Best campaign moments

[Blade of Desecration]

This was inspired by a thread back at the WotC boards. What were your favorite moments in you campaigns? Were they comic or dramatic? Was it a single line, or a whole situation? Did your DM or PC do something amazing or hilarious? Share the madness that is the game.

 

[Nightcloak]

Great idea!

So many memories...

Well, I've told the boholder-lich and rogue roulette story already, so here's a quick one for now.

During a dungeon crawl, the party found a Wizards spellbook. The Wizard was pretty excited about that (I introduce third party and Forgotten Realms spells into my game this way). The player himself was even more exited when I handed him a prop:

A hand made "book" of 18 pages yellowed and browned with age, tied in twine, and burned a little.

You would have thought it was Christmas morning. During the next break, while a couple players went out to the porch for a smoke, the Player/Wizard started flipping through the book. I feel almost guilty for what happened...

"Oh, this is great! Page 1 is something called "Continuous Missles", page 4 is a 9th level spell called "Duplicate", page 12 is an Improved Mage Armor, and page 13 is... what the hell, it says: "trap" - roll 10d6 and ..... oh @#$%!"

 

[Blade of Desecration]

Great idea!

So many memories...

Well, I've told the boholder-lich and rogue roulette story already, so here's a quick one for now.

During a dungeon crawl, the party found a Wizards spellbook. The Wizard was pretty excited about that (I introduce third party and Forgotten Realms spells into my game this way). The player himself was even more exited when I handed him a prop:

A hand made "book" of 18 pages yellowed and browned with age, tied in twine, and burned a little.

You would have thought it was Christmas morning. During the next break, while a couple players went out to the porch for a smoke, the Player/Wizard started flipping through the book. I feel almost guilty for what happened...

"Oh, this is great! Page 1 is something called "Continuous Missles", page 4 is a 9th level spell called "Duplicate", page 12 is an Improved Mage Armor, and page 13 is... what the hell, it says: "trap" - roll 10d6 and ..... oh @#$%!"

Rotfl, thats hilarious! I really wouldn't want to be that wizard though.
Something similar to that, which are also extremely fun, are explosive runes poems/letters.

Dear elected official: This is an assassination note. It is written entirely in explosive runes.
P.S. There are also beads from a necklace of fireballs enclosed for a bigger boom. Goodbye!
Yours truly, friendly neighborhood assassin.

 

[Nightcloak]

Rotfl, thats hilarious! I really wouldn't want to be that wizard though.
Something similar to that, which are also extremely fun, are explosive runes poems/letters.

Dear elected official: This is an assassination note. It is written entirely in explosive runes.
P.S. There are also beads from a necklace of fireballs enclosed for a bigger boom. Goodbye!
Yours truly, friendly neighborhood assassin.

BOOM!

Neat trick.

For fun, I went and found that prop. Maybe some pictures will help inspire others who read this thread. Sorry for the quality, it would appear I forgot to put ranks in Knowledge (Digital Camera).

 

[MarkCsigs]

Simply amazing! I love props and I think they add a lot to the game. Tell me, how did you yellow/brown the pages so well? I've done similar stuff with maps before but they've never come out looking that good.

--Mark C'sigs

 

[DarrenGMiller]

So many moments, so little time to type.

The party was attempting to sneak across a river in enemy controlled territory. There is a guarded bridge less than a hundred yards upstream. The guards have already been tested by members of the party attempting to cross without the proper papers (looking suitably harmless so as not to get arrested of killed). Everyone is playing smart and speaking in character.

There are woods screening the banks outside of about a 100' clear zone. The party is doing a great job of approaching unnoticed and hiding in the woods. As they scope out the opposite bank of the river, they see a small cabin hidden deep in the trees and well-camouflaged, with a small hidden inlet with a dock and a small boat on it. This seems to be what they are looking for, so one of the characters swims across and successfully avoids attracting the attention of the guards. He scopes out the cabin and boat and returns to the bank on the opposite side of the river from where the characters are.

Up to this point, the players are all whispering to each other, since the characters are and everyone is into it. The players begin whispering to the player of the character on the opposite bank, who very LOUDLY says, "WHAT???" The player really just didn't hear, but since everybody was speaking in character he almost fell out of his chair when he realized what he had just done.

The soldiers on the bridge hear the shout and mobilize. They spot the majority of the party and head that way. The party then swims for it. Meanwhile, the PC across the river bolts into the cabin, spreads his caltrops and hides behind an upturned table. When the party reaches the other side, several of them ready the boat while two more go into the dark interior of the cabin to retrieve the character inside.

At this point, they hit the caltrops...

Now THAT was a LOT of fun!

DM

 

[Nightcloak]

Simply amazing! I love props and I think they add a lot to the game. Tell me, how did you yellow/brown the pages so well? I've done similar stuff with maps before but they've never come out looking that good.

I'll put how I do it in the GMF Members Creations Thread.

This prop is almost two years old, which probably helps.

 

[DungeonmasterCal]

I have several I'm pretty proud of, but this is probably my favorite. I really like my players to come up with detailed backgrounds for their PC's. In a campaign I ran for nearly 10 years, one of my players had written the reason her ranger had left the "corps" was to flee an abusive relationship by a fellow ranger.

Now I try to make time "in game" coincide with "real time". So two years later, her ex-lover showed up. The ranger's player was very surprised by this. I ran him, as an NPC, for several adventures, and during the whole time, he tried to show how much he still loved her and how much he'd changed. She wanted nothing to do with him, and he eventually attacked and tried to rape her. She and the rest of the party chased him away, thinking that was the end of it.

Now, about 6 months further on, the party, while exploring the tunnels beneath an ancient and ruined city, are attacked by a pack of ghasts, led by a wight. Just as things begin to look their grimmest, her ex-lover charges in and dives into the fray. The last words they hear from him are, "Run! Get out while you can! I'll hold them off!" They get out of the sewers, and wait and wait, but he never appears.

2 months later, her character has gone off ahead of the rest of the party to scout the location where they are supposed to rendezvous, when she is attacked in the ruins of a wizard's tower. Fighting in the darkness, she can't make out her foe clearly. During a lull in the combat, the creature steps into a pool of moonlight, and in a harsh, gutteral voice says, "I swore I would always love you, and that we would always be together. If I can't have you in life, then we'll be together forever in death!" She gets a good look at the creature; her ex-lover, now a wight, who has stalked and tracked her since his fall to the undead monsters in the sewers.

The player actually screamed, and nearly burst into tears at the shock. And when I say player, I don't mean her character. She was so caught off guard by this that we had to stop the game so she could calm down.

Yeah... I'm VERY proud of that one.

 

[themind]

Off and on I have been running the Maure Castle adventure that was revised in Dungeon Magazine. On the second level, the 5 PC's come across a Gnoll Cleric. In the seocnd round of combat, the gnoll casts Word of Chaos, affecting 3 out of 5 of the PC's with confusion for 4 minutes. The Cleric then escaped with Word of Recall, hoping the PC's kill each other. Which they very nearly did.

It ended up the sorceror, the Cleric/Geomancer, and the rouge were affected. The other 2 fighters were able to keep the rogue stuck in a room for the entire duration, and realy had to worry about the other 2. So for 4 minutes, they were wither running away, fighting each other , or whatever. It came to a point where the cleric cast harm on the sorceror bringing him down to 1 HP. The next round, the sorceror acts normally, and teleports back to town. He then runs to the temple to get help. Along the way, he rolls to attack the closest person, which ends up being a commoner. So he uses disintigrate on the poor fellow.

The clerics at the temple were confused. He'd run in yell for help, run putside, run back in, throw a fireball at the alter, plead for help, etc.

I enjoyed that greatly, cause it was the first time I had ever used Word of Chaos, it worked so perfectly.

 

[ChaosEvoker]

The player actually screamed, and nearly burst into tears at the shock. And when I say player, I don't mean her character. She was so caught off guard by this that we had to stop the game so she could calm down.

Yeah... I'm VERY proud of that one.

That....is awesome....

I'll try to come up with one of my own here in the next few days