Help, I'm a DM

Hey, I'm Jay. Come look at dice and get sinister ideas about worldbuilding and roleplaying with me.

[ros-sauce]

I'm imagining a fortune teller who's also a child so her idea of what a good fate is vs a terrible one isn't really in line with her clients at all

[ros-sauce]

Imagine u go to visit the oraclet (oracling?) and she tells u there's untold riches in your future and later it becomes very apparent that what she was predicting was you winning $20 from a lottery ticket

[ros-sauce]

She dismisses every wedding she predicts as a Terrible Fate because she thinks the kissing is cringe

[mindboogling]

I love making a gag character for D&D, forgetting they’re just a gag character, and then take a step back to look at the original ref

[pokeninjager-ghost-art]

continuing the gag- tosses a benny

[artyfae]

For your consideration… Warlock of The Map Dora and Ranger Boots

[mindboogling]

IM SCREAMING!!! THIS IS BEAUTIFUL!!!!!

[that-house]

The Tarrasque Can Blow Me or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Make 5e Bosses That Don't Suck

HI, I'm Catherine that-house, and I play Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition almost as much as I hate it. I do this because I am a sicko pervert who likes to tinker with abysmal dogshit, not because it's a good game. This screed is dedicated to everyone trapped in the same mine as me.

D&D 5e combat sucks! Here's the flow chart for your melee champion fighter's turn:

IF BAD GUY: smack bad guy

IF BAD GUY WITHIN 30 FT: move to bad guy, smack bad guy

IF LOW ON HP: second wind

IF NO BAD GUY WITHIN 30 FT: dash towards nearest bad guy

action surge, take it from the top

IF YOU'RE FEELING DARING TODAY: maybe a grapple or an item interaction

And pretty much any non-caster monster has a pretty similar flowchart: there's no real back and forth, just the same set of actions over and over and the only time you have to pay attention on someone else's turn is for an attack of opportunity maybe. Finally one side reduces the other side's number to 0, and you can get back to roleplaying in your roleplaying game.

In general, I strive to make my boss fights hard and interesting, with interesting being the more important of the two. For some reason the wicked clowns working at WOTC got it into their heads that the only ways to make a fight hard are Bigger Number and Less Counterplay. I don't have any data on how they sought to make fights interesting because as far as I can tell they were too busy siccing the Pinkertons on people like it's the fucking 1800s.

Probably not all 5e combat is like this. But, like, look at the statblock for the Tarrasque, the CR 30 "strongest monster in the game" and try to tell me that that thing looks INTERESTING to fight. Difficult? Maybe, if your stats are bad. But INTERESTING? It walks at someone and murders the shit out of them, then rinses and repeats. The fetid dog turd that is the Tarraque is the perfect example of the Bigger Number, and even its meme status as the DM's "fuck you" monster is eclipsed by later additions to the game.

The other end of the "strongest 5e statblock" spectrum is shit like Sul Khatesh from Eberron, who earns the title of "most bullshit" by being immune to nonmagic attacks and creating antimagic fields. This is progress, because you might force someone to grapple it out of the field or something so everyone can deal damage! But this is still ultimately a pretty linear fight, not unlike fighting any other caster in the game, but with Less Counterplay.

My DMing style is pretty character goal-oriented, with the occasional bullshit superboss. We sit around for a few sessions while people pursue side projects and gather information, and then I subject them to the Horrors of a 5e fight that requires things like "positioning" and "planning" from turn to turn.

When playing a high level D&D campaign with insanely bullshit homebrew magic items and character-specific custom mechanics, it becomes necessary to pull out the big guns. The biggest guns. I'm talking a gun like my boy Hierarch Ozyas, undead demigod, father of monsters and heart of a living city, who had a meaty 2000 hit points and took somewhere in the vicinity of thirteen rounds of combat to bring down. Building bosses is an arms race and it's my job to lose in style. Here's Ozyas' statblock:

The bitch himself

Anyways I've been talking for a bit without actually saying anything of substance besides making fun of the Tarrasque. Which I will do one more time:

...deep breath...

D&D 5e is a pretty widely-disdained game by pretty much anyone who's ever played more than one RPG system. I myself only play it because I enjoy game design, and the thoroughly-beaten dead horse that WOTC calls a game serves as a decent foundation to do a lot of heavy tinkering. The Tarrasque is perfectly emblematic of all of the trash I have to wade through in order to get to the stuff worth keeping: it is an uninspired, anticlimactic relic of the past that didn't even manage to cling to a shred of its old glory and is instead content to wallow in the filth of what it once was, never once providing a challenge to any character with a flying speed. I would probably attempt to beat it to death with my hands (and fail, because it checks your character's stats rather than challenging you as a player in any way), but Jim the 1st level aaracokra with a save-forcing damage cantrip already solo'd it for me, so I'll settle for chewing through the throat of whichever game designer forgot they were making a "game" and submitted a three step flowchart for D&D's ultimate boss monster.

But anyways, I promised you a guide to how I design boss fights these days, so let's get to that.

Actually, first here's a quick aside about action economy that I didn't bother finding a place to fit in elsewhere: legendary actions are basically a necessity for any boss past level five or so. One big action is going to be a lot more polarizing than several small ones (i.e. one big crit on a large attack could completely flip the course of the fight, whereas multiple smaller attacks offer the same amount of damage output in a more consistent fashion). If you don't want to give your boss a bunch of HP to make it live long enough to take a few turns, you could consider giving it two turns in the initiative order (reducing the damage per turn to keep the damage per round constant). Low health minions are also a good way to pad out action economy, and even if they're easy to kill they tend to buy the boss another turn or two just from the actions it costs to take them down.

ANYWAYS, here's the core ideas I like to focus on in my boss design:

Keep them moving

Keep them working

Keep things changing

Reward good play

Punish mistakes

Make it a game

Along the way I'll be using snippets of the boss I mentioned above to illustrate examples of these principles and how they affected play. Let's begin.

KEEP THEM MOVING Positioning doesn't really matter in 5e. AoEs and movement values are both so large that you can easily get away with not having a battle map and sorta just tracking "in melee" or "not in melee." I run most fights without a battle map and just kinda track that, but for a good boss you need a map.

But how do we keep the game from just falling back into "move into range and hurt people," you ask? Simple: the Zone of Nasty. The Zone of Nasty is something on the map that is going to hurt the PCs if they're in it, and the Zone of Nasty moves. Depending on the boss, it could grow, shrink, follow a player, follow the boss, alternate between areas of the map, whatever. Some bosses might have multiple different Zones of Nasty that move in different ways and do different things.

There are other ways to force movement besides a moving AoE, such as punishing players for being too close or too far from each other or the boss.

The general principle here is that a boss should at times force suboptimal play: optimal play involves simply standing around, spending all your actions on damaging the boss, and it's incredibly boring from a strategic standpoint. There should be turns in which your players have to spend their action economy on protecting themselves or helping their allies. If they find themselves in a Zone of Nasty, it should force a decision between suffering the consequences to continue optimal play, or spending resources to get out of it.

Our boy Ozyas had a Cancer Field that he could move slowly around the arena that damaged and debuffed PCs inside it, and Pretender-God-Piercing Strike, a telegraphed line attack that oneshot anything that stayed in its area too long (more on this one later).

KEEP THEM WORKING Everyone needs a job to do! This job is probably just going to be based on what their class and abilities encourage them to do, but it sucks for someone to not be able to meaningfully participate in a boss fight.

Let the DPS players kick the boss's teeth in, obviously, but make sure the person who focused on AoE effects has some extra enemies that they can deal with. Bonus points if the extra enemies have something that forces them to be dealt with instead of just rushing the boss' HP bar.

Worst case scenario, throw in a secondary objective like completing a ritual, controlling a point on the map, or fighting the boss' soul on a higher plane to give someone who isn't immediately needed for DPS to still have something to do.

Ozyas spawned a bunch of extra monsters from these gross Birthing Pillars around the map, and killing the monsters and destroying the pillars provided a nice secondary course of action for people either not equipped to slug it out with the boss or not currently positioned right to fight him.

KEEP THINGS CHANGING The tarrasque sucks because it does one thing over and over until it works or it dies. The Theros splatbook improved on this marginally: Mythic Traits are fucking baller! Combats should change over the course of the fight, or this could have been a fucking autobattler. But we can go further.

In addition to occasionally shaking things up based on health thresholds, here's a few ways I like to do it:

Rotating list of effects that change every round

Huge list of options the boss can choose from for one of their effects with no repeats

Some sort of meter that increases and decreases based on what's happening in the fight and modifies the boss' abilities

Ozyas summoned new monsters every round and could customize the statblocks with a bunch of quick templates I whipped together, and in his second phase he started alternating between scaling the to hit/damage of his tentacle attack, the reach of his spear attack, and applying extra buffs to his summons.

REWARD GOOD PLAY These next two kind of tie together but the core idea here is that it's okay if a boss is a bit easy, as long as it makes your players work for it.

This can include things like ways to trivialize certain parts of the encounter as long as the players utilize them, typically at the cost of advancing other parts of the fight.

I knew that Ozyas was going to be a long fight, so I gave my players the ability to heal to full health, as an action, whenever they wanted. They were fighting inside Ozyas' body, and he was a generous host. However, any time they healed, he would be healed for the same amount. They got around this restriction by hitting him with Chill Touch to disable his own healing whenever people needed to heal, but that obviously had the cost of losing two actions' worth of damage output.

Towards the end of the fight, everyone was still standing thanks to that healing, but as he began to infinitely scale his stats once he reached his second phase and started taking them seriously, they couldn't afford to waste turns healing anymore and the safety net they built up by healing earlier in the fight kept anyone in the party from dying.

PUNISH MISTAKES The range on D&D characters' HP pools and general survivability can be pretty broad. I like to give my bosses a reasonably-heavy hitting melee and some sort of light ranged attack to remind the backliners that they too can die. But there's a third kind of attack.

The great equalizer.

The One Hit Knock Out move.

These need to be telegraphed. There needs to be copious time to get out of the area, or to stop the boss from using it, or whatever the case may be. But any superboss should have a way to threaten any player on equal standing: a move that will always hit if its conditions are met, and puts them clean to 0.

Ozyas' OHKO was Pretender-God-Piercing Strike, where at the end of each turn he would wind up a spear thrust with enough range to hit across the entire map, targeting a 15-foot line through the nearest player. Neither he nor the line could move after that, and if you were still in that line at the start of his next turn, you were done.

It wasn't hard to avoid: just walk like 10 feet and don't get pushed back in by another enemy. They even lined it up to target some of his own allies sometimes. But it forced them to think about positioning and stay moving, and there were a few times where it aaaaalmost caught someone in the line. The prospect of Instant Death really does wonders to ratchet up the tension.

And now, finally, we come to the most important part:

MAKE IT A GAME D&D 5e likes to jerk off while fantasizing about being real. "Catherine what the fuck are you talking about?" What I mean to say is that D&D makes a fumbling attempt towards a more simulationist style of game, trying to distance itself from the fact that it is, in fact, a game. It tries to comport itself like reality, such that every part of its combat makes sense in-universe, and then immediately falls short because it can't be assed to indulge in actual simulationism.

It is my belief that if you're going to spend 4 hours fighting a boss, and one of the boss mechanics doesn't really make much sense as an in-universe concept but does make the boss more interesting and fun to fight, then that's a perfectly fine mechanic. Obviously finding some way to justify it is preferable, but my bosses prioritize good gameplay over verisimilitude.

The upcoming boss in my campaign has a feature which puts the fight on a ten-round time limit before he begins kicking substantially more ass than he was before (and the prior ass-kickery was indeed already substantial). If this is a desperate fight with his life and his dreams on the line, why doesn't he open with that? If this were a WOTC statblock, barring a mythic trait, that's exactly how it would work. But fuck that, because it would make the fight way less interesting! Now there's time pressure! And sure, the post-round-ten version of the boss is meant to be fled from, not fought, but if he's at a low enough HP it could instead make for an insane climactic finish!

I let my players see the whole statblock before the fight. We talk through all of its abilities, and I'll even point out some of the potential points of complexity and the big risks to watch out for. There's no in-universe justification for why the characters would know this (beyond, perhaps "you're exceptional adventurers and are good at evaluating your foes"): in fact, one of the quintessential examples of classical 5e metagaming is the Guy Who's Read the Monster Manual. I think that's fucking stupid, though. With open statblocks:

Features can be game-warpingly deadly without instantly incurring a TPK born of ignorance. OHKO moves don't feel fair unless the counterplay is known

The players can strategize around the ways in which the boss is going to change throughout the fight

It's fundamentally fair. Some GMs just wait X turns and then let the boss go down when it takes a big, impressive hit (and I fully respect people who do that! That's still more compelling boss design than 5e's normal schlock), but I personally like when numbers have meanings.

You can still hide some information (I like to black out the boss' Mythic Trait, and then only use it if the players stomp the fight too easily), and you can still tweak it to adjust the difficulty, with the difference being that your players know it's being adjusted and how so (which again comes back to my feelings of fairness).

A few other fun mechanics to toss in include stacking debuffs that trigger something horrible at some certain threshold, additional win conditions or lose conditions, and silly little minigames. One trick I particularly enjoy is having my players secretly vote between two or more bad outcomes, and punishing them even more if the vote is tied.

CONCLUSION Your mileage may vary, but I'm hoping at least some of the insights here were useful to you! I have a particular strain of undiagnosed mental illnesses that make me especially predisposed towards piloting huge convoluted intricate bosses with 1k+ word statblocks, and I'm lucky enough to have players who know their shit well enough to play around this bullshit. Find something that works for you and your players.

If you hate 5e combat and think this sounds like way too much work to be worth doing, go play something else, like Pathfinder or Lancer or (heaven forbid) a game that actually struggles to trace its lineage of inspiration back to D&D. Go to itch.io and find some game no one's ever played before, and toss the creator a bit of money. The only way we're making it out of these goddamn Mines of Phandelver is if people try something new from time to time.

On the subject of cool games with cool combat, bear with me as I shill for a friend real quick. If you want a game that cares less about combat as an abstract dick measuring contest and more about combat as a facet of violence and all that that entails, check out [BXLLET> by @rathayibacter.

And, finally, from the bottom of my heart, fuck WOTC. Your books aren't even worth pirating, and the Tarrasque can blow me.

[devilishdm]

Agreed.

I’ve DMed since 2013 and basically only play home brew Pathfinder games these days. I think this post has some very valuable stuff that I’ll be using for my upcoming game, but I have some things to add, too:

Use your fluff

OP is right about D&D having formulaic fights, but that’s the fault of its game mechanics, which is out of your control a bit. One thing that is in your control, though, is storytelling. Not that you always should, but you *can* make some guys standing in place trying to hit each other interesting.

If a player rolls an 18 to hit but the AC is 20, they swung with their mace and the target caught the mace in the air! Next round player B goes in to help, also swinging at the target, this time hitting because of the flanking bonus. In storytelling, player A is locked in place, with the target holding their mace and player B comes in and smashes the target’s hand, causing them to release the mace! The PCs hi-five, and A tells B she owes him a pint at the tavern if they survive!

Almost none of that was stats-based, but it created a characterful moment. When the stats (the crunch) fail you, turn to your fluff. Sword fights are badass! Combat is drama! Don’t drop your imaginative storytelling just because you’re in combat. Someone gets hit for 1/3 of their HP, tell them they lose their leg! Someone gets hit for 10 damage tell them they lose feeling in their hand. A swing and a miss means you’re open to the enemy’s next attack, they swing and miss on their turn, meaning you’ve managed to bring your sword up to defend just in the nick of time! Maybe you’re left with a scratch on your sword from that hit that you need to buff out later. Letting the actual stats and the storytelling fluff balance each other is one of the keys to a successful game, I think.

Give Your Boss A Reality

Fights get boring when the boss’s only goal is to kill the players. Think about what the boss does when it’s not doing this. Are there booby traps it set up? Is its favorite vase dangerously close to the fight? Could it retreat from this battle and regroup with other forces later? If a battle companion goes down in combat will your boss change tactics? Will they suddenly fight with reckless abandon, or try to grab their fallen comrade and escape?

When you make your combat truly live, by making your characters and their actions more than just stat blocks and turn order, your combat becomes more than just math and tactics— suddenly it’s an opportunity for high-stakes roleplay, for seeing who someone really is when their back’s against the wall.

[biggaybunny]

I don't care about Dungeon Meshi otherwise but "Tallmen" is SUCH an elegant solution to placing humans in a fantasy setting that it's still blowing my mind. Just the term itself is enough to instantly recontextualize humans. They're no longer the default race. They're those big goobers with long legs, striding about all the time. I can so easily envision much more interesting relationships between humans and non-humans because of it. Like perhaps "tallmen" are stereotyped as shepherds by other races because they can watch over their flocks better, or as vagabonds because they are better suited to long travel on foot. And of course, they don't *literally* have to be taller than everybody else, they were just the tallest around whenever the label became the norm, or something like that. I just feel like it's so much better than what I've seen in settings like D&D that go "and humans are the... adaptable, generalist people :)!"

[stormtide-leviathan]

tags by @the-warlock-syndicate

[worddevourer]

And I mean, when you look at a lot of the common fantasy races, they usually do live either as long or longer than humans. Elves and Dwarves, at least, and depending whose hobbits/halflings/gnomes/whatever you're looking at, they might well live longer as well (Bilbo reaches 111 and he's surprisingly well preserved, but it's not unimaginable that he'd live that long).

And really, 'humans live fast and live hard' is definitely lore I've seen before. Now, that said, if you're like me, you're still peeved about D&D giving you just '+1 to stats' and that's it, when the lore of the setting is very much 'yeah, no, humans burn really bright while they're alive'

The 'Real World' option would probably be having human endurance going way above most species. Dungeon Meshi actually kind of does this; When Laios gets temporarily turned into a dwarf, he needs to stop to eat way sooner, though that may be more about calorie consumption from all those muscles, rather than about raw endurance. But also, see those posts about the terror of being pursued by humans as an animal, or the 'humans are space orcs' genre, where humans are commonly depicted as exceptionally durable.

In the 'humans are children of fire' thought in the tags above, you could do something similar, but you could also represent that as them literally learning faster than other people, because they have so much less time. For an RPG, having that as a mechanic might be challenging, depending on how learning/leveling up is balanced against innate abilities, but I imagine it could be done.

Like... Imagine you're an elf magus, and by the time you've gotten to grips with this human archmage, and you know their secrets, they're dead of old age, and by the time you've registered that, no, they're really gone, and it wasn't a murder, their two apprentices are already innovating on their techniques, and by the time you've fully processed that, they're already almost at the level of their old master.

Or, have them burn out brightly, and make it lore that most 'enlightened' species die gracefully, while humans rage and claw like animals, desperately trying to make something happen even if they know they're about to die.

[worddevourer]

Seriously, though, D&D, let humans take up to 7 levels of exhaustion, and the first doesn't count.

You're fleeing through the night, and day comes, and you're beginning to lose your senses, and you look back, and the humans are gritting their teeth, obviously not happy, but still going at full force.

[alexseanchai]

[image: tumblr tags: #for my own worldbuilding projects I always love associating humans with fire #I kind of hate the generic mcblandrace thing humans always got going on while elves are nature incarnate and dwarves are stone and metal # I conceptualize it thus. a race's elemental affinity is tied to the first friend of that race #dwarves made their homes and hid from predators in stone caverns and mines #elves lived in harmony and attunement with nature and the forests and were affected by their element #dwarves are craggy and tough like stone and age like rocks. elves age like the trees and take it slow #but humans? we are the beings of fire. it was not the caves that protected us nor the trees of the forest #fire was our first friend. in the primordial darkness it burned and cast away the shadows and frightened beasts of the night #we use it to cook our every meal and need it in a way that influences every aspect of our culture #as civilizations used to forge our tools and weapons. it heated our homes. the energy we take for granted was all fire #even today electricity is still predominantly made by fire #and we are as fire. swift-lived but terrible. a hungering devouring force which seeks to consume all the resources around it to expand #a human will never have the longevity of an elf or a dwarf. but the flame burns bright #much like the shifting lights and shadows of a bonfire the empires of mankind rise and fall with a terrible dramatic swiftness #compared to the relative placidity of elves and dwarves]

[probablybadrpgideas]

Just like you can upcast low-level spells, you can downcast high level spells.

First level meteor swarm just throws hot ping-pong balls. First level time stop stops time for exactly 0.05 seconds. First level wish lets you hope superhumanly hard that something will happen.

[ultrafacts]

[solarflicker]

So glad I decided to fact check this. I would have gone my entire life without knowing it was a Russian doll shark situation.

[ahsoka-in-a-hood]

Imagine you murdered some guy and dispose of the body by feeding it to wild shark. You'd think you were pretty smart. You'd think you got away with it. Unless the shark, before it's even finished digesting, gets eaten by another, bigger shark, and then the bigger shark, before it's even finished digesting, gets captured and taken to an aquarium where it vomits an identifying tattoo to a whole group of people. I mean what would be the odds of that happening

[marlynnofmany]

When we say truth is stranger than fiction, this is what we mean. What an absolutely bonkers set of coincidences.

[probablybadrpgideas]

Is there a particular wild magic table you’re using? Bc I need one for one of my campaigns and the RAW one is boring :(

It's my own one - Paper

[shiftythrifting]

t-mobile christmas sweater

[randomitemdrop]

Item: Sweater of the Five G’s; causes the wearer to emit cell phone signal. Roll save against also emitting whatever the hell conspiracy theorists claim 5G does, I tried to read a summary and it was too dumb for me to try and summarize here.

[bardicblast]

night of the full moon

[roboco-san]

found my new favorite d&d character background

[roboco-san]

pc: hey do u want to do me a favor and fuck with that cop?

six random commoners: boy do I!

[mightofmerchants]

Some people have asked me if I can publish my mapmaking tools. So I developed a software. 🙂

Here is the result:

Canvas of Kings on Steam

Canvas of Kings is a minimalistic mapmaking tool that focuses on randomness and auto-generated elements on user-definable and interactive pa

[yeoldenews]

A few of the better names I've come across in Regency era newspapers recently.

[mylordshesacactus]

Warlock concept: A warlock multiclassing as warlock.

[mylordshesacactus]

Two separate patrons, two separate pact boons.

Level 7 warlock multiclass: Warlock 4/Warlock 3.

[mylordshesacactus]

Celestial/Fiend.

[mylordshesacactus]

just this. constantly.

if you bribe the DM, go Pact of the Chain for both and literally have an angel and a devil on your shoulders 100% of the time.

[mylordshesacactus]

I probably shouldn’t be allowed to play d&d

[legogonkdroid]

everyone likes to talk about fucked up joke spells like "super brain hemmorage" and "fill lungs with water" but i let my players make spells once theyre a certain level and my sorceror just sent me this text

[deadreckon-deactivated20230712]

blood is basically the most normal thing for a sword to hunger for. if a sword gained sentience and started asking me for blood i'd be like yeah i thought you might say that

[devilishdm]

Item idea: sword that hungers for sandwiches. Sword that hungers for biscuits. Sword that you can’t take to the king’s feast because you can’t hear the king’s royal toast over your sword screaming at you in your head to take it out and cut the turkey on the table

[probablybadrpgideas]

Rarer D&D alignments

Bastard Good: You make the world better for people but in a really obnoxious way so everyone low-key hates you for it

Chaotic Dead: You set yourself on fire at the start of each session

Informed Evil: you're wearing a red cape and cackling so we kind of assume you've probably done some bad things off screen, right?

Lawful Pointless: You follow the rules of chess in every situation you find yourself in.

False Neutral: HAHA FOOLS! I WAS NO DRUID! I WAS A PALADIN ALL ALONG!

Lawful Anxious: You follow very strict laws but you don't know what those laws are or if you're breaking them.

Personal Evil: rather then making things worse for sapient life, you work to make things worse for Steve specifically. Everyone else is fine.

Centrist Neutral: "I don't support The Chained God Tharizdun breaking free and unmaking all reality but if we stop him through force we're just as bad as he is. Did you know there's actually zero difference between good and bad things?"

Sponsored Good: You provide justice, compassion and the great taste of subways sandwiches! Put in the code SMITETHESINNERS when ordering online for 20% off!

Sexy Lawful: You follow very strict rules but in such a way we kind of suspect you're getting off on it.

Chaotic Incidental: You act completely randomly but by sheer chance your actions turn out identical to if you followed very strict rules.

Theoretical Good: You want to do good things to help the world and once you stop binging Netflix you're absolutely going to.

Ugly Neutral: None of the other alignments want to hang out with you so you're neutral by default

Chaotic Meta: You pointedly refuse to follow the rules of the game you're playing.

Thirsty Evil: Look, orcs are hot, ok?

[funnytwittertweets]

[lekosis]

The dog has one of the Great Old Ones reassuring him with pats and treats tho. If the King in Yellow had played with u and fed u for ur entire life and let you sleep in his berth of unspeakable blackness at night, and then hugged you reassuringly when Cthulhu rose from the depths, you might be able to handle it better too

[devilishdm]

DM idea: all the gods see their followers like pets