Stumbling out the gate

[Lonely Tylenol]

This past weekend, I started my Age of Worms adventure with a new group who have played together in the past, just not with me. They're an interesting bunch, and run the gamut from cautious and careful to reckless and silly.

In the first session, things were going all right. The party was exploring the Whispering Cairn, finding clues, starting to get an idea of how the place worked, when *wham* two characters died. This happened because the party got split up right before an important encounter

Spoiler

with the beetle swarm and mad slasher

which caused the larger group to run off, leaving the other two stranded on the lower level, only able to emerge one at a time...which they did, getting annihilated at the leisure of the creatures that were waiting for them.

It was kind of funny, since the two had gone ahead to explore something, and the rest of the party stayed behind, then got impatient and opened a tunnel into the area with the monsters that rushed out. Then the monsters just waited around in the main area for a while, and the other characters just wandered back expecting their party to be waiting there. Oops.

Now the one player is making a new character, and I allowed the other to bring in "the dead guy's son, who is remarkably like his father," although I'm only going to allow that one once. This is my new record for "number of characters killed in the first session". The group will triumph over the cairn, I'm sure, but it's just interesting to see things grind to a halt so soon after setting out on an adventure.

Anyway, use this thread to tell your stories of adventures that crashed and burned in the first session, or at least suffered some major setbacks that derailed their plans until they could undo the damage inflicted upon those plans.

 

[Fletchard]

Though my whole campaign didn't grind to a halt, one of my wizards learned not to be a wizard when she charged past two kobolds to get to a third, and then charged passed them again to get to one that popped out near where she was in the first place. I think the 4th attack of opportunity killed her. Had to drag her body out etc... so much work.

I should say that she should've learned to not be a wizard at that time. Later in the campaign, she came upon a pit trap in the middile of a small cave. Instead of jumping over it as I intended, they spent 5 minutes looking through the spells and then decided to cast earthquake in order to cause a cave-in that would fill the pit with rubble so that they could then simply walk across it...

 

[Whisper72]

Well... in a pbem game some time ago, we were playing two teams, evil PC's against good PC's. I was among the evil PC's. We scryed the good group and thought we could get the drop on them as an opening move. We decided to set an ambush, teleporting in as two teams, attacking from various sides while the good group was in some corridor.

Apparently we lost surprise, they had 'felt' the scrying...

Among the good group (was a high powered game), there turned out to be a silver dragon. It breathed on one group, the ones supposed to form the anvil, pretty much annihilating them in the confined space. The remaining group which was supposed to be the hammer was suddenly on the defensive. Out of eight or so PC's, three got out alive, among which my PC. Talking about a plan going wrong...

 

[Hjorimir]

I met a bunch of guys down at a local gamestore and started a campaign for them. There were five players and nobody wanted to play a cleric. Knowing that the adventure was decently dangerous I provided an NPC cleric willing to accompany them on the adventure. He asked each PC in turn if he could go with them...they all said no.

So, later when they are far out of town, the elf and dwarf get into it with one another and exchange blows resulting in one dead elf and one seriously messed up dwarf. Enter the ruins and fight what else but a metric ton of skeletons...hrm...what are we missing here? Result dead human rogue, dead human ranger, dead dwarven fighter, and one seriously messed up human mage who flees the ruins and tries to find his way back to town. No ranger, completely lost, no food (left his back in the ruins), he ended up lost for days and eventually died alone in the wilderness.

Fortunately, all of the players took it in stride and we still laugh about it today.

 

[werk]

Running an old Dungeon adventure (I think something Huddles, the one with the leprechaun painting the cow on the cover, and in the adventure) for old gaming buddies that hadn't played in a while. My gaming style had obviously matured, while they were in 'run in and kill stuff' mode.

We started the adventure, and their characters grew immediately frustrated. The goal was to hide out at the farm and investigate what was going on (the barn had been burned down and other strange things were going on), but they were not having that. Within an hour of arriving at the farm, and aggressively asking questions, the farmer said that he thought it might be the neighbor, with which they were having a small fued.

Next thing I knew, they had burst into the neighbor's home, and had him pinned against the wall screaming at him to confess. Being a weak little halfling with no clue what was going on or who they were, he confessed, then peed himself. The character leading everything then killed the innocent farmer, for no real reason, and returned to their employer to tell him the good news. I had the farmer basically kick them out, calling them evil monsters, and rounding up his children for safety.

The party then left, slowly, to travel they knew not where...That's when the posse caught up to them.

FYI, don't play evil characters unless it is an evil campaign, and don't play CN as evil just because evil is not allowed. They still had a great time, but not the way that I thought.

 

[luke_twigger]

I'm not sure if it was the absolute first session, but certainly within the first 3 sessions of a campaign we had a TPK where the entire group got killed by goblins, only for the DM afterwards to realise the goblin stats were wrong (can't remember if it was a typo in the module or if the DM screwed up) and they were much better in combat than they ought to have been. So we rewound time and the following session we played out the entire encounter again, thankfully prevailing on the second attempt.