Your Crowning Moments of Awesome

[Varianor Abroad]

Right at Gen Con 2008! (Playing Lands of the Jade Oath.)

Za Vhin, an enlightened scholar (who looks like a large, human child-sized rabbit), is inside a volcanic tube with his five friends. The lava is rushing toward them. He yells at the others to get out, then runs down the lava tube, throwing his alchemical cold explosives at the lava to try to create a plug. His friends run out the end of the tube, and throw themselves down the mountain to get away.

They look up.

Lava bursts out of the tube, ejecting an enormous plug of stone with the terrified, screaming figure of Za Vhin clinging to it as it shoots over the valley toward the next mountain! The lava crackled down onto the village below, burning up most of it.

(Oh, by the way, he lived by making a saving throw and using a feat called Compensate for Size. Za Vhin was found hanging by both hands from a branch of a tree.)

 

[Kunimatyu]

(I'm the GM, running Eberron, PCs 16th level)

The PCs have successfully lead the legions of Thrane to a victory in pitched battle versus a skeletal horde lead by a former PC, an artificer lich, who mastered the art of creating powerful coterminality zones with other planes.

While they celebrate, they notice a shape in the sky, the silhouette of the lich's airship. The lich activates an eldritch machine that opens a zone with Dolurrh, Realm of the Dead, and the dead on the battlefield begin to reshape themselves into hideous and gigantic monstrosities as a foul black mist creeps along the ground.

The players of the Warforged Juggernaut and Aasimar Cleric/Warlock exchange glances.

The Warforged uses his unique artifact, which allows for transformation into a Warforged Juggernaut 1/day. The cleric flies over to the Warforged, and Teleports the both of them several hundred feet above the lich's airship.

Several tons of Titan slam into the ship, which breaks apart in midair. The black mist fades and the looming undead fall to pieces.

The airship crashes, and a figure strides out of the necromantic wreckage, vacant eye sockets blazing with hate.

 

[Falkus]

Here's from my Spycraft campaign, in the World on Fire setting

The team is a group of Shadow Patriots, who have been fighting the SRH (an international arms dealing organization providing cheap, high tech weapons to terrorist groups). They've finally tracked down one of their offices, an office building in Moscow, and are sneaking into it to gain access to their networks and find out the location of the HQ of the group. It's a joint operation between the Shadow Patriots and the Krypt, a team of NPCs agents from the Krypt are on the ground floor, planting explosives to take down the building when the intel has been acquired.

However, the SRH knows that the team is coming. As they access to the network hub on the eight floor, a group of assassins pours out of the elevator and rapell down from the roof, firing through the window with AK-74s. After a tense battle, the assassins are all dead and the information has been downloaded.

At this point, the Krypt team radios in. They're pinned down in the lobby by a machinegun on the second floor balcony overlooking the lobby, and need help. I was initially expect the team to take the elevator or stairs down, and hit the assassins from behind.

But instead...

Black Widow, the team's soldier, immediately jumps out the eight floor window, and grabs one of the dead assassins hanging from his rappelling gear. She releases the lock, and rides the dead body down six stories, and comes to a stop in front of a window overlooking the machine gun position. Then, using the dead assassin for cover, she proceeds to open up on the SRH assassins, firing her machine gun one handed, and gunning them all down.

 

[That One Guy]

Those are some awesome stories. The thing about Egypt and Carrion is really tragic. I hope people keep weighing in w/ their stories.

 

[JohnBiles]

This was not quite a crowning moment of awesome, but it was a truly defining moment for the unfortunate Suzuka:

From the Log of an Amber DRPG session:
Death cocks his head. WOULD YOU LIKE THE GOOD NEWS OR THE BAD NEWS?

Suzuka says, "Bad news." ACTUALLY, I HAVE TO GIVE YOU THE SORT OF GOOD NEWS FIRST. YOUR BODY SEEMS TO BE GETTING MARRIED. THE BAD NEWS IS THAT YOU SEEM TO BE MARRYING YOG-SOTHOTH.

Suzuka says, "..."


An actual moment of Awesome from the game (Master-level Power Words = your friend. Especially when Psyche-master Anthy backs you up with a Spikard and Demi-Jewel of Judgement...)

Uotani now points at Child. "I am the Daughter of the Bear, the Disciple of the Mistress of the 631 Secret Runes, Mistress of the High Rune of Ujikal. Lord of Chaos, I BANISH YOU IN THE NAME OF UJIKAL, WHO ABHORES ALL THE DELVINGS OF CHAOS!" She draws a rune in the air, a glowing sign of perfect symmetry and structure, and power flows into it from Anthy and her Eye and her Wheel. And then it soars across the open space towards Child. Child stares in shock. "Ujikal is dead! I saw his towers burn, I saw his children scattered, his power bound into a spoon of all things and......AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!" The sign strikes him, and he hangs on it for a few seconds, and then explodes into a shower of crystalline fragments which burn and blow away in the wind, surging into the sky and floating towards a distant horizon. Uotani says, " YEAH!!!!!!!!!!"


As for D&D Awesome:

Players hear werewolves in the distance. I intended this as a flavor thing; they were in an area with a serious werewolf problem, but I assumed the second level PCs with only one magic weapon and no silver ones would carefully stick to the road.

They thought I meant them to HUNT THE WEREWOLVES. How do they kill them?

Grapple them and then force them to eat the party's hundreds of silver pieces, then grind them against the ground in order to ensure the silver rips them up from the inside.

The whole time, all I could do was just stare mindlessly.


Another game, same group, but I was a player and the guy who figured out how to kill the werewolves was the DM:

We'd become Spelljammers, but I missed the start of a session and when I got there, we'd all been charmed by beholders and become their slaves.

Somehow, the 5 Wisdom Barbarian Grettir threw off the charm first and went on a one-man unarmed beholder killing spree. He had his Belt of Storm Giant Strength which they'd left on him so he could haul cargo around for them. He got to the central shaft and waited for a beholder to come up the shaft.

When one did, he jumped down onto its head, ripped off two of its eyestalks...and beat it to death with them.

We were all yelling "YEAH!!!!" while the DM stared in surprise.


Grettir's other moment of awesome--a group of adventurers were trying to threaten us, so Grettir punched their leader's warhorse in the head. Thanks to a homebrew crit table, when he rolled a natural 20, he got a quadruple damage crit and killed it with one blow.