The Long Con
I’ve always wanted to run an elaborate prank session as a GM. How wonderful, I thought, if I could disguise the powerups from Mario or the plot from some famous movie, only to reveal my fabulous gotcha! at the the final moment.
“Your princess is in another castle!” the myconid steward might declare. Or perhaps, once the orc shaman had fallen into her designated acid pit: “Only her footgear remains. The shoes are surprisingly fashionable though, festooned with red gemstones. Upon further examination you discover that they are magical, and can cast word of recall once per week. Would you like to know the command word?” Cue GM troll face and pained player groans.
Of course, even though I’ve read about this stuff on the interwebs, I never got around to making such shenanigans a reality. Certainly I never thought they would be perpetrated upon my poor unsuspecting person. Is it time for another tale from the table? You bet your Lollipop Guild union dues it is!
So no shit there we were, foundering on the shoals of catastrophe. The session premise was that we’d been washed up on an uncharted isle post-shipwreck. No complaints though. (It’s an old trope, but it checks out.) What made the situation interesting was our NPC escort. We’d been sent on a diplomatic mission, and it was our job to keep Madame Ambassador alive while we scoped out the tropical wilderness and found some means of escape.
Our first stroke of luck was another wrecked ship. It had apparently washed up on shore some years ago, and looked to be a magical boat. It was also missing a big chunk of its keel.
“Could we restore it if we found the keel?”
“You mean the McGuffin?”
And so we had our mission. The next piece of luck came in our first combat encounter. Scanning the clifftops overlooking the beach, we spotted a humanoid figure looking back at us. He was clad all in red. And as the lanky weirdo begins to pick its way down towards us, the ambassador pipes up with some lore.
“These islands are supposed to be uninhabited. Even the pirates have given up on them. The last who sailed these waters perished in my grandfather’s day: a fearsome buccaneer by the name of Lord Howl. His ship was supposedly lost at sea some fifty years ago. Wise mariners have steered clear ever since.”
I should mention at this point that this session was part of an ongoing Dungeons & Doggies campaign. No doubt Lord Howl would turn out to be a warg or a werewolf or some other appropriately themed beastie.
Any dang way, by the time the ambassador finishes her exposition the figure is shambling down the beach towards us. He calls out in a weird, broken voice, and we soon discover that it’s a jester wearing red motley. He is also clearly undead.
The fight was short and very one-sided. The ghoul had some kind of homebrew escape powers though, so he slipped our barbarian’s grapple and bolted into the woods. All the while he’s muttering in that dorky voice of his, “The captain’s not gonna like this!” Lacking any better leads, we followed after the jester. If he was the minion of a very-probably undead Lord Howl, we figured he might lead us towards the missing keel and our ticket off the island.
Fast forward to combat encounter #2. The jester’s trail led us to this huge, elaborate treehouse on the far side of the island. Thatched roofs and platforms and spiraling staircases were bolted onto the biggest palm tree any of us had ever seen. And coming down one of these staircases was another undead. He held the jester in one beefy hand, shaking him by the scrawny neck and berating him for failure.
“Captain Howl?” we venture.
“Yes, and no,” replied the abomination. “I am the Captain, but Lord Howl waits within.”
The jester scampers off once again while we do battle. Grapple barbarian manages not to fail his rolls this time, and action economy soon puts an end to the flesh golem pirate captain.
Encounter #3 came immediately thereafter. And for a change of pace, it was a social scenario. The jester is quivering behind a wizened old undead who calls himself the Sage. “What do you want here?” says this latest monstrosity.
“We want off this island. Take us to your leader!”
“Very well,” croaks the Sage. “But be warned. If you seek an audience with Lord Howl, you had better prepare a worthy gift.”
Diplomacy turned out the be the right call, as the Sage shepherds us past another couple of combat encounters. The first chamber has this weird stage or dais or some such, along with a female undead in a tattered gown. Relieved to bypass a banshee fight, we pass through the kitchens en route to Lord Howl’s throne room. There’s a water-logged corpse scrubbing mindlessly at rusted pans. It peers at us through lank brown hair, and once again we feel like clever adventures for skipping the fight.
At this point we traipse over a narrow bridge to a final chamber, arriving inside the highest room of the treehouse. A pair of undead sit on a pair of bamboo thrones. One is wrapped in tattered sail cloth. His paramour looks to be some kind of creepy veiled lady.
“Lord Howl, I presume?”
“Gifts!” roars the pirate-themed mummy.
“Well you see, we were hoping to make our way off this island. If you could see your way to lending us that big chunk of keel-shaped wood strapped to the back of your throne….”
“I want gifts right now!” demands Lord Howl. He’s got a posh Mid-Atlantic accent for some reason, which is not exactly intimidating. But being spectacularly patient PCs, we begin offering gold and minor magic items. They disappear one by one, popping through Lord Howl’s wrappings and into his chest cavity. He seems to grow stronger with each offering, and he absolutely refuses to bargain. “More gifts!” he keeps shouting. And it’s at this point that we launch into Encounter #4 of the evening.
The jester chases our poor rogue around. The Sage levitates into the air, then begins to hurl coconut-grenades down at us. Meanwhile Lord Howl is wailing away on grapple barbarian, who is doing his best to rip the keel out of the throne via multiple Strength checks.
A few rounds later and combat is going surprisingly well. The jester and Lord Howl teeter at the edge of the throne room balcony. The Sage has been blinded, so he’s throwing around incendiary coconuts with reckless abandon. Meanwhile grapple barbarian has finally worked the keel free from the throne.
“That only counts as my free ‘interact with object,’ right?”
“Sure!” says our GM.
“Perfect! Then I charge the jester and his boss, using the magic keel as an improvised great club.”
The multiverse has a sense of humor, so of course grapple barbarian crits. Of course the damage is massive. And as the burning palm tree begins to topple, and as the undead fly off into the stratosphere like Team Rocket, Lord Howl berates the jester with words that I’ll never forget: “Ghoulligan! You idiot!”
The table froze. You could hear the hamster wheels turning as our minds cast back over the session. The lanky jester all in red. The Captain we’d fought downstairs. The fabulously dressed banshee and the brunette scullery zombie. The Sage and his coconut-based ordinance. And then of course…
“Lord Thurston Howell III!” whispers the dumbstruck barbarian.
“And his wife!” cackles the jubilant GM.
We escaped shortly thereafter. With the keel restored, the wreck turned back into a useful magic item. No points for guessing the name of the boat though. It was painted bright and bold on the side, clearly visible once we brushed away the sand. We also managed to swipe a magical walkie talkie that could cast message, but only between the two halves of the same coconut. I’m not sure I’ll ever forgive my GM.
I hope you’ll forgive the long-winded tale, but this mess happened just a few days ago. The outrage is still fresh in my (and my grapple barbarian’s) mind. What about the rest of you guys though? Have you ever fallen for similar GM chicanery? If so, tell us your tale down in the comments! And if not, please send your condolences. I need all the sympathy I can get after falling for that one.
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spotlight on microphone, front centre stage
footsteps approaching from stage left through the darkness
steps into spotlight
makes final adjustment to microphone height and angle
reaches into inner jacket pocket for cue card
clears throat
double-checks line on cue card
returns cue-card to inside pocket
looks directly at audience
“It’s in the frakken’ ship.”
exit stage right
footsteps receding into the darkness
Atlantia, when the shields fell.
Indiana Jones, all the traps in reverse order until the rolling stone trap, at which point I had caught up with the DM’s ploy (really should have changed the “walk in my name” into less obivious clue), this was back in mid double 0’s and 3.5 homebrew adventure one of my first games.
I was playing Cleric back then, more Templar knight than priest, by the time we reached the room with a stand holding the relic we were hired to retrieve (can’t remember the plot anymore) and I’m just yelling to stop and point out everything else had been booby trapped, of course being in our early to mid teens the youngeat of us having chosen a very, very kleptomanic rogue ingnores my warning (mainly due to enjoying antagonicing me) and grabs the relic. I did get an extra turn of distance as I started running before the fool triggered the trap, I think we all made out of there.
Afterwards I have never trusted anything to do with treasures, to the point my current group thinks I am overly paranoid, granted I am and always carry a back up character precicely due to having played with more homicidal GM and actively backstabbing players in my early years.
I think metagaming in that scenario is perfectly justified. Boulders do, like, many d6 of squashing damage.
I feel dumb for not seeing the ‘setup’ in this strip. If there is one, that is.
It’s referencing the Bob Dylan song “All Along the Watchtower”.
Do I even need to state that I prefer the Bear McCreary version…?
The one from BSG? Yeah, that was a great rendition of the song…
“There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief,
“There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth.”
“No reason to get excited”, the thief, he kindly spoke,
“There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late”.
All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.
Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.
I didn’t get that one either
Quick! To the comments section!
That is why I am here
Happy New Years strip! Not much fireworks in this one. Sorcerer would be dismayed.
I really need to start working ahead again. I’ve been strip-to-strip for most of the last semester.
Anywho: HAPPY NEW YEAR!
I love a good feghoot, though I tend to inflict them on others rather than fall for them myself. I’ve created entire character builds as elaborate set-ups for jokes, including a Pathfinder 2e shoony whose backstory is both a figurative and literal shaggy dog story, but my favourite was the time I derailed a one-shot into the lead-up to a pun. Here’s the story:
It all began when the GM came up with an adventure about tracking down some kobold thieves. For this, I designed Arisielle, a storm sorceress from the noble background focused on ice spells. She was Chaotic Neutral, not caring about right or wrong as long as she didn’t have to worry about rules. She was also a forgiving sort who didn’t want revenge on the kobolds; she just wanted her stolen stuff back, and when they were defeated, she wanted them to be released unharmed.
The payoff? She ended the adventure with the words, “Let it go; the kobold never bothered me anyway.”
I sent the TV tropes on “feghoot” to my group’s punster. No doubt he has a new favorite author.
Also: I think every gamer who saw Frozen suddenly wanted to run an ice sorcerer.
As far as elaborate references go, I had a character named Hassan Ch’oph. They were a Suli Skald with a scimitar. Once they yelled ‘Hassan Ch’oph, the Looney Tunes reference was discovered.
I also made a Vanara Investigator with a pistol and an alchemist who was pretty much Wilson from Don’t Starve.
In an AP I played, one of the climactic scenes was a very elaborate reference to a real-life historical figure from Greek times, which was intermingled with the Cthulhu mythos.
I think these examples are adjacent, but I’m not sure it’s quite the same trope as a “feghoot session.” A single-gag character or an allusion to history isn’t quite the groan-inducing moment of “we waited the whole session for THAT!?” (Though the character name comes close.)
Is that Jester going to be a future (N)PC? Perhaps an Arcane Trickster? A Hoaxer, mayhaps? Or a foil/nemesis to Bard’s shenanigans (in either Handbook)?
https://www.aonprd.com/ArchetypeDisplay.aspx?FixedName=Bard%20Hoaxer
I toyed with having him just be Bard in motley, but decided that would confuse the issue.
There’s actually a Jester base class in 3.5e. It’s in Dragon Compendium
Yeah, the main setup is the first two lines…
…but if you look up the lyrics, the comic (and the alt-text) reference quite a few other lines… the two riders approaching, the wind howling.
Oops, that was meant to be a reply to Nine-Tailed Cat identifying the song.
No worries. I’m sure folks will figure it out.
In the original script, I just had Thief and the Jester trapped in a dungeon, and the only clue was the Jester’s line. I burst into Laurel’s studio just as she was starting lie, “Wait!”
Our GM recently snuck a Hotel California-themed session into our campaign. It was a bit too subtle, and nobody picked up on it until afterwards, but essentially the “pretty, pretty boys she calls friends” were a werewolf commune / cult living near town.
Don’t drink the pink champagne…. you really don’t want to know where that came from. But it turns out that stabbing with your steely knives will kill the beast if they’re properly enchanted first.
Hey, I know a dude that did that….
http://rustyandco.com/comic/level-9-13/
Yeah, our GM doesn’t follow that strip, so he didn’t know about it until I told him afterwards.
Very different execution anyway… the Rusty one made it the overt theme of that adventure, though you had to pay close attention to catch some of the references. Ours was subtle… adventure elements chosen from the song lyrics, e.g. the werewolves for their immunity to mundane weapons, but nothing that really pointed to the GM being a smart-ass.
I tried to be clever with an archfey fascinated by the concept of currency, that mortals had found a way to turn simple gold into a token of potential that could become just about anything through no detectable magic at all. So he decided to study it as a simple shopkeeper.
The players saw through it immediately. I probably shouldn’t have made him a tanuki, to say nothing of the kitsune rival who specialized in forging artistic masterpieces. To say nothing of the campaign happening during New Horizons’s peak.
I think it’s my turn not to get the gag. Haven’t had the chance to play New Horizon.
The Tanuki would be Tom Nook, who runs the Store in basically every Animal Crossing game. Don’t know the name of the Fox though.
And here I thought we were talking about Zero Dawn.
Oh wow, the comic is exactly the right level of subtle. The reference is vague enough that the players aren’t likely to see it coming, but also makes enough sense that everything clicks when they do realize the joke.
Cheers! I was pretty happy with the way it turned out. And I think Laurel was happy mining a whole song’s worth of lyrics for background gags.
The defunct webcomic Erfworld was basically that, constantly. Which greatly puzzled and annoyed the isekai-esque protagonist because he was the only one to whom the pop culture references meant anything.
Personally I don’t remember being ever subjected to this kind of things, nor did I ever inflict it upon hapless players. Perhaps my group is taking gaming too seriously. The worst we did in a session was quote the Blues Brother about being on a mission from God (which, as befits fantasy, was literally true).
Pfft. Who would quote Blues Brothers? That’s low-hanging fruit. Lazy comedy like that….
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/origin-stories-the-anti-party
…Is uh… Perfectly valid and erm… Well done you.
Is there any group that hasn’t quoted that line at some point? It’s just so fitting for almost any form of fantasy gaming.
Not exactly a DM trick, specifically, but two of my fellow players once made a set of PCs whose names (the Investigator Apo Lowcreed and the Barbarian/Brawler Rockabal Boa) and backstory NPC names were all references to characters from a certain film series about boxing.
In a current campaign, I have actually brought those two PCs into the continuity as bounty hunters hired by a woman to track down the maniacs who broke into her house and brutally murdered her daughter for no apparent reason. The players have begun to learn about strange people asking around about them. What they do not currently realize is that each of those people is actually Apo Lowcreed using disguise magic – and each disguise he dons is a ridiculous disguise those players have used in other campaigns. (The Monopoly Man, a farmer with bat wings, a frog person, a clown gargoyle…) I’m sure that when the shoe finally drops, there will be a big reaction.
As a bonus, here is how Lowcreed deduced that PCs were behind the murder: https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_RPG/comments/mja6wv/some_offscreen_events_in_my_campaign/
Love that you’re using their goofy disguises on them. That’s so ludicrously perfect as a messing-with-players strat.
There must be some kind of way outta here
Said the joker to the thief
There’s too much confusion
I can’t get no relief
Well, uh, outside in the cold distance
A wildcat did growl
Two riders were approaching
And the wind began to howl, hey
Love that song but i am lowkey disappointed Laurel didn’t include the business man drinking wine, princes keeping the view, women coming and going barefoot servants too. No reason to get excited, Schattensturm, he kindly spoke. There are many here among us who feel that the comic is but a joke. But, uh, but you and I, we’ve been through that and this is not our fate. So let us stop talkin’ falsely now the hour’s getting late, hey 😀
I can’t believe you fell for that 🙁
Haven’t seen Giligan and yet i could see that before they left the beach 🙁
We have used references but not as trolling and jokes. I make the plot and feels like a too much long setup for such a simple joke 🙂
The way that same song is used on Battlestar Galactica is how we make things with our DM 🙂
The businessman drinking wine is in the alt text.
Because Laurel doesn’t want to work more 😛
Now i think of it, is that bard? Or is a new character? 🙂 Is he a jester like in Darkest Dungeon? 😀
The businessmen are in the hover text. I used the princes in today’s Twitter post. I’ll have to see if I can’t get her to add Lady Duplicity and some servants though. Thanks for catching that omission!
It hits different when you aren’t expecting it. Also of note, you only really need the theme song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcIFlmm_WbU
Why people keep saying of the alt-text like i never read it? o_O¡
“It hits different when you aren’t expecting it.”? Are you telling me you don’t sit on the table expecting that the DM pulls a Giligan plot? You always need to be prepare for that 😛
Never get involved in a land war in Asia. Never go in against a Sicilian when DEATH is on the line. Always expect a Gilligan plot.
So I’ll tell you a story ’bout a Joker and a Thief in the night…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLN1eRA8m2Y
Great song. Unofficial sequel? WHO KNOWS!?
This is where my head immediately went too.
Happy new year, everyone.
365 new chances in 2022 for one and all.
Woohoo!
Just be grateful that you actually DID manage to get off the island. After all, THEY never did.
Yeah, but we didn’t get to meet the Harlem Globetrotters. So really it’s about even.
https://img-9gag-fun.9cache.com/photo/axzQp31_460s.jpg
I may have referenced it before, but I ran one session where the PCs entered a valley that had an overabundance of exclusively male adult elk. The ranger spotted the anomalous wildlife first, long before they reached the first town. The players wasted a hilarious amount of time discovering that it wasn’t an illusion or a “glitch in the matrix,” but an unexplained anomaly. The locals also had no answer for the relatively new phenomenon.
Three or four unrelated encounters later, the PCs rescue a woman from a tavern that been slaughtered by trolls looking for a new lair. The party also finds a strange ring among the treasure.
When asked about the ring, the rescued barmaid (and sole survivor) says that three men had been arguing over the ring two nights ago: one died, twisted into an anatomically improbable shape, the two others vanished but left behind the bag of endless dung and a pouch of infinite hammers. The next night, a discussion between three other adventurers over the same ring led to one wishing for “something she couldn’t overhear,” whereupon a leprechaun with a piano appeared and began playing. The second man wished for a lot of money, but nothing appeared, and the commodities merchant wished for “a hunnert rolls a’ silk.” He was instantly clad in a silken tutu, which was really funny for about five minutes until the five-score Hunter Trolls arrived.
The players chewed on this for a minute, then one buddy at the end of the table began to swear vehemently:
“Sack of s#!, Bag of Hammers! Go…yerself! Hunter Trolls & silk! A 12-inch pianist! A million @#5%&! bucks! You mean to tell me we’ve been fighting and investigating for five hours and it’s all just the build-up to a pun?! I’m out! That’s some Spider Robinson-level mess right there.”
I consider his tirade very high praise, indeed.
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/wondrous-items/a-b/bag-of-everlasting-dung/
Were there at least a few charges left in the ol’ ring of idioms?
Ah. The party was too clever by half. They realized it was probably some form of malicious wish-granting dingus and a) shrank it, b) turned it into an inert plush accessory, c) stored it in a lead-lined box, and d) buried it in an abandoned facility under a lake.
It’s a shame. The Efreet and I had made big plans for the next session.
I’ve probably mentioned that I’ve run the plot of the original Fallout several times in various fantasy campaigns, various different MacGuffins hunts with a similar premise (go find MacGuffin to save your magical vault group), and once it was “go find water crystals so we can fix our magic water generator artifact” and basically ran every major encounter from Fallout 1 for that group.
It helped that that group had never played Fallout 1 or 2, and this was before 3 existed…
I think this is a slightly different trope. Lifting the plot from another source can be fun in its own right. But disguising pop culture references for the sake of an eventual big reveal is a special kind of diabolical pleasure.
You magnificent bastard!
*plays sick guitar solo*
I don’t really do it as jokes, but I also make no effort to hide what I’m taking from with my games. It helps that what I’m mostly building are matches for a gladiatorial arena-style game, so I’m not really building a narrative, but I often just pull from whatever I’ve been playing at the time, hence why my players have fought; a Skaven ambush in the sewers, a Beastman patrol in a fog-shrowded wood, and a Belfry Gargoyle trying to knock them off a roof.
How do you stage a sewer ambush in an arena?
Oh, it’s more of an ‘interdimensional being’ sort of gladiatorial thing. While some matches do take place in arenas, the arena master (The Architect) also creates whole biomes for gladiators to fight through.
Worst setup I’ve seen was in a French comic book series called Lanfeust de Troy. There’s an entire digression where the protags have to participate in a gala at an embassy; and long story short, the entire sideplot was just a pretext so as to shoehorn a parody of the Ferrero Rocher ambassador’s party commercial. With some creative naming and punning to have background characters quote a phonetically accurate retranscription of the conversation from the French version of the commercial.
That’s taking it to another level. Got scans of this masterpiece? Or at least a link to the commercial.
It’s the wide panel in the middle here. (Sorry, the scan is kinda small.)
https://i.imgur.com/hB2WrIy.jpg
And here’s the British version of the commercial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMlP_Moo0bE
The name pun about “Fëh-Rëhr, Auroch d’Or” was meant to be pronounced like “Ferrero Roche d’Or”, but in 1995 the chocolate was renamed “Rocher” to get the same name worldwide, so the whole setup only truly worked for two years (1993 and 1994), before the commercial did not exist and after the line was redubbed with the new name.
Some groups disguise the pop culture references, some groups embrace them, some revel in the absurdity. We once played in a game where a thunder cat, a my little pony, a confederate general, and a pokemon trainer had to infiltrate a museum full of animatronic presidents being lead by the reanimated head of Richard Nixon.
Aroo.
https://m.imgur.com/boyk0nn
So far I’ve only done things like including a matriarchal monarchy whose name sounds like Et/ou, or throwing a malicious mallard – twice the size of any man! – at the ship the PCs are using. No full-setting references so far.
It’s only a few months since I sneaked “The Walrus and the Carpenter” into the Rime of the FrostmIden campaign, almost entirely with elements the campaign guide provided – only having to rearrange and conjoin a few encounters.
I had a lot of fun, but unfortunately, one of the players is my ludicrously scholarly sister, and she stole my thunder barely halfway into the unfolding act.
Then again, the sheer confusion on the other players when she announced apropos of nothing that she was checking if the oysters had shoes was a joke in itself.
You’ve nicely encapsulated the two pitfalls of this shtick: 1) Finding something universal enough that everyone will instantly recognize it; 2) Keeping it hidden enough to get to the big reveal.
I hope it was a successful session despite your disappointment at getting all that thunder stole.
Preparation is key: make sure your players should know. You want them to get it at some point. It’s very aggravating when the players completely miss the joke. E.g. if you’re riffing a book then make sure your players have read that book. It’s also frustrating for a player when you’re riffing off something they cannot know – e.g. a TV series when they don’t watch TV. Especially when everyone else gets it and they do not.
Oh dude, I had a one-shot at a gaming club. GM had us fighting a group of aarakocra in an exhibition match. He based it on this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TTqVwOzXkU
I don’t watch Always Sunny. It’s a fine show, but I’ve never made the time. And out of context, that mess is just about the unfunniest shit in the universe. Poor guy even paused the game to show us the clip when me and my buddy failed to get the joke. A fine GM otherwise, but hoo boy was that one an unfortunate judgement call.
Actually, that story (and your comment) remind me of this one:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/parody
If you try to do this sort of thing, you absolutely have to make sure your reference is universally known and recognized.