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Nowe Udie - The ASS-ASSin

A boring campaign demanded a little bit of excitement and creative problem solving.

My normal group of D&D players was small, comprising four to six playing one, maybe two characters. Games were fast and fun, and campaigns were less than a few weeks long at the most.

At my college, a continuous game of D&D took place in the back of the spacious cafeteria. It piqued my attention, and I sat in to watch.

These were massive campaigns, with twenty or more players running two or more characters and some had NPC (non-player characters) staff they controlled. The DM was extremely competent and handled the chaos, but it was slow where simple tasks took hours. To those who don’t play, imagine trying to get a small town to pack up for an impromptu road trip.

This was over forty years ago, so some of my memories of rules and what went on are hazy at best.

I watched for hours as this group was preparing for a long caravan trip led by an insufferable Paladin and his extensive player and NPC entourage. It was enormously painful as some of the lower-level players delighted in having their characters doing dumb attention-gathering things, like getting drunk, playing cards, and getting naked.

About to leave to start the adventure? Hey, let’s start a bar fight. Gleeful dice rolling as we sat waiting. Some players were complete jerks in and out of the game.

There was the cute, flirty girl who played beautiful, flirty characters. The guys were enraptured. This was pre-Cosplay models. Girls who played were rare and graded on a curve. Motion stopped when she talked about her beautiful pixie, how she was dressed, drank, flirted, and stabbed aggressive guys with her tiny dagger.

The caravan was still stuck in town as players wandered about looking for an adventure rather than going on an adventure.

I kept thinking, “This group needs an assassin to clear out some of the chaff.” I don’t normally roll evil characters. Chaotic Neutral was about it.

The DM is like a drug dealer, always looking to get someone hooked. He tells me I should roll up a new character. I pass a note to the DM if they had, allowed, or needed an assassin to get things “moving.” This idea seems to shock and delight him, and he agrees.

First level characters are newborn kittens. All hiss and no fight. Assassins are from the thief class, more about stealth and stealing than direct fighting.

I roll up Nowe Udie (sounds like Now You-Die). I got a note that the head merchant may need my services. In real life, the guy who is the player looks like a merchant, round and merry with a scruffy beard.

My first job is a troublesome player who is at least level five. To win, you must be smart, tricky, and lucky to take on a much higher-powered character. This guy is a fighter, so it is an even greater mismatch.

While he was out, I slipped into his caravan wagon and poisoned his beer. Dressed as a beer keg, I waited for his return. The target misses his saving throw, and I may have stabbed him to death to finish it. Nowe Udie strips him naked and poses him on the bed, embracing a dead sheep. I add a tender love note professing deep and abiding love to said sheep. My character slips out unnoticed with the player’s valuables in his bag of holding. The next day I return to the D&D game and the table is buzzing about the death of the character. The player does not know who killed his character. My note causes a stir. Both the merchant and DM think this is hilarious. When a DM likes it, you get to do more bizarre things without explaining how you disguised yourself to look like a beer keg.

The merchant buys all kinds of things from adventurers, like a small cask of rare and expensive purple worm poison. The cost is far beyond early-level characters to get, but the merchant had a problem and extra stock. This is fun stuff. If you get hit with it, missing your saving throw does huge damage (12d6?) and half damage even if you make the saving throw. Assassins get to throw three darts or shuriken per round. If you get hit with them, they do almost no damage (1-3 pts per dart) unless dipped in purple worm poison, then missing even one saving throw roll likely means death.

You are not fighting back if you are making savings rolls. You can see the pattern here, which brings more jobs and more levels.

I am told of a small team of adventurers comprising a low-level magic user, a cleric, and two fighters have become a problem. They are stealing from the merchant and others.

Nowe Udie watches as they go carousing after a big score. Later. they get handsy with the new cute barmaid. After eating, they all must make their saving throws. All but one dies, and no one notices “sleeping” drunk guests, because the barmaid announces a round of beer at the bar for everyone and hands a gold coin to the proprietor. The bar maiden helps the lead fighter out to be sick. She returns to clear the table plates.

Someone yells there is a dead soldier outside. (A friendly DM gift). Oddly, he has been stripped of his weapons and his valuables. Most of the crowd goes out to look and the nice barmaid strips the bodies of the dead, their valuables into a bag of holding and slips out the back door, gifting a second coin on the bar for another round of beer. A few moments later, out of a nearby room, steps a portly monk.

Why wasn’t Nowe Udie dressed like the cook? Because the barmaid was funnier to me. When he got his butt pinched, the DM rolled to see if they might find a weapon or find out that he was a guy. The absurdity of my behavior kept me getting so many breaks. The DM had allowed me to make up outrageous costumes and circumstances to set up kills. These twenty people are trying to figure out who is killing everyone. I don’t even remember if I gave them a fake name for my character at first. It wasn’t odd for characters to be named things like Finnegan the Deathbringer Fighter, so mine wasn’t weird.

Players fight with other characters and kill NPC. My character keeps going up levels and getting richer, which gives him access to purchasing weird poisons, potions, enchanted armor, weapons, and costumes.

The merchant and the DM are having fun, and that goes a long way to your character’s survival. I keep getting notes about jobs. Then a big one comes in for the pompous paladin (I think it was him, there were lots of haughty high-level warrior characters). This guy is leagues in levels above mine. A punch from him would kill me. No weapon I had would nick his magical armor. The guy running him is as irritating as the character, and not very bright. This guy had been a jerk to most of the others. I am more than a bit arrogant myself.

In costume, I get hired as a lowly page. My job is to clean his tent, polish his stuff, and get him ready for the campaign. This was some of the stuff they did for the sake of reality. I am more of a let’s get going, throw in a grenade to liven up the party kind of player.

I discreetly tell the DM what has happened, and he is trying not to laugh. The morning of the campaign arrives, and the DM beckons the great warrior and has a private conversation with him. The player is angry, scanning his player sheet, pointing out things, and frowning. He is pulling out dice and rolling. There are so many rolls, he borrows dice. The DM could have sped this up, but maybe the player wanted to play up his herculean battle. Maybe he didn’t understand percentages. As he rolls, and rolls and rolls, he cycles through cheers and far more groans.

When his team of retainers slip on his chainmail over his cloth hauberk, some ass has twisted in hundreds of sharp pokey wires into the rings of his chainmail. Each of these needle-sharp tips were covered in purple worm and other kinds of poison. When the character fell face down, the fall jabbed more wires into him. Another roll had it that when his retainers flipped him over to help him, he got more jabs in his back, requiring him to perform more saving throws. He had to do a saving throw for every wire. The DM had made up a percentage that would not have gone through his cloth hauberk; it was still an enormous number.

Realistically, it would have taken days to wire the chainmail, and coat the wires from the outside, and I would have had to use antidote and make savings rolls for my slipups. I never found out how much damage the targeted character took. It had to be thousands of points. When a DM gets frustrated with a player, it is amazing what can be done, or what sure-things fail.

His character dies and he calls to his god in a last-ditch effort to save him and it works because of being high up in the cult. Now, this guy isn’t particularly bright, so he asks to be saved from the purple worm poison as that has been the commonly used poison recently. Nowe Udie became an early influencer.

He is saved from the purple worm poison! Hooray!

The DM instructs him to roll again. The guy is mad. His god has saved him from purple worm poison, and he owed the god a quest or something! Weird, some of the spikes have other poisons on them as well, and that is what kills him. Again.

To top it off, some jerk (me) bought up the last of the purple worm antidote weeks earlier. Not a drop in the whole region. I am sure other players may have had it, but the player was abrasive.

Focusing on school, I was gone from playing for a few weeks. I came back and word got out that I was Nowe Udie. I expected some angry people. Many of us live vicariously through our characters. I grieved the loss of a few of mine. I was told that two other assassins had joined the campaign; “So Udie” and “And Udie”, who were my “brothers.” The players were not very imaginative. It was not flattering.

The character So Udie didn’t check his shoes and little poisoned spikes were nailed up through the souls of his shoes. I slipped a poisoned ring on his hand. The character And Udie finding the dead assassin stole the flashy ring and died moments later. They were low-level characters, so it wasn’t too difficult to finish them. More embarrassing notes expressing undying/dying love to sheep were found with them, but there were no sheep. I was maturing and began caring about fictitious NPC animals.

This group moved over to playing the more realistic RuneQuest. My character Nowe Udie and D&D just faded away. For a while, I put the ASS in assassin.

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Read excerpts from Trolls and other Trouble - Book One
Read excerpts from Prophecies and other Problems - Book Two