DM: Anyway, in the wake of Pipsqueak and the screaming foals, the townsfolk that had previously been warming up to the Princess become somewhat colder with doubt.
Applejack: Woohoo, wordplay.
Fluttershy: It’s… still about the kids, after all. The adults might be seeing reason, but if “the Princess is scaring the children”…
Princess Luna: <sigh> Precisely.
Rainbow Dash: Y’know, I’m just gonna throw this out there, see if it sticks… Maybe the kid’s in on it. No, really! We all assume he’s the harmless new kid with the accent, but then WHAM! He’s actually the bad guy the whole time. Think about it. Every time this has happened, who’s always been present? Littlepip.
DM: Pipsqueak.
Rainbow Dash: Whatever. Point is, I think we oughta really look into this guy.
Princess Luna: I… What?
Applejack: Dash. The townsfolk clearly heard a stallion’s voice. Not a colt’s. And no accent.
Rainbow Dash: What, there aren’t voice-throwing spells in this setting?
Twilight Sparkle: Pipsqueak is an earth pony.
Rainbow Dash: They still have some weird magic, right? I remember that from… somewhere.
Pinkie Pie: I’ve been watching Pip all night! And earlier, I saw a shadowy figure sneaking around!
Rainbow Dash: Maybe it was an illusion to throw us off the scent.
DM: For Pete’s sake! YOU! TOOK! A! BRIBE! From… NOT Pipsqueak!
Rainbow Dash: …Maybe the kid has a partner?
Twilight Sparkle: Sometimes a scared child is just a scared child.
Rainbow Dash: Pfft. An interesting theory, but a little too complex. I’m gonna go with Occam’s razor.
Twilight Sparkle: …Okay, NOW you’re doing this on purpose.
Rainbow Dash: Who, me? Never.
The Rule of Cool can also apply to player paranoia. "Oh man, I have no idea if that's actually the twist, but that'd be evil and/or awesome if it were true." About 50% of the time, this leads to the DM revealing that the players *cough* correctly *cough* guessed *cough* the answer.
My flu seemed to hit its nasty peak last night, so I think I'm on my way down - knocking on all kinds of wood here. I hope to be fully functional by the end of the week.
Notice: Guest comic submissions are open! Guidelines here. Deadline: February 20th.
In fanon, maybe. But that's usually him being aged up. For some reason Lil Pip gets all the mares in fanon. He's also a swarthy mofo who never seems to shower.
"Never trust a xeno."
Guardsman wisdom is wasted on a kid from the nastiest slums who never trusts anyone ever anyway under any circumstances. The spy was a fantastic fry cook though.
Anyone here seen the movie Zathura? I just finished an adventure with some online pals, running them through a pony adventure in that setting. One of the NPCs early on was an earth pony filly stowaway in the house. They thought her harmless, but as the adventure unfolded, the NPC was showing up less often around and no one paid her mind.
Wasn't until it was almost too late that they realized that filly was a changeling trying to make the players lose the Zathura game. Nearly succeeded!! :D
I hear you, Spud. Anything that goes for my lungs is an instant knock out. Let's hear stories about disease and how they affected your characters in game.
Diseases in game? Wow players really hate that one but alright.
The two I have ran into on separate games are Necroplauge and Madluotus. (can't remember the real names, but those were the player given names to the diseases which stuck.)
The necroplauge affected the party's fighter leaving him to take a more zombie like appearance. If he got KOed then he would have to roll a CON check otherwise he character kicks the bucket and rises back up as an undead. It also lowered his CON by a little and people would bare him from villages because it could spread.
Mostly we avoided it by staying away from him and telling him not to come near us even if we were about to get killed. Eventually we found a medic that fixed it with some magical herbs.
Madulotus was a much more chaotic and worse disease. We were playing some game that had a Call of Cuthulu vibe except the world was already a mess (after the end) and you characters could actually survive.
Our party was exploring this old lab in search of modern equipment like computers to break back to our town/base. Then we ran into one of the DM's "Mooks" (We called him main boss) which caused us to get affected by the Madulotus which was a plague like disease that turned you crazy.
After the battle as the Mook got away as we were all hearing voices. So we started searching the lab trying to find the cure because crazy madness disease in lab means the scientist were trying to cure it right?
Wrong... So we gathered the electronics and sealed them in a room for us to retrieve latter as we went down. a few battle latter with low sanity we ran into the boss. That was when we started losing our sanity roll which in this game was kind of funny and cruel.
Some of us got to hit stronger but not as accurate while others ranted about the voices growing louder making us unable to hear anything. Then with our tainted sword's (wo)man losing her sword she freaked out and rolled for her sanity since she had a Golum like attachment to it and slaughtered the boss with her bare hands.
Boss dead so we win right? Saddly that wasn't the case as our wither bunch of nut jobs went crazy attacking each other or running into the wilds no smarter than the beasts out there. The girl turned into an eldritch monster and slaughtered the rest of the team.
New characters rolled up as we check the lab wearing full hazmat suits despite the penalties and tried gunning down the Mook that killed our party last time and laughed as we set his body on fire as we claimed we finally killed the boss. DM kept insisting that he wasn't a boss and even showed us his low stats. We didn't care.
I know the last one sounds weird but for their zombies Tasers worked even better than bullets in killing them. So staying in cities and making electricity was a lot better than cabin in the woods in terms of survival.
This one is from that other campaign I mentioned about 10 or so pages back. The one where everyone was stuck on a strange island. See, the island was basically the domain of an ancient evil, with things having landed there and gone mad. We had washed up on the island and were trying to survive. In retrospect this would have gone a lot worse if it hadn't been for me.
See, I was playing a Cleric at the time. And the DM had completely forgotten that a Cleric spell available to me was "Create Food and Drink", so we didn't have to hunt as much. As a result of that and other factors though, I was stuck as a support. I... wasn't happy about this to say the least, and this accumulated to a particular breaking point.
See, we had just investigated a place, and were making our way back at night. Keep in mind we're about Level 5-6 at this point, possibly 7. I'm providing rearguard, hoping to actually get to be a Battle Cleric like planned for once, when a Night Hag pops out of nowhere. One frantic combat later, and we survive, but flee with me bitten and incapacitated by the magical disease/poison on the Night Hag. That could kill me off.
At this point we took a break because like I said, that was accumulation. Ended up venting frustrations of my character about to die because I happened to be the only character who had taken any skill ranks in heal, something not remedied to later down the line. Fortunately for me and the party my cleric survived and last almost all the campaign... before I managed to get within the final boss's spinning attack of death radius while healing the oft injured barbarian and ended up being one of the only two to die in the fight.
Running a level 20 campaign with an alchemist, we had some pretty epic enemies of various types. My alchemist had a fun little spell called blood transcription that if he consumed a pint of a fallen spellcaster's blood, he learned a spell from them.
Funny thing...there are consequence when you quaff about 4 pints in the space of fifteen minutes, and one is undead, one is angelic, one is demonic and one is mortal. I actually opened my mouth and asked if I should be taking some heavy penalties.
I can't remember what the ensuing sickness was, but it involved screams of agony first from the alchemist, then from whatever vessel his diarrhea was being ejected into. I had to make saves every 12 hours against violent bowel movements for eternity. DM said that nothing short of a god of healing fixing me was gonna get rid of it forever.
Never made a character that had it, but in the very terrible Marvel Universe RPG (the one with no dice based on the Hero system, not the current incarnation), you could take all kinds of crazy flaws for additional character build points. One of the more ridiculous ones was "has a techno-organic virus." That's, if memory serves correctly, a virus that is slowly turning you into a machine. It was one of very few flaws in that game that had actual mechanical implications besides how you would be expected to roleplay. You literally had to dedicate a portion of your energy every turn to stopping the disease from spreading. You could only do this if you had some kind of power that could conceivably be used for it, but the book encourages the GM to allow for slightly broader uses of a power than intended because otherwise that would include basically nothing. The example they use telekinesis to physically restrain the infected blood or something ridiculous like that.
Basically, it was an amount of points so high you would actually be tempted by it, but you functionally have a permanent reduction in maximum energy and the GM could impose very arbitrary punishments if you ever used your full energy on something because it meant that for a split second you weren't holding back the disease.
There were two times when disease nearly wiped out the city we were in... And It was totally our fault. First was when the necromancer was seeking undead to study/subvert to his will he came across a Mummy and became a carrier for mummy rot. so the first thought in his head was, lets touch a few people before I remove this disease. AND that is how he wiped out the slums in two days.
The second time was in a mad druids lair when we freed one of her prisoners, turns out he had a Chrisma damaging disease on him that took a while to go into effect. So as we all got the disease from the prisoner, we then went about hanging around the city for 2 weeks before it kicked in. But thankfully after the mummy rot epidemic, ALL the temples set up a plan to Cure the entire city in a matter of weeks.
And this is why All our characters now go in for scheduled checkups with the party Cleric.
A player in the Only War game I'm... trying to run hopes to fall to Nurgle eventually. In case he somehow manages to avoid falling to Slaanesh first (I made what I can only assume to be the rookie mistake of letting him trawl the camp for sex and drugs while the other characters did legitimate things, and he made spectacular use of a halfway decent Fellowship score) I'm working on inventing some nasty stuff; so far I'm just using 'common' names, but I'm rather proud of the 'Weeping Blue.' It's a fungal, or maybe bacterial, infection that starts by colonizing the gut. After incubating, it takes 3-15 days to spread through water from excrement, not unlike dysentery or giardia, before it starts getting lethal, moving into the subcutaneous tissues and turning fatty bits blue with oxygen deprivation before it kicks into high gear and starts eating through the skin, leaking out like congealed chicken broth.
Devastating in densely populated, temporary dwellings like Imperial Guard camps, and suitably disfiguring to make undying Nurglite carriers look horrific.
Same here. I've been crushed, mashed, dropped in acid, killed by money, dive bombed by a dragon, turned to stone then smashed while being used as a weapon to kill the medusa that turned me to stone, burned, exploded, etc. And yet, having spent two days looking back at all of my dnd experiences, I've never had to deal with a disease of any kind.
Don't forget Luna, Celestia, the rest of the party, the justice department, the weather factory staff, everyone who disliked that story, Newbiesupd, Pony Satan, and Sue, the receptionist.
I actually had the same line of thought as Rainbow Dash a few pages back, but I dismissed it as too obvious and went back to the chalkboard. Imagine the heart attack I got when I started reading this comic. I kept saying "No, no this is not happening! This really shouldn't be it!" while reading it all the way till Pinkie Pie brought up that she was watching Littlepip Pipsqueak and then I took a sigh of relief.
Good one Spud. Now if you will excuse me, I need to see if it's possible for the culprit to be Discord in an attempt to steal the Elements of Harmony and thus be able to take over all of Equestria without fear of being turned to stone while his nose itches.
I still say it's gonna be Pipsqueak. It's ALWAYS the one you least suspect.
Hell, once I surprised my GM by correctly guessing that the big, dumb animal we had a sudden and mysterious contract to transport was actually the one behind the contract. Surprised everyone else, too.
Remember, kids, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're NOT out to get you.
That's why paranoia is always the best response.
If they are out to get you, you're prepared.
If they aren't out to get you, they're lying and you're still prepared!
The one I least suspect is Luna herself... which actually kind of makes a twisted kind of sense. This could just be some elaborate gambit to garner sympathy for her through unjust accusation. Unlikely, but possible.
My flu seemed to hit its nasty peak last night, so I think I'm on my way down - knocking on all kinds of wood here. I hope to be fully functional by the end of the week.