Cast contagion to try and delay an army from sieging a city by weakening them.
Accidentally wipe out three civilizations and kill so many people that the gods won't accept any more dead people. Have 260,000 ghosts haunt me for the rest of the game.
Sounds like an exaggeration of the spell effect.
Which plague was it that spread so quickly that no 5th (or higher) level cleric could remove them? Bubonic Plague?How did the paladins react to it? How did the churches of good deities react to it?
Well me and my party accidentally killed off a small country...
We were going along when we stumbled upon an old ruin. Being the great adventurers we were, we went and poked around. The party scout (a ninja) noticed a pretty onyx ball. Well, since he found it while scounting up ahead he decided to keep it and drop it into his bag of holding. Well fast forward to the next town over and the rogue manages to sell the ball for a pretty penny. Well, when we leave the shopkeep he sold it to dropped the ball, creating a portal to the shadow plane and a bunch of Shadows and Dread Shadows came out of it and pretty much killed the whole town... oh and it became a quest later because when we found out, damn near the whole small country fell to shadowpocalypse (the GM just wanted an excuse to create a shadowpocalypse xD)
Back in AD&D I played a swashbuckler type guy who and always longed for a magical rapier. For a long time we found only swords until, finally, I found a rapier that seemed magic. When I grabbed it this beautiful weapon started to talk to me saying "Make a wish, go on and make a wish." Not knowing what that meant I was just glad about my shiny new magic rapier.
The, some time later we encountered some evil guy who was muttering in a foreign tongue, gesturing, while behind him 9 people in full-plate made ready to attack us. When I got ready my rapier again went "make a wish!" And I yelled "Alright now stop it! I wish that guy could not cast anymore!"
The guys spell fizzled and my depleted wish-blade disappeared leaving me weaponless* against the 9 undead the cleric had sent to kill us. The cleric himself fled for not being able to cast spells anymore. At least not in the short time it took my companions to kill him and his undead.
*Has been a long time, not sure if it really disappeared or just was non-magical after that.
Well me and my party accidentally killed off a small country...
We were going along when we stumbled upon an old ruin. Being the great adventurers we were, we went and poked around. The party scout (a ninja) noticed a pretty onyx ball. Well, since he found it while scounting up ahead he decided to keep it and drop it into his bag of holding. Well fast forward to the next town over and the rogue manages to sell the ball for a pretty penny. Well, when we leave the shopkeep he sold it to dropped the ball, creating a portal to the shadow plane and a bunch of Shadows and Dread Shadows came out of it and pretty much killed the whole town... oh and it became a quest later because when we found out, damn near the whole small country fell to shadowpocalypse (the GM just wanted an excuse to create a shadowpocalypse xD)
Now that is what I call dropping the ball.
In a rolemaster game, party member read a scroll of gate to summon a demon in some guys place that pissed us off. The odds were pretty slim that it would actually be anything that possed a challenge to them. He rolls a 99 and the gm says holy crap type V demon. Nothing in the city could stop it, including us. We ran and lived.
Ahh Rolemaster, where you can get killed by a baby rat or summon something like this by accident.
Not even close to a TPK, but I'm playing a witch in one of the AP's and we had recently recovered a large, magical book while on a side adventure. She and one of our rangers were in our room at the Inn and decided to see what this book was all about. We set off a trap when we opened the book, and the witch and all of the Inn's inhabitants went instantly insane. The witch tried to kill herself, but the ranger made his save and thankfully was able to overpower her (she's quite squishy at a STR 10) and haul her down to Pharasma's temple for some mental healing. As we came back to the Inn, all chaos had broken loose, so we had to pay the temple's clerics to heal everyone at the Inn, too. Thankfully, no one was killed, but the Innkeeper had our horses saddled and ready to go at first light the next day.
The witch is now a little more careful about where she is when she opens an unknown magical book.
I just remembered a funny little instance where our party wizard "accidentally" killed everyone...
Essentially we were up against the final evil guy, a star-spawn of Cthulhu. We were stopping it from trying to awaken Cthulhu. Well here comes our level 18 wizard to the rescue... cast a quickened Empowered Maximized Fireball and a Dazing Empowered Maximized Fireball... AWESOME! He just killed the BBEG GUY! That was fast!! unfortunately... he also blew up the whole party with it xD...
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Whilst trying to stop an invasion of their nation, my players battled a powerful archmage above a heroic monument which had been enchanted ages before to protect the kingdom (though none could now recall from what). During the fracas, the statue was damaged, and slowly began to deteriorate during the following weeks. As the cracks slowly expanded in the statue's marble, so did their nation falter and despair, since they superstitiously believed it strongly influenced their good fortune.
In desperation, my players then stole a powerful artifact of healing from a faraway (largely innocent) island nation of giants, plummeting the foreign nation into the dark ages (since said artifact was literally what allowed them to grow big and strong in the first place). They then spirited the artifact back to their home, where they used it to repair said magical statue.
...a little too well.
As it turned out, the statue wasn't a magical artifact representing an ancient hero. It WAS the ancient hero. Finally freed from his self-imposed petrification, he cried out "What have you done!?" before descending into madness and despair from which none could interpret his ramblings.
At that moment, the stars fell from the sky and plummeted to the world below. All of them, blanketing the sky with endless night and many nations with fire.
You see, the stars weren't actually stars, but glowing craft carrying an ancient menace from the far reaches of the void that threatened to destroy the world. One such craft crash-landed near the PCs before releasing never-before-seen horrors (essentially flying aboleth) and their servants (statistically retrievers). One of the aboleths attempted to abscond with the healing artifact, but it burned him, and so was forced to flee with a retriever carrying it in his stead.
The ancient hero had long ago sacrificed himself, using the very same artifact that freed him, in order to trap the horrors in the dark veil of space.
A horror that was stopped before time immemorial, had suddenly been awakened to enact its ancient plans once again. What's worse, much of the world had long since come to worship the stars as gods, so when they literally fell from the sky in the form of silver spheres carrying horrific monsters, the PCs suddenly found themselves surrounded by not only monsters from the void, but by misguided friends now turned into fanatic enemy loyalists.
They not only didn't save their nation, they effectively destroyed another and plummeted the planet into a world war.
Though we never finished that campaign, it was my intent for the heroes to fight in the world war, retrieve the artifact, and assault an alien fortress under the sea where they would either be forced to destroy the artifact or to use it once again, sacrificing themselves to destroy the menace once and for all.
The party paladin, in particular was a most interesting character, since he died early on in the campaign and was mysteriously resurrected by forces unknown (actually the leader of the monsters of the void). Since his return to life, he has been assailed with misleading visions that were meant to prompt him to destroy the healing artifact in the final moments of the campaign.
The campaign would ultimately have ended with him possessing multiple contradictory clues as to what action he should take, and having to make a decision that would save everyone, or doom the world.
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Guess this one is kind of funny in a weird way:
My dm once asked me to make a fighter, essentially the rival of my character. For laugh and giggle, I made the figher a bit insane and going on a rampage across the kingdom like a madman. I managed to get to our hq while we were gone, almost killed all the npc living there, getting away with murder etc...that was many years ago. What I didn't anticipate, it's how much my DM enjoyed the npc so much, that he made him a recurring villain , thorn on our side for all this time, killed a couple of party members and a lover of our paladin with his crew and only very recently was dispatched in cold blood by our party.
Worst or best part of all this? This guy became insane after I sold him to slavery to pay off a gambling debt on my PC and was essentially on a monte cristo quest for revenge against my character, that none of the other party members knew about.
In a rolemaster game, party member read a scroll of gate to summon a demon in some guys place that pissed us off. The odds were pretty slim that it would actually be anything that possed a challenge to them. He rolls a 99 and the gm says holy crap type V demon. Nothing in the city could stop it, including us. We ran and lived.
Ahh Rolemaster, where you can get killed by a baby rat or summon something like this by accident.
My first experience with RM. Spending 6 hours creating a character in Rolemaster...and then dying by getting out of bed.
** spoiler omitted **
Though I regret nothing. It certainly was a learning experience.
Sounds like unbelievable fun! I've come to the realization that there are a lot of these small-publisher games that I can't understand the appeal of in the least.
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First PF campaign. Party is fighting a cult headed by a worm that walks and his six lich servants. Party decides to weaken the cult with a blitz attack on their main garrison. Turns out the cult saw this coming (again, liches) and evacuated all but a token force meant to distract us while they attack our hometown, causing a whole lot of damage and killing many including the sheriff, high priestess, and the paladin's son.
Morals of the story: don't leave important things poorly guarded, never forget the "scry" in "scry and fry."
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Two of them
1) Eberron game. I'm playing a halfling sorcerer. We come across some kind of giant warforged machine. I go first in initiative and move in front of the party to cast lightning bolt at it! I had meant to cast two (action points) but forgot. The warforged titan goes next, has a higher speed than I thought, and crits me. Not just dead, but dead dead.
2) Playing some kind of sci-fi RPG where ships create singularities for propulsion. I'm playing a scientist type and manage to convince the GM that I can create black hole missiles out of the singularity drives since they can be used in 1 man spacecraft. Regretted by the end because even though we won, I was kind of brought up on war crimes with my new weapon.
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Sounds like unbelievable fun! I've come to the realization that there are a lot of these small-publisher games that I can't understand the appeal of in the least.
People around here like to make fum of Rolemaster for some reason, with stories that have more to do with stupid GM than stupid rules. Iron Crown Enterprise wasn't exactly a small publisher either, not until the 90s anyways.
As for the rules of Rolemaster, people have no idea how d20 is the love-child of AD&D and Rolemaster combined. Monte Cook's influence perhaps, who used to work at ICE before going all Planescape at TSR and eventually (co)developing 3rd ed for WotC...
1. Meleeing
2. Adventuring with a party too suicidally foolish to flee and regroup after 1.
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I was playing in a GURPS Space Opera game about a decade ago. The theme of the campaign world was a hodgepodge of classic SciFi tropes. I was playing an "Adept of the Grymmoedyrrch" (forget the spelling- it was an actual Welsh word that meant "spirit of the universe" or something like that.) she was effectively a Jedi knight, and she was fiercely loyal to her her homeworld: Earth, which was the capital of the Democratic Federation of Worlds.
After a few sessions, we are on a spy mission, and have infiltrated the much larger Barogen Empire, which had been the former imperial overlords of the Federation before the rebellion 75 years earlier. We'd encountered another Jedi, an older woman, who was working with agents of the Imperial Psi Corps, who blew our cover. The enemy Jedi wore a vowel, and had a scarf over her face.
We get into a fight, and it isn't going well. I get into a light saber duel with the other Jedi, and try a telekinetic trip maneuver, coupled with a saber strike. Critical successes on both: She trips and is unable to take defensive actions, then I roll max damage on the saber strike, but that's doubled for the crit. Combat in GURPS is deadly, and the light saber does a ton of damage normally. What I roll is enough to cut a person in half! The players cheer and start high fiving.
The GM gets a look of shock on his face, "Uh, she's dead. And you really weren't supposed to kill her. Sorry for this..." He went on to describe her beckoning me to her side, which I did. "So proud of you... sorry it has to be like this... love... you..." She shook her head and the scarf fell away. It was my character's mother, who I had thought was dead, who we later learn had been a sleeper agent for the Federation. She was supposed to have been a major NPC ally.
The GM said we were supposed to have been totally outclassed by the "bad guys", who were supposed to win the fight and take us into "custody", but it was really going to be a briefing and a way to bring us deeper behind enemy lines.
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@Haladir: Rule for GMs: never assume player failure or NPC survival.
I pitted three level 11 players against a 18HD fey lord who was invulnerable as long as he was sitting on his throne, which was also invulnerable. They targeted the ground, knocking him off the throne. A set of readied attacks (and a lucky x3 crit) later... luckily the plot didn't rely on the fey's survival, it was just intended to be a non-combat encounter.
It was my character's mother, who I had thought was dead, who we later learn had been a sleeper agent for the Federation. She was supposed to have been a major NPC ally.
Ouch man, that's a nasty twist. Did it derail the adventure much?
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It was a long day and the heroes neared the final boss.
Lovable Munchkin: Ha! This was a cake walk! I can't believe these pathetic demon lovers managed to even rob peasant caravans.
Mr Perfect: Yeah hopefully Aranna has a surprise for us in the final fight.
Fox: Guys she looks tired and we have been playing for 13 hours...
Newb: I charge into the throne room!
Tactical Genius: Wait you fool! She probably has the door trapped!
Me: Inside you find the rest of the demon cult waiting for you. "Surrender fools or I will feed your beloved prince to the demons who hunger!" The high priestess demanded.
In the middle of the room I had a big pit filled with hungry fat demons.
Newb: I attack the priestess!
Me: Are you sure? She is dangling the prince over the edge of the pit.
"What will it be fools?!" the priestess demanded.
Mr Perfect: How many demons?
Me: Looks like dozens of powerful demonic things.
Newb: I want blood! I charge!
Tactical: Where did you find this guy munchkin?
Munchkin: ~sitting back grinning~ He's great isn't he!
Tactical: He burns through my healing way too fast...
Me: Um... you guys could talk... or something...
~sigh~ Fine she drops the prince into the pit where he starts being devoured by the demons.
Munchkin: I leap into the pit and start slaughtering the demons!
Me: Wait... What?! You can just walk around the pit... the demons look trapped. {panicking because the demons were NOT CR balanced and are too strong for the group. They were supposed to be there for effect and the final cult death scene.}
Munchkin: I came to kill something tough these will do just fine.
Mr Perfect: I leap in to help my friend.
Everyone except Newb leap into the pit...
<snip>
After several rounds of combat 3 of the dozen overkill demons lay dead and munchkin has finally died as well. The rest are severely wounded oh and Newb having been beaten by the cultists surrendered to them. The rest of the group doesn't last even one more round with munchkin dead.
And the priestess tosses Newb into the pit to join his friends as dinner.
The enemy Jedi wore avowelcowl, and had a scarf over her face.
Damn you, Word Flow! Still getting used to Shape Writing on my Windows Phone. It's faster, but more error-prone.
Ouch man, that's a nasty twist. Did it derail the adventure much?
It derailed a bit, but not too badly. The GM gave the role of double-agent to one of the Psi Corps agents that had been present, and we went from there. Unfortunately, that meant that the GM had to come up with other ways to give my character some needed backstory: that my PC was the Emperor's daughter, and wasn't entirely human... But that's another story.
@Haladir: Rule for GMs: never assume player failure or NPC survival.
Yup-- that's what I got out of it!
The other trope the GM was going for is from comic books: When two heros meet for the first time, they always assume the other is an enemy and fight!
Of course, I'm about to break that rule my own game...
Of course, she's fully statted up, in case things go unexpectedly and the PCs force her to join the fight. That fight is already APL +4. But if they do force her hand, it becomes an APL +7 encounter!
(I have a contingency plan in store if the PCs manage to corner her into fighting, and she proceeds to mop the floor with them... In that case, the cultists capture the PCs and heal them up, intending to use them as living sacrifices to Urgathoa. Next adventure will be the PCs having to break out of a dungeon, and get their stuff back.)
Whatever happens next week will be epic... and hopefully not an Epic Fail.
I drafted up a rather large side quest for our adventurers and left the game session with a cryptic cliffhanger detailing this new epic threat. After proudly dropping my amazing drama bomb I looked around the table with instant regret. I could see that my friends really did not like this new direction. They were trying to be polite about it but the expressions on the faces looked like sour milk.
The next game session I started the game with something like "after defeating the menace the players moved onward".
There was collective sigh from everyone at the table. One of them even laughed and said "thank god".
-MD
In my first game as an alchemist I had several wonderful examples of this. I blew up a fox that was in a trap that turned out to be a nearly dead druid. I got eaten by a living cauldron that had dr5 fire. So I had to keep detonating my bomb inside the cauldron with me, and my crowning achievement, making a deal with a Worg for something I don't remember. We ended up leaving our grippli rogue with him while we went to clear a dungeon. I can now unequivocally say that Worgs enjoy Frog's Legs.
Poor Rogue. He almost got away too, even though he was unconscious when we left him.
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The party in one game I was running set fire to an inn that had a brown mold locked in a room in the basement.
In another campaign I opened a door to a fairly small room and saw a red dragon crammed inside. I figured there was no way the dragon could have gotten in there so I attempted to disbelieve, I died in a fire.
In yet another campaign we were fighting a room full of hell hounds. The mage summoned an invisible stalker and told it to kill all the hell hounds. Every adventure since we come across the bodies of dead hell hounds from time to time. Nice to know he's still at it.
Lastly, we claimed the island that held Guardian Mesa for the king who hired us. Since we got to claim the land, we called the island Ruprecht. No matter what the king changed it to (and no matter how much the GM protested), we continued to call it that. So now there exists the island of Ruprecht, home of Mad Jovian's Bed and Brothel and Popeye's Pork Palace.
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We played an old 3x campaign that went into the early epic levels. One of the characters was a wizard named Calor who was known to burn hot and bright and had an impressive touch for bad luck, to the point of people saying 'He got Calored' years later whenever something terrible happens.
Examples are impressive:
Getting the party magic jarred by an ancient evil race trying to find new bodies so they could live on through time,
dropping a flying island on a city ship,
dropping a large object on a town,
killing off an entire family of dragons,
killing off a beacon of good because it happened to be possessed at the time,
causing a demi-plane that bordered the shadow plane to have a rift directly to the shadowplane so it was now uninhabitable
Not knowing how to better deal with a tarrasque so banishing it to said demi-plane to be eternally killed and reborn
Accidentally giving a boon to a demi-lich
And probably my favorite, an evil extraplanar troll caught a disease of universal entropy(epic levels are complicated) and they didn't know how to cure it. Taking pity on it, he tried to use a spell to dismiss it. Don't remember the exact spell, but there was an attack roll involved and he swung wild. We used the crit/fumble decks and he sent it to a random plane, rolled randomly and he sent it to celestia. Poor bastard didn't know what hit it.
First time I tried to run Rise of the Rune Lords one on one with my fiance after we lost our last group due to.. differences. Not to mention the first game I'd run in a long, long while...
Knowing it was meant for four to six member parties, I decided that it was going to a lightly modified gestalt (prestige class for the gestalt class, stack hp and skill points) to shore up potential weakness, since we wanted to actually experience it as it was without me having to mod it.
I wind up using the actual town table to roll random items in the magic shop... Having found the combats pre-Thistle Top somewhat difficult, I decided to abuse wealth a little and let her character (a Kitsune Trickster/Noble Scion) draw out a line of credit with the magic shop to save the town. We left town with a single handy haver sack, and a couple of Elemental Gems (Earth and Fire).
Before this, she wound up fooling Tsuto with the False Friend talent rather spectacularly. Over the course of his being in prison, she wound up seducing him, with a rather epic roll. Wound up getting the entire lay out of Thistle Top from him. Though, the roll wasn't good enough to get him entirely away from Naulia, it was enough to confuse him. He broke out of prison and went back to Thistle Top.
Getting through the outer portions, we get into the goblin's fortress proper.. And they're all still at their little religious mass like we planned (thanks for the info Tsuto!)
Eventually, we happen upon Vancaskerkin.. Whom her character seduces and convinces to be an ally. Mostly, thanks to being a noble scion, and Vankaskerkin needed the help.
With Vancaskerkin in tow, we wound up assaulting the gathering. The combat was epic, drawn out, and everything you'd expect it to be. Earth elemental guarded the main hallway, choking the elites and the yeth hounds. Some of the elites, Naulia, Tsuto, and that other human who had the hots for Tsuto tried to come around and out through the back door, where we held them in the choke point and dealt with them as much as we could (though Naulia and co. wound up stuck behind the goblins in initiative, and therefore couldn't get out to cause trouble).
After clearing out the main hallway of goblins and the 2 yeth hounds, the elemental earth-glided around and behind the rest of them. At this point, I remember my character's fire elemental gem, which is now pointless since the battle's practically over.
Long battle short, the elemental was wiped out, the goblins were more or less obliterated, Tsuto fell for the rogue mid-battle (had to roll 95% or higher, she hit 99%) and switched sides, Naulia and the other human woman were betrayed, and killed....
Went into it as a party of 2 pseudo-gestalts... Came out a party of 4, with 2 pseudo-gestalts, 2 regular characters, and a whole lot of more work on me as the GM.
So what did I learn? The 'random treasure' table can lead to trouble, never underestimate player ingenuity, and False Friend + Charm Person = New friends and cohorts if you roll high enough!
After those characters died, we tried to reboot... And she played an alchemist, who decided she was going to use a philter of Love on Tsuto.... *facepalm*
Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/water flowing underground...
I have two that come to mind. They aren't total failures, but they are pretty funny.
First: We're all about level 3, there are 3 PCs and the DM. We're travelling with our wagon and 4 horses. There's a Gestalt human Fighter/Warlock, a gestalt Dwarven fighter/cleric and me a Gnome Bard/Scout.
All of the sudden a druid and several giant scorpion pets jump out at us and the scorpions go for the Horses. We fight and manage to kill the scorpions (although the druid gets away) but not without first having the cleric and myself getting dropped to 0, getting healed up and then having to heal the other one who was just dropped to 0. Happened at least 3 times each. Don't remember if the fighter got dropped or not. Anyhow, now we have a wagon and all our stuff and no horses. (Horses got killed in the fracas) So the dwarf decides to pull the wagon to town...
Second one, same campaign, level 4 now probably: We go through an abandoned town and I find a wand of levitation while in the town and just stick it in my Triple H sack (3.5 game). We go into a dungeon and we get to this cliff. The fighter tosses me up onto the cliff where I spend the next 3 rounds failing spot checks. Finally the dwarf and fighter get up with me and I make a spot check! And find myself staring at a young white dragon. I panic and jump off the cliff. They get blasted by its breath weapon and start fighting. I spend the entire fight failing climb checks to get back up there finally making it AFTER the dragon is dead. Forgetting that I had a wand of levitation in my backpack... (It was my first campaign).
I was the DM, not the PC:
They were being harassed from the darkness (they didn't realize the danger in carrying lanterns) by one enemy--shoot one arrow and run. The wizard had had enough, after being plinked he responded with a snapshot fireball back down the incoming bearing. This was 1E with space-filling fireballs. In 5' dungeon corridors.
Everyone else screamed "NO" but this wasn't a newbie player, I considered them too late to stop him. I was reasonably generous and assumed a perfect aim for the fireball and I was also generous in figuring the guy had managed to move a bit after his shot--thus the fireball went on by until it exploded on a turn in the corridor.
I'm looking over the map counting off squares and after each circuit of the area around the burst point I'm describing the wall of fire getting closer. They weren't at full health, anyone who failed their save was at best in the negatives (I didn't kill right at zero) and some would have gone negative even if they did save. They were scared.
The fireball burned out 5' in front of the party--luck, not fudged.
That. Is. Awesome.
(REPOSTED FROM DIFFERENT THREAD; but it still counts)
I count this as the dumbest thing I have ever done in a game session:
Playing a cleric, initiative was rolled. Mine was higher than the rest of the party. Rather than cede to at least one other party member who would have been better prepared, I walk into the room, where I know the monster is, knowing what the monster is (in this case, a Beholder), and after performing in ineffectual spell, I get disintegrated into a small pile of dust.
Epicly epic fail as I rolled a "1" for my save by the way.
To add insult to injury, it was my first session with a new group. Fortunately, they still let me play.
(REPOSTED FROM DIFFERENT THREAD; but it still counts)
I count this as the dumbest thing I have ever done in a game session:
Playing a cleric, initiative was rolled. Mine was higher than the rest of the party. Rather than cede to at least one other party member who would have been better prepared, I walk into the room, where I know the monster is, knowing what the monster is (in this case, a Beholder), and after performing in ineffectual spell, I get disintegrated into a small pile of dust.
Epicly epic fail as I rolled a "1" for my save by the way.
To add insult to injury, it was my first session with a new group. Fortunately, they still let me play.
Wow that has me beat. I've never actually gotten one of my PC's killed. Close, we were unconscious and only saved by Deus Ex Machina and a power gamer, but we were also like level 5 and pitted against several ethereal flying things and a few harpies. It was way too much of a fight for us with negative levels involved.