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Jan 1st, 2011
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  1. So I go to my DM and tell him that I want to try a new character concept, a very shades-of-grey rogue going into assassin, who makes no bones about what he does. Someone who'll do horrible things and blacken their soul, all for a good cause, reasoning that he can save the world if he damns himself. He'd be Good if he wasn't torturing and whatnot.
  2.  
  3. The DM, mind you, is an old, hardline classic D&D type--good is Good, evil is Evil, staying hard and fast to the fairly arbitrary nature of D&D alignment. But he says he thinks he can work with it.
  4.  
  5. So, we're low-level, I'm one of the childhood friends of the party's cleric (of Wee Jas). Goblins quickly beset the small hamlet we all live in, and we arrive in time to see the cleric's uncle and guardian strung up on the town gate. The cleric swears revenge, and being his friend, my rogue decides to help.
  6.  
  7. We investigate his Uncle's house and find a journal that quickly makes it clear that he had found something valuable that the goblins had wanted, and they probably were looking for this journal when they got ahold of him. If I remember right, we figure out where they're going from the journal and set out after them. We find one of their old camps, including a crudely drawn map of the area with various local hamlets on it. Ours was X'd out, and another nearby was circled. They were gonna raid another town.
  8.  
  9. Not going to happen. Due to our remoteness from the capital, the royal guard were too far away to provide aid, and they certainly couldn't stay around to protect from a prolonged threat. It would be up to us.
  10.  
  11. Now the rogue has been thinking--there are a lot of them, and maybe five of us. Town militia were ruined by the warband. So he begins studying with the cleric (who has multiclassed wizard) and begins reading up on poisons, a plan formulating in his head.
  12.  
  13. As we pursue leads and try to build up resources, over time I continue studying magic (my lead in to the Assassin PrC, which uses some) and poisons (same deal), and spend a good thousand or so of my gold--at our level a lot--to buy as much poisonous material, pesticides and vermin killers, that sort of thing--as possible. He wheels, he deals, he asks favors, he performs them. He does odd jobs, he picks up herbalism to pick his own. And soon he has two big urns full of poison, and we have a lead to the goblin army's camp.
  14.  
  15. They've holed up in an abandoned keep, camped out on three of the four sides, with a hill overlooking the last.
  16.  
  17. The party makes its plans, and the rogue sneaks by their sentries unarmored--I was still so low-level that the ACP from my Chain Shirt would make or break a skill check. He reaches the base of the tower, and begins to scale the wall. He makes a climb check. Then, a turn later, another. And another.
  18.  
  19. > "Just keep making climb checks. I'll tell you when to stop."
  20.  
  21. Twenty-six. Twenty-six fucking climb checks.
  22.  
  23. Obviously, he's playing the odds, here--I'm bound to flub a roll eventually, and a couple times I come close.
  24.  
  25. Throughout, myself and the other players are objecting to this. How tall is this tower? 80 feet. I'm just trying to get up to a window.
  26.  
  27. Midway through this clusterfuck, incidentally, while the party runs interference on the ground to distract the pickets, one of the goblins sees me and perforates me with a crossbow bolt. Low-level rogue, middling Con, and no armor. I have to make yet more climb checks to avoid falling off, and I have like four hit points left.
  28.  
  29. But finally, I make it into the fucking tower.
  30.  
  31. I proceed to find myself staring down two goblins and a human wizard, alone, unarmored, and heavily wounded. They all see the rogue. So much for sneak attacks.
  32.  
  33. Long story short is I defenestrate one of the goblins, splatter the other, and just manage to make it to the wizard and perforate him in time to stop his spell. Stop and listen. No alarms raised. It's time.
  34.  
  35. Carefully, the rogue sneaks through the keep, climbs downstairs to the front doors, and slips into the larder near the guards. The food is mostly filthy, moldy grain, horrible fare. He empties those two big urns of toxin--all his work, his money, his efforts are coming to fruition as he checks and ensures--between the smell and the taste, the goblins will never notice the poison in their food. Confident he's saved towns from suffering the fate his did, he steals back out.
  36.  
  37. And that's when the goblin army picks up and leaves. Without eating first, without stocking up on rations, they break camp and go. Mind, they weren't mobilizing when we found them--this was their base of operations.
  38.  
  39. I almost died and our plan was for absolutely nothing. Wait, kids, it gets better.
  40.  
  41. We spend the night in the tower, reasoning that, since they all fucking left in such a hurry, maybe they left some documents or valuables we can take advantage of when we resume the hunt. We get some sleep, when midway through the night we're awoken by a crash and a thump.
  42.  
  43. We hurry down those stairs again, and there, breathing shallowly on the floor near the open larder door, is a unicorn.
  44.  
  45. My rogue had poisoned a fucking unicorn. Yes, it had somehow gotten through the barred keep door, opened the larder, and decided it really wanted some filthy fucking goblin rations.
  46.  
  47. Oh, and just to clarify--this was a TALKING unicorn. It wasn't "intelligent for a horse," it was fully sapient.
  48.  
  49. I realized about then that this was my DM's brilliant idea for how to justify my character's Evil alignment requirement for becoming an assassin. I think he expected me to finish it off.
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