After a few hours of careful planning, the party finally enters the dungeon beneath the Baron’s castle. They explore about a dozen rooms and corridors, come across venom-spitting, snake-men, mind-controlling snake-men, and crablike skittering horrors. Hilariousness ensues when they need to wash some venom out of a blinded party member’s eyes, and after giving their character sheets the once over, they realize no one is carrying a waterskin. Not a drop of fresh water anywhere. Someone asks “Um, so what if I just spit in your eye.”
Everyone cracks up. Other alternatives to fresh water or spitting are proposed, and somehow this degenerates into Jim asking his wife (who came home at around this time) “If someone has snake-venom in their eyes, and we’d need to wash it out by peeing into her eye, would it be possible for her to contract syphilis?”
In hindsight, not a high point of comedy. But it was funny for a few minutes.
After a short break we got back to the business of serious role-playing.
During the previous session I had struggled a bit coming up with meaningful (e.g. not stupid) things for the NPC’s to say. So this time I had actually taken a few minutes to write down a few lines of dialogue, most of which I ripped off from a movie running on the telly at the same time. This dialogue was intended for the main villainess of the piece, and contained a lot of exposition on different unresolved issues in the campaign so far.
I needn’t have worried. About a couple of sentences of diatribe, the party goes “Screw this, lets just kill her and be over with it!”
The party is soon overwhelmed. One goes down, then another. A third party member decides to leg it with his henchman. One more goes down, at which point the main villain’s right hand man gets cocky, tries to take the last remaining player character alive, and gets a mace to the face.
To make a long story short, the PC gets mind controlled, and is sent on an errand. She runs across the party member who ran away earlier, who pretty much immediately notices something’s awry, and knocks the mind controlled PC unconscious. He then loads her up in a wheelbarrow with all of the loot, and makes for the open road. Witchingham be damned!
As it is extremely unlikely, that the party will ever be in the position to ever get to hear the villainess’ complete monologue, here it is reproduced in its entirety.
”Greetings, brave souls. Have you come to receive my blessings? No? Very well, then. What do you seek? Treasure? There is plenty here, free for the taking. Please, you have my permission. I have no need for it. After all, you deserve a reward for all that you have done. You freed me from captivity, and proceeded to systematically rid me of my enemies. I am deeply grateful. That fool of a baron Rupert, his halfwit son Christpher, that blowhard Godfrey, and the rest of those poor, misled wretches. Many thanks to you.”
”Oh, you wouldn’t by any chance know the whereabouts of that whore Genevieve? She and I still have a bone to pick. You wouldn’t be hiding her by any chance? Bring her to me, and I shall see to it that you are rewarded for that as well.”
”Do you know what I am? I am as close to a god as you people will ever witness in the flesh. I have been here since time immemorial. I was here when the Romans held sway. Such a wonderful people, the Romans. They knew how to indulge in the ways of the flesh. So unlike your own god nailed to a wooden cross, who locked up his brides in convents. Did they really enjoy themselves, hm? Poor little virgins masturbating in the dark. Then they repent for their sins indulging in flagellation until they wept tears of blood. Captive virgin whores of an impotent god.”
And yes, that dialogue rips off Ken Russell’s film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s The Lair of the White Worm, a great film, which every fan of campy horror should be familiar with. Not convinced yet? Then have a look at this screenshot from a scene where nuns are raped by Roman soldiers while a blue skinned heathen snake priestess oversees, and a huge, white worm is taking a bite out of the arm of some guy nailed to a cross.
Blowing smoke 