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  1. - Top - End - #1
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    Goblin

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    Default Tell Your Wish Stories

    While we don't need to get into why wishes get twisted, we can all enjoy stories of a wish gone wrong.
    The trillion gold that dropped on your head. The Evil magic item that took you over.
    What are your worst/best wish stories?
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    Bugbear in the Playground
     
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    Default Re: Tell Your Wish Stories

    A fellow player once wished (and the wording was almost iron-clad, since he was a law student) for a million gold pieces. Unfortunately, when I say almost, I do mean almost. He forgot to specify that the gold be created. So what the wish did was take the gold from the treasury of the kingdom directly rivaling the one we were working for at the time. But when I say kingdom, I really mean empire - it covered half the continent, and the one we were working for was similar in size. The empire the money vanished from used magic to track where it had gone. And only noted that it had gone to agents of the enemy that they had wanted to destroy for years.

    Two months later, there had been truly catastrophic levels of war, death and bloodshed, several magical equivalents of nuclear weapons detonated, all-out destruction, and we were pariahs.
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    Orc in the Playground
     
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    Default Re: Tell Your Wish Stories

    Was not in the game. So the party was captured and had all their nice magic items taken away. The thief swallowed his ring of 3 wishes and after they were all thrown in to the dungeon the thief brought the ring back up and promply said "i wish for all our s**t back". They all died in tons of fecal matter.

    In a Rifts game the GM who was known for is funny but very monty hall games had us go into a bar where a bottle of the best wiskey was like 100 credits but a gin and tonic was 5k. So when one character ordered the gin and tonic it turned out to be a dejin and tonic. The dejin gave him a wish. He wished to have a rune sword. Since the wishes are not powerfull enough to make a rune sword it took one, right out of Athena's (yes the god Athena) hands. Needless to say she was less then impressed about it since she was in the middle of a duel with it. We ended up with an angery god that took her sword back, destroyed the bar, and punished the player.

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    Default Re: Tell Your Wish Stories

    Towards the end of a hard fight, which was not going quite to the parties advantage someone said "I wish that we were all back home and in one piece".
    Luckily someone else had a wish to sort that one out.

    Another campaign, in the desert, similiar situation, ..., someone said "I wish that we were all in Arn". Now Arn was a character from a previous campaign (same group) so this was an obvious mis-speak/non-sequitor. The whole group went silent. I just teleported them 3000 miles north to a small village in the great northern forest, it was the first time they had seen snow and they were dressed for the desert.

    Another time, I'd given out a Luck blade in some treasure, only they didn't bother identifying it. Instead they just handed it out. Sometime later the player whose character is carrying it says "I wish we'd brought some deck chairs". Priceless.
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    Sith_Happens's Avatar

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    Default Re: Tell Your Wish Stories

    Quote Originally Posted by nedz View Post
    Another campaign, in the desert, similiar situation, ..., someone said "I wish that we were all in Arn". Now Arn was a character from a previous campaign (same group) so this was an obvious mis-speak/non-sequitor. The whole group went silent. I just teleported them 3000 miles north to a small village in the great northern forest, it was the first time they had seen snow and they were dressed for the desert.
    You know, if this was D&D 3.5 then teleportation is on the "safe list" of wishes. Which means that if he wished for them to be in Arn, then they should in fact have subsequently been in Arn.

    Another time, I'd given out a Luck blade in some treasure, only they didn't bother identifying it. Instead they just handed it out. Sometime later the player whose character is carrying it says "I wish we'd brought some deck chairs". Priceless.
    Now THAT is hilarious.
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    Bugbear in the Playground
     
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    Default Re: Tell Your Wish Stories

    Quote Originally Posted by nedz View Post
    Another time, I'd given out a Luck blade in some treasure, only they didn't bother identifying it. Instead they just handed it out. Sometime later the player whose character is carrying it says "I wish we'd brought some deck chairs". Priceless.
    Luck blades are definitely among the funniest possible treasures to give out if the group doesn't have a convenient/reliable means of identification. I've never seen it go this well, though.


    I had a group of adventurers, quite low level, who ended up with a scroll of Wish somehow. I expected them to save it for sometime they actually needed the thing, so naturally, instead of giving it to someone with a WIS score, the party Wizard decides he's going to use it to stop/delay the impending war* and give the kingdom they're employed by a fighting chance: "I wish all the <invading kingdom> soldiers were back at <capital city>." Now, transport of one creature per caster level is a "safe" effect, but ten thousand troops is going to come with a price, and he did say "all"... The invading kingdom spent the next several weeks fighting the horde of undead ex-soldiers, so at least it worked...


    *They were employed, as their first real quest, as messengers to a neighboring kingdom. When they crossed the border, they discovered an army on the other side, nearly ready for a full-scale invasion.
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  7. - Top - End - #7
    Orc in the Playground
     
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    Default Re: Tell Your Wish Stories

    well, last session I had a wish gone awry gone right.

    We playing a homebrewed version of 3.5 set in planescape

    My character, a homebrewed wild mage, got his hands on a wand of wonder, basically a wand of wishes, but the wishes automatically wild surge, except it is a true unlimited wish, i.e. it wont mess up and try to screw you over.

    We come to a town on Ygdrasil where a possessed druid is wrecking havoc and have trapped 2 from the party inside a burning building (which is also her stable for her animal companions, plural)

    So I do a few spells with the wand of wonder, simply trying to duplicate spells, to little effect, but then I decide to banish whatever is possessing the druid and hit the wild surge effect (1%) chance that the spell functions normally, so the demon thingy is expelled and she undoes the magic trapping our friends and we put the fire out, but the druid is wailing, all her animal companions are dead at her hands.

    I walk over to her and tell her not to worry, I use the wand, wishing all the creatures of come back to life. Now, I don't hit the 1% chance of it working normally, I turn to the druid "It just worked" I say, meaning earlier, but then I had hit the other wild surge result (without knowing it) that the next sentence I said would become true, so all her creatures suddenly came back to life.

    So yeah, one of the other players have talked about his character is going to start refering to me as "the one who walks amongst us" for doing magic that is beyond almost all mortals; Resurrecting multiple creatures at once
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    Firbolg in the Playground
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    Default Re: Tell Your Wish Stories

    This isn't quite a Wish, but its close. I was playing a sorceror in 7th Sea using an ancient lost sorcery (homebrewed) of Illusion magic. This particular sorcery had the odd property that as long as the illusion held, it was fully corporeal (and it was basically broken if the number of observers exceeded a skill rank). So you could use it to do things like build a bridge across a chasm as long as you were alone. Sort of neat. It also worked off of art - sort of the, I have a scroll with a painting of a tiger and it becomes a tiger. My character's version was via song and music.

    We were in the ruins beneath the capital of Montaigne and we found some kind of Syrneth ruin suspended from the ceiling of a huge cavern. The ruin involved these corridors that seemed to go at weird angles (turns out there was a whole anti-grav thing you could turn on). In any event, I fell down one of these corridors. In a panic, I sang out 'A million pounds of feathers beneath my feet!'.

    Game paused. Everyone looked around. Someone asked the question that was on all of our minds: 'Uh, just how much is a million pounds of feathers?'

    A second later, the entire ruin is full to the brim with feathers, and rather than falling to my death I was choking to my death. We ended up getting out of it by exploiting the anti-grav and some Syrneth disintegration weapons, but I think its a good example of a wish going awry just by being granted exactly as asked for.

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    Barbarian in the Playground
     
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    Default Re: Tell Your Wish Stories

    I was once running a very high powered 2nd ed AD&D game, by today's standard, it would be a high-powered epic game.

    There were 3 players, all were the sole-surviving members of an ancient and powerful race (well, other than their king), all could use magic as fluently as they could speak (arcane and divine). Effectively they could use Wizard and Cleric spells as though they were a wizard/cleric of their HD.

    The campaign began with the characters coming out of a thousand year hibernation to find their civilization destroyed, their people dead, and their existence to be nothing but myth and legend. A great war between their kind and the Dragons had preceded them going into hibernation, and through the campaign, they found that the Dragons had lead their "children" (the Elves) to destroy them whilst they slept, only for the Elves to turn on the Dragons afterwards and almost wipe them out as well.

    Anyway, the characters king had survived the carnage, and had gone insane from the knowledge that his people were all but wiped out (he was life-linked to them all). The king became the major, recurring villain for the group, but they were torn when having to go against him. He was trying to destroy all sentient beings by beginning devastating wars and by creating powerful natural disasters.

    In one major confrontation, (it lasted 2 whole game sessions), the three characters fought their king over the spires of the Elven capital. The characters were almost done, the king was almost done, the fight was coming down to the wire. One of the players called down a wish, but linked it with the other characters (we were using homebrewed rules for linking spells to created more powerful ones), he believed that to have any effect on the king, the would need the wish to hit with the power of 3 wish spells.

    His wish.

    "I wish the king was now as he was before he slept".

    He was putting his hope on the fact that the wish would make the king sane again and end the conflict then and there. The king being sane before he went into hibernation.

    It was a good idea, and could have worked.

    Unfortunately, the king had slept the night before.

    He healed all his wounds.
    He regained all his spells.

    The other two characters swore and teleported out.
    The wishing player was like "wait... what?" and then had his character ripped apart.

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    Orc in the Playground
     
    Daemon

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    Default Re: Tell Your Wish Stories

    My first campaign ever We ran into a crazy gnome who took all of our gold and gave us two three wishes. The more expirience yet terrible meta gamer wished for the best magical bow for me... because he easily manipulated my Elven Ranger who was the perfect slayer of our most common and hated enemy Orcs. We got the bow but it was made of ice. So he decided that if I drank the melted bow I would gain its bonuses inherently... then the (in real life) retarded bard wish that the bow was made of wood because she wasn't paying attention. so midway through my drinking of this water it became a longbow and I died from my throat being ripped open... The third wish brought me back to life... Never trust a known greedy beguiler they lead to drowning on solid objects.

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    Default Re: Tell Your Wish Stories

    In one adventure that was meant to be lengthy, we were looking for a mythical flying ship. We had a random encounter with an efreet and as we fought him, he eventually surrendered and granted us a wish. So we wished to be teleported (immediately, whole and hale) to the deck of said ship.

    And that instantly concluded the adventure. Yep. While twisted wishes may be frustrating, non-twisted wishes may get boring. Although I should add that this was not a very good DM.
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    Troll in the Playground
     
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    Default Re: Tell Your Wish Stories

    I had a stone giant with crazy strength and horrible mental scores. I wished that I could make myself significantly stronger in the mental realm for brief periods when I needed it, because I was vulnerable in that area. I ended up getting a split personality, both personalities having totally different stats, (the mental one with much lower strength/con.)
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    Bugbear in the Playground
     
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    Default Re: Tell Your Wish Stories

    In a campaign I ran a couple of years ago, there was a bunch of wishery going on.

    The first instance wasn't really a wish spell, but it was funny anyways. The characters needed information that had been lost for centuries, so the only way to get it was to seek out a place known as the Oracle of Zozer (a desert-deity from Sandstorm). Basically, the giant temple was constantly surrounded in a sandstorm, and as the sandstorm moved, the building moved with it. The oracle allowed any creature to ask a single question, and get a perfectly true answer, once in their lifetime.

    So the characters, after many misadventures, found the Oracle. They decided to go in in individually for some reason. The first couple went in and asked their questions (The questions weren't answered in language, but instead the oracle imparted images, feelings, sounds, and other sensory stimuli that represented the answer directly into their brain, which sometimes required interpretation) with no hiccups.

    The third and fourth characters decided to go in together. After the big light show of the oracle appearing before them (it looked like a fire elemental sitting in a giant throne), one of the characters asked the other, "Do you think that's the oracle?" The oracle flared bright red, and that character was filled with a powerful feeling of affirmation .

    The party had also had a special efreeti bottle with them for most of the campaign. The efreeti within could grant up to three wishes to any one person, but the wisher needed to command him with his full name and title, which was the one thing he was allowed to keep secret in his imprisonment. One of the characters used his question at the oracle to find the efreeti's name, but the characters were exceptionally stingy with their wishes.

    Some of the best ones were: when the character who learned the efreeti's name had a particularly important duel to fight, a different character wished that "[He] would not die in the duel." How did the efreeti interperet this? Well, if he dies now, he can't die in the duel, right? The wish killed the character (he got better; resurrections are geat!).

    After that, in an attempt to make the genie more friendly, that same character used one of his wishes to wish that the genie had the same morality and feelings towards mortals that he did. Since this character was one of the most kind and good-hearted characters in the party, this seemed to remedy the situation. The efreeti started taking on the appearance of a butler-like person of his current "master's" race whenever he was summoned from then on, and seemed like he was being very helpful. What they forgot, however, was that, for a character like Issac (The one who made the wish), forcibly altering a creature's alignment and essentially making them a mind-slave is something that he really, really hates, and had fought against before. Therefore, wishing the efreeti to be like him was essentially the same thing, so the genie's new morality told him that his "master" was an evil person to be fought against as best as possible. He secretly warped all the wishes they made to him during that time in subtle and sinister ways.

    When the party found out after something particularly nasty happened as a result, another character (Chishio) was really angry, and used one of her wishes to wish that the efreeti would "Suffer unbearable pain and misery for the rest of your existance!" Which would have worked really well as a punishment, except for the fact that the genie was one of the lords of the city of brass, and fully expected to go up in rank (and title) soon after his inprisonment in the bottle ended. Since Chishio commanded him as the "Lord of the 5th Spire," the moment he became the "Lord of the 4th Spire," his existence as the lord of the 5th would end, so he would be free of her punishment.
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    Pixie in the Playground
     
    GnomeWizardGuy

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    eek Looking for wishes

    This probably doesn't belong here, but seemed a good place to put it.

    I'm actually looking for the source of a wish-story; a long time ago a gamer once read to the group I was in a cautionary tale of a guy whom bought a ring of three wishes that had two charges left and paid full price.

    He spent over a month working on wording his wish so it won't come back to bite him. At the end of the month he thought he had it perfect.

    Basically, he wished to be immortal, his family never to know fear, and to have a keep all his own. in the end he might not have been immortal, but was turned into an ogre with a +4 mace left alone on an asteroid that orbited the sun. As for his family, they all joined a league of assassins. They no longer feel fear, and instead instill it in others.

    Does anyone know where this story came from. I've been wracking my brain trying to remember it, even dropping thirty dollars US on drivethrurpg PDFs for old magic related titles. It'd had been from 2nd edition or earlier.

    Any suggestions would be appreciated.

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    Titan in the Playground
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    Default Re: Tell Your Wish Stories

    Here are three stories.

    The first was told to me by the DM. The party had an arrow of giant slaying. In AD&D 1e, such an arrow automatically kills.

    Many players word their wishes carefully. Others … don’t. After killing a giant with a single shot, he said, “Man, I wish I had a buttload of these arrows.”

    So, where would your DM have delivered them?

    -----

    A follower of Diana (the Greek goddess of the moon) had gotten a bad curse. So she prayed for divine intervention.

    The player (David) and I had both studied Greek and classical Greek mythology. Between sessions, he wrote a prayer to Diana, in proper dactylic hexameter (the same meter as the Iliad and the Odyssey). The first two lines were actually in classical Greek. He used proper scansion, good epithets, proper allusions. I decided that it was worth +8, on a 2d6 reaction roll. [The game was original D&D]

    David then rolled 2 6’s. So he had rolled a 20 on a 2d6. I knew Diana was going to help the PC, I was just trying to decide how. Just to see if it might help me, I rolled up a treasure for what was available to Diana, and it gave me my answer.

    I said, “A sword appears at your feet.” David was confused, and asked if anything else happened.
    “No.”
    “I wasn’t asking for a sword; I just wish this curse would go away.”
    “The sword glows, and the curse is gone.”
    “What?”
    “That’s what happened.”
    “Well, I wish I knew how that happened.”
    “The sword glows again, and speaks. It tells you that it was a sword with two wishes on it. You used the first wish to end the curse, and the second to understand what happens. It is now an ordinary +2 magic sword.”

    -----

    In a 3.5e game I just started, I did something weird – at the end of the first session, the party of first-levels each got a wish. I put some restrictions on the wishes. [The entity could only affect the immediate area; you couldn’t wish for something for your village.] I also made clear that these were not twisted wishes. They were freeing a god from another universe, and he was properly grateful.

    None of these long-term D&D players had ever played 3.5e before. [I also had some limits I didn’t tell them. One of these was that a spell-like ability was in fact doable.]

    The rogue wanted to be able to heal faster. He has a SLA of lesser vigor 1/day.
    The ranger wanted to fly. He has fly as an SLA 1/day.
    The bard wanted to be able to use her lute to heal. It can cast cure light wounds 3/day.
    The enchanter wanted more spells in her spell book. I gave her an assortment, up to fifth level, most of which she cannot cast yet.
    The druid wanted to be able to communicate with anybody. She has a SLA of tongues 1/day.

    [The druid has a young cheetah as a animal companion, and the enchanter has a raven familiar. After the wishes were granted, the cheetah was seen contentedly eating an antelope carcass, and the raven was wearing a shiny bauble on a chain around its neck.]

    We have not yet had the second session, so we’ll soon see how well these work. The purpose was to mark this party as people greater than most.

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    Ogre in the Playground
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    Default Re: Tell Your Wish Stories

    I've held a mini-game as prelude to larger adventures: players take on the roles of a cabal of wizards who have to use a nearly all-powerful Wish spell both to their benefit and to prevent it from causing horrible destruction in the wrong hands.

    After wishing for more wishes (one per each), they almost wished for no wish to do wrong. One player stopped the group from doing this by pointing out that they had not specified a standard for "wrong" and thus had no idea how such a wish would be interpreted. This lead them to clarifying that no wish should go against their values and should not do harm to them.

    Skip forward two thousand years to their next set of characters acquiring a Wish spell. They then wished for an interesting adventure. The rest of the game was formed around reconciling the interpretation of how the Wish ought to be interpreted with a one-way trip to Carcosa.

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    Archmage in the Playground Moderator
     
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    Default Re: Tell Your Wish Stories

    Metamagic Mod: to quote a person wiser than myself, "Wishing for necromancy is still unappreciated."
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