Describe your most humiliating defeat

[Tzarevitch]

This one happened in a 2e Al-Qadim game.

Our group was trying to chase down a member of the evil Brotherhood of the True Flame (flame-specialist wizards). The dossier on the particular wizard were were after was that he was an insane pyromaniac. He had a plan to set bombs made of greek fire and gunpowder throughout the city to spread tholy fire and terror. Our PC cleric unintentionally cornered the guy in his hideout which turned out to be the very lab where he was making the gunpowder and greek fire.

As he looked around, he realized that the place was stacked floor-to-ceiling with barrels of gunpowder, lamp oil and greek fire. He also discovered that the guy we were looking for was standing in the center of the room with a lit torch and open kegs of greek fire and black powder.

Once the BBEG saw him, he demanded that the cleric back off or he'd light it up. The cleric then responded with words now infamous to us, "You wouldn't dare."

To make a long story short, we had to restart the campaign that night. The rest of us were scaling the walls of the warehouse to come in and back up the cleric so we never even saw the explosion. We just saw a flash all around us and the next thing any of us knew were in the afterlife.

The resulting explosion killed the flame mage, all of us, and several thousand people in the surrounding area. The fires in the city raged on for days. Thankfully, my character had a noble marid in his service who wasn't at the disaster. He used his powers to wind back time and allow us to undo that disastrous mission once he figured out what happened. Since then, that mission has gone down in infamy as our worst disaster.

Tzarevitch

 

[sniffles]

Our group has seldom had an ignominious defeat, but a month or so ago we started a new campaign that got off on the wrong foot.

Our party of 12th level adventurers were on their way to a dungeon crawl of sorts. The first session of the campaign began with entering the dungeon. We'd descended on ropes into a pit and found ourselves facing a portcullis with an invisible sentry on the other side. Our dwarf dungeon delver noticed some sigils on the portcullis that were partly covered by cloths tied over them. He tried to lift one of the cloths to see what was underneath. A beam of energy shot out and struck our monk/warmage/enlighted fist. Luckily she was wearing some sort of magic circlet that allowed her to increase her saves once per day. Otherwise she would have died on the spot.

The invisible guard kept poking fun at us from his post on the other side of the portcullis. He applauded when we were attacked by a couple of large constructs that did a lot of damage before we defeated them. Eventually his comments got on our nerves, so the enlightened fist shot an iceball (fireball with energy substitution) at him. Unfortunately he was still able to move enough to pull the rags off the sigil. Three PCs and our NPC healer were all in range of the ray. Boom. Three characters of a party of 5 dropped dead in the first 30 minutes of the campaign.

Luckily the healer (favored soul) had a spell that could bring him back from the brink of death, and he was able to get to two of the fallen PCs before they completely passed over to the other side. Then we had to haul the third person back up the ropes to the nearest town to get her raised (it was the enlightened fist). When we got back to the dungeon that same annoying invisible sentry was still there.