Gaming Group Lore

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 2, 2014

Over the years, our dice-and-paper gaming group (which hasn’t remained constant – we’ve had a few changes in membership over the years) has its own lore, and a short-hand vocabulary for referring to certain kinds of events. Some people in our current group weren’t even there when some of these events happened, but we refer to them enough that they know the stories (in general).  I guess in a way, we emulate the Tamarian language from Star Trek (“Darmok”) – referencing these events as a way to describe complex ideas. These little stories – and our references back to them – define our group in a lot of ways. It’s a shared history.

This is the kind of thing I was thinking about when writing the dialog in Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon. These kind of shared experiences, like “Sergeant ‘Back-of-Us'” in the discussion between Arianna and Shiela, or the ‘incident that was never to be spoken of’ involving a hemp golem and a badly-timed fireball, are the kinds of back-story elements that really help bring characters to life, make their relationships seem more ‘real,’ and gives the player a sense of a world that is already in motion before he or she arrives.  Plus it gives me a lot more to work from, as a writer, as these characters already have a wealth of stories (at least in outlined form) for me to draw from that has helped define them.

But much of that will be revealed in upcoming games. For now, I figured I’d just share some of these little misadventures from our gaming group, complete with reference and metaphorical meaning, for your (hopeful) amusement.

Phrase: To “Unicorn” something, or “To Kill the Unicorn.”
Meaning: To botch something up so horribly that it threatens to throw not only the adventure, but possibly the entire campaign, completely onto a new track.
Reference: In a first-edition game of Mage: The Ascension, the party found themselves in a pocket-dimension with a recurring time-loop that had wrapped itself around the death throes of an entity that was the source of the unicorn legends. The time loop protected the unicorn from dying, but it was reliving its final moments again and again. The party overcame all obstacles, all threats, and finally came to heal the entity. The player who specialized in such magic botched. Badly. And botched a possible recovery. And rolled really horribly to determine what happened with the load of paradox she was carrying around with her at the time went off in response to her critical failure. The result? The time-loop was resolved by her completely un-making the unicorn. Not only was it gone, but it had never existed. Thus all the stories about a very real creature in the past became nothing but mythology.

Phrase: Little Packets of Dye
Meaning: To make a bluff with incredibly poor support of your story.
Reference: A player (my wife, actually) tried to convince some guards that she was a professional dye merchant, selling dyes.  But rather than having a caravan or cargo of any size, she only had a couple of little packets of dye, which she held up as “proof” of her story. The guards did not buy either the story or the little packets.

Phrase: Hiding Under the Floorboards
Meaning: To make elaborate efforts to solve a problem that didn’t actually materialize.
Reference: This is one committed by yours truly, when I spent the latter half of the adventure armed and dangerous in a crawlspace under the floorboards in expectation of an encounter getting violent.  In the end – the traitor surrendered peacefully.

Phrase: Charging Through Both Doors at Once
Meaning: A plan backfires in a spectacular way.
Reference: Another mistake committed by yours truly when playing through a module-based adventure. By aggressive mapping, we’d found we’d come to the final room containing a powerful specter.  There were two entrances to the room, and so my plan was to charge through both doors at once, immediately surrounding the Big Bad, and taking advantage of flanking bonuses, rapidly get all of the party into attack range without invoking attacks of opportunity, etc.  But, to our surprise, the room only had one door. The other actually led to an antechamber that had been sealed off from main room, and it contained the insanity-causing undead wife of the Big Bad… the second most lethal danger in the adventure. So instead of seizing a tactical advantage against a difficult foe, the party found itself split, each facing a major threat with only half our numbers. Surprisingly, we all survived that one. Just barely.

Phrase: Pulling the shotgun
Meaning: Embarking in an aggressive action without a plan
Reference: In a D20 Modern game, one player (not me this time) seemed to know exactly what he was doing, escalating the situation by pulling out the shotgun and threatening violence. The thing was – it was a bluff, we knew it, the bad guy knew it, and the only thing that happened was that the situation got a whole lot more dangerous. The dialog went something like this: “When you pulled the shotgun, I thought you had a plan!” “The shotgun WAS the plan!”

Phrase: “Go ahead, I can take it!”
Meaning: Tempting fate
Reference: We were winning a battle with a monster, but it’s next attack was coming up, and the monk was in melee with it and was running a little low on hit points. It was questionable as to whether or not he’d survive another round. It was the pyromancer’s turn, but her biggest attack was an area-effect which would also hit the monk. She’d do, on the average, a lot less damage than the monster would, and the monk had evasion and had an 85% chance of completely dodging the attack. Even if he failed, he’d probably take less damage than another round of melee with the monster, which was clearly on the ropes. So the player told the pyromancer’s player, “Go ahead, I can take it!”  You can guess what happens. She rolled way above average on the damage, and the monk failed his save. Both monster and monk were incinerated.  To his credit, the monk’s player just laughed, and began rolling up a new character.

 

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