I like tailoring my games to the occasional holiday, much as Paizo does for its magazines. Yesterday I ran a special April Fool's session of my STAP game. My players were half-expecting something goofy (not that our games aren't always goofy) and I wanted to fulfil those expectations.
The party was down in the tunnel in Here There Be Monsters. Whilst exploring, they came upon a golem who shone a bright light at them. The characters fell unconscious. When they awoke, the NPCs were gone, and the PCs had switched bodies.
The prankster rogue/noble, who'd had a long-running rivalry with Avner, woke up in Avner's body.
The macho fighter/sorcerer woke up in Captain Amella's body.
The paranoid rogue who was the unwilling focus of Tavey's adoration woke up in Tavey's body.
And the clever necromancer woke up in the body of Avner's horse.
The rest of the session involved the party tracking down the golem, finding their real bodies, and switching back. But it was a double-fools adventure, and by the time they reached the end of the tunnel complex (which I'd inserted into the adventure), they realized it was the crashed spaceship from Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. They fought a few police robots, assisted a vegepygmy in rescuing his thorny, and overcame a sickly, terribly weakened froghemoth before reclaiming their bodies from an insane medical droid. With great relief they made their way out of the spaceship, everyone's soul in the proper body, and resumed their adventures.
It was pretty darn fun. Anyone else do something silly?
Not so much silly as terrifying.
I play in a group running through a Greyhawk adventure. We've been playing for a while and the party is pretty high level (16th or so). We were playing Saturday, and all day was straight ahead gaming. We get into a relatively routine combat encounter and we're lining up our characters, etc. Then suddenly, and without warning, the DM pulls out his Colossal template. He's dead serious and says the monster is charging in from the side. He describes it as a "large reptilian creature with a hard carapace." Myself and the other ubergeek in the group look at each other with that "oh sh--!" sort of expression because it has sunk in - we're fighting the Terrasque! Holy crap!
On it's charge it scores a 72 to hit our ranger, and fortunately on did 23 points of damage. Up to this point I think it must be an illusion or something, but the DM played it off. As soon as the first attacks damage was put onto the character's sheet, our DM says "April Fool's!" The clock had ticked past midnight just before the encounter, and none of the rest of us had realized it.
All in all, a great prank and genuinely made us sweat a bit.