[nostalgia] Looking back at the stupid crap we used to do

[Henry]

Ever have a group of friends design the combat SSD for the Battlestar Galactica using the Star Fleet Battles Rules?

Mine did.


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For my own transgressions, many of my dungeons ripped off direct pieces from other modules, and stuck them together on one meandering map. The most crazy, however, came from a Spelljammer "Evil World". It was a pretty nasty world where all good and neutral gods had been exiled, and the powers of evil, through a Powerful Lich and his Undead and Demonic and Abomination armies, had destroyed all of civilization, save for the last bastion of humanity, guarding a pool which had instant healing properties. The pool was the only reason the place survived. The PC's by themselves took on numerous threats, helped the last humans and demi-humans re-contact their old gods, and went on a secret mission to destroy the lich.

Had I played it cunningly, they would not have survived. Instead, they triumphed. Despite the craptastitudinous plot, the surreal challenges they faced, and the railroading (they crash-landed on the planet after a wizard destroyed their helm, and there was no way to leave other than to steal the lich's secret spelljammer helm) ---

that was some of the most fun I ever had playing D&D. The players in it still talk about elements of it to this day.

 

[ciaran00]

Two that I remember (that I probably should tell you about):
* Doing a homebrew version of Dark Sun that was a complete ripoff of Dune
* Trying to make conversions of Final Fantasy: Tactics character classes for my homebrew version of Dark Sun that was a complete ripoff of Dune.

Needless to say evidence of those documents have been burned.....

ciaran

 

[diaglo]

Ever have a group of friends design the combat SSD for the Battlestar Galactica using the Star Fleet Battles Rules?

we did too. but first we tried it with the Car Wars rules.

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

The things I have in notebooks and folders...

Just off the top of my head:
1. "The New Olympus Quest"-My first attempt at a campaign. I took all the modules I had at the time (Keep on the Boarderlands, Isle of Dread, Against the Giants, Village of Homlet, and Tomb of Horrors), drew up a world map, and dropped them where they fit. I added a few teleportation portals conveniently located next to the start of each adventure, and gave the whole thing a name that sounded really cool to my 12 year old mind but had nothing to do with the adventures or the world. Then I covered the whole folder with really cheezy stickers of dragons and other monsters. I ran one session for my brother, a friend of mine, and my uncle (who I now realize was high the whole day, but then we just thought he was acting silly).
2. My basic D&D character (whose name I forget) that I played for a few years. An elf who had almost every magic item in the basic & expert books, and had lost his arm in combat with a dragon. He made himself a new arm from some bones found in the dragons lair, animated it (I don't remember how), and went back in and killed the dragon. He maxed out the levels of elf, then I borrowed someones AD&D Players Handbook and "converted" him to AD&D, convieniently making him several levels higher.
3. A series of halfling characters named Billbo, Cillbo, Dillbo, Eillbo, Fillbo, etc. All brothers, all fighters, all died at first level in a friends campaign.
4. A series of Thieves named Slither, Slither 2, Slither 3, etc.
5. A Marvel Super Heros character named "Graffitti" whose power was to change the color of things that he touched with his fingertips. Not a very effective power in combat, his favorite attack was to try to poke someone in the eyes (three stooges style) and turn their eyes black so they were blinded. He was the laughing stock of our long running lunchtime game in highschool, but I played him for 2 years. He never did amount to much, but I thought he had so much potential.

 

[der_kluge]

That's great, CL.

The first D&D game I ever DM'd was based solely on Ultima. The Nintendo version, that is. So, there were 8 dungeons scattered about the world, in which the heroes had to try to retrieve something from them. I think I ran that game once. Hey, we were kids, our organizational skills were lacking.

And I made a rogue character (boy, I loved thieves back then!), named Xapy the Black Ghost. Well, I thought it was a cool name, until everyone laughed at it.

 

[Melan]

I was going through one of my old folders, from back when I was in high school, and I pulled out a set of maps for a campaign that I had created. I don't remember all the details of these maps, but it was probably created when I was playing Wizardry VII, so it had to do with PCs meeting technology. And I remember one map with robots on a prison wall shooting 50-cal machine guns at the PCs. Ugh, that was awful.

Awful? I had an entire dungeon full of real, honest to goodness Savant Guards! And at the end, the characters recovered the "Orb of Ultimate Power" (guess what it was based on) and became demigods.

And you know what? I am not even ashamed of it. It was extremely cool for the time.

Also the moment (same adventure) when the characters were exploring a city's sewer system, when they found a way leading straight up to street level, to an isolated courtyard... It was nighttime and it was swarming with undead, all controlled by a Lich. It was crazy.

 

[Rel]

The first group that I ever was involved with was a bunch of guys from my Boy Scout troop. Most of them were playing "gods" by this point and I was admitted to their group, primarily so they could all use me as a pawn to plot and plan against each other.

One of the other guys (the only one I became lasting friends with) decided that the whole thing was getting kind of stupid. So he devised (stole actually) a plan involving the Warlock's Wheel (taken from a Larry Niven story). The Warlock's Wheel was a device that spun itself using magic. The faster it spun, the more magic it used to make itself harder (to withstand the forces involved) and the faster it would spin. Eventually it would suck all the magic out of an area at which point it was spinning at a rotational velocity that was a small percentage of the speed of light. With the magic gone that would make it tough enough to withstand this speed, it exploded, killing everybody nearby.

So my pal invited everybody to a dinner party to show off his new wheel. It spun, they lost their magic, it exploded, everybody died. Or at least that's what should have happened. Instead everybody bitched and whined and complained that their character would never die to something like that. So we quit playing with them. Which is what we should have done in the first place.

Oh, and my character was a Thief whose middle name was "Stickyfingers". Subtle, eh?

 

[jasper]

Saucer section from Enterprise with light sabers, phasers, stun grenades, etc.
magic missle machine guns. aka mac 10s
multiple staffs of the arch magi (add another column to the magi staff)
hiding gold pieces in blocks of cheese
t rex in a dungeon. don't ask how he fitted through the door.

 

[Remathilis]

I had a horrible D&D world, which was a mix of 1992 D&D Cyclopedia, Star Wars (stromtroopers, the emperor, and a "death star" like weapon, all magical of course) and final fantasy 3 (the espers were gods, and each character had a "special" ability unique to them.) They had an airship and a host of NPCs (21 NPCs, 2 PCs!) which they could take up to four NPCS with them at a time. The final fight (thankfully never reached) was a demi-god dragon with 1250 hp.

Certain members of my gaming group never let me live that down...

 

[BlackMoria]

I recently discovered the first dungeon (about 15 levels) that I ever designed in one of my boxes of stuff. The dungeon's genesis was some 25 years ago.

I had a room legend of monsters and treasure for each level. The scratch marks were still there from when I stroked out stuff the party defeated and acquired.

My god.... I gave absolutely gave no thought for ecology. I had a group of LG dwarves in a room and 10 ft across the corridor was a room of orcs. I had a dragon in a room barely big enough for its body, let alone having any regard for how the poor creature left the room or even traverse the standard 10x10 corridors. I had put a +5 sword on the first level with the dungeon in a room with 3 orcs....and the sword was in the chest, so the orcs weren't even using the sword. And more and more of the same sort of stuff all through the dungeon.

Good thing back then that noone that I was playing with cared a fig about ecology and it was all good fun.

Still, I look at this original creation of mine, today, and grimace....