The All Guardsmen Party

[Shoggy]

I (finally) finished reading this. It's hilarious. I do have to ask: how did the sequence of notices on the laundry room door come to be? Also, did Carrot Ironfounderson get transported into the Arbites and then get assigned to be a traffic cop, or did he found the Arbites? I get that there is an element of Judge Dredd in this to, but surely you guys were pulling from the worlds funniest far-too-literal policeman.

The notices were just some mostly-freeform RPing to fill the timeskip, so us all just sitting around speculating on what would be fitting (or amusing) activities for the party to get up to during transit. The tone was already pretty much set when the DM kicked off with a Futurama reference and explained that the Arbite was being an overly-literal **** to Sciscitat too. So then we hypothesized on just how much trouble we could cause, there was a "roll to see if you blow up the laundry room" moment, and then Twitch's player pointed out just how critical a laundry room is and how much important/valuable stuff goes through it, which led to the classic rpg "how can we MONETIZE this?" moment. So mostly just fun freeform screwing around, but things did get a bit weird (from our perspective) when the DM let us have a high-level ID card without fuss, and let us plan out an escape attempt without more than a handful of checks, so we were fully expecting SOMETHING plot-related to stop us from escaping, we just didn't expect to get so far, or to run into Oak at the exit.

Given that we skipped over the whole plot-hook involving the Arbite, I can't really comment too much on his Carrot-ness, but it does sort of fit (I can say that our own IG version was one of the many prologue deaths). Honestly, to us he came off as far more of a lawful-angry terminator than misguided idealist. We filed him away as the DM wanting to put in a super-powered low-level cop to screw with us, as opposed to an actual real character, which is why we used him as a sort of speedbump for Bane instead of really interacting with him. Apparently there was this whole sub-plot we could've gone down with us partnering up with him (in place of Ivana I guess?) and helping him arrest more or less the entire planetary government.

I recently discovered these through a Youtube Channel called Cloak and Dagger where there are effectively audiobook versions of all of these. They're absolutely fantastic, thanks for writing them.

Glad you enjoy the stories! I really like Cloak's readings too, hopefully he keeps going with them, but I'm also hoping I can get to the end before he does.