fem octavius who is a fucking boSS HELL YEAH who leads her troops to goddamn sweet victories and takes no prisoners and yells in that grandiose voice- who’s too busy to think about finding any of her soldiers attractive
fem jedediah whos respected by all of her cowboys who takes no shit who doesn’t pay a single thought to roping herself a fellow cowboy
fem jedtavius meeting one another and although they’re on opposite sides they still hold a grudging respect for one another as women
and wow doesn’t that octavius girl have anything better to do with her hair than just let it fall like that- and how the hell does it not tangle in fucking everything, it just sort of cascades down in waves over her shoulders right down to the edge of that roman skirt that just shows off her legs just right and ohhhh fuck
and wow why does that jedediah woman stuff her hair into that braid- moreover, how does she do that? and huh maybe it would look better if she put a couple things in it like maybe some flowers? hmm what would it look like if she let it down because as a braid it has that weird tendency to fall down on top of her breasts and oh no
Death offers a game for your life. You decide on D&D.
“I assume you’ve never played?” I asked.
The cloaked figure across from me shook their head slowly.
“Great,” I said. “I’ll be the DM. I’ll walk you through everything. First, character creation.”
Six hours later Death sat leaned over the table with a mountain dew in one hand and a D20 in the other. Their hood was thrown back to reveal a bleached grinning skull.
We were in the company of four infernals from the depths of the Abyss. I don’t remember which of us invited each of them. Turned out we had quite a few friends in common.
They rolled a one.
“Oohh, tough luck,” I said with a smile.
“Fuck. This is the best time I’ve had in centuries, but I really should get back to work,” they said reluctantly.
“Yeah…” One of the demons agreed. “I actually have a meeting with some senators in like an hour.”
“Same time next week?” Death asked.
“I’ll be here,” I agreed.
I suspected they knew before we started that this was a game that didn’t have to have an end and didn’t have a winner.
For those who don’t know, this xkcd strip was done as a memorial when Gary Gygax died.
They came back the next week, and the week after that. After a month of weekly sessions, Death pulled me aside.
“Hey,” he muttered, shuffling his skeletal feet a bit and rubbing his arm. “I don’t want to be That Guy, but this game does have an end, right? I’m having a blast, but this is still technically work for me, and I have to file reports, especially with all the loopholes I had to pull on to get a multi-session game approved in the first place.”
“Oh, yeah, for sure!” I told him. “There’s lots of ways for it to end. “Your characters could all die, we could finish the story we’re telling together, or our group could even just stop playing.”
Satisfied, he took his place at the table, but for months thereafter, he would cock his head at me every time I ended a session with excitement to play again. All I could do was shrug.
The weeks turned into months, turned into years, and Death stopped his reminders that our game, like everything else in the world, would eventually have to die. He told me, once, that he was determined to see this through to the end because my absurdly long game would make for a good story, but I think he had grown attached to his gnome cleric. Her magic was from the Life domain, and his grin always seemed just a touch wider every time he healed someone.
Half a decade after we began, my players were as seasoned as their level 20 characters, and I was running out of curveballs that would challenge them, so I wrote an end to the campaign. I spent months on it, carefully tying up every loose plot thread I could think of and giving all five members of the party the best resolution I could muster. Three of them got married to each other.
There were tears flowing from every eye that wasn’t an empty socket as I narrated their proverbial rides into the sunset, before finally I folded my screen, looked at each of them in turn, and said “The end. Death, you can take my soul now.”
He froze, and the demons around the table turned as one to stare at him.
Then, slowly, he cocked his head the same way he used to. “But you won,” he said. “The object of the game is to tell a story with your friends, and you did.”
“But so did you!” I cried. “And everyone knows that when Death wins a game, he gets your soul.”
Death’s grin spread wider than it ever had when he saved someone’s life in-game. “Didn’t you just finish pouring it into a game that you shared with me?”
everyone in fantasy novels is horny on main for elves and it’s honestly a travesty like why the hell would you want to marry an elf you’ll just spend the rest of your days growing old in the woods with a bunch of immortal bastards whose heads are so far up their asses they think singing week-long ballads is prime entertainment and say shit like “thou” and “beseech” unironically y’all should be hooking up with dwarves who 1. actually know how to throw the fuck down and let loose at a party 2. will literally shower you in diamond dust and gold they mined and crafted with their bare hands and 3. can sling you over their shoulder like a sack of potatoes with their huge muscular arms developed from hours of said mining and crafting. there’s literally no contest.
“if it’s not plot relevant, cut it!!” is such awful writing advice
if JRR Tolkien had cut every bit of Lord of the Rings that wasn’t directly related to the central plot, it would have been just one book long, COLOURLESS and DULL AS DIRT.
all the little worldbuilding/character details are what draw you in and give the central plot weight, FOOL
The plot is not the same thing as the story. The plot is the mechanics of how one thing causes another.
Some classic stories have no plot to speak of – the characters just wander from one situation to the next. Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz are examples.
Some stories have partial plots, where some things in the story cause other things, but other things come out of the blue and pass away without consequence. This category includes classics too: Huckleberry Finn, The Wind in the Willows.
Even in stories with a strong plot, sometimes the most iconic moments fall outside that plot. Think of the No-Man’s-Land scene in Wonder Woman or the dying dinosaur in Jurassic World II.
Ah, but those aren’t classics, I hear someone say. Well, I disagree in the case of Wonder Woman (although time will tell), but let’s go right to the top of the English canon, Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
What’s the most iconic scene, if you had to pick one to illustrate for the front cover or the playbill poster? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it’s the Yorick skull scene. What does that have to do with the plot? Precious little. It’s just a way to keep Hamlet busy until Ophelia’s funeral arrives. And even there it’s not very well fit for purpose, because it doesn’t explain why Hamlet is hanging around in a graveyard anyway.
That’s because, tight though the plot of Hamlet is, the story of Hamlet is not reducible to its plot. Hamlet is a three-hour exploration of death and skulls and murder and corpses and funerals and ghosts and “what dreams may come”. The plot is just there to drive you around between the features of that mental landscape.
So the question isn’t “Does this serve the plot?” The question is “Does this help explore the idea that the story is about?”
(Why yes, I have written all this somewhere before.)
Death By Catchphrase 