Introduction
Hey Reddit, and anybody else who may be seeing this. This is a rather tame (not outright torturous) but still very funny DnD Horror Story with a lot to sink your teeth into; a recounting & dissection of a campaign with potential to be great, wasted by a bad DM. This game took place across about 5 months, ending only two months ago as of the writing of this post. Before I go any further, let’s get to know the cast of this story.
-Nic (Dwarf Barbarian), the comic relief of the group, had the worst luck imaginable and forgot to take his Subclass for 2-4 sessions after reaching Level 3. He ended up being a bit of a punching bag for how little effort his player put into the character, but he was actually pretty funny.
He canonically weighed over 250 KG (551 Pounds) at 3’ something, and we had fun flinging him at opponents and ore deposits.
-Dala (Human Wizard), my character, and a central personality of the party. She was big, strong and spoke in a thick Russian accent, but her humour only hid her true intelligence. She was often the party face, and the most talkative in the early sessions, but the others started speaking more frequently as the game went on, which was great.
She was the one to always have a plan of action, had many cool moments in the story, and was ferocious in plotting against our party’s shared nemesis: Twisted.
-Rufus (Minotaur Fighter), a big scary pirate who committed many minor crimes throughout our adventure and had some good bits. His backstory included a pirate hunter who appeared numerous times in the 3rd Act, but was never confronted.
With the group’s support, Rufus managed to purchase and captain his own ship after a big payout, which acted as our home base for the whole of Act 3.
-Anastasia (Human Artificer), an inventor with a few screws loose. She had very good luck unlike Nic and ended up being the one with the most HP in the party at the end of this story.
Additionally, she was a wanted criminal in the city she originally came from, but it came up only once. Her character was loosely based on Olivia Octavius.
-Ren / Xavier (Human Monk / Human Cleric), as there’s not all too much to say about their characters, I'd just like to comment about the player that they were a really chill person who mostly stayed out of the drama of this whole story.
Since they were a friend of John’s, it seems like they were spared from his antics, but they did still witness most of the things that made this campaign a horror story. They played well, are still chill with everyone involved, and we retained them as a player in another campaign.
-Opias (Human Tech Priest [From Warhammer 40k]), a character designed to be as busted as possible with broken homebrew content. He had over 19 AC at Level 1, really good Martial capabilities with Magic on top of that, and had overpowered abilities which could one shot enemies of CRs much higher than reasonable.
I think one of his abilities was basically a melee flamethrower with the Damage of no-miss Scorching Ray, and he could do it several times per day. The player made it as a joke to see if it could fly under the DM’s nose, and it did.
He dipped out of the campaign after the first session, and somehow didn’t actually cause any problems for the balance of the two encounters he was a part of.
He’s still a good player in our other games to this day, and we recently invited him to one of our bigger campaigns to fill John’s seat after he left.
-The DM, we’ll call him John, was probably the most interesting and complex character in this story. I’ll be giving you a solid picture of the type of person John is as we go along.
He was a fairly long-time acquaintance of all of us, and brought Ren’s Player into the game, as well as eventually our circle. He had gotten into some controversies over racist remarks in the past, also Anastasia and Opias’ players weren't all too fond of him, but tensions were low at the time, so it wasn’t a problem to play with him if in exchange we got an exciting new campaign.
This story is as much about him as his game, so you’ll be hearing everything there is to hear about him as I deem it relevant across this story
For some context, Most of the aforementioned people were friends of mine who played in a different campaign run by me. When my game went on hiatus, a few others stepped up to DM new ones, one of which being John. He wasn’t overly fond of my campaign, but he played long enough to learn the rules of DND 5th Edition, and wanted to make something of his own in the form of an original DND campaign after a burst of inspiration.
As a forever DM, I was itching to play, and so I was in almost immediately. Most of my friend group also came along, and established the core party.
Just to be clear, I'll be writing the story from my own perspective, and I'm prone to exaggerate here and there or string nonsensical parts into a more cohesive order for the sake of good storytelling and ease of reading, so take my words with a grain of salt (I also go on a lot of side tangents, but they all tie back to the game and the DM, so they still contribute to the story).
That being said, this entire text has been added to and fact-checked by several of the players of this campaign who all witnessed the events and sessions, so everything in this story that isn’t subjective, intentionally changed or my own personal opinion, should be fairly reliable information.
It should also be known that this isn’t a callout post or just my unfiltered rant about the DM (though there’s still plenty of that), but rather all my thoughts on what went wrong and why. I bear no grudge to John, neither for his shortcomings as a DM or his own personal problems, and I hold no hate as of the writing of this story.
I’m really glad we at least got what we got out of this game, and I was able to learn from John’s mistakes and successes as a DM, as well as my own as a player thanks to this campaign. That being said, I enjoyed writing this story, as I am a little goblin for DND horror stories, and got pretty damn hyped as soon as I realized I had played through one.
Unlike a few others I've read, this Horror Story is a big STORY, with my full, only somewhat trimmed rundown and dissection of this entire campaign, split into 3 Acts containing a total of 14 Sessions and a few bonus side stories. So get cozy for this full-on epic I’m about to recount for you, here begins the tale of Ant Simulator.
Act 1 - Good Old Days - (Sessions 1-4)
Session 1 (Rejecting The Heat)
We started off in the world as a group of miscellaneous Level 1 adventurers, called forth by the kingdom of Calastro on the continent of Terra. We were to perform an expedition out into a large jungle in the middle of the continent that had recently begun spilling strange new threats out into the world.
We began in a small tent, got to introduce our characters with a quick roll call, and were allowed to stretch our legs in a military outpost near the jungle before setting off. At Session 1, the group consisted of Dala, Nic, Anastasia and Opias, although Opias did little to no roleplay, and thus might not come up until the very last combat of the session. In the camp there were some places to buy supplies such as food, but it was quickly apparent that the camp was very hostile to us, despite us being called here in their service.
As you’ll see later, John had a habit of making an assertive asshole out of every figure of authority in the game, despite almost none of them being villains or people we were supposed to or even allowed to dislike. They were almost always either on the same side as us, in a public area with a lot of soldiers / kin or so much stronger than us that we would surely find ourselves in prison if we tried to pick a fight.
We were only allowed to buy from very particular stands, and we couldn’t walk past a certain point to explore further. The weapons shop was across the line, so we weren’t allowed to buy any additional combat equipment, and were threatened with angering the entire camp when Anastasia’s player (out-of-game) thought about sneaking over just to take a look at what they had. We ended up having a small RP segment when purchasing apples or bread (It’s been a while, I’ve forgotten) from a vendor whom I recall being rather rude to us. Safe to say we were royally ripped off an entire Gold Piece for about one or two pieces of food.
Having had enough of that, we went forward with a small caravan to be escorted to the jungle, after which we were off. Although I don’t recall the full interaction, before we left, John had a quick talk with our characters in the voice of the commanding officer of the caravan, and was telling us some backstory about the jungle and previous expeditions. We basically said we got it, and when John asked if we had any questions, we said no, because we didn’t. John said something along the lines of “Oh, you don’t want to know more about the lore I spent hours writing? Ok, that’s fine, there it goes, yep” to vent out his salt before continuing.
We followed the trail into the jungle for a small while, until we came across an encampment. Now, I don’t fully recall what was there, because it’s clear John was trying to build up some sort of plot, but we didn’t really understand the hints presented to us. There was the body of either a mage or alchemist inside one tent, and a lot of very specific evidence for some sort of murder or betrayal that happened to a previous group of explorers here. It was mentioned only once in the future, and never became important to the party; a common theme in John’s works.
As it wasn’t relevant to us, nor the Calastrian military from what I recall, we decided not to try to figure it all out then and there. Instead, we got looting right away, as the camp had some resources. The others got some miscellaneous stuff which I can't recall, but Dala happened upon a small cross necklace. Yes, the cross of Jesus and the biblical god, which John was quick to point out was canon in this world, although he soft-retconned this later by establishing an original pantheon.
More importantly, he also said something about holy objects (by extension, this cross) being a way to communicate directly or have the deity in question “See” through. As any humour-inclined party would, we immediately started the bit that this cross allowed us to Facetime with god, which John was not amused by, stating that “It’s Not Like That”. Regardless, we got some good laughs out of it for the rest of the session.
After moving forward from the encampment, we walked deeper into the jungle a bit more, at least half an in-game day, and were then prompted to choose between setting up camp or continuing through the night, the latter option implied to be a bit risky considering the current state of the jungle. Despite not having expended any of our “Per Long Rest” abilities thus far, we chose to set up camp and wait out the night just to be safe. We had some nice RP by the campfire, Dala and Nic were chomping down a ton of rations from what I recall, when we heard some rustling in the nearby bushes – It was a group of about 3-4 uncivilized humans wielding scrappy metal weapons, and they spoke in a language we couldn’t understand.
The first combat ensued, and it wasn’t all too bad. It was more of a warmup fight, nothing too notable happened other than everyone getting to do all the cool things on their sheet to a few practice dummies. There was something I should probably mention, though. John told me a lot of basic information before we started the campaign, mostly about the world and what to expect, although there was one detail that I raised an eyebrow at.
Before the session, John made sure to tell me that since I was playing a female character, I should be wary that the “Enemies” (Jungle Humans) of this first session came from a place where women were seen as lowly. I really hope he did not use the word “Slave” when describing their status, as I really don’t want to make that accusation on the off-chance that I merely misremembered his wording, but it was still a bit weird. Somewhere during the combat, Dala and one of the men got into a physical confrontation, and John described something about them scoffing at her or trying to belittle her, I don’t remember exactly what it was. What I do remember is that Dala, even as a wizard, was specced to have a +2 to both Strength and Constitution, as well as the Weapon Master Feat from being a Variant Human, which meant that she was able to absolutely humiliate the guy with her Handaxe as soon as he got close.
I think about this scene from time to time wondering what exactly John’s endgame was if I were to get worse luck in that scene than I did, which is kind of why things like this can get weird fast. Even weirder looking back, since this detail was never once brought up after this encounter, despite us running into these people again a few times later in the story. Now that I'm thinking about it, maybe disincluding that fact was actually a pretty good call from John for this campaign, assuming he didn’t just forget.
We took care of the humans pretty easily, and ran their figurative pockets. Crude swords and other miscellaneous equipment, most notably some sun-blocking goggles and a handful of strange golden coins. Dala grabbed the goggles and some of the gold, although we only got any use out of the coins once in the future. John also put a close up picture of the coin in the chat, it was clearly taken from some game or other media, but we didn’t yet know where.
However, while we were thinking about the things the Jungle Humans had said in a different language, John commented that the language they spoke was somewhat similar to ours, and when a party member thought out loud why it would be similar to English (Common), John either accidentally or due to poor decision making let slip that no, it *was* English, and the English we spoke (Common) was just similar.
It was John's first time DMing, and these things happen, but this is a good time to bring up something really bad about how John behaved socially. You see, whenever we told John that something he did was embarrassing or a mistake, critiqued him or his writing, or gave him any feedback on things we thought he could or should improve, he would immediately deflect by saying that he did it all intentionally, when he clearly didn’t.
We always tried to explain to him that, there was no shame in retconning things or admitting to mistakes on the spot, and that it would actually be worse to claim that he made all of these poor choices on purpose, and he would always try to spin it like he was playing 4D Chess and we didn’t get his grand design, or claimed it was a non-issue that he had already solved, and that he simply didn’t bother applying his social skills or brilliant DMing when interacting with us; like we were a throwaway circle, even though we weren’t.
Whenever I critiqued his writing, he’d say things like “It’ll Make Sense Later” or “Just Trust Me”. It rarely paid off. From the name of this first continent, Terra, you might also notice John’s pattern of naming things by slightly twisting the latin translation of the thing he bases it off of, sometimes not even that. A good example of this is when he finally came up with a name for the campaign after a long time of us simply calling it “John’s Game”. The name was Expeditionem, “Campaign” or “Expedition” in Latin.
Whenever you hear a unique name for a place or thing that John presents, you can pretty much assume it’s a direct rip or shuffling around of latin words.
Now, to give you a better idea of this guy out-of-game, John rarely admitted any weakness, spoke very matter-of-factly at all times, and would say things like “Oh I Know.” nonchalantly whenever we pointed out his flaws. He was always attempting to make himself seem untouchable by ignoring his social skills and emotional intelligence, acting like nothing we did could ever affect him (not for better, always for worse), and that he had everything figured out already.
At the same time though, he would randomly become the complete contrast of that persona. He was one of the biggest gun & history nerds I knew, used edgy reddit humour that sucked all the air out of the room every single time, and would occasionally say the cringiest one-liners when he was a player in a few of our other campaigns, getting defensive when we all collectively told him he was making himself look like a jackass.
It was clear to me that he took on apathy as a defense mechanism, as he would rather try to shut out the people around him than hone his social skills and become a better version of himself; something we really tried to get him to do from time to time. Now, back to the game.
We went back to sleep without incident after the encounter, and continued our trek in the morning until coming across a pathway which led to our final destination. From our observations out in the foliage, it appeared to be a long-forgotten ruin of some small stone temple with a courtyard, now teeming with a TON of those humans from before.
They appeared to be building an outpost of their own in the middle, we saw a peek at some logs being transported, and they had already set up crude wooden shacks in the courtyard. There were a few grilling something in a fire pit near the middle while keeping watch as well. The place was armed to the teeth, and the count of men was in the 20s, so we clearly needed a really good plan.
There may have also been tamed wolves posted up near the temple grounds, but I think we managed to use some meat to lure away and quietly kill them in the bushes one by one before taking any action, so they ended up not mattering.
This is where I got to work playing out Dala’s intelligence, I was attempting to formulate a plan to approach the situation with. Since it was about evening, we saw that the amount of soldiers was thinning, so as the first order of business we decided to wait until night. I was thinking of ways we could blow up part of the stone structure that was positioned next to the small wooden huts near a corner of the courtyard, to hopefully have it collapse onto the huts and immediately kill all of the soldiers sleeping inside.
A line here that John narrated to us overhearing, as Nic rolled medium to understand what the soldiers at the grill were saying, was that they commented on being frustrated at “Not being able to take their Slaves here”. Although I have no proof, I think from earlier events it could be inferred that they were referring to the women of their homeworld.
As we were running the numbers, I had to go pee for about 5 minutes, and when I came back, my party was blindly rushing into the camp with little to no plan. I do not recall who was the genius behind this idea, but Dala immediately took action, and ran to block the door of a more reinforced cabin in the back, holding several soldiers inside as the rest of the party fought the humans stationed outside and pouring out of the other shack.
Despite being outnumbered, and the humans being relatively strong, we managed to thin the horde for a whole two turns until Dala ran out of strength to hold the door. That’s when I took out plan B. You see, my character had started with some miscellaneous bonus items for flavor purposes, one of which being a bottle of Potato Vodka from her homeland. With a tinderbox, she lit it on fire and hurled it inside the cabin at the moment she lost her hold on the door.
I think John had realized that he vastly oversupplied this camp with enemies, so he narrated the men burning inside the doorway without rolls. There were 4, and they were dressed as an elite version of the common guards, god only knows how bad this would have been if they had gotten out. But this was a good turning point, and it allowed me to properly join the fight as we tried to clear out the rest.
However, before we managed to finish them off, another group burst in through a room of the temple in another corner, about 2-3 normal guys and one really big commander.
This is where Opias came in. Turns out he’d been REALLY holding back, and he got to work on the commander. I can’t remember exactly the exchanges which occurred, as Opias was still a silent bobcat during all this, but I do know that he started to melt the commander’s health, and since his AC was so unexpectedly high, I don’t recall the commander hitting him even once; or at least not dealing any meaningful damage.
As Opias held the line, we picked off all the small mooks, and eventually joined his wail on the commander to secure sweet victory over the encampment. We got some stuff from the boss, but I believe Opias took most of it, which was deserved but still unfortunate because he left the game immediately after this session, and we never got to redistribute. Anyways, we headed over to the room where the commander and his buddies came from, and discovered it was a small armory with a portal in the back. Now, John described this portal as a “Mirror”, as if it appeared to be in a normal mirror frame, but you could see some kind of other place through it, and it was clearly where these people were coming from.
Right about now I should point out that John was not too big of a fan of that original campaign of mine while he was a player in it, mostly because he was actually kind of a scaredy cat and I was making a massively horror-focused campaign inspired by games like Fear & Hunger, so that was understandable. However, I always got this subtle feeling that he wasn’t a fan of my writing either, like he looked down on it but just wouldn’t say it, but seeing this mirror was a bit peculiar, because it’s an idea he clearly got from my campaign.
Now, a portal in a mirror frame is no trademarked or super inventive thing, but basically everyone agreed that this was not a coincidence at all, and John just brushed it off and never commented further. You’ll see a few more examples later where John, despite not being fond of my creative works outside this campaign, incorporates aspects of them into his game regardless and expects us not to bat an eye. Either he did appreciate some aspects here and there but was too proud to admit it, or he genuinely thought we wouldn’t notice.
He also used the exact same set of House Rules for DND 5E that my original game used (with many additions of his own), but that could just be because he hadn’t ever played without them thus far. Looking back, I think that using the base DND 5E ruleset could have mended some balance concerns he developed later, especially with magic.
Through the mirror was some kind of vast desert, or at least that’s what we could make out from the hazy and swirling surface of the portal. We could also see someone walk by the mirror; decked out in wasteland gear and metal parts. They had a squint at us through the mirror, and walked past. Even in hindsight, I still don’t know who exactly this was, but I definitely know they were one of four characters who will become integral to the story later.
Then, John popped a question that he himself had somehow not accounted for. “So, do you guys want to go through the mirror, or go back and report to Calastro about it?”. Before the game, John had been teasing the ending of the first session, saying that he’d drop some epic reveal that would leave us all stunned and that he would dramatically leave the call right after it happened, likely thinking he’d be leaving us “Wanting for more”. He also told us to “Not get comfortable with the world”, so it was clear this reveal would mean the rest of the campaign taking place somewhere completely unexpected. Here came the best decision in the entire game: We unanimously decided to ignore the mirror, go back, get paid, and see where the road took us.
I’m not sure how this didn’t occur to John, like, “Hey guys do you want to go on a death expedition into an uninhabitable desert wasteland, ditching all your former lives and the generous paycheck waiting for you at the city, or stay in this new and exciting fantasy world I've been talking about for the past three weeks that you all actually signed up for?”. Not to mention, Dala had been the main spokeswoman of the party thus far, and she was a 6’2 northerner who navigates people through snowstorms for a living, safe to say she was very outspoken about not going to a place as far from her comfort zone as A DESERT.
Nobody else was particularly equipped for those conditions either, and it really didn’t seem interesting enough of a prospect for anyone to actually petition for, so we agreed we’d return to Calastro, report our findings truthfully, get our 50 GP each and see if we got any new orders. As a last touch, while we were discussing our plans, Dala also removed the commander guy’s head and propped it up on a pike directly in front of the mirror as a warning for future invaders.
In response to us not wanting to go through the mirror, John seemed a bit surprised, but in co-operation with the best choice we made during this campaign, he returned the favor with his best choice in DMing, and allowed us to reject (what we now know was) his campaign’s premise. It was settled, we might run into more mirrors in the future, but the campaign would now be about our adventures through the fantasy world, just as we had wanted. And this is where I actually started to think pretty highly of this game, as John had managed to provide way more freedom than my previous game – While that game was really good, it was a bit railroaded, and locked into one large area & a set of endings similar to a soulslike instead of being truly free like most campaigns, and John’s, were.
We were having a blast at this change, and that rush of freedom honestly continued for a really long time; all the way up until the midway of Act 3. It was one of the things John did just right, and it genuinely inspired me to make my newest campaign, which was all about having the party build their own story like this. John was also a member of that campaign up until recently, so we might get into that after the story, but for now let’s continue.
We managed to leave the jungle without incident by retracing our steps backward, and were greeted by an officer and a few other soldiers (on horses I believe?) who were surprised to see us alive. The officer listened to what we had to tell him, and we directed the band to the temple, as well as warned them of the mirror and the men who were coming through. They seemed a little puzzled by what we were saying at times, as if John was expecting us to describe something else instead of what we did, or that what we were saying was somehow hard to believe in this fantasy land, but it was all completely truthful information.
We arrived back at the camp where we started, and were told of new orders that had come in. Apparently, more of these weird people had been sighted over at a neighbouring continent Nix Frigida, Dala’s homeland, so we had been tasked with traveling there and eliminating the threat for even more money. We were immediately in, and I was super hyped to see Dala’s homeland, as well as explore the cool world even more.
On top of it all, we were given our payout: 50 GP Each. It was a pretty nice check this early into the game, and we did also Level Up from the previous fight, so we rolled into Calastro’s capital city, Norgard, in high spirits. We had a few in-game hours to kill before our ship to Nix Frigida would arrive, so there was lots of fun to be had in the city for the rest of the session.
We went on a small shopping spree where we collectively blew through about half or more of the total money we’d been given, and everybody got an upgrade in one way or another. There were two things in particular that Dala had especially requested and bought from the Spell Scroll market, that were relevant to this story, however. A Scroll of Magnify Gravity, and another of Glyph of Warding. These will both become the catalyst to a massive chain of events way later.
After the shopping was done, we went to a tavern and had some food and drink, ending off the session on an extremely good note. There were a couple suspicious things we were able to pick up on right away though throughout this session, even if we mostly ignored them, The biggest being John’s use of AI.
Although he later started making continent maps with Inkarnate, and received my help for mapping out his world after that, it’s important to note that he showed us an AI-Generated image for the map of Terra in the first session. He told us he’d remake it in Inkarnate later, but he never did. I also found out while writing this story that the lore doc John sent us which contained everything about Terra, its nations and main cities was 100% AI generated. Not even a little, absolutely all of it; I ran it through several different AI detectors because I didn’t believe it the first time.
We found out about most of this dirt only after the game fell apart, but at the time of this first session, I was super hyped for this campaign regardless. Looking back at this campaign, it had some really poor decisions from time to time, and didn’t hold up in the long run, but it still had some of my favorite moments and sessions in all of DND.
When John was still running the golden days of this game, it built up a lot of trust in his skills for me, which is why it was so saddening to see him get worse and worse over time. I was genuinely invested for a really long time, which I’m sure you’ll see from just how much I have to say about all of it.