Not necessarily. We could have a ghoul thread, or a wight thread, or a mummy thread, or a ghast thread, or…
And even if we do decide on zombies, which kind? The traditional Animate Dead Zombie, or go old-school for a Juju Zombie, or maybe if we want to be wild and crazy about it, a Necrocarnum Zombie? Or then of course, there’s always the Zombie Dragon, which, true to the spirit of dragons, never really seems to think any of the rules apply to it, in any version?
Some years ago we tired of playing Marvel Superheroes and decided to have a Marvel Supervillains campaign instead, much to the chagrin of the GM.
My friend played a character who had Probability Manipulation as his power, and that was pretty much it. Marvel was a d100 system and PM, in game terms, allowed for the percentile dice to be switched to be more favorable for the owner of the power (i.e. rolling a 2 and an 8 on two ten-sided dice was an 82 for him, a 28 against him) so we decided that to raise some capital for our criminal activity we’d head to Las Vegas and cheat our way to a fortune.
Suffice it to say, the powers that be did not like our winning ways and sought to stop us from continuing to participate in their games of chance and just as things looked their most grim, my friend suddenly remembered he had a shotgun tied to his back. He’d recently acquired it and had strung it across his back for later use but had forgotten all about it, as had we all.
The GM, shocked by his oversight in allowing us to frequent a major casino all the while openly brandishing a firearm, was forced to rationalize it by saying that his power to manipulate probability had caused everyone to completely miss the weapon because it was so prominently displayed that the probability of missing it was about nil.
Things quickly turned in our favor upon this realization and to this day whenever one of our gaming group has a “Eureka!” moment we instead say, “Wait a minute, I’ve got a shotgun on my back!”
I used to enjoy devising odd traps and defenses for my campaigns and reached what I thought was my pinnacle in an underground approach to the stronghold of an illusionist and a necromancer who’d partnered up for nefarious purposes that the party sought to destroy.
After several rooms with illusion based traps, like one where it appeared that the floor had a large pit with spikes at the bottom–which was an illusion, the trap was that it was actually solid ground and if they attempted to jump over it they landed on what appeared to be solid ground but was actually a pit with large spikes at the bottom–the party entered a large cavern with no visible ceiling or floor and only a single foot wide stone walkway bridging the 100’ or so gap.
Wary of illusions they slowly made their way across the walkway, meticulously assuring that the walkway was solid and had gotten about halfway across when from the cavern walls a few secret doors opened and previously undetected cannons launched zombies who tried to grapple them as they flew past.
They managed to avoid being tackled into the abyss with the first volley and most of the party decided the prudent thing to do was to drop to the walkway, making themselves smaller targets, and shimmying onward to get to the other side as soon as possible. Except for the rogue who was positively convinced that the zombies were just illusions (who ever heard of a zombie cannon?), and believed his suspicions were confirmed when a moment later the same zombies that had just shot by and fell into the darkness fell out of the sky and whizzed past them.
The zombies were very real, and the room was part of a small, circular pocket dimension. The others realized something to this effect quite quickly, but the rogue, insistent on proving his theory correct to his party, allowed himself to be hit by the next volley of zombies, which of course knocked him off the bridge and into a freefall.
Eventually he extricated himself from the zombie’s grasp and thought it a great idea to, after a few passes building up tremendous speed, try to throw his grappling hook to catch the rock bridge and stop his descent. The rest of the party had by this point made it all the way across and were feverishly checking their spell lists to see if anyone had a feather fall spell or something similar and calculating if they could time the spell right to affect him before he fell out of range, but before anyone could figure out a way he tried his plan.
I gave him some pretty heavy negative modifiers to his roll, but he made it clean. Natural 20. He timed it perfectly and the hook wrapped around the bridge and found purchase. I made him make a penalized strength check to maintain his grip once the rope went taut, which he also made clean. Another natural 20. Quite amazed at his luck and kind of secretly rooting for his success at this point, regardless of how his own stupidity got him into this mess, I made him make one more roll; a not-so-heavily penalized constitution check to see how his arms held up from the enormous force of stopping suddenly. He rolled a 1.
He and his ripped off arms are, so far as I know, still falling.
And what about the huecuvas?! Won’t somebody think of the huecuvas?!
My regular DM likes to give us scenarios that allow us to be creative, which tends to bite him and us in the arse.
Scenario 1: Ars Magica campaign, so think wizards in twelfth century Europe. We’re trying to find out information about a minor royal who is currently sleeping in her tower bedroom of the local castle.
I (a Norse forestry wizard) turned into my falcon form, and the Illusionist made herself invisible and cast a spell on me to make me look like a duck. Our reasoning was that a duck would elicit less comment wandering around a castle. We made it to the door of her tower, which was being guarded by two guys who were sent to sleep by the Illusionist’s magic bell. I then used my wood alteration powers to get through the door. So far, so sneaky.
I then reasoned that we could get some info out of the princess if I was disguised as one of her guards. I slit his throat, steal his clothes, and then realise two things:
- I could have dressed up by magic
- I don’t speak the same language as the princess. This also comes into play when we try reading her letters.
So in the end, the proceeds of that mission was one dead guard and the name of the princess which was the only bit of the letters we could read.
Scenario 2: Same game, we needed to navigate a castle without being detected.
Solution: We all become invisible.
Problem: Only one of us knows the way.
Solution: Leader carries a stick that we can follow.
Problem: Guards decide to investigate floating stick :smack:
Later problem: door in the way.
Mage 1: Stick head through using wood magic.
Mage 2: Hang onto Mage 1 to also see through the door, causing him to panic and lash out.
Mage 3: Try the handle.
Mage 4: Panic at Mage 2’s cries, set fire to the door, leaving a pile of ash and Mage 4 holding a door handle.
We didn’t always work well as a team, to put it lightly.
Scenario 3: Warhammer 40k universe, trying to solve a murder. We have a suspect and a shiruken from the corpse.
My idea was to meet with the suspect and get shot by him so we could compare weapons. I would meet with him just for a chat in a restaurant, out Techpriest (the toughest character) shoots at him, gets shot and escapes, I claim ignorance and leave.
This plan would have worked perfectly had he not had three cloaked bodyguards with him, and the Techpriest and I hadn’t bothered to tell the combat characters from our party to come with us to provide backup. We barely escaped with our lives, although I did manage to miss the suspect at point blank range and waste the band behind him. Oops.
Scenario 4: Warhammer Fantasy, narrow corridor, combat going on at one end. Ranged combat character decides to shoot down the corridor, misses by the right margin to shoot one of the party - me. Hits me in the neck for massive damage, and five minutes into that campaign I’m rolling a new character.
Scenario 5: Warhammer Fantasy. Our party is split up and thrown in adjacent dungeon cells. Three of us can escape through a secret tunnel in one of the cells, leaving one character behind. She sweet-talks the guard to give her the keys, and escapes into the castle. Her escape plan from there is to cross the courtyard full of guards, climb up the ramparts, and climb down the walls and cliff to the river below.
After she completed all this, sustaining a fair bit of damage, I asked her why she didn’t use the same tunnel the rest of us did.
What about the Yellow Musk Zombie? Okay, so it’s technically not undead, but it’s still a rotting walking corpse, and I think that earns it some representation. Won’t somebody think of the the yellow musk zombies?
I was really hoping this story would end with, “And that’s when we remembered we were still disguised as ducks.”
On a similar note, I was in a CyberPunk adventure once, where our party of bad-ass corporate cyber-ronin were hired to rub some guy out. Our characters were hard-core. Armed to the teeth, boosted, jacked, enhanced, and ready to absolutely murder the fuck out of any poor sumbitch who made the mistake of getting in our way.
When we prepared to go find our target, we realized that we’d made one minor oversight. Amongst our gang of highly skilled assassins, there was not one person who knew how to drive a car. Nor did any of us own one.
We ended up having to take a bus to the hit.
One of our players (whom I will refer to as “dumbass”) had a dwarven smith character. Now as I’m sure you know, even a run-of-the-mill dwarven smith can craft stuff that makes most human master craftsmen weep with envy. And although carrying an anvil and forge around wasn’t practical, he could do miracles with even a basic smithy and some stock iron. So he was in charge of repairing all our armor and weapons, except for the high-end enchanted stuff. He saved us a large amount of money and in fact most of the time no one else could have matched his work anyway.
After a couple of heavy battles we’d retreated to the nearest town to spend our loot and get some healing and repair work done, resupply, etc. So he asks around where there’s a smithy he can rent out, and receives a rude shock: in that town blacksmithing is totally controlled by a powerful guild (backed by the town despot), and only members in good standing are allowed to practice the craft. Now I’m still not sure if dumbass was simply staying in character or if he really meant it, but he became absolutely furious that these humans could tell HIM he wasn’t qualified to be a swordsmith! When he was told that the only way a non-citizen of the town could be certified by the guild was to apprentice to a town blacksmith, he said fine that’s what he’d do.
We tried to explain that apprenticeship is typically a 20-25 year process, starting in boyhood where you spend several years doing scut work like chopping firewood, hauling water and sweeping the shop before you’re even allow to touch the forge. But he would have none of it. When our party was finally ready to set out on a new campaign, he actually stayed behind so he could get that certification. So off we went and had adventures while every so often the GM would have him role 2D10 and announce things like “today you dug a new latrine behind the smithy”. After three sessions of this he happened to roll double-0, and the GM announced that a band of giants had attacked the town and that one of them had stepped on him, and he was now dead.
Epilogue: At one point I got three Wishes, and in hindsight I wish I’d asked for his dwarve to become my undead thrall, just so I could forbid his character to do all the dumbass shit he used to.
This one is on my brother.
My very first D&D campaign was played with my older brother and his friends. I was eight years old, and they were teenagers; my brother basically got stuck babysitting on game night. To keep me occupied, he had me roll up a character and join them, and steered me toward making a fighter, because it was simple. He promptly killed off the character with a trap that dumped him amongst a bunch of wraiths. (We mostly got along, but we did have our moments.) I didn’t sulk, just asked if I could roll up another character to join them next time. He agreed, then forgot about it.
I spent the rest of the week poring over the rulebooks. Next time, I showed up with a magic user. He had Magic Missile prepared, a dagger, ragged leather clothing (not armor, just clothing), and a list of miscellaneous junk from the equipment tables and a list of stuff Bro had made up for shops in town. I offered a brief description to the rest of the party, drawing the comment that my guy looked like a down-at-the-heels thief, which is exactly what I wanted. Bro glanced at my sheet, but didn’t pay too much attention. I was eight, after all; how cheesy could I have made a first-level magic-user?
He found out later.
The whole way through the dungeon, I saved my Magic Missile. Instead, I slunk around, trying to get behind things to backstab them (which anyone got bonuses for back then). The other players kept teasing me about playing a thief.
“I’m not a thief, I’m a wizard!”
Finally, we faced the Big Bad of the dungeon, who happened to be a wizard. While the party engaged his guards, I finally trotted out my one spell of the day and missiled him for trivial damage. Of course, Bro knew that meant I was out of spells (and it was logical enough that the bad guy would, too), so he shrugged me off in favor of the real threat, and paid only minimal attention to me thereafter.
So, I ran away. Back to the door, at least, then turned aside behind the curtains lining the walls. Bro was busy with the combat, and told me to just mark my movements on the map. He didn’t even make me roll Dex checks as I snuck all the way to the other side of the room.
“I’m using this,” I said, pointing to an item on my sheet.
“Okay, whatever.”
He finally took notice as I moved in to backstab the wizard…but still. A backstab from a magic-user with a dagger is nothing, right? And the wizard was busy getting ready to nuke the party, who were rather beaten up and had been pushed back into fireball formation.
Stab. Connect. Double damage from the backstab is a whopping 4 points.
“Okay,” Bro said, “Now he’s pissed at you. He turns and starts casting.”
“He’d better make his save first.”
“…what save?”
“Save versus poison at -4 or die.”
“What?!”
I pointed to the crossed-out line on my character sheet that showed I’d spent most of my starting gold on a vial of really nasty poison. Bro swelled up like a toad and rolled for the save…and failed it badly. Dead bad guy. Mission accomplished. The party praised my guy as the greatest thief ever.
“Wizard!”
Had I been their DM, someone would have decided that a duck dinner was a grand idea. Hijinks would have ensued.
From a game of Deadlands I ran last year. A game set in the American Old West with steampunk Mad Scientist, undead gunslingers and Baptist Preachers with powers given to them by the lord.
Setup: The PCs are fighting a bunch of wendigos (think cannibalistic Chewbaccas) in an effort to save the lives of a bunch of town folk on a burning train at a station. In Deadlands, each player has a number of poker chips that can be used for thinks to mitigating damage and re-rolling dice. This last part is very important to the story.
Odesio: Okay, you approaching the burning train and a bunch of furry creatures leap towards you shrieking terribly! Everyone make a Guts (Fear) check!
Player with Death Wish: I fail.
Helpful Player: Dude, spend a chip and re-roll.
PDW: Nah.
Odesio: You panic at the sight of the fearsome beast and flee into the woods.
PDW: I want to run towards the caboose I don’t want to run into the woods.
Odesio: You failed your Guts check. You’re running away from the creatures in a blind panic. People in a blind panic do not get to make strategic choices.
<Some time passes as the player runs deeper into the woods failing to spend chips on Guts checks until he finally passes. Now he is confronted by a wendigo that chased him through the forest.>
Odesio: The Wendigo charges you, it rakes its claws down your chest as it slams into you. You take a Heavy Wound.
Helpful Player: Dude, spend some chips to get rid of those wounds.
PDW: Nah, Odesio’s not going to kill me.
Helpful Player: You’re going to die if you don’t spend chips.
PDW: He won’t kill me in a fight with mooks. He’ll just capture me or something.
Odesio: Okay, your attack missed and the creature attacks you again. <roll> You are incapacitated. Do you spend any chips?
PDW: No.
Odesio: Everything fades to black.
<Other players finish killing the wedigos at the train station and come looking for their friend in the woods.>
Odesio: You find pieces of him strewn throughout the woods. You have the feeling there should be more meat on his body but large chunks of him are missing.
PDW: I can’t believe you killed me!
You didn’t think to carjack a ride?
:dubious::smack:
Back in 87 or so a guy that hung out at CHQ in Norfolk with us was writing some sort of game, not sure which system he was really using. he called it Warbots and Death Machines. This being a military town, we had Navy, Marines and Army. Usually stuff shook out it was usually Navy vs Army with the Marines quibbling between fellow ground pounders or their rides … 
In my little circle, I had a Naval officer that I was on and off dating as moral support =), the guy that ended up as my first husband, and a friend who was on hold waiting to get into boot for army. Our opposition was 2 guys that taught at the Naval Warfare group there, and an Army officer from Fort Story. We had been discussing microarmor while playing AD&D off and on for a few months, then it shakes out into a game challenge. Kenny and John tell them they are picking me to round out the 3 man team since they had 3 and they wanted the sides to be equal. Premise is 2 hammers slammers type mercenary groups both landing on the same planet. In the middle is a crashed freighter full of supplies headed towards the war zone and both of us are running low on parts and ammo. We are given our startup budget and told what the scenario will be.
So the guys give me the budget to work with, and we consult the books. We end up with 3 scout vehicles, 2 units of jump armored scouts to be spotters and an array of roughly stalins organs loaded with lovely ordinance. I also buy the required repair and maintenance and logistics peeps and supplies.
The infamous day arrives. We set up on the big table in front. Us on one side, with an array of subs and drinks from the sub shop next door, and a bunch of miniatures in boxes. The other guys show up with an array of subs and drinks from the sub shop next door, and an array of miniatures in much few boxes.
We each take our sides of the tables and set up our base camp, and there is a random paper shape representing the dirt dart freighter. We do it partly on paper and partly on the table, since we both know the freighter is there and our camps are in place, those are on the board. we flip a coin for first turn and we win. I tell our fearless GM that I roll out my scout cars, and the katyusha crews are gratified to see that they can in fact reach every point on the table from the camp. \o/ Scout cars get to the assigned zones and it is now the OPFOR turn. GM and OPFOR discuss their first turn. My next turn is the katyushas opening up, and bouncing out my scouts to just past the halfway point, which the GM notes that I can now see pretty much all of their Mechs. Nice big stompy expensive and delicate mechs. So the OPFOR dutifully set out their nice stompy mechs, grumbling that they do not understand why they are the only ones set up on the boards … My next turn involves my cute little well stealthed scouts calling in airstrikes on every single one of their mechs.
pop
Much grumbling ensues because a gurrrl beat these big bad war college trained tactics teaching ossifers … with ww2 tactics.
Not my fault they blew their budget buying expensive mechas instead of thinking tactically.
And then there is the time I killed a boy and his dog …
Another experimental game, oddly enough preSG1 … premise is that 1 in 10 million people have this mental quirk to be able to open alien gates. These gates open onto a system of roads that lead through wormholes between planets. So, you get drafted by the government to go explore.
So off our little band of intrepid people go, with assorted military hardware, loaded in a LAV to check out the next planet in the portal system. It is roughly like Baja - desert, dry, somewhat broken ground with hills, and villages in the valleys between the rough ground.
So several of us are exploring, and knowing that there are hostiles in area, we are nervous. So I hear scrabbly sounds along a road we found, and I shoot in a grenade at what looks like a sentry with guard dog :smack: Technically he was a sentry, but he had brought his puppy along and was taking a break and walking the pooch … we should have jumped him, and questioned him as he was more neutral and drafted by the aliens who moved in and were taking the planet over.
I always wondered if he went on to write for SG1
Since none of us could drive, it wouldn’t have done us much good, would it?
Quoth Balance:
Was in the Night Below campaign. Our thief was looting the wizard’s shop in Thurmaster I think it was. He was using a bag he found laying around, shoving all kinds of sparkly things in the bag. After a while, he noticed the bag wasn’t getting heavier. He looked inside and saw it was empty. Confused, he turned it inside out. It was a bag of devouring.
It exploded, but there was two problems. The first was the explosion was amplified by the other magical items still in the shop. The second was there was portals open to several adjoining cities. The explosion used these handy gates to travel to those towns and devour them as well.
By the time it was over, the only settlement still standing was a farming community in the swamp. The cities and their surrounding areas became magically irradiated regions of weirdness. The thief’s intelligent short sword, for example, had enlarged and managed to gain some appendage-like outgrowths from objects melded to it and was in the process of enslaving those not dead when the survivors of the party was stumbling blindly past it, looking for safety.
You’d think a bag like that, lying around in a place like that, would be clearly labeled to prevent just such an outcome.
“See, kids? Because of me, now they have a warning!”
When you 'jack, you get a car and a chauffeur.
I can’t believe I haven’t seen that before.
Especially since I followed DM of the Rings from practically the beginning and this is clearly an homage to it.
Meesa take offense at that.
