I've heard something about an ancient red dragon at level 4 from people in my gaming group who have been around longer than myself.
I sent an army of 120 oni, ranging from 40 kuwa oni (CR 4) foot soldiers up to their leader a fire yai oni (CR 15), against a 14th-level party. The party had a fortress, occupied by 20 soldiers (CR 6), and knew the army was coming. The first wave was 19 earth yai oni (CR 13), so overall CR was around 21. No, make that CR 22 because they used intelligent and disciplined tactics. The second wave was 3 ice yai oni (CR 14) and 2 atamahuta oni (CR 11), overall CR 18.
After that, the party oracle cast Sending and called for help.
Besides, they had killed the other half of the army before the attack started. My players are clever. Details posted at http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2q4z3?Amaya-of-Westcrown#10.
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Basically anything my frenzied berserker did ever. Deathless frenzy made her a ridiculous powerhouse of hardcore brütal metalness.well what is your top most brutal number one thing your berserker has ever done. something you would brag about when your old and grey and make those whipper snapper think your senile.
Convincing your GM to let you play a Frenzied Berserker.
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I feel guilty. I have to confess. I caused a paladin to fall. At level 1. In his prelude.
This player had been wanting to play a paladin for some time and finally he could. The character had a background related to another recurring character from previous campaigns: he was looking for his sister who was also a paladin and had disappeared some years ago during a battle. Nobody knew where she had gone but the dryads who were the messengers and chosen ones of his goddess asking him to go on a long trip away from his home to search her, as they sensed she was in danger and she needed to be saved.
He traveled for years, carrying the word of the goddess everywhere he went and helping the poor, the hungry and everybody who needed help. He was the kind of paladin who'd rather get eaten by goblin babies than harming them.
This was all in the character background. Then we started the prelude with him finally finding out that his sister was actually the leader of a demon worshipping cult who had been ravaging the world for many years (she always wore a full plate so nobody knew what was under her armor. Many people thought she was not even human... and she wasn't, she was half elven).
So the poor broken man went back to his hometown to tell the dryads that he had failed and it was too late for his sister.
And here is where I messed up.
«We already knew. We sensed it through our bound with the goddess»
«Then, if you knew why didn't you tell me?»
I improvised too much on this conversation and I started to make it worse and worse instead of fixing it.
I don't remember the exact words, but the dryads ended telling him:
«We needed you. We only wanted your sister to be ours again»
Not «be with us», not «be one of us».«Be ours». The paladin was horrified. Had he been an slave for his goddess or for the dryads all those years? Why did they send him in a nonsense search for his sister? Was he only a pawn for a tyrannic goddess?
I could have just stopped and tell him I just had messed up and correct my words. But I went on.
Finally the paladin was so angry that he attacked the dryad, attempting to kill her.
What could I do? She was a messenger for his goddess. I made him fall. And he interpretated that he was being rejected by his goddess because he had realized her true colors.
He was told to go away and don't come back.
Tomorrow I will tell how this continued and how the paladin finally ended becoming a pretty cool antipaladin, who the player enjoyed playing but wasn't what he had intended to play anyway.
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More what our gm allowed the party to do to a pc 2nd ed/3rd ed.
A player betrayed the party, not just as a "ha ha ive been evil/your enemy/working for the king all along" kind of betrayal. One of those oh shit the campaign fundamentally changes and the gm has to rethink the consequences to the multiverse kinds of betrayals.
So we killed him.
Then raised him, polymorphed him into a pig, researched how to make a spell called trollish fortitude permanent and applied it to him, blasted him into insanity. Researched how to make some high level spell that rendered him immune to an element permanent, did this for fire and acid and applied them to him. Cursed every one of his stats down. Then we took him wherever we went and charged peasants coppers to beat the immortal pig to death with a club and watch it return to life.
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wow
just
wow
that's brutal. what did the player think of that happening to their PC?
No one cared, he crapped up a 10 year campaign for shits and giggles.
edit:At the last count we spent about 1.25 million gold on research and spellcasting, and earned 425 gold, 230 silver, and 90 copper coins. from having him beat to death at 5 copper a go.
On the plus side, everyone became pretty on board with party unity and campaign goals afterward.
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More what our gm allowed the party to do to a pc 2nd ed/3rd ed.
A player betrayed the party, not just as a "ha ha ive been evil/your enemy/working for the king all along" kind of betrayal. One of those oh s&@@ the campaign fundamentally changes and the gm has to rethink the consequences to the multiverse kinds of betrayals.
So we killed him.
Then raised him, polymorphed him into a pig, researched how to make a spell called trollish fortitude permanent and applied it to him, blasted him into insanity. Researched how to make some high level spell that rendered him immune to an element permanent, did this for fire and acid and applied them to him. Cursed every one of his stats down. Then we took him wherever we went and charged peasants coppers to beat the immortal pig to death with a club and watch it return to life.
You. I like you.
RPG Superstar 2011 Top 32
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Heh, that vengeance story reminds me of one from 3.0 days. We were playing in two groups with two GMs in a shared world, when our group found out that a member of the other group had killed an NPC we really liked. Out group was... the less nice group, so we got our revenge by killing him, turning him into a wight, encasing him in stone, then enchanting the block of stone to cast make whole on itself every round permanently. Then we buried the block in our backyard. The goody-two-shoes group did eventually manage to rescue him.
As a GM I once made a door that inflicted 20 negative levels on anyone who touched it. In the previous room there was a zombie whose entire command line was "open the door if anyone asks you to." The 16th level PCs blasted the zombie to pieces before they found the door...
I'm a firm believer in "everything is fair at high levels, the PCs can deal with it." I ran an adventure set on the edge of the negative energy plane where the PCs were trying to stop a necromancer from becoming a lich. The complex was full of undead, and they kept getting stronger as the ritual progressed - think gaining HD each minute, also the negative energy released by killing each undead went to the remaining ones, so by the end of the adventure they were fighting ridiculously overpowered 50 HD spectres and such. They did not succeed in stopping the ritual, and the lich became a recurring villain over several campaigns in that world. Sadly for him, he got the nickname "comic relief lich" due to his propensity of dying like a chump.
Melted by a keg of holy water? Check.
Shaken to death by a dragon while trapped in a resilient sphere? Check.
It ended when someone landed a control undead on him, and made him retrieve and destroy his own phylactery.
A suggestion to sit down and eat at a feast table - pretty chill as far as suggestion goes, right?
Less so when the main course is human flesh.
Spiced with poison.
Bless his heart, he still lets me play with him. :)
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From my most recent game session.
Lawful Good 11th level magus PC developed an intimate relationship with a paladin of Sarenrae NPC. This was all well and good, no problems there, although given the adventuring lifestyle they were both pretty convinced the relationship wouldn't last forever because one of them would die sooner or later, quite possibly in a condition that it was not possible for a Raise Dead to just fix.
So a few sessions ago, the party was protecting the leadership council of the city that they were staying in. Said council was under attack by a bunch of rebels, led by a vampire wizard they had crossed swords with a couple times before.
With a ton of dangerous enemies (including the vampire) flooding into the council chambers, the party decides it's time to get out of dodge rather than try to fight all of the rebels off all at once. Unfortunately the vampire had brought along an evil outsider known as a derghodaemon to deal with spellcasters (both in the party and the council).
The particularly nasty ability of this outsider is that it can generate an aura around itself that inflicts Feeblemind temporarily, which basically turns any spellcaster into a drooling idiot. Well, it popped in right next to the high priestess of Pharsma that was on the council, and somehow she whiffed the Will save vs. the aura (anybody can roll a 1!).
The paladin was unwilling to abandon anyone, so while the rest of the party gtfo'd along with the rest of the city council, she stayed behind to try and get the feebleminded high priestess to safety. The lawful good magus also stayed behind, and figured he could solve this problem by using Dimension Door to bamf next to the high priestess, grab her, and then bamf out on his next turn.
He had no trouble bamfing next to the high priestess, but doing so brought him within the aura of the derghodaemon. An aura which he had just seen reduce a high-level cleric to a nigh-useless drooling idiot. But he would be fine, right, he's a PC, that won't happen to him! Except he rolled a nat 2 on his own Will save, so he got to join the priestess in a drool fest.
The rest of the party was gone, along with the council - it was just him, his paladin lover, and the high priestess (well, until the daemon's turn came up again and it full attacked the high priestess into a bloody paste anyway). Now, the obvious punishment for this high-risk play that didn't pay off was death - he might have been able to kill the daemon although it was unlikely without the ability to use his spells, but the vampire and other guys storming the room would have finished him off almost certainly.
But just killing him was boring, I'd already done that several times (the magus had a bad habit of overextending and getting himself into trouble if luck suddenly swung against him, as it had here with the failed Will save). So instead, the paladin sacrificed herself to save him, covering his escape - sadly, she didn't make it out herself and got captured.
There was some debate once the magus got back together with the party about going back to rescue her, but it was decided that it was more important to get the surviving council members to safety. So they did, and handled a couple other crisis issues in the city (it was pretty much an all-out attack on the city itself, so it wasn't just the leadership council in need of PC-level help).
Anyway, that's all the backstory leading up to last session, where they finally got done with the most pressing stuff and decide to go back and try to rescue the paladin. They learned she'd being held in the vampire's lair, and it's been less than a day so she might still be alive.
They get there, and learn that the vampire is getting ready to flee the city. But while he's doing that, he's prepared something to keep those meddlesome PCs busy - the paladin is locked in a room that will slowly flood over the next several minutes, and if they come after him there won't be time to save her. But wait, there's more! - the vampire has turned saving her into a game. Just for the magus PC to play, and if anyone else tries to help him the vampire will flood the room immediately instead of slowly. The game is simple - there are three locks keeping the paladin prisoner, and for each round of the game that the magus PC plays, he'll get one key.
The point of the game is to see just how much the magus PC loves the paladin - she was willing to give up her life to save his . . . but does he really feel the same about her? So each of the three trials revolves around proving his love according to some love-related saying.
First trial is to walk through fire - there's a key in the middle of basically a blazing hot furnace, magus has to crawl in there and get it. He takes some fire damage, gets the key, makes the Fort save to keep a hold of the searing hot metal key, climbs out, no problem.
Second trial is whether he'd accept her in sickness or in health, blah blah blah - basically just an excuse to have a pit filled with a Leech swarm. Key is hidden somewhere on the bottom of the 10' x 10' pit, only way to find it is to crawl down into the pit and feel around while the leeches feast on him. Magus gets lucky, picks the correct square right off the bat, makes the Perception DC to find it on his second attempt, only taking a few points of CON & STR damage from the leech swarm's blood drain (he saves versus the distraction and poison).
This is all well and good, but at this level of the game some HP and stat damage isn't really that scary though. I needed something a bit more intimidating for the finale. And so the third trial . . . was based on the "I'd give an arm for you" saying. Quite literally, the magus had to shove his arm instead of a gargoyle head, and flip a switch that would activate a trap. It was made plain to him what this trap would do; he still did it. Bam, guillotine blade comes down on his arm just below the elbow, and he loses his off-hand (particularly crippling for magus as their whole schtick is basically one-hand swording while simultaneously off-hand casting).
But he'd done it, he'd proven his love over those three trials. And so, staggering at 10 HP (after a tourniquet was applied to his arm), he goes into the last room that's slowly filled up with water. At the back of the room is a coffin locked with three big padlocks.
Magus uses the three keys he has, opens the coffin . . . and finds his paladin love inside . . . already turned into a vampire. The fourth "trial", the vampire crows from a Message spell - can he still love her even though she's now a monster? Next to the paladin's head is a wooden stake and mallet - since the magus only has one hand now he'd have to stab her with the stake and then pound it into her chest, not a quick or clean process.
The paladin wakes up, confused and unaware of what she's become (a vampire being a particularly heinous thing for a Saraenite to become). Magus explains, comforts her, telling her it'll be alright as he picks up the stake. They say some heart-rending goodbyes, and then the magus stakes her, pounding it into her heart as she writhes and screams. With some difficulty, he then picks her up, carries her down into the swirling water (which counts as running water in this case) and holds the body of his love underwater until she melts away into ash, and is permanently gone (pretty much forever unless he manages to find a True Resurrection or Wish somewhere).
TLDR - I kidnapped my PC's love interest, had him permanently cripple himself to rescue her, and then revealed that she had been turned into a vampire, resulting in him mercy-killing her forever.
./bow
From my most recent game session.
Lawful Good 11th level magus PC developed an intimate relationship with a paladin of Sarenrae NPC. This was all well and good, no problems there, although given the adventuring lifestyle they were both pretty convinced the relationship wouldn't last forever because one of them would die sooner or later, quite possibly in a condition that it was not possible for a Raise Dead to just fix.
So a few sessions ago, the party was protecting the leadership council of the city that they were staying in. Said council was under attack by a bunch of rebels, led by a vampire wizard they had crossed swords with a couple times before.
With a ton of dangerous enemies (including the vampire) flooding into the council chambers, the party decides it's time to get out of dodge rather than try to fight all of the rebels off all at once. Unfortunately the vampire had brought along an evil outsider known as a derghodaemon to deal with spellcasters (both in the party and the council).
The particularly nasty ability of this outsider is that it can generate an aura around itself that inflicts Feeblemind temporarily, which basically turns any spellcaster into a drooling idiot. Well, it popped in right next to the high priestess of Pharsma that was on the council, and somehow she whiffed the Will save vs. the aura (anybody can roll a 1!).
The paladin was unwilling to abandon anyone, so while the rest of the party gtfo'd along with the rest of the city council, she stayed behind to try and get the feebleminded high priestess to safety. The lawful good magus also stayed behind, and figured he could solve this problem by using Dimension Door to bamf next to the high priestess, grab her, and then bamf out on his next turn.
He had no trouble bamfing next to the high priestess, but doing so brought him within the aura of the derghodaemon. An aura which he had just seen reduce a high-level cleric to a nigh-useless drooling idiot. But he would be fine, right, he's a PC, that won't happen...
This is a murderhobo origin story right here.
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Basically anything my frenzied berserker did ever. Deathless frenzy made her a ridiculous powerhouse of hardcore brütal metalness.well what is your top most brutal number one thing your berserker has ever done. something you would brag about when your old and grey and make those whipper snapper think your senile.
Probably how she finally died. She basically soloed a whole party of mid-level characters (including a warmage that was an absolute beast for damage output). She ended up somewhere in the neighborhood of -300 HP, on fire, and disarmed, fighting using her fingernails and teeth. The warmage, who was the only one she didn't manage to drop was completely panicked ("WHY WON'T YOU JUST DIE!?!?!?") and half-dead herself when the frenzy finally ended.
Also, there was the time she aced a check to break down a portcullis and managed to bring down half the wall in the process.
With another character, who had a preoccupation with revenge, at the end of the campaign he became a god, and one of the things he eventually did was to find a ship's captain who had wronged the party years before and settled the score by making him immortal, shrinking him down, crucifying him to an amulet, and then made into an artifact.
I didn't do this, but it happened in a game I was DMing. So, we were playing Pathfinder and I allowed a friend to play a converted 2E wild mage. I was also using a variety of custom wild surge charts I'd found. One of the surges he rolled said "all trees within a 1 mile radius begin screaming." No duration. So I decided it was permanent. What did he do? He made furniture. Screaming furniture. That never stopped screaming. Ever.
Failed knowledge checks against an Adherer, adamantly meta-gamed that it was a mummy so they blasted it with turn undead and all their undead affecting spells. Tried talking to it in common while it grappled them into a pit.
wow
just
wow
that's brutal. what did the player think of that happening to their PC?No one cared, he crapped up a 10 year campaign for s*&!s and giggles.
edit:
At the last count we spent about 1.25 million gold on research and spellcasting, and earned 425 gold, 230 silver, and 90 copper coins. from having him beat to death at 5 copper a go.On the plus side, everyone became pretty on board with party unity and campaign goals afterward.
Even James Jacobs has had bad experiences
In a low-level 3.5 campaign...
I gave the boss monster a cursed weapon solely so that the party's Warlock couldn't shatter its weapon like he'd been doing to everything else they'd encountered. It was a +5 Large Greataxe of Delusion... the merchant failed his will save can paid the party 50k for what he thought was a +5 weapon.
Same campaign...
I had the party encounter several bands of goblins that made use of Shield-Wall feats supported by heavy crossbowmen that would open from their maximum range. Also, Goblin Psions with Dissipating Touch, and Ectoplasmic Grease.
In my last Pathfinder Campaign...
I had an Young Green Dragon (CR 8) try to rob my level 5 party while they were on their way to another job. It had pre-cast Entangle in the middle of the road, and ordered its orcish minions to lie in wait on the far side of the area. Meanwhile the dragon circled the area from above waiting for the party to arrive. This particular dragon was pissed because the party had curb-stomped three or four bands of orcish bandits which were on the dragon's payroll.
I was hoping to give them a tough fight, but they were so cautious it took forever for the fight to actually start, and when it did one of the fighters got lucky with a poisoned arrow and forced the dragon to retreat (which it did by way of the river located along the roadside).
One of the orcs fumbled its javelin and impaled himself in the foot and then escaped on horseback into the forest (later he earned the nickname "Bootless" when he was encountered again, missing one boot), the rest died horrible, painful deaths.
The party levels up.
Pissed that a dragon had ambushed them, and they hadn't gotten to kill it. They tracked the dragon back to its lair which turned out to be an ancient elven ruin now occupied by an orcish tribe, and confronted the dragon again, except that it had been healed by its pet Witch Doctor (the pre-errata kind from Monster Codex that doesn't suck).
They engage the dragon, and almost kill it again! Its life is saved by the invisible Witch Doctor (whom they didn't know was riding on its back holding a healing spell). The dragon taunts, orders his orcs to attack, and then escapes again; leaving them to fight the entire orcish tribe instead. The party barely survives... and levels up again (stupid fast XP track...).
The next day, the party is waiting in the dragon's lair to ambush it when it returns. the Dragon returns, accompanied by its invisible Witch Doctor. The Dragon opens with its breath weapon, and the Witch opens with a Wand of Lightning, they almost wipe the entire party. The fire domain cleric casts Fireball, and thanks to some clever moves by the party rogue the witch doctor is tied up until the two Fighters manage to finish the dragon... now there is no escape for the witch doctor, it dies two rounds later.
The party got XP three times for defeating that dragon... which was only supposed to be a minor distraction on their way to a mission they are now too high a level to challenge them.
In the 5th Edition game I am DMing, I used a CR 4 oculus swarm against a party of six level 3 PCs. An oculus swarm is from Kobold Press's Tome of Beasts and is a swarm of floating eyeballs that suck your eyes from your skull after 2 consecutive rounds of taking damage from the swarm. The first round causes damage and temporarily blinds you as it pulls your eyes halfway out, and then permanently blinds you when it plucks your orb from your dome.
The swarm was contained in a bunch of glass jars filled with eyeballs, so there was a ton of warning for the PCs. Jars tipping over and breaking, broken glass all over the floor, floating eyeballs tipping over other jars, and eventually shelves filled with jars.
The tiefling warlock got his eyes sucked out, got blinded, and the rest of the party could only find one of his eyes after they killed the swarm. So they picked up a different eye and stuck it in his face. So now he has heterochromia iridum. I think he now has 1 yellow eye and 1 red eye.
Also, he got hurt from walking, blindly, over the broken glass, which acted as difficult terrain AND slowed him AND had him moving in random directions.
@Kileanna: I like to think of myself as the player who made a goddess fall.
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Love it Inspectre
Convincing your GM to let you play a Frenzied Berserker.Basically anything my frenzied berserker did ever. Deathless frenzy made her a ridiculous powerhouse of hardcore brütal metalness.well what is your top most brutal number one thing your berserker has ever done. something you would brag about when your old and grey and make those whipper snapper think your senile.
+1 on that... I've played with a frenzied berserker, and he's a liability to the party, not an asset... OTOH, the DM being a complete dick, mmaybe he gloated on hearing the player explain his project and did not have to be convinced all that much.
As I said, I'm telling the rest of the story that I had to cut yesterday. Seeing other stories (ahem, vampire paladin) I feel a bit better with myself now.
We left our poor fallen paladin exiled, without a cause and with nowhere to go. Here I was improvising everything as all I had planned for this character had been screwed up.
In this setting there were two separate worlds: the above level world, where rules and laws were very strict and deshumanizing; and the underground world, where the only rule was survival of the fittest. Most people from above never went underground as they wouldn't survive there. But the opposite was also true, as visitors from the underground were often caught in legal traps or punished for crimes they didn't even know.
There were some undead communities underground. Most undead were intelligent and not necessarily hostile even though they were of evil alignment. They mostly wanted to unlive in peace.
So our wandering paladin encountered an angry dark elf from the underground yelling to a police officer, telling him that his friend had been killed and asking him to do something about it. The paladin approached, wanting to help, and asked what was going on. The officer answered that he couldn't be of any help, as the man who had been killed was an undead, and undead didn't have legal rights.
The paladin was confused. All his life he had been told that undead were nothing but a mindless plague. But that elf actually cared for his undead friend. He was curious about it and asked many questions: «Was your friend intelligent?» «Why was he killed?»
The elf kindly answered all the questions and he ended thinking that undead were only different life forms that, for some reason, were oppressed an despised.
The worse part came when, trying to come to an aggreement, the officer said that he had found a way to punish the killer: as he had left the corpse in the street, he could sue him for throwing garbage illegally.
The paladin, who had always revered life, was completely mad at the officer. How could he be so disrespectful?
Realizing he actually he did know nothing about undead and life in the underground, he decided to go on a journey to understand this alternate life forms a bit better.
Long story short, he went underground on a self discovery trip, found an old shrine where a long lost zombie-god manifested to him, and he became his paladin, making a new oath to defend life in all its forms and to fight for equal rights for the undead.
He is now the leader of an army of undead, monsters and dark elves. But he still has a paladin's mind in a lot of ways. He is a great character, and his player loves him... But still it isn't exactly what he intended to play, I just messed everything up and I ended having to improvise the whole story for him.
The next time I'd be telling the story of an alternate reality where an alternate version of him... fell again!
Not for Pathfinder but Shadowrun 5e.
At the end of a run, the runners were told to escape via helicopter off of a roof; only to be stopped by a Dragon (in human form). Now before running the game and explaining the strength of Dragons, talking about the lore, how things are more dangerous, these 3.5/PF players decided that they'd try to kill him (after he revealed what and who he was) instead of a climactic chase via helicopter.
Knowing full well that this would go poorly, I opened up with his Fear aura to get them onto the chopper. They decided to burn Edge (hero point equivalents) to pass. After revealing his true form. destroying the anti-aircraft guns with a single shot, talking them up for the paydata, and basically shrugging off the damage they kept deciding to fight.
A few rounds later he chose to make an example of them after receiving confirmation of his payment from his employer and used his attack to slay one (46 damage on his 9 point condition monitor [hp]). They kept trying to fight. So he immolated them with a Force 18 Fireball.
Suffice to say they learned not to deal (or mess) with Dragons.
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+1 on that... I've played with a frenzied berserker, and he's a liability to the party, not an asset... OTOH, the DM being a complete dick, mmaybe he gloated on hearing the player explain his project and did not have to be convinced all that much.Convincing your GM to let you play a Frenzied Berserker.Basically anything my frenzied berserker did ever. Deathless frenzy made her a ridiculous powerhouse of hardcore brütal metalness.well what is your top most brutal number one thing your berserker has ever done. something you would brag about when your old and grey and make those whipper snapper think your senile.
The party I was in was great, since we all knew what to do when I frenzied, things went rather smoothly :3
(All the other party members had mounts)
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I have a couple... fond memories...
Scenario 1: The Kobold
I remember building a megadungeon (or trying to, rather) and setting up one of my favorite fights ever in it. I never finished the dungeon, but this fight still stands out to me.
The party had been hacking apart some kobolds (a few of which had 1 class level) and were dealing with their traps and such pretty easily. They came to the boss room, and it looked pretty straightforward: there's a boss caster with like 8 kobolds around her protecting her. They were using flanking tactics with a mixture of reach and close range weaponry, with a couple slingers with a class level of something pelting them with stones. The players realized that the caster was the most dangerous target, but she had a Magic Circle Against Good up, so only their neutral characters could really get in and hurt her - namely, the rogue.
The party killed the kobolds near the entrance pretty easily and started pushing toward the caster, and this is where I pulled the nasty trick.
This caster was a Cleric who originally had 2 third level scrolls on her: Animate Dead and Magic Circle of Protection (the latter of which had been cast upon the party approaching the room). Now, I forget how this worked, but she had some means of touching things from afar - a custom magic item, perhaps, or a Mage Hand-like ability? Whatever the case, what she did was touch the kobold corpses near the back line of the party, raising them as zombies right beside the party's sorcerer and alchemist. The result was... pretty bloody. The sorcerer tried to use his draconic powers to claw them to death and instead got eaten. The alchemist got KO'd (but survived) and someone else came really close to dying.
The party DID survive. But they spent the rest of that large dungeon on their toes. Everything spooked them.
[b]Duck Island
One day in a different campaign, my players made me very mad.
You see, we had used Dawn of Worlds to create the world, and all my players had expressed a desire for us to have an island world. I was happy, because this meant high seas adventures. But then my players decided midway through that turning halflings into shapeshifting supersaiyans and having airships be invented would be conducive to good gameplay on this world filled with water.
Needless to say I was not happy. I was even less happy when the players decided in the Second Age "hey, everything is fine; let's leave the world EXACTLY LIKE THIS, aight?"
And so I was mad. And so I became filled with a desire for vengeance. Enter Duck Island.
It started with a pretty simple quest: go kill a dragon on Duck Island and bring back its egg. But this dragon was known for being... weird. Namely, it was a duck dragon, the fearsome Quackon. (Don't worry, the names get worse from here.)
Well, they decided to take their steamboat (I REFUSED to let them use an airship) to the island. And that's where they saw this fat, purple dragon covered in feathers with a duck's bill dancing around on the water. And in one of my better moments in that ill-fated campaign, I had the Duck dance around their boat, farting out a strange purple gas that immediately caused everyone to hallucinate like they were tripping on the best. Drugs. EVER.
(To summarize: one person thought they were melting, another was reliving the Aliens scene where an alien bursts out of someone's stomach <read: everyone but them>, another became certain that monsters were boarding the ship, another was possessed with a sudden surge of greed and went to loot the cargo hold, and the last person just stood there watching everyone else trip over the side of the ship and otherwise make asses of themselves. He passed his will save.)
Anyway, the party survives relatively unscathed (save for having chopped each other up a little). They get to the island, which has really weird flora, and decide to go adventuring to find the dragon.
And then they find some rocks. On closer inspection, these rocks are eggs. On even closer inspection, these eggs sprout legs, charge right at them, and explode in an Acidic equivalent of Fireball. Boom.
My players are disgruntled, especially since these things leave no loot. But whatever: they've got adventuring to do. So they proceed and...
...and fight duck-billed small-sized creatures I call "Quacklings." They start looking at me funny. They're basically kobolds, but whatever.
Then they get into this cave where they believe the Quackon lives. And inside, they fight more exploding eggs and quacklings, but also find a poor, young woman dressed in rags. One of them realizes she's not actually a human, but a monster!
And that's when she turned into a Duckubus. Yes, really; a Duckubus. Someone actually got negative levels from being macked on by a Duckubus.
Well, my players are about fed up with this place, but they still want to delve deeper. They fight a literal trash monster (read: Otyugh) that makes obnoxious quacking noises at it as they fight. Then they actually ARE fed up with this crap and decide to just leave Duck Island.
As they leave, though, one of them succeeds his Perception check (which they'd all failed earlier SOMEHOW). The Quackon has been sitting on top of the cave the whole time. Irritated, one of my players (the Fighter) yells at it and points her spear at it. "GIVE US YOUR @!$ $%#^ed EGGS!" she shouts.
"Ooo~kaaaayyy!~" says the Quackon in its most sing-song voice. And so it turns around and lifts its butt up.
My players immediately flee, knowing exactly what's happening. Behind them, the sound of eggs crashing into the ground and smashing open can be heard. And then the most terrifying enemy yet chases them through this ducked up jungle...
...Velociquacktors.
My players never want to see another duck again.
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My players never want to see another duck again.
In fact, yamabushi tengus have a strange loathing for ducks—they find these birds to be a mix of comic tragedy and pitiful hideousness, from the blunt shape of their bills to their distinctive gait and their warbling quacks. The presence of a duck can often provoke even the most restrained and crafty yamabushi tengu into making poor choices: faced with choosing between attacking a truly dangerous foe or using their weapons and magic against a nearby duck, most yamabushi tengus make the choice to kill the duck, even if such an act might compromise their position to their actual enemy.
The worst thing I ever did was give the players their head. Long prep time for an assault on a BBEG base. I sat and listened to all their plans and plots. Despite having some 20+ days, they did absolutely no recon of the place and hired a spy without checking up on his information once. No layout, count of guards, conspicuous lack of climbing equipment, No food or water...and no one thought the baddies might have built the place in a null magic locale.
No, I had it set up that way over a year ahead, though for another group that barged right in and turned tail when the realized the situation. The second group knew all the people in the first group and had done no intelligence work.
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Left the Orb of Annihilation Gygax placed in "Tomb of Horrors" where it was.
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...From my most recent game session.
Lawful Good 11th level magus PC developed an intimate relationship with a paladin of Sarenrae NPC. This was all well and good, no problems there, although given the adventuring lifestyle they were both pretty convinced the relationship wouldn't last forever because one of them would die sooner or later, quite possibly in a condition that it was not possible for a Raise Dead to just fix.
So a few sessions ago, the party was protecting the leadership council of the city that they were staying in. Said council was under attack by a bunch of rebels, led by a vampire wizard they had crossed swords with a couple times before.
With a ton of dangerous enemies (including the vampire) flooding into the council chambers, the party decides it's time to get out of dodge rather than try to fight all of the rebels off all at once. Unfortunately the vampire had brought along an evil outsider known as a derghodaemon to deal with spellcasters (both in the party and the council).
The particularly nasty ability of this outsider is that it can generate an aura around itself that inflicts Feeblemind temporarily, which basically turns any spellcaster into a drooling idiot. Well, it popped in right next to the high priestess of Pharsma that was on the council, and somehow she whiffed the Will save vs. the aura (anybody can roll a 1!).
The paladin was unwilling to abandon anyone, so while the rest of the party gtfo'd along with the rest of the city council, she stayed behind to try and get the feebleminded high priestess to safety. The lawful good magus also stayed behind, and figured he could solve this problem by using Dimension Door to bamf next to the high priestess, grab her, and then bamf out on his next turn.
He had no trouble bamfing next to the high priestess, but doing so brought him within the aura of the derghodaemon. An aura which he had just seen reduce a high-level cleric to a nigh-useless drooling idiot. But he would be fine, right,
I did have to check for a pulse because dressing up the paladin as vampire so my character would stake my character's love interest threw the heart alive would totally be something inspector would do.
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The most brutal thing I did to a group is extremely tame in comparison to all of these massacres but why not...
They all involve Rappan Athuk, the Dungeon of Graves. Most of them didn't involve any extra work on my part, just running the module. Add in the fact that I ran the dungeon when I was in college and a far more 'touchy' DM back then...
If you hit it with a weapon and fail a ridiculously high reflex save the weapon gets stuck. If it hits you? Same save or get stuck yourself. It then will proceed to engulf you. Without the advent of 9th level spells freeing a trapped character is near impossible.
I allowed the players to create essentially any broken character they wished in hopes of breaching the first level and going deeper. So, using Savage Species almost all of them created the most bizarre characters they could.
The biggest single loss of life involving the 'ooze' was when the Ghaele (yes an angel) got his hand stuck and an entire host of other characters tried to save him. Two others ended up getting stuck before the Ghaele was engulfed and 'drowned'. One of the others managed to escape but one of the other would be rescuers was also dragged in and drowned as well.
Realizing that they were likely to lose the group did the smart thing and retreated to the surface to rest and camp a short distance outside the dungeon. Their mistake was assuming that the Rakshasa was somehow confined to the dungeon.
While the gnome rogue was on watch (played by the same player who had lost the Ghaele earlier) the Rakshasa snuck up on the camp, cast charm person on him and then convinced him that he could sleep while he 'the obvious Rakshasa' took watch.
The gnome went to sleep and the Rakshasa coup de grace'd him before dragging him out into the wilds to consume his corpse.
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A long time ago, '88-89/90, we're playing AD&D. 1e shifting into 2e.
One of the players wanted his character to become a lich. He'd read the article on how this was done in Dragon Magazine.
He figured I wouldn't go for it.
So he didn't say a single word of the plan to me. Ever. In two years+ of play.
He just slowly & quietly went about collecting the ingredients for the potion, his would-be-phylactery, etc.
But not once did he ever mention he was researching liches.
Wich is a mistake. Because you need the DM involved for such things!
Had he spoken to me about it? I'd have said yes. And written adventures to accommodate it. He'd also have learned that I wasn't using that system to create liches....
But he didn't. He just assumed that since he read it in a Dragon issue that that's how it'd work in my game.
Well, eventually I caught on. Still though, no word from the player....
So I just let it continue. Even let him enchant the phylacerty.
And when the big day came & he downed his poison potion?
I informed him that his character was dead & couldn't be brought back. That this is not how liches are created in my game.
The stunned look on his face as he realized he'd just suicide a 17th lv AD&D character was priceless.
After that boy was he mad that I'd stung him along for almost 2 years. :)
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A personal favorite form the forum
I think this is possibly the single meanest encounter I have ever thrown at my PCs.
What the PCs see: A twenty foot by twenty foot stone room, its floor ten feet below the floor of the hallway leading in. In the center lies an ornate coffin with no lid. The interior of the coffin is lined with silk. A frail, emaciated man wearing expensive finery lies in the coffin with his arms crossed over his chest. A ring on his finger is set with a large, glowing gemstone. A wooden stake protrudes from the man's heart. The room is otherwise empty.
What is actually going on: The entire setup - coffin, man, ring, stake, everything - is a dread vampire failed-apotheosis mimic. The gemstone on the ring is actually the mimic's eye, so anyone who studies it too closely is targeted by a dominate. As soon as someone does something stupid, the mimic unleashes its horrific appearance, then casts deeper darkness as a surprise round. Anyone the mimic hits with a slam (or who touched the mimic) is grappled with no escape, making it easy for the mimic to pin and blood drain to death. For bonus points, the entrance to this room is not at ground level, making it very hard to find your way out in the dark.
I threw two separate parties at this encounter - both fled with half the party dead, bricked up the entrance to the room, and swore never to return. In both cases the party paladin was the first to die - one tried to behead the vampire to finish killing it (and of course got their sword stuck to the mimic) and the other got grappled right off and only carried a two handed weapon...
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A long time ago, '88-89/90, we're playing AD&D. 1e shifting into 2e.
One of the players wanted his character to become a lich. He'd read the article on how this was done in Dragon Magazine.
He figured I wouldn't go for it.So he didn't say a single word of the plan to me. Ever. In two years+ of play.
He just slowly & quietly went about collecting the ingredients for the potion, his would-be-phylactery, etc.
But not once did he ever mention he was researching liches.Wich is a mistake. Because you need the DM involved for such things!
Had he spoken to me about it? I'd have said yes. And written adventures to accommodate it. He'd also have learned that I wasn't using that system to create liches....
But he didn't. He just assumed that since he read it in a Dragon issue that that's how it'd work in my game.Well, eventually I caught on. Still though, no word from the player....
So I just let it continue. Even let him enchant the phylacerty.
And when the big day came & he downed his poison potion?
I informed him that his character was dead & couldn't be brought back. That this is not how liches are created in my game.The stunned look on his face as he realized he'd just suicide a 17th lv AD&D character was priceless.
After that boy was he mad that I'd stung him along for almost 2 years. :)
He deserved it. This kind of things should always be done with the complicity of the GM. Hiding your plans from your GM to avoid him foiling them is plain stupid, as a GM can always find the way to foil it when he realizes what's going on. But if you tell him, you might have his complicity and the whole thing accomodated into the story.
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RPG Superstar 2011 Top 32
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He deserved it. This kind of things should always be done with the complicity of the GM. Hiding your plans from your GM to avoid him foiling them is plain stupid, as a GM can always find the way to foil it when he realizes what's going on. But if you tell him, you might have his complicity and the whole thing accomodated into the story.A long time ago, '88-89/90, we're playing AD&D. 1e shifting into 2e.
One of the players wanted his character to become a lich. He'd read the article on how this was done in Dragon Magazine.
He figured I wouldn't go for it.So he didn't say a single word of the plan to me. Ever. In two years+ of play.
He just slowly & quietly went about collecting the ingredients for the potion, his would-be-phylactery, etc.
But not once did he ever mention he was researching liches.Wich is a mistake. Because you need the DM involved for such things!
Had he spoken to me about it? I'd have said yes. And written adventures to accommodate it. He'd also have learned that I wasn't using that system to create liches....
But he didn't. He just assumed that since he read it in a Dragon issue that that's how it'd work in my game.Well, eventually I caught on. Still though, no word from the player....
So I just let it continue. Even let him enchant the phylacerty.
And when the big day came & he downed his poison potion?
I informed him that his character was dead & couldn't be brought back. That this is not how liches are created in my game.The stunned look on his face as he realized he'd just suicide a 17th lv AD&D character was priceless.
After that boy was he mad that I'd stung him along for almost 2 years. :)
Agree. Heck, I'm hoping that when I run Hell's Vengeance one of the players will want to turn their PC into a vampire or lich, because that would be awesome.