All-Time Classic Roleplaying Game Moments

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
61

First D&D game I ever played, when I was 9, the party leaped into a portable hole to hide from a red dragon. The dragon promptly picked up the portable hole and ate it.

First game I ever DM’d, when I was 11, I rolled up a flock of sheep as a random encounter. This was for a first-level party, 2nd edition, using the random encounter tables in the Montrous Compendium. Our chaotic neutral cleric decided to sacrifice one to his god. It didn’t occur to me that the sheep would probably, you know, just run. I had the flock counterattack.

The whole party was wiped out.

During the longest campaign I ever DM’d, two members of the party married – a druid and a fighter. During a lover’s spat, the druid used “call lightening” on the fighter. It wasn’t pretty.

A couple of years ago, I was player with a first-time DM. He sent us to the Elemental Plane of Gruel to fight gruel elementals. We never let him DM again.

62

I wasn’t here for this one, but I heard about it a bunch of times.

In the Changeling LARP chronicle my fiance and his best friend were in before we met, the resident nocker (played by my fiance’s best friend) and the resident troll baron (played by someone I’ve never met) got into a duel over who ruled the freehold. They each had to choose a weapon.

The sidhe duke chose (I believe) a rapier.

My fiance’s best friend chose a Garou.

Guess who won.

63

Talk about rotten luck! First he gets turned into a woman, then it turns out “he” has PMS!

64

Didn’t think about it that way. :wink:

I still got a million of’em, folks, so this thread will keep coming back like too-spicy pizza until I’ve expended my store of anecdotes.

Let me tell you a little bit about Hagran. Hagran was a Monk. 3rd Edition D&D. He was not what one would characterize as a stodgy Monk, though… no, he was very big on wry humor. (The line from the Critic : “You’ve taken a vow… of comedy!” was used more than once in reference to him.) So he was an unusual and fun character to play.

He also was pretty good with the zen-logic thing. We were crawling through some deity-forsaken pyramid, and we’d found the vital organs (in jars) of this mummy-wizard who promptly showed up to menace us… it was shaping up to be a rather typical combat encounter … so I took it upon myself to suggest to the Mummy that he could give up on this whole rotting-in-the-dark deal, and just join us… get out, see the world, (un-)live a little.

So he did. :smiley:

Another thing I sometimes do with characters is that I tend to borrow names from things. Garion from the Belgariad, various Arthurian knights, Eron (from a certain Magic : The Gathering card) … but my two favorites were Morton Kondracke, the Bard, and Hans Delbruck, Paladin.

65

One time in Norfolk Va, a bunch of us would gather to play AD&D, and assorted other games as whim dictated. At the PsiCon one fall we tested a game called Warbts and Death Machines. My team got trounced fairly well, which was no big deal because we were playing something totally new. We decided to have a rematch several weeks later. My ex husband and his friend and I were one team, and on the other team were a couple of officers [one army, one navy] and an enlisted scum army buddy of ours. It is a game based on the big robotesque MicroArmor books and games.

My team decided to let me do all the work, saying they were just there for the beer. Figuring that I knew less than nothing about microarmor, I opted to spend my money doing what I knew…modified guerilla warfare.

As Chris and his team stomped their very expensive bots around menacingly on their side of the board, I zipped all my little APCs and scouts and stalins organs around, lined them up and before the opfor got anywhere near close to me, I pasted pretty much every base camp, supply depot, repair tech and comm facility into dust. My scout troops used electronic painting to target the bots, and I leisurly lobbed eraser missiles at them and wiped the sand table with him.

I don’t do anime, dont like micro armor, but I do understand tactics…zerg the heck out of them before they can take you out=)

It was very embarasing, these wonderful trained military minds trashed out by a little girly girl…<evil grin>

[though we did try another game I would love to track down sometime - 1% of the people on earth can detect the energies used in a sort of ‘stargate’ device that leads to an intrricate set of pathways between planets and alternate universes. People are pretty much automatially enlisted in the organization that is exploring these pathways…most of the equipment was typical US military gear with a few game specific things from other universes…]

66

I’ve got two, both from the Vampire LARP.

  1. A buddy of mine was playing a Malkavian hippie, who probably had one too many hits from the bong before being embraced. His character showed up at Elysium, and was questioned by the new Sheriff, who was a large, gruff Brujah from Scotland. I should describe the actual physical appearances of the two players. The hippie was (the player still is) a very skinny man, who stands about 5’8". The Brujah was played by a man who is 6’5", and weighs close to 350lbs, is bald, and drives truck for a living. His character always wore a kilt. So the exchange went like this:

Brujah[with scottish accent]: “Who is your sire”
Hippie: “You mean my daddy?”
Brujah:“That’s right your sire”
Hippie:“My daddy?”
Brujah [getting angrier]:“Right, who is your sire”
Hippie:“Daddy?”
Brujah [grabbing Hippie by the shoulders and pushing him against wall, at the top of his lungs]:“WHO IS YOUR DADDY!!!”

Needless to say, everyone within ear shot laughed uproariously.

Number two happened directly with me. I was playing a Malkavian from Russia, who used had a severe case of Turrette’s, complete with the tics and the swearing, and so on…So, my character had been made primogen of the city, and was preparing to meet with an Archon who was in town for a visit. (During the annual May-Long weekend game that is held in Regina). So, of course, as soon as I meet said Archon, who happened to be a Ventrue, I fail the random test the storyteller’s always gave me to determine if I had a Turrette’s attack. The rest, I’m sure you can imagine.

67

The Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG. Fun little game. When playing it, however, I’m always the guy that gets to be Xander. Not that I’m complaining… I’m good with the crack of a quip. Two anecdotes in this regard stand out.

While playing at the Origins gaming convention in a one-shot Buffy event, the Scooby gang was seeing some unusual things… apparently, a sorcerer had moved into town… he was using magic to steal peoples’ reflections … he could then make someone else appear as that person does… and it made the person from whom the reflection was stolen more susceptible to magical control.

To make a long story short, the Scooby Gang figured that the guy was going to re-open the Hellmouth, so we high-tailed it to the ruins of Sunnydale High… where we were met by a legion of our friends and loved ones.

Thinking “quickly” as Xander, I yelled for Anya to toss me a pocket mirror, so I could check them for reflections as we fought, so we could verify if these were our friends and loved ones, or merely thugs given their images to prevent us from fighting back.

I check… no reflection. “It’s really them!” I pipe in… then the other thought hits me. “Or, possibly, they’re vampires… Cross, anybody?”

They were vampires. Sigh.

My best Xander moment came in an ongiong BTVS campaign I was playing in… I got to do a lot of fun things as Xander there, but one incident stands out.

Willow, Oz, and I spotted a vampire outside the Bronze acting suspiciously, so we tracked it back to Willy’s Bar, the local demon hangout, and wnet inside, casually observing from a distance.

He apparently spotted us, and invited me over to have a drink with him. I didn’t really have any good way out of the situation, and figured he couldn’t smell the humanity on me in the crowded bar, so I went over and sat down.

He proceeds to tell me about how the Vampires are gettin scared, he and some pals are gonna head out of town, etc. Easiest interrogation ever. Then he asks : “What kinda demon are you?”

Hm. Checking my metaphorical “What Would Xander Do?” bracelet, I hesitate only a moment, and reply that I am, in fact, a Q’apla demon.

The GM makes a random roll to see if the vamp is a Star Trek fan, which as it turns out, he was not, and he asks me some questions about my clan.

“Oh, we’re a proud, warrior race… we wield crescent-shaped weapons and value honor highly.”

He nods, and asks if I want to be their daytime driver for their trip out of town, and I politely decline.

Heh. As a kicker, later that ‘episode’, Giles’s player was trying to identify a demon and I suggested it might be a Q’apla demon… when he inevitably replied that he was unfamiliar with that sort of demon, I just chuckled mysteriously. :smiley:

68

Speaking of PMS . . .

One of my friends in college attended a Renaissance Festival. As part of it, they had an event where they collected a bunch of people from the crowd, put them on trial for various imagined offenses and then punished them by putting them in the stocks, etc. Anyway, Dan was arrested and accused of causing “Minstrel Cramps” by singing. There were three “victems” (one of whom was male) who accused him of causing their cramps. Apparently, they were all sick to their stomachs, etc.
Well, Dan got an idea, and he asked if he could speak up to defend himself. He was given permission, and he informed the Sherriff that these Minstrel cramps were not his fault. These people actually got sick before they even heard someone singing, they were suffering from “Pre-minstrel Cramps” the sherrif was amused and Dan got away without punishment.
What made this story extra funny was when Dan told it in front of Melissa. Melissa did not like hearing about bodily functions. Therefore, whenever Dan told this story in front of her, he would tell her to cover her ears before he said “minstrel cramps” and “pre-minstrel cramps”. She got to hear the rest of the story, just not those magic words.
About the same time, maybe a little later, my roommate and her fiance acquired the game Star Wars Monopoly. After playing once under normal Monopoly rules, they developed a need to make the rules more Star Warsish. This involved some elaborate house rules, most of which I have long ago forgotten. The one bit I do remember is that R2D2 only got to roll one die (which meant in our test game the player playing R2D2 never made it around the board to pass go, or at least made it far less often than anyone else) and Darth Vader rolled both dice, but then subtracted one or two dots in order to accomadate the somber Star Wars theme music most associated with him. (If you were in my appartment, I could sing it to you, I can not, however, type it for you).

69

2 from D&D 3e.

As a player: Group of 8th level characters. 2 rangers (one armed with a crossbow, one with a rifle (slightly modernised setting)), a bard/wizard/Dragon Disciple, a rogue, a bard, and a Barbarian (me).

We’re exploring a ruin, attempting to dig up an ancient construct that the various BBEGs don’t want us to find.

So, we encounter a Dragon. A Red Dragon. One of the main entities in the lesser BBEG group. I’m not sure which age category he was, but… I’m guessing Great Wyrm, from the size.

We…attack it. The archer and sniper can’t make a dent in it. The bard and rogue don’t even bother. The bard/wiz/DD mainly succeeds in annoying it. I fail to do more than scratch his scales - which is pretty amazing, given my STR score.

Then it eats me. I manage to avoid getting eaten (good DEX, too), but I’m stuck in his mouth. So, I start hacking my way out. Took about 3 rounds. Drop from his mouth. Again - Great Wyrm Red Dragon…this is quite a fall (Actually, I have quite a reputation for falling…more on that in a minute*). The bard heals me, then runs. I, at this point, decide it’s not worth it and run. The rangers run. The rogue’s nowhere to be found. An NPC - a dragon of the same power level as the other - shows and distracts him while we escape with our lives.

  • For some reason, every time Alferd (my barb) tries to jump down from one level to another, he cannot land properly. The first time was when they were in a shopping mall-type area. One of the enemies knocked my axe to the lower level, then jumped down there. I jumped down to retrieve my axe and pursue him. Badly rolled the tumble check for the landing. WHAM. Orcish belly flop. Repeat for, at various points: Jumping to safety, bull-rushing an enemy, failed Climb check, and attempting to drop on an enemy.

The Bard/Wiz/DD made a nose-ring of Featherfall for him to prevent this.

GM’d:

The PCs are attempting to steal an artifact from a magic academy. They fail, set off the magical alarm, and the Rogue is magically marked as the attempted thief by glowing hands. (She tries putting gloves on, but the glow is still visible.)

When confronted by the proctor of the library where the (mislabeled) artifact was, she managed, through virtue of a) a good argument (‘It was knocked off the display stand and I was trying to put it back.’), b) a high Bluff rank, b) a mediocre Sense Motive rank, and c) ridiculously unbalanced opposed rolls (a 20 vs a 1), she convinced him she wasn’t trying to steal it.

She tried again (and succeeded) about an hour later - during the hours the library was open. She has big balls for someone who doesn’t have them. (Quoth her: ‘It’s a wonder I can walk.’) Had they tried at night (as I was expecting them to), they’d have gotten caught in a magical maze and faced a powerful guard-construct (but still managed to escape, assuming the construct didn’t kill them.).

70

I was running a superhero campaign.

The plot was fairly straightforward: a sinister company has been trying to manufacture supers using some kind of undisclosed genetic/magical/superpowered tampering. Some of their test subjects escaped a few weeks ago and went a little power-mad.

One of the test subjects decided she was going to hunt the others down and punish them for their crimes. This was not known to the PCs. All they knew was that there was a legion of fresh supers out there being hunted down one by one and left horribly, horribly dead.

The two superheros in the party were very unusual. The first one named X, and he was a time-grabber. He could grab anything out of the timestream as long as he could identify what it was. (X could only grab an infinitesmal “slice” of something from the past, so he couldn’t use the ability to steal famous works of art: a “grabbed” Mona Lisa would only vanish for a tiny split second and re-appear before anybody noticed it was gone.)

The other was a woman named Yin who could, among other things, talk to the spirits of inanimate objects.

They decided to try to call one of the victims, and found that he had disconnected his phone.

X decides that the best way to get in touch with him is to “grab” a phone from two weeks ago and call him in the past.

Um, I said, okay.

The man on the other end was angry. “Why are you calling me? Who are you? What do you mean you’re from the future? Go away! You’re who? What danger? Leave me alone! If you don’t stop asking me stupid questions I’m going to change my phone number.”

X thinks about this for a minute. All right, he said, I’ll grab a phone from five minutes before that.

They didn’t notice the gleam in my eye when I said sure, no problem.

This time they managed to catch him in a better mood. The then-target explained a little bit about his friends, who were worried that someone was trailing them, and was about to explain the whole situation when:

Just a minute, there’s a call coming in on the other line.

No, no! said X. Don’t answer—

Click.

Yin tried to get a little more information by searching the victim’s abandoned apartment. She interrogated the phone message booklet, trying to find out more about who the victim may have spoken to. However, the message booklet was uncooperative and panicky and refused to speak without the presence of a legal pad.

71

I love it. Everytime I post another of my anecdotes, I get 2-3 more funny ones from other folks.

This one’s not so much an anecdote, as it is a description of the Best Character Name Ever.

A friend of mine introduced his gaming group (including myself) to the Deadlands system. So we all whipped up some characters.

Looking through the options, I decided to play a bespectacled kid, around 14 years of age … decent at shootin’, better at playing the piano, and a real sharp with cards.

His full name was Jack McIntyre, but folks 'round those parts called him Four-Eyed Jack, on account of the card-playin and the glasses, y’see.

I just love that name.

Completely shifting genre, I was once Chief Engineer Thomas McHale of the USS Milan, in a Star Trek game. He had a knack for whipping up new and innovative technologies to benefit his ship. There were a lot of good moments in that game, but one stands out… in our final episode, we’d engaged in battle with a Borg super-node thing … a giant, semi-mobile space station of enormous power … and despite our best efforts, we were losing. There was just no way we could out-do its self-repair mechanisms in our efforts to deal damage… but then an idea struck me.

I asked the GM about the node’s speed an maneuverability (we were in the Future of the current ST timeline, so these things’ characteristics were in our records) … basically, it was pretty slow-moving until it could drag itself to one of the Borg’s pre-fab transwarp conduits. I knew that I had them, then.

We did a nosedive towards the system’s sun, luring in the smaller attacking craft … activating the ‘metaphasic’ shielding that was developed in NextGen… dove into the sun’s corona, and turned 180 degrees… blasting back out of the star and zipping back towards the node… catching the attackers somewhat offguard…

And then I launched a trilithum torpedo into the sun. You remember, the star-exploders from Star Trek : Generations. I’d specifically prepared one ‘just in case’ several missions earlier. Star goes boom as we hit Warp 9, and scratch one Borg node.

72

A vignette from an original D&D campaign maybe 25 years ago. Character involved was impulsive, ADHD, and somewhat chaotic, mainly because the player was all those things too.

GM: you see a door at the end of the corridor and …
ADHD: <interrupting>we open it!
GM: … you see stairs …
ADHD: <interrupting> we go running up them!
GM: They go down …
ADHD: AAAAAHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhh…

We were pretty much sick with laughter for several minutes.

73

One of the most powerful characters I ever played… and incidentally, one of the most fun… was in a RIFTs campaign that was borrowing heavily from D&D (spells, planes, things like that).

He’d been designed based on an NPC from my own D&D campaign… an overconfident Shifter (master of dimensional magics and dark pacts). The path that this character, Azrael, would follow … well, I found it extremely entertaining, to say the least.

On one of the very first adventures he went on with the group, they’d gone to the Yucatan … a magically charged and dimensionally unstable region on RIFTs Earth. We worked our way inside one of the mystic pyramids there, and encountered a being out of Lovecraftian Horror… a psionic projection of the flesh-cone bodies of the Great Race of Yith. The GM called for a ‘Horror Factor’ check with a difficulty 20, to avoid being struck with awe and terror… considering the few modifiers we all had and the fact that it was a twenty-sided die, a difficult check.

Everyone failed… except Azrael. Natural 20. He nonchalantly nods to the flesh-cones, with a blase ‘Hey.’

They were impressed by his lack of fear, and he began a long and profitable association with them thereafter … but that ‘Hey.’ was the beginning of more… it defined his character. His bonuses against Horror Factor checks stacked up … I never failed to roll a 20 when confronted by the most terrible things imaginable… it grew to such a running gag that he was utterly unable to be impressed that the GM finally just said Azrael was immune to Horror Factor, and left it at that.

The party’s power grew quickly after that, each in their own field of specialization… I was the resident Wizard, and the GM had a bit of a bias towards magical things, so I tended to benefit more than some others. But Azrael’s primary strengths weren’t his spells. No, he had a boundless ego and a capacity to annoy and unnerve even the most reserved of opponents… which proved useful in the next memorable anecdote.

The arch-lich Vecna had come to Rifts Earth, preparing a nasty ritual from a stolen book to raise and control a Cthuloid horror. We’d played right into his hands, unfortunately, and we were moments away from the critical time when he would channel the power and raise the beast … so Azrael stepped forward and asked him calmly if Vecna thought of himself more as a wizard, or a common thief.

Vecna got very, very angry … he was a pompous sort, not used to being insulted. He got so angry, as a matter of fact, that he missed the crucial moment for his spellcasting … a fact about which Azrael taunted him further.

I honestly have a ton of Azrael anecdotes… I’ll have to sift through them and see what’s worthy of posting. Among the highlights of his career, for those of you familiar with the RIFTs universe… he became a member of the board of directors for Naruni Enterprises… he starred in an interdimensional television version of ‘Cops’ titled ‘Adventurers’… he abducted a Kreeghor Dreadnought and accompanying fleet… and if I recall correctly, he slew the Alien Intelligence that ruled the Kreeghor by collapsing it under its own weight with a few gravity-related spells.

74

The Cast

Me (the GM), and two players, A and Z.

The Setup

I am a 14-year-old boy, running the latest session of a three-year campaign for two other 14-year-old boys. The game is GURPS, so the characters are not as powerful as they might otherwise be, but they had four or five worlds worth of contacts and resources to draw on, along with some nice items and magical abilities. They even had an airship, though they’d learned to teleport a while ago and had pretty much quit using it.

The party is trying to recover the Ten Swords of Power, which were vitally important to the survival of the world for reasons I no longer remember. They had figured out that one of the Swords was in the possession of a Biomancer, a wizard with the ability to create new life forms. He lived in a magically-constructed tower with the rudiments of intelligence. In this campaign world, living flesh blocks scrying and teleporting (so you can’t make your opponents disappear one bloody chunk at a time, as had been the case in the last campaign I ran with these two), so they weren’t really sure what all they’d face.

The Session

I arrived that day with my notes on the tower: thirty-eight double sided pages, in ten point type, plus maps. My players saw the stack of paper, and dove into their preparations. Old allies were contacted, bound demons were tortured for advice, ancient gods awoken and asked for favors. Eventually they found a way in, but even with all the power they’d amassed they were very dubious about entering the Biomancer’s domain. Justifiably so, as they’d encountered a few of his creations before: spiders that spun threads out of web a molecule thick, that cut through flesh and bone without even noticing it.

After four hours of intelligence gathering, they still had no edge. There’s no resurrection magic in this world; if they die, they’re gone for good. They need to take this guy out soon; the longer they wait, the bigger and nastier his crafted army will get.

They have an inconclusive conversation with the spirit that lives at the bottom of the deepest volcano in the world. They’re almost out of ideas. Finally, A turns to Z and they have the following conversation.

A: Well, that’s it then.
Z: Hm?
A: I mean we’ll have to do that thing we talked about.
Me: ?
Z: You mean…?
A: That’s right!
A and Z, with indentical expressions of glee: Hindenburg!!

Yep. They crashed their airship into the tower. The gas that kept their airship afloat was highly flammable, and the resultant explosion killed the wizard, slaughtered his pets, and scattered my carefully constructed tower over ten square miles of empty landscape. They subcontracted the actual sword recovery to a tribe of dwarves, and the adventure that I’d planned to ocupy a month with was ended in one night.

I still have those notes.

75

I know some of you table-top and LARP types won’t even count this because it’s a an online game, but I tell you it’s one of the best times I’ve ever had in all my years of gaming.

When Everquest was still in its infancy, I was in Highhold Pass one day fighting Orcs. Now for those of you who don’t know - Highhold Pass is a face paced zone where low level (levels 15-20, which was actually mid to high level in those days) players go to level up pretty damn fast.

We were in a well balanced group, trucking along quite well when, suddenly, a group of wizards and one enchanter showed up. The Enchanter would mezmerize a whole group of orcs and the wizards would blast them to bits before we ever got a chance to touch them. We were trying to pull our share in damage and bitching a good bit at our adversaries at first, but it was all useless. It didn’t take us long to realize that this just simply wasn’t going to work, so I formulated a plan.

We all took a few steps back and started walking around and talking, giving absolutely no attention to the fight. It took all of about 3 seconds for this to pique the interests of the wizards and one of them came to ask what we were doing.

“We’re having a party.”

“You’re having a party?”

“Yes, we’re getting drunk and having a party. Would you like some booze?”

“Yeah! That sounds fun!”

So I passed booze out to all my teammates, who in turn passed out to the killstealing jerk wizards and they all proceeded to get sloshed while we sat back, unbeknownst to the wizards, perfectly sober.
Now, for those of you who don’t know, alcohol has two effects in Everquest: number one is that it takes a shit all over your intelligence. Intelligence is where these types of casters get their mana so they suddenly found themselves with precious little firepower. The second, even greater effect, is that is causes you to involuntarily swerve and sway even if you’re just trying to stand still. Well, wouldn’t you know it, you have to be standing still to cast a spell!

Thouroughly defeated, the jerkwads headed on their own way and we retook our spawn, triumphant through our own brand of intelligence :smiley: .

76

Ahhhhh…memories.

I think I can say I was a damn good GM. This was bad in that I never got to play RPG much…hardly ever actually but MAN did I GM quite a bit. I actually had a ‘rep’ among fellow geeks and people wanted to RPG with me as GM. It was not uncommon to have 14 people playing at once. This was great. Ahhhhh memories.

I tried to run my campaigns like a novel. Setup and mystery at first, followed by discovery then struggle to attain a goal (or thwart someone elses). I considered a climax to be an important part also. Always needed a big finish.

One particular climax involved a huge battle, taking place in an AD&D Universe. The characters were faced with the wrath of a big baddie who threw a particularly well organized force against them where they clashed outside one of the PC’s castle. It was a huge affair with 16 PC’s and 40 NPC’s against a few hundred enemies.

The players were tough and had accumulated a nice stash of goodies. The battle lasted 8 hours RL time and was extremely brutal. The players had lost 2 PC’s and probably 12 NPC’s. They had steadily burned through their ‘goody’ reserve and were getting very nervous. You could see morale fading and discussions on fleeing started becoming more common.

At that time, the bad guys threw in a last large push. It was baaarrreeelllyyy beaten off and morale started to shoot up. The Players pushed em back and finally one of the PC’s exclaimed “I think we’ve done it. I think we won!”

Unknown to them, the main baddie had ‘contracted’ the services of a Beholder…one of the most nasty monsters in AD&D. He didn’t want to do it because it cost him a huge amount of money. The beholder was summoned and when it showed up it didn’t have to even get close.

Without any planning or whatever, morale collapsed and every PC fled as fast as they could with their prefered ‘emergency escape’ method. It was hilarious.

I know, it doesn’t sound like much…but 20 years later they still bring it up and laugh about it.

77

One of the many, many campaigns I’ve run over the years was a three-part Superhero saga centering around Lovecraftian horrors … the first part took place in 1934 (though we had such fun with that stage that we extended that part for a few more “seasons” of “episodes”) …the second in 1968, and the third in 2002 … soon to be wrapping up.

There are many, many memorable moments … and some excellent quotes that I’ve already cited in this thread.

One of the characters created for this campaign was a British archaeologist by the name Sir Reginald Spencer. He was a PC in the '34 version, and an NPC later on… he was famous for his propensity to drink and for his fondness for firearms.

Almost equally famous was his tendency to put down anything and everything that wasn’t an Oxford-Educated Englishman. Denouncing Harvard as an agricultural school, insulting various natives with deliberately-wrong racial slurs, these were all in a day’s work for Spencer. His condescension was elevated to an art.

An excellent and truly memorable character.

Another fun feature of this campaign was the fact that each ‘episode’ had two titles… one moderately serious title, and another title based on some atrocious pun. I like puns.

My two favorites :

'68 Stage - PCs have been transported into a strange pocket dimension where they manifest as toys (action figures, of course). Title? Toyland Trouble.

'34 Stage - PCs are contacted by a professor of archaeology at Stanford… seems he let a colleague borrow a jade sculpture of a demon’s heart, which he’d found in China, and he hadn’t heard from the colleague in weeks. Title? Loaner of an Oni Heart.

78

A group of players in AD&D came across some nasty minotaurs. They fought it out and killed off the minotaurs. In our worlds, it always seems to be that minotaurs get a bit confused between gold and copper, and they hoard copper like you wouldn’t believe. So, they didn’t have anything worth looting.

One player asked “don’t they have anything?” The DM replied: Well, they’re wearing pants… Now we’re always on the lookout for Minotaur Pants.

(I may be up for a screenname change… heh)

In our game this past Sunday, our half-orc barbarian befriended an evil ogre by fantastic diplomacy checks during a farting contest. We had a puzzle to solve that involved rotating giant statues (stone golems, actually) and pulling a lever.

The ogre became convinced that these were “goblins” and kept pulling the lever to bring a “goblin” to life, then beating the crap out of it. We pulled up chairs, popped popcorn and watched the carnage.

79

The second-most powerful character I ever ran was a fellow I dubbed ‘Shinma’. Shinma was in the D&D3 system … he was actually a spin-off of the aforementioned Azrael (this campaign had the same GM as the RIFTs game). I had intended to translate Azrael himself for this game, but factors present resulted in me wanting to play a less amoral character, so Shinma was born.

Backstory : Azrael, in his adventures, had been saddled with a mystical conscience… a Lawful-Good voice that tended to nag his effectively Chaotic Neutral behavior. So my concept for Shinma was that Azrael had found a way to rid himself of that curse, by spinning the consience into it’s own body.

Shinma was mild, polite, occasionally witty. And humble, usually.

Anyway, the set-up for the campaign was something like 30 class levels, the ‘psionic’ template, and Divine Rank 0 - Quasideity. We were all movers and shakers. it was an Epic Campaign.

Shinma’s concept was that he’d been discovered, amnesiac, at a traveller’s shrine in the Japanese region of the world he ended up in. He studied magic and swordsmanship, while acting as a temple guardian.

So I cherry-picked levels here and there, acquiring the best abilities I could find, adding them together… and resulted in what can only be classified as a monstrosity.

Between his items, stats, and special abilities, Shinma had a ‘resting’ AC of 103. He could adjust that higher with spells, too. The humble swordsman immediately acquired the nickname ‘the Untouchable’.

And there were three others like him… an Elven Sorceress, and a Druidic Sage… and a Sikh King who wielded twin swords. The Sorceress’s schtick was her beauty… the Druid’s was his army, which after nested multiple Leadership and Epic Leadership feats, number in the millions… and the King’s schtick was dealing massive amounts of physical damage quickly.

It *still * surprised us that when the GM put us up against Cthulhu from the stats presented in the back of the *Call of Cthulhu d20 * book that we killed him in three rounds.

Okay, maybe Shinma was more powerful than Azrael…

80

I used to have a buddy. We called him the Troll, because he was a big fellow. Tall, broad, didn’t know his own strength. Not your archtypical “fat geek”… just… BIG. Like you or I would be if the Enlarging Ray was beamed on us for a few seconds, right?

Game: James Bond Roleplaying Game, by Victory Games.
The JBRG included a neat game mechanic, called “hero points.” Points were earned by great acts of cleverness or roleplaying, and could be used to alter the gamemaster’s dice rolls in one’s favor, right? Our gamemaster also declared that any time anyone rolled a natural 01 on the percentile dice used for the game, an instant Hero Point would be awarded.

One night, the Troll rolled about nine of them. Bing, bang, bong. Drove the GM nuts. He’d slip on a banana peel, make a roll, 01, surprise, you land on your feet and the banana peel rockets down the hall and kills the guard you were sneaking up on… I mean, it was durn near that comical.

In a fit of rage, the GM finally decided that enough was enough. We got in, we accomplished our mission… and on the way out, we ran across the obligatory army of ninjas in spandex with Uzis. Dozens of them. Blocking our only way out. “Gonna have to THINK your way out of this one,” growled the GM.

The Troll looked at his character sheet. Between his recent acquisitions, and his leftovers from the last adventure, he had something like fifteen Hero Points, a truly ungodly number.

And he said, “F**k it. Cover me,” and charged the army of submachine-gun-ninjas, screaming like a lunatic, blazing away with guns in both hands.

The rest of us hit the deck and immediately began sniping away at the guards. They were certainly not going to worry about US right away.

The GM grinned unpleasantly, and began rolling. Every time a hit occurred, the Troll would say, “Hero point,” and mark one off. Meanwhile, the rest of the team gleefully picked off anyone we could see as he charged at them, screaming. He rolled two more 01s as he charged, slaughtering two more, and winning two more Hero Points.

The GM was durn near apoplectic. He rolled. We rolled. Troll rolled. “Hero point,” said the Troll, marking off a few more.

But the Troll was out of Hero Points. He wasn’t going to make it. He leaped at the few remaining ninjas, hurled his guns at two of them, and dived on this one in particular… with a grenade hung on his belt.

…and rolled an 01, taking out yet another ninja with his hurled .45.

He spent that one successfully pulling the pin on the grenade, and bodyslamming the guard it was hanging on into his buddies. The grenade went off.

The guards were dead or incapacitated. The Troll was incapacitated. We gathered him up and ran like hell for the submarine.

The GM about cried when it came time for experience points…