...every good story is that way because, somewhere along the way, your guts get twisted with the goings on and the emotions are dredged to the surface for better or worse. While this was one of those situations where "worse" won out, it certainly isn't anything to apologize for. It. Was. AMAZING!!!!

Flipping back and forth between that, and writing Tara/Tara's death in Little Kithran was . . . really rough. I spent a lot of time petting dogs to get through that.

To reiterate though, and maybe this is more a reflection on my weird self, it was still fun and interesting to write. Emotionally destructive, for sure, but an interesting challenge to try to get into the psyche of someone losing control.

AND LOOK, all you have to do is throw a net over Kith and just get her like, all of the therapy. Bing bang boom.

I know that I'm very happy to have known Aranwen, and that wouldn't have happened if not for this game. It's been a pleasure writing for her, to partake of her journey. However, I can safely say that several years ago I wouldn't have been able to handle it.  

How happy I am that you took her on

Wouldn't have been the same without you, Butterfly! 

The fact that you three were writing KC&K while all of this was going on just took that emotional payload and turned the knob to somewhere around 23 on the typical 1-10 scale.  You guys were making this FAMILY that had been through so much together.  And here I was, orchestrating this horrible future...

The callbacks from Aranwen, the lines quoted to recall back to the death and loss featured in KC&K have brought so much reality to everything going on here.  I literally HURT for this make believe character.



For more "behind the curtain", here's an interesting thing that has happened along the way.

Back in the beginning, Davena was a pretty flat, two dimensional femme fatale.  Yes, she had carried one of these hybrid ghoul babies (thus, the scars), but more than anything else, she existed as a way for me to make a player feel grossed out that their character had not only had sex with the Big Bad Guy, that they also had been with someone who was pro ghoul hybrid on a personal level.  Ewwwwwwwwwww, amirite?

But as Bree and I have collaborated, Davena has come to life.  Her history is, quite honestly, pretty tragic, too.  Her mother was a priestess of Miellyah, was a good woman.  Davena was a good girl... until her mother was killed by the death cult, Davena was taken.  She was beaten, raped repeatedly, brainwashed herself. 

As I have pointed out to Bree - yes, Davena has incredible depths of evil, and has an imagination that makes her a genius at torture.  Except... who is giving her those ideas?  What does that say about ME? 

And it has prompted a lot of uncomfortable questions about the nature of evil.  I mean... when the flashbacks are done, I'm hoping that it will be tough to hate Kithran for the betrayal.  In the real world, truly strong people are broken and brainwashed.  In a fantasy world, where someone can be tortured with pain not even AVAILABLE in the real world, to the point that real people

 could never survive it... onlt to have that flesh magically put back together to allow the process to be repeated again and again and again and again... I don't know that ANYONE would survive with an intact mind. 

But if we can see that Kith is a victim and not hate her... what about Davena? 

D&D: fun game, deep ethical questions.

Davey's pretty cool, I think you all need to give her a chance.

re: However, I can safely say that several years ago I wouldn't have been able to handle it

I can say with the utmost confidence that had I run this adventure successfully the first time or two that I tried it, I could not have handled it going the places it has gone.  Following the script would have been tough enough. 

Yes, I've grown as a person... but again, you people have made this thing just come to life.

>Davey's pretty cool, I think you all need to give her a chance.

Love the use of the pet name. 

I mean... Davena is suuuuper pragmatic, and would likely allow the party to join her service.  There might be some issues with Cedric's unreasonable religious beliefs, but by and large, I expect that she's be willing to iron out any differences and move forward in a spirit of cooperation.

In the unwritten path, a path where Aranwen and the party were successful in reaching and subduing Davena, Aranwen would have asked Ch'dau and the others to stay their blades, so she may have spoken with Davena.

She would have asked her if this was truly what she wanted. To die the pawn of a parasite with no will of her own. Aranwen would have tried to appeal to her - she knew the flame Davena held inside of her, hidden deep beneath detached actions and words. She would have offered Davena to go with her. That even she might yet be saved, somehow, and live the remainder of her years with some level of peace. 

Naive, almost undoubtedly, but it is what Aranwen would have offered to her, having seen the extent of the scars she bore. 

If Davena had refused, Aranwen would have, regretfully, taken her life then. She would've chosen it to be her own hand and blade to do the deed of killing a subdued opponent, knowing that to do such might not have sat well with the others' personal feelings/codes. Aranwen would have been shaken in doing so, but because it was in line with one of her oaths, she would have been okay. 

Yet, as we know, such did not come to pass.

This is what Aranwen was talking about when she told Davena "it didn't have to be this way" 

I think being able to relate to the Big Bad (even on some small level) is another piece of what makes a tale like this so intriguing, actually. Depth of character and motivation are crucial pieces of the puzzle (I mean who didn't watch Halloween or Friday the 13th and not feel something for Michael or Jason after their backstories came into play? You didn't want them to 'win' necessarily, but there was some bit of, 'Oh yeah. I get it, dude! Kill that d-bag next!')

As to "hating Kithran" in the end of all this... Hmmm... Ch'dau, for one, could never hate her. She and Ara have been his clan for all this time, after all, and he loves them more than he likely ever should have given his quest to be returned "home." Should he survive to see her, again, he may have some 'trust issues,' but I'm sure that, given time to understand all that has happened, those too will fade soon enough.

Oh, I will... Just gotta decide if I'm going with the Sweet Vidalia BBQ sauce or the Teriyaki! Always hard to tell when preparing foreign food.

Talk about nobility.  Thy name is Aranwen. 


Just to be very, very clear to everyone - this is an actual, real D&D game, not a freeform horror in D&D clothes.  I have tedious amounts of stats and dice rolls here. 

Yes, the deck was stacked against you in a way that led to your jailing (once we came up with the idea of Kith being brainwashed, I needed a sensiable way for time to pass to allow her to be adequately tortured), and yes, the deck was again stacked here to lead to the betrayal. 

But the fight in the cells was winnable (I could not belive how many saves you guys made).  Garn could have been held, Davena could have been killed, etc. 

I am an evil, horrible, manipulative person telling a disgusting, vile story... but I would not just cheat you guys into a given outcome. 

Just to be clear. 



Also.... ROFL @ foreign food.  I'm partial to sweet vidalia in anything.

"Hey, Mistress, maybe don't go near the cat. He's not good with necromancers."

Olan had told me a little of Davena's story, as she likely would have shared a bit of it with Kith, and while he had mentioned that her upbringing reflected a lot of what Kith's fate had come to be, I couldn't help but to align it more with Tara's childhood and all that had happened to her. This, of course, led to a lot of my own personal brainwashing to D's side haha everyone just being a product of their circumstances, and taking slightly different paths that drastically altered who they became.

Complex stuff.

After all of this collaboration back and forth, of us making sly little in jokes to one another in the Q&A while trying to keep this Big Awful Secret bottled up, of the exploration of the dark side of the human psyche... not to mention, some INCREDIBLE poetry along the way, Bree and I have both signed up for some therapy sessions.  I think if we get everyone involved, we can get a group rate!