AN INITIATION IN HATRED
In Which the Gods Seek the Murderers Among Us
I
The Funnel seeks not the courageous nor the puissant-at-arms; it hungers for the lucky who glide down, down into the dark on greasy toboggans of lashed corpses...
So. Many. Corpses.
Back at it with six players and a mob of somewhere around 18 characters, off to riot in a dilapidated castle which is either haunted by an "ancient horror with a seed of taint" or an "ancient whore with a seedy taint"—there was so much shouting I couldn't hear the warning clearly. Either way, my squad of an effete elf falconer, a slightly-stupid dwarven rat-catcher and a human alchemist all double-buckled their pants in anticipation.
This being a game where you find out that things are dangerous by watching them do what they do to your comrades—kind of an ongoing, low-fantasy D-Day scene from Saving Private Ryan—there has been much talk of recruiting random other villagers to accompany the "adventurers" as a kind of ablative meat-shield. The idea is to shave the backs of their heads and brand numbers on them: "Awright, lissen up you lot! If I can't see yer number yer facin' the wrong way!" And if we see anyone we don't recognize we know we need to slap them to spin them back around. "Oh, it's you, Number Seven! Get in there!" (And shove.)
After a smattering of random, pointless deaths that did little more than illustrate novel concepts:
- "Wow, you can trap a door with fire?"
- "Who knew halflings could scream and scream and scream like that?"
- "I will never sleep again."
we began to behave cohesively and pull together like fingers into a fist.
Fig. 1 — Preach it, GC.
There was a particularly bad choke point with a rather harrowing dolly zoom when we disturbed something huge, snuffly and multi-limbed; it came at us, bellowing ribbons of angry snot, its one-two-three-four-more-than-four fists clutching a dervishy hash of nail-studded timbers. There was a brief math moment where even the dyscalculic knew it was a rolling TPK that could clear the room in something like 2.4 combat rounds.
Combat math is easy when you only have one hit point!
Without so much as a gasp the entire mob pivoted and crammed back out the door, deployed a chain low across the threshold, deadweighted both ends with peasants as Dave did his best "nanny-nanny-boo-boo-boo" dance in front of the open doorway. The thing charged, roaring, and hit the chain—we were yanked after it, giving me the briefest of nightmares of all of us chained to its thundering bulk in a fatally disarticulating rodeo—when it stumbled and fell flat on its "face".
There was a single communal heartbeat of disbelief—and then we all piled in and mobbed it with pitchforks and rolling pins and dented helmets swung by the straps, mouths wailing beneath tear-streaked faces. It was this or death and we fully expected to die, every last one of us.
The thing groaned with a wrath that loosened our bowels as it rose to its many knees and I knew this was it, an end that would warble past no bard's lips if he wished to eat; for the things that would happen next are not only hard on the psyche but difficult to rhyme...
And then one of us, some filthy beggar or outlaw or peripatetic scribe buried his pitchfork deep in the thing's neck, cracking vertebrae and unleashing a torrent of ichor.
We had done it. We were now officially the playthings of the Gods.
II
The mob huddles in the courtyard of the haunted castle as the Great Beast shivers in death-spasm. Some of us are hugging, others bawling openly, all pretense of manly stoicism shattered. More than one is fetal and hyperventilating.
There is the tower we just fled from, a briar patch, and a chapel that was barred from the outside and burned (not by us—honest—it was like that when we found it); it's still warm and smoky.
"Hey, where's Juli?" someone asks.
"He's on a date," replies Big D, "the kid was on a triple-digit dry spell. He needs it bad."
A murmur of disapproval rolls through the group. Bros before you-know-what, questions about his dedication to The Story, and other less-savory things. Juli might be getting lucky, but he's also about to learn a very valuable lesson about bravery.
"And where's Tod?" I ask.
George, the Judge, speaks up. "Some family thing. He may or may not make it."
"Okay," I say, "Tod and Juli's guys run over to the burned-out chapel and start trying to pry the door open. 'Wait! No! Stop!' I cry. But there's no stopping them! They're just too brave."
"What about the briar patch?" asks George.
We all chuckle.
"Look," I say, "player knowledge here: We all know the briar patch contains nothing more than a monster and death—no treasure."
George sighs. "A valuable lesson—wisdom—is its own kind of treasure."
I wave a character sheet at him. "I don't see a wisdom stat on this sheet—besides, my surviving guys have seen enough to start whole schools of philosophy on the subject. No sale."
Meanwhile, Tod & Juli's men hammer away at the burned-out chapel's doors despite our protests.
I text Tod to let him know what's up:
Chris text wrote:Your guys are going into the evil chapel—so brave!
"What's he say?" asks George.Tod text wrote:NOOO donor kill my gangplank
"He says he gets first dibs on treasure, the greedy bastard."
Tod shows up before too much death, but not before he gets the short end of the treasure stick.
Fast-forward through stuff happening, evil stuff, deadly stuff: brackish pools, robes and skulls, an underground sea with an eerie, pilotless dragon barge.
Then Dave finds a small chest.
"Open it!" we cry.
"Get your own!" he shouts, and runs off down the corridor with it. He pries it open and finds a hidden compartment. "Mine, mine, mine," he mutters as he digs into it—
"Something... happens," says George.
Dave stops. "Does it go chunk, whoosh or bang?"
"It goes snikt!" says George. "You lose—" he rolls a die "—three fingers."
"Do I take any damage?"
"Ha ha! Of course," says George. "One point."
Dave tears his sheet in half. "I'm dead."
Dave comes staggering back down the corridor, clutching at a jetting gang-sign, face corpse-white. He pitches forward and gags on a death rattle.
"Only three fingers?" I scoff. "Musta been a hemophiliac."
We fall to our knees around our downed comrade and loot the hell out of his corpse.
And so it goes...
III
The end of The Funnel is a hideous thing. It's only big enough for a single being to crawl through on hands and knees as if in supplication to the transcendent light beyond that strobes with either Just Reward or scything blades; you can't really tell until you commit your head to the hole. The process is not single-file, after-you-no-please-I-insist, but an accelerated hurtling, the whole lot of us bunched up, gaining speed, knowing full well that some will shoot right through while the rest paint the walls, perhaps spectacularly so. One can only hope.
We could feel the end as attrition had made us cautious, being "down to just one guy" the excuse for why you shouldn't be expected at the front... or the rear, for that matter. The friendless loitered in corners and behind pillars as the rest of us fought and died and discovered the awful truth about the world: pretty much everything hates you.
But what did you expect? Even your mother's womb spat you out.
There were tentacles, dread sacrifices, and a final, all-out assault on an otherworldly ritual, the sprialing ramp to the priests thick with misshapen horrors that once slumped as men. We bunched up out of deperation and, perhaps, a psychic reflex as the barely-sensed limits of Destiny—the walls of The Funnel itself—began to narrow.
We rushed the ramp with a phalanx of four driving a horizontal timber to catch the horrors and push them back even as three more of us filled the gaps with jabbing pitchforks and various sharpened sticks. The rest put their shoulders into the back of the formation and powered it ever upward and around, a mobile, gore-slick rugby scrum.
We pierced their eyes, necks and bellies; we plowed them off the railingless ramp; we trampled the dying beneath our panicked feet. All I had left were the misshapen dwarf and the snotty elf, both grist for the mill, lube for The Funnel, The Funnel take them! They were hateful and would make terrible characters to be stuck with. I threw them up front and with much abandon.
The dwarf, though... the dwarf began to rack up an astounding number of kills in spite of his birth defect—you see, Feebln was born under an unlucky star and so suffered a god-chuckling -3 to hit. But it mattered not. He was the Belly-Burster, the Spurt-Finder, and I found myself actually starting to like him—which is, of course, the exact instant in which he died.
Atop the ziggurat we did the usual things. Priests were stabbed and Spartan-kicked into lava, unholy relics were scattered and stomped, pants were enthusiastically crapped.
In the end we crawled from this place, the very nipple of The Funnel itself, wiser, meaner and far less likely to put up with guff. My elf had spells and at least three of us became clerics.
"Huh," someone coughed, "I guess we're a cult now."
Fig. 2 — A final vision after the iron
and blood? (Disclaimer: Afterlife may
not actually contain Coors.)
CODA
After surviving three sessions in The Funnel and witnessing 11 deaths firsthand, the remaining townsfolk converted their pathos and PTSD into 1st level. We spent the session poring over the books, horse-trading random gear, debating the merits of following Law vs. Chaos, and finding out that sh*t is so fucked up in this universe that Cthulhu is considered a neutral deity.
Newly minted clerics and wizards attempted their very first spell castings:
Cleric: I'm gonna detect magic on some of that dungeon swag! [rolls die] I got a one!
Judge: Oooh. [sucks teeth] Your god is displeased. Now you must roll on the Divine Displeasure Table...
and
Wizard: Awright! Time to summon my familiar! [rolls die] Uh-oh.
Judge: You pierce the Veil to open a conduit to otherworldly power—and poke a demon right in the "eye". His dread presence hovers just behind you at all times.
Wizard: [sigh] Wizard life, hard life.
And me? I realized that my elf is so dumb—how dumb is he?—my elf is so dumb he can only speak Elvish. And no other languages. This explains his detached, haughty demeanor and all the slappings. He could only stand so much of the barking-dog Common speech—at ever-increasing volume—before slapping the party member who was yelling at him.
The question, really, is why these guys?
"Well," says some random god, placing a new piece on the Eternal Chessboard, "I had already painted the mini."
Fig. 3 — Only the lucky get to live la vida van mural.