Form Letter Chronicles: Bag of Scolding
Chapter: Season Four
The bag of scolding was one of the first things I ever pitched to a gaming magazine. It was a silly cursed item in a pitch containing several RP heavy cursed items. The best part about the form letter? No one signed it. Back in the day, someone would sign it but now, in my mind, NO ONE wanted their name associated with the pitch.
I have a lot of old, rejected pitches and I have friends who have shared their rejection stories with me over the years (usually with many laughs over drinks at a convention). If we played the “What was I thinking?” drinking game, someone would die. Hindsight aside, I think I am going to make this a running feature. It’ll be cathartic and (hopefully) hilarious. I’ll change names to protect the innocent.
I can’t imagine the level of self control some of these companies have to go through while rejecting pitches. How many times do you think they have to show enough self restraint to not respond with “Seriously, what the f&%# are you thinking?!? Don’t mail us ever again!!!”
Yeah.. i once put a horse in my bag of holding. With some hay tho! And did the living bag once. Was a life shaped item looked like a big frog. It could store or retrieve things for you with its tongue. Was suppose to take 3ish days for the bag to trust you n climb on your back. The player didnt know why it was doing that tho. He threw it off, yelled at it, and told it it could walk on its own. Oh well.
My old group had a dead character, and we needed to transport his corpse for a resurrection. BAG OF HOLDING’D.
Our group also uses its Bag of Holding as a temporary container for the deceased, currently containing one petrified ex-party member, one remains of a different ex-party member (those parts that the pet tiger and cannibal halfling party member left), spare parts for another party member (we managed to acquire a second head for one player) a black dragons head (proof of ID for the party) and the scorched remains of a halfling NPC that we will resurrect once it is safe and the halfling mob isn’t looking for him.
You had me at “cannibal halfling party member”…
Athasian halfling is it?
That reminds me of Order of the Stick, when Haley doesn’t want to get the inside of her bag covered in dead Roy.
Some of the nonsense that’s appeared in various monster manuals over the years and this got rejected?! They probably thought it was too sensible….
Dude…. this sounds amazing.
I once ended up in a long discussion over whether or not you could put a pony in a bag of holding (Halfling, so pony). The consensus was “Only if you constantly provide it with fresh air, etc.
Somehow this ended up with the image of me holding the bag open and running around yelling “Live, pony! Liiiiiiiiiiiiiive”
We always used bag of holding rules presented in one of the novels from2nd ed days. In umm the Obsidian Oracle by Troy Denning one of the characters got stuck in his bag. Could breathe just fine. But couldnt get out unless someone stuck in their arm n thought of you n thus floated you to the entrance. Once almost had someone forever lose their whole party by trying to sneak them into a place with a bag o holding n died before pulling em out. Everyone else stuck “forever”
I never pitched this anywhere, but I totally ripped off Hermione’s beaded bag from Book 7 and gave the cleric a pink, sequin-encrusted bag that came from a merchant’s wife (who died in a caravan raid). It was dubbed The Handbag of Holding. I make sure NPCs and monsters occasionally comment on it…
I used to play a warlock that TOTALLY kept an undead horse in a large bag of holding.
That which is not alive cannot be killed. Problem solved! 🙂
That. Is. Genius.
I thought of something. With a bag of holding, you can “hold” anything you can put IN it, right? then how could you make the horse ENTER the bag?
and what happen if you tear the bag, all the jnk gets out, or there is a tiny black hole effect until the bag turns over?
Cheers!
By the way, love the d20monkey series, Brian.
Ah yes, endless discussions about bags of holdings at our table. How do over sized items get in the bag? Does the opening expand to allow it to enter, does the item shrink to fit? Do things actually go bad in there, or is it suspended animation so to speak? Which was very important for us to discuss and figure out since we had a dead party member who we wanted to resurrect, but obviously not if he ended up half decomposed by the time we returned to the nearest city. And the things that ended up in the bag that we thought would be useful later only to be asking ourselves months later, why do we still have a 10′ monkey poking stick in our bag, and why should we keep it?
Thanks to the MUDding community I grew up with, the rules of bags of holder were:
Time Stop
Shrink (black hole/vacuum)
Pocket Dimension (limited size, just much larger than the carried space… also meant to additional mass)
Stasis (Added as an errata, so that you couldn’t enter a permanently time-stopped space and not age while researching).
Nether Gate (Objects “grounded” to another realm (players putting things in) could pass through without being effected (allowing movement in timestop) unless they fully entered the realm, in which case they were no longer grounded)
I think the best thing I ever stuck in a bag of holding was a Rune of Return we found in a dungeon… I later stuck my hand in to find a very confused and disoriented MU who didn’t much care for what I considered the most entertaining practical joke at our table.
*sigh* I miss being a PC
I could use a bag of folding, just toss my laundry into it and have it come back out folded.
Why am I hearing Gilbert Gottfried’s voice when I read this? Could that be another curse of the bag, that it always sounds like it’s yelling?
I once ran a very twisted necromancer who made an army of undead and put them all in a bag of holding. They don’t need air or anything. Sure, getting them out is a pain, since it’s one at a time, but once you have a few out, they can continue the process. Still, there’s some usefulness to having an undead army that could be deployed overnight.
I’m pretty sure just about everyone in our party had at least one bag of holding, one portable hole, or one Heward’s Handy Haversack. Our characters were serious hoarders and we always had so much gold, we never sold anything in the bags.
We used to justify a lot of “what ifs” thanks to those damn things.
I love it!
You win, Ruth… you win.
I actually laughed out loud at the spoiler alert part. Brian, this comic in general has touched on all of my feels, but this one really made me laugh, and I needed that. Thank you, sir.
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