What's the most rat bastard thing you've ever done as a DM?

[The_Gneech]

Strange as it may sound, the most evil thing I did was put a gray ooze off in a corner of a dungeon, minding its own business.

Why is that evil? 'cause I knew the fighter with the magic waraxe that he loved so much wouldn't be able to resist running up and attacking it.

sssssssssssss

The easiest way to defeat a gray ooze is to walk away!

The next most evil thing I did was a trapped corridor, set up like this:

___#____x____#_________#_____p

Where # is a chamber in the ceiling, x is the pressure plate, and p is the direction the party is coming from.

Scouting rogue stepped on trap, cubes came down, and he was trapped between them ... with an additional cube between him and the rest of the party.

-The Gneech

 

[Delgar]

Told a player that nobody liked that the campaign was over.

I thought Piratecat was asking what you've done as a Rat Bastard DM, not what kind of bastard you are!

Delgar

 

[Mouseferatu]

Okay, this may take a minute to set up...

The party was playing in a homebrew campaign world that I'd been running for years. The current campaign was set over a thousand years after the previous campaign, where the first group of PCs (from the old campaign) were now legendary heroes.

One of the things the first group of PCs did was to recover a number of related artifacts. Well, one of those same artifacts has become important in the new campaign, and the new characters have to locate it.

I allow them to discover, through various Divinations, that this artifact was last seen in the possession of the old group of characters. Through powerful magic, I allow the new characters to look back in time and observe the old characters--thus giving me an excuse to let the players play their old, epic-level characters one more time.

So I ran an evening's session with the old characters, and it ended so that the old characters had to hide the artifact where they thought nobody could ever retrieve it.

Yes, I made the very players who had to find the artifact play the epic-level characters who were going to hide it somewhere almost impossible to retrieve. And because my players at the time (thankfully) understood how not to use OOC knowledge, they did their best to put it somewhere beyond anybody's reach (the wizard teleported it to one of the word's moons), all the while yelling at me for making them screw themselves over.

 

[Limper]

Not me but my DM has screwed the whole party by insisting we convert to 3.5 and not allowing changes to our characters to correct for the loss of abilities. The average party level is 16 right now as well.

 

[Pbartender]

A while ago, I ran a single-shot adventure all about a medusa couple that hunted a deep dark woods. The medusa would turn creatures to stone, drag them back to her lair, and her hubby would return them flesh, so they could eat them.

So... The PC's run across a camp fire in the woods. No one is there at the camp site, but to all indications, someone was camping and cooking dinner not too long ago.

The PC's hear a rustling in the darkness, and go to investigate, but the underbrush is too thick for their horses. They leave the horses behind at the camp with the NPC guide that they had brought along. The PCs search the woods for an hour or so, but find nothing.

When they return to the camp, the guide is missing, horses are all turned to stone, and a pair of shallow, parallel furrows lead off into the woods. They follow the tracks to a low cave entrance, which is barely large enough to crawl through. Just outside the cave, they find a broken-off stone arm clutching the hunting knife that the NPC carried.

There was the recurring D20 Modern villian I created who was a Telepath working for a secret agency. He himself was too useful to send against the PCs, so the actual foil was a Replacement (a clone). He was pretty mediocre at combat, but wonderful for tampering with minds. He was going to slowly turn all the PCs allies against them. If they confronted him and killed him, a new (more powerful) replacement would be made to, well... replace him.

The whole, however, is that during character creation, I had one player who wanted to be a Telepath, but complained that the class to too weak. I was going to show him otherwise. Unfortunately, half the players decided that they didn't want to play D20 Modern, and so we never got past the first adventure.

 

[Delgar]

The most Rat Bastardly thing I've done as a GM is as follows:

I was running a campaign where the players had unknowingly uncovered a plot where this very cold, calculating mage was trying to piece together an artifact. Basically it was a race to find pieces before he could and defend the pieces they had found against his minions. He was one of the first villians they had faced and he had escaped.

Now the wizard, had killed innocents, slaughtered an entire town and was always one step ahead of them. They kept hearing rumors of this black robed man, where ever he went death seemed to follow. He would stop at nothing to recover the pieces of this artifact.

Now the players had recovered a map from one of his lackeys revealing the possible locations of the pieces and they could also link the artifact back to a specific family.

Anyway to make a long story short they had contacted the lord of this town where one of the pieces was rumored to be. Apparently it was an heirloom of the family. The party had a pleasent dinner with the lord and his daughter and warned him of the black robed mage and his lackeys and about how he would stop at nothing to recover this item. The lord of course confident in his abilties said he had already been contacted and that he would be able to handle it.

One of my players became quite smitten with the daughter of the lord and she too had developed a fondness for him. They had a little Romeo and Juliet style love affair. The player then snuck onto the manor ground, proclaimed his lover for her and gave her a golden mirror (an object he had found earlier). The father found out and forbid his daughter to settle for such a commoner (he was a dashing swashbuckler sailor type).

The daughter fearing for her fathers life snuck out of the house and found the group at their inn and told them that she new where the gem was and how they could get there. That it was a family heirloom and that it was hidden in the family crypt. She wanted them to take it, to protect her father. The swashbuckler alread falling in love with the daughter of course readily agreed and gave her his earing as a token of their love.

Now for the Rat Bastard part:

The players snuck into the crypt and stole the object. Which in turn was stolen from them. The father, through magical means found out they had stolen the gem and had an arrest warrant set out for the party. The daughter could not believe that the swashbuckler had betrayed her and her family. The party had to get out of dodge.

The swashbuckler, snuck back into the manner grounds to try and swoon his love back to explain. But she couldn't believe that he could betray her so and she droped the mirror in the courtyard as she didn't want to have anything to do with him and the mirror shattered just like her love for him. He picked up every piece of the mirror as a reminder of their shattered love and vowed one day to mend them both.

Of course every now and then the Black robed mage would show up to taunt the party, always wearing the earring that the swashbuckler had given him.

Ahh thinking about that campaign always makes me smile. I wish I had finished writing my story hour up about it.

Anyway, I hope you all enjoy!!

Delgar

 

[MarauderX]

I was just reminded of a campaign that began with the original D&D module 'Nights Dark Terror' (B10?). I upped the BBEG to be a Rakshasa that would alter self to spy and mislead the party, as well as steal from them. They all thought it was pretty rat-bastardly when they finally defeated him (it's an epic module) and found all of the props the BBEG had to the different costumes. One of them was a drunken gnome merchant that they had saved and who the PCs told everything to when he would ask. It was just funny listening to them explain to the BBEG exactly what they were up to, sometimes bragging about the whole thing and what they were going to do next, and sure enough there was a trap waiting for them as the Rakshasa was always one step ahead.

I think the BBEG escaped about 4 times, frustrating the PCs, but the first two times it was for the party's own good as the Rakshasa could've TPKed the shredded party. It would use up magic items like crazy (wands, potions and such), which one player kept saying 'that could have been ours!'

And they had always thought the fur left behind in the BBEG lairs was from a hairy familiar.

 

[Pants]

Here's a couple fun ones, all involving the same group and the same campaign.

1) Just a little backstory. The group at this time consists of: a level 8 Sun Elf Wizard, level 8 Dwarven Rogue, level 7 Elven Fighter, and a level 6/1 Bear Druid/Barbarian (he was a Gnome before he was killed and reincarnated into a Bear).
A large mining community has been having some trouble with a particularly vicious group of ogres that have taken over the trading pass that heads through the mountains. The PC's are tasked with ridding the area of the ogres and making the pass safe for traders. They are also tasked with getting the head of the leader of the Ogres and bringing it back as proof of the deed.
The PC's head up the pass, with the party Druid wildshaped as a bird to scout. The party finally encounters the rather mean group of Ogres, which have camped on both sides of the ravine that is the pass. The party Druid scouts out the area and realizes that one, particularly tough looking, blue skinned Ogre is leading the group, which consists of no less than around 25-30 Ogres!!
The party decided to charge in, spells blazing. They lay waste to about 12 of the Ogres before the Ogre Mage leading the Ogres decides to show up. At this time, the Elven fighter is at very low HP's and the Bear is at 0. The Ogre Mage shows up and Cone of Colds the Elven Fighter into the much negatives and hits the Bear with a magic missile, which ends his Rage and kills him. The remaining party members use their Wand of Ice Wall to separate the remaining Ogres from their lord Ogre Mage and proceed to drop him into the negatives... while he's floating above the ice wall. So his corpse drops onto the other side of the Ice Wall, which is full of hungry Ogres.
The party members decide that now is the time to run away (!) with the corpses of their companions. They return to the city, discover that none of the Clerics are high enough level to cast Raise Dead, so they get a Druid outside of the town to reincarnate their fallen comrades. The Elven fighter is returned as a Pixie... a friggen Pixie and the Bear is reincarnated as a Gnome (!).
The party decides to return to the scene of the battle and get the Ogre Mages head. However, they return to the mining community to find that another group of intrepid adventurers have freed the pass of the Ogres and they are marching around town displaying the head of the Ogre Mage. The other adventurers recieved the payment for the task AND all of the respect. The party members were not pleased.

2) Same party, same city, several levels later. The pixie left the party and the group got a human cleric to fill the spot. The party has also got the enmity of a thieves guild leader who hired an assassin to track them down and kill them.
While the party members are walking down the street at night, the poor cleric gets shot in the butt with an arrow! The arrow also has a note attached to it. The curious cleric pulls the arrow out of his butt and unrolls the note. The message is written in some arcane symbols and the cleric casts a read magic to read the runes. The other party members are telling the poor cleric to not do this, however the cleric is adamant and will not budge on his decision. Unfortunately, the message turned out to be a short one which said only, 'BOOM!' before the Explosive Runes on the message went off and burned the cleric a bit. The cleric was peeved and ever since, whenever they are given a note, the party asks if it says BOOM.

Final one
3) Some more crazy backstories. The party was tasked with hunting down a Death Knight and returning a sword that he had stolen. Along the way, the party met up with an ancient elf named Eltian who had long ago helped said Death Knight with some money troubles.
Eltian was the leader of a powerful thieves guild and he occasionally contracted the party members to do some jobs for him, some of which involved killing the leaders of another guild and retrieving part of an evil artifact, that kind of stuff. And since the Death Knight had taken a bit of a money loan from Eltian and never paid him back, Eltian had a bit of a grudge against him. He also needed the Death Knight's head in order to ascend to Lichdom, however he never told the party this.
The party defeats the Death Knight, has both the sword and the head and they return to Eltian. They give him the head and he pays them a lot of money and sends them on their way. Well, during the night, Eltian starts the ritual that will turn him into a Lich. Using an artifact that the party provided for him, he tears a hole to the Negative Energy Plane and floods the city with it (!). The party is saved by the cleric who uses one of his turning attempts to keep the party safe.
Meanwhile, 95% of the citizens in the city have been turned into Zombies, Wights, and Ju-Ju Zombies ALL of them controlled by Eltian. The players flee the city, barely, and later find out that Eltian has an undead army under his control, along with a council of Death Knights that he created from his most trusted servants. And the party unwittingly helped him to ascend.

 

[haiiro]

My conclusion thus far? I nowhere near enough of a rat bastard.

The only three things that I can think of that might qualify for hamster bastard (thanks, Someone ):

- my favorite trap: a gelatinous cube that completely fills the bottom of a square-ish pit. The pit has smooth, tapering walls, and falling into it closes the trapdoor you fell through.

- not original, but entertaining: engineering a fight with two clay golems in an antimagic field (which the PCs wound up avoiding...doh).

- in a one-player PbEM GURPS Illuminati game: reserving a few of the PC's character creation points for GM use, and making him the carrier of a highly infectuous military virus. Everyone he wound up interacting with at the beginning of the game would catch it, spread it, and die horribly -- and since it was an Illuminati game, all sorts of odd things were going on around him all the time, just to confuse the issue.

 

[coyote6]

A PC was raised in a monastery, then left there (before play began) to explore the world; she basically ran away. Suddenly, mysterious men are looking for her. They give names of members of the monastery, and look vaguely similar (right race, height, eye color, shaved heads), but aren't the guys they claim to be. They are, however, monks. PCs flee.

Eventually, the PCs learn that they are Scarlet Brotherhood monks, and they're looking for the McGuffin (your standard great and powerful artifact), and think the PC has it. Group goes to her monastery, finds it destroyed, monks dead (and animated as skeletons), etc. Whole place was thouroughly searched.

Eventually, after kidnappings and assassinations, the wizard PC manages to figure out that what the monk PC has is a map to the artifact's location. Said map is magically tattooed, as a kind of permanent secret page, with a localized permanent nondetection effect, on her scalp.

The funniest part is that the PCs don't want to go find the artifact, 'cause it's obviously well hidden, so now they're trying to figure out how to get a higher level conjurer off their backs.

********

In that same campaign, I sent the PCs stumbling around the world via a millennia-old decaying network of teleportation circles that no one knew how to operate properly. Awakening ancient yuan-ti scouts, getting stuck in dank jungles, shipwrecks, pirates, bullywugs, dead dragons (and the stone golem guarding one's lair), an arrogant living young dragon, plane-switching citadel of a long-lost witch, having to ally with enemies, and assorted other hijinks followed.