Kobolds Ate My Will to GM!

Did I ever tell you about the Kobolds Ate My Baby adventure I was writing? It was actually based on The Colour Out of Space, except for all the eldritch stuff and spooky New England atmosphere, and it was specifically designed to kill all of the players' characters.

See, I started playing this cute little beer and pretzels game about kobolds with three guys down the hall, except instead of our characters dying frequently in humorous ways, two of the GMs went insane. (The game had a die mechanic for deciding who had to be the GM. It wasn't supposed to be an art form.) The guy running the game would fudge save rolls, give us magic items up the wazoo and let everyone buy their stats up higher than humans--higher than prominent, "unkillable" NPCs.

Once you get to playing characters like that, KAMB's "roll two dice if you feel like it" system kind of starts to lag. After a few reads, the same flavor text for the GM to read aloud begins to pall. Combat was basically just rolling dice, declaring "oh, okay, it's dead" and rolling on the random treasure table. So they wrote up pages and pages of optional rules and prestige classes (for kobolds, remember) and expanded random armor charts.

There was a pimp class. I'm not kidding. You could be a thief, warrior, magic user, cook or cleric in the original game--well, in optional rules from a supplement--but that wasn't enough, so they wrote up the pimp class. It had special abilities (I believe it got slapping bonuses) and its own overpowered magical items and everything.

Their home-brewed, pencil-in-spiral-notebook apocrypha for the KAMB system was in danger of giving us Skin Elasticity Factors (or demigod classes) when it came time for me to be the GM.

Cackling, I wandered back to my dorm room/hovel. The previous adventures had all been incredibly, mind-numbingly random--wander randomly generated dungeons, fight randomly generated monsters, get randomly generated treasure and randomly generated magical items. If you rolled Magic Item on the treasure charts, you had to randomly figure out what kind of magic item it was, and then what kind of enchantment it had. And then there were the homebrewed charts, as lengthy as they were illegible, adding a few more die throws to killing and acquiring.

The crazy kobold guys liked this because they didn't have to work on the adventures between games, but if saving effort were an issue, we could have just hooked up a random number generator to a simple program and had the computer tell us the end results of the game.

My adventure, the one designed to kill the super-characters and end our long national nightmare, took me an evening to write, in between occasional attacks of homework. I drew maps with keys and color and consistent scale (and remembered to put in outhouses), wrote descriptions of locales and psychological profiles of the NPCs. Everybody had a name, even if there wasn't any chance of the players ever learning them. I decided where and what all the treasure was--although, since this took place in a normal podunk village, there wasn't too much.

Hell, I had family trees for this pseudo-medieval village, adjusting everyone's ages and appearances so the relations would hang together right, even though I knew the player characters would attempt to kill everyone immediately on meeting them.

Of course, I boosted the NPCs' combat skills accordingly. And that wasn't counting the visiting cultists and the thing they were chanting to in the woods.

The cultists were, innovatively enough, the plot. There was a timeline of the plot, which would happen whether or not the PCs witnessed it or cared, and probably engulf them if they didn't look sharp. It involved two corrupt priests, a village madman and an enormous fungus zombie/golem composed of dead vestals. It was a plot that would have held together for an actual game, if I don't say so myself. I might pull my notes together and put it online somewhere as a KAMB module.

Anyway, I was all fired up about this game. I should have worked on schoolwork and packing and such, but instead I spent the evening writing stats and motivations and--wuh-oh! forgot to give everyone armor classes--and it got to be time for me to drag everything--the dice, the books, the notes, the maps (Did I mention I drew maps? With colored pencils and everything!), the pencils--over to the guys' wing.

And then I got there and one of 'em said, "Oh, we decided we aren't playing tonight."

...

DAMMIT.

You generally tell the GM little things like that.

So I watched Letterman and went to bed.

I did get to run that adventure later, but with fewer players and with much less enthusiasm. It still went well, if only for the moment when the Master Pimp PC--the guy who invented the pimp class and whose fault most of the baroque touches were--used his Mighty Slap on one of the minor hideous fungus zombies (of course there were zombies).

Crazy Player 1, World's First Kobold Pimp: I use my Pimp Slap!
GM: Okay, you hit him with your bare hand, right? (I am no good at subtlety when I am a GM.)
Crazy Player 1: Yeah, that's what it says in the rules.
Normal Player 2: (slightly more astute, knows me better and has read more Lovecraft than Player 1) Uh-oh!

So of course he had fungus growing his hand for a while. I was being too nice--my other fault as a GM, dammit--and didn't have it kill him. It turned out for the best. Before anyone could figure out that fire killed fungus, the player, despairing for his extremely powerful character--knowing that it would take him weeks to work another character up to that level, weeks in which our characters would kick his around like a fuzzy green football--had his character chop his own hand off.

And then he realized that KAMB has no system, magical or otherwise, for replacing limbs. He began erasing one hand from his character sketch, looking down at the sheet like Burgess Meredith looking at his broken glasses.

After the game, the insane ex-GM wandered away mournfully while the normal player told me he enjoyed it immensely. Together, we planned more blasphemies to perpetrate against the still-twitching corpse the other guys had left us. I think there was going to be Kobolds Drank My Vitae: the Masquerade, and then, because the kobolds would be immune to the effects of time, Kobold Commando, and then they'd be cloned without the vampirism and cyborg bits as Ko-B-OLDs in some twisted, horrible version of Paranoia.

But in practice, we just stopped playing Kobolds Ate My Baby.

Which was about as good, really. Trying to have an epic Kobolds Ate My Baby campaign is a lot like hitting yourself in the head with a paddleball while blindfolded; it's pretty difficult, surprisingly annoying, looks stupid, takes a lot of desperation to continue doing it and is an overall relief when you stop after all.

It also doesn't lend itself terribly well to analogies.