Hello All!
I am currently co-writing "Ecology of the Rust Monster" for an upcoming issue and I wanted to include some of the most harrowing tales of encounters with these metal munching menaces straight from the mouths (keyboards?) of us players.
Do you have a harrowing/fun/heart-breaking/rage-filled anecdote about an encounter with a rust monster in your game (as a DM or player)? Were you left in nothing but you're loincloth? robbed of your holy avenger? Reduced to a sobbing babe, your tears mixing with the rust of your very favoritist piece of steel? If so, use this thread as your shout-out, and let us all know.
I will be selecting a couple of short excerpts from these Tales of Rust and Doom to include in the Ecology article as a Sidebar...in other words you will be in Dragon magazine! That's cool.
Did the rust monster eat your stuff? Tell Uncle Nick all about it...
Nick, you so crazy....
Tell Uncle Nick all about it...
That sounds so... wrong. :P
Did the rust monster eat your stuff? Tell Uncle Nick all about it...
I remember having a female Dwarf Fighter in my party (this was back in the good old days of 2nd edition) who was ambushed by a rust monster. Needless to say, the look on the players face was priceless - her dwarven full plate vanished first, then her mighty axe o' orc-killin'. Standard fare, I imagine, for rust monster encounters...
...except that the next room had a belt of masculinity in it. She put it on (along with an oversized-for-her cloak and boots) and suddenly... well... luckily she had the cloak on.
It was back in 2nd ed that i ran into the rust monster I happen to have been playting the party paladin. My friends thought it was very funny to see a paladin running screaming from a rust monster. Needless to say I lost all my armor weapons and all. My friends ended up losing their weapons as well and we had to kill it with our hands and magic.
My party warforged lived in terror of the things.
Hello All!
I am currently co-writing "Ecology of the Rust Monster" for an upcoming issue and I wanted to include some of the most harrowing tales of encounters with these metal munching menaces straight from the mouths (keyboards?) of us players.
Do you have a harrowing/fun/heart-breaking/rage-filled anecdote about an encounter with a rust monster in your game (as a DM or player)? Were you left in nothing but you're loincloth? robbed of your holy avenger? Reduced to a sobbing babe, your tears mixing with the rust of your very favoritist piece of steel? If so, use this thread as your shout-out, and let us all know.
I will be selecting a couple of short excerpts from these Tales of Rust and Doom to include in the Ecology article as a Sidebar...in other words you will be in Dragon magazine! That's cool.
Did the rust monster eat your stuff? Tell Uncle Nick all about it...
So you were the lucky chosen one. I suspected as much. I'm afraid I don't have any tales of doom to tell you, as in 27 years of gaming, I've never encountered them as a player.
If it will help give you ideas, I can post my rejected outline to werecabbages for you to peek at.
- Ashavan
I am currently co-writing "Ecology of the Rust Monster" for an upcoming issue
I love you
I will be selecting a couple of short excerpts from these Tales of Rust and Doom to include in the Ecology article as a Sidebar...in other words you will be in Dragon magazine!
Pssht, been there, done that. ;)
Well, alright. There was once in a game I DMed when I decided it was high time for a rust monster. Before Ak'huar, cleric of Umberlee, became a lich, he adventured with a feral minotaur mercenary named Drek, twelve feet tall and almost a more vile beast than Ak'huar himself. Oh, and an imp archer riding Taren, who was a human reincarnated as a badger. They spot the trail of a rust monster, and Ak'huar gets ready to see if the rust still works when it's undead.
Of course, CR3 is no challenge for these guys, so I advance him up a little... to fifteen hit dice. They find themselves facing a massive creature the size of a wagon, except a wagon can't ruin the mithril fullplate of the deep you just spent all your money on just by brushing you with antennae as long as swords. +14 to touch attacks against someone in full-plate is pretty hard to dodge - remember that the more you rely on your armour, the lower your touch AC is going to be.
Sure, Drek tore the creature apart with his bare hands, but by the end of the fight Ak'huar had himself wandering a dungeon in his underwear. He never got his zombie rust monster, either.
Oh, I've got another one.
The adventure involved a feud between two rival clans of dwarves - the Stonehearts, who had long controlled the mines in a mountain around which a human city had grown - and the Redbeards, an upstart clan named after the brass-haired sorcerers, a trait that ran in their clan's blood. The players arrive to buy new mithril armour after they lost their last one, and there's a mysterious shortage for some reason.
A rust monster? No. The Redbeards have managed to trap an efreeti in their mines and demanded three wishes. One, they demand the schematics to a vehicle of war so powerful that the Stonehearts won't invent it for centuries. Two, that their own dead mines fill with gold. The efreeti plans to kill them after they make their third. The Redbeards are the most powerful clan in the land now, because they're absolutely stinking rich.
Here's what I'd thought would happen. The PCs invade the mines, kill the Redbeards orc and ogre guards that they hired with gold, and there's a climactic battle inside a gold mine with a gang of dwarven miners and sorcerers and their mithril-armoured drill-tank, after which they free the efreet and get that last wish as their reward.
Here's what really happened. The PCs betrayed the Stonehearts and took over the damn mine. They raise the entire Redbeard clan as skeletons and set them to work mining for them. They hire up every orc within a hundred miles for quadruple normal wage, and have them protect it. Then they go off adventuring in the mithril-armoured tank.
They come back to find their orcs fled, their mine empty, and their skeletons mining worthless rock. Turns out, gold's almost like a narcotic to all those rust monsters. All those fifteen hit dice, golden rust monsters - and they all just smelled some mithril.
So you were the lucky chosen one. I suspected as much. I'm afraid I don't have any tales of doom to tell you, as in 27 years of gaming, I've never encountered them as a player.If it will help give you ideas, I can post my rejected outline to werecabbages for you to peek at.
- Ashavan
Actually, I am only tackling some of the article, oddly enough the rest of it is being written by another guy named Nick! Small world. :-)
Ash! If you want to post it to werecabbages that's awesome! I don't know how much I an pillage (Wes gave us a pretty detailed plan of action) but you never never know. Thanks! :-)
Not much to add to this except that I had a moronic player many, many years ago who attempted to tame one that he found in a Dungeon. He thought it would be useful to herd along through Dungeons (with organic guides, of course) and use to get through locked doors, locks, etc.
Of course it just ate all his weapons and armour, as swaddling himself in cloth proved to be a poor deterrent against the creature.
Gotta love players...
|
Not strictly a rust-monster anecdote per se, but...
Lost Caverns of Tsjoscanth: the party had found an absolute hoard of coins, weapons, armour, etc, including some fabulously ornate dwarven full-plate, belonging to the ancestors of one player, who had declared it his life's goal to return this armour (and the owner's body) back to his kin.
Being good old-skool dungeon-robbers, we scooped up everything that wasn't nailed down, and threw it in the obligatory bag of holding.
Later that night, we come across a cave of xavers (wierd scuttling sword-shaped critters)and we discover their rusting ability. Cue an hour of 'One Man & His Dog'-style shenanigans, with ropes, poles, cloaks & torches, until we finally herd them together and lasso one. We realise we won't be able to hold it for long (since its body is mostly one big blade), so the dwarf has the bright idea of keeping the thing prisoner while teaching it a lesson... tossing it into the bag of holding and shaking it furiously about...
Munch! the entire contents of the sack (virtually all treasure collected thus far) turn to useless rust, followed by...
Rrrriiipp! the sharp-bladed critter tears the extradimensional fabric of space-time inside the bag, showering the entire party in thousands of pounds weight of afore-mentioned rust.
(Cue dwarven sobs, and looks of astonishment/puzzlement, and an expression of utter contempt from the lone voice of sanity, i.e. me!)
Actually, one other thing. Is this article going to make any allusions to Rust Dragons, one of my favourite Planescape critters?
well, the most harrowing thing is you cannot out run them cause they move faster than anyone in armor, so you just gotta chuck your local monk at the rust monster and hope he can slow it down while you show A's and E's. To find a door or something or give the wizzy time to make a wall or blow it up with a spell; dont worry about the monk; the monk factory will make more. I have seen a lot of groups pick a "volunteer" to "slow him down a bit, you know, grapple or something", it always amazes me how upset players get when they loose items, some pout for weeks which is kinda funny. I think there should be rust monster variants that eat cloth, wood - with a preference for worked and treated wood, paper - like scrolls and books, glass and pottery which might give you interesting results from monsters drinking your potions or target pcs who carry most of the potions. Disenchanters; a beast that came out of Dragon a few years back; are good compliments to this beast in dungeons, they invoke about the same reactions. I have had some amusing moments of goblins armed with flails and whips made from rust monster tenacles chase moderately high level pcs around, hehe they still throw the monk at them and search for a barricade like a door or something - just till the mage gets ready, they often assure me.
I think there should be rust monster variants that eat cloth, wood - with a preference for worked and treated wood, paper - like scrolls and books, glass and pottery which might give you interesting results from monsters drinking your potions or target pcs who carry most of the potions. Disenchanters; a beast that came out of Dragon a few years back; are good compliments to this beast in dungeons, they invoke about the same reactions.
Many moons ago, when the goal of the April issue of Dragon was to have funny content you could take to the game table, there was a parody Monstrous Compendium. One monster featured therein was a paper dragon that ate scrolls and burped the spells back at PCs.
Put one of those, a disenchanter, and rust mosnter in the same dungeon and you have the Ultimate Fun Dungeon (for DMs).
lol. Don't forget oozes. One encounter with those and I had three naked PCs.
Actually, one other thing. Is this article going to make any allusions to Rust Dragons, one of my favourite Planescape critters?
Hiya Filch!
I don't think rust monsters are making an appearance in our article...which means...
Ecology of the Rust Dragon is fair game! ;-)
Thanks for the great anecdote! Tamed rust monster! HA!
In my ice age campaign this Monday night the PCs are going to come up against a hill giant and his gigantic rust monster companion on an icy bridge. It will be the first time I use a rust monster in the game.
This of course will be just after the PCs get some funky new magical armor from a treasure vault. Boy, I can be mean sometimes!
Ecology of the Rust Dragon is fair game! ;-)
Thanks for the great anecdote! Tamed rust monster! HA!
I don't even know if they're still canon tbh, I just liked them. Sadly, I don't think I have the talent to do them justice.
Yeah, that guy was dumb... he even called it Rusty :)
I'm currently Dming a strickly elven game in which they recently founded an abandonned mine belonging to a stone giant.
Their leader bound to retake the lost mine of his ancestor leads the way inside. After a straight corridor two of them arrive in a room full of old broken wooden carts in one corner.
There is two parralel lines of dust on the floor leading to a fla stone wall. As they are searching for an obvious secret door, the giant which is a half demon-stone giant elder-Ftr2 spying on them via meld to stone, springs his trap. Rock to mud on one wall and a fat advanced rust monster rush in the room. At the same time a stone block fall on the exit, cutting them off from the rest of the group. They fight a ranged skirmish, the bard turns invisible but is quickly found by the hungry rust monster. As they lose weapons and armor, the giant comes out and kills the bard. The leader is flanked by the giant and the rust monster and screaming like a girl for help. The giant trigger a pit trap under the leader and his pet, dropping them 60 feet in a shallow pool below. He returns into the wall (meld to stone), release the stone bolck and waits for the others to come in. I had the group in two different rooms to play this encounter. The other group was facing some orcs and ogres bounty hunters looking for the deserting giant, when they prevailed and came into the mine, all they saw was a stain on the floor looking very much like a naked bard and no trace of the leader. Meanwhile, their leader was trying to kill the rust monster with his bare hands and teeth. My players never expexted a side quest to recover a gold mine to be so costly, and i never tought i would enjoyed so much relieving my players of their dearest magical weapons.
sheesh and i thought i was cruel, anyway not so long ago a group of adventurers ventured into a dungeon they eventually made there way to a seemingly empty room little do they know 4 invisible rust monsters awaited them .
Hey All!
Great stuff! Thanks so much for sharing all the fun tales. I will be compiling the sidebar for the article tonight, so this also your last chance to contribute if you have a tidbit you are just dying to share. Thanks again lords and ladies!
Nick
I just want to add that the PC paladin in my campaign lost his ceremonial dire longsword, his magical full plate, and his magical greataxe to the giant rust monster mentioned previously by mwa. The rust monster would have eaten the paladin's shield as well, but it's made out of blue ice (damn)!
Tell Uncle Nick all about it...
Show me on the miniature where the rust monster touched you...
Hey guys!
Anyone who posted a story or quip here (you too Sucros) if you don't mind I'd like to include your real names in the article. You can email them to me at nflogue@hotmail.com if you don't want to post them here. Thanks all!
Nick
This is my real name.
I remember an old adventure in Dungeon magazine I think was called "The Mud-sorcerer's Tomb". In it was a corridor filled with columns. When the party was halfway down the corridor the columns transformed into rust monsters. The first round of initiative every party member fled!
This is my real name.
Oh, I knew about you Jon, I've read your work in Dragon, great stuff!