Nowe Udie (Now You-Die) - The assassin!

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A boring campaign demanded a little bit of excitement and creative problem solving.

My normal group of D&D players was small, consisting of four to six playing one, maybe two characters. Games were fast and fun, and campaigns were less than a few weeks long at the most.

At my college, in the back of the large cafeteria, there was an almost non-stop game of D&D going on. It peaked my attention and I sat in to watch.

These were massive campaigns, with twenty or more players running two or more characters and some had NPC (non-player characters) staff they controlled. The DM was extremely competent and handled the chaos, but it was slow where simple tasks took hours. To those who don’t play, imagine trying to get a small town to pack up for an impromptu road trip.

This was over forty years ago, so some of my memories of rules and what went on are hazy at best.

I watched for hours as this group was preparing for a long caravan trip led by an insufferable Paladin and his extensive player and NPC entourage. It was enormously painful as some of the lower-level players delighted in having their characters doing dumb attention-gathering things, like getting drunk, playing cards, and getting naked. About to leave to start the adventure? Hey, let’s start a bar fight. Gleeful dice rolling as we sat waiting. Some of the players were complete jerks in and out of the game.

There was the cute girl who played flirty characters that had the guys enraptured. There is a great movie called Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (2016) with Tina Fey about war correspondents. They had a phrase something like six-ten-six. Back home, you are about a six out of ten, in war zones, you become a ten, and six when you head back home. This applied (back then) as D&D was a dorky guy world.

I kept thinking, “This group needs an assassin to clear out some of the chaff.” I don’t normally roll evil characters. Chaotic Neutral is about it.

The DM is like a drug dealer, always looking to get someone hooked. He tells me I should roll up a new character. I pass a note to the DM if they had, allowed, or needed an assassin to get things “moving.” This idea seems to shock and delight him, and he agrees.

First level characters are newborn kittens. All hiss and no fight. Assassins are from the thief class, more about stealth and stealing than direct fighting.

I roll up Nowe Udie (sounds like Now You-Die). I get a note that the head merchant may need my services. In real life, the guy who is the player, kind of looks like a merchant, round and merry with a scruffy beard.

My first job is a troublesome player who is at least level five. To win, you must be smart, tricky, and lucky to take on a much higher-powered character. This guy is a fighter, so it is even a greater mismatch.

While he was out, I slipped into his caravan wagon and poisoned his beer. Dressed as a beer keg, I waited for his return. The target misses his saving throw, and I may have stabbed him to death to finish it. Nowe Udie strips him naked and poses him on the bed embracing a dead sheep. I add a tender love note professing deep and abiding love to said sheep. My character slips out unnoticed with the player’s valuables in his bag of holding. The next day I return to the D&D game and the table is buzzing about the death of the character. The player has no idea who killed his character. The note causes a stir. The merchant and DM think this is hilarious. When a DM likes it, you get to do more bizarre things without explaining how you managed to look like a beer keg.

The merchant buys all kinds of things from adventurers, like a small cask of rare and expensive purple worm poison. The cost is far beyond early-level characters to get, but the merchant had a problem and extra stock. This is fun stuff, if you get hit with it, missing your saving throw does huge damage (12d6?) and half damage even if you make the saving throw. Assassins get to throw three darts or shuriken per round. They do almost no damage (1-3 pts per dart) unless they are dipped in purple worm poison, then missing even one saving throw roll likely means death.

You are not fighting back if you are making savings rolls. You can see the pattern here, which brings more jobs and more levels.

A small team of adventurers consisting of a low-level magic user, a cleric, and two fighters have become a problem. They are stealing from the merchant and others.

Nowe Udie watches as they go carousing after a big score. They get a bit handsy with the new cute barmaid. After eating, they all must make their saving throws. All but one dies, and no one notices “sleeping” drunk guests, because the barmaid announces a round of beer at the bar for everyone and hands a gold coin to the proprietor. The bar maiden helps the lead fighter out to be sick. She returns to clear the table plates.

Someone yells there is a dead soldier outside. (A friendly DM gift). Oddly, he is stripped of his weapons and valuable. Most of the crowd goes out to look and the nice barmaid strips the bodies of the dead their valuables into a bag of holding and slips out the back door slipping a second coin on the bar for another round of beer. A few moments later, out of a nearby room, steps a monk.

Why wasn’t Nowe Udie dressed like the cook? Because the barmaid was funnier to me. When he got his butt pinched, the DM rolled to see if they might find a weapon or find out that he was a guy. The outrageousness was what kept me getting so many breaks. The DM had allowed me to make up outrageous costumes and circumstances to set up kills. These twenty people are trying to figure out who is killing everyone. I don’t even remember if I gave them a fake name for my character at first. It wasn’t odd for characters to be named things like Finnegan the Deathbringer, so mine wasn’t weird. They start fighting with other characters and killing NPC, as my character keeps going up levels and getting richer, which gives him access to purchasing weird poisons, potions, enchanted armor, weapons, and costumes.

The merchant and the DM are having fun, and that goes a long way to your character’s survival. I keep getting notes with jobs. Then a big one comes in for the pompous paladin (I think it was him, there were lots of haughty high-level warrior characters). This guy is leagues in levels above mine. A punch from him would kill me. No weapon I had would nick his magical armor. The guy running him is as irritating as the character, and not very bright. This guy had been a jerk to most of the others. I am more than a bit arrogant myself.

In costume, I get hired as a lowly page. My job is to clean his tent, polish his stuff, and get him ready for the campaign. This was some of the stuff they did for the sake of reality.

I privately tell the DM what has happened, and he is trying not to laugh. The morning of the campaign comes, and the DM calls the great warrior over and he talks to him privately. The player is angry, scanning his player sheet pointing out things, and frowning. He is pulling out dice and rolling, and rolling, and rolling, and rolling. He cycles through cheers and far more groans.

It turns out, when he had his team of retainers slip on his chainmail over his cloth hauberk, some ass has twisted in hundreds of sharp, pokey wires into the rings of his chainmail. Each of these needle-sharp tips had been covered in purple worm and other kinds of poison. The character fell face down and falling jabbed more wires into him. It was rolled that his retainers flipped him over to help him, and he got more jabs in his back requiring more saving throws he had to do. He had to do a saving throw for every wire. The DM had made up a percentage that would not have gone through his cloth hauberk, it was still an enormous number.

Realistically, it would have taken days to wire the chainmail, and coat the wires from the outside or I would have had to roll saving throws as well for slipups. I never found out how much damage the character took.

His character dies and calls to his god in a last-ditch effort to save him and it works due to being high in the cult. Now, this guy isn’t particularly bright, so he asks to be saved from the purple worm poison as that has been the commonly used poison recently.

He is saved from the purple worm poison. Hooray!

Then he is instructed to start rolling again. The guy is mad, his god has saved him from purple worm poison, and he owed him a quest or something! Weird, some of the spikes have other poisons on them as well and that is what kills him.

To top it all off, some jerk (me) bought up the last of the purple worm antidote weeks earlier. Not a drop in the whole region.

For some reason, maybe I was focusing on school, I was gone from playing for a few weeks. I came back and word got out that I was Nowe Udie. I expected some angry people, as many live vicariously through their characters, and I did as well. Not too much. I was told that two other assassins had joined the campaign; "So Udie" and "And Udie", who were my “brothers.” The players were not very imaginative, so it was not so flattering.

Udie didn’t check his shoes and little poisoned spikes were nailed up through the souls of his shoes. I slipped a poisoned ring on his hand; And Udie finding the dead assassin stole the ring and died moments later. They were low-level characters, so it wasn’t too difficult to finish them. More love notes to sheep were found with them, but no sheep. I was maturing and caring about completely fictitious animals.

This group moved over to playing the slightly more realistic RuneQuest, so Nowe Udie and D&D just faded away. For a while, I put the ASS in assassin.

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