Adventures, Anecdotes, and Shenanigans

    Rats in the Lantis Valley

    Today, we learned that doors are the real BBEG.

    The dungeon crawl had only just begun.

    My players at the time, a cleric, an artificer, and a wizard, had taken on their first real quest of the campaign, venturing out from the city of Karsthag into the wilds of the Lantis Valley in search of miners who had gone missing from the local silver mine. They tracked the trail of the miners to an old ruin at the southern end of the valley by following the moss-licking dwarven artificer who rolled well enough on his nature check to be able to tell which way the ruins were based on the taste of the moss and which side of the rock it had been growing on.

    The Dwarf would go on to lick many a questionable item throughout the course of the campaign and his constitution checks would come to be legendary. Unless those constitution checks involved drinking contests with the party’s half-elf.

    But I digress.

    Within this old elven ruin, the party decided to investigate odd smells and strange sounds coming from a number of the rooms. And as any good D&D party does, the first door they tried placed them immediately into mortal peril. When the wizard was nearly hit by a rat who had rolled a natural 20.

    Fortunately for Maeka the wizard, the door was still mostly shut when the rat attacked, so I, as the gracious DM who didn’t feel like TPKing the party full of my friends in the first session at level one, decided to have the rat take a chunk out of the door. After the attack, there was only half a door remaining. Luckily, they had a better time with the rest of the rats, and the wizard lived to fight and push his luck another day.

    Goblins and Bagpipes

    This one was the Cleric’s fault.

    I will admit, the initial fault lays with me. For I did not foresee the hijinks that would follow and failed in my duties as Dungeon Master to prevent this chaos before it escalated into an all out meme war.

    Now, I love my players, I do. But my decision to allow eighteenth century English law to be considered a sourcebook was probably not the wisest idea. But, I stuck to my word and allowed Dusk, the party’s cleric, to use her bagpipes as a weapon. As a former Highland dancer, I ruled that the bagpipes do 3d8 thunder damage to all creatures within 300 feet that fail to perceive the need for and make a Dex save to cover their ears before the bagpipes roared.

    Thus, when a pack of goblins rampaged through the village market in Tarnstead, Dusk prepared her greatest feat of tomfoolery yet. With a great bellowing of her bagpipes she felled half a dozen hapless goblins, leaving only a single survivor.

    Who the party then proceeded to capture and interrogate.

    At least they didn’t adopt it. Which, given the dispositions of the party, wasn’t something that would have been completely unexpected.

    But they did proceed to ask it about its people, its boss, and where they could find the rest of the goblins. And this seemed fine, at first. I could bring them to the goblins and we could proceed with the big goblin encounter I’d planned.

    Until the cleric with a silver tongue decided to TALK to the goblins and find out WHY they were so angry and raiding and pillaging the village.

    And that is how the cleric became solely responsible for the newly improvised plot hook of it being a family of ankheg moving into the goblin tribe’s caves and evicting the goblins from their home that led the goblins to raid and pillage the nearby villages for the first time after decades of peace.

    I tried to stop them from adopting a goblin, and they effectively ended up adopting an entire tribe of them.

    I learned that night that sometimes it’s best to just let the players adopt whatever they want and just pray that it doesn’t come back to bite you. Something I would proceed to do several more times over the course of the campaign in the form of mounts, pets, and other beloved tagalongs to accompany them on their journeys.

    I Didn’t Mean to Kill the Wizard!

    Wizards are not supposed to run around acting like they have 20 AC.

    Now, was this entirely a surprise that the wizard would be the first in the party to die? No, not really. Since the very beginning, Maeka was a foolish human wizard who liked to push his luck, and who liked to fight with a polearm instead of just his spells.

    Did I allow him to train proficiency with polearms? Yes, yes I did. Do I regret this decision? …Some days, yes.

    Now, that said, I had been VERY generous with my players up until this point. Dusk had a holy sword that turned her into a DPS machine, Artus had an axe and a set of armour that effectively turned him into Thor, and Maeka…Maeka had a glaive that did both slashing and magical force damage.

    Yes, he had taken a level or two in fighter. No, this did not MAKE him a fighter. He was still working mainly with a D6 hit dice and was NOT sporting heavy enough armour to make acting like the party tank survivable.

    Which is why when I set a small pack of catobleps on the party, I expected it to be an easy encounter. After all, they’d taken down a turtle dragon only a few sessions previously. They could handle a few CR 5s at level 5, right?

    …Well, I was half right.

    I set the creatures on the party, and they were up in an instant, readying weapons, if not armour, and preparing for battle. …Then Dusk put Sanctuary up and managed to protect herself from the incoming attacks. Unfortunately, since they were magical attacks at range, they were redirected. To the wizard.

    Maeka took four Death Ray attacks that day, and his death would go on to cause the party to embark on an eight month long quest, both in and out of game, to revive their fallen comrade.

    Crits VS. Trolls

    And this one was the Artificer’s.

    Let me preface this by saying that I didn’t PLAN to play out the session by throwing three trolls at my level 3 players. It just…happened.

    I had been skimming D&D forums online when I came across a rather interesting homebrew rule that I thought sounded like a neat way to spice up the campaign a little.

    The rule bring that, if one of the players rolls a critical success in combat, the DM can then give them a choice. Do the normal double damage OR do normal damage an impose a status effect. I, being the new, naive DM that I was, implemented this rule with the condition that I would choose a status effect that fit the nature of the weapon they used to roll the natural 20.

    …I didn’t account for what this now meant for the dwarven artificer.

    Now, you may be thinking “but fighters are the ones who have a higher chance to crit than anyone else because they can crit on a 19 as well!” And you would be right, they DO have a higher chance to crit.

    But that fact did not matter at ALL to this dwarf.

    They were freshly level 3, having just beaten a nest of Ankheg and solved the tensions between the mainly halfling population of the village of Tarnstead and their goblin neighbours in the forest caverns. And because of how powerful they’d grown through homebrewed training rules and their DM being a little too generous with magic items right off the bat, I decided that they needed more of a challenge. And I thought to myself, what better challenge than to have them fight a troll?

    Artus the artificer proceeded to roll a natural 20 on his first magic stone attack, chose to impose a status effect which stunned the troll for a round, while Dusk and Maeka proceeded to DPS its health down rapidly with a couple of very lucky crits.

    So, since the first troll was clearly far too easy a challenge, I decided to give the troll a mate and threw a second troll at the party. And Artus proceeded to stun-lock that troll as well.

    It wasn’t until I threw their offspring, a third troll, at the party that I finally managed to get a few good hits in. But no one went down, and the party inevitably got the bragging rights they were entitled to after downing three trolls in a row at level three.

    But at least I made them feel guilty for murdering a whole troll family.

    What I learned from this encounter is that my players WILL fight whatever is in front of them, no matter how terrifying it looks. Why? Because the artificer likes money, and the rest of the party figured out that if they kill enough monsters, they’ll inevitably be able to find a market where they can sell the monster parts to fund the artificer’s businesses.

    Those businesses are how the party ended up with their own castle.

    Get That Cat Off My Ceiling!

    I underestimated monks for the first and I would like to say last time. But it would not be the last time.

    With the death of Maeka the wizard, I of course allowed my player to roll up a new character to meet the party and accompany them on their adventure in search of a way to revive their fallen comrade.

    As a relatively new DM at the time, I was wholly unprepared for the sheer chaos that adding a monk to the group would cause.

    Onka, as our new feline friend was called, would turn out to be a Way of the Astral Self tabaxi monk. One who would go on to routinely cross entire battlefield maps in a single turn, climb up walls and cliffsides, and lodge herself on the ceiling whenever she felt like it.

    This cat would quickly become the bane of my existence, using her astral arms to grapple and drag my creatures all over battlefields and drop them wherever she pleased, if she dropped them at all. And, with her feline agility, would become capable of crossing my entire gargantuan dragon-god boss map in a single turn.

    This would, of course, not be the last time that mischievous Onka completely bypassed obstacles meant to challenge the party into finding creative ways to cross otherwise unpassable terrain. And, to my dismay, Onka’s grappling abilities often meant that a two foot tall cat could routinely pick up the larger members of the party and drag them across the room via the ceiling if she had a mind to.

    …She often had a mind to.

    The exploits of Onka, the tabaxi Way of the Astral Self monk would go down in such fame an infamy at my table that, as a DM, I was actually relieved when they revived the wizard who routinely gave me headaches with his antics just so that I would never have to deal with that monk ever again.

    Thankfully, with Maeka reincarnated into a half-elf, Onka parted ways with the party, choosing to accompany Ser Kai in his journeys as a paladin of the Lord of Light, bringing light to every corrupted and darkened corner of Danterin and beyond.