I once ran an adventure where the party was hired by a red-headed man who asked them to protect his village from the predations of an evil wizard. It started out as a standard adventure.
The man wore a magical amulet that let him cast a
Sympathy/Antipathy spell a certain number of times per day. The party discovers that each person in the village had their own special amulet that let them cast a particular spell -
Friends,
Charm Person, Control Weather, etc...
And it turns out that all the villagers are were-bears.
The wizard is trying to steal the amulets to use their combined magic to power a device designed to allow him to create an army of mind-controlled slaves.
Now, here's where it takes its first twist...
The villagers aren't just were-bears... They're were-
Care Bears. (Try saying that seven times fast, lol.) Yes, I went there. And the "evil wizard" looks suspiciously like the Purple Pieman from
Strawberry Shortcake. He's stealing the amulets to build a device designed to suck all the joy out of the world, and turn children into mindless workers.
The party quickly gets the picture, that they're stuck in a comedy module centered around Eighties nostalgia and all the iconic things of their childhoods - they set off through an Enchanted Forest filled with trees covered in chocolate bark or with chocolate licorice trunks and spearmint leaves and caramel Squirrels running through the branches, past a stream filled with blue raspberry soda and Swedish Fish... Along the way, they meet several interesting characters including a blue marshmallow ghost who joins the party.
As they get close to the wizard's tower, the
second twist kicks in. It is now a
horror adventure.
They're attacked by hordes of rabid forest animals including chocolate rabbits, little yellow marshmallow birds, and cinnamon bears.
When a stray arrow hits one of the trees, it bleeds strawberry blood.
The blue marshmallow ghost turns to the party as its eyes begin to bleed blueberry-syrup blood and lets out a banshee's wail.
At the castle gates, the party battles chocolate-covered giant ants and gummi orcs.
When the orcs are hit, there's a horrid squelching sound as the weapon becomes stuck in the orc's body and the "flesh" seals up around it. A yellow gummi orc has its left arm chopped off only to pick up the right arm of a red gummi orc and hold it to the stump, where the two melt and flow together to form an orange scar before the arm becomes functional again.
A
Fireball from the party's wizard leaves them gagging on the horrid stench of burnt chocolate and slogging through ankle-deep puddles of the stuff.
When they get inside the tower, they discover that the evil wizard is actually a
necromancer, and the amulets are going to be used to power a device needed to perform a profane and infernal ritual that will slowly begin sucking the very life force out of the children of the world, turning them into mindless undead minions of the wizard.
The last battle before the boss fight with the wizard was against the small horde of child zombies the necromancer had already created.
By the time the adventure was over, the entire party were looking at me with haunted, shell-shocked eyes, but they were smiling like lunatics. it was probably the finest DM-ing I'll ever do.
I'd love to run that adventure again, but I've never found another party I would have felt comfortable running it with, who'd be okay with me putting them through that kind of hell for their own entertainment.