September 30 - Hand Of Death
As calypsos about dark magic go, this is certainly one of the better ones. Another Mountain Goats rarity, and one that shows both its past and its future. Bleak lyrics with a cheerful beat is basically the Mountain Goats stock in trade and this is a lovely example, but it feels like it throws forward to other versions of the same. What is here a warrior preparing for a macabre battle is, by the point of Training Montage, a badass hero doing the same. Both songs are even about "The Temple".
I think what I'm going to do when we hit In League With Dragons is to share a D&D story with the group, so here's a story about the second time someone died in a D&D game I was playing.
The first time was straightforward if horrible. We were facing a mass of mouths that gibbered, appropriately called a Gibbering Mouther, and our cleric Zanfaerd The Wonderous was eaten by it. And the thing about Gibbering Mouthers is that if they knock you to zero hit points with their attack they absorb you into themselves. You are at that point just dead. And so our only healer died in front of us. I'm fairly sure we were, like, level 4 at this point. It was a bit of a bummer, made less of a bummer by how funny the player's replacement character was.
The second time was much later. We were exploring a wizard's tower in the far north. There was a chest of treasures there, secured by a glyph of warding. Thew thing about Glyph Of Warding is that you can put any spell you like in it. So when our rogue opened this chest, the glyph automatically cast the spell it was holding on her. And that spell was Power Word Kill. The way that Power Word Kill works is that if you have more than 100 hit points, it does nothing. If you have 100 hit points of fewer, you fuckin die. Just straight away drop to the floor dead. No save or anything. And when this happened to the rogue, my character did what anyone would do in that circumstance. He dug into his bag and pulled out a weird coat. it was a Robe Of Useful Items that had a resurrection scroll on it that would only work within a minute of someone dying. So as everyone was freaking out because our friend was dead, my artificer was pulling on a coat, pulling off one of its patches, turning it into an item and then bringing the rogue back to life. One of the weirder moments of my first campaign.