Committed Role Playing

Inspirational song: I Eat Cannibals (Toto Coelo)

“I don’t feel like I’m welcome in this group,” he said in his character’s voice. Where can we go with this? It’s a large D&D party, double the average number of player characters, of people who are old enough and experienced enough to stretch the bounds of the type of roles we created for ourselves. His character is a halfling, sort of like a hobbit from the books and movies, and his personality has been hard for the rest of us to crack. When we were on a ship together, he stood apart from us most of the time. My uptight, rule-obsessed Amazon spent most of the ship time split between doing her job guarding a local functionary and mentoring her nieces. The guy who is playing a humanoid frog monk hid from the seawater and the sun. The guy who is playing an injured bird man was sociable, but classic human interaction was a bit alien to him, so we had to approach our assumptions from other angles. The rest of the party is all over the place too, with two dramatically different elves (one the polar opposite of me when it comes to the rule of law and social norms), a guy who is the fantasy world equivalent of Indiana Jones, and an eight year old boy who appears to be able to shape shift into a cat....or maybe it’s the other way around.

While we were sailing, we heard all kinds of crazy rumors about things like raiders on the sea, traders of gems, and cannibals. The halfling only heard about the cannibals, three or four times over. It utterly terrified him. So now here we are, stranded on a beach after a hurricane, half our shipmates missing (like my nieces) or found dead. The terrain is bone dry if we leave the waterline. No trees, no softness, no shade. A rocky coast with one man-made structure, inhabited by a strange little man who scavenges what washes up from the sea. And with one off-hand comment, the halfling is convinced this guy is the cannibal, and moreover, he’s going to kill and eat us.

We’re in a tough place, shipwrecked and lost. We are missing most of our supplies, most of our clothes, and most of our weapons. We would have all died when the eye of the hurricane kept moving over the top of us, and the storm returned. Without his stone shelter, there would have been nothing left of us. So when we were burying bodies of the ship’s crew members who didn’t survive, it didn’t help our situation any to have the weird little man shrug and say, “meat is meat, boy.” I don’t want to have to chase the halfling a mile down the beach again, next time he gets scared of a man who has thus far been nothing but gentle and generous. So how do I hide from him that while I was helping bury our dead, our host took a little detour to make jerky out of a sailor’s quadriceps? I’m not sure how I feel about it myself.