The Asshole Elven Navy game
Sep. 6th, 2004 11:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zdashamberA couple weeks back, after having been a gamer for a decade, I finally got to play a session of DnD... 3.5, Spelljammer. It turned out to be one of the best and most tear-inducingly hilarious gaming sessions I've ever been in, thanks to the character interactions. There we were, stuck on a tiny Elven Imperial Navy dragonfly ship far from the reach of central command: four young guys who had to work together to survive, who we soon realized hated each other with a passion.
I thank the alignment system... And a certain amount of desire among us to run like hell with it. Mike, who played the captain, announced in the midst of character generation that he wasn't going to be playing Lawful Neutral, he was going to be playing Lawful Asshole. "Wait, Mike... Playing?" And we're off!
We were all, of course, taking the system with due solemnity. Our characters were "Fyrre", "Yyse", and "Greydanse" with an E and an S... And then there was the hadozee, who I'm afraid, as asshole racist imperialist superior elves, we only ever called "Hey! Monkey!" He cursed us all in muttered Sylvan, which none of the three elves spoke.
I really did love the way the alignment system set us up. Bernie's guy was Chaotic Good, which he immediately decided meant he would be constantly clashing with the Lawful captain. I was Neutral Good, which put me as dodging the captain's silly orders. The hadozee was True Neutral.
A bit of playing-to-alignment I really loved was when we captured a goblin to interrogate. Having learned that there were captured elves in the cavern (the "pantry" part) we had no further use for the snivelling little bastard. The captain was planning to just stomp on his neck (so he wouldn't have to dirty his sword), but my Good character protested kiling a bound captive, even when the captain purposefully misunderstood the root of the protest and suggested that he could instead just pick the critter up by his hair and sort of whip him around in a circle to break his neck...
So the two good characters carried the goblin back to the ship (and understand, they despised it all the while), where it looked with relish on the rotting remains of a couple of giant scorpions we'd left when we went out scouting. The captain nixed having dead scorpion in the ship's holding cell. But previous talk about how we were going to carry away an unknown number of captive Imperial Navy elves in our tiny dragonfly came back to my character... The captain's verdict had been, "If we don't have enough food, we'll just tie ropes to them and toss 'em out the back into the Flow, and drag them back to base in coldsleep like waterskiers." And it was clear to him that if the captain had other choices of navigators and able hands, when they ran out of food it wasn't wasn't going to be the rescued guys tossed into the Flow... So as soon as the captain wasn't looking, the goblin's rations were rotting scorpion.
It was a really fun dynamic. We'd all make snarky comments about every decision, but do it anyway. The ones not immediately in action would be making snarky comments to each other about the ones in action. In between times when we were separated by action, we'd all join in making snarky comments about the high command, each other, the other elves, the orcs, the trolls, the goblins, their ship, our ship, the world... It was very much like a session of physically whacking at each other with foam swords, except done with sarcastic wit. There were times when I was in the corner curled up to spare my sides, wheezing with laughter...
In the end, we went for the straight "Get 'em" plan, three elves and a hadozee versus a pitch-black cavern full of orcs and trolls. We didn't even know the location of the starved abused elves we were running in to rescue... We had a wand of Find Inanimate Object, but we hadn't had any luck getting useful information from it. Bernie hit a flash of true brilliance:
I thank the alignment system... And a certain amount of desire among us to run like hell with it. Mike, who played the captain, announced in the midst of character generation that he wasn't going to be playing Lawful Neutral, he was going to be playing Lawful Asshole. "Wait, Mike... Playing?" And we're off!
We were all, of course, taking the system with due solemnity. Our characters were "Fyrre", "Yyse", and "Greydanse" with an E and an S... And then there was the hadozee, who I'm afraid, as asshole racist imperialist superior elves, we only ever called "Hey! Monkey!" He cursed us all in muttered Sylvan, which none of the three elves spoke.
I really did love the way the alignment system set us up. Bernie's guy was Chaotic Good, which he immediately decided meant he would be constantly clashing with the Lawful captain. I was Neutral Good, which put me as dodging the captain's silly orders. The hadozee was True Neutral.
A bit of playing-to-alignment I really loved was when we captured a goblin to interrogate. Having learned that there were captured elves in the cavern (the "pantry" part) we had no further use for the snivelling little bastard. The captain was planning to just stomp on his neck (so he wouldn't have to dirty his sword), but my Good character protested kiling a bound captive, even when the captain purposefully misunderstood the root of the protest and suggested that he could instead just pick the critter up by his hair and sort of whip him around in a circle to break his neck...
So the two good characters carried the goblin back to the ship (and understand, they despised it all the while), where it looked with relish on the rotting remains of a couple of giant scorpions we'd left when we went out scouting. The captain nixed having dead scorpion in the ship's holding cell. But previous talk about how we were going to carry away an unknown number of captive Imperial Navy elves in our tiny dragonfly came back to my character... The captain's verdict had been, "If we don't have enough food, we'll just tie ropes to them and toss 'em out the back into the Flow, and drag them back to base in coldsleep like waterskiers." And it was clear to him that if the captain had other choices of navigators and able hands, when they ran out of food it wasn't wasn't going to be the rescued guys tossed into the Flow... So as soon as the captain wasn't looking, the goblin's rations were rotting scorpion.
It was a really fun dynamic. We'd all make snarky comments about every decision, but do it anyway. The ones not immediately in action would be making snarky comments to each other about the ones in action. In between times when we were separated by action, we'd all join in making snarky comments about the high command, each other, the other elves, the orcs, the trolls, the goblins, their ship, our ship, the world... It was very much like a session of physically whacking at each other with foam swords, except done with sarcastic wit. There were times when I was in the corner curled up to spare my sides, wheezing with laughter...
In the end, we went for the straight "Get 'em" plan, three elves and a hadozee versus a pitch-black cavern full of orcs and trolls. We didn't even know the location of the starved abused elves we were running in to rescue... We had a wand of Find Inanimate Object, but we hadn't had any luck getting useful information from it. Bernie hit a flash of true brilliance:
"Look for Elvish Imperial insignia; no..." - Mike
"They're probably naked." - Madeline
"We look for elvish shit." - Yyse