Crazy Enough to Work
It’s been a while since we talked about the RPG lie, but the outrageous things we gamers say is nothing compared to the shenanigans we actually pull off. Story time, kids!
My tale of daring do comes courtesy of Exalted 2e. If you’re not familiar, Exalted is a crazy-go-nuts fantasy setting. Everyone’s a super powered demigod, no one has common sense. It’s kind of like that.
Any dang way, this party of Lunars (shape shifters) were trekking through the bowels of the Labyrinth, an endless maze of haunted caves that wind throughout the Underworld. After months of travel the party finally neared their destination—the city of Thorns, citadel of a Death Lord called The Mask of Winters. There are strange flows of necrotic essence underneath that place, and unwary humans who stray too close may become twisted and strange, mutant versions of their former selves. This weird essence has also caused the Labyrinth itself to transform into a living throat. For the party, it was like walking through the insides of an enormous serpent.
The mutant, when they encountered it, still looked something like a man, but much more like an enormous starfish. The points of its arms were sharpened jags of bone, and these were touching the sides of the tunnel when it began to spin in place. It cut the Labyrinth like a saw blade. The party began to float away into the airless void of space, and could only look back at the outside of this writhing snake tunnel. One of the party members had acquired a giant floating jellyfish form. Unable to fly in space, the others could only cling to that, while the clever archer used his essence cannon to generate thrust, steering the party back towards the waiting starfish monster.
Thus was born the legend of ROCKET POWERED JELLYFISH SUPER PUNCH GO! I believe that attack KO’ed the creature.
That’s my story. What about you guys, though? What absurd “just crazy enough to work” plans have you pulled off?
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Exalted, 2e. Infiltrating the equivalent of Hell, the party had managed to commandeer a tax collector’s air ship. Our final assault on the palace, everyone was dangerously low on mana.
GM: “Guys, you have that battery full of all the mana the tax collector was gathering.” The GM was hinting that we could use it to recharge and continue the fight.
The Party:”We could use that as an Essence Bomb! We drop it on the Palace!”
GM: “Goddammit…”
Now see, that’s just a case of bad GMing. I mean, trying to be nice to players? SMH. Poor form.
So as it goes, another infiltration mission, to try and figure out which ships in a port town have refrigeration units so we can piece together who’s been including long pork in their cargo. We get the Special Deluxe Ferry package from a captain, which includes an unguided tour through a shipping warehouse. Among the tour materials are the patrol routes of the guards.
The guards are spaced closely, and we initially have no idea how to breach the premises. However…one guard has been playing Solitaire with tarot cards. A 4th level wizard doesn’t have an awful lot to work with, but Silent Image is a staple. How about making every face up card look like Death? It got quite the reaction, he fumbled for his key, dropped it, and pounded on the door until another guard came out to see what the hell was going on. As they discussed the cards, we switched the Silent Image to instead be an illusion of ‘The Scenery’ while we walked behind and into the (now ajar) doorway. Once we were inside, Mage Hand snuck the fallen key into our own pockets.
The rest of the venture was spent convincing every guard in the facility that Chaos and The Withering had come and their doom was at hand, with my small handful of level 1 and 2 spells, along with liberal use of Prestidigitation to color light bulbs red and soil the walls with wrathful words like “THE WORLDSLAVE COMES” and such. Upside, we got all the evidence we could possibly use, as well as quite a bit of liberated currency and a large sack of spices that the Undine picked up (which was immediately turned over to the aforementioned captain for fencing in return for an amazing crossbow upgrade)
Downside, the Inquisition got involved and now we’re very much on the lam, because the Inquisition doesn’t mess around. I was -kind- of expecting them to show up (it’s the Spanish version that people don’t expect), but I was hoping that the few guards that kept to their posts would have tarried just a tad longer. Ah well. At least the meat shipments should stop.
Wait a minute…did the Inquisition show up to investigate a robbery, or were they there to try and put a stop to the coming of the end times?
Spectacular use of low level spells, though. I always enjoy watching GMs throw a small detail into the mix (i.e. “One guard has been playing Solitaire with tarot cards.”) and watching the party run with that. That’s the kind of moment where the GM really invites players to participate in the “make some cool stuff up” aspect of RPGs, and seems to be where the best stories come from.
It started out the latter, and turned into the former, once the Inquisitoral squad figured out what was going on.
Consequences and repercussions. Good GMing there!
As a side note, I would be remiss if I didn’t relate the story of Krunk the Good, our Lawful Neutral half orc monk of 3.5 days, who sovereign glued the soles of his bare feet to the nape of a blue dragon’s neck and proceeded to beat the goddamn stuffing out of it.
Wait a minute. Let me consult the interwebs for a moment…
http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Sovereign_Glue
Thought so. How the crap did you get the dragon to sit still for a full round while the glue set?
Mostly an 18 vs a 2 on the dice of the opposed grapple check, Krunk’s favor. It didn’t end up working perfectly though, as the dragon pulled off a barrel roll after a couple rounds and ran him across a parapet like a cheese grater. We still won with no casualties, and Krunk got new sandals.
Well, this tale probably really belongs on the charm-anything comments, but we’re here now and nothing else comes to mind.
This was in game 1 of the Star Wars campaign trio I’ve mentioned before.
We’d gone a bit off mission on a certain planet we’d been sent to to presumably track down the sith who killed our masters. Along the way we’d fallen partially to the dark side ourselves and aligned ourselves with the ‘good guys’ in a planetary scale civil war. The reason for this aside from “hey plot hooks”, was because it would enable us to get our hooks into the rulers if their side won and the planet was a producer of spaceships.
We infiltrated and got captured by the other side. During our daring escape we got ourselves face to face with the leaders of the other side. Thanks to the very torture we escaped from, we’d fallen farther to the dark side and unlocked more powers. Specifically, taking the good ol Jedi Mind Trick to whole new levels. We wound up walking out of there, having essentially ended the war and being the new shadow rulers of the planet.
Then the Jedi and Republic army showed up having finally gotten wind of the whole civil war thing before we could see the thing through to it’s conclusion.
Still, they never found out about our secret plot and they didn’t wind up ousting any of the very important people of either side we had influence over, so we actually did claim the planet as ours in the end… post credits of course.
OK guys, here’s the plan. First we get ourselves captured and tortured. It’s the only way to level up. Darth Planahead? You sink all your points into “mind trick.” Next, we brain wash the Confederacy into thinking that none of the planet’s droids are the ones they’re looking for. Unable to function, they’ll have no choice but to make us shadow rulers of the planet. Ready? Break!
So there we were, middle of the day, middle of the city, and we’d just stumbled upon a Vampire Den. None of us knew it was coming, so few of us had Silver, and the only one with a Holy Symbol was our Cleric. Now maybe we still could have taken them. We didn’t need to though. You see, it was mid-day, all the vamps were sleeping. Part of the party was me, a Kitsune Rogue with the climbing ability of (at the time) a squirrel and a few points in Know (Engineering) for personal reasons, and a Gunslinger with gunpowder to spare. So, an hour later in-game and many Know (Engineering) checks later, and we’ve rigged the roof of the building to blow. Light the fuse, jump off the roof and let my amazing Acro bring me down unharmed, and boom. Those vamps never knew what hit them. Rest of the party mops up, and that’s one less vampire den in the city.
Nice! For extra shenanigans, I’m imagining tying ropes from the coffin lids to the roof so that they’re all jerked open the moment the gunpowder goes up.
That’s why competent vampires always sleep in heavily reinforced coffins.
So, it’s the very end of the campaign. The apocalypse is looming, and we’ve finally found the gathering of super-powerful priests about to enact the ceremony to summon the god Void to the world and end all things. We haven’t got much time; they’re going to sit down to one last communal meal, then end the world. We need a distraction, some way to break this all up so we’re not facing a unified army of priests who are capable of literally voiding the heart out of your chest.
When a distraction is needed, send in the kender.
The kender walks in, looks around the gathering, and announces OOC “I’m using my scroll of Frisky Chest.” The DM asks “on what?”. “The giant pot of stew they’re cooking.”
Cue ABSOLUTE CHAOS as a giant boiling cauldron jumps off the fire and charges wildly around the hall. The priests in general then proceeded to fail a few checks and start panicking and diving out of the way to avoid burns and splash damage. The cauldron finds the (now unlocked and ajar) doors and bursts out into the night.
“Is that the signal?” “I don’t know, but I’m throwing an exploding fireball in there.” “Hey! I’m still in here!” “WE KNOW!”
Wizard rolls near-max damage. Massive explosion destroys all doors and windows, kills most of the lower-level priests, heavily damages most of the rest. Kender crits her save, goes flying, no damage except a bit of non-lethal from the force of impact as the paladin caught her. Battle is joined, and won.
And that is the legend of the Frisky Stew.
“I’m sorry, WHOSE ranks in Profession (cook) are useless? Put that in your pipe and smoke it, and tell ’em that the kender sent ya!”
Amazing plan, flawless execution. 10/10, would fireball the kender again.
So, 5e DnD, we once had to steal phoenix eggs from a volcanic crater at the top of an enormous, snowy mountain to perform a rebirth ritual and cure our warlock of vampirism.
Once we got up there, we all realised that the phoenix wasn’t going to be too happy about the arrangement… So we got out our portable boat and pushed it to the edge of the crater, tied a Catfall Cloak (homebrew item that essentially lets you take no fall damage; it puts the brakes on just before you hit the ground) to the mast as a sail, got the warlock to grab the eggs, then all piled in and used an enchanted quarterstaff called the Boomstick (essentially casts a miniature thunderwave on a strike) to punt ourselves off the side of the mountain.
The Boomstick caused an avalanche, and the phoenix gave chase and damn near killed us, but eventually gave up after we got a lucky ranged crit on it and knocked it into the avalanche. We hid in a cave about 3/4 of the way down the mountain til the avalanche was over, during which time we beheaded the warlock while he held one of the eggs; he resurrected from a pile of ashes healthy and free of vampirism.
Mounatin-sailing is something so awesome, it just HAD to work.
That’s amazing! And doubly so because, unbelievably, this is actually the second “we sailed a boat down a mountain” story I’ve heard recently. Here’s the other:
https://www.reddit.com/r/exalted/comments/57ycus/just_crazy_enough_to_work/d8w8kge?context=3
Okay, okay, I’m two months late reading the comic. But…
After a long and arduous campaign on the Western Seas of Exalted, the party of Solars finally had a plan to destroy the Silver Prince once and for all. Which was great, except that the Sidereals were concerned that the Solars were going to go all murder hobo, and ask abhorrent as the Silver Prince was, they didn’t want a bunch of bloodthirsty Solars “fixing” everything wrong with the world. They were warned if someone killed the Silver Prince, the entire Bronze Faction of Sidereals would be coming down on them, hard.
Fast forward, the Solars fire a gigantic Solar Essence Cannon at the Prince’s base, leaving the air supercharged with solar energy and burning weaker creatures of darkness where they stand. The Prince’s lair is infiltrated, battle is joined (after some hard fought mental battles to sway the PCs individually to his side), they slowly whittle the Prince’s motes of essence down so that they have a chance of dealing damage that he doesn’t just immediate regenerate from… and, being a smart fellow, he leaps away with Mountain Crossing Leap Technique, a charm none of the party can duplicate.
This is what the Night caste has been waiting for, though. He burns through a combo, firing an arrow at the departing deathlord with a perfect strike, then immediately using Graceful Crane Stance to leap onto and ride said arrow. The arrow doesn’t deal a significantly large amount of damage, but the Night caste is now back in hand-to-hand combat with the Silver Prince, and more importantly, the Silver Prince’s leap was interrupted, changing the landing from “completing a jump” to “falling from a great height”. There’s a series of blows that leave the two increasingly scuffed up, then just before impact, the Night caste fires another arrow and rides it to the ground. The Silver Prince impacts less gracefully and doesn’t get up again.
The rest of the party join the Night caste, and are shortly joined by some very disgruntled Bronze faction Sidereals insisting to know who did the deed. The Night caste points downwards. “You’ll have to take that up with Gaia.”
Deathlords know all the charms, right? Cue the ST flipping furiously through the books trying to come up with a way to avoid falling damage.
Ima have to see about replicating that stunt in my next game though. I’m an insect totem lunar, and I think we’ve got an archer in the party….
I feel bad about this one… I was a horrible teenager. I gotbetter, eventually. We were playing Mechwarrior. Our group were Clan Wolf mercenaries hiding from our clan in inner sphere space. We were cruel, and more than a bit evil. When we negotiated, we always made sure to put the plastic sheets down. We salvaged and scavenged everything from our battlefields. Our poor ST, bless his heart, let us save up for our own jumpship, and made the mistake of mentioning that we had an “extra” dropship. One of the big ones…. Well, he set us up to try to negotiate with a superior force, and they refused to limit the forces they would field like any civilized ruler would… So, I had one of our expendable pilots drop our expendable dropship at the planet at full speed… And I had cut all the brake systems and safety overrides. The poor pilot thought he was dropping our elites into a hot zone, when he was just piloting a big metal extinction event…. Our ST didn’t say anything to me for twenty minutes. We became friends again later in life.
Yeesh. That’s not cutting the Gordian Knot so much as nuking it.
In D&D 5e, we were flying back from Icewind Dale to Neverwinter, when 2 miles out, we saw a group of merchants being attacked by a goblin ambush party. The other group members who were being introduced, were having a hell of a time keeping the goblins back. So, 2 mikes away from Neverwinter and 200 feet up in the air, I look at my DM & say, “I swan dive off the gryphon’s back.” The DM is staring at me like I just said I could shoot rainbow beams out my ass. He said, “If you miss the landing, that’s 20d6 points of damage. You will be a pancake.” “I won’t miss.” “Roll it, wiseass.” I burned my Inspiration point to roll Advantage. “How’s a 21 sound?” “…I hate you.” Not to be outdone, the 1/2 Elf Ranger tied a rope sound his gryphon & decided to Errol Flynn off his. I looked at him & said (IC & OOC), “What the hell was the rope for?” All our poor DM could do was facepalm & say, “Why do I get the suicidal Rangers?”
Suicide Squad? That sounds like a surefire concept for a cool story about a group of weirdo antiheroes trying to save the world. I suggest adding Queen songs to the next session.
Oh, my DM absolutely REFUSES to let me play a Bard. I have a playlist of songs I turn on for certain spells (for example, Thunderstruck when someone casts Thunderwave or Thunderclap). I said if my Wood Elf Ranger (yeah, yeah. Cliche, I know.) dies, I was gonna come back as either a Bard or Kender Thief. He flat out told me, “You will never die. In fact, you will live forever.”
I’m toying with that idea of incorporating more myself. I talk about the difficulty of adding music to the game over here…
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/ambiance
…But if it’s a player rather than the GM doing it, I might have to revise my opinion. Syrinscape in particular looks cool.
https://syrinscape.com/
Ages late on the comment (just discovered this great comic and binging):
We were playing our first 5e session together and I was a gnome illusion wizard running around this cave we found, saving the party’s collective butts (or so my character would imagine). After convincing a group of goblins that I was a god( a flaming squirrel god) and then my party promptly murdering all of the but one (that one proved to be unkillable no matter how hard everyone tried). We had a discovered a treasure chest of gold on an island surrounded by an underground river. We also discovered it was guarded by a water elemental that just wanted everyone to leave the treasure alone. He was my buddy in that I used Unseen Familiar to toss a piece of gold into a gelatinous cube that had nearly killed me and he proceeded to blow it up to get the gold back. Much trickery and stupidity later we managed to steal the gold before the elemental could return it to the chest. Newly enriched we journeyed deeper into the cave (with lots of murder on the way) only to run into a juvenile red dragon. It decided it really liked me and decided to chase after me through the dungeon. Using prestidigitation I lead it to a large pile of corpses we left behind and convinced it I was it’s new servant, here to feed it. While it was distracted, I created a path of gold leading to my bestie, the water elemental. They proceed to duke it out and the dragon just barely killed off the elemental. Terribly injured, he came stomping after me while my party members managed to miss him/be mysteriously absent. Just as he bore down on me, I blasted him in the face with magic missile and finished him off. Turns out while I was trying to deal with not being eaten, my entire party had robbed everything of worth in his hoard. But because of my actions I became a minor goblin diety and the lone survivor goblin become the first cleric who proceeded to start a temple in our home base town. So I got that going for me.
1. Welcome to the comic!
2. That’s awesome.
3. What are your divine portfolios?