After wrapping up our scorpion battle–including the by-now-familiar Paladin Vicious Mockery, which was somewhat limited this time by the fact that I was insulting scorpions and after "Your mother was a pillbug!" and "I’ve eaten scarier claws in a seafood restaurant!" I kinda ran out of steam*–and our primal druid turning into ANOTHER scorpion to fight them, for what was either Hot Scorpion-on-Scorpion Action or Really Bugger-All Confusing, depending on who you ask–Kevin and I were lounging around the bedroom watching Top Gear and discussing our upcoming dungeon crawl.
KEVIN: I gotta figure out how to do the maps. At this rate, I might have to go to the NetHack model…
URSULA: We’ll be fighting letters of the alphabet?
KEVIN: No, you’d be….hmm, y’know, actually that’d be kinda entertaining, we could do it alphabetically…pity, Beholders are like level 10…
URSULA: It could be a baby beholder! With its eyes still shut, like a pinky mouse!
KEVIN: …
URSULA: And little wiggly eyestalks!
KEVIN: NO. You would keep it as a pet.**
URSULA: I will name him Mister Squinty.
KEVIN: NO.
URSULA: But we’d have to keep him. We couldn’t live with ourselves if we killed a little baby beholder!
KEVIN: He’d get older. And more belligerent. They’re not good pets!
URSULA: We’d find him a nice dungeon to live in when he grew up.
KEVIN: You’d have to release him into the wild, in a touching scene…
URSULA: Go on, Mister Squinty! Run free! Insomuch as you have no legs!
KEVIN: And you couldn’t just release him into a dungeon, you know. He wouldn’t know how to survive in the wild. You’d need to go on a quest to find…monster rehabbers.
URSULA: Seriously, if that’s not already a campaign somewhere, it totally should be.
*Vicious Mockery is a bard power, which my paladin picked up by virtue of being a half-elf. It is his only reliable ranged attack and thus it gets used pretty much every battle, which involves me going off on a minute-long tirade over Ventrilo about the ancestry and sexual habits of the enemy. It’s gotten to the point where the GM has started rewarding or punishing my delivery of the mockery–I get extra damage for a really cutting tirade, but I am warned that if I fail to bring my A-game, I will only be doing half damage. No pressure or anything.
**The chief piece of advice my last GM gave Kevin was "Never let Ursula’s character have any pets."
