Bartoneus and joshx0rfz have started talking about some of their favorite RPG moments, and I was asked to share mine. I tend to GM much more than play, so mine are more about what my players have done than what I’ve done as a player. This story is always the first one that comes to mind when asked, and I present it here for your enjoyment.
Call of Cthulhu d20, which would become the first “Conspiracy University” game I ran. The setting was the college we attended, with everyone playing college students. Despite it being a CoC game, the party had been through a number of adventures together and no one had been killed or driven permanently insane.
I remember throwing together the adventure somewhat haphazardly- usually there was a lot more going on in each adventure, but this one was straightforward. The party discovered the ruins of an old Native American city beneath the steam tunnels of the university. Paintings and writings told the story of how the Miami tribe sealed away servants of “The Lord of Nightmares” who happened to be green, large, and have tentacles on his face. The images depicted these artifacts, which the party uncovered in the ruins.
Then in a cave, they found a Mind Flayer, one of the servants who had been driven underground and was trying to find the artifacts for himself. My thought in planning the adventure was that they’d figure out the artifacts were magic and use it against him. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen, and they were up against a Mind Flayer, which lemme tell you is brutal to a Call of Cthulhu party. Mind blast took down most of them. Some tentacle attacks dropped a party member to bleeding. Only two were left standing. And that’s when Jason LaRue, “World’s Greatest Lover”, took a stand and declared he was going to hold off the beast while everyone else escaped. The other person left standing grabbed the other party members’ stunned forms and hauled them away. They looked back in horror as I made the Mind Flayer’s tentacle attack routine, hit with all four tentacles, and crushed in Jason’s skull.
A major league sanity check later, the party escaped to rest and recover, and finally figured out what the artifacts were for. They returned to the scene to find poor Jason’s corpse (sans brain), and no sign of the creature.
However, Jason’s heroic sacrifice isn’t what makes this my favorite. It’s what happened next.
Tabitha “Cole” Coleman wasn’t exactly the sanest character to start with, using wisdom as her dump stat, and doing all kinds of crazy things. She wasn’t sure that the Mayan knife she had picked up actually talked to her or if she was just a little nuts.
And waaaaay back in the first adventure, she had been the one to take a Lovecraftian Book full of spells. (This first adventure was The End of Paradise, the awesome adventure included in the book.) One of those spells, long forgotten by me, was Summon Yog-Sothoth. Her plan was quite simple: she was going to Summon Yog-Sothoth and get him to resurrect Jason.
What followed was an adventure, run pretty much with just her, but with everyone else in the group (especially Jason’s player) enthralled. Cole proceeded to seduce a frat boy in a bar, and use him as a sacrifice to Yog-Sothoth (as requirement for the spell.) She hauled both the frat boy and Jason’s corpse up to one of the Bell Towers at the University, having decided that it made the most sense as a place to summon.
And so she cast the spell. It cost her a significant chunk of her already low sanity (and sending her into a torpor for a bit) but it worked. (After all that awesome work, how could I have it fail?)
Of course, there was a price to be paid, and Jason came back a bit… wrong, and the Elder God kept the Bell Tower, causing some issues down the road. But that single session, starting from a game gone awry, is one of my favorite RPG moments of all time.
So what’s your favorite RPG moment?
double fisting repeating crossbows while my dog sniffs out a stealthed baddy? win….
2nd Edition AD&D. I’m playing a bard with zero combat ability, as this was primarily a role play campaign, but I find myself in combat. The rest of the party is kicking goblin butt, and I’m doing jack. Finally, I say “screw this” and grab up goblin heads, tie rope to them, and start swinging them over my head. The goblins freak out and take off running.
Hence how a bard with no combat skills defeated a whole tribe of goblins 😀
Tomcat1066’s last post: The Race Race
My favorite moment was in a Call of Cthulhu RPG in which one of the players attempted to “wing” a fleeing crazed homless man with his Desert Eagle. Granted, the man was “stopped” but he wasn’t of much use for questioning after his leg was blown off.
A second was in that same campaign when they were facing off with a werewolf. Lacking most any weapons one of the players whos theme was “Garage Mechanic” put his driving skill to good use, driving UP the local government office buildings steps in his truck to run the werewolf down. Then attempting to run him over again and again with the mostly destroyed vehicle.
Two seperate instances, but they’re both from the same modified Ninjas & Superspies campaign (modern day, but altered using the magic rules from Palladium and Rifts):
1) Party is fighting an Immortal (yeah, from Highlander). He has his sights set on another character (also controlled by me), and no one can do anything before he lops the guy’s head off. Then this happens:
Me: “Wait, I’m still invisible, right?”
GM: “Yeah, but your pistol won’t do enough damage to drop him before he gets to NPC”
Me: “He’s walking right past me and can’t see me. Can’t I put my Desert Eagle up to his temple and pull the trigger?”
GM: (Mouth hangs open. He obviously hasn’t thought of this) “Yeah…”
Long story short, we drop the sword-guy right before he gets to his target. We watch as his head starts re-forming and healing, and give the guy he was going after a sword, tell him to take the head off, and leave the room. He picks up the sword, takes a few practice swings as the neck, almost pukes, then decides not to take any chances with missing and breaking the blade. He kneels down next to the body and starts using the katana to saw at the other guy’s neck, stopping and re-starting every now and then to cut back through any tissue that re-forms behind the blade.
2) We’re in Europe chasing down a bad guy. He entered a dungeon through the altar in this abandoned church. We knew the entrance was under the altar, but had no idea as to how to move it. It was too heavy to push or lift, and no one knew of any command words or secret latches to pull. That’s when we busted out with the Stone to Flesh scroll that the GM forgot we had and turned the altar into a huge block of Spam (we tasted it) that we had very little difficulty chopping through.
Flaming undead.
Krog’s axe between Vapora’s eyes.
“Hello, Son!”