Ok so yesterday’s game involved nearly a dozen Non-player Characters getting killed and nearly everyone else in the group nearly dying in a Spelljamming vessel crash. The fun part was that all of the deceased were children. Orphans, to be precise. In the course of a game I actually went ahead and incinerated orphans.

I feel as though that might need a smidgen of context. It wasn’t as if I set out to target these wee hapless waifs for destruction. They were just terribly unfortunate to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The reason they were placed in jeopardy wasn’t my idea at all. No, the glory for that notion all falls upon the players. As this group tends to thrive on the “rush in with reckless abandon” mentality why would they change their modus operandi just because there were a bunch of parentless children present? That’s not how this group rolls. As they say in Maelonbourg now, “where fools rush in orphans perish.”

Far be it for me to cast aspersions on my players or do the eye-roll whenever they do these incredible and hilariously self-destructive things. This is just the most recent example, by the way. They have charged up a flight of stairs into the keening wail of a banshee that immediately sent them crashing to the bottom of said stairs as a crumpled corpse. They have rushed headlong into combat with a gazer and ended up with a couple of them being turned to stone. One of them married a woman without knowing a damn thing about her¹. These are my people. Wild, carefree, and perhaps just a touch psychotic.

So back to those orphans. Spoiler alert: one of the party went to fairly heroic lengths to get the little sots raised back from the dead. They weren’t just left sad and moldy. No, these poor longsuffering kids will doubtlessly be killed again when the Troublemakers drag them off to some other gruesome misadventure and they get eaten by a manticore or barbecued by a mummy or some other horrible fate.

In the meantime the players are dealing with a dramatic turn of events in the game, charred and scarred children not withstanding. We’ll see how quickly they can figure a workable “Plan B” for next week. Stay tuned for updates on how those poor waifs end up suffering further.

¹Full disclosure: all of those examples highlighted are fully about one player in particular. He knows who he is.