Tthe fucking What mage
Okay, so some friends and i were playing a short two-session campaign, right? And in this setting, magic was viewed as taboo. So I did what any self-loathing masochist would and decided to play a wizard. But I don’t think I emphasized how taboo magic was in this game’s setting - it was in the midst of witch-burning inquisitions, the works. So I needed to find ways to cast spells without being noticed and executed. Enter Corky the Clown.
Corky the Clown was a quiet fellow, a man of few words. And by that, I mean he communicated exclusively in bicycle horn honks. Our party’s rogue was a knife-thrower for a traveling circus that was burned down during one of these magic inquisitions, and I was his coworker/unwanted sidekick as we struck out looking to find a new place to belong. Now, you’d think that having a mute party member whose entire ability set could get him and everyone associated with him killed would be a liability, but Corky the Clown slowly but surely earned his keep. Some highlights include:
Corky wasn’t actually mute. He just had an extremely quiet voice. This proved advantageous to casting spells unnoticed.
Corky’s preferred form of attack was to call a time-out in the middle of battle, pull out an oversized cigar, and offer it to the enemy. When the enemy refused, he’d shrug, pull out a lighter, and light the cigar. Alas, this whole stunt was just a means of stalling while he ever-so-quietly invoked Flaming Sphere, and after taking a drag off the cigar, he’d blow into it like a balloon to make the burning end swell into a fireball.
A pretty useful cantrip for wizards in 3.5e is Acid Splash. Corky the Clown took advantage of this by sauntering up to a foe while quietly invoking the cantrip, then letting loose a squirt of acid from the flower pinned to his bowler hat.
Grease is usually used to lube up a 10-foot area, but it can also be focused on a single object. Corky’s object of choice was a comically oversized beach ball, which he would coat with grease before bowling it in the direction of the enemies. This ball bounced harmlessly off the enemy’s shin, but left a trail of grease behind, turning a huge tract of land into a slippery disaster zone. The foes never saw this as anything more than mere clown antics - when Corky would make an exaggerated show out of slipping and sliding around, they’d laugh or be confused before invariably taking a step and careening into a wall.
Feather Fall was concealed by carrying a dinky parasol, floating around like Mary Poppins.
But where did Corky keep these balls and parasols and cigars? Well, the DM decided to spice things up by letting us each choose a more uncommon item as part of our starting set. I chose a Bag of Holding, which I kept on my person at all times.
Corky the Clown was also a little bit of a kleptomaniac, always looking out for things that might prove useful for an act. The party investigating a city’s commercial district led to him finding an abandoned shipping crate full of bandanas.
These bandanas saved the party’s life at a later point, where we were cornered by bandits on a sinking airship and had nowhere to go but down. The control room was all the way on the other end, blocked off by our foes. Thinking quickly, he pulled out a bunch of bandanas tied together from his sleeve and tied them around a support column, before... abandoning everyone and jumping to his death?
Not a chance - as he fell, the tied-together bandanas kept spewing from the Bag of Holding in his sleeve like a bungee cord, and when they ran out, he was able to use this rope and the inertia of the fall to swing across the underside of the airship, grab onto the bow, and haul himself up into the control room where he managed to make the airship narrowly avoid a mountain and crash into a lake instead.
Alas, we never did finish that campaign, so Corky’s fate will forever be lost to the ages, but I’ll never forget the time we had with him.
