First appearance: S6E1 — Murder at the Dread Fortress (TTRPG Murder Mystery) · watch it on YouTube
Richard S. Skelman is a skeleton of the old school: no flesh, no eyeballs, no feelings in his bones, and a family business in dungeon design passed down from his lich grandfather. He began as a murder-mystery suspect in the Dread Fortress, joined a rescue squad that was mostly made of men named Richard, and ended up winning a Deathmatch for leadership. His opponent seemed to keep winning without even trying and kept ascending into higher planes of being. Along the way Skelman became the founding leader of the Grandmaster’s second team, the gloriously named Team D.
Story
Murder at the Dread Fortress
Skelman arrived in S6E1 — Murder at the Dread Fortress (TTRPG Murder Mystery) introducing himself as “Richard Skeleton Skelman,” “Dungeon Designer and Keeper of the Year,” from a long line of Skelmans. He described himself as “one quarter of a guy.” He had been resurrected without his clothes, and while he didn’t remember his own murder, he knew he had been murdered. His voice and his thoughts come from his one magical bone, his big toe.
He had a professional grievance as well. His dungeon application had been rejected for an overblown bone budget, and the rejection was delivered by an insulting imp messenger. His dungeons make use of Tim and the Poopshoe chutes (which are “leaky”), he imports monsters from China, and he hoped to hire Bunga for a butter trap. He was the first to notice Thea’s body. His evening ended badly when he fired a rocket at the Arbiter, who sent it straight back at him as a homing missile. Skelman was reduced to a skull and his toe, which Dr. Octo stuck onto a femur.
Tip to Tip, Part 1
In S6 Ep4 — Tip to Tip - Part 1 (TTRPG One Shot), Thea went missing, and her tracker placed her in the mausoleum “all the way over in the Shadowlands.” The Arbiter opened a portal and summoned an elite squad: Killy Yesman, Skelman and Richard Knottley. The Grandmaster already knew Skelman. He had “always been beloved by the fortress,” though she hadn’t known he could fight. “I may be missing muscles amongst all of the bones, but I assure you I am quite capable,” he told her. He explained that he gets around without eyeballs by chattering his teeth rapidly and feeling the vibrations come back through his bones. The three were dubbed “Team B” until they could pick a leader and earn a real name.
The Midnight Mausoleum turned out to be personal. The first zombie to come at him was Josephine, his jilted lover. “Hello, Josephine! It’s been a while. I scarcely remember the last we met, where I buried you alive.” His plea to rekindle what they once had went nowhere. She swiped at his face and then flung her own arm into it, and Killy finally dissolved her with a special red bottle of Double Sun Cola. Her last words were “I’ll forever hate you, Skelben.” Skelman kept the arm. He later threw it at a crying angel statue, drawing attention to a plaque at its base, and he used it to pat his teammates on the back for good luck. Further down, poltergeists made the team hit themselves, and Skelman begged his Auntie Ethel to stop over a dinner he’d once ruined. A trap corridor followed, and the Grandmaster confirmed that this was the Skelman family plot. He had buried his ex there because it was “the last place anyone else would look.”
At the end of the corridor they found Thea, who had been playing hide-and-seek with a friend with long, bejeweled fingers. Skelman thought it might be his mother, Meredith. It was actually his grandfather, a lich who had turned the family mausoleum into a dungeon for his retirement, having “passed down the business” to Skelman. Unimpressed by his grandson’s begging (“Good thing I have plenty of other grandchildren”), he attacked. Skelman answered with his signature move, the Bone Zone: he dragged his grandfather into one of his own custom dungeons, where a swinging axe and a ceiling slime took chunks out of him. In the second round, Skelman pulled himself apart and rebuilt the team into the Bonetron, a towering amalgam with Killy at its center powering it with soda. It “stomps forward, blasting away with sodas, conspiracy theories, bones, and the slimes,” and it blew a hole straight through the old lich. One last soda beam evaporated him.
Skelman left with Josephine’s arm and one of his grandfather’s ribs. Killy was called away to Double Sun Cola retraining, and Skelman swore that “these two dicks are going to come get you out.” The Grandmaster and the Arbiter still needed a leader, so they called a Deathmatch between the two remaining Richards. “Dick to dick! Tip to tip!” In the after-show, Skelman warned his friend: “I hope that you can accept your boning with dignity, pride, and humility, as we will still be friends after.”
Tip to Tip, Part 2
In S6E5, Tip to Tip - Part 2 (Richard Knottley v Richard S. Skelman, the leadership Deathmatch), the two Richards returned to the mausoleum to fight for leadership of Team B. A row of mustached Chinchillas watched from the front of the grandstands. Skelman greeted them with “It’s the Parliament! Our government is being run right before our eyes.” The fight started badly for him. Knottley won a dance-off with Vogue moves and bouncing elbows, while Skelman’s hip, then his knee, then an arm popped out. Thea asked him to prom, and he declined out of legal caution. Then she stepped on his head mid-dance. He got some revenge by pulling off his own arm and challenging Knottley to match it. Thea obliged with a rocket pack and tore off Knottley’s arm.
The fight got stranger from there. Knottley became a skeleton powered by a stolen Peloton core. Skelman knocked him into a pile of bones with a Falcon Punch, and a kindly pep talk (“You can be anything you want to be”) inspired Knottley to rise again as a ghost. At Knottley’s urging, Thea pelted Skelman rapid-fire with her own poop (“I’m used to the goo, but not the poo”). Knottley briefly possessed his bones to clean the poop off, which earned him a lecture on why possession is “inherently evil.” Skelman then sucked the ghost into a vacuum given to him by an Acolyte named Luigi. He offered the vacuum to the Box of Chaos and asked for a new set of cosmic dice. The box gave him the Shield of the Golden King instead, and the Arbiter blowtorched it down into golden dice.
Twice Skelman opened the Bone Zone, now “the danger dungeon,” and sent the angel statue from the week before after Knottley. “I own the dungeon. I subcontract the work inside that dungeon.” The second time, his lackeys lined a hallway with goo-coated axes, a spike box, flamethrowers and a wall of lightning. Knottley simply sidestepped the lightning. Then the ghost merged with the statue and punched him, and the golden dice shattered the first time Skelman needed them. Skelman had accepted defeat, but his gelatinous cube Francis had not. Francis threw out a pseudopod and blocked the final blow. Knottley summoned a storm of flying Peloton bikes (Skelman: “I hate cardio!”), but he had pushed himself too hard. He faded away and became one with the universe. “You’re ascending again? God damn it! … I’ve been trying for thousands of years to ascend.”
Skelman had won. The Grandmaster told him, “luck is part of winning. Don’t ever underestimate it. Leverage it,” and asked him to lead the team. He credited “the other two dicks” and named the squad Team D. As the Arbiter escorted him off the field, Skelman realized he could have chosen “Dick Dynasty,” and he regretted it immediately. In the after-show he announced his first orders of business as team lead. The first was rescuing the third dick from re-education. The second was declaring himself a sovereign citizen who no longer pays taxes on his many dungeons. He also promised the largest Dickazord anyone has ever seen.
Personality and Abilities
Skelman is a courtly, put-upon old skeleton with a fondness for pie (“because it sticks to the ribs”) and puns about bones. He says he has existed as a skeleton for “a millennia,” and he speaks with a gentleman’s formality even when the subject is burying his girlfriend alive (“I was in the right!”). He holds firm ethical views on things like prom with minors and possession spells, he hates cardio, and he never went to his high school prom because “nobody asked me.” His grandfather summed up the clan: “We’re all dicks. That’s the family name.” That family includes his mother Meredith, his ghostly Auntie Ethel and his sister Dick Arena.
His bones are held together by what he calls “magnets,” and he can detach them at will. He feels nothing and sees by echolocation. A gelatinous cube companion keeps him in one piece; the current one is Francis, and he gets a new one “about every week.” His great weapon is the Bone Zone, a domain of his own dungeons that he can drag enemies into. He staffs it with traps, slimes, subcontracted statues and lackeys. Pulled apart and reassembled with his friends, he can also form the Bonetron, “literally double the size of any dick that’s dicked before.”
Relationships
- Richard Knottley: fellow Richard, teammate and close friend, whom he beat for the leadership of the team. Knottley pushed himself too hard and ascended.
- Killy Yesman: the “third dick” of Team B, whom Skelman vowed to rescue from Double Sun Cola retraining.
- Thea: rescued by Skelman’s team. She asked him to prom, threw her poop at him (“I love you, Skelvin!”) and consoled him when he was losing.
- Grandmaster Elusia Skypiercer: knew him as “beloved by the fortress” and named him leader of the Grandmaster’s second team.
- The Arbiter: sent Skelman’s own rocket back at him during the murder mystery, and later escorted him off the field with talk of “Dick Dynasty.”
- Josephine: his jilted lover, buried alive in the family plot. She came back as a zombie, cursed him with her last words before Killy dissolved her, and left behind a severed arm that Skelman kept.
- His grandfather: a lich who handed him the family dungeon business. Team B killed him “again.”
Memorable Quotes
- “I thought I was the only dick in the room, but it seems that there may be two of us this time.” (Tip to Tip, Part 1)
- “Hello, Josephine! It’s been a while. I scarcely remember the last we met, where I buried you alive.” (Tip to Tip, Part 1)
- “No match for the bonetron! It’s so big! It’s literally double the size of any dick that’s dicked before!” (Tip to Tip, Part 1)
- “I own the dungeon. I subcontract the work inside that dungeon.” (Tip to Tip, Part 2)
- “I’ve been this way for thousands of years and yet he ascends immediately.” (Tip to Tip, Part 2)
- “This will not be the last you see of us, for we will go delve deeper and find our third dick, reclaim him as one of our own, and then we will create the largest dickazord that anyone has ever seen.” (Tip to Tip, Part 2)