Fake War Stories

I’ve been running a weekly Call of Cthulhu game wherein each session is a self-contained investigation. A few weeks ago, I had 2 new players in the session who had played DnD before, but never CoC. The immediate difference is that CoC decides to take the track that bullets are very deadly and people take a while to heal from injuries.

Typical gun damage? 1d10.

Typical Investigator health? 8-12 HP.

How fast can you heal? Depending on the GM, anywhere from 1 HP per day to 1 HP per week. It also features a sanity score, so what doesn’t kill might make you crazy.

The session took place (as CoC tends to do) in the 1920s era. At one point the players ended investigating a mansion while looking for its missing owner.

During this investigation, at one point—very suddenly—fungal-like tentacles oozed out of the cracks and the floor and started enveloping one of the investigators. Everyone panicked and attempted to free him, but other pseudopods attacked, hampering any effective effort lest they too get snatched up.

After a few minutes, the fungal pseudopods pulled the unlucky investigator through the floor. The other players hurriedly ran to the basement door and started bashing it down.

They succeeded… only to find that the whole basement is filled with an amoeba, fungus-type thing/abomination.

At the point I realized I had forgotten to ask one of the other players what his investigator was going to do (while the others were bashing down the door.) 

He said “I get the hell out of that house and run to the car!”

One of the players responded, “You’re just going to leave your friend to die?!”  

To which he replied with the best quote I’ve heard describing the deadliness of the system:

“YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND HOW THIS GAME WORKS!”

A few years ago, I was running a D&D 3.5 steampunk pirate campaign (yes, I know, -so- 2007). It started at 1st level but one of the players had wanted to play a “Shepherd Book\Priest with a Past” that would really only work if he started as a Rogue, and then multiclassed to Cleric later on. So, rather than stick the party without a healer for that vulnerable first level, we agreed to let him play another cleric with the expectation that I could find some entertaining way to kill him off by 2nd or 3rd.

My setting had a few crime syndicates and we worked out his back story as a member of one of those mafiosi (the Buoanottis) who would cross paths with our intrepid party. That opportunity came when the party’s ship took anchor at a secluded cove to take on fresh food and water. The party had set off on a foraging expedition and I was going to set up the introduction of the next character by having them run across the corpse of a Buoanotti explorer who was killed by something.

As to what that something was, I rolled on a wandering monster table that was a couple of CR’s higher than usual. I figured that I’d throw something at them that was big, scary and deadly, kill the priest and chase the survivors back to the ship; and continue with the rest of the plot. The party has played a lot of D&D, and I had made up my own wandering monster tables wih a bunch of template buffed monsters (undead elephants, kobolds wth class levels, that sort of thing).

Needless to say, that regardless of what WIzards used for scaling Challenge Ratings by tweaking hit dice or adding templates, these homebrew wandering encounters weren’t balanced at all. I rolled for a zombie tiger. I don’t think it was a dire tiger, but it was certainly something that I expected to give the party a run for their money.

It didn’t.

It failed to even kill its target. What it did achieve, though, was arouse the party’s curiosity. They started asking what an adventuring mobster was doing here in the back of beyond and what the connection was with the undead. There had to be one. So, rather than just telegraph “WANDERING ENCOUNTER! NOTHING TO SEE HERE” I just humored them and said that, “uh, yes, the corpse had a journal and reading through it you realize that he was here prospecting.”

PartyLeader\Swashbuckler: “Prospecting for what?”

DM: “Uh… according to the journal, he was chasing rumors of black onyx in the hills to the north. The Buoanottis might pay handsomely to have this journal returned to them.”

Swashbuckler: “Screw that idea. We should come back here and take the gems for ourselves.”

Priest: “Spellcraft check for seeing if black onyx is a vital spell component for anything. 22.”

DM: “Why, yes, {metagaming cheater}, augmented with your Knowledge (religion) you know that it’s a vital component for necromancy magic.”

Swashbuckler: “So! The presence of the zombie tiger means that the onyx is real and, even better, someone else has found it and is already extracting it for their own purposes! We just have to take it from them.”

DM: “Uh, sure.”

And, so that’s how one wandering monster encounter led to a plot arc that lasted across twelve sessions, and involved a four way contest between the goblinoids who were running the mine, a coven of criminal vampires, a cabal of corrupt Church officials and our own party, who were beginning to display an excellent nose for trouble. I wonder what would have happened if the dice had just landed on the feytouched wolverine instead.

A couple of years ago, my group started a Spycraft game. The game was pitched as a hardboiled, hard sci-fi, Neuromancer-style cyberpunk game. We have the best equipment: Personal stealth wing suits, laser-guided micro-missile-firing guns (which were basically soundless, 8th generation night vision goggles with smart-linked HUDs), we have it all. To a man, all of our characters are hyper-professional special ops types with rigorous training and years of field experience.

So in the second session of the game we are supposed to HALO drop into a top-secret Chinese research and development facility in a southern China demilitarized zone. Our mission is to kidnap or rescue some scientists, depending on who you talked to. We leap from the plane and dive head first into the night. The entire group botches our piloting roles and we miss the target by almost a mile.

Now outside the perimeter, we group up and try to formulate a plan. The GM announces that we see an armored patrol car on a security detail. At once, we assault the vehicle, killing its two passengers and taking their uniforms. The plan becomes the old “steal the uniforms and get past the gate with charm” bit. We drive up to the gate and start sweet talking the guards. There was only one problem. 

None of us are Chinese. None of us even speak Chinese. None of us are even Asian.

We have this international group of characters which includes an Irish sniper, a Russian explosive expert, an American of Israeli descent with an IQ so high that he is borderline precognitive. But none of us saw any holes in this plan…

A horrible firefight ensued which we somehow survived. Sometimes there is just no justice for a GM.

GameSpy did a nice interview with Stephen Colbert back in 2004 on his experiences with gaming—Dungeons and Dragons, specifically. Here’s the full interview, but I particularly liked this first segment:

No board — just dice, just probabilities. It allowed me to enter the world of the books I was reading. I put more effort into that game than I ever did into my schoolwork. 

We were all complete outcasts in school — beyond the fringe, beyond nerds. We were our own sub-dimensional bubble of the school. I’m not even sure we were on the rolls of any of the classes; that’s how outcast we were. 

D&D made quite a little explosion when it first came out. We were close to the Bible Belt, and ministers were preaching on TV against it, saying that it was a cult, telling stories about kids going too far, playing in the sewers and getting swept away when it rained or getting carried away and believing that the games were real and hurting each other with swords or trying to do incantations, demon worship. I remember thinking, “Who’d be stupid enough to believe this was real?” And, while I certainly wished it was real at times, I was sure these were boogyman stories made up by preachers who didn’t like the implications of stories like Tolkein’s, and by what they believed to be dabbling in the occult.

Added bonus: simple, but (I hope), honest, video of Colbert’s tribute sign-off to Gygax

Long ago, in the early 1980’s, our AD&D group was wandering through a dungeon and came upon some loot. Included was a vial with some indeterminate liquid in a very fancy container. We all passed it around, sniffed it, putting a drop on our finger, drop on the tongue, but we couldn’t reach a conclusion as to what was in it. Of course no one had any Identify spells - those were saved for the end of the adventure!

After a minute or so, our ever-impatient Chaotic player says “Fine! I drink the whole thing!”.

The DM blinks and says, “what?”

The player says “I drink it! Now what happens to me?”

The DM smiles, and starts laughing until he can barely breathe. When he calms down enough, he finally manages to say, “that was an Oil of Slipperiness!”

Which, of course, worked. Very well. A lesson in what happens when biology meets magic.

The player immediately had the entire contents of his digestive system, top to bottom, dump onto the floor. We all got a roll to see how fast we could jump back (we all made it out of the blast zone in time). The poor player’s armor was stained completely brown from the waist down.

For the next three days (until the DM finally took pity on him), everything that went in his mouth immediately came out the other end. He gave up wearing armor, leaving it all behind. We all had to make sure we were always upwind or far enough ahead of the smell.

I would like to say he learned from the experience, but I bet that the rest of us learned a lot more than he did!

I’ll just let Vin Diesel explain why we love gaming.

During a spirited campaign of Vampire: The Masquerade(V:TM), my players found perhaps the worst solutions to the simplest of problems. For those of you who have never played V:TM, it centers around a secret underground world of vampires who battle physically and politically over domains of influence.

During this particular game, my group of five players found themselves attempting to break into a drug safe-house in the middle of the ghetto guarded by a couple dozen Hispanic street thugs. The number of guards that had been pushed up after a reconnaissance mission the night before resulted in one of the guards being loudly beat to a pulp and thrown into the dumpster behind the safehouse.

That said, my player base sat together at the table, dumbfounded as how to breach the interior of the building. After last night’s encounter, they were wary of a run-and-gun approach that might result in them taking excess damage. The recon mission had been a stealth mission, so they did not trust their powers of subterfuge.

The lunatic vampire amongst my players smiled with a flash of brilliance and asked for a phonebook. I obliged and he told me that he was going to call for a distraction. What I didn’t anticipate was what he wanted to call for: pizza, more pizza, and Chinese food… and flowers.

EVERYTHING that was open at the time and made deliveries. Through promises of big tips and large orders, they were seducing every local business they could into making a trip out of their way.

Vampires. Creatures of immeasurable influence, masters of strange occult powers that could do everything from wiping a mortal’s mind clean to punching through a stone wall, were calling for fucking delivery boys. I had to take a few minutes to process this. They had just spend thirty minutes calling every Pizza Hut, Dominoes, and Chinese joint. Hell they even called 1-800-FLOWERS.

I made a face. They made their decision.

The following hour, as they watched from a safe distance, there was a small trickle of delivery vehicles. A kid in a beat-up Honda Civic here, a delivery van there, all of them being turned away by the thugs. But it didn’t stop. Delivery vehicles flowed into the area, clogging up the street. Angry Chinese servers and frustrated drivers got out of their cars and began to argue with the hoods. Out of fear or maybe frustration, my NPCs had no choice: one opened fire in the air followed by another taking a pot shot at an enraged Pizza Hut delivery boy. The kid dropped dead on the spot.

What ensued was nothing less than a riot. Police showed up in droves, forcing the thugs to retreat into their hideout where an extended shoot-out left 15 dead (including the poor Pizza boy) and 11 wounded, all because of my smart-ass players.

I created the following to commemorate the next day’s news:

Lesson learned.

Some years ago, we were running a D&D game when a Player Girlfriend decided she wanted in.  It was a relatively high level campaign, around 15 and naturally, being a new player, she decided to roll a dual-classed warrior/mage.

It was a solid party and we carved a bloody swath through the land, despite our often unconscious warrior/mage.  Alas, the Player behind the Character didn’t have a knack for cleverly weaving spells and was underpowered as a pure brawler, despite her efforts to the contrary.  But we persevered.

Some time later we found ourselves on the trail of a Drow plot, taking us into deadly tunnels and caverns filled with devious traps and unseen enemies.  Eventually, the Drow emerged in clever choke and we had a proper battle on our hands.

The Player Girlfriend, however, had had enough of Drow, their poisoned weapons, and the Character unconsciousness that inevitably followed.  She asked for help.  A Meta strategy session ensued as the Party looked over her character sheet.  She had memorized a couple summoning spells: perfect.

“You can summon one of two things,” we told her, “a Celestial Lion or a Celestial Eagle.  They’re like the normal animals, only huge and vicious.”

“I’ll summon the eagle,” she said.

“But it’s a tunnel, like, six feet wide, the eagle will barely be able to move, let along spread its wings…”

“I want to summon the eagle.”

And thus a celestial eagle popped into the Prime Material, in a space so small it couldn’t move, a half-dozen angry Drow in front of it and a ragtag party of heroes behind it.  Not wanting to hack through the bird to get at the Drow, we reluctantly continued into the depths.  The dark elves were not so kind, hacking through our Wall of Hitpoints, though not quickly enough to continue their pursuit.

Some hours later, we reached the edge of the Underdark: in this case a massive, open cavern with no apparent bottom and thousands of feet between the walls.  And, once again, the Drow were upon us, scrambling up the cliffs from below.

“I’ll summon the eagle again,” the Player Girlfriend said.

“You can’t.  You already summoned it today.  Plus, I don’t think it would respond to your summons after last time, anyway,” replied the DM.

“Fine.  I’ll summon the lion.”

“The… lion?”

“Yes.”

“Um.  Okay… where would you like to summon the lion?”

“Over those elves climbing the walls.”

“In midair?”

“Yes.”

Somewhere in the Celestial Plane, a heavenly lion was relaxing on a golden savannah.  It had not a care in the world as it basked in the afternoon sun, absentmindedly grooming.  And then, suddenly, it was dark.  And cold.  And the lion was falling.  Falling into the blackness, but not alone.  As it fell, the lion collected strange little grey men and their swords and bows.  The men seemed agitated as the lion crashed through, shearing them from a nearby rock face, and they impotently slapped at him with their weapons.

And it was, indeed, a very long way down.  As he plunged into the inky blackness, just before blinking back to his own idyllic plane of existence, the lion shouted to the heights:

Never Summon Me Again…

I ran a long-term D&D campaign a while ago (3 years, 30 levels… no cleric), which led to a climactic fight through the Abyss to a face-off with the demon lord Yeenoghu.  They finally tracked him to his throne room, where he brandished his three-headed flail, a weapon that they had heard horrific stories of in regards to its ability to really, really hurt.  He reared his head back, howled a howl of defiance at the adventurers, and promptly lost initiative to the party’s sorceress.

Sorceress: “Casting a spell.  I wish his flail was up his ass.”

DM: “You, er… you what?”

Sorceress: “I wish his flail was up his ass.  Right up there.”

Spell resistance?  Sorceress rolls a natural 20 and breaks it.  Saving throw?  None.

So my big, bad demon lord spent his first turn forcefully removing his own dread weapon from his bunghole, damaging himself grievously in the process, while the party dogpiled him.

I have a bit of a reputation as a DM.  I’m very “let the dice fall where they may.”  This has lead to many an untimely character death.  At the time of this story I was running a Forgotten Realms game.  It had been a six month campaign.  The group was in the midst of re-assembling an “item of power,” or as the last poster put it the MacGuffin.

Anyways, during the course of the game one of the players, a paladin, had died a couple of times.  This being D and D though, he had been raised from the dead with no problems.  It had had the effect of making him a bit gun-shy though.  

The plot finally lead the characters to a dungeon that I had built from scratch over several months.  They got there and I finally described the place to them.   The place looked impregnable, a fortress built in to the side of the mountain.   Guard patrols, traps, monsters.  Old-school.   So, my player looks at the rest of the group, this shining paladin on a holy mission given to him by his god, and says, “Let’s skip it and come back to it, when we’re higher level.”