Do anything cool recently?

[Isida Kep'Tukari]

The last session we had was our back-up campaign (we play that when a certain player can't make our normal session), which is Incarnum-based 3.5 D&D. The group was investigating a warehouse, and in the process was attacked by some of the contents, namely a rug, a crate full of jars of jam, a bookcase, and a bunch of books. The rug ended up being worn like a poncho by our chaos incarnate. It kept trying to strangle her while she pummeled it to death. The totemist eventually broke the crate, and the jam, all over himself. The soulborn destroyed the bookcase, but not before she was attacked by a whole swarm of books.

All of this merriment was caused by two amoral ravids who had arrived through a small portal from the Positive Energy Plane that had been placed in a mummified corpse (usually as a religious gesture to free the soul, but this portal was actually active). I have never seen a group of PCs so cheerful to make the acquaintance of one-handed floating dragon-snake-extraplanar-thingies in my life. They dubbed them Wrack and Ruin, made them friends, and they ended up becoming instrumental in extracting said corpse from the clutches of possible corpse defilers (by floating the sarcophagus out of the warehouse under a shroud while the group pretended to be a bunch of monks taking it for burial... and none of them knew squat about religion, so they hilariously got every reference wrong even as they bluffed their way across town to a safehouse).

I don't think we'd laughed that hard in a while.

 

[WayneLigon]

We were doing a Savage Worlds one-shot featuring us as people with certain special abilities - I was a Shadow-like guy, trained in martial arts and some slight magic. We're doing Rocket Nazis on the Orient Express. The Nazis land on the train and we ... split up, with the two other combat people risking the roof of the train, and me trying to find the professor we and the Nazi's are looking for.

I open the door to the next car... and find it full of Nazi's, with their commander inches in front of me. I punched him so hard I put him out but then there are the other eight or so guys to contend with! I hold herr Commander up by the lapels so they are loath to shoot through him to get me, then I ask the GM if I can spend a bennie to luck out and figure how to turn on the rocket pack. So I turn him around and activate his rocket pack, sending him roaring through the car and knocking down all the Nazi's there, giving me time to regroup with the others.

 

[Mallus]

Let's see, cool stuff...

My 2.5 year-old AD&D campaign has just about hit the Full Gygax. Last session the party killed it's first dragon, every party member, including henchmen & hangers-on were mutated by "medical radiation" from the Expedition to the Barrier Peaks spaceship --which gave the cavalier 5 foot long "squid hands"-- one PC was Fireballed by a Raksasha she was trying to seduce --and said PC is only female because an evil artifact mask she's wearing changed her sex. This happened as they were galumphing across the Isle of Dread map on their way to Weiss and Hickmans's Pyramid.

Oh, and on the way they might try to free a hybrid of Ra and Jesus Christ -- the "Son of the Sun" aka "Eximius Stella Christum Solaris" or "Solar Christ Superstar" -- from magical bondage in order to get a Wish.

Our 13th Age campaign is the planning stages, But updating our 4e setting for the new campaign is already producing some pretty cool results. Such as today's idea: the League of Character Assassins. They use magic masks that transfer the sins committed by the wearer onto the soul of the person whose likeness the mask bears. Handy for destroying the lives of pious public figures!

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Let's see, cool stuff...

My 2.5 year-old AD&D campaign has just about hit the Full Gygax. Last session the party killed it's first dragon, every party member, including henchmen & hangers-on were mutated by "medical radiation" from the Expedition to the Barrier Peaks spaceship --which gave the cavalier 5 foot long "squid hands"-- one PC was Fireballed by a Raksasha she was trying to seduce --and said PC is only female because an evil artifact mask she's wearing changed her sex. This happened as they were galumphing across the Isle of Dread map on their way to Weiss and Hickmans's Pyramid.

Oh, and on the way they might try to free a hybrid of Ra and Jesus Christ -- the "Son of the Sun" aka "Eximius Stella Christum Solaris" or "Solar Christ Superstar" -- from magical bondage in order to get a Wish.

That is full of win!

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

2xPost

 

[Mallus]

That is full of win!

Thanks Danny!

As the session concluded around 11:30 PM, my friend's 11 year-old son who recently joined the game, turned to me with a big smile on his face and exclaimed, "That was great!". I'm pretty sure it's the highest compliment I've been paid in 20+ years of DM'ing. And proof that we'd achieved our goal of recreating the D&D we loved as kids.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Tonight, it was the casting of simple spells that saved several butts.

Our party encountered a trio of wights that were laying in ambush. The sword & board fighter was on point at the time, and he rolled a Nat 20 for his spot check. The DM ruled the wights didn't notice him noticing them, so he got a surprise round on them instead of them triggering their ambush. He smacked the closest one hard, but didn't kill it.

He then proceeded to get the highest initiative in the combat, and started off by finishing off the wight he hit first, then cleaving into another, wounding it.

My Marshal/Duskblsde/BttlSorc was dead last in initiative. By the time it was my turn to act in the first round, the wights were all dead. I decided to cast my extended Magic Circle of Protection from Evil on the lead warrior anyway- at 200 minutes duration, I figured it might come in handy...

Immediately after that casting, a hidden horde of vampire spawn jumped us, accompanied by shadows. But it was a surprising combat,

Between the MCoPfE, my Marshal Auras and a Prayer spell, our foes couldn't hit us, and we were racking up good damage totals...when we hit. Frickin' incorporeal undead shrugged off my 3 best shots, and others had similar accuracy problems.

We got through relatively unscathed. As it stands, only 2 PCs got hit with the nastier powers- one guy has a single negative level, and another took some ability damage.

 

[Bagpuss]

Not cool by me but by one of the players in my FATE "Heroes" type RPG I'm running. It was a good example of a succeed at cost from our game, one of my player's characters Travis Blake a Telekinetic Street Magician and a important contact of his were being chased by out of a shopping mall by a Pyrokinetic Rebirth Terrorist .

"Do you have a car anywhere?" He asks Dr Paula Powell, "Yes in the underground car park." So they dash down the stairs the street magician not seeing any object he can move to block the stairs behind him. Until he gets to the parking level, where he says I'll throw the nearest small car against the door.

Okay you need a +5, you've not moved anything that big before. Rolls and fails, or succeeds at major cost. Spends a Fate Point to get it to succeeds at minor cost. I ask him to describe it.

I lift the car, straining with all my will, it flips on it's side, metal screeches as it slides into place blocking the door. I turn to Doctor Powell, "So where are you parked?" She gestures to the now empty space. "I was parked there."

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Very cinematic!

 

[Umbran]

Had an excellent play by my players... and by me, in my Deadlands game.

One of the BBEGs in my game is an arms dealer, sometimes working with highly exotic weapons indeed. The players failed to keep this BBEG from getting access to a cache of petrified monster eggs, and failed to keep him from acquiring the method of restoring these to life. End result is that weaponized giant monsters are getting shipped around to wreak havoc.

One particular monster was quite powerful, so BBEG 1 had to make a deal with BBEG 2 to control the giant sasquatch. Monster and BBEG 2 were shipped to Deadwood, where the PCs were hanging out. Predictably, the PCs are there to combat the beast. Somewhat less predictably, the PCs also choose to engage BBEG 2. Usually they are wiser than to try to take the BBEGs head-on like that.

The party *pasted* them both. I have notoriously bad dice and card luck for my bad guys. Combine that with some seriously concentrated firepower, a really lucky spell (which managed to turn the monster against the BBEG) some mad-scienced mucilage and a bundle of TNT, the bad guys were halted. The Monster is well and truly dead. Well played, players!

BBEG 2, however, is not dead. Yes, they filled him full of lead. Yes, they blew him up. Yes, they then chopped off his head, filled his mouth with holy wafers, and so on. But merely removing his head won't kill this guy permanently*. And they're still carrying around his head!

Before this, BBEG 2 didn't actually have anything against the party. He thought they were kind of funny, honestly. But, whether or not it permanently kills you, gettin' blowed up *hurts*. So now he's really cheesed off, and I am going to have a super-fun time creeping the players out with his reanimation and return.


*As a GM, I love statements like this, don't you?