Coolest Encounters you can remember...

[Chairman7w]

What are some of the coolest encounters you can remember? I'm setting up a one-night adventure, and I want to throw in a couple of cool, unique, and most of all, FUN encounters.

For example:

- A cool fight on a Pirate ship - lots of swinging from masts, sliding down sails, etc
- A chase on horses / wagons. One guy rolled a 1 during a jump=faceplant!

Looking foward to hearing cool ideas!

 

[roguerouge]

A room whose floor tilted based on the weight distribution. The only support for the floor was a column under its center. The further towards the edge the heavy people got, the more the floor tilted.

 

[exile]

One "chase" encounter that I tried to run was between adventurers on horseback and goblins mounted on wolves. It actually turned into more of a pitched battle than I had hoped- a shame.

While running the Night Below campaign (updated for 3.0 of course), one of my players had his character bitten in half by a giant albino eel while diving for treasure. I thought that was pretty cool.

A battle on a collapsing bridge could be fun.

A battle in a room with a collapsing entrance could be interesting- tie the strongest character in the party up just trying to hold up a support beam. Maybe this would be best conducted on the way out of a mine where the party has just defeated the BBEG and now must escape before his failsafe collapses the place.

A few ideas to get this thread started.

 

[HellHound]

Scene in an uber-luxury hotel with a waterpark on the second through fourth floors. The party is looking for the badguy, and are going to get a room at the hotel in order to track down his net access using the hotel network once they've hacked the router.

The lobby is a huge affair and directly over their heads is the glass ceiling separating them from the water park - right over the reception area is the pool at the bottom of a big water slide. The goal is to make the hotel feel wet and cool, a nice change from outside.

Since we were getting very late in the evening, I sped up the encounter, with the target showing up on the floor above them and seeing them. He fires a pair of HEP grenades from his handguns into the pool directly over the party's heads. The first grenade shockwave sends huge cracks through the glass ceiling, and just when they are sure they can see the water about to start leaking through, the second grenade cracks it right open - huge chunks of glass rain into the lobby along with thousands of gallons of water and quite a number of frightened and freaked out (and injured) water park attendees.

 

[Lord Ipplepop]

During a 1ed game, the DM had a room that was completely frictionless, and there was a pit in the center of the room with a rusty razor blade in the bottom, across the entire width of the pit.
With no friction, the players cannot save themselves from falling into the pit, and can barely avoid falling on the rusty blade. The party was between 5 and 7th level, so the d6 in damage wasn't that huge of a deal, and the rusted blade had to make a "to hit" against armor to do damage... the fun part (for the DM) was trying to figure out how to get out of the trap. (hint: the secret door under the blade.)

 

[HellHound]

The opening scene for our Eberron campaign involved picking up a smuggled shipment of warforged parts at the docks, and then traveling them through the underground portions of the city, while being chased by security forces from house Deneith.

Two ponies pulling a cart at high speeds through tight hallways under the city, including running down short flights of steps and so on, while the party is trying to keep the various warforged parts from flying off the cart and repelling the security forces, only to discover that some of the parts in question belong to something 'special'... a warforged starts assembling itself from the parts in the cart, further adding to the chaos.

 

[tzor]

"You can always kill the Green Dragon."

Once upon a time a relatively low level 2E party was searching for a young "black" dragon in some relatively boring little swamp. Well our team of highly qualified but not always so accurate rangers followed the trail to a lake to a under water cave to a ... very large sleeping green dragon. (This was not the dragon we were looking for.) Seeing it sleeping and knowing it probably could kill us in its sleep the party bravely swam away.

Then whenever we were at a loss as what to do next, we - including the DM - always joked, "well you can always kill the Green Dragon."

One day we say, "I think we can kill the Green Dragon," so we went armed for green dragons to the green dragon lair. The green dragon was still "sleeping." And so we attacked it with all the power we could muster. HAVE AT THEE!

A few rounds later the Draco Liche came over and was quite upset at us hacking away like mad at his former scaly skin.

One interesting combat later ... a few survived and the draco liche was no more.

 

[Lord Zardoz]

A fight against a bunch of goblins led by a very evil warpriest. The goblins had tied a farm family to a series of stakes and were in the process of torturing them. In the first round of combat, the goblins set fire to them. The players had to defeat the goblins before the farm family all died.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[Galethorn]

Piratical True20 game.

PCs were pirates/privateers doing a job for the governor of Trinidad.

Long story short, the port was under siege by voodoo-style zombies when we arrived back.

My character, the group's captain, organized a tactical withdrawal. The governor's soldiers peppered the zombie crowd while civilians escaped. The zombies were breaking through the gate of the governor's mansion, and I ordered the soldiers to fall back to the ships. I then ordered my first mate (one of the other PCs, who was really good at running) to set a fuse to set off the island's main powder store. Everybody left, running through the island's secret tunnels, getting just far enough away to be safe when the mansion basically exploded.

There was one problem; the treasure. We were halfway to the port without it.

The crew pleaded with me to just forget it and be happy with stealing a ship. Nope, Captain Jack Fletcher wouldn't let the treasure go unclaimed. The crew continued on without me, assuming they would never see me again.

I made my way back to the mansion's ruins. There were zombies everywhere; literally hundreds. I drew my sword and raged. I chopped my way halfway to the treasure chest before the zombies hit me, and then I shrugged off serious wounds easily. When I reached the chest, I sheathed my sword and picked the chest up. Using it as a bludgeon, I--despite all odds (and the intentions of the GM, I later learned)--bashed my way through to the tunnel entrance.

Meanwhile, the rest of the party had been met by a flesh-freak (a huge mass of miscellaneous limbs and body-parts that can absorb creatures into itself), and one of them was being absorbed. I popped out of the end of the tunnel, saw the monster, and raged again. In short order, by way of some very good roles, I had cut my crewman free, and everyone made it to the ship.

With Trinidad burning behind the temporarily stunned flesh-freak, I had my crew load the guns and give the freaky bastard a full broadside. It was reduced to goo and we sailed away triumphantly.

 

[Tinner]

The opening encounter from Mad God's Key is excellent.
It's a mad scramble over barges full of everything from angry spiders and barking dogs to rotten fish. The environment plays a huge part in the scene, and it makes for an exciting and memorable encounter.

On a similar note, I recall an old Top Secret adventure from Dragon Magazine back in the day that sent the investigators to an amusement park. That was another great environment for an adventure. There was a fight on the overhead gondala ride. People were swiging back and forth between cable cars, there was a pitched gun battle in the tunnel of love, and all the while we had to be very careful not to endanger/harm any of the civilians in the park while we protected our charge.
Of course the fact that we were all playing heartless mercenaries meant we were less than careful with out shot placement.
Mayhem always seems fun at the time ...