I believe I gave you fair warning that I would be telling the story of how, in our family D & D game, we conquered a castle that was occupied by the forces of evil. Well, this is it. It happened in the castle I described as an adventure setting last week.
The heroes, led by the halfling Gandy Rumspot (number two son’s character) and Mira the Kalashtar (daughter the Princess’s character) were asked by the Kingdom of Breland to investigate what happened to their ally, the Duke of Passage, Dane Evernight, in the Kingdom of Aundair.
So they loaded up their trusty airship and flew to Passage. Where they immediately learned of two mysterious boys made completely of stone and, yet, still living.
They found the two in the city square north of the castle.
Druealia the wizardess; You two boys are golems? Living statues?
Angel statue; We weren’t before Dr. Zorgo took us into the lab. We were castle pages to the Duke of Passage.
Gandy the rogue; He changed you? Who is this Dr. Zorgo?
Faun statue; Zorgo was the Duke’s court physician. When we woke up in the castle, everybody had been turned into some sort of golem. Stone golems, rag golems, animated statues… even the Duke himself. None of us remember much about our lives before our minds were put in these new bodies.
Mira the Kalashtar; We have to get inside the castle and put things right!
So, the question became, “How do we get into the castle without this Doctor Zorgo finding out and turning us into golems too?”
The answer came from a visiting professor from Morgrave University in Sharn. Professor Hootigan was a sentient giant owl. Not only could he warn them about the dangers of facing a mindflayer, a psionic monster who can read your thoughts and attack your mind, which Zorgo actually was, but he could fly the two lightest members of the adventuring party up to the summit of the castle, bypassing all the many traps and defenses that Zorgo had most likely laid. And it didn’t hurt that both Hootigan and Mira were psionically able to protect the group from Zorgo’s mind attacks.
So up they went. Hootigan’s flying skill roll was high enough to not only get them inside, but get them in quietly enough not to awaken the sleeping stone gargoyles who guarded the heights.
They were protected from Dr. Zorgo’s routine mind probes of the castle by Mira’s mind-shielding powers.
Once they were past Zorgo’s lab, they soon discovered two different things. Zorgo hadn’t yet changed the Duke’s daughter, Sien, into a golem yet. She was still imprisoned in the castle’s dark pit, called an “oubliette”.
They also discovered that fighting golems was extremely difficult. They discovered this in a fight with three golems they dubbed Moe, Curly, and Larry for some mysterious reason.
After a very frustrating slap-fight in which they discovered that you can’t kill or wound a rag golem with weapons, they finally won the day when they discovered all they had to do was stop the Larry golem from playing “Pop Goes the Weasel” on his fiddle. That took away their will to fight. And they were even helpful as former faithful servants of the Duke. They revealed that all the golems in the castle were controlled by one golem-control wand wielded by Dr. Zorgo himself.
First they sneaked down to the oubliette and rescued Duchess Sien. Then they had to steal back her magical armor and swords. Many more golem guards and gargoyles were in the way of achieving their goals, but they used a bit of trickery to turn the odds in their favor.
They tricked Major Jak Pumpkinhead into thinking that the castle was being assaulted from the front. When all the castle defenders rushed to the front towers, Gandy closed the inner gates on them, locking them all inside their very own defensive positions.
Finally they confronted Dr. Zorgo himself. This time Mira’s defensive mind shields were not so successful. Zorgo incapacitated Sien Evernight and Gandy Rumspot with mind attacks because they did not have their own psionic defenses (and because Mira rolled a 4 when she needed at least a 10 on the 20-sided dice). Dr. Zorgo set the golden golem that had once been Duke Dane Evernight on a course to killing Mira. At the last possible moment, Mira threw her magic dagger at Zorgo’s golem wand, rolled an 18, and destroyed it. The gold golem, realizing he was now free, exacted his revenge. He grabbed Dr. Zorgo and plunged off the balcony of the castle’s summit with him to a jarring destruction at the bottom of the 300-foot tower and cliff.
It was a mostly “happy ever after” event. The player characters now owned a castle, provided that Fate agreed to marry Duchess Sien and become the new Duke of Passage.
The numerous golem servants, having nowhere else to go, and no longer being human, elf, dwarf, or whatever they had been previously, stayed on to be castle servants. Duke Evernight’s golden head was retrieved from the bottom of the cliff and, still able to talk, was to be the useful adviser of the new Duke.
That is pretty much typical of our D & D adventures. Full of slapstick humor and mindless destruction, it was a whee of a time that made us laugh and enjoy time spent together playing weird imagination games with various toys, props, and dice.
Catch a Falling Star 
Stupid Is as Stupid Does
This is not a tribute to Winston Groom and his famous creation, Forrest Gump. This is an admission that when I have had very little sleep and lots of worry lines on my brow, I often do remarkably stupid things.
And sometimes, doing something monumentally stupid makes me feel better. You know, more a part of the stupid, meaningless, and goofy world around me. So, what stupid thing did I do? I joined a nudist organization’s website. Me, who freaks out when members of my own family happen to see me naked. And, you see, there is more to joining this organization than just signing up for some random thing on the internet where you get a lot of random emails. I had to submit nude photos of myself to be posted in community forums. And I may be able to write a blog for this website, which will mean taking some camping gear and actually going to the naturist club site near Dallas to experience the things I will be writing about… and probably making jokes about. But don’t be afraid of being subjected to the hideous torture of having to see me naked. In order to see any of that, you would have to join the organization yourself, and you are probably not as stupid as me. (But I am not telling you the name of the website anyway.)
This is a detail from an illustration based on Golding’s Lord of the Flies. But it is also a picture of me and a childhood friend from back in the skinny-dipping days, based on an old black-and-white photo.
You see, I have some real life experiences with nudists before this happened. I had a roommate in grad school who liked to go au naturel, and even was comfortable with me being in the room when his girlfriend was visiting. He was nude in the kitchen one time when my grandparents came to visit. It is a good thing my grandfather entered that room ahead of my grandmother. I also had a girlfriend in the eighties who had a sister living in the clothing-optional apartment complex in Austin, Texas. Every time we visited Austin, the city nearest where my parents lived, she would stay with her sister there and I would have to go in to fetch her whenever we had plans. Sometimes I was there just to visit. But always, since clothing was optional, I took that option. I did get used to being around naked people, though. I actually have nudist friends.
So, though I am not a nudist, I guess I already know a lot about how to be one. It is how I managed to stumble into this awkward arrangement.
I know I will never be able to get my wife to go along on this harrowing adventure. She refuses to even consider going nude in the house. She has to wear clothes to bed even though studies say that sleeping nude is good for you. I will be facing this basically naked and alone. And possible paid writing work will never make this worth it by itself.
But my photos are already posted and approved. My membership is a real thing. And I am not ready to shoot myself for this stupid decision. In fact, I will probably be less naked there than I have been here in this very blog where my every secret is laid bare and made fun of on a daily basis.
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Filed under battling depression, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, humor, nudes, Paffooney, self pity, self portrait, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as bad decisions, humor, naturists and nudists, stupid stuff, stupidity