Tomb of the Unknown Potion
So there you are, looting the corpses of your enemies like a good little adventurer. You’ve taken the goblin’s couple of grubby copper, stripped him of his rusty chainmail, and so find yourself pawing through his distinctly unpleasant messenger bag. That’s when you hear it: the telltale clink of glass. Looks like mean green was packing some potions.
What happens next is proof that GMs are evil, black-hearted creatures. There in the moment of your triumph, when you should be enjoying the fruits of your labors (read: your murder of short green people), you’re now faced with a new challenge. What the crap does the potion do?
If you’re fortunate enough to have a wizard, and if that wizard if fortunate enough to possess the identify spell, then you’ve got your answer. However, I find that murky liquids and unlabeled bottles aren’t quite the same thing as regular treasure. You know they’re different because your GM is peering over his screen like a street vendor watching some rube bite into to a “premium cut” hot dog. The pressure mounts, sweat beads on your forehead, and you know there’s no choice but to try your luck.
Like we said back in “P is for Poison,” there ain’t no Food and Drug Administration in fantasy land. No human being in his right mind would drink the crap you’re likely to loot off of a goblin corpse. Yet here we are. All eyes are on you. You’ve got to drink the goblin juice.
At this point you might have guessed that I’m talking about more than literal potions. The guess-and-check school of encounter design has more to do with pushing your luck than winning schwag. For example, you might think that coating your hand in the slightly-magical water will allow you to safely retrieve the maguffin from the furnace, but there’s only one way to find out. If you’re of the clerical persuasion, perhaps you’ve got to make a literal leap of faith. As in today’s comic, you might be a naive catgirl trying to score free hooch from the local laboratory tavern. And maybe—just maybe—sticking your head into the devil’s mouth is a good idea.
So how about it? Have you ever had to gamble on a hunch? What happened? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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In one campaign we played, we we little 4th level adventurers trying to solve a strange series of murders in a small coastal town and discover why the area had been in a non-stop torrential downpour for the past month. Long story short, we find this cave overlooking the sea wherein the bbeg has his hands in a stone bowl sunken into the floor, two npcs on nearby sacrificial mounds with their blood draining into the bowl, and giant rats flanking them. As we look out into the ocean we see in the distance a surge in the water and a monstrous shadow lurking below it.
We figured out pretty quickly that we were on a timer and rushed to fight the bbeg. Problem was that though we could hurt him, he did not seem to react to pain and was supernaturally strong. The surge was getting closer and c form eventually enough that we could make out the form underneath it: the kraken. A successful knowledge check reveals that the alter is giving bbeg a conduit to his deity and allowing him to summon the kraken. That’s when our bard took the gamble: she placed a shatter spell in the middle of the bowl, hoping to crack it and disrupt the ritual. Rolls 28 damage, which is enough to crack but not destroy the bowl, but it is enough to blast the bbeg into a thousand chunks.
Fortunately (read: DM mercy), before we could do anything else, the DM had the cleric roll Religion to get the sense that the alter was deity neutral; it could contact any deity, though it was an extremely dangerous prospect, and he used it to get help from his god to turn back the kraken.
Afterwards, the DM told us that he had given the bowl 30 hp, so the bard’s shatter left it with literally 2 hp left. However, destroying it wouldn’t have saved us; the bbeg had already given the summoning call, and the bowl was the only way to turn the kraken back. If the bard had rolled 2 higher damage we level 4 adventurers would have no way to turn the kraken and would have to fight.
So basically, our bard gambled, made the wrong hunch, and by sheer luck that just barely didn’t doom us all.
I submit that the bowl was in fact connected to a particular deity: Polyhedros, God of fortunate dice rolls.
I forgot to mention this in the text, but the deity our cleric worshipped? Pun Pun, kobold god of munchkinry. Were that he were only more able in the practical application of his faith, we would not have had to rely on Polyhedros, the fickle plastic
I have done this WAY to many times as a GM, mostly in the form of magic horse liquid.
Horse liquid! We meet again.
When we last left off, I was a gender swapped kobold sorcerer with pink hair and an orcish bloodline. I also had a +2 dex, -2 con, -4 cha stat array. Tough to get much worse than that.
I drink the horse liquid! What happens?
Let’s see…
You grow to medium size, and darkness and light are now inverted for you.
Wait a minute. You mean to tell me that my stat array just became +2 Str, -2 Con, -4 Cha? Lando! Get in here!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-sA-NqMlvI
You know, Magus always seemed slightly off. Couldn’t put my finger on it. But I get it, now; She’s using an archetype that switches Intelligence for Charisma. Also, it’s good to see the Alchemist again.
One of my PFS characters is Sten the Vanaran Fire Kineticist. He’s trying as hard as he can to follow his dream of becoming a powerful wizard in his own special way. He doesn’t have any magic beyond “Burn Stuff” and “Burn A Whole Bunch Of Stuff” but he does have a couple ranks in Use Magic Device and a wand of Identify.
In his half dozen adventures, he’s spent two of them as the party’s only magic item specialist. And you know that wand will bust on nat-1 rolls midway through the adventure. One time, he found a scroll that no one could check and his wand wasn’t on speaking terms with him at the time. So he blindly activates it, targets himself, and becomes the proud owner of an expended scroll of Magic Missile.
(Seriously, if you’re playing a caster that can cast Detect Magic, why don’t you have ranks in Spellcraft? I don’t want to tell people how to build their characters, but it reaches the point where you have a certain responsibility to the party.)
Suffice it to say she’s book smart.
I couldn’t get a handle on her character for the longest time. Then I realized she is hopelessly naive and has the same voice as BMO from Adventure Time.
Sounds a bit like that Monk I played- the one who learned all the proper adventuring etiquette from reading cheap dime-novels and refused to make Sense Motive checks.
It was his unspoken mission to absolutely kill any chance for angst or grim-dark to creep into our setting.
I once had a Star-Nosed Moleman Cleric drink some sacred water from a spring, that we were supposed to recover. I then passed out and met my deity, who gave me a quest to dig to the center of the planet. It’s also possible that the spring was filled with dangerous hallucinogenic bacteria and I got stupidly sick off it and spent 12 hours in a coma while the rest of my team finished the adventure while lugging me around in scale mail.
So… How was the center of the planet?
I was in college when Gary Gygax died, and someone in our group decided that running Tomb of Horrors would be a fitting memorial, especially for a bunch of us newbies that had never experienced it before. The plan was to start after dinner and make it a drinking game of sorts, playing long into the night until we were either all dead or passed. Standard nerdy-kid stuff. The GM instructed us to bring at least 2 backup characters apiece.
Anywho, we managed to avoid falling for the “stick your arm in the statue’s mouth” bit, but there was an ugly looking painting or mural or something in the first hallway, and the Paladin decided that it was a tribute to evil or something so he’s gonna smash it with his hammer. Turns out there was a Gargoyle hiding behind the wall, it pops out, full-attacks the Paladin, and kills him in one turn.
Distance from main entrance to first death: about 20 feet.
Unfortunately, I can never play through the Tomb of Horrors. I got tired of hearing about this legendary thing but never getting a chance to play it, so I decided to read through the module myself. That mess is straight up unfair.
I hope you all did a shot in memory of that poor paladin.
From what I heard, it wasn’t designed to be fair- it was intentionally set up to kill everyone who walked in the front door. The creative part mostly comes in how unexpected the deaths will be, not just that there’s a giant red dragon with 80000 HP that you’re party can’t beat.
Intention in design is an interesting concept for me. Trying to play Tomb of Horrors with your favorite character after a years-long “normal difficulty” campaign sounds like a terrible idea. If you’re just going in there to watch characters explode and drink heavily it sounds like a blast.
I had a brief chat with some of the Fantasy Flight guys at the last Dragon Con. I asked why we can’t have more descriptive blurbs on the back of boardgame games. You know, ones that actually tell you if you’re holding a worker placement game with draft elements or a cooperative dice fest with a traitor mechanic. I imagine a small label with bullet point keywords similar to this:
https://boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgamemechanic
The answer was that you want to be somewhat vague in your description for marketing reasons. You want the guy that “hates eurogames” to give your game a shot. In the same way, I imagine Tomb of Horrors’ status as “the really difficult module” is a selling point. Unfortunately, “really difficult” is too vague to help unsuspecting players understand how screwed they really are.
It’s weird seeing a magus be so… “hopelessly naive” when the only magus I’ve ever played with is a super intelligent badass
Our party was tasked with destroying an ancient council of wizards by one of said wizards, who offed herself afterwards. The world can’t be at peace with them alive. However, one of them convinced us he was good and would help us deal with the rest. This blew up in our face much as that drink is probably gonna do to poor Magus.
But! We got him eventually… only 6 more wizards to go…
I think Magus is one of those characters defined more by her race than her class. Recall her first dialogue:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/recurring-villains
Also recall this very good advice when selecting new party members:
https://mattrhodesart.deviantart.com/art/We-are-NOT-taking-the-wizard-626887777
Well he wasn’t a party member, but he was a trade lord for one of the largest cities in the area… So killing him would’ve been tough to do without trouble, but we did it and have proof of him being a jackass
Also, have we seen Magus actually do any uh, magus-like things?
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/nova
I’m getting a definite sense of “High Int, Low Wis” from her (or swapping Int for Cha, like the other guy said). And the cat thing, of course.
I got curious and went for a Google. I don’t think there’s a way to make Charisma a magus’s casting stat. I might have to invent an archetype.
Literally Eldritch Scion lmao https://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/base-classes/magus/archetypes/paizo-magus-archetypes/eldritch-scion/
It’s been out since 2014
Eldritch Scion would be what you’re looking for.
Huh. As it turns out, old threads on the Paizo forums are not definitive. Cheers!
In our D&D 5E game we once found a weird looking chair in an abandoned evil child experimentation facility, that you strapped in and then huge rings spun around it.
My Wood Elf Monk being of high Wis, but still only being a kid by Elven standards (20-21 years old), decided to sit in the chair and have one of the others activate the thing.
The others randomly saw me wink out of existence. I suddenly found myself at a table talking to one of aspects of the Shadow (of the less pleasant Eberron gods). It was not a pleasant conversation, luckily my friends opened a portal and managed to drag me out of there in one piece.
I think I saw this movie: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/TSaO9VGjLXc/hqdefault.jpg
I hope you guy had Perform (poetry).