Oh yes, earlier I mentioned my first D&D game. I was 14 or 15, and my friend had just gotten a set of 3.5 books for his birthday. He was extremely excited about it. Several of us were supposed to come, but I was the only person who showed up. Luckily, his mother had anticipated a small turnout and had been prepared to play if needed.
She'd played some in high school, and she was totally up for it. Of course, it was a different edition, and none of us really knew the rules. We struggled for hours over character creation, eventually ending up with a half-elf rogue with purple hair (me :v) and a druid with a familiar named after the DM's cat Fibonacci (who, for his part, spent the evening whacking our paper minis).
We spend all this time getting our characters together. Great, we think! Time for ADVENTURE! ... his mom's druid died in the first battle.
This was not something he was prepared for. He thinks for a moment and, not wanting to undo all of hour hard work, has me come upon a fountain with a weird red liquid. Somehow I determine it will bring her back! ... undead. Within the space of one battle, we have an undead druid.
So after that, we go on our merry way. A lead brings us to this tower, and we get to the top. We wind up locked in the room, and there's this giant portal to the unknown. We look at it and decide we really don't want any part of it. DM had not planned for that, either.
It's obvious we're going to be railroaded but that doesn't stop us from trying everything we can possibly think of, giggling all the way. We break through the floor into the room below, and he lets us. We even get some mundane loot! Woo! But it's locked too, of course, and we can't get out of it either. Now we're in this supply closet and have to figure out a way back up.
Our druid decides she will throw her familiar up and have him drop us a rope. Great plan, except by DM fiat, Fib just... keeps going. He flies into the portal. Imagine a cat in a tractor beam. We get out somehow, and of course we have to follow because our mascot is there. :P
room topic changed to The Campfire: Well, bard, get barding. Regale us with tales of your old RP experiences. (no tags)
Let's see, it takes a mod to move posts, doesn't it? P:
I'll just link this so the first part of my story is accessible. xD
At any rate, I... can't really recall what happened in the portal! It was some kind of otherworldly steampunky realm full of big clockwork dudes. We did find Fib and get out, eventually. :P
So after this point, I start recruiting people. A couple of my friends had never played before, but they happened to be staying at my house on days I was going over to play, so they joined up too. The first one made... a vampire! Of course. I don't remember if she was statted as one, but she was fluff-wise a vampire.
We are now up to: purple-haired half-elf rogue, an undead druid, and a vampire (or a demon or something like that). I don't remember our alignments, but I'm pretty sure I was chaotic-something. :P
I can't remember what my other friend played, only that she'd never done any kind of RP before ever but totally loved it. I think she played a reasonable character, which is why I can't remember too well. :P But the last addition to our party was my then-boyfriend, who played a dwarf who -- for some reason -- collected the teeth of his fallen opponents.
There was honestly no in-character justification for this band of misfits whatsoever.
@Nyoze No extra powers, but it looked like a big smiley face.
Because this was 10 years ago, I'm not 100% on the sequence of events, so I'm trying to piece it together in a way that makes sense. Let's see...
When we had our whole crew together, we went back to town. We proceeded to buy a bunch of things. I bought a house! And a warhorse! I kept the warhorse in my bag of holding because nobody knew you couldn't actually do that. Everybody else got stuff too. Then, we started to look for intel. And where to you go for intel? A tavern, of course.
This led us out of town, toward a new dungeon. Unfortunately, when we got to the top of the cliff, we turned around to discover that the entire town was quickly going up in flames. Fire. Everywhere. Remember, I had just bought a house.
(Keep in mind that this is a game between friends and none of us are being serious whatsoever, so this wasn't as utterly evil as it sounds. It was really funny even then.)
Luckily, my horse is fine because he's in my bag of holding and nobody realizes that means he should be suffocating.
The town is, well, toast, so we have no choice but to continue to move on. When we get to the next dungeon, we find vampire flowers, Piranha plants, and at the end there's a lich (or something of that nature) who has the +1 sword of smiley face. This is the part I really wish I could remember more about because the DM had abandoned all airs of seriousness and we laughed the entire session.
> town of gingerbread houses > set fire to all of them > "Looks like his town..." > pull out sunglasses, put them on > "... is toast." > YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!
This is about the end of the story until I can remember more details or ask someone who was there. Oh yeah, and my friend made my then-boyfriend and I hold hands for the first time during a session. She literally picked our hands up and put them together. :P
So yes, who else had a story to tell? Was it @Codeacula?
My character is a Werefox Rogue named Callidus that has traveled the countryside as a scout saving dwarves from evil duergar and teaching sylph women to love
So the story for the current campaign setting and the arc that just recently ended is thus:
A demon named Mastiphal has been spreading a curse throughout Europa that converts members of the good races to warped versions of themselves ( Elves become Drow, Dwarves become Duergar, Gnomes become Anti-Gnomes, etc. )
The dwarves are the race most affected by the demons evil machinations however. Normally their tight knit familial communities and their high saves against poisons would help them in situations such as this, but unfortunately this wasnt the case, the curse was of a magical nature and targeted the wrong saves, the dwarves were doomed
The elves were protected mostly by their resistance to magical effects and enchantments
And now I want to be an evil orc warlord who sets up two catapults on the opposite sides of a besieged city, and shoots gnomes and anti-gnomes from them, trying to collide them mid-air.
The city was more recently one of the ones affected by the "Duergar plague", and some of their citizens were changing into creatures unknown to the dwarves
These creatures had yellowed teeth, scraggly unkempt beards, and were anti-social and argumentative to the point of starting fights with one another over the smallest issues
( IE Duergar )
Callidus entered the city as an Ambassador from the town of Burgundy, which was adjacent to Pallet town. ( but not really )
He was accompanied by his long time friend and recently ordained Lord Hiras and his wife Lady Vocaphil
They arrived and began speaking to the dwarves, Callidus, having traveled for long times knew that the best way to butter up a dwarf was to compliment their arms, so he did. This began a long story about the dwarfs ancestors and how his grandpa's grandpa used the same axe and it being passed down his family line, each generation adding its own small details to the weapon.
( On a side note, Dwarf arms are very burly and generally quite hairy )
( Not to be confused with Dwarf arms, which are very shiny, sharp, and well maintained )
In any case, during the meeting two priests with scraggly unkempt beards wearing black armor burst into the room, axes gleaming in the firelight of the inn the talk was taking place at
They accused the Dwarf lord Jovin of abusing his power and everyone got up from their seats, brandishing various weapons.
I have my first time as a player, or my first time GMing a Shadowrun campaign. One is a tale of mysticism, and the other is a tale of of the accidental mundane.
Anyway during the combat one of the evil priests pulled a small bag off of their waist and was fumbling to get it open, at the same time Callidus did a backflip off of a table over the dwarf and used a dagger to cut the strings of the pouch, catching it in his hand
The priest spun on Callidus and the Dwarf lord Jovin's axe caught the priest in the back, dropping him, while his ally priest was cut down by the other duergar
> Hey, sweet guns! "Thanks, I'm pretty proud of my collection." Uh, I mean, good muscles! "Thanks, I fished them outta the ocean just this morning." What I mean is, good arms. "Yeap, the family crest, I like to keep those polished." No, I mean nice biceps!
@Codeacula Oh no, not at all! Jazz hands is a pretty good ending note after all. xD I just knew the floating lich tower had not come up yet, so I had better context.
This was my first time GMing a game I didn't make. When I was in high school I was all about making the games because for some reason I didn't like D&D but I wanted the setting.
I got my closest friends together to give it a try. I had always loved Shadowrun since I played the SNES version and really wanted to finally give the tabletop game a try.
I, of course, did the new GM thing, and spent a week planning the details of what would be their first run, coming up with an excellent intro run, giving them the chance to learn all of the elements they need
The run was simple: Force a college professor to change the list of students accepted into their program to include a high-level corp's kid.
I set it up so that each path to research would trigger a runner to come after them in return, as part of the introduction into combat. There were in all four NPCs I spent half a day each making.
Coming up with a little backstory, generating them from the book, all the fun stuff.
I made a super huge mistake, though, and decided I'm going to "play fair"
You know, that phrase most players use to try and banish their GM's
I give my players the backstory, tell them how they had gotten together, they did their meeting with Mr. Johnson, and everything went well
When they got done with the meeting, they looked at each other to figure out what to do next. I would drop hints, but I wanted to see if they would pick it up on their own.
So, they decided to go sleep. While their characters were sleeping, they discussed their strategy, how they would handle the next day. So they had their technomancer do a search. Fortunately for them, I notoriously roll bad dice.
(It helps for D&D campaigns, since it's usually bad enough for fun but not so bad I die)
I'm going through my list of runners to send after them, excited that I'll be able to start alluding to the fact they're being chased, but the technomancer scrapes data from the school's host without leaving any trace at all, as far as dice rolls are concerned.
I try to push them into investigating the people their target knows with subtle hints, but either they're too subtle or they don't care and decide to just go over to the professor's house and "see what we can make happen"
So, their plan is to have the technomancer (who is a vagrant) go over to the professor's house and try to hack the comm link. I find some security goons I drew up, assuming his sneaking rolls fail.
Of course, they don't. He manages to sneak into the professor's front yard, and proceeds to lie down and to begin hacking.
They rest of the party stayed away, so all that's there is a hobo in the grass apparently asleep, but this whole time he's breaking into the professor's commlink.
Of course, every single roll I do just makes it easier for him, and he manages to steal a video of the professor doing some unsavory stuff with people other than his spouse. The technomancer comes back too, walks away, and nothing was triggered.
At this point I'm a bit upset, because I spent all this time doing my planning and my stupid dice rolls are messing it up. I don't want to be the GM who is going to inflict pain and agony just because they players are rolling too well.
They send a message to the teacher with a copy of the video basically demanding he put the student on or else that gets out. Then they go to sleep
They next day was when they were supposed to get attacked, but instead I have nothing, because I'm following my rules.
I'm being a "fair" and "just" GM
They go to collect the pay from the Mr. Johnson, and I make them have to do it at a slammin' elf night club. The main street sam of the group has the uncouth quality, so I make it a point to throw him in every single terrible situation I can justify
They all know sending him in is a bad idea, but they're going to try it anyway
Outside of inflicting pain and agony, I would think that the Professor would attempt to retaliate to get the video back before just submitting to their demands, and being a player I'd expect something to go wrong at that point, otherwise there's absolutely no point there being anyone else except the Technomancer in the party. :(
I code, so...it's either super easy or super hard, and the super hard stuff is usually either solved by going to the bathroom, taking a shower, or going to sleep
@Sandwich Congratulations. That is officially the first time anyone has made me glad to go to a private school. They even set aside a room for us for D&D/Warhammer... :\
Nobody cared about us having RPGs in my club's case. We just had two main issues. First, our sponsor wouldn't come to our meetings. They just signed on as our sponsor because someone asked them to. Eventually we weren't allowed to have meetings at school without our sponsor, and that didn't happen.
We tried to play Shadowrun one time... key word tried. The behavior was so exceedingly bad that day (even in a club member's home) that the president decided to end things, and me and the like... two other serious people agreed wholeheartedly. xD
On the subject of bad rolls, I will always remember Veyfiel the Shinymancer. This was a party of like 5 sleep-deprived teenage girls at a sleepover who decided, hey, let's play some D&D! Right now! Veyfiel was actually a sorcerer, but something or other led to him being designated Shinymancer.
> More Dakka. You can use Create Advantage to place a free invoke on your gun, plus one more for each time you've used this stunt with that gun before now. After you do this, roll Overcome vs the number of free invokes on that gun to prevent it exploding and dealing that much damage to you and everyone near you.
@Sandwich Heh. He flubbed everything else, so why not. :v
The setup our GM devised was a tower with a bunch of doors, and there were really weird things behind each one, some very dangerous. Pretty early on we realized that just opening doors was not smart. We were scouting ahead with familiars as well as stopping to listen at each door before entering.
Unfortunately, neither Veyfiel nor his bat familiar could succeed at listen checks.
Now I want to make a dungeon of weird angles and magical darkness to watch pc's bump into walls they don't know are there... You guys give me good ideas :)
At some point the DM told Veyfiel, who'd rolled like a 2 again, something about what the door felt like, and I think he wound up thanking it and calling it a nice door. The DM then decided that Veyfiel spoke door. She told me to write it under my languages. For the rest of the session, doors spoke to Veyfiel. Mostly, doors are not very smart.
Oh, he's that optical illusion guy, I get where you are going now. Leave a trail of breadcrumbs as you walk up the stairs and then run into your own trail without going downwards.
I think we had some Escheresque rooms in the tower we were exploring in that game, actually. Then one room was a sea of molten lava, one was an actual sea complete with serpent (I think we just had a nice chat with him), etc.
Oh yes, and there was one point where I think everyone else could hear perfectly well what was going on. Poor, sweet Veyfiel failed his listen check again and proudly announced, "This door sounds like a door!"
If I GM anything it'll probably either be Fate or Roll For Shoes, so even more options. It'd work nicely if I ever get a Digimon game together, actually.
A very light game where your first skill is Do Anything, and things you roll successfully become increasingly better but also increasingly specific skills.
Now it feels like we should make a RFS room to play with... Have you guys got a bit of time? Work is quiet as at the moment, and none of my PBP's are replying. And I don't have any funny stories to tell, so making some sounds like a plan :D
The Campfire
The Campfire