I have a couple of stories floating around /tg/ at this point, most about D&D with my amazing DM, but what people don't know about him is just how dark he can get.
Take our Call of Cthulhu campaign.
See, we got a little bit uppity and may have over stepped our bounds, which put the DM, or GM in this case, into maximum passive-aggressive mode. In 3 sessions, a group of 4 of players lost no less than two dozen characters. And they went out brutally.
Some caught fire, some lost their minds and went rambling into the night, and more than a couple shot themselves after taking out an ally or semi-important NPC. Needless to say, we had lost a lot of hope for playing a full campaign with a single character.
And then I created Bonzy, the sad clown.
Bonzy was my way of trying to apologize to the GM, a way to appease him if you will. After all, what better way to show heartbreak than with a symbol of joy and fun shattered into a broken and unloved shell?
Bonzy dressed simply. He wore very little makeup, a small red nose, had dark hair, and his clown uniform was covered with an old, worn trench-coat that was not as bad-ass as it implied. He had a slight drinking problem, but managed to maintain sobriety without withdrawal, and never seemed to crack a smile.
He met the other players by chance, having missed his bus and decided to bum it in the town for a few days because hell, it's not like he really had anywhere to be after all. The first character to find me thought I was a traveling clown, and tried to strike up a chat about his chosen career.
“Hey, Bonzy, know any good jokes?”
“... Why did little Suzy fall of the swings?”
“I don't know, why?”
“Because little Suzy lost her arms to cancer years ago.”
Bonzy sighed, slowly reached up, and honked his nose.The table was dead quiet, save for the player I just spoke to. He wore a priceless expression of “sweet god you're serious” and quietly giggled.
“Do, uh, you know any others?”
“Knock knock.”
“Who's there?”
“Not Suzy.”
HonkThe game proceeded rather organically from there, with the occasional interjection from Bonzy on why the town was fucked up and we should leave. When they encountered a librarian who just so 'happened' to be the local cult leader, Bonzy was the first to know. After all, who else would know when someone was faking anything?
The trap we set was simple, but if anyone here has played Call of Cthulhu, then you know simple doesn't mean jack. We entered the library, two of us moving to the roof, the third sneaking behind the building. Leading the charge? The only one who didn't care what happened; Bonzy. The sad clown ever so quietly knocked on the door, watching the librarian fish for his keys as rain gently drizzled in the night outside the windows. Bonzy entered, took off his coat, and draped it over his arm with only a few words of greetings.
As we talked, our third guy suddenly found himself at the business end of a shotgun, and as if he was a machine, pulled out another character sheet and started generating a new character. The other two were just as unlucky, knocked down and grappled by other cultists who were on the stairwell. Everyone was already pulling out sheets, muttering how they made a mistake and were going to do better next time.
But they forgot Bonzy.
After all, nobody cares about Bonzy.The librarian, still unaware of the ruse, pretends to act nice, talking about the books and how he hopes that the fire was going to be enough to dry off. And then, Bonzy hearing the clattering, decides to act. The librarian also decides to ask the obvious question of Bonzy.
“So, since you're a clown, I'm sure you know plenty of jokes. Got any about books?”
“Sure. What did the one book say to the other?”
“What?”
“I was just checking to see if we were on the same page.”
HONK
BLAMBonzy fired the revolver he was hiding under his coat, spreading the librarians brains over the bookshelves directly behind him. This of course alerted the cultists to the sad clown below, and the one behind the building decided to investigate, leaving the tied up player beaten, but alive.
The cultist rounds the corner, pulling out his gun and trying to spot something in the library. He never saw Bonzy behind him with the law book.
Ten hits over the head later, Bonzy wipes the blood off his face and examines his work. “Guess I threw the book at you.”
HONKThe other three cultists on the room, send two of their own to investigate, which were promptly disposed of by the sad clown lurking in the shadows with the gun and a collected works of Shakesphere. “Not to be, I guess.”
HONKAfter freeing his allies and finding a map of the area, Bonzy turned to his group, and stated flatly “I'll be in the car. Reading in the dark is bad for your eyes.”
HONKThe campaign continued without much happening for awhile, losing only one member in the span of a month of game time, which we thought spoke highly of our redeemed status, but I wouldn't stop yet. I wanted to ensure our GM wasn't going to kill us in the middle of the night. Bonzy remained just as sad, and it served him well when they met the second group of cultists.
The location was an abandoned funeral home. Apparently, the cult was of an eldritch god who was most powerful with the dead. No big surprise, seeing as everyone up to this point had connections with some dead family member from years ago. We pull the car around the back, two sneak in the vent, and two (Bonzy) sneak in the back door. We knock out two guards and tie them up with a stretchy rubber chicken, then make our way deeper into the building. First room we find with a cult? The morgue.
The cultist tosses a knife, landing in Bonzy's ally shoulder. Bonzy pulls out a gun and fires off two into the cultists chest, killing him and blowing their cover. Bonzy wastes no times in preparing his next plan. He pulls out the knife and stifles the wound (Having been a performer, he had dealt with knife wounds before), and told him to wait by the door with a gun while Bonzy waddled into the shadows to meet up with the rest of the group. He spotted a cultist in the hall, but managed to hide long enough to sneak behind him as the cultist passed.
Bonzy raised the knife to his throat, and quietly slit it before he could alert the others.
“Guess that was a close shave.”
HONKThe other upstairs cleared the rest out, and helped Bonzy lug the wounded character back to the car, but not before they saw another group of cultists preparing for something nasty in the wings of the funeral home, so Bonzy opts to investigate, with a friend of course. Bonzy was sad, not stupid.
Investigating paid off, and Bonzy and the friend uncover the cultists attempting a ritual to summon their dead god. The character says with a few minutes, he can put a bomb together, but it looks like it'll take more time. So, Bonzy volunteers.
Imagine the cultists surprise when this rather depressed looking clown waddles out from the shadows, holding a little flower and a deck of cards. It was time for the routine.
“What did the dead god say to the humorless cultists?”
“...”
“Is it dead in here or what?”
HONK“Who are you, clown?”
“Please, call me Bonzy. Clown was my father.”
HONKThe cultists mutter a hushed debate about how to kill Bonzy, who was taking this time to turn the flower into a napkin, and then pulling it out of his sleeve. One cultist got closer, and Bonzy offered him a hand of cards.
“Pick a card, any card.”
The cultist reached for a card-
“Not that one.”
The cultist stopped, and reached for another-
“Not that one either!”Finally, the cultist grabs his card, studies it, and offers it to Bonzy.
“Why are you giving it back?”
“Because you're going to make it disappear.”
“And waste a perfectly good playing card?”
HONK
The cultists finally run out of humor and pull out knives to sacrifice the sad clown before them to their dead god. Lucky Bonzy, the friend finishes the bomb just in time, which he tosses to Bonzy. The clown lifts it up as the timer counts down. The cultists back up, waiting for a pun from the strange clown.
“No clever words this time?”
“... Not really.”
“Are you out of jokes?”
“No, I just want to go out with a bang.”
HONKAfter we high tailed it out of there, the group managed to save the player with the knife wound, and Bonzy survived with only minor injuries and a scar on his upper arm from a brazing bullet. Dozens of puns, sad clown routines, and close shaves later, we decoded the last clue from the books, and we had it. The final showdown spot where everything must come to an end. And I think somewhere, we all knew Bonzy was tired of being sad all the time.
Bonzy was going to finally have his peace.
A graveyard, hundreds of years old, and plenty creepy, was full of cultists that seemed armed to the teeth with daggers and strange magic. We had found a way to hoard the weapons from the police station, and entered the fray like a 4 man army right out of the pulp fiction books. We left nothing in our wake, and cleverly averted disaster after disaster. Bonzy took a couple of hits, but he was already sad, so it wasn't like anyone noticed. When we reached the last, inner circle of the cult, we took a small vote about who would take point, and the most dangerous position, on our last mission. Bonzy doesn't even finish listening, instead waddling out onto the dark grass and honking his nose with the deepest frown on his face.
The cultists debate killing me, but the leader lets Bonzy draw closer. I think it was out of curiosity rather than an ingenious plan, but whatever drove him allowed Bonzy to draw within punching distance.
There were no words, no puns, only the cold stares of two men in the dark, surrouned by ancient chanting and dark magic that warps the very flesh of any who touch it. Then Bonzy pulls out a long balloon (which I mimicked, having practiced this for a week in advance).
“You know what I hate most about being a clown?” Bonzy asked after inflating the balloon.
“It's the assumption that I'm going to he happy, and smiling, and always ready with a joke. Everyone sees a clown and suddenly, they can't be unhappy. At least, not really unhappy. How can someone with a lifetime of jokes and puns ever be sad? Shouldn't they be smiling and laughing and carrying around rubber chickens all the time?”Bonzy shows the balloon to the cultist, revealing a puppy. I offered the real one to my GM.
“But we can be sad. In fact, I think we HAVE to be sad. People want to be happy so much, they'll ignore everyone around them to keep their illusion of happiness. I accept that. After all, I'm Bonzy. My job is to be unhappy so everyone else can be happy, and smile, and laugh. That's what clowns do, we make people happy.”
Bonzy reaches into his sleeve, and pulls out the only picture on his persons. A little girl with a young, smiling Bonzy.
“I wanted Suzy to be happy.”
Bonzy reveals a grenade in his other hand, just underneath the balloon animal. As the cultist pulls away, he realizes he's too late to notice the grenade pin attached to the bottom loop on the feet of the balloon puppy. As it clings, the cultist drops the balloon and shouts for everyone to back up. Bonzy smiles as the rest of the team clears out the inner circle, leaving the leader and Bonzy near the center. As he's about to leave, Bonzy grabs the man's wrist and slides on a trick cuff.
The leader looks down at his wrist, and then back up to Bonzy, who is honest to god smiling as the eldritch monster begins to manifest in the mortal world. Bonzy picks up the animal, holds it up, and grins gently as the eldritch god begins to take form.
“That's all, folks.”
HONKThe rest of the group looked for hours through the bloody, mangled mess of the god and cultists for anything of Bonzy, but they found nothing. Were it not for Bonzy blowing up the heart of the monster as it arrived, the undead god would have fully formed and taken the world with plagues of undeath and decay, but now it lay broken and would need to reform over eons in the cold reaches of space.
The party did manage to find something of Bonzy, finding a lone, old photo of a smiling clown and a little girl.
They took the photo had a few words on the back, and the GM read them in a quiet voice.
“To Bonzy. Thank you for always making her happy. Suzy thanks you.”
They left the photo on a small gravemarker in the towns newer graveyard, and they decided to leave town. Before they left, one produced a rubber nose from his pocket and tied it to the grave.
And like that, they left Bonzy, not the sad clown.The clown that was sad so everyone else could be happy.
God, I love a good TTRPG game.
When it's good, it's great. The stories that come out of it are so memorable and funny. I still talk about some of the stories from when I DM'd.
This story is awesome.
I love this story and will never get tired reading it.
@Zagorath Hey I just wanted to thank you for the incredible work you're doing in this community. These stories are all so incredibly well written, and to think they only came into existence thought the collective creativity while playing a #ttrpg game simply blows my mind. Thank you for gathering these fine pieces of literature in one place here on #lemmy. It's a great pleasure to read, every time I'm here
