• NOW LIVE! Into the Woods--new character species, eerie monsters, and haunting villains to populate the woodlands of your D&D games.

What is the most over-the-top wildest D&D campaign you've been in?


log in or register to remove this ad

I played a character in a campaign where we were stuck in Candyland -- it was pretty funny until we encountered the starvation and cannibalism. :)

Oh, that did trigger a suppressed memory.

We played in a summer campaign in a Candyland setting. The Candyman was a powerful despot with wicked servants like yo-yo wielding giants, a marionette golem named Mr. Snickers (he was armed with a power drill that he'd attack knees with) and the countervailing magical force in the campaign was a mighty and eccentric wizard named Caramba who made hot pink magic items. Most of our PCs were normals who had been accidentally gated in, but one PC was a local paladin named Percival Heathbar. He wore fruit leather armor with gum drop studs.
 

My first online game (play by post) was set in the Land of Black Ice (World of Greyhawk). Weird and unusual, perhaps, but probably not over the top... even with the blue bugbears.

After that, I devised an undersea campaign (play by post). Weird for some, I suppose. I also ran a chat-based game set in Hades, where the PCs began as larvae and worked their way up (down?) the demonic ladder. THAT one was wacky!

After that, it was on to my current undersea chat-based game.

I have also been working on a new campaign, where PCs begin as small forest animals. That ought to be interesting.
 

Last year I ran a bachelor party one-shot full of innuendo and sophmoric escapades. About the only thing I can share without suffering the ire of Eric's Grandma™ are a few place-names like Mourning Wood and Bone Henge.

Here's a custom enemy I created for the event:


Black Chalice Warrior Maiden


The Black Chalice Warrior Maidens are clad in chain mail bikinis and black beaver-pelt cloaks. They dye their hair black, and braid them into ornate pigtails ending in bright red bows.



Black Chalice Warrior Maiden Level 1 Skirmisher
Medium Natural Humanoid (Natural) XP 100
Initiative +3 Senses Perception +1;
HP 26; Bloodied 13
AC 15; Fortitude 15, Reflex 13, Will 13
Speed 6



Bastard Sword (standard; at-will)
+6 vs AC; 1d10 + 3 damage



Javelin (standard; at-will)
Ranged 10/20; +6 vs AC; 1d6+ 3 damage
2 javelins



Wardrobe Malfunction (standard; encounter)
Close burst 5; +2 vs Will; In the fury of battle, the Warrior Maiden's already skimpy clothing becomes twisted, tangled, and unglued showing more than her opponent was expecting. Opponents take -2 to AC, and grant Combat Advantage to enemies until the end of the Warrior Maiden's next turn.



Alignment: Unaligned Languages: Common
Skills: Intimidate, Athletics
Str 16 (+3) Dex 13 (+1) Wis 13 (+1)
Con 10 (0) Int 10 (0) Cha 10 (0)



Equipment: Bastard Sword, 2 javelins, beaver pelt cloaks



Black Chalice Warrior Madien Tactics
The Warrior Maidens always work in pairs to take down the biggest threats. They strategically time their battle dances to maximize the use of their encounter power.
 

Well, for a few sessions my group played what we call the Nexus campaign. Essentually, it was d20 Sliders - We had two Jedi (from different SW eras and one had an R2 droid), a FR Druid who rode a Rhino named Stampy, a guy from Fallout (complete with talking knight-rider-esq car named...Car). I was a Warforged named Crucible (the lord of blades) from an Eberron-based campaign setting who eventually weilded a chainsword fullblade (3d8 damage - oh yeah).

First "slide" had us fighting trollocs in Wheel of Time setting, and then we went to Ravenloft and took down Straud (DM used the Ravenloft WotC adventure book). It's not our main campaign, but whenever we get back to it our characters are going to have some R&R on the world of BESM.
 

Oh GAWD... all from 1st Ed AD&D

BURRA : (ca. 1980) On a DM's world set in Zelazny's Amber, the PCs were fighting some urban warfare resistance against an occupying invader. One PC uses Polymorph Self to become.... a Giant Pink Bunny who acts in a street play to lampoon the invaders. Other PCs follow suit, polymorphing into giant rabbits as the PCs urban resistance army takes shape.

Some player names the PCs group and BURAA is born: The Bunny Underground Resistance Army of Amber.

"By Kos and Magni": (ca. 1981) SomethingorOther-the-Dwarf has The Invulnerable Coat of Arnd, Girdle and Gauntlets and TWO Hammers of Might, named Kos and Magni.

"By Kos and Magni!" says SomethingorOther during one session - and BOTH gods show up at the mention of their names.

"Where's the Giants": (ca. 1981) Same SomethingorOther-the-Dwarf jumps down a bottomless shaft to reach the realm of the Giants. Wearing the Invulnearble Coat of Arnd and being consequently immune to physical damage, Dwarf creates a Looney Tunes crater at bottom of bottomless pit. Climbing out of crater, the Dwarf declares angrily" "Where's the GIANTS" . Everything wrong with the mechanics of 1st edition in one paragraph.

The Aaracockran: (ca. 1981) A 18th level thief with Mournblade AND Stormbringer does an invisible flying backstab from great height on some Greater ArchDuke of Hell on his homeplane, utterly anihilating the Archduke with damage exceeding like.... 300+ hits or something like that with one single attack. Archduke dies. Campaign (same one that Somethingorother-the-Dwarf is in) goes down in gaming circle lore as the "Picnics to the Lower Planes" Campaign.

It was utterly silly. Nearly thirty years later, it still makes me smile and chuckle.

Lightning Bolt!: (ca. 1981) Game is taking place in my parents' basement which is illuminated by a cheap chandelier affixed to the ceiling. One of those five-bulbs-in-one-things from the 70s.

During late-night play session, the Deck of Many Things makes it quarterly appearance. Some monster appears to attack the party. Player playing the Magic-User has a tennis racket in his hand that is lying around the basement. Shouting out "lightning bolt!!" as he points at the DM excitedly... at the same time he sweeps his other arm upward...player forgets he is holding a tennis racket and DESTROYS the chandelier, sending blue electric flashes in the room for a split-second before the basement room plunges into total darkness.

TOTAL SILENCE as we wait breathlessly to see if my Mom heard (of course she did. It was LOUD).

Somebody pipes up: "Holy Sh$t. Did you cast Darkness too?"


The. Most. Embarassing. Gaming. Incident. Ever.: (Saturday, April 10, 1982) Player in a Middle Earth campaign rolls high for his race option and is granted the singular privilege of playing a Noldor Elf. Player is deliriously happy with his character. Bree is attacked by the forces of the Witch King of Arnor, (for some reason) and the town burns to the ground. Instead of playing out the epic Battle of Bree, a simple saving throw of 3 on a D20 is imposed. All players agree this is fair and makes sense.

Seven players make the save vs. death, the Noldor Elf FAILS. DM takes mercy and allows another saving throw. Noldor Elf fails again with a 1. DM declares the Noldor Elf dead in the Battle of Bree.

Player (who is age 25 at the time) goes into a RAGE for several minutes, stunning the rest of the teenaged gaming circle into shocked silence. Player takes character sheet and crumples it up into a ball and THROWS IT AT THE DM, declaring with sneering contempt: "You killed it, you keep it."

Not an over-the-top anecdote perhaps, but... still. Nearly thirty years later, "You killed it, you keep it!" remains the battle cry of our gaming circle when a PC dies. Three of us from that group still game together after all these years (Somethingorother-the-Dwarf is one of them, as it so happens).

But not (happily) the player of the Noldor Elf. He left our gaming circle loooooong ago.
 
Last edited:

Currently, I'm developing a world that we ran as a one shot. In it, we played the role of a ronin, basically a bunch of hapless warriors who were kicked out of a lord's service and left to our own devices.

The world was supposed to reflect if Labyrinth was written by Yoji Enokido. Which I think we pulled off petty well, everyone had so much fun that it's becoming our regular campaign setting.

We had battles where our fighters where bouncing around and cutting through Goblins driving crudely built Mech suits. They had heaps of other little gadgets as their Labyrinth city was made from Magitek.

A group of thieves and cut throats made up entirely out of teenage girls almost took over a small city by taking turns at imposing the prince.

While in the background a big Clerical supply company tried to eliminate free will by divine control. They were going to use giant Divine-tek irons to flatten out the barrier between material and celestial planes and then have the gods crowned boss of everybody, all the time.

Everything revolved heavily around the rule-of-cool. Definitely the weirdest, non-typical DnD game I've ever played.
 

Nothing as crazy as some posters.

But my favorite campaign that I ran from the 90's involved a time travel event.

The PCs traveled back in time against their will by an act of a demigod (Cyronax the Ice Devil, my namesake) ...... it was roughly 80 years in the past. The time travel rules IMC worked thus: you could technically be pushed into the past, present, or future but you couldn't survive simultaneously with your true self. (It was sort of like TimeCop from the mid-90s ... what a trip).

Anyway, the party had two years to figure out how to get to their home time or at least sometime else before the birthday of the party's gnome (the oldest member of the human, human, gnome party). If they reached that date, the gnome would simply evaporate due to the nature of time travel.

The trio (plus two tag-along NPCs) were dead set on saving their demi-human friend.

Unfortunately, that awesome summer campaign was suspended due to college. Never finished it.

C.I.D.
 

The most over the top ongoing campaign (sort of), was a ludicrously high level 3.5 game. This reached its peak of over the topness when one character had a pair of portable ring gates surgically grafted onto the front of his shoulders, and a third placed around his wrist, leaving his left hand permanently on the far side of it. The wrist ring gate connected to a room in his castle where half a dozen mid-level clerics working in shifts would constantly cast healing spells on him, and the two shoulder ones into two seperate rooms, each filled with a half dozen combat wizards. These would all chuck spells through the gates during combat, allowing him to stand there idly quipping at foes and occasionally dodging, without having to lift a finger to fight himself. And he was far from being the most stupidly powerful in the group.
It was apparent from the outset that this was going to get a bit silly. We abandoned it entirely after the third session, when a "your kingdom is besieged by an alliance of evil nations" plotline was thwarted by the party simply shifting the entire kingdom to a nice private demiplane.

One of the more ridiculous one offs I've run was a test of improvisation. I gave the players a week to come up with any character concept they wanted, statted out in any system they liked or just left as a description. I read these one hour before the game, converted them all to one system, and came up with a plot for a four hour session using these characters. The party included Mild Mannered Jack, an accountant who could flip his character sheet to become Daring Pueblo, the world's least secret secret super hero; The X Axis, an unspecified number of nazis; a mass hallucination, whose form was chosen after each scene change by a random player; and Statisticus, a giant lizard monster constructed from parts of other games. The player of Statisticus gave me no description, just stats from a dozen different games, ranging from D&D to Vampire, Magic to Gemcraft. They ended up being agents for the department of Metafictional Research, a future weapons development group seeking to weaponise the fiction of the 21st century. In this case they were test running Statisticus, a lizard warrior constructed from weaponised RPG and Videogame parts. The whole thing got very silly and broke the fourth wall into tiny little pieces.
 

i once ran a session entirely in klingon. took us months of planning and practice to pull off.



i also ran a small campaign based on Wind in the Willows, Watership Down, and Secret of Nimh. but that was more Gamma World then D&D.


edit: a few years (5 or 6) back i played as a guest for a friends campaign. one of his players was leaving and he wanted to give him a big sendoff with an Epic level session. i played a Blackguard. one of the guys gave each of the regulars a knife. of course, someone got cut and bled all over the table.


Nice! The in character *and* out of character stuff was over the top!

Jay
 

Into the Woods

Remove ads

Top