"Game Master! Why have you forsaken us?!"

[Deepbluediver]

Let me know impart to you the tale of...THE DEADLIEST GAME!!!1!


But because every super-hero tale needs an origin story, first a little background:

Were I went to school, there was a fairly substantial geek/nerd population, with various groups for anime, card games, D&D, videgames, etc. There where about 12-15 people who played D&D, but our schedules where so random and different that most of what we ran where short things that could be done in a single evening or at most a weekend, and so they tended to be heavy on the action and light on plot and character development. There where multiple "adventures" that could be accurately summed up as "We fight monsters in a cave. The End."

This is just so you know the sort of game most of us where used to playing.


Anywho, our story begins when a certain individual failed the ultimate fortitude save and passed beyond to the great gaming table in the sky. A handful of us decided to get together and run something in his honor.
The reason this story is appropriate is because of WHICH module the DM picked for us to run. It was a certain (in)famous dungeon crawl that has a reputation for being the "thinking man's game" of adventures, which was in direct contrast to our "kick in the door, then burn everything" style of play. A few of us had heard about the adventure in question, but none of us had run it, in any incarnation.


Five or six of us got together late at night with a bottle of potato juice to give the ol' dice a workout, and the DM, being not COMPLETELY oblivious, told us to each bring multiple character sheets of 10th-11th level. Everyone just kind of grabbed what they had lying around either unused or from other campaigns. The background fluff was that a rich patron was funding an expedition to the dungeon, and most of the party would camp outside for support and backup while a select group worked their way deeper in. Any deaths would be replaced with "reinforcements" from the surface. (fyi, this was about twice as much effort as normally went in to actually explaining things for our games)


We managed to blast our way into the dungeon in fine style, and everything pretty much nose-dived from there. My first character, a paladin (thats "paladin" with a lowercase "P", I was actually a Fighter/Holy Liberator) died within 10 ft. of the entrance. I smashed the wrong painting and woke up a four-armed gargoyle that chewed my face off in a round and a half.
The distraction of my tank-character getting pulped was the only thing that saved us from losing another PC to an ugly statue and an orb-O-death. Having managed to get past the threshold in slightly less than one piece, we blundered on.
From here, I'll merely relate a few of the more dire bits.

One of our heavy-hitters had sunk the majority of his wealth into a greatsword with several different enchantments. I forget the exact details, but in addition to it's normal damage it dealt something like 2d6 Fire, 1d8 each of Cold and Electric, and 1d6 Acid. On every hit. He rolled an entire handful of dice and used a small chart to keep track of everything. His plan was that no matter what we faced, he'd never be entirely useless. Facing off against on particularly nasty beast, he rolled, scored a crit, counted off everything and reported it to the DM, who responds "One."
"One?"
"Yes, one. That's how much damage you just dealt."
"Well...****."

Another character in heavy armor took repeated tumbles down a series of pit traps. We managed to hoist him up and patch him back together, only to have him fail a will save a minute later and run screaming back down the hall in a panic. We didn't bother trying to recover his corpse.

Because we wheren't paying much attention to what skill-sets we had in the dungeon, and tried to just soak-damage our way through everything, at one point we ended up with no skill monkeys, and the entire group rapidly got trapped in a solid-stone chamber with no way out. We had to be retrieved by a "backup party" sent from the surface.

We TPK'd at one point and the next attempt only succeeded because the monsters where half-dead and we managed to surprise them as they where disposing of the bodies of our formerly-alive brethren.

We had fewer than half our original character sheets left when the DM'd informed us we where only a third of the way through the dungeon.

Eventually we started running out of warm bodies to throw around and people resorted to controlling several NPCs and a horse we had brought along to carry supplies.

Sometime around dawn (real-world dawn) we DID manage to defeat the dreaded and feared demi-lich, and celebrated our pyrrhic victory. Then the DM asked what our characters did next. NOT ONE of them made it back out of the dungeon. Not alive anyway.


I like to think our ghosts hang around our fancy new tomb to either warn any subsequent groups who venture in, or try and hinder them into failure so we don't go down in history as the worst adventuring party of all time.


Edit: To make it more clear, the DM picked a dungeon that was virtually guaranteed to turn a night of fun and whimsy into a grueling slog.