Topic: A great adventure that is not my idea

As much as I would love to take credit for this, I'm just transcribing the following from something I found on 4chan, but I think it is great materal for any LotFP game.

Time to share some nightmarish horror stories with y'all /tg/. I'm no writefag, so forgive me if this isn't really up to shnuff, I'm not trying to produce literature here, just relay events. I started putting this old tale into writing during the Tall-Man thread. That was like... Six hours ago, I was interrupted by a few episodes of Monk.

Our DM is an artsy type, but not in an interesting way. He likes verisimilitude more than useful information. He's like the Tolkien of Dms. We've often badgered him about his style of running things. He likes making worlds, and then turning us loose in them. We happen to prefer adventure modules, and whatnot. So after a particularly harsh heckling (which I regret,) he offers to run us something very special, in the mode that we seem to prefer. We agree, though I fully expect some more of his mediocre twattle.

So, we start out in this shitty little town in his world's analogue to dark age Germany. It's gray, wet, there's a lot of mud, everyone is dirt poor, all the peasants are insular and taciturn around foreigners. We groan several times as we begin... But learn that we're actually on our way through. On our way to... Persia-Rome or something, on a mission to recover some sort of artifact. The guy sending us gives us rations, supplies, and what he called “Karthaki marching powder,” which we understood to be a joke expy of cocaine. A good start.

Well, we head out, and pass through some sort of black forest, and then a dreary swamp with incredibly dense fog, where he has us seriously make eight spot and listen checks. Every once in a while pausing for like three minutes at a time, and asking if we had any more modifiers to add. As usual, his descriptions of the surrounding area is incredibly articulate, sometimes bordering on the poetic. It had been corny most of the time, but this time it worked... Because this time it wasn't just hollow detail. There were things to notice. Cryptic but alluring hints towards the nature of... Something. We didn't know what it was, there was no hint towards what it was we were supposed to be learning about, only that there was something. Something fast, something slick, something twisting and limp, but taut and strong that was... Pursuing. Not us, but chasing something, something that, a moment later, took on its traits.

I can't even begin to describe it. We actually forgot for a moment that we were supposed to be playing. We were hypnotized. He shook us out of it, all of a sudden, with orcs, that cartwheeled and spun out of the swamp, dragging moisture from the air back into the swamp as they emerged, dragging gore from the ground back into their bodies into closing wounds as they did, losing pallor and glazed expression to take on the green vibrance of life, and psychically drawing weapons to them from the ground and brackish water. We killed them, throwing them back into the water directly from whence they came, and re-opened their wounds for them.

We were pretty sure that was it, after that. We met some weird folk after that, like an elf who refused to walk on the wet stone of the road through the swamp, to the point of laying down two squares of wood to walk upon as he went, and talking entirely in paradox. Eventually, we took the wooden planks away from him, and broke them when he tried to take them back. If he kept walking so slowly, he'd get his ass killed by zombie orcs, right? The mook just sat down and started crying after that, but we kept going.
Sounds like pretty standard faire, doesn't it? Oh, we thought so too. We complimented the DM at the end of the session, for a job well done. He had really gotten us with those zombie orcs. Really creepy. Heheheheh... Oh, but it only got worse there from there.


We arrived... in a village. A little village, on the outskirts of the country we were supposed to be entering.
Do you remember the bit about how good he was at describing shit? Well he brought us to tears here. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard put into words before. He described the most idyllic and wonderful place imaginable. It was a golden town, full of vibrant life and surrounded by flowing wheat. The people came up and greeted us, welcoming us to their little town. All the men were friendly and offered us lodging and hospitality, and all the women were long-braided and beautiful, with ample bosoms and wide eyes...

Every home had a bronze symbol of the sun with a grinning face on it nailed to the door, and every street corner had women twirling slowly on the spot, dancing in the joy of the daytime, and the people all moved in rhythm, taking long steps every two or three seconds of walking, sidestepping as they spoke. Very musical people, too, they were always humming.
It was good stuff, so we figured we'd stay around for a while, to check everything out. We go to the inn, and get ourselves some rooms. We chat up the townsfolk, and we learn that the town is called Kar-Tordek. I think this is a laugh, and decide that I'm in this town for the bitches, so I convince three of the women to sleep with me (they are, of course, a promiscuous people whose religion revolves around how awesome strangers are. Go figure.)

So, the rest of the crew follows suit, and we all wake up surrounded by tits. We head out into the street, and... start noticing things. For one thing, the same women are dancing on the same street corners. Everybody greets us by name with elaborate greetings. Nobody just says “hi.” Nobody just says “good morning.” They say “May the light of the lord of light shine on you.” or “Welcome to the dawn of His glorious day.” It doesn't take us long to realize that the DM is talking entirely in rhythm with the music that's playing in the background. He had been since the first moment. The townsfolk were all speaking in meter. Dee-duh dee-duh dee-duh dee-duh dee-duh, like a heartbeat. We start freaking out, because we KNEW that something was wrong with this fucking place, somewhere in the back of our minds we knew that there had to be. We're all over that shit in a heartbeat, we start asking questions.

The local lord is a sorcerer, but all of the damn lords in this place are sorcerers.
The gray marshes that we passed through are terrifying places that nobody likes traveling through. Well no shit.
The primary crop is gravewheat, which only grows on ground watered with human blood. Sounds like a good crop to be pl-OH WAIT. YEAH.
So the cleric starts detecting evil. EVERYTHING shows up. Everything. The dirt? Evil. The people? Evil. The houses? Evil. The DM asks for a spot check, which he's been doing for a while now, though we hadn't really given it much thought after the first thirty times.

For once, he sits up straight, and all of a sudden says “you notice that the man speaking to you has no eyes. None of them do.”

There is a full ten seconds of silence, before he adds, “they never did.” He then begins to elaborate upon what else they did and didn't have. The list was elaborate, and traumatizing. The end result, boneless, toothless, eyeless, with long rubbery limbs and gray flesh. What we had mistaken for braids on the women had been long, blackened tongues. Tongues, he said, that we had grown rather accustomed to during the night there. We start freaking out about halfway through that last bit.
I smash the one we're talking to's face in with a morningstar. The sorcerer turns around and lights the little gang of “women” that had been following us on fire. Some of them, covered in ragged cloaks of human skin attack, some begin flailing about like lunatics, screeching and cackling and talking backwards. Instead of attacking, they would rub up against us, shuddering and slivering and boneless, moving into our way when we tried to flee, and taking our blows like they were nothing, until we had hewn them to bits.
It was sick, and unnerving, and it didn't make any sense, but we fucking killed them all. We fucking killed them all. Every single one of them, we cleared that village out one goddamn building at a time, killing their lipless horrors and the little sharp-toothed ones that gnawed at our ankles and jumped out of dark corners, and the ones that grabbed our legs, and the ones that would throw themselves at us while others flanked around or ran off, to ambush us later. We killed them all, and ended the threat.

One time I took drugs while playing D&D 4 ed and I got scared.

But we knew what the root of the problem was. It was the wheat. The gravewheat. It must've been corrupting the people with foul necromancy. So we painted warnings on the buildings, left notes for anybody who might have come, warned them of what would happen if they ate the stuff. And then we lit the fields on fire, and left. The DM ended our third session there, and congratulated us on a job well done. The next session, though, he showed up with a Dark Heresy book. We had been wanting to play that for a long time, and he said he had brought character sheets and everything, and we had all had our fill of horror. Gruesome death was one thing, but that stuff was just... surreal. Too much. So, we purged some heretics from then on. Didn't take one look back at D&D for a few months.

Then, we came back. Not to the same campaign, nobody mentioned it again. The DM had us roll up characters, and had us start out in the same little town we began in before. We're all a bit worried, but he raises our spirits by informing us that it is fall. It had been spring when we had departed last time. It wasn't just a start-over, it was something different. Good stuff. We get almost the precise same starting equipment as the first group from almost the exact same quest-giving priest. We don't get the marching powder though, which was good, it had struck me as a bit goofy anyway.
So... we're going on our merry little way down the swamp road. We don't run into any orcs, which is good, but we do find... An elf. With broken legs. The emaciated, starved corpse of an elf with broken legs. Clearly orc work. We proceed, and get what amounts to the single darkest moment in the entire history of my gaming life. We find the town.

Burned black. Scorched Earth. The surrounding fields are little more than ashes and soot worn down by fall rain into a slurry. The sky is dark, it is dusk, but we proceed through the early evening with torches, and investigate the town. It is the scene... Of unspeakable carnage. A hundred people killed like animals. Weaponless men, hewn down as they tried to defend their families, women butchered as they attempted to clear the escapes of their children. Infants, trapped in corners and run through, monks wearing the white robes of pacifists, who had clearly tried to grapple and pin down their assailants, beaten down and split open with repeated, unnecessary, horrible mutilating strikes.
And the buildings. The buildings were covered with writings, in blood, gibberings and the frothing babble of madmen, rhyming rhythmic mournful furious meanderings that made no sense, but read clearly nonetheless, for they all had something in common.
Like one long, grand verse, they were written in iambic pentameter.

Re: A great adventure that is not my idea

Wow, that is some good stuff!  Any possibility you can link to the source?

Re: A great adventure that is not my idea

The source I got this from:
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/6088875/