This was in a D&D 5e game, and features the only character I've ever had get from level 1 all the way to 20.
This is the story of Rotmar.
So I've been playing dnd with my great friends for about 4 or 5 years now, and one of the newest members in our group (who had been playing with us just a few months at the time) wanted to DM their first game. I actually wasn't there for the first session, which I actually liked because the group used to rely heavily on me just being there for the game to function, given that I basically have the players handbook memorized.
In the first session, the group had dealt with a tribe of Kobolds, lead by a dragonborn sorcerer, who had a magical goblet with some kind of connection to Tiamat. After my friends texted me the basics of what I missed, when the session ended. I immediately had an idea. I texted the DM, and asked if I could be a Kobold who was a survivor of the tribe they just killed, the DM said yes, and thus… Rotmar came to be.
Rotmar was a little red Kobold, who was a dragon sorcerer with a red dragon ancestor. He started out like your typical Kobold, a scrawny, cowardly, weakling, who begged for his life. But over time he became what no other Kobold had before. Rotmar also had this special little bonus, thanks to the ritual the now dead dragonborn sorcerer had done with the magic goblet. The DM intended for this to be a curse, and something would happen to me every long rest, but they always forgot to do it. The curse had its own benefits though, because it increased all my stats by 1, and gave me +1 to my AC, it also made Rotmar's already red scales, look as though they were made of pure ruby. (This becomes slightly more relevant later)
I'm a little fuzzy on all the details now, but I remember that after leaving the kobold lair, the group had given the goblet to a wizard, who was the person that hired the group to raid the Kobolds. Rotmar wasn't happy at first that his holy relic was taken, but the wizard did eventually give it back to him if I remember correctly. After this, the group was sent by the wizard to protect a farm from a werewolf attack. I had a stroke of cleverness when we got to the farm, and spent about 4 hours making a 10 foot deep trench around the entire farm with the mold earth cantrip, and used all the extra dirt to build a wall on our side of the trench, then I got a ladder, climbed up to the top of the barn, and we waited until nightfall.
For this session, I think it was only me and one other player, who was a Kenku Samurai. When the werewolf eventually showed up, I stayed on the roof of the barn and blasted it with firebolt's, while the Kenku shot it with their bow. The pit trap didn't trap the werewolf sadly, but the dirt wall did slow it down enough for us to get a few free hits on it. We killed the werewolf easily, even though we were terrified it would obliterate us, and then returned to the wizard. It was at this point the DM handed us a map, and the wizard sent us on a quest, to journey to the capital city, which was about 2 weeks away.
Along the way we ended up killing an entire tribe of bandits, and claimed the mine they were using as our base… which we never even used. We left the mine after marking it on our map, and continued on our way to the capital city. When we finally got there, we finished the wizard's task… which was delivering a package to some tavern owner, and then proceeded to look for quests to do.
Eventually we found one, it was a woman who found out there were monsters living under her child's bed, and she asked us to take care of it. It turned out that there was a dungeon beneath her house, and the entrance of it was in her child's bedroom. Inside this dungeon were some homebrew monsters the DM wanted to try out, the main one being some kind of wall that just crawls over to you and breathes fire. After we finished clearing out the dungeon, we gathered all the loot we could, I don't remember everything that we got, but there happened to be a wand of wonder, and this strange horn. The horn didn't appear to be magical, yet it seemed magical at the same time, we blew it a few times, but nothing seemed to happen. Well, no big deal, we leave the dungeon, get paid for our work, and try to sell some of the loot. Eventually we end up in a magic shop, and we sell and buy a bunch of stuff. Then I think we either tried to sell, or identify the horn with the magic shop owner. Either way, he took one look at it and asked if we had blown it. We told him that we did, multiple times, and the magic shop owner just wished us a good day, teleported us out of the shop, and teleported the entire shop away. We later found out that this horn had apparently set a timer, which would summon the tarrasque after about 9 months. Needless to say, we were panicking once we found that out, as we were only level 3 or 4 at the time.
The rest of the campaign then became a grind quest, to get enough xp to level high enough, to possibly take on the tarrasque. I don't fully remember the how or why, but we ended up going to another capital city in the south, and lording over that city happened to be a dragon god, who took one look at Rotmar and removed his curse. This dragon god explained that the curse was created by a mad wizard long ago, and he made multiple different types according to different gems, if a dragon being became powerful enough, the wizard could essentially reincarnated himself, and possess their body. This is when Rotmar's holy goblet of tiamat was also destroyed, which turned out to be an object of the mad wizard the whole time. As a way of reimbursing Rotmar for his loss of power, the dragon god gave him magic resistance, which gave him advantage on all spell saves and magical effects.
After that we left while flying on the back of a gold dragon, while flying back to the first big capital city, our rogue spotted a green dragon below us, and thought it would be funny to attack it. He had bought these homebrewed firework bomb things while in the city we just left, and decided to drop one on the green dragon. This caused us to be chased by an adult green dragon, while we were still flying on the back of the gold dragon. The gold dragon just kept flying, and let us attack the green dragon, we had a range advantage on it, and withered down its health, eventually killing it. Killing that adult green dragon brought us from level 5, to level 7. Honestly we were entirely lucky to have killed it at all.
We eventually found the dragon's horde, and took the spoils of our kill back to the first Capitol city, we sold a bunch of stuff, bought a bunch of magic items, etc… and this is where the DM made their fatal mistake, one of the magic shops had a deck of many things. I don't exactly remember the hows or why's, but the rest of the party apparently tried to buy or steal the deck of many things, when I wasn't at the game. When I got there though, they wanted me to try and buy the deck of many things. The magic shop owner liked Rotmar, and gave him a sweet deal on it, as I traded in multiple magic items for it. Now a level 7 Kobold sorcerer had a deck of many things in his hands, and proceeded to use the entire deck in the span of about an hour. I don't remember the full details of that hour, but while I had the deck, I only ever pulled red cards, while the rogue and samurai pulled the instant kill cards, meanwhile, I had basically every good card in the deck except the one that granted wishes, so I had my own castle, 50,000 gold worth of gems, expertise in persuasion, and so much more. I even got the service of a 4th level Kobold fighter because of one of the cards, and ended up dual charactering the rest of the campaign. We called this second KoboId Sagna, and his scales were green. Eventually someone realized that since I was playing both a red and green kobold, I was basically playing the Mario bros. So from that point on, we had a running joke of calling my Kobolds Rotmario and Saguigi, and I loved it.
I asked the two party members with me who wanted to be brought back with the magic of the fates card, the rogue wanted me to, while the samurai player wanted to change characters. So I brought the rogue back, and we got back to business.
The samurai player ended up making a warforge artificer, and after meeting up with them, we all decided to go fight in the arena, and this is officially the moment where Rotmar was no longer a cowering kobold, and instead gained a god complex. The arena was easy, as Rotmar just used slow on a lot of the big enemies, like a hydra, and some homebrew dragon rhino things. This brought him up from level 7 to I think 8 or 9. After the arena, we decided to go clear out the castle that Rotmar acquired ownership of from the deck of many things. When you pull the card, it informs you that the castle is full of monsters, and needs to be cleared out.
We made our way to the castle, and killed a bunch of gargoyles, along with a sapphire dragon, I don't even remember what level that brought us up to, or what we did next; however, I do remember that shortly afterwards I was a high enough level to cast plane shift. We found out about a white dragon who had a lair up north, and seeing as we had taken down 2 or 3 other dragons by this point, we decided to take it on. When we got there, Rotmar climbed along the ceiling with slippers of spider climbing, while the rest of the party fought it. This was an ancient white dragon, and the DM had forgotten about its legendary resistances. I kept moving until I was directly over it, and jumped off the ceiling. When I landed on the dragons back, I smacked it with a plane shift, which it completely failed. It was sent to pandemonium, and we were all like level 16 at this point because of that fight, except for Sagna, who was always about 2 levels behind.
At this point the dm figured that if we could take on an ancient white dragon, we could take on the Tarrasque. So she skipped the 6 or 7 months we had left and had the tarrasque go straight to the capital city. We had a day to prepare, and after doing all we could, the fight of our lives began. For this session we were pulling an all nighter, and the fight with the Tarrasque lasted until 8:30PM, to 8:30AM. In the end, we didn't even kill the tarrasque, Rotmar was out of spells, our warforge artificer could do basically nothing to the tarrasque, and our rogue was buried alive under the rubble of a tower. As a last resort, Rotmar flew down to the Tarrasque's foot and put down a portable hole, then on my next turn I flew 20 feet up, and dropped a bag of holding into it. The tarrasque was sucked into the astral plane, and we became heroes of the land.
But this story doesn't end there. At this point we were level 19, while Sagna was 16 or 17, and we decided we needed more, we needed to take on an ancient red dragon.
I'll just skip to the part where I tell you that we beat the red dragon, which brought us all up to 20, except sagna, who was only 19. Thus, Rotmar had killed about 5 or 6 dragons, and defeated the mighty Tarrasque. But there was one more trial ahead. Within the dragons lair was a portal, and after opening it we walked through, and there we appeared before none other than the DM themself. The DM challenged us, and said if we could last 60 seconds in a fight, then we would win an extraordinary prize. We agreed to it, completely cocky in our abilities. The artificer went first, and tried to shoot the DM with their thunder cannon. The DM then proceeded to pull out a sword, that cut the bullet out of existence, and made the artificer completely disappear. This is when Rotmar and the Rogue both looked to each other, they had rolled the same on their initiative, and Rotmar's kobold instincts suddenly kicked in. Rotmar insisted that the rogue try something first, the rogue agreed and tried to stab the DM, he was met with the same fate as the artificer. Now completely panicking, Rotmar casts wish, and wishes for it to be 60 seconds in the future. The DM smiled and said that I had passed, as the actual test was the not fight at all. The DM then stepped down from their throne and gave it to Rotmar, then disappeared to another dimension, where he asked the artificer and rogue if they would like to be reincarnated into a new world they were creating. They ended up only being out in prisons by the DM's sword earlier. The two of them said they would like to be reincarnated, and the dm took their souls and left, for a completely new world, which ended up being for the DM's next campaign. Leaving Rotmar as the DM of his own universe.
And that was the story, of how an unassuming Kobold, rose to become the ruler of the very fabrics of the multiverse itself, that was the story of Rotmar.
[zombify_post]
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