Thy Dungeoncrawl '08: THE PUNCHING OF THE GODS!

It can wait no longer! Insomnia conquers laziness! Verbosity conquers recalcitrance! The thesaurus conquers all! The greatest epic of our time (noon to 6pm Saturdays) must be told! Tonight on this giant-size edition of Dave's Euro-Blog!

To discover the small but dedicated group of heroes who dare to brave my cyclopean labyrinth of misery, hie thee hither!

Our three amigos begin their journey in the small, quiet frontier town of New Varela, an outpost of life in the bleak tundra of the Northlands. Cold winds are ever at one's back. Great snow-capped mountains loom in the north, and their shadows are long. It is a ramshackle town, and rough, but the three are cold and hungry.

Teresa recalls the words of the oracle of Pelor: "A great evil wells up in the north, time runs short..." She knows not what she faces, but she faces it with the courage her lord has granted her.

Dust, the wanderer, the tale-spinner---for her to be wandering into a strange town with naught but the clothes on her back and the stories in her mind is nothing new. But now her wanderings are tinged with sadness, for what she has left behind. She once wrote words that she had hoped would topple a government, but exile was her only reward.

Saif saunters into town knowing that he could own it, that he could destroy it with a few minutes work (or so he is confident). Monster-hunter, mercenary without peer, master of the blade---he goes where it is most difficult for him, so that he can prove that he can: where dangers are most dire, so that he can overcome them. To live fully for a time, to win death or glory.

The company meets by the hearth of the local inn, where the coins they had plundered from men and monsters bought bountiful ale and warm food.

In the corner, two halflings speak quietly to each other in their native tongue. They then depart, leaving behind a parchment nailed to the wall. Intrigued, the party investigates:

WARRIORS NEEDED Monstrous bear threatens hunters and travelers. Forming a band to slay it. Reward provided. Skip and Holly Daggerdare, Hunters.

This, then, would be their first trial. After all, as my man Chris Sims says, bearfightin' is pretty much the standard by which all acts of badassery are measured. Hence, this scores approximately 2.3 kilobearfights.

So they meet with the halfings at dawn and trek out into the frozen wastes in search of this mysterious killer bear. All that they've been able to determine is that the bear is enormous and territorial, and that it...

HOLY CRAP THERE IT IS!

Not just any bear, but the biggest friggin' bear known to man, the dire bear. "Dire," in this case, meaning "Ungodly Fecking Huge." And trust me, it came out of nowhere. Or rather, it came out of a suspiciously bear-shaped snowbank. In any case, it was on.

The party reacts swiftly: Teresa summons forth her celestial steed and runs the beast through with her lance. Alas, only a glancing blow was dealt, and the furry monstrosity howled its rage as the mounted warrior galloped past, out of its reach and beyond its range.

Closer at hand was Saif, who, with a superhuman flying leap, rushed in to smite the creature's shaggy head with his unfeasibly large greatsword. His hopes for decapitation were dashed, however, by the bear's judicious application of one of the best monster feats of all time: "Large and In Charge." From the dumbest of names grow the sweetest of fruits. Without going into nerdful detail, I can tell you that this ability allows a large monster to swat anything that gets within its reach...with such force as to send them sprawling backward, well away from the monster itself. Thus, it's highly difficult to charge such an adversary, as Saif learned the hard way as he was batted aside like a child's toy.

It was at this point that Teresa the paladin noticed, with her divine gift of Detect Evil, that Saif was beginning to radiate evil. His eyes glittered sinisterly and something inside him seemed to be struggling to get out.

And then it got awesome.

Large monsters such as the dire bear are generally very good at grappling. In the case of the dire bear, "grappling" is not quite as give-and-take as the word implies. For the dire bear, grappling means shredding you with foot-long claws and eating you. Which is precisely what it proceeded to do to Saif, pinning him to the frozen ground like a collector's butterfly as it strove to crack the hard shell this morsel seemed to be packed in.

Saif, unable to swing his greatsword, and highly distressed from being, you know, devoured, did what any sensible adventurer who was by that point possessed by unquenchable rage would do:

He started punching the bear in the face with his spiked gauntlets.

The damage he ended up inflicting with his bearpunchin' was minimal, but the image will live forever. But a giant bear was not the coolest thing that he punched that evening. Consider yourselves FORESHADOWED.

Meanwhile, Dust was doing what she does best: offering highly encouraging advice while staying comfortably far away from the monsters. A bard can be very effective against human foes, charming, dominating, or confusing them. A savage, primeval bear, however, proved a bit too difficult to charm or manipulate. Nonetheless, she helped out with her morale-boosting running commentary on the battle ("And then, the big stupid smelly bear, who TOTALLY had no idea who he was messing with, kept chewing on Saif's torso, like it matters or something..."), which inspired her allies to strike with deadlier precision.

The rest of the fight was a struggle to keep Saif from being eaten alive, as the bear was stubbornly refusing to discontinue his meal, even in the face of arrows, charging paladins, and the occasional lightning bolt from Holly the halfling. Eventually, the bear, who by now was wounded in a dozen places, decided that the crunchy morsel was more trouble than it was worth, and turned to easier prey. Holly was caught within range of the bear's deadly claws, and it almost casually slashed her belly open, leaving her to bleed out her life in the snow. Shocked, the party redoubled its efforts as her brother Skip came dashing to her side. Even a near-fatal blow from the paw of the great beast did not deter his desperate rush to save his sister.

The mounted paladin ran the monster through with her lance, and it roared in agony, its thick blood splashing across the snow. And then, Saif, chewed nearly to death, made a flying leap and landed atop the monster's back, and plunged his massive blade betwixt the beast's shoulder blades. With a shuddering cry, the great bear fell to the earth, to rise no more.

And that's how Saif acquired his giant bearskin cloak.

But while the local tannery was hard at work, the party had other business to attend to. Hearing rumors of an abandoned, supposedly haunted, tower in the evergreen forest to the south, the party decided to investigate once the scars of battle had healed. Dust, feeling inadequate because she could not safely wound the beast during the fight, decided to equip herself with a bow. Told to visit an eccentric old gnome shaman, she found the shaman's humble hut, as well as her pet sabertooth cat. The wizened old lady told Dust that she could carve her a fine bow if she were to retrieve some wood from a particular grove in the evergreen forest. She was told to look for a spot where no snow fell. And with that, the group trekked back to the forest and entered.

The trio wandered for a while, looking for the fabled grove, when suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, Saif noticed something odd. It looked like the outline of a white, antlered stag, moving across the snow like a shadow. The stag bolted at his glance, and he pursued, calling to the girls to come.

But strangely, it was then that a second white, ephemeral stag appeared, speaking to Dust in a language that was unknown to Teresa, but which brought tears to her eyes at its sheer beauty. Dust told her that the stag wanted the two to follow it, but warned not to follow their companion, who had taken off through the woods.

Meanwhile, Saif was running through the woods after the white snow-stag, which always seemed to be just beyond his reach. At that point, I rolled for him a Will save. For the non-DnD-savvy, Will saves are basically tests of how strong your mind is--whether or not you succumb to madness or mind control or the like. Hearing your DM say "Make a Will save" during a seemingly innocuous encounter is a sure sign that you're in for a bad day. And Samy's luck didn't turn any better as he rolled an abysmal result.

"So," I said, "you get this stifling tunnel vision. All you can see, all you care about, is that fricking white stag. So you run after it. You run and run and run. It occurs to you, in the back of your mind, that you seem to be running at about sixty miles per hour. But you don't even think twice. You just keep running. And when the white stag leaps into the air, it doesn't occur to you that you shouldn't be able to run after it. But you do. You just up and run into the sky, chasing that goddamn white stag as fast as you can. And then, later, you can't really tell how later, you come down from the clouds and suddenly...you make a Will save."

So he did, and he did much better than the first time. And he woke up from his delirium and found himself lying in the snow in an unfamiliar location.

He tries to stand, but he finds that his feet are covered in third degree burns, to the point where the bones are visible under the charred flesh, and the soles of his shoes are gone. He can't walk so good. Samy at this point gives a heartfelt and profane response, and I switch back to the ladies.

They are led by the spectral ice stag to the fabled snowless grove. There, the white hart leaps into the center of the grove, and instantly a multitude of similar apparitions leap from all sides of the clearing and merge into the center of the grove. The cloud of frosty dust coalesces into a giant winged stag, floating off the ground, whose feet dissolve into a cloud of ice. FREAKING OUT NOW.

The winged stag speaks to Dust for a while in the beautiful, lilting language, then gives her a log. Seriously. The winged stag disperses in a gust of icy wind, and snow begins to fall over the once-green glen.

Dust, holding a log, stumbles back towards civilization. She says little of what the creature told her, save that it says that she is a child of destiny, and great and terrible things were on the horizon. But then they realize Saif's gone.

Unfortunately, the two of them aren't exactly prepared to search for him, because they are cold and tired and have absolutely no survival skills between them. So they return to town, in search of anyone who could help them find their friend.

They find the old gnome, whose name is Tella Timbereye, and a strange, smiling elf male who has taken up residence in the inn. He says he serves the Laughing God, Olidammara, and generally creeps everyone out with his constant mirth. Nonetheless, he's actually a semi-competent cleric, so he's recruited to look for Saif.

Tella takes the group to the edge of town and, revealing exactly what kind of shaman she is, turns into a giant raven. Yep, she's a druid, who are renowned for controlling animals and plants and shapeshifting. So Dust and the laughing elf rode the giant raven off towards the woods to look for Saif, while Teresa and her full plate armor were too heavy and stayed behind.

Meanwhile, Saif, in typical Saif fashion, has been crawling along the ground for a while in the direction he thinks New Varela is. Pretty soon, his incinerated feet go completely numb from the snow, so, great! Now he can walk on them. Or, well, stagger. But hey. So he sets off on his unfeeling, mutilated stumps, and after about an hour is beginning to freeze to death. Well, a normal person would be freezing to death. As a PC, Saif is really only mildly inconvenienced by the sharp tendrils of icy death, in spite of him wearing a highly thermally-conductive suit of metal armor.

He lopes along, but as he goes he gets an increasingly unsettling sense that there's something lurking just at the edge of his vision, but every time he looks, there's nothing. Then it's gone for a minute, but comes back.

This goes on for about five more hours, and with each passing hour, he starts going progressively more insane. Really. He seems to be drawing near the edge of the forest, so New Varela is presumably somewhere nearby, but by that point he is convinced that there is a barely-visible creature lurking in his peripheral vision that's whispering things to him. As the hours drag by, the whispers get more and more clear, although they are very incoherent and rambling. But the gist of what the thing is trying to say is that Saif ought to let whatever it is rip his chest open, eat his heart, and replace it with a heart of ice, and then Saif can be its friend and eat human flesh with it. And Saif, whose Wisdom score has by now dropped from 12 (above-average) to 5 (psychotic), is beginning to think this sounds like a good idea.

So Saif finally collapses at the edge of the forest, and the thing that has been stalking and maddening him finally reveals itself:

Yes: a demonic floating yeti-creature with jagged fangs, glowing eyes, and charred stumps for feet with the tibia sticking out. In other words, a wendigo.

The wendigo (or windigo, or wiitigo) is one of the few (that I know of) monsters native to North America. And they are awesome. Read up on their mythology, and suddenly, Saif's predicament makes a lot more sense. They prey on men who have evil hearts (usually cannibals and murderers, but also, maybe, people who have demons living in their body), they lure them away into the wilderness, the victim runs after so fast their feet burn away, and then they become one. Saif, by making his Will save at the crucial time, escaped the wendigo madness just in time to keep his feet from completely disintegrating. But the wendigo wasn't done.

It appears, hovering in front of Saif, whispering insane promises to him. And Saif is about to listen to the wendigo, and let it infect him with its curse, because he's fairly crazy at that point. But then, Saif uses one of his secret techniques from his Warblade training.

It is a technique that allows him to use a skill called Concentration in place of the Will save he now has to make. Since he's mostly insane by now, his Will save is subsequently not so hot. But his Concentration skill is just as good as it always was. In essence, he overpowers the forces of madness by saying, "Hey, wait...I'm not supposed to listen to people, I'm supposed to be hitting them!" Yes: Even in the throes of insanity, his basic, involuntary reaction to the world around him is to murder monsters.

So the wendigo hovers up next to him and tries to bite him, to infect him with the wendigo curse. And Saif?

Saif punches the wendigo in the face.

And when this happened, all I could think of was another misunderstood anti-hero who went around punching supernatural horrors so hard they died:


The wendigo floated away, peeved that its face just got bashed in. Unfortunately, its unnatural metabolism allowed it to heal completely within moments. So now the wendigo is out of punching range, and Saif's legs don't quite work. So, what to do...I dunno...how about...

Throw your greatsword at it.

Unfortunately it doesn't go that well, and by that, I mean he tosses the sword an misses by a good twenty feet, and then the wendigo goes and steals his sword. It then turns back into a white stag and flies off, but this time Saif is in no mood to chase it.

So...you know, this post is long enough already, so I'll cut to the chase. Saif gets found by the rescue party, and proceeds to punch everyone who gets anywhere near him. So the sane members of the group have to figure out how to knock him unconscious, which, given that he was mauled by a bear and survived, would prove to be rather difficult. But in the end, he was subdued, hogtied, and brought to Tella Timbereye's hut for healing. He's out for a couple days, and he wakes up violent and crazy, but Tella and the laughing elf cast curing magic and restore his sanity, although even with their healing magic, his feet are badly mangled and he has difficulty walking.

The party is back, safe and more or less sound! But what could possibly top this tale of madness and punching? How about A CLASH OF FIENDISH TITANS ON THE BLOODY FIELDS OF SLAUGHTER? Be there!