Category:The Gaming Groups

From Knights of the Dinner Table

Characters[edit | edit source]

The Knights of the Dinner Table[edit | edit source]

The main group of characters are the members of a gaming group known as "The Knights of the Dinner Table" in a fictionalized version of Muncie. The players' best-known and most often-used characters are the HackMaster characters known as the "Untouchable Trio (Plus One)" (abbreviated as "UT+1"). They consist of:

The Knights

The Black Hands Gaming Society[edit | edit source]

Usually represented as the "evil" counterpart to the Knights, as most of their games revolve around the PCs finding reasons to kill each other before completing the intended adventure. Their membership consists of players who have been rejected from all other local groups, and hence they remain together simply because none of them has anywhere else to go. They are far more results-oriented than the Knights, enforcing demerit policies when Weird Pete is behind the GM screen (often worked off by unpaid labor behind Weird Pete's counter), and holding extensive post-mortems on their game sessions, to see where things could have been done better (usually by the members of the group not slaughtering one another's characters for minor infractions of local "rules", to vent a real-life grudge, or to gain experience points needed to advance their own character a level (or two)). They are especially prone to do this to "new" characters – most all of them have a psychological "button" which triggers a desire to execute a character based solely on race, attitude or type of clothing (e.g. looking like the character might be an assassin).

The Black Hands

Hard Eight Enterprises[edit | edit source]

In the KODT world, Hard Eight Enterprises are the creators of the Hackmaster, Cattlepunk, Space Hack, and Scream of Kachooloo gaming systems. Well respected by all of Muncie's gaming groups (USUALLY anyway), they call the shots. Hard Eight Enterprises run the tournament-level Hackmaster games in the semi-finals, which one year resulted in the disqualification of the Black Hands, and the Untouchable Trio (Plus One) causing Timmy Jackson to cry. Hard Eight runs the annual Garycon game convention; there is now a real-world convention with this name, held in memory of Gary Gygax in Lake Geneva.

Hard Eight

Patty's Perpetrators[edit | edit source]

Patty's Perpetrators (Patty's Perps for short) are one of the newest sanctioned groups in Muncie recognized by the HMPA . Patty's Perps have the stigma of being the very bottom of the barrel (i.e. they take in those who no one else will accept, like Crutch).

Patty's Perps

Troy Watson and his players don't really consider themselves a gaming club. They simply don't take their weekly game that seriously and rarely participate in local conventions or tournaments. (With the exception of an occasional HackMaster Tournament if a cash prize is involved.) They consider their style of play to be superior to those of most other groups and have little interest in socializing or having contact with other gamers who they consider, "weird." It is for this reason they are largely invisible from the point of view of Muncie's gaming community. They jokingly refer to themselves as the "Bottom Feeders" because during freshman year they pledged several fraternities but, with the exception of Troy, were never initiated.

Troy's Boys[edit | edit source]

The Dorm Troopers was originally a splinter group of the Knights of the Dinner Table who broke off to form their own table. The D.T.'s are highly competitive though in recent months they have suffered from a drop off in membership.

Troy's Boys

Other groups[edit | edit source]

The Dorm Troopers Logan's Heroes and Slacker's Hackers are part of some of the other local gaming groups across whom the Knights come at intervals, most notably in the incident of the Player Exchange Program (and resulting intergroup grudge match). In this, certain GameMasters conspired to arrange for the annihilation of competing groups' characters (so that their bodies could be looted for plunder) by switching players into other groups' games where, separated from their regular comrades, they could be killed off; the ultimate plan was to eliminate competition in an upcoming local HackMaster tournament, as well as use any magic items and other enhancements looted from other characters to win the tourney.

Notable characters from the Muncie community include:

  • Bridget Keating, a beautiful woman who wears skimpy costumes at conventions and delights in using her appearance to manipulate the "geeks" (not least by involving them in the LARP "Vampyres: Lords of Darkness" and then using them for manual labor).

Two fictional groups that are frequently referenced in stories are the Hackmaster Players' Association and Hackmaster Gamemasters' Association (HMPA and HMGA, respectively). They act as networking organizations for the two types of participant, perform lobbying activities on behalf of their groups to Hard Eight Enterprises (e.g., to advocate for rule changes that benefit their members), arbitrate disputes, and issue rulings that are binding on their members. The HMGA also serves as an accreditation body for gamemasters. The HMGA and HMPA are examples of the exaggerated level of organization of the RPG hobby in the comic; another is the fictional Gamer Temps company that provides, for a fee, drop-in temporary players for campaigns when a regular player is absent (minor character Ty Ferfel was introduced as a Gamer Temps employee).

The Dorm Troopers[edit | edit source]

The Dorm Troopers was originally a splinter group of the Knights of the Dinner Table who broke off to form their own table. The D.T.'s are highly competitive though in recent months they have suffered from a drop off in membership.

Dorm Troopers

Logan's Heroes[edit | edit source]

Logan's Heroes

Slacker's Hackers[edit | edit source]

Slacker's Hackers

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