The Outer Planes, Part 8/8: Whimsy
This officially concludes our foray into the Outer Planes. While we can assume that our various adventurers have made their way from the far-flung corners of the cosmos and back to the safe harbor of Handbook-World, our sanity may not be so lucky.
As we established way back in “In Your End-O!” it it scientifically impossible for gamers to resist a pun-off. But at least when you’re punning and word-playing, it’s possible for everyone at the table to join in on the anti-fun. Unfortunately, there is an equally sadistic, groan-inducing form of comedy floating around the hobby. And it’s one that only GMs have access to.
See that little shit on Druid’s tree-shaped bough? That’s what you call an “imp.” And I’m not talking about the little red devils that chain pact warlocks like to pal around with. I’m talking Bat-Mite. I’m talking The Great Gazoo. That OP wanker Q from Next Gen. Any time you have an all-powerful, indestructible companion character, you’ve got an imp on your hands. And you can be damn sure that they’ll speak in the most annoying, high-pitched voice your GM can conjure.
Last time I ran one of these things, it was a fae named Anomander. He’d set up a giant circus tent in the middle of the ocean. When the PCs’ pirate crew sailed inside, they found themselves in a Tunnel of Love. I believe that the major obstacle was clearing a path through a mound of erotically-flavored jelly beans. At the time, I thought my joyful antics and nonsense non sequiturs were comedy gold. Imagine my surprise when, after the session, my players made it plain that this wasn’t a love-to-hate character. This was just regular type hate.
“His constant pop culture references are a bit much. And that voice you do… It’s like Foamy the Squirrel scraping on a chalkboard. Plus that manic grin you get is slightly scary. Could Anomander maybe make a return appearance never?”
This was quite the blow to my ego. Naturally, I made Anomander the campaign’s BBEG on the spot.
What about the rest of you guys though? Have you ever encountered an “imp” in a game? Did you enjoy the silliness, or was it a case of “a little goes a long way?” Tell us all about your fae tricksters, obnoxious demigods, and persistent intelligent cursed items down in the comments!
CONVENTION TIME! We’re at the Atlanta Comic Convention this weekend! We’ve got some convention-only merch and special prizes for anyone who can roll at nat 20 in one go!For information about the con (and that oh-so-important parking question), you can go to atlcomicconvention.com.
GET YOUR SCHWAG ON! Want a piece of Handbook-World to hang on you wall? Then you’ll want to check out the “Hero” reward tier on the The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Each monthly treasure haul will bring you prints, decals, buttons, bookmarks and more! There’s even talk of a few Handbook-themed mini-dungeons on the horizon. So hit the link, open up that treasure chest, and see what loot awaits!
Just FYI, I can see this page, but the comic isn’t showing up.
gasp The imp is messing with the comic!
How meta is that…? 😉
We’ve all been bamboozled. BAMBOOZLED, I SAY!
But yeah, I don’t see any image. And plucking through the site data (with CTRL+U), I found this where I assume the comic should be:
[ No HTML, Gallery or Featured Image Found. ]
Likewise for me.
Clearly Colin/Laurel are merely pretending they uploaded a comic as an excuse for not having to do a comic today.
Yeah, I can’t see the comic either. Or are we actually just getting a peek into the Astral Plane? 😉
Nevermind, I stand corrected. I decided to refresh one more time and it appeared.
We managed to temporarily banish our local imp to Bizarro World. Everything should be back to normal.
You do ONE comic theater of the mind and everybody goes nuts /j
I’m not sure if he was entirely an “Imp” considering that: a) He was very much not invulnerable, and 2) the players actually half-liked him, but there was a fish called “Sir Finnegan” in one campaign I ran.
Sir Finnegan was an attempt by the villain to create an underwater minion/spy. However, because one of the villain’s greatest flaws was his inability to actually stick with a project, he abandoned the plan after imbuing Finnegan with intelligence, but before imbuing him with loyalty to his intended master. (He also probably should have imbued Sir Finnegan with a Wisdom modifier higher than negative three, but didn’t get around to that either).
Sir Finnegan believed himself to be akin to a knight. A just and honorable warrior who fights fearlessly in the face of evil! He sided with the PCs against his former master and gave them directions through his undersea lair, and then promptly died of an acute case of winning initiative and then charging out of the relative safety at the center of a fifteenth level party, and headfirst at a kraken.
Sir Finnegan died and was brought back to life seven times in that one dungeon. The PCs took him with them when they left and appointed him “Captain of the moat” of their stronghold, which was on an island in a lake in an extinct volcano’s caldera. I.e. they moved him somewhere with no enemies to recklessly charge at.
Cue a Roc or other avian trying to fish Sir Finnegan out of the lake as a quick snack.
The next time he dies, you ought to reincarnate him as a fox or some other more-mobile or more-capable creature. Or cast the ‘Antrophomorphic Animal’ spell on them, so they can be an actual fish-person!
That is an awesome story and a fine retirement plan! ^_^
Methinks Sir Finnegan is part of another proud tradition:
https://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-5/labyrinth-sir-didymus-brand-a-transparent.png
A PSA for all aspiring evil overlords: When designing minions from scratch, your priorities should be loyalty > wisdom > intelligence > charisma.
Our current 4e game seems to have a few characters with imp-like qualities. We had a self-named ‘King of bandits’ who’s clearly very capable at his job and a loner, and who sort of roped us into some adventures with them as a start of an overarching plot. We don’t like them much out of principle, but they haven’t screwed us over yet, so…
There’s also an odd, pink-haired necromancer who seems to live by her own rules. She’s not outright hostile but she does do things that pretty much nobody can actually stop her from doing them, like setting up zombie-generating towers to go march into a desert and then not giving any insight as to why they’re doing it besides ‘it’s important’. She even ‘killed’ my character by examining his soul (with my consent).
She’s clearly a very powerful ‘don’t-mess-with-this-person’ figure that we can’t really do much about, with dubious morals/ideology and an incomprehensible personality. Which I suppose does make her actions mysterious and intriguing to discover, but also makes confrontations with her a bit awkward.
Manic pixie dream necromancer is too many templates. 😛
We haven’t yet encountered a true imp in our campaign, but we DO have an obnoxious, indestructible companion in the form of a floating talking skull just following us around and never shutting up. Most of his color commentary has been about how cool the various chambers of the dungeon we’re in are (it’s 5e’s Tomb of Annihilation) and how he’s buddies with every monster we’ve encountered so far (none of these monsters have deigned to acknowledge him). Only the bard of the party really tolerates him, because he also loves to hear the sound of his own voice. Completely harmless, but also never helpful, which is JUST the kind of annoying the GM wanted.
On an unrelated note, you CAN have an imp-style character be just nice, like Genie from Disney’s Aladdin. Obviously the reason they can’t solve the plot for the PCs is because they’ve got some kind of rules holding them back from bringing their full power to bear, or they don’t really have a means of controlling that power so while they mean well they can’t stop potential wacky complications occuring!
I think the “indestructible” part more than qualifies. As fun as the “omnipotent” part of “omnipotent comic foil” can be, an imp is really nothing more than a chance for the GM to accompany the party and snark at them in-character. And in that sense, the 4th wall breaking Genie qualifies too.
The first “imp” that comes to mind was literally an imp, who occasionally gave us helpful advice, usually irritated us, and was explicitly there because he liked watching us struggle.
The only specific thing I remember it doing was waking up the party in the middle of the night. One player wanted his character to keep sleeping—partly because the rest of party was handling the threat well, partly because sleeping through a nighttime attack is kinda funny, partly because he needed to recover spell slots. So the imp kept at it for several rounds, until finally the sleepy wizard’s rest was officially disrupted enough that he didn’t get the benefits of a rest.
One of the more petty “F you” moments that DM pulled off. I rank that well below telling a veteran that foxholes wouldn’t work.
So my players actually just visited the fey wild in yesterdays session, where they had to deal with a bunch of pixies and sprites being inspired to play various games after robbing a cinema. The Fairy Princess (An archfae with the mindset of a paticuarly spoiled 6 year old) tasked them with gathering her people back to her, as none of them wanted to play Disney Princesses anymore. Instead they had split themselves up into different groups based on other films. So there were Mad Max Pixies calling themselves the Fast and the Fairyius who travelledb the Fairy Road. Wild West Pixies with a tough lone wanderer who need six more people to defend the town against the aforementioned Fast and Fairyius. Finally there were the Spy Thriller film noir Fairies that were in a high stakes game centered around a stolen government nuclear launch pack, that can launch a nuke at any location in the multiverse.
Another rule was that if you spoke someones name in the Fey Wild, and they were further then a 100 feet from you, you summoned them. Hence why everyone in the feywild either have a weird name or a title. Which was very unfortunate for an Eladrin the group named Carl and then accidentally kept summoning throughout the entire adventure.
One adventure I ran had Cleric (the only Lawful Good in the party) get contacted by his temple precisely because he hung out with so many Chaotic Neutral types. The priests and paladins had tried to destroy a “relic of unrelenting chaos,” only for it to detect their efforts and turn a bunch of them to stone (and worse). Perhaps the PCs could remove it from the temple?
The “artifact” in question was a sentient marotte (fool’s scepter) with an animate, talking head, possessing the powers of a rod of wonder and a few functions of other garden-variety rods and voiced with my best (or worst) Mark Hamill Joker impression. “Rod” (as he asked to be called, among other titles) agreed to parley with the party as long as they carried him to the nonexistent “Temple of Festivus” in [random location based entirely on character backstories and the players’ accidentally-in-game dialogue].
Bonus points went to the player who correctly guessed that Rod’s true end-game was to ruin a random PC’s home town by setting himself up as a god and wooing the populace with “endless fun!” After tormenting his baby-sitters/transportation across half a continent and an ocean voyage and fending off various forces that sought to harness his power, Rod revealed he was capable of his own locomotion, anchored himself in a space between two buildings, grew into a maypole, and created a massive luxury pavilion around himself (as per rod of splendor).
The resulting Cult of Festivus still persists as a nuisance to law enforcement, noise ordinances, and public decency laws.
Over the course of the evening, some beings were turned to stone and covered in ivy, leaves, and butterflies–one PC was reduced to 2″ high and made to glow bright pink. His teammates placed him in a lantern to use as a light source.–I altered the “30′ stream of 40 gems” to a blast of Mardi Gras throwables. Said one player after a troll was felled by such a fool’s fusillade “It’s all fun & games till somebody takes the King Cake Baby in the eye.”
My preferred tone is “Everything is puns, but everyone in-universe takes it completely seriously. I find it puts players in the right mindset since it prevents them from going too grimdark or jokey.
Just ask the Dwarven military branches of heavy metal (The heavy-armored troops) speed metal (The cavalry units) and black metal. (The spec-ops) Noted villains include the monks of the Wu Tang monastery, the silent but deadly Elven Assassin “The Green Wind”, and the awakened T-Rex druid named “King Theodore”.
not an Imp, but I try to put The Winslow in my sandbox adventure somewhere.
https://comicvine.gamespot.com/winslow/4005-31428/
The Winslow is love 🙂
I would never write such a thing on any campaign and for our DM it would be more simple to just ask nicely if he wants we set his house on fire >(
So no. We haven’t got one and i hope we never got 🙁
Enjoy the con and be safe 😀
“Naturally, I made Anomander the campaign’s BBEG on the spot.”
The most proper response.
Personally I tend to hew more serious, but Characters (PC and NPC) can crack jokes, puns, etc, but I never make a BBEG into a Q, the closest will be an Ally or Anti-Villain who refuses to take themselves or other things completely seriously, but I do not make jesters. That way leads to clowning and clowning tends to derail game.
And having been in a campaign that died in the first hour of session one because of puns, yeah, I just try to avoid campaign death by clownery.
What horrible punnery is capable of murdering a campaign? I must know!
I haven’t gotten a chance to use him since I haven’t played with actual people (as opposed to computer games like Kingmaker or ToEE) in years and that game was in a different campaign setting, but Zagyg Yragerne – the Greyhawk deity of humor and mad/eccentric geniuses – seems like he was made for this (and indeed he was made for the closely related purpose of providing an in-world explanation for why there were so many dungeons whose layout made no sense)