Submitted for your entertainment from the Steve Jackson Games Daily site:
That’s a coincidence - I was just thinking of “The Head of Vecna” story, yesterday, and told my wife about it (and about this story too Eric & the Dread Gazebo :: DreadGazebo :: Roleplaying Resources)
It was mentioned in today’s installment of Darths and Droids.
Well, it’s a classic of its sort. It gets referenced amongst gamers. It came up in chat in an MMO I play a few days ago, and it’s not even a medieval-fantasy type MMO.
Do try and find the story about the Paladin and the Gazebo. That one is just as much of a laugh riot.
You have angered the Gazebo!
No need to search–AndyL linked it in post #2.
About two months ago I joked about the Penis of Vecna as an alternate joke for the players who already know the ‘head’ story.
The Head story has one huge flaw. How would anyone expect this isn’t simply resurrecting Vecna while killing yourself?
Was that from the Knights of the Dinner Table or did they rip it off?
Big Bang Theory stole their ‘Does anyone have wood for sheep?’ bit.
I think it’s pretty clear the characters in question weren’t using any scraps of neural tissue that happened to be in their heads, anyway. Offering munchkin players a suggestion of artifact-level power results in roleplaying and even basic logic going out the window.
In one campaign, we had a druid who found a Tooth of Dahlver-Nar that had one power: Mass Animate Dead. A horrible, unnatural power, right? In-character, most druids could be expected to be a bit squeamish about it–anything from grumbling about the party using it to demanding that they find a way to destroy it. As soon as she found out what it was, she undertook to knock out one of her own teeth with a club, so she could stick the Tooth in its bleeding socket. And she used it at every opportunity. If I’d been DMing, there would have been Consequences, but I wasn’t.
This would be the same druid who, when fleeing through Lolth’s treasure chambers in the Abyss, was told that if she stopped to loot, she would definitely die. She used her shapeshift to turn into a kangaroo and dive through a treasure pile, hoping to scoop up loot in her pouch without stopping.
The KODT strip is based on the original Eric and the Dread Gazebo story.
From what I remember, Jolly Blackburn had secured permission to reprint the story in the KotD issue it appeared in. And the comic he did based on it fell well within the parody part of fair use.
The “wood for sheep” joke is old hat among boardgamers, possibly dated back to 1995 when Settlers of Catan first came out.