Tournament Arc, Part 8/8
Poor oblivious Elf Princess. She has no idea that she’s been herded into the tempestuous corral of an equine love triangle. Let this be a lesson to the rest of you about prioritizing your Perception scores! As important as proper monster identification can be, I think that there’s actually a more important lesson at play here. And to illustrate the point, I need to tell you about an NPC blacksmith.
Her name was Aesa. She was an immigrant to the campaign’s dungeon-adjacent town, having come from the land of the ice and snow. As a proper daughter of the Lands of the Linnorm Kings, she was more than a match for the local swordsmen. Tall and fierce, her strength had been built by years at the forge, and her flashing blue eyes held all the frost and cold beauty of her frozen homeland. Yet they melted when they fell upon the party’s paladin.
“I will sell you new steel,” she said. “And it will cost you dear. Or you might earn it.”
“A quest!” exclaimed the pretty man with the exceptional CHA score. “What do you ask of me?”
“Buy a girl a drink?”
“Yeah, no. Just sell me the sword.”
Aesa was not accustomed to being denied. She was a rare beauty, and her forward manner had served her well in the past. Yet this paladin refused! Was it some holy oath? A deliberate insult? She decided that she would pursue this would-be lover, and so spent the better part of three levels in a very one-sided love affair. She jacked up her prices; played an unsubtle hard-to-get; tried to sow the seeds of jealousy by dating the wimpy bard in the anti-party. None of it worked!
Finally, perplexed by my player’s rejection of the love interest, I asked him what the deal was.
“You said she’s some huge viking chick, right?”
“Yeah. She comes from warrior stock.”
“And you’ve been doing this goofy Swedish accent the whole time.”
“What’s wrong with Aesa’s accent?”
“Why do you think I’d be interested in her!?”
We went round and round like this for about fifteen minutes before we finally got to the root of the problem. I don’t recall my initial description, but somehow I’d failed to convey my vision of Aesa. My buddy the paladin thought that I was doing a joke character. As it turned out, he was under the impression that Aesa looked a little something like this. The whole time my poor player thought I was Pepé Le Pew-ing him with a bad opera stereotype.
We laughed long and loud when we both realized what had happened, and I quietly retired the Aesa/paladin ship. As it turns out, you need both parties to be on the same page when you want to add a romantic subplot. In retrospect, I suspect it doesn’t help that we’re both large bearded men IRL. I guess I’m not so great at portraying hot warrior chicks.
So how about it, gang? Have you ever encountered a failed romance in one of your games? What killed it? Sound off with your tales of good lovin’ gone bad in the comments!
ADD SOME NSFW TO YOUR FANTASY! If you’ve ever been curious about that Handbook of Erotic Fantasy banner down at the bottom of the page, then you should check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Twice a month you’ll get to see what the Handbook cast get up to when the lights go out. Adults only, 18+ years of age, etc. etc.
Rise of the Runelords spoilers incoming.
I’ve run RotRL more than a few times, and on one occasion, a young sorceress quite enjoyed the attentions of a certain nobleman named Foxglove.
She chatted and laughed with him, accompanied him on a boar hunt where her burning hands left the boar pre-cooked, and generally seemed quite eager to use him to join the nobility. Oh yes, she was quite the aspiring gold-digger.
Well, let’s just say that later… events, which involved Mr. Foxglove left her enthusiasm waning. Unfortunately, as her interest faded, his grew. Eventually, he killed her (in the name of love, of course), and was finally beheaded by the party’s fighter in the midst of biting lovingly into the sorceress’ throat.
That’s no way to get a ghoulfriend.
There’s a whole thread of romance-related stories involving a certain NPC in the Rise of the Runelords AP.
Spoilers below for book 1, you’ve been warned!
https://tinyurl.com/yam3drrq
Heh. My half-orc barbarian was sweet on Shalelu. It did not go well for him. Absolutely nothing in common for those two. Terribly awkward first date.
Anything from Jade Regent? Which is pretty much ‘romance/BFF/family your PCs with the RotR NPCs’.
Naw. We quit just outside the dungeon at the end of Book 1. Something about feeling like a supporting player in someone else’s story.
Between Necromancer and now Snowflake, the women around Paladin sure develop vendettas a lot.
And here I thought Wizard attracted drama.
Wizard generates drama
Heh. I wonder if there’s a comic in there somewhere. The “I hate drama” chick is usually the one causing it. Hmmm….
I have been a player at a couple of games where the GM tried to encourage romance between my character and an NPC. Generally, if I turn it down, it is because I either haven’t decided the orientation and/or motivation for the character, or because I had decided the character’s orientation/motivation beforehand, and it was not compatible.
Otherwise, such romances go off with a hitch. Ofcourse, at my tables, we generally don’t roleplay out the romance between player and gm. Instead, the GM leaves the scene open-ended and lets the player describe the sexual conquests or romantic escapades themselves; it is generally less awkward that way.
There orientation thing is always an interesting question. Laurel actually rolls for it after character creation is nearly done.
Rather bad lovin’ gone good (christ that sounded heinous).
The half-orc ranger in my Out of the Abyss game, who stuggled to meaningfully fill a role in the party, finally found his calling as Graz’zts boytoy and used his status to shield the party from the bellicose duergar (whose king was controlled by a succubus of Graz’zt).
The failed romance part is: I didn’t intend to have a romance at all. I wanted to depict Graz’zt (and whoever worships him) as a sexual deviant by presenting a Berserk-style pagan cult that is over the top for just about everyone, including the drow.
Halfway into a speech I stole from the Slithering Shadow (“They will put you through paces you never dreamed of!”) the ranger volunteered as tribute with a gleam in his eyes. Even with his abysmal constitution, he rolled extremely well and Graz’zt was pleased with both his technique and his eagerness to take this one for the team.
I swear that it wasn’t as weird as it seems when one reads about it.
The pairing didn’t last for long though. When Gracklstugh was partly burned to the ground by an obese red dragon and partly jellified by the Derro Revolution/Juiblex worshippers, the lovers were separated never to unite.
My group never got to the bottom of the succubus thing. In our Out of the Abyss game, fat dragon won the war and we GTFO’d.
Yeah, would’ve been a lot easier to manage I’d wager.
That Gracklstugh section is really confusing in its layout and plot structure.
Imprisoned red dragon, succubus-controlled king, jelly cult, derro rebels. There is way to much going on in a section that the group is encouraged to leave immediately.
So… in the arc that the princess gets turned into something, it’s going to be a horse of some breeding, isn’t it.
Calling pegasus to complete the set.
What a preposterous plot! Why would Elf Princess get turned into anything?
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/a/anthropomorphic-animal/
Besides, we all know pegasi are unfit for royalty. She’d be a breed of distinction and POWER.
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/magical-beasts/dragon-horse/
Because it’s a Princess trope turned about 30 degrees from played straight and there’s a crazy witch on the loose.
<_<
I kinda wanted to get a romance going in my game. I had an NPC who was a member of a necromantic shadow group who the party captured and another NPC successfully turned to our side. She was accompanying the party and it seemed one of the party members was a bit sweet on her. However, that party member had to drop out of the campaign, and I was having a hard time playing a party member and DMing at the same time, so I had her leave the party.
Isn’t that mess the worst? You put in all the time and effort to build up a cool NPC only to have the relevant player go MIA. Bleh.
I guess it’s the cost of doing business though. If a PC is interested in a plot hook, you work to make it interesting. When the interested disappears (along with the player) so does the plot hook.
To be fair I didn’t put that much effort into her, and that wasn’t my original goal. I more just wanted an NPC in the party so I could more easily guide my players to something I want them to encounter. It just so happened that one of the player characters seemed a little sweet on her and I was willing to run with it.
I see what you did there. I approve.
In the party I’m currently DMing one of the PCs seems to have a crush on their Paladin employer. I think it ties back to my initial description of her as “If a brick-wall had curves, wore an eye-patch, (She still has both her eyes, she just wears it cause it’s awesome. The party has seen her wearing it on different eyes on different days.) and had a butt-length braided pontyail.” Sadly for said PC, said Paladin is straight, and mostly has a preference for buff Dragonborn men. They’re still pals though. They share trashy novels, drink together, get into bar-brawls together, and lots of other traditional Dwarven activities.
When I was playing a Wizard there was an encounter with a Succubus/Incubus duo. Sadly for them, my Wizard saw sexuality as a distraction outside of that one time he hired someone to try it out. (Not for him, but now he’s safe from virgin sacrifices, and vampires. Not associating with unicorns is a small price to pay) They never managed to lure him into a vulnerable position away from the party.
This kind of thing makes me sympathize with the Dragon Age guys:
https://venturebeat.com/community/2011/05/18/bioware-and-the-bisexual-conundrum/
It doesn’t feel very true-to-life to make everyone in your setting bi, but it does lock romance-loving players out of certain relationships. That’s a tricky thing to navigate for a game designer.
Characters being “Player-sexual” always feels pandering to me. Some people aren’t going to swing your way, it’s a fact of life. Accept it, move on. Plus said Paladin wouldn’t put moves on her employees because of the power-dynamic in play.
That said it’s entirely possible the player sees said Paladin as just a role-model and I’m reading too much into her admiration.
Heh. “Player sexual.” I like the term.
I guess it depends on whether you see players as audience or author. Are they there to absorb the game world as it is presented, or to help create it? Different games have (very) different answers on the point in general. Kind of makes me wonder what the PBtA crowd would say on the questions of NPC pansexuality.
Man, looking at that article just reminded me how much I wanted Mass Effect to do that. I get that writers and publishers only have so much time but… I wanted to be a murdery renegade with Wrex and marry Samara and romance Tali as FemShep and… I would have played the game about twenty times through if everyone were romanceable.
Flashback to pointedly interrupting every Haer’Dalis/Aerie and Aerie/Minsc conversation in BGII when I was wee because if my only option was bloody Anomen, ain’t nobody in this party getting any.
You wanted Mass Effect to have overweight Norwegians? 😛
I honestly do think a lot of this issue has to do with player positioning in a formal sense. Are you the author of the story, or are you just participating in someone else’s? I think it’s much easier to deal with the issue at the tabletop since you have access to the GM, whereas you don’t have access to the game devs.
“…. said Paladin is straight, and mostly has a preference for buff Dragonborn men.”
This brings up an interesting facet of fantasy romance: this Paladin’s preference is interspecies, indeed not even mammalian, yet because she’s only into men regardless of species this is still described as “straight.” There’s an entire extra axis of attraction in D&D settings that seems to often be treated as a non-issue. What words would we even use for this? Anyone have ideas?
Oof. There’s gross stuff like “jungle fever” IRL, but I don’t think that’s right. There’s a difference between human ethnicity and D&D “species.” That makes terms like “interracial” pretty fraught as well.
In this particular case, dracophilia could work.
I once missed out on a romance with an elven princess because the DM had set up a chance for me to go meet her privately… while she was bathing. I was playing a good noble boy, not a peeping tom!
Opposite experience for me. My teenage wizard did a disguise self to sneak into the women’s side of the hot springs. Oddly enough, I don’t think he got any romance out of the deal either, lol.
Welp, called the horsey love triangle (it needs a more official name, I feel). Guess I’m a Oracle/Diviner in real life. That, or a really good Mesmerist/Enchanter.
Fun fact: All three of them still have one thing in common – long ears.
Hmmm… I can’t think of a way to work “elf” into “Snowsplosion.”
Lumbelf Snowsplosion.
Snelfsplosionflake.
Two equines, one elf.
Vigilmountcess.
Royal Cornflake
I’m calling it now: Jealous Pally Horse will become a new mysterious reoccurring villain ala a Black Knight who will kidnap Elf Princess, who will naturally be rescued by Horse Power with regular consistency. The Pally Horse will develop a rivalry against Horsepower aka Joker vs Batman involving schemes in which to endanger the Elf Princess so that the Pally Horse can finally be together with Lumberjack.
Or to sum up, Snowflake will grab some Slayer levels, try to assassinate Elf Princess and end up Horsepower’s arch-nemesis AND Lumberjack Explosion’s lover?
Takes notes.
I suspect it doesn’t help that we’re both large bearded men IRL. I guess I’m not so great at portraying hot warrior chicks.
So what about hot warrior guys IN THE NAVY? 😉
As for the failed romance, once one of my PC got not one but two failed romances. The first involved a borderline bishie prince who was hetero, and the other a hot bardess who was open to many things but not a threesome with her equally hot brother. Also there was an NPC with an unrequited love from other character of mine, unrequited in that my pc didn’t was into girls and more so into living ones 😛
Is there a musical RPG?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSMxnpecSZM
There should be one 🙂
Romance has rarely been a significant part of any game I’ve played in, much less between PCs and NPCs. There was an almost-triangle between three PCs in a Masks (supers) game, but that was more of a case of a real relationship between two of them, and a lot of regrets from the third over bridges burned in back-story. She was a repentant villain, so it was an awkward-but-fun, “sorry I broke your heart and tried to kill you” kind of relationship.
I always appreciate when parties come up with their dynamics ahead of the game. Makes for more varied experience than the straight-up “we’re allies.”
Yeah, it’s nice to have some starting basis for how the characters relate to each other… having them as strangers gathered in a tavern by some mysterious employer is classic D&D, but that does leave the party something of a blank slate to be worked on over time. I prefer it when characters have at least some prior acquaintance with each other.
In this case, Masks is one of those games that builds it into character creation — each playbook includes a few simple fill-in-the-blanks questions relating to the role that playbook is expected to fill… from memory, two about your relationship with other characters, and one about how the team came together. For the repentant villain, for example, one of her questions asks about how she hurt another character, and why she regrets it. Easy to turn that into a previous relationship gone supervillain levels of bad…
In the Pathfinder 1E home-brew game I am currently in, my DM and I have taken some inspiration from the tragically doomed romances of Korean Dramas. My character is a transgender half-elf wizard (Originally a human Prince) who was tricked (with the aid of Charm Person) into a Prince and the Pauper kind of situation by a body-stealing Necromancer.
That happened around 8 years before the campaign began, and her goal all that time had been to find her childhood bestie, the Crown Prince of the neighboring kingdom and prove her identity to him. Unbeknownst to her, her friend actually had a huge crush on her back when she was a Prince, which confused him greatly. When my character confessed her desire to be a woman to him as a teenager, he got even more confused and left to do some soul searching. It was during that absence that the necromancy shenanigans happened.
Fast forward to now, and my character finally found him. Or rather, his agents found her as he had long since realized that the Necromancer impersonating her was a fake, even if he didn’t know the full story and couldn’t prove it. Their reunion has ignited sparks neither one really knows what to do with. For my characters part, she is not interested in men but she does have complicated romantic feelings for her friend the Prince. For his part, he knows she isn’t interested in him that way, but he has still carried a torch for her all this time. Even if he has resolved himself to loving her from a distance.
It’s all terribly tragic and messy, and both I and my DM love the drama of it. I think Wizard would be proud! When I first read through this webcomic I had a good laugh when Wizard’s arc started playing out in ways surprisingly similar to my own character’s.
It pleases me no end that Wizard gets to be a trans character. It seems to have spoken to a lot of people. Not something we set out to do with this comic, but that’s the joy of emergent narrative.
I know there’s an NPC is Wrath of the Righteous that got a permanent sex change in order to make a relationship work. Is that a possible solution for Prince friend in your game?
Y’know, I am unsure. I think the Prince is pretty happy remaining a dude, but my GM loves to surprise us! Perhaps the failed romance will find it’s second wind at some point in the campaign. Either way, I think it’ll be fun navigating their relationship as the game progresses.
I’m happy to say that while I’ve had failed romantic arcs, they’ve always gone bad for in-character rather than out-of-character reasons. The most recent would be my rogue Skyspinner: She fell in love with an allied paladin and spent a while trying in vain to flirt with her, then found out that said paladin had a very strict vow of chastity (she considered herself in a committed relationship with her god). Thankfully, once that bit of awkwardness was cleared up, it worked out amicably.
Oof. I wouldn’t have thought that proficiency in Religion was most useful for avoiding awkward social situations, but there you go.
If we count Lumberjack Explosion and Horsepower as two separate entries, would this be the world’s weirdest love rectangle?
Wasn’t that an episode in Batman: The Animated Sereies? Batman and Bruce Wayne became separate entities somehow…?
Not sure if this counts, but we did have some shipping in our group a while back. Particularly between our fighter and a certain tiefling NPC…
Was there fan fic? It definitely counts if somebody wrote fan fic.
My Arcane Trickster/Knowledge Cleric was a withered 673 year old wood elf anthropologist. For a good visual just imagine a pointy eared version of Cologne from Ranma 1/2.
Her life literally spanned 3 separate eras (age of war, age of dying, age of rebirth) and her backstory was a long series of exploits built around justifying her extensive language selection via vast sexual exploits which her current stature made contextually uncomfortable for other players. She was just shy of a full out Golden Girls joke character made for that explicit purpose of making players squirm uncomfortably thinking about old people sex.