So here’s a recent story from our current campaign:
After defeating the boss of a low-level dungeon, we did a little exploring of the nooks and crannies for more items and experience from any other monsters left around. One of our party members is a Kenku, and one of his character flaws is to seek for knowledge at any cost, even if it is at a detriment to the team. We come across a wax statue with no face that looks human in shape, with a wick behind its head. For most of us, this is our first DND campaign and none of the players ever came across this kind of item/creature before. So we investigate, while our only sorcerer goes off to take a leak, both in and out of the game. The Kenku is the only one brave enough to approach this thing, and thinks it funny to use his Forgery skill to draw our Sorcerer’s face onto the wax statue. (Rolls a 1, it looks like ) Then, curious, the Kenku lights the wick with his torch. The team stands back, waiting for this thing to attack us. Instead, it mimics the Kenku’s movements. The Kenku extinguished the flame, and it stops moving. Curious to see how resilient it is, the Kenku (who just leveled up in the last battle) tests out one of his new bloodmage skills. It’s super-effective, and the wax statue explodes all over the cave walls. Our sorcerer comes back from taking a wizz, and the team explains what happened and why there’s wax everywhere. He does an arcana knowledge check, and we find out it was a magical item that would have followed the telepathic commands of the one who lit its wick, and would have been a nice additional team member/bait/decoy and would have saved us on torches (although we all had a decent amount of torches anyway). We all get mad at the Kenku for destroying a potentially useful item.
A few minutes of dungeoning later, the group is ambushed by some floating shade monsters with tentacles that can psychically cause darkness to the whole party in the area (when concentrating), and can grapple the head of its prey. Once we can see again, our bard, monk, and the Kenku have been grappled. We roll initiative and the monk tries to get it off her head by bashing the monster against the floor and punching it (she was panicked). My character, a half-orc barbarian with amnesia and has the vocabulary and mannerisms of The Tick (he’s friends with everyone until they’re not his friends), despite rolling a 9 for Intelligence, sees his monk friend bashing her head to try and loose the monster from her head, and sees his Kenku friend needs a little help. I’m still pissed that he screwed us over, but my character is too dumb to know that. He just sees his friend in trouble, and enlightened by the monk’s actions, with one hand he grabs the monster on the Kenku’s head, and yells, “Don’t worry, bird friend! I’ll help you!” Then he proceeds to slam the monster, along with the Kenku’s head, against the closest cave wall. (Nat 20, 2d4 damage to the creature, and DM says 1d4 damage to the Kenku…it was 4) The creature de-couples, but the Kenku, suffering a mild temporary concussion, squawks with his limited vocabulary, “Bacon, children are delicious, who the f*ck are you?!” The other barbarian (a dwarf) in the party with 20 Strength and 16 Intelligence just pulls the creature off of the struggling monk without trouble. The half-orc barbarian stands proud, grinning, because he helped his bird friend. The players felt that was punishment enough for earlier.
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