Scribbles and Horrors

There is no being more frightening to have players encounter than The Redactor. Other monsters do hit point damage or attack with level drain or simply eat up valuable session time with tediousness. The Redactor is more malevolent and irreversible than these. The Redactor devours referee notes.

The Redactor has 5 HD, moves at a speed of 20”, and cannot be harmed.

When The Redactor attacks, each hit dealt corresponds to the complete blacking out referee notes, either 1 line or paragraph (for text) or 2 square inches (for maps and illustrations) (Determined randomly, perhaps by where the dice fall on the page.)

If The Redactor hits with three simultaneous 6s, an entire page of referee notes is destroyed.

Destroyed here means shredded and thrown away. It means gone, not set aside, not retired, not crumpled up playfully only to be carefully unfolded later. The referee must rip the page out there and then and tear it into tiny pieces, or burn it, or shred it, or eat it. Digital files must be deleted and overwritten. All copies, originals, backups, and collages of that page must likewise be destroyed–no trace can be left. No photocopy or photograph or partial residue is safe. Best efforts must be made to take down shared or published material. As much as possible, all material traces of the page must be wiped away. What remains will be only memory.

Player notes are entirely unaffected by Redactor attacks.

The Redactor can be appeased if willingly offered pages of player-made notes–between 1 and 6 pages of maps or 3-30 pages of text will satisfy it. Otherwise it will hound the party relentlessly, steadily eliminating the substance of the game itself.

There are stories of referees who have lost entire campaigns to The Redactor when players did not realize what was happening until it was too late. They could not find their way out of the underworld because the referee map was gone and stairways were improperly marked. Page by page, the campaign sank into oblivion.

There are further stories–more unsettling–of games which continue on long after The Redactor has eaten everything up, of referees who sit without pencil or paper, only dice, running the game by memory alone while players scribble furiously, nearly hidden behind stacks of loose leaf and binders, their copious notes.