Tell me about your Total Party Kills

[Richards]

Our group just experienced our first 3E TPK, playing through "Headless" from Dungeon #89. SPOILERS follow:

The setup: an evil duergar necromancer cleric of Orcus is constructing a deadgate in an abandoned frost giant fortress. Once finished, the deadgate will whisk the souls of anyone who dies within a 200-mile radius straight to the Abyss. The PCs have been receiving prophetic dreams from their respective deities and have learned about the deadgate and its location. They head there to put a stop to it.

Unfortunately, Veridian the druid is slain by one of the retrievers guarding the fortress. While the others are fighting off the other retrievers, this one slices off her head and scuttles away to add it to the deadgate (which is powered by the decapitated heads of sentient beings). The PCs make it through the next couple of rooms without incident, but then Tiatianna the sorcerer is slain by a finger of death from a death slaad. The party is now down to Justaine the cleric and Soriah the fighter, along with Kane the awakened dire wolf (Veridian's animal companion) and Pyracor the toad familiar. Since time is of the absolute essence (once that deadgate's completed, all bets are off), they decide to press on.

The next room, they meet up with a frost giant jarl who tells them a sad tale of how he was defeated by the necromancer cleric who slew his men and cursed him to remain on his throne for eternity, looking upon the slain bodies of his followers. He begs the PCs to help rid his fortress of the evil, and for once, the players buy into his story hook, line, and sinker. (They're ususally a more distrusting bunch.) This is unfortunate, since the jarl is lying his eyes out; he quizzes them on their capabilities ("Do you think you have enough combat spells ready to take out a necromancer?"), and they blab about their weaknesses to him like he was their long-lost best friend ("Well, we lost most of our offensive firepower when our druid and sorcerer were slain. I have some spells left, but they're mostly low-level at this point."). [It was exceedingly difficult to keep a straight face at this point, let me tell you.] So, having heard all he needs to know, he calls for the attack, and a bunch of the dead bodies on the floor rise up (they're frost giant mohrgs), as does he - it turn out he was lying about being stuck in his throne, as well.

We played it out until the final end, but the conclusion was foregone. I didn't even use the simulacra of the evil necromancer (riding nightmares, no less) that were supposed to be part of the ambush. They went down fighting to the last, uh, being: Pyracor lasted the longest, and took out a badly-damaged mohrg with a potion of fire breath before getting squished. TPK.

Of course, I realised I had an opportunity I don't always have. The next adventure, instead of having everyone roll up new PCs, their old ones "wake up" in the Abyss in front of Orcus (the deadgate having since been completed, using their own heads!). They have absolutely no memories of their former lives, and Orcus informs them that they are demons who tried to overthrow his rule. Rather than kill them outright, he has decided to let them earn back their true positions at his side. He had their essences put into the feeble humanoid forms they now wear (the better to infiltrate humanoid society), and they must perform missions for him. If they're successful, they might one day be returned to their "normal" forms and be given back their demonic memories. Orcus even went so far as to rename them: Justaine is now Germtongue, Tiatianna is Titmouse, Soriah is Snakeheart, and Veridian is Vilechild. Kane, the awakened dire wolf, was renamed Karcass, and that proven to be an appropriate name as Orcus turned him into an undead mohrg with a snap of his fingers as an example of what can happen when you cross him. The same fate awaits the PCs if they fail in their mission.

So far, it's been fun. Their first act upon being sent to the Prime Material Plane in their planar bodies was to kill two paladins of Hieroneous to gain their armor and weapons. Those guys are going to need a whole lot of atonements if they ever get their true memories back! (And then they're going to have to head back to the deadgate and shut it down before they do anything else.)

Johnathan

 

[arwink]

It came when I was running the party through If Thoughts Could Kill. The party make-up was a little wierd. No tank fighters, no straight-out combat machines. Everyone focused on sneak attacks, tumbling and magic to do their damage. I think there was a fighter/rogue, a psion/psi warrior, a sorcerer/edritch master, a druid and a cleric/rogue.

Then they encounter the psi-killer and its anti-magic effect, as well as a mindflayer or three. One charmed fighter/rogue, a creature that's immune to damage and some serious problems with damage resistance pretty much stalled the game then and there.

They put up a damn good fight though.

 

[EarthsShadow]

The only TPK I ever ran was one the characters walked right into with the choice of avoiding, so when it happened all I did was sit back and laugh.

The group was entirely 4th level, one a psion/sorceror, one a monk, one a pure sorceror, another a wizard, and one a rogue. They just exited one small cave in which they killed a bunch of orcs and zombies, and after resting for a while they continue exploring the mountainside.

After a few minutes they come to another cave, this one much larger. I did roll for a random encounter and it did come up, so I went along with it to see what they would do. They heard hefty laughter coming from within the cave, and upon entering the cave and making a couple of Hide checks they saw two Hill Giants playing toss the elves and goblins into the cooking pot. None of the characters save one had a good alignment, all else were neutral. As they debated what to do, the psion/sorceror character decided to take out his crossbow and fire it at one of the giants.

Neededless to say, they managed to kill one of the giants but did get smashed themselves. They felt that I had set them up, I told them that the giants had no clue they were there until one of them fired the crossbow bolt (which didn't do any damage), and they could have walked or ran away. They said that's not what players do. I was laughing for a long time after that.

 

[incognito]

My TPK

Players:

1/2-ling Wiz 5(evoker)
Human Ranger2/Rog1/Cleric of Farlangan 1
Human Ranger 2/Rog3
1/2-Orc Cleric of Obad-hai2/Barbarian3

and an NPC L4 Paladin on a War Horse (NOT a special Mount, Although the party assumed he was)

How it happened:

The ‘scouts’ (The two Rogues) stumbled upon a gnoll war party guarding the moat house from Monte’s RttToEE. One of the Rogues accidentally gave their position away (failed move silently)

All told there were 40 Gnolls. I broke them up into simple search bands:
5 regular gnolls x 2, one gnoll with an obvious signal horn
4 regular gnolls with a CR3 leveled Lieutenant (ranger)

The rest of the Gnolls would stay together, with the Chief (Level 5 barbarian), and other lieutenant (CR3 ranger again)– unless the party threatened the main camp, which would cause the Chief, the other lieutenant, and 3 gnolls to protect the tribe.

The gnolls has some minor potions (aid, CLW, CMW, Enlarge) and the following 3, more powerful magic items: Quaal’s feather token: whip ->lieutant#1, potion of Fire Breath ->Lieutenant #2, +1 battle axe Chief ->

The party was putting the smack down on first band of regular gnolls, but failed to address the signal horn. The second search party came, and was quickly down to 2 members, who ran, and blew their signal horn again! Note that they ran back towards the gnoll camp. The third party of gnolls homes in on the party, and the wizard who had been sneaking ahead invisibly opens up on the lieutenant with Magic Missile (his first offensive spell of the day – he had been conserving). This did not kill the lieutenant, but got his attention – he loosed the Quaal’s feather token: Whip on the mage – who could not wrestle free, and had no Verbal-only escape spells.

Still with the NPC helping, that party was looking ok, and it was only once the lieutenant blew the horn to summon the chief that things got ugly. The party dropped the lieutenant, the next round, and there was only a single Gnoll left of all three original hunting parties. He ran and the party chased him 100 or so feet., leaving the wizard behind, for now (they thought).

They ran into the Chief’s band.

The chief had the RUN feat, and ran 200’ ahead of his band (40x5). He provoked 2 AoOs to get into the center of the party. The two rogues tried to flank him, and because he was a L5 barbarian, failed (but still hit him for *some* damage). The chief RAGED, and took his full attack with the +1 battle axe on the Ranger/Rogue in two hands, dropping him in one round (d8+10 x2), proving that CON is always an important stat. STILL things did not look so bad. The party had a single bead of force that they threw at the chief, who took 5d6 and was trapped in the force sphere.

Mean while the second lieutenant, drank the potion of fire breath and went to town with it. 3d6 of damage, save for ½ (or none when you are a Rogue) may not seem like much, but to a Paladin in full plate, and a grappled wizard with bad luck, it was ugly. They took all three rounds of it (9d6) – this killed the wizard, the previously injured Paladin, and his Warhose (total damage was 35 – but the last roll was the killer – the other tow were average - the paladin went from 12. to -3 in one round).

Now things were looking grim. Two party members faced of against a leveled Gnoll, and 2 Regular Gnolls while the Chief watched, drank healing potions, and grew fatigued.
The Cleric/Barbarian was a strong tank with a low AC. He raged. He dropped one Gnoll a round like clockwork... And then it happened: the lieutenant rolled a 20 to hit and was using light picks as his weapon - that‘s a x4 crit to you and me folks, and it’s easy to confirm a crit vs a shield less raging Cleric Barbarian 4d4+16 later last source of healing dropped with 1 gnoll and the lieutenant wounded, but up.

The player debated running (he had used his expeditious retreat), but decided to try and tactically circle around the force bubble in an attempt to lure the gnolls away from the downed PCs, so he could RUN in and give the cleric a healing draught. And it almost worked, Trouble is, when you run, you lose you DEX bonus to you AC, which in this characters case, was a LOT (4). He took 2 javelins while scooting over to the cleric, for d6+4, and d6+2, this resulted in 15 points of damage, placing him at -1

End of Line

 

[Thanee]

No TPK's so far, and I'm happy about that.

Closest one was when two chars were dead and one was forced to another plane of existance.

They were fighting an archnemesis (Drow Sorcerer/Archmage), who had prepared a clever trap for the party, using their own Scry/Teleport routine against them.

When they teleported next to him, they found themselves in the dark cavern, they had seen, but he was not there. Instead, they were surrounded by Spectres and Iron Golems. The Dark Elf came around a few rounds later (after buffing up) to join the carnage.

Anyways, in the end, one prismatic spray had send the party cleric to another plane and the paladin was killed by various hits and spells. The last party member, the wizard, killed the Drow and all the other remaining nasties (Iron Golems, the Spectres had been prime targets in the beginning for obvious reasons) and afterwards died from the secondary damage of the Iron Golem's poison (a natural 1 on the save really doesn't help there).

When the cleric finally came back (after calling a djinn to guide her back to the material plane and using sending to get someone to teleport her over to her companions), nothing was alive in the dark cavern anymore.

Bye
Thanee

 

[avatar of blood]

i was the GC

it was spycraft

they were trying to difuse a bomb but no one had demolitions so they were sitting there, god they were stupid, so they decided it would be best to try and shoot it

I even told them that was a really bad i dea and about all of them were ready just to run, when one of them pulls his gun and fires it at the bomb

everyone died
hahahaha

 

[Guilt Puppy]

I've never DMed a full-on, roll-up-some-new-characters TPK, but I've come close:

The cast:
Elven Cleric of Corellon Larethian
Half-Orc Barbarian
Half-Elf Monk
Halfling Wizard
Halfling Rogue

Party is exploring underground crypts for some reason (they'd made some good Gather Information checks which put them farther into the story than they should have been... but they weren't combat-heavy crypts, just a place to introduce a powerful NPC for them to get satisfaction from killing later on.)

There is one minor encounter in the crypts -- four ghasts, the BBEG's guardians.

Going down the staircases, they see four corpses in the walls, and notice they look far more recent than the skeletal remains that had lined the hallways up to this point. Cleric announces "I walk up to them, and see what they do." Barbarian follows him.

Once he's within ten feet, corpses spring up. Both parties were expecting the encounter (the party was carrying torches in an otherwise dark area), so no surprise round: Roll for initiative.

Ghasts win for initiative. In the first round, both the Cleric and the Barbarian are paralyzed.

Monk and Rogue go down to try and kill the ghasts. They manage to take one out, but get paralyzed themselves. Wizard has the sense to stay back throwing spells at them, manages to kill another ghast -- but she's a halfling, so she can't outrun them and cast spells every round (and doesn't think to double-move, and cast every other round). She too gets paralyzed.

Description of ghasts chewing on their paralyzed bodies for a while, then enter BBEG who calls them off, and sends the party on their merry way (he was planned to have no particular desire to kill off intruders, or people he did not consider a threat... so it was only a half-way fudge to their survival)

Later, the Cleric has an argument with me about what "I walk up to them" entails. (Also later, they go back in, manage to kill the ghasts, only to find out that BBEG is way too powerful for them to kill at this point... they get a lot of information from him, because the evil thing that they were researching was really just a minor game of his that he didn't care much about, but they're still frustrated that they don't just get to kill him in the face.)

Closest I've been to TPK, aside from once or twice when I had to fudge allowing the players to surrender (when it's happened it's been my mistake, having them fight stuff that's just too powerful). In my opinion, TPK is reserved for cases of total party stupidity -- and they haven't coincided yet.

 

[jdavis]

The majority of our adventures end that way, of course we used to play alot of Chthulu and Werewolf.

Then there was Tomb of Horrors.....and Tomb of Horrors.......and then after that Tomb of Horrors, after we lost the third party we just gave up, we spent more time getting characters than actually playing. We never did finish Tomb of Horrors.

 

[Asheron]

If you think that name is bad, one new player wanted to have a cleric in an egyptian-styled campaign with a name of "Mr. J. Jackson".

How about Ruud Gullit the Paladin?

 

[0-hr]

Our latest TPK was pretty simple:

We were a group of 4th level characters, so the GM found an exciting CR 4 creature to put up against us:

Ogre(CR 2) + Half-Dragon Template (CR 2) = a "normal" challenge that should have expended approximately 20% of our resources for the day.

Well, it starts out with it's handy breath weapon and gets all of us for 610 damage just like the template says. Well, that is 33 points average and our toughest guy had like 25 hit points (and failed his save). The rest of us were dead weather we saved or not.

Thanks Mr. CR System!