Monday Mashup #46: This Is Spinal Tap

We all know what Spinal Tap is, right? Good.

(I said the Monday Mashups would be sporadic. You thought they were gone for good, didn’t you? Hmph.)

“The Wild Coast adventure has been cancelled.”
“What?”
Yeah. I wouldn’t worry about it, though, it’s not a big adventuring region.”

“This sword goes up to +6.”

The world should be fairly obvious from those quotes: Greyhawk, D&D 3.5, straight up no chaser.

The trick is playing it straight on the world level and deriving amusement on the meta level, which is pretty tricky stuff. The tendency is for the snark to slip into the world, but if the PCs are snarky you lose a lot of the meta humor. So how to go about it?

I’d have people make level 10 characters and play those for a session. Then I’d tie the 10th level characters up with chains and hit them with a wight about nine times, give or take. Good comedy has a tragic aspect, and what’s more tragic than a party of level 1 newbies who remember what it was like to be gods?

“What happened to your first cleric?”
“He died in a bizarre gardening accident.”