T w e n t y S i d e d

I’ve been playing a classic dungeon-crawling game to loosen up for my upcoming Patreon series, and since I’m still building up a buffer for my next Tuesday LP, I’m doing a little one-off. Probably a little two-off, actually. Let’s see what happens when failure’s even more guaranteed than usual.

Everybody wants the Orb of Zot, and if you don’t, you’re a degenerate and you need to get the hell out of my office.

What does it do? What does it do? What kind of slackjaw rube question is that?

Nobody knows what it does, you knucklehead. Nobody’s seen it. It’s at the bottom of a rotten daemonic middenshaft bursting with the worst things ever. To get the orb you’re going to need to fight more living things than you have seen in your entire life so far and personally kill all of them. Beast by beast. Room by room. Stratum by stratum. The least messed-up things you’ll see will be snakes the size of horses and rats bred exclusively on living flesh, and within ten minutes, you are going to be powerfully nostalgic for such simple pleasures. Then you are going to get lost. Then you are going to get cursed. Soon you are going to starve–and if you’re lucky you’ll starve to death. You’re going to need to do the unheard of, win impossible victories, and get enough hidden evil magic runes to unlock a unholy antechamber with an unsurvivable anteconfrontation followed by a general-purpose brouhaha–and if you’re legendary enough to survive that, congratulations! The Orb is yours. At least for a few seconds, because now you’re going to have to fight back up except this time evil gods are showing up to kill you personally.

So are you gonna sign the contract or are you gonna wuss out on me?

What’s in it for you? You’re asking about the Dungeon of Zot. You’re asking me why you ought to go down into a hole and die. I do not have the answer to that question. That’s why the lease on this office is “annual”, not “until I’m eaten by orcs doing something an idiot would do.” If you had an ounce of sanity and any good reason to live, you wouldn’t go–wouldn’t think about going. You wouldn’t even be asking these questions. You’d be meeting somebody nice at a tavern and splitting a roast chicken or you’d be out on your porch whittling a duck. Look, I can promise you what’s in the contract, which is–in the downright apocalyptic eventuality that get the Orb–a percentage of whatever money turns out to be involved in that. In exchange I give you a weapon, some cheap clothes, a breadstick, and a toothbrush. Is it a good weapon? Well, let me point out to you that I’ve never ever gotten one of these back, so you tell me: am I going to give you a good weapon?

There’s my door. If you don’t have some kind of awful, horrible reason why you need to throw your life away trying to get that Orb–you walk right out there and never come back.

No?

That’s what I thought. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Ruts Plays CRAWL: Part 1 of Dead”

Rutskarn is a writer, author, wordsmith, text producer, article deviser, prose architect, and accredited language-talker. If you enjoy his contributions to this site you could always back his Patreon.