Random Encounter
If this scene is familiar to any of you grognards, then congratulations. You’ve been gaming for a lot longer than I have. This encounter and the gnomish captain’s dialogue are lifted directly from the 1985 Dungeons & Dragons Module B8: “Journey to The Rock.”
…A dozen or so more humanoids are picking up round logs from the rear of the ship and carrying them as quickly as they can to the front of the ship, where they drop the logs in the ship’s path to serve as rollers. Even so, the weight of the ship pushes the logs into the soft sand, and the pullers are straining with all their might against the obstinate bulk. Standing atop the foredeck is a small humanoid with a beard almost as long as he is tall. He is shouting through a megaphone, exhorting his workers to pull harder and sing louder.
I for one love this type of encounter. It takes place in the middle of a parched desert, and it introduces a completely unexpected element to the game world. And even though the concept is silly (the gnome read a book about sailing, built a ship, and is now trying to find the sea) the encounter teaches its lesson beautifully: Players should not get too comfortable. This is a game where literally anything can happen. As a part of the B-Series, a group of introductory modules designed for use with the Basic Dungeons and Dragons rules system, that lesson is a valuable one for new players. However, I’d go a step farther and say that it’s a good lesson for all players. After all, no one goes adventuring in search of the known.
Questions of the day then: What’s the weirdest, most out-of-left-field-bizarre encounter you’ve ever come across as a PC? What’s the weirdest encounter you’ve inflicted on your players?
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Hmm, this kinda gives me an idea for a campaign or part of a campaign where beasts are showing up and attacking the PC’s in places where they don’t belong. A mammoth in the desert, a dragon turtle in a small, mountain pond, troglodytes in the trees! See how long it takes the PC’s to realise that they’re out of place, and someone is sending these things after them…
I can practically feel the smug wafting off of future-you.
Player: “Why the crap is there a mammoth out here?
You: “Why indeed? Sinister laugh.”
Don’t forget polar bears on tropical islands.
Well it ties into the larger plot, but in my game there was a surprise Aboleth in a mine (flooded) on a mountainside. Aboleth’s and mountains…don’t really belong together.
Naw man. Aboleths and mountains are a classic!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWNZdOY94ko
I was pretty amazed during high-school when, during a game, a Werechicken tried to take over a village with his crossbow armed dire chicken army.
That was our “tucker’s kobold” if i ever see one, our characters almost literally rolled to not shit theire pants when a chicken was in sight
They make natural fighters:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4WGQmWcrbs
A majority of my DMs have been pretty straightforward and I can’t remember if they pulled shenanigans like that or not off the top of my head. What I -do- remember, however, is running a scene of my own on a D&D chat.
The PCs all collapsed wherever they were within the home city, and gathered together in an ethereal plane where they couldn’t tell what was real or not. A rumbling of rocks greeted them as stones in quantity rolled down a mountainside at them, which they dodged to the best of their ability. After this, I drove the point home that they were not getting out of this…illusion or what have you, easily.
I had them roll perception checks, and the ones that rolled high noticed something coming out of the sky. It was a young boy, pretty ragged looking, impoverished, destitute, pitiable, who landed in front of them. After some conversation, he told them he didn’t need their charity, it wasn’t worth it for someone like him. He was pretty much ‘extra’ he said, lots of boys like him floating around, they come and go all the time. Sometimes he gets a bone thrown for him, sometimes it gets stolen, didn’t really matter much to him.
He did have a problem, though. He’d killed someone with a hand crossbow, and his folks wanted revenge. He felt it was a shame, since he hadn’t been around too long…
Maybe by this point you get that I ran the entirety of Bohemian Rhapsody: The Adventure. I had the PCs do Perform: Dance checks (or a more difficult Dex check) to get across a pit where the only footholds required skillful execution of the Fandango, and there was a room with the password Galileo Galileo Galileo Galileo Galileo Figaro Magnifico, accompanied by a (bearded) devil set aside for them.
The players that I keep in contact with still remember gleefully.
Nice! I’ve always wanted to run a “van art” campaign in which every session is themed off on an 80s power ballad. At the end of the campaign everybody gets a mix tape.
That is awesome.
How long did it take them to figure it out?
My best friend of the group asked his question just after I gave them the Fandango Dance Pit, most of them realized after I ran them through an electricity/sonic trap, followed by the fear trap that would have put them back into the thunderbolt and lightning if they hadn’t disabled it, and all doubts were cleared up when they saw the Galileo Door.
So weirdest thing I’ve had a GM throw at me as a player was definitely a chupacabra.
Oh you want some kind of tale or explanation to go with that? Ok fine.
So it was a Shadowrun game and the team was actually not runners, but a team of Aztechnology “problem solvers”. As far as I can recall our team was *officially* regarded as simultaneously the best AND the worst such team in the whole globe spanning company. The reason for being the best was because when we were sent out to solve a problem, no matter the difficulty, we solved it without having to come back to base nor needed any kind of backup or reinforcements. The reason for being the worst was because it was very simple to sum up our solution to any problem as explosive, note the lack of quotation marks. Every mission ended loud and, unless physically impossible, property damage. Even stealth missions.
I’ll save the other tales for another time, but on this particular mission we were sent out to deal with a suspected chupacabra sighting, out in the wilderness (because apparently someone was paying attention to our MO). We weren’t super sure it was actually going to be a chupacabra, but we planned for it. Namely by purchasing a goat, cutting it open, stuffing it full of C4, sowing it back shut, and setting up camp for the night prepared to detonate it if we heard screams in the middle of the night. And we sure did. Of course it turned out the screams we heard were one of out teammates getting attacked by the chupacabra, but the member of the team with the detonator didn’t know that. It ended well enough for us though since the chupacabra was still caught in the blast anyway. Of course so were at least a few members of the team. But everyone came out of it ok and like we did to any still living hostile, we pumped the chupacabra full of EX-explosive rounds until it was no longer a problem.
While that was the weirdest specific thing the GM threw at us, it was probably the least absurd mission of the campaign in general.
As for weird stuff I’ve done to players, I once ran a TFOS game where I made an actual maze for the players to run through full of crazy stuff and at the end I moved the goalpost by…. literally having the goal post run away from them.
The goalpost literally…? I mean, did it grow robot legs, lol?
My favorite moment in Shadowrun was a dumb little improv thing from the group’s first session. I was a low-tech Cajun combat troll / small time con man. He stole a tiny Supermart vest from the trash, then accosted shoppers at the door, demanding to see their receipts. He’d then send them off to customer service while he “watched the merchandise.” As soon as the customer was out of sight he’d throw their big-screen TVs and gaming rigs onto the back of his moped and speed away, giant troll-ass hanging off of either side. It was good times.
I can’t recall, but something like that yes. =D
Heh, yeah. Shadowrun is full of opportunities for comedy. Like stealing a billion nuyen worth of a brand new designer drug out from under a megacorp, the russian mob, and the yakuza. Though that’s a tale for another time.
I’ve been STing Exalted for a some years now, and at one point they were wandering the deserts of the south when they encountered “long parallel metal beams crossed by wood sections at even intervals”, which the players followed to a small town. It took some of the players a few hours to realize that I had /literally/ railroaded them!
You clever bastard… I hope they had a satisfying gun fight with some righteous devil practitioners.
Could have happened if I’d know about that particular martial art at the time, but this was in the beginning of my dive into Exalted.
Goddamn. Hatrats.
I gather you had to fight this guy: https://taestfulreviews.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/remycontrolslinguini.jpg
Worse. They come in nines, and are able to cast only first level spells, selected at random from the magician hats they wear.
Kill one? Now there are eight, and they all cast only second level spells.
Kill another? Seven. Third-level casting.
You see where this is going. If you kill them one by one, you could end up with a randomised magician rat with twenty levels in full-caster of choice. They’ve wiped out entire parties before for this reason, when the players don’t catch on. LUCKILY, I noticed that the DM wasn’t asking for damage rolls; if you hit at all, they disappeared in a puff of smoke… so Doc chucked an Alchemists Fire in their midst, killing them all on Round 2.
AoE: Kills rats dead.
Aha, yup! Single-target just creates one very angry full-caster, albeit the squishiest one you’ve ever seen.
While a GM on a Pendragon game, where my players were on the Grail Quest, they were crossing paths with the Roadrunner, and Will E. Coyote.
And then they found the Grail Castle, and the strict christian (sort of Templar) knight failed all the tests, the (semi-)jewish knight got two the the three tests\questions right, and the (pagan) pictish knight aced them all, was offered the Grail, and then turned it down: Nah, thats not my thing, you know. I only came along to help the others.
I expected you to say that the Grail Castle was painted on the side of a cliff.
Beep Beep!
My players once happened upon a city where a Mind Flayer was creating a powerful effect that made a number of otherwise terrifying monsters believe they were ordinary people, and made anyone who didn’t make their Will save believe it as well. It took them a while to figure everything out, and in the mean time, the bard ended up having an intimate encounter with a Rakshasa and a Bugbear. The players’ favorite part of the whole thing was a Medusa who wore a blindfold and had a seeing-eye dog.
That’s some good barding right there. You never pass on a chance to Captain Kirk it up with exotic lifeforms!
Yeah, that Rakshasa curse is nothing to mess with, though… “Why am I having nightmares all the time and wake up still tired?” is a weird symptom for an STD.
I’ve seen weirder: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3235888/
Hmm, never actually used it (I built it for a competition), but the monstrosity I dubbed Futility is a flying swarm of vampiric roses in the shape of a winged anthropomorphic wolverine, wielding the powers of soul and hatred to crush the heroes. http://bit.ly/2XGBURC
(The first story section is easy to find, the other three are in the CR sections).
I had a table for weird random encounters that I hacked together a Python script to automate, and used it maybe half a dozen times before the party started shadow-walking everywhere. But one of those rolls was worth it.
The players were hiking through a forest and came across a goblin village in the road. Literally built on topnof the road, in their path, a line of little huts. (The goblins said it was the only open land around.)
The goblins were surprisingly peaceful, so the players didn’t want to just murder them; instead, they offered to move the huts out of the road so nobody else would destroy the village.
I started calling for Dexterity checks to push the huts carefully enough to not destroy them. After a couple of failures, the goblins were no longer eager to move their village…but they were maybe 20-30 goblins against a party of mid-level Pathfinder characters. So the party destroyed all but two of the huts.
Then one of the characters* set the huts on fire and started murdering goblins. Because I guess she just needed to blow off some steam after destroying their homes.
*Not the one played by the player I’ve previously referred to as Galaxy-Brain. If she comes up again, I’ll call her the murderhobo so you can connect everything in the GWG Gaming Expanded Universe if that’s a thing you’re trying to do.
I blame the three consecutive comics that inspired interrelated comments.