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View Full Version : Storytime! Your proudest moment running a game



GoblinGilmartin
2014-02-08, 04:07 AM
I just wanted to share a story of one of my proudest moments as a GM. Please share your own as well!

The players were escorting a merchant form place to place, and they got ambushed by a necromancer hired by the merchants rival. The necromancer led one of the party away, pretending to be a traveler whose brother had had a tree fall on him off of the road, and then sicced a small army of spellstitched zombies on the rest of the party (and the brother turned out to be an undead horror in disguise). I organized the zombies into six units of four, and each unit had a zombie that could cast: Obscuring mist, magic missile, and I believe burning hands and mage armor. The combination of these spells made my players have to think tactically, and turned the battle into something really memorable for them and for me.

Artemicion
2014-02-08, 06:02 AM
I find my proudest moments as a storyteller are those that involve story weaving, inclugin player ideas or actions into the plot of the campaign. Two examples come to mind.

1. My first big campaign ever, we were all teenagers. The PCs were hired by a dying baron (dying from a mysterious, incurable disease) to find his children scattered in the state so he could die surrounded by his loved ones. They found all the children, but every time they found one he/she was in some kind of danger. It quickly became apparent that all of them were to be assassinated in a way of another, and all assassins bore the same medallion which radiated evil magic.

My plot was that a rival baron was trying to have the whole family killed before invading the estate. He had corrupted the cook who fed the baron a magical poison/disease that nobody could cure, and had arranged for the children to die.

The PCs, once they saved all the children, stopped to ponder about the events. Who could be behind the attempted assasinations? (At that time I had never mentioned the rival baron). Then all of the sudden the PCs face light up. Of course! They asked about the baroness, with a smirk.

I must admit I had not given much thought about the baroness. However, the PCs seemed to be so proud of their idea, and the idea itself was pretty good. I very quickly thought. Yes, she could be involved into this. The rival baron could have promised her power or something and she could be working with him. It was unlikely that she would have her own children assasinated though. How to solve this?

I answered the PCs that the baroness was the baron's new wife, whom he has married a year ago, after his first wife had mysteriously vanished. The PCs had their answer. The baroness was behing all this, and they eventually confronted her. I made her quite evil and seducing, she managed to escape, and became one of the most hated recurring villain of the whole campaign.

At the end of the session, one of the players came to me and asked "You would never have thought we would get it so quickly, uh?".
"No, I would never have though so. Good job!".

2. In my most recent campaign, one of the players secretely played a reincarnation of an evil demon warlordess. Her character, named Ealis, was a paladin of the god of redemption, who tried to atone for the misdeeds of her former self. When the game started, I thought it would be fun to include a rival paladin as an NPC, named Cassandre, who hated the guts of the PC. Nobody knew why, but I had decided she was the descendant of a holy warrior who had fought the evil warlordess at the time and whose ancestor had vowed to destroy her. The players did not know. Hence the animosity. Cassandre was nasty good.

In one of the adventures, Cassandre went with the PCs and fought a few encounters. To my dismay, in trying to protect the other PCs she got herself killed. Bye bye Cassandre. I think everyone was disappointed because they liked to hate her.

I ruled that Cassandre was the last of her lineage, and that the vow her ancestor was made was very powerful. She could not poceed to the afterlife as long as her nemesis lived. The PCs did not know, but the ghost of Cassandre followed them around, unseen, and tried whenever she could to have Ealis killed. Weird stuff happened to the PCs but they never got that the ghost of Cassandre was following them. In time her hatred for Ealis grew.

The players went into a dungeon which was basically a complicated puzzle elaoborated by a powerful evil cleric. One of the encounters he had prepared was terrible temptation. He paid a nigh hag a hefty number of souls (he had a lot of them) to tempt mortals in his temple with great rewardsin exchange for their souls. So Gwyonzelle the night hag was designed to be just an encounter in the temple.

To my surprise, Ealis actually accepted to sell her soul (the part of the evil warlordess, anyways, for which she wanted to atone) to receive magical items as well as a clue to the puzzle. Now I wondered what as night hag would do with a piece of soul of a powerful evil warlord. Sell it to the highest bidder, of course.

I decided that there was much more profit for Gwyonzelle in selling the soul a Ealis than in keeping her "job" in the temple. So she "quit" and left for demonic realms.

Cassandre saw the hag as an opportunity. She talked to her, and did a terrible bargain: she agreed to sell her soul o her if the hag worked to have Ealis killed. The hag, happy to harvest a paladin's soul, took her to the demonic realms.

The PCs went on on their adventure, and were confornted a few times with the night hag and the ghost of Cassandre who were trying to eliminate them (the surprise on the PCs fac when they saw the former paladin with the hag).

The PCs eventually found a contraption that allowed them to see other people's fate. The looked at Cassandre's and learned her story, as well as the fact that she was kind of starting to like her condition.

In their final encounter, one of the PCs Cassandre, who was attacking them with Gwonzelle again, that if she killed Ealis she would be sent to the afterlife. Cassandre knew. This had become one of her questions: why would she seek to fulfill an old vow to try to go to a god's realm she did not really believe in anymore?

Cassandre stopped, said she would not pursue Ealis anymore. The hag lokked shocked. "So would renounce your holy vow and forsake afterlife?". Cassandre answered defiantly "Yes". To everyone's surprised, the hag did not seem upset that she would not get the promised soul. Quite the opposite, actually. She started cackling with a sinister laugh. "Then, my dear, you are forever damned. And I am free!". As she laughed maniacally, she started to dissolve, and slowly Cassandre's features started to get purple. In a few seconds, she had become a night hag. And she loved it. She looked at the PCs with an evil smile and left.

(Before the encounter I had ruled that hags were damned soul who could only get free by replacing themselves. She had found suitable replacement in Cassandre. When forsook the holy vows taken by her ancesters and spit on the afterlife, she damned herself forever.)

Thus two random NPCs for whom I did not have big plans at the start eventually led to a great encounter and a somehow satisfying end.

Wraith
2014-02-08, 07:41 AM
My proudest moment was running Dark Heresy.

The Players started out as petty criminals, and had spent several sessions working their way towards a 'crime lord' by proving how tough and clever they were in order to get hired by the local Big Fish. Said crimelord turned out to be the false identity of an established Ordo Hereticus Inquisitor, and by drawing his attention they managed to get hired as his newest warband of Acolytes.

They were immediately sent out to investigate some kind of cult, one that was very well informed about the Hereticus Inquisitor and had been the proverbial thorn in his side for many weeks. It was they who had killed his previous warband, thus necessitating the need for hiring the PCs, for example.

Several furious, running firefights later, the PCs were bloody but victorious - they had wiped out the heavily armed cult and done good in the Emperor's name.
Or had they? Typical PC-habit had them looting corpses.... and discovered that one of the cultists was carrying an Inquisitorial Rosette. They hadn't killed off a cult.... They had wiped out the warband of another local Inquisitor, including the Interrogator (read: Apprentice and Second-in-Command) who had been carrying his master's seal of authority as he tried to arrest the PCs. :smalleek:

A few sessions of Cat and Mouse go by - the PCs continue working for the Hereticus Inquisitor, but are obviously disquieted by the implications of what they had done, all the while finding subtle-but-definite signs that someone was searching them out, and getting very, very close.....

Long story short, they found themselves cornered by the Ordos Xenos Inquisitor whose warband they had murdered, and he wanted his rosette back. He also wanted to know why they thought they needed to kill an Inquisitor's Warband, and after a short discussion later they discovered the true nature of their own Master.

He was a genuine Inquisitor, but he was a Radical. All the while that he had been employing the PCs, he'd had them gathering alien technology and hoarding it for himself, under the belief that he could assemble it and use it as a potent weapon against the enemies of the Imperium.
The tricky part is, an Inquisitor technically has the right to do this, up to a point. Their authority allows them to use almost any means in the persecution of their duties, but it's a very, very find line between taking liberties and going too far.
The Xenos Inquisitor believed that the Hereticus Inquisitor had managed the latter, and was hunting his own peer on charges of conspiring with Xenos and utilizing forbidden technology. The Hereticus Inquisitor believed himself in the right, and had been using the PCs as his proxies to fight a battles of philosophy against his hunter - if he was tried he might be censured, but if he killed his enemies before they could prove anything then he'd be free to pursue his own agenda and allow his results to speak for themselves.
The end justifies the means, right?

So, the Xenos Inquisitor offered the PCs a choice; join him as his new Acolytes and bring their (generous and actually quite likable) old Master to justice for heresy, or stay with their original Master and be forced to continue fighting the Xenos Inquisitor and all those who would come after him.

And then there was The Moment.
Each of the Players stared at each other. All of them silent, with fear and apprehension in their eyes.
Which side is in the right? What happens if I say one thing, and another of you guys says the opposite in front of the other Players and in front of this Inquisitor whose colleagues we have murdered? To who do we owe most loyalty? To what do we have the most invested? What do we do next?

They were genuinely torn, one way to the other, and the in-character discussion, argument, debate and conflict that occurred over the next real-life hour was wonderful. :smallsmile:

kailkay
2014-02-08, 07:52 AM
I had improvised a pathfinder campaign; the party was dwarves, they worked for a merchant's guild, and they were supposed to bring a chest filled with whatever, some kind of payment, from their guild headquarters to a dockmaster of a nearby major port city, to continue 'renting their trade fleets' basically.

Something... wasn't right about it all, and the party was incredibly suspicious of everyone they met, everywhere they went, and so forth. They could tell something was off, so I played on that. When the time came for the big meeting with the dockmaster, they had no idea the chest they were about to give him had been tampered with.

I remember the look in the players eyes as I described them sliding the chest toward the dockmaster. They knew something was up, but they didn't know exactly what it was; they figured the dockmaster was about to betray them, so they were pretty on guard.

I remember describing the dockmaster turning the key in the lock of the chest, clicking it open, and slowly lifting the lid with a creeeaaaaak.

"He pauses a moment, looking slightly confused. 'What's this?' he says as he reaches forward--"
"No, wait!" was the exclamation of one of the PCs, who apparently had just clued in that something very bad was about to happen.
"BOOM!" I shouted, causing the party to jump in their seats. They had just blown the dockmaster to smithereens, and were now wanted criminals.

It turned into a Law & Order campaign, extremely heavy on the RP. I think maybe three dice were rolled for the remainder of that session. The late comer had rolled up a paladin, so he was the guild HQ's lawyer, who came down to figure out what had happened and defend the party in court, etc etc. It was the most fun campaign I can remember running.

CombatOwl
2014-02-08, 11:32 AM
I just wanted to share a story of one of my proudest moments as a GM. Please share your own as well!

The players were escorting a merchant form place to place, and they got ambushed by a necromancer hired by the merchants rival. The necromancer led one of the party away, pretending to be a traveler whose brother had had a tree fall on him off of the road, and then sicced a small army of spellstitched zombies on the rest of the party (and the brother turned out to be an undead horror in disguise). I organized the zombies into six units of four, and each unit had a zombie that could cast: Obscuring mist, magic missile, and I believe burning hands and mage armor. The combination of these spells made my players have to think tactically, and turned the battle into something really memorable for them and for me.

Player 1: "Wait, who was it we were supposed to kill again?"
Me (portraying an AI NPC): "Oh, nobody special, just this Tir countess that my data suggests is a shadowrunner who helped arrange an assassination attempt."
Player 1: "Oh, alright, tell me more about this job..."

... Three OOC hours of mission planning later ...

Player 2: "Oh ****!" (out of the blue)
Me (OOC, as the GM, since we were on a break): "What's up?"
Player 2: "I just realized, you've already set us up haven't you? If we kill her, we're going to get killed by the Tir government, backed by Hestaby the Great Dragon. If we don't kill her, we're going to get burned by a megacorp and personally by that AI. We are so ****ed."
Me (OOC still): "Well, that leaves you with a choice doesn't it--would you rather die poor or die rich?"