Mithras and the world’s best place to die
Inspirations for the Motivations in Roleplaying Game Economies
Hello dear readers. Today, I present to you the final episode of play in this series that inspired our Motivations in Roleplaying Game Economies essay. This one involves an impulsive decision with lasting consequences.
Mithras, a halfling, was played by my coworker Chase in one of our long-running KSR D&D campaigns. He was an unlikely hero full of bone dry wit, lofty aspirations and oddly practical solutions. He was also a crack archer.
His group was contesting with the powers that ruled a lost city across the borderlands from the famous Keep. A few sessions prior to his death, his Charisma score was magically enhanced to 181 and he was subsequently granted the title of Baron (though by magic, not by any duke or king) over High Port. Once he was so elevated, he proclaimed his philosophy—Mithraism—to be promulgated throughout his realm. He proposed the following tenets:
The greatest service is to usher in a better death.
All that’s living dies. Since you have to die, you should do it in style.
Highport is the end and beginning of all life. All old life flows through this point and all new life through Copopes.2
And something about Happy Hour.
In addition, he added some notes about his rulership
The baron of Highport is divinely chosen.
Highport is the world’s best place to die and watch one’s family die.
Ghoul choir3
He then declared the name of the place changed from Highport to Dieport and created tourist-destination style slogans for his new capital: “A great place to Die-port" and a mascot saying “I loved dying here and so will you.”
Mithras’ crew called themselves Swords with Friends. While they were not out-and-out evil, there was a streak of moral relativism that ran through the group, guiding them to…let us say…interesting decisions along the way. At the time, the Sword Friends were beefing with a slave-taking organization known as the Hounds.4 This criminal organization ran their operations from the fallen port city, over which the magical powers had mysteriously granted Mithras rulership. So, as the Baron of Dieport, he had double skin in the game—revenge and demonstrating his rightful rule. Thus he issued the following proclamation:
Immunity for lizards who swear loyalty5
Elections for prime minister6
Training for gravediggers and undertakers7
Hotels8
Diverse funerary services: graveyard, pyres, river floats
Katrina (the group’s cleric) is making wells9
Hopefully that gives you a sense of his thinking—very civic-minded—but the night Mithras died, he was in a mood.
After a series of running skirmishes throughout Dieport, Swords with Friends scouted the Hounds and found they were fleeing due to the recent appearance of a black dragon bent on avenging itself on the slavers (for reasons way too long to go into here).10 They were packing out, loading two ships with their goods, valuables and captives—stuffing dozens of lizard captives into hold of their ships. Truly awful. The Hounds were an odious group to be sure.
The Sword Friends decided to focus their wrath and power to raid and sink one of the ships. After a harrowing caper involving (another) greased halfling, a Bag of Holding and invisible fire, they extracted from the ship’s storeroom a crate, a small stone chest, three sacks and a glyph-covered chest. Ignoring the other loot, Mithras fixated on the potential contents of the chest and claimed them all for himself, despite having provided little support during the raid.
The Baron of Dieport continued to argue for his rights as the cleric dispelled the wards on the chest and disgorged the contents: copper coins, some gems (one quite valuable) and three rusty-crusty daggers (one copper, one bronze and one brass).
Mithras examined the daggers. I told him that the blades were crusted with some redding substance, possibly dried blood.
“I lick the blade to taste it.”
I caught my breath. That was not the action I expected, so I replied as neutrally as I could, “You lick it?”
“Yes, I want to at least find out what kind of dried blood it is.”
“Right.” It took all of my discipline as a dungeon master to maintain a poker face. I briefly checked the text of the adventure to confirm what I already knew. “Make a saving throw.” The group fell into a reverent hush, customary for making saving throws.
Surprised and suspicious, but with no lack of confidence, Chase reflexively grabbed a twenty-sider.
He rolled a 4, far below his needed Poison save.
In my most flat, restrained dungeon master voice I intoned: “Mithras is dead. These are poisoned daggers.”
Then my face cracked and I started laughing, “You just licked poison.”
Chase was stunned, eyes wide and mouth open. The group then broke its silence with a clamor of laughter and shouts. We laughed so hard we cried. Dieport was truly the best place to die.
The End.
Via a lucky draw from the Deck of Many Things, no less.
The nature, identity and powers of the Copopes was sadly never defined.
Likely a policy addition from his ghoul companion, Ghuldo. Of whom we shall speak in detail in a future post.
A renamed and reconfigured version of the villainous organization found in B10, Night’s Dark Terror. At this point in the campaign, SwF had therefore been at odds with them throughout two major adventures, consisting of a couple of years of real time. But the Hounds were created for our AD&D campaign that ran from 1994-1998, inspired by the A1-4 Slavers series, of course. An international criminal organization, they still exist today in our Burning Wheel: Orphans campaign, causing endless headaches for the players.
Presumably to lure them from their service to their draconic protector.
I believe the only candidate for office was his companion, Katrina, a cleric.
Mithras expected an uptick in deaths in Dieport once his policies were implemented.
Presumably to accommodate the influx of tourists the rebranding was destined to bring.
A fitting campaign promise for a prime minister running for office. One can practically imagine the photo opportunities: a smiling cleric, shovel laden with loamy soil, surrounded by orc, hobgoblin and lizard children near weeping in anticipation for a new source of clean drinking water.
I had merged L1 The Secret of Bone Hill, A1 Slave Pits of the Undercity and L2 The Tomb of the Lizard King into one larger scenario.
That character sheet is an awe-inspiring ludological artifact.
Fixed an error in the footnotes.