Dungeons and Dimwits
is a follow-up to It's The End Of The World As We Know It by Samey90. It is complete.
Set in the Equestria Girls universe, it follows the adventures of Indigo Zap, Sour Sweet, Sugarcoat, Sunny Flare, and Lemon Zest, as they try to actually complete a successful Dungeons & Dragons campaign for once. Their strategy? Bring Twilight Sparkle in to serve as Dungeon Master instead of Sugarcoat, who keeps killing off everyone's characters.
Dungeons and Dimwits provides examples of:
- Accidental Unfortunate Gesture: After being reanimated by Sugarcoat's necromancy, Sinbad appears to give her the finger... but it turns out that he's so badly mutilated that he no longer has an index finger to point with.
- Alliterative Name:
- Gmork Gartenzwerg
- Hunzrin Hundsfott
- Alliterative Title
- Anachronic Order: The story takes place within the same timeframe of It's The End Of The World As We Know It, although the author admits to taking some liberties with the timeline and there are a few occurrences that contradict the order of events seen in the other story.
- Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Sugarcoat's list of maritime crimes include "mutiny, casting dark magic, religious propaganda, and being a drunken twat".
- Ass Pull: In-universe (or at least, in the game's universe). The second chapter begins with several hasty and dubious retcons to cover for the fact that the Shadowbolts are terrible at roleplaying.
- Bag of Holding: Gmork deploys a full-sized ballista in the last chapter, saying that he had been carrying it in his luggage the whole time.
- In chapter 6 Lemon claims that her pony survived the chuul attack in her luggage, prompting Sour to tell her that this is not how ponies work.
- Bavarian Fire Drill: The Shadowbolts try to pull this off while pretending to be cultists. It backfires rather quickly.
- Bilingual Bonus: Gmork's last name, "Gartenzwerg" is German for "garden gnome".
- Hunzrin's last name, Hundsfott is German for "scoundrel".
- Blade Enthusiast: Sour Sweet's elf character Araralei is nominally an archer, but she carries a bewildering array of daggers stashed all over her person, and isn't shy about using them.
- Bolivian Army Ending: Discussed at the end of the story when the party gets surrounded by angry innkeepers.
- Cherry Tapping: The chuul Indigo kills takes a lot of punishment, but in the end it's killed with a halfling.
- Cool and Unusual Punishment: Indigo threatens Gmork the half-orc into talking by pointing out that if he doesn't talk to her, he'll have to talk to Sugarcoat instead, which is considered to be a Fate Worse than Death.
- Crazy-Prepared: Sugarcoat made four different plans to take over the ship, plus a backup plan involving mass murder and necromancy if the first four failed.
- Creator Thumbprint: "Baboon" turns out to be Juniper's safeword.
- Crippling Overspecialization: Indigo put all her Intelligence and Wisdom stat points into Strength instead, and as a result, her character can't read.
- Damned by Faint Praise:Captain: This reminds me. Why'd I need a halfling cleric on my ship?
Gmork: Ballast. - Deep-Immersion Gaming: The story jumps back and forth between the real-life tabletop game and the actual in-game world.
- Fantastic Racism: Sour Sweet character's attitude towards any race that isn't elves (especially halflings).
- Friendly Fire:
- Literally in Lemon Zest's case - her character is a tiefling and is innately resistant to fire, but her teammates, not so much.
- Indigo's barbarian character Fafhrd also has some... accuracy issues when it comes to fighting.
Sour Sweet: Do you even know what close combat is? - A Good Name for a Rock Band:Sugarcoat: ...have you ever heard of a thing called lactose intolerance?
Indigo: No, I'm not a fan of grindcore. - Grievous Harm with a Body: At some point Indigo's barbarian character ends up using Sugarcoat's halfling as an improvised weapon, much to Sugarcoat's displeasure.
- Height Angst: Indigo tends to play hulking barbarian characters, which she admits is just compensation for her short stature in real life.
- Here We Go Again!: After Twilight (successfully) finishes up the Shadowbolts' campaign, she runs into Rainbow Dash — who wants her to DM a campaign that promises to be just as whacked-out as this one.
- Hot Skitty-on-Wailord Action: Gmork's father is a gnome and his mother is an orc. Don't think about it too hard.
- How We Got Here: The opening scene is a Flash Forward to an event that occurs halfway through the story.
- I'll Be in My Bunk: Sunny Flare after witnessing Sour Sweet and Lemon kiss:Sunny: I’ll be in the toilet. I need, to, uhh… brush my teeth.
Sugarcoat: Do you happen to have an electric toothbrush?
Sunny: Not your business. - Impaled Palm: How Sour Sweet deals with hostile bartenders.
- Improvised Weapon: Fafhrd the Barbarian uses quite a lot of strange objects as weapons, including a halfling and a minecart's brake lever.
- Incendiary Exponent:Indigo: If you want to hang out with us, you need to remember one thing: we always light buildings on fire.
Gmork: Gmork can light things on fire in more ways than ya think are possible. - Insistent Terminology: Sugarcoat insists on calling herself a hobbit, despite Twilight's equally stringent insistence on the more legally-safe term "halfling".
- Intoxication Ensues: An interesting case. In chapter 2, Sugarcoat's character gets drunk with the sailors, but she's sober in real life. In the next chapter, Lemon and Sunny get drunk while waiting for the rest to arrive, leaving their characters drunk for at least two in-game days.
- I Shall Taunt You: Lemon using the Vicious Mockery spell in chapter 2 ends up quoting Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks with a random "I fart in your general direction" thrown in.
- Killer Game Master: Sugarcoat. The other Shadowbolts get so fed up that they go looking for a Dungeon Master who won't kill their characters off time after time, which brings them to Twilight and kicks off the story.
- Large Ham: Juniper tends to overact when playing NPCs, prompting Sour to shoot one of them.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In-game.Lemon Zest: Fire Tornado? A little voice in my head that sounds exactly like Twilight tells me I can't use it.
- Ludicrous Gibs: The fate of Lemon's first character after one of her fire spells ignites a barrel of gunpowder.
- Metagame:Sour Sweet: Don't worry, it's all a part of my plan.
Lemon Zest: What's the plan?
Sour Sweet: Kill Sugarcoat, make her get a new character, and then I'll think of something. - Mythology Gag: Indigo suggests buying Twilight Sparkle a quesadilla, but Sugarcoat stops her because she knows that Twilight is lactose-intolerant. In the show, Twilight has a fear of quesadillas.
- Narcissist: Juniper has shades of this; she asks Lemon if she can keep a nude portrait of herself that Lemon drew and gets rather defensive when Indigo suggests that "they aren't that big".
- Non-Human Humanoid Hybrid: Gmork.Twilight: Sunny, your character is the shortest half-orc I've ever seen.
Sunny: That's because the other half is a gnome. - Noodle Incident: Apparently the girls once played Vampire: The Masquerade with Lemon Zest as a DM. The results almost caused them to burn the handbook.
- Oh, My Gods!: Sour Sweet (as Araralei) curses in the names of various Forgotten Realms deities.
- Only Sane Man: Twilight. Or at least she tries to be.
- Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: In-universe. Indigo manages to keep up her character's accent for a whole scene before forgetting it for the rest of the campaign.
- Pinned to the Wall: Indigo impales a dwarf to a wall with her sword at one point.
- Playing with Fire: Lemon Zest has a fondness for the homebrew Fire Tornado spell.
- The Real Man: Indigo's player archetype. She always chooses enormous tank characters who are great at swinging a massive sword around and very little else.
- Recruiting the Criminal: Sugarcoat manages to avoid being hanged by pointing out that her dark magic will be useful in the imminent fight against attacking pirates.
- The Roleplayer: Sunny Flare is about the only one making a real effort to roleplay her character.
- Screw You, Elves!: The party's common reaction to Sour's more outrageous antics.
- Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: Gmork tries to pull this off, though his companions are less than thrilled.Gray Mouser: I don’t want to interrupt, but about a hundred drows are aiming their bows at us.
Gmork: Don’t worry, this baby note holds thirty bolts.
Gray Mouser: I said ‘a hundred‘. Sure, we can hope they’ll go full circular firing squad and shoot each other, but I’d rather not be in the middle of all this. - Shout-Out:
- Indigo's and Sugarcoat's characters are Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, respectively.
- Lemon Zest suggests using an Accio spell to summon a dead sailor's missing windpipe.
- Sour Sweet's character hates sand.
- Indigo and Sour Sweet have a Body-Count Competition when fighting the pirates, à la The Lord of the Rings.
- Sunny Flare keeps a replica of the jet glider from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind in her room. She also most definitely doesn't own a body pillow of Katyusha from Girls und Panzer.
- The cultist's base bears an uncanny resemblance to Boatmurdered. The chapter where it's introduced is actually called "Hope You Like Miasma".
- When introducing his full-auto crossbow to Chandara, Gmork says "Shall Gmork show ye its features?"
- Lemon's second character is named Charlene after the character from Stephen King's Firestarter. Her powers are pretty much the same.
- Speaking of Charlene, Lemon tries to channel Old Man Henderson by writing a long and elaborate backstory for her. However Twilight, being a Bookworm, reads it all, much to Lemon's dismay.
Twilight: You may have thought that putting your equipment list in the middle of an erotic story featuring Charlene’s parents was a clever move, but I actually got to that part. Well, I actually didn’t expect this story to turn erotic, which made it pretty awkward since I was reading it in the toilet. Also, while you do have some interesting items in your bags, the potion of supreme healing is not one of them. Other parts I read consist of an unrelated vampire story featuring a fetish I didn’t know I had, another story of Charlene’s father that features things I never knew existed, several pages of random gibberish which, after reading it backwards turned out to be a salad recipe in French, a detailed plan on how to murder Sugarcoat, Charlene’s statistics and character traits, and a nude portrait of, as far as I can tell, Juniper, sketched with pencil and finished with Conté crayons. Why are you looking at me like that? - Skeleton Crew: Unsurprisingly for the Shadowbolts, Sugarcoat does use the pun when reanimating the dead crew of the pirate ship so that they can get to their destination.
- Standard Snippet: Indigo starts humming the ER theme when Sour Sweet tries to stabilise Sugarcoat.
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: Sunny Flare in chapter 5:Indigo: Hey. what's this? Beneath all those old uniforms?
Sunny: It’s most definitely not a body pillow. - That Came Out Wrong:[after killing a group of pirates with an explosive barrel]
Gmork: Gmork blew them all!
Sour Sweet: Don't say that again, please... - Third-Person Person: Gmork.
- Throwing Your Sword Always Works: Indigo seems fond of this tactic, despite her sword being an enormous zweihander.
- Totem Pole Trench: Sour Sweet claims that her character was assaulted by three halflings in a trenchcoat when she was younger, as a justification for her hatred of the species.
- The Unpronounceable: Sour Sweet's elf character is named Araralei, which is not that difficult to pronounce, but enough of a tongue-twister that Indigo immediately gives up on it.
- We Named the Monkey "Jack": Lemon names her pony "Lyra Heartstrings", apparently unaware that one of the Canterlot High students is named exactly the same.
- What the Hell Is That Accent?: Sugarcoat has no idea what barbarian accent Indigo is trying to pull off, although it quickly becomes moot as Indigo drops the accent almost immediately after establishing it.
- When All You Have Is a Hammer…:Sugarcoat: ...when all you have is necromancy, every problem starts looking like someone who needs to stop breathing.
- Worst Aid: Indigo's idea of dealing with a stab wound is to pull the knife out. Naturally, Sugarcoat chews her out for this.Sugarcoat: Did you ever listen to Nurse Heartless during the first aid classes?
Indigo: Only when she talked about getting shot. You know, in case Twilight and Moondancer ever went full Pumped-Up Kicks. Are you okay?
Sugarcoat: I'm one death saving throw away from dying and I just heard a tiny voice that sounds exactly like our DM, telling me that you really shouldn't have mentioned Pumped-Up Kicks. - You All Meet in an Inn: Twilight starts the campaign in an almost textbook fashion, much to Sugarcoat's annoyance. Played for Laughs at the end, when Twilight has the party run into a group of former innkeepers who are looking for some payback after having their establishments wrecked.
