"GM, what direction is that Tarrasque we accidentally let loose going?"
"West"
"Ok, we are no longer adventuring on the west side of the continent. Ever."
That was almost 5 years ago. And they still refuse to go anywhere past the Dwarven mountain range which separates the west section of my map. They have have abandoned entire quest lines to avoid dealing with the consequences of their actions.
I would try to make the party face the consequences of their actions in one of 2 ways:
1. Create an NPC party of antagonists from the West. The antagonist party's origin story is that their homes were destroyed by the Tarrasque, and the antagonists later managed to defeat the Tarrasque themselves. The antagonists then try to hunt down those that unleashed the Tarrasque on their home. One interesting way to do it would have the party hear news from the West that the Tarrasque has been defeated. Later down the line, give the party a quest that sends them East. In the West, the antagonist party would naturally be heroes, and once the party is identified as responsible for releasing the Tarrasque they find themselves isolated in hostile territory, with a powerful group of enemies pursuing them.
2. Single NPC, evil wizard of some kind, manages to take control of the Tarrasque and uses it as a weapon of war. Slowly build rumors of a wizard conquering the nations of the West, eventually have the antagonist cross the mountains with the tarrasque and an army behind it.
I think option 1 would be the more interesting of the 2, but if you really want to make the party fight the Tarrasque, then I'd go for option 2.
To be honest, having an entire section of the map blocked off because of their paranoia is a consequence all by itself. It would be pretty funny if they spend the entire campaign avoiding it like the plague and then it turns out some high level adventurers took care of it immediately after it was released and there was never anything for the party to be afraid of.
Another way for an NPCs to deal with a Tarrasque-
To quasi permanently deal with a Tarrasque, you disintegrate it and use a Wish spell to stop the regeneration (was some original lore, not 5th edition- Mr Rhexxx did a fantastic video on the Tarrasque).
Then, you have said wizard NPC cast Wish on the ashes again when the party is near to undo the first Wish to allow it to regenerate right under the players' noses.
They'll never see it coming.
I rolled on the random travelling events board. Standard D100 stuff. I got on the Xanathar's Grassland Encounters: "A tornado that touches down 1d6 miles away, tearing up the land for 1 mile before it dissipates" Players grew curious as to why a tornado would randomly be tearing up the place in what I had described earlier as a 'serene and quiet day'. Cut to me about 20 sessions later borrowing from Princes of the Apocalypse with an Air Cult that spontaneously became the big bad when my party failed to kill them in the cave they were meant to die in. Now there are storm clouds and living lightning bolts sieging towns from a nigh unreachable advantage point on a ruined Storm Giant Skycastle. Exceptionally amusing that rolling on that table in hindsight was a lot better than what I had originally with 'Dragon Cultists are running the governments'.
The party met a mafia lord type who had the mcguffin they were after. He was a business man so offered to sell it, trade for it or they could work for him in exchange for it. I thought with 3 options they had plenty of choices... they chose to attempt to murder him in his own base. They barely survived, managing to flee carrying two unconscious party members. The mafia lord went from a merchant they could deal with to a mini boss they needed to work out a way to assassinate.
Always prepare for your players to pick option: murder. As soon as they don't agree with each choice you lay out, you might as well get the minis out and initiative rolled.
A player who missed a session entered the city alone with no money as a war was about to start. He asked if there was a job board, so I made up something reasonable and a couple of joke ones, including cat sitter at 2 cp per week.
He saw that as a free place to stay and jumped on it. So he had to deal with a demon cat owned by a young watchman who going off to join the army, not realizing he's the true heir to the throne.
That ended up becoming a major part of the plot, as the PCs deposed the evil king and installed this good guy watchman who didn't exist until a player though cat sitting would be an easy gig.
Our warlock died in a fight, failed all death saves on top of that. He was upset cuz he really liked his character.
When it came around to his turn again in combat, instead of being skipped, the DM roleplayed as his patron in the afterlife. He gave him a second chance with the trade of an even stricter pact.
He came back to life as an undead warlock.
All of them, really. This might be the result of me largely only running homebrew campaigns until the last year or so when I started running Curse of Strahd, my first module ever. But my general DM style is to do a decent amount of world building for a setting, and get to a point where I really understand my NPCs, and the NPCs have goals, some of which will help shape the overall story of the campaign. But I don't really plot much out more than one session ahead. I might have a little nugget of an idea for the future, usually as the result of something someone does, but I always let those ideas stay vague until we come up upon the moment.
That said, there have been lots of times where I thought I roughly knew where the story was going to go, only to be thoroughly proven wrong due to some player action. A few years ago I was running a low-ish magic campaign in the Stone Age of my homebrew world, where people were just starting to learn how to do magic. And I'd come up with sort of an alternate physics system for how magic worked, so that we could still use the rules and game mechanics of D&D, but the lore-reason for why stuff worked was different. Instead of it being Mystra or the Weave or whatever, the idea was that Belief directly shaped magical energies. So the more people you could get to believe the same thing, the more that thing became reality.
One of my players played a practical joke on what was essentially a sleazy Bartender, and used a little magic to convince the Bartender that \*he\* in fact had magic, and that it was super easy to do. Well, keep in mind that my players were in the dark about the whole "Belief causes reality" thing in the beginning, so what they didn't realize is that this practical joke wound up turning this simple Bartender into one of the best magical users in the whole campaign, because he was convinced, and convinced a lot of people around him, that he was super gifted with magic. This snowballed until this sleazy Bartender became a literal god among men. Pretty crazy. I still think about that.
In the first session one of the PCs made a nat 20 swim check, and decided he was going to focus on becoming a sea god. And I faciltated this to an extent.
Running LMoP and one of my players makes mead in their spare time and another loves cooking/cocktails/etc. Decided for fun to say the inn in Phandalin served hard cider made from the apples at Edermath's orchard. They immediately wanted to visit him. The player that makes mead kept mentioning bees over and over to Edermath. I assumed they were wanting to role-play harvesting honey to make mead, so finally I was like sure Edermath gives you a sack of bees just to kinda move on. The very next thing I had planned was the Redbrands jumping the party. The moment the words, "give us your stuff" left my mouth I knew I had messed up. My player clutched their sack of bees and declared, "Not my big sack of money?!" And the other player shouted, "Your mother's ruby is in there! Oh no!" My Redbrands of course then had to confiscate and open the sack of bees. My party has called themselves The Bee-Holders ever since.
Hahaha, yeah, their energy is what has absolutely changed the trajectory of the campaign. I'm always looking over my shoulder for bees or bee energy antics 😅
Set up a dragon fight in its lair. After the players were worn out and half-dead from the battle to defeat it, I revealed that the NPC that had been tagging along was a shapeshifted black dragon who had engineered the conflict to take out a rival and claim his hoard. The players were supposed to run at that point.
Obviously they chose to fight the second dragon, and against all odds, won. So then the campaign entirely derailed, as the players now had control of a hoard that the first dragon had claimed from a fallen Dwarven empire, and the logistics of securing and moving that much gold and its impact on the geopolitics all of the wider world took up the next several sessions.
Player who had set out to play a ruthless, greedy, yet charming conman with family trauma ran into a tiefling teenager who struggled to do the right thing from time to time and ran away from her family after trying to screw the party over and getting caught.
He found her and talked her into going back to her family with a ridiculously high persuasion roll (for a level 2 bard) and hit her with the line, “If I had a family like yours that fought to have you as hard they are now, I’d never let them go”.
Minor thing, but it changed the entire course of her character who was originally going to be a reoccurring villain that would tragically get more and more in over her head and more evil as she went.
Instead, her and her foster sister (along with a young goblin wizard also saved by the party) have formed a mirror party that looks up to the main group. They run into each other occasionally and constantly joke that “those kids are actually the chosen ones”. I think its made parts of the party alter the way their characters behave and has slowly adjusted towards heroism.
This is just beautiful and reminds me of how I ruined a huged fight for my dm. We are in Curse of Strahd and I came across the bodies of two children. I was alone as a lvl 2 Barbarian, but I'm also a Acolyte of Kuliak and upon seeking these bodies started to pray for their souls to be at peace. Well their spirits came and after some RP I am now carrying the skeletal remains of these two kids to try and set their spirits free. He was expecting me to upset them because of how my character is, but he forgot I honor the dead and have a weak spot for caring for the young.
We failed every check during a mid-canpaign fight where we were supposed to run away and regroup because the BBEG was going to monologue us about how we had no chance of beating him and our Fighter rolled a Nat 20 to headbutt him in the middle of his speech... Which resulted in us getting TPK'd because I had one spell left and Grease didn't do anything except make our corpses really slippery after the fact.
Cut to us IRL bummed about having to reroll our characters next session. Then in the next session, our DM told us to make a Will Save just as we were getting ready to present our new PC's. We did make those Will saves.
Lo and behold, our old PC's are now undead that were previously enthralled to the BBEG we head-butted last session and have now broken free of his control. 20 years have passed in-game and we now have a new quest.
One of the members of our party is a time wizard, and his magic is against the laws of the universe. There is an organization of time cops who enforce that type of thing not be used, so the entire campaign we never spoke about it out loud unless we were in a private sanctum, made sure not to use the magic in front of people who could live to tell the tale, etc.
Eventually we find another player's long lost mother, and that player is comforting their mother by assuring her of our groups power so we can protect her, and absent-mindedly mention, while listing all of our feats, that the time wizard is able to revert any mistakes that may happen as though they didn't.
This was not intentional, and none of us even recognized what had even happened until we turn towards the time wizard's player and his jaw is just on the floor
Now we've got time cops constantly chasing us, patrolling around our home city, and causing general trans-dimensional shenanigans
So early on in my campaign the party met this guy who owns a museum of magical artifacts who sent them on a quest to recover an incredibly dangerous relic that was stolen by bandits. They return it to him and it’s revealed that this guy is actually a Warforged who’s lived for hundreds of years, an extremely powerful Artificer, and sworn enemy of the BBEG and the dark god they serve.
What does the party do with this information? Fucking rob him for his bag of holding, burn down a local business to create a diversion, lie about all that to his face, and, in a later session, accidentally destroy it.
There goes the most powerful ally you’ll ever have in this campaign i guess
Ya know, the Lord of Blades is a pretty slick mini, really has some nice table presence on a battlemap. Your players just wanted to give you the gift of a new evil warforged who can have a really cool model!
The party split up to search for clues when we found a town that had very clearly been attacked.
I went to check the windmill for survivors and when I opened the door a couple goblins up in the rafters shot at me with a bow. I attempted to fight them with me reach weapon and failed, fled, and when I joined back up with the party the rogue asked what happened to me.
I felt kina embarrassed about losing so badly, I was playing a proud fighter, so rather than admit defeat I lied. I just shrugged and said "Ghosts."
The rogue didn't believe me, left on his own to look in the windmill and got shot. He moved in to shoot with his bow, got crit hit but the damage rolled poorly so he survived, but we played it as him getting hit and losing an eye. He flees as well and when he joined back up with us he looks at me and just says "Ghosts?" I nodded and replied with "Ghosts."
Both my fighter and the rogue now had a fear of goblins and those two goblins got class levels and later went on to be the bbeg of my story arc.
D20 modern. Halloween night in New Orleans.
The party was supposed to be protecting a young man who had the rare magical ability to transport people between the real world and the parallel realm of magic.
One PC was the daughter of a crime boss in New Orleans. The party had been pursued by some dangerous people, and they got an invite to a masquerade ball on Halloween night at the house of the crime boss.
The PC daughter of the crime boss ends up slightly misunderstanding the dynamic, and then hands over the young wizard to be murdered.
I sort of assumed this would be the end of the campaign. The players had just lost their ability to travel into the realm of magic, which kind of was the main hook of the campaign.
But another player said, aren't we in New Orleans? Don't they do voodoo here?
And that's how we brought the dead character back as a ghost to continue the campaign.
Party got dragged into bar fight, tried not to do too much damage to others, but the barbarian raged and role played hitting a town guard in the confusion. This turned the campaign from decently fun standard fantasy to the most memorable campaign I’ve ever DM’d with a lot of run-ins with the law and shenanigans.
If you have a doctorate in galaxy morphology, stop reading here.
Players were tasked with rescuing a researcher from a parasitic forest, and for flavor I had one of their entourage get infected by the psychic fungus that formed the main ecosystem. Then the lunar sorcerer says "I grab the guy and Lesser Restoration, does it do anything?"
*On impulse* "Roll me a flat charisma check."
"Dirty 20"
"Ok, he collapses and you can haul him inside the house before fighting off the others."
This random flavor dude has become the main target of the BBEG because of said psychic nonsense. And several other players are about to get involved in the action. It's very nice when your players manage to make the plot happen for you.
The players pulling every pin on a belt of grenades the BBEG was wearing.
I had to rapidly come up with a plan for what the guy would do in that situation, ultimately leading to his immortal partner giving up her immortality so he could survive, her regretting it terribly and switching sides, and him eventually turning into a horrible mutant monster.
Haha first big “leave the safety of the starting village” mission involved a child being kidnapped. This was a foregone conclusion by the DM that this would happen. He even used a Goblin Shaman with an invisibility spell to facilitate it. But, my quick thinking artificer used Fairie Fire. The goblin saved but the girl he was carrying did not and her outline allowed our Ranger to shoot him dead with a well shot arrow.
Saved the girl, annoyed the DM 😝
Told them they could only pull the sword from the stone with a Disadvantaged DC 23 Athletics check.
Natural 20.
Could not believe it. Insane moment, and now a lot of things need to be revised.
During an evil one shot (in a setting that I run all my campaigns for multiple groups) where the players were heisting the tower headquarters of the Empires anti-magic cops. They took a detour and ended up at the top of the tower, in a room I knew was there from the days the world had been my creative writing project. It was lined with ominous stone coffins and they opened one. Inside was a withered humanoid, half entombed in blue crystal. They decided to put them out of their misery. The room was a jury rigged control choir for the world's entire soul cycle and a major state and historical secret where the anti magic cops had imprisoned ancient and powerful magi to stabilise ancient magitech they barely understood. Now unstable, the tower exploded, destroying the capital city, 10 pages of political intrigue, city factions, bathing the region in radiation and collapsing the entire empire. I had to rewrite all future ideas, but ultimately was for the better as it shook up an otherwise stable world. The capital city ended up as a fun STALKER/Roadside Picnic homage campaign.
I got a wild magic chart off the internet and didnt read most of the things on it - i was a fairly newbie DM at the time- and one day something triggered a wild magic surge and they rolled the fateful number that brought a nearby tree to sentient life.
They named him Limbert and he became a permanent member of the gang.
He later - thru much tom foolery and DM yadda-yaddas - became the pilot, brain, and mast of a sentient barge.
And even later after than that, he got an upgrade to be a submarine.
There were plans to upgrade him further into an airship but the year 2020 ruined our lives and we never made it that far.
Limbert is my new favorite.
Honestly wild magic sounds so fun, I keep hoping that a player picks that subclass but so far nobody has. In one campaign I homebrewed a "Gnomengarde firecracker" that involved rolling on the wild magic table, just for a little taste of that sweet sweet chaos.
If you ever play a game online with room for two tired parents, my husband and I have a way of mercy monk and wild magic sorcerer pair! And I'm *dying* for a DM who remembers that I have wild magic.
My Level 11 party is currently in the Feywild on their way to see Queen Titania, who has summoned them. They are searching for the Cleric's missing twin sister, a powerful stolen McGuffin, as well as their missing Bag of Holding. I haven't wanted to railroad them, so I don't even know where those are or why.
Last night, two of the three PCs pulled cards from the Deck of Many Things. They have a couple of powerful Gods that can and would help, as well as a Wish, but we don't want to cheese it. We agreed that it would be much more fun to play this out.
The Warlock pulled the Ruin card, but it had no effect because the only items he has are magical. (5 total, including his clothes.) Bullet dodged and 1 card gone.
The Cleric, on the other hand, pulled the Void card. His soul immediately got shunted into a vessel somewhere. The Warlock is tethered to him thanks to an Archfey, so he immediately joined the soul-trapped PC in that location but not in the vessel.
The Ranger player has no idea what's happened because they left the session early. The Ranger PC and Druid NPC are sleeping on an airship in the Feywild, so they have no clue at this moment either.
The three of us initially agreed that we could run the soul recovery as a Cleric and Warlock one shot the next time we lose our Ranger player for a session.
This could be irrelevant to the overall plot. Next session, they could just return to the airship and continue on as if nothing happened.
Alternately, where they are (i.e. with the missing sister?), what the soul vessel is (i.e. in the McGuffin?), and who/what is guarding the vessel (i.e. the bandits they are after? The BBEG or their minions?) could bypass a bunch of story/plot. That would leave the Ranger PC & player out of completing one or both of their quests, and that option is terrible in all of our opinions.
So, instead of either of those scenarios, the two card pulling players are likely going to play the Druid NPC and one of the Airship crew NPCs, and go on a quest with the Ranger to find the Cleric's soul and Warlock.
It's a big curve ball, but one we are all excited about.
Agreed. We once got carried away and let the deck destroy another campaign. This campaign, though, is our collective baby, so we're being thoughtful and cautious about it. We're two and a half years in and plan to go to level 20, so we thought long and hard about whether to bring the deck in. In the end, we're all DMs, so we all take responsibility for it.
One of us has a physical deck, and we've pulled a few cards OOC at the end of our sessions, just to brainstorm what we'd do. We know that it doesn't have to be the death of the campaign if we are creative, so this time, we did it in character. We've come up with some great ideas for this scenario, and I can't wait to see how they play out.
Following-up to report that this turned out really well for us. We ran it in-campaign, in one session. The entire party, except the silly Cleric, was able to go on the rescue mission, thanks to a Wish from Titania. They also got some help from a PC turned God from our very first campaign. The card-pulling player piloted the Druid NPC and the God, who was their OG PC. They fought a two-headed Dragon that was guarding the vessel and killed it in pretty epic style. Not only did they get the soul back, but the vessel the soul was trapped in turned out to be a pretty powerful artifact that may help them in the future.
DoMT - surprise surprise. One of the most classically infamous magic items threw a major monkey wrench in what was still considered a serious campaign at the time. When I made the Deck available to a level 8 party, I knew the risks, and I knew my party would revere the seriousness of it. I removed 4 cards from the deck: 2 absurdly positive cards and 2 game-breakingly negative cards. The rest was random.
Naturally, they fished out the Moon card for 2 wishes. At this point in the campaign they were in a pinch because 3 of 6 party members had died in a crazy fight last session, one of them being the cleric who would have leveled up if he had survived that fight. No Raise Dead, no good options. But when they pulled that Moon card, the half live party started carefully crafting their perfect first wish: “Bring everyone from our party back to life”. In their minds, that meant every character who was ever a part of the party, and when my players get excited and have got their hands on a once-in-a-campaign magic item, I’m not going to break their hearts. So then a fairly large number of characters were brought back to life in addition to recent fallen PCs because I had run levels 1-3 as a meat grinder. The party had just succeeded in earning a well-equipped base of operations, and now it was filled with a small army of player characters that my players began to assign tasks to. It was a big moment that I was proud of my players for, and it spelled the beginning of some serious shenanigans within our game.
Had a buddy who didn’t exactly understand spell-casters and specifically how prepared spells work.
So when my Wizard finally was rewarded for a quest with a scroll of Featherfall he immediately tackled me off a cliff after I had finished adding it to my book-o-spells.
Needless to say I did not survive the 600ft drop off the side of a mountain.
I mentioned offhand that the local paladin turned blacksmith was married, as was the local arcane trickster turned magic shopkeep (at the time I didn’t want the players to try and seduce them). One of the players asked if they were married to each other. I rolled with it and now they’ve been decently important NPCs for a few years IRL.
Our party was tasked with getting a nondescribed "magical artifact" for the king of the monstrous nation (united goblins, kobolds etc who had made their own country). We found it and it was a magical lamp. The entire party said f it we opening it ourselves! So we did and rolled a dice. We landed the 5% chance that the entity inside was free instead of granting a wish, so he just f'd off. The party went, meh, hey we still have the magic lamp so we can turn that in.
So we handed the empty lamp to the kind and he immediately tried to do the exact same thing we did... only the was nothing inside. The party artificer told only the dm but he enchanted his crossbow with goblin slaying, so when the king was trying to capture us he just oneshot the poor guy. Next part of the campaign was to try and flee the country.
In my Sw5e game, after a long time playing they had fallen into the good graces of the top dog of the crime scene. After the players killed the first big bad of the game, the crime lord approached them and offered them employment.
They accepted! A small caveat is that they would not be taking orders directly from him, but from his two capos.
They met the first capo, a supposed best friend of the crime lord, and they hit it off with him very well.
The other was a HUGE bitch, using and abusing her status over the party to order them around. She was even able to boss around the other capo, seemingly holding something over his head.
See, that last fact was a hint to what the next plot would be. The plan was the players would work with the syndicate, doing legit jobs for a while, before the friend capo would start sending them on strange missions, with the ultimate conclusion of him revealing he's started a coop against the criminal head, with the strange missions the players have done all being steps in fulfilling this coop. They would be given a chance to join or not, and the game would go from there.
INSTEAD! The players did ONE job under the syndicates employment, a whopping whole afternoon on the clock, before they got fucking sick of the bitch capo and killed her in a coffee shop.
This set off her dead-man switch (the thing she held over the other capos head) and altered the top guy to the scheme. The players, in their panic, decided to fake their freaking deaths to hide from the head guy's wrath, then joining the coop with new identities.
This is what my game has been following every since.
I wasn't even there, it happened on the first session and my character and I only joined the group on the second session.
The players went through a dungeon, and at the end they looted a magical ring. For some reason, they were instantly suspicious of that ring, assumed it to be evil, and dangerous. The DM built the whole campaign around that ring actually being evil and dangerous. A couple years in and we're still chasing relics of a powerful lich that is trying to come back after being beaten hundreds of years ago, of which the ring was only the first one.
My players were up against a druid-based puzzle (none of the PCs are druids, they were hired by druid NPCs). The clues they had were fiery in nature - with the suggested solutions in the module being a healing spell, dispel magic, heavy application of water, or go fight some fire elementals in the volcano they were on the side of. Halfway up the volcano they decided the *real* solution was interplanar travel and I guess we're a shadowfell campaign, now.
My character's best friend in the campaign (also a PC) died tragically, breaking her heart, and later in a town we glimpsed her long-lost brother. My character ran after him and turned on as much charm as her desperate self could muster, and I rolled a natural 20 to get him to come have a drink with her. One drink turned into five, they talked until the sun came up, and he played a pivotal role fighting for us in the campaign until the end. (Post-campaign, they became partners -- just two ace black dragonborns in love. <3)
Months after that natural 20, I found out that the brother was meant to be a major force of evil and destruction for us, as a brainwashed pawn for one of the BBEGs. And that natural 20 was the only thing that could have gotten him to change course.
DMing a Curse of Strahd campaign.
Party were fighting Strahd and Rahadin in the streets of Kresk during an invasion of his forces onto the town, as Strahd was trying to take Ireena. Party kill Rahadin and, in my infinite wisdom, thought it would be fitting that Strahd would go into a fit of rage and on his turn he fires a cone of cold at the party. However, I was in so deep 'roleplaying Strahd' (read: being a goober) I missed the fact that Ireena would also be caught in the cone. Ireena was turned into a human popsicle. Everyone was shocked, including myself, and I made Strahd flee the battle after he realised what he had done. The party had to then turn their attention to the vampire spawn laying waste to Kresk.
We've taken a break since that session as I write my way out of this hole that I've put myself into, but I have some ideas about Strahd just going full 'fuck it' scorched earth. Will time skip a few months and the party have to retake every major city from Strahd's wives and make a final assault on the castle to kill that evil bastard.
TLDR: Don't DM and goober Curse of Strahd
In our dragon based guild heavy campaign. On like a lvl 4 adventure, we were sent to kill two wyrmling black dragons. Thinking it was easy, we accepted a quest board mission to allow an intern type adventurer to tag along.
IT WENT SOUTH, the intern was trapped along with another guild team. We found them melted and mangled. Having grown attached to our dear normal human NPC, we traveled all over with a mangled leg for someone to revive our boy.
The babayega showed up with an offer. On our D100 resurrection, this poor intern human now became an Aasimar with a greater calling. He's helped a ton, introduced us to a ton of opportunities, and we had to hand over a deck of many things to uphold our part of the deal to the Babayega.
Travis, if you're out there, I hope it has all been worth it.
One of my PCs grew up misled by the church and was very unprepared when I stuck an NPC in the campaign that challenged these views. This character being told that everything she had been taught was a lie and she was just being used by the church. Well, saying she didn't take it well is an understatement. She failed every insight check against the NPC and every consititution check to reign in her anger.
She ended up attacking the guy, stealing a MacGuffin that was essentially a way into this secret kingdom they found, and escaped the guards to run out of the city with every intention to hand it over to her church handlers.
Boom. Unintentional villain arc. I took over the character and she's now the main antagonist to the party. It's a really fun twist on what I was expecting.
On the very second combat encounter they fought 2 throw away cultists with a hostage. Captured one of the cultists who over the course of the campaign developed into the cleric's love interest and proved to be vital in breaking apart the schemes of an eventual cultist time loop scenario.
Originally was just supposed to find the cultist medallions on their corpses and hint at future plot line. Instead it all got heavily incorporated with a developing character arc of a party NPC.
Party was exploring the deep parts of the Underdark, bordering on The Abyss. They found an unholy congregation of demons and devils, and my players successfully snuck and got all the information they needed, or at least, wanted to find out.
Telepathy to fighter: “We will be waiting for you, son of Wrath” (was doing a 7 Deadly Sins thing).
Fighter walks back in (omg) and actually makes a deal with the devil. They got a super powerful weapon, and all they had to do was make sure it was the item to defeat the current dragon BBEG.
They actually did this lol.
The devil shows up: “I forgot to mention, the last component for this ritual is red dragon’s blood!”
Cue the game going from a Legend of Zelda temple esque vibe to a “we have unleashed the apocalypse, this is our fault”
In a campaign I ran; the party was serving as monster hunters in a frontier town. The idea was for them to venture into the moors and return with monster ears to exchange for gold to buy better gear, so they could delve deeper on the next run and so on.
One wise guy roped the party into a crazy idea that derailed the entire setting. He wanted to counterfeit ears. They trekked to another town entirely, sold all their possessions to buy as much leather as possible, and went to work for several months. Once done, they had to crawl back to the first town with little else aside from the clothes on their backs and sacks of fake ears. They arrived fairly broken and bleeding and when they tried to "cash in" they were asked what monster they had hunted to get the ears from. A failed roll roused suspicion and the jig was up. The party was easily subdued and thrown in prison. Eventually the monsters overran the town.
A friend's campaign met a similar fate. During session zero for his homebrew someone asked what stance the kingdom they were supposed to save had on LGBT rights. He said it was a very ye olde' setting and marriage was exclusively for heredity reasons and not love. His party didn't like that, instead choosing to start an underground movement to overthrow the kingdom. After a year of long fought conflict, they successfully deposed the king, formed a republic, and gay marriage rights were the first thing signed into law. The Lich King's hordes invaded on the day of the first legal gay marriage and annihilated the city.
Playing LMoP. Party discovers Gundren is being held at Cragmaw Castle.
Druid: “Cragmaw Castle?!? Well we better raise an army!”
The Siege of Cragmaw Castle starts next week.’
They went to Gnomengarde (DoIP) and were to get a troop of goat riding, gnomish knights to help.
The dwarfs sent troops after they retrieved lost silver ax of Axeholm (DoIP).
The gnomes and dwarves are excited that through the parties actions the Lost Mines of Phandelvar will be restored.
War and intrigue in Damara... but then the players saw a corner of Ravensburg called 'The Forbidden City' and really wanted to check it out. I borrowed elements from Blight in Path of Exile. It went over so well that they don't care about the war raging against the goblin horde. They just want to fight necromantic mushrooms alongside a patronizing woman. I've rewritten the entire module.
One of my players was playing a Warlock Fiend. One of my encounters ended up in a party kill so I decided that the Warlock player met his patron in Hell and accepted becoming a devil (one of the Transformations from Grim Hollow) in exchange for sending souls to the patron. He got some soul coins which I ruled would resurrect the other players so everybody didn't have to make new characters. It was a shame we never got to finish the campaign as the Warlock player wanted to marry his patron and end up as the Prince of Hell with the patron as queen
The party found an old shipwreck of a legendary Viking ship, with all of It's crew turned to ghosts cursed to repeat the last seconda of their lives
Cue me improvising that when a PC touches a Ghost they see the Moment of their death
Cue me improvising again to describe how pseudo Jesus with the power to control flames killed half the crew 200/300 years ago and using a random image on the book to describe him
Now the party has to fight and kill flamey jesus.
Also this basically forced me to rewrite the next part of the campaign as it was going in a completely different direction
The first session ever the players joined up with a local militia leader to clear out a drug den, wanton violence abounds! Then there was a baby at the top floor, which the players saved from being killed by their maybe-not-so-ally.
Lierally the rest of the campaign centered around that kid, he is now on track to become an arch wizard and his bonus family (the party) could not be more proud.
Playing a rwby campaign. My barbarian tries to make a point of not trusting the hunter schools headmaster while standing on a forested cliff side.
'I trust that man as far i can throw this tree'
Proceed to Nat 20, rip an entire tree out of the earth and suplex/yeet it off the cliff hundreds of metres away.
follow that with a nat 1 wisdom roll, and now my character has never once doubted a single word he says, and has put himself into all but guaranteed death situations because of it.
We were doing ToA, Dm have us some magic drugs while we were in a major city. One of the pcs triggered a wild magic surge when reading eating it, and it cast meteor swarm, destroying the city.
This allowed Acererak to invade and take over half of the peninsula with a massive undead army....
Oops
So this didn't really change that specific campaign, but it *did* change the campaign that followed up this one.
I just got done playing the first D&D campaign I've ever played before. It was a Cyberpunk 2077 themed campaign with the group of players as a group called the Deadmen, who work for the big bad company of the series, MathersTec. The Deadmen were forced to work for MathersTec, having been captured after cyberpsycho. Anyway, the end of our campaign had the players split off into seperate ending groups. The one I choose with two of the five other players was dubbed the 'Rebellion' ending, where we went to nuke MathersTec. Well, at the end the DM was going to have the three of us vote on which of the two Rebellion ending variations we got: the ending where we succeeded in nuking the building and take out an entire city with us, or the ending where we went back to MathersTec to work for them again. There were three players, so three of us to vote. I had already said, as my character was in the middle of going cyberpsycho again, that I was nuking the building and finishing the job. One of the other players said that we would turn ourselves in. So the ultimate decision was left on the last player, who happened to have an entirely luck-based build where he was at the point of killing hundreds through lucky coincidences and not directly. He flipped a coin and it landed on its side instead of heads or tails, so the character ***killed himself in response.*** We had no idea what to do, so the DM just chalked it up to both of the remaining players living. But he regrets it now that the followup campaign needed a definite ending for our characters, where mine ended up a speed demon with a mechanical dog and the other player became our version of ***ADAM SMASHER.*** So we basically created the most terrifying player character in all of Cyberpunk campaigns by the luckiest player character we had killing himself.
“You find yourself in front of the Companion of Elturel, the beacon of holy light which banishes evil and undead from this place. As you stand before it, a warm and seductive voice enters your ear, offering a burst of sudden growth and power if you were to only touch the Companion and allow her influence on to it. She says her name is Zariel and… oh you accept? You touch the Companion and offer yourself to Zariel’s control? Um ok well…”
Cut to 6 months later and my players are corrupted generals in Zariel’s devil army, hunted by their old allies, fighting demons in the Blood War.
Our party was introduced to the BBEG relatively early on. He was a wizard that had his own kingdom, pet ancient dragon, and the hand of Vecna. We pretended to work for him until an opportune moment to strike presented itself.
Our plan was simple. Teleport on top of him after destroying one of his hag eyes (homebrew stuff we also have access to) to blind him, then wrestle him to the ground and slap dimensional shackles on him. After that, beat him to death.
Well, turns out he had Timestop prepared. He managed to get it off despite a counterspell, broke the shackles with his bare hands, and was getting ready to fight us.
My wizard had cast contact other plane a LOT to research the BBEG so we knew the hand of Vecna could cast teleport and that we couldn't do anything to stop it because the DM ruled that an item casting a spell could not be counterspelled.
So we panicked and our monk force-fed the BBEG a vial of blood from a very powerful abberation we had injured and fled from (that's a story on its own). Our barbarian tried to anoint himself with the blood and was comatose for a day, so we thought it would do the same thing. Turns out feeding him an entire vial was worse. The BBEG failed his save and didn't use a legendary resistance because he thought it was just poison.
Well, he was wrong. He effectively transformed into a child of the creature we had gotten the blood from, and plane shifted away. The rest of the campaign has been trying to procure means of shutting off its dimensional travel and murdering it. Instead of killing him during that battle and taking the hand of Vecna, we now have to stop the creature from beelining to the eye of Vecna and triggering a series of really bad consequences.
Overall it's made for some great moments and I don't regret a thing. We've got two more sessions including a final showdown with the creature before the campaign ends.
Picture the scene: The party are cornered by Drow, their only way out is a pit behind them that leads into the underdark. It's at this point the Wizard grabs one of the Drow soldiers and drags them down with us as we make our escape.
The Wizard's whole thing is that she's a pacifist who is determined to see the good in everyone, no matter how vile they might be on the outset, so it was her goal to redeem the Drow she pulled down with her.
Even despite things being stacked against her, she succeeded in turing the Drow over to the side of good and turning a random mook into an important character.
This one was my fault. We had a mission to guard a hospital patient so our party wouldn't go to jail. We walked away, the patient was murdered, and we came back and realized we'd screwed up big time. The minute the doctors realize their patient and the part assigned to them was gone, we'd be fugitives.
So everyone decided to skip town. But, I thought that if I could make a distraction that was bigger than the murders, we'd be forgotten in the chaos. I circled back invisibly to the hospital lobby...and planted a full bag of megic beans that generate two pyramids containing mummy lords on top of the hospital, killing everyone.
It was certainly a distraction and wouldve worked if the beans didn't also create a statue in my likeness that shouted my crimes and exact location. From heros to terrorists in 5 min and all the lawful good characters rolled new PCs.
I treated my players to an Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade style dungeon in the main campaign and included a "very important chalice" that brought people back to life and a "you chose... Poorly" chalice that killed people, but would bring them back to unlife if used a second time. The Poorly Chalice was just supposed to be a fun gimic, they'd been hired to get "the very important chalice" for a slightly evil, but not really a big deal, professor.
Reader, instead of giving him the good cup, they gave him the bad cup. (they did not know about the becoming undead part and had never tested it) they saw him test it on a guard. He sent the cup back to a shady government who has now started building an undead army half a continent away. They are currently unaware of the army, but they did turn the professor to stone and have been carrying him around in their bag of holding.
My very first campaign was with a lot of other first-time players and a first-time DM. We met another party on the road led by a dwarf paladin and my brother, playing a halfling rogue, asked to talk to him “short king to short king.”
Dwarf asks him “You are a king?” to which my brother responds “…Yes!”
After a Nat 20 deception. The Kingdom of Short is created. Turns out the halfling’s deadbeat dad is the evil king. Once we kill him we suddenly have a place to be safe from danger as we take next steps as “The Court of Short”.
Well we started with a system that wasn't dnd and the system confused even our rules lawyer. We were playing Sword Chronicle and our group just didn't get it.
So I suggested we move to 5e keep the story and the characters and they make them the appropriate level.
Switching to 5e was an improvisation which allowed me to bring a lot more to the story. The campaign quickly shifted to an invasion into their world by Lord Soth from his Dread Domain in Ravenloft.
Sadly the campaign ended due to availablility we were so close to the end of the story and the players were about level 16 or 17.
so, in the course of 2 sessions, because one guy decided to roll for what plane he ends up in when casting planeshift, we have now made a deal with an archdevil to help them become the master of the nine hells, as well as the devil giving us basically the ability to raise and arm a massive army of undead with ease (we are NOT a good aligned group btw) so now the plan have changed from "lets go see what happens in that one temple" to "welp. time to conquer the earth"
I was presented with three options of things currently going on, none of which could wait.
* I could go with the gold dragon to help him secure the crown of the neighboring nation that he rightfully ruled
* I could go to the trial of a once exiled oracle or predicted doom, who was right, and that doom was upon us, and we needed her help
* or I could go deal with some mystery force burning the countryside of another neighboring nation who my nation was historical enemies with
I had the choice of supporting an ally, supporting another ally, or supporting an enemy. I chose supporting that enemy (well, I feel more like character chose it. I was surprised)
cut to several sessions later, that decision has resulted in our nations being allies, standing together against the BBEG when almost no one else would, and is probably the most significant decision in why the world even **survived**. otherwise they probably would have turned on us "before we could turn on them" and everyone would have been stuck fighting each other instead of the real threat
When my Dragonborn Paladin, Ironclad Brawclath, took a Pact with a Wood Elf named Fulvear. He became an Undead [VRGR] Warlock and was shown the positive aspects of necromancy, which he was strictly agaisnt due to his religion and his upbringing. Ironclad grew stronger and stronger and became Fulvear's, right hand, and even becoming a Hitman for him as well. In turn Fulvear would assist Ironclad in purging the darkness that is the undead that plauged the world they lived in. After a long while, Ironclad requested that he himself become undead, specifically a Mummy Lord, (In this world it was still considered holy, since Mummification was an actual holy practice, thanks DM.) which understandably took Fulvear by surprise, but he granted Ironclad's wishes and helped with the Mummification process.
Ironclad and Fulvear are now two of the strongest characters we have in our built universe. They are retired now, but are still actively doing their thing, and even get call backs in some other campaigns and I absolutely love it.
One of the PC's was a dwarf who spent all his starting gold on a donkey and two huge casks of very fine liquor which it carried on its back. He asked if the casks could be 'really big, and really boozy' if he spent all of his money on them and I just said 'sure, yeah, that seems fine, whatever'. He then insisted on bringing it *everywhere* with the party, which would have been annoying but he RP'ed it really well and thought through what it would actually take to do and it ended up being a pretty fun and funny through-line for the adventure.
Fourth or fifth session they encounter the giant they had been tasked with hunting, the intention was for this to be a brief encounter with them running away because they were simply not strong or experienced enough to take them on. Instead, the dwarf sent in his donkey with the booze. I was pretty fond of the donkey at this point and didn't relish the idea of killing it, so I had the giant snatch the casks and let the donkey canter off. Giant starts drinking the first cask and... Dwarf fires a flaming crossbow bolt at the cask, rolls a 20.
In that moment I probably could have done some math to figure out just how much damage that would actually do, and it almost certainly wouldn't have been enough to kill him BUT, it was just too funny and too perfect and too fitting and I wanted to reward him for having so beautifully RP'ed the donkey and cask thing for so many sessions so that we could have this moment.
So the Giants face was blown off in the explosion, and the booze it had already swallowed blew a hole in its guts before the second cask exploded, totally immolating it.
The next several sessions were spent dealing with the aftermath of the forest fire they started.
My cleric player introduced her character as the “Last cleric of Loki”, thus morphing the entire campaign into a tour de force of Norse mythology and the prevention of Ragnarok.
Early on with a one player game with my wife, the first encounter was her saving my DMPC from a bear. After she killed the bear, she rolled an investigation check to see if there was anything worthwhile on the body. She rolled a natural 1.
I improvized a line like "The bear's fur is covered in a strange black goop and is unsalvageable." Basically the fur was worthless due to the natural 1.
She then brought up the weird goop a few times throughout the session, and was convinced it was incredibly important to the problems the town was facing. To humor her, I had the goop reappear on the armor of the boss I made. For context, the armor was a family treasure that was entrusted for safekeeping to a friend of my wife's character's father. She was sent to retrieve it because of increase demon incursions back home. The boss was designed to just be a bandit leader who stumbled upon the armor by kidnapping the family friend.
I brought the goop back as a way to lower the power level of the armor (Hide of the Feral Guardian. Like I said, solo player campaign, so it was meant more as a power fantasy for her), and when she wanted to play more, I turned the goop into a point of investigation to a cult in a major city. It has since been a driving force for the campaign, given the name Blood of Orcus, and shaped the campaign I made for her...
All because my wife rolled a Nat 1 to check out a bear corpse.
Having been infected with a spark of divine but melevolent energy my players were sent by a mystic to seek out and kill a hag, so that they could use her finger in a potential cure.
Instead they decided to allow the hag to take the divine spark, left, and never came back.I've got two whole arcs out of that bad decision and were still going strong.
This turned my planned 3-shot into my first ever campaign.
I was getting my feet wet with one-shots to give our DM a break, and had planned a level 8 three-to-four session game in the Shadowfell where the group was hunting down rare creatures for a wizard of questionable ethics. One of the random encounters I made that I would roll for every time the group did less than optimal on stealth or survival checks was a Gloomweaver.
They had just finished off three Gloomstalkers, and I had a sudden idea: what if the Gloomweaver couldn't use magic for some reason? The statblock is very good at stealth even without it's spells. But why wouldn't she be able to cast? Well, what if a mage-lord of a nearby city-state had bound her magic, as a punishment? Those thoughts led to more ideas, and suddenly I had an NPC with an interesting, arguably sympathetic backstory who was still morally VERY questionable. I didn't want to make her instantly an obvious plot hook, though.
So instead, I equipped her with some Wyvern venom, and while the party was catching their breath from handling the Gloomstalkers, she snuck up behind the fighter, held the dagger to her back, and tried to rob the party. When the party didn't comply, she stabbed the fighter in the back, doing a very hefty chunk of damage (although the fighter did have poison resistance).
What followed was a very tense encounter where the ranger shot the NPC in the arm, she panicked, tried to flee, and rapidly was tackled and held on the ground by the fighter with a knife to her throat. I did let them know about interesting, malevolent orange colored arcane sigils encircling both of the NPCs wrists. The fighter was a VERY hot-tempered tiefling, and was clearly struggling with the intense desire to kill the NPC for stabbing her in the back. The rogue, cleric, and ranger were more curious about what the NPC's whole deal was, now that she'd been neutralized. Eventually, they talked the tiefling down, and an entire campaign that lasted 6 months was born.
Oh, the fighter and the NPC ended up absolute BFFs.
I randomly had in the bar in the starting village let an Npc named Steve talk about how he was a pirate. For some reason they keyed on 'Steve the Pirate' and press ganged him into all their campaigns and he ended up have a remarkable life, surviving gladiators, helping down a floating city of Drow, and once being the receptacle for a god's spirit. He is still fondly remembered by all the players.
I'm a player in my first ever DnD campaign, it's all custom or whatever you call it. And one moment like this likely kept my character from dying by almost also killing them if the DM was mean.
Basically my character is a fey in our party and her dad is this super stupid and uber strong centaur barbarian of large size cause he's a hulking beast who can rip the heads off of giants and shit, well he went and used physical force and unknown black magics (we have no idea how he got them, or anything even now), to take over Oberon and Titania's domain, we went there to stop him and kill him for his actions per the demands of the fey king and queen listed, well we found what you would call a full dead of many things earlier in the campaign, and one of our players had this big bad we're about to fight draw a card from it. He got of course the one thing he shouldn't have (all dice rolling), he got the fate card which lets you rewrite anything as you see fit, it makes you a momentary god basically. He used it while we were fighting to for him and his reanimated wife to kill and steal the power of the king and queen.
He did all this stuff original because she died, so had the DM been mean he could have simply stopped her death but that would have caused my character's death which the other players didn't know, however I don't make extra characters until one dies as I'm fully immersed in my character, so thankfully he didn't kill my character off when he could have so it could have killed me, however it ended up saving me because he used it instead to have him and his wife kill the king and queen and absorb their power, after this mission was over my character was going to effectively talk shit to King Oberon because he treats her poorly because she's not exactly bright, something she's dealt with from tons of people all her life and throughout the campaign (even by the other PCs cause she admittedly isn't particularly bright in normal information) so had the card not done that Oberon likely would have killed her for shit talking him to his very face. Instead she killed her father and ended up getting Oberon's powers and is now the Queen of the that domain instead so... not only did it save her after nearly killing her, it made her effectively a god, though since I'm still playing as the character we can't have her be godlike since they're not level 20 yet.
There was no way to know what card would be obtained, we'd used it 2 times before and both times good things happened. My character does not have the cards but wants with all her might to have them and draw them all because she truly doesn't understand how horrific those cards are. She's just seen good things becoming even more grand with ever draw, to her this is a deck of wondrous amazing magical happiness things.
Also if you wondering how long the battle was betweenm y group of like 8 or 9 people at level 15 against my character's father and reanimated wife, around 8hrs, the first 2 forms just him and her normal then him and her fae king and queenified, took an entire 5hr session on it's own. and then we spent the next session doing phase 3 which was some sort of I think it was told later fiend pack super bad daddy version of her father, which didn't take as long it was 3 or 4hrs, though a lot of that second fight was 1 of our magic users spending entirely too long looking at spells each turn instead of figuring out what the fuck they wanted to do while they waited for their turn.
we had a DM PC who was basically a heal and buffing caster for us, 5 PC's including myself, a similacrum or whatever, a firebird pheonix pet, and we had 2 literal angles helping us too. against 2 people. In that 8ish hrs I think 2 people went under 50% besides me, one who nearly died in a single turn (magic caster hit by a high level fireball) and our beefy tank mage who sometimes helps me the tank manage things who got quite a railing, and myself who took quite a railing too but as the primary tank it's my job, granted a number of people had to treat me as a slut for heals that entire fight to keep me from hitting under half but still.
It was likely one of the best fights we've done so far, everyone did really good, no one died, only a couple people came even remotely close to dying, but the fight felt stressful and like we could lose at any moment, really fun fight I really like our DM for this one, it's so fucking fun.
yeah I mostly play PF2E stuff that's pre-made adventure paths and one shots as that's the system I was introduced to TTRPGs, but man home campaigns are soooooooooo much better than pre-written stuff. I've enjoyed this more than every other game I've played and I've been at this for like 5yrs.
A PC siding with Strahd. Half the others were unconscious, 2 remaining, one hopped out the window, the other shot the window hopper and joined Strahd.
Two sessions later, the one that joined Strahd had to stop playing bc he was going into finals.
I never managed to get that game back on track. We now use that time to just chill and play random games together.
My character, a wizard/Bladesinger fighter based on Count Dooku, died unexpectedly in a fight with a beholder. Completely on a whim, the DM decided to have Vecna approach my character in the afterlife and give me my life back if I served him. It turned into a “Palpatine/Apprentice” relationship where I slowly became more powerful and more evil, eventually turning on my party in a plan that took months to come to fruition. Stealing a page from the Emperor’s book, I told the party I would become more powerful in death, and they still killed me.
This character eventually returned as Vecna-incarnate, Wish spelled his home continent off our world into its own dimension, and that is now the setting of our next campaign.
Well I told my boyfriend to come and be the voice of a dragon npc.... He did this weird horny furry druidic green dragon and the party thaught he was hilarious, sooo they adopted him and became the party druid for two years Until the end of the campaign.
I’ve got a good one for this. I had played a black Dragonborn artificer for months and was around level 12. His character was very vague and secretive toward the party and it was because he was part of a secret society that was based on the kang dynasty. TLDR of this society is that black Dragonborn sorcerer figured out how to pull variants of himself from different timelines and my artificer was the first variant he ever pulled. As I progressed through the campaign, myself and my society became notorious to the point that we became enemies to the party(the BBEG of the campaign used me as a scapegoat to manipulate the party). This led to a couple of private sessions with my DM and I where he said the outcome of them will either set me on the course of a redemption arc or will set me up to be a secret BBEG. My character went on a quest where he began working closely with the god of death and a couple of other celestials and gods in the name of advancing the society and stopping the campaigns BBEG. The gods and celestials constantly warned him of the sorcerer and his madness, which my character vehemently denied. All of that being said, I missed a session due to work and sat in on the last 30 minutes. I don’t know what possessed me to do it but I told my DM I wanted to play and my character got up from where he was and wondered across the world to meet with the god of death. God of death revealed the society was in conflict with the Raven Queen, and not only that, but the conflict was because the leader of my society was actually an underling of the BBEG, who is in conflict with the Shadowfell as a whole. This eventually led to me going to the Raven queen and giving my corporeal form up to speak with her, she revealed the truth and corruption to me and she became my patron. I changed the course of my entire character in a random decision to play the last 20 minutes of a session I wasn’t even written into. Eveurthing my DM and I did was improvised and it ran over an hour of us just throwing dialogue back and forth. Incredibly awesome moment
I started a carrot farm it became a city i took over a nearby ciy now my characters only goal in life is to become the most powerful creature in the universe
None so far. I'm in my first campaign and we're just reaching my DMs homebrew section this week. He started us off with a story module to help me and the other newer players get into the swing of things and we just finished it.
Thought it would be fun to give my players a deck of many things, they sold a card to their favorite NPC, ended up getting the sword of Kaz and beginning a lone quest to destroy Vecna’s hand and eye
"GM, what direction is that Tarrasque we accidentally let loose going?" "West" "Ok, we are no longer adventuring on the west side of the continent. Ever." That was almost 5 years ago. And they still refuse to go anywhere past the Dwarven mountain range which separates the west section of my map. They have have abandoned entire quest lines to avoid dealing with the consequences of their actions.
Hey... Eventually the tarrasque going west shows back up in the east. Unless your planet is flat.
A planet that *isn't* flat? What absurdity! What would the firmament rest upon if not the mountains that border it?
Just let the tarrasque go until it falls off the edge of the Disc
Years later, the players are now in a Spelljammer campaign. You guessed it: Space Tarrasque
Well... Use your imagination! It could be cylindrical, with flat North and South poles.
Wouldn’t that just make them go the other way?
Or he learns to turn.... And its called the material plane. Not the material sphere.
I would try to make the party face the consequences of their actions in one of 2 ways: 1. Create an NPC party of antagonists from the West. The antagonist party's origin story is that their homes were destroyed by the Tarrasque, and the antagonists later managed to defeat the Tarrasque themselves. The antagonists then try to hunt down those that unleashed the Tarrasque on their home. One interesting way to do it would have the party hear news from the West that the Tarrasque has been defeated. Later down the line, give the party a quest that sends them East. In the West, the antagonist party would naturally be heroes, and once the party is identified as responsible for releasing the Tarrasque they find themselves isolated in hostile territory, with a powerful group of enemies pursuing them. 2. Single NPC, evil wizard of some kind, manages to take control of the Tarrasque and uses it as a weapon of war. Slowly build rumors of a wizard conquering the nations of the West, eventually have the antagonist cross the mountains with the tarrasque and an army behind it. I think option 1 would be the more interesting of the 2, but if you really want to make the party fight the Tarrasque, then I'd go for option 2.
To be honest, having an entire section of the map blocked off because of their paranoia is a consequence all by itself. It would be pretty funny if they spend the entire campaign avoiding it like the plague and then it turns out some high level adventurers took care of it immediately after it was released and there was never anything for the party to be afraid of.
Another way for an NPCs to deal with a Tarrasque- To quasi permanently deal with a Tarrasque, you disintegrate it and use a Wish spell to stop the regeneration (was some original lore, not 5th edition- Mr Rhexxx did a fantastic video on the Tarrasque). Then, you have said wizard NPC cast Wish on the ashes again when the party is near to undo the first Wish to allow it to regenerate right under the players' noses. They'll never see it coming.
That's hilarious! I agree, planets are round, maybe you should have him show up again...
Maybe the tarrasque shows up east
Sounds like someone must magically enslave the tarrasque, take control with it over the west and then declares war on the east.
I rolled on the random travelling events board. Standard D100 stuff. I got on the Xanathar's Grassland Encounters: "A tornado that touches down 1d6 miles away, tearing up the land for 1 mile before it dissipates" Players grew curious as to why a tornado would randomly be tearing up the place in what I had described earlier as a 'serene and quiet day'. Cut to me about 20 sessions later borrowing from Princes of the Apocalypse with an Air Cult that spontaneously became the big bad when my party failed to kill them in the cave they were meant to die in. Now there are storm clouds and living lightning bolts sieging towns from a nigh unreachable advantage point on a ruined Storm Giant Skycastle. Exceptionally amusing that rolling on that table in hindsight was a lot better than what I had originally with 'Dragon Cultists are running the governments'.
Anytime an adventure gets to "and then you go to the castle in the sky..." you know things are cookin
but what if the dragon cultists are the ones running the government from the castle in the sky?
The dragons are living on the plane of air
The party met a mafia lord type who had the mcguffin they were after. He was a business man so offered to sell it, trade for it or they could work for him in exchange for it. I thought with 3 options they had plenty of choices... they chose to attempt to murder him in his own base. They barely survived, managing to flee carrying two unconscious party members. The mafia lord went from a merchant they could deal with to a mini boss they needed to work out a way to assassinate.
No matter how many routes you give the players, murder is always an option...
NPC: "Today we have Lasagna or bouillabaisse" PC: *eyeing him suspiciously* "and..."
Always prepare for your players to pick option: murder. As soon as they don't agree with each choice you lay out, you might as well get the minis out and initiative rolled.
I love this example of the players “doing it wrong” turned into a whole storyline created by their actions. Good job DM
A player who missed a session entered the city alone with no money as a war was about to start. He asked if there was a job board, so I made up something reasonable and a couple of joke ones, including cat sitter at 2 cp per week. He saw that as a free place to stay and jumped on it. So he had to deal with a demon cat owned by a young watchman who going off to join the army, not realizing he's the true heir to the throne. That ended up becoming a major part of the plot, as the PCs deposed the evil king and installed this good guy watchman who didn't exist until a player though cat sitting would be an easy gig.
This is amazing
Our warlock died in a fight, failed all death saves on top of that. He was upset cuz he really liked his character. When it came around to his turn again in combat, instead of being skipped, the DM roleplayed as his patron in the afterlife. He gave him a second chance with the trade of an even stricter pact. He came back to life as an undead warlock.
That is perfect! And that’s why you put effort and backstory in your character. Your DM will work with you to develop your character.
"Wow! Thanks for reviving my Warlock, DM!" "Oh, don't thank me yet..."
I love that!
All of them, really. This might be the result of me largely only running homebrew campaigns until the last year or so when I started running Curse of Strahd, my first module ever. But my general DM style is to do a decent amount of world building for a setting, and get to a point where I really understand my NPCs, and the NPCs have goals, some of which will help shape the overall story of the campaign. But I don't really plot much out more than one session ahead. I might have a little nugget of an idea for the future, usually as the result of something someone does, but I always let those ideas stay vague until we come up upon the moment. That said, there have been lots of times where I thought I roughly knew where the story was going to go, only to be thoroughly proven wrong due to some player action. A few years ago I was running a low-ish magic campaign in the Stone Age of my homebrew world, where people were just starting to learn how to do magic. And I'd come up with sort of an alternate physics system for how magic worked, so that we could still use the rules and game mechanics of D&D, but the lore-reason for why stuff worked was different. Instead of it being Mystra or the Weave or whatever, the idea was that Belief directly shaped magical energies. So the more people you could get to believe the same thing, the more that thing became reality. One of my players played a practical joke on what was essentially a sleazy Bartender, and used a little magic to convince the Bartender that \*he\* in fact had magic, and that it was super easy to do. Well, keep in mind that my players were in the dark about the whole "Belief causes reality" thing in the beginning, so what they didn't realize is that this practical joke wound up turning this simple Bartender into one of the best magical users in the whole campaign, because he was convinced, and convinced a lot of people around him, that he was super gifted with magic. This snowballed until this sleazy Bartender became a literal god among men. Pretty crazy. I still think about that.
Red makes it go faster!
In the first session one of the PCs made a nat 20 swim check, and decided he was going to focus on becoming a sea god. And I faciltated this to an extent.
I'm getting solid "the Deep" vibes from The Boys...
Heh. His goal was to get water-related abilities, and to eventually be able to transform into a tentacled sea monster.
Running LMoP and one of my players makes mead in their spare time and another loves cooking/cocktails/etc. Decided for fun to say the inn in Phandalin served hard cider made from the apples at Edermath's orchard. They immediately wanted to visit him. The player that makes mead kept mentioning bees over and over to Edermath. I assumed they were wanting to role-play harvesting honey to make mead, so finally I was like sure Edermath gives you a sack of bees just to kinda move on. The very next thing I had planned was the Redbrands jumping the party. The moment the words, "give us your stuff" left my mouth I knew I had messed up. My player clutched their sack of bees and declared, "Not my big sack of money?!" And the other player shouted, "Your mother's ruby is in there! Oh no!" My Redbrands of course then had to confiscate and open the sack of bees. My party has called themselves The Bee-Holders ever since.
I love your players' energy oh my lord hahaha
Same
Hahaha, yeah, their energy is what has absolutely changed the trajectory of the campaign. I'm always looking over my shoulder for bees or bee energy antics 😅
This is the best party name ever.
Set up a dragon fight in its lair. After the players were worn out and half-dead from the battle to defeat it, I revealed that the NPC that had been tagging along was a shapeshifted black dragon who had engineered the conflict to take out a rival and claim his hoard. The players were supposed to run at that point. Obviously they chose to fight the second dragon, and against all odds, won. So then the campaign entirely derailed, as the players now had control of a hoard that the first dragon had claimed from a fallen Dwarven empire, and the logistics of securing and moving that much gold and its impact on the geopolitics all of the wider world took up the next several sessions.
Oh god I love the wild dice throws to win stuff you’re not supposed to win haha. As a dm tho my jaw would just hit the floor.
Player who had set out to play a ruthless, greedy, yet charming conman with family trauma ran into a tiefling teenager who struggled to do the right thing from time to time and ran away from her family after trying to screw the party over and getting caught. He found her and talked her into going back to her family with a ridiculously high persuasion roll (for a level 2 bard) and hit her with the line, “If I had a family like yours that fought to have you as hard they are now, I’d never let them go”. Minor thing, but it changed the entire course of her character who was originally going to be a reoccurring villain that would tragically get more and more in over her head and more evil as she went. Instead, her and her foster sister (along with a young goblin wizard also saved by the party) have formed a mirror party that looks up to the main group. They run into each other occasionally and constantly joke that “those kids are actually the chosen ones”. I think its made parts of the party alter the way their characters behave and has slowly adjusted towards heroism.
This is just beautiful and reminds me of how I ruined a huged fight for my dm. We are in Curse of Strahd and I came across the bodies of two children. I was alone as a lvl 2 Barbarian, but I'm also a Acolyte of Kuliak and upon seeking these bodies started to pray for their souls to be at peace. Well their spirits came and after some RP I am now carrying the skeletal remains of these two kids to try and set their spirits free. He was expecting me to upset them because of how my character is, but he forgot I honor the dead and have a weak spot for caring for the young.
We failed every check during a mid-canpaign fight where we were supposed to run away and regroup because the BBEG was going to monologue us about how we had no chance of beating him and our Fighter rolled a Nat 20 to headbutt him in the middle of his speech... Which resulted in us getting TPK'd because I had one spell left and Grease didn't do anything except make our corpses really slippery after the fact. Cut to us IRL bummed about having to reroll our characters next session. Then in the next session, our DM told us to make a Will Save just as we were getting ready to present our new PC's. We did make those Will saves. Lo and behold, our old PC's are now undead that were previously enthralled to the BBEG we head-butted last session and have now broken free of his control. 20 years have passed in-game and we now have a new quest.
One of the members of our party is a time wizard, and his magic is against the laws of the universe. There is an organization of time cops who enforce that type of thing not be used, so the entire campaign we never spoke about it out loud unless we were in a private sanctum, made sure not to use the magic in front of people who could live to tell the tale, etc. Eventually we find another player's long lost mother, and that player is comforting their mother by assuring her of our groups power so we can protect her, and absent-mindedly mention, while listing all of our feats, that the time wizard is able to revert any mistakes that may happen as though they didn't. This was not intentional, and none of us even recognized what had even happened until we turn towards the time wizard's player and his jaw is just on the floor Now we've got time cops constantly chasing us, patrolling around our home city, and causing general trans-dimensional shenanigans
So early on in my campaign the party met this guy who owns a museum of magical artifacts who sent them on a quest to recover an incredibly dangerous relic that was stolen by bandits. They return it to him and it’s revealed that this guy is actually a Warforged who’s lived for hundreds of years, an extremely powerful Artificer, and sworn enemy of the BBEG and the dark god they serve. What does the party do with this information? Fucking rob him for his bag of holding, burn down a local business to create a diversion, lie about all that to his face, and, in a later session, accidentally destroy it. There goes the most powerful ally you’ll ever have in this campaign i guess
Sounds like they got a BOGO deal on a second BBEG if you ask me!
Ya know, the Lord of Blades is a pretty slick mini, really has some nice table presence on a battlemap. Your players just wanted to give you the gift of a new evil warforged who can have a really cool model!
The party split up to search for clues when we found a town that had very clearly been attacked. I went to check the windmill for survivors and when I opened the door a couple goblins up in the rafters shot at me with a bow. I attempted to fight them with me reach weapon and failed, fled, and when I joined back up with the party the rogue asked what happened to me. I felt kina embarrassed about losing so badly, I was playing a proud fighter, so rather than admit defeat I lied. I just shrugged and said "Ghosts." The rogue didn't believe me, left on his own to look in the windmill and got shot. He moved in to shoot with his bow, got crit hit but the damage rolled poorly so he survived, but we played it as him getting hit and losing an eye. He flees as well and when he joined back up with us he looks at me and just says "Ghosts?" I nodded and replied with "Ghosts." Both my fighter and the rogue now had a fear of goblins and those two goblins got class levels and later went on to be the bbeg of my story arc.
D20 modern. Halloween night in New Orleans. The party was supposed to be protecting a young man who had the rare magical ability to transport people between the real world and the parallel realm of magic. One PC was the daughter of a crime boss in New Orleans. The party had been pursued by some dangerous people, and they got an invite to a masquerade ball on Halloween night at the house of the crime boss. The PC daughter of the crime boss ends up slightly misunderstanding the dynamic, and then hands over the young wizard to be murdered. I sort of assumed this would be the end of the campaign. The players had just lost their ability to travel into the realm of magic, which kind of was the main hook of the campaign. But another player said, aren't we in New Orleans? Don't they do voodoo here? And that's how we brought the dead character back as a ghost to continue the campaign.
Party got dragged into bar fight, tried not to do too much damage to others, but the barbarian raged and role played hitting a town guard in the confusion. This turned the campaign from decently fun standard fantasy to the most memorable campaign I’ve ever DM’d with a lot of run-ins with the law and shenanigans.
If you have a doctorate in galaxy morphology, stop reading here. Players were tasked with rescuing a researcher from a parasitic forest, and for flavor I had one of their entourage get infected by the psychic fungus that formed the main ecosystem. Then the lunar sorcerer says "I grab the guy and Lesser Restoration, does it do anything?" *On impulse* "Roll me a flat charisma check." "Dirty 20" "Ok, he collapses and you can haul him inside the house before fighting off the others." This random flavor dude has become the main target of the BBEG because of said psychic nonsense. And several other players are about to get involved in the action. It's very nice when your players manage to make the plot happen for you.
I only have a master's, so: great comment
Squeaking by on that technicality
Squeaking by like a Honking Pingknuckle squeaks through your lower intestines
The players pulling every pin on a belt of grenades the BBEG was wearing. I had to rapidly come up with a plan for what the guy would do in that situation, ultimately leading to his immortal partner giving up her immortality so he could survive, her regretting it terribly and switching sides, and him eventually turning into a horrible mutant monster.
Haha first big “leave the safety of the starting village” mission involved a child being kidnapped. This was a foregone conclusion by the DM that this would happen. He even used a Goblin Shaman with an invisibility spell to facilitate it. But, my quick thinking artificer used Fairie Fire. The goblin saved but the girl he was carrying did not and her outline allowed our Ranger to shoot him dead with a well shot arrow. Saved the girl, annoyed the DM 😝
Told them they could only pull the sword from the stone with a Disadvantaged DC 23 Athletics check. Natural 20. Could not believe it. Insane moment, and now a lot of things need to be revised.
Never offer something you're not willing to back up ahaha. But this sounds epic, and it sounds like you are
During an evil one shot (in a setting that I run all my campaigns for multiple groups) where the players were heisting the tower headquarters of the Empires anti-magic cops. They took a detour and ended up at the top of the tower, in a room I knew was there from the days the world had been my creative writing project. It was lined with ominous stone coffins and they opened one. Inside was a withered humanoid, half entombed in blue crystal. They decided to put them out of their misery. The room was a jury rigged control choir for the world's entire soul cycle and a major state and historical secret where the anti magic cops had imprisoned ancient and powerful magi to stabilise ancient magitech they barely understood. Now unstable, the tower exploded, destroying the capital city, 10 pages of political intrigue, city factions, bathing the region in radiation and collapsing the entire empire. I had to rewrite all future ideas, but ultimately was for the better as it shook up an otherwise stable world. The capital city ended up as a fun STALKER/Roadside Picnic homage campaign.
I got a wild magic chart off the internet and didnt read most of the things on it - i was a fairly newbie DM at the time- and one day something triggered a wild magic surge and they rolled the fateful number that brought a nearby tree to sentient life. They named him Limbert and he became a permanent member of the gang. He later - thru much tom foolery and DM yadda-yaddas - became the pilot, brain, and mast of a sentient barge. And even later after than that, he got an upgrade to be a submarine. There were plans to upgrade him further into an airship but the year 2020 ruined our lives and we never made it that far.
Gosh there was also the time the rogue set off -essentially- a nuke and... well thats a story for another time
Limbert is my new favorite. Honestly wild magic sounds so fun, I keep hoping that a player picks that subclass but so far nobody has. In one campaign I homebrewed a "Gnomengarde firecracker" that involved rolling on the wild magic table, just for a little taste of that sweet sweet chaos.
If you ever play a game online with room for two tired parents, my husband and I have a way of mercy monk and wild magic sorcerer pair! And I'm *dying* for a DM who remembers that I have wild magic.
My Level 11 party is currently in the Feywild on their way to see Queen Titania, who has summoned them. They are searching for the Cleric's missing twin sister, a powerful stolen McGuffin, as well as their missing Bag of Holding. I haven't wanted to railroad them, so I don't even know where those are or why. Last night, two of the three PCs pulled cards from the Deck of Many Things. They have a couple of powerful Gods that can and would help, as well as a Wish, but we don't want to cheese it. We agreed that it would be much more fun to play this out. The Warlock pulled the Ruin card, but it had no effect because the only items he has are magical. (5 total, including his clothes.) Bullet dodged and 1 card gone. The Cleric, on the other hand, pulled the Void card. His soul immediately got shunted into a vessel somewhere. The Warlock is tethered to him thanks to an Archfey, so he immediately joined the soul-trapped PC in that location but not in the vessel. The Ranger player has no idea what's happened because they left the session early. The Ranger PC and Druid NPC are sleeping on an airship in the Feywild, so they have no clue at this moment either. The three of us initially agreed that we could run the soul recovery as a Cleric and Warlock one shot the next time we lose our Ranger player for a session. This could be irrelevant to the overall plot. Next session, they could just return to the airship and continue on as if nothing happened. Alternately, where they are (i.e. with the missing sister?), what the soul vessel is (i.e. in the McGuffin?), and who/what is guarding the vessel (i.e. the bandits they are after? The BBEG or their minions?) could bypass a bunch of story/plot. That would leave the Ranger PC & player out of completing one or both of their quests, and that option is terrible in all of our opinions. So, instead of either of those scenarios, the two card pulling players are likely going to play the Druid NPC and one of the Airship crew NPCs, and go on a quest with the Ranger to find the Cleric's soul and Warlock. It's a big curve ball, but one we are all excited about.
Yeah deck of many things just seems like a wild ride waiting to happen!!
Agreed. We once got carried away and let the deck destroy another campaign. This campaign, though, is our collective baby, so we're being thoughtful and cautious about it. We're two and a half years in and plan to go to level 20, so we thought long and hard about whether to bring the deck in. In the end, we're all DMs, so we all take responsibility for it. One of us has a physical deck, and we've pulled a few cards OOC at the end of our sessions, just to brainstorm what we'd do. We know that it doesn't have to be the death of the campaign if we are creative, so this time, we did it in character. We've come up with some great ideas for this scenario, and I can't wait to see how they play out.
Following-up to report that this turned out really well for us. We ran it in-campaign, in one session. The entire party, except the silly Cleric, was able to go on the rescue mission, thanks to a Wish from Titania. They also got some help from a PC turned God from our very first campaign. The card-pulling player piloted the Druid NPC and the God, who was their OG PC. They fought a two-headed Dragon that was guarding the vessel and killed it in pretty epic style. Not only did they get the soul back, but the vessel the soul was trapped in turned out to be a pretty powerful artifact that may help them in the future.
DoMT - surprise surprise. One of the most classically infamous magic items threw a major monkey wrench in what was still considered a serious campaign at the time. When I made the Deck available to a level 8 party, I knew the risks, and I knew my party would revere the seriousness of it. I removed 4 cards from the deck: 2 absurdly positive cards and 2 game-breakingly negative cards. The rest was random. Naturally, they fished out the Moon card for 2 wishes. At this point in the campaign they were in a pinch because 3 of 6 party members had died in a crazy fight last session, one of them being the cleric who would have leveled up if he had survived that fight. No Raise Dead, no good options. But when they pulled that Moon card, the half live party started carefully crafting their perfect first wish: “Bring everyone from our party back to life”. In their minds, that meant every character who was ever a part of the party, and when my players get excited and have got their hands on a once-in-a-campaign magic item, I’m not going to break their hearts. So then a fairly large number of characters were brought back to life in addition to recent fallen PCs because I had run levels 1-3 as a meat grinder. The party had just succeeded in earning a well-equipped base of operations, and now it was filled with a small army of player characters that my players began to assign tasks to. It was a big moment that I was proud of my players for, and it spelled the beginning of some serious shenanigans within our game.
Had a buddy who didn’t exactly understand spell-casters and specifically how prepared spells work. So when my Wizard finally was rewarded for a quest with a scroll of Featherfall he immediately tackled me off a cliff after I had finished adding it to my book-o-spells. Needless to say I did not survive the 600ft drop off the side of a mountain.
I mentioned offhand that the local paladin turned blacksmith was married, as was the local arcane trickster turned magic shopkeep (at the time I didn’t want the players to try and seduce them). One of the players asked if they were married to each other. I rolled with it and now they’ve been decently important NPCs for a few years IRL.
Our party was tasked with getting a nondescribed "magical artifact" for the king of the monstrous nation (united goblins, kobolds etc who had made their own country). We found it and it was a magical lamp. The entire party said f it we opening it ourselves! So we did and rolled a dice. We landed the 5% chance that the entity inside was free instead of granting a wish, so he just f'd off. The party went, meh, hey we still have the magic lamp so we can turn that in. So we handed the empty lamp to the kind and he immediately tried to do the exact same thing we did... only the was nothing inside. The party artificer told only the dm but he enchanted his crossbow with goblin slaying, so when the king was trying to capture us he just oneshot the poor guy. Next part of the campaign was to try and flee the country.
In my Sw5e game, after a long time playing they had fallen into the good graces of the top dog of the crime scene. After the players killed the first big bad of the game, the crime lord approached them and offered them employment. They accepted! A small caveat is that they would not be taking orders directly from him, but from his two capos. They met the first capo, a supposed best friend of the crime lord, and they hit it off with him very well. The other was a HUGE bitch, using and abusing her status over the party to order them around. She was even able to boss around the other capo, seemingly holding something over his head. See, that last fact was a hint to what the next plot would be. The plan was the players would work with the syndicate, doing legit jobs for a while, before the friend capo would start sending them on strange missions, with the ultimate conclusion of him revealing he's started a coop against the criminal head, with the strange missions the players have done all being steps in fulfilling this coop. They would be given a chance to join or not, and the game would go from there. INSTEAD! The players did ONE job under the syndicates employment, a whopping whole afternoon on the clock, before they got fucking sick of the bitch capo and killed her in a coffee shop. This set off her dead-man switch (the thing she held over the other capos head) and altered the top guy to the scheme. The players, in their panic, decided to fake their freaking deaths to hide from the head guy's wrath, then joining the coop with new identities. This is what my game has been following every since.
I wasn't even there, it happened on the first session and my character and I only joined the group on the second session. The players went through a dungeon, and at the end they looted a magical ring. For some reason, they were instantly suspicious of that ring, assumed it to be evil, and dangerous. The DM built the whole campaign around that ring actually being evil and dangerous. A couple years in and we're still chasing relics of a powerful lich that is trying to come back after being beaten hundreds of years ago, of which the ring was only the first one.
My players were up against a druid-based puzzle (none of the PCs are druids, they were hired by druid NPCs). The clues they had were fiery in nature - with the suggested solutions in the module being a healing spell, dispel magic, heavy application of water, or go fight some fire elementals in the volcano they were on the side of. Halfway up the volcano they decided the *real* solution was interplanar travel and I guess we're a shadowfell campaign, now.
My character's best friend in the campaign (also a PC) died tragically, breaking her heart, and later in a town we glimpsed her long-lost brother. My character ran after him and turned on as much charm as her desperate self could muster, and I rolled a natural 20 to get him to come have a drink with her. One drink turned into five, they talked until the sun came up, and he played a pivotal role fighting for us in the campaign until the end. (Post-campaign, they became partners -- just two ace black dragonborns in love. <3) Months after that natural 20, I found out that the brother was meant to be a major force of evil and destruction for us, as a brainwashed pawn for one of the BBEGs. And that natural 20 was the only thing that could have gotten him to change course.
DMing a Curse of Strahd campaign. Party were fighting Strahd and Rahadin in the streets of Kresk during an invasion of his forces onto the town, as Strahd was trying to take Ireena. Party kill Rahadin and, in my infinite wisdom, thought it would be fitting that Strahd would go into a fit of rage and on his turn he fires a cone of cold at the party. However, I was in so deep 'roleplaying Strahd' (read: being a goober) I missed the fact that Ireena would also be caught in the cone. Ireena was turned into a human popsicle. Everyone was shocked, including myself, and I made Strahd flee the battle after he realised what he had done. The party had to then turn their attention to the vampire spawn laying waste to Kresk. We've taken a break since that session as I write my way out of this hole that I've put myself into, but I have some ideas about Strahd just going full 'fuck it' scorched earth. Will time skip a few months and the party have to retake every major city from Strahd's wives and make a final assault on the castle to kill that evil bastard. TLDR: Don't DM and goober Curse of Strahd
In our dragon based guild heavy campaign. On like a lvl 4 adventure, we were sent to kill two wyrmling black dragons. Thinking it was easy, we accepted a quest board mission to allow an intern type adventurer to tag along. IT WENT SOUTH, the intern was trapped along with another guild team. We found them melted and mangled. Having grown attached to our dear normal human NPC, we traveled all over with a mangled leg for someone to revive our boy. The babayega showed up with an offer. On our D100 resurrection, this poor intern human now became an Aasimar with a greater calling. He's helped a ton, introduced us to a ton of opportunities, and we had to hand over a deck of many things to uphold our part of the deal to the Babayega. Travis, if you're out there, I hope it has all been worth it.
One of my PCs grew up misled by the church and was very unprepared when I stuck an NPC in the campaign that challenged these views. This character being told that everything she had been taught was a lie and she was just being used by the church. Well, saying she didn't take it well is an understatement. She failed every insight check against the NPC and every consititution check to reign in her anger. She ended up attacking the guy, stealing a MacGuffin that was essentially a way into this secret kingdom they found, and escaped the guards to run out of the city with every intention to hand it over to her church handlers. Boom. Unintentional villain arc. I took over the character and she's now the main antagonist to the party. It's a really fun twist on what I was expecting.
On the very second combat encounter they fought 2 throw away cultists with a hostage. Captured one of the cultists who over the course of the campaign developed into the cleric's love interest and proved to be vital in breaking apart the schemes of an eventual cultist time loop scenario. Originally was just supposed to find the cultist medallions on their corpses and hint at future plot line. Instead it all got heavily incorporated with a developing character arc of a party NPC.
Party was exploring the deep parts of the Underdark, bordering on The Abyss. They found an unholy congregation of demons and devils, and my players successfully snuck and got all the information they needed, or at least, wanted to find out. Telepathy to fighter: “We will be waiting for you, son of Wrath” (was doing a 7 Deadly Sins thing). Fighter walks back in (omg) and actually makes a deal with the devil. They got a super powerful weapon, and all they had to do was make sure it was the item to defeat the current dragon BBEG. They actually did this lol. The devil shows up: “I forgot to mention, the last component for this ritual is red dragon’s blood!” Cue the game going from a Legend of Zelda temple esque vibe to a “we have unleashed the apocalypse, this is our fault”
In a campaign I ran; the party was serving as monster hunters in a frontier town. The idea was for them to venture into the moors and return with monster ears to exchange for gold to buy better gear, so they could delve deeper on the next run and so on. One wise guy roped the party into a crazy idea that derailed the entire setting. He wanted to counterfeit ears. They trekked to another town entirely, sold all their possessions to buy as much leather as possible, and went to work for several months. Once done, they had to crawl back to the first town with little else aside from the clothes on their backs and sacks of fake ears. They arrived fairly broken and bleeding and when they tried to "cash in" they were asked what monster they had hunted to get the ears from. A failed roll roused suspicion and the jig was up. The party was easily subdued and thrown in prison. Eventually the monsters overran the town. A friend's campaign met a similar fate. During session zero for his homebrew someone asked what stance the kingdom they were supposed to save had on LGBT rights. He said it was a very ye olde' setting and marriage was exclusively for heredity reasons and not love. His party didn't like that, instead choosing to start an underground movement to overthrow the kingdom. After a year of long fought conflict, they successfully deposed the king, formed a republic, and gay marriage rights were the first thing signed into law. The Lich King's hordes invaded on the day of the first legal gay marriage and annihilated the city.
Playing LMoP. Party discovers Gundren is being held at Cragmaw Castle. Druid: “Cragmaw Castle?!? Well we better raise an army!” The Siege of Cragmaw Castle starts next week.’ They went to Gnomengarde (DoIP) and were to get a troop of goat riding, gnomish knights to help. The dwarfs sent troops after they retrieved lost silver ax of Axeholm (DoIP). The gnomes and dwarves are excited that through the parties actions the Lost Mines of Phandelvar will be restored.
War and intrigue in Damara... but then the players saw a corner of Ravensburg called 'The Forbidden City' and really wanted to check it out. I borrowed elements from Blight in Path of Exile. It went over so well that they don't care about the war raging against the goblin horde. They just want to fight necromantic mushrooms alongside a patronizing woman. I've rewritten the entire module.
One of my players was playing a Warlock Fiend. One of my encounters ended up in a party kill so I decided that the Warlock player met his patron in Hell and accepted becoming a devil (one of the Transformations from Grim Hollow) in exchange for sending souls to the patron. He got some soul coins which I ruled would resurrect the other players so everybody didn't have to make new characters. It was a shame we never got to finish the campaign as the Warlock player wanted to marry his patron and end up as the Prince of Hell with the patron as queen
The party found an old shipwreck of a legendary Viking ship, with all of It's crew turned to ghosts cursed to repeat the last seconda of their lives Cue me improvising that when a PC touches a Ghost they see the Moment of their death Cue me improvising again to describe how pseudo Jesus with the power to control flames killed half the crew 200/300 years ago and using a random image on the book to describe him Now the party has to fight and kill flamey jesus. Also this basically forced me to rewrite the next part of the campaign as it was going in a completely different direction
The first session ever the players joined up with a local militia leader to clear out a drug den, wanton violence abounds! Then there was a baby at the top floor, which the players saved from being killed by their maybe-not-so-ally. Lierally the rest of the campaign centered around that kid, he is now on track to become an arch wizard and his bonus family (the party) could not be more proud.
Playing a rwby campaign. My barbarian tries to make a point of not trusting the hunter schools headmaster while standing on a forested cliff side. 'I trust that man as far i can throw this tree' Proceed to Nat 20, rip an entire tree out of the earth and suplex/yeet it off the cliff hundreds of metres away. follow that with a nat 1 wisdom roll, and now my character has never once doubted a single word he says, and has put himself into all but guaranteed death situations because of it.
We were doing ToA, Dm have us some magic drugs while we were in a major city. One of the pcs triggered a wild magic surge when reading eating it, and it cast meteor swarm, destroying the city. This allowed Acererak to invade and take over half of the peninsula with a massive undead army.... Oops
So this didn't really change that specific campaign, but it *did* change the campaign that followed up this one. I just got done playing the first D&D campaign I've ever played before. It was a Cyberpunk 2077 themed campaign with the group of players as a group called the Deadmen, who work for the big bad company of the series, MathersTec. The Deadmen were forced to work for MathersTec, having been captured after cyberpsycho. Anyway, the end of our campaign had the players split off into seperate ending groups. The one I choose with two of the five other players was dubbed the 'Rebellion' ending, where we went to nuke MathersTec. Well, at the end the DM was going to have the three of us vote on which of the two Rebellion ending variations we got: the ending where we succeeded in nuking the building and take out an entire city with us, or the ending where we went back to MathersTec to work for them again. There were three players, so three of us to vote. I had already said, as my character was in the middle of going cyberpsycho again, that I was nuking the building and finishing the job. One of the other players said that we would turn ourselves in. So the ultimate decision was left on the last player, who happened to have an entirely luck-based build where he was at the point of killing hundreds through lucky coincidences and not directly. He flipped a coin and it landed on its side instead of heads or tails, so the character ***killed himself in response.*** We had no idea what to do, so the DM just chalked it up to both of the remaining players living. But he regrets it now that the followup campaign needed a definite ending for our characters, where mine ended up a speed demon with a mechanical dog and the other player became our version of ***ADAM SMASHER.*** So we basically created the most terrifying player character in all of Cyberpunk campaigns by the luckiest player character we had killing himself.
The search for ice cream.
“You find yourself in front of the Companion of Elturel, the beacon of holy light which banishes evil and undead from this place. As you stand before it, a warm and seductive voice enters your ear, offering a burst of sudden growth and power if you were to only touch the Companion and allow her influence on to it. She says her name is Zariel and… oh you accept? You touch the Companion and offer yourself to Zariel’s control? Um ok well…” Cut to 6 months later and my players are corrupted generals in Zariel’s devil army, hunted by their old allies, fighting demons in the Blood War.
Our party was introduced to the BBEG relatively early on. He was a wizard that had his own kingdom, pet ancient dragon, and the hand of Vecna. We pretended to work for him until an opportune moment to strike presented itself. Our plan was simple. Teleport on top of him after destroying one of his hag eyes (homebrew stuff we also have access to) to blind him, then wrestle him to the ground and slap dimensional shackles on him. After that, beat him to death. Well, turns out he had Timestop prepared. He managed to get it off despite a counterspell, broke the shackles with his bare hands, and was getting ready to fight us. My wizard had cast contact other plane a LOT to research the BBEG so we knew the hand of Vecna could cast teleport and that we couldn't do anything to stop it because the DM ruled that an item casting a spell could not be counterspelled. So we panicked and our monk force-fed the BBEG a vial of blood from a very powerful abberation we had injured and fled from (that's a story on its own). Our barbarian tried to anoint himself with the blood and was comatose for a day, so we thought it would do the same thing. Turns out feeding him an entire vial was worse. The BBEG failed his save and didn't use a legendary resistance because he thought it was just poison. Well, he was wrong. He effectively transformed into a child of the creature we had gotten the blood from, and plane shifted away. The rest of the campaign has been trying to procure means of shutting off its dimensional travel and murdering it. Instead of killing him during that battle and taking the hand of Vecna, we now have to stop the creature from beelining to the eye of Vecna and triggering a series of really bad consequences. Overall it's made for some great moments and I don't regret a thing. We've got two more sessions including a final showdown with the creature before the campaign ends.
Picture the scene: The party are cornered by Drow, their only way out is a pit behind them that leads into the underdark. It's at this point the Wizard grabs one of the Drow soldiers and drags them down with us as we make our escape. The Wizard's whole thing is that she's a pacifist who is determined to see the good in everyone, no matter how vile they might be on the outset, so it was her goal to redeem the Drow she pulled down with her. Even despite things being stacked against her, she succeeded in turing the Drow over to the side of good and turning a random mook into an important character.
This one was my fault. We had a mission to guard a hospital patient so our party wouldn't go to jail. We walked away, the patient was murdered, and we came back and realized we'd screwed up big time. The minute the doctors realize their patient and the part assigned to them was gone, we'd be fugitives. So everyone decided to skip town. But, I thought that if I could make a distraction that was bigger than the murders, we'd be forgotten in the chaos. I circled back invisibly to the hospital lobby...and planted a full bag of megic beans that generate two pyramids containing mummy lords on top of the hospital, killing everyone. It was certainly a distraction and wouldve worked if the beans didn't also create a statue in my likeness that shouted my crimes and exact location. From heros to terrorists in 5 min and all the lawful good characters rolled new PCs.
I treated my players to an Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade style dungeon in the main campaign and included a "very important chalice" that brought people back to life and a "you chose... Poorly" chalice that killed people, but would bring them back to unlife if used a second time. The Poorly Chalice was just supposed to be a fun gimic, they'd been hired to get "the very important chalice" for a slightly evil, but not really a big deal, professor. Reader, instead of giving him the good cup, they gave him the bad cup. (they did not know about the becoming undead part and had never tested it) they saw him test it on a guard. He sent the cup back to a shady government who has now started building an undead army half a continent away. They are currently unaware of the army, but they did turn the professor to stone and have been carrying him around in their bag of holding.
My very first campaign was with a lot of other first-time players and a first-time DM. We met another party on the road led by a dwarf paladin and my brother, playing a halfling rogue, asked to talk to him “short king to short king.” Dwarf asks him “You are a king?” to which my brother responds “…Yes!” After a Nat 20 deception. The Kingdom of Short is created. Turns out the halfling’s deadbeat dad is the evil king. Once we kill him we suddenly have a place to be safe from danger as we take next steps as “The Court of Short”.
Well we started with a system that wasn't dnd and the system confused even our rules lawyer. We were playing Sword Chronicle and our group just didn't get it. So I suggested we move to 5e keep the story and the characters and they make them the appropriate level. Switching to 5e was an improvisation which allowed me to bring a lot more to the story. The campaign quickly shifted to an invasion into their world by Lord Soth from his Dread Domain in Ravenloft. Sadly the campaign ended due to availablility we were so close to the end of the story and the players were about level 16 or 17.
so, in the course of 2 sessions, because one guy decided to roll for what plane he ends up in when casting planeshift, we have now made a deal with an archdevil to help them become the master of the nine hells, as well as the devil giving us basically the ability to raise and arm a massive army of undead with ease (we are NOT a good aligned group btw) so now the plan have changed from "lets go see what happens in that one temple" to "welp. time to conquer the earth"
I was presented with three options of things currently going on, none of which could wait. * I could go with the gold dragon to help him secure the crown of the neighboring nation that he rightfully ruled * I could go to the trial of a once exiled oracle or predicted doom, who was right, and that doom was upon us, and we needed her help * or I could go deal with some mystery force burning the countryside of another neighboring nation who my nation was historical enemies with I had the choice of supporting an ally, supporting another ally, or supporting an enemy. I chose supporting that enemy (well, I feel more like character chose it. I was surprised) cut to several sessions later, that decision has resulted in our nations being allies, standing together against the BBEG when almost no one else would, and is probably the most significant decision in why the world even **survived**. otherwise they probably would have turned on us "before we could turn on them" and everyone would have been stuck fighting each other instead of the real threat
When my Dragonborn Paladin, Ironclad Brawclath, took a Pact with a Wood Elf named Fulvear. He became an Undead [VRGR] Warlock and was shown the positive aspects of necromancy, which he was strictly agaisnt due to his religion and his upbringing. Ironclad grew stronger and stronger and became Fulvear's, right hand, and even becoming a Hitman for him as well. In turn Fulvear would assist Ironclad in purging the darkness that is the undead that plauged the world they lived in. After a long while, Ironclad requested that he himself become undead, specifically a Mummy Lord, (In this world it was still considered holy, since Mummification was an actual holy practice, thanks DM.) which understandably took Fulvear by surprise, but he granted Ironclad's wishes and helped with the Mummification process. Ironclad and Fulvear are now two of the strongest characters we have in our built universe. They are retired now, but are still actively doing their thing, and even get call backs in some other campaigns and I absolutely love it.
One of the PC's was a dwarf who spent all his starting gold on a donkey and two huge casks of very fine liquor which it carried on its back. He asked if the casks could be 'really big, and really boozy' if he spent all of his money on them and I just said 'sure, yeah, that seems fine, whatever'. He then insisted on bringing it *everywhere* with the party, which would have been annoying but he RP'ed it really well and thought through what it would actually take to do and it ended up being a pretty fun and funny through-line for the adventure. Fourth or fifth session they encounter the giant they had been tasked with hunting, the intention was for this to be a brief encounter with them running away because they were simply not strong or experienced enough to take them on. Instead, the dwarf sent in his donkey with the booze. I was pretty fond of the donkey at this point and didn't relish the idea of killing it, so I had the giant snatch the casks and let the donkey canter off. Giant starts drinking the first cask and... Dwarf fires a flaming crossbow bolt at the cask, rolls a 20. In that moment I probably could have done some math to figure out just how much damage that would actually do, and it almost certainly wouldn't have been enough to kill him BUT, it was just too funny and too perfect and too fitting and I wanted to reward him for having so beautifully RP'ed the donkey and cask thing for so many sessions so that we could have this moment. So the Giants face was blown off in the explosion, and the booze it had already swallowed blew a hole in its guts before the second cask exploded, totally immolating it. The next several sessions were spent dealing with the aftermath of the forest fire they started.
My cleric player introduced her character as the “Last cleric of Loki”, thus morphing the entire campaign into a tour de force of Norse mythology and the prevention of Ragnarok.
Early on with a one player game with my wife, the first encounter was her saving my DMPC from a bear. After she killed the bear, she rolled an investigation check to see if there was anything worthwhile on the body. She rolled a natural 1. I improvized a line like "The bear's fur is covered in a strange black goop and is unsalvageable." Basically the fur was worthless due to the natural 1. She then brought up the weird goop a few times throughout the session, and was convinced it was incredibly important to the problems the town was facing. To humor her, I had the goop reappear on the armor of the boss I made. For context, the armor was a family treasure that was entrusted for safekeeping to a friend of my wife's character's father. She was sent to retrieve it because of increase demon incursions back home. The boss was designed to just be a bandit leader who stumbled upon the armor by kidnapping the family friend. I brought the goop back as a way to lower the power level of the armor (Hide of the Feral Guardian. Like I said, solo player campaign, so it was meant more as a power fantasy for her), and when she wanted to play more, I turned the goop into a point of investigation to a cult in a major city. It has since been a driving force for the campaign, given the name Blood of Orcus, and shaped the campaign I made for her... All because my wife rolled a Nat 1 to check out a bear corpse.
Having been infected with a spark of divine but melevolent energy my players were sent by a mystic to seek out and kill a hag, so that they could use her finger in a potential cure. Instead they decided to allow the hag to take the divine spark, left, and never came back.I've got two whole arcs out of that bad decision and were still going strong.
This turned my planned 3-shot into my first ever campaign. I was getting my feet wet with one-shots to give our DM a break, and had planned a level 8 three-to-four session game in the Shadowfell where the group was hunting down rare creatures for a wizard of questionable ethics. One of the random encounters I made that I would roll for every time the group did less than optimal on stealth or survival checks was a Gloomweaver. They had just finished off three Gloomstalkers, and I had a sudden idea: what if the Gloomweaver couldn't use magic for some reason? The statblock is very good at stealth even without it's spells. But why wouldn't she be able to cast? Well, what if a mage-lord of a nearby city-state had bound her magic, as a punishment? Those thoughts led to more ideas, and suddenly I had an NPC with an interesting, arguably sympathetic backstory who was still morally VERY questionable. I didn't want to make her instantly an obvious plot hook, though. So instead, I equipped her with some Wyvern venom, and while the party was catching their breath from handling the Gloomstalkers, she snuck up behind the fighter, held the dagger to her back, and tried to rob the party. When the party didn't comply, she stabbed the fighter in the back, doing a very hefty chunk of damage (although the fighter did have poison resistance). What followed was a very tense encounter where the ranger shot the NPC in the arm, she panicked, tried to flee, and rapidly was tackled and held on the ground by the fighter with a knife to her throat. I did let them know about interesting, malevolent orange colored arcane sigils encircling both of the NPCs wrists. The fighter was a VERY hot-tempered tiefling, and was clearly struggling with the intense desire to kill the NPC for stabbing her in the back. The rogue, cleric, and ranger were more curious about what the NPC's whole deal was, now that she'd been neutralized. Eventually, they talked the tiefling down, and an entire campaign that lasted 6 months was born. Oh, the fighter and the NPC ended up absolute BFFs.
With a smirk and a wink, the DM had to turn a throwaway character in Dragonheist into 1/2 of an epic love story
I randomly had in the bar in the starting village let an Npc named Steve talk about how he was a pirate. For some reason they keyed on 'Steve the Pirate' and press ganged him into all their campaigns and he ended up have a remarkable life, surviving gladiators, helping down a floating city of Drow, and once being the receptacle for a god's spirit. He is still fondly remembered by all the players.
I'm a player in my first ever DnD campaign, it's all custom or whatever you call it. And one moment like this likely kept my character from dying by almost also killing them if the DM was mean. Basically my character is a fey in our party and her dad is this super stupid and uber strong centaur barbarian of large size cause he's a hulking beast who can rip the heads off of giants and shit, well he went and used physical force and unknown black magics (we have no idea how he got them, or anything even now), to take over Oberon and Titania's domain, we went there to stop him and kill him for his actions per the demands of the fey king and queen listed, well we found what you would call a full dead of many things earlier in the campaign, and one of our players had this big bad we're about to fight draw a card from it. He got of course the one thing he shouldn't have (all dice rolling), he got the fate card which lets you rewrite anything as you see fit, it makes you a momentary god basically. He used it while we were fighting to for him and his reanimated wife to kill and steal the power of the king and queen. He did all this stuff original because she died, so had the DM been mean he could have simply stopped her death but that would have caused my character's death which the other players didn't know, however I don't make extra characters until one dies as I'm fully immersed in my character, so thankfully he didn't kill my character off when he could have so it could have killed me, however it ended up saving me because he used it instead to have him and his wife kill the king and queen and absorb their power, after this mission was over my character was going to effectively talk shit to King Oberon because he treats her poorly because she's not exactly bright, something she's dealt with from tons of people all her life and throughout the campaign (even by the other PCs cause she admittedly isn't particularly bright in normal information) so had the card not done that Oberon likely would have killed her for shit talking him to his very face. Instead she killed her father and ended up getting Oberon's powers and is now the Queen of the that domain instead so... not only did it save her after nearly killing her, it made her effectively a god, though since I'm still playing as the character we can't have her be godlike since they're not level 20 yet. There was no way to know what card would be obtained, we'd used it 2 times before and both times good things happened. My character does not have the cards but wants with all her might to have them and draw them all because she truly doesn't understand how horrific those cards are. She's just seen good things becoming even more grand with ever draw, to her this is a deck of wondrous amazing magical happiness things. Also if you wondering how long the battle was betweenm y group of like 8 or 9 people at level 15 against my character's father and reanimated wife, around 8hrs, the first 2 forms just him and her normal then him and her fae king and queenified, took an entire 5hr session on it's own. and then we spent the next session doing phase 3 which was some sort of I think it was told later fiend pack super bad daddy version of her father, which didn't take as long it was 3 or 4hrs, though a lot of that second fight was 1 of our magic users spending entirely too long looking at spells each turn instead of figuring out what the fuck they wanted to do while they waited for their turn. we had a DM PC who was basically a heal and buffing caster for us, 5 PC's including myself, a similacrum or whatever, a firebird pheonix pet, and we had 2 literal angles helping us too. against 2 people. In that 8ish hrs I think 2 people went under 50% besides me, one who nearly died in a single turn (magic caster hit by a high level fireball) and our beefy tank mage who sometimes helps me the tank manage things who got quite a railing, and myself who took quite a railing too but as the primary tank it's my job, granted a number of people had to treat me as a slut for heals that entire fight to keep me from hitting under half but still. It was likely one of the best fights we've done so far, everyone did really good, no one died, only a couple people came even remotely close to dying, but the fight felt stressful and like we could lose at any moment, really fun fight I really like our DM for this one, it's so fucking fun.
That's really cool!
yeah I mostly play PF2E stuff that's pre-made adventure paths and one shots as that's the system I was introduced to TTRPGs, but man home campaigns are soooooooooo much better than pre-written stuff. I've enjoyed this more than every other game I've played and I've been at this for like 5yrs.
A PC siding with Strahd. Half the others were unconscious, 2 remaining, one hopped out the window, the other shot the window hopper and joined Strahd. Two sessions later, the one that joined Strahd had to stop playing bc he was going into finals. I never managed to get that game back on track. We now use that time to just chill and play random games together.
My character, a wizard/Bladesinger fighter based on Count Dooku, died unexpectedly in a fight with a beholder. Completely on a whim, the DM decided to have Vecna approach my character in the afterlife and give me my life back if I served him. It turned into a “Palpatine/Apprentice” relationship where I slowly became more powerful and more evil, eventually turning on my party in a plan that took months to come to fruition. Stealing a page from the Emperor’s book, I told the party I would become more powerful in death, and they still killed me. This character eventually returned as Vecna-incarnate, Wish spelled his home continent off our world into its own dimension, and that is now the setting of our next campaign.
Well I told my boyfriend to come and be the voice of a dragon npc.... He did this weird horny furry druidic green dragon and the party thaught he was hilarious, sooo they adopted him and became the party druid for two years Until the end of the campaign.
I’ve got a good one for this. I had played a black Dragonborn artificer for months and was around level 12. His character was very vague and secretive toward the party and it was because he was part of a secret society that was based on the kang dynasty. TLDR of this society is that black Dragonborn sorcerer figured out how to pull variants of himself from different timelines and my artificer was the first variant he ever pulled. As I progressed through the campaign, myself and my society became notorious to the point that we became enemies to the party(the BBEG of the campaign used me as a scapegoat to manipulate the party). This led to a couple of private sessions with my DM and I where he said the outcome of them will either set me on the course of a redemption arc or will set me up to be a secret BBEG. My character went on a quest where he began working closely with the god of death and a couple of other celestials and gods in the name of advancing the society and stopping the campaigns BBEG. The gods and celestials constantly warned him of the sorcerer and his madness, which my character vehemently denied. All of that being said, I missed a session due to work and sat in on the last 30 minutes. I don’t know what possessed me to do it but I told my DM I wanted to play and my character got up from where he was and wondered across the world to meet with the god of death. God of death revealed the society was in conflict with the Raven Queen, and not only that, but the conflict was because the leader of my society was actually an underling of the BBEG, who is in conflict with the Shadowfell as a whole. This eventually led to me going to the Raven queen and giving my corporeal form up to speak with her, she revealed the truth and corruption to me and she became my patron. I changed the course of my entire character in a random decision to play the last 20 minutes of a session I wasn’t even written into. Eveurthing my DM and I did was improvised and it ran over an hour of us just throwing dialogue back and forth. Incredibly awesome moment
Lol goblin shenanigans. My crew did something similar with a mobile fortress and a family of hardworking gobbos.
I started a carrot farm it became a city i took over a nearby ciy now my characters only goal in life is to become the most powerful creature in the universe
My players finishing a quest and saying we want to leave and go to the capital
that's awesome. what fun role play! the logistics of having an army would be fun to mess with haha
Our Halloween session.
None so far. I'm in my first campaign and we're just reaching my DMs homebrew section this week. He started us off with a story module to help me and the other newer players get into the swing of things and we just finished it.
Thought it would be fun to give my players a deck of many things, they sold a card to their favorite NPC, ended up getting the sword of Kaz and beginning a lone quest to destroy Vecna’s hand and eye