DMing with Charisma

Name: Nathaniel “Nate” Westerling
Campaign: The Eight Arms and the Conqueror Worm

For as proud as I am of the Eight Arms campaign setting, I haven’t leveraged the cross-campaign ramifications of it much. After seven campaigns there have only been six characters who appeared in more than one, and one of those was an NPC. Four of the others are part of the same party, and I couldn’t get away with not mentioning them.

Nate Westerling was a member of the Eight Arms Crafting Team, a group of adventurers ostensibly united by having some sort of item-making skill. Nate was the group’s bullet-maker and he also happened to be an expert rifleman, which was good considering how often “making bullets” segues into “fighting for your life” in my campaigns. He didn’t much trust fancy modern technology, which was an interesting trait for a person whose boss fought in a steam-powered flying suit. Most importantly he had a nice hat, which we think was the reason he was hired into the Eight Arms in the first place.

I like to think he was the result of a government experiment to pack as many Western tropes into one character as possible. Sometimes he was a young guy looking to make a name for himself with only the gun on his shoulder, sometimes he was a grizzled veteran of many a strange and unspeakable thing, and sometimes he was the loyal deputy willing to ride anywhere for the friend at his side or the woman he loves. But he always, always, pronounced the letter G as an apostrophe (fightin’, thinkin’, tryin’, etc.)

…Cripes, he had “west” in his name. How did I not see that before just now?

I should point out that Nate was a gunslinger that didn’t use guns. When the Eight Arms campaign setting started there were no gun rules, so I made some that largely treated guns as mechanically-viable crossbows. Paizo published gun rules between that first campaign and the second, but we generally don’t like them. The bits of guns that were good were balance-breaking good, and the bits that were bad were fun-destroying bad. Instead Nate used the gunslinger class and with one of our homebrew guns, so I got to see the gunslinger without the “does so much damage so safely, nobody else in the party matters” issues I hear about. That may be the most readily a player has ever adopted one of my custom rules.

Nate’s story isn’t over, though after he went on trial for the murder of a supervillain, got the Eight Arms banned from Scotland, accidentally helped the love of his life change sexes, and overthrew a country’s rightful ruler to put a demon in his place, he might want a break.

Name: Sammael
Campaign: The Eight Arms and the Shadow Invasion

I feel like every third PC can be described as “exceptionally handsome, but impulsive and foolhardy”. I might as well describe somebody who has that exact phrase on his wiki page.

Sammael was that celestial necromancer I reference now and again in my posts. He was an aasimar oracle of bones, so not only was he part-angel he was also the party’s healer. His philosophy on necromancy could be summarized as “What? It’s magic like any other magic. It’s not like anybody was using those corpses.” He dutifully failed to notice the judgmental stares of people around him, the souls of those he had wronged literally haunting him, and being constantly told he had the faint smell of death on him. It’s not that he disagreed with everybody’s assessment of him (though he did), it’s that his low Wisdom never let him associate “everybody dislikes me” with “I might have forcibly exhumed their parents”. That’s how stats inform fun characters.

Sammael had an menagerie, another one of those things about D&D everybody hates because they saw somebody do it once or heard about it from a friend of a friend. It included:

• FedEx, the zombie dragon who was too dumb for much besides ferrying packages from one end of the city to another. He never saw combat mostly because he could barely fit through the door of the room where he stayed.
• The Versatile Animated Skeletal Haulers, six orc barbarian skeletons. Sammael actually went out of his way to find, kill, and animate orc barbarians for their alarming Strength scores. They also never saw combat and were mostly used to carry gear, though they did wear red leather dusters and carry guns just in case.
• Boni Bologna the Skeletoni Oni, a skeleton with natural flight and fast healing who flew far above battle and harassed enemies with a longbow. He did participate in the campaign’s few outdoor battles on the Material Plane.
• A grey render zombie whose name is lost to time. Sammael could summon this one at will but rarely did after the conversation described here

The running theme here is “the menagerie didn’t participate in combat much”, and that’s what made them great. They were story tools to show how deep into necromancy Sammael was, but they didn’t detract from the rest of the party’s importance or screen time. This is how a good, workable menagerie is. Its members show up, perform some task, and leave. They don’t hang around and suck up table time or destroy the action economy, which are the reasons summoners get as much hate as they do. A summoner is an entirely valid concept (I’ve run for four, one of whom is later in the month, and played another) and none of them have monopolized our time. It’s like anything else: as long as you have a reasonable person with some grasp of the rules running them, they’re no problem.

When last we saw Sammael he was going on a solo adventure with two strange men he’d just met to find a magical artifact that may or may not have existed. He won’t be back for the next campaign with his fellow party members, but I’m sure he’s not dead. Pretty sure.

Name: Rikkek, Lurquol, Thrott, Skreech, Tretch, Skweel, Skrolk, Thanquol, Glitch, Snitch, and Sneek Queek, et al.
Campaign: The Eight Arms and the Memento Mori

I wasn’t actually the first choice as this character’s DM. Initially the player went to our local Pathfinder Society DM and asked to play a goblin who spent all their money on a cannon, which they would transport and load using minions from the Leadership feat. The DM’s response was something like “Not a single word of that is legal in Pathfinder Society.” And when something is ridiculous but not technically legal, obviously I am the next best choice. I think my only reservation was “alright, but in this setting goblins have German accents”, which was a more effective way of changing the character’s race than any banlist.

The Queeks were several ratfolk, all siblings and members of the Eight Arms Friend to All Creatures party. Among the siblings Rikkek was their leader and the one who fired the cannon, Lurkwall was the cohort and defender, and the others all lugged and loaded the cannon so Rikkek could focus on aiming and shooting. Each one had a distinct personality and set of skills so they each had a chance to be ineffective over the course of the campaign, but Rikkek was the PC proper.

By the numbers Rikkek was ridiculous. He was an 8th-level character who did 12d6 damage per attack, hit on a 2 against almost every creature (and giant creatures, the team’s bread-and-butter, traditionally had terrible touch ACs) from across a city block, and dealt 30d6 damage on a critical hit before he started getting fancy. He could only attack every other round, but when every hit was a kill that was usually enough. While he spent his rounds manning the cannon, his cohort managed the battlefield at the level of a competent, though not good, fighter. Essentially he was a slightly underpowered front-line defender who also had a nearly-unavoidable, long-range, free-action, instant-death spell that took a round to recharge.

What made the Queeks interesting was their drawbacks. A cannon, of course, is large and heavy, and that limited its ability to move across the battlefield, through the middle of town, anywhere with an unstable floor, and into any waterbound dungeon or encounter that required not being at the bottom of the ocean (please recall that this was a sailing campaign). It was also expensive, as was equipping eleven characters, two of whom needed to be near PC-level. All those characters required a lot of maintenance, and most of them were low-level NPCs; the player came into the campaign knowing full well a single fireball, or even a burning hands, would kill the entire character concept pretty much irrevocably. Rikkek was terrifyingly powerful, but he had so many intentional restrictions on what he could do I never felt like he was steamrolling the campaign.

I think the best part about him is that he felt like he should have been a reskin but wasn’t. He just took a few little-used sections of the rules and ran them as expected to get a fun result that didn’t derail the campaign. He pretty much reached my limit for character wackiness, a line my players seem dedicated to approaching asymptotically, but it worked out.

The Queeks ended the campaign where they began it: on dry land with everybody alive and little reputation, no wiser or richer but still ready for the next ridiculous adventure. I think their player wouldn’t have it any other way.

Name: Orabelle Peña
Campaign: The Eight Arms and the Memento Mori

There’s a joke among early 3E players about especially stupid paladins. Intelligence was a common paladin dump stat in a class that really wanted three good ability scores, and paladins also got an intelligent mount that began at Int 6. It wasn’t uncommon to have a mount smarter than its PC. But it is somewhat strange to have a mount more interesting than its PC.

Orabelle was a halfling sailor and sling expert who accompanied (but did not join) the Eight Arms monster-friending team, which started as the Eight Arms monster-hunting team until the campaign started and the party decided to hug everything they met. She was the only person in the party competent on the water, a somewhat meaningful trait in an ocean-based campaign, and the only person who could make a ranged attack without a bucket of gunpowder. She was, however, fairly weak physically, to the point where she couldn’t even carry her full compliment of sling bullets.

Enter Orson, Orabelle’s animal companion whose name also conveniently begins with O. Orson was, as far as the rules were concerned, a mundane turtle. His damage was terrible, his speed was terrible, his cognitive functions were terrible, and his primary uses were carrying gear and providing cover with his AC nineteen points higher than the party’s cleric’s. But Orson’s true worth was in assigning him a funny voice and saying whatever seemed most subversive at the time, which rapidly became making dark predictions whenever the party succeeded. In no time we determined he was either a creature from beyond the stars or merely their servant, a harbinger of the coming apocalypse.

Exactly what apocalypse that is, I don’t know. This isn’t an example of foreshadowing, this is an example of making jokes and pretending they were foreshadowing if I commit to them later. The point is that Orson was a hilarious way for me as the DM to insert comedy into the campaign, not that he was actually a setting villain (…take half a drink).

Orabelle as a whole ended up not doing much. I expected her to be a “real person” balance to the “monster hunters” in the rest of the party, but since the party ended up allying with almost everything they met that didn’t work. Orson is the part of the character we remember. I don’t want to say the lesson here is “be useless, nobody notices anyway”. It’s more like the lesson is “be fun”.

After the Eight Arms fought Mega Ultra Chicken, the campaign’s backup final boss, Orabelle left the group and returned to her normal life. This is the same character who played Felicia, and I’m not sure if “I’ll hang out with you, but not too long” is something I should take away from running for this player.

Name: Nicodemus Kriedy
Campaign: The Eight Arms and the Shadow Invasion

I spoke with several of my players as I wrote the articles for this month, mostly to warn them about which days they should skip if they didn’t want to see themselves get buried (the glee with which several of them anticipated their assumed roasting fills me with confusion and dread). When I brought up this character, his player recommended I describe him as “the best person that his particular life experiences could have produced”. Which, actually, is a pretty apt description of the Eight Arms setting.

Kriedy was a former soldier and thief with the soul of an egalitarian and the demeanor of a men’s right activist. He gave his allies and enemies exactly as much respect and deference as they deserved, no more, and he did what was right as long as he considered himself the best person to do it. He served as a middle ground between the wackier members of the party and the level-headed ones, maintaining a professional demeanor while doing unprofessional things for professional reasons. He even had his full plate glamered to look like a suit.

Most importantly, he was the head of the adventuring guild around which the campaign setting is based. One of the early bits of advice new DMs get is “don’t give members of the party power over other members of the party. If one PC can boss around other PCs, it will devolve into bickering and the campaign will fail.” Perhaps that’s good advice with certain kinds of players, the sorts who look for reasons to oppress each other. But having a PC be another PC’s boss isn’t in and of itself a bad thing. Nicodemus is the first in a series of characters in our campaigns who show that, with a mature table, it’s a character relationship like any other. He didn’t lord his power over the of the party, and in return the party deferred to him whenever it was time to make a decision. Everybody had a reason to stick together, there was no NPC pushing the party around, and we got exchanges like this:

Kriedy: Did your summoned zombie just kill one of the hostages we were supposed to save?
Necromancer: Yeah.
Kriedy: …
Necromancer: His Int score is a horizontal line! He doesn’t know better!
Kriedy: I’m docking you.

After Kriedy I’m not so gun-shy about letting one PC be the boss, manager, or patron of the rest of the party. He showed that, as with splitting the party, it’s not a matter of the action itself as how you handle it.

The Eight Arms succeeded in their first adventure, though Kriedy did die once along the way. He also played the damsel in distress for The Eight Arms and the Unforgiving Blade. After a second brush with the campaign setting’s hard limit on resurrection I think he’s wielding a chaingun in my next campaign, because that’s apparently the best way to use all those two-weapon fighting feats.