or maybe... Learning to Fly (Pink Floyd)
or even... Learning to Fly (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers)
At some point in the many decades of writing Doctor Who, it must have occurred to someone that the Daleks' worst enemy was not the Doctor, but stairs. How many years was the show on the air before they entered it into canon that Daleks could hover and fly? It changed everything, that little detail, didn't it?
We have been playing Pathfinder D&D since October or so. I've had so much on my plate that I never, in all of these months, dug deeply into the abilities for my character. I've spent so much time developing his personality quirks that I skipped the in-depth reading for his skills. It was too much fun developing an affable alcoholic trans half-dwarf who has an obsession with cats and looks like he raided the entire pink section of Queen Elizabeth II's closet. He's impatient and likes to smash things with his fancy Lucerne hammer, but other than that he hasn't demonstrated a whole lot of useful clerical talents. I thought I was picking up the pace a week or two ago, whenever we last played, when I paralyzed the big bad foe (waving my pencil like a wand and yelling "petrificus totalus!") long enough to peel off his special gauntlets, leaving a small piece of him vulnerable to an "inflict wounds" spell once he broke free of my hold. But no one blinked at what I thought was clever clerical work.
So this week I had my head down in the rule book for a while. We were climbing an unusual bell tower (let's say that the drawing was rather earthy and suggestive), that was crumbling in disrepair, and there was a section of the interior stairwell missing. I pushed my way from the rear of the party to the front, wanting to see whether the stairs were really broken through, or was it an illusion. I threw sand on them, and it totally fell all the way down. I didn't waste a spell slot on "detect magic," when it was obvious there were no hidden stairs. Two of our fleet-footed party members acrobatically leapt across the opening and stretched out a rope. Brn, my dwarf (and if any of my old campaign from high school reads this, his backstory is that he is the natural son of Drn and an unlucky dwarven barmaid--they'll understand), is the strongest member of our party, and he wanted to be useful and hold the rope to get everyone else across the danger zone. Everyone waved him off as superfluous, and he experienced a moment of insecurity. For his sake, I asked the Game Master how this whole "special spells granted by your deity" bit worked, and got the answer I wanted. This was the GM's first mistake.
The three faceless skinsack minion monsters (Brn is too impatient to remember exactly what they're called) were quite startled when a muscular, bearded, pink fairy flew up to the top of the tower and rang the bells they were hiding on with his scary, pointed hammer, and one good thump knocked out two of them, then all three fell when the bell came loose from its mooring and fell to the ground below. They died instantly. Brn got all the experience points and the rest of the party looked at each other and asked, "Did you know the dwarf could FLY??" Well, most of them did. Nick got knocked off the stairs when the bell clipped them on the way down, and he needed Brn to land and get back to regular cleric magic, and heal his significant wounds from falling onto the bell and the dead monsters.
I don't know how dramatically I've changed the trajectory of the party by revealing that new talent. I know the GM looked as full of dread as the day she allowed Nick to be created, with his dazzling display and charismatic attack that can only fail if he rolls a natural one, after Mr S-P discovered during our Festivus side campaign that when he ran up on enchanted Christmas trees and yelled, "I AM SANTA CLAUS!" he was able to intimidate them into sacrificing themselves into a burning yule log. I can't wait to see how they react when I automatically gain the ability to teleport. The poor DM.
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