• fae/faer or they/them

fae otherkin in the streets, anthro red chocobo in the sheets


lemme tell our Warduke story

so Warduke appears in the Wild Beyond the Witchlight module, which is trying a few interesting ideas but also is prey to the nostalgia fuel that the current crew running the show at D&D are deep in on. I guess that's better then the people who were running things when 5E came out. Anyway. I really enjoyed it, but it was with a lot of customization and tweaking on the DM's part, and I suspect there are parties and runners I would not have enjoyed it half as much with.

we played this module within our usual campaign setting, running concurrent to our usual campaign (our characters were on a boat for a week, while this went down), with a regular player running and our regular DM in the party. the former plays a gunslinger normally; the latter played her younger sister, an existing NPC alchemist who was just arriving at a magic school. (my usual character is a student from there, the party having a family member attending is part of how I joined them.) this secondary party was entirely from this magic school, a collection of teenagers who got chucked through a mirror into a small pocket of the Feywild.

there's a lot that goes on in this module, but one of the hooks is the Lost Item hook, which is that when your character was a child you were pushed into a deal with one of the three hags in the campaign, who took something from you. this is kinda neat. my character lost her sense of creativity and I played her as a very by-the-books medical student until she got it back and immediately got onto some goth carny shit. the alchemist lost a stuffed animal. this is more mundane at first glance, but the DM decided this was part of the bond between sisters.

early in the campaign, we received word that the older sister, our normal party member for several years, active in the "A" party at the same time, was dead.

naturally this prompted some curiosity. was the DM killing her usual character? what happened? she was fine last we looked! but none of us had any IC context, this party didn't know this woman, so we treated it less as a mystery and more as a tragedy that'd befallen one of us, even if we had plenty of OOC questions.

eventually, we reach the hag who had stolen from our alchemist. The dice decide we need to get a particularly intense curbstomping in-I don't think any of us even took a hit, we just mobbed this creature-and the alchemist sprints away from the combat arena to reclaim her Lost Item and hopefully fix the timeline.

she doesn't. her sister stays dead. the two players involved go through this with all the weight it deserved, a session that was massively challenging for reasons that didn't involve fighting.

AND THEN HERE COMES THE FUCKING WARDUKE

like, very shortly after that, we get to the final leg of the campaign, the last palace, and there's this guy outside. take a moment to look up top, dear reader, look at my friend the Warduke. Look at his weird scale mail singular legging, his stupid fucking belt, his stupid fucking helmet, his stupid fucking name....and understand he rolled out to impede a party containing three teenage girls and one teenage boy who'd just been through some shit.

reader. we were unkind.

our poor suffering DM had this cool setpiece in mind wherein he'd summon a whole cadre of spectral soldiers and we would look surrounded, but we'd have this big moment where the allies we'd made (the entire rest of the module besides the hags themselves) would portal in and match them. she needed to wait for god damn near twenty minutes while we all got our frustrations out on roasting this stupid cartoon character. I've never seen a party who was more Not Having It then we were in that moment.

so after our allies portaled in he just said "god, fuck this" and left.

anyway that's why I love the Warduke.


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