Faster Purple Worm Game 1: Everybody Dies in the Eye of the Beholder

Last year I was a Kickstarter backer for Faster Purple Worm, Kill! Kill! By Beadle and Grimm. (Available for Pre-Order here). I was originally going to use it as a low-stakes way to introduce some family and friends to TTRPGs. It would be low-stakes since everyone is expected to die at the end anyway, so no one has to feel sad or disappointed if they die since it’s expected. However, the timing of getting together hasn’t worked out well recently.

I’m a little behind in posting my session recaps, but there’s one group where I get to be a player rather than a DM/GM and that’s The Pyros. I met the GM during New Game Master Month and joined up with a bunch of other folks she’d GM’d for in the past. The GM is running an episodic campaign (that is, a series of one-shots in which we play the same characters and slowly level up). Earlier in the week I mentioned to her that if she ever needed a break from GM duties to catch up on session planning, I’d be willing to run a one-shot from FPWKK. Wth the summer upon us here in the USA, it’s the one time that nearly everyone can go on vacation (on account of both good weather and kids being out of school) so we found ourselves short of a quorum to run our campaign. The GM asked if we could do one of the Faster Purple Worm one-shots, so we moved over to my server and the players created new characters while I set up the scenes in FoundryVTT.

One of the appeals of these one-shots is that most of them are 4-6 pages (or thereabouts) of GM material. The adventures in the book come from their show of the same name and most episodes are between 30 and 40 minutes long. So I didn’t have too many scenes to set up and we were able to run our adventure in about 45 minutes. I chose “Everybody Dies in the Eye of the Beholder” because I knew this group would find the situation fun and it was the one I had already planned to run for the other group so I was pretty familiar with the story beats.

While I was planning on running this for my family group for the reasons I stated above, I wanted to run it for The Pyros because we JUST BARELY take our main campaign seriously. Or rather, eveyrone roleplays their characters in a way that makes sense, but there’s always a bit of comedy to our answers or the way we handle the tasks or our NPC interactions. This group turned our FPWKK one-shot into barely controlled chaos. It was awesome! (which is why I’m taking the time to write about it)

For already established groups, one of the best things about playing this kind of quick one-shot is that it encourages experimentation with different player compositions than you might normally play. Everyone chose a class they’d never played before. Then, based on a prompt in the book and the way the folks were already acting, I had them make up the backstory for why they were hired to do this job of the person next to them. I was already laughing so hard I was afraid I’d wake up the kids.

One of the best things for me as the GM of this one-shot is that I was more ready than ever to accept any suggestion. It was 100% “yes and”. Whatever they wanted to do, I was game as long as they could beat the DC I set. When they got to the bouncer at the door, a gazer (eg a beholder with less eye stalks) they played a horrible quality recording of Xanathar telling them to let the characters in. They rolled an 18 and the dude was stated in the FPWKK materials to be dumb and paranoid, so WHY NOT? We were playing ToV (Kobold Press’ 5e variant) and so our usual GM was playing a mechanist. She used her class’ special transformation metal to make a duplicate of the artifact they were supposed to steal. Two different players offered to create a diversion for the bait and switch. The one who was pretending to slip on water they themselves spilled rolled high and was able to distract the guards for the the slight of hand to succeed. The other player wanted to use mage hand to drop a chandelier; they rolled a 1. I said their mage hand got a cramp and got laughter for my description of the crit fail.

The whole point of these one-shots is that everyone dies at the end. But the players asked if they could try the recording trick again against Xanathar and pretend to have a recording of a female beholder who they could hook him up with. This led to a player tangent about whether beholders had genitals. That further devolved into whether they could be kicked in the genitals. Eventually they decided to stick with the beholder date idea and I thought that was a hilarious idea, especially as one of the other players was going to try and give him a copy of the artifact. I told them, given the crappy quality of the recording and the high intelligence and wisdom of Xanathar, they could have it with a crit 20 and let them both roll. Unfortunately, lady luck was not with them and they were reduced to ashes.

Everyone had so much fun that I’m on the hook to do a few more sessions of Faster Purple Worm one-shots this summer to account for people not being able to make every session. Although I can’t wait to play once again as Scrabble, my kobold bard, I am really looking forward to running the next Faster Purple Worm session. I’ve already started looking through the book to find the adventures that I think will vibe best with this group.

• Tales of the Valiant
• ToV