The current Pathfinder campaign I'm running took a series of odd turns along its way, until it ended up in one of the most intriguing experiences I remember running, all thanks to the sharp wits and unending thirst for money of my player's characters. If you can spare an eye or two, I am going to tell you a tale, the tale of an industrious rogue...
Many, many sessions ago, the group stumbled upon a trapped room inside a dungeon, which contained a rift into the Paraelemental Plane of Salt. The idea was to have the characters face a small Salt Elemental and then get on with the dungeon. After killing it, one of the players -the Rogue- asks me about the price of salt, which after an Appraise roll I told him could fetch about 1g per pound. So then he spends a while filling every possible container he had (including his boots) with salt from the elemental rift, and then the session continued as planned through the dungeon. Once back in the city (we're playing in Katapesh), he managed to get a handsome sum of money for the salt.
About half a year of campaign later, when most of the party levels up to 7 (the "Sonk" or "Monkerer" -Monk/Sorcerer- was stuck at level 6 after missing a couple of sessions), the Rogue asks me about taking the Leadership feat and wants to discuss the possibility of gathering some followers (his Charisma score of 20 and other things qualified him for a good amount of followers), so we get on it during the pizza break (he had notes prepared from before). Most of what he asks sounds reasonable (I'm often a harsh DM, but very flexible when the players are being creative), so I let him go along with it, and so he starts his criminal gang. Or at least I thought it was going to be a criminal gang.
Instead, after the pizza break the player announces his character is going to leave Katapesh for a couple of weeks (we were at a between-adventures part of the campaign, so I gave the players the opportunity to conduct some medium-term tasks if they all agreed on moving the time frame a few weeks into the future. The idea was to have them craft stuff, meet up with their families, get the chance to set up a proper base of operations in the city, etc. Also, one of the character was getting married to an important NPC who later got kidnapped, but that's another story).
But before he does, he and his followers go on a pretty odd shopping spree, buying large amounts of wood, iron, smithing material, shovels, carts, weights, et cetera. I began suspecting the kind of thing he was after (I've been playing with these guys for about 15 years, so I know when they are up to something), but I wasn't quite so sure until he had his character visit a local moneylender.
He arrives at Honest Abdul's House of Wealth Facilitation (the party had conducted some business with Honest Abdul in the past, when they helped him rig a gladiatorial fight and score some big earnings, so he charged them less abusive interests and his stealing margins were lower), and starts working on a deal to secure a warehouse in the port district and shipping permits (he knew Abdul had some contacts there from a previous mission they were involved with), for which he requests a rather substantial loan, which would be "promptly paid back with an offer for a business joint-venture". Abdul was not quite convinced, so the Rogue had to steal some stuff from a Temple of Desna to serve as collateral (same temple which had served the party as safehouse for most of the initial part of the campaign. He swore he would pay it back with donations, one day).
So he and his followers set up to travel. Keep in mind that while now it seems rather obvious what he had in mind, it had been about 8 months of real time and many sessions between that moment and the time they originally found the elemental rift.
However, when the Rogue asks the Priest (who among his many oddities is a cartographer -both in real life and in character-, and kept maps of everything) for "The map of that abandoned Osirian temple we stumbled upon when we were chasing that lamia that sliced off Vorgok's left hand" (Vorgok is the party's Barbarian and resident killing machine. He actually killed that lamia by taking his sliced hand, putting it inside a spiked glove and shoving it down the lamia's throat until it died of suffocation. He then cooked the lamia. He got his hand some sessions later after striking a deal with a necromancer. The Priest and the Sonk got the hand from the local necropolis, and the necromancer got it "installed". Sometimes it tries to choke him, other times it slaps women in the butt, but as Vorgok says "Hand holds sword. Sword kills people. Vorgok pleased with arrangement"), I recalled his keen interest for salt.
The Rogue and his followers take about 4 days to arrive at their destination, and he quickly starts setting up quite an impressive layout of the stuff he wanted done. He clearly had put a lot of thought into it and it was actually quite reasonable, so I allowed it to go through (with a few accidents here and there, of course. I'm a DM, after all).
After making sure the operation in the surface was up and running (set plans for building living quarters for the overseers, started digging a pit where the slaves he would later buy would be locked, sent off a mage initiate with a dowsing rod to find some water, organized a patrol to guard against the gnoll tribes that inhabit the region, among other things), he went into the dungeon with his strongest followers. While they did encounter some creatures (mostly gnolls who had taken residence in the now-open temple ruins), they made it easily to the room with the rift, where they had to fight yet another Salt Paraelemental. But they finished it and got to work on securing the site, so the workers could come in and start digging out the dungeon.
Let's move forward in time three weeks in-game, when the rest of the party, now done with their own businesses (which among other things resulted in the Priest becoming permanently infertile and bald for manipulating something that could be best described as "solid doom farts". At least that's how the party's Warrior/Minstrel-Ohgodwhydoeshekeepsinging described it when they first found them), made their way to their friend the Rogue.
The salt-extracting operation was now in full swing. The first caravan of salt had been sent to Katapesh a week ago and the sacks were quickly sold among the various merchants. Abdul had spoken with the Rogue and felt the operation was potentially profitable, and agreed to gather some investors, so money started pouring in.
The next sessions were dedicated mostly to planning it out. Since most of the money the Rogue originally used to buy the materials he started with was borrowed from the party (and because they were the only ones he trusted), he had them join him, and our campaign took a momentary halt from the main story arch (which involved a bunch of doomsday factions fighting each other over how the world had to end and the characters accidentally caught carrying the artifact central to said dispute and everyone trying to have them working for their cause) to focus on the salt.
During those sessions, the operation grew from the initial prospecting and odd caravan to a much bigger thing, which employed around 100 people (half of which are actually slaves. I had the Rogue suffer an EXP penalty due to letting 25 of them die after ordering them to "Pile up over that loose elemental! Don't let the merchandise escape, you gnats!" His original Chaotic-Neutral alignment was starting to find its greatest challenge yet: Business. And it only got worse from there), among workers, guards, caravans, traders, a sea ship between Katapesh and Absalom (called "The Really Salty Sailor", go figure), scribes in each city that handled all the paperwork and port issues, and a host of other minor individuals.
Suddenly, the whole place got caught in a series of earthquakes. Tremours had been common since the operation got big, mostly thanks to the absolutely careless use of an explosive concoction deemed by the group as "Nessus' Toilet During Taco Night" (which they originally got very early in the campaign from a Bedouin alchemist. The guy was a quack and I never expected the characters to try and replicate his formula, which involved rather worrisome amounts of camel droppings), which has turned what once was a beautiful and very, very holy Osirian temple into a gapping hole the size of a stadium in the middle of the desert, with the elemental rift standing at its centre (they had the miners dig underneath the rift, so salt fell out through the portal and accumulated in a massive pile from which it is was then loaded onto one of the dozens of leather conveyors powered by slaves inside hamster wheels), but now they were getting particularly powerful.
As the Priest was quick to guess (he's the party's expert on Cosmological stuff), the rift had become dangerous and potentially unstable. His successful Knowledge [The Planes] rolls allowed him to guess what was going on: The rift had been pouring such massive amounts of material from the Paraelemental Plane of Salt that the native elementals were becoming restless (Elemental Planes in the Planescape conception -which is the one I use, even though we are playing in Golarion- are rather sentient by themselves, with Elementals being manifestations of said planar awareness).
Long story short, elementals started pouring out of the rift, first a few -1d4 Small Elementals- per day, until growing to chaotic proportions -1d100 Small Elementals, plus random amounts of bigger ones, per day-.
Workers, guards and overseers were now getting killed by the dozens each day, but there was enough people to spare at first, since by then a whole village had started to form in the area surrounding the operation, with all kinds of people settling there either to work in the mines and refinery, to serve somehow in the related services or to make money off the people working there, setting up taverns, brothels (lots and lots of brothels with really, really ugly women. Still, Vorgok managed to institute his own version of the "Prima Nocte", and it became mandatory for every new 'woman of ill fortune' in Saltspit -that's how they named the incipient town- to spend her first night of service with Vorgok. Some of them didn't get to survive past that night), shops and the like.
Keep in mind we are talking about 5 months in-game down the road. Since the campaign had become more focused in long term events, we sped up the time rate and often squeezed a lot of in-game time per session, a custom left from our Ars Magica days (where long-term events can end up being the main focus of the game).
So this elemental outbreak quickly turns into a big threat, and the Rogue hurries back to Katapesh to get support from his main associate, Merchant Prince Osman Bin Hassir, who sends him back with his personal Mage-Vizier and a host of soldiers from the Zephyr Guard. They manage to battle the elementals, but one thing catches the Rogue's attention: The Mage-Vizier had somehow commanded the elementals with a rod (I gave him a Rod of Elemental Compelling, which allowed him to force elemental of lesser power to perform certain actions. The idea was to have him push the elementals back into the borehole so the guards would surround them. Purely for stylish reasons. Foolish me. I should have seen what would come afterward).
Let's move one week into the future. The situation has been controlled and the mines are being repaired. But wait. Elementals keep pouring out at a regular rate! Ah, but the Rogue had noticed how the Rod managed to force small elementals into moving in a particular direction, so he figured "So far we have been collecting the salt, processing it here, loading it on camels and sending it to Katapesh. What if the salt went there... by itself?"
And so he managed to convince the Prince to have his Mage-Vizier craft a few more Rods of Elemental Compelling (the components had to be taken from an obscure location in the Mwangi Jungles, which served as the pretext to get these nascent Rockefellers back into adventuring for a session), which were then given to hired Mage Overseers so they would command the salt elementals from the mines to Katapesh.
A special processing facility was built in Katapesh, where the elementals would be led into a large funnel-like structure lined with metal rings enchanted with Dismissal-like spell effects, thus sending them back to their plane of origin and allowing the remaining salt to be refined (the rings weren't too powerful, so it was common for elementals to go through unharmed and cause havoc in the ovens underneath. But the pay was good, so workhands were aplenty). This, combined with the regular caravans that still went back and forth day and night (as a lot of the salt was just regular salt without a CR), skyrocketted profit, to the point that the party could finally start building their much-desired fortress near the mines (which included hiring a Conjuration specialist to make them their own oasis, which led to some other business opportunities. But more on that later).
However, it came with a cost: With the rift churning out elementals day and night at progressively higher rates, alarms began ringing among some leaderheads of Katapesh (how much was envy for the profits and how much was actual concern is another matter altogether), who cited issues like the ludicrous increase of travelers reporting being attacked by wild salt elementals (which had increased from 0 to Way More Than 0 in less than a year). Prince Osman managed to calm things down a bit by setting a series of permanent guard outposts along the recently established Salt Route to make sure all the elementals which escaped the caravans were slain (which led to an entertaining session where the characters were now the ones hiring level 1 adventurers just like them to do the job), but trouble was starting to brew among the brazen domes of Katapesh.
No better way to make enemies than success.
The issues with the salt operation and the related incidents managed their way into the Merchant Court of Katapesh, in order to be brought to the ears of the Pactmasters. Even though Prince Osman is the Grand Vizier of the Merchant Guild, the rest of the katapeshi nobles and trade lords were pretty upset about the whole thing, especially those whose businesses were somehow being affected. One particular man, Sheik Hossain Ibn Shappur, who owned the largest spice trading company in the city -salt being among his main trade goods-, pulled strings to get this brought to the court.
This part of the campaign was mostly political, with the party negotiating with various groups of interests and individuals in order to calm things down (though what “negotiating” means changes from character to character), but it all ended up in Saltspit being attacked by a powerful wizard and his crew of not-so-powerful wizard companions.
Also, a sudden release of energy had everyone with itching noses. Moments later, one of the overseers shows up yelling “Accident in the mines! The slaves are escaping!” The Rogue panicked. Then the mines exploded in a fantastic display of special effects. Then everyone panicked.
After beating the wizard, they tried using some rudimentary Divination scrolls they had bought in the past (the Priest didn't have anything useful prepared. Then again, he is the kind of Priest that charges the rest of the party for healing), but the man was powerful enough to resist them. So they decided to cast Vorgok.
The Barbarian starts by chewing off every single one of the wizard's toes, without even removing his shoes first (early in his career, Vorgok took Animal Fury as his first Rage Power, which gives him a bite attack while enraged. Then around level 4 or 5, I think, he took off all his teeth with a clamp and went to see a blacksmith in order to have steel teeth installed, which had to be bolted to his jaw. Vorgok passed all the Fortitude saves to avoid extreme blood loss, but he had a critical fail in the one to handle the pain. Remembering how dangerous Vorgok was the last time he felt actual pain -killed a gladiator that cheated a friend, cut of his head, nailed his hand through the throat and used the severed head as a bludgeoing glove to kill the other gladiator. He still keeps the head, called Wilson, and uses it like some kind of very grotesque puppet when he gets "philosophical", as he says [in Vorgok terms, "getting philosophical" is anything from "Did I take a dump today?" onward]. Once he attempted to earn money by using Perform in a square to set up a ventriloquist show with Wilson. He didn't have Perform trained, he didn't know how to do ventriloquism, and he was using a SEVERED HEAD TO TELL JOKES. Didn't work out- Valanar -the Priest- gave him copious amounts of Pesh Liquor in order to control him, but but trying to drug up a 2,2 metres tall Ulfen is no easy task, so the party had to chain him down before he killed the blacksmith (who was hammering the red-hot teeth into his jaw over an anvil. The Ulfen had Damage Reduction thanks to his National Feat. He's from Irrisen), and force-feed him every bit of Pesh -or any kind of narcotic, for that matter- they could find. After the blacksmith was done, Vorgok enraged and ran out, and they found him the next day, dancing naked on a fountain while singing "I'm a Little Teapot").
So there's Vorgok with the toes -and half the boot-, which he then proceeds to ram into the wizard's mouth and prepares to do the same with the rest of his fingers, when his massively enhanced Intimidate roll breaks down the man, explaining what's going on: The Sheik cashed in some favours with an old associate, Emir Kassan Bin Fashar, an extremely wealthy man owner of a jewel trading company who had ties to a Dao (in fact, Bin Fashar's mines never produced a single gem; instead all of them came from his Dao associate). Apparently, he managed to have the Dao send elemental servants to the Paraelemental Plane of Salt (which is coterminous with the Elemental Plane of Water and the Negative Energy Plane, so getting his own elementals there actually required a bit of extradimensional political games with the Marids. That's part of a side-plot that's brewing for further down the campaign, though) and find the other side of the rift, which by then had become a massive cavernous region deep in the plane (to make an estimate, about 1 metric ton of salt pours through the rift every minute, and the operation has been going for about a year almost non-stop. While the rift is much older, now that the salt is consantly removed it doesn't clog, so it keeps pouring. Since the elementals began churning out, the rate practically tripled).
I'm sure that by now everyone is aware that this isn't exactly a party composed of paragons of good (though normally they play good-aligned characters. This campaign has been some kind of pressure valve, I guess). As a detail, this is what the party is composed of:
Hassan ibn Jaffar: Human Rogue, though he prefers to be deemed as an "Entrepreneurial Explorer and Archeologist". Lawful-Evil (started as Chaotic-Neutral). Native of Katapesh.
Valanar of Noravia: Human Priest of Sivanah (Goddess of Secrets), scammed his own father and got his entire family sold as slaves in order to secure his inheritance. Lawful-Evil. Native of Cheliax.
Vorgok "The Merciful": Human Barbarian. Got his nickname after forgiving the life of a gladiator (yes, in a recreation of Gladiator, even including the "Are you not entertained?!"), though he has been turning increasingly insane since then. Chaotic-Neutral (started as Chaotic-Good). Native of Irrisen.
Jack Sandweaver: Human Warrior/Bard/Duelist. Former pirate, travels along with a goblin minstrel he somehow convinced into comming along with him. The player actually writes down the songs he sings in the game (and they are all about him). Chaotic-Good. Native of Taldor.
Rakhim Apravarnasi: Human Monk/Sorcerer (“Sonk” or “Monkerer”. Originally wanted to play a "Clonk" -Cleric/Monk-, but decided he really wanted Silent Image). The voice of reason in the party, but had the really bad idea of getting romantically involved with an NPC (an elf priestess that helped them early in the campaign), as Valanar (who's a manipulative bastard) keeps using it against him (remember I mentioned having the wife kidnapped? Well, guess who contacted the kidnappers and used the elf as bargaining chip). Lawful-Neutral (started as Lawful-Good). Native of Jalmeray.
The Dao's servants set some kind of magical apparatus that, when combined with a similar artifact placed by the wizard on the other side of the rift, caused it to become unstable and "break in half". As Valanar found out, "breaking in half" is slang for "transitive split", which occurs when a portal has its points of entry severed and both ends instead open to the transitive plane that exists coterminously to both ends (or a random one if the portal connects planes that are not coterminous to the same transitive planes).
In this case, the rift became a portal into the Ethereal Plane. Valanar, who had made his homework and knew a thing or two about this, explained that this could prove rather dangerous.
At first nothing seemed wrong. Sure, the accident had destroyed most of the facility, but as Hassan put it once things calmed down "At least there is still a lot of salt to sell. Get back to work!". Saltspit was mostly unharmed (the village was by now basically a middle-eastern version of Deadwood by all accounts. There's even an Al'Sherengen NPC who handles his own clique of bad guys), so there were people to draw from to get the operation back to work. They hired a band of gnoll mercenaries to hunt down the slaves who escaped (or to get them new ones if the original ones couldn't be found) and quickly built the thing back up.
A couple of weeks down the line salt was once again being hauled to Katapesh and beyond, although the elemental processing facility in the city had to be closed and rented to the meat packers (with the rift severed, there were no more elementals to process) to make some margin.
Still, the investors were worried that, even though the rift explosion released a huge amount of salt, the fact remained that no new material was pouring through, and so the operation was now less attractive in the long run.
This was a heavy blow to some of the more fancy projects, such as the group of engineers brought from Alkenstar specifically to work on the design of a cargo zeppelin (they were asked to halt their work and return to Alkenstar until further notice. The ship was barely in the initial stages of construction), the plans to send a slave-drivers expedition to the Mwangi Jungles to capture a large host of ape-men (which would make excellent slaves as they are very strong and can operate tools with all four extremities), and even the grand opening of the Katapeshi Salt Exchange, which Prince Osman proposed as a mean to calm down the competing merchants who were feeling far too threatened by the ever-growing operation in Saltspit.
Needless to say, Hassan was baffled, seeing how his incredibly intricate and thoroughly detailed plans were on the verge of failing.
And that's when camel droppings hit the fan.
Alarming reports started coming from the Brass Legion (the band of soldiers of fortune the party had hired to institute some kind of order in the town. It was mostly a bunch of abusive bullies, but better to have the bullies on your side), that Saltspiterians -or Saltspitians, or Salspitooners. We haven't managed to agree which one should be. I like Saltspitooners- were being found dead on their beds by the numbers.
Initially this was attributed to disease, which in the festering pit of brothels and alehouses that Salspit had turned into (counting almost 3,000 inhabitants) would be expected to happen sooner or later, but as these became more and more regular, Rakhim and Valanar decided to make further investigations.
As it turned out, people found dead didn't appear to show any signs of fatal diseases, murder or anything like that, except for the fact their hair, eyes and skin were white as milk. This, in conjunction with the fact every single person died while screaming horribly, led to the widespread rumours of ghosts and other malign entities haunting Saltspit.
As if things weren't bad already, Imam Salim Al'Salam, caretaker of the local Temple of Sarenrae (as people began flocking into Saltspit, religion came along. A few other cults have also set foot there, but only that of Sarenrae has a temple already built), began preaching that these deaths were the cause of the excessive greed and avarice with which the owners of the mine had been chasing material wealth, sacrificing countless lives in the process.
The preaching became more and more incendiary as deaths multiplied, and by the end of the month, the makeshift cemetery outside the town counted over 80 dead bodies from what came to be known as the "The White Woes".
Dealing with a progressively more scared workforce (several workers had stopped going to the mines altogether. That's the problem with paid employees), a string of inexplicable deaths, and an imminent outbreak of religious fury, the party decided to take things more seriously.
Although my campaigns normally don't generally take such permanent detours, this has all the marks of a truly great campaign.
As an example, from my college Forgotten Realms game:
-The elf rogue jumping from a tree to a manticore and rider, grabbing onto the manticore's leg, and letting the manticore (now over its carrying capacity) glide to the ground, where the dwarf can climb up the manticore (using the urgrosh spike as a handhold) and tackle the rider to the ground, letting the dwarf's spiked full plate do the rest.
-Convincing a CN true dragon (a fang dragon) rolled as a random encounter (100 on the ol' d%) to join the party.
-The gnome cleric/bard having competitive dance-offs while the dwarf fighter took on the rest of the establishment in a bar fight.
-Interrupting and derailing a vampire's villain speech through the power of a ranged heal castable as an immediate action.
-The ranger losing five consecutive games of chess to a familiar (who had less than 10 Int at the time)...just after having used chess (successfully) to broker an alliance with a native tribe.
-The ranger and rogue using a dose of narcotic as collateral to enter a supernatural black market, having looted the drug near the start of the campaign and apparently having planned it out long ahead of time.
-Enlisting the help of a wyrm brass dragon for the party's army by promising him the spoils of an entire ruined opera house.
-The mage animating a dragon skeleton with the purpose of riding into battle. (The player had never read The Dresden Files, surprisingly.)
-After getting hoisted into the air, the knight counter-grappling the offending erinyes, pinning its wings, and letting gravity do the rest, riding it into the ground.
-A PC making a long term business invest into a roadside inn.