Session Log

 So tonight my 5e D&D players get high on psychedelics in game, and head toward the river to find a crocodiamond (this is a diamond-scaled crocodile born when one of my players misheard me say “crocodile” and I said “No, crocodiamond is way cooler, let’s run with that”). Their NPC Dwarf fighter friend comes with them to babysit.

I decide that they meet machine elves. Machine elves, if you don’t know, are a name given to a kind of being some LSD users have reported experiencing during trips. In my game, Machine Elves are kind of like modrons who read too much Henry Ford and now seek to break into the material world and launch an industrial revolution of such scope and speed that it would give Queen Victoria whiplash. On the spot, I decided the plot my players foiled last session – a Druid sought to ferment dissent in the City of Blackwall so he could use the resulting chaos to replace the Vizier – was about preventing the Machine Elves from breaking through. When the players blabbed that they got rid of the druid, the Machine Elves realize that now’s their chance. 

 

One of my players, lets call her Amber, is a nature paladin. Amber realizes the danger that is at stake and quickly tells the Machine Elves she has taken up the mantle of the druid (who she defeated) and will protect the city from them. The machine elves then assemble into a Voltron mega-machine elf form with AC 20 and 100 HP. Now remember that they are on psychedelics and as far as their dwarf friend can see, they are talking nonsense at thin air. The behind-the-scenes plan was that no damage or spell loss would be permanent, but if the players lost the combat (not going to happen realistically – this is 5e after all) the Machine Elves would, in fact, be able to break through. 

 

Two rounds into combat a crocodiamond joins. The players are still on mushrooms so the crocodiamond looks like a thousand shimmering stars risen out of the dancing lightshow that is the river. The dwarf sees the crocodiamond and joins the fight, so the players figure out that the crocodiamond is real; they are uncertain about the Machine Elves. 

 

Now my other player, lets call her Betty, is a warlock with a great old one patron. She’s new to the campaign and I have wanted her to have a roleplay moment with her patron for a bit, so on round 5 of combat Tsathoggua, the hideous bat-like Old One from the Lovecraft-Howard-Smith shared universe of 1930s pulp fantasy, shows up to protect his warlock. The players still can’t tell what’s real and become even more unsure what’s going on when the Machine Elves announce that they will not let Tsathoggua defeat them again. There are now 6 combatants: 2 players, 1 NPC, a crocodiamond, a huge and nigh-invincible LSD entity made from several smaller LSD entities, and a Lovecraft deity. 

 

The session isn’t even half over when the Machine Elves are finally defeated and the slowly sobering up Amber chases the crocodiamond into the river and hauls its 1,000 GP carapace up to high land. 

 

Morning dawns, bright and sunny. The players go to the Vizier, who is the ‘power behind the throne’ in Blackwall. Lord Therin, the neutral-aligned lord of the city, is meek and unfit in every sense of the world, and more than happily delegates all decisions and responsibilities to his trusted Vizier, whom any court of law would agree is legally distinct from Game of Thrones’ Varys. The players want to sell the crocodiamond’s scales to him. Varys – sorry, the Vizier – instead asks them to bring a Dark Alliance merchant to the city and sell them to him. He will even pay a fee if they succeed. 

 

Now in the campaign intro document I outlined how the world works. The Dark Alliance is a free trade network of chaotic-aligned cities bound by a network of chaotic priests, merchant princes, and wizards. The merchants form the economic lifeblood of the post-apocolyptic world. When a city relies on them, they bring their priests, who either convert most of the population to their faith or else convert the city’s leadership. They then bring in a Chaotic wizard to either rule directly or rule as the advisor to the Lord, since econonomic power and religious influence have paved the way. None of this is coercive – this is just the hand of the fantasy market. My players in this session are Lawful-aligned. They support the militaristic dictatorship of the elven queen to the north. She may be harsh, but her people know peace instead of watching merchants and wizards trade cities like coins at a bank. Both are meant to have compelling reasons to support them. 

 

The problem is that my players didn’t read the setting document. They didn’t have to, there is nothing in there they couldn’t learn at the table. For example, you can take the Vizier’s quest, invite a Dark Alliance merchant prince you met a few weeks ago, and go the extra step of introducing the two for some extra coin. This is how you don’t read the setting document and learn the way cities become Chaotic. Did I mention the city lies on a major river trade route between the Lawful Elf Kingdom to the north and the neutral city states of the West? There is a lot of economic balance going on around this city that the players are messing with. Even the very trade route they met the merchant prince on all those weeks ago was part of the alignment balance of the region and they are about to change it all without even realizing.

 

Now on the inside, the chaotic priest travelling with the Dark Alliance merchant prince uses the whole “incident with the druid” to incite dissent among the palace guards. The merchant prince, meanwhile, has made fast friends with the Vizier. It doesn’t take much for the players to figure out what’s happening. The priest will convert the palace guards who have lost faith in Neutrality and they will overthrow Lord Therin, install the Vizier as Lord of the City, and appoint an Alliance Wizard to be the new vizier. The funny thing is, everyone involved in this thinks the PCs did it deliberately. They were, after all, the ones who came up with the idea of introducing the chaotic merchant prince and the chaotic priest to the vizier. 

 

So the players go to the Mercenary Guild to get a quest, since the coup probably won’t happen today. The Mercenary Guild has been hired to support the coup, and thinks the PCs are in on it, so they give a quest to find a secret entrance to the palace in the sewers. For this the players turn to another NPC they met – Scamen the Sewer Crawler (short for SCAvenger MAN). Scamen is a slightly insane narcotics addict who lives in the sewers and speaks with an unhinged prospector accent.

 

Scamen thinks some friendly people are just expressing interest in his home so he leads them around, shows them the sights, tells them about the monsters and where to go to avoid the traps. Eventually he mentions that he alone knows of the secret entrance into the palace’s kitchens, where he gets his food. Also that he can whisper to the water and it will attack people he doesn’t trust. This is true, there’s a water elemental there who has formed a bond with him, but the way Scamen describes it he just sounds crazy. 

 

The players declare that Scamen is the key to the coup and begin to discuss whether or not to kill him, deciding on not killing him and protecting him once he pleads for his life. They tell him that there is a coup being planned, he is the key (which is already a lot to tell the crazy drug addicted sewer dweller), and when he asks who is behind the coup they only say “nefarious forces from the dark alliance.” To which Scamen asks “Are you a little insane too? Because after I got lost down here, I also thought nefarious forces from the dark were out to get me.” 

 

The players decide they are going to trap the sewer's entrances to the palace and eventually blow up the secret entrance to the kitchens. They also name drop the head of the mercenary guild as a major player in all this, but believe Scamen when he says he’s “never heard of him.” Now let me remind you, the sewers are this man’s home and the secret entrance is where he gets food. The people who debated murdering him are now planning to trap his home and cut off his food supply for a coup they won’t explain. Scamen doesn’t trust any of these people as far as he can throw them, has sabotaged all their attempts to  trap the entrances without their knowing, and as soon as he can he’s going to run for Alfred the Red and sell them out. 

 

Scamen does actually know Alfred the Red, but doesn't know he is on the chaotic side. So the players, once again, totally because of their own ideas and their own actions, are delivering a victory to chaos they could not have gotten without them.

 

The session’s humor doesn’t come across in this summary, but I hope it’s bizarre gonzo nonsense does. It was the funniest session of D&D I've ever run and certainly one of the top 3 sessions I've ever run, period.