A Chat Between GMs: Part Two
As a card carry member of the church of “Let the Dice Fall” I can tell you that there are times when you hear an idea hatched by players and think “well, we’ll let the dice speak” and then a monk is shoving a tree token up a hill giants ass.
Holy damn, I love gaming. Speaking of, I posted a preview from the Monkeynomicon PDF I am working on (a system neutral monster book written from Sam’s perspective). All of the flavor text is taken directly from my notes on Karthun, so that might be of interest to some of you. Enjoy!
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Commenters: Best crazy use of a magic item… GO!
HAHAHAHAAAA! That’s beautiful!
The only thing my group did that was stretching the magic item a bit was in our Eberron campaign. I played a Warforged Cleric. We were in the Mournlands when one of our characters got hurt. He needed healing badly so one of the power gamers suggested jumping into the Bag of Holding. So we did and I healed him just fine. I was told I had to remain in the bag and they would throw untried pay members in for me to heal.
I believe the Bag of Holding explicitly states that nothing can live in there. I suppose a Warforged might be an exception, but I remember clearly reading there’s no air inside.
Warforged don’t breath, so it’s legit.
Yeah, that was their reasoning, too. I just couldn’t have any spiky armor.
Best crazy magic item story? Has to be R.A. Salvatore’s “Wubba Wubba”.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzpgAQpcp8o
He’s such a great story teller haha.
Not really a magic item related story, but a “let the dice roll” kind of moment. We found a dungeon that had a section where a bunch of large combat apes were being kept. Between a combination of a 8′ monkey poking stick and a bit of animal control skill we were able to “tame” the ape and used him as our official pack mule to carry more loot than we could. So, for a few weeks we ran around with a pack ape until it was eaten by a creature larger than him.
On the line of non-magic item related stories, and in a slightly different genre, I have one as well.
I was running a telepath. Pure and simple, my char was mind-suppression, take a single enemy out of the fight and force the enemies to fight without their strongest unit, unless their strongest unit was magic based. So, we come into a butchers room, their are dozens of enemies there. There’s a bunch of slaves, and the butcher, appears at least, to be a slave. He’s using what is basically a chainsaw to cut the meat, and the gruel is being fed to the slaves. My group is undetected. For a minute, I ask the group to wait. We’ve got a bunch of shooters and, in theory, we could’ve won. However we didn’t want to be caught in the fortress. So, after a minute, the butcher sees a haunch of uncut meat. So, the butcher goes over, with a shrug, and chops it. Then, slowly, it dawns on the poor butchers face what, precisely, he has done, and how much peril he’s in, as the armor of the guard becomes more and more apparently, as does the look of shock. The rest of the slaves in the area rebel and we kinda just walk through.
I won a relatively easy mind control check, but the panic rolls on the guards, the logic tests, were flubbed so bad it let us go through stealthily with no stealth skill whatsoever.
OH i know first campaign I played in college we used a time travel Mcguffin (i want to say a gauntlet but i can’t remember) that resulted in our half elf paladin to kill his Elvin father father before he raped his human mother effectively causing him to give his mother a temporal abortion
then it got REALLY batshit crazy
either that or the magic weapon i created called the Dagger of the ornrey red drake
it was a adolecent red dragon that had been turned into a weapon it acted as a familiar(in theory) had a daily fireball spell (in place of flame breath weapon) and could fly withing 5 feet of it’s scabbard giving it’s barer and extra attack roll
the down sides it was a teenage dragon that pissed off it’s elders enough to turn it into a dagger and give to a human…a human rouge specifically
OMG! i just looked up feather token Tree
Tree: A token that causes a great oak to spring into being (5-foot diameter trunk, 60-foot height, 40-foot top diameter). This is an instantaneous effect.
Looking forward to the Monkeynomicon!
Hmmm… well, off the top of my head there’s the fact that my players know that I follow the ‘official’ ruling (as given by Mike Mearls, I believe, I swear to God, it’s in one of the podcasts) that every ‘Bag of Holding’ has a goblin inside.
I always treat BoHs like ‘Heward’s Handy Haversack’ in that you don’t have to search through one to find what’s in it, you just have to know what’s inside and think of it. So, in my games, if you turn a Bag of Holding inside out, a small goblinoid (maybe a kobold) creature pops out. It’s essentially a little extradimensional spirit that organizes the bag and hands you stuff, but most people don’t know it’s there.
Nothing special has come of it, but maybe one day it’ll run off or give them a quest or just become their friend.
TALK ABOUT GETTING WOOD!!! BWAHHAHAHAHA
…I’ll show myself out.
I’ll have to use that technique the next time I get the chance.
The monkeynomicon preview is AWESOME! I would like to throw some money at this.
Best magic item use: Easily the immovable rod the paladin in my game had. She used it to great effect regularly. The single best moment has to be when the party was fighting an elder blood worm in an arena in Dis. The paladin intentionally lunged into the worm’s mouth and was swallowed by the great beast. She activated the rod and when the Mage cast a massive gust of wind to throw the worm backwards, ithe immovable rod stayed right where it was and ripped a hole in the creature’s side and the paladin was left hanging in mid air clutching the immovable rod and dripping in gore. It was pretty amazing.
The best was in a home-made campaign. Our party had royally pissed off the Council of Treants, and had gotten themselves wrapped up in a full-scale war. Part of our job was to kill the council to cause confusion.
We get to the final one, and he was an Ancient. We’re talking this guy could of been The World Tree. He was beating us worse than anything before, when someone remembered.. We have an Eternal Flame..
Funny thing about this Eternal Flame, it required a proper spell before it would flare up to its full heat. Was meant to keep people like us from causing mass destruction.
We tied the little spark to an arrow, which our Ranger fired into the treants mouth, while our Mage invoked the spell. Next thing you know, this enemy is BURNING, and slowly catching the entire forest on fire. We’re running as fast as we can, hoping to not get caught.
So, once again in our eternal wisdom, someone cracked open a Carried Storm.. Now, one might be wondering, “Why were you even carrying these things?!” This was due to natural adventure kleptomania. See an Eternal Flame for grabs? Take it. Find a Carried Storm in a cursed jar? Someone will break the curse, right?!
So now we have this hurricane blowing these flaming trees down, and it’s not making things better. We’re getting slowed by the mud, the wind is tearing us apart, the fire is STILL out of control..
This isn’t pretty at all. We’re causing wide-spread destruction trying to STOP the bloody thing! So, what does my party do? Amulet of Held Time. Our Paladin sacrificed half his life to hold one part of the forest in time. The flames never touched it, it stayed healthy forever. A good part of the forest, too.
I had to give him creativity for it. Also, seriously noble sacrifice.. Even if it didn’t repair the damage done.
In an old and fairly standard AD&D campaign I played when I was in my teens, my ranger had got hold of some magic explosive arrows. We were helping defend a village from attackers, including a dragon. I loaded up with the explosives, took a shot, and scored a critical hit followed by max damage. Our GM honoured this fluke by having the arrow go straight down the dragons throat as it was about to breath fire and killing it instantly in a huge explosion. Unfortunately, between the bang and falling chunks of roast dragon, it also destroyed a fair part of the village we were defending. Our GM specialised in being a dick even as he was being cool 😉
I think the best use of a magic item in a game I’ve played in recently is in the Reign of Winter Pathfinder game I’m in… my character is a bard based on Matthew Swift from Kate Griffin’s Urban Magic series (he believes that there are innumerable angels sharing his body, and uses I and We interchangeably during conversation because of this), and has a tendency to sing in random languages while playing a magical lute as they walk along.
Anyway, we killed an evil cleric/necromancer, and he had a cloak known as the Cloak of the Yeti… essentially it’s a basic natural armour bonus providing cloak, that also provides a bonus to intimidate checks when you put the hood up, as it merges with your face and gives it yeti-ish features…
My character doesn’t really need the intimidate bonus, due to Versatile Performance letting me substitute my perform skills for various other skills, but the other players find it amusing to tell the GM that they’re sneaking up behind me and flipping the hood up while I’m interrogating prisoners… in one instance, there was an old man standing in our way, and negotiations had failed… so I decided to intimidate. I rolled obscenely well, and the GM was about to say that the old man backed down immediately, when suddenly there was a yeti staring him straight in the face threatening his life… One chance roll later, the old man keels over from a shock induced heart attack.
Or, in the same campaign, there’s my recurring ambush method… dance up to group of bandits sitting by a fire while singing and playing the aforementioned magic lute, distract them while opponents get into position by making them think I’m a madman (not difficult given that the character is actually insane, albeit in such a way that he’s still functional), then signal the attack by hitting them with the Chord of Shards spell, which I like to picture as the bard playing a power chord on the lute with such force that it turns the air in front of it into an explosive cone of razor shards.
One of my players liberated some enslaved goblins and Totally-Didn’t-Enslave-Them, and has one of them she lovingly named “Meatloaf” is trained to be a Bard and ordered to follow her and the party around with what is essentially a magical boombox though the travels. Meatloaf remains out of sight and away from any possible dangers, and never contributes anything of any note.
However, the reason she has Meatloaf follow her around is because at any given time, she can shout out an order in Goblin and there’s just a *click*, followed by scene-appropriate background music for the party.
So they’ve kicked in the door to like, a Vampire’s lair, and she’ll shout the equivalent of “Meatloaf! KICK IT~!” And there’ll be battle music playing. Or when they’re in a suspenseful chase scene and she’ll have Meatloaf play chase music. ^_^”
A DM friend of mine created an item called “the soul cube”. DC 20 will save, be trapped pretty much in a poke ball. It was given to us with the tarrasque inside. Well, we let it out once, put out back in (DM rolled a one) and kept it. Months later, demons set up a strong hold atop a mesa and we were told to get the demons out. In our team was a master of many forms who loved flight and was clinically insane. My group now forever has operation: tarrasque wrecking ball.
Best over-the-top use of a magic item I ever experienced was back in 1980. We had a high level group that (due to a Monty Hall DM) had a crap load of major magic items. One of which was a Deck of Many Things that was made out of steel with diamond edges. This was carried by our thief/assassin member and he would flick the cards at enemies like a throwing star. Of course, given the random nature of the cards, many times it would (and did) backfire on him but he loved the things and had somehow managed to work the system so the cards were always recoverable, though he couldn’t actually use the powers on himself.
So the thief’s player carried an actual deck of cards that he would mess around with while playing the game and his character would shuffle and mess with the cards while sitting around the campfire at night. One night he and the paladin party leader got into it pretty bad and the players themselves were getting pretty hot under the collar. I don’t recall what the player/character actually said but suddenly the thief player just stands up and says “F— you!” and then flips the entire deck of cards in his hands up so they are facing the other player.
I’d never heard anyone shriek in a bass voice before. He was completely and totally wigging out. He actually had a panic attack at the thought of what his character was going to go through. Fortunately for his sanity, the DM ruled that by seeing so many cards, none of them actually activated but the memory of the incident always makes me laugh.
That, however, wasn’t the funniest experience I’ve ever had at a gaming session. Best one was when my baby sister decided she wanted to see exactly what roleplaying was. She ended up playing a mage, and the DM warned her to be very careful because low-level mages are very vulnerable. Well, he was running us through a module that had a huge number of goblins in it. The module itself had a rep for being pretty tough but he thought we could handle it, even with a 1st level mage in the party. The mage, however, had the same ridiculous amount of curiousity as my sister and so most of the time we spent running around after her stopping her from killing us by touching the wrong thing. But the funniest part was every single time something bad happened and we should have been totally destroyed, the DM would roll nothing but ones and we’d be rolling 20s. Totally flabbergasted him. He just kept shaking his head and muttering to himself in disbelief.
By the time the gaming session ended, we were all completely punch drunk on laughter because her mage, with 2 hp, had managed to wander/lead us through the entire dungeon, with us killing off almost all of the goblins encountered without anyone taking more than 1d6 in damage while remaining untouched herself.
Decanter of Endless Water + Permanent Tenser’s Floating Disk = JET SKI!
Had a pal of mine playing a half ogre basic fighter, a dear friend of my Classic Bard. We’d been playing these characters on and off for about two solid years and through moxie and dumb luck had climbed pretty high in the levels. We’re sitting around the campfire one night just hanging out, my bard John is sorting through his loot when this half ogre looks over and goes “You know, there’s something I’ve always wanted to try”. Without another word he reaches into the pile and grabs the Deck of Many Things and starts flipping through it. No armour, no weapons, no nothing. He’s showered in treasure, cool stuff, nice effects, and just keeps flipping till he gets what he wanted: a death shows up to attack him.
So this half ogre stands up and PIMP SLAPS this death across the face, criting him to the ground. And does it again when this death gets back up. Apparently that thing that he’d always wanted to do was to pimp slap death to death and be sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Death would come PERSONALLY when his time came.
One of my friends creations, a chain gun that never misses made by combinig a Rod of Many Wands with wands of maximized magic missile and used by an Ebberon kolbold artificer.
Also a really dumb character using several immovable rods in a basic ladder formation to climb to heaven to find his dead brother only to die due to lack of oxygen, then those same rods due to a random percent roll stopping an asteroid from crashing into the world.
Brilliant. Long ago, I played a cross-dressing one-legged rogue in a D&D 3.5 campaign. My wooden leg was actually a fireball wand and one night, after a certain number of drinks, my character finds himself in a dark alley wearing a dress and surrounded by thugs.
The DM was trying to make a point about how making stupid decisions led to disastrous outcomes. I get that now. But at the time, I just smiled and said to the assembled thuggery, “Now, now, boys, let me just hitch up my train…” and let off with the fireworks. Sure, my character was burned something fierce, but there’s a half dozen thugs who’ll not be troubling the fairer sex in the future.
I was once playing a sprite in a fantasy campaign. Sprites are very small, but we kept finding magic rings, which, of course, wouldn’t fit on his fingers, but they did fit on another prominent, elongated part of his anatomy. He had quite a collection by the time we finished that campaign.
A couple of years ago, I ran a Star Wars RPG (using GURPS. Yeah.) and in one sadly too-memorable scene, one of the Prophets of the Dark Side took a PC into an antechamber saying something like, “Come now and we’ll debrief you….”
It never got further than that. Just last week, I was still hearing the “debrief” jokes. What do you do when a word becomes unusable?
One of my proudest moments in my recent gaming experiences is making the DM say the following. ” I don’t even… I…I…just roll.”
My first D&D campaign I ever played, there was a PC Rogue who maxed out Hide (we had a house rule nullifying the cap on ranks per skill per level) to the point that he didn’t need to Hide *behind* anything, he could just become invisible. He also had an enchanted broadsword that could be “stored anywhere on his body,” which obviously led to him hiding it in his mouth. Once, he was captured and tied up. He called the jailer over and leaned close to him…and *spat* the broadsword into the jailer’s face.
In order to stop some super stupid cultists from recovering the hand of Vecna we devised a plan to place a portable hole on the ground near the hand and throw a box of holding into it. With a roll of a 20 we hurled the box into the hole causing a blowout banishing everything in the blast radius into the astral plane. Our DM just stood there with his jaw open for 5 minutes and closed his notebook while silently muttering “Well OK then”.
Yeah… I deal with crazy uses of magic items all the time. Actually two sessions ago the Tiny Sized druid of the party crawled up a Titan’s asshole and began casting fire spells, summoning sharks, etc. Same player will goad enemies with Swallow Whole into eating her so she can Wild Shape in their throats.
But the craziest use of an Magic Item I have… a Bag of Holding. Although it wasn’t the bag that was used specifically, it was actually a tree. The party, while traversing a jungle, came across something like an Ironwood Sequoia logging camp, where they cut down large, mythic trees large as sequoias and hard as metal. They saw a tree that had been cut down and was in the process of being cut up for lumber. It was night, so the lumberjacks had all gone to sleep, and they didn’t station anyone on guard of the tree, because honestly who the hell could steal something that big and heavy??
Well, the group had a bag of holding. And they didn’t even know WHY they wanted to steal the tree, but they wanted to steal the tree. So very carefully, they got the bag around the tree, and managed to pull the bag over the trunk and slowly work the tree into the bag. Afterwards even THEY were confused as to why they had just stolen the tree. They had no idea what they were going to do with it, they had just stolen it because… they could, I guess.
They lugged the tree in the bag around with them for pretty much the rest of the game. Until the time came when their criminal empire was close to becoming exposed, and they had decided that the local lord/lich who ruled the place needed to go.
So, rather than storm the elaborate flying castle/dungeon to fight the lich and his minions, the sorcerer took the bag of holding, cast fly on himself, flew a few hundred feet above the lich lord’s castle, then upturned the bag of holding.
The party’s luchador did the math for just how much force a tree of that size/weight would deal to a castle at that height. And the intended endboss of the game was destroyed without a single combat roll.
That’s the thing about the group that I DM for. The crazy bastards don’t even need an item to be MAGIC to break the game.
Second most crazy use of a magic item I’ve seen was a bracelet of friendship, or rather multiple bracelets of friendship. The fighter/cleric/rogue/bard/sorcerer/radiant servant of Pelor (don’t ask, I don’t even think he knows why he took all those classes) had his hawk familiar fly high above a large enemy with the bracelets, where the familiar then uses the bracelet’s power to summon the fighter/cleric/rogue/bard/sorcerer/radiant servant, where he falls down adding momentum to his sword attacks on unsuspecting large enemies below. Granted, he only targets HUGE or bigger enemies because if his timing is off, he falls to his death. Also granted, that he has fallen to his death often… so his plan isn’t perfect… or even practacle… but it still is insane.
OH, then there was my mistake of including the Anymug from the webcomic Goblins into a campaign. See, while the mug has limitations on what can/can’t be summoned by it so it cannot (in theory) be abused (can’t summon acids, magic liquids, liquid summoned must be room temperature, ect.) the one limitation it DIDN’T have was the ability to create poisons and venoms. Then one of the players looked up the poison of a Devastation Centipede… which is a poison that deals around 2d12 damage to dexterity… and they realized that the rules of the mug allowed for summoning this liquid. Balance of the game would likely have totally collapsed then and there, but the VAST majority of the enemies were undead, so the poison luckily wasn’t as overpowered as it would normally have been.
Oh, and then there was the party’s idea to use summoned zombies to draw from a Deck of Many Things, thereby causing all negative effects to screw over the zombie while they took all the free gemstones, magic items, and CASTLES that the zombie created by drawing cards constantly…
Actually I have tons of these stories come to think of it… the party is crazy creative at finding exploits in anything.
… I’m pretty sure your DM should’ve called your party out for somehow stretching a magical object the size of a paper grocery bag over a massive redwood tree. Both in sheer physical limitations (the ability to lift an iron tree of that size to slip the seemingly infinite stretchiness of a magical burlap sack) and the weight limitations and storage capacity of said bag of holding.
Otherwise, If I were a lich villain, I’d just take an oddly super-powered Infinite Bag of Holding and drop it in the ocean, soak up all the water and kill all life on the planet after I toss it into a portable hole.
Also, your DM should’ve ruled that you can’t have a the Anymug summon poisons because it’s meant for beverages. Hence, the no acids thing.
And as a dick move, your DM shouldve had a minor stipulation that the deck of many things only work for things that understand what they’re doing. Otherwise, you might as well have just made a magical device that just shoots playing cards into the air non-stop, and press the button once for infinite rewards.
One of my parties once hired random peasants to pull cards from a DoMT, then beat them up for the goods and let them deal with the bad.
And yeah, I always set an apperture size and max volume for my items of holding because some of my PCs have tried stealing statues from temples.
Was… was your party Evil?
I think it’s wise btw to set a limit on maximum size of a single item, but I think the bags normally have a limit on total mass, no? (In size and weight?)
On a side note, I just realized that I’ve DM’d 5 campaigns, and I don’t think I ever willingly gave anyone a bag of holding or handy haversack… O.o” I think the closest I’ve ever gotten was a magical pants pocket that acted like a removable pocket because my friend wanted her rogue to wear was were essentially booty shorts, but also have pockets that she could use. It only held like, 2 lbs. of stuff, up to the size of a fist…
not a magic item but an insane spell combo; create spiked pit (the rules as written state the pit closes instantly) with a wall of iron over the top. so you have a creature, or a group of creature being shunted up at effectivly light speed with no where to exit safely. the one time we got away with it, the wall of iron reached low orbit, the troll was reduced to a fine pink mist.
then theres the sillieness of finding a ring of retrobution, a 10d6 fire ball spell centered on the caster and giving it to a rouge who has a bonus greater than the reflex save DC
The ring is clever.
The Spiked Pit trap however doesn’t work. The rules as written state that the pit itself opens in an interdimensional space, so if you do it on the bottom level of a ship, you don’t cause the ship to collapse. There’s nothing that would “Shunt them up at effectively the speed of light with nowhere to exit safely”.
Also, there’s no reason they’d shoot straight up. They’d most likely take the shortest way out. So unless you somehow created an incredibly large dome, there’s no way to launch people into orbit.
Most likely, they’d just be stuck in the pit, unless you somehow shoved a wall 50′ underground into an interdimensional space.
For my best use of an item I ran a campaign that went from level 4 to 22 and early on (around level 6) the party got this rod made of ornate wood enameled with hieroglyphs that radiated magic as a 20th level item. They kept it with them for the entire campaign trying to figure out what it did. It couldn’t be identified, Legend Lore failed, it was just this artifact level item that they couldn’t make work. Every encounter the thief would try to get it to work at least twice with use magical device. Nothing.
When the campaign finally ended the players demanded that I tell them what it was, since it had become this macguffin that they (and dozens of other factions) were fighting over.
So I told them: “Oh, you mean LINDA? Yeah, Looks Interesting, Never Does Anything. It’s a level 20 Nystul’s Magical Aura permanently bound to a stick.”
They nearly killed me for that.
I love you for that. I have never thought of that, but Now… now I must use that on my own players… xD
I would cut off my hand for that .pdf because that alone is -awesome-.
I would become a Shepard to be a part of a Karthun game run by you.
I’m not sure what I’d do to be part of a campaign for it.
I’ll add you to the play test list (Yes, for real). 🙂
I’d love to read it, but I don’t know if I could run something that dark. It seems pretty nasty. I had similar problems running CoC in the past.
I think the closest I’ve gotten to Magic Item Exploits is an idea to fit a Ring of Elemental Fire over a Decanter of Endless Water just so my character can take hot showers.
That is brilliant. I must share that with my friends xD
Both of these occurred in Dark Heresy (Warhammer 40k) campaigns:
In the very first session I ever GMed, the players were gifted a greatsword from a local tribal chieftain and seer in exchange for saving their lives. Certain that this was an enchanted blade, the group’s Tech-Priest wielded it in an epic battle with a summoned daemon, and now carries its twisted husk with him as a holy relic.
It was, of course, a completely normal great sword, but believing it was magical meant they were eager to take risks with it, which led to their victory.
The other group had been entrusted with the care of their Inquisitor’s holy stake crossbow. After their Imperial Guard minions and cultist enemies alike were slaughtered by a Khornate Bloodletter, they reached for their last resort. While the group’s Adept readied the weapon, the Psyker thought it would be a good idea to pass around the remaining silvered ammunition to use as daggers…
…only to be horribly burned by the purifying energies embedded within the bolts, and in his agony scatter them across the blood-soaked and body-strewn floor. Everyone scattered in panic, but the Psyker eventually redeemed himself by braving the soul-searing pain to find one and plunge it into the daemon’s chest.
Now that I think about it, both of these events occurred in the first session of their respective campaigns. Maybe players are just more willing to take risks with characters they aren’t attached to yet.
my party is fairly creative but really just insane and filthy. but one of the best uses of spell combos that i can remember is when we had our party’s adolescent celestial silver dragon eat a bunch of soap and drink gallons of soda water at the bottom of a crater to make her breath out bubbles of dragon-breath . then our sorcerer, with clever use of mage-hand and felt item, turned said bubbles into coin sized felt disks. that’s right, we made dragons breath weapons that anybody could use.
but the greatest dice-fall-where-they-may story comes from our party’s star elf ranger. my party was tasked with tracking down a slave ring in the port town that we were in. after freeing the slaves that they had and thoroughly humiliating the leader of the ring, they didn’t much like us. they captured a member of the party and had us confront them on the docks. we weren’t stupid so we got the local guards to come and assist in the battle. after some banter and insult thrown at each other the fight was on. our ranger was placed up on nearby roof and was assisting by firing arrows at the slaver forces. then in a stroke of genius he decides to try attacking the men on the slaver ship. Now our ranger has a habit of rolling very, very poorly, this time was no different. the first person he trys to shoot, he critically fails. the DM decided to be nice and instead of having our ranger shoot himself in the face, again, the DM decides that the arrow flew a bit too high, hitting the main mast of the ship he was attacking. and with the battle going on somehow weakening the structural integrity of the mast, causes it to topple over, instantly killing 20-30 of the slavers and guards below buy crushing them.
Was your dragon mentally challenged? You force-fed a Celestial dragon, which by all means should be a perfectly intelligent creature that can talk, soap and carbonated water by the barrel load.
And instead of becoming ill or dying because it’s eating nothing but soap and carbonated water seemingly of his or her own free will, your DM decided that Dragon Breath comes from (evidently) Dragon Vomit.
Or that a fumble happens to fumble so hard that it kills 2-3 dozen enemies and destroys a slave ship. Which raises the question of how powerful would his shot have been if it actually hit whoever the heck it was aiming at.
I’m assuming that his bow is the one from the movie Immortals, made by the Zeus as the only weapon that can kill immortals and is used to destroy otherwise invincible fortress walls, with infinite ammo created from holy light.
So, I was playing a paladin with a much higher intelligence than wisdom. These are conditions that lead to terrible things happening.
Earlier in the campaign, I had picked up a statuette made of pure orichalcum. I hung onto this thing, laboring under the impression that it was going to be plot-important later (apparently it was, just not within the next century or two of in-game time). A few sessions down the line, the city that’s come to regard me as a hero and defender is struck with a terrible “plague” of people turning to stone. Hours upon hours of desperate research later, a demon-lord gives me an ultimatum: I can stop him, but I have to do it without “lifting a weapon against him,” or he’ll just perpetrate some other great evil. I pick up this little girl street urchin, and the cleric and I are taking care of her on this ridiculous quest. We wind up in the labyrinth of catacombs under the freakishly huge tree next to the city, and we find a chamber that has a shrine-thing that is definitely causing the plague. The demon-lord shows up, and taunts us because every time we get close to the shrine, it tosses us back. I’m extracting information from the demon-lord as best I can, trying to reason with him, and having the cleric tell me what he can about the structure of the shrine, and then it dawn on me: it’s a capacitor.
I think over what I have, and it occurs to me that there is an object in my bag of holding that is fiercely magical, and which will probably cause what amounts to a short circuit. I pull out the orichalcum statuette and throw it into the shrine. My DM gives me this look like, “really? Really, Drakey?” and describes the huge explosion that nearly kills the party, little girl and all, then leaves me to deal with the aftermath in typical self-sacrificing paladin style.
I survived this incident, but only just.
Earlier in his career, this paladin escaped a pit trap by summoning his mount up above to stomp the door open, but that’s a ridiculous use of a class feature.
The best ridiculous use of magic I’ve seen was when one of my players polymorphed the heart of Tiamat herself into a muskrat. This would, of course, be after filling her lungs with caltrops. It was a hell of a fight.
That reminds me of one time, one of my friends tried to stop a train of horses that were running at full gallop, with a wagon caravan behind them.
He was really strong, but not very bright, because he tried to stop them by grabbing the T-beam that holds the horses together to the wagon, and ended up getting knocked over. The DM was treating it as an Overrun attempt, and the Horses won, knocking him over and running him over with a dozen horses and like, 3 or 4 full wagons of stuff.
My friend, the DM, declared that the character was dead.
the player demanded that the DM roll the damage anyway, and so the DM got like, a box of d6s (like, 30 of them). Rolled them, and the player somehow ended up just barely alive, having survived the massive damage rule with a natural 20, and was at -2, but alive enough that the cleric could heal him in time.
My friend (the player) still lords it over the DM that he survived.
Not so much crazy use of a magic item, but a system break. Using my magitek Gatling wand gun arm (yes my left arm turns into a Gatling gun with wand slots). I used an arcane wand (stretches the crit range), to an arcane bow spell (magic bow arcane descriptor) and over laid it on the Gatling arm. So the Gatling had a blazing magical bow on in, looking like a cross bow. Using the bow and wands in the Gatling magitek arm, I stretched my crit range to 10-20 ie 55% percent. Than I used a feat tree that allowed you to modify crits, taking two extra crit multipliers for 3 total. Not a big deal, I’d still need to roll to confirm… I also took an obscure Feat most ignore, that causes all crit threats to auto hit/confirm.
I was walking around with a giant wand Gatling, spitting off arcane sparks, and critting at x3 on a roll of 10 or above. I also have the lucky trait, allowing me to spend earned luck points to bump up dice rolls. Basically I critted all night, using a very fun and unhinged combo.
Can anyone tell me what system that is? That sounds amazingly awesome. 😀
Hmmm, insanity with items… In one game I gave my party a crate of Immovable rods. They used those things to make crash barriers and to bar doors to the dungeon rooms they were sleeping in. those are fairly normal uses. But they also used them to make ladders up walls, monkey bars over pits and sewers… and the party’s archer used them to make sniper perches above the combat where she could shoot and the enemy combatants couldn’t reach her with much even though she was in plain sight.
One of my party once put a direbadger inside their bag of holding… then released it in the face of a necromancer. Another time the same character used a decanter of endless seawater on a lightning elemental. that was fun.
THe most insane thing I’ve ever done as a player is to give a Small character with Mage Hand a war hammer (5lbs) and have her wield it in combat as a ranged melee attack.
Those are all pretty standard uses of Immovable Rods for anyone lucky enough to get more than one of the things.
Insanity in game sessions huh? There are so many to choose from. How about something from the end days of the Living City Campaign,
The party is given the mission of defending an underground temple that already has some built in defenses and a few squeeze points against unknown assailants. Most, if not all the defenses are rendered useless due to the enemies being able to fly and having hardness. During prep the cleric bought crates of caltrops, spiked chains and bandages. All within the limits as set out my the adventure. Strategically placed them with lids open. Glyphs of warding charged with animate object at each location. Do you have any idea just how much material can be animated with just one spell at 20th level before the wisdom buffs bonuses are used?
Picture if you will, caltrops swarming across the floor like a living carpet of shiny spiky hurt, bandages fluttering through the air to en-wrap their targets and spiked chains swarming around like steel centipedes on speed and those things have reach. It was glorious. It also didn’t hurt that the cleric prepared flash cards with scaled effects and damage tables for the GM. Die roll or statistical mean? uhm … how many dice? Lets go with the stats. XD
Excellent monster and backstory! You are a truly creative DM, sir. 🙂
A rogue in one of my games convinced the big bad to play poker with him for the fate of the world. And then he pulled out a Deck of Many Things and let the big bad deal. He lost the resulting fight against Death.
That’s gotta be a pine in the arse!
I’m not sorry.