There was a tavern in town called A Tavern. It was run by a retired adventurer named Eman Laeraton and the joke was that adventuring groups meet at A Tavern. He had opened it to attract adventuring groups for nostalgia and it quickly became the place where adventurers would go to hear about local rumors, quests, etc. from Eman. He was a retired ranger with a pet panther and pet wolf named Foe and Fayne.
In the end they found out Eman was the BBEG who was subtly guiding adventuring groups to do what he wanted by steering them with rumors. Eman Laeraton backward is “not a real name”. They never caught on. His pets were a magically disguised displacer beast and some wolf-type create I’d found—their names being homonyms of faux and feign.
A PC's background involved his parents being assassinated. He fled the scene, escaped the assassins, and grew up on the street until he was taken in by a wealthy benefactor.
Unknown to the player, his "parents" were agents of Shar who had actually kidnapped him from his real family because he had an innate talent for Shadow magic. The "assassins" were Harpers who had tracked down the kidnappers and were attempting to rescue him. His benefactor was a member of the Church of Shar who managed to find him so he could bring him into the fold.
The PC eventually begins looking into his parents, and finds their grave in the City of the Dead in Waterdeep. The inscription on their headstone read:
***S****ing* ***H****allelujah*
***A****waited* ***R****est*
***R****ising* ***U****pward*
***L****ong* ***E****ternal* ***S****leep*
***T****o* ***H****onor* ***E****verlasting*
***S****weet* ***H****eavens* ***A****bove*
***D****oors* ***O****pen* ***W****ide*
***S****inging!*
(Boldface type added.)
Sadly, he missed the clue. :)
No, I don't know who that is. He was my nephew. The character's name was Orion. It was a PBP. I wrote it up and posted it [here](https://forgotten-realms.wandering-dwarf.com/shadows/shadows_toc.php) if you're interested in reading it.
Lol, Shadowheart is one of the main companions in the game Baldur’s Gate 3. I’m sure you at least know about the game if you haven’t played it.
Anyway, I won’t give details in order to avoid major spoilers for the game, in case you ever decide to play it, but just know that your nephew’s character’s backstory is extremely similar to Shadowheart’s.
Hey don't worry in my group we once had an incident involving a really easy riddle where we had to press a stone with the letter e on it and we all floundered around for like an hour to find it as we were thinking too hard.
I gave the party a prophecy. They dutifully followed it despite not fitting the description of the heroes of prophecy, causing mass chaos, Because how could the prophecy not be about them?
The prophecy was for the party of my \_next\_ campaign; which most of them played in, and I helped guide character creation sufficiently without them noticing, that they built characters that fit the prophecy well. It was over 5 years later that I gave the players the same prophecy again, and they didn't recognize it as the same...
The DM revealed that the ancient prophecy we had been following for nearly an IRL year was written from the perspective of the antagonist. Thus, completing it will ensure the eternity of them and *their* beliefs, not of ours. That was genuinely bone chilling.
DM made a build up that a water genasi pirate (I play a water genasi warlock) was related to her- later learning they’re twins. My warlock, Lynn, never met another water genasi before despite living in the ocean most of her life. All I mostly gave to the DM was that Lynn was born to human parents who abandoned her as they didn’t want a water genasi child.
We arrived to a beach town to figure out a way to get across the ocean when we stumbled upon a huge ship nearby. Some crew were loading up on stock when they saw Lynn and claimed she looked *exactly* like their captain. After the crew alert the captain, DM describes him to look *exactly* like Lynn- skin, hair, eye color (even the heterochromia), the only difference was he was taller and had facial hair and of course the opposite gender. He was also about a decade older than Lynn.
A lot of interactions happen afterwards, and Lynn and him have very similar stories. Human parents, abandoned young, and were both genie warlocks to Marid. Even had the same genie vessel ring as Lynn. This was when I thought perhaps he’s related to Lynn, but I wasn’t sure what relation yet.
The captain allows us to board his ship as our destination was the same area, and I knew DM was hinting at something. Even when one of the PC’s talked to the captain before we departed after being dropped off, DM said to the PC how he could almost see Lynn’s smile on the captain’s face.
We level up to 10, and DM plans a private conversation between Lynn and Marid. I ask some questions about the captain, and Marid confirmed they were related, but I **did not expect them to be twins** at all. How: water genasi’s (hinted all genasi’s) are cursed to not pass down the race “naturally,” so Marid has to basically create them and have them be born in the world. The captain was born first of course, and he accomplished so much at a young age- including owning a ship by age 10. This was when Marid wanted to create another water genasi similar to the captain.. which was how Lynn was born. He used the same genetics as the captain, and only changed the gender.
Lynn had no blood family, so discovering this was incredible to find out the DM planned this. Originally the captain was just a fun water genasi NPC for if the party wanted to explore other islands, but when I joined (I joined later, around level 5), DM wanted to make him more connected.
Not what you're expecting but.....
Hanging out at an illathid bar the night before a tournament to gain illathid support in the wider war. One of our enemies are dark angels created by Bane himself. We've got...a rapport going with one of them. She's nice, we're hanging at the bar telling her about the world (she was created 2 weeks ago, and was curious about the world.) By now, we have established she's horny as fuck, but also has no idea what to do with those feelings (anything not evil+kill wasn't exactly planned for in creation.) Anyway, in walks our Huge bronze dragon buddy in humanoid form. She spies him and the DM rolls. Goes "oh, she's into him." She (unintentionally) lays out a seduction field on him. And he fucking fails. the. save. Our DM can't even tell us what the roll meant because he's laughing so hard. It's one of those one in 400 chance rolls. Anyway, he ends up turning her down cause she's angel-drunk and they have to try to kill each other the next morning, but says if they both survive they should meet up.
The next morning in fight we wrestle control away from Bane and grant her freedom (turning her into a good aligned angel now.) The two disappear for a few weeks off screen. The next time we all see each other to go into battle, she tells us (AFTER THE BATTLE) that she's pregnant. With a Half Celestial Bronze Dragon. What the fuck.
Anyway, we just started a new campaign and now I'm playing their grandkid 👍
I haven't revealed this one yet, but I'm in an amazing situation right now where two different PCs have approached me separately and asked for their Warlock Patrons to secretly be specific major villains from past campaigns. And these two villains knew each other, and didn't get along. Best of all, the Warlocks are immediately great friends right out the gate.
There's going to be a huge throwdown later, I can't wait.
There was a few...
One of the most prominent was *"It was him all along!"* twist.
The party got hired by a wealthy halfelf merchant named **Baltazar Teuss**, who sent them on a scavenger hunt for a powerful artifacts. He did not need them, but they were required to open up *the vault*. And Baltazar wanted *the treasure* from that vault.
After meeting with the merchant, the party was snatched on the streets by some shady thugs with *please go with us* routine. By following them they met next influential figure: tiefling prince of crime named **Lazarus Bastet**. He got the information about the scavenger hunt, and hired the party to follow the instructions of the merchant but doublecross him at the end and give *the vault*'s treasure to prince of crime.
Some time later on the seas, party's bard deciphered the magic item usage and got into contact with a demon of the seas **Tasar Zuls Taeb** who also wanted *the vault*'s treasure.
So party ended up on the same quest from 3 different sources. And if you like anagrams, you'll figure out they got the quest 3 times from the same guy.
He was neither halfelf merchant, nor tiefling prince of crime, nor demon of the deep.
He was one of the guardians (devil appointed by Asmodeus himself) of *the vault*, who just wanted to get out of the job after millenia of servitude.
He hired party 3 times, so they will focus on *for who should we do the quest?* instead of *should we do the quest?*.
My rouge player found a magic dagger in a ship wreck, they discovered they were cultists dead in the ship under the sea, the dagger "Cenva's Dagger" Bright red with a black sharp edge, bright red gem in the center. He found this right before they went to fight thousand tooth. (Ghost of saltmarsh campaign, heavily modified). It was a nice dagger, what the party didnt know was any time he got a hit on an enemy with this dagger it captured part of their soul and i kept a list of those it captured... they came back to town one day to find the gate being attacked by a large group of knolls. halfway through the second round a knoll dies that he had hit with his dagger.. that was the 13th enemy.. I stopped the game, paused the music, "Thank you for releasing me child" Cenva is an anagram for VECNA, i used the name Cenva as often as i could, none of them caught on. it was a seal holding part of vecna's soul, The knoll fight turned into fighting knolls, 1000 tooth, another gator, harpies, some of those fish guys i forget their name, a few goblins and an ogre.. it was HECTIC when i dragged 13 familiar enemies onto the battle map making a show of how beams of light came out of the dagger and started to form these creatures... The party did not trust many magic items after that :P
I mainly do oneshots so it's not something with a long buildup but i made this eight level boss fight against a mage wearing a fancy cloak. Whenever the players damaged it i described some of the damage being taken by the cloak instead. When they finally got close enough and attempted to take his cloak away i revealed that it was a cloaker who then promptly enveloped their fighter
4 year campaign. Early in our career, our party took down a surface outpost of Drow. We thought nothing else of it until my ranger went back to the site to make sure they haven’t returned. Instead I found wanted posters for myself and our paladin. The time I spent in town, people were following me, keeping an eye on me. I thought this had to be the work of the Drow so my party and I planned extensively for a potential invasion.
Then one day the Drow did attack. They burnt down my rangers forest and attacked multiple elven cities on the surface but we were better prepared and quickly took down the Drow and their demon allies.
After we wrapped up the campaign, our rogue reveled that he had paid people to follow us in town, created wanted posters, and all sorts of other things to try and mess with us. The entire time we thought it was the Drow. Our dm revealed that they had never laid any secrets/notes or clues about the Drow invasion. It was pure chance that we believed our rogues antics to be the work of the Drow.
Our bard was a doppelgänger the entire campaign and didn’t realize it till the last session where they attempted to steal one of our identities and replace them.
Ahhh, where to begin.
I was running a super hero campaign using 5e rules, set in the worm universe. If you haven't heard of worm and have any interest in superheroes I highly recommend it.
Anyway, one of the pcs was dating a npc names tattletale. She had essentially the power of super intuition.
They got along well as she always gave them excellent Intel when going into a mission.
Fast forward to the group doing a mission against their former employer and now nemesis, coil, a man who can simulate two realities at once and pick the one he likes best. They manage to "kill" coil, but it turns out it was a body double made by another super who could turn pigs into identical copies of people.
Coil drops off the radar for a while and the group is fighting a guy by the name of enforcer. A cape who could steal and absorb other capes powers.
At some point tattletale gets captured.
They orchestrate a mission to free her. A mission that went along very smoothly. In hindsight... too smoothly.
Coil reappears and is making a bid for power by teaming up with enforcer.
At this point in the story tattletale has been acting weird. Not her usual self. She has a newfound hate for bacon, she snorts when she laughs and her intuitive powers seem delayed.
The enforcer unleashes an attack on the group, and the players hide away all their important npcs and loved ones in a pocket dimension.
During the fight with enforcer, the pcs are losing and tattle tale tells one of the pcs, Roulette, that she has a plan and needs to go back to the pocket dimension. Roulette, the man dating her, is the only one with access to the pocket dimension.
In a fit of desperation he gives her the coordinates and the access phrase.
She disappears to go enact her plan.
In reality, the enforcers attack was a diversion.
Tattletale had long been replaced with a copy who quickly went to go tell Coil where the players hidden base was.
He sent his top assassin in their, and by the time the players realized they had been tricked it was far too late.
They rushed back to their base after the fight to find nearly every dead or kidnapped.
Never have I seen my players so bent on revenge as they were here.
Months later they finally tracked down Coil and murdered him in the most intense way I could have imagined.
And eventually found and freed the real tattletale.
The party's Warlock was searching for his girlfriend who ran away when she discovered he had made a pact with a devil.
The Warlock was tasked with collecting 1 soul per day, so either from one of their combats (a goblin, a giant, a giant spider person, an owl bear) or would go out hunting/fishing each day and take the soul of that creature.
The Warlock made a deal to stop a TPK. The deal was he could stop collecting souls if he agreed to give up "the soul that binded him to this mortal coil". He agreed, and role played the rest of the campaign as if his soul was assigned to go to hell when he died, but it was a small price to play to protect his party.
The Warlock finds his girlfriend after 18 months of playing lots of emotion at saving her and their reunion. And yep, she is immediately dragged to hell as she his love for her is what binds him to this mortal coil.
They go to hell to rescue her, where a bone devil has been collecting souls to unleash an all powerful devil. He only needs 5 more.
The devil throws all the collected souls onto the ground and they create a monstrosity, a BBEG that is an amalgamation of every soul the Warlock collected.
When they discovered that "Nemesis" the evil wizard they heard about long ago (they even went in one of his abandoned lab, dealing with his monstrous experiments) was none other than Demetrion, the NPC who gave them the quest to retrieve parts of the "Scepter of Zuul".
Actually, the "Scepter of Zuul" was none other than the Staff of Fraz-Urb'luu, and they gave it right in the hand of the demon lord itself.
Some of them were sus about Demetrion (the mofo has magic to conceal his real alignment and he was a master deceiver, with Bluff skill maxed), but none of the players suspected that Demetrion and Nemesis were one and the same.
We were playing a Spelljammer inspired game (before the 5e port so this was a homebrewed campaign) and I was playing a Revived Rogue flavoured as a pirate and basically left my backstory largely up to my DM as I decided to play with the 'I have amnesia' concept and two things happened
My character went through some sort of ritual to become a Navigator because we needed one and the diety I met (a space whale basically) was like 'You've been here before' and then when we were tracking down a McGuffin for the story on a abandoned ship we met someone who was pretty unhappy to see me and when we got to the shipwreck it became apparent my character was involved in the betrayal that likely lead to the circumstances of this shipwreck
Our first game which was a Mines of Phandelin game that expanded into a bigger campaign basically culminated with us realising that the world we were in was older than everyone thought (indicated by the presence of a dragon that's age didn't match up with the age of the world) and that when we got to Draconia the main Church of Bahamut was basically formed under false pretenses
We did sort of kind of destroy that church and we were trying to help the ancient red dragon but they got betrayed at the last moment because SOMEONE in my party made a deal with Orcus.
Prostitute at the tavern was BBEG spy. BBEG was secretly supplying all the magic items the party was buying (lets it keep up to date on all potential future threats and lets it subtly manipulate and spy on parties). That same BBEG was actually a pawn to try to create a heroic party capable of reversing the damage caused by the actual BBEG.
The warlock’s patron was actually the BBEG the entire time.
Warlock chose the Pale Night as his patron.
For those us aware, the Pale Night is an extremely malevolent and sadistic being, though very capricious. Her power rivals that of other demon lord of the Abyss, though she does not associate with them. In fact, she hardly associates with anyone and her motives are very difficult to decipher.
As the story goes, the warlock was damned to the Abyss where he would suffer for the rest of eternity. But during his stay, he happened upon the Pale Night and realizing that she was an extremely powerful being, he begged to be returned to the Mortal Plane. He would do her bidding in return, no matter how despicable.
Turns out, everything the party went through was set up by her, just to make him suffer more.
Made a oneshot where the players played some monsters , ending it with them unknowingly causing the planes collapsing. Many decades later they play unknowingly in the same world.
There was a tavern in town called A Tavern. It was run by a retired adventurer named Eman Laeraton and the joke was that adventuring groups meet at A Tavern. He had opened it to attract adventuring groups for nostalgia and it quickly became the place where adventurers would go to hear about local rumors, quests, etc. from Eman. He was a retired ranger with a pet panther and pet wolf named Foe and Fayne. In the end they found out Eman was the BBEG who was subtly guiding adventuring groups to do what he wanted by steering them with rumors. Eman Laeraton backward is “not a real name”. They never caught on. His pets were a magically disguised displacer beast and some wolf-type create I’d found—their names being homonyms of faux and feign.
This is fucking brilliant
Thank you!
This plotthread will make a fine addition to my collection
You are a goddamn genius, sir!
A PC's background involved his parents being assassinated. He fled the scene, escaped the assassins, and grew up on the street until he was taken in by a wealthy benefactor. Unknown to the player, his "parents" were agents of Shar who had actually kidnapped him from his real family because he had an innate talent for Shadow magic. The "assassins" were Harpers who had tracked down the kidnappers and were attempting to rescue him. His benefactor was a member of the Church of Shar who managed to find him so he could bring him into the fold. The PC eventually begins looking into his parents, and finds their grave in the City of the Dead in Waterdeep. The inscription on their headstone read: ***S****ing* ***H****allelujah* ***A****waited* ***R****est* ***R****ising* ***U****pward* ***L****ong* ***E****ternal* ***S****leep* ***T****o* ***H****onor* ***E****verlasting* ***S****weet* ***H****eavens* ***A****bove* ***D****oors* ***O****pen* ***W****ide* ***S****inging!* (Boldface type added.) Sadly, he missed the clue. :)
thats an awesome hint though!
Was your player Shadowheart?
No, I don't know who that is. He was my nephew. The character's name was Orion. It was a PBP. I wrote it up and posted it [here](https://forgotten-realms.wandering-dwarf.com/shadows/shadows_toc.php) if you're interested in reading it.
Lol, Shadowheart is one of the main companions in the game Baldur’s Gate 3. I’m sure you at least know about the game if you haven’t played it. Anyway, I won’t give details in order to avoid major spoilers for the game, in case you ever decide to play it, but just know that your nephew’s character’s backstory is extremely similar to Shadowheart’s.
My son has played it, but I haven't tried it yet. He's told me a little about some of the weirdness that goes on in it, but no major spoilers. 🙂
Hey don't worry in my group we once had an incident involving a really easy riddle where we had to press a stone with the letter e on it and we all floundered around for like an hour to find it as we were thinking too hard.
I gave the party a prophecy. They dutifully followed it despite not fitting the description of the heroes of prophecy, causing mass chaos, Because how could the prophecy not be about them? The prophecy was for the party of my \_next\_ campaign; which most of them played in, and I helped guide character creation sufficiently without them noticing, that they built characters that fit the prophecy well. It was over 5 years later that I gave the players the same prophecy again, and they didn't recognize it as the same...
That's incredible! I came to this comment section because my DM pulled a similar "oh, this prophecy? It wasn't about *you*" twist on us
Reveal their dog companion has been just guiding them to destroy the bandits that threatened his home.
That's a sweet reveal. Who doesn't love vengeful dog?! Can I ask specifically, how the dog guided them? I'm thinking of borrowing this idea.
The DM revealed that the ancient prophecy we had been following for nearly an IRL year was written from the perspective of the antagonist. Thus, completing it will ensure the eternity of them and *their* beliefs, not of ours. That was genuinely bone chilling.
DM made a build up that a water genasi pirate (I play a water genasi warlock) was related to her- later learning they’re twins. My warlock, Lynn, never met another water genasi before despite living in the ocean most of her life. All I mostly gave to the DM was that Lynn was born to human parents who abandoned her as they didn’t want a water genasi child. We arrived to a beach town to figure out a way to get across the ocean when we stumbled upon a huge ship nearby. Some crew were loading up on stock when they saw Lynn and claimed she looked *exactly* like their captain. After the crew alert the captain, DM describes him to look *exactly* like Lynn- skin, hair, eye color (even the heterochromia), the only difference was he was taller and had facial hair and of course the opposite gender. He was also about a decade older than Lynn. A lot of interactions happen afterwards, and Lynn and him have very similar stories. Human parents, abandoned young, and were both genie warlocks to Marid. Even had the same genie vessel ring as Lynn. This was when I thought perhaps he’s related to Lynn, but I wasn’t sure what relation yet. The captain allows us to board his ship as our destination was the same area, and I knew DM was hinting at something. Even when one of the PC’s talked to the captain before we departed after being dropped off, DM said to the PC how he could almost see Lynn’s smile on the captain’s face. We level up to 10, and DM plans a private conversation between Lynn and Marid. I ask some questions about the captain, and Marid confirmed they were related, but I **did not expect them to be twins** at all. How: water genasi’s (hinted all genasi’s) are cursed to not pass down the race “naturally,” so Marid has to basically create them and have them be born in the world. The captain was born first of course, and he accomplished so much at a young age- including owning a ship by age 10. This was when Marid wanted to create another water genasi similar to the captain.. which was how Lynn was born. He used the same genetics as the captain, and only changed the gender. Lynn had no blood family, so discovering this was incredible to find out the DM planned this. Originally the captain was just a fun water genasi NPC for if the party wanted to explore other islands, but when I joined (I joined later, around level 5), DM wanted to make him more connected.
Not what you're expecting but..... Hanging out at an illathid bar the night before a tournament to gain illathid support in the wider war. One of our enemies are dark angels created by Bane himself. We've got...a rapport going with one of them. She's nice, we're hanging at the bar telling her about the world (she was created 2 weeks ago, and was curious about the world.) By now, we have established she's horny as fuck, but also has no idea what to do with those feelings (anything not evil+kill wasn't exactly planned for in creation.) Anyway, in walks our Huge bronze dragon buddy in humanoid form. She spies him and the DM rolls. Goes "oh, she's into him." She (unintentionally) lays out a seduction field on him. And he fucking fails. the. save. Our DM can't even tell us what the roll meant because he's laughing so hard. It's one of those one in 400 chance rolls. Anyway, he ends up turning her down cause she's angel-drunk and they have to try to kill each other the next morning, but says if they both survive they should meet up. The next morning in fight we wrestle control away from Bane and grant her freedom (turning her into a good aligned angel now.) The two disappear for a few weeks off screen. The next time we all see each other to go into battle, she tells us (AFTER THE BATTLE) that she's pregnant. With a Half Celestial Bronze Dragon. What the fuck. Anyway, we just started a new campaign and now I'm playing their grandkid 👍
I haven't revealed this one yet, but I'm in an amazing situation right now where two different PCs have approached me separately and asked for their Warlock Patrons to secretly be specific major villains from past campaigns. And these two villains knew each other, and didn't get along. Best of all, the Warlocks are immediately great friends right out the gate. There's going to be a huge throwdown later, I can't wait.
There was a few... One of the most prominent was *"It was him all along!"* twist. The party got hired by a wealthy halfelf merchant named **Baltazar Teuss**, who sent them on a scavenger hunt for a powerful artifacts. He did not need them, but they were required to open up *the vault*. And Baltazar wanted *the treasure* from that vault. After meeting with the merchant, the party was snatched on the streets by some shady thugs with *please go with us* routine. By following them they met next influential figure: tiefling prince of crime named **Lazarus Bastet**. He got the information about the scavenger hunt, and hired the party to follow the instructions of the merchant but doublecross him at the end and give *the vault*'s treasure to prince of crime. Some time later on the seas, party's bard deciphered the magic item usage and got into contact with a demon of the seas **Tasar Zuls Taeb** who also wanted *the vault*'s treasure. So party ended up on the same quest from 3 different sources. And if you like anagrams, you'll figure out they got the quest 3 times from the same guy. He was neither halfelf merchant, nor tiefling prince of crime, nor demon of the deep. He was one of the guardians (devil appointed by Asmodeus himself) of *the vault*, who just wanted to get out of the job after millenia of servitude. He hired party 3 times, so they will focus on *for who should we do the quest?* instead of *should we do the quest?*.
My rouge player found a magic dagger in a ship wreck, they discovered they were cultists dead in the ship under the sea, the dagger "Cenva's Dagger" Bright red with a black sharp edge, bright red gem in the center. He found this right before they went to fight thousand tooth. (Ghost of saltmarsh campaign, heavily modified). It was a nice dagger, what the party didnt know was any time he got a hit on an enemy with this dagger it captured part of their soul and i kept a list of those it captured... they came back to town one day to find the gate being attacked by a large group of knolls. halfway through the second round a knoll dies that he had hit with his dagger.. that was the 13th enemy.. I stopped the game, paused the music, "Thank you for releasing me child" Cenva is an anagram for VECNA, i used the name Cenva as often as i could, none of them caught on. it was a seal holding part of vecna's soul, The knoll fight turned into fighting knolls, 1000 tooth, another gator, harpies, some of those fish guys i forget their name, a few goblins and an ogre.. it was HECTIC when i dragged 13 familiar enemies onto the battle map making a show of how beams of light came out of the dagger and started to form these creatures... The party did not trust many magic items after that :P
I mainly do oneshots so it's not something with a long buildup but i made this eight level boss fight against a mage wearing a fancy cloak. Whenever the players damaged it i described some of the damage being taken by the cloak instead. When they finally got close enough and attempted to take his cloak away i revealed that it was a cloaker who then promptly enveloped their fighter
4 year campaign. Early in our career, our party took down a surface outpost of Drow. We thought nothing else of it until my ranger went back to the site to make sure they haven’t returned. Instead I found wanted posters for myself and our paladin. The time I spent in town, people were following me, keeping an eye on me. I thought this had to be the work of the Drow so my party and I planned extensively for a potential invasion. Then one day the Drow did attack. They burnt down my rangers forest and attacked multiple elven cities on the surface but we were better prepared and quickly took down the Drow and their demon allies. After we wrapped up the campaign, our rogue reveled that he had paid people to follow us in town, created wanted posters, and all sorts of other things to try and mess with us. The entire time we thought it was the Drow. Our dm revealed that they had never laid any secrets/notes or clues about the Drow invasion. It was pure chance that we believed our rogues antics to be the work of the Drow.
Lol yo what
Our bard was a doppelgänger the entire campaign and didn’t realize it till the last session where they attempted to steal one of our identities and replace them.
Ahhh, where to begin. I was running a super hero campaign using 5e rules, set in the worm universe. If you haven't heard of worm and have any interest in superheroes I highly recommend it. Anyway, one of the pcs was dating a npc names tattletale. She had essentially the power of super intuition. They got along well as she always gave them excellent Intel when going into a mission. Fast forward to the group doing a mission against their former employer and now nemesis, coil, a man who can simulate two realities at once and pick the one he likes best. They manage to "kill" coil, but it turns out it was a body double made by another super who could turn pigs into identical copies of people. Coil drops off the radar for a while and the group is fighting a guy by the name of enforcer. A cape who could steal and absorb other capes powers. At some point tattletale gets captured. They orchestrate a mission to free her. A mission that went along very smoothly. In hindsight... too smoothly. Coil reappears and is making a bid for power by teaming up with enforcer. At this point in the story tattletale has been acting weird. Not her usual self. She has a newfound hate for bacon, she snorts when she laughs and her intuitive powers seem delayed. The enforcer unleashes an attack on the group, and the players hide away all their important npcs and loved ones in a pocket dimension. During the fight with enforcer, the pcs are losing and tattle tale tells one of the pcs, Roulette, that she has a plan and needs to go back to the pocket dimension. Roulette, the man dating her, is the only one with access to the pocket dimension. In a fit of desperation he gives her the coordinates and the access phrase. She disappears to go enact her plan. In reality, the enforcers attack was a diversion. Tattletale had long been replaced with a copy who quickly went to go tell Coil where the players hidden base was. He sent his top assassin in their, and by the time the players realized they had been tricked it was far too late. They rushed back to their base after the fight to find nearly every dead or kidnapped. Never have I seen my players so bent on revenge as they were here. Months later they finally tracked down Coil and murdered him in the most intense way I could have imagined. And eventually found and freed the real tattletale.
The party's Warlock was searching for his girlfriend who ran away when she discovered he had made a pact with a devil. The Warlock was tasked with collecting 1 soul per day, so either from one of their combats (a goblin, a giant, a giant spider person, an owl bear) or would go out hunting/fishing each day and take the soul of that creature. The Warlock made a deal to stop a TPK. The deal was he could stop collecting souls if he agreed to give up "the soul that binded him to this mortal coil". He agreed, and role played the rest of the campaign as if his soul was assigned to go to hell when he died, but it was a small price to play to protect his party. The Warlock finds his girlfriend after 18 months of playing lots of emotion at saving her and their reunion. And yep, she is immediately dragged to hell as she his love for her is what binds him to this mortal coil. They go to hell to rescue her, where a bone devil has been collecting souls to unleash an all powerful devil. He only needs 5 more. The devil throws all the collected souls onto the ground and they create a monstrosity, a BBEG that is an amalgamation of every soul the Warlock collected.
When they discovered that "Nemesis" the evil wizard they heard about long ago (they even went in one of his abandoned lab, dealing with his monstrous experiments) was none other than Demetrion, the NPC who gave them the quest to retrieve parts of the "Scepter of Zuul". Actually, the "Scepter of Zuul" was none other than the Staff of Fraz-Urb'luu, and they gave it right in the hand of the demon lord itself. Some of them were sus about Demetrion (the mofo has magic to conceal his real alignment and he was a master deceiver, with Bluff skill maxed), but none of the players suspected that Demetrion and Nemesis were one and the same.
We were playing a Spelljammer inspired game (before the 5e port so this was a homebrewed campaign) and I was playing a Revived Rogue flavoured as a pirate and basically left my backstory largely up to my DM as I decided to play with the 'I have amnesia' concept and two things happened My character went through some sort of ritual to become a Navigator because we needed one and the diety I met (a space whale basically) was like 'You've been here before' and then when we were tracking down a McGuffin for the story on a abandoned ship we met someone who was pretty unhappy to see me and when we got to the shipwreck it became apparent my character was involved in the betrayal that likely lead to the circumstances of this shipwreck Our first game which was a Mines of Phandelin game that expanded into a bigger campaign basically culminated with us realising that the world we were in was older than everyone thought (indicated by the presence of a dragon that's age didn't match up with the age of the world) and that when we got to Draconia the main Church of Bahamut was basically formed under false pretenses We did sort of kind of destroy that church and we were trying to help the ancient red dragon but they got betrayed at the last moment because SOMEONE in my party made a deal with Orcus.
The tagalong kid that's largely a running joke is actually a literal deity.
Prostitute at the tavern was BBEG spy. BBEG was secretly supplying all the magic items the party was buying (lets it keep up to date on all potential future threats and lets it subtly manipulate and spy on parties). That same BBEG was actually a pawn to try to create a heroic party capable of reversing the damage caused by the actual BBEG.
The warlock’s patron was actually the BBEG the entire time. Warlock chose the Pale Night as his patron. For those us aware, the Pale Night is an extremely malevolent and sadistic being, though very capricious. Her power rivals that of other demon lord of the Abyss, though she does not associate with them. In fact, she hardly associates with anyone and her motives are very difficult to decipher. As the story goes, the warlock was damned to the Abyss where he would suffer for the rest of eternity. But during his stay, he happened upon the Pale Night and realizing that she was an extremely powerful being, he begged to be returned to the Mortal Plane. He would do her bidding in return, no matter how despicable. Turns out, everything the party went through was set up by her, just to make him suffer more.
Made a oneshot where the players played some monsters , ending it with them unknowingly causing the planes collapsing. Many decades later they play unknowingly in the same world.