Whether you love them, loathe them, or just don’t get them, Puns have a tendancy to manifest in almost every D&D session. Whether it’s joking table-talk about the dreaded Megoosa (which turns her victims to bread for her goose-head-hair to feast upon) or if it’s the joke character (I’m a human fighter - I fight humans!) or a joke name (My character’s a town guard called Dan who turned adventurer, and he’s a gnome, so he’s Guard Dan the Gnome!), it seems like puns form something of the core of D&D humour.
The role of Puns is such that I had a moderately profound realisation* that Puns offer a strange link across the fiction that we create when playing D&D. Much of the context of puns is linked to the real world and not to the world in which our characters exist - a Minotaur artificer who’s stylised to resemble a shaggy mongolian breed of cow might elicit laughs** for being named Elon the Musk-ox, but in the game, that name means nothing - the characters will likely respond obliviously with “Nice to meet you, Elon.”. The joke exists for the Players, and not for the Characters.
This realisation made me wonder - could a game be designed to play both courts of this game? Could it provide a meaningful and truly dangerous adventure for the characters, whilst also offering amusement and exasperation (they are puns, after all) to the players? Could the two mesh neatly together into one adventure which carries both sides?
Short answer: Absolutely.
This little labour of love cemented my position as a dungeon master at the local D&D group in Barnstaple, Devon, UK (conservative club every tuesday, 7pm!). Spanning two sessions, the adventure sees the characters go from attending a cheese chasing festival (inspired by the Gloucester Cheese Chase) to fighting to save the world from a hideous evil which has been unleashed by three riotous halfing youths. To date it is my most requested adventure, and I never fail to enjoy running it!
The core adventure of this module is not itself groundbreaking - the party has to fight their way uphill to get to the source of the power which threatens to consume the world and then they have to put a stop to it, which may or may not include fighting a Big-Bad Evil Guy. For the adventure itself, it has a core of fun hack & slash & zap strings of combat encounters, framed between some fun initial setup and some hard choices at the end - just the sort of thing you want for a one-shot*** game where the characters backstories aren’t too closely woven into things!
What makes this module truly unique, however, are the puns
Oh, the Puns!
This module is 12 pages of lovingly crafted story, illustration, and puns. So. Many. Puns.
There are 86 puns within this little gem of a module (that’s a pun density of just over 7 per page), and every one of them is related to cheese****. The town itself is Steepfield, a halfling town which stands on a steep slope beneath a huge boulder called Sentinel Hill, which protects them from landslides. Thus the town has grown upwards, rather than outwards, until it became a huge stack of interlinking towers, which gave it it’s nickname - the City of Cathedrals. The Cheese Chase is a celebration of the local Paladin Order, the Order of St Agur and the Church of the Jovial Bovine, of a time when they chased evil from the town and into the Churn; the lake at the bottom of the hill. The cheese is chosen by one of the Pilgrims of St Agur, and then is rolled down the hill, pursued enthusiastically by the halflings. The event is overseen by the town Mayor, Old Harry Ogleshield, who cradles his newest granddaughter, Belle, in a red cowl.
That’s just a summary of how it starts, and did you catch all 8 of the puns? If you did…
Why is this module so good?
As much as it sounds like I’m blowing my own trumpet here - and I suppose I am a little - I have had to think about what made this module so successful for me***** and I honestly think it’s the way that it scratches the itch where a group of friends having a good time wants to throw in some laughs here and there. The puns mean nothing to the Characters - after all, a bard throwing vicious mockery at a hulking chunk of oozing cheese which is trying to eat her knows nothing of the Camembert region of Normandy - but the Players get to appreciate it without skipping a beat in the hard-fought victory they are carving themselves towards!
And indeed, this adventure doesn’t hold back on the combats. From the moment the first blow is struck, it’s a fast-paced slog through the abandoned city of Steepfield to get to the top of Sentinel Hill, close the book of Emmental Evil, and banish the Brie-holder (as seen on the cover) back to the depths from which it came, before it can destroy the city beneath the earth-shaking tread of his greatest minion!
And the final hurrah for the cheese-puns is the table of random NPC names for the Steepfieldians - with 20 male and 20 female names, each of which is a type of cheese!
So, love them or hate them, Puns are here to stay, so why not embrace them and build your players an adventure where they can have laughs** all the way through whilst maintaining the grit and consequence of a tough D&D module!
Thankyou all for reading this far, and if you enjoy seeing D&D content scattered amongst the beautiful artwork and sterling stores (and let’s face it, this place is full of some seriously good creators) then please…
Thankyou all and goodnight!
*sufficiently profound that I dropped half a chocolate hobnob in a cup of tea, I was so astounded!
**or groans. Usually groans.
***In this case the one-shot grew into a 2-year campaign, still going strong after 54 sessions - so you know it’s good!
****I am proud to say that most of these puns required no research from my part - I am an absolute cheese fiend (coincidentally, this is a monster type which commonly appears herein), and I already knew so many cheeses that it came entirely naturally to punnificate them!
*****That’s personally successful, not financially. So far, I’ve sold about 6 copies, and if you’re one of those customers, then I would love to know how you got on with it!
I’m here for the puns and cheese. Bought it! 😊😊😊😊