Thought I'd share a little gaming story.
I ran this awhile back as a one-shot.
The players;
Flesh Golem - using the Savage Species rules.
Were-cat of some kind.. I forget which. Had some class levels.
Dwarven Barb.
So.. the thing that really sticks with me is the magic rug.
This item is laying in the floor of one of the rooms and if you step on it, (if you fail your save), you are sucked into the rug. The dwarf found this out and they had a heck of a time getting him out.
What turned out to be just a random type trap turned out to be the item that saved the players...
The golem picked up the carpet. Being 100% to magic and tech. not alive... carried it and used it as a weapon. He swung it as a bat.
So, here we are.. going through the tomb whacking the occasional baddie and sucking them into the rug.
Once the other two members of the party were teleported to the other side of the dungeon.. I had to make a secret passage for the golem. Not that big of a deal.
The end game...
I brought out all the stops... I bombarded the party with everything I could thing to throw at them. The final move?
The big bad had constructed a perm. rock wall trapping the were-cat on the other side. The big bad was floating near the ceiling on the other side.
The were-cat had the mud ring and changed the wall into stairs. The golem walked up the stairs.. hit the big bad with the rug.
Failed save.. the heros win the day.
I just liked the item being used in a way it most likely wasn't intended. So, I thought I'd share. Sorry it's random.. but it's been six or seven months.
Interesting twist. Reminds me of how Gygax wrote about a group of players going through the Tomb of Horrors (ironically enough, the very module that inspired The Mud Sorcerer's Tomb). They ended up using the "wrong" end of the scepter and crown, intended as a trap for the PCs, on the demilich to destroy him. Players can be pretty resourceful sometimes.
I can only wish my players had thought of something like that. We eventually abandoned MST after about the third TPK, I think: nobody had an adamantine weapon, and all the monsters had DR 300/adamantine and like SR 50. For the love of Gygax, screen the character sheets before you run the module. If there aren't enough adamantine weapons and no-SR spells, DON'T LET THEM IN. It's just not worth it.
Thanks for that Paul, I love it when the PCs take from their environment to win the day. I’m sure that when I play I miss just how many dungeon traps double as weapons. I guess it’s time to watch more MacGuyver re-runs.
Kirth, I know a few folks have expressed concern with the MST 3.5 make-over because of the DR and while I can't disagree, I myself did not find it a deal breaker. By 14th level I would usually consider a golembane scarab from the DMG as a required investment for fighting types. It’s a steal at 2,500 gp and it neutralizes golem DR entirely. Perhaps the DM should drop one in as treasure early on.
Though I concede it won’t help against Tzolo’s guardian (or constructs). Big TG is just bad bad news. But that‘s the way it’s supposed to be. Yikes! I’d just consider it an honor to die in such a fine tomb.
By 14th level I would usually consider a golembane scarab from the DMG as a required investment for fighting types. It’s a steal at 2,500 gp and it neutralizes golem DR entirely. Perhaps the DM should drop one in as treasure early on.
Yeah, my fault entirely; I should definitely have done that. I also assumed it would be "Tomb-of-Horrors"-esque enough that a rogue-heavy party could survive... boy was I wrong! The whole thing became incredibly comedic, with PCs fleeing frantically from invincible golems, but they couldn't get out because the Tomb was sealed behind them! Raspberry jam everywhere, with the poor saps frantically looking in closets for adamantine weapons, and on the golems' ankles for "ichor valves" (too many Ray Harryhausen movies!) -- "Do I find one?" "No, but you draw an attack of opportunity... oops, another dead character. Sorry!"
I've never before had so many fighters rolled up as replacement characters.
Thanks for that Paul, I love it when the PCs take from their environment to win the day. I’m sure that when I play I miss just how many dungeon traps double as weapons. I guess it’s time to watch more MacGuyver re-runs.
Kirth, I know a few folks have expressed concern with the MST 3.5 make-over because of the DR and while I can't disagree, I myself did not find it a deal breaker. By 14th level I would usually consider a golembane scarab from the DMG as a required investment for fighting types. It’s a steal at 2,500 gp and it neutralizes golem DR entirely. Perhaps the DM should drop one in as treasure early on.
Though I concede it won’t help against Tzolo’s guardian (or constructs). Big TG is just bad bad news. But that‘s the way it’s supposed to be. Yikes! I’d just consider it an honor to die in such a fine tomb.
I agree with that. I have yet to play 3.5 version (its high on my to-do list), but even when we played the original 2nd ed. version it was a meat grinder. Which is how it should be. MST is extremely well thought out and contains some of the most devious, clever traps I've ever seen in a dungeon. It deserves to be a party-killer; testing the mettle of high level characters and only matched by the most ingenious PCs.
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Bump
Man I wish I had seen this Thread earlier. See, I have a similar story to Paul's.
Back in 93-94 I was in a mostly dungeon-crawl game. I was a PC and we were almost TPK'd almost every fight, real ToH, MST kinda stuff. So, in one of the deepest levels we finally found the item we'd been hired to retrieve from the dungeon, a gem of somesort.
But if you step on (even touch) the rug you get teleported to a corridor a ways back that was a merciless PC killer. After torturous trial and error one of the other PCs used a 10ft pole or something to lift the rug up from underneath and let the gem roll off. Yay US! . . . And because we learned that the rug's bottom wouldn't teleport we rolled it up and took it with us.
Well, we give the gem to the "Mysterious Seer" or whatever and get another job. The campaign goes on and on and on, Wemics and Rakshasas, and Dire Bears, Oh My.
And we find ourselves, a few months later in some old Tamoachan-like ruins. Except they're empty and quiet... Too quiet.
And, of course, hordes of undead begin to surround us, hordes. Then on the top of some fallen temple a BBEG Necromancer announces that we're his prisoners. We were toast and we knew it.
After a moment of panicking, with the undead getting closer and closer, a PC pulls out the rug, opens it up and we all jump in, the last PC standing underneath making the rug fall on him so the bottom would be upside down for the undead!
- Snip -
Haha! That's great! My player that has had the flesh golem in a few games swears the rug is forever on his character sheet.
Speaking of ToH - I had a player that was a mage and he broke his.. staff of the magi or something powerful like that... to take out the lich.
But, jumping in the teleportation type rug you mentioned is great! Fantastic way to get out of dodge!
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The thing that made it so great is that it was, like, months later. NO ONE remembered that we had that thing; the whole campaign felt like a different campaign by then.
When the Player said, Oh s#&%! I pull out that old "teleporting rug" and jump in the look on the DM's face was priceless. He had designed the whole next part of the campaign for us to be prisoners of that Necromancer -- not unlike the experience in the Slavers series.
It was great.
And the DM had to rewrite a bunch of material to get us back on track with the campaign; it was completely derailed -- of course we weren't going back to that Tamoachan city again!!
-W. E. Ray
That really is classic.
I also really feel for that DM.. haha.. but.. players are of a shifty sort... never know what they're gonna do.