of Heroes world worked in the past. I quote: “Play it cool. They only get a check if thou drawest attention to thyself”. https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/disguise
Priest should feel no shame for falling to see throught their clever disguises, I mean Fiends have an alarming good Charisma stat.
An talking about bad Sense Motive. During and Evil campaign (That turned quickly into a Lawful and burocratic campaign). We were in the middle of a square where the church was doing a sarmon and showing a holy relic. After the sermon, our bard (That’s me) approached the priests and did conversation with them. While they were doing that the relic was stolen by our rogue who hide in the crowd.
Later in the campaign they accused us of everything bad that was happening in the village (To be fair they were right), but they still had no idea what happened with that relic.
They do seem to be pretty good at Disguise checks. I mean, that horrible monster In purple tricked me into thinking she was cute.
I can’t wait for the ‘Nightmare version of Lumberjack Explosion’ (Treehugger Implosion?) to meet Snowflake.
Hmm, I wonder how Snowflake is handling Paladin becoming a Divine Herald? Given he can plane-shift and has wings, he certainly will never need a mount again, making Snowflake completely obsolete (again).
G O O D ! =_=
I love how much you guys hate Snowflake. Cracks my shit up every time.
We’re just remembering the lesson to never trust a unicorn.
A statement that is totally intentional and not caused by misremembering Snowflake’s status at all. After all it’s obvious she’s hiding her horn. Right ?
(Good thing I’m not a GM, or I’d have to actually stick to that statement.)
It’s uncanny how fiend-Thief is almost identical to Thief, barring the horns and teeth. Are they actual twins?
Hmm. Thief grows horns, which need to be trimmed by Barberian…
You may be onto something, but I doubt they’re twins; fiend-Thief was nowhere to be seen during the blood rite.
Maybe she’s an aunt? … or a more direct ancestor?
… oh dear
Goodness
All these shenanigans just so an embarrassing relative from Thief’s (not so) distant past can pay a personal call for some family time?
Truly this will be a Demon’s night to remember
I was always proud of the version of Malefeas I used in Exalted. Because Exalts are such powerful creatures, their misdeeds spawn personal demons. Perhaps the Heroes’ perfidious deeds have birthed these creatures?
Poor Thief. She’s making her way in the world, fumbling every roll, and you’re suggesting that her misdeeds have spawned a demon daughter to torment her
Then again, she did murder Barmaid that one time…And come to think of it, Succubus has both harassed Thief more than once and used to work alongside/and for Bad Cat…
Every time Thief fumbles a roll, fiend-Thief’s power grows. I imagine she uses it to make everyone else in her party roll poorly to be more competent by comparison.
You know, we never established WHY Thief turned to a life of piracy….
I remember one campaign where the GM figured out how to reverse that trick, and get all the PLAYERS to swallow all the villain’s lies: just make the bad guy a nerdy little geek with cool goggles. All our players loved mad science themes, and steampunk in particular. So even though this particular campaign was set in a high-fantasy world, the shy, stuttering small-town alchemist Bort, with his complicated brass goggles bigger than his own skull, had us all eating out of his hand.
“The town is overrun by zombies who reek of pungent chemicals? Great, then the endearing nerd with the lab full of pungent chemicals is just the guy to help us get to the bottom of the situation!”
Fortunately, Bort’s attempt to pin his murder-and-zombie-making spree on a convenient stranger failed, because Churrik, my naive and trusting ratfolk explorer, was so dangerously gullible that he accidentally wrapped back around to objectivity. Churrik picked up absolutely NONE of the alchemist’s dark hints about the motives of the scary Orc priestess who had been lurking in the graveyard. “She’s in the graveyard? But that’s where the zombies are swarming! We have to warn her; she’s in terrible danger!”
I absolutely thought Churrik was making a disastrous mistake when I had him give up a perfect ambush opportunity to hail the skull-bedecked Orc for a chat…but once we started talking to her, Bort’s story fell apart quickly. The priestess served a stern-but-just death goddess, and claimed to be on a quest to shut down the zombie operation and shepherd a confused amnesiac ghost child (the spectral remains of one of the recent murder victims) to a proper afterlife. The ghost remembered very little about her life or death — she had already thoroughly spooked Churrik when he was temporarily trapped in her tomb, by claiming she had lived there “forever”, when it had in fact been a few days — but the fragments she DID remember were sufficiently damning to Bort that we broke in and searched his basement, and knew we had our villain, and a new ally in the non-nonsense Death Priestess.
For as long as that group gamed together, “But he has GOGGLES!” was our catchphrase for foolishly believing the wrong person…
I will have you know that I mentally replaced your death priestess with Necromancer.
Did Churrik liberate the goggles from Bort’s corpse, thus becoming the goggled one?
The goggles were collateral damage when Bort was torn to shreds by his own minions. But Churrik did recover some lenses and gears and other bits of goggle debris to tinker with, which helped feed his fascination with pre-Winter technology. (The magical cataclysm that had nearly destroyed the world generations back was known simply as “Winter”.)
The best bit of pre-Winter tech he ever found, though, was an intact coffee maker. “Nobody ever has to sleep again!”
Once had a team of halflings who consistently pulled the “We are but a troupe of lost circus performers” card every time they were caught somewhere they shouldn’t be– the Rogue began a juggling routine while the Fighter hoisted him in the air with one hand. Exceptional Performance checks can serve in place of Diplomacy, so hostile or unfriendly encounters with sentient creatures all became a succession of Look What I can do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNTR8o5dk9s
That is a such a good pull. Yeah, man. All NPCs are a little bit Kronk.
Hey, clever!
Reminds me of this time I was in a party that had to get out of Korvosa. My tiefling rogue Bluffed the gate guards into believing we were roofers, called out to a farm, and that the team’s barbarian was basically our heavy equipment.
“It’s cheaper than getting a team of oxen and a crane out there, innit? Eats less, too! How else are we going to get the fresh timbers up on that rotted old roof? Eh? You tell me!”
The high-fantasy equivalent of walking around with a clipboard and an expression of intense focus. Clearly you have a vital reason to be where you are!
“Demons walk abroad on Devil’s night!”
*Lore nerd twitch*
Getting those two mixed up is a good way to start a planar bar-fight.
No no, the demons are walking abroad because the devils are out partying during their designated off-duty night. Chaos taking advantage of the predictability of the lawful!
Demons = Fiends
Devils = Fiends
Demons = Devils
I dare you to spot a flaw in my mathematical proof!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trollface#/media/File:Trollface_non-free.png
Meanwhile Daemons are other thing unrelated 😀
We still can’t call them Daemons, they’re stuck with the stupid Satanic-Panic name “Yugoloth.”
*two fiery portals open behind Claire*
Two voices proclaim: “We’d like a few words with you, Claire Stricklin…”
Eep! O_O
“So why did you dress Fiend Fighter as Shaggy when he’s clearly a Fred?”
See hover text.
Now recall the relationship between Shaggy and Scooby.
Demons going out on Devil’s Night is what sparked the Blood War eons ago. Devils were all “hey, that’s *our* night” and demons were all “don’t care, lol”, and so they started fighting and haven’t stopped since.
Maybe the opposite of the type of story asked for, but I can’t resist the opportunity to tell a story about one of my favorite moments I ever ran.
We were in the small town of Mountainsgate, one of the PCs had contacted their estranged husband, almost gotten him killed, and then dropped the final straw that broke the camel’s back, and said husband didn’t just want a divorce, he wanted their marriage annulled.
Given that he was a prominent politician and they were both nobles, this prompted a cavalcade of lawyers who had to do the tedious business of unraveling years and deciding what, ultimately and retroactively, belonged to who.
The villagers (and players) treated this with an almost festive air—as the PC reinvented themself, free from a relationship they never actually wanted, the villagers had fried food and placed bets on which side would gain custody of any particular piece of property or land or right. Bets, mind you, described as “a few coppers.”
Now some of the players hoped to leverage their insider knowledge (being friends of one of the anullment-ees) to make money on this betting… so two of them went to find a guy to place their bets for them in exchange for a cut. After a low investigation roll (to find a likely partner), they offered this farmer 1 gold of the cut to place their 20 gold bet. They then failed an insight check, and he took their money to go to the bookie… and kept going, right back home, with the full 20 gold, many times what anybody else was betting and almost a month’s wages for most people.
The players laughed, the two betting PCs resolved not to tell the party what they’d tried (with personal funds, not party funds), and the townsfolk continued to bet between 2-5 coppers on whether the silverware would go to one family or the other.
What, they didn’t go to this farmers house to terrorize him and demand their money back? What kind of murder hobos are you raising!?
Sorry, but nothing will top the sheer stealth reference this story leverages (see link)
What link?
My best “caper” was in my first full game. Council of Thieves. There was a cursed parchment that a rival in the dungeon planted so we’d have to fight a Devil that was contracted to kill whoever held the parchment for a certain length of time.
I managed to roll high on the Bluff check to trick them into thinking it was our plans, so the NPC picked it up, triggering an “or collects it for a second time” clause. The group got a chunk of EXP for tricking that NPC.
Reminds me of the “pick me up” grenade from Mom and Dad Save the Universe.
Not a D&D character, but I played a fast talker in a Call of Cthulhu game, and between excellent scores and lucky rolls, we got away with a *lot* of stuff which the authorities probably should have asked a few more questions about. Especially when you show up at a hospital with one guy who’s obviously been shot, and another who looks like something big has been chewing on him.
I can’t remember what abominations we’d been fighting in the woods, but an extreme success on a Fast Talk roll says it was a hunting accident (and I suppose from a certain point of view that was true), no need to report this to the police.
The thin blue line between “oblivious” and “dumb.”
The one i remember the most was on the opposite way, where on a infected apocalypse my PC failed a check to realize that mob was one of infected, and i roleplayed it as thinking they were drunk thuggish kids and taking a detour to avoid them, as it was yet the first day and my PC had to notice what was happening. The DM laughed hard that day.
There was another were a kender-alike player that carried a recently killed corpse to make it look she was one of them. It did not work, of course, but we laughed and facepalmed hard, depending if IC or OOC, that day.
Hm….. could Thief and Demon Thief be considered cousins?