The Many Deaths of Kenny

This was from a campaign called Blessings of Mother Earth—a light-hearted, futuristic fantasy D&D campaign in which I played Crimes LeBandit; a racoon rogue. I didn’t document the whole thing on here, but whatever. In short, our characters were summoned from across the multiverse by Mother Earth to fight Death (the concept, not the band). With the not-so-serious tone of the campaign, Gustav once again took the opportunity to create something ridiculous. This time it was Kenny.

Kenny had once been a viking fisherman during in the real world. He had the special ability to reincarnate or, as we later found out, actually just possess a random person whenever he died. Gustav’s brain was always overflowing with crazy character ideas, and Kenny Kennedy Kennyson was his chance to play them all.

Death #1: Suffocation

When the group first met Kenny, he was a tabaxi (cat person). He wore a fishbowl full of water on his head. He had been cursed to only be able to breathe underwater. This was terribly inconvenient, especially when he had to swim in dirty water and the bowl got all murky and disgusting. Crimes (and I) had a lot of fun with the fishbowl—pouring beer and popcorn into it when Kenny was least suspecting it. But, as one might expect, the bowl wouldn’t last forever. It shattered when Crimes sang a high note during karaoke at a hotel. Kenny ran to the kitchen and poured tap water on his face. From then on, he had to walk around with a massive bottle of water to pour on himself. Interestingly, this isn’t the first time we’ve had a water-breathing tabaxi staying alive by pouring water on himself. A similar scenario happened with a water-breathing curse and a Decanter of Endless Water in Dungeons of Drakkenheim.

With Kenny somehow surviving on his bottled water rations, the party continued with their quest. They found a temple dedicated to the god of death, and were invited to watch human sacrifices. The party opposed the idea of human sacrifice, but the victims turned out to be willing. Unable to persuade the brainwashed cultists not to Juliet themselves, they decided to accept the invitation and watch. That’s how they ended up sitting in a theater watching a bunch of dudes stab themselves. Kenny had asked if he could participate, and was told that the sacrifice was only for humans. He thought this was racist, and in the middle of the ceremony, threw his bottle of water away, ran up on the stage, and choked to death.

Death #2: Drowning

Kenny’s second death was the opposite of the first one. But let’s step back a bit. The party continued without Kenny, but his reincarnated form eventually meandered back to them, now in the body of a kenku, or a bird person. He didn’t die when he dressed up as a house to lure out Baba Yaga’s hut. He didn’t die when he mixed up the pages of his spellbook and failed to cast Feather Fall, causing him to fall hundreds of feet (kenku don’t have wings). He didn’t even die when he fought Moby Dick. No, he died immediately after that. Because we killed him.

For reasons ignored, a child the party knew was orphaned. The group wondered if perhaps Kenny’s reincarnations took the form of recently deceased people in the vicinity. If that were the case, the child could have one of his parents back, albeit with the personality of a complete nutcase. To test this theory, Kenny agreed to get drowned in the ocean. He did, in fact, not return as the child’s parent, but rather as a frog man.

Death #3: Explosion

Frog Kenny would meet his end in the final act of a manor murder mystery. His signature move as the frog had been, other than using his tongue as a grappling hook, to cast Glyph of Warding on the Fireball page of his spellbook, setting it to trigger Explosive Runes when he cast fireball. Now, if you’ve read the Player’s Handbook, you might know that this isn’t how the spell works¹. But Gustav hadn’t, so here we go. Frog Kenny had an ability that let him take damage instead of spending the money required for expensive spells, so he could stack up Glyph of Warding for free. This almost killed him several times. But he survived that, and he also somehow survived his own stacked up explosion twice. But after that, he didn’t use it for a couple of sessions, instead choosing to stack up more and more glyphs until the explosion would be strong enough to take out just about anyone.

So there we were, in the garden of the murder mystery manor, when one of the suspects revealed themselves to be the murderer and turned into a giant celestial killer rabbit. Kenny walked right up to him and cast Fireball, triggering enough explosions to leave nothing but a crater behind. So much for that boss fight.

Close Calls

The Tripwire Gauntlet

At one point, the party was forced to navigate a hallway full of tripwires to fetch a key at the other end. Crimes accomplished this with all the grace of a rogue who can’t roll below twenty-one on acrobatics. Kenny, now a red panda (or as crimes called it, ginger raccoon) but still the same Kenny in soul and mind, was curious to see what would happen if he triggered the tripwires. When the party was done exploring the dungeon, he charged right at them. The party stood watching at a safe distance, and everyone except Crimes told him not to do it. But do it he did, and boy was that a bad idea. The explosions he triggered sent him flying back across the room, slamming into the far wall. Somehow, he didn’t die.

Crimes’ Door Prank

In a similar scenario, the party had solved a puzzle at the far end of a hallway, successfully avoiding triggering the puzzle’s trap. But as they say, curiosity killed the Kenny, and he went back down the corridor after everyone had left to trigger the trap. Crimes was at the far end, and Kenny instructed him to close the door as soon as Kenny came running out of it. Kenny feared there might be an explosion, and his plan was to trap it inside the hallway with the big iron door. But let’s face it, you can’t trust a guy named Crimes. Especially not when he’s a mischievous raccoon. When Kenny triggered the trap, it erupted in a terrible explosion that sent Kenny flying towards the door opening. Suddenly, the door opening was no longer an opening. It was just a door, Crimes having slammed it shut. Everyone saw it coming. Kenny somehow survived.

The Tongue Trick

One time, Kenny (frog edition) was on a rooftop. He’d climbed up there to flank the enemies that the others were fighting, but found that there was no way into the building from the roof. There were windows on the walls, as there are on all non-depressing buildings, but Kenny wasn’t quite sure how to get through them. Our of character, I suggested he use his grappling hook frog tongue to Spider-Man his way through the window. That is exactly what Kenny did. Or rather, attempted.

Kenny ran towards the edge of the roof and jumped off, flipping upside down in the air, and shooting his frog tongue back at the building. This would make him swing right back through the window, reentering the battle in badass fashion. Only, he missed, and crashed right into the ground².

RNGsus Hates Your Guts

The party was in a tower that had a rotten wooden hatch at the bottom. There were no floors in the tower’s central stairwell, so it was a straight drop from the top to the wooden hatch. Crimes thought it would be really cool of, instead of using the key they’d found, someone dropped right onto the hatch from the top of the tower and destroyed it. Everyone looked to Kenny (red panda edition), the most expendable of the group. However, Kenny had a Ring of Feather Falling that Crimes had bought him so he wouldn’t mess up feather fall again, and Kenny didn’t want to take it off.

After some discussion, the group decided that Floura, the group’s tooth fairy barbarian, would just slam him into the hatch like a bag of potatoes. This she did, and the DM asked us what a reasonable damage roll would be. I suggested a d100, Gustav’s favorite die, and he enthusiastically agreed. So we rolled, thinking it would be a fun gamble since the damage could be both really low and really high.

It came up a hundred.

Kenny took one hundred damage and plummeted straight through the hatch into a basement filled with toxic gas. I have no idea how he survived.

So there you have it, the many deaths of kenny. Though I guess “many” means “three” in this case. In the end, red panda Kenny survived. He didn’t want to go back to the viking age a a red panda, and instead came with Crimes to Brooklyn. They’re both probably sitting on the gargoyles of the Chrysler Building³ looking over New York to this day.