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Let's hear some Tabletop RPG stories!
I absolutely LOVE hearing other's stories from their games. Crazy things happen in game land, and these kinds of tales inspire others to play and experiment as well.
Some of my favorite moments
- My group had a guy - Thorgrimm - who was extremely impulsive and often did whatever first came to mind. It was often hilarious as the DM to play out, but alarming as a player to deal with. One such time, the group was face-to-face with a large host of Inquisitors (read: super soldiers) from another realm. They were in an anti-magic field, outmatched and outnumbered. Not to be deterred, Thorgrimm decides to parlay in his usual bombastic style, and one of the inquisitors silenced him (there were ways around the anti-magic field which had not been fully explored yet by the party). Thorgrimm took offense to this and attacked, alone, against 30+ inquisitors. The rest of the party distanced themselves from him. Well, Throgrimm got absolutely wrecked but was somehow clinging to life with a handful of HP. He then conveniently remembered his gimmick Wish spell, that I had given the party some time ago (I considered it a funny thing to do, I've been told I create a lot of trap items). With the party screaming at him not to, he used up the Wish spell to get them out of jail free.
- Which brings us to my second favorite moment... The group teleported back to their employer, The Wizard Who Did It (TM), known as Nobb. He had contracted them to retrieve an artifact of great power (Dymlingen Dire, a knife so sharp it can cut you if you look at it). The party bard, Jarl, thought this was crazy cool and wanted to keep the knife. Nobb said "Yes, as long as you forfeit all other rewards for this contract." Jarl readily agreed, while the rest of the party was distracted by arguing over Throgrimm's decision earlier. Suddenly, all the amazing items they had found over the last several adventures while in Nobb's employ disappeared. Jarl, in forfeiting the reward, had given up the rights to owning those items. The party was LIVID. Jarl's Player thought it was hilarious and one of the other Player's, a lawyer, began searching for loopholes. In the end, many of the PC's made more bargains with Nobb in order to receive their items back, meaning they had worked for him at great length and somehow become even more indebted to him... Which is totally perfect since Nobb would secretly turn out to be Loki, trying to kick off Ragnarok.
I run a cyberpunk/precursor artifact accelerated world in Fate.
My players decided in this campaign to start pretty low level for the most part and underpowered to "come from the streets" and really have potential for a large power arc (it's going to be a multi-year campaign).
So in order to make some extra creds they took a job from an app for criminals (lol) which was to disrupt this gentrifying mid-sized upstart of a corporate corner store in an old part of the city that still had some locals and flavor to it and hadn't be over run by the mega-corps bullshit quite yet. Part of the stated job description was also that they could keep anything they stole from the place as a bonus.
So they stake the place out, place surveillance drones, canvas the area, get a couple people inside, talk to locals, hit the local corner shop, hit the bar, speak to one of the employees who is a netrunner who is one of two people that essentially serve as the mainframe for the store (it's cheaper to use a human as a CPU than a PC...gotta love a dystopia), they trail the owner to his condo, pick his pockets, toss his apartment, map the patterns of the security service patrols, access the email system and inventory controls.
During which they discover that the store is running on the bare minimum of insurance, behind on a couple payments and a bad month could possibly collapse the entire business.
So they've got all these wheels in motion, they've got all this actionable data. What do they decide to do?
You guessed it.
They set off a dirty bomb in the store.A few quick ones:
A group in D&D (maybe second edition) was rescuing a unicorn that was magically kidnapped. They are exploring a cave system and come to one of many doors. They hear breathing inside, but the room is dark and they are skittish. They throw a torch in, which lands on a pile of straw that the magically sleeping unicorn is on. So they lost some prestige returning the unicorn par-cooked.
Had an impulsive player, 3RD edition d&d, who was part of a group storming the lair of a mid tier necromancer as part of a larger arc. There was a boy who was dead on an altar, in the darkness, being used in an incantation when they attacked. For reasons (?) the player rushed past the enemies inviting attacks of opportunity, to give CPR to the dead (?) boy, that they couldn't even make out features of in the darkness and who wasn't even a major plot point. Fine, roll for (?) to see how that goes. Guy almost dies rushing to give mouth to mouth to a decaying foot, and then dies the next round.
Had a min max monkey, 3.5 d&d. I level set the players that I don't mind a little bit of munchkin builds, but the world itself is grim and won't tolerate murder hobos, and the setting has mechanisms for that. He just kept escalating the shenanigans and attacking people until eventually a group of high level wizards that acted as final enforcers for the local government attacked the party and power word killed him to death. Shocked Pikachu face when they realized that all the NPC warnings and threats were real. Decade plus later they still moan about how I just don't get the spirit of player driven play, lol.
I ended up creating/playing a character one of my friends liked so much that he reappears in campaigns from time to time.
Figlindel Glorfinsnatch, a half-elf Bard from the Forest of Whimsy, joined the party after being found in a broken barrel by the side of a river. Prior, in the Forest of Whimsy, he offended its lord, Alurlialilundilar and his wife, Queen Illuvivarvivarita, by snorting up what remained of their magical fairy dust. After a lengthy trial he was sentenced to being sealed in the barrel and tossed off a waterfall. As he floated in the barrel he was contacted by a demon in a vision, got into an argument, and offended the demon so badly that he was denied entry to Hell, and thus survived.
In the campaign, at one point we were in a city that was under attack by an eldritch monster. We discovered that by sacrificing someone the monster could be cast into a different plane, and so Figlindel goaded his orc companion until the orc slammed his halberd through Figlindel's chest. That player rolled a 20, so Figlindel was obliterated. However, due to having offended the demon, his soul was caught in limbo while the party got together the necessary magic to revive him from a leftover skull fragment. After he recovered from soul sickness, Figlindel traveled with the party to the lair the monster came from, and along the way got access to a single wish spell.
The lair was at the southern pole, and at the southern pole was a flock of penguins. Figlindel found a penguin, named him Pingus, and used the wish spell to make Pingus sentient. Armed with a shortsword and a little leather tunic, Pingus ventured with the party until the end of the campaign, while Figlindel taught him the ways of war and the need to unify the other penguins. In the campaign's epilogue, Pingus did travel back to the southern pole and brought together his people, waged a war of conquest and became the lord penguin. Figlindel traveled back to the Forest of Whimsy, but wasn't allowed back in because they still hated him. So he reappears from time to time, a traveling madman with wild stories no one believes.
A lot of my fond tabletop success has been getting a generally good character arcs over particular moments, but I can think of a few...
1. Fading Suns (think kitchen sink Dune), my party of a noble and her company was in the domain of a semi-rival house. We knew from experience that house Decados isn't the greatest house to negotiate around, with their weaponized space-heroin and whatnot. The noble we worked with was trying to hide typical slimeball house motives behind the conflict we went to investigate, but he was at least genial and not as terrible as we'd thought. Still, we were under the impression something was off. His kept scratching his face. It kept twitching.
My character, Natasha, was an Eskatonic. They're the big heterodox branch of the series church. (Think space-Christians and space-Jesus interpretation.) They're more or less allowed to exist in the empire, though, because they know one very important theurgical rite - Rending the Veil of Unreason - which reveals anyone in an area around them who is Symbiot. The Symbiot are basically The Thing. They're locked behind a set of one-way jump gates (think Mass Effect) and an endless war across four planets, but the idea that they get out is an obvious major concern.
Unfortunately Natasha was kind of a sheltered airhead and grew up never seeing any Symbiot. So I played her with a bit of a preoccupation with thinking people around her could be Symbiot. Like... Everyone. It messed with her head, and she'd be thinking about it until she had good reason to trust someone. Thankfully it was unreasonable, since no Symbiot ever made it past the containment hellhole world of Stigmata. Actually casting the spell would be a faux pas of disastrous consequences in noble company. But what if? The scratching. What if? The twitching. What if? Natasha was clawing at the table.
...Then that twitching on this noble's face turned green. Natasha had enough. She SCREAMS the rite out, bursting from her through the room.
No one spoke a word for the next minute or so. Everyone stared at Natasha. She stared back. Then alllll eyes in the room moved to the noble... Who was suddenly all scaly and weird. The noble was looking at their hands all frozen, seemingly just as confused. In one of the most movie moments I could imagine, he looked up at us to see all the guy's own guards in the room slowwwly pointed their guns at him.
As they methodically shreded the guy, our directive shifted a lil bit.
2. One unhinged Shadowrun campaign included escaping on a stolen tractor going 90 mph down the highway and a side mission where we hung out in a corner getting absolutely nothing done over four hours because (from what I remember) each of our plans got comically shut down by the GM. The best, though, was a side mission where the team got turned into a bunch of just add water! sorta pellets, and we completely eschewed the cyberpunk for a one-shot Redwall-esqe mission. We played a bunch of beavers. I named mine Nibbles Woodaway, who was convinced that the pellets were god-given artifacts presented to us on a heavenly mission. I never got so into character so quickly than as a fucking beaver.
He thereafter was slain because a friendly mole decided not to move a space to the side in combat. Nibbles died a martyr.
I was playing an Old School Essentials campaign as a magic user, but reskinned into an artist who cast spells through the beauty of their paintings. My DM is also a good guy who pretty much operates by the Rule of Cool, so he’s more than willing to bend the rules a bit to allow something interesting to happen.
My group happened upon a spider’s lair where they had made their nest in a huge trash heap. We stumbled into a fight against a huge spider flanked by supporting mobs of spiders and goblins. My first idea was to try to charm a goblin to turn the numbers game a little more in our favor, but the spell would only allow a charmed creature to follow commands given in a language they understood, and the goblin and I didn’t share any languages.
So, being an artist, I said that art is a universal language and had my character draw a simple sketch depicting the goblin hurling its lit torch into the flammable trash heap housing the spiders. The idea made my DM laugh and he allowed it, describing in great detail how the goblin studied my sketch for a long while before dutifully immolating his former allies, giving our party a huge advantage in the fight.
This past session, I wanted a shiny new sword. I did not have the money for a shiny new sword. So I scratched some nonsense runes on the handle of my old sword (the generic "longsword" with no other descriptors that I started the campaign with), walked into the fancy weapons shop, and traded it in, convincing them (with a natural 20 roll on deception) that it was the legendary Sword of Thorb.
There is no character named Thorb in this setting.
So I (the party's bard) am now spinning this entire backstory about Thorb, the legendary warrior who defeated the Eater of Memories, but at the cost of being erased from history themself, which is why nobody's heard of them.
This is brilliant and I love it. As a DM I really enjoy world building like this, and would probably incorporate it into the lore.
I play a kenku bard in a 5e campaign ; a scholar of folklore who, despite me initially intending him as a cool eloquent wandering scholar type with 18 charisma, became more of a socially awkward nerd, possibly due to being played by a socially awkward nerd. A relevant detail is that, at the time of this story, we were four* and aside from our goliath barbarian, we all have a measly strength of 8.
We're working as investigators for a certain organization. By looking into the death of an aristocrat in a certain town, we discovered a plot by a cult of werewolves to summon a demon prince, and accompanied by a friendly NPC ranger and former hunting buddy of the victim whom we like a lot, we go to the very, VERY high cliff it's taking place at to prevent it.
Big session-long fight ensues. Lots of werewolves. Climatic fencing duel between our half-elf warlock and some mysterious swordsman. One of the bigger henchmen gets thrown off the cliff and will be falling for the rest of the fight. Halfway through the fight, our NPC friend starts throwing insults at the werewolf leader, something like "You'll pay for what you did to Erick, you monsters!".
To which he answers, "But do you not remember? It was you who killed Eric!". And suddenly, our friend starts unwillingly transforming into a gigantic werewolf. Big reveal!
I liked the guy a lot, and didn't want us to kill him, but we were in the middle of a massive fight and if we had to contend with him alongside the rest of the enemies, someone would most definitely die. At this point in time, we didn't have a ton of crowd control except for my Sleep spell, and there was no way I'd roll high enough to put him under. The others tried to talk him out of it, but it was not working.
But it happened that we obtained a potion of hill giant a few sessions ago which I was carrying (when drank, get 20 strength for a minute), and he was standing right next to the edge of the cliff, which lead into an idea. I drank it, gained humongous bird muscles and after making an insight check to be confident he'd survive the fall (somehow, yes), I tried to shove him with a strength check...
Natural fucking 20. My nerd bird did not just shove that dude ; my nerd bird gloriously suplexed that werewolf off of that cliff like his name was John Cena. This canine took, like, 3 or 4 rounds to hit the ground and was taken out of the fight entirely, allowing us to finish up with the other enemies and save the sacrifical hostage.
We didn't find him again after that, his camp was empty when we returned there, but know he survived the fall, which was the goal ; we still have him as a loose plot thread since he's now got a bounty on his head placed by the victim's wife (who is the hostage we saved), and we'll hopefully get back to that. In any case, my kenku still longs for the day we find another potion of hill giant so he can experience the bliss of having humongous, perfectly sculpted bird biceps again...