Explosives
It was finally time for the grand finale. The party had fought their way through literal Hell, commandeered an infernal tax collector’s airship, and were making their assault on the BBEG’s palace. It wasn’t an easy approach. They had to slog their way through a couple of difficult fights just to get on an approach vector, and our band of Lunar Exalts were dangerously low on essence.
Me, An Idiot: “Remember guys, they don’t collect money down in Hell.”
My Players: “The tax collector’s essence battery!”
Me, An Unsuspecting Idiot: “Exactly. Of course, there may be some side effects if you top off using infernal essence, but you can still–“
My Players: “We’ll use it as an Essence Bomb! We drop it on the Palace!”
Me, A Remorseful Idiot: “Goddammit…”
There’s a reason that black powder tends to be expensive or scarce in D&D. It’s the same reason why, in a Pathfinder campaign when my players boarded an enemy pirate ship, I chose to make it a “ballista and crossbows” kind of ship rather than the “pistols and cannons” kind. If you give players the means to blow a hole in your campaign, they’re going to bloody well find a way to do it.
So here’s my question of the day to all your little pyros out there: Have you ever managed to get your hands on an arbitrarily large amount of explosives in a game? What did you blow up? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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I have successfully helped my players drop one city into the ocean, drop a city on a Hecuva that they didn’t like(with a coalition of evil gods being the primary target), set fire via explosives to a gold dragon’s city, level 3 nations armies with a single epic spell, and deal something like 2000 damage to a Kraken-like abomination by turning part of the sea into alcohol with a little lightning to spark it all.
I’ve… uh… put a portable hole in a bag of holding? There’s no way that I can, or will ever, top any of the above.
Please stay at least three continents and two dimensions away from me at all times, for my own safety.
Just believe in yourself, and you too can blow up the ocean.
I’m betting the kraken also got some hefty debuffs from alcohol poisoning. Of course, the Dead condition tends to make the other ones a bit redundant, but still.
I’m’na assume the Kraken in question arrived in Gaping Maw so intoxicated Demogorgon became drunk.
In a Shadowrun game our modus operandi was to blow stuff up. We were a group of corporate runners working for Aztechnology, and plan B was to ‘cut open the ______, fill it with explosives, and when the ________ came near… boom!’ Also most of the characters used high explosive ammo in everything. Lucky for us we got results, otherwise this wage-mage would have found himself being a blood sacrifice or something.
By and odd coincidence I had a very similar experience! =P
The Johnson and the beleaguered desk sergeant from Kung Fury are basically the same character.
“You leveled a city block! The paperwork is going to be a nightmare. But goddamn if you don’t get results.”
Actually, we know each other irl. The game he refers to is the same one I’ve referred to a few times.
Well of course you use unscrupulous methods if you work for Aztechnology. You’re probably a huge pariah in the shadow community.
Does, “Tearing a rift in the fabric of the multiverse by causing a paradox after someone plane shifted a bag of holding into the same bag of holding” count? Because someone did planeshift into the bag of holding he was carrying, and he brought the same bag.
Infinite recursive loop dungeon?
Loving sorcerer’s fancy new outfit! (Also, who’s the dwarf at the counter?)
They call him… Alchemist: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/strange-brews
Where’s Abercrombie?
He’s in remission. It’s been hard on Alchemist.
You know, surprisingly, my group has never really just used a big bomb to solve our problems. I think this is because we tend to be a lot less murdery in higher tech games where gun powder is more common. Or atleast less indiscriminately murderous.
There’s also less wilderness in high tech games, so collateral damage becomes more of an issue. No one wants to play through a “you blew up your family’s apartment complex” storyline.
By the way, since I am moving to california next week, do you have any suggestions for looking for a new group for and, pathfinder, or something like that. I imagine just looking at the local university gaming group or gaming stores might be best. I don’t really have experience with looking for a group, as the first time I had one, a friend just invited me, and then for my college to now group, I got it while just on the bus with another guy and we ended up talking about dnd and pun pun.
I DM’d a game which was heavily based on The Hobbit. Like, a really lunatic, gonzo version of The Hobbit. What’s that you say? Like the film? Ok, yes, but about ten years earlier with with 100% fewer love triangles.
Anyway, the PCs got to the Mountain, and were trying to figure out how to kill the dragon. I had explained the “dragon-lore” which it was reasonable that they would be able to discover, which made clear that the big problem is penetrating the scales.
I was expecting them to do something like poking it in the eye while it was asleep. Instead, they hammered a helm into a cone, lined the inside with the explosive they had bought from the goblins, and then made another copper cone and laid this against the explosive.
If you’re not familiar, this is the design for a shaped charge, as commonly used in anti-tank rockets. On detonation, the copper will be compressed into a jet of molten metal travelling around 10km/s.
They sneaked this over to the sleeping dragon and detonated it against its head, putting a hole straight through.
I enjoyed toying with them by opening with, “as you know, red dragons are immune to fire damage…” before killing it with regular kinetic damage. Oh, but the looks on their little faces!
The image of Thorin Oakenshield shopping for explosives in Goblin Town has me dying.
Seconded.
Depending on where he stands when it goes off, he’ll be particularly Thorin the morning though.
Sigh. I don’t know what I did wrong, but when I introduced a Drow attack party going after a dwarf city with what was basically an ottoman Great Bombard, they didn’t even set it on fire or anything. And after the attack was driven off, they didn’t try to do anything with the bombard, or the black powder! They just decided (correctly) that it smelled like the work of gnomes and sallied forth without even doing anything with the new toys!
Luckily, they did later find some barrels of black powder, and used them th glorious effect in holding a choke point. The stone giant PC would roll or hurl the barrels into the middle of the enemy (which were immune to magic) and the wizard and/or archer would set them aflame.
Truly, the desire to blow shit up is the lifeblood of cooperation. Nothing incentivizes teamwork like a boatload of fiery d6s!
Haven’t ever used explosives (our musket sniper sucks up most of our “reactive chemicals” budget), but we did once have to open a secret passage door that the enemy had stuffed an entire building’s worth of furniture in front of. We ended up taking our Barbarian/Brawler who has access to Alchemist mutagen via his Brawler archetype (giving him a total of 30 STR), handed him my adamantine longsword, revved him up like a chainsaw and had him just hack our way through.
Oh, I guess we did once accidentally collapse a building that we were in using Fireball, so I guess that counts.
I always thought it was interesting that fireball specifically doesn’t generate force, just heat. It’s the designers saying, “We know the kind of shenanigans players will get up to with explosives.”
Is nobody gonna comment on the “Don’t sell to Sorcerer” sign in the bottom-left? (Which mistakenly calls him an Elf because it’s very hard to distinguish half-elves from elves without making your elves super-cartoonish, or giving your half-elf secondary sexual characteristics. (Everyone knows male Elves can’t grow facial hair, and female elves don’t have breasts. Half-Elves on the other hand do)
Also what happened to all of Alc’s body-horror? No sign of muscles, tentacles, or Ambercrombie.
That’s not actually Alchemist. That’s the Simulacrum he made of himself to run his store for him. A true scientist doesn’t have time to spend a 9-5 workday selling stuff! There are chemicals to mix!
Tentacles to pluck! Tumors to incubate! Half-formed parasitic twins to wrestle!
In my “cutlasses and sorcery” game, I thought about using black powder and pistols for a bit before reworking my entire world to not have it at all. D&D and it’s variants are generally balanced around the players not having access to raw explosives in great quantities. shudders from past GM memories
Instead of cannons and pistols, most ships instead employ a 5th level caster of some kind, so fireballs and archers are pretty much the totality of pre-boarding combat. I also deliberately restricted the range of spells going over the ocean so that people actually had a reason to board, rather than having the martial characters watch the two ship’s mages duke it out.
So like… firing over the ocean somehow saps a spell’s range?
Are you familiar with the All Guardsmen Party?
It’s a Warhammer 40k group whose stories you can find here.
A lot of those can be summed up as “…and then they blew it up, problem solved”, which, honestly, is awesome (and rather in line with the 40k universe from what I understand…)
I see it referenced all the time on certain subreddits, but I’ve never dived to n myself. That’s quite the time commitment! Plus I lack the 40K lore to really appreciate it. Think it’s still worth a read anyway?
Absolutely! I barely know any 40k lore either, and I still enjoy it a lot.
And the few things I didn’t know, I picked up quite fast. On the rare occasions where I did miss a reference, a quick search on 1d4Chan solved the issue.
It’s also divided in chapters, so the time commitment isn’t that big, unless you binge read of course.
I DM a lot of strange games and once when running a monster and demi-gods themed game set in prehistory I made the hysterical mistake giving the players an epic level artifact in the form of a box of stone tablets, they were intended to allow them to summon elemental lords ergo the biggest meanest elementals you could imagine and control them through the use of the tablets. Each elemental could only be called once and there was only one for each of the primary elements a few odder elements like cold. This had been intended as a way to deal with some of the large scale combats that might come up without having to run a war game. Unfortunately, my players never bothered to translate the tablets and just broke them when they wanted to use one of the elementals which resulted in an explosion and a gait unstoppable elemental running amok. Then they let the were-pather shamon who was possessed by multiple spirits one of which was a pyromaniac carry the ark the tablets were. This led to a string of incidents, some of which they stopped and most they didn’t. To highlight a few incidents he almost incinerated the vampire court they were trying to ally with, while being attacked by a giant mummified crocodile he caused it to become the host to cold elemental and though he managed to escape he let a giant ice crocodile rampaging up the nile. They also destroyed no less the 2 entire cities, but it wasn’t a complete loss, we never did have to run a mass combat, so in a way my plan worked, but the moral of the story is that no one ever reads the instruction manual.
Too many commandments. Did not read.
I love that so many answers to today’s question get to the fundamental nature of explosives. It’s all about over the top force. The sort of thing that’s way out of proportion to the problem at hand. Doesn’t matter if it’s a bomb or a summoning tablet.
This reminds me of several parts (“The Tanker Truck Incident”, the finale… Possibly the “dropping a yacht from a helicopter” part…) of the Old Man Henderson story after which the “Henderson Scale of Plot Derailment” is named…
“MUCKLE DARMED CULTISTS!”
I had a big deception planned. The party had found a bunch of “black powdery substance”, but didn’t actually try to identify it. The owner, paranoid that people would try to steal it(retroactively justified), had replaced half his barrels with ground poppy seeds.
I so wanted for them to try and light it, expecting a fiery blast only to get a smouldering pile that might smell faintly of a bakery. But, as with so many other things, they simply forgot about it and my grand reveal had to be made out of character to the players as I pleaded “Look, look how smart I am, I would have fooled you all so hard. Please validate my efforts.”
Lol it may have not worked, but I have to steal your idea the next time I GM.
You were very clever and should feel validated. 😛
Oof. It’s easier to list problems my main party hasn’t solved with explosions or fire. We ain’t called “The Trailblazers” for nothing.
Now see, I would have thought “trailblazers” was a party of stoned rangers.
“Dude… Where’s my bear?”
“Dude… I am your bear.”
“Cool man.”
In an We be Evil oneshot, my group actually took advantage of the fact that gunpowder was both a rare and relatively known material to essentially pull off a fantasy twin-tower disaster with a temple and government building during an important festival. It was a pretty meh game since the DM was new (hence how we even got blackpowder), but he didn’t expect us to be able to do enough damage to collapse two giant stone towers and kill everyone inside in less than two turns.
And we were just suppose to scare off a spy in our little mob group. Suffice ya to say, we showed hm exactly what we’re willing and capable of doing to keep him quiet.
Gotta teach ’em young. It’s the only way they’ll learn.
I remember in a low level campaign (like level 5 at the time), our party found a grenade in some lunatic’s secret lab. Now, this is Pathfinder, but our characters had no idea what grenades are. Since my character is a tinkerer, I kinda wanted to break it open, see what it’s made of and make my own version of it. My railroading half-ass GM immediately shut me down with a “Sorry, but black powder’s illegal here. Maybe you should go to place-I’ve-been-trying-to-send-you-to!”
Like damn, lemme have some fun with explosives, I ain’t gonna blow the game up – you already gave the pyromaniac arcanist a never-ending necklace of fireballs. In fact, most mages have a tendency to go with Maximized Empowered Fireballs as their demolitions tool, can explosives really get worse than that?
The thing is, we know what fireball does. I’ve seen my share of “we calculated out what 2000 lbs of black powder would do” type posts, and converting kilotons to d6s is enough to make any GM nervous. Maybe you would have been responsible. And maybe the campaign world would have turned into the end of Duck Dodgers:
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zM_cYDZM4oQ/Vu9vT1Bdo8I/AAAAAAAAHEc/hl1yuWp5WzMoNC7M_UOWMKZranYBV2QOw/s1600/DuckDodgers_Orig.jpg
In my wisdom it doesn’t matter the quantity, but the quality. In a Godbound game, once my pc convinced another godbound, of making, to transmutare some rocks into another material, just a little few. With that little piece of metal i made A-Bomb. My fellow players, a bunch of pussies who even in a game respect the Ginebra’s Convention, don’t let me use it. At least until much later when a Make-god eat like a dozen. They told me to not use my bomb and i accepted, they are my friends and should have know to told me to not make more. Long story shot, we blow-up a god, which i posthumously named Eothas the II, and with very few colateral damage to the engines that keep reality running. A good day of work for a party of gods.
That said, i don’t like gunpowder too much in my games. An Helm’s Deep like bomb is fair trade, an only gun with a decisive shot is very exciting. Otherwise, well there is a reason why after the introduction of gunpowder in the armies the knights and warriors of yolde went extinct. If i go to Alchemist shop i will buy the eldritch abomination of the left than the bomb.
Chekhov’s A-Bomb is far more dangerous than the normal type. It’s guaranteed to go off.
A Chekhov A-Bomb would be a nice thing. Gunpowder as a plot-device is good. Gunpowder for all makes problems.
The best I’ve got is a wizard who created a steamworks on the shoreline. A Permanent Wall of Fire would refine salt from sea brine, and the (relatively) purified water would be piped to the boilers and make his mechanical doodads function while he studied as he liked. Good source of income and energy to fuel his research.
And then he got invaded by jealous players and their oh so smart schemes. After surviving a disappointing assassination attempt, he retreated to his friend the Kingsguard and from there shored himself up in the Salt Tower. Eventually they came knocking through his door.
“Eventually” was the wrong move, it gave him All Sorts Of Time to reroute pipes and spells and contingencies. About three minutes of in game time (or an hour of roleplaying) my wizard teleported out to a safe haven he’d established on a remote island, and the enormous concussive blast of an entire manufactory reaching full steam and exploding sent all of my dear interlopers to their respective planes. Many diamonds were used that day.
For obvious reasons, another tower was not reestablished within the home city.
As a corollary, the picture I use here is art of said wizard. I helped a friend out, so a while later she made this sweet drawing.
I don’t suppose you’re familiar with the Tale of an Industrious Rogue?
https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Tale_of_an_Industrious_Rogue,_Part_I
Salt process was a major player there as well. I guess it goes to show that any finely ground powder in sufficient quantity is going to be dangerous.
This particular thing is actually circular. I was first linked to Industrious Rogue from one of your links in earlier comics. When I read through, I realized that there were a lot of moneymaking opportunities for someone who wasn’t on the road saving the world all the time. I applied that to my wizard, and we happened to be in a seaside city in this setting, so the most available trade good coincidentally happened to be…
It all comes back around, doesn’t it? 😀
My Bard he decided to cast Shatter on the base of a tower in order to drop it on an enemy. He was standing on top of that tower. From that day forth his adventuring group was “The Brotherhood of Bad Ideas”. This was a Bard whose spells all corresponded to classic rock songs I sang when I cast them. (Healing Word: Living on a Prayer, Hold Person: Under Pressure, etc.)
My current character hasn’t had access to any explosives, but he has used fire to great effect. He has a distinct hatred for monstrous plants, and many of them are immobile. Therefore he burns the area they’re in, and walks away.
What’s wrong with exploding a tower? That doesn’t sound like a bad idea to me. It sounds like solid strategy!
I was GM in Pathfinder. A team of ninja led by a siege wizard had built a big wooden dragon-shaped shell around themselves, and what was essentially a big old-timey flamethrower. The result was a big wooden dragon, poisoned darts flying from strategically hidden ports on its sides, magic empowering it’s abilities, and gouts of flame periodically spewing from its mouth.
Our party’s alchemist shoved a bomb into its mouth when the hatch opened for the dragon to “breathe” fire. All the combustible fuel the enemies had stored in there did the work from there.
…Of course, since ninjas have evasion, half of them inexplicably dodged the explosion of their wooden mecha-dragon, and the fight went into part two. They’d taken out the wizard and the enemies’ mobile cover, at least.
Holy crap I love that image. Exploding dragon bits everywhere.
It occurs to me that “suicide” bomber ninjas are a viable strategy for an encounter. Just keep dodging your own AoEs!
We were playing a game using the World of Darkness system for a modern spec-ops mercenary type group. Our first mission was to rescue one of the princes of England from some terrorists in Afghanistan before he was executed.
It was supposed to be a quiet/subtle operation. We had fire support from an AC-130 if we really needed it. By the time we got to the back of the cave system where he was held (using stealthy cinematic silenced guns and such), and about to be executed on live TV, our plans changed. In what became our general solution to problems we started with tear gas grenades, followed by flash bangs, and rescued him and then bragged about it…on live TV.
On our next secret mission we used large amounts of tear gas, exploives, and flash bangs and demolished half a wall of a smuggling king-pin’s mansion and had major fire fights outside a small Canadian town.
He fled to a shipping yard, but we had gotten there ahead of him, snuck on to his container ship…and rigged it with enough explosives that when detonated it set off the fuel and everything…below the waterline of the ship, so it lifted somewhat out of the water, exploded, and sank in the harbor.
We also wound up destroying another mansion, and purposely burning that to the ground and stealing our former boss’s car. Which, while clearing our name, we had contacted friends and get ready to storm our old compound on our signal. Which consisted of using the boss’s mustang convertible, which we had rigged with explosives and a sound system, and jumped out of a C-130 and aimed it and used that as a bomb to signal the attack.
We were very subtle.
That’s awesome.
I demand to know what song was playing on the mustang’s sound system.
In my homebrew setting, access to gunpowder depends on a particular race or culture’s tech level. high magic races such as elves have dark age europe technology, middle – low magic races such as goblinoids and humans have reneissance – age of enlightenment technology, and races that are are low – almost non existant magic such as dwarves have up to 19th century tech level. Gnomes are exception, high magic but 15th – 18th century tech
So what have your dwarves blown up?
Most dwarves are pretty conservative when it comes to explosives. Duergar are too busy fighting a never ending war vs illithids/horrors of the underdark and a cold war vs Shield (Mountain Dwarves) the Shield Dwarves are “keeping an eye” on Duergar and act as last line of defense for the surface world, Surface (Hill dwarves) on the other hand have blown up their own holds (mountaintop blasting mining) and while they respect/support the other dwarves, they’ve the mindset of robber barons and early industrialists. If there’s an obstacle to progress, blow it up.
Goblins on the otherhand, like the ferengi daVinci minded bomb fetishists/pyros that they are, blow themselves up regularly when their hobgoblins aren’t around to keep them in check. Favored hobglobin tactic is goblin scuicide bombers/alchemists. Hobs are jaime hyneman and gobs are adam savage.
I would watch that show. I would also play with those NPCs.
Me, playing an evil character with a team of neutral, good-ish characters… And we got our hands on an Extinction Wave Device in Pathfinder. Better, we got our hands on the map of the final stronghold for that particular part of the adventure, and it was full of really nasty critters that plague the darkest recesses of our fears, Pathfinder’s versions of the Illithids/Mindflayers, the Neh-Thalggu. It also had hostages, or rather, people the Neh-Thalggu and their Intellect Devourer pets liked to eat. We also had a pile of rocket launchers (Numeria’s a fun place), cylex, and, due to a new player who got intrigued by the idea, a young, newly minted space dragon in our corner (he used to be the brain of a Black Dominion spaceship, but we reincarnated him).
So, after killing the guards at the front gate, we prepped the bomb. The GM… Did not like this plan. My evil pirate-themed slayer didn’t like it, either. So, he reminded the rest of the party:
Me: “You guys DO remember that this place has prisoners, right?”
CN Sorcerer: “So? We’ll just resurrect them later!”
NPC Tagalong: “But… My husband!”
CN Sorcerer: “He’ll be FINE!”
Me: grabbing him by the collar “WE ARE NOT WASTING ALL THAT GOLD TO RESURRECT THE PEOPLE WE DIDN’T NEED TO KILL!”
GM: “…Really?”
Me: oblivious to the alignment changing behavior “So, according to the map, this wall is the thinnest. We should use the rocket launchers to blast through, yank the folks out, get on the airship and detonate the EWD once we’re far enough away!”
GM: concerned we’re about to easily crush his carefully crafted challenge “Er… Uh… If you do that, the, uh… Yeah, that gunk on the walls you see on the map? That’s, the, uh… nerves! Yeah! Of the dungeon’s end-boss…”
Me: “Fine… We’ll do it the HARD WAY, so you get to run us through some fights… But I’m cylexing that God damn enemy spawner!”
So, I got one of the wizards to make me invisible, used Engineering and Disable Device to plant the Cylex on a growth that made little evil living spider bots, stepped outside and we blew the thing up.
We were able to rescue the hostages after a couple more fights, the GM told me I was now considered “Neutral” by the gods, and we hopped in the ship and hit the base with an extinction wave. The endboss and the cenobite-like Succubus were the only ones who survived (immune to mind-affecting attacks), so the Succubus got to work bringing the Neh-Thalggu back to life. All of their spare brains were dead, so their processing speed was way down, plus they were suffering negative levels from the resurrection; they were SUPER PISSED at us when we came in to finish the job. The Succubus wasn’t so bothered, even offered to help us when we were eventually victorious, but our wizard/technomancer told her to get back to Hell where she belongs and we continued the adventure (since she looked like a character from Hellraiser, even my only recently converted to Neutral pirate was smart enough to go “I wouldn’t bang that with a stolen dick!”).
So much sympathy for the GM here. I’m having flashbacks to my own “essence batter” moment like you wouldn’t believe.
If GM ever told me my evil character is now neutral, I would go burn down an orphanage, like any neutral character would do. And that would be only the beginning.
Do your players have access to Shrink Item? Because if they do they now have a ballista
Stop. Giving. Them. Ideas.
I have two, which are slightly off topic. They are both, ironically enough, Mutants and Masterminds.
The first was Nova, who thought she was a standard flying brick but was actually a daughter of Apollo. She was also an experiment in Dynamic Arrays. This lead to the fun of a Speedster who thought she was getting away. Nova then proclaimed she would shift all her divine might (points) into the Flying Attribute to keep up. So Nova became Sonic Boom for a round and shattered windows all through downtown. That one was embarassing for me, but I got a Hero point!
The second I was running for, and this was a Hero who decided to be sponsored by the US Government, cause he was a mecha suit pilot. He proceeded to turn a character who didn’t even have that much that could do collateral damage into the meaning of the word. I had fun roleplaying the beleaguered Public Relations Officer who had to constantly field his mess-ups and doing little things like the officer missing his son’s soccer game because of the Hero. I eventually had the Public Relations guy go rogue and become a villain who used technology nullifying Sticky Frisbees to fight tech heroes who caused too much collateral. It was funny.
That’s a licensing opportunity. Find a glass repair company and smile for the camera.
Myself. I blew up myself. It was in a mine, there were barrels of blasting powder around, I tried to scatter some across the floor to burn a horde of rats that was scampering around, but our DM decided it simply exploded. Total bullshit as far as I’m concerned, since the powder was scattered all over the floor, not in the barrel anymore. But fuck it. Everyone had fun anyway, so I just went with it. Besides, I was the party fighter and had all the hit points in the world. I was fine.
So you only blew yourself up a little. Seems fair. 😛
Two scenarios
1)playing a one piece home brew. Character had a devil fruit that allowed him to turn his skin into anything he touched ( usually rocks wood or steel). Gm gave me a small rock at one point that was kinda explosive when struck…. turned all of my skin into this rock and walked into an encounter that everyone around was armed with swords….
2)Dungeon Workd game played an immolator… could generate fire on a whim…. one player owned a bar, and a botch later we opened the first of our chain smoking crater. Yes every town i went to left another bar in such a state.
Yeah, I’m not allowed to buy gunpowder in bulk in most games I’m in anymore. I’m one of those people who reads ‘Things Mr. Welch is Not Allowed to do in an RPG’ for ideas.
Plan B usually is twice as much gunpowder as Plan A.
Yeah, I know I’m late to the party, but I can’t resist this story.
Playing in 4e D&D, in a homebrew world, our party ran across a plan to blow an allied city-state off the map by loading the mining tunnels underneath it with ‘magic C4’.
I’m… still not sure why the DM was surprised when the party opted to steal as many of the explosives as we could feasibly carry. Then we told the allied town about the plot, figuring that a mining city-state would have obvious uses for the leftover kaboom-makers.
The plot moved on, and eventually we ran across a boss fight; an ancient gold dragon that had been corrupted by centuries of guarding a portal to the Far Planes. Now feral and insane, the dragon promptly attacked us… and our spellsword tossed down a perfectly-timed Drawmij’s Instant Fortress, resulting in the dragon’s head being inside the room, the neck poking through an (adamantine) window too small for the head to withdraw through.
The dragon began drawing a breath to roast the lot of us, and we promptly tossed about 200kg of magic semtex down its throat. The fight didn’t really last much beyond that, and the DM was torn between horror that we had pretty much bypassed an important fight and amusement at the mental image.
Because he doesn’t read this comic.
I’M OUT HERE TRYNA WARN FOOLS!