At long last, our 2010 edition of Roleplaying Therapy for the Severely Disturbed (formerly Out of the Box Roleplaying) is available for your online viewing pleasure.

The premise is that the characters are all adventurers with various mental disorders or strange personality flaws and that they arrive at an institution for help from Dr. Dante (me).  The panel did not disappoint, they dutifully ignored my plot (so badly that I clumsily had to wrap things up at the end of the session) and hijinks ensued.  I enjoy getting the opportunity to bring this particular brand of crazy to GenCon each year.

Our intrepid panel this year consisted of: Dave The Game, Bartoneus, Chris Sims, and Phil The Chatty DM from Critical Hits, Graham from Critical Ankle Bites, Micah from Obsidian Portal, e from Geek’s Dream Girl, and everybody’s favorite switch-hitter Vanir from StupidRanger / Critical Hits.

Everyone was throwing the heat this year… there was an amnesiac that swore she was married to someone on the panel, severe multiple personality disorder, a minotaur supremacist, a patient dead set against authority, a shardmind that went to pieces collecting different phobias, a puppetmaster, and a maniac that needed to be in the spotlight and climb the walls.  Literally.  Vanir rounded out our motley crew by reprising his role as Black Rainbow, a dangerously insane overweight druid that hates plants.  He ended up anger-humping melons.  Yes, you read that correctly.  I think we’re going to go with less character sheets and less plot and more semi-structured craziness, that seems to be where it ends up anyway!

Thanks to the panel, and thanks to the great crowd for putting up with our filthy brand of insanity.  Also thanks to Carson from Role-Playing Discussions, who annually presents the Carson F. Ball Worst Pun of the Year award.  He’s a force of nature when it comes to terrible puns, so he knows his stuff.

Anyway, the event was great fun and we’re looking forward to it next year!!

It is my custom to leave an “Out of Office” note on my whiteboard before leaving on vacation.  This time, I left a message indicating my out of office dates and a drawing of a d20 (on crit, naturally).  I also implored my office to “feel free to write something nerdy up here in my absence” expecting to get a random Star Wars quote or something to chuckle about upon my return.  Instead, my initial request was erased and replaced by… well… THIS.

As you can see, I work with a bunch of hyper-nerds.  My favorite: “For Sale: Unicorn, 5000 GP or Trade for Pictures of J. Alba”.

How I love my coworkers!

The drama continued through the evening as Critical Hits’ advertising sponsors began to leave. Evony was first, their legal department sending a curt email that said simply “We cannot be associated with real women. Only ones from stock photographs. This news not make us feel like King.” This morning, Mr. Chalker made a public statement to the press:

Good morning, and thank you for joining me. Many of you in this room are my friends. Many of you in this room know me. Many of you have cheered for me, have worked with me, always supported me. Now, it is obvious that I have failed my INT check, and my only recourse at this point is to shoot for Diplomacy (and perhaps Bluff).

My behaviour has caused considerable worry to my business partners, to everyone involved with my blog, including my staff, board of directors, sponsors — and most importantly, the young nerds we’ve reached. Our work is more important than ever. I have long been a champion of Cooties Awareness, and despite this lapse of willpower I will continue to fight Cooties wherever it rears its vanilla-scented head.

I owe it to my readers to become a better nerd with fewer social skills. That’s where my focus will be. I have a lot of work to do, and I intend to dedicate myself to doing it. Part of following this path for me is worshipping Pelor, who is fictional. People probably don’t realize it, but I was raised to worship Pelor since high school and I actively practised my faith from adolescence until I drifted away from it in recent years. Nothing repels chicks like telling her you can’t visit her parents because it’s a fake deity’s holy day.

Today, I want to ask for your help. I ask you to find room in your heart to one day believe in me again. I want all you to look into this neuralizer for a moment, and forget all of this ever happened.
Thank you.

The latest rumors are that Mr. Chalker’s mystery woman may have stolen some of his powers somehow and may even be able to speak our language. More news as it happens.

Yes, I know, I was as shocked as you. Especially with the recent upswing in Bullywug Awareness throughout our culture, it is difficult to look on such ignorance. I don’t know whether to be sad or angry. Did this poor soul simply not have access to a proper education? Or is this simply a willful choice to disbelieve that anything so magnificent and deadly could exist?

Regardless, I feel that it is my duty to enlighten this poor soul, and to give the rest of us a refresher. Let us start with the basics.

Bullywugs were discovered in the year 1852 by a sociologist by the name of Eberhard Anheuser. While on a nature hike through the virgin woodlands of what would later be known as Belgium, he happened upon a tribe of what appeared to be frog-people sacrificing one of their own upon a large sacrificial altar. This was accomplished by rolling a large boulder over the sacrifice, which caused a veritable tidal wave of bullywug-humors to cascade all over everyone in a 10′ radius. (This, also, was the origin of the little known Abjuration classic, “Eberhard’s Protection From Humors, 10′ Radius”.) These humors, as it happened, turned out to be both incredibly delicious and addictive, a fact that Mr. Anheuser quickly capitalized on. In 1854, he mobilized a small army of men to build a factory and to hunt and breed bullywugs in captivity for the sole purpose of  the later harvesting and bottling of their tasty bodily fluids. This beverage was known to the locals as “Wugweiser”.

The bullywugs did not take this lying down, of course, and within the year had developed a strong (and amphibious) resistance. Under the leadership of one Frederick Wuglass, known both for his oratory skill and fantastic hairbeard, the bullwugs brought production of Wugweiser to a standstill. It was not long after that Mr. Anheuser began to act very strangely, retreating from friends and family, and spending most of his time sunning himself on a rock. When he eventually did return to the office, he ordered a complete shutdown and retooling of the plant to make a much more uninteresting beverage with a far more uninteresting brand name using fermented grain. The locals believe Mr. Anheuser was secretly kidnapped and replaced by one of the bullywugs, but that is complete nonsense. Everyone knows that bullwug magic is only for making rainbows and powering the Great Engine that fulfills dreams for the Make A Wish Foundation.

The bullywugs had hoped to recede back into obscurity after this incident, but unfortunately a man named Gary Gygax invented a game called Dungeons and Dragons and, using a book of forbidden knowledge he accidentally checked out from the Lake Geneva Public Library, included many of their secrets in the game. The last straw came when the D&D cartoon was released in the United States in 1983. Though largely unnoticed by the general public, it prominently featured brutal, racist caricatures of many key members of the Bullywug Parliament. Outraged and insulted for the last time, the bullywugs vowed blood-revenge on humanity. That is how hip-hop music came to be.

And that, Frank, is what the f*ck a bullywug is.

(Not that it usually stops me.)

Class Is Now In Session

In our group’s current campaign, we now possess, through a series of strange events, a magical item that allows us to control the legendary Tarrasque. We weren’t exactly sure what we were supposed to do with it, just that we needed it to combat the forces of a dark goddess who was angry at us. So we were riding it back home so it could eat a couple armies.

As it happened, I had been hitting the E.L. Fudge cookies pretty hard before we started playing Saturday night and I was very thoroughly sugared up. I had reached a state of being Dante refers to as “Professor Vanir”, in which insanity starts to pour out of my mouth but I speak with confidence about it as if I was a college professor teaching a class. (I am told he imagines a graham cracker mortarboard on my head when I am like this, but that sounds like the ravings of a madman to me.)

The Inevitable Conclusion of Rock

In the throes of my delicious chocolaty berserkergang on Saturday night, I was possessed by the urge to roleplay. And by “roleplay”, I mean “let Bat Loaf’s freak flag fly”. For those who don’t know, Bat Loaf is my rock-and-roll bard. He has settled down (after a fashion), and gotten himself married. He and his wife are both epic-level rock bards, totally metal and totally in love. We had a legendary monster at our disposal with only moderate risk of being torn apart and eaten. We had been afforded the opportunity to do things you never get to do in the span of a normal character’s lifetime.

Thusly, the only logical conclusion for me to arrive at was to do the single most metal thing that has ever been done: conceive their first child on top of the Tarrasque.

You Want To Do What?

When I announced my intentions to the group, Dante got that glassy-eyed stare that he gets when he simultaneously thinks something is intensely funny and still wants to kill me. Several players (and my wife) simply put their head in their hands and sighed. But we were escorting the Tarrasque for hundreds of miles at a movement rate of 30 and it was literally swallowing every random encounter we had whole, so it’s not like we had much better to do.

Initially, I did not know how I was going to get Bat’s wife to our location, and I suggested to Dante that he and his wife had a thing that’s called “radar love”. I also submitted to him the fact that they had both “a wave in the air” and “a line in the sky”, and thusly she would know he needed him and would travel to him as quickly as possible. Incredibly, these arguments fell on deaf ears, and I was forced to come up with a more realistic alternative. (Like magic!)

Eventually, I asked the wizard of the party to use Limited Wish to teleport Bat Loaf’s wife to our location, and so they took care of the very serious matter at hand for the next 48 hours as we moved. The rest of the party assumed positions and cast the appropriate spells such that they would not be exposed to any adverse sights, sounds, or fluids, and thusly attempted to pretend all of this never happened. Many steps were taken to assure that the union would bear metal fruit, not the least of which was the use of the spines on the tarrasque’s back as a Liberator sex wedge to elevate his wife’s pelvis. Our paladin also cast Divine Favor to increase our chances of success and realized he should devote part of his life’s work to encouraging people to have babies. At the time of this writing, we do not yet know if the Bardic Torpedoes successfully entered the appropriate exhaust port or whether they just impacted on the surface. However, the attempt was pretty goddamned metal, and thusly worth it regardless of the results.

Our paladin, however, was moved to perform rituals of atonement because of the “wicked thoughts” he was having about how one might mate a human and a Tarrasque — and consequently that got us all thinking about one might harvest a Tarrasque’s genetic material. That conversation will haunt all of our dreams forevermore.

Making The Most of a Unique Situation

Having a psychic link to the Tarrasque making him your ally (sort of) affords you some interesting opportunities you might not normally have. One is to cast Haste on the Tarrasque. I wanted to do this for two reasons. One was to make him eat our enemies faster. The other far more important reason was so that I could imagine the Benny Hill theme song playing as he did so. There was some debate as to whether the Tarrasque was intelligent enough to understand that we were allies and thusly could drop his spell resistance, but in the end I have to think that Dante let it happen because it was just too funny not to.

Somehow, the baddies managed to make the Tarrasque fall over and roll on its back. Which was good for us, since we weren’t underneath it like about 500 of the bad guys were. Seeing this inspired me to use the psychic link via Bat Loaf remembering the last time he had the bedspins from too much ale, causing our gigantic monstrous legendary indentured servant to lose his balance and do a barrel roll on command. Gotta be careful with that one.

Just Smile and Nod

You may be wondering if there is a point to all of this. Not really! I just wanted to share some of the delightful retardation we had last weekend. D&D is what you make it . Even if you never get anything done, as long as everybody has fun you did it right. I’m pretty sure everybody had fun (after the initial shock), and somehow we actually DID stay on track for what Dante had in mind to happen during the adventure despite the box lying broken and burned by the side of the road, never to be stepped inside ever again.

And if Bat’s wife is pregnant, they’re naming it “Tarrasque Loaf”. Here’s hoping!