The death of Hydronos

This article contains something which makes absolutely no logical sense, such as Nazi Zombie Mercenaries, Fucking Space Orangutans, anything written by a certain Irish leper or Robin Crud-ace, or Wizards of the Coast hiring the fucking Pinkertons over a children’s card game. If you proceed, consider yourself warned.

The following article is a /tg/ related story or fanfic. Should you continue, expect to find tl;dr and an occasional amount of awesome.

Get ready for the most ridiculous player death you will ever read about. Not just in D&D, not just in Tabletop gaming, but in any sort of activity that could by any stretch be called a game, ever.

It takes place in Dungeons&Dragons, 2nd edition. And involves the Deck Of Many Things, but whatever you're imagining, it's not that. Not by a long shot. To start, we need to talk about a friend of mine and fellow player. For his safety, let's call him Frank. He's since gotten wiser, but at that stage in his life, Frank was kinda stupid. If they made a movie about him at that age, he'd be played by Adam Sandler. He had a habit of doing very annoyingly dumb things in this campaign that tended to set our party back considerably.

We also need to talk about his mount. see, the DM, my dad, is a very funny guy. Frank was playing a paladin named Hydronos, and this was 2e, so once your paladin reached a certain level, you got a mount. You normally rolled percentile dice to see what type of creature it was. 75% chance it was a horse, but the other 25% had lots of cool creatures, like a 3% chance of a griffin. Frank said he wanted a hippogriff, so my dad opted to just give him a ditzy talking hippo. named Griff.

This was no ordinary talking hippo though, this was a talking hippo with the personality of a big, goofy, friendly dog that thinks it's still a puppy. Griff liked to sing "carol of the bells," except it was the "Ding, fries are done" version of the song (he never mentioned Burger King or anything, he just repeated "Ding, fries are done. Ding, fries are done" over and over). not only that, but his stats. He could fly due to tiny normal-sized dragonfly wings on his neck. he could use "hipponosis," which Griff thought was genuine sleep by hypnosis, but actually was where he would walk up to someone, repeatedly say, "you are getting SLEEEEEEpy" right to their face, and they'd fall unconscious from his bad breath. Griff could also use "the spreader attack," which was where he'd turn around and spray hippo diarrhea all over the floor such that people began to trip and fall. he also had a bite attack that dealt 1d20 in damage, and he could cause a small earthquake by dancing around. As you can see, balance tends to take a back seat to humor whenever my dad starts homebrewing.

Now, on to THE DECK. My dad always likes to come up with additional homebrewed cards for THE DECK so that we the players can just pull from an actual deck of playing cards. Black cards are bad, red ones good. you drew ace of spades? that's Ruin. You drew Ace of Diamonds? You now have fire breath three times a day. One of our other players drew a homebrewed black card that gave him a bifurcated colon, meaning he now had two anuses and three buttcheeks (to clarify, no my dad is not a sexual deviant, he just likes fart jokes. Some people I've told this story to were left with that impression). Stuff like that. Now this is where Frank comes in. Keep in mind, my dad had legitimately shuffled the deck before we started drawing, and that there's always the same quantity of good and bad cards. At first, Frank drew a card that gave him three wishes he could cash in at any time he wanted, as per a genie or the wish spell. After that card, he drew a black card that subtracted four from his intelligence. Next card gave him ken doll anatomy. Remember how I said that Frank wasn't the highest modifier on the sheet at this point in his life? Well, at the time he was under the impression that the rules of random probability dictated that a given string of bad luck must be immediately followed by an equally long string of good luck. So he just. kept. drawing. Next card took three from his wisdom. Next card morphed his nose into a floppy penis shape (not an actual penis, just shaped like one) that, because of how paladins worked back then, would cost him his paladinhood if he ever exposed it in public. Next card took another three from his intelligence. Next card said that three powerful vampires were chasing him down, and would catch up to and fight the party in a certain amount of time. next card took six from his wisdom. Next card said that a horde of demons were chasing him down, and would fight the party in a certain amount of time. Next card took another three from his intelligence. Next card took five from his charisma (reminder: this was the state the deck wound up in after having been shuffled). Next card took four from his intelligence. Frank only stopped drawing cards at the next one, which turned him into a goat. Not a goat with the mind of a paladin mind you, an ordinary goat. ...with no genitals, a penis-shaped nose, and talking hippo best friend. Since Griff was still bound to this goat as his mount, we couldn't keep him, so he had to follow when the goat wandered off into the part of the dungeon we'd already cleared. End of session.

But sometime before next session, my dad remembered that this goat STILL HAD THOSE THREE FREAKING WISHES. So when we finished the dungeon and walked to the exit, we found them in a room that now had a river of beer flowing through it, cabbage endlessly, to quote my dad, "bleeding" from the walls, and an oddly attractive female goat with unusually-prominent teats. Then the vampires and demons teleport in, and they just stare. in. silence. They didn't even stop us from leaving the dungeon.

(If this sounds simmilar to a story you heard on a Mr Ripper video, that's because it is the same story. I posted this to that channel's subreddit as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/MrRipper/comments/h122up/get_ready_for_the_most_ridiculous_player_death/ )