What's the most rat bastard thing you've ever done as a DM?

[Chroma]

Is this more like it?

A hamlet near the PCs' home town is terrorized by an undead menace. The heroes come to the locals' rescue and discover that one entire family appears to have been slain, but the bodies of their youngest son and daughter are missing.

Some quick divinations reveal the children are still alive and the PCs head off in pursuit of their captors. A long fight through ghoul infested catacombs ensues, and the PCs finally come to a disturbing chamber, with the 11-year old girl on an altar, surrounded by strange ghoulish priests. The party annihilates the foul undead, who seemed to be trying to perform a hideous ritual, and rescue the girl, though no trace of the young boy is found, perhaps eaten by the ghouls. The girl seemed to have been struck mute by her ordeal... orphaned, alone, so pitiful... the party took her as their ward and allowed her to live with one of their families, swearing to give her a good life.

Despite the tragedy that had befallen her, the young girl seemed very bright and eager, helping around the house, listening to all their stories and plans, even babysitting one of the party member's very young children. She also seemed to show an aptitude for magic, and the party mages took great delight in teach her the rudiments of the Art, especially since it got her to speak. She was like the party's mascot, allowed into the treasure vaults, access to the spellbooks and tomes of the wizards, and privy to almost every conversation discussing plans on how to thwart the vampire lord that was the party's nemesis, all in a hope to compensate for the terrible things thay had happened to her.

Two more years of this pass, and, just after her thirteenth birthday, the young girl becomes a woman, and the soul of the long-thought-dead Necromancer Queen, that had been the consort of the vampire lord, was able to fully manifest in all her dark glory, placed there by the ritual the ghouls had been able to complete before the party stopped them. And she knew all their secrets... all their plans... all their hiding places and how to open them... and they weren't home when it happened.

They came home to find their vaults plundered, their non-travelling spellbooks gone, and a black teddy-bear with a thank-you note on it in one of the toddler's cribs... the children sleeping peacefully.

She was one of the most hated villians ever after that... it was priceless! People still wonder what she may have whispered into the children's ears as she sung them to sleep... and why they never cast detect evil on her.

 

[Mark Chance]

Ages ago, in a solo adventure I was running (well, not solo really, since the player ran two characters), I included a room with a door guarded by a guarded daemon.

The player, Fred, assuming that there must be something worthwhile on the other side of the door, launched an attack. The guardian daemon trounced his characters the first go 'round, largely due to a poor saving throw against the suggestion, "Flee from the dungeon," aimed at one of the characters.

On the second try, Fred's characters managed to slay the guardian daemon after a fierce combat. The characters then picked the lock, disabled the trap, and opened the door to discover behind it...

-- drumroll, please! --

...a blank wall!

 

[Glen]

Ok, I get called Rat bastard all the time from my players. I don't understand why but then I asked one of them what they think the most rat bastard thing was I did and here is what he said.

New game started I make them write up a bio and want detailed history for there characters. Started off with some minor stuff as individuals as they did not know each other and brought them together in a caravane heading to a big meeting.

they first night of game several days pas and they are going about their normal business, most of them sleeping as at this time as it is late at night, but one is awake and gaurding, he is a luminous with not much in possesions.
They are attacked by a hord of monsters that compleatly destory the caravane all the people associated with it and all their items. leaving only the characters alive.

Why does he think this is evil? I asked him and this was what he said.

1) he had taken all the time working out what he wanted and then setting up his character. Everything he had was destroyed.
2) His father, Mentor, many of his family members were in the caravan going to the big meeting. No one but the players survived.
3) he had worked hard on me to allow him to buy some different books to study and they were destroyed.
4) I made sure he was aware of the greif that him mother must be going through.
5) Then I made the player characters have to fufill the roles of the different representitives from the kingdomes they were with. So he wasn't able to go home.
6) As he was getting a chance to go home he found out his mother and the rest of the family was destroyed when going to visit the place of his fathers death. He hadn't even been able to greive for his father as the meetings and stuff had been keeping him busy.

I don't think this was the worst I've ever done but he thinks its prety bad.

 

[Silver Moon]

My player would probably vote that what I pulled off in the current module ranks as "Rat Bastard" material. The adventuring party was hired to guard a group of magical jewelry and gems that the local Lord was to soon auction off. They were also given an interdimensional building to use (Kulp's Comfortable Castle) and put the items inside along with half of their party to guard it.

A gnome rogue who had once owned the collection, and also had a key to the Castle, attempted to steal them. During one attempt he unlocked the door to the Castle and sent his disguised apprentice in to get the items, but she failed. So the next time he managed to get inside he used the key to deactivate and shut the doorway, making off with the whole Castle. They did catch him and get the doorway back, but now have to spend five days reachinging it in order to open it again. In the meanwhile they have had to field a whole new team to replace those stuck inside the building (one of which is the team leader's pregnant wife). Okay, that's nowhere near the range of PirateCat's evil, but boy were the players ticked off about it!

 

[Kareyev]

My best Rat Bastard moment was actually a tag team effort. I had moved to a new city about a month before, but had returned to tie up some loose ends. The DM in the old city let me join in a game for one last hurrah. I played a Paladin. The party was traveling with a little girl who was key to a prohecy of some sort and the party had spent the last month tracking her down and protecting her from all sorts of bad guys. Every battle I would grab the girl, jump on a dog sled and run away while the rest of the party dealt with the danger, returning when it was safe. On the forth iteration of this scene I just kept on going and kidnapped the girl. You see, I was actually an anti-paladin.
The funny part was I moved back 6 years later and rejoined the same campaign (all new players, but same DM). When I introduced my new character they gave him the 3rd degree. It seems my anti-paladin was still a legend that all good PCs feared.

 

[teitan]

Well, I had a player who bugged the hell out of me about a SHocker Lizard companion (am I the only person who has had this annoying request repeated at least five times a session?) so finally I got tired of it and gave him two. Well, he named them Jay and Silent Bob and pampered these things. One night during camp I rolled a random encounter and it was a group (yes, group) of Trolls. Heh heh heh. Well, he had left his lizards in his tent. Have you seen the sleeping bag scene in Jason X? Those two lizards were pounded into a pulp by a Troll while stuck in the tent he had set up. Heh heh heh. I let him raise dead on them, but I never, EVER received a request like that again. Funny part is that after he threw a tissy over the lizards getting mauled... he let them die so he could get a Dire Bat as his companion. It was a cute bat...

Jason

 

[Berk]

I setup an adventure where the party would get tons of exp, eq, and money. Only thing is they were on a time schedual and they didn't know it. It took them a bit too long and the inhabitants of the dungeon left for a certain reason. So when the party got there they were run through an empty dungeon filled with nasty nasty traps. It was a fun 2 gaming sessions though. =o)

 

[Salamander Napolean]

I had a group of players causing trouble in a small city; getting in street fights, threatening locals, dealing with known criminals, and so on. But they knew they were the toughest characters around, and the local constables couldn't really do anything about it.

At some point the Chief Investigator asks them to come to help them question a captured spy down at the jail-house. The player's are wary, but interested in interrogating the prisoner for information. The chief is really friendly and let's them keep all their weapons while inside, so what can it hurt? He leads them into a locked, metal-walled interrogation-room on the top floor, and watches them question the spy for awhile. Since it's illegal to use violence on prisoners, the characters wait until the chief steps out of the room for a minute, then they start breaking the guy's arms.

All of the sudden, the room starts shaking, and they can here the sound of sawing, chopping, and hammering. The chief speaks in through the little window in the door that there's a situation outside and they'll be let out shortly. More sawing and hammering. One player is looking out the door's window screaming threats at the chief when I describe this scene:

Suddenly the room lurches, and the chief starts shrinking away from you. As the scene widens, you see the outside and roof of the building, and a half dozen workmen with axes, saws, and hammers standing around a large ragged hole in the wall. In the middle of the hole is the chief waving farewell, with a big smile on his face. The room lurches again and the view swings past a huge mechanical crane and over to a large sea vessal. The ship grows larger and larger until you can hear the voices of sailors, and finally make out the deck at close range. the coarse face of a sailor appears in front of the window and says, "Welcome aboard the slave ship Narwhale!"

The players were really pissed that they got tricked, but they were even more proud that the police preferred cutting a room out of the side of a building and sticking it on a boat than facing them in a fight. For the rest of the campaign, they'd always boast about it to NPCs.

 

[Nine Hands]

My wife and I created a tournament FR D&D game where we told the players that they were invited to a nobles birthday party, informing them that there were no weapons or armor allowed. Then as they were walking down the street to the party, magical gates all over the city start popping out monsters (orcs, T-Rexes, rust monsters, etc)

So here are some high level 9th+ characters some without weapons trying to fight off these monsters and get to a party

 

[Dinkeldog]

Told a player that nobody liked that the campaign was over.

Then continued to game without him.


Wulf

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