2e specialists got more spells per day than regular wizards (only 1 more per day of each level, but it was still enough of a difference that everyone starting at low levels specialized, and it still wasn’t really enough), but I don’t remember anything about gnome illusionists and undead. Although, for that matter, I also don’t remember undead having any special advantage against illusions to begin with, and in fact the low-level ones were disadvantaged by being stupid.
Two more stories, both based on my running the same scene in the same module:
A friend wrote the awesome first-level adventure Of Sound Mind for 3E. I ran it at DragonCon one year, and one of my pick-up-game players changed the way I see gaming. Our group traditionally had been extremely cautious planner-types, sometimes spending an entire session planning a single combat.
So when the PCs encountered a pile of severed heads near a doorway that suddenly opened their eyes and shrieked (a burglar alarm for a nearby evil cleric), I expected them to back up, cast Detect Evil, poke at the heads with a 10’ pole, etc. etc. for several minutes.
“I pick up one of the heads,” declared this new player, “tuck it under my arm like a football, and take off running.” He chucked it into the nearest river, neatly ending the encounter, and I realized that being on the opposite end of the planning spectrum could be tremendous fun.
A few years later I ran the same adventure for my (then) 7-year-old triplet cousins, after Thanksgiving dinner. When we reached the severed head scene, I decided that severed heads were a little too gory for the crowd, so on the fly I changed it to a pile of dolls that suddenly opened their eyes and began to shriek. Good change, I thought–until the next morning when one of them came downstairs and started happily recounting to her mother her dreams about shrieking dolls. That’s when I realized that yes, there actually IS something creepier in the world than screaming severed heads.
D&D party is walking along the usual stone corridor:
DM: you see a wooden door in the left-hand wall
Thief: I listen, if I hear nothing I open it
DM: you hear nothing, the door opens towards you. Looking through the doorway, you see a set of stairs …
Bored Impulsive Player: I go running up them!
DM: … going downwards.
BIP:AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa … [plop]
Omnes: laugh to the point of helplessness
COMPLETE BOOK OF GNOMES AND HALFLINGS. “Any gnomish illusionist can elect to be an Imagemaker … all creatures – even those not normally susceptible to illusion – can be taken in by the creations of the Imagemaker. However, creatures that would not normally be fooled by illusions do not suffer the -2 penalty when they attempt to disbelieve … In addition, the Imagemaker’s skill is such that the images he or she creates last longer than those cast by a non-specializing illusionist. Illusions that do not require concentration have their duration doubled when cast by an Imagemaker. Illusions requiring concentration last for 2-12 rounds after the caster ceases concentrating.” Plus, y’know, free Ventriloquism proficiency.
This is a D&D story that also shows how awesome my wife is 
Another couple had convinced her to play and I was the DM; I was running the Sunless Citadel. They came to a part where they heard goblins (or something similar) in a room and where trying to decide what to do. My wife recalled that I had mentioned a room earlier had some elf pudding in it.
Me: “So?” It was part of the built in description of a random storage room.
Her: “Is elf pudding slippery?”
Me: [Letting the Gods of the Dice decide . . . I roll a 20.] “Yeah, it’s fairly slick.”
They make awesome move silent checks and dump a barrel of (at least this brand) very slippery elf pudding right out side of the room. They make a bunch of noise and as the goblins (maybe they were kobolds) come out all but one falls and is cut down. One was able to make an attack and failed.
I had to give them some bonus xp for creativity.
I have no idea if the slipperiness of elf pudding in the D&D world is established or not, but flexibility is one of the awesome parts of RPGs.
Is it made by elves, or out of… 
See, I was envisioning a really unusual deadly pudding variant…
In Soviet Russia, the pudding eats you!
I had wondered that too. I don’t remember what the conclusion was though. Just that is smells bad and aparently requires a balance check DC 20 to walk in at a normal pace.
That would be an awesome idea! The slime “wakes up” when the first goblin steps on in . . . and it gets mad.
They were only level 1 characters though, so any slime probably would have done them in. They were already in debt with the local temple for healing them after their first trip into the dungeon. They decided to have the rogue climb down the rope and then light a torch. He got jumped by a few rats while he was realizing they forgot any kind of tinderbox.
The elf pudding is why any wizard or sorcerer worth their salt takes Grease as a level 1 known spell.
In a Sci-Fi game the mission was simply to land on a planet, release a bio weapon (which was in a suitcase) and get away. So, the player, lands, checks into a fancy futuristic hotel and the first thing he does is ask the hotel’s main computer to scan his suitcase and tell him what is in it. The computer does so, then locks down the room and calls the authorities. Quarantine and extermination followed.
Did the players know that that was their mission, or were they being blindly manipulated into it?
Oh, he knew his mission. I am not sure why he wanted the case scanned. Paranoia?
Well, if it was Paranoia, then it ended exactly like it’s supposed to…
I assume he died satisfied he hadn’t been double-crossed.
Indeed. I have another long, ridiculous story involving flying camels, a grease spell, and half a dozen ghouls plummeting to their deaths. It all seemed very reasonable at the time.
Here’s a trick that I used as a player one time, that I kind of regretted, but kind of not since my character wasn’t “broken” by any stretch.
I can’t even remember at this point which rule set it was… 2nd ed? 3rd? 3.5? Probably 2nd or 3rd. Anyhow, my character was a super high Con. dwarf berserker, with fairly high HP. In one particularly brutal encounter, he got level drained by a vampire…like 6 or 8 levels, pretty significant. The rule for level drain at the time that we used, was you actually lost those levels and… since no one remembers what HP they rolled each level, you un-roll for each level you lost. I did so, and rolled very low. As I recall, I had to re-earn those levels the hard way (we didn’t have a cleric with…heal? regeneration? whatever it was), and each time I gained a level, I rolled super high again. So by the time I got back to the level I started at, I had HPs way over the maximum possible.
The reason I say he wasn’t broken is that he was somewhat gimped as a character, STR wasn’t that high, didn’t have good equipment…all he had was an insane amount of hit points.
I think the rules I used actually existed at the time, but of course if I had it to do over, I’d do something a little more reasonable. Not that level drain has even existed in D&D for a while.
There’s still level drain in 3.x. It works differently, though - you don’t actually lose a level, you gain a “negative” level. Each negative level a character has gives them (IIRC) a cumulative -1 on most rolls, and -5 to you max HP. They can be cured through use of a Restoration spell. It doesn’t change your characters actual level, or effect how many XP you have.
But if the negative level isn’t Restored or worn off after 24 hours, then you have to make a Fort save or really actually lose the level and drop XP, just like old school.
And I wouldn’t exactly call that a “trick you used”, unless you were controlling the dice. It could just as easily have gone the other way, with you ending up with an impossibly low number of HP. You just got lucky, in a notably peculiar way.
Does anyone remember the “create water” spell from the original (paper) D&D set? The rule said that it created a given volume of water, which doubled for each level the Mage was … someone calculated that a level 60 (IIRC) Mage could create a large enough sphere of water to undergo spontaneous fusion, that is to say turn into a star.