2002: Dark Hearted Heroes

Memory betrays me, and I'm not sure when and exactly how these new players were introduced to me. I know that I moved to a new school, and that I somehow made some very unexpected friends. I think me getting involved so much in church work helped turn them from acquaintances into friends, and it was through involvement with the church that I came to introduce them to Dungeons & Dragons. How I came to make acquaintances in the first place is a mystery to me, but I think it was mostly Andy's doing. Anyway, I quickly met a lot of people who were interested, and at one point I ran a game for – no lie – eight people: Linus, Bjarne, Andy, Charles, Eric, Lawrence, and two random girls whose names I honestly didn't catch. It says a lot about the crowd I was hanging with that I didn't catch their names because the rest of the group referred to them as “the bitches”. I know one of them was someones' sister, maybe Linus'. I'm not sure.

Anyway, out of the many new contacts I made, only the ones involved in church business became in any way close to me – Bjarne and Charles. These two players and Andy would form the core of my new group, but it took a while before we got to that point. We played a lot of one-shots, often involving contacts or weird friends of Bjarne, and in the early days it happened often that I unpacked my briefcase and declared “today's adventure is about a goblin-infested ruin” without having much clue about who the hell all of the players were.

Before I go on, I'm going to wax nostalgic about the locations of our games for a bit. We seldom played at my house in the early days, mostly since there were so many almost-strangers – instead, we ran games in the most bizarre locations. Usually, we hung out at the church-sponsored youth center, but we also ran games in Linus' garden shed, outdoors in the school yard or on picnic cloths, in Charles' garage, and even in Andy's kitchen (where a gruesome torture took place, and me and him alike were, I think, pretty scared his parents were going to hear us).

And on the subject of gruesome torture, I quite naturally arrive at the titular Dark Hearted Heroes. I don't know what made us stick to them. Perhaps they were mechanically well-designed, or perhaps it was the sheer glee of villainy that appealed to the players – I honestly don't know – but the main game of this year became the chronicles of Tjocka Bombadil Salabim Potter af väldigt mycket fetstryk, Lord över gläntorna i skogen, helgon av Furyondy och dotter till Tjock and Erok the dark elf. The former was a male halfling druid for the first five minutes of her existence, after which she promptly grew “Dolly Parton breasts” and became a female halfling druid. The latter was a dark elf assassin with some backstory – he was basically such a terrifyingly evil bastard that the other dark elves kicked him out.

The third character was the mild-mannered, kind-hearted half-elf ranger named Amsirac Parwyn. He was chaotic good, liked birds and music, and fit in with the other two about as well as Tinky-Winky would fit in the Inglorious Basterds. They would surely become the best of friends.

I should probably stress, at this point, that by no means was there a lack of roleplaying – at least not by the standards I had then. Sure, they made powerful and optimized characters, but they also did a lot to portray their characters. Charles spoke with a much darker voice than usual and often with in-character language, and although it was somewhat hilarious to see a 2-meter tall man trying to portray a woman less than half his size, the squeaky voice did give a lot of feeling. Furthermore, while two characters were evil, they were not just cardboard-cut-out villains – Erok wanted people to respect and fear him, whereas Tjocka was driven by a combination of greed and religious zealotry. Amsirac was also very well portrayed, almost a little overzealously sometimes, and also had a well-defined goal, namely to settle down and raise a family. On their own, each character was perfectly sensible. Together, only the law of We Are Player Characters kept them from killing each other, and even that eventually failed.

I don't remember how the game begun; I know that Bjarne, for about a session, played a half-orc but grew tired of that character almost immediately and retired him – said half-orc was probably his only character that didn't end up dying horribly. I know that Erok and Amsirac hated each other from the very start, but that they initially kept this hatred down to a tolerable, Gimli-and-Legolas level. The story was set in the Gnomeworld, in Glorywell initially, but of the early adventures I recall almost nothing except that a lot of them were bank heists and that the phrase “I look for the richest house in town” was used a lot.

The unique flavor of the game was of course readily apparent already then, but it didn't get truly crazy until Amsirac haphazardly became the mayor of a nearby city. The storyline centered around a lost ring that was the symbol of office for a city called Hyboria (I was terrible at coming up with names back in the day – Hyboria is from Conan the Barbarian), and whoever held the ring would become mayor of the city. The plot was for the players to be given copious sums of money for returning it to the rightful owner, and I thought money would interest the PCs more than power since money = magic items, and power just means having a lot of peasants.

Unfortunately, the players were smarter than that, and double-crossed me; only to be promptly double-crossed by Amsirac. Through a complicated series of diplomatic deals, both within the party and outside it, the ring wound up in the hands of the good player character, who took it to protect the city from the onslaughts of his two terrifying companions. Amsirac then decided to settle down there, took a wife, and had three daughters. His two companions were furious, and traveled back to the dark elven kingdom to kill Erok's elder brother (who had just killed their father) in order to have his estate fall into their hands. Finding the estate too small and too far north to be pleasing, they kidnapped all the homeless people from Hyboria (because no one else was stupid enough to waltz onto a ship to be sold into slavery, basically) and established their own kingdom, then immediately declaring war on Amsirac. Almost immediately thereafter, they decided that one kingdom was too small for the both of them, so Bjarne arranged to become the ruler of Gnomeworld's equivalent to the Shire, which he immediately turned into Soviet Mordor.

From here, the story really, really took a gleefully suicidal turn. Erok wrote a pact with the Demon Lord of Lust, Graz'zt, in exchange for great powers. Then he also made a pact with Nerull, the God of Death, in exchange for immortality. Then he also made a pact with Erythnul, the God of Slaughter, to become a terrible and dangerous fighter. So then, to one-up him, Tjocka willingly became a vampire, and also made a pact with Tharizdun, the Ultimate Evil God of Being Such A Massive Psycho Even The Other Evil Gods Are Afraid of Him, Also God of Madness. Then she turned into a pig.

For those who haven't heard this story already, the explanation is that druids in D&D can't cast resurrect, but they can cast a spell called Reincarnate, that allows the recipient to return in the form of an animal. Tjocka had died at one point, but through favors with an NPC druid had managed to reincarnate in the form of a piglet. Fortunately for her, druids can always shapeshift into their own true form (which is explicitly counted from before the reincarnation), so she could turn back into a halfling more-or-less indefinitely, needing to reflexively reactivate the power every 36 hours or so. However... druids whose alignment shifts so that it no longer has “neutral” in it (in her case, to Chaotic Evil from Neutral Evil) immediately lose their shapeshifting powers. Meaning that, when her 36 hours were up, she couldn't reactivate the power, and so reverted to a pig. A vampire pig.

At this point, the entire campaign world was basically going to hell. The three player characters were among the most powerful beings in the setting, and had sort of as a byproduct of trying to become rich defeated the most dangerous villains around (villains that my father introduced when he ran a brief game based on the Wheel of Time series with me and Alex). Now, Charles and Bjarne were raising the stakes.

Erok and Tjocka set out on a quest to find the legendary Sword of Kas, a blade used by a vampire to backstab the God of Lies. The ultimate in traitor accessory, the sword is an artifact and unrivaled in power, but getting to it required asking demons to find out where it is. So, naturally, they summoned a couple of demons and let them loose on the countryside, finding out that they would have to travel to one of the Nine Hells to ask more questions there. They used Tjocka's magical cloak to open a portal there... and sort of casually left it open.

Some explanation of my reasoning here is in order: I was, by now, pretty tired of the Gnomeworld. It had already been entirely bent out of shape by the mad antics of this group of three, and I'd also started playing in several internet games, taking place in the World of Greyhawk. To this end, I'd purchased the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer, and suddenly had 200+ pages of pre-written campaign world, plus 25 years of experience from my new online friends, since the setting is one of the oldest RPG campaign settings around. So I had decided to let the Gnomeworld go. The heroes had already travelled beyond the Impenetrable Mountains of the West, seen the King of Glorywell die, founded three separate kingdoms and generally turned the setting into something quite different from what it had initially been. So, when the two evil players gave me the opportunity, I ended the world.

Through the casually-left-open portal, the demonic forces of Hell poured out, spurred on by the evil gods who now reaped their end of the bargain with Erok and Tjocka, turning them into their helpless pawns. The forces of evil marched against Hyboria, where I allowed Amsirac one last hail-mary solo adventure to summon the forces of Good. The resulting cosmic cataclysm tore the Gnomeworld to pieces, and when the dust had settled, Tjocka the Vampire Pig was imprisoned in a magical coffin at the bottom of the deepest ocean, Erok the Assassin had become some kind of utterly insane demon, aimlessly wandering the ancient deserts of the South, and Amsirac had managed to save his family and a small fragment of his kingdom. With that, we took a final farewell to the Gnomeworld, leaving the world in ruins – except for Amsirac's beloved Hyboria, which stood as a last, flickering beacon of hope.

Notable Characters:
All three were of course notable, but Amsirac gets the special mention here. Playing the good guy when both of the other characters are explicitly evil is a dangerous move, and I wouldn't allow it in a chronicle run nowadays. However, Amsirac became an interesting character, acting as a damper on his villainous friends' behavior. Often ridiculed as wimpy and spineless, Amsirac was actually the direct opposite – and I let him survive the end of the world for a reason other than him being sympathetic. Amsirac was, actually, pretty damn smart, and had countless times managed to counter the onslaughts of his friends through careful applications of diplomacy, strategy, and the right choice of spells. His most clever move was probably getting a hold of a crystal ball – which his character couldn't use – and then doing small solo missions for a friendly wizard in exchange for the wizard spying on his enemies. Bjarne and Charles never figured it out, because they still thought inside the box of game rules – rangers can't use crystal balls, so how could Amsirac possibly be predicting their moves?

I should also mention three characters that were in a humorous side-game: Bjarne played a combat chef, Andy played a stoner wizard, and Charles played a monk who had seen the Matrix film in a vision, and sought to mimic it. Very badly. They made a great gang, who ran a delivery service together, and ferried absurd cargo to even absurder recipients. Although it was short, it was very, very fun.


Crowning Moments of Awesome:
Ending the world was a lot of fun.

There's also: Tjocka throwing herself off a tower to seal the pact with Tharizdun through her own death. Erok's return from the Abyss after his first demonic pact, now in the form of an ebon demon with blazing red eyes. Amsirac's ascension to the throne of Hyboria. My favorite, though: That one time when Tjocka and Erok blew up a bar for no goddamn reason at all, and then fled the explosion by turning into a rhinoceros with Erok riding on its back. Amsirac was right outside, trying to persuade some NPCs to help their cause when the rhino and its maniacally laughing dark elf rider burst out of the wall.

Next Up:
2003: The World of Greyhawk, a.k.a. Raiders of the Lost Knark, in which four villains and Todd set out to gain riches and respect, but come to discover the errors of their ways, and eventually gravitate to the forces of good – becoming champions of all that is right and just in the world – until they eventually meet their tragic demise. A full story, with beginning, middle and end, continuity, and an impressive main villain, this chronicle took the good pieces of the previous games and put them together into a beautiful whole. Also: People die. A lot.