Okay so last week during the GM took me aside and asked me how a creature would fight. (New GM) After giving him a basic rundown of how the Giant Spider would take on a party of 4 or 5 characters, he just said that he would take over my character and that I should run the encounter.
And so I spent most of the encounter hidden in the webs entangling the party until one "bright" PC got the idea to burn the webs, which he did. However the entire floor was covered in webs and so the fire spread till half the floor was covered in flames and the other half was covered in webs. So I just had the spider run away, all the treasure for the encounter was destroyed, the monster fled, and the rest of the dungeon was alerted to the PC's making the dungeon even harder.
So I was just wondering how everyone else has used lower lv monsters to scare the PC's into making an easy encounter very difficult?
I LOVE IT when this happens. My favorite was one time a party mistook a fancily dressed ghoul for a lich, ran screaming, went back to town, prepared for like a day, came back, and dropped the thing in like a round. The looks on their faces... Good times.
Oddly enough, this kind of things happens ALOT in our campaigns.
Mostly because most players don't have the monster books.
My favorite was bloody flaming skeleton on a bloody skeletal flaming horse, being mistaken for a "death knight on a nightmare"
Party was 6th level.
Fighter, Rogue, Ranger and Sorceror.
They ran from this thing multiple times as it would make frequent evening visits to this town to terrorize it (ala the headless horseman).
It wore armor and so did the horse.
Swung it's sword around, set fire a a few huts. The characters would run every time it showed up.
One time it showed up with a band of regular skellies on foot, and they ran from that too.
Eventually, the ranger gets the bright idea to track it and see where it is comming from. So they track the scorch marks to the "black forest" (the flamming skelly had set fire to just about everything flammable already".
Now they had just about spent all party wealth on things like anti-magic scrolls and such, they jump it in a surprise round and burn several scrolls of this and that to nerf the thing so it couldnt eat pudding straight, had quaffed all these potions etc etc (must have brunt 20k in stuff) jump the poor little skelly and his normal skelly freinds and the fighter hits it with his war hammer and the thing buckles in one full attack.
They got a potion of healing, a wand of detect magic and a masterwork short sword as treasure, it was anti climatic, but pretty funny.
Different kind of over react, but stirges.
I believe the gas spore (a floating fungus ball that approximately resembles a beholder which explodes when struck) is specifically designed for this kind of overreaction.
Hm. This makes me wonder whether there's an RPG equivalent to the internet's rule 34; if you can conceive of an oddball way to mess with your players, chances are there's already been a monster designed to fit your idea.
one of the best moments I ever have as a DM is when players assume one thing, and over react.
I suppose the best moment I can recall at the moment was the Gelatinous Cube in a 10X10 hallway with a suit of brilliant full plate armour, this happening in a completely pitch black dungeon.
The party automatically assumed "ghost" and pretty much wrung the cleric dry of Channel Energy, only to have the rogue charge it and stand paralysed "in fear" at the "glowing nimbus" surrounding the "ghost."
The party eventually ran after finding out what it really was, making me have to ignore that encounter.
either that or...
Once, and this was pure DM fluff, the party happened upon a worg, who talked to them, the party's reaction...kill it with fire, lots of fire...you can imagine my disappointment when they killed the NPC, the worg, that was supposed to give them clues as to where they were supposed to go next, made me spend a whole week writing up a new NPC encounter to keep the story rolling.
It all depends on presentation. You'll get as much out of a monster as you put in.
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3.5 is still good for an example, right?
I had a party in the 6-8 level range, one of them being a gnome druid riding a dire ape. They cast clairvoyance in the chamber beyond, and they saw a horde of skeletons, two dogs, and a cleric. The party discussed it, and they refused to believe that the skeletons were just fluff. They barged in and the Gnome Druid was letting loose with lightning spells and blowing the skeletons to pieces all over the sacrificial chamber, at one point doing damage that was ten times the amount of the skeleton's hit points. As the DM, I was laughing at the waste...
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Best party over-reactions hmm?
Well just about anything that has the optential to destroy gear gets most PC's skaing in thier boots. I've seen the bravest boldest paladin in existance turn and run like a frightened rabbit from a rust monster, all the while screaming "Kill it, Kill it Kill it!!" to the party's wizard.
Destratchen, dissolvers, disenchanters, and black puddings all have similar effects.
Currently in my RotRL home game, I think the biggest overreaction has been
Since we have some long-experienced players in our group, there's not a lot of over-reaction. However, in a recent encounter we encountered a mummy and one of our most experienced players asserted that a single touch by the mummy would drain 1d4 levels or something like that.
So we spent the entire encounter kiting the mummy and blasting at it from range until the cleric finally remembered he could turn, and did so, causing the mummy to flee into a small tomb where we cornered it and destroyed it.
After the encounter the GM laughed and informed us that the mummy did not have level drain abilities. We wasted a lot of ranged spells on a mummy that our tank should have just walked up to and beat down.
All we got for it were some mundane gems worth a couple thousand gold...
I actually find it to be more interesting when the players over estimate their abilities than when they over estimate their opposition. Once, long ago, probably 2e, I made up two tribes of desert-dwelling creatures. One tribe absorbed spell damage and grew stronger if you cast spells, but was vulnerable to physical damage. The other tribe absorbed the energy of physical blows and grew stronger as you beat on them, but were vulnerable to spells. After the party dispatched a group of the spell absorbing tribe they encountered the energy absorbing tribe and dang near had a total party wipe before they realized that they were fighting something different. I always find it interesting and entertaining to watch how a group of people reach a common awareness of a situation and then try to deal with it. The party tank simply would not accept that the new tribe was absorbing his energy, and when the rest of the party started trying spells, they eventually had to cast hold person on their own tank to win the encounter.
Good times...
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Pugwampi. Those evil little things get such a reaction out of all of us in my gaming group. My dm ran a Legacy of fire campaign in which we came across a church filled with the little buggers. Only being first level we were cautious but figured it would be a breeze. The fight lasted for almost an hour with almost half the party at less than half hit points. And it wasn't even from actual combat damage, their silly little aura contributed to a ton of failed skill checks for fighting in the rafters of the church.
So now my dm will casually throw a pugwampi mini on the field every now and then just to watch us react... usually with overwhelming rage or abject terror. Good times, good times.
I was running back in 3.5 and had a powerful, but bored, mage creating simulacrums and teleporting them in to attack the PCs. One time he sent a level 1 warrior with Law devotion and a hydra (half strength because it was a simulacrum) the party teamed up on the warrior, thinking he was controlling the hydra and obliterated him in the first round (with much wasted resources). The hydra then wiped out the party. The experienced players felt it was there own fault for dying, while I felt I was to blame. A new party made it's way to their destination.
A rustmonster, aren't paladin's supposed to be fearless ? ;)
A rustmonster, aren't paladin's supposed to be fearless ? ;)
The standard for fighting rustmonstes in my LARP used to be "throw copper to the side and run around it". But armor and weapons are so common now, no one bothers.
A rustmonster, aren't paladin's supposed to be fearless ? ;)The standard for fighting rustmonstes in my LARP used to be "throw copper to the side and run around it". But armor and weapons are so common now, no one bothers.
I do not really play with the magic shop in my campaign, so they are still scary.. I had alot of fun with my goblins mounted on rust monsters, they were fairly harmless really, but they made the dwarves run, that alone was worth it :)
One of my GMing 'tells' is that I like to include the trope of the 'cute betrayer.' 1 out of 5 times, if the party in a game I'm running encounters a somewhat useful, slightly lighthearted NPC, it means that NPC is working for the big bad, is prone to selling them out, has interests opposing theirs, et cetera.
Once, I was running a game where the party encountered some Campestri.
The party proceeded to burn down the whole forest.
I do not really play with the magic shop in my campaign, so they are still scary.. I had alot of fun with my goblins mounted on rust monsters, they were fairly harmless really, but they made the dwarves run, that alone was worth it :)A rustmonster, aren't paladin's supposed to be fearless ? ;)The standard for fighting rustmonstes in my LARP used to be "throw copper to the side and run around it". But armor and weapons are so common now, no one bothers.
With the exception of scrolls and potions, magic items are rare or non-existent in my LARP. Oh yeah, and the occasional one shot magic item (like a scroll anyone can use). I was talking about mundane armor and weapons...
I had alot of fun with my goblins mounted on rust monsters...Now pugwampis mounted on rust monsters, that would be fun. XD
Inside a gelatinous cube.
Inside a gelatinous cube.I had alot of fun with my goblins mounted on rust monsters...Now pugwampis mounted on rust monsters, that would be fun. XD
Better still: armed with slings and juvenile gelatinous cubes.
Best reaction I got from a party was Kobolds. None of my friends own or ever played the original Baldur's Gate. So I gave a hook of Kobold raiders storming a town and razing it to the ground. They came up with all kinds of excuses must be illusions or something. Party ignores all the broken crossbow bolts that have fading magic... the corpse of a Kobold. It lead to an interesting encounter. First round the fighter stood there and tried to disbelieve before he got hit by 7 1d6+4 1d6 fire damage crossbow bolts... Kobold KOMMANDOS rule :)
One of the best dungeons I ran had the party deep underground just after they had buffed up their armor and weapons from masterwork to +1 types. The rogue failed the DC on the trap, and dropped all of them into what was looked like a pit but was actually the level below. The torch went out, leaving only the see-in-darkness guys cursing the humans bumping into them. Then one of the PCs says "Hey, what's that chirping sound?"
Three rust monsters come out of the hallway and charge all the metal armor-wearing PCs. In lightless, tight quarters. Roll that to-miss chance.
The guy playing the breastplate-wearing and heavy shield-carrying fighter screamed like a little girl, and the full-plate cleric was trying to climb up the walls to the level above with his gauntlet-covered hands. After several rounds the elven ranger managed to finally put enough arrows into the rust monsters to kill them, but not before the fighter and cleric were left standing in their skivvies. The wizard also lost a nice +1 light mace he had.
I think the fight cost the low-level PCs 6,000-8,000 gp in rusted equipment, and they didn't have a single chain shirt to share among themselves after that. Plus the rust monsters (according to the module) didn't have any treasure past some mildewy leather armor. I as GM made it up to them a few encounters later with some special leveling-up weapons, but the look on their faces when the ranger rolled his Knowledge: Nature check on the sound was priceless.
In the one homebrew game I ran, I had the Zern from Monster Manual 4 as the evil monsters out to take over the world. To those who haven't seen the entry on them,
The party first encountered the Zern in the first session. The rogue (a sailor) had washed up on shore near the wizard's hut, so the wizard was escorting him to the local fort. As they went through the woods, they saw a Zern idly standing around while it's minions slaughtered some bandits. I'd pre-rolled all the dice and scripted the battle, although the players were free to break in whenever they wanted. They got really spooked by this, and ran off to tell the fort that there was something going on. I can't remember if they ended up joining the fight - I think they were about to, before the Zern decided to vaporize one of the fleeing bandits with his energy ray, so they ran off, but I'm not entirely sure.
Their next encounter was several sessions later, at the bottom of the Tomb of the Forgotten King (I replaced the yuan-ti at the end of the module, and said the king was the one who locked up the race that evolved into the Zern in the first place). That's where they first fought a Zern, although they didn't realize it until they killed him and his alter self wore off. Then they realized why he had been so hard to kill (I think someone got polymorphed in the battle, too but they recovered), and how he was able to get out of their grapple so easily (boneless form). The next fight was a pair of them with some of their minions. I don't remember how that went.
But basically, they had so many options, that every time they fought these things, it did something they hadn't seen one do before. By the third or fourth, they were saying "They can do what?!?" By the fifth, I think they were in shock, and suspecting everyone they met who acted at all oddly of being a Zern in disguise. By that point, they could have killed a regular Zern pretty easily (although one with class levels would still be really scary), but I never let them have that easy fight, so they remained the scary menace in the shadows, with the PCs trying to convince the various people in power that the Zern actually existed (no one would believe their tall tales), and suspecting everyone, until the game fell apart.
It was great fun.
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More recently, in my XCrawl game, the party (11th level) encountered a Balor. Everyone was "Yikes! Blow everything" for a round or two, before they realized it wasn't actually hurting anyone. It was just an illusion (being controlled from offstage) to distract them from the Annis hag that was the real threat.
Level 11-12 party (mind you they were escorting a dozen low level NPC's), and I had some fun with Lemkin (CR 9 fey) http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/fey/lemkin They never actually did see one (though they never tried searching, they were ultra careful once they figured out it was a fey).
Then I decided it would fit in the spirit if lemkin had mage hand. The party was travelling through an area with a lot of undead, and the first undead they encountered was a lone CR 8 Autum Death http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/undead/sneak-peek-week-1- autumn-death-cr-8
Now the lemkin wanted to cross this area unmolested, and didn't feel like detouring.. so after seeing the party take out the Autum Death, they decided to follow the party and 'encourage' the party to take out the undead for them. During the daytime many of the undead liked to 'rest' on or slightly under the ground, so the Lemkin used mage hand to put circles of leaves around any undead they found (and quite a few mundane skeletons that weren't undead). Autum Death happens to look like a pile of bones in a circle of leaves when it isn't attacking. It was fun watching the party unload on any circle of leaves (and there were many over a day of travel) irrelevant of any bones even rising from the leaves.
I recall a moment playing DDO where there were rust monsters, and instead of fighting (we were pretty much at full resources), EVERYBODY (especially the warforged) ran as quickly away as possibly. Hilarious. :)
As far as monsters and overreactions, there was a situation with a mind flayer...but really, overreacting when meeting a mind flayer is pretty standard issue. The player goes "crap" and the character (usually) goes "Derp, brain melt."
Dopplegangers a moonless night and an unfamilar farm = shananigans
There are too many...
Anyway, recently, in a 3.X game, I threw two undead werewolves (a Norse variant, imagine a mix of werewolf and wight) at a group of five 6-8th level characters.
The combat started in a spiraling staircase, so only two characters could stand in front of them, a fighter and a ranger.
The ranger took a critical hit in her head and got decapitated (I use hit locations).
The fighter grabbed the head and body, and withdrew from the fight upstairs.
The group blocked the door and ran away.
There are too many...
Anyway, recently, in a 3.X game, I threw two undead werewolves (a Norse variant, imagine a mix of werewolf and wight) at a group of five 6-8th level characters.
The combat started in a spiraling staircase, so only two characters could stand in front of them, a fighter and a ranger.
The ranger took a critical hit in her head and got decapitated (I use hit locations).
The fighter grabbed the head and body, and withdrew from the fight upstairs.
The group blocked the door and ran away.
How is this an overreaction?
Ive never been attached to equipment, maybe thats why I like monks.
Rust monsters attack my fighter and wipe out his gear, it's a good thing I can fight will all weapons.... where's that club?
...(a Norse variant, imagine a mix of werewolf and wight)...
When you say a "Norse variant" is that then based on a real folkloric monster or something like that? :) Does it have a name? I'm danish and have my own game system and setting - so I'm always looking for new "monsters" - preferrably from folklore and the like.
I had a fun moment in my RotRL game...
one of the players character was from sandpoint so she remembered nualia and what a role model she had been, so it was a bit of a surprise to her of how far she had fallen. Had a moment of shocked silence around the table when they cornered her and found her several months pregnant next to her fiendish hyena sire. The party was actually reluctant to attack her initially until she dropped two of them in combat. Was a good end to the thistletop campaign. Should be interesting when they find out that the item she had (the demon mothers mask) actually allowed her to concieve with her fiendish hyena pet rather than Tsuto or one of the other humans that were working for her
Two griffons (CR4) against a party of 4 5th level characters. They were terrified! I still don't know why. Amazing, and very amusing, at least for me.
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In a trap laden dungeon during a convention where death ment "bye-bye" the players were really on their toes.
When encountering a magically dark room they "elected" the fighter to go first. The fighter stumbled into the room after a little pushing and shoving from the rest of the PCs and bumped into "something soft and warm".
After wheeling around and striking blindly he hit "the thing" several times driving his sword through its "flesh" in a very promising manner (it seemed to have a fairly bad ThAc0 which probably was "a sign of an awesome amount of hitpoints and immunity to weapons") until the "thing" managed to "grab" his sword and he couldn't yerk it free (rolling a 1 on his str-check).
This was when finally the party Wizard arrived and the party dared to enter the room the wizard managed to dispel the darkness.
Lo and behold an old sofa and now badly sliced sofa came into view with the fighters sword having been badly wedged into one of the springs...
In a trap laden dungeon during a convention where death ment "bye-bye" the players were really on their toes.
When encountering a magically dark room they "elected" the fighter to go first. The fighter stumbled into the room after a little pushing and shoving from the rest of the PCs and bumped into "something soft and warm".
After wheeling around and striking blindly he hit "the thing" several times driving his sword through its "flesh" in a very promising manner (it seemed to have a fairly bad ThAc0 which probably was "a sign of an awesome amount of hitpoints and immunity to weapons") until the "thing" managed to "grab" his sword and he couldn't yerk it free (rolling a 1 on his str-check).
This was when finally the party Wizard arrived and the party dared to enter the room the wizard managed to dispel the darkness.
Lo and behold an old sofa and now badly sliced sofa came into view with the fighters sword having been badly wedged into one of the springs...
lol, I love this one, I'm going to have to throw that at my perty some time!
+1
It's not a monster, but the party did overreact.
I started a War of the Burning Sky game with some old players and a new player. After getting the characters all set up and familiar with the setting, I started the game.
No real spoilers, since I didn't get past the first sentence!
They were all going to a tavern to meet their underground resistance contact and arrived at the door to the meeting place.
They then spent over 10 minutes of real time talking about this door. Deciding whether it's trapped, how best they should approach entering it, if they should have one person sneak around, etc.
They were all called here on purpose by a friend, and I gave no indication that this might be at all suspicious.
Finally, I had their contact open the door wondering what all the shuffling was about, and chastized them for being late. /sigh
Oh, and for some irony (or at least funny coincidence):
Later, there was a shop they had to go to when tracking down some bad guys, and it was a door shop. There literally was a room full of doors.
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One of the sneakiest ones I've had the pleasure to run was an encounter the party went looking for. They were attempting to hunt down a trio of black dragons (random encounter roll from earlier) and had tracked them to the swamp. They were pretty well prepared for the encounter water walking and acid resistance to help negate the swamps natural hazards and dragon's breath weapons (the original encounter melted the unprepared oracle). When they got there the encounter started with a fog cloud rolling in around the party. just out of reach they saw very large black scaled shapes stalking them in the fog. Party gets very tactical at this point readying actions and preparing to pally smite all of them (three melee machines -- pally, fighter, and monk -- plus aura of justice). they ready their actions dispel the cloud and smite, only to find that charm reptiles is an awesome tactic and fighting 2 dire crocodiles that you thought were dragons as well as an awful lot of poisonous snake swarms while the invisible flying dragons use harrying tactics after your smites are wasted was not what they expected. Charm reptiles FTW. Sometimes its not what you make them fight but how you describe it.
Better still: armed with slings and juvenile gelatinous cubes.Inside a gelatinous cube.I had alot of fun with my goblins mounted on rust monsters...Now pugwampis mounted on rust monsters, that would be fun. XD
Jello Shots?
I don't know if it's "overreacting" but my group has a healthy respect for Remorhaz. They combine the wonders of weapon destruction with a swallow whole grapple monster.
Pugwampi. Those evil little things get such a reaction out of all of us in my gaming group. My dm ran a Legacy of fire campaign in which we came across a church filled with the little buggers. Only being first level we were cautious but figured it would be a breeze. The fight lasted for almost an hour with almost half the party at less than half hit points. And it wasn't even from actual combat damage, their silly little aura contributed to a ton of failed skill checks for fighting in the rafters of the church.
So now my dm will casually throw a pugwampi mini on the field every now and then just to watch us react... usually with overwhelming rage or abject terror. Good times, good times.
I hate those little bastards.
I recall one time when *I* was the one to grossly over-react. Our DM at the time was running a one-shot for 3 PCs back in the heyday of 3.5. We fought our way through this dungeon and arrived just outside the door of the big bad - a sorceror who terrified the nearby townsfolk.
We buff a bit, roll initiative, and kick the door in to find a man wrapped in elegant robes, sitting on a stone throne with 2 beholders beside him and one floating above him.
The DM gave us a surprise round, and I had the highest initiative roll of the group, but I couldn't imagine how we were going to overcome this encounter. ONE beholder would have been tough for us to handle. THREE and a sorceror to boot had TPK written all over it.
Wracking my brain for a solution, I finally realized what I had to do.
So I charged into the room and got just far enough to be in the square immediately in front of the throne. I had a beholder directly above, one adjacent on my right and one adjacent on my left. As part of the move action, my DM was gracious and let me pull a folded handkerchief from my belt.
After the surprise round ended, turns out I was still at the top of the initiative order, so I did what I was born to do.
I stuffed that handkerchief, which was actually my portable hole, into my bag of holding.
So the low level old guy who was pretending to be a terrible sorceror, the 3 beholder illusions conjured by the throne, and I were whisked away to oblivion in spectacular fashion.
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About ten years ago i was running the Forge of Fury. We were just starting out with 3rd eddition. Everyone was loving the multiclassing system, had taken a level of ranger, but none of them could track. they weren't that "kind of ranger". Anyways, they were passing by a underground waterfall and pool. I described seeing flickers of white and some sort of movement in the pool. perhaps it was white and scaley.
One of the players said " crap an aboleth". Everyone got their weapons out, spells were cast, and no one wanted to go near the water. after nothing happened, and someone crept up to the water and investigated, they discovered a pool full of white blind cave carp.
In a game I was running, my players were just getting used to the random curveballs I was throwing at them, encounter-wise. I had a group of savvy players so I did my best to keep them on their toes by deviating from core critters.
So, at one point, they stopped off in a little town beside a lake. The villagers were all super-friendly, folksy people and the party decided to relax and stay the evening. Just before they all go to sleep, I tell them that they start getting this really eerie feeling. Then I start making hidden rolls and not telling them what I'm doing.
They go out to explore the town and can't find anyone. So the rogue breaks in to someone's home to see if they're asleep and alive. While exploring the home, one of the owners shambles up to him, moving all weird and jerkily.
At this point they're all already on edge. They know I'm not running monsters as written and frequently borrowing from movies, myth, and books. Rogue takes one look, in the dark, at a shambling body lurching towards him and immediately thinks 'ZOMBIE!'. And not your standard D&D zombie either. He thinks I've dropped movie zombies in, like one-bite-and-you're-infected zombies. So he shanks the guy and runs into the street, screaming about zombies, and the party runs to hide in the wilderness.
In reality, the villager was just being psychically manipulated by the aboleth that lived in the lake nearby. The whole village was being subtly influenced by the thing. One monster. Little bit of psionics used on level 1 commoners. No zombie apocalypse. The party eventually managed to find the courage to go back to town and uncover the much simpler threat.
Zombies still make them jumpy though.
Nobody has mentioned a gazebo yet?
what is it doing? Does it react in anyway if I threaten it with my bow?
"No, Eric, it's a gazebo!"
Not a tabletop game but a weekend-long fantasy LARP being played in an old campground and surrounding forest. Players would band together to go exploring the woods, often bumping into and grouping with other adventuring groups along the way. At one point a few mage-heavy groups crossed paths when one lone undead creature (likely a skeleton) came shambling out of the woods. Being squishy mages, the players immediately fell back on the tried-and-true tactic of taking cover behind the front liners. Problem was that, for whatever reason, there were no melee warriors anywhere in sight. The end result was some fifteen or so mages desperately trying to take cover behind each other; all too panicked to stop and cast a spell at the thing. It was quite a sight; seeing all these robed figures leap-frogging in an unintentional disorganized retreat most of the way back to the campground in a bid to escape the slowly advancing skeleton. Eventually the slowly retreating group crossed paths with a few warrior who stepped up and dispatched the lone undead quickly. And that's why all-wizard groups don't work...
At low-levels, PCs ran into the 'Champion' of an Orc tribe, a fearsome looking Orc in Adamantite Full-Plate, mounted on the back of a Gorgon.
PCs were only at 3rd level, crapped themselves and ran away ...
One Perception check, later that day, had the entire party facepalming for several minutes.
It was actually an Orc who had looted a suit of Full-Plate off a Knight killed by a fireball, and hadn't gotten around to cleaning the soot off. The 'Gorgon' was actually his surly Bison 'mount' that had just been outfitted with full-plate barding.
Only took them three rounds to kill the Orc and calm down his bison.
Got a couple more, but cats are currently brawling again. Bloody cannibals ....
I hate those little bastards.Pugwampi. Those evil little things get such a reaction out of all of us in my gaming group. My dm ran a Legacy of fire campaign in which we came across a church filled with the little buggers. Only being first level we were cautious but figured it would be a breeze. The fight lasted for almost an hour with almost half the party at less than half hit points. And it wasn't even from actual combat damage, their silly little aura contributed to a ton of failed skill checks for fighting in the rafters of the church.
So now my dm will casually throw a pugwampi mini on the field every now and then just to watch us react... usually with overwhelming rage or abject terror. Good times, good times.
I've been meaning to inflict a pugwampi templated into a high level threat every since my group started Legacy of Fire. They are now in the final dungeon, so I'll have to get off my duff and do it soon if I intend to.
I was looking at putting the paragon template(from epic level 3.5) on a pugwampi, but looking at the result, I don't think they would stand a chance. The critter would only be CR 15.5 at that.
That paragon is a pretty nasty template. I might just need to look at stacking more normal templates.
On one night adventure I was running the PCs found themsleves on the edge of a dessert with a valley that leads into the monatains (old tower had a teleportation device that led them there, and stranded them they needed to find a way back. They had no idea were they were).
So they head into the valley and find a river and follow it up river. It starts to get cooler faster then should and they see a chunck of ice flowing down the river. They shoot it with arrows and realize it is just a chunk of ice. The water is warm though. (this is not the overreaction you are looking for)
They travel a couple miles more and come across a waterfall the top of it is nearly frozen over with chunks of ice falling into the river below. It cool there in the 50s to 60s. Though not cool enough to form ice.
The module had very good flavor text to read so I read it verbatm instead of paraphrasing it. Well it mentions some white rose bushes.
Our elven rogue freaks out over the white roses and examines them.
"Are they real?" yes they are real white roses.
"I try to cut off one" ok you have a white rose in your hand
"Does it feel real?" Yes completly normal. I try to stear her back to the water fall being frozen and the trail leading further up river.
"I want to check the dirt under the roses. Can the mage detect magic are these magical roses?"
... at least 15 to 20 minutes pass about the white roses. The party helps her examine the roses.
Being a one nighter I tried to get them back on track reminding them about "THE FROZEN WATERFALL WHILE IT WAS STILL AT LEAST 60 DEGREES WHERE THEY WERE AT" The rest of the party catches on but the elven rogue still asks questions about them.
They do move on and see more white roses. In the module they are just that white roses, nothing special.
Eventually I break down and say "It is just a rose!!!! They have nothing to do with the adventure follow the river."
Till this day if anybody in the group starts to over examine anything we in unison say "It's just a rose!"