I've decided I'm going to post some of the vignettes the players in my D&D game have emailed me regarding their characters.

With the permission of some of my players in my weekly Dungeons & Dragons game, I'm going to post the fiction vignettes that they've been inspired to write about their characters. I think you may enjoy them. I plan on doing the first one Friday, but first, there's a little housekeeping in that I want to share with you how I started them all out adventuring in my homebrew world (homebrew is a term that means it is not an official product; rather it is one of the author's imagination).

I started them off by actually having them create roleplaying personas of people who are alive in modern Salt Lake City, year 2021. I told them that the only restriction on this was that they couldn't be a famous person. My friend Jed decided that he would be a thirty-five year-old man living in the basement of his parent's house, bitter that he cannot get a girlfriend, and watching anime porn/hentai all day long on Wi-Fi while trolling people on message boards. My friend Jake decided to be a sixty-five year old business man who got drunk a lot because his wife of 25-years left him for the son of a local billionaire. My friend Jesse decided that he wanted to play a guy that was in his eighties who was super rich. My friend Jordan decided he would play the son of Jake's sixty-five year old character. And my friend Sasha decided that he would play the son of the billionaire responsible for breaking up Jake's character's marriage. There wasn't a whole lot of originality, as most people just wanted to be either rich or to make a character that mocked and/or teased Jake in some aspect. Jake has diagnosable levels of narcissistic personality disorder, so it may have been a kind of passive/aggressive response to build characters linked to his background. Additionally, Jake may also have encouraged it as he very much wants things to be about him. But I digress...the table was set for these characters to make their first appearance on my game world, which I call "Wynwrayth."

Now, all of them were friends with a guy they called Milbar, and I always had in my head that Milbar looked like the actor Paul Giamatti. So, I told them that in this fictional Earth, Paul Giamatti didn't exist as an actor because I was going to use him as Milbar. They were okay with that. Milbar in the Wynwrayth universe is the very powerful god of magic. And I stole an idea from the movie, Jumanji (Dwayne Johnson not Robin Williams), to get them to Wynwrayth, only it was a bit more "colorful."

I told the group that their characters all knew Milbar (that was their common link). He was some skeezy guy that always had the hottest women hanging off his arm. He was the friend that always asked for favors, borrowed money, and never paid any of it back. He was kind of a slovenly pig, very well-spoken, but also arrogant. When he was at a party he would be wearing those 70's style open shirts with the big collars, displaying lots of chest hair and gold chains, with a cigar in one hand and brandy in a shot glass in the other. He'd just blatantly tell people, "I'm the god of magic," and then do cheesy card tricks while womanizing.

Anyway, for one reason or another, they all ended up at his house which wasn't in the nicest neighborhood one sunny afternoon in mid-July. With the pandemic raging, they were there to collect on money he owed them (or various other reasons). They arrived and saw in the driveway an adult maid service Kia was parked. I described it as bright pink, with fake eyelashes around the headlights and dominatrix stuff in the backseat. They knocked on the door, but Milbar didn't answer. They heard noises which caught their curiosity, and they walked in. That's when I played a cut scene from the show Billions. I'll link it below.

View it to just after Paul Giamati's character is getting the "golden shower" and that's where I stopped it. Needless to say, my group of players was shocked and laughing out loud. That's when I said, "Suddenly, Milbar notices you and in a fit of shock and embarrassment, he yells, 'Uhh! Uhhh! THIS ISN'T WHAT YOU THINK!" and he's gesturing wildly with his hands when "BAM" they get hit by something that flares out of him, and the next thing they know...they are hurtling through space and time in a wormhole of colors and images that are both terrifying and beautiful. And then everything goes black. When they wake up, they are in a field on top of a hill, and they are no longer in their original bodies. Jed's character (the man that lived in the basement and loved anime porn) is in the body of a super hot half Drow teenaged girl of seventeen (so he's now essentially transgender), and the others have similar and shocking discoveries of their new bodies. Furthermore, just like in the show Jumanji they can slap their upper chest at any time and view their character sheet. However, no one in the world can actually see it. Oh and each one of them has something useless that came from Earth. Cell phones with no signal, paper money and a money clip, one even had the steering wheel to their parked car (but the car wasn't there). One person had a laptop with no signal, etc. And that was the first day for their characters visiting my world, and we've been playing for a little over a year now.

So now, with that background, maybe the vignettes I post will have more meaning (and hopefully you will enjoy them).