Funny / Rusty Quill Gaming

Given that Rusty Quill Gaming is made up of improvers and comedians, expect plenty of moments that will make you cry with laughter just as much as sadness.

Note: Most episodes include a short blooper reel at the end, so there are many other moments in and out of game.

Erasing the Line

Prologue

• Bertie catches Zolf with one finger, and, outside, an ice cream truck goes past the Rusty Quill Towers.
• After the party is captured by Barret's thugs, Zolf attempts to convince them he's more injured than he is. He fails the Bluff check, which Ben plays as Zolf saying, in complete deadpan, "Help, I have fallen and I cannot get up."

Season 1

• During the chase for Pseudo-Byron, Zolf, who can't move more than 10 feet per turn, simply opts out and gets very, very drunk on the bank's free alcohol, to the point of taking off his peg leg and using it to fence.
  • Similarly, during the chase on the Paris rooftops, Zolf decides he won't even bother:
  Ben, introducing his character: Zolf "two tile" Smith!
• Wilde and Bertie's over-the-top flirting and subsequent "interview." James wonders aloud whether he should roll for "ride" or "intimate knowledge (nobility)."
• While stuck in a jail for a week, Zolf gets very, very into romance novels (thanks to the jailer giving him one).
  Zolf: Jennifer, no!
• While travelling to Calais, the party encounters Doris & Sandra, two elderly British women who race each other across Europe every year while getting absolutely sloshed. They proceed to flirt wildly with Hamid and race them towards Calais in their cars.
• Bertie finally gets a chance to tell the party about his situation while in a magically protected room:
  Bertie: I am under a curse. I am under a curse! It’s a massive curse. It’s a curse full of lawyers, it’s a real problem, it’s been quite the nuisance and I can’t talk about it when I’m out there! I can definitely talk about it when I’m in here! Then it’s fine! Then the lawyer gnomes won’t be watching me all the time! If I talk about the curse, it triggers the curse more. If I break the curse in any way – basically I have to be a knight! I have to be a bold kni– I don’t want to do any of this! Sick of this, it’s horrible! I wanna be at home, coated in honey the whole time, being gently licked by nice young men. And here I am haring all over the continent – I’m bloody stuck with it!! I’m sick of it! I hate all of you!
• When chasing the old man on the rooftops of Paris, both Sasha and Bertie spectacularly fail their saves to jump across a building, taking massive amounts of fall damage. Cue Bryn pretending that Hamid is going to try that same jump, and the whole table freaking out before he clarifies that it's a joke.
• As Sasha separates from Hamid and Zolf to look for exit to the catacombs, a terrifying monster starts chasing her:
  Zolf: I spy with my little eye something starting with a — (Horrifying screech from the monster getting stabbed echoing down the tunnels.)
  Hamid : ...EEEE-vil?
  • Sasha then attempts to lie very, very badly that everything is fine – she just needs to check the other tunnel but Hamid and Zolf should probably not make a lot of noise.
• As Hamid and Sasha fight a fire elemental, Bertie comes to check on them: he opens the door to the room, sees how the fight is going, and simply closes the door again.

Season 2

• Paris, flooded? In Seine.
• The table's names for an entire street of restaurants, beginning with "The Soggy Admiral" and progressing through ship's ranks (ex: The Soggy First Mate, The Soggy Boatswain, etc), culminating in "The Soggy Cabin Boy," who is just a boy standing outside in the rain offering prawns to passersby.
• Bertie's attempts at vengeance on Harrison Campbell while aboard Amelia Earhart's skyship. He throws Campbell over the side of the ship, where he dangles for a moment, before being rescued through a lower window. Bertie, however, doesn't see this rescue and believes Campbell has just plunged to his doom. Earhart goads Bertie into descending on a line to check that Campbell's not hanging on the bottom, and when he does, has cooking fat thrown down the side, leaving him to repeatedly slip down the side of the skyship as Earhart and Sasha watch, eating chicken.
• One of Hamid's first acts as the party's new leader is coming up with a name: the London and Other London Outstanding Mercenary Group, or L.O.L.O.M.G.
• Grizzop's on-the-go funeral rites: "Ashes to ashes, funk to funky, go off and join the Celestial Hunt-y!"
  • The bloopers reel at the end of the episode reveals the party workshopping the phrase, leading to increasingly vulgar suggestions about words that might rhyme with "hunt."
• The party spends half an episode trying to get the talking raven in Kafka's office to first admit that it can talk, and then to tell them what happened to Kafka — and then of the benefits of capitalism.
  • The episode summary being just 'Everyone talks to a raven for ages.'
    Alex: People choose to listen to this podcast for pleasure.
• Sasha and Grizzop play I-spy on the trek across the floor of Newton's office, much to the chagrin of both Hamid and Alex. Grizzop proceeds to try and argue with the "Sky Ghost" for interrupting.

Season 3

• Grizzop and Azu wander into a seedy bar in search of Sasha — only to inadvertently start a bar fight. Grizzop rolls a natural 20 to shoot a man's kneecaps off, and then immediately regrets his decisions and reattaches them.
• While fighting off dozens of Mooks from the Cult of Hades, the players descend into tears of laughter as they decide that the cultists are all "lads and/or blokes of indeterminate gender" and insert "lads" or "blokes" into every phrase that comes to mind.
  Ben: My milkshake brings all the blokes to the yard!
• Alex asks the party to come up with a name of a classy restaurant in Cairo. Their answer? The Griddle of the Sphinx.
• The party hires a limo to take them into Damascus, and unwisely let Sasha drive. As the party speeds down the hill, Azu tries to climb out the window to talk to Sasha, but falls out the carriage. Not knowing what's happening, Grizzop and Sasha jump out after her. Hamid, left alone in the carriage, his three companions having leaped from the limo for absolutely no discernible reason, takes a swig of wine from the bottle and continues into Damascus.
• Alex begging Ben to stop saying that the party will now explore "the pump hole", which just causes the rest of the players to get involved.
  Helen: It's a dirty, moist, gaping, sunken pump hole.
• Wilde's solution to the group telling him to get some rest? Sending illusory fireworks into the air that read "Wilde's fine! Stop asking!"
• While trying to flood the factory, Grizzop has a "very exciting" meeting with several half-naked orcs. He ends up walking with a group of them, leaving him surrounded by orc thighs.
• Grizzop's desperately tries to get the "People's Front of Damascus" — the single most incompetent group of revolutionaries in the lands under Meritocratic control — to help him get to Rome, leading Grizzop on an increasingly absurd treasure hunt around Damascus to keep their actions "hidden."
• The party encounters Ed Keystone, of all people, in Rome — he'd been making a pilgrimage there, and despite the many guards posted outside to prevent anyone from entering, ran inside to fight a monster. He's been running from monster to monster for weeks, very confused and hungry:
  Ed: I ate a frog, Hamid!

Season 4

• Zolf singing a sea shanty.
• As they make their way across turbulent waters in a monstrosity of a boat, Cel turns into a dolphin and screeches, in Dolphin, to direct Zolf, who's steering. Later, Cel apologizes:
  Cel: Hey! You understand Dolphin! Sorry I swore so much at you. I was really - I shouldn't have called you those things, but I was just panicking, you know? Just panicking.
• Ben reveals that Zolf is not just sad, he's mechanically grief-filled:
  Ben: I’m so sad that if anyone is like “Welp, I’m going to make you sad!”, and I’m like; “*sigh* ...I’m already sad...”
• After Zolf assures everyone they'll mutiny if Earhart goes off the deep end, Earhart takes him aside for a private conversation... where she confides very earnestly that she thinks there's going to be a mutiny on her vessel. You can practically hear the sound of "Ben.exe has stopped working" in his reaction.
  "Best first mate ever!"
• Cel's adventures in making friends with the suddenly-animate ship supplies as they pass through a patch of wild magic, including a keg that very earnestly tries to get them to drink it despite the logistical problems of being separated by a magical Faraday cage. This is never mentioned again.
• The characters have to sail through a patch of wild magic, which produces randomised and potentially horrific effects. What effect occurs? An honest-to-god body swap, straight out of fanfic
  • The next set of episodes have Alex and the other players desperately trying to remember who is in whose body as they try to carry out emotional scenes, which always adds a new level of awkward.
• After Hamid makes the party unfathomably rich by selling all the ore they looted back in Damascus, Azu proceeds to spend her share buying an absurd number of... marbles.
  • This becomes even funnier during the Ursan arc, where their barter-based economy allows for Azu to pay for everything in marbles, kicking off a marble craze in the community. So'Rah even approaches Azu to request some for their child.
    Bryn: Azu's about to completely crash the marble economy!
• Alex's Villainous Breakdown at the party trashing his lovingly-constructed boss encounter in the Garden of Yerlick, as is their wont.
  Alex: (prompting the players for their turn) How would you like to hurt me? Just hurt me, physically?
  • The crux of the encounter is the teleport bomb, which is incredibly powerful... and which everyone manages to save against.
    Alex: It's a horrendous effect that you might have all managed to dodge, and if you did, I'm really — Before, I was playing it up, ha ha ha, I have something else. If this doesn't go off, I'm gonna be furious. I'm gonna be really, legitimately annoyed, because this was beautiful design.
    [...]
    Alex: And I cannot overstate two things: One, it was incredibly unreasonable of me to put you against [the teleport bomb] on top of everything else, and two, look all the good it did me anyway.
  • Alex is so happy when one of the party manages to fail the save against the teleport bomb... only for Ben to ruin that, too.
    Alex: Was [the roll] an 8? Not a 9, an 8? Definitely an 8, Ben? Because, my friend, Ben, if it was an 8... not a 9, but an 8... you're in so much trouble, Wilde.
    Ben: But — no. I'm doing a little read of the rules, right. I have Unity as Zolf — (Alex laughs nervously) — so I can allow people to use my saving throws instead of theirs as an immediate action.
    Alex: Or — or, you could just not.
    • Ben proceeds to troll Alex even further with this:
      Ben: Does Wilde want to take this boon? I have to ask since, you know, he's not my character.
      Alex (despairingly): Wilde does.
  • Alex ends up Hoist by His Own Petard when the party No Sells his teleport bomb, which, as it turns out, also affects the other monsters.
    Alex: No, it gets worse. Oh, no, it gets worse.
    Ben: Does it hit everyone?
    Alex: Alex needs to do a check for one or two of his monsters that he was like, "That is an acceptable loss for the chance of getting rid of you all."
• During the guilt-trip illusions attempted by the Eldritch Abomination in the Garden of Yerlick, Cel is completely unfazed, critiquing the illusion as if it's a bad fanfic: the scenario makes no sense and everyone is Out of Character! By all appearances, they actually hit a nerve, because the illusion abruptly restructures itself into a different scenario halfway through.
• Lydia decides that Cel's superintelligence manifests as them having meta knowledge, leading to many hilarious Leaning on the Fourth Wall jokes throughout the season.
  Cel: I've actually come up with a really cool thing that we could be doing. Like, you know how, really, to understand people, you just mostly reduce them to numbers and statistics and then you randomize elements in order to provide a certain level of —
  Alex: (buzzer noises) FIRST. WARNING. There has been one golden rule that has never been violated. Feel free to carry on. I know where you're going with this. First warning.
  Lydia: Doesn't it make sense to play D&D —
  Alex: (buzzer noises) SECOND WARNING. NO RECURSIONS! No recursions, this is a hard ban. I am not diving down this rabbit hole.
  Zolf: Yes, but if we do that, can I like — I have to meditate every day, and I have to decide what my spells are gonna be, and to be honest, the pressure is just ridiculous. So can I be something nice and easy like whatever Hamid is?
  Hamid: I'd like to be some sort of hero who can swing a sword really well!
  Alex: AND SO WE ARE JUMPING TIME AHEAD A FEW HOURS.

Specials

General

• Alex takes great delight in always making the most annoying or bizarre characters to strain the limits of the system.
  • Simply hearing him introduce himself in character is usually enough to gain some expression of exasperation from everyone else at the table.
  Bryn: How is that every character you ever play in these one-shots I instantly hate?
  • (different one-shot:)
  Lydia: Alex, who are you and how did you get here? Also, introduce your character.

Space Pals

• The players getting into a rules-light vs. rules-heavy argument.
  Helen: [Vast & Starlit] is a narrative-driven game — that is the kind of game that I mostly play, because I am much more along the lines of a Grant Howitt gamer than an Alex Newall gamer.
  Alex: Rules are fun!
  Helen: No they're not! I'm hosting today! My way goes!
  Tim: No rules here!
  Ben: Helen, I have to say that I'm very glad that our faction has taken over the podcast.
  Helen: It is a better way.
  Alex: Tim, join me and together we will rule, with subsystems!
  Ben: It's only Bryn and Alex, and Bryn's not here, so Alex's completely outnumbered.
  Lydia: Now, I don't dislike rules —
  Tim: Traitor!
  [...]
  Helen: I mean, I do tell a lie. There is some character creation before we get to the actual gameplay.
  Ben: A rule?!
  Helen: I know, I'm terrible.
  Alex: And so it begins...
• The players randomly interjecting "Hot!", "Difficult!", and "Dangerous!" into random conversation, in a parody of the rules of Vast & Starlit.
• Schmer manages to go the entire story without interacting with a single other character.

Sexy Battle Wizards

• Krampus (played by Grant Howitt) revealing that his plan to raise an army of the undead and destroy Christmas can't possibly fail, as he is aided by Sexy Twink Jesus.
  Krampus: Please, Jesus. We can't have a full conversation, we're just NPCs.

BenQuest

• The intro.
  Ben: I am your host and GM this week, Ben Meredith, and with me today I have...
  Alex: Ben Meredith.
  Bryn: Ben Meredith.
  Lydia: Ben Meredith.
  Helen: And Ben Meredith.