Our Quest Givers voted, and it was The Anti-Party that got hit with the Rule 63 stick. They really ought to be careful though. If my personal experience is anything to go by, gender bender Halloween parties are occasionally permanent. (I still own the Morticia Addams dress, btw. I’m wearing it to a Halloween wedding next week.)
Any dang way, as we contemplate the unreliable nature of illusions, allow me to paint you a word picture. Your group is in the middle of an Arabian Nights campaign. There’s been sand and sun and all manner of fun. You’ve raced camels on flying carpets versus cobra people or whatever, and you’ve come out the other side with jeweled scarabs and enchanted songbirds that know all the latest Bollywood tunes. But now you’ve got an urban adventure coming up. After IRL months of wandering the wastes and shaking down genies for wishes, it’s finally time to go to court.
“Hear ye, hear ye! The sultan will pay a literal mountain of gold for the aid of experienced adventurers in a matter some delicacy. Personal discretion is required. Males need not apply.”
Rumor has it that a great many of His August Majesty’s royal bastards have come out tiefling recently. This is beginning to cause a scandal. Courtiers whisper that the sultan is cursed, and surely it would be better for the kingdom if some other royal buttock sat upon the throne?
While the sultan suspects the truth, your GM knows for a fact that an incubus has got loose in the harem. Your party will have to talk to the courtesans, find the disguised fiend, and keep collateral damage to a minimum. The problem is that no man but the sultan may set foot in the place. And so you begin to see where today’s comic comes in.
So now you’ve got hijinks set up and ready to go. Disguise checks, romantic comedy, and mistaken identities are all part of the fun. Even better, it just so happens that the party mage has a certain high-level illusion scroll in inventory. You know, the one that makes the subject look, feel, and smell just like the creatures the spell makes them resemble. And so your party of beefy boys disguised as Rat Queens rock up to the throne room.
“We’re here for the job,” says your barbarian. “And don’t worry. We can be real discrete and delicate.”
“Give me a Performance check.”
“Why? The spell doesn’t give a save unless you interact with it.”
“Did you take the Actor feat?”
“No. Also I’m pretty sure that feat isn’t in the same system as veil.”
“Whatever. Now explain to the nice sultan why the nubile young adventurer before him sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
This is just one example. But in my experience, illusions are prone to sudden and unexpected failure according to how much of a hardass your GM wants to be. So for today’s discussion, why don’t we share our own stories of failed illusions? What were you trying to fake, and how did it get the royal guard of Agrabah chasing after you? Tell us your tale of magical deception gone wrong down in the comments!
Technically it wasn’t a case of *illusion* magic going wrong, just magic in general. I’d built a Grey wizard (illusionist spec) in warhammer fantasy and was looking forward to lots of sneaky bullshit. Unfortunately this was Warhammer, so I wound up with a nasty case of “eaten by daemons” and was a tad short of fate points. My next guy was a blacksmith. Such is life.
Warhammer magic is its own can of chaos-tainted worms. XD
This is not the story of a failed illusion but rather of one that was a little too succesful.
So no shit here we were. After our attempt to infiltrate the tyrant kings fortress had failed and part of the city had burned down in the process(which was not our fault) we were hiding out in the burned out area. And by hiding out, I mean we had been using our craft skills to build our dream home from the wreckage.
One of the kings tax people visited the area to assess the damage and stumbled upon our home. A bit flabbergasted when he stumbled across our home, he nonetheless intended to do his job and assess our building for tax purposes. We weren’t too worried, as our faces weren’t known. With one notable exception : our warforged druid’s Rhinoceros pet, who had his own covered paddock right off the entrance hall.
Panicking a little, my character cast an illusion over the Rhino to stop us from being identified. At that point it was well past midnight and I wasn’t exactly thinking straight, so in my slightly addled state I decided the obvious disguise for a rhino was a unicorn. Que the tax man:
Tax man: Oh my, what a beautiful unicorn! The king has been looking for one of these for his zoo for a long time now! Name your price!
Me: Ehm… It’s not for sale.
Tax Man: that is not acceptable. The king must have it. Name your price, or else the king will simply take it.
Me: Ahhh… You see it’s not exactly a unicorn it is.. *rapidly shifts illusion* a shapeshifting… *Remembers some obscure mythology* fox… thing.
Tax man: Oh my, how exotic. The king truly must have this. Name your price!
Me: *panicking*
Rest of the party: *preparing violence*
Me: Ehmm… This is not the shapeshifting fox fox thing you are looking for! *Casts suggestion*
Tax man:… Right, this is not the shapeshifting fox thing I am looking for. Anyway, please show me the rest of the building so I can properly calculate your tax rate.
Everyone: *sigh of relief*
So yeah, this is how my illusions almost got us in a lot of trouble because they worked a little too well.
That’s a fantastic bit of RP. Also a fantastic bit of comedy. Good show!
“After our attempt to infiltrate the tyrant kings fortress had failed and part of the city had burned down in the process (which was not our fault)”
That’s a quite suspiciously specific denial if I’ve ever seen one…
I’m sensing a pattern here…
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/crossplaying
Time for another Patreon poll? Sorc and Oracle (purely for the glorious facial hair and/or Cleric shipping) have good odds.
I *love* disguised Oracle’s giant moustache; truly, it is a thing of beauty.
I love how you can tell when Laurel is having fun.
I’m not projecting onto my characters! YOU’RE projecting onto your characters. I mean… My characters. Point is, shut up! 😛
…
In all seriousness, I do love the gender bender trope for obvious reasons. But Laurel is also a happy camper when she gets to redesign our characters, as witnessed by the monthly pinups over on the Patreon.
Barbarian is going to have a tough time keeping her hairdressing salon in business when she’s supposed to be dead. Did she leave any reliables to inherit it, or is it subject to a takeover by an unscrupulous entity that’s an allegory for the evils of capitalism and corporate greed?
She can just pretend to be her own identical twin brother, Barbarian2.
People won’t be suspicious as Fighter has already normalised those kind of shenanigans.
Of course, I meant to say *the Fighter family* has normalised this.
My condolences to Fighter #38 for his many tragic losses.
Ya know… This ins’t a bad plot point. It stands to reason that Witch might have taken over. They need a new evil lair since the incident with the cone of cold:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/quality-of-life
Also the fumigation:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/where-we-gamin
I can imagine Witch using the hair salon for evil, giving people evil/cursed hairdos that, whilst fabulous looking, also like to strangle people / whisper maddening secrets / have spider nests in them.
The take I’ve heard from every professional I’ve ever talked to is “don’t take advice from your fans.” The idea is that someone will eventually be like, “Where’s my cut of the profits?” That’s really sad though, because brainstorming with the other denizens of Handbook-World is a joy.
Bleh. Probably a corporate concern more than an indie one. I don’t plan to change my MO any time soon. 🙂
I sometimes use illusions to justify advantage on intimidation checks… but I don’t think it’s ever actually worked. The character is a bard, maxed out charisma, so theoretically capable at intimidation… but even rolling with advantage from taking on some monstrous appearance, the dice have clearly decided that she just isn’t a scary person.
I know that feel bro. 🙁
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/intimi-beef
This is more the opposite… the stats say the character should be good at scaring people, but the dice disagree. And for the most part, the dice are right — I’ve never played her as a threatening sort of person — but it’s a mix of amusing and frustrating to watch her (literally) put her scary face on, and still fail so hard at it despite massive bonuses.
Possibly I should stop calling it intimidation, and start calling it performance… the bonuses are the same, but she’s probably better at faking scary than being scary.
Today’s question reminded me of a spell in 3.5 called Reflective Disguise.
Reflective Disguise makes any observers see you as being the same race and gender as them.
So our party were planning to walk through the middle of a city of drow, with all the drow seeing us as other drow (we had the mass version of the spell, on a scroll). It was a very handy spell for this obstacle, but we had to be aware of the potential pitfalls.
The drow men would see us as drow men, and the women as women. I don’t remember us being concerned about clothing giving us away (and I just checked the spell description and it does change clothing). But we were worried about talking to a mixed-sex group and giving ourselves away by acting according to the wrong social status, in such an unequal society as default-drow.
And if we met an ambassador from the mind-flayers or something, then they would see us as a group of 5 mind-flayers walking down the middle of the street. They might get a bit suspicious of that; just hope they don’t say anything to the drow around them.
That’s not a great spell in terms of optimization. But it friggin’ rules for RP. Much more fun than the simple pass/fail of spells like veil.
One of my favorite missions to run requires a party to be incognito and untraceable as they raid a neighboring thieves’ guild and retrieve important documents for a CG ruler.
-) One group to play the scenario wore single-use magical disguises that made them appear to be generic black-clad adventurers. One PC investigated the cells where kidnap victims were held and found himself face-to-face with an NPC that the party had met before who was there to rescue the victims of a slavery ring. Mistaken for one of the oppressors, the PC had to tear off his disguise in order to avoid a fight! –Fortunately, the Monk was one of the least-famous members of the adventuring team and so wasn’t recognized on his way back out.
-) Another group used a combination of mundane and magical disguises. The Fighter (Sturm) had a complicated backstory involving a missing twin brother wrongly convicted of crimes and yadda…yadda…yadda. Given three black-clad women in the group and one 6’6″ heavy-metal warrior, they made quite the impression but were not recognized as themselves. Afterward, as the party progressed in level, they began to hear increasingly embellished stories of their own exploits vs. the thieves’ guild misattributed to the missing twin brother. (After all, without high-level magics, there’s a limit to exactly *how* much they could disguise the hulking fighter.) Eventually the fictional stories of “Drang the Destroyer and his Lethal Legion of Leather-clad Lovelies” began to eclipse the true tales of the PCs’ exploits. Before we retired the campaign, I made sure to let the (now exonerated) missing brother show up as an NPC and ask why villagers keep asking him “Where are the ladies?”
That is an excellent social encounter. You’ve got to engineer that kind of moment so that disguise situations feel suitably epic.
No notes!
You need to get on the Discord and run a one-shot. You sound like a great GM. 🙂
Knowing about what happened to Wizard in the past, as well as the First Law of Genderbending (thanks TVTropes), plus how good Sorcerer looks, esp. in contrast with Barbarian and Oracle (no offense), i’m slightly concerned about the, uh, “developments” that Sorcerer may undergo in the future.
Jokes and observations aside, i first took note of this comic when i heard about Wizard’s transformation (thanks TVTropes x2), so having that “utilizing gender identity for fun and profit in RP” concept revisited in a new and interesting way would be great.
What, like some kind of nonbinary Sorcerer who specializes in seduction as part of a level dip into Warlock in order to gain enough power to rescue Demon Queen only to accidentally awaken his succubus / incubus powers in the process?
That’s a farfetched plot that will definitely never happen. I mean, we already have a Warlock! >_>
I honestly don’t think the GM was out of bounds there. I suppose a player new to spellcasting classes embarking on a game that started at 11th-16th level might have appreciated a hint to make, e.g., spellcraft check representing common sense (“We won’t actually SOUND like Rat Queens, you guys!”). Equally, though, it sometimes comes down to the group to be clever enough… and sometimes it’s just fun when the obvious is forgotten in the midst of otherwise very formidable magic.
Neither do I, actually. But another GM might just as easily handwave it in favor of rule-of-cool. That’s the point. Illusions are inconsistent creatures, and that’s in terms of rules as well as rulings.
Oh, absolutely. It’s all subjective and table-dependent at the end of the day. I think the best GMs are those that know their players well enough to know when the rule of cool will be appreciated, and when they’ll have even more fun laughing at an error such as this.
I’ve never had a player want to play an illusionist. The only time an illusion spell had was when the kender disguising a young demigod with an illusion spell bought from the merchant who supplied most of the theatre companies in the capital city. They aren’t great spells, but as long as they’ll pass from the front row, that’s all that matters.
What was funny is all the group but one failed their perception checks miserably. I took the one player who made his roll outside to find out what he was going to do about a 10 year old demigod running around with the kender. He looked me straight in the eye and said, “Nothing. I’m going to sit back and watch the chaos.” One of the few times a player actually caught me off guard.
Wizard sees Sorcerer: Typical of sorcerers always coping what Wizards already did. Some of us were already being a girl before it become fashionable 😛
Male-barbarian looks great 😀 Totally the winner of the genderbent on the Handbook 🙂
Meanwhile Oracle looks like the lovechild of Alchemist and the Lorax 😛
I dunno, Wizard got to keep her genderbend…
A couple of old friends of mine had a Halloween wedding. I think. The groom was dressed as the Devil and the bride was wearing a deer skull. They may have just been satanists. I was the one who first introduced them through a Pathfinder game I ran but never finished, so I’m possibly responsible for all that.
In 5e, hallucinatory terrain only hides natural terrain—you can’t use it to hide a house or something. That’s fine; my party just wanted to use it to cover the foxholes they dug for an ambush.
The DM said no, that counts as a manufactured structure. The party pointed out that they literally just dug a hole in the natural dirt. Footprints are also holes dug in the natural dirt—can they be hidden by the spell?
(Also, upon closer inspection, the spell specifically mentions making a road look like a swamp.)
Then the DM basically argued that there’s no way to dig a hole that works as a foxhole, which would be ridiculous enough if one of the players he was arguing with hadn’t spent four years in the army. I don’t think he ever ambushed anyone from a foxhole, but if I was DMing, I’d take the veteran’s word about hole-based tactics.
Anyways, the end result of what preparations we convinced the DM were possible was…basically nil. I don’t think we even got a surprise round. The DM gave us a quest prompt that said “Ambush the bad guys when they go down this road,” he always talked a big game about encouraging creative solutions…but when the dice hit the table, the only ambush he would accept was charging into battle while screaming at the top of our lungs.
I don’t think the illusions were the problem.
That’s so wild—and hallucinatory terrain is already SUCH a specific spell, what else are you supposed to use it for of not this?!
Sometimes a DM just has a plan locked and can’t let it go, hopefully you ended up at a table with a more reasonable one
On the contrary. The illusion of agency was very much the problem. 😛
Not an illusion, but a disguise issue for sure—in my last Lancer session, the team was trying to capture an enemy spy ship while it was in transit. They managed to get launched on an intercept trajectory in their mechs, grabbed on without getting caught, sabotaged the comma array to prevent distress calls, and even managed to get inside without setting off alarms.
The ship was manned by a small crew, and they were able to avoid enemies… until they got to the bridge. An empty hallway, and two armed and armored guards at the end of it by the doors.
Fortunately, the players have a plan: rather than use invisibility and quiet weapons to take out the guards quickly… Trev Starfucker is going to make himself look vaguely like one of the few people on the ship as seen through grainy recording, have his color-changing sylphsuit make it look like he’s injured (and getting out of his stealth hardsuit to do it), and expect both guards to rush to his aid so they can hit them with melee weapons quietly
Naturally, this does not work. Trev rolls well below a 10, the next person to go has a chance to act before the guards and also rolls we below a 10. One guard opens fire with his assault rifle, getting Trev good, and the other one gets on the radio and calls in the alert.
Luckily for the players, they made short work of the guard once they did start shooting, with multiple critical successes, and captured the bridge before they were swarmed by marines or the captain could initiate the self destruct. The crew surrendered in short order, and any distress calls failed due to the sabotaged comms array.
Overall, a highly successful mission! Mr. Starfucker is going to have some explaining to do to the medic, though. So you’re saying you got out of your stealth armor to confront the guy with the gun? Oh there were two of them? I see…
(It WAS a very fun moment, and more interesting than a straightforward stealth takedown, but it is definitely a wild choice.)
Not what you think about immediately when some1 call out ‘illusion’ BUT it is the same type\subtype as vail – illusion (glamer).
– of course Im talking about the good old Invisibility spell.
So my player just found out that a nasty bard impersonated him (HE actually used the illusion and was inept doing so) to take out what ever he had saved in the local guild deposit box (said player failed miserably to undertake the bard’s gang and while he was being kept barely alive at their holdout they decided to clean him up for good).
The player used his vast contacts and actually found out the inn that bard was staying at so he decided to go look for him. it was a high class inn with an even higher class casino at ground level. and the smart guy thought the BEST WAY to go past all the guards at the first floor was by being invisible.
because obviously no-one EVER THOUGHT of trying to be invisible and do something cheesy near the cards and dice tables…
He was found out by the resident magickly invested guard at round one of his operation..
This discussion about illusions getting problematic reminds me of an example, not from a RPG though but from another webcomic.
In it, a dark elf lieutenant was explaining how magical rings of illusion are working while a subordinate demonstrated by taking the appearance of a dwarf. The lieutenant was insisting on the fact that it’s an illusion, and dwarves being shorter and wider they should be wary of hitting something they shouldn’t and give themselves away. Meanwhile, the subordinate was goofing around (“Oh look at me, I’m a short stupid hairyman!”) and the lieutenant gave him a dope slap — by aiming above the illusory dwarf’s head, demonstrating her point.
Later, things turned hairy during a confrontation with the city guards, when one of the guards fired his crossbow as a warning shot “above the dwarves’ heads”. Nailed one of the dark elves straight between the eyes.
Most illusions have a big weakness: They’re a visible magical effect, meaning they detect as illusions for **Detect Magic**. Any secure facility that employs people with at least 1st level spells has all entrants screened with DM as basic security.
Thankfully a nice nonmagical Disguise Kit requires rolls to contest.