Once again, I feel a need to share the silliness. As before, no mentioning of what lies beyond what I'm describing please! :)
A Bridge Too Far
Imagine this scene if you will. Our intrepid heroes tramp through a forest and successfully sneak through a goblin-infested briar maze with the help of our silly little gnome druid (the very same who soundly defeated an Ridiculous Quasit with an equally ridiculous eagle and dog trick). We managed to avoid ALL the encounters in the Briar maze, and so we arrived at a bridge spanning the gap to the goblin fort, perched up on the rock.
Here we stopped for a full 20 minutes of real time, trying to come up with a sound plan for sneakily crossing the bridge without goblins in watchtowers noticing us. One of our better plans included painting a goblin on the dwarf's tower shield having him "sneak" one person across at a time. In the end, we decided to say "screw it" and just rush across and tackle whatever we came across head on.
So the fun starts. Dwarf goes first, I, the cleric go second, and then the third person goes and *snap* bridge goes out. The third person jumps back successfully but me and the poor dwarf go plummeting into the drink. Upon impact, my cleric takes enough damage to go unconscious and starts to drown. The dwarf, while surviving the fall, is so encumbered by his armor (-14 armor check?) that he cannot swim correctly and sinks.
Our gnome decides to tie a rope around his waist, hands it to our nimble third, and jumps off the cliff so he can reach me and save me before I drown to death. DM not-so-secretly rolls Use Rope: 2. Gnome falls into the water as well. The gnome then summons a Dolphin to save me and bring me to shore while he climbs back up the rope. At this point the dwarf begins the long slow march across the bottom of the ocean toward dry land, holding his breath all the while.
So then the murderous BUNYIP appears and eats the Dolphin's head. Hmmm. Now it's right next to my unconscious form, ripe for the head-eating. At this point, the rest of the party on the cliff is desperate coming up with plans to distract the Bunyip away from me; everything from crossbow bolts to Dancing Lights.
Suddenly, our gnome gets another bright idea! He dashes back into the briar maze and taunts a group of 10 goblins hanging out in the maze, then proceeds to dash for the cliff! What is his plan you say? He jumps off the cliff, rope still tied to his waist, and leads the pursuing goblins, 10 in all, over the edge! The gnome slams into the cliff side because of the pendulous swing of the rope and goes unconscious, never to witness the sight of goblin bodies splatting to the ground around my half-drowned form.
Somehow, all of this distracting nonsense gets the Bunyip to flee. Eventually, me, the gnome, and the dwarf are hauled back up onto the cliff face and awakened. All of this nonsense because of a stupid, simple bridge. And the very worst part? None of the goblins in the watchtowers noticed any of it! We yet retained the element of surprise.
Creators of this ominous Bridge: I salute you!
----
The Pickle Plan
Nothing so long-winded as above, but much hilarity ensued and soon as we found a bag of pickles in a goblin watch tower. Our DM slipped to us that there was actually a intricate and convoluted story concerning a bag of stolen pickles. For the rest of the session we continued to devise ways to use the bag of pickles to taunt and trick various goblin encounters. Goblins playing 'Kill Gull' (as our DM describes)? We threw pickles at them from hiding and watched the funnies unfold. Battle with the Goblin chieftan and his cronies? Throw pickles at them and let them fight over the goods! One of our more complex plans included trying to plant the pickle bag on one of the human collaborators (perhaps our wayward Aasimar?) and let the Goblins draw their own conclusions!
This is seriously excellent stuff. I am in total awe of the creativeness behind these madcap situations. My hat is off to you, oh creators of Rise of the Runelords. So far, this has been a campaign to remember, and we're still in the first chapter!
Much love, and thanks for reading. :)
|
As the DM in question in the above post I figure I should toss out some of my observations of all of this from my side of the screen.
First of all, the adventure really has been a blast. There has been a lot of comic relief in the form of the goblins, but there have been a good number of things that have kept the players on their toes as well(the yith hounds proved rather tough for them, though they survived it well. And I know the sinspawn scored a 'What is that?' reaction).
Thankfully, due in large part to a stodgy dwarf, few of the above pickle plans came to actual fruition. The gnome did use his fishing pole to toss out a pickle where the goblins playing killgull could see it, while hiding in the safety of the brambles, before pulling it back again to try and lure the goblins into the waiting hands of the group. Fortunately for them, only one goblin saw it and so the trio began arguing when they thought he was trying to cheat and distract him from their game and their scuffle resulted in one less goblin for the party to deal with.
As for the bridge, that scene turned out just perfect. The gnome, who isn't the brightest in the bunch, proposed the idea of painting a goblin on the front of a shield and going that way. What would have made the scene priceless is that it would have worked, if only because going two at a time would have kept them beneath the weight limit of the bridge.
As for the goblin guards, their listen checks were abysmal when it came to distance and already being distracted in one way or another. Thanks to some very low rolls, there was no hope of them catching the sound of the fall or the ensuing struggle(and the other falling goblins. The druid got the rest to chase after him and ran through one of the watchroom windows, pursued by all the refugees and the goblin druid. I figured the refugees didn't know the area that well so at least one would follow him over. I rolled a d10, and hit a 10, so I gave them the comical vision of goblins slamming one after another into each other and tumbling down until only the druid remained).
Finally, the above post left off what I took to be my favorite part of the entire encounter, one that left the party really unsure of why they were expecting some sort of tactical reprisal from the goblins. They fell back and rested after their ordeal and then returned to the site the next day, expecting some sort of resistance ready for them. When they arrived they found the bridge had been pulled back up and a sign was tacked on it, written in an obviously human hand(goblins may not write, but I doubt they have any problem getting one of the humans in the place to have their words stolen). The sign simply said warned the mosswood goblins(I think that was the name of the refugee camp) that this is what happens to those who defy Ripnuggets orders. The group looked at the sign for a minute, then looked down at all the goblin corpses below and realized that they thought the other tribe had tried to cross the bridge and it collapsed.
-Tarlane
My players take some beating for stupid idea's but yours may will be a match. We are due to start RotR on Monday evening. I shall try and keep the history of the pickles to myself when we get there.
Under no circumstances must these parties ever meet in an adventure.
My players looted the goblin druid's potions of Tree Shape, then taunted the goblins inside the main door, ran outside, slammed the door (which I said opened outwards), then lay down in front of the door and drank the potions. They then heard "splat!" "splat!" "splat!"...."splat!" as the goblins ran into the door headfirst, then laughed themselves silly, dragged the door open, made the goblins hop over the 'log' who then turned into a wizard behind them and incinerated them with a Burning Hands spell. Seriously, my players are devious.
I liked the tower shield plan.
|
Must add my funny bridge story here.
My group was worried about the bridge being trapped after noticing the dangling rope on the far side of the bridge (thanks to the rogues perfect 20 plus maxed out skill in spot). The rogue went across by himself, declared the bridge safe, so the rest of the group started across. Meanwhile, the rogue was examaning the dangling rope and noticed it quivering as the party moved across the bridge, decided to secure it, so pulled on it to tie it down. I even asked how hard he was pulling on it. His answer? "Nice and tight". So he yanked on it, sending the rest of the party into the drink below as they made their way across the bridge. (2 humans and a gnome, so i ruled they could all 3 walk on the bridge... gnome being small, and underweight anyway).
Only one death... gnome wizard, and they managed to bring him back to life. But to this day they wont let the rogue live it down.
|
Our group missed out on all the hilarity of the bridge sadly enough... Our DM asked for Knowledge Architecture and Engineering and one of our Rangers pulled through and told us that it would collapse if we overloaded it... So we completely avoided that problem and continued to beat the feck out of the Goblins inside...
But even if we had have made the bridge collalpse I can't see if it would have mattered too much considering that my Dwarven Wizard-Fighter and the Half-Elven Ranger went down the Bunyip hole earlier and took it out. Without much effort actually. Then we took great pleasure in searching the bunyip hole over and over and over... We still haven't searched without finding something which is a tad strange...
And as for the pickle incident? We barged into the tower, waking up the goblins in the process and killing one in the surprise round. The remaining Goblin's action was to throw a bag out the window. After we had dealt with that Goblin we decided that the bag must have had something of value so tied a rope around our Halfling Monk, and threw him off the tower. When he returned with a bag of Pickles we were all a tad confused. We ended up giving the Pickles to a certain horse who looked starved... Can anyone say situational modifier? :D
My all-goblin party ate the pickles, of course.