ITT stale cliches

Kill the prince, claim diplomatic immunity, then get the fuck out of dodge when that fails with the wizard's teleport.

Rally to her service to remove shotafags, trapfags and the entire kitsune race from the empire.

>crossdressing
>trap
>kitsune

>dressing as a girl
>looking like a girl
>being able to transform into a girl
Isn't this a bit overkill?

Capture the princess, return her to her family/throne for a hefty reward, and then take the trap for my harem.

Everything is a cliche if you describe it in one sentence. I'm interested in "what happens next?"

For some reason I think of Disney's Aladdin. "Rebellious princess wants to be free" is the cliche, but then even though she manages to blend into the crowd she doesn't understand how money works and almost gets dismembered as a thief. And what happens next after that could be any number of things more interesting than "but then she reveals she's a princess and doesn't learn anything about the merits of extrajudicial dismemberment-based punishment seriously guys the story's about a magical genie don't focus on the poor people they're not relevant".

My players stopped an attempted murder and found out the target was a man who had rejected a young noblewoman. They didn't believe the woman to be able to attempt this, so they investigated and questioned her. As soon as they showed up, she burst into tears and apologized for rushing such a decision. They soon discovered that she had gotten drunk as fuck to drown her sorrows and then her evil uncle had told her about hiring a hitman to dispose of the one who had insulted her family's honor. After the hungover passed she remembered what she had done but wasn't able to call the hitman off.
Apparently she drinks a lot because she can't keep a fiancée for more than a couple months.

>Princess runs away from arranged marriage
>actually wants to marry the man
>but shes infertile and cant have kids
>doesnt want the man shes going to marry to be without children, so if she runs he can marry somebody else
>party tries to find a way to restore her fertility

could this work

Here's the twist.

She's twelve years old

...

Want to make it more complicated? She runs away because she's pregnant with another man's child.

The child is a half-bugbear

This is more or less the reason for the existence of monsters in my setting, one of the goddess is infertile, so one god chose another goddess, the infertile goddess create monsters to kill the other couple creations.

Consider the prince's opinion. Act based upon that. Acquire favors to be used at a later date.

I ran into this once. We helped her reach the border while evading soldiers who were hunting for her, frequently being only one town away from them and their messengers who were out offering bounties.

Turned out she was an incredibly powerful bandit lord who'd escaped the day before her execution. We got stuck between her men and a platoon of soldiers after delivering her, and had to fight our way out. She got away again, and the last living officer present gave us an ultimatum - bring her back dead or alive, or else we'd face execution as well.

Took us three months to find her hideout and kill her. It was a pretty fun campaign, though kinda sad since she and our party had genuinely gotten along and liked eachother while travelling together - but it was either us or her, and we made our choice.

typical woman

>Infertile and can't create life
>So she _creates_ monsters to kill the other creations

Que?

Magic, she can't have biological children.

Shit man, if I was in love with someone and presumably they were reciprocating only for them to drop me like a sack of shit because I was shooting blanks and then hooked up with some random dude I'd be mighty pissed. And when you're a god and mighty pissed, bad things tend to result.

And pregnant

>Half-bugbear
>Not half-displacer beast

You gotta make it weird, user.

Wait, so everyone else is actually descended from the gods?

Does that blood line or the generations of incest that must have followed actually give people any benefits?

>life can be magically created out of nothing
>gods still fuck each other to have actual kids instead
>they even consider fertility relevant enough to chose couple

So... You literally made Lamashtu?

Only one royal bloodline is descendant, the rest of humans were made, like the other creatures, to mine magic crystals, the fertile goddess gave them their freedom.

They are gods to the humans, they are simply older humans + powerful magic.

>they are simply older humans + powerful magic
That changes nothing.
People want kids of their own because there's some psychological issues with taking care of something you made yourself. If you can actually create life with your own hands and power, it's basically the same in your mind. Fertility is a non-issue when you can actually, literally, create life.

Didn't know about her. Thanks gonna check it out.

Do these gods fuck the lesser humans from time to time?

I ran an inversion of this one time. An old woman paid the party to kidnap a young girl who was about to be married off by her family to an inappropriate nobleman. The reason being that the old woman was the matriarch of her house, at odds with her descendants because she refused to abdicate in any of their favor, due to their general incompetence (due to her poor parenting and neglect). The girl was her last chance of a decent heir, and her parents were keeping her to themselves in hopes of controlling the inheritance.

I mean if this is happening in an analogue of as medieval setting that isn't so weird.

How would you do it?
I haven't decided it yet, still creating the setting.

Look up the Anunnaki, that might give you some great inspiration.

They already are.

>Old man runs away from ravenous young noble lady because he fears for his health.

You can culture bacteria in a petri dish but that doesn't mean you can suddenly have kids with someone.

Ah, good, I like your style.

>Creating creatures nearly or as complex as humans
>The same as culturing bacteria

Nani?

Shhh user he's obviously retardedly

I'd make it so there's some strong difference between life created with magic and life created by procreation.

As in, you just can't create anything but abominations when using magic. No matter how hard you try or how powerful you are, it will always come backwards and out of control.

Or you can create whatever with magic but it takes a part of your soul with it, and thus whoever that takes a go at it are bound to become insane and quickly become a twisted creature themselves.

>Half displacer beast
>Not half gelatinous cube

Maybe it's like how things work with Tolkien, where Melkor and Sauron could not truly create anything new, but could twist and corrupt existing creation. The original orcs were (maybe, possible; Tolkien kept changing their origin and never really got a definite version down) elves that were tortured and twisted by Melkor into beings of evil.

Thanks, I was thinking in those lines.
This is indeed a good idea too.

Any idiot can create another human with zero money, equipment, and resources.

Doing that with bacteria is significantly more difficult.

I suppose so, but creating synthetic life from scratch, that's something more worthy of a god methinks.

Burn down the entire port and have the fish man make uncomfortable sexual advances on the guards.

It's only a clerical error by the midwife, she's a kitsune princess.
The king decided to ignore the issue completely instead of forcing his daugther to live as a boy, but sadly the spies and diplomatic envoys are really bad at their jobs, and everyone outside the country is convinced that the princess is a whimsical girly looking boy.
She's gonna gut the next pretendant that tells her she really look like a girl.

> And old man is on the run from a political marriage of necessity to a young hottie arraigned by his noble house, because he is convinced that his bride will kill him and take control of his estate after the wedding. Maintaining peaceful relations with the noble house to avoid the crises is more important than he is, so he is pretty sure his own family would even let it slide as long as it was blatantly murder.

>I've seen this so often, and literally never any of my DMs put any clever twist or variation into it
The one time I ran it the princess wanted to marry another older man.

Okay, and women do this crap all the time too so?

Someone's never read the Wedding of Dame Ragnelle.
>errbody feasting in King Arthur's court
>old hag Dame Ragnelle in attendance
>challenges Arthur to answer a question for her within a year: "What do women want?"
>if he can't find the answer, he has to marry her
>psh this'll be easy
>wait this isn't easy
>Gawain help me
>Gawain agrees to pick up the slack, including marrying Dame Ragnelle
>and he marries her, the absolute madman
>it's their wedding night, Gawain's not into that GILF pussy
>suddenly Ragnelle turns into this beautiful woman
>"so here's the deal: I can either be ugly during the day and hot at night, or hot during the day and ugly at night. Which do you prefer?"
The Wife of Bath version has it as "beautiful and a cheating slut or ugly and the perfect loyal waifu". Or maybe it's the other way around?
>well that's a difficult choice, you do it
>"surprise that's the right answer! What women want is to make their own choices! You've broken the curse and now I get to be hot all the time!"
Though I prefer Green Knight.

>fish man make uncomfortable sexual advances on the guards.
Let out a hearty kek

We once met the pair having run off together to not get married. The old noble had promised his heart to another women ages ago on campaign, but his parents had forced him into a marriage when he returned so he was on this quixotic quest to find and make right with the one women he had ever loved. The girl, who in hindsight probably helped encouraged this, was along as his squire because she was a complete romantic and wanted to make sure nothing happened to the old man.

Damn, son. Gawain is an absolute MAD man.

The absolute madman.

I never thought I'd find something on the internet that was so genuinely fucking annoying. Good job, you've done it. I hate you.

>Someone's never read the Wedding of Dame Ragnelle
Except Gawain didn't bail and run, which was sort of the point I was trying to make.
Gawain is super underrated.

>whiteknighting the princess
>they do it for free

As a DM im guilty of always making the climax of my campaign some kind of invading force of evil humanoids. Nobody has said anything directly but I can tell they've noticed it which means I really have to switch it up.

I just love the ways those play out, and to my own credit they usually end up being defeated differently and its always a fun time.

I always liked imagining just how fucking smug Gawain would have been after that, walking around with a smoking hot wife that could have been King Arthur's just as easily if he hadn't of panic'd.

>People want kids of their own because there's some psychological issues with taking care of something you made yourself.

I think it's got more to do with the evolutionary drive to spread your genes. It's like the difference between being able to build a robot and being able to have a kid.

Gawain is too pure a chivalrous to be smug, which is arguably more infuriating.

Switch it up by making it an invading race of otherkin.

>I prefer Green Knight.

You know what's worse? When that young, rebellious noblewoman is a player in the party.

Why is he making llamas with his hands

> > It's "The party meets a young rebelious noblewoman, who ran away from her family, because they wanted her to marry an old man" episode.
- She's running because she's actually wanted for assassination attempt of her father, because she tried to make a powergrab for the throne and failed.
- She's running because her parents were just assassinated by the old man, and now he tries to legitimize his ascent to the throne by marrying her (basicaly Empress Emily).
- She's running because her parents AND the old man are involved in a cult of dark magic, and she wasn't aware of it. The marriage is required for some sort of dark ritual.

There you go, zero effort required.

Jesus Christ user are you stupid or something?

Those are obviously Alpacas.

>pic
Those eyes are pretty fucking empty, famalam.
Those are the eyes of a serial killer, who will mercilessly gut you in the back alley.
I would NOT trust that fox.

Eh, I tried it before. Not as a DM, but for a character backstory.

Her parents wanted to marry her to a prince from a bigger, more technologically advanced kingdom, using her as a diplomacy tool. She refused because she was in love with a peasant boy. Her father threatened to kill him if she didn't marry the prince, so she went along with it until the wedding day.

The king, being an asshole, executed him at the wedding when he wouldn't shut up. Princess went nuts and slaughtered everyone at the wedding, which included everyone in power from her kingdom, and some people from the bigger kingdom.

So she pretty much single-handedly turned the kingdom to anarchy, which actually worked out fine for a while, until the bigger kingdom came in and took over/enslaved them, imprisoned her in a void for hundreds of years with a powerful spell, leaving her in her hatred and festering rage. By the time she was released, she ended up with an intense hatred of nobility, and developed a way to feed off her hatred and anger as sustenance, as well as draw power from it, much like a paladin or cleric would from a deity.

Unfortunately, by the time she was released, both kingdoms had fallen, and so there was nothing she could do to save her people, so instead she devoted her life to freeing common folk from oppressive notabilities, wearing the armor of the "fiancé" she killed as a sort of disguise for herself, as well as making herself seem more intimidating.

Edgy as hell, but a fun character nonetheless.

>The party meets a rebellious noblewoman, who is currently commanding a large band of bandits and goblins in the marshlands to the south, having sworn to kill her uncle after the massacre of her father and brothers, and the abduction of her mother.
>They happen upon her drilling the goblins in the use of flintlock rifles they've recently stolen during a raid on a nearby military fort.
>Bandits are in the midst of loading cannons into crates for sale to neighboring powers, bolstering them against the usurper's marauding flunkies.

...

>Party meets a kindly older noblemen
>Cinnamon bun. To pure for this world.
>His family is well off but... they could do better
>His wife has died, he is the only member of his family who is not married
>His family wants him to marry a rich Noble woman
>He doesn't want it
>He asks to party to save him

R8 Me M8s

>Hoping to outlive her
>going to war

Son, were you born an idiot or did you have to work at it?

Abduct the Prince. Wing it from there.

It's the kitsune hand gesture.
I'm not joking.

Nice.

Hey, some wars can last for fucking ever. Either way he gets what he wants.

yes

...

It's actually still super weird.

It's why, for example, the Hadiths make sure to note that Aisha was very mature for her age.
Which wouldn't seem to be a necessary thing to keep mentioning when talking about fucking her if it was normal.

It's why the lawsuit between Joan of France and Louis was so fucking... weird.

The "Western European marriage pattern" (Women marry those they wish in their mid to late twenties) was already fairly solidly established at the end of the medieval era, and we see the precursors of it as far back as antiquity.
That's not to say that child marriages didn't happen, they were just still super weird.

>twenties
That's more because shit nutrition and various other environmental factors delayed onset of puberty sometimes till the mid to late teens, and even then you'd want to wait for a few years of development.

Anyways child(by today's definition) marriages were by no means uncommon or weird, I mean hell there are many places today where it's still practiced and not viewed as strange. It was however relatively uncommon to consummate these marriages any time before first menstruation and instead these marriages were more political/cultural ones. For the most part the whole idea of children and childhood as something special is more of a modern concept than anything though. If you were old enough to work in any serious capacity you were treated like an adult in nearly all senses of the word. Sexual relations however, again as stated before were not particularly common as the delayed onset of puberty combined with the simple fact that in those days people primarily took wives not for simple pleasure, but because having offspring was of primary importance to one's survival. An infertile bride wasn't of much use.

>Hadiths praise Aisha
That's more because she's a venerated figure in Islam though, they praise the shit out anyone directly entangled with the prophet even his damn cat.

So you've never even seen
>The party meets a young rebellious noblewoman, who ran away from her family because she wanted to go kick monster ass?

Play Dragon Quest IV.

>It's a "See thread on Veeky Forums talking about cliches or things they hate and start doubting myself and think every one of my ideas are cliche and shit" episode
Please tell me what you think is NOT cliche? I literally just thought up an idea for a character that I thought was amazing but now I don't know.

Also as for that scenario you have there
>Young, upstanding, and polite scholarly nobleman runs away from his family because they wanted him to marry a rebellious young rebel noblewoman who's parents (And yours) all think she is the sweetest thing despite her being a mean bitch.
How's that?

>That's more because she's a venerated figure in Islam though, they praise the shit out anyone directly entangled with the prophet even his damn cat.

See, you'd think so.
And I'd agree. Were it not for the fact that they stress her worldliness mostly when they're talking the consumation, or lack thereof.

Her wisdom is praised all the time, except when its not.
Aisha is actually fairly controversial, Shi'ites usually can't stand her.

>That's more because shit nutrition and various other environmental factors delayed onset of puberty sometimes till the mid to late teens, and even then you'd want to wait for a few years of development.

Yeah, that's the opposite of how it worked actually.
The age of marriage tends to rise with prosperity. It's true for the antiquity, it was true pre and post economic depression, and it was true in the medieval era.

>Anyways child(by today's definition) marriages were by no means uncommon or weird, (...) It was however relatively uncommon to consummate these marriages any time before first menstruation

Actually it was ILLEGAL in christendom (See:Western Europe) to marry a girl before she reached puberty, and popes stressed that fact HARD.
How hard?
Pre-emptive annulment, declarations of heresy, and condemnation all around.

And yes they were uncommon.
They existed, sure, no one is denying that. Again I mentioned the really funny case of Joan of France and king Louis. Which was basically medieval Maury, but literally everything about that case tells you that this shit wasn't normal.

> I mean hell there are many places today where it's still practiced and not viewed as strange

And sure, if we were talking about India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, or really any other place in that region, or Greece that would be fine. But I'm going to go ahead and assume your game is based on an amalgamation of French, British, German, Italian and Spanish middle age culture.

>Fantasy setting
>Dwarfs, humans, and elves, but lazily reskinned into Umans, Delves and Darfs.

If you're gonna do a tired trope, than at least fucking do it and don't try to hide it in the lamest way possible.

>Actually it was ILLEGAL in christendom (See:Western Europe) to marry a girl before she reached puberty, and popes stressed that fact
>Pre-emptive annulment, declarations of heresy, and condemnation all around.

Well, I was thinking more in the peasantry rather than among people who would have any contact with the papacy. But now that I think about it I guess we were talking about princesses, so yeah sorry about that.

Same as the witches-take-over-the-castle thread, chip in to pay to have the DM chemically castrated.

I once played a gnome who went on adventure! To finance a decent house/living with his forced bride

Well, I once did an instance where a rebellious old man ran away because he was being married to a young noble woman, and the party made fun of the idea until I buried it.

>Mfw no last adventure.
>Mfw called mad by everyone for wanting to fight gloriously against the darkness that encroaches upon the land.
>Mfw meeting party of adventurers with whom I may escape.
>Mfw turned away and called a fool by even them.
>Mfw dragged away, days later, to rot away in isolation by my own family, none of whom have felt the drive to more than what they were born for.

Honestly, just hearing "rebellious old man ran away because he was being married to a young noble woman" made me cackle externally. It still sounds like a good idea though and you should do it anyway even though it is a bit silly.

>tfw one servant boy goes along with it
>tfw one last adventure
>tfw old nobleman dies fighting the forces of darkness and passes on his inheritance to the servant boy with hsi final act
>tfw servant boy's now married to the noblewoman and noone can start shit over it because the old man died a hero
Another book gone unwritten, I suppose.