Proudest moment in GMing

[Duff]

Hi All - Small brag and then I invite you to put in your own:

Many years ago I ran a "Retreat from Kabul" sequence in a home brewed setting (the game was the 80's Dragonquest with a fair bit of modification).

The PCs had gathered an army to go and deal with some orcs.
For several sessions the ever shrinking army moved through the barren hills, loosing people to hit-and-run raids by the Farqaduk orc nation as they went (both on the way in and back . There were about 30 survivors from the 2-300 they started with so I was happy with that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1842_retreat_from_Kabul (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1842_retreat_from_Kabul)

A few years later, my wife chanced to see footage from the Sovit Union's time in Afghanistan (without knowing the context of the footage and not knowing the difference between the Retreat from Kabul and the Trail of Tears). She yelled "Thats Farqaduk territory!"

[Alhallor]

I fear I don't have any grand tales but there are some things that stand out to me that made me weirdly proud.

In the first campaign I DM'ed there were a special kind of assasins that weared robes, and the down part of the robes were slashed into several strands (for better mobility) and only the second time the Players (who have never played a P&P game before) encountered them and I gave that describtion my Players were "Oh, one of these guys!"

A pretty much non-roleplayer getting more and more into the whole roleplaying thing while playing culminating in him finding a totally in-character solution to a riddle (Vampire the Masquerade, "no Vampire can leave through this door, and no mortal can enter." The Player smashes a hole at the side of the door so they can come and go as they please.)

[Kurald Galain]

All right.

One is when I successfully pulled off a time loop. The party was exploring a dwarven city when it got attacked by a different tribe of dwarfs and they got caught in the crossfire. During this, the party got separated, and I dealt with the main party first before getting back to the lone cleric. Of course the main party ran into certain kinds of trouble. So the playtime with the cleric was after the rest of the party out-of-game, but before most of what the rest did in-game. Despite this being a freeform/sandbox campaign so I had no idea what the cleric was going to do, I ended up wrapping the cleric's part with him being directly responsible for the trouble of the main party. That was fun.

Another was when a different party entered a warehouse to confront the local thief guild who had stolen a necromantic idol, and a fight ensued with the thieves and their hired wizard. When this appeared to be going well, suddenly a team of undead crashed through the wall who also wanted the idol, forcing the PCs and thief guild to hectically fight side-by-side against the too-powerful undead, seeking to delay them until they could get themselves and the idol outside in the sunlight where the undead would not follow. This was a major "oh crap!" moment for the PCs, followed by some hasty diplomacy checks to keep the thieves from running, followed by the idol being passed and thrown from one PC to another as the undead leader kept immobilizing whichever character had it.

They made it out by the skin of their teeth. I was happily surprised when the players involved brought it up in a discussion about a year later, how they still remembered the awesome three-way fight. One of the PCs developed a permanent sense of guilt for the villagers that died that day.

[Cozzer]

During my longest campaign, the PCs knew of the existence of the main villain and that he was trying to estabilish a position in high society for himself, before triggering his Evil Plan. They were navigating high society themselves, trying to gather allies and resources so they could put put pressure on the villain and be ready to stop the Evil Plan before it could do too much damage.

After unwittingly crossing roads with the main villain multiple times over the course of several adventures, with no prompting on my part, they sat down and started putting all the various hints and pieces of information together. They realized who the villain was, and came up with a pretty solid plan to verify their hypotesis. From that moment on, they took control of the campaign and drove it towards its climax by tying together and closing all the various plots that I had opened until then.

The part that I'm proud of is that it happened exactly when I hoped it would with no input on my part, as a natural result of the players and the characters gradually gathering information and power. It was a pretty big gamble for me, at the time. :smalltongue:

[Tawmis]

I have been playing D&D for ... eons... and DMing almost just as long.
But my proudest moment happened roughly a year ago.
A friend (who I knew through a mutual friend and had never really hung out with) - discovered I DM'ed.
She (Anita) had just discovered I played D&D - and more so that I DM'ed.
She asked if I'd be willing to DM for a group of her friends who'd NEVER played D&D.
I said, "Heck yes!"
Then the day came - I was at Anita's - and my nerves were on fire.
I realized their impression of D&D was going to rely on me. Whether it was a good or bad experience.
As they showed up - it was great - because it was mostly women.
I say great, because it was nice to see D&D reaching more and more women!
So Amy, her husband Dave, their friend Albert, Melinda, Jessica and Anita was the original group.
Jessica's husband kept hearing about the fun we had - so he ended up eventually joining us.
The most amazing thing was - all of them were connected to Anita - but didn't know one another.
So Jessica didn't know Amy or Melinda, for example. The only common thread was everyone knew Anita, but no one else.
Within two sessions - we were all fast friends, friending one another on FB, and talking all the time.
Not only was my D&D session a success - but we played once a month - and just recently celebrated a year together. (https://youtu.be/9k3lir8p0hc)
That night helped me feel more confident than I ever have - having DM'ed for complete strangers - who cared enough to buy the books, dice, and get into it.
And forge new friendships.

[Lvl45DM!]

When I got the group I grew up with, mostly my dad's friends about 60 now, and the group I played with, all mid-twenties, and ran them separately through a homebrewed Isle of the Ape, culminating in a 12 player session where they all teamed up and fought Godzilla to save King Kong, and therefore all mammals from reptilian tyranny.

12 people, noone on their phones, working in harmony with near-strangers to work on and pull of a battle plan against a ludicrously overpowered enemy, after a few months of slogging through dinosaurs and giant apes and freakish monsters.

That was....that was special

[Phhase]

This is a pretty small one, but I was pretty proud of this player's cunning, and am still wondering if it's RAW allowed. One of my players was struck by an effect that plunged them into a mental illusory battlefield, although their body remained in place, frozen and invisible. Their reaction was to cast Suggestion on themselves with the command "Wake up." I was stymied for a good minute, trying to figure out if it would work. In the end, I narrowly, begrudgingly, ruled against it because he wasn't technically asleep, and it was very high-powered fiendish magic. Fortunately, this gave him the opportunity to try other cool things in the illusory duel that I ruled did work. It was a cool moment.

[Resileaf]

A few weeks ago, I recreated the opening scene of Saint's Row 4 in my Starfinder campaign and one of my players rode a nuclear missile with Aerosmith's Don't want to miss a thing playing.
I was rididulously happy about that.

[Zakhara]

Five players entered a vampire's lair with a Clerical Continual Light stone in hand, but had to track the monster down (for context, they are equal to "full daylight" in OD&D, making them invaluable vampire-hunting tools).
My proudest moment came when the thralls who dwelled there (like a cargo cult) knew this, and systematically split up the party and disarmed them of their most dangerous tools with simple manners and humble requests rather than risk a losing fight. Five players entered, only two left, all because they felt the thralls seemed just that harmless.

[Kaptin Keen]

My greatest moment as a GM is also kind of a failure.

I like my moral grey zones, and I had engineered - over long months of a long campaign - a situation where the players could reasonably join with the villain, because he was in his way innocent, and his plan really would be for the greater good of all mankind. Sure, it would plunge the galaxy into an exhaustive war, but if he won, he would be the God-Emperor reborn. Or arguably so - he was a 'clone' of sorts.

Anyways, the moral grey zones was good enough that the players couldn't agree what to do, and ended up fighting each other over the outcome and the fate of the galaxy.

Where it fails is that the group that lost didn't take it well. The grand majesty of the story arch didn't seem to trump the fact that their PC's got player killed.

=(

[weckar]

Anytime when a plan involving months of breadcrumbing comes together, really.

[JBPuffin]

My first session as a DM with a group whose primary game I’ve just joined, I had a rather ambitious plan - a “save the princess” where the princess was a vampire from a monarchy built on vampirism who was captured by the church of the sun god. The whole session, the party (split evenly between “for the crown!” enthusiasts and apathetic scoundrels) received hints but never made the connection...until the princess broke the celestial chains the sun god’s priestess had bound her with and tore her throat open. Seeing their faces as they thought in unison, “we totally just became the bad guys, didn’t we?” was stupendous.

[King of Nowhere]

I have a player who keeps asking for loot and stuff. He's a good player, but distracted by the shiny.
So, he was asking for an adult gold dragon cohort. I don't use cohort rules, if it makes sense that some npc follow the party i let them keep the npc as cohort. The player had a white dragon whose life he saved, but he wanted a power-up.

I decided that the player was asking too much, so he'd get a bad deal: he'd get an adult gold dragon set to betray him.
At the time dragons had little space in my campaign. They were part of the world, but kept to themselves. I needed to come up with a motivation.

Eventually i developef the full plot.
Dragons breed slowly and have limitations. Humans breed really fast. Some dragons are concerned that humans will grow too much and take up their space. So a secret society of dragons formed with the purpose of enslaving humans.
But for all their powers, dragons cannot just conquer humanoids. Those hairless monkeys are stronger than they look, and some dragons would defend them.
So they planned to cause a war that would weaken the humanoids. And since the party was stirring up trouble, they sent one of them to help.

And it was wonderful. This dragon subtly manipulated the party for over one year. It was a great payoff when i could finally unveil the whole thing.

In general, i had a lot of people pulling strings in my campaign, and it was always nice when i could reveal why some things happened. Another of those is when i' ve been telling the players that they could not buy the best equipment because all those crafters capable of making them were "busy with other projects", and then it turned out one of the villains hired them to keep the party from getting special items. The party eventually allied with this villain against a greater evil, and they got to use the super golem he had commissioned

[Odessa333]

Minor spoilers for curse of Strahd.


I think it's the simple things, when you make a reveal and hear the reactions, the shocked gasps, the comical laughs, etc. When you can get those reactions, that's priceless.

For me, one of my prouder moments is when I ran curse of strahd on roll20. I ended up with six players, 4 seasoned adventurers and two newer players. One of the newer players liked to draw, and as we were setting up the campaign, she shared a lot of her art, from concept art of her character to pictures of these winged cats she liked; she was wondering if she could get one as her ranger companion, I think, but ended up going hunter instead. Well, I had saved all of her artwork, and surprised her by scattering it into the campaign. Like Baba had her scarecrows, but also had several of the winged cats serving as her spies, and eating ravens around her swamp. Her reaction was priceless, every time.

[Lvl45DM!]

Just had another one last week. Low-levelled group and I spent months building up their contacts in the small town they started in, each of them had allies and mentors and people they wanted to protect.

So when they got back from their adventure and the town was on fire...wow I've never seen them so invested. They rapidly came up with a plan for evacuation, the monk and barbarian went door to door saving people, and they were so emotionally involved. Not a single joke was made, and noone was on their phones.

It felt goooooooooood

[Leon]

Meeting someone you taught to play the game out in the wild by chance and having them gush about how that kick-started their interest in both playing and then GMing.

[Wraith]

Mine was in a game of Dark Heresy. Set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, the players were Acolytes of an Inquisitor - a man literally above the law, charged with seeking out sedition and heresy and burning it at the root.

They spent weeks chasing a cabal of clandestine terrorists across a planet, scrapping in slums and doing daring high-speed chases in hovercars through the spires of a fortress-city until they eventually hunted down the leader of their enemies, catching him sitting at his desk in a secret bunker, orchestrating his grand plans.... Who then very quietly opened a small box and presented them with his own Inquisitorial rosette of authority.

It's a simple and oft-repeated story, I know; the BBEG turns out to be a different type of Good Guy who had his own reasons for secrecy, and the players mistook professional mystique for sinister intentions. At the time however, I utterly blind-sided them and they were all left looking at each other, mouths agape, waiting to see who would dare react first and decide what to do now that they were caught between two all-powerful authorities.

To their credit, the players impressed me even further as their first act was NOT to murderhobo the guy and be done with it. They excused themselves and spent a good amount of time deliberating on what they should do, in character - the new Inquisitor had made them a decent offer and what he was asking really wasn't a "bad" thing, it just required them to choose between their original Puritan/conservative contact and the new Radical/extremist one.
They all agreed that what either side was doing was righteous, and seeing them take it so very seriously really struck home - I had them invested, and they were enjoying it. A small thing, but that can be a lot to ask from a group who is usually 30% beer, 30% pop culture references and 30% irreverence. :smalltongue:

[sktarq]

So my players in Vampire knew I had both a vague plot set out in front of them and a large sandbox aspect where they could basically go out and do whatever their unbeating hearts led them too...and when things went really into territory I obviously had not planned for they called it "Taking (sktarq) offroad" ... one of my main techniques to get my own brain working would be to ask questions to myself (how faithful is the leadership?) And toss a d10 - ask a few questions and this would give me a bit of a skeleton to build off. This is one of those nights...

For various characters personal reasons they decided to mess with a particular religious institution building/facility...that I basically had to make up the grounds for on the fly...
A couple hours of this (basically messing around, searching the lost and found, reading personel files, redecorating etc) one of them piped up...

Player 1" Wait did you create that religious hypocrisy in their architecture on purpose? "
Me: "you noticed!"
Player 2 "What I was focused on was the subordination of (the minority religious group) we are actually supposed to be dealing with in the personnel records but (Character 3) keeps making a big fuss"
Player 3 "You realize I could dress my family, and especially my characters mother, day-to-day in this lost and found stuff? And the Organ music is the kind she was always on about? And (Character 3) HATES her mother!
*two more players with similar blubs*
Player 6 " I just figured (sktarq) co-opted a planned thing somewhere else since this place obviously includes the numerology and themes from the Oracle we talked to about a month ago-that was the plan right"
me "honestly i was planning that confluence because of the luck roll for "occult connection to the story" came up a 1 (botch/critical failure) so that is a red herring that honestly I don't want to deal with if I can avoid it."
Player 1: So you pulled all of this character development, plot links, and backhanded humour (off the top of your head)?" *actually said something with "out of" and not repeatable here*
Me: "Yeah"
player 6:"Sunshine" (which being vampires that word was a curse word within the player group)




So that and when a person (actually player 3 above) I had taught to play ran a really good game as GM and allowed me to be a player for the first time in a good long while.

[King of Nowhere]

Mine was in a game of Dark Heresy. Set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, the players were Acolytes of an Inquisitor - a man literally above the law, charged with seeking out sedition and heresy and burning it at the root.

They spent weeks chasing a cabal of clandestine terrorists across a planet, scrapping in slums and doing daring high-speed chases in hovercars through the spires of a fortress-city until they eventually hunted down the leader of their enemies, catching him sitting at his desk in a secret bunker, orchestrating his grand plans.... Who then very quietly opened a small box and presented them with his own Inquisitorial rosette of authority.

It's a simple and oft-repeated story, I know; the BBEG turns out to be a different type of Good Guy who had his own reasons for secrecy, and the players mistook professional mystique for sinister intentions. At the time however, I utterly blind-sided them and they were all left looking at each other, mouths agape, waiting to see who would dare react first and decide what to do now that they were caught between two all-powerful authorities.

To their credit, the players impressed me even further as their first act was NOT to murderhobo the guy and be done with it. They excused themselves and spent a good amount of time deliberating on what they should do, in character - the new Inquisitor had made them a decent offer and what he was asking really wasn't a "bad" thing, it just required them to choose between their original Puritan/conservative contact and the new Radical/extremist one.
They all agreed that what either side was doing was righteous, and seeing them take it so very seriously really struck home - I had them invested, and they were enjoying it. A small thing, but that can be a lot to ask from a group who is usually 30% beer, 30% pop culture references and 30% irreverence. :smalltongue:

oh, right, getting players involved to the point that they will take lenghty discussions on the moral consequences of their choices is also a great thing to see as a dm. I had a similar situation when i had an npc who has served as a minor villain offer an alliance to the players against the major villain in exchange for impunity for his previous crimes. took them a while, and they had to vote on it.

by the way, didn't your player question that the inquisitorial rosette may have been forged?

[Jay R]

One of the difficult tasks for a DM is to make critical hits, or critical fumbles, memorable. I don't know how cool you'll think it is, but the players loved it.

The game was Flashing Blades, a musketeer game. The rogue in the party had decided to learn the Etiquette skill, which takes three months. He'd spent two weeks on it. To make a successful role, you have to roll your Charm or less on a d20. And he had a low Charm of 8.

The party went to a high-status hunting party, and at one point, the rogue decided that he was going to go talk to the duke's daughter, who was surrounded by noble suitors. They tried to tell him that he cannot go introduce himself to her; he needs a proper introduction. But he decided that since he was learning Etiquette, he could do it anyway.

So he barged through a collection of high-level nobles and introduced himself to her, and said, "I want to make an Etiquette roll to impress her."

So, he is attempting to use a cross-class skill he has not in fact learned, in competition with several masters of the skill, having already misbehaved, in a high-stress environment, and would have had to roll an 8 or less (if he had the skill at all).

He rolled a 20. Critical fumble.

I said, "You compliment her beauty, look soulfully into her eyes, take her hand gently, bend over it, raise it to your lips ... and f*rt."

[Son of A Lich!]

Had players fighting a monolithic golem that drew undead to it in 3.5.

It had a brazier of blue flames and would suck up random people and zombies scurrying away into it's chest with an Iron Maiden in it and drop out improved zombies with armor plating.

It was supposed to be a futile task to try to kill it. I drew up a town square for the party to fight it, with a water fountain in the center to give my ranger a means to kite zombies around and avoid being killed and I was going to see if the party could find a way to hide from it.

As soon as initiative was rolled, The Bard told the Grapple-Barb to try and suplex the massive, Huge-sized Beacon into the fountain - which is frankly such a logical solution to putting out the flames that I would have felt all bad-wrong cheaty-face for not letting it work IF the Barb could pin it in a grapple.

Oh, OH GODS No he couldn't.

He flubbed his roll and the Monster sucked him into the chest. This was where I had to do some quick thinking about how to handle this scenario. I ruled that he was going to take half the damage on behalf of the monster (Since it was rumbling around and he was in an Iron Maiden) and that he had to make a Fortitude save each round while it didn't wait for him to be dead to start grafting onto him.

On his turn, he asked what was inside the Iron Maiden and I described a glowing blue crystal that seemed to be the beating heart of the monster, and I let him choose to auto fail the fortitude save to attack it WITH HIS FISTS!

This was by far the straightest poker face I have ever pulled in my history of DMing since Highschool, acting like I had this all planned out from the get go. The sorcerer used a Sonic Fireball as a way to "Trip" The golem into the fountain and the barb ripped it's heart out, and came out with all sorts of fancy new grafting.

Oh, man, in my head I was sweating because I realized my Bard had never played D&D before and was under the impression that if I put it in front of him, there was a way to kill it if they were creative enough (Since the closest he had ever come to Table Top games was Video Games where this is the norm), despite telling them that it was intended to be a Hard Horror campaign but the player himself was charismatic enough to convince them to do nigh suicidal things.

That was a good campaign...

[Bulhakov]

For me it's when my friends reminisce over games we played 10-20 years ago. For example, how I got my players to recreate the 1992 Punisher Warzone comic... with vampires. None of them read the comic before, but afterwards they were amazed how well they recreated key scenes without ever feeling railroaded (basically they infiltrated the mob as foot-soldiers and went on eliminating bosses and drug-labs, while successfully framing other mob families for each hit).

[Wraith]

by the way, didn't your player question that the inquisitorial rosette may have been forged?

They did! He simply handed over his rosette and told them to scan it (they had a dataslate/tri-corder like thingy that connected to their boss' archives) if they wanted to see for themselves.

As it happens, it was genuine - the archive reported back his full name, ID number and confirmed his active authority. They immediately cringed and apologised for being so rude. :smallbiggrin:

They absolutely COULD have fought and killed him right there, no one IC knew they were there and they would have gotten away with it, but they had all completely bought into the setting and the look of "oh.... ****" on their faces was another proud moment. :smalltongue:


For me it's when my friends reminisce over games we played 10-20 years ago. For example, how I got my players to recreate the 1992 Punisher Warzone comic... with vampires. None of them read the comic before, but afterwards they were amazed how well they recreated key scenes without ever feeling railroaded (basically they infiltrated the mob as foot-soldiers and went on eliminating bosses and drug-labs, while successfully framing other mob families for each hit).

Speaking on behalf of one of my GM friends, we did something similar but for the movie "Unforgiven". He told us to make "cowboys" and then handed out a bunch of Flaws to turn us into grumpy old men - one guy had a missing leg, another was hard of hearing and had to wear spectacles, that sort of thing.

All of our characters were crippled mechanically, but honestly that just added to the fun - we all immediately fell into role-playing our guys and no one felt left out, because we ALL had "bad" characters. :smalltongue:
Unlike your players, we recognised the plot about 1/3rd of the way through but even so the GM complimented us for playing it straight and voluntarily hitting the key points, rather than trying to sabotage a plot that we all knew and understood. I highly recommend stealing a plot from a film or book, hobbling their characters to make them fit the setting, and then seeing how far you can go before your players recognise what's happening. Bonus points if they decide to go with it, without immediately deciding to try and assassinate Darth Vader :smallbiggrin:

[Onos]

Proud of the players, it was a fairly generic beer-themed one-shot for a bunch of new players. But my oh my it did not go how I expected.

The setup: a cult of Asmodeus has taken over the magical Swiftstag brewery/monastery, creating a mind-control beer. They have isolated the region around the brewery to perfect the beer, planning on moving onto the rest of the kingdom etc etc.
The king hired the players to investigate missing persons and taxes.

Probability was not on my side though.

The twist: the tielfing warlock (fiend) manages to bluff the guardian demon to enter the catacombs...okay. The party captures one cultist, and the bard decides to spruce up the warlock to look more demonic...okaaaay. Warlock mistaken for an avatar of Asmodeus, interrogate cultist for information much sooner than I'd anticipated, use cultist to gain entry to brewery....uh oh. Party convince cult (dam near all of them) to cut their own throats (rewards in the afterlife etc, this was not easy), leaving just the head cultist and some bodyguards....panic! After taking out the leader, the party decides that, since the bridges to the region are still out and the plan is almost finished, they'll take over the cult!

I didn't get to make a single attack all session. A true, crazy player scheme, from a bunch of newbies. Never been prouder of my table.

[Jay R]

A few years ago, I ran a Champions game, set in the Silver Age of comics. The campaign introduction had the following paragraphs:

The world has always had heroes. Gilgamesh, Achilles, Robin Hood, Scaramouche, Zorro, Phantom Eagle, Tomahawk, the Blackhawks, the Lone Ranger, the Rawhide Kid, Two-Gun Kid, Cheyenne Bodie and Kwai-Chang Caine are all historical figures, well-documented in any history book.

Most of the heroes are not known to have any actual powers. In fact, most of them don’t have any powers, but it is also true that they are not really public figures. They’ve learned that it’s important that the crooks not know too much about them. Many simple people in masks are assumed to have powers even if they don’t. When designing your characters, remember that a power describes an effect, not a cause. A skills-based stealth hero could have Invisibility (only can be turned on when nobody’s watching). That doesn’t mean he has super-powers, but that his stealth and movement are so good that it’s easier to simulate that way. Similarly, heroes might be believed to have powers that they don’t really have. There are rumors of a half-man, half-flying-predator creature seen flying around the streets of Gotham at night. Don’t assume that that means the creature can fly, or even that it really exists.

Heroes are vigilantes, at least at first. This does not carry any inherent illegality – it’s perfectly legal for somebody to try to prevent a crime in progress. You will all be based in the same town, one in which there are no other current heroes. There is a certain amount of public fascination with the heroes, especially now that there are so many fewer than there used to be.

1938-1950 is called the “Golden Age of Heroes”. It seems like every city had a masked protector, and some had several. It was a grand and glorious time, in which many gangs, mobs, spy rings and crime bosses were put out in jail. Unsurprisingly, business got much better, and the United States has pulled far ahead of other countries in wealth and prestige. By the late 1940s, crime was at an all-time low, and the mystery men slowly slipped into obscurity and retirement. No point patrolling all night if you can’t find any crimes. For the last ten years, there have been very few heroes, and very little need. But there’s a new breed of young adult with less respect for the establishment, older criminals are slowly getting out of jail, and the super-deterrent is no longer there. The crime rate is slowly creeping back up, and rumors of Communist spy rings are flourishing.

The super-powerful ones don’t exist (yet). You may assume the existence of any well-known Golden Age comic hero (except the ultra-powerful -- Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Flash, Captain Marvel, Spectre, etc.) if you have a specific need for him or her. (Your character was saved as a child by the Red Bee, which is why he wants to be a hero, for instance.)


I invented a supermarket tabloid named after a crucial Silver age comic,

Rumors about heroes are extremely common. In fact, there’s a supermarket tabloid that specializes in them. “The Brave and the Bold” is a source for any rumor about any hero you could ever want to read about, from Forbush-Man to the Crumple-Horned Snorkack. They are responsible for the rumor that Captain America didn’t really die at the end of World War II. They are currently writing an “expose” about a putative hero team called Sugar and Spike, (who nobody else thinks exists), and are trying to convince everyone that these are merely new costumes and identities for the Golden-Age Fox and the Crow. Nobody takes them seriously, but everybody seems to know what they’re saying, and they outsell the National Enquirer by millions of issues each week.

Between games, I always gave them a few stories from The Brave and The Bold.

An unknown clown was found beaten to death on the streets of Gotham city. There was no evidence linking the crime to anybody, and the only unusual aspects of the case are that the coroner was unable to take off his white clown makeup and green hair dye, and that his face was frozen in a hideous grin, like the victims in a couple of earlier crimes also in Gotham. The police suspect that his murderer must also be guilty of the other crimes, but no other clues are available. (Of course, Gotham is believed to be a corruption-riddled city worse than anything seen since Chicago in the 1930s, so who knows?)

Meteorologists are unable to explain certain weather conditions in Central City. Blasts of extreme cold, and mini-whirlwinds are being experienced.

There is also evidently a new costumed villain in New York City. The papers there are all talking about the illegal exploits of this “Spider-Man” character, but it’s not entirely clear what crimes he’s done.

A small town in upstate New York reports that a couple of local crimes have been solved by an “Ant-Man”. A couple of weird weather conditions have been seen in and around Central City (bizarre lightning strikes on a clear day, large amounts of ice in the streets, and whirlwinds that cannot be explained meteorologically).

A small pudgy man in a tuxedo was found cruelly murdered in Gotham City. The name on the handle of his umbrella identifies him as Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot.

People near an air force base in New Mexico claim to have seen a green monster occasionally. The base claims that these are hysterical reports, and says that no such monster could exist. But “The Brave and the Bold” tabloid seems to believe that a really strong hulking brute really exists.

A man wearing a weird suit with question marks all over it has been found with his head caved in at the scene of a Gotham city bank robbery. He has been identified as Edward Nigma, a puzzle editor on a local paper. Nothing in his background explains his presence at the crime scene or his death. He appears to have been beaten severely. “The Brave and the Bold” claims he has been leading a double life as the little-notice crime fighter “The Question”. (They’ve been running a series exploring the hidden identity of “The Question” for some time, illustrating him as a man with no face.)

In Star City, a modern Robin Hood has appeared, using green arrows with unusual gimmicks.

Each time, there was reference to a brutal murder, or to a half-man/ half -flying-predator vigilante, in Gotham. And there was often an unexplained phenomenon in Metropolis, Central City, Washington, or Coast City. It was primarily just to provide color, but I was also slowly giving them clues that the Crime Syndicate (evil versions of the Justice League) were a major villain group.

In the second session, they heard a report of a spaceship landing out of town, and monsters coming out. When the heroes got there, their flaming hero (Flamebird) flew overhead, and saw a rough, vaguely manlike creature with orange skin, who uprooted a tree and threw it at her. So they attacked. The aliens soon had their own flaming person. The hero with the dog saw a bunch of thin, plastic loops wrapped around something, but there was nothing inside. And he smelled two humans. Soon a long, thin plastic extension attacked Flamebird with a fire extinguisher. And there was a hand at the end of the extension.

The combat lasted for more than an hour before they discovered that they had blundered into the origin of the Fantastic Four.