Fanfic meme: Death/Dungeon Master

[daibhidc]

Sorry I haven't been online for a couple of days - I am still working on the others.


Quest Object

You want to borrow my sword? Why?

Dungeon Master pulled a scroll out of his robes and unrolled it between them. "Here," he said, pointing, "is the Lernaean Hydra. My young charges must defeat it, and the only way of doing so is with a sword of infinite sharpness."

Death studied the map with interest. Why does this map have hexagons all over it? he asked.

Dungeon Master ignored this. "So if you give me the sword, I shall leave it here, in the Swamps of Despair, where they can find it. Once the monster is destroyed, they shall return it to the swamp, and I will return it to you."

Death frowned. Well, he didn't frown, of course, but something about the glow in his eyes shifted to make it look like he wanted to frown.

If it's so important the children get the sword, why not simply give it to them?

"They need to overcome obstacles to succeed," Dungeon Master explained, "If I were to just give them what they need, they would miss important lessons."

Ah, said Death dismissively, Drama.

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

Yes! This is exactly the sort of thing I had in my head (very vaguely), only better of course. And not just in my head.

Just one thing - what's the line about the hexagons mean? Because I'm guessing it's a joke I'm not getting!!

But this is spot on. Death and the Dungeon Master! (Wasn't that the title of something?)

[daibhid-c.livejournal.com]

Glad you liked it.

The Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game, which the cartoon was based on, used (and possibly still uses) hexagonal grids on outdoor maps. D&D was based on wargames, which used hex maps because, unlike a square grid, the centre of a hex is the same distance from the centre of all the surrounding hexes. Since Discworld takes stories literally and Pterry was a roleplayer, I wanted to slip in a gag about Dungeon Master actually being a DM, and this seemed like the sort of odd detail Death would worry about.

If Death had studied it a bit longer, he would have been even more perplexed to realise that national borders, and possibly even coastlines, followed the hexes...

[thisbluespirit]

Hah! Thank you. Somehow I suspected it would be something like that. I could tell it was a joke, at any rate. :-D

And, yes, of course. And that sounds scarily like DM anyway. He probably was... He was certainly up to something.