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Okay, so once upon a time I was playing AD&D. This was after the Steve Baker campaign where I played Arminas, and I think we were still playing 1st edition (although we might have been trying out 2nd). Anyway, I had rolled up a magic-user . . . what's that? You don't know what a magic-user is?
Sigh. Kids, today. No sense of history. Magic-user was the 1st edition term for a wizard. ANYWAY. . .
I had rolled up a MU, and it was the very FIRST MU I had ever tried to play. Our DM, being the sadistic Gygaxian bastard that he was, decided to take us on a spin through the original I6 Ravenloft. Yeah, we were so screwed.
Anyway, he took some pity on us and gave us players a few things to help out. So, I'm a 7th level MU, and he gives me this magic staff: a staff of the magi. Actually, THAT got me worried. That he believed I NEEDED that item.
Game starts, and we get really creeped out by the Gates and the fog and the crimson-eyed black-furred wolves that just won't leave us alone as we trudge along to Barovia.
Yeah, the village was fun; and we did manage to rescue Ireena and drive away the Mysterious Rider. Sure enough, she joins us as an NPC, and off we go to see the wiz-. . . er, Count.
I don't have to go into all the details. Those of you who played this back in the day, you know all about it. It was one of the most memorable modules I have ever played in, and the creepy moods were perfectly set by our drama major DM.
My character did NOT have fun with the vampire's minions though. Halfway through the module, I was level drained all the way down to 3rd level. OUCH! Remember, back in those days, the cure for level draining was gain more experience. There were no easy restorations and the like.
Well, I've got the casting ability of a 3rd level MU now, and sure enough, we meet up with Strahd. Knowing that my character was weakened, he moved in and two hits later, I was a 1st level character all over again with 2 hit points left. YEAH!
So I did the only thing I could do. I broke the staff.
Yep, snapped it right over my knee, with forty-seven charges left. While I was standing right beside Count Strahd von Zarovich (Ireena right behind me).
You should have seen my DMs face. He WAS NOT expecting that to happen. And, not only did I fail my save, so did Strahd and Ireena. THEY took 235 points of damage (I think), I was simply annihilated in the explosion. With his bride dead and his eviscerated mist form snaking towards his coffin, the DM suddenly smiled at the REST of the group who had been JUST far enough away to survive.
Did I mention he was a bastard, that DM?
You guessed it: the explosion had shifted the interior castle walls, and broke the foundations, and stone blocks began to fall as the upper levels started to collapse atop of the party. ONE, (1), Uno, single party-member (the druid who shape-changed into the form of a peregrine falcon) managed to get clear before the ENTIRE Castle came a'tumbling down atop of my friends, crushing them and sealing off Strahd's tomb.
And that game ended.
So, my question to you, fellow gamers is this: what have you done to completely derail your DM's module or campaign using only the tools he gave you? In ways he never expected you to use them!
Give us your stories, mates. Tell us the tales of high adventure!
Master Arminas
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I know what a magic user is. It's this guy that casts one or two spells then throws darts at stuff.
I didn't derail the game, but had a fun moment; several actually. See we started this campaign at first level with the intent that at 16th level we'd go through The Dancing Hut of Baba Yaga, and my GM gave each of us a wierd, common item. I started with this pair of gloves...
Turns out they're artifacts. On certain adventures we'd hit these milestone moments and unlock powers in the artifacts. They were supposed to get better as we got better, and then they'd help us against the witch.
Fast forward to the hut. Firstly one of the most ridiculous powers of the gloves was that they TRIPPLED Sunder damage (3e game fyi). My character is a converted 2e stoutblooded halfling who was basically a beardless dwarf carrying a great maul for his weapon. He's also a fighter with a ridiculous amount of specialization with this hammer.
Add all these points together and there wasn't a single door in the module that survived.
One room I smashed open contained a font and a pair of pit fiends. I (somehow, don't ask me) won a surprise roll on said fiends and got a round of free attacks...which all hit. With some lucky damage I took out both in the surprise round.
My 2 fave moments though were as follows. In one room there is a cauldron in an impossibly deep fireplace; out the back of which is a secret entry to one of the important inner chambers. The cauldron is perpetually hot and would kill anyone touching it; on thei INSIDE it's perpetually cool so no damage. My GM had forgotten that the FIRST power of my gauntlets was immunity to heat (I used them as a master blacksmith to keep my hands safe); now let me say that again...IMMUNITY to heat. The rest of me not so much but my hands? I could reach into the core of the earth my GM once said and not feel a thing. I pulled the pot out, helped everyone in the party climb in, then pushed like a frickin mule all the way for 7 rounds without taking a single point of damage.
Then at the end of the module the party's split between the control room and the engine (I'm in the engine). The device at the heart of the hut is a centrifuge pinning everyone to the walls with insane force and dealing damage every round. My character, w/the gauntlets on, has a 24 strength. He's also the only one that's made the Fort save to be able to take any actions. I start double moving...digging my fingers into the floor and clawing my way toward the engine! It took 4 rounds, I suffered massive damage, but I also had the feats that let you keep operating after negative HP and a MASSIVE Con, so I clawed my way, inch by inch, up to the thing and pulled myself up. I then pulled my hammer (round 5) and SUNDERED THE ENGINE OF BABA YAGA'S HUT! Tripple damage yo!
I was at like negative twenty-something hp but that was that and our cleric slapped a bunch of CLW's on me over the next couple of rounds. And then we all retired.
My DM when we played Castle Ravenloft had us all in the driverless carriage careening toward the castle when suddenly it veered to the right and we all plunged to our deaths in the chasm. Just to add salt to the wound (which, by the way, had us in hysterics), we could just hear Strahd say, "All too easy" as he closed the shutters on the window from which he watched us.
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The last time I attempted to run Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, the heroic party looked at the tall looming castle and formulated what they thought at the time was a clever non-confrontational strategy. Excessive use of Stone Shape to open holes in the floor and constantly send non-flying creatures to floors below them, and seal them up right after and continue exploring.
Which presented quite a problem when after the top spires were explored, they realized they'd have to journey into the sub-levels where they kept sending every horrific creature which was surely still lurking and plotting.
In a Warhammer 40K game (Dark Heresy, to be specific) we were investigating a series of mysterious murders and had traced them back to this weird cult. My character, having the best social and disguise skills in the party, infiltrated one of the cult's ceremonies. Part way through said ceremony, I botched things up and got discovered. The GM had planned that right around here I would be captured and there would be a subplot about me trying to escape from this cult while my friends tried to save me.
Thankfully I was wired, so my fellow Inquisitors burst into the room. One of them chucked a hallucinogen grenade (a type of grenade that releases a gas that makes everybody in range experience severe and terrifying hallucinations), while the other stood at the door and made sure nobody escaped. I fought my way out, when our cleric pulled out his flamethrower, setting the room on fire and igniting the apparently flammable gas of a hallucinogen grenade. The building exploded and all of the cultists died.
We literally blew up our GM's subplot.
It's not a story that derailed a game, but the first two times I played a paladin in 1st edition my DM rolled Asmodeus on the random encounter tables.
In one of my more successful Ravenloft campaigns, one of the players "accidentally" got into a fight with Strahd, while being only 7th level. Fun times.
The party had recently arrived in Barovia, and there were rumors of a girl who bore a striking resemblance to Strahd's lost love. As Strahd is wont to do, he goes about the towns dressed up in disguise as Count Vassili, asking questions and trying to find this girl.
The party arrived at an inn where Strahd was doing some investigating. They noticed a particularly pale fellow asking questions of many of the patrons, and being the bold braggarts they were, decided that guy wasn't being very cool, and stepped up to him...
Now, I had absolutely NO plans for this to turn into a fight(but had a couple big spells on his list just in case). Really, all I wanted was for Strahd to be part of the background, and make a hasty exit should things get rough. I underestimated just how badly the party was looking for a fight. But, this was likely the last time they would be so bold...
So, the party cleric intervenes during one of the Count's questionings, and is promptly dominated (cleric rolled a 1 on his Will save to boot). As I said, I wasn't looking for this to be a fight, so Strahd simply commanded the cleric to have a seat at the bar and stay out of his way. Well, the party wizard quickly saw that the cleric had been dominated, and the rest of the party took that as an act of aggression, and readied themselves for combat...
As they prepared themselves, the Count was already leaving the inn(again, not looking for a fight). They ran out the door after him, and called him out in the street. Strahd sneered at them beneath his disguise, and simply kept walking. The dwarven grappler jumped onto his back and tried to wrestle him to the ground, but was easily thrown off like a wet coat. The barbarian stopped for a moment, stunned by the strength of this "noble."
Strahd made it to his horse before the wizard, in a fit of over-confidence, let loose a Lightning Bolt, along with an array of insults. At this point, Strahd had had enough...
I stopped the game. I asked the players if they wished to go through with this. I don't normally do this, as I'm a fan of letting the players make their own decisions and pay for their own choices, but this particular time I felt I needed to intervene. I told them that (obviously) this noble is not who he appears to be, and if they continued down this path, it was going to get ugly; there would be PC deaths. But, I would also reveal who he is to the players, as sort of a runner-up award for being so bold.
Now, the curiosity was too much for the party. They chose to continue.
The Wizard cast yet another Lightning Bolt at Strahd, as he was climbing down from his horse. In return, Strahd threw a pair of Maximized Lightning Bolts back at the wizard, and burned him to a crisp. The rest of the party just stood back, shocked at what they had just seen (but not as shocked as the wizard). The vampire walked up to the wizard's corpse, tore off his head, mounted his horse, and rode off into the night.
At this point, the players were in a fervor over these events. They excited asked who in the 9 hells this noble was, so I simply peered around my Ravenloft DM screen, and pointed to the guy on the front... Everyone was in an uproar after that, bouts of laughter and "holy crap!" It was one of my funnest night in that campaign setting.
Even the wizard's player came up to me and shook my hand afterwards, said that that was a blast and was totally worth losing the wizard over. He had to leave the campaign soon anyway, due to a change in his work schedule, so he wanted to go out with a bang... Literally. :)
This one was actually not my fault.
I was playing Dakkon Bloodbeard, Dwarven Battlerager - Barbarian heading for that prestige class as well as Frenzied Berserker. Well, to be more precise I was playing three characters: Dakkon, Kreevan Irthirirthos the Kobold Binder, and an Elf Ranger whose name escapes me; the campaign was set up where we would have three separate parties working in tandem, one a brusier/basher party, one a diplomatic/information gathering party, and one a nature/stealth-based party respectively. Sadly, in part due to what happened, that never came to be.
Dakkon, being who and what he was, had a single destination in mind when he arrived in the starting town: "I find the toughest-looking bar in the toughest-looking part of town". The DM introduced us to an establishment that has since become a recurring landmark in our games: the Smashed Orc. Bounced by a black half-dragon, owned and bartended by a stonechild, and catering to the roughest, meanest, most disreputable and disorderly clientele possible.
Dakkon felt right at home.
The bar's specialty was a bubbling, fizzing, unnaturally-colored, malevolently-moving concoction referred to as "Chaos Beast", which in retrospect OOCly (Dakkon, having no Knowledges whatsoever, would never have managed it) might have been an all-too-appropriate name for its primary ingredient. I forget what the award was but there was a lot of prestige and some wealth involved in being able to survive drinking it... and perhaps expectantly, the only ones who had done so were the bartender and bouncer. Dakkon being the stubborn dwarf he was skips all the (extremely potent) lesser drinks on the menu and goes straight for the Chaos Beast. The bar drops into a stunned silence and observes as it's brewed, served, and drank. Between my massive Constitution, racial bonuses, and a lucky 20, Dakkon downs the whole mug and survives, though he passes out for three days as a result. The bar's patrons reverently carry him up to a room to sleep it off.
Now here's the part where things break.
Another member of the "break stuff" party was a Sorcerer who dabbled in alchemy. (If you've read some of my posts in other threads, you know this guy and know the trouble this means.) He and the third party member (a Psion/Soulknife who was basically a Jedi) happened to arrive at the bar, following Dakkon's trail, moments before the Chaos Beast was served. Seeing the concoction, he immediately decides he needs some of it for his experiments. He tries to buy a vial from the bartender, who refuses; this rebuttal becomes even stronger when he explains why he wants it, as the bartender (logically) sees it as someone trying to steal his trade secret.
After much badgering, the bartender relents slightly: if he can survive a mug of the stuff, he'll let him have all he needs for his "experiments". The Sorc, who for a while we referred to as "Dice Jesus" for his uncanny knack at rolling just what he needs whenever he needs it (we suspected him of cheating a few times when we played online, but his utter luck when rolling in person was legit and insane so we could never be sure), took him up on the offer. The dice rolled very well for him, but not perfectly, I think he got something like an 18 or 17. Unfortunately, he was a Sorc, had a moderate Con, and was not a dwarf. His lucky roll put him right on the threshold of "passes out from the intoxication" and "organ failure total system shutdown".
The Psion, being a generally good guy, decides to make an attempt to save the Sorc. He made his necessary checks to identify some of the contents of the Chaos Beast, and determined if he could acquire some Lawful-oriented materials he could counter it if he was quick enough. He ran to a nearby alchemist and purchased a handful of things including axiomatic water, shavings of cold iron, etc., along with a syringe. He then ran back to the Smashed Orc, where the Sorc was now in some pretty severe convulsions, and injected him with the stuff.
DM flipped a coin: heads, the two concoctions neutralize each other and the Sorc lives; tails, the two repulse each other and the reaction tears him apart. Came up tails. Sorc-splosion.
Dakkon wakes three days later, having missed the entire scene (and never having met the Sorc, feels no regrets for the death of a pansy caster who can't hold his liquor) and comes downstairs to a standing ovation from the Smashed Orc's patronage, including the Psion. The DM chooses that time to jump to one of the other parties earlier than planned, with the intent of letting the Sorc's player roll up a new member for that team in the meanwhile. However, we never did get back around to that group and the campaign ended up sidelined. It remains to this day one of the most memorable stories of my early gaming days.