June DWC 2026 Day 7 - Horrify
Thursday nights had been something sacred to the group. Nobody officially declared it tradition, but somewhere between deployments, transfers, and increasingly complicated schedules, the five of them had collectively decided D&D campaign night took priority. They had trained together for the elite forces and despite no longer being stationed in the same places, somehow still found time every other week to gather at someone’s apartment, drink some cheap beer or wine, and make poor decisions inside worlds Keyalin built entirely from scratch.
Tonight was at Keyalin and Aerden’s apartment, which meant the dining table had once again ceased functioning as usable furniture for about a few days prior. Blackwater Crossing spread across nearly the entire surface in absurd detail. Crooked harbor streets twisted between weathered buildings, lanterns were fully functional, market stalls sat cluttered with hand-painted details, and the docks looked damp enough to smell faintly of saltwater. There were fishing nets, barrels, moss creeping along stone, and even tiny scattered oyster shells.
Lyessa stood over the table with crossed arms, staring. “There’s algae,” she said after a long pause.
Keyalin glanced up from organizing miniatures. “Yes.”
“Like, -actual- algae.”
“It improves the realism, why wouldn’t there be algae?”
Sael crouched lower and suspiciously narrowed his eyes. “Did you paint fish?”
“Yes.”
“You painted individual fish?”
“They’re part of the environment. Do you want your sets to look real or not?”
Across the room, Aerden sat comfortably on the couch with a beer, looking amused and unsurprised by any of this. Unlike everyone else, he had long ago accepted that living with Keyalin occasionally meant overhearing deeply concerning statements like ‘the dock erosion lacks authenticity’ at two in the morning.
“He spent three hours repainting roof moss last night,” Aerden mused.
“The original texture didn’t look right,” Keyalin replied.
“You whispered ‘immersion is suffering’ like someone died.”
Talia had already picked up one of the miniatures and was inspecting it closely. “…Did you contour this merchant’s face?”
“Well, of course,” Keyalin said.
“He’s an inch tall!”
“He still deserves cheekbones.”
Lyessa sighed, “you continue to horrify me.” It was a compliment from her, and Keyalin took it as one with an amused grin.
The strange thing was that if anyone outside their group saw Keyalin like this, they probably would not recognize him. He was usually much quieter and more reserved. A little awkward sometimes, especially socially. The kind of person who paused too long before answering because he was carefully thinking through every possible interpretation of a sentence.
But campaign nights transformed him into someone else entirely. The moment he sat behind the screen, something shifted. He smiled and moved more, he became expressive in ways that bordered on theatrical. The awkward engineer who occasionally stumbled through small talk disappeared, replaced by someone fully committed to storytelling, dramatic tension, and too many NPC accents.
“Previously,” Keyalin began, lowering his voice dramatically in a way that made everyone groan, “our collection of catastrophically underqualified adventurers arrived in the harbor city of Blackwater Crossing seeking answers regarding the disappearances beneath the cathedral district.”
“Oh, we’re being insulted immediately,” Sael muttered.
“You robbed a funeral home,” Keyalin reminded him.
“It was abandoned!”
“There was an active funeral!”
“There were no signs...”
“There were mourners.” Keyalin sighed, this was normal.
Sael’s rogue, Rook, was essentially just Sael with lockpicks and worse impulse control. Overconfident, reckless, and somehow still charming enough to survive consequences, Rook approached danger with the unwavering confidence of someone who had survived enough bad decisions to start trusting the process.
Lyessa played Seraphine, a heavily armored paladin who specialized in healing and spent most sessions functioning as the exhausted parent of the group. Off the table, Lyessa had always been practical, dependable, and quietly protective, and somehow she had accidentally recreated herself in fantasy form.
“I just want everyone to know,” Lyessa said while organizing dice, “that if any of you touch something obviously cursed this time, I reserve the right to slap you after healing you.”
“Hostile much?” Talia replied.
“You remember what happened last time.”
Talia’s warlock, Vesper, remained one of Keyalin’s greatest narrative challenges because she treated every single encounter as a potential romantic opportunity. Guards, villains, mysterious strangers, cultists, even suspicious entities… it truly did not matter. He was also fairly certain she had used those skills in real life against Aerden, judging by the way they kept glancing at each other across the table with obvious interest.
“You flirted with a wanted criminal last session,” Lyessa reminded her.
“He had sad eyes.” Talia pointed out with a smile.
“He murdered six people.”
“I could fix him.” She winked over to Aerden.
Aerden, meanwhile, had refused to play anything remotely close to a healer. “I already heal people in real life,” he had said months ago. “In my free time I would like to hit things.” His barbarian, Bram, reflected this philosophy beautifully. Dryly sarcastic and profoundly practical, Bram approached everything by asking whether it could be solved through violence before entertaining literally any other option.
The evening’s session began in the harbor market, where rumors of disappearances beneath the cathedral had begun circulating among fishermen. Keyalin slipped seamlessly between characters, moving effortlessly from a suspicious dockworker to an exhausted merchant to a city guard who was clearly hiding something. Watching him work always felt faintly surreal, because he got so into it. He gestured while speaking, changed his accent, tone, and even posture between NPCs, and did insanely realistic sound effects.
The disaster began when Sael attempted stealth. Again. “I rolled a natural one…”
Aerden sighed immediately, and the other two facepalmed, something terrible was about to happen. Rook was the worst rogue in existence.
Rook attempted to discreetly sneak through the fish market. Instead, according to Keyalin’s increasingly delightful narration, he tripped over stacked crates, tangled himself in fishing netting, knocked over an entire display of oysters, and accidentally stumbled face-first into the single angriest goose in existence.
Keyalin dug through his stash of minis before placing a tiny, white, angry-looking goose onto the table. “You see...” he spoke slowly, visibly trying not to laugh already, “an aggressively territorial harbor goose filled with resentment!"
Silence.
Talia immediately leaned forward. “Oh my god.” She considered seducing it, but decided that perhaps even Vesper had her limits.
Aerden nearly snorted beer through his nose.
The goose attacked instantly. It bit Sael hard enough to knock off a good chunk of hit points. It chased a screaming Lyessa through the market, who apparently had unresolved issues with birds. It stole bread directly out of Talia’s inventory. Then, somehow, it snatched a folded map from an NPC cultist and sprinted into the harbor district while hissing like something fueled entirely by vengeance.
“You’re kidding,” Sael said.
“We have to pursue the goose!” Aerden exclaimed.
Thanks to one entertaining roll after another, the goose kept accidentally helping. It led them toward hidden tunnels beneath the cathedral, bit a suspicious priest, exposed someone secretly involved in disappearances, and then violently attacked a cultist carrying an important key.
“He senses evil,” Talia whispered.
By the end of the investigation, after Sael fed it stolen berries and Lyessa wrapped a scarf around its neck ‘for characterization,’ nobody wanted to leave it behind.
“What’s his name?” Keyalin asked, already sounding tired. This was all improvised and not a part of the plan, but this was also how every single one of their campaigns always went.
Aerden answered immediately, “Duke Honkers.”
Nobody questioned it, and they all immediately cheersed Duke Honkers.
The cathedral beneath the harbor came later. Keyalin physically swapped sections of the map while narrating their descent underground, and the mood shifted almost instantly. The deeper they traveled, the stranger things became. Hallways bent subtly wrong, statues seemed to change direction when no one was looking, and something wet moved somewhere in the distant dark.
Then, Keyalin stood and everyone immediately groaned.
“Oh no,” Talia muttered.
“He’s standing,” Lyessa sighed.
“That means trauma,” Sael winced.
“....But we have Duke Honkers, all will be well.” Aerden whispered.
The creature descended slowly from the ceiling. Keyalin paced slightly as he described it, fully committed now, voice low and unsettling enough that even Aerden stopped joking. Flesh hung unevenly across its body like soaked cloth stretched over bones assembled incorrectly. Limbs folded inward at grotesque angles, joints clicking as they reset themselves with squelching sounds.
Faces moved beneath its skin. Not fully visible, just impressions pressing outward briefly before disappearing again, mouths opening silently beneath translucent flesh. Too many eyes blinked in places eyes should not exist. Mouths split across ribs and palms, with rows of teeth grinding together while fragments of overlapping voices escaped in frightened whispers.
“The smell reaches you next,” Keyalin continued quietly. “Saltwater and rot, with something sweet underneath that in an attempt to mask the stench.”
The fight became chaotic. Sael nearly got swallowed after another bad stealth roll. Lyessa spent most of combat healing everyone through visible disappointment and constant swearing. Aerden solved problems by throwing furniture. Talia attempted flirting with the eldritch horror, which forced Keyalin to physically stop narrating because he was laughing too hard.
Through logic nobody could fully explain, Duke Honkers landed the final blow. The room exploded into laughter while Keyalin sat behind the screen staring at the battlefield in complete disbelief. “You know, there wasn’t even supposed to be a goose.”
“He chose us,” Talia replied.
“He chose violence,” Aerden corrected with a firm nod.
Keyalin looked down at the tiny goose miniature, sighed dramatically, and quietly moved it beside the party figures. “Fine,” he muttered. “Congratulations.”
Duke Honkers had joined the campaign. Keyalin already had three ideas for his backstory.
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