30 Day Dungeons and Dragons Challenge, Day 6: Gods

Dagda

Back during the very first serious campaign I ever played in I had a Dungeon Master who could best be described as a fuckhead, but more generously you would call him a waste of sperm. At the time we were friendly and the campaign seemed alright enough - especially when you consider that I had never played in a campaign that lasted longer than two nights at that point. Anyway, during this campaign he would constantly pull out his own characters and establish each as an invincible, epic character that somehow needed my first level ass to help him. That was annoying. What became worse was when he established one of his characters as a god within the campaign world.

I killed powerful non-player characters (NPCs) at the drop of a hat, even going so far as to openly murder one of my own characters during the game

Every session of that campaign became an excuse for him to turn the game into a circle jerk. I grew to hate that campaign and would eventually leave it to create my own. That first campaign was more about savaging what I didn't like than what I did. I killed powerful non-player characters (NPCs) at the drop of a hat, even going so far as to openly murder one of my own characters during the game. Apparently I wasn't the only person who hated that old campaign as my group swelled from six, to twelve, to sixteen, to twenty-two players.

Best version of this book, ever.

I am very proud of that campaign, but nothing in it excited me more than a god I dropped in to mock that earlier bullshit. I hated the god from dickhead's campaign, the Nameless One. It was meddling, pedantic, and trite in all the ways that every Forgotten Realms god only aspires to be. So I flipped through the pages of Deities and Demigods and contemplated how best to mock that fucking annoyance. It was then that I found one of the greatest gods in my gaming career: Dagda.

Dagda could split himself into twelve different personalities and I used each to satirize the Nameless One. One aspect of Dagda would mimic the Nameless One while another undercut him. Each aspect terrorized the other and would harry the players whenever things got too boring. I constantly worried about crossing the line and working myself into a self-aggrandizing position as king of shit castle. But in the end I avoided even that by killing off the god.

I miss him often, but the point was made with him and you cannot dreg up past successes just because you have nothing going on now that excites you anywhere near as much.

Fucking Marvel and DC should learn that lesson.