Set-up: Ran Elfs today. Bit of background first.

The players were: the wife, a guy, Brian, from the game I had just left. He the fellow who's recently moved back from California for those keeping score, and his wife Lisa. Here's what happened.

Brian came over about 2 weeks ago and we spent most of the time bitching about the current game. We jawed about this and that. I slowly began to realize that I used GNS as an excuse to leave the game and that the real problem was purely social. In either case, I asked Brian my usual question to get the ball rolling "what is the most fun you've had in a roleplaying game?" He thought about it for a second and answered something to the effect of "when plans go awry and it's funny" For whatever reason, this made me think of Elfs. I loaned him my printed copy and he became really jazzed about the idea. Which was nerve-racking for me because I figured I would wind-up GMing. I really didn't spend too much time preparing at all. I had a small memo pad with one line plot hook ideas like "evil twin" or "I am your father!", some rough ideas in my head and a vague idea of just taking what I'm given and running with it.

A few days prior, Brian said she would bring some alcohol "because it seemed appropriate." So we purchased about $40 is booze.

One other item: we have three cats and both Brian and Lisa are allergic. We cleaned fairly well ahead of time but every once in a while we had to yell at one for being friendly. Poor kitty.

So they arrive at 2. We blow the next 2 hours making up characters, Brian & the wife bitch about the other game which still has social problem while I try to explain this whole thing to Lisa. She had tried playing about 5-7 or more years ago with the other GM, played a few sessions and never played again. I was a little surprised that she wanted to play because of this and felt some weird kind of responsibility because of this.

After I tried getting some more info to work with, which was basically me stalling before we could start playing. I got them all to pick a desired magic item to give them some additional motivation.

The characters:

Brian : Nipple Twist
Spunk 3
Low Cunning 1
Dumb Luck 3
Genital stage
Magic-slinging
Item: Invisibility cloak

Lisa: Hungry Hungry Hippo
Spunk 4
Low Cunning 1
Dumb Luck 1
Oral stage
Magic-slinging
Item: Picnic basket

The wife: Cherry Tart
Spunk 3
Low Cunning 2
Dumb Luck 2
Genital Stage
Demeanor: Blonde/Big boobs, small brain.
Item: Talking sword

I finally kicked things off Nipple Twist sucking on the toes of a buxom blonde girl when suddenly the door burst open and a big burly guy shoots at him with a crossbow. The bolt thunks into the wood next to his head. “Daddy,” shouts the girl. “Shucks. Now hold still, son,” says the man while he reloads. Not willing to wait, Nipple attempts to cast Snorr to knock the man out while choosing Fizzle as his counter. The spell explodes and nipple jumps naked out the window. The porthole, I correct him and he’s now in the river.

I then turn to the wife and say, there’s an explosion down at the docks. What are you doing. Brian chimes in that your father busts in and shoots a crossbow at your lover. I look at her and say, it’s up to you. So that’s how it happened.

Hungry was eating at a restaurant and when she hears the explosion and sees the smoke, she figures there’s a barbecue and races over.

Nipple had purchase a big cartoony mallet and Cherry tosses it after him and it hits him in the head. After the smoke clears, Cherry’s father informs her that there’s someone with a job she may be able to do at the Snoogan’s Head Inn. Not dishes, she asks. No, I asked him that. It may be pots & pans, though.

Meanwhile, Nipple swims to shore and meets up with Hungry. He attempts to proposition her and she keeps trying to get him to buy her a hot dog at the nearby stand. Cocktail wiener jokes come into play because the water was pretty cold. Cherry later rejoins them and returns Nipples clothes and tells them about the potential job.

They go to the Snoogan’s Head Inn where the innkeeper, Mac, tells them to get out because he had just gotten the chandelier fixed. They ask him about the job, and after offering them jobs as dishwashers, he points them to a black-cloaked guy in the dark corner who’s been drinking water all day, the cheap bastard.

The approach Elmer who has a dark cloak, dark glasses, a white sheet tied around his head, pasty white skin, and an Elmer Fudd lisp. (“What’s the job?” “Oh yeah, what’s the job?”) He wants them to retrieve the Bass monkey, an artifact of great power that will look lovely on his mantle. They try to nail him down on a price, but he only says he will reward them handsomely. For whatever reason, they went anyway. (“So we’re expendable?” “Exactwy.”)

They traveled to the cave. Along the way, they find evidence of a camp. When they enter, they are assaulted by a god-awful stench. “It smells like my brother’s room.” Cherry shouts down the tunnel and listens to the echo. They walk down until the come to a fork in the tunnel. Cherry shouts down each and from one there’s a long, low, deep farting sound. “My brother’s down there.” Naturally, they go down that tunnel.

They are ambushed by an NPC party of a cleric, a paladin, and a cavalier. I really didn’t spend much time on this group and I certainly didn’t use the rules for humans. My plan was to have a rival group of NPC adventurers who would pop-up every once in a while and complicate things. This is not what happened.
Cherry did the old run at a wall and run up it and flip over your opponent and hit the cleric. Nipple fumbles another spell and accidentally heal him, which has an orgasmic side effect on the paladin. Hungry lunges at the cavalier, trips and bites through the man’s cod piece. Hungry later hits the man with her daggers and takes him down. The cleric calls time and the talk a bit. Yeah, talked. They found out these humans are big on god or something and are also after the brass monkey. The NPC try to tell the elfs to go back, but that doesn’t work. The elfs go on ahead while they heal the cavalier. They come upon a huge chamber about 300’ long filled with corpses piled waist-deep, armpit-deep for an elf. They can see the brass monkey at the far wall.

They decide to loot the bodies and two important thing happened because of this. First, they all found their desired magic items, non-hoser versions, and were ready to just leave. I mean, why when they didn’t have a good price nailed down. Besides, the cleric said that Elmer was evil (he also said their church wants the brass monkey for their mantle. This became a running joke) But when looting the bodies, they found that all the coins were now lead for some reason. They checked their own coins and found they were lead as well. Curious, they decided to get the monkey anyway. Another important item is that all of the heads were busted open and hollowed out.

They decide to tie the rope to the pedestal the monkey is on and drag it out the door because Cherry’s new talking sword, Bob, told them that something bad happens when you touch the monkey. Attempting to drag it, the pedestal wobbles and topples. Nipple & Cherry run out. Hungry throws a cloak over the monkey and ties a rope to it and attempts to drag it out that way. The corpses suddenly become animated and are focused on the monkey, although some are following the rope up to hungry. Hungry attempts to run out jumping from zombie head to zombie head. She does well but then one of the zombies was missing a head and she falls. Cherry Xena leaps, with the yell, into the air to catch Hungry. She then grabs the rope and attempts to bull-rush the zombies, complete with cheesy football music. Hungry takes tomatoes out of her basket and start chucking them at the zombies. Nipple fizzles another spell and blows several zombies to pieces. Cherry tries to pole-vault over the corpses but she’s still got a hold on the rope and is stopped short and falls straight down. Hungry pulls out some watermelon and shoots the seeds machine gun-style. Cherry tries crawling between the legs of the zombies. Hungry grabs her to her feet by the hair and they manage to race out with Nipple. Hungry tosses banana peels and they race past the NPC party dragging the monkey at the end of a long rope with zombies in hot pursuit.

On the way back, they meet a couple elf farmers, Jeb and Adiah. They decide to test if touching the monkey is safe by tossing it at Jeb. He is taken off his feet by the 90 lb statue. Much like throwing a medicine ball square in the chest of a six-year-old who isn’t ready for it. They convince Adiah to let them have their cart because Hungry with perform orally for him tomorrow. He’s simple country folk. He agrees. They head back to Cherry’s house boat and hide it under her bed. He bed is a cot about 6” off the floor, so it’s up on a crazy angle.

The decide to ask Elmer for a price. When they get back to Snoogans, Mac is sweeping up the remains of his chandelier. Elmer says he’ll give them 500 gold coins and a piece of coconut crème pie.

[the notes my wife was taking start to get sketchy thanks to the mudslides]

They decide to kill Elmer. To do this, Cherry messies herself up and says she the others are dead but has the Brass monkey in the woods outside of town. He reluctantly follows. Nipple ambushes him and knocks his head into the coconut crème pie. Nipple tries to strike again and he blocks the mallet with a single finger. Elmer wipes off his face with a polka-dotted hanky and the white make-up comes off as well, revealing he has dark purple skin. That’s right. Elmer is a Dwow. He was about to use nasty, nasty magic when Cherry whacked him in the balls and Nipple pounds his purple head into the ground.

The group then decides to go to Madam Cockrel’s Curio Shop where they learn that the Brass Monkey is anti-alchemy so it turns gold into lead.

They then head to the tower of the wizard Earl the insane in the east. They pole Cherry’s house boat across the river while her dad sleeps on the roof.A Chinese dragon answers the door. Nipple starts scratching it behind the ears and rubbing its belly. They speak with Earl a little bit but get nowhere.

I didn’t take the bait with Earl, so I paid for it with the next bit of insanity.

They decide to see if they could blackmail the king into paying them into not bring the brass monkey to his treasury. Because this would more likely get thrown in jail, they decide to offer to the king to take the monkey to a hostile neighbor’s kingdom. When they get back to their town, they find that most of the townspeople were harassed and beaten up by 3 humans who are looking for 3 elfs with a monkey on s string.

On the way to see the king, Nipple spots a beautiful young girl. He knocks on the door but an old crone answers who then comes onto him.

When they arrive at the palace, they are stonewalled by the guards. They find out here that the king is human and decide to fuck him over. Nipple sneaks in with his invisibility cloak. Cherry and Hungry, realizing they’re too short to pass as humans knock out and steal the clothes of a couple kids. They somehow manage to convince the nanny to take them to the treasury. The nanny has sex with the guard while they do the brass monkey thing on the treasury. The brass monkey’s area effect causes mass chaos as gold turns into lead in the surrounding town as they leave. A jeweler is upset as his shop goes up in flames. He tries to blame it on the elfs and Nipple shoves him into his burning shop. That makes two kills for Nipple. Elderly Jewelers are tough to kill.

They decide to go to the Man Village to the North, where the NPC party is from and do more-or-less the same thing to them, and rob the church.

Nipple Twist now has a purpose in life, to bring humans to their knees before elfkind. Either by making elfs great again or by dragging them down to elfs’ level.

The thing I liked about this is Brian noted that more stuff happened in those four hours then tends to happen in an entire campaign in the other group. At least they had fun :)

Hi Jack,

I'm sure I speak for many here when I ask:

Did you have a good time? And I'm talking socially, just the baseline situation of hanging out and doing a fun thing with these specific people. It sounds like "yes," but even if it's kinda, I personally would like to see you revel in it. Kind of a payback for sundry other threads in the past.

Less importantly, thanks for playing Elfs - it sounds to me like exactly the right game for your purposes.

You mean ... the corpses became animated and attacked them? Really?

Their employer turned out to be evil? No! ... and he's a Dwow? Eek!

If you keep playing, I'd suggest using the Chinese dragon as an interesting NPC. Seems like a fun loose end.

Best,
Ron

Did we have fun? Well, hell yeah. I even mirrored the munkin-type play Elfs satirizes better than expected. The anti-alchemy powers of the brass monkey was kind of an after-thought, really. It wasn't part of the plan went they arrived, but when they tried to loot the bodies, I just said all the coins were lead, and then all of their coins were lead. This led to two things I really didn't plan on.

1) I gave the player a magic item that was way too powerful for anybody and they frickin' used it.

2) I hosed the players big time because they need to find and spend treasure to have experience. Har Har. Brian had a cruel chuckle since he spent all of his starting cash on equipment.

I fear Lisa may decide to not play eventually, partially because the cats were making her eyes water, partially because she seemd to be thinking that she isn't quite creative enough to play. Bullocks, say I. True she ran with other peoples suggestions most of the time, but she did well by herself

One beat I missed with the dwow encounter:
Cherry hits him in the nads, Hungry noitices the coconut creme in his ear and jump on him and starts licking him. WHile she on top of him, Nipple put his foot on head head, pinning Elmer's head and whacked it like a croquet ball. She does fine. She just need to break out of her shell a little more.

Hell yeah, though. Comparasons to the other game were unavoidable. I am reveling big time.

Jack, that recounting is the funniest damn thing I've read all week! Thanks for sharing!

Way to go! Glad you finally got a fix of some satisfying play.

I am curious though, is it not an option to game some other place, w/o cats? I don't know your situation, but that sounds more palatable then losing your new players.

-Chris

C. Edwards wrote: I am curious though, is it not an option to game some other place, w/o cats? I don't know your situation, but that sounds more palatable then losing your new players.

This post is from one of the players in the game Brian AKA -Nipple Twist

First off, Everyone had a great time at the game, Jack is not going to lose his players we will figure something out.

Lets see what else to add:

To “greyorm” jack condensed to last two hours of chaos into the last 3 paragraphs there was much more comedic insanity that was left out of his telling of the tale, the posting could have been twice as long.

Jack definitely did a good job GM’ing. A single example of this was the way he handled The Chinese dragon answering the door. Yes it was a fire breathing dragon but jack did not decide ahead of time what the only thing we could do to get past it would be (a great move). I looked at it as a house pet answering the door so when I announced to Jack that was going to scratch it behind the ear he looked at me for a minute with a cocked head, then declared that the dragons rear paw was thumping like a dogs does. This was the general way he handled most of the encounters.

Jack had a good sense of what everyone found fun and didn’t try to beat us down. We actually tried to sell the Brass Monkey 3 times. I’m glad no one offered us a small fortune for it, it’s much more fun this way.

I’m not sure how much longer the campaign can go on this way though; I think we destroyed the economic system of an entire kingdom and I’m not done yet.

Jack Spencer Jr wrote: We need a place to play. The game store won't work because the other GM is a big regular and they have rules about how raunchy you can get, little kids & all. We need to think on this.