Storytime: "It was Death. Himself."

Hear ye! Hear ye! Gather round citizens of Zale for we have a unique storytime to share! This week’s story: “It was Death. Himself.” This is our social media assistant, Emma’s, favorite tabletop story! Do you have a favorite tabletop story? Comment below, we’d love to hear more!

Emma Wyman: “My favorite tabletop story is from a few months ago when I first joined the playtesting group. We were starting Act II of a campaign from one of Zubie’s (Alex’s) other tabletops. Our party was hired by this rich man, Theodore Everett, who told us that there were multiple unexplainable deaths going around the main city. People all over the city would go about their day as normal and then suddenly they would just drop dead, with no explanation. Theodore told us that if we were able to uncover the truth and possibly kill the monster that was killing these poor innocent people, our party would get paid fairly.

After some initial investigating in the city, we came across an old man’s house. After some conversations, we were interrupted when the front door creaked open. Standing in the door was a dark cloaked figure. It was Death. Himself. He said slowly, “Oh. I wasn’t expecting anyone else to be here…” after some more conversations between our party leader, Darian Gallows, Death continued on to say “Let’s arrange a deal. You let me go about in peace, I will let you live.”

That’s when the best part happened. Darian took a swing of his flask and said, “Yeah… I really can’t let that happen.” as he pulled out his sheathed sword from his cane. At that moment everyone in the party had to make the decision if we were going to continue with this fight or not. Needless to say—after A LOT of strategizing—we decided to continue on with the fight. It wasn’t easy either. We got a lucky initiative order, we used a TON of divinity points to increase the damage from our weapons, and we used some of our divine interventions to guarantee that we succeeded a roll. By all of this we were able to defeat Death himself before it even got to his turn (which by the way if he touched ANY of us, we would die instantly).

At the end of this session, Zubie revealed to us out of game that this was actually the Act II boss and he planned it where we’d run into him at the beginning of the act and then face him at the end. However, since we messed up his storyline, he had to write a completely new Act II for us XD

While the combat and strategy of this encounter is amazing and super cool, what sticks out to me as my favorite tabletop story is the fact that the party was willing to go all the way even though our odds looked like a complete party wipe. This was session 0 so we made our characters earlier that day and the fact that the party was willing to give up their characters so easily was very inspiring to me. I never truly felt like I’d be 100% okay giving up a character so soon, until I joined this group. Now, I have so many different playstyles I want to test out and I can’t wait to make the next character. This improved mindset has also helped me with combat and how if my character is on the brink of death, I can always make a new one.”

We hope you enjoyed this week’s storytime. If you’ve got a story to share, post it in the comments section below and check back for more content related to War and Aether!