I can’t decide on a single moment, but one of the most memorable campaigns I ever played was a large Arcana Unearthed campaign- 8-10 players depending on who showed up, and we had been working together as a group for almost a year by this point, so we had a pretty good sense of things.
Our party was unbalanced in the extreme, consisting of 8 different highly specialized spellcasters, one akashic (think zero combat ability, but an insultingly large variety of skills and knowledge to make up for it), and a meat shield who was too terrified to actually tank most of the stuff we fought.
We were also an incredibly dysfunctional lot. The players were all friends, but what started as vaguely funny in-character trash talk and competition had quickly blossomed into outright antagonism, until our characters were less men on a mission and more a loud, destructive ball of hatred and bad language that was only kept together by the fact that we were much safer in a group than alone, and because some wizard had told us we were heroes bound for greatness together.
None of our characters were evil, but they all shared some pretty nasty personality traits- to a man, every one of our party members was greedy, rude, egocentric, abrasive, and incredibly, incredibly stupid. We didn’t try to get into trouble so much as we bumbled into it, and our (intentionally) moronic solutions to escape trouble often caused things to snowball from bad to cataclysmic. Allow me to narrate an excerpt from our very first session to illustrate the kind of game we’re talking about here:
We saw a giant taking a nap in a peaceful field. One of our party mistook “sleeping” for “dead,” and cried out “Oh no! He’s having a heart attack!”
One botched First Aid roll later and our attempt to perform CPR on the poor giant accidentally kills him. Having declared him tragically dead, the party wastes no time on rushing to search his body for anything useful, making haste before our fellow adventurers get the good stuff first.
In searching him, we find his driver’s license and discover that he is, in fact, the prince of the (very large, very powerful) realm. Panicking, we quickly decide that hiding the body is our only solution. We find a farmer’s cart full of manure nearby and hurriedly dump the body inside, doing fairly severe damage to the corpse in the process since he’s a giant and we’re a pack of terrified humans, fairies and hobbits. We quickly wheel the cart down to the river, but before dumping it in our Akashic (and soon to be up-and-coming criminal mastermind) suggests we do something to hide his face, so he can’t be identified. Several party members attempt to maul him beyond recognition with knives and clubs, but this is very ineffective and kind of disgusting, so we settle for setting the wagon on fire and dumping the wagon into the river.
The river which feeds into a sewer grate on the side of the king’s castle not 200 yards downstream.
Having now murdered the prince of the realm, mutilated his corpse, set it afire, and sent it, floating, in a cart full of shit to his father’s doorstep, we decide that running for our lives is probably the best solution, thus ending the night’s session.
Now, I should specify that this wasn’t a particularly memorable night. This is because that sort of thing happened every time our group got together. Off the top of my head, in the first semester of gameplay we:
- Volunteered at a hospital that we quickly burned down by accident.
- Volunteered at a morgue, that we quickly burned down on purpose (who knows how many of these bodies might be zombies in disguise?)
- Borrowed the cook pot of the only innkeeper in a hundred miles in order to have a vessel to mix many hundred pounds of explosives with. Our explosives recipe involved thousands of pounds of (stolen) manure, all of which spent time in the cook pot.
- Returned the cook pot and didn’t tell anyone what we’d used it for.
- Accidentally set loose the god of chaos, having told him that the king whose son we murdered “Said he was a total pussy”.
- Systematically murdered every dog in the realm, as a token gesture of revenge for our tank, who was tragically raped by a large dog when he staged a distraction to help us steal the aforementioned cook pot.
- Brainwashed a guy into becoming a prolific serial killer and helped him commit several murders in a large plot to manipulate the local police into doing something we wanted.
- Decided that tracking down our serial killer and getting rid of him was too much work, and left the moment we had what we wanted.
And countless other acts. And for the entire game, not a single one of our party members honestly considered themself to be anything but a great hero of the realm.
To the DM’s credit, he did a beautiful job of describing what a pixie with a copper lodged in its head would look like as its corpse fluttered on the winds into the chasm. The rest of the pixies fled. The whole party passed the bridge for a copper.