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MesiDoomstalker
2017-07-18, 12:54 AM
Tonight me and my players had the most amazing unplanned thing happen. A bit of backstory; the party's Tiefling Paladin/Oracle was kidnapped by his Great^16 Grand Dad (whose an Archdevil) and took him back to the Plane of Dismanter (custom setting, essentially Hell). The PC's lacked the ability to Plane Shift (Tiefling was the only divine caster and they are only level 9), however luckily for them an Exorcist (level 9 Halfling Cleric) NPC was coming to their city to exorcise a Ghost Dragon from earlier in the campaign so it couldn't reform and continue to wreck havoc every couple of weeks. The PC's asked the NPC Cleric to take them to Dismanter and he agreed, if they paid him for the spells cast and a special charge for going to Dismanter (the NPC worshiped the main Halfling god, who is CG and associated with Water, the Sea, Sailing and to a lesser degree, Piracy). Additionally, the NPC wouldn't go to Dismanter till he did his exorcism thing on the ghost dragon that he was initially hired for first.

The Tiefling gets some plot info from Grand Pap and is sent out into the plane proper to find his own way home. He finds an Inn (Dismanter's second layer is a massive sprawling metropolis which functions as a trading place for the less scrupulous of all planes) and starts looking for someone willing to Plane Shift him back home. I gave him the option to go through the permanent portal to the EVUUUUUUUUUUUL Empire halfway around the world, but he refused go figure. Meanwhile the NPC has done his Exorcism thing and Plane Shifts the rest of the party to Dismanter. Hijinks happen, and the party is reunited and the NPC Plane Shifts them back to the Prime.

Now before I continue, a tad more information on this setting. The planes are all massive cylinder's instead of spheres or infinite flat planes. The way gravity works is there is a line that runs through the center of the cylinder and all gravity pulls towards that line (as opposed to a singular point at the center of the mass). So at the edge of the Prime's cylinder is either very tall mountains that end in the more sheer precipice imaginable or massive oceanic waterfalls that fall till they hit the cylinder's center, where it is pulled into the setting's Underdark equivalent's aquifer.

I rolled the off target for their Plane Shift spell, rolling 240 miles. Consulting my map of the setting, that puts them somewhere in the wilderness of the 3 neighboring kingdoms or in the ocean with a small chance they are near the world's edge. I ask them to roll 6d6 and 1d100, which they roll a 32 and 100. This of course calls for the most dire situation possible; the Edge of the World. They must desperately make Swim checks to get to and hold onto the Wizard who had prepped Teleport twice. They had 3 rounds to do so before they get pulled over the edge and if they failed 2 rounds before their fall pulled them into the Underdark aquifer where drowning would be the most likely result. Everyone but the Paladin (in his Full Plate) and the Rogue manage to do round 1. And for the life of the Rogue (literally) he can't pass a swim check. Even the Paladin passes and everyone else succeeds on their strength checks to keep hold of the wizard. So they go over the edge and the Paladin fails his check to hold onto the Wizard. Luckily, he's a Dragon Oracle so he has Fly on his list, casts that (passing the concentration check for violent motion and the 20% failure due to casting inside a waterfall). He grabs the Rogue, and then succeeds in grabbing the Wizard again. The Wizard tries to cast his Teleport but fails the concentration check, losing the spell. And this is it. They have 1 round to make it to safety and only 1 Teleport spell remaining. The Paladin fails his check to keep hold of the wizard, the Rogue fails his reflex save to grab someone, anyone. The Ranger passes her check to grab the Rogue meeting the DC exactly (she grabbed his ear). The Wizard casts his spell, passing both Concentration and the 20% failure. They had selected their favorite bar in their home city as their destination.

It is at this point I reminded them why they had prepped 2 Teleport spells. The Wizard's Caster Level was such that he could only bring 4 people, including himself. The party is 4 PC's plus their hired NPC. So the question became who got left behind to certain death? The Wizard wasn't an option, he would always be included in his own Teleport spell. That left the Ranger, Paladin, Rogue and the NPC Cleric. So I asked them to roll a d6, where I had assigned a different person to each number and put "GM's choice" onto 6 and "no one" onto 5. They rolled 6. Now, I didn't want to cope out and off the NPC nor did I want to arbitrarily kill a PC, so I asked the Paladin player if he wanted Evens or Odds. If he guessed correctly, the NPC got left behind. If he guessed wrong, he'd be left behind. But at least he still had his Fly spell plus several more 3rd level slots to use on more Fly spells. He chose Odds and I rolled a 3. The NPC got left behind and everyone is safe.

But of course, not everything is hunky dorry. They never paid the NPC and got him killed for his troubles. So I decided he will be coming back as a Ghost. I remind you, he was an exorcist who is now a ghost himself who worshiped a god of the sea and died by drowning. It was truly the most amazing thing I didn't even plan that has happened in one of my games. What stories does the Playground of unplanned awesomeness?

Saint Jimmy
2017-07-18, 07:37 AM
Well I ran this whacked out Call of Cthulhu game once. It was... very weird.

The players were all famous musicians from the 80's or 90's, and it started at the 1994 MTV Music Awards. Basically one of the bands got up there and just lost it, screaming in R'lyehian. People began filtering out of the venue, and then the guitar player pulled out a pistol and shot all the other band members. After that he proceeded to empty it into the crowd.

Enter the Investigators. Neither them nor their players had any knowledge of the Cthulhu Mythos, which caused some interesting scenes later. So they had a super intense scene where they exited and went in the back way, stealing some guns from the Security service locker. They searched for awhile, getting thouroghly creeped out by the whole thing, until they found and shot up the guitar player.

Deciding that they didn't want to talk to the cops they fled the scene and headed over to the house of the now dead guitar player to "figure out what the hell is going on." Instead of sneaking around it like a normal group, they first spend 10 minutes trying to decide if they should blow it up or not. They end up...

Driving the car into the house, and then shooting everyone inside.
I'm pretty sure nothing about that session was "normal" CoC. :smalltongue:

rs2excelsior
2017-07-18, 10:57 PM
It's not quite as dramatic as the edge of the world thing, but one of my best DM stories (one I use to encourage newer DMs in our group) that fits this:

Decently high-level Pathfinder campaign (Party was level 14--not properly high level, but considering most of our campaigns take place over the level 4-10-ish range, higher than a lot of games we run). The party was on the trail of the big bad, through the colonial wilderness. They'd just been through a tough fight (one character was down, but the druid could cast reincarnate--that character had been reincarnated once by the druid already). I had planned for them to continue on the trail, meet up with big bad briefly, have BB jump through his portal and order his minions to attack, leading to an endless mook swarm until the party managed to get out of the situation. This was my second campaign as DM, so I didn't plan in too much detail and I was (kind of) comfortable with improvising, but I had a general framework I could adapt to what the party wound up doing.

Start of session, Druid uses Travel via Plants to teleport off the continent, back to their base of operations. Threw me for a loop. The spell teleports between plants of the same type, so we start off with the party (a sylph, a tiefling, a vanara--basically an unknown race outside of the wilderness southern continent, and a dead half-orc) teleporting into the parlor of a very shocked human noble (who would be likely to have a plant from an exotic, wilderness area that's barely been colonized?). From there, we never rolled initiative or attacks once, but it led to one of the most RP-heavy, memorable sessions of that campaign, all based on the party doing something I had not expected them to do at all. It was 100% improvised on my part, but I had good players and everyone had a great time with that session.

Nowhere near as epic as nearly falling into oblivion, but hey, unexpected opportunities for memorable RP.

souridealist
2017-08-05, 03:50 PM
One time I ran a Call of Cthulhu oneshot that ended in a fairly spectacular TPK. (Normally TPKs mea I've failed in my goals as DM, but it's a oneshot, so no story is being curtailed and no one is losing a beloved character, and also, it's Call of Cthulhu.)

I had the story set up as kind of a mystery - 'what happened to our mutual friend who vanished off the face of the earth?' I was using some homebrewed monsters instead of the actual Cthulhu mythos - a posse of sorts called the Cat, the Rat, and the Snake, each of them a personification of crappy things humans do, each of them looking human except for the eyes. (I had something of an eyes / eye trauma theme going on.)

I'd planned on it being a very low-combat setup, so the monsters weren't really statted to be something the party could fight; they're personifications of cruelty, cowardice, and deceit. I'd planned on a no-guns rule, but one of the players wanted to play a Godfather-gangster type, and kind of browbeat me into letting him have a gun.

Party tracks their friend around, figures out a few things about what he'd gotten himself into, loses a little bit of sanity, and eventually makes their way down to the basement that the creatures had been using as a base, where they find the body of their friend lying on a table with roses growing out of his eyes. I'd intended this to be an 'oh crap' moment that lead to a lot of fast-talking, maybe they get offered some Faustian deals, leave and try to burn the place, whatever. Instead the guy with the gun opens fire.

The other two guys in the party are basically fistfighting, so it doesn't go too well for them. The guy who usually runs our sessions tries to tank and dies fairly early, so he takes a peek at my notes and just starts laughing. The second guy goes down, and the guy with the gun - now very low on heath himself - makes a break for the door on the far side of the basement.

On the other side is the posse's master: a man who looks like he's made of melted wax, with empty hollows where his eyes should be. He lifts one hand from the arm of his chair and says, "Hello there."

Player: "I drop to my knees, put my gun to my head and pull the trigger."

Most cinematic ending the session could have had, and I couldn't have done half so well if I'd tried to set it up that way. It was great.

Less cool, more ridiculous, but in the land of teleport mishaps, we had a wizard:
- teleport us out of a dragon's cave and into an orc campsite
- teleport us out of the campsite formerly belonging to orcs and into the middle of a full-scale battle against demons at the Worldwound
- teleport us out of the middle of a full-scale battle at the Worldwound and land us at the North Pole

Because sometimes the dice just hate you.