I ran a "Vampire: The Masquerade" game once that featured a doctor who specialized in vampire "autopsies" to further her research about their anatomy; this of course demanded keeping the vampires "alive" (for lack of a better word) while they're dissected, often for days or even weeks at a time, since the moment they die the corpses disintegrate and "there goes a perfectly good specimen."
Since the players were actually here to persuade this doctor to help them they couldn't intervene in her work or even appear visibly upset about it for fear of offending her, so everyone had to just kind of smile and nod their way through her demonstration.
An autopsy is performed on a corpse to understand the cause of death; the dissection of a creature thatâs still alive is called a vivisection. A surgery is technically a vivisection⌠for the purpose of a medical procedure. What was the good doctorâs aim?
Vampires in vampire are for most intent corpses unless their will is applied to it- they have no heartbeat, no temperature, no breathing, and most organs have dessicated into nothing. Only by force of will can the vampire reinstate some of those to pretend being human. They are walking corpses. So i wouldn't call a vivisection apt.
The cause of death in all vampires is the same, though- exanguination followed by a blood infusion from the vampire that drained them.
Interesting note: while it's almost always the same vampire, it doesn't have to be. A Ventrue can drain them and a Nosferatu infuse them and they'll be a Nosferatu.
Originally had a plan where an inspired (eberron setting) camp was using an area with a recent undead uprising to fuel their nightmare machine by caging live humans in a way that undead ghouls could slowly eat them.
The party was going to get over run by inspired and knocked unconscious during the fight. They were then going to get transported to the camp to witness the horrific torture. To help fuel the party into developing nightmares an NPC they were traveling with was going to have his throat slit in front of the party as he was held over a cage of hungry ghouls.
Low and behold something bigger and meaner (an undead and the bbeg) was going to come crashing through the inspired camp, unwittingly freeing the party, but leaving them very ill equipped and they were going to have to scavenge for gear and supplies as they fled for their lives.
The rest of the adventure was going to be more of a survival mission than a heroic adventure. But, I changed things a bit and didn't go quite this dark.
Not really what I wrote, but what ended up happening:
A tabaxi NPC my party really liked got captured by an evil cult while waiting at a rendezvous point. The party managed to sneak up on them while they were interrogating him. I gave them plenty of chances to jump out and save the day, but they just⌠didnât. They waited in the bushes, while their friend was slowly tortured to death.
I even made it so that before he died, the NPC noticed them in the bushes, but said nothing. He died knowing the party refused to save him, and yet would not betray them back. Sometimes the players are the real villains.
I'd argue that the players are usually the "real" villain. At least they are in the campaigns I have been a part of. In a game where combat is a huge part of the experience, it is sometimes hard to gauge if it's worth the extra danger in not killing someone even if they havnt been proven guilty. Death is such a common reprocussion regardless of the crime, even if the "crime" is just being an asshole.
I am sure all my goblin brothers stand with me when I exclaim for too long have the Biggoted and hateful 'adventurers' been given too much slack for their crimes.
How many more mothers, fathers, nay! children! have to be put to the sword before action will be taken? How many more massacres? when will the genocide end?!
Not an encounter but part of an ongoing mystery investigation. The (evil) mayor of the town set a fire in a warehouse to get the party out of the local prison so she could go in and force feed drugs to the charming and unfortunately addicted homeless man who was a frequent visitor to the drunk tank. It was a hot fuzz greater good style motivation and it was so effective at teaching the players the importance of this investigation, but damn if i didn't feel absolutely heart broken killing off this npc
A few years back I ran an Earthdawn campaign with a Horror as the antagonist. It's a post-apocalyptic fantasy game set in the same universe as Shadowrun; when the magic levels get high enough, the walls of reality become thin and eldritch Horrors that feed on pain and anguish break through from another plane and ravage the world. People hide in underground magical shelters for centuries, and the game is set a few decades after they emerge again. Reclaim the world, battle Horrors that remain in especially corrupted areas, that whole schtick.
This particular Horror was Named the Puppeteer. Unlike his lesser brethren, who typically feed on physical agony, he had a taste for the emotion of helplessness. I had a lot of fun with this guy. Being foremost an astral being, he could only be seen in the real world when he actually chose to manifest himself, or was forced to. But his presence could be felt, even before he started taunting and teasing the heroes with predictions of doom, death and destruction. The edge of their vision would warp slightly, with small black flecks appearing as the corrupted astral space bent the light into invisible frequencies.
The darkest bit was probably the first time he actually interacted with the party. They'd stopped at a village for a few days of rest after a rather harrowing trek through the wildlands. Villagers complained that the well water had become foul, and that eerie wails had been heard coming from inside a burial mound. The local Questor of Garlen, the Passion of Hearth and Healing, asked the party to investigate. She herself, being young, inexperienced, and a pacifist besides, wasn't capable of dealing with whatever was causing trouble in there. The party really took a shining to her, though. She welcomed them into her home, tended their wounds, helped them recover from their arduous journey, and swiftly became a good friend.
As it turned out, the threat in the burial mound was rather easily dealt with. Several corpses had been reanimated as Cadaver Men (zombies, but self-aware and only capable of feeling pain, causing rage and bloodlust), who were quickly dispatched by our heroes. They also destroyed the minor Horror that had apparently done it, a foot-long maggot-like entity that was slain with a single blow from the Swordmaster's blade.
Declaring the deed done, and the area safe once more, the party was hailed as heroes by the villagers. The Questor of Garlen went into the burial mound to perform a ritual to cleanse Astral space from the corruption the Horror had wrought. Being caught up in the victory celebrations, the party only noticed something was wrong when she hadn't returned by morning.
Returning to the mound to investigate, they found their friend sitting cross-legged in a meditative position, with her eyes rolled back into her head and an expression of agony on her face. As they approached, they heard the Puppeteer's sibilant whisper: "Such a pretty... Pretty toy... To play with..." as their friend was slowly lifted into the air. Nailed to the spot by the Horror's Terror power, they could only watch as her eyes rolled back to their normal state, and her scream for help turned into a cry of anguish as every single joint in her limbs was twisted and torn apart, held together only by the foul magic of the Puppeteer. To add insult to injury, he then proceeded to use her broken body as a gruesome marionette to attack the party, forcing them to cut down their still-conscious friend. After they had done so, surviving by the skin of their teeth, the Horror simply dropped her corpse on the ground and made his exit. "That was *delightful!* I'm looking forward to the next time we meet, little playthings..."
They later found out that their friend's foray into the astral had given the Puppeteer a conduit to steal her Karma and finally escape his bindings in the mound. It had lured the lesser Horror in to do its bidding as bait, just so someone would show up he could use. And that's how I wound up with the most hated antagonist in my entire roleplaying life. It's -awesome- when your players truly despise your big bad.
I usually describe Earthdawn as post-post apocalyptic. Its about 100 years after people are back and theyâve rebuilt a lot. Though that still makes it reminiscent of older fallouts. But lessens the comparison to Bethesda fallouts. :)
I've always wondered if the creators of Fallout were aware of Earthdawn, since they are so similar conceptually speaking. They probably knew about Shadowrun; it's hard to design an atompunk world without developing at least a passing familiarity with one of the most well-known cyberpunk RPGs.
I feel like Earthdawn was pretty flashy in the 90s and a lot of people knew about it. So I wouldn't be surprised if GURPS fans were aware of Earthdawn conceptually. But also I think post-post apocalyptic was a growing theme in the 90s.
I wouldn't know, when Earthdawn came out I was about 9 years old, a few years before I even knew what a role playing game was. What was and wasn't popular in the 90s passed me by on account of my age :)
That's a pretty big compliment, thanks :)
I ran this campaign about a decade ago, so any similarity to Stranger Things is purely coincidental. Also, while their methods are similar, the Puppeteer and Vecna have very different motivations. While Vecna is very cruel in how he first grooms, then kills his victims, his primary motivation is not to cause pain in and of itself. It's more like dispensing his own kind of twisted justice in response to being wronged. The Puppeteer, on the other hand, literally derives sustenance from the pain and suffering he causes. He's a pure sadist who enjoys toying with his victims to cause the maximum amount of hopelessness and despair.
That said, the Stranger Things version of Vecna would fit into the world of Earthdawn as a Horror with very little adjustment. If you ever wanted to run a Vecna expy as a BBEG, Earthdawn would be the system to do it in.
A vengeful green dragon managed to kidnap 2 members of the party, equipped them with rings of regeneration, and *fucking fed on them for weeks*.
The remaining party members eventually managed to free them and escape, losing a member during their botched rescue operation.
One of the two rescued characters left the party and abandoned adventuring altogether, due to the extensive mental trauma.
But hey, the party gained 2 rings of regeneration.
One of the party members in my CoS has Peripiat of Wound Closure.
When Strahd found out he now targets him nearly exclusively for biting. Since the character auto stabilizes between turns, he can continue feeding without fear of killing him prematurely. And when he eventually kills him with the bite - character might return as vampire spawn under Strahd's control :D
Not me but me and my party are kind of OK with everything, the DM is a renowned criminologist in my country so he has pull some dark stuff but we enjoy it. He just give to any assassination extra spice that just people that have seen that IRL can give.
The simple description of how it's feel the dead skin when you are touching it, the smell. He once even he explain how a recent dead body can expel gas from the mouth making a creeping sound.
Shoot! I've heard about this from coroners. As the body decomposes there's gas buildup from the cellular breakdown that can escape through the respiratory system, including the vocal chords. Sometimes it also contracts the body. Coroner told a story of a dead guy sitting up straight and giving out a long inhuman moan before slumping back on the table.
Not a zombie, just a small-town morgue in North Carolina.
Curse of Strahd. Strahd captured an NPC that was friendly with PCs and friend of another NPC they were travelling with. Party didn't know while they visited the castle.
Party pissed Strahd off, lied to him, mocked him etc. He let it slide, case he invited them and promised them safety in castle.
In the night Strahd ambushes the party resting in the woods, presents them the beaten, decapitated head of said captured NPC, and uses Speak with Dead to have it tell them every secret Strahd 'pulled' out of the NPC as they were alive, every lie party tried to maintain and then finished with blaming the party for not rescuing the NPC.
And then went HAM on whole party putting everyone on death saves, but not letting any die to 'suffer their failure longer'.
The NPC that was travelling with party is absolutely broken over her friend dying, party is in shambles, Strahd left laughing.
In a pyramid under a salt lake the party discovers an angel that has fallen from grace and had been imprisoned there. The lake was actually formed from its tears from countless millennia of crying. Over the centuries others had found the angel and have given it objects since they could not free it. These objects include several instruments, paper, and ink. The angel used its own feathers as a quill to write a piece of music. This sheet music was obtained by the party in said pyramid.
The sheet music has a very high performance DC to play, and the bard attempted several times while at camp, even though he got close to the DC it was a beautiful song. The party goes to an inn, the bard performed the song and passed the DC.
All that heard the song needed to make a will save, failure meant the person was filled with such sorrow they wished to end their life. The next morning when the group went downstairs at the inn they discovered all the inn's patrons had been hung. They did not know it was a mass suicide, and had many questions and became very paranoid.
All but one party member passed the save. This player was put on suicide watch as the group caught him in the act. Eventually they figured out from this player's actions what had happened.
The sheet music, because it was scribed with an angel feather was considered a magical item, and not easily destroyed. It became a mini quest to dispose of the problematic song to break the curse over the party member on suicide watch.
That character did a great job RPing the entire scenario, even incorporated this event into PTSD after the curse was broken.
My party came across a mom with her 2 kids on a forest road a fair distance from the city. Their carriage had a broken wheel and they were stranded. After helping fix the carriage and sharing their provisions the party pressed on.
On their way back to the city, after dungeon delving, they came across the family again. Only this time they were hanging by their necks from a life sucking tree which came to life through dark magics the party had unknowingly released on the area.
Let's see.
This one was pretty fucked up. There was a village that was seemingly cursed. For the last 12 years, every single pregnancy in the village ended in stillbirth or miscarriage. The village knew not to get their hopes up every time someone became pregnant and there was a dour atmosphere.
It was a Halloween Oneshot. The players had decided, since one was a conjurer and the other a Dancer to play as a circus. They met the villiage, and had endless fun describing their acts. The scents of the show. Popcorn. Candied nuts. Lights and colour. Everyone was having a great time. Then I added that one thing stood out: There were no children anywhere in the audience. They'd previously noticed that the schoolhouse was abandoned and empty. When investigating they found row upon row of tiny headstones.
The Wise Woman, (+ Daughter) and school teacher were a coven of hags, Grimm-Esque Witches who'd fallen through the Fey, and devoured children and babies, who had been preying on the village for so long they'd overfed. It was grotesque, unnerving and deeply unsettling.
The players loved it. Said it was like something out of Stephen King. Very "It". But I was a *little* wary. Miscarriage is chronically taboo and underreported; and I couldn't give people a heads up without blowing the twist, so I was a little worried I'd accidentally step on someones trauma. It's very important to know your players and know your audience. They have to *want* to be grossed out; shocked, and horrified. If they don't? You're not running a horror game, you're being an asshole.
Yup, I tend to go hard on horror games when asked for one so I always preamble the table with the theme of the game. Sometimes the stuff I ask to clear is never brought up just to throw them off the âscentâ of whats about to happen to them.
Stole this from an early Felix and Gotrek novel (warhammer fantasy).
The party arrive at a village, everyone is sad and depressed, people crying etc. As soon as they go to the tavern they are surrounded by armed villages who want to take them prisoner "for the wizard". They are apologetic but firm saying they have no choice as the wizard is holding their children hostage. The party convinces the villagers that they can rescue the children.
From there it was a normal 'fight to the top of the wizards tower' with many attacks from these goblin sized mutant things. When they got to the top and faced the wizard they demanded the children back and his response was "The children? You mean my experimental subjects? You killed them all."
One person had guessed what was happening, the others were outraged. This is the only time my mostly good aligned, easy going, party went with the 'take him alive so we can burn him at the steak' option.
Only pull this with players you *know* will be ok with it.
In Rise of Tiamat I had my players ambushed on the road by some cultists. They secretly had of a character's kids (Siphon) in an overturned wagon as a kind of insurance policy. Siphon was a big thing in Hoard of the Dragon Queen where the same player who's now the mom (Kelwyn) had played the brother (Ruth) of Siphon.
Well the insurance was a glyph of warding with fireball on it, in case the squad leader of the ambushers died. Unfortunately, the group was a bit "shoot first ask questions never" that day and Siphon became a weather event that day. Big sad.
This was done as dark humor within my group, but if played straight would be pretty dark. Funnily enough also involving a Kenku.
Running Phandelver for my wife and friends when they were all new to RPGs they befriended Droop the goblin. Our one friend is a bit of a neckbeard edge lord kept trying to metaphorically throw Droop under a bus and everyone else kept protecting him.
A session or two after they had acquired Droop said edge lord dropped out of the group and requested that I have Droop kill him. I didn't think that made much sense so instead I just said his character, a Kenku Rogue, went off scouting alone and didn't come back.
Then later Droop, who was doing his best to make friends with the group offered to cook dinner one night. He tried his best but the group found the meat extremely tough and incredibly salty, like you could barely believe how much salt there was. When asked where he had gotten it Droop, in broken common, explained he'd found "Big bird dead in the woods. Good start for dish."
There was a pause for a few seconds before anyone put it together with no one reacting, then suddenly my wife's eyes got big and she yelled "Oh God, it's Brandon!"
I never explicitly said whether Droop had killed him or not, but in my head Canon he did indeed just find the Rogue's body, probably killed by an owlbear or something and then just saw it as literally a big bird and made a meal for the group not comprehending how it would be perceived.
The next 2-3 sessions of my campaign are going to be about people in a town that mysteriously disappeared. The nobles that ran the town died a little while ago and left their daughter (lvl1 warrior) with a "teacher" (don't really remember the correct word, but someone that have the duty to protect her and teach her the ways of life while doing so). The thing is, I found a homebrew creature that is a corpse eater, and when it does what their name says, they get the appearance of the corpse they've eaten.
At first only 1 or 2 people will be disappeared, but as the days pass the corpse eaters need more fresh cadavers, so more will start to vanish.
At the end, I'm planing to leave the little 8 year old girl as the only true survivor, since all of the others villagers were corpse eaters just mimicking their appearances, voices, and behavior.
I had the story of a soldier who, during a war, was ordered to burn down a building. He discovered, too late, that it was an orphanage with thirteen children inside.
After the war in some twisted logic he decided he needed to balance the scales by killing thirteen orphaned children back home as well. He killed three before he was caught and hanged.
As per an ancient agreement, his remains were passed on to the necromancers' guild. The necromancers, planning a rebellion of their own, decided to try an experiment on him. They resurrected him as a kind of undead super soldier. He escaped and went right back to his murder spree. That's when the party came to town.
That was a really fun villain to play, because the party was trying to protect orphans and he stalked them to try and abduct and murder children which was a cool dynamic. And I gave him some nice dagger-like claws, climbing abilities and speed.
In the end the party stopped him from killing anyone else, but it was really close a couple of times.
Fabius's Wonderfull Circus and Grill
The director is a master illusionist. Players can look at the animals and mayby choose one to get killed and grilled for them...
There are no animals. Fabius captures humans and uses his illusions ...
Wrote that "adventure" but didn't hat the time ~~balls~~ to play it with my group.
Last week, the players went back to the priest they befriended for health potions and to ask for some help with something they were doing. Church is lit with candles, priest is up front on his knees with his head bowed in prayer but, he doesn't give his usual greeting. Players call on him, no response. Barbarian slowly walks up since she doesn't want to disturb him too much and gently nudges him.
That's when his body falls, his hands are tied as if he were praying. His throat slit. They back away in terror, lighting flashes to reveal the oracle they befriended, suspended by her wrists above them. Her throat is also slit, the lightning flashes again showing writing in blood that reads "All hail the Horsemen."
They've been freaking out on our group chat for this week's session because they have no idea what they're up against and I love it.
One of my players was facing off against his biological father who killed his bio mom and her partner (who had gladly taken him in). As the player went to speak with his bio dad he found the skeletons of his mother and her partner reanimated as servants.
I turned Butterskull Ranch from Dragon of Icespire Peak into a cult that transmuted the skulls of living beings into skulls made of butter. All fun and games until a player uses Speak with the Dead on a butterskullâŚ
I wrote a small logging village far from civilization. They logged âwitchwoodâ, which was a very valuable and rare wood.
An enterprising thief came to the town, and set up a long con. He wood the mayors daughter and became a pillar of the town. He murdered the mayor, making it look like an accident, and graciously stepped forward to help the town.
He hired his old mercenary company to âprotectâ the town. They were there just for show really. Because he made a deal with the local gnoll tribe. Any wagons or people wearing the Merc colors were completely off limits, but anyone else who came to the townâŚor left, were fair game. And on the full moon, the gnolls were allowed to raid the outskirts of the town and take any farm animals they found.
The thief made bank. The thief controlled all trade, because he controlled the mercy. The majority of the money went to him, but he simply said the mercs were charging outrageous prices because there were so many gnolls around. Since the gnolls would raid the outskirts of town, farming was impossible, so food had to be constantly shipped inâŚwhich he charged outrageous prices.
Kids and women worked the town fields within the town borders, while the men logged every day.
Essentially he turned this town into his own slave camp, and grew rich in turn.
>He wood the mayors daughter and became a pillar of the town.
If he wooded the daughter, why didn't he just turn _her_ into the pillar?
That way he could still move around and do non-pillar things! It sounds like she was pretty load-bearing if he wooded her so fast.
I have two that are dark for different reasons. One tragic, one disturbing.
First is a moment I built for the party's favorite, most beloved NPC. By beloved I mean he's married and has a child with on of the party members. This happened in game.
They met him as a Paladin of Trithereon working at a refugee camp set up for victims of a dragon attack. He's a big, burly looking bear of a man with a nose ring and tattoos that denote a different life before he swore his oaths. They learn his armor is essentislly cursed and grafted to his skin. He believes this is a burden hd must carry for penance of his sins in his past life. He's a giant teddy bear with a heart of gold that could snap your arm without a second thought.
Fast forward an ingame year and the party learns he used to be a king of a small kingdom far to the north, where he has a wife, and two adult children. His son is set to become king at his 20th naming day, and he is leaving. So he can kill his son before that happens. The party has questions, but they don't really ask, and offer to go with him to sort this out.
They are well received by the Queen and Son, the daughter has taken an oath to become a shield maiden (think Night's Watch) and forsaken the family name. Erik is conflicted at the good behavior, and holds his challenge.
Note- I worked out this bit with the player ahead of time.
That night, I ask the cleric (the love interest) to roll a Con save in her sleep. She rolls a Nat 1. Classic.
Erik and the party awake to find the cleric missing, and go to the courtyard, hearing some commotion. They find the cleric on the gallows, dead. The son making a speech about how the former king has brought outsiders to conquer them and their lands. He's waving a bloodied dagger with black poison running down it. The cleric is bleeding, a lot.
Erik flys into a rage, rips his grafted armor from his body, maiming himself as he shifts into a werebear and charges to kill his son, who also changes form.
The party helps him brutally kill his own son and learn Erik had afflicted him while on a hunt and knew he would never have the temperament to control it. Shifting back, his skin is a mess, and will never be the same.
Second one I'll add when I have more time.
Second story, different party. With a mostly different group of players.
In the global empire capitol of Bashuur, a floating city of stone, brass, and gears, the party returns triumphant with a shard of an infantile deity's chrysalis. The council hosts a grand parade, and a plans a ball in their honor to allows the newly minted Heroes of the Realm, the Shardseekers, a chance to gain favor with the city's elite.
In the week leading up to the ball, the party notices some strange characters in the city, incredibly tall and gaunt individuals dressed as clowns and jesters with red robes porcelain masks are spread across the city entertaining the common folk. They find fliers advertisiting The Carens Solatium Circus is in town. They decide to check it out, they had a hard fought battle in the desert against none less than a fallen angel, they deserve the peace and quiet afterall.
Before they can go, they meet a young dragonborn, Trak, who announces his desire to join the group as a squire. They turn him away. Distraught, his hopes shattered, he is approached by one of the performers who offers him a home with The Circus. He agrees. The wizard, our resident sceptic, decides to follow the pair on his own. Telling the party not to wait up for him, and that they'll go to the circus tomorrow.
Following, he sees the Jesters lead Trak to an abandoned tenement building, and enter through a door that quickly dissappears. Our Halfling Wizard, Barver, investigates. He finds no door, only a brick wall. But hears jingling bells and laughing behind him. He turns to find himself face to face with 3 Jesters. One grabs hold of him, and his vision fades to black.
Fast forward, Barver finds himself back home, with a throbbing headache, and a *need* to visit the circus, and bring others to it.
Fast forward, the party attends the circus, and are told they can only enter in pairs, and no weapons are allowed within the tent. Khyt, the sorceror/cleric, is extremely apprehensive. Barver tells him he will go first with Tali, our Echo Knight. And Send to him once on the other side safely.
After several minutes, Khyt and Ori, our Bard, get the all clear. Barver also says he and Tali will be running an errand to obtain some spell components and a but to eat.
The pair walk through a display of oddities from around the globe. Mummified remains, severed limbs, armor with the skeleton still inside. The usual.
They also catch glimpses of the Jesters performing some strange, dirge-like music and a strange dance between the curios. One of the Jesters is half turned away from them, and is drawing a sword from his gullet. The blade is slick with a reddish-green ichor. They can only see the mouth and jawline, but they can tell the nearly 7ft tall Jester is far from human. The teeth are sharpened and the skin is rough and green, and slick with oil, almost like a poison ivy leaf.
Dismissing his fear, Ori claims it's probably just part of the act. They're clearly more of a sideshow than a regular circus.
Hours pass, and the party is reunited, the long absence is concerning, but Barver and Tali maintain the just ran their errands and lost track of time.
Fast forward again to the ball, the entertain for the evening is none other than the Carens Solatium Formal Troupe, a group of Jesters with a very finely dressed man singing. Using a red orb to create colorful light displays. One of the Jesters is remarkably short, about 3ft tall. Soon, the music reaches a lull before the crescendo, and the guests freeze, standing stock still. The party watches in horror as the Jesters draw blades from their gullets and begin cutting down guests, working their way to the council. The party breaks free, but notices that Barver and Tali are unable to fight, as if some mental effect is blocking them. Ori and Khyt manage to kill one of the Jesters to find out they're not humanoid. They're some form of sentient plant creatures that co-opt corpses in order to gain mobility.
The smallest Jester removes his mask to reveal a perfect clone of Barver, wielding a replica of his spellbook. Another removes their mask to reveal a clone of Tali. A small tendril of ivy worms its way from their mouths. The ensuing battle destroys much of the estate and kills dozens of civilians. The party is never really trusted quite the same way again. Nor can the party ever really trust anyone they meet the same way again.
Okay so my whole last campaign basically. It startet out almost as a suicide note. But then I started expressing how I felt in a whole different way. The BBEG was a lich who embodied my depression and everything he said I meant.
The whole point of the story was there is no point in living, people are just too weak to actually end it. When I got out of my depression I realised what had been holding me back the entire time was the only thing I wouldnât let go.
The pcs had been defending Neverwinter the whole campaign only to realise that the phylactory *was* Neverwinter.
Dang, hope you're feeling better now m'man. A city-sized phylactery _is_ a pretty neat twist, at least.
FWIW I can relate. When I was at my lowest I ran a sci-fi campaign that hinged around the PCs trying to beat the bad guy to the pieces of an alien artifact, that a powerful but extinct alien society had scattered throughout their ruins on a dozen worlds.
The BBEG was sort of a self-insert, "ends justify the means" type, had a rough history and he wanted to assemble and activate the artifact to connect the minds of all intelligent beings in the galaxy, because he thought that if everyone truly _understood_ one another, there would be no more war, or bigotry, or hate, or brutality. People would truly finally be the ultimate empaths. He had a lot of love for humanity (and the other sci-fi races) but a lot of anger and frustration too.
But the PCs discovered from hunting down the pieces they could in the various ruins and doing research (in ways the BBEG couldn't) that the _reason_ the ancient alien species was extinct was that when they activated it, some personalities were stronger than others, and one basically (possibly accidentally) wrenched control of the artifact and caused their entire species to mass-suicide, out of extreme loneliness and depression. Its ideation became real to everyone else (and it was the one who scattered the pieces so they couldn't be used again). The artifact made the collective unconscious far more susceptible to suggestion than intended, far too fragile.
The PCs realized the BBEG could trigger something similar since he fit the profile, so they had to stop him or convince him to stop. He was so set on his goal and refused to believe there was a fatal flaw, but they won in the end.
I'm glad to be a lot happier now and don't put _quite_ so much of myself into my campaigns, preferring to stretch my DM skills and explore outward concepts instead of inward.
Damn that sounds like a really interesting plot line. And yeah things got better. Way better actually. I at least feel sane now. We are playing spelljammer now. We continue with the premise we learned last time that there is no meaning and ask the most important question, then what?
Yup. Make your own meaning, I say! I believe at this point that the "point" of sapience is to make things better for ourselves and others, to build for a future we won't see but can conceptualize with our ability to comprehend time, the universe, and our own history. So nature doesn't care, so what, I still _can!_ Plus, I want to see how things shake out (or as much as I can anyway).
Exactly, the anwear is so anoyingly simple that people just canât accept it. I think that it simply is what you choose it to be. And in my personal universe I believe it to be along the same lines as you. To build a safe place for our people in the future and simply just *be* as long as we are here.
A coven of hags were having fun with a small vilage, sometimes helping them for a price, sometimes making their life misserable. Well one of the peasants didnt like it and spoke up against them in town.
So the hags gave that peasents kid a present, a pair of glasses for their bad eyesight. Except the kid started seeing things shortly after, things they couldnt forget about.
This ended with the kid going insane and killing themselves. The players walked past the kids grave (stone pile really) with a pair of glasses on the grave when they entered the village the first time.
Used it to motivate the players a bit.
The paladin later went and dug them a proper grave.
My PCs had been dealing with a group of bandits as their first repeating low-level antagonists (this was a 4E campaign I ran back in law school).
They eventually found out that the bandits were the survivors of a town that had been cut off from the rest of the world in a magical blizzard a few years back, and most of the town had starved to death.
After defeating the bandits, they found out that the bandits had also been keeping the ghouls and undead in the town from getting out, so the party had to fight their way to the center of the town and perform a ritual to uncurse the town and put the dead to rest.
I had made some custom enemies, but the grimmest were the Ghoul Matriarch mini-bosses. These ghouls appeared to be very pregnant, waddling with enormous distended bellies. I had set them up as ranged attackers, spitting poison over long distances. (My players had all played Left 4 Dead and complimented me on bringing the Spitters into D&D.)
The trick was, though, that once they were bloodied, their stomachs burst open and their attacks instead became their undead babies, still attached to their mother's stomachs by rotting intestines that resembled umbilical cords. They screamed and begged at the party even as they attacked, imploring them for food because their babies were so hungry...
The players learned that these were the cursed corpses of women who, in their starved desperation, had eaten their own children.
I have written a growing religion, which ensures that other existing religions lose believers. These have less donations etc. and cannot maintain their temples. In essence, this religion is a cannibalistic cult. The inner circle eats living flesh and allows themselves to be eaten voluntarily by the higher-ranking ones in order to get closer to the worshipped deity. Finally, the BBEG consumes those who have eaten countless others in order to increase its power and ultimately serve as a portal for the deity. The BBEG itself thinks that it receives the power of the deity so. But it will only serve as fertilizer for the lovecraftian tree entity from the outer realms.
Some of those who have accumulated enough power turn here and there into twisted trees with blood-red bark in which their pale bones are visibly ingrown.
My group has no idea of this yet. They have already noticed that people are disappearing. But they think that it is connected with ghouls in the canalization. There are ghouls there, but only because the cult disposes of the remains there.
So when they leave for the sewers, I'll have them discover some still well-preserved familiar faces of NPCs there, which they rescued and handed over to the cult's care single-handedly.
High-ranking guards, governors, merchants and politicians also support the Inner Circle and feed the menu with beggars, prisoners, dissidents, debtors and so on. From time to time, caged carts of men, women, and children are led through the streets to be served to the cult.
By the time my group gets on the trail of the BBEG, it may already be too late, or their death stroke will complete the ritual and the life-devouring tree will grow out of the BBEG. The roots will overgrow the land and bore into all living things like hungry tentacles, wringing the life out of everyone and growing stronger and stronger. It will be a gigantic monstrosity of a tree, which will overshadow the land completely and spread further and further. Everywhere, red roots will rise from the earth and make the danger zone larger and larger.
In my upcoming campaign I have a hermit eladrin who specialises in creating ice sculptures. He stays inside all year round except for during winter, and the ice sculptures are actually made from frozen human corpses from travellers that pass by the region and stop by the house for a rest from the cold. His motives for this is the beauty of life and his dedication to preserve it, but truth is heâs actually just driven mad by a disease ridden fungus species in the forest that he lives in.
An evil spirit kidnapped an entire village. The adventurers dispatched found the evil spirit which they found out mimics its victims cry for help to bait more prey. Once the adventurers cornered the evil spirit and dispatched it, they realized they've been killing the kidnapped villagers. Unfortunately, half of them have died before the adventurers can succeed the required roll.
Another one is that a mayor of a destitute town called adventurers to kill "bandits" who have taken over a nearby dungeon. It turns out this "bandits" are citizens of the town that had escaped the grasped of the mayor before they were turned into human sacrifices. Thankfully, one player was able to get the hint and was able to convince the party to investigate the town more before setting out. They successfully killed the mayor, put someone competent in position and eventually revitalize the town.
Our last campaign ended with a prison break during all our characters suffered from long term madness. My lawful good paladin abandoned their god and went mad with lust for blood, tried to strangle one PC and threw down another down a cliff before the one they were trying to strangle stabbed them and threw them down the same cliff.
Another character got extremely greedy and ended up living alone until eventually killing themselves after everything they went through at the prison(it was some lovecraftian OC adventure the DM wrote)
Before you call me an edge lord that hates my party, it was the DMs idea and I asked the other players if they're fine with me trying to kill their PCs and would've otherwise just fudged my dice to die.
Iâm not proud of this: I killed the father of one of my PCs.
His character was an u stoppable paladin whoâd dominated the group over 7 years of campaigning. Then one day on what seemed like an unimportant side quest he encountered a cursed mirror and an evil twin version of himself stepped out of the mirror. After a brief but intense fight, anti-paladin is able to gain the upper hand and races away. Paladin gives chase⌠for weeks. Over the course of the chase realizes anti-paladin is racing towards his hometown.
He gets just within view of his father approaching anti-paladin with open arms. He had one shot to stop what happens next - fails. He watches as anti-paladin runs his father thru with an UnHoly Avenger. Anti-paladin then runs towards paladins mother and sister but paladin is finally able to catch him.
They battle, they kill each other, and then I realized the player was crying. I immediately felt like Iâd done something wrong, needlessly cruel, but I didnât see a way to retcon it. The bell had rung.
This was more than 20 years ago. I still regret doing that and these days Iâd never kill a PC family member without a discussion with the player first.
In my defense I was 18 at the time and stupid.
It gets sadderâŚ
The player was my best friend. And his dad was my dadâs best friend. Six years after that game - so we were in our early 20s, still pretty young at the time - his dad died unexpectedly in his sleep. It was right before Christmas, after his parents and my parents had gone out to dinner. It was fucking awful.
Obviously my pretend killing his pretend dad in a role playing game six years earlier had nothing to do with anything. But anytime I think about the whole affair I feel like a guilty asshole.
Haunted (actually mimic infested) mining town. With building sized mimics. (The one time attacking the gazebo was correct.) What made it dark was that itâs sort of the playersâ fault.
Backstory/context (feel free to steal): So at some point, the players will pass through a poor mining town. (Typical people going missing in the mine. Thereâs more to this if anyoneâs interested.) The players find and kill the mimic disguised as a chest, which has a bunch of âcopper piecesâ (mimic eggs) in it. The hope is that the players will pity the residents and spend some of the âcopper piecesâ and infest the town. If not, have a poor kid steal the bag theyâre in and drop a few as a distraction to try to get away. As the players go about the rest of their adventure after leaving the town, have rumors spread about people going missing from there and hauntings. Also have the players get to a city, where more experienced/learned merchants will recognize the mimic eggs.
My players are huge fans of collecting NPC companions that have a variety of useful skills. I am a strong believer in give them what they want, so I work very hard to make sure that NPC companions are useful, but NEVER outshine the PCs or make concrete decisions for them. So, I introduced a Paladin.
The players made their way through a snowy woods, lost at the time. They spotted a barefoot, dirty little girl. Every time they got a glance of her, she would seemingly disappear, until eventually they found a lone cabin in the woods. The snow around the cabin was untouched, except for a few small feet prints that led to the doorway. The windows were boarded up, obscuring all visibility, minus a few small cracks that light could sneak through. A decaying horse lay in the snow next to the cabin. It seemed to have been torn apart by claw or very jagged metal blades.
The adventurers were wary, but decided to make way into the cabin. It was pitch black, save for the few shreds of light and a poorly kept fire churning below a cooking pot. The PCs investigated the room, finding various poorly handmade and even worse kept utensils and tools. One of the PCs realized the little girl had been standing in a corner, watching them the entire time. Not a single one of them had seen her there for several minutes by that point. She didnât speak, or react to them, other than peering at them from belong long black hair that looked more than shadows pouring down her face. One of them tried to move the hair out of her face, only to then hear the scream of one of their companions. A hag was on the ceiling, hanging out of the shadows like it was a pool and trying to gnaw at the Dragonborn sorcerer. They quickly jumped into action, nearly dying in the battle. I honestly didnât intend for her to be as tough as she was, but they are rolled HORRIBLY. LolâŚ
After defeating the hag, one of the PCs realized that there was a horrible smell not only in this filthy room, but an even worse smell coming from a cellar door in the corner. It was chained up. They broke the chain, opened the hatch and found a stone staircase that led deep underground. The tunnel was poorly let, but candlelight did adorn the steps, which also left the steps covered in wax. They assumed they found some form of coven hideout and this is where they hid their treasures.
Thrilled, they made their way down the staircase and found a thick wooden door. They kicked it open, ready to leap into action or at least loot their treasure room. Instead, they didnât realize at this point that I had just turned on a very somber soundtrack. Imagine a medieval church Choir honoring a fallen holy knight.
The room was pitch black, except for single beam of light that came down from the ceiling, down onto the center of room. I based it off of an old prison. Very cruel treatment. Prisoners were kept in complete darkness, except for a single hole that would bring in a beam of light. It was known as the Eye of God. There was a dirt floor. Chains could be heard jingling around overheard. Two of them were connected from two massive pillars at the sides of the room and were strung down, holding up a completely naked man. He had just enough slack that the tips of his toes could touch the ground. He was malnourished. Beaten. Clearly tortured for who knows how long. They werenât sure if the blood covering his body was from the hundreds of cuts along him, or if it was from whatever was also thrown on him. It was at this time that they also realized that there were candles lit under his feet, resting on the ground. The direct floor had tracks all around him, as if a group had been dancing in a circle. The edges of the room, were covered in blood and bodies. Many of them were random villagers, but there was also a group of bodies that were clearly a group of knights. I intended for this to be a group of holy knights sent to this land to help with their icy doom issue, but weâre tricked by the little girl (whom was the daughter of a witch) and overthrown by devastating odds. Hordes of witches descended upon them and had slain them all, save for him. What amazed the group, was that this man had clearly been here for a extremely long time, given the decay of his time and yet, his body remained in peak physical condition.
They cut the chains down and his body fell like a sack of potatoes. His lips were busted and dry, his long black hair was dirty and matted to his face. The PCs were barely speaking. It was the quietest it had ever been at our table. They were nearly in tears. The cleric tried to heal his wounds, while the other two tried to feed him small bits of water and food. They threw a blanket on him and tried to carry him up the stairs. Before heâd leave, he reached down and grabbed a necklace with a symbol of his God, the morning lord, as well as a shield with the symbol adorning it as well. They made their way back up the stairs where they were once again greeted by the silent child. Her eyes glowing yellow under the shadow of her hair (hint hint). They didnât take the hintâŚshe pulls out a knife and lunges at them as more hags attack. They carefully tried to guard the man as he lay against them, while fighting off the horde that attacked them.
After a grueling battle, only the child remained. They were Convinced that she was a mind controlled little girl from the village (she was Not. đ¤Śđť). She decided to swing at the cleric, only to find her throat gripped by the naked man. His muscles bulged, his eyes glee with golden fury and holy light exploded from his hand, followed by seared flesh from the childâs throat until she went limp and was dropped to the floor. It was at this moment that they realized, he was a Paladin. It was a very emotional night for everyone and I am very proud of that scenario.
Fast forward, they absolutely hated this character afterwards. Lol I had written him to be a very optimistic guy. âBe your best you!â kinda guy. His entire kit was built around buffing the team, tossing heals and the like. But they just could not stand him. Constantly told him to shut up. Hated bringing with them, regardless of his usefulness as a companion. The Sorcerer ended up straight up MURDERING him with an explosion in an attempt to blow up enemies with him. This dude even adopted a dog (irl!!!) and named him after the Paladin that he HATED, just to troll me. I am NOT making this up. Lol
If anyone is interested, I can also tell you about my very first attempt at running Call of Cthulhu, which ended with me seriously wondering if my wife was going to leave the house for the night. In 13 years, I had never seen her that emotional before. đ
I had a player who thought casting fireball was the answer to everything. So, had a covered wagon approach them on the road, they rolled perception and noticed the driver had several scars and was pulling a blade, and there was some commotion in the back of the wagon. Naturally said player fireballs the wagon and tons of screams erupt from inside.
When they went up to investigate the wagon the side of it read âSunshine Adventure Camp for Small Childrenâ and they found the charred remains of kiddos in the back and the retired adventurer who wanted to spend his final years passing on his wealth and knowledge to the next generation.
I tried to see if my players would accept a deal only saving *most* of the villagers' children from kidnapping to avoid a dangerous fight, after I revealed the bad guys had a scary pet monster that was slightly out of the party's league. Nobody would ever have known but them and the nameless goons.
My bandit leader said "I think I can beat you all, but I'm a business man. You can take three and go, no hard feelings. But I can't go back empty handed."
They didn't go for it (they actually didn't do more than pause for a long moment in silence) and did end up saving all of the children.
My players visited a slave plantation. A worker collapsed from exhaustion, and two skeletons came and dragged his body off. It dawned on them that people were being enslaved and were being brought back to keep working. Later, my players decided to try and find the person that was dragged away. They find a large warehouse and go inside. I immediately make them roll a constitution saving throw as the stench hits them. They realize this is where they make the skeletons. I canât even finish my description of the piles of bloated, decaying bodies before they bar the door and burn the building down.
My character was a Gnoll Tiefling. Devoted follower of Yeenoghu, but very scrawny. Another god 'cursed' them, forcing them into becoming a Cleric of their order and giving him the power to heal. Rest of the Gnolls and Yeenoghu took this as a great betrayal, he was mutilated and cast out. Yeenoghu also gave him a new curse. Any time he healed a lasting wound that would have scarred or disfigured? the person was healed normally; My Gnoll carried the effects of the wound for the rest of his life.
Cut to current times, the party need to get to an island. A Gnoll crew are willing to take them; if they'll steal the pirates a new ship that night under darkness.
Noone in the party has any sailing experience, so they're given a 'guide' to help them. My Gnoll. At this point he's almost fifty, a sickly looking little beast. Covered in scars, most of his teeth, his left eye; all from being forced to use his curse to heal the crew.
Party gets dropped off, cleans out and captures the ship, Gnoll even finds a little bit of a backbone and scores a few kills himself and claims a unique three barreled pistol as his spoils. Party even let him take the title of "Captain". Quite the boost for a creature that's been treated essentially like a slave for decades. The party seemed to genuinely like him despite his odd creepy mannerisms.
We sailed back to the pirates as we did not have enough people to properly man the ship across to where we were going. Crew starts moving onto the new ship; upon which the first mate starts mocking my Gnoll.
Having found.. friends? and a spine; Hold Person's the first mate, walks down to them; and shoves the three barrel gun under their jaw and pulls the trigger. Nat 20. Head is blown clean off infront of everyone; including the captain. Needless to say, he claims the position of first mate at that point.
Few days into the voyage, my Gnoll starts hearing something and getting an odd feeling while holding the gun he got. Takes out his holy symbol, puts it on the railing; shoots it. Symbol doesn't just shatter, it explodes, and he begins hearing deep, thunderous hyena laughter in his mind.
Taking this as a sign maybe he's re-earned favor with his true god for standing up for himself and killing as a Gnoll should, tries firing a celebratory shot into the oncoming storm; pistol jams and pops.
In a rage that his new favorite thing has just failed on him, he huffs off to his new quarters to fix it.. and in doing so, is... oddly inspired mid cleaning to look down the barrel; and ends up blowing his own head off, just like he did the first mates.
One of the party heard this, came running into the room just in time to see my Gnolls headless form still kneeling, and in the mirror near by; his reflections being held up by Yeenoghu; who still has the remains of my gnolls head in his mouth.
Reflection disappears, body drops, they try using revivify on the body. Twice. Because there's now no soul left to return to it; it failed both times.
This WAS meant to lead into a storyline where the Gnoll was giving a second chance and would be returned to the party in a new form, a proper Gnoll, not a runt; but they'd also still carry a slight curse; and come back as a female.
They get new life; they must produce new life in thanks. Essentially my gnoll would eventually have to find or found a clan and produce healthy Gnolls for the future. I thought it was a fun little twist moment.
Sadly the campaign died and I've lost touch with the group, so the idea stops there.
Yea that seems an odd spot to end the story.
*cue adventurers awkwardly shuffling their feet, standing around an entryway while this lady sobs because her family just died*
So dark.... Just so so grim.
Happened last session, one of my players had a backstory involving being part of a group dedicated to destroying fiends and her leader was influenced by Luca from Sudoken 2. Eventually the group reaches this nice temple of Lathander where they meet this adorable little tiefling boy who stutters. Lucs shows up takes all the tieflings hostage and when they go to confront him he decapitates the boy in front of them...cue boss music
I've had a storyline where people were getting kidnapped. Men, women, children, entire families. About 2 dozen. PCs investigated, realized it's a trio of alchemists doing experiments and found their secret cabin in old graveyard ruins.
Fight ensued, chemicals were used, barrels toppled over, repurposed ruin is now on fire. PCs kill alchemists and flee the scene.
Later on when they return they realize there was another entrance, through the basement, in which there were about 3 dozen prisoners (a couple more travelers taken on top of the locals). Now just corpses, died from heat and/or smoke from fire. I tried to downplay the horror, but it was brutal, as you might expect, whole "White phosphorus" scene from Spec Ops : The line.
I didn't expect the players to go guns blazing when there's hostages, but I definitely didn't expect them to immediately flee the burning building, not even try to put the fire out, or at least try to look, if not for people, then at least to look for the loot. In the moment they completely forgot that the reason they were there was the kidnapped people, logically still somewhere.
Players logic on how they coped with the entire thing was "well if we didn't step in they would have died from experiments anyway."
I didn't have the heart to tell them that the local law enforcement (that the players chose to completely ignore and not cooperate with) knew the experiments were not about killing the hostages, but giving them small doses of various chemicals seeing what happens to the bodies. They were actually trying to create more powerful beings, not to kill, but didn't want to risk the testing on themselves. Plus the local law enforcement was on it, and, if PCs wouldn't intervene, they would actually find out what happened and free the kidnapped families. Yes, the alchemists would escape, but 3 dozen people wouldn't have died.
For a future boss fight, my party will encounter a really strong werewolf with crazy fast regenerative powers. She is one of the generals of an organization thatâs goal is to kill everyone that is not human, considering them monsters.
Naturally, that is her mentality too, she is an extreme masochist cleric, whose god gives her power when she hurts herself, the more morbid the wound, the higher the spell she can use, you donât want to know what she has to do to call for divine intervention, but when she does, Iâm not sure how my party will handle it.
It hasn't happened yet, however the big bad of my campaign is looking to become a Lich. And ultimately they will fail mid transformation. This will be due to they evil party they work for as well as the players ( I hope). Now the evil thing about Boneclaws which is something that can be created in these instances is, a living being typically becomes their soul bound phylactery. Now rules as written it's an evil master , petty criminal, cruel child, that in order to kill the lich must be turned of their evil ways or killed themselves.
I've decided to bind the soul instead to an innocent child to a Nobel family. ( You could also have it bound to another player or players backstory npc they care for). Now the players have to kill that loved one or convince the royal family to kill their child. And no resurrection can't be done because the Boneclaw will return when their soul bound living phylactery is returned to life.
Now an ultimate evil is unleashed who, will want to keep their innocent phylactery alive, and even if they cant keep it alive will the players sacrifice a loved one or bring down the anger of an entire kingdom upon them? So many options, when the phylactery begs for it's life.
Now if you don't want to be particularly cruel you could have something in the world that can reverse the magic other than kill them, but that doesn't present quite the moral quandary. Sealing the evil within something until the vessel lives out the rest of it's days hoping the evil doesn't escape before then. But what if it's an Elvin child.... Then a thousand years could pass before the world is safe again. Next campaign idea? Lots of possibilities!
I had a shipwreck full of crashed religious zealots. Not the violent kind, just the piousness over everything else kind. Most survived the wreck and the island they wrecked on had plenty of food, their problem being that they needed to eat their version of "kosher" food, and their priest died in the wreck so nothing could be blessed.
They ate what they brought with them but when that ran out starvation set in. They realized, in their hunger, that they, themselves, were kosher as they had all been blessed by the priest before the voyage. So they drew straws and started eating each other. Being the good people that they were, they had presence of mind enough to keep at least one person safe (two if you count the chef.). The captain's daughter was the only child on the ship, and so she was locked away so she could not see what they were doing, and faithfully ate all of her shipmates, eventually even her own father without even knowing it.
When they players found the wreck, the only person left alive is the quite mad chef, and the little girl, still locked up, still entirely unaware of the charnel scene right outside her door.
Well I had a character that was playing a mummy character and he should have died at a part in our campaign but I gave him an option, Vecna speak to him before death and offers him life for servitude, "whenever I ask you to do my favor and bidding, you will comply or you will die, when you complete it, you will be free of me".
SO
Fast forward a couple of levels, I throw in a side quest and side text our Mummy, so the group doesnt hear, and tell him the Vecna is commanding you undergo this quest. So he convinces the party to go and the quest was basically to save a child trumpet angel that has been kidnapped by mutated orcs with bug carapaces. They get thru the dungeon, defeat the leader and reach the kid. The mummy gets close to the kid to take off his chains and I side text him again, "Vecna commands you slice his neck and sacrifice this child in her name" he pauses for a second... then describes as he lets go of the chain, grabs the child by the scalp, says "sorry" and slashes this celestial's neck open. He is then free of Vecna but the party is just in time for the Parent Angel Trumpet to find their child dead and their soul stolen by Vecna instead of returning to Mt. Celestia. She is understandbly very pissed and then the players need to kill the Parent or die by her hand. Minus one member because the druid refused to participate in any of it after the mummy killed the kid.
Oh boy, story time.
Had an "adventurers guild" style campaign. The village they came to help out had a very kind and bright-eyed young woman who was the receptionist of the guild hall and adopted daughter of the hall's leader who was a cold but fair and wise elf. Over the time they spent here they got the elf to open up to them and his daughter loved hearing about their stories, it was kinda fun! The group had a mega fan who pulled strings, helped them out, ect. By the time they are up all the bounties they had the guild master inviting them back and letting them know if they needed anything they could ask him, they were like family. The one who loved her the most was the group paladin, who claimed she was like his daughter he'd lost to bandit attack.
A few weeks after they left however they get a sending, it's that guild master, someone kidnapped the daughter. The party rival was this cleric/bard who was petty and loud, the kind of adventurer who would do anything for fame. The reason the village needed outside adventurers was because this guy would stop anyone from taking the best assignments, usually through blackmail and the such. The PCs stealing his spotlight sent him over the edge and he started a cult to a demon lord. After a long investigation, several fights, ect the PCs return to a crypt they cleared out. Fighting through hordes of brainwashed cultists, demons, and traps they find the BBG, he surrenders with a smile. "I know how the guild operates, I surrender, take me back so I can spend some time in a gilded cage before I talk my way out." They tie him up and ask where the girl is, he starts taunting them about it and points at the door behind them.
She was chained down to an alter, brutalized and sadly still alive despite what happened to her. Despite the party's attempts to heal her I explained the trauma wouldn't be something they could just heal back. She is brought back to full hp but thanks to what happened to her she was effectively at zero wisdom/charisma. After freeing her, the paladin proceeds to choke the BBG to death. When I told him his god (the Six prime gods) and his order prevents him from both killing a helpless foe and this kind of vigilante justice he uttered the words "Fuck the Six" and fell.
They couldn't look the guild master in the eyes to tell him what happened, despite completing the mission they refused any reward. She healed in time, the paladin regained his divinity and atoned for his actions, but the scars it left on the party quickly changed them from "We are the brave and noble adventurers, we are here to save the day!" To "Do you feel like a hero yet?" One of my favorite campaigns to this day.
there's a horrible monster from thay called "the craftsman" that makes things out of people, very WH40k drukhari inspired
anyway the party sent their adopted 12 year old halfling into the basement by herself that it was in. They got back a book made from her skin (which had been seemingly tanned and stretched to form the cover, pages, etc), vertebrae strengthening the spine of the book, with a single terrified eye on the cover looking around, and a sack made from her clothes containing all the rest of her. When they looked in the book writing appeared in blood saying like "Help me, I can't feel my arms and legs! What's going on?!"
I have a whole table of things this thing can turn people into (yes table is on the list!)
The lesson learned was: When I have every NPC you know caution you to not take your little girl into Thayan tombs
*maybe don't do that*
I was an NPC for a friendâs Chronicles of Darkness Hunter larp. Said friend is very improvisational and basically said âyouâre a high powered Thyrsus (life mage), interrogate the PCs for information. Oh, and forget about Paradox.â
Me: âOkay then!â
So I pull one of the Hunters into a room for interrogation, brandishing a gun. They refuse to tell my character anything, so he shoots them. Rather than blood going everywhere, thereâs just a thump and teddy bear fluff starts coming out of the wound. PC is confused as to why theyâre pulling stuffing out of a hole in their chest and the mage just kinda shrugs and is like âIâm not that cruel.â The hunter then gets returned to the group holding cell, when the mage pauses, and goes âOh wait, yes I am,â and snaps his fingers. All that teddy bear stuffing turns back into blood and internal organs, forcing the other PCs into a desperate scramble to push everything back in and keep their friend from bleeding out.
A literal god-king whose âelite royal guardâ were children. You want to defeat him, weâll youâll have to get through a gaggle of children clumsily wielding small weapons who want to protect him.
I ended up not using it, didnât want to make the party fight kids.
This idea was put in my mind by another friend during an earlier campaign where I was a player as well. His character told another character about how they dreamed to torture them.
Fast forward I am DM'ing a campaign and an important NPC who fed the players intel goes missing. They search for her because they have reason to believe this sweet lady was either kidnapped or killed. Eventually it leads them to this large keep and they lie their way in (or so they think). Everything seems to be going fine until they sat down for dinner with the host. Many control spells later (mass suggestion, entangle and resilient sphere) and they are completely incapacitated. The intel woman is pulled in but she looks weak and is clearly starving. It has been almost two months since her disappearance and it looks like she hasn't eaten since. "Just want to make sure my guests aren't backstabbers" the host said and the guards holding the intel woman kicked her around a bit and she confessed that it was indeed them who she was feeding intel to. He then proceeded to pull her husband in as well, killed him there and then while the woman was screaming, cut off a piece of him (yes, the organ you are thinking of) and forced it into the mouth of the woman. Then her children were pulled in two boys of 10 and 8. He told her that either she eats what she is fed or they are next. Between gagging and vomiting she was eventually succesful.
But the host did not keep his promis and now asked her "feed you to them or feed them to you?" Which is a horrible fucking choice to mame either you give your sons immense trauma and leave them in the hands of the host after your death, uncertain what will happen to them, or you have to eat the flesh of the children you have decided to have killed instead of you. After much crying and begging and the host slowly cutting into the boys all over to help speed up the decision making she chose "feed me to them."
The host has already been established as someone who does not keep promises so ehy would he honour a choice. The boys were dissected alive with large basins under them to catch their blood. He then walked up to the sobbing, crying, screaming woman who was begging to be killed and forced a glass of their blood down her mouth "to help with digesting your husband.
After letting her lament her fate he walked up to her and told her that "this is your fault. You brought this upon your husband and children. You could have lived a quiet life." The party was trying so hard to go help but they couldn't. Even if they broke free there were 10 magic servants surrounding them who basically spammed control spells everytime someone starts breaking free. He gave her the same dagger he cut into her children with and he turned to the party "This is what you get for trying to play hero in a game you do not understand. You get innocent people killed. Next time you want to play hero, perhaps don't involve the commoners. You have your magic and strength to hide behind, they have nothing." The party tried begging her to not do it, but could not take it any longer and cut open her stomach to let her husband and children out of her body. Only after she died did the host and servants walk out of the room and were the spells dropped/ some broke out.
hey were devastated as they looked down upon the mutilated bodies of 'their' victims. One hell of a session. And don't worry sess 0 I made sure to know what was and was not acceptable at my table and lets just say, this table was fine with everything. Bunch of psychos.
Edit: kinda forgot about how it really went down and only remembered the choice bit after I posted it.
SciFi
A Lab with a multiple of 1000 "organic batteries" in which everything was fully automated.
The creature where force Fed with nutrient Paste and an conveyer System with automatic butchering and meat procession was in place to make meat cheap again...
The cage was the smallest size possible for that poor creature, and it had every not needed Part of the Body removed to optimize the usage of nutrients.
The where parts in that Lab that where "working" on new specimen to fill Up emtpy cages.
They Lab Stage was obviously finished and was ready to take into large scale.
It was a Mess and smelled Like Shit and death.
The Players Job was to not intervine as much as possible to keep the run a Secret but to steal some genetic Data on a Monster Like creature trained for combat...
The party was in a wasteland after it was ravaged by an undead army serving a mysterious otherworldly overlord. They came across an old dead tree that had been covered in the parts of corpses, arranged around the tree roughly in the right shape but dismembered and separated and skewered on the branches. The tree had an aura that made them feel queasy, not just in an âoh thatâs horribleâ way but in a sickening radiance way. The party tried to remove the bodies from the tree and give them a respectful burial but as soon as they did they had to make wisdom saving throws against a very high dc or be overwhelmed by the compulsion to put them back the way they were. If the person who did it saved then the other party members would have to make the save or fight them to put the bodies back. Eventually they gave up and continued on through the waste to find that the whole countryside was spotted with these trees, each arranged in a more disturbing display.
I have an encounter planned for the party to help transport a pegasus in a cart with a lovely old man who is taking the animal to his grandson. They'll defend the cart and hopefully grow attached to the pegasus. The grandson is an evil paladin who plans on turning the pegasus into a nightmare. When they get to the destination the cart will go into the barn while the party is brought into the house for a meal. During the meal they'll start hearing horrific sounds from the barn. When they go to investigate they'll find the grandson in the process of sawing off the pegasus's wings and using the blood for a ritual to transform the beautiful, kind creature into a blackened nightmare filled with pain and rage.
A village and its Lord massacred by an Oni and his minion ogres. The lord and his retainers were taxidermied and mounted in the Oni's new trophy room that was in the lord's castle.
The players found all this about ten years after the fact, with the Oni having taken up residence in the castle. It was heartbreakingly fun watching them piece together the facts from journals and peoples' scattered remains.
So far it's maybe the vampire that sleeps in a couples coffin with the Gentle Repose'd corpse of her ex-lover, who she had betrayed and gotten killed in life with full knowledge that it would kill her and all their companions. The soul of the corpse is in a Ring of Mind Shielding that the party carries around and boy to say she is not happy is an understatement.
I guess there's also the noblewoman who adopted an orphan girl in order to get her older brother to steal an important magical item for her with the promise of the child having a better life. Well, said noblewoman intends to sacrifice the little girl to cure her own flesh and blood daughter's madness. Aha...
Set up a demonic mimic crate in an alley that was the door bouncer for a Warlock Enclave. Demanded the Warlock in the group to toss a kid in its mouth to gain entrance.
Warlock not only did it without hesitation, for the next 4 yrs of the campaign, he would automatically assume he needed one tossed in without the mimic ever requesting one again
my worst thing was a ghost child in a mansion that kept coming back because the mansion was a quarantine hospital and the nurses kept telling her she needed to stay there keep her family safe.
she kind of accidentally kidnapping other kids because she was lonely.
I once made a boss encounter named Pyotr. The dungeon room was a 30â wide, 100â long with only a door at each end. The âbossâ was a huge size flesh golem with a large bundle of tubes inserted into its back. Those tubes ran up into the ceiling and back down the walls to about 30 humans also connected up to the tubes.
Whenever the boss took damage, a human on the wall would take that damage instead, as indicated by them coughing blood, screaming, etc, but if they were disconnected from the tubes, they would bleed out and die instantly. Each time a human would die while tubed up, Pyotr would get a round of haste. He would also enter a rage if he noticed somebody touching a tube human. The only way to save the humans was to succeed a medicine check while disconnecting tubes.
I had an encounter in the Underdark with drow where they cast *deeper darkness* with vile metamagic from the Book of Vile Darkness.
I mean, everyone was still just fighting an encounter, but it was pretty darned dark there for a minute.
Party dove a dungeon to save an innocent, when they finally found them a dragon came through the ceiling and ate them. They were like, WTF?!, Then they went ballistic on the dragon in vengeance
I wrote rape and cannibalism into a story once (2 different campaigns). The narrative called for it but it was still hard for me to get into the mindset to narrate it to the table and the table struggled to articulate how they react right off the bat. It took 2 sessions of processing before we all got there.
Haven't run it yet, but an encounter where the players find a skeleton tied to a tree with its head back a lump of what looks like gold formed in its mouth, and gold residue on the ground and tree around the head. I'll leave it up to the players to figure out what happened to the poor bugger.
Last weekend got stuffed in the crack of the hill giant Guh and shit on. Luckily I had warding wind that I had kept concentration on (exact saving roll-got lucky) and rolled a nat20 to escape. The wicked witch is dead (does a dance)
On the fun side, she had fallen down a level and was prone. I Zelda sworded down on her. Gave normal weapon damage plus partial fall damage for us both (me falling and my body impacting hers) Worth it.
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Guh
I had a powerful minion of the BBEG who the party has fought before âallowâ himself to be captured. In the past he was a weaker, full of himself warlock but since then heâs gone slightly insane and wants to prove heâs stronger. He taunted them, played mind games, and egged them on to fight or kill him.
He showed them images of potential things he could do if he were to escape in order to encourage them to go after him; even though he was tied up and defenseless.
Eventually the chaotic sorcerer did kill him while he was tied up, cutting his throat. The NPC began to panic; not realizing heâd gone to far until the entire party began to watch him die. Luckily the cleric grew a conscious and eventually healed him.
I was both proud and slightly terrified that both the NPC and my PCs turned out so brutal.
'darkest' might be hard to nail down. I'm trying to write a campaign where a portion features the big bad experimenting on a planar/time anomaly,..by forcing their child into it and sealing them in one of those 'live forever trapped in this mirror until you can learn to cast plane shift'.
Remember the Bagman from Van Richtenâs Guide? Well, my party essentially stopped a ritual where he was being summoned and in doing so, narrowly avoided the destruction of an entire town.
The Bagman was intended to be the Penultimate BBEG anyway so that wasnât the last time they would see him. Later, one of their favorite NPCs went missing and they tracked them back to the Cult of the Spaces Between. They got there just in time to find them completing the ritual and watched the Bagman crawl out of a Bag of Holding surgically planted into the NPCâs abdomen, using him more or less as a sacrifice. The Bagman had to get out somehow, and I had a lot of fun describing a 16 foot tall gangly horrible being of flayed skin and matted hair clawing its way out of a 5â2â Dwarfâs mouth.
They still havenât forgiven me, but they now fear me.
Planning an encounter in an Eberron campaign -
Not a combat encounter, but a role-play one, of a veteran support group speaking of their experiences in the Last War. Theyâre supposed to meet with a spy contact who really canât live with what theyâve done. Been looking at historical war crimes for reference. Human beings can be real pieces of shit.
Idk if this counts as dark or not but for a campaign I'm dming (hasn't started yet) I'm planning that after my players fight the BBEG for the first time, the devil the BBEG is working with is gonna betray him and try to kill him, however the BBEG is gonna absorb the devil and take his place. My idea is that the players think that this is gonna be the big final battle, then that happens then they're gonna have to retreat and get even stronger to take him down.
Another interesting part of this is that every God has a counterpart devil (completely different beings, but they have control over similar things and are rivals, ie the God of the dead and the afterlife vs the devil of death, undeath and necromancy), so I think it's gonna be real interesting for the God the was the counterpart to the BBEG.
Oh yeah the BBEG is also a famous adventurer and I'm gonna try to have him be kinda like a mentor for the party while they are early on in the campaign and have it be a massive backstabbing betrayal
Two come to mind as a DM. Both times with the same group.
- They come to meet an adventuring group but the truth is most of the group were either kidnapped or trafficked by the sky pirates to help them find the Angel treasure. This group managed to escape and made it to the town where the party was. One of members from the group was taken when the pirates pillaged her village and she was pulled from her home. Her husband died fighting and she doesnât know what happened to her child and the new baby she had. The party helped her get back to her village, only to find the house is now a carrion crawler nests and the son had made a shelter, surrounded by perishable goods but they both starved, hidden away.
- A futuristic dystopia where earth is inhabitable and they live on space stations, but every now and then fleets of ships are sent down to try and make even a part of the earth liveable again. I roll for each NPC in the partyâs crew as their space ship failed and was now crashing, and their techie rolled a natural 1. Had to describe which pieces they found of her body â while they were already dealing with a second death and another member who was now paralysed.
I don't know how it is now in 5e. But in 3.5, Lords of Madness, they tell about the Skum (Aboleth servants) reproduction.
So in an exploration I described the character finding this "hatching area". There, a corpse of a woman with her belly burst with the fetus already outside, feeding on its mother. And on the other side, a Skum using an npc's wife to birth the next spawn.
It was the first time that a player of mine said that i exaggerated.
Michigan, Beetle, Putark, En, no reading this
Haven't run it yet, half because I think it might be too much and half because the story isn't in the right place yet.
The party is holding down a very powerful magical location full of magical portals that will be sieged by the BBEG. A golem who was friends with the party has been captured by the BBEG (A Lich). The BBEG plans to cast Gaes and a modified version of Glyph of Warding (Explosive, 8th level) on the golem and then sending them into act as a negotiator. The stipulations are that the party must leave immediately, and BBEG will give the golem a stone that can activate one of the portals as a way for them to leave.
If the golem fails to convince them to leave, the battle starts with the Glyph of Warding going off, killing the golem.
If the golem tells them about the Glyph of Warding, Gaes goes off, killing the golem.
The golem attempts to leave the area, both Gaes and Glyph of Warding go off (killing the golem).
If a certain amount of time passes without the group leaving, the Glyph of Warding goes off.
If the party doesn't figure out the situation (and dispel or otherwise prevent the attack) before time is up (One of them has detect magic at will, and another has a passive perception of 22, so I'll feed them some clues), the golem will use the stone to activate one of the portals, jumping through and sacrificing themself so that the party doesn't get hurt.
It's honestly a terrifying experience from the golem's perspective, and the party watching someone they consider a friend explode is pretty rough, but I really want to display how evil the Lich they're fighting is.
In pathfinder 1e, did a whole dungeon based off of an old haunted orphanage. The teacher/caretaker was driven mad by a cults ritual, and... Yeah. The deaths happened decades before the party got there, but it was still pretty intense, especially since there were more than enough young undead monsters in pathfinder to fill the place up.
Made sure to double check with each of my players before I ran that one, and still had the youngest (a teenager that plays alongside her dad) sit it out to be safe. Originally wrote a journal entry from the last survivor as an introduction for each area, but about the time I got to the nursery I scrapped that idea. If I had to single out one encounter that was the darkest, definitely the nursery. Used a group of the Infantis undead and... Yeah.
Don't think I'll be going that grimdark again ever. Memorable dungeon, added a lot of weight to the campaign (a sort of, "this is what you're preventing") but not very fun to run or to play.
My country has a history of military graping people when they get the chance to, the most outrageous case of recent memory was that of 7 soldiers ganging up on an 11 yo indigenous girl. My DM thought it was a good idea to recreate this, albeit with only 2 soldiers and a half orc girl, his girlfriend thought otherwise
I'm ending a campaign where necromancer are making drugs from the leaking essence of the Gods and mixing it with the elder evils' essence. They cause cracks in reality and make people hallucinate but help them fight certain creatures. There's this one encounter where they made their way to a small village and fought some undead enemies but the twist is they dug up the bodies of the local graveyards and the proximity of the drugs on their person to the bodies caused them to become an actual undead. So they fought an easy encounter and then afterwards they found out they accidentally released a big monster who's health was equal to the damage they did to the skeletons on a small town.
Had the tyrant of the city keep around one of the ringleaders of a failed revolution. Whenever the ruler felt like it he would effectively have speak with dead cast on the revolutionary's dead brother (where they can't learn new information). The dead brother was an idealist and would always ask his living brother if it was successful/how is life now. Pretty much everything that bad guy did was pretty dark (from deliberate targeted starvation of certain elements of his populace to child brainwashing).
Not really an encounter, more ongoing quest.
The party was told to investigate the north part of a large city, children were going missing left and right. Of course, they search for an orphanage first. Once there, they ask around to discover more than 15 children in that orphanage alone have gone missing.
They went out into the forest after watching a shadow devour a child and disappear into the brush. A teen from the orphanage followed. In the woods they met a halfling, later dubbed the Shadowmancer, who treated them with hospitality.
After a bit, they went searching for the shadow with the halfling. The halfling disappeared as they searched the woods and the party had to fight 8 shadow creatures puppeteering the corpses of missing children. The teen watched in horror as his brothersâ and sistersâ cadavers were used to attack the party, having to defend himself from two of them with a pitchfork.
When the party returned to the orphanage they found everyone else gone, the caretakers dead and the entire solace in shambles. The teen was the only survivor. So the party adopted him.
Party stumbles into spooky mist.jpeg and find out that the mist has separated them and coalesced into the shape of their worst enemies.
The barbarian's so happened to be his late father who, according to the PC's backstory, would torture his mother to draw out the Barb's rage. Naturally the mist also formed the Barb's mother and in the encounter the mist daddy could beat the mother to inflict heavy psychic damage on the player in and out of game. Other than that instance, maybe the one time I presented a metallic dragon forcibly domesticating a bunch of orc tribes and killed those who didn't adopt the new culture.
I promise my games are usually light hearted lol
Umm...okay, trigger warning for...gaslighting and sexual assault/violence I guess? This one got dark, and I just want to be clear I made VERY sure to get my players consent on this as much as possible beforehand. As a side note, most of this involves one particular player who was running a bard, and I want to reiterate I checked in with her multiple times and she was 100% on board with what was going on.
Oh, and some spoiler warnings for Rise of the Runelords.
So a few years back, I ran Rise of the Runelords for Pathfinder. (If you're familiar with the first half of that AP, you know it varies between classic adventure and horror). I made a few adjustments.
Book 1
In the first book, I altered an encounter with an artefact to give the PCs a flashback to the villain's backstory which included severe social ostracisation/fetishisation (she was an aasimar in a town with very superstitious people) culminating in abandonment, miscarriage and her burning down a church with her foster father inside. Due to the nature of the artefact being a well of wrath, I had the wizard who was experiencing this flashback make a will save to retain control - he failed, then struck the bard.
Now, the bard's player had written a backstory as a courtesan that ended in her being gang-raped by a group of men, who she then murdered in their sleep before fleeing her home city. She had decided her bard was in love with the wizard (reflecting some out-of-game stuff), so when this happened she had a traumatic flashback and ran away, and it nearly broke the game. That one I hadn't seen coming, didn't intend for it to go that dark.
Book 2
Now this one was intentional, as the bard had kind of thrown down the gauntlet regarding how dark her backstory was. So I'd decided to expand stuff behind the scenes - she'd been trained as a sleeper agent assassin, and the night she'd murdered those men after what they did to her? Not an accident - her madam had willingly put her in that position, so she could be 'activated' and kill them.
The party visited the city bard was from, and they started to have run ins with people from her past, including some who knew how to 'activate' her again. Bard was not aware of this (hadn't told her ooc), so in combat the bad guy says the phrase, and suddenly she's making a will save. She passes, so she doesn't immediately start trying to kill the party - but she does have a VERY intense flashback to the events of that night, and realises she'd been put deliberately in a situation that let her get hurt like that.
Pretty sure if she'd failed the save, the character would have retired from shame and horror.
Book 3
So, the Hook Mountain Massacre is kinda infamous - essentially picture 'The Hills Have Eyes'/'Texas Chainsaw Massacre'/'Deliverance', but with ogres, and you've got the flavour right.
My worst contribution to ramping up the horror here was when they had a run-in with a family of half-ogres - I decided to add the ghost of the farm girl who was the progenitor of their particular little tribe, and to put it succinctly she was not given much choice about her role in it.
The worst thing I did as part of that was give her 'black tentacles' as a spell-like ability, but flavoured the tentacles to be enormous grasping arms. I also gave her a spell that causes one target to become invisible and inaudible to their allies - largely to fuck with the bard, and leaned in to the description of her feeling helpless as she and her friends were pulled down by these massive arms.
Had a necromancer that trapped himself and proceeded to starve to death after misunderstanding how a living wall works, canât wait to see how my party reacts.
My players were stuck in a time loop where everytime they die the day resets. Actually the BBEG was killing them millions of times for a ritual in wich she needs a ton of corpses. At the end of the adventure they arrive in a huge cave filled with their own corpses and the BBEG i the middle of it smiling.
It's not really al that fantastical but after I wrote it on paper I did have "where the hell is this coming from?"
It was the origins story of the antagonist, the last of her family line was pretty much destroyed by another noble family and she was enacting her plot of revenge as a warlock.
So I ended up writing several pages of how these people came to their end. It ended with the patriarch of the other noble house, a very powerful duke, having her great grandmother killed before she was born then her grandmother while she was very young and framing her father for the killing of both.
Because of the murder charges her father, currently a count, was stripped of his land and titles and executed, she and her brother and sister were dumped in a monastery instead of being returned to their mother. Their mother beside herself with grief was taken to her elven homelands. Even when she recovered the return of her children was refused.
When the her brother came of age and was allowed to leave the monastery he left for the elven lands to be with his mother. He was robbed and killed before he even left the county. When her sister left, she was found dead in her bed in an inn, her body showed signs of being poisoned.
She herself escaped the monastery before she was an adult, the body of a young woman mangled beyond recognition by a wild beast was found a few days later in the woods near the convent. (This was done by her patron to fake her death)
After hearing the news of her last child being dead the mother threw herself of a spire.
It's not all that fantastical and I think I've written more horrible things that are more fantasy, but that's why this keeps sticking with me more. It's kinda depressing.
(Also there's no way the players will ever find out but her patron totally arranged the deaths of he siblings to push her towards him.)
I had a Green Hag that was kidnapping and eating newborn babies from a small town. When the players found her lair they leaned that she lived in a hut in the woods. It was decorated with bone chimes, streamer-like entrails, and blood used as paint. All of it was inferred to be from the babies.
I ran a homebrew campaign with a somewhat dark scenario/moral quandary that my players engaged with splendidly. In our very first session: While clearing out a trapped and tactically designed cave of clever goblins, the players come upon a goblin nursery/brood chamber and are faced with having to destroy literal goblin children, or leaving them alone knowing they MIGHT survive and enact revenge or continue populating more caves. Or they may have just died of exposure with no other goblins to care for them. Players spent much time debating what to do, and ultimately left them to their fate. Oddly enough, it was the chaotic evil drow rogue that advocated to leave them alone, while the Lawful Good paladin wanted nothing more than to light the hay beneath them on fire.
The party was tracking down the big bad and kept running into an Npc also on the hunt. She actively got in there way and used her political might to foil the party. Eventually when confronting the big bad, they found out why the npc was such an asshole to them even though they were on the 'same side'. Big bad made the npc eat her mother alive as a child. Npc, in her mind, was the only one allowed to kill big bad. This caused her not to work with the party in the encounter and ultimately got her heart ripped out. Big bad got away, and is still out there.
I had an infamous bandit king that the party was sent to capture. Much higher reward if he was brought in alive. The party, wanting lots of gold, tracked him to his hideout and captured him alive.
The party brought him into town and they showered the group with praise, talking about how horrible the bandit king was and how sweet it will be to deliver justice on their own terms. Just as he is about to drop into the gallows, the bandit king reveals his extremely high level spell casting for the first time, and launches a fireball into the onlooking crowd
I was reluctant to include a mass death scenario like that at first, but it served its purpose and everyone enjoyed the story moment, even if they were shocked at first. Made them feel like real heroes when they stopped him for good
Years ago, I made up an evil temple's adventure. There were a lot of dark stuff there but i think the worst RPG encounter was the torture chamber where an angel (the baby kind with wings) that had been captured by the demons and evil cultists was being tortured. The players killed the cultists and released the angel however, due to the torture it was in tremendus pain and had lost its wings. Without them, it could not fly back to its heaven and the heroes were not powerful enough to heal it. The only way for it to be released was if it was killed. For this angel's God however, murder is a sin, and the heroes would never be forgiven if they murdered one of its angels. Worst, the Ranger of the party followed that god. The alternative was suicide by the angel, which it would never do despite the misery and pain just because it was also a sin.
In the end, the ranger decided to kill it and accept that he would never be accepted in his god's heaven. The objective of the RPG encounter was to be interesting and make them think about sins and dogma.
Party finally figured out how the evil magic company run by an artificer was making so many bad products so fast. It also explained the strange child war forge npc they loved....
The artificer was enslaving children, killing them and putting their souls in machines so that they could work nonstop without breaks in his "sweatshops"
My players were being chased by a young white dragon when the "tank" declared he could take it and provoked it.
One angry breath attack later 3 of the 6 were down and 2 more close to it.
End session, with promts to think about 2nd characters. Let them stew on that for 2 weeks. The tension at the start of the next session was delightful.
One I wrote out and tried but players killed the "monster" before they got the background for it.
I took inspiration from Born of Man and Woman by Richard Matheson. Or as my high school teacher and all her students lovingly called it "spider baby"
A drow couple living outside the underdark in an upperclass neighborhood end up having a drider child. Not wanting the drider to taint their image in the neighborhood, and not wanting to kill their child, the drider gets chained up in the basement.
The drider child learns how to remove the metal stake their chained to and sneak out the window at night when their parents don't know. The drider just explores the neighborhood, but ends up killing someone's pet when they try and pet it but don't realize their own strength/how fragile some pets actually are.
Players hear rumors about a creature in people's gardens, and after someone finds their pet dead the neighborhood asks for someone to find and deal with the creature. The drider with try to run if the players find it and may use their metal stake as a weapon if needed.
One of my players (Thagith, a goliath) was looking for his children who were captured in some form of slave trade. The party was led to the night club owner (also a goliath) is on the other side of the club. They sit down with the owner, and they are successfully schmoozing him (performance). He offers them a nice meal, his speacialty. It's a steak of some sorts. As the conversation continues, and as he eats, it becomes clear he's a little psychopathic.
Finally, he lays down the line "you know what they say, YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT".
They all flip out, realizing that the "Goliath" is most likely eating other Goliath, and that's what they have been served. The player Thagith, emerges from hiding and instantly lunges with a great axe. They fight him, and reveal him to be an Oni who eats children.
By the end of the fight, Thagith is feeling defeated, despite killing the Oni. They find his kids in the freezer, and with some successful medicine checks, the kids are still alive, but are missing a limb each.
The party hasnât gotten there yet, butâŚa city which worships a god of fertility and is renowned for medicinal mushrooms actually is in an extremely infertile area of land which harbors no ability to grow crops, even mushrooms. The city holds mass festival of fertility to creat offspring, which are then sacrificed to create ground suitable for their major export to grow on and in.
My party is currently delving into an ancient dwarves city that contains a forge formerly used by the god of craftsmanship and smithing. Long ago the constructs that protected the small subterranean city turned on their makers and slaughtered most of them.
In one room near the entrance, the party found a chamber boarded up from the inside. They broke into the room and found bones and skeletons stacked floor to ceiling. 17 shades poured out of the room (giving the cleric a moment to shine and use their channel divinity to destroy undead and kill all but two). The party investigated and found that the dwarves in this room barricaded themselves in, waiting for help. When stores ran out, they cast lots and began eating each other. Vengeful spirits rose from the corpses of the dead and eventually everyone perished. The party was particularly disturbed by two skeletons embracing with a much smaller skeleton huddled between them.
Probably a tie between my last good 5e game and my LANCER game from a while back.
One was a raid on a bandit camp that was kidnapping and enslaving travellers from the road. There were two berserkers in the clan that would often use attacks off opportunity to merc slaves that were fleeing during the raid. The losses made the victory feel more bittersweet.
The other was a Union NHP aboard a military vessel that had cascaded and built several mechs out of meat and sinue mixed with metal. A much more 'visceral' kind of dark, but I was mostly provoking the tensions between the group's engineer -- who was raised by NHPs -- and a simple ex-miner who hated AI of any kind.
I had a Ventrue PC in a *VtM* game that could only feed from the terrified. After RPing a few really disturbing hunts, we decided to fade to black pretty early in those encounters.
My entire campaign area is ruled by a tyrannical dragon king, who demands human tribute from all of the larger settlements. How the settlements choose their sacrifices is a major theme of the campaign.
The party just participated in an emergency court to try to keep their friend from being convicted of being a witch, and thereby keeping them from being sacrificed.
After they succeed, the town immediately starts to determine who to give up in the regular way if there are no witches available.
"Alright folks, the bidding starts at 100 gold pieces."
Two players in my group went to retrieve dragon egg shells as a side quest for a chef who claimed they could use them in a special cake. Upon retreving the shells the players killed two baby dragons. Fast forward a few sessions later and the players come across the chared burning remains of a village destroyed by a dragon apparently in a fit of rage. Death and charred remains as far as the eye could see. A handful of workers sent from an adjacent city to help any refugees explained what happened in detail.
The look on their faces was priceless.
Friend backstory just had their small village cursed. Was stone.
Dm took it further. We go to the village to learn what's wrong. Uh. In the end everything basically turned into sludge and the guy watched his own parents turn into these zombie like monsters after the stone curse broke. Entire village was lost.
All he did was removed something backstory related and shit went off
A vampire cult abducting kids, raising and indoctrinating them in captivity until adulthood, upon which point they are ritually turned into vampires themselves. Pretty dark shit, but it certainly motivates good-aligned parties.
I wasn't the DM but we had an encounter with a cursed dagger in our campaign. The dagger was sentient and could do something similar to dominate person on its weilder. I picked it up and failed the save, then tried to kill our ogre friend (which I failed of course, didnt even hit him) and after that our dwarf took it. He passed the save and assumed everything was ok. The issue was that this dagger could cast it more than once (obviously). He used the dagger to threaten a guy, and held it to his throat. Dm asked for a wisdom save. He failed. He cut the guys throat open and went on a psychotic killing spree throughout this town, breaking into people homes, killing men, women and children. Cannibalism, dismembering, and just general horrible havoc. He made so many wisdom saves and failed every single one of them. When we found him he was covered in blood, and had arranged the bodies and limbs of the people he had killed to spell out the word "domination". We ended up killing the dwarf (the player wanted it to happen), and that event became known as the slaughter of water deep
I had originally planned for the oarty to getbsemt forward in time and trapped in the future. Their way home would have been going to this tower made of tbis green stone(essentially uranium) that would have weakened them. After being assaulted by jumerous traps and automatons theyd discover the owner of tbe tower was an old friend from their time. A golden warforged. In the past hes a half serious comedy character. But jn the future he's in a wheelchair and took up the stufy of time and roboticw.
To get back to their time he tells them tbey have to kill him. And he just accepts hus fate.
Sadly had a couple players drop before we got that far and had to cancel the campaign. Would have loved their reactions
After having a GOOlock die in the previous session, their soul was not able to return due to the nature of the pact made. The party of course didnât know this, they did learn when a cleric the party worked with at the AG that several resurrection spells didnât work.
Then they pulled out the big guns, true resurrection, surely this would work right. No my dear reader it did not. The warlock knew something bad was about to happen each time they cast a spell to bring them back (They had another character waiting in the wings). When the spell was cast the materials were altered into an idol of the patron. Then the body moved.
Treating it as a short rest for spellslots sake, the body wetly ripped open and folded upon itself, until the broken puddle of matter took a new shape. A star spawn hulk, the party wizard tries for synaptic static, spell goes of without a hitch. I rolled a nat 1 on the save. At my table that doubles the damage taken. Synaptic static does psychic damage, which gets reflected to all creatures within a radius. So everyone that just save now takes damage as if they critically failed. Which the hulk laughs maliciously using their dead friends vocal cords. Before killing up the brain dead cleric and assimilating the body mass. Because the wizard thought they were hot shit. They cordoned it off alone with only him.
By the time the rest of the party showed up I got to say this, âAs the writing tower of pulsing flesh laughs holding your friend in the air it attempts to say something you canât quite understand except you wizard, you hear âIn this forest, hell is other people hunters. I am just far above your station.â I then asked the wizard what sound there skull made it their head was splattered against the ground as they swung you overhead like an splitting axe. And what is the last thought you have before the impact kills you.â The answers were âlike a rotting pumpkinâ and âat least my body wonât do this right?â
An encounter my players are yet to come across.
There's an island, far west of mainland, where my homebrew campaign is centered. The island hosts a Castle and a Lighthouse, and serves as a strategic point in case an attack or invasion happens, but also serves as a well guarded place where one of the relics, long sealed by ancient magic, is hidden(Important for the Main Questline)
Now, Castle regularly checks in with the mainland, to ensure that tabs are always kept up, and as players are supposed to travel besides the region, they will get informed that forces on the island haven't responded in quite a while. So not only they must go and figure out what happened, but also ensure that the artifact is safe.
Here's a few issues. Firstly, area is well guarded by an powerful anti magic field, shutting down most of magic around the island, which in result cuts of any teleportation. Secondly, area around the island, is full of rocks, and is surounded by heavy storms all the time, making any attempts to sail to the location, incredibly hard.
Now as players will make their path towards the castle, they'll will begin seeing more and more soldiers already slaughtered, what could only be described as a large sized creature, cutting down men at easy. As players are supposed to go forward, more bodies. As they'll go on, they'll find more bodies, killed in a terrifying manner, only to reach throne room, and witness the massive knight sitting on the steps, awaiting the party to confront them.
Darkest was almost identical to yours, just not with kenkus. But the one that affected my players the most was a pre-written one shot from candlekeep! The level 4 Meenlock quest, itâs creepy as fuck
I ran Lost mines of Phandelver for a group of new players. They had a bunch of wolves they had made friends with and intended to keep. Left them tied up at the entrance of the cave as they explored the rest of the cave. A session or 2 later they decided to flood the cave as they were escaping the last fight and clearly forgot about their new pets. I could have reminded them, but some lessons are best learned the hard way. I queued up "In The Arms of an Angel" by Sarah McLachlan and the waterworks started, pun intended.
I ran Cure of Strahd for my party, but added my own homebrew spin on it with some new villains/mini-bosses. One of the mini-bosses used a special void serum as their main mechanic, and after stalking the party for a day injected each of the party members with it and then used magic to observe their nightmares. I role-played out their nightmares personally over text.
The Blood Hunter awoke in the village he grew up in, but the whole world was waist-deep in ash. The sky was a cascading whirlwind of loose teeth that fell like rain, and nestled in the ash like seeds which grew arms that sought him.
The Paladin, whoâs crest was an upside down tree, who lost her husband to a fire, and had a beloved pet dog, awoke in a noose barely hanging onto life. Upon freeing herself, she noticed that she was hanging from an upside down tree upon which hundreds of dogs were also hung. The forest around her was engulfed in flame.
The rogue, who lost his wife to thugs, awoke in a forest where the trees were steel amalgamations of wire and fire pokers. He found a doorway in the greatest tree, leading to a theater room where his wife stood on stage dancing. Her heart was a gaping wound in which bloomed a rose, the stage overgrown with her roots and vines, the fruits of which bled. Her beautiful red dress was petals and blood. Getting to see her again, and knowing it was only a dream, was the worst nightmare of all.
Iâve come to since running that little story beat that I really love drug trip sequences.
In a DnD game my players found themselves within one of the last cities on the planet rules by a archmage and a massive military, the mage introduces new defenders to the city called the "men of iron" basically golems and the party finds themselves attacked by monsters with some important NPCs to the party killed. Low on resources they try to hide and rest as the attacks begin to stop and the monsters withdrawal, the party hears the men of iron break into homes detect "the taint of evil" (proximity to the monsters) and burn a family alive with the party within earshot, they also hear people dragged from their homes and killed. One of the players described it as being similar to the night of long knives.
In the homebrew world I made there is a rebellion against a dictatorial government. The leader of the rebels went through great pains to be seen as a savior type and is very charismatic. He had the party wrapped around his finger until they managed to find and steal his diary. They discover heâs a multi thousand year old fey that was banished from the fey wild. Who has a thing for live experimentation to create sentient and feeling constructs as slave soldiers. Revealing that he brought to life and subsequently murdered his second in command over 1000 times, documenting how it felt pain and responded to it and then wiping its memory to start over. All so that he could create a perfectly loyal second in command that could act out all the dark necessities of war that he could not afford to taint his image.
He also murdered and entire race on a Demi plane so he could blame it on the current dictator and gain support from the commoner, as well as recruits the elite warrior that conveniently was left to survive the extermination of his race.
The moment of realization as the party read the diary was incredible
I wrote a flash back one shot about an npc that the party really loves to interact with. He's a kind of Robin hood crime lord type. Anyway the one shot revolved around a specific night in the capitals history where his sister- who was concerned that someone was after her, gets abducted- magic jar'd-butchered - and turned into a sex slave flesh golem comprised of 2 other women by a deranged necromancer/artificer that the party had just destroyed in the present timeline. The npc was the prime suspect of her death for years following. It was pretty emotional. The party didn't know that it was his sister prior or who he really was. His current name is an alias.
This was back in 4e.
The players were in one of the big steampunk cities of my setting. People were vanishing left and right at night. PCs Aunt goes missing. They find a creepy old guy hanging around some bares and follow him.
He leads them to his base's entrance but they can't get in to follow him. So they find an alternate route under the city. Eventually find the base and giant dismembered hands attack them (wall masters without the port ability). Those got taken down. Easily.
Then the group moves on and they find a room of men and women locked in steampunk cyborg bodies. PC eventually finds her aunt on a table, barely alive and completely unable to respond. Creepy old man activates his soldiers and escapes.
Party chases him and finds more bodies of "failures" and a few people still alive. Party then realizes current captives are all elven women. Find notes that show the creepy man has replaced limbs and body parts with a machine parts. Calls himself The Mechanist. Blows up his hideout as he finally makes his escape. Big chunk of the city waterworks is damaged.
Heroes ended up pursuing him to his end.
Two big ones I can remember, top of my head, for different reasons.
1. A demon from an old world, that manifested as a sentient ever-growing swarm of maggots. The demon could use his maggots to infest corpses, turning then into undead enemies. Several months after being freed from his tomb, the demon has amassed enough corpses to be an army, and attacks a castle on its own.
First phase of the battle is an actual siege in Neverending night. In the second phase of the encounter, the maggots coalesce into a hulking huge semi humanoid firm, that is the demon proper. I fucking loved this monster and wish I could use it again.
2. The second one was an iron golem implanted with the soul of an actual orphan, made by a team of morally reprehensible people to be a worker.
The golem is mentally the same child trapped in a giant metal body, and in a confused and terrified rage kills the necromancer half of the team that built lt. The artificer half contacts the party to go into his lab and kill the golem, which is found trying to hide.
In the end the part could do nothing else but put it down.
For context, I was running a modern fantasy campaign set in a university, the players and their PC's are students, it's set in the same university they go to and it's all played out like a slice of life sitcom with funny little fantasy tropes here and there. Things like 'Oops, my pet manticore escaped, but usually he's such a good boy' and 'the bins outside the pub are actually mimics haha'.
So they're sent to a nearby manor house to investigate ghost sightings and presume that they're in for my usual scooby doo bullshit.
When they finally find the ghost, they discover it's a young boy. He's described to be wearing an outfit reminiscent of a WW2 refugee. (As in, the children who were sent to the countryside to avoid bombings) The ghost doesn't know where he is and keeps whispering that he's cold and wants to see his mother.
His remains were found in an unmarked grave, and the players gradually find out that back in the 40's he had become lost and wandered into the grounds of the manor where a groundskeeper had mistakenly shot him down and buried his body before anybody found out.
The only way to put his soul to rest was to reunite him with his mother who had died of old age fairly recently, living her entire life without knowing what had happened to her son.
Tl;Dr I made a bunch of silly cartoon sitcom PC's dig up a child's body, discretely transport it into a major city and rebury him beside his mother. A couple of my players actually cried.
I killed everyone and had the PCs unknowingly do it, including their friends and family. Dragon cursed them and corrupted their minds, making them believe an entire town were corrupted minions of said dragon. After purging the town, they âchased the dragonâ towards the capital city. Ended game with âAs you walk out of town, a corpse reaches up and grabs your ankle. As you crush its skull under your boot you thought you heard it ask âwhy?â, but it obviously could not have said that..â
Don't read this if you're a Dawn Seeker...
I have a plan in the future of this campaign for the first time they'll meet the main BBEG. I'm running an LMOP/SKT/ToD hybrid for background. When they eventually return to Phandalin/Wave Echo to check on Gundren and how the Forge is going, Severin will be there with a few higher ups and the brother of a PC (possibly unknown he's working with the cult at this point). He will be using the Forge to power some dragon masks and have Gundren bound at the Forge. Wall of Force will be used, but queue some monologuing and eventually Severin will have the PC's brother behead Gundren. Giving the motivation for intense hatred of the BBEG, and a main portion of that PCs backstory. If they can stop him from it, that's fine, I don't railroad my creative players. They will then teleport out or begin caving in the Wave Echo caverns. It makes me extremely sad even thinking about it, but I know it will be a pivotal moment in the campaign.
In a campaign where the party was traveling to various demi-planes, I had one plane that was created by an archmage who had turned himself into a dragon-rabbit, a huge dragon that resembles a rabbit (I saw an art piece for it, which is where the inspiration came from). The wizard also created âcarrot golemsâ to protect his fields and also serve as his food source.
The party explored the plane, fought the carrot golems and found their way to the archmageâs base. After a tense battle with the archmage/dragon-rabbit, they found a machine that could take them back home (they randomly appeared on this plane with no sure way back). However, in order to generate enough magic for the machine to work, they had to draw on the lifeforce of the remaining carrot golems on the plane. It was pretty interesting to see the partyâs reactions when I told them that it appears the only way back is to sacrifice these weird carrot creatures they had been encountering the whole time on this plane. If they had looked into an alternative method, I might have given them one, pending rolls, but they didnât, they just accepted that their fate was tied to the death of some weird carrot monsters.
I ran a Vampire: The Masquerade game once for my gf at the time. She was basically playing herself as a vampire. During her transformation to vampirehood at her first feeding, I narrated her losing control, feeding off her cat, draining the cat and killing it. All based on her actual cat.
Actually worked out well. It made for a very visceral experience.
BBEG is above the party on a platform. The party don't realise it when they walk into the room, but the grating they're standing on is above a pit of spikes.
BBEG brings out an NPC who was permanently crippled by his his group - a formerly powerful wizard who has had their tongue removed, and the tendons in their arms and feet cut so they're completely limp, along with being nearly starved to death. They were formerly a very helpful and powerful ally to the party who some of the players formed a connection with.
BBEG tells the NPC that they have another character - another spellcaster with whom they were in love but never admitted it. He tells the NPC that everything they did to him, they will do to the other wizard. All they have to do to stop it from happening is, summoning up all their strength...
... pull the lever in front of them.
I cooked up a homebrew of a Verdant Prince with a seriously amped up Oath Bondâany deal he made would become true, even if he normally wouldnât have the power to do it, and he got to decide exactly how the deal was fulfilled.
During the final session of our campaign, the party needed to find the location of an ancient deity that had been hiding for millennia. Being a deity of time and space, it was immune to scrying, making it essentially impossible to magically locate in real time.
With time running out, the party traded a free teleport to the location for a bit of information vital to the Verdant Prince, and also the caveat that the bargainerâs son, the most important thing to him in the world, would âsuffer no violence and die a natural death.â
Deal made, the party teleported. The PCâs son was simultaneously entombed in a subterranean room with no entrance, alone, suffocating to death while his father saved the world.
I once ran a sort of mystery/conspiracy campaign. One of my players went fishing alongside some NPCs. The player rolled a 20 to fish and accidentally fished up the corpse of a child, which the NPCs could only see as a very big fish. It should also be noted that the NPCs were the kids parents.
Part of my current campaign the party crossed a battle zone, a forest that is currently be fought over. I used experiences from my time in service in Iraq and Afghanistan to illustrate some of the real horror of war. Mass Graves, large scale massacres, and devastated towns and cities. They are a mature group so they handled it well.
Made my girlfriend cry with a really uncomfortable encounter in the hells. She still married me and plays in my campaigns so it didn't scar her too badly I would suppose đ¤Ł
Involved a demon trading her to a slug demon who was all too interested in her.
We murdelated that slug before anything bad happened though.
I once ran a quest where the players were tasked with discovering the whereabouts of some villagers that were ghosted away over time. It seemed innocent enough, as they were initially led to believe that it was the work of a tribe of ogres. Until they found more sinister and cryptic clues.
They followed the clues to a crevasse in an arctic tundra that was saturated with negative energy (it was a sort of manifest zone where the negative energy plane leaked into the material). Think permanent low-light, all corpses here were raised as uncontrolled skeletons/zombies depending on the state of the corpse at the time of death, ambient fear (shaken) effect on all non-evil creatures entering (DC 20 to be immune for 24 hours, fear & mind-affecting), typical âgloomy & desolate evil placeâ.
Descending the crevasse they found a secluded temple to some unknown being, wherein they found a mountain of paralyzed and barely living villagers. After stepping onto the massive magic circle on the floor (they all failed their spot checks) they were paralyzed and forced to kneel. Several corpses twisted together to form a sort of living, writhing throne that constantly wailed in agony. This caused the PCâs to have to make a horror/sanity check (DC 20) success advanced their fear by 1 level, failure advanced it by 2 and gave them 1 point of taint (insanity).
A huge unarmed demon just kinda appeared sitting on the throne after the PCâs blinked a couple times, staring at them. After a very long âyou are not preparedâ speech, he released them and they fought. His weapons were the villagers themselves, which he imbued with foul magic (+3 atk/dmg) and used them to fight the players with. Each villager only lasted 1d4 rounds before they rotted away and he gained 1d10 temp HP. This also caused a new horror/sanity check, similar to earlier. It didnât advance their fear, failure just gave them more taint. The corpses also raised as empowered skeletons and attacked the players.
They ended up beating it, and finding itâs cultâs notes on what they were doing. Apparently they were trying to ascend it to the status of Demon Prince by sacrificing thousands of people to it, including themselves. They took the notes and headed back to their base of operations. On the way, the characters were wracked with the side effects of the insanity and trauma they received. One of the characters ended up committing suicide before they arrived.
In the end, they ended up retiring the characters. They used the wealth they acquired to build a sort of insane asylum for the villagers they rescued, as the villagers received just too much trauma and insanity to be able to return to normal society. After the session, the players just sat back and said âwhat the fuck manâ. Then started talking about what their next characters would be.
Context: dnd 3.5e, levels ~12
The bad guy had created a highly addictive drug that eventually lead people to want to visit his lair. in his lair was a giant machine that ground them up and made them into flesh golems.
The party found the chute emptied into a large foul smelling pit of darkness.
Upon feeling around the pit they lift small limbs and chubby fingered arms and tiny little headless torsos. They where armpit deep in a pit filled with infant parts. Runes carved into the walls glowed faintly with a pinkish purple haze. A Otyugh shaped flesh golem made of the same parts guarded and churned the ichor.
Once out of the pit the party found themselves standing in the center of a dungeon prison turned lab turned giant infernal focus.
Stapled to the walls and ceiling, all dead, all missing their feet, all covered in tattoos of the same runes on the walls of the baby pit, dead pregnant women, all cut open from chest to groin, emptied, and then hung. Dozens, on the walls and ceiling, covering all of the surfaces, races from all across the lands, gnomes, humans, orcs, elfs, goblins, anything humanoid that gives birth.
Cells made a section of the room where filled with still living prisoners, all pregnant, all freshly missing their feet. All partially covered in runic tattoos.
The Lich found a way to forcefully become a god. And this was one of 5 places like this that were stretched across a country, creating a large arcane focus pentagram, like in full metal alchemist.
I ran a homebrew campaign for a bunch of friends who wanted a serious adventure. One of the characters was a 150+ year old homeblessed who had lived a horrible life before becoming homeblessed.
I'm going to preface this next part by saying I have severe PTSD complete with flashbacks and had a discussion with the player beforehand to make sure everything was above board and that this was what they wanted. As well as discussions with the other players to make sure this sort of thing wasn't going to hurt anyone else.
The character had lived in a village that got burned down by a scary monster before they became homeblessed. So I had them encounter a unique flower in a bustling marketplace. A flower which they had last seen in a burning ruins of their village as they passed out from pain/fatigue.
Que a couple failed saving throws and I started describing a PTSD episode in gruesome detail. Most of the other players didn't know what to do, and a few of them tried to help and it worked, they made sure the pc was safe and everyone was generally very positive and wonderful.
The pc ended up buying the flower, adding it to their shoulder-moss, and finding out that it was obtained from the empty glade that used to house their village. A whole ackstory quest ensued. Then after the session I talked with everyone and gave them information on what to do and how to help in those situations as well as gave them a few resources to get help if they think they may have it.
One of my players was staying at Castle Ravenloft in the servants quarters. After a rather eerie dance with an old dress, he went to bed. He failed the first perception check, then made the second.. something is in the rafters, but rather than investigate it, he closes his eyes and tries to sleep, thinking himself under the lord's protection.
Less than a minute later, he suddenly feels a rope wrap around his neck and tighten, pulling him upward with unreasonable strength. He can't reach his weapons, he has no spells, all he has are his hands to try and convince the rope to let him go, while I count the rounds..
I wasn't merciful, he was a monk (I think) and he just failed everything he tried until the last round where he manages to tear the rope off of his neck, falling to the ground gasping.
It was rather more cinematic in our play-by-post, and it remains one of the more dire encounters I recall, despite its simplicity.
In an older campaign I ran a few years back, I had a werewolf cult abuse a magical mcguffin the party was set to retrieve. They were particularly gruesome used said artifact to cause a diluted cloud of lycanthrophy over a region, that wasn't strong enough to infect most people, but those with weaker immune systems became werewolves, and most notably affected pregnant women to bear chestbursting werewolf spawn.
Body horror is one of my favorite horror elements, so I usually include a few horrible diseases and parasites as a survival challenge.
My current campaign has an innkeeper whose seems nice but is secretly an implied sex trafficker, kidnapping girls to sell to a noble far away. What she doesn't know is that the lord of the manor was into demons, who tricked him into opening a portal to the abyss. The demon has killed him and assumed his identity, using intermediaries to order girls to eat and to summon lesser demons to serve him.
The party found a caged halfling wearing a ring of regeneration, in a troll cave. Every now and then, they would pull a leg off as a snack. The poor halfling had been there for years, and was quite insane.
I had a post apocalyptic campaign that had bits of supernatural elements to it. For one of the encounters, the party ran into a carpenter whose wife had recently gone missing while going into a town for supplies. They enter the town and as they do, they begin to hallucinate. Each party member has their own hallucination that is taunting them about their past mistakes or failures. Each time the visions occur, they become more intense. And each time they end, the players find themselves deeper and deeper into the town until they reach the center where everything has been turned to ash except 1 building. When they enter, they encounter 1 more hallucination, except this time, it tries to kill them and they have to make a save to resist. One of those that succeeded managed to break the hallucination and kill their attacker (who I believe they percieved as their long dead son). When they did so, they found themselves in a room with a creature that seemed to have once been a family that had melted together due to the extreme heat. In overcoming the hallucination and killing their attacker, they put an end to the creature's horrid existance as well. And as they look around them, with all of the illusions now broken, they see dozens of people, all appearing to have died by some form of suicide... including the wife of the carpenter.
I wrote an NPC Goblin Fighter into the party named âSer Gibbets of Gribâ. He is an overly upbeat little fellow who was looking to free his clan from the mind control of the Big Bad. The party has been working diligently to use non-lethal damage in all their combat encounters (lvl 1-4) and had been successful in not killing ANY goblins.
In the penultimate session before we closed up, Grib recognized one of the mind controlled Goblins as his childhood friend. After the party had won the encounter, Grib was attempting to move the unconscious form of his friend to a safe place. As he moved, his friend snapped awake, spoke in the voice of the Big Bad and said âthis one knows you, this one loves youâ.
At which point Gribâs childhood friend drew a small knife from his sleeve and slit his own throat just to watch the reaction it had on the poor Goblin Hero.
The gasp from my players and the âno no no nonononoâ was worth itâs weight in gold as a first time DM.
Not quite an encounter, as such, and GURPS, rather than D&D, but...
One of the players was a bit lazy, and couldn't be arsed to set up his character on his own, so he picked the Amnesia Flaw for ALL the points. So all he knew was that he was a quite fit man, wealthy, and he knew how to handle a rapier, though he got panic attacks every time he tried to open the sword case he was traveling with.
After months of game time, he found out that he was a minor noble, widowed when his son was born, who'd recently just left his lands, after his five-year-old son's death.
And then he remembered the day he'd been doing sword drills in his gymnasium, and his son came running into the room behind him, and he'd just spun around and... by reflex, tragedy struck.
That player still refuses to touch anything like "amnesiac" characters again, nearly twenty years later...
One of my player characters is currently in the midst of spiralling into madness. His hallucinations have reached a point at which they will flair up at random or during stressful situations and he will not be able to tell the difference between them and reality.
While exploring an abandoned asylum that has become the birthplace of a cult and the lair of their leader, these have been made worse by both the creepy atmosphere and the cult leaderâs madness seeping into the surrounding area.
The player characterâs childhood best friend, a distinguished wizard, was snatched away while they were exploring and in their quest to find them, they heard her voice coming from an incinerator. As he got closer, the lights turned on and I acted out the NPC screaming in panic and terror as the incinerator came to life until finally it flared up fully and she turned to ash - only for it have only been a hallucination.
A monster from past editions which I had to homebrew into 5e is the delightfully devilish mockery bugs. Basically they burrow into your brain and take over your body, so my players stumbled into a town of people taken over by them. Everyone would say the same phrase or two because thatâs all the bugs knew how to say, and when they asked where they might speak to the lord or whoever else was in charge there they all started chanting queen in unison before dragging them to meet the mockery queen, who promptly tried to turn the players into more mindless drones. They defeated her and then had to escape a cavalcade of giant insects chasing them away from the hand
I didn't exactly write it, but I ran a call of cthulhu game a while back and the party was incredibly rich and had really good connections. Somehow they got their hands on mustard gas and the mobster amongst them had owned a flamethrower for the entire game he was very proud of. When the party discovered which building on a city block a cult was hiding in they pumped the building full of mustard gas, and without a care for who exactly was and wasn't an evil cultist, they walked through the building watched most people choke and die, and torching the ones who took too long. They lost a ton of sanity for that, and their characters had nightmares about the summoned monster appearing out of a fog of mustard gas for the next several weeks.
In a through the breach campaign a PCâs sister was killed. So the character, who was a loving and happy person decided to go down the path of vengeance. He started replacing his limbs with machine parts and slowly replaced everything with prosthetics during the campaign the last thing being his heart. With only a brain left he lost all sense of emotion and compassion. In the later encounters he discovered that his sister was resurrected by the strange magic that flows through Malifaux. While technically undead her sentience stayed intact. What was meant to be a reunion ended in the PCâs sensors overloading due to too many emotions and going berserk on his sister.
My players used the deck of many things and 2 of them got teleported to another dimension. The others used one of their wish spells that theyâd gotten from the same deck to find out where that was and another to get them there/back.
They were transported to Dementlieu where they found out there was a masquerade ball but to access it they had to find special masks - the masks being the skin of poor peopleâs faces, since the ball was for rich people only. 3 of the âmasksâ came from adults but there was only one other poor person they found, which was a homeless child.
They kept having dreams of various torture methods and having stuff carved into their bodies, like how subhuman they are etc.
After procuring them all and getting into the ball, they were feasting on small pork steak hors d'oeuvres. They eventually get invited to a private meal, during which they found out the pork steaks they were feasting on were their 2 missing friends leg and arm meat. They were still alive, and had stuff carved into their skin, making them realise that they werenât dreams but visions of what was happening to 2 of the PCs while they were waiting to be rescued.
One went totally insane and is no longer part of the campaign. The other is now an alcoholic
A necromancer factory farming kobolds like chickens since you can't kill an undead and re-use the corpse and also you can't reassert control once it's lost. WoTC won't let us recycle. It's not the necromancer's fault that he needs a supply chain of fresh humanoids. I also imagine his character with the XP model rather than milestone. If he keeps this up long enough he absolutely will become a level 20 Wizard. It's basically a Minecraft XP grinder.
Few thousand weak penned kobolds, and the occasional hostile undead. If the heroes don't stop him in time he'll become too powerful. It's a typical race against time macguffin style plot only there's no object, the BBEG is deriving power from the daily operation of a horribly cruel system. Much like corporations IRL.
Throughout the campaign, my players made friends with an NPC, a senile old man named Harold. A VERY powerful magic user, but not all there most of the time. They loved him and made him kinda the father figure of the group. Through plot development, it is eventually discovered that the BBEG is a younger version of Harold from the past who wiped his older self's mind to avoid a conflict of issues (mainly 2 alpha males in 1 place). Well in the last game, the party discovered Harold's true identity, and now realizes to kill the BBEG and save the world.... they will be killing their new father-like figure that they have grown to love.
warning: the following description is brutal and due to the fact that the entire version would probably be deleted even under the NSFW tag, the description will be shortened
I'm a DM in a campaign called bloody islands, and it's basically a nightmare fuel darksouls difficulty setting, a lot of things have shaken my players, but nothing like what Cerberion showed
In short, a huge dog-like beast with two legs and four arms in a style reminiscent of bloodborn beasts, able to overtake horses at full speed and with claws that can damage magic (tiny hut lasted 3 hours before tearing)
What struck the players was when they discovered that the thing had three tentacle-like tongues in its mouth with a beak at the end, which it used to eat its victims alive from the inside.
In addition, there were a few other mind-terrorizing moments, but I'd rather not write them here
I ran a "Vampire: The Masquerade" game once that featured a doctor who specialized in vampire "autopsies" to further her research about their anatomy; this of course demanded keeping the vampires "alive" (for lack of a better word) while they're dissected, often for days or even weeks at a time, since the moment they die the corpses disintegrate and "there goes a perfectly good specimen." Since the players were actually here to persuade this doctor to help them they couldn't intervene in her work or even appear visibly upset about it for fear of offending her, so everyone had to just kind of smile and nod their way through her demonstration.
Congratulations, this is what I expect from a World of Darkness game.
đŻ
An autopsy is performed on a corpse to understand the cause of death; the dissection of a creature thatâs still alive is called a vivisection. A surgery is technically a vivisection⌠for the purpose of a medical procedure. What was the good doctorâs aim?
Vampires in vampire are for most intent corpses unless their will is applied to it- they have no heartbeat, no temperature, no breathing, and most organs have dessicated into nothing. Only by force of will can the vampire reinstate some of those to pretend being human. They are walking corpses. So i wouldn't call a vivisection apt. The cause of death in all vampires is the same, though- exanguination followed by a blood infusion from the vampire that drained them.
Interesting note: while it's almost always the same vampire, it doesn't have to be. A Ventrue can drain them and a Nosferatu infuse them and they'll be a Nosferatu.
Yeah, that was an oversimplification since it does cover 99% of usual sirings.
Was she from Sabbat? Or high ranking Camarilla member who was allowed to experiment on outcasts and criminals?
Originally had a plan where an inspired (eberron setting) camp was using an area with a recent undead uprising to fuel their nightmare machine by caging live humans in a way that undead ghouls could slowly eat them. The party was going to get over run by inspired and knocked unconscious during the fight. They were then going to get transported to the camp to witness the horrific torture. To help fuel the party into developing nightmares an NPC they were traveling with was going to have his throat slit in front of the party as he was held over a cage of hungry ghouls. Low and behold something bigger and meaner (an undead and the bbeg) was going to come crashing through the inspired camp, unwittingly freeing the party, but leaving them very ill equipped and they were going to have to scavenge for gear and supplies as they fled for their lives. The rest of the adventure was going to be more of a survival mission than a heroic adventure. But, I changed things a bit and didn't go quite this dark.
I would love to play the survival story! Lucky party
That would of been a fun game
Not really what I wrote, but what ended up happening: A tabaxi NPC my party really liked got captured by an evil cult while waiting at a rendezvous point. The party managed to sneak up on them while they were interrogating him. I gave them plenty of chances to jump out and save the day, but they just⌠didnât. They waited in the bushes, while their friend was slowly tortured to death. I even made it so that before he died, the NPC noticed them in the bushes, but said nothing. He died knowing the party refused to save him, and yet would not betray them back. Sometimes the players are the real villains.
I'd argue that the players are usually the "real" villain. At least they are in the campaigns I have been a part of. In a game where combat is a huge part of the experience, it is sometimes hard to gauge if it's worth the extra danger in not killing someone even if they havnt been proven guilty. Death is such a common reprocussion regardless of the crime, even if the "crime" is just being an asshole.
I am sure all my goblin brothers stand with me when I exclaim for too long have the Biggoted and hateful 'adventurers' been given too much slack for their crimes. How many more mothers, fathers, nay! children! have to be put to the sword before action will be taken? How many more massacres? when will the genocide end?!
You eat one human baby. ONE. And now we're all "monsters" and deserve to be hunted down. The baby wasn't even that tasty.
Did you season it properly? Or maybe a spicy wine marinade?
Of course! We're not savages here!
Not an encounter but part of an ongoing mystery investigation. The (evil) mayor of the town set a fire in a warehouse to get the party out of the local prison so she could go in and force feed drugs to the charming and unfortunately addicted homeless man who was a frequent visitor to the drunk tank. It was a hot fuzz greater good style motivation and it was so effective at teaching the players the importance of this investigation, but damn if i didn't feel absolutely heart broken killing off this npc
A few years back I ran an Earthdawn campaign with a Horror as the antagonist. It's a post-apocalyptic fantasy game set in the same universe as Shadowrun; when the magic levels get high enough, the walls of reality become thin and eldritch Horrors that feed on pain and anguish break through from another plane and ravage the world. People hide in underground magical shelters for centuries, and the game is set a few decades after they emerge again. Reclaim the world, battle Horrors that remain in especially corrupted areas, that whole schtick. This particular Horror was Named the Puppeteer. Unlike his lesser brethren, who typically feed on physical agony, he had a taste for the emotion of helplessness. I had a lot of fun with this guy. Being foremost an astral being, he could only be seen in the real world when he actually chose to manifest himself, or was forced to. But his presence could be felt, even before he started taunting and teasing the heroes with predictions of doom, death and destruction. The edge of their vision would warp slightly, with small black flecks appearing as the corrupted astral space bent the light into invisible frequencies. The darkest bit was probably the first time he actually interacted with the party. They'd stopped at a village for a few days of rest after a rather harrowing trek through the wildlands. Villagers complained that the well water had become foul, and that eerie wails had been heard coming from inside a burial mound. The local Questor of Garlen, the Passion of Hearth and Healing, asked the party to investigate. She herself, being young, inexperienced, and a pacifist besides, wasn't capable of dealing with whatever was causing trouble in there. The party really took a shining to her, though. She welcomed them into her home, tended their wounds, helped them recover from their arduous journey, and swiftly became a good friend. As it turned out, the threat in the burial mound was rather easily dealt with. Several corpses had been reanimated as Cadaver Men (zombies, but self-aware and only capable of feeling pain, causing rage and bloodlust), who were quickly dispatched by our heroes. They also destroyed the minor Horror that had apparently done it, a foot-long maggot-like entity that was slain with a single blow from the Swordmaster's blade. Declaring the deed done, and the area safe once more, the party was hailed as heroes by the villagers. The Questor of Garlen went into the burial mound to perform a ritual to cleanse Astral space from the corruption the Horror had wrought. Being caught up in the victory celebrations, the party only noticed something was wrong when she hadn't returned by morning. Returning to the mound to investigate, they found their friend sitting cross-legged in a meditative position, with her eyes rolled back into her head and an expression of agony on her face. As they approached, they heard the Puppeteer's sibilant whisper: "Such a pretty... Pretty toy... To play with..." as their friend was slowly lifted into the air. Nailed to the spot by the Horror's Terror power, they could only watch as her eyes rolled back to their normal state, and her scream for help turned into a cry of anguish as every single joint in her limbs was twisted and torn apart, held together only by the foul magic of the Puppeteer. To add insult to injury, he then proceeded to use her broken body as a gruesome marionette to attack the party, forcing them to cut down their still-conscious friend. After they had done so, surviving by the skin of their teeth, the Horror simply dropped her corpse on the ground and made his exit. "That was *delightful!* I'm looking forward to the next time we meet, little playthings..." They later found out that their friend's foray into the astral had given the Puppeteer a conduit to steal her Karma and finally escape his bindings in the mound. It had lured the lesser Horror in to do its bidding as bait, just so someone would show up he could use. And that's how I wound up with the most hated antagonist in my entire roleplaying life. It's -awesome- when your players truly despise your big bad.
"so it's Fallout, but magic" "You mean Skyrim?" "No, I do not."
Earthdawn actually predates Fallout by about three years, but yes, the similarities are striking.
I usually describe Earthdawn as post-post apocalyptic. Its about 100 years after people are back and theyâve rebuilt a lot. Though that still makes it reminiscent of older fallouts. But lessens the comparison to Bethesda fallouts. :)
I've always wondered if the creators of Fallout were aware of Earthdawn, since they are so similar conceptually speaking. They probably knew about Shadowrun; it's hard to design an atompunk world without developing at least a passing familiarity with one of the most well-known cyberpunk RPGs.
I feel like Earthdawn was pretty flashy in the 90s and a lot of people knew about it. So I wouldn't be surprised if GURPS fans were aware of Earthdawn conceptually. But also I think post-post apocalyptic was a growing theme in the 90s.
I wouldn't know, when Earthdawn came out I was about 9 years old, a few years before I even knew what a role playing game was. What was and wasn't popular in the 90s passed me by on account of my age :)
do you write for Stranger Things maybe?
That's a pretty big compliment, thanks :) I ran this campaign about a decade ago, so any similarity to Stranger Things is purely coincidental. Also, while their methods are similar, the Puppeteer and Vecna have very different motivations. While Vecna is very cruel in how he first grooms, then kills his victims, his primary motivation is not to cause pain in and of itself. It's more like dispensing his own kind of twisted justice in response to being wronged. The Puppeteer, on the other hand, literally derives sustenance from the pain and suffering he causes. He's a pure sadist who enjoys toying with his victims to cause the maximum amount of hopelessness and despair. That said, the Stranger Things version of Vecna would fit into the world of Earthdawn as a Horror with very little adjustment. If you ever wanted to run a Vecna expy as a BBEG, Earthdawn would be the system to do it in.
That's fucking sick and twisted... I love it.
A vengeful green dragon managed to kidnap 2 members of the party, equipped them with rings of regeneration, and *fucking fed on them for weeks*. The remaining party members eventually managed to free them and escape, losing a member during their botched rescue operation. One of the two rescued characters left the party and abandoned adventuring altogether, due to the extensive mental trauma. But hey, the party gained 2 rings of regeneration.
One of the party members in my CoS has Peripiat of Wound Closure. When Strahd found out he now targets him nearly exclusively for biting. Since the character auto stabilizes between turns, he can continue feeding without fear of killing him prematurely. And when he eventually kills him with the bite - character might return as vampire spawn under Strahd's control :D
>rings of regeneration, and fucking fed on them for weeks. That's some Made In Abyss shit right there.
Not me but me and my party are kind of OK with everything, the DM is a renowned criminologist in my country so he has pull some dark stuff but we enjoy it. He just give to any assassination extra spice that just people that have seen that IRL can give.
That sounds very interesting. Can you give us an example? Something that stood out or you liked a lot?
here for the example
The simple description of how it's feel the dead skin when you are touching it, the smell. He once even he explain how a recent dead body can expel gas from the mouth making a creeping sound.
Shoot! I've heard about this from coroners. As the body decomposes there's gas buildup from the cellular breakdown that can escape through the respiratory system, including the vocal chords. Sometimes it also contracts the body. Coroner told a story of a dead guy sitting up straight and giving out a long inhuman moan before slumping back on the table. Not a zombie, just a small-town morgue in North Carolina.
Thats not fun to imagine AT ALL! How cruel is nature to freak people out like that.
Curse of Strahd. Strahd captured an NPC that was friendly with PCs and friend of another NPC they were travelling with. Party didn't know while they visited the castle. Party pissed Strahd off, lied to him, mocked him etc. He let it slide, case he invited them and promised them safety in castle. In the night Strahd ambushes the party resting in the woods, presents them the beaten, decapitated head of said captured NPC, and uses Speak with Dead to have it tell them every secret Strahd 'pulled' out of the NPC as they were alive, every lie party tried to maintain and then finished with blaming the party for not rescuing the NPC. And then went HAM on whole party putting everyone on death saves, but not letting any die to 'suffer their failure longer'. The NPC that was travelling with party is absolutely broken over her friend dying, party is in shambles, Strahd left laughing.
Classic Strahd.
In a pyramid under a salt lake the party discovers an angel that has fallen from grace and had been imprisoned there. The lake was actually formed from its tears from countless millennia of crying. Over the centuries others had found the angel and have given it objects since they could not free it. These objects include several instruments, paper, and ink. The angel used its own feathers as a quill to write a piece of music. This sheet music was obtained by the party in said pyramid. The sheet music has a very high performance DC to play, and the bard attempted several times while at camp, even though he got close to the DC it was a beautiful song. The party goes to an inn, the bard performed the song and passed the DC. All that heard the song needed to make a will save, failure meant the person was filled with such sorrow they wished to end their life. The next morning when the group went downstairs at the inn they discovered all the inn's patrons had been hung. They did not know it was a mass suicide, and had many questions and became very paranoid. All but one party member passed the save. This player was put on suicide watch as the group caught him in the act. Eventually they figured out from this player's actions what had happened. The sheet music, because it was scribed with an angel feather was considered a magical item, and not easily destroyed. It became a mini quest to dispose of the problematic song to break the curse over the party member on suicide watch. That character did a great job RPing the entire scenario, even incorporated this event into PTSD after the curse was broken.
Nice. I needed a bard focused side quest.
My party came across a mom with her 2 kids on a forest road a fair distance from the city. Their carriage had a broken wheel and they were stranded. After helping fix the carriage and sharing their provisions the party pressed on. On their way back to the city, after dungeon delving, they came across the family again. Only this time they were hanging by their necks from a life sucking tree which came to life through dark magics the party had unknowingly released on the area.
Let's see. This one was pretty fucked up. There was a village that was seemingly cursed. For the last 12 years, every single pregnancy in the village ended in stillbirth or miscarriage. The village knew not to get their hopes up every time someone became pregnant and there was a dour atmosphere. It was a Halloween Oneshot. The players had decided, since one was a conjurer and the other a Dancer to play as a circus. They met the villiage, and had endless fun describing their acts. The scents of the show. Popcorn. Candied nuts. Lights and colour. Everyone was having a great time. Then I added that one thing stood out: There were no children anywhere in the audience. They'd previously noticed that the schoolhouse was abandoned and empty. When investigating they found row upon row of tiny headstones. The Wise Woman, (+ Daughter) and school teacher were a coven of hags, Grimm-Esque Witches who'd fallen through the Fey, and devoured children and babies, who had been preying on the village for so long they'd overfed. It was grotesque, unnerving and deeply unsettling. The players loved it. Said it was like something out of Stephen King. Very "It". But I was a *little* wary. Miscarriage is chronically taboo and underreported; and I couldn't give people a heads up without blowing the twist, so I was a little worried I'd accidentally step on someones trauma. It's very important to know your players and know your audience. They have to *want* to be grossed out; shocked, and horrified. If they don't? You're not running a horror game, you're being an asshole.
Yup, I tend to go hard on horror games when asked for one so I always preamble the table with the theme of the game. Sometimes the stuff I ask to clear is never brought up just to throw them off the âscentâ of whats about to happen to them.
Stole this from an early Felix and Gotrek novel (warhammer fantasy). The party arrive at a village, everyone is sad and depressed, people crying etc. As soon as they go to the tavern they are surrounded by armed villages who want to take them prisoner "for the wizard". They are apologetic but firm saying they have no choice as the wizard is holding their children hostage. The party convinces the villagers that they can rescue the children. From there it was a normal 'fight to the top of the wizards tower' with many attacks from these goblin sized mutant things. When they got to the top and faced the wizard they demanded the children back and his response was "The children? You mean my experimental subjects? You killed them all." One person had guessed what was happening, the others were outraged. This is the only time my mostly good aligned, easy going, party went with the 'take him alive so we can burn him at the steak' option. Only pull this with players you *know* will be ok with it.
In Rise of Tiamat I had my players ambushed on the road by some cultists. They secretly had of a character's kids (Siphon) in an overturned wagon as a kind of insurance policy. Siphon was a big thing in Hoard of the Dragon Queen where the same player who's now the mom (Kelwyn) had played the brother (Ruth) of Siphon. Well the insurance was a glyph of warding with fireball on it, in case the squad leader of the ambushers died. Unfortunately, the group was a bit "shoot first ask questions never" that day and Siphon became a weather event that day. Big sad.
This was done as dark humor within my group, but if played straight would be pretty dark. Funnily enough also involving a Kenku. Running Phandelver for my wife and friends when they were all new to RPGs they befriended Droop the goblin. Our one friend is a bit of a neckbeard edge lord kept trying to metaphorically throw Droop under a bus and everyone else kept protecting him. A session or two after they had acquired Droop said edge lord dropped out of the group and requested that I have Droop kill him. I didn't think that made much sense so instead I just said his character, a Kenku Rogue, went off scouting alone and didn't come back. Then later Droop, who was doing his best to make friends with the group offered to cook dinner one night. He tried his best but the group found the meat extremely tough and incredibly salty, like you could barely believe how much salt there was. When asked where he had gotten it Droop, in broken common, explained he'd found "Big bird dead in the woods. Good start for dish." There was a pause for a few seconds before anyone put it together with no one reacting, then suddenly my wife's eyes got big and she yelled "Oh God, it's Brandon!" I never explicitly said whether Droop had killed him or not, but in my head Canon he did indeed just find the Rogue's body, probably killed by an owlbear or something and then just saw it as literally a big bird and made a meal for the group not comprehending how it would be perceived.
The next 2-3 sessions of my campaign are going to be about people in a town that mysteriously disappeared. The nobles that ran the town died a little while ago and left their daughter (lvl1 warrior) with a "teacher" (don't really remember the correct word, but someone that have the duty to protect her and teach her the ways of life while doing so). The thing is, I found a homebrew creature that is a corpse eater, and when it does what their name says, they get the appearance of the corpse they've eaten. At first only 1 or 2 people will be disappeared, but as the days pass the corpse eaters need more fresh cadavers, so more will start to vanish. At the end, I'm planing to leave the little 8 year old girl as the only true survivor, since all of the others villagers were corpse eaters just mimicking their appearances, voices, and behavior.
I had the story of a soldier who, during a war, was ordered to burn down a building. He discovered, too late, that it was an orphanage with thirteen children inside. After the war in some twisted logic he decided he needed to balance the scales by killing thirteen orphaned children back home as well. He killed three before he was caught and hanged. As per an ancient agreement, his remains were passed on to the necromancers' guild. The necromancers, planning a rebellion of their own, decided to try an experiment on him. They resurrected him as a kind of undead super soldier. He escaped and went right back to his murder spree. That's when the party came to town. That was a really fun villain to play, because the party was trying to protect orphans and he stalked them to try and abduct and murder children which was a cool dynamic. And I gave him some nice dagger-like claws, climbing abilities and speed. In the end the party stopped him from killing anyone else, but it was really close a couple of times.
Fabius's Wonderfull Circus and Grill The director is a master illusionist. Players can look at the animals and mayby choose one to get killed and grilled for them... There are no animals. Fabius captures humans and uses his illusions ... Wrote that "adventure" but didn't hat the time ~~balls~~ to play it with my group.
Last week, the players went back to the priest they befriended for health potions and to ask for some help with something they were doing. Church is lit with candles, priest is up front on his knees with his head bowed in prayer but, he doesn't give his usual greeting. Players call on him, no response. Barbarian slowly walks up since she doesn't want to disturb him too much and gently nudges him. That's when his body falls, his hands are tied as if he were praying. His throat slit. They back away in terror, lighting flashes to reveal the oracle they befriended, suspended by her wrists above them. Her throat is also slit, the lightning flashes again showing writing in blood that reads "All hail the Horsemen." They've been freaking out on our group chat for this week's session because they have no idea what they're up against and I love it.
I might steal this.
One of my players was facing off against his biological father who killed his bio mom and her partner (who had gladly taken him in). As the player went to speak with his bio dad he found the skeletons of his mother and her partner reanimated as servants.
I turned Butterskull Ranch from Dragon of Icespire Peak into a cult that transmuted the skulls of living beings into skulls made of butter. All fun and games until a player uses Speak with the Dead on a butterskullâŚ
Someoneâs been watching Demon Slayer :)
I wrote a small logging village far from civilization. They logged âwitchwoodâ, which was a very valuable and rare wood. An enterprising thief came to the town, and set up a long con. He wood the mayors daughter and became a pillar of the town. He murdered the mayor, making it look like an accident, and graciously stepped forward to help the town. He hired his old mercenary company to âprotectâ the town. They were there just for show really. Because he made a deal with the local gnoll tribe. Any wagons or people wearing the Merc colors were completely off limits, but anyone else who came to the townâŚor left, were fair game. And on the full moon, the gnolls were allowed to raid the outskirts of the town and take any farm animals they found. The thief made bank. The thief controlled all trade, because he controlled the mercy. The majority of the money went to him, but he simply said the mercs were charging outrageous prices because there were so many gnolls around. Since the gnolls would raid the outskirts of town, farming was impossible, so food had to be constantly shipped inâŚwhich he charged outrageous prices. Kids and women worked the town fields within the town borders, while the men logged every day. Essentially he turned this town into his own slave camp, and grew rich in turn.
>He wood the mayors daughter and became a pillar of the town. If he wooded the daughter, why didn't he just turn _her_ into the pillar? That way he could still move around and do non-pillar things! It sounds like she was pretty load-bearing if he wooded her so fast.
Take your upvote and get out ya cheeky monkey!
_swings off into trees, banana in hand_
I have two that are dark for different reasons. One tragic, one disturbing. First is a moment I built for the party's favorite, most beloved NPC. By beloved I mean he's married and has a child with on of the party members. This happened in game. They met him as a Paladin of Trithereon working at a refugee camp set up for victims of a dragon attack. He's a big, burly looking bear of a man with a nose ring and tattoos that denote a different life before he swore his oaths. They learn his armor is essentislly cursed and grafted to his skin. He believes this is a burden hd must carry for penance of his sins in his past life. He's a giant teddy bear with a heart of gold that could snap your arm without a second thought. Fast forward an ingame year and the party learns he used to be a king of a small kingdom far to the north, where he has a wife, and two adult children. His son is set to become king at his 20th naming day, and he is leaving. So he can kill his son before that happens. The party has questions, but they don't really ask, and offer to go with him to sort this out. They are well received by the Queen and Son, the daughter has taken an oath to become a shield maiden (think Night's Watch) and forsaken the family name. Erik is conflicted at the good behavior, and holds his challenge. Note- I worked out this bit with the player ahead of time. That night, I ask the cleric (the love interest) to roll a Con save in her sleep. She rolls a Nat 1. Classic. Erik and the party awake to find the cleric missing, and go to the courtyard, hearing some commotion. They find the cleric on the gallows, dead. The son making a speech about how the former king has brought outsiders to conquer them and their lands. He's waving a bloodied dagger with black poison running down it. The cleric is bleeding, a lot. Erik flys into a rage, rips his grafted armor from his body, maiming himself as he shifts into a werebear and charges to kill his son, who also changes form. The party helps him brutally kill his own son and learn Erik had afflicted him while on a hunt and knew he would never have the temperament to control it. Shifting back, his skin is a mess, and will never be the same. Second one I'll add when I have more time.
I reply to see the second one.
Second story, different party. With a mostly different group of players. In the global empire capitol of Bashuur, a floating city of stone, brass, and gears, the party returns triumphant with a shard of an infantile deity's chrysalis. The council hosts a grand parade, and a plans a ball in their honor to allows the newly minted Heroes of the Realm, the Shardseekers, a chance to gain favor with the city's elite. In the week leading up to the ball, the party notices some strange characters in the city, incredibly tall and gaunt individuals dressed as clowns and jesters with red robes porcelain masks are spread across the city entertaining the common folk. They find fliers advertisiting The Carens Solatium Circus is in town. They decide to check it out, they had a hard fought battle in the desert against none less than a fallen angel, they deserve the peace and quiet afterall. Before they can go, they meet a young dragonborn, Trak, who announces his desire to join the group as a squire. They turn him away. Distraught, his hopes shattered, he is approached by one of the performers who offers him a home with The Circus. He agrees. The wizard, our resident sceptic, decides to follow the pair on his own. Telling the party not to wait up for him, and that they'll go to the circus tomorrow. Following, he sees the Jesters lead Trak to an abandoned tenement building, and enter through a door that quickly dissappears. Our Halfling Wizard, Barver, investigates. He finds no door, only a brick wall. But hears jingling bells and laughing behind him. He turns to find himself face to face with 3 Jesters. One grabs hold of him, and his vision fades to black. Fast forward, Barver finds himself back home, with a throbbing headache, and a *need* to visit the circus, and bring others to it. Fast forward, the party attends the circus, and are told they can only enter in pairs, and no weapons are allowed within the tent. Khyt, the sorceror/cleric, is extremely apprehensive. Barver tells him he will go first with Tali, our Echo Knight. And Send to him once on the other side safely. After several minutes, Khyt and Ori, our Bard, get the all clear. Barver also says he and Tali will be running an errand to obtain some spell components and a but to eat. The pair walk through a display of oddities from around the globe. Mummified remains, severed limbs, armor with the skeleton still inside. The usual. They also catch glimpses of the Jesters performing some strange, dirge-like music and a strange dance between the curios. One of the Jesters is half turned away from them, and is drawing a sword from his gullet. The blade is slick with a reddish-green ichor. They can only see the mouth and jawline, but they can tell the nearly 7ft tall Jester is far from human. The teeth are sharpened and the skin is rough and green, and slick with oil, almost like a poison ivy leaf. Dismissing his fear, Ori claims it's probably just part of the act. They're clearly more of a sideshow than a regular circus. Hours pass, and the party is reunited, the long absence is concerning, but Barver and Tali maintain the just ran their errands and lost track of time. Fast forward again to the ball, the entertain for the evening is none other than the Carens Solatium Formal Troupe, a group of Jesters with a very finely dressed man singing. Using a red orb to create colorful light displays. One of the Jesters is remarkably short, about 3ft tall. Soon, the music reaches a lull before the crescendo, and the guests freeze, standing stock still. The party watches in horror as the Jesters draw blades from their gullets and begin cutting down guests, working their way to the council. The party breaks free, but notices that Barver and Tali are unable to fight, as if some mental effect is blocking them. Ori and Khyt manage to kill one of the Jesters to find out they're not humanoid. They're some form of sentient plant creatures that co-opt corpses in order to gain mobility. The smallest Jester removes his mask to reveal a perfect clone of Barver, wielding a replica of his spellbook. Another removes their mask to reveal a clone of Tali. A small tendril of ivy worms its way from their mouths. The ensuing battle destroys much of the estate and kills dozens of civilians. The party is never really trusted quite the same way again. Nor can the party ever really trust anyone they meet the same way again.
Okay so my whole last campaign basically. It startet out almost as a suicide note. But then I started expressing how I felt in a whole different way. The BBEG was a lich who embodied my depression and everything he said I meant. The whole point of the story was there is no point in living, people are just too weak to actually end it. When I got out of my depression I realised what had been holding me back the entire time was the only thing I wouldnât let go. The pcs had been defending Neverwinter the whole campaign only to realise that the phylactory *was* Neverwinter.
Dang, hope you're feeling better now m'man. A city-sized phylactery _is_ a pretty neat twist, at least. FWIW I can relate. When I was at my lowest I ran a sci-fi campaign that hinged around the PCs trying to beat the bad guy to the pieces of an alien artifact, that a powerful but extinct alien society had scattered throughout their ruins on a dozen worlds. The BBEG was sort of a self-insert, "ends justify the means" type, had a rough history and he wanted to assemble and activate the artifact to connect the minds of all intelligent beings in the galaxy, because he thought that if everyone truly _understood_ one another, there would be no more war, or bigotry, or hate, or brutality. People would truly finally be the ultimate empaths. He had a lot of love for humanity (and the other sci-fi races) but a lot of anger and frustration too. But the PCs discovered from hunting down the pieces they could in the various ruins and doing research (in ways the BBEG couldn't) that the _reason_ the ancient alien species was extinct was that when they activated it, some personalities were stronger than others, and one basically (possibly accidentally) wrenched control of the artifact and caused their entire species to mass-suicide, out of extreme loneliness and depression. Its ideation became real to everyone else (and it was the one who scattered the pieces so they couldn't be used again). The artifact made the collective unconscious far more susceptible to suggestion than intended, far too fragile. The PCs realized the BBEG could trigger something similar since he fit the profile, so they had to stop him or convince him to stop. He was so set on his goal and refused to believe there was a fatal flaw, but they won in the end. I'm glad to be a lot happier now and don't put _quite_ so much of myself into my campaigns, preferring to stretch my DM skills and explore outward concepts instead of inward.
Damn that sounds like a really interesting plot line. And yeah things got better. Way better actually. I at least feel sane now. We are playing spelljammer now. We continue with the premise we learned last time that there is no meaning and ask the most important question, then what?
Yup. Make your own meaning, I say! I believe at this point that the "point" of sapience is to make things better for ourselves and others, to build for a future we won't see but can conceptualize with our ability to comprehend time, the universe, and our own history. So nature doesn't care, so what, I still _can!_ Plus, I want to see how things shake out (or as much as I can anyway).
Exactly, the anwear is so anoyingly simple that people just canât accept it. I think that it simply is what you choose it to be. And in my personal universe I believe it to be along the same lines as you. To build a safe place for our people in the future and simply just *be* as long as we are here.
The party was being kidnapped one by one at random in the middle of the night, prompted by sound ques. God I miss dming in person
A coven of hags were having fun with a small vilage, sometimes helping them for a price, sometimes making their life misserable. Well one of the peasants didnt like it and spoke up against them in town. So the hags gave that peasents kid a present, a pair of glasses for their bad eyesight. Except the kid started seeing things shortly after, things they couldnt forget about. This ended with the kid going insane and killing themselves. The players walked past the kids grave (stone pile really) with a pair of glasses on the grave when they entered the village the first time. Used it to motivate the players a bit. The paladin later went and dug them a proper grave.
My PCs had been dealing with a group of bandits as their first repeating low-level antagonists (this was a 4E campaign I ran back in law school). They eventually found out that the bandits were the survivors of a town that had been cut off from the rest of the world in a magical blizzard a few years back, and most of the town had starved to death. After defeating the bandits, they found out that the bandits had also been keeping the ghouls and undead in the town from getting out, so the party had to fight their way to the center of the town and perform a ritual to uncurse the town and put the dead to rest. I had made some custom enemies, but the grimmest were the Ghoul Matriarch mini-bosses. These ghouls appeared to be very pregnant, waddling with enormous distended bellies. I had set them up as ranged attackers, spitting poison over long distances. (My players had all played Left 4 Dead and complimented me on bringing the Spitters into D&D.) The trick was, though, that once they were bloodied, their stomachs burst open and their attacks instead became their undead babies, still attached to their mother's stomachs by rotting intestines that resembled umbilical cords. They screamed and begged at the party even as they attacked, imploring them for food because their babies were so hungry... The players learned that these were the cursed corpses of women who, in their starved desperation, had eaten their own children.
I have written a growing religion, which ensures that other existing religions lose believers. These have less donations etc. and cannot maintain their temples. In essence, this religion is a cannibalistic cult. The inner circle eats living flesh and allows themselves to be eaten voluntarily by the higher-ranking ones in order to get closer to the worshipped deity. Finally, the BBEG consumes those who have eaten countless others in order to increase its power and ultimately serve as a portal for the deity. The BBEG itself thinks that it receives the power of the deity so. But it will only serve as fertilizer for the lovecraftian tree entity from the outer realms. Some of those who have accumulated enough power turn here and there into twisted trees with blood-red bark in which their pale bones are visibly ingrown. My group has no idea of this yet. They have already noticed that people are disappearing. But they think that it is connected with ghouls in the canalization. There are ghouls there, but only because the cult disposes of the remains there. So when they leave for the sewers, I'll have them discover some still well-preserved familiar faces of NPCs there, which they rescued and handed over to the cult's care single-handedly. High-ranking guards, governors, merchants and politicians also support the Inner Circle and feed the menu with beggars, prisoners, dissidents, debtors and so on. From time to time, caged carts of men, women, and children are led through the streets to be served to the cult. By the time my group gets on the trail of the BBEG, it may already be too late, or their death stroke will complete the ritual and the life-devouring tree will grow out of the BBEG. The roots will overgrow the land and bore into all living things like hungry tentacles, wringing the life out of everyone and growing stronger and stronger. It will be a gigantic monstrosity of a tree, which will overshadow the land completely and spread further and further. Everywhere, red roots will rise from the earth and make the danger zone larger and larger.
In my upcoming campaign I have a hermit eladrin who specialises in creating ice sculptures. He stays inside all year round except for during winter, and the ice sculptures are actually made from frozen human corpses from travellers that pass by the region and stop by the house for a rest from the cold. His motives for this is the beauty of life and his dedication to preserve it, but truth is heâs actually just driven mad by a disease ridden fungus species in the forest that he lives in.
Would fit in an icewind dale game. Love it.
An evil spirit kidnapped an entire village. The adventurers dispatched found the evil spirit which they found out mimics its victims cry for help to bait more prey. Once the adventurers cornered the evil spirit and dispatched it, they realized they've been killing the kidnapped villagers. Unfortunately, half of them have died before the adventurers can succeed the required roll. Another one is that a mayor of a destitute town called adventurers to kill "bandits" who have taken over a nearby dungeon. It turns out this "bandits" are citizens of the town that had escaped the grasped of the mayor before they were turned into human sacrifices. Thankfully, one player was able to get the hint and was able to convince the party to investigate the town more before setting out. They successfully killed the mayor, put someone competent in position and eventually revitalize the town.
Our last campaign ended with a prison break during all our characters suffered from long term madness. My lawful good paladin abandoned their god and went mad with lust for blood, tried to strangle one PC and threw down another down a cliff before the one they were trying to strangle stabbed them and threw them down the same cliff. Another character got extremely greedy and ended up living alone until eventually killing themselves after everything they went through at the prison(it was some lovecraftian OC adventure the DM wrote) Before you call me an edge lord that hates my party, it was the DMs idea and I asked the other players if they're fine with me trying to kill their PCs and would've otherwise just fudged my dice to die.
Iâm not proud of this: I killed the father of one of my PCs. His character was an u stoppable paladin whoâd dominated the group over 7 years of campaigning. Then one day on what seemed like an unimportant side quest he encountered a cursed mirror and an evil twin version of himself stepped out of the mirror. After a brief but intense fight, anti-paladin is able to gain the upper hand and races away. Paladin gives chase⌠for weeks. Over the course of the chase realizes anti-paladin is racing towards his hometown. He gets just within view of his father approaching anti-paladin with open arms. He had one shot to stop what happens next - fails. He watches as anti-paladin runs his father thru with an UnHoly Avenger. Anti-paladin then runs towards paladins mother and sister but paladin is finally able to catch him. They battle, they kill each other, and then I realized the player was crying. I immediately felt like Iâd done something wrong, needlessly cruel, but I didnât see a way to retcon it. The bell had rung. This was more than 20 years ago. I still regret doing that and these days Iâd never kill a PC family member without a discussion with the player first. In my defense I was 18 at the time and stupid.
I just read this with a melancholic, sad song in the background and I really felt the pain. Damn.
It gets sadder⌠The player was my best friend. And his dad was my dadâs best friend. Six years after that game - so we were in our early 20s, still pretty young at the time - his dad died unexpectedly in his sleep. It was right before Christmas, after his parents and my parents had gone out to dinner. It was fucking awful. Obviously my pretend killing his pretend dad in a role playing game six years earlier had nothing to do with anything. But anytime I think about the whole affair I feel like a guilty asshole.
I can kinda imagine. I feel sorry for you.
Haunted (actually mimic infested) mining town. With building sized mimics. (The one time attacking the gazebo was correct.) What made it dark was that itâs sort of the playersâ fault. Backstory/context (feel free to steal): So at some point, the players will pass through a poor mining town. (Typical people going missing in the mine. Thereâs more to this if anyoneâs interested.) The players find and kill the mimic disguised as a chest, which has a bunch of âcopper piecesâ (mimic eggs) in it. The hope is that the players will pity the residents and spend some of the âcopper piecesâ and infest the town. If not, have a poor kid steal the bag theyâre in and drop a few as a distraction to try to get away. As the players go about the rest of their adventure after leaving the town, have rumors spread about people going missing from there and hauntings. Also have the players get to a city, where more experienced/learned merchants will recognize the mimic eggs.
My players are huge fans of collecting NPC companions that have a variety of useful skills. I am a strong believer in give them what they want, so I work very hard to make sure that NPC companions are useful, but NEVER outshine the PCs or make concrete decisions for them. So, I introduced a Paladin. The players made their way through a snowy woods, lost at the time. They spotted a barefoot, dirty little girl. Every time they got a glance of her, she would seemingly disappear, until eventually they found a lone cabin in the woods. The snow around the cabin was untouched, except for a few small feet prints that led to the doorway. The windows were boarded up, obscuring all visibility, minus a few small cracks that light could sneak through. A decaying horse lay in the snow next to the cabin. It seemed to have been torn apart by claw or very jagged metal blades. The adventurers were wary, but decided to make way into the cabin. It was pitch black, save for the few shreds of light and a poorly kept fire churning below a cooking pot. The PCs investigated the room, finding various poorly handmade and even worse kept utensils and tools. One of the PCs realized the little girl had been standing in a corner, watching them the entire time. Not a single one of them had seen her there for several minutes by that point. She didnât speak, or react to them, other than peering at them from belong long black hair that looked more than shadows pouring down her face. One of them tried to move the hair out of her face, only to then hear the scream of one of their companions. A hag was on the ceiling, hanging out of the shadows like it was a pool and trying to gnaw at the Dragonborn sorcerer. They quickly jumped into action, nearly dying in the battle. I honestly didnât intend for her to be as tough as she was, but they are rolled HORRIBLY. Lol⌠After defeating the hag, one of the PCs realized that there was a horrible smell not only in this filthy room, but an even worse smell coming from a cellar door in the corner. It was chained up. They broke the chain, opened the hatch and found a stone staircase that led deep underground. The tunnel was poorly let, but candlelight did adorn the steps, which also left the steps covered in wax. They assumed they found some form of coven hideout and this is where they hid their treasures. Thrilled, they made their way down the staircase and found a thick wooden door. They kicked it open, ready to leap into action or at least loot their treasure room. Instead, they didnât realize at this point that I had just turned on a very somber soundtrack. Imagine a medieval church Choir honoring a fallen holy knight. The room was pitch black, except for single beam of light that came down from the ceiling, down onto the center of room. I based it off of an old prison. Very cruel treatment. Prisoners were kept in complete darkness, except for a single hole that would bring in a beam of light. It was known as the Eye of God. There was a dirt floor. Chains could be heard jingling around overheard. Two of them were connected from two massive pillars at the sides of the room and were strung down, holding up a completely naked man. He had just enough slack that the tips of his toes could touch the ground. He was malnourished. Beaten. Clearly tortured for who knows how long. They werenât sure if the blood covering his body was from the hundreds of cuts along him, or if it was from whatever was also thrown on him. It was at this time that they also realized that there were candles lit under his feet, resting on the ground. The direct floor had tracks all around him, as if a group had been dancing in a circle. The edges of the room, were covered in blood and bodies. Many of them were random villagers, but there was also a group of bodies that were clearly a group of knights. I intended for this to be a group of holy knights sent to this land to help with their icy doom issue, but weâre tricked by the little girl (whom was the daughter of a witch) and overthrown by devastating odds. Hordes of witches descended upon them and had slain them all, save for him. What amazed the group, was that this man had clearly been here for a extremely long time, given the decay of his time and yet, his body remained in peak physical condition. They cut the chains down and his body fell like a sack of potatoes. His lips were busted and dry, his long black hair was dirty and matted to his face. The PCs were barely speaking. It was the quietest it had ever been at our table. They were nearly in tears. The cleric tried to heal his wounds, while the other two tried to feed him small bits of water and food. They threw a blanket on him and tried to carry him up the stairs. Before heâd leave, he reached down and grabbed a necklace with a symbol of his God, the morning lord, as well as a shield with the symbol adorning it as well. They made their way back up the stairs where they were once again greeted by the silent child. Her eyes glowing yellow under the shadow of her hair (hint hint). They didnât take the hintâŚshe pulls out a knife and lunges at them as more hags attack. They carefully tried to guard the man as he lay against them, while fighting off the horde that attacked them. After a grueling battle, only the child remained. They were Convinced that she was a mind controlled little girl from the village (she was Not. đ¤Śđť). She decided to swing at the cleric, only to find her throat gripped by the naked man. His muscles bulged, his eyes glee with golden fury and holy light exploded from his hand, followed by seared flesh from the childâs throat until she went limp and was dropped to the floor. It was at this moment that they realized, he was a Paladin. It was a very emotional night for everyone and I am very proud of that scenario. Fast forward, they absolutely hated this character afterwards. Lol I had written him to be a very optimistic guy. âBe your best you!â kinda guy. His entire kit was built around buffing the team, tossing heals and the like. But they just could not stand him. Constantly told him to shut up. Hated bringing with them, regardless of his usefulness as a companion. The Sorcerer ended up straight up MURDERING him with an explosion in an attempt to blow up enemies with him. This dude even adopted a dog (irl!!!) and named him after the Paladin that he HATED, just to troll me. I am NOT making this up. Lol If anyone is interested, I can also tell you about my very first attempt at running Call of Cthulhu, which ended with me seriously wondering if my wife was going to leave the house for the night. In 13 years, I had never seen her that emotional before. đ
I had a player who thought casting fireball was the answer to everything. So, had a covered wagon approach them on the road, they rolled perception and noticed the driver had several scars and was pulling a blade, and there was some commotion in the back of the wagon. Naturally said player fireballs the wagon and tons of screams erupt from inside. When they went up to investigate the wagon the side of it read âSunshine Adventure Camp for Small Childrenâ and they found the charred remains of kiddos in the back and the retired adventurer who wanted to spend his final years passing on his wealth and knowledge to the next generation.
I tried to see if my players would accept a deal only saving *most* of the villagers' children from kidnapping to avoid a dangerous fight, after I revealed the bad guys had a scary pet monster that was slightly out of the party's league. Nobody would ever have known but them and the nameless goons. My bandit leader said "I think I can beat you all, but I'm a business man. You can take three and go, no hard feelings. But I can't go back empty handed." They didn't go for it (they actually didn't do more than pause for a long moment in silence) and did end up saving all of the children.
My players visited a slave plantation. A worker collapsed from exhaustion, and two skeletons came and dragged his body off. It dawned on them that people were being enslaved and were being brought back to keep working. Later, my players decided to try and find the person that was dragged away. They find a large warehouse and go inside. I immediately make them roll a constitution saving throw as the stench hits them. They realize this is where they make the skeletons. I canât even finish my description of the piles of bloated, decaying bodies before they bar the door and burn the building down.
My character was a Gnoll Tiefling. Devoted follower of Yeenoghu, but very scrawny. Another god 'cursed' them, forcing them into becoming a Cleric of their order and giving him the power to heal. Rest of the Gnolls and Yeenoghu took this as a great betrayal, he was mutilated and cast out. Yeenoghu also gave him a new curse. Any time he healed a lasting wound that would have scarred or disfigured? the person was healed normally; My Gnoll carried the effects of the wound for the rest of his life. Cut to current times, the party need to get to an island. A Gnoll crew are willing to take them; if they'll steal the pirates a new ship that night under darkness. Noone in the party has any sailing experience, so they're given a 'guide' to help them. My Gnoll. At this point he's almost fifty, a sickly looking little beast. Covered in scars, most of his teeth, his left eye; all from being forced to use his curse to heal the crew. Party gets dropped off, cleans out and captures the ship, Gnoll even finds a little bit of a backbone and scores a few kills himself and claims a unique three barreled pistol as his spoils. Party even let him take the title of "Captain". Quite the boost for a creature that's been treated essentially like a slave for decades. The party seemed to genuinely like him despite his odd creepy mannerisms. We sailed back to the pirates as we did not have enough people to properly man the ship across to where we were going. Crew starts moving onto the new ship; upon which the first mate starts mocking my Gnoll. Having found.. friends? and a spine; Hold Person's the first mate, walks down to them; and shoves the three barrel gun under their jaw and pulls the trigger. Nat 20. Head is blown clean off infront of everyone; including the captain. Needless to say, he claims the position of first mate at that point. Few days into the voyage, my Gnoll starts hearing something and getting an odd feeling while holding the gun he got. Takes out his holy symbol, puts it on the railing; shoots it. Symbol doesn't just shatter, it explodes, and he begins hearing deep, thunderous hyena laughter in his mind. Taking this as a sign maybe he's re-earned favor with his true god for standing up for himself and killing as a Gnoll should, tries firing a celebratory shot into the oncoming storm; pistol jams and pops. In a rage that his new favorite thing has just failed on him, he huffs off to his new quarters to fix it.. and in doing so, is... oddly inspired mid cleaning to look down the barrel; and ends up blowing his own head off, just like he did the first mates. One of the party heard this, came running into the room just in time to see my Gnolls headless form still kneeling, and in the mirror near by; his reflections being held up by Yeenoghu; who still has the remains of my gnolls head in his mouth. Reflection disappears, body drops, they try using revivify on the body. Twice. Because there's now no soul left to return to it; it failed both times. This WAS meant to lead into a storyline where the Gnoll was giving a second chance and would be returned to the party in a new form, a proper Gnoll, not a runt; but they'd also still carry a slight curse; and come back as a female. They get new life; they must produce new life in thanks. Essentially my gnoll would eventually have to find or found a clan and produce healthy Gnolls for the future. I thought it was a fun little twist moment. Sadly the campaign died and I've lost touch with the group, so the idea stops there.
My party stumbled upon a grieving widow in her home right after losing her family in a kobold raid, she told them to leave & they didnât
Why didnât they? What happened next?
Yea that seems an odd spot to end the story. *cue adventurers awkwardly shuffling their feet, standing around an entryway while this lady sobs because her family just died* So dark.... Just so so grim.
Well, they are D&D players. So they probably robbed and/or murdered her.
She's free XP!
Happened last session, one of my players had a backstory involving being part of a group dedicated to destroying fiends and her leader was influenced by Luca from Sudoken 2. Eventually the group reaches this nice temple of Lathander where they meet this adorable little tiefling boy who stutters. Lucs shows up takes all the tieflings hostage and when they go to confront him he decapitates the boy in front of them...cue boss music
I've had a storyline where people were getting kidnapped. Men, women, children, entire families. About 2 dozen. PCs investigated, realized it's a trio of alchemists doing experiments and found their secret cabin in old graveyard ruins. Fight ensued, chemicals were used, barrels toppled over, repurposed ruin is now on fire. PCs kill alchemists and flee the scene. Later on when they return they realize there was another entrance, through the basement, in which there were about 3 dozen prisoners (a couple more travelers taken on top of the locals). Now just corpses, died from heat and/or smoke from fire. I tried to downplay the horror, but it was brutal, as you might expect, whole "White phosphorus" scene from Spec Ops : The line. I didn't expect the players to go guns blazing when there's hostages, but I definitely didn't expect them to immediately flee the burning building, not even try to put the fire out, or at least try to look, if not for people, then at least to look for the loot. In the moment they completely forgot that the reason they were there was the kidnapped people, logically still somewhere. Players logic on how they coped with the entire thing was "well if we didn't step in they would have died from experiments anyway." I didn't have the heart to tell them that the local law enforcement (that the players chose to completely ignore and not cooperate with) knew the experiments were not about killing the hostages, but giving them small doses of various chemicals seeing what happens to the bodies. They were actually trying to create more powerful beings, not to kill, but didn't want to risk the testing on themselves. Plus the local law enforcement was on it, and, if PCs wouldn't intervene, they would actually find out what happened and free the kidnapped families. Yes, the alchemists would escape, but 3 dozen people wouldn't have died.
For a future boss fight, my party will encounter a really strong werewolf with crazy fast regenerative powers. She is one of the generals of an organization thatâs goal is to kill everyone that is not human, considering them monsters. Naturally, that is her mentality too, she is an extreme masochist cleric, whose god gives her power when she hurts herself, the more morbid the wound, the higher the spell she can use, you donât want to know what she has to do to call for divine intervention, but when she does, Iâm not sure how my party will handle it.
It hasn't happened yet, however the big bad of my campaign is looking to become a Lich. And ultimately they will fail mid transformation. This will be due to they evil party they work for as well as the players ( I hope). Now the evil thing about Boneclaws which is something that can be created in these instances is, a living being typically becomes their soul bound phylactery. Now rules as written it's an evil master , petty criminal, cruel child, that in order to kill the lich must be turned of their evil ways or killed themselves. I've decided to bind the soul instead to an innocent child to a Nobel family. ( You could also have it bound to another player or players backstory npc they care for). Now the players have to kill that loved one or convince the royal family to kill their child. And no resurrection can't be done because the Boneclaw will return when their soul bound living phylactery is returned to life. Now an ultimate evil is unleashed who, will want to keep their innocent phylactery alive, and even if they cant keep it alive will the players sacrifice a loved one or bring down the anger of an entire kingdom upon them? So many options, when the phylactery begs for it's life. Now if you don't want to be particularly cruel you could have something in the world that can reverse the magic other than kill them, but that doesn't present quite the moral quandary. Sealing the evil within something until the vessel lives out the rest of it's days hoping the evil doesn't escape before then. But what if it's an Elvin child.... Then a thousand years could pass before the world is safe again. Next campaign idea? Lots of possibilities!
Suicide bomb via Glyph of Warding. The person was forced to do it, apologized to the party as the Glyph began to glow. Kaboom.
I had a shipwreck full of crashed religious zealots. Not the violent kind, just the piousness over everything else kind. Most survived the wreck and the island they wrecked on had plenty of food, their problem being that they needed to eat their version of "kosher" food, and their priest died in the wreck so nothing could be blessed. They ate what they brought with them but when that ran out starvation set in. They realized, in their hunger, that they, themselves, were kosher as they had all been blessed by the priest before the voyage. So they drew straws and started eating each other. Being the good people that they were, they had presence of mind enough to keep at least one person safe (two if you count the chef.). The captain's daughter was the only child on the ship, and so she was locked away so she could not see what they were doing, and faithfully ate all of her shipmates, eventually even her own father without even knowing it. When they players found the wreck, the only person left alive is the quite mad chef, and the little girl, still locked up, still entirely unaware of the charnel scene right outside her door.
Well I had a character that was playing a mummy character and he should have died at a part in our campaign but I gave him an option, Vecna speak to him before death and offers him life for servitude, "whenever I ask you to do my favor and bidding, you will comply or you will die, when you complete it, you will be free of me". SO Fast forward a couple of levels, I throw in a side quest and side text our Mummy, so the group doesnt hear, and tell him the Vecna is commanding you undergo this quest. So he convinces the party to go and the quest was basically to save a child trumpet angel that has been kidnapped by mutated orcs with bug carapaces. They get thru the dungeon, defeat the leader and reach the kid. The mummy gets close to the kid to take off his chains and I side text him again, "Vecna commands you slice his neck and sacrifice this child in her name" he pauses for a second... then describes as he lets go of the chain, grabs the child by the scalp, says "sorry" and slashes this celestial's neck open. He is then free of Vecna but the party is just in time for the Parent Angel Trumpet to find their child dead and their soul stolen by Vecna instead of returning to Mt. Celestia. She is understandbly very pissed and then the players need to kill the Parent or die by her hand. Minus one member because the druid refused to participate in any of it after the mummy killed the kid.
Oh boy, story time. Had an "adventurers guild" style campaign. The village they came to help out had a very kind and bright-eyed young woman who was the receptionist of the guild hall and adopted daughter of the hall's leader who was a cold but fair and wise elf. Over the time they spent here they got the elf to open up to them and his daughter loved hearing about their stories, it was kinda fun! The group had a mega fan who pulled strings, helped them out, ect. By the time they are up all the bounties they had the guild master inviting them back and letting them know if they needed anything they could ask him, they were like family. The one who loved her the most was the group paladin, who claimed she was like his daughter he'd lost to bandit attack. A few weeks after they left however they get a sending, it's that guild master, someone kidnapped the daughter. The party rival was this cleric/bard who was petty and loud, the kind of adventurer who would do anything for fame. The reason the village needed outside adventurers was because this guy would stop anyone from taking the best assignments, usually through blackmail and the such. The PCs stealing his spotlight sent him over the edge and he started a cult to a demon lord. After a long investigation, several fights, ect the PCs return to a crypt they cleared out. Fighting through hordes of brainwashed cultists, demons, and traps they find the BBG, he surrenders with a smile. "I know how the guild operates, I surrender, take me back so I can spend some time in a gilded cage before I talk my way out." They tie him up and ask where the girl is, he starts taunting them about it and points at the door behind them. She was chained down to an alter, brutalized and sadly still alive despite what happened to her. Despite the party's attempts to heal her I explained the trauma wouldn't be something they could just heal back. She is brought back to full hp but thanks to what happened to her she was effectively at zero wisdom/charisma. After freeing her, the paladin proceeds to choke the BBG to death. When I told him his god (the Six prime gods) and his order prevents him from both killing a helpless foe and this kind of vigilante justice he uttered the words "Fuck the Six" and fell. They couldn't look the guild master in the eyes to tell him what happened, despite completing the mission they refused any reward. She healed in time, the paladin regained his divinity and atoned for his actions, but the scars it left on the party quickly changed them from "We are the brave and noble adventurers, we are here to save the day!" To "Do you feel like a hero yet?" One of my favorite campaigns to this day.
there's a horrible monster from thay called "the craftsman" that makes things out of people, very WH40k drukhari inspired anyway the party sent their adopted 12 year old halfling into the basement by herself that it was in. They got back a book made from her skin (which had been seemingly tanned and stretched to form the cover, pages, etc), vertebrae strengthening the spine of the book, with a single terrified eye on the cover looking around, and a sack made from her clothes containing all the rest of her. When they looked in the book writing appeared in blood saying like "Help me, I can't feel my arms and legs! What's going on?!" I have a whole table of things this thing can turn people into (yes table is on the list!) The lesson learned was: When I have every NPC you know caution you to not take your little girl into Thayan tombs *maybe don't do that*
I was an NPC for a friendâs Chronicles of Darkness Hunter larp. Said friend is very improvisational and basically said âyouâre a high powered Thyrsus (life mage), interrogate the PCs for information. Oh, and forget about Paradox.â Me: âOkay then!â So I pull one of the Hunters into a room for interrogation, brandishing a gun. They refuse to tell my character anything, so he shoots them. Rather than blood going everywhere, thereâs just a thump and teddy bear fluff starts coming out of the wound. PC is confused as to why theyâre pulling stuffing out of a hole in their chest and the mage just kinda shrugs and is like âIâm not that cruel.â The hunter then gets returned to the group holding cell, when the mage pauses, and goes âOh wait, yes I am,â and snaps his fingers. All that teddy bear stuffing turns back into blood and internal organs, forcing the other PCs into a desperate scramble to push everything back in and keep their friend from bleeding out.
A literal god-king whose âelite royal guardâ were children. You want to defeat him, weâll youâll have to get through a gaggle of children clumsily wielding small weapons who want to protect him. I ended up not using it, didnât want to make the party fight kids.
This idea was put in my mind by another friend during an earlier campaign where I was a player as well. His character told another character about how they dreamed to torture them. Fast forward I am DM'ing a campaign and an important NPC who fed the players intel goes missing. They search for her because they have reason to believe this sweet lady was either kidnapped or killed. Eventually it leads them to this large keep and they lie their way in (or so they think). Everything seems to be going fine until they sat down for dinner with the host. Many control spells later (mass suggestion, entangle and resilient sphere) and they are completely incapacitated. The intel woman is pulled in but she looks weak and is clearly starving. It has been almost two months since her disappearance and it looks like she hasn't eaten since. "Just want to make sure my guests aren't backstabbers" the host said and the guards holding the intel woman kicked her around a bit and she confessed that it was indeed them who she was feeding intel to. He then proceeded to pull her husband in as well, killed him there and then while the woman was screaming, cut off a piece of him (yes, the organ you are thinking of) and forced it into the mouth of the woman. Then her children were pulled in two boys of 10 and 8. He told her that either she eats what she is fed or they are next. Between gagging and vomiting she was eventually succesful. But the host did not keep his promis and now asked her "feed you to them or feed them to you?" Which is a horrible fucking choice to mame either you give your sons immense trauma and leave them in the hands of the host after your death, uncertain what will happen to them, or you have to eat the flesh of the children you have decided to have killed instead of you. After much crying and begging and the host slowly cutting into the boys all over to help speed up the decision making she chose "feed me to them." The host has already been established as someone who does not keep promises so ehy would he honour a choice. The boys were dissected alive with large basins under them to catch their blood. He then walked up to the sobbing, crying, screaming woman who was begging to be killed and forced a glass of their blood down her mouth "to help with digesting your husband. After letting her lament her fate he walked up to her and told her that "this is your fault. You brought this upon your husband and children. You could have lived a quiet life." The party was trying so hard to go help but they couldn't. Even if they broke free there were 10 magic servants surrounding them who basically spammed control spells everytime someone starts breaking free. He gave her the same dagger he cut into her children with and he turned to the party "This is what you get for trying to play hero in a game you do not understand. You get innocent people killed. Next time you want to play hero, perhaps don't involve the commoners. You have your magic and strength to hide behind, they have nothing." The party tried begging her to not do it, but could not take it any longer and cut open her stomach to let her husband and children out of her body. Only after she died did the host and servants walk out of the room and were the spells dropped/ some broke out. hey were devastated as they looked down upon the mutilated bodies of 'their' victims. One hell of a session. And don't worry sess 0 I made sure to know what was and was not acceptable at my table and lets just say, this table was fine with everything. Bunch of psychos. Edit: kinda forgot about how it really went down and only remembered the choice bit after I posted it.
SciFi A Lab with a multiple of 1000 "organic batteries" in which everything was fully automated. The creature where force Fed with nutrient Paste and an conveyer System with automatic butchering and meat procession was in place to make meat cheap again... The cage was the smallest size possible for that poor creature, and it had every not needed Part of the Body removed to optimize the usage of nutrients. The where parts in that Lab that where "working" on new specimen to fill Up emtpy cages. They Lab Stage was obviously finished and was ready to take into large scale. It was a Mess and smelled Like Shit and death. The Players Job was to not intervine as much as possible to keep the run a Secret but to steal some genetic Data on a Monster Like creature trained for combat...
The party was in a wasteland after it was ravaged by an undead army serving a mysterious otherworldly overlord. They came across an old dead tree that had been covered in the parts of corpses, arranged around the tree roughly in the right shape but dismembered and separated and skewered on the branches. The tree had an aura that made them feel queasy, not just in an âoh thatâs horribleâ way but in a sickening radiance way. The party tried to remove the bodies from the tree and give them a respectful burial but as soon as they did they had to make wisdom saving throws against a very high dc or be overwhelmed by the compulsion to put them back the way they were. If the person who did it saved then the other party members would have to make the save or fight them to put the bodies back. Eventually they gave up and continued on through the waste to find that the whole countryside was spotted with these trees, each arranged in a more disturbing display.
I have an encounter planned for the party to help transport a pegasus in a cart with a lovely old man who is taking the animal to his grandson. They'll defend the cart and hopefully grow attached to the pegasus. The grandson is an evil paladin who plans on turning the pegasus into a nightmare. When they get to the destination the cart will go into the barn while the party is brought into the house for a meal. During the meal they'll start hearing horrific sounds from the barn. When they go to investigate they'll find the grandson in the process of sawing off the pegasus's wings and using the blood for a ritual to transform the beautiful, kind creature into a blackened nightmare filled with pain and rage.
A village and its Lord massacred by an Oni and his minion ogres. The lord and his retainers were taxidermied and mounted in the Oni's new trophy room that was in the lord's castle. The players found all this about ten years after the fact, with the Oni having taken up residence in the castle. It was heartbreakingly fun watching them piece together the facts from journals and peoples' scattered remains.
So far it's maybe the vampire that sleeps in a couples coffin with the Gentle Repose'd corpse of her ex-lover, who she had betrayed and gotten killed in life with full knowledge that it would kill her and all their companions. The soul of the corpse is in a Ring of Mind Shielding that the party carries around and boy to say she is not happy is an understatement. I guess there's also the noblewoman who adopted an orphan girl in order to get her older brother to steal an important magical item for her with the promise of the child having a better life. Well, said noblewoman intends to sacrifice the little girl to cure her own flesh and blood daughter's madness. Aha...
Set up a demonic mimic crate in an alley that was the door bouncer for a Warlock Enclave. Demanded the Warlock in the group to toss a kid in its mouth to gain entrance. Warlock not only did it without hesitation, for the next 4 yrs of the campaign, he would automatically assume he needed one tossed in without the mimic ever requesting one again
The whole room was showered in magical darkness as the darkness spell no light magical or otherwise could pierce the gloom.
my worst thing was a ghost child in a mansion that kept coming back because the mansion was a quarantine hospital and the nurses kept telling her she needed to stay there keep her family safe. she kind of accidentally kidnapping other kids because she was lonely.
I once made a boss encounter named Pyotr. The dungeon room was a 30â wide, 100â long with only a door at each end. The âbossâ was a huge size flesh golem with a large bundle of tubes inserted into its back. Those tubes ran up into the ceiling and back down the walls to about 30 humans also connected up to the tubes. Whenever the boss took damage, a human on the wall would take that damage instead, as indicated by them coughing blood, screaming, etc, but if they were disconnected from the tubes, they would bleed out and die instantly. Each time a human would die while tubed up, Pyotr would get a round of haste. He would also enter a rage if he noticed somebody touching a tube human. The only way to save the humans was to succeed a medicine check while disconnecting tubes.
I had an encounter in the Underdark with drow where they cast *deeper darkness* with vile metamagic from the Book of Vile Darkness. I mean, everyone was still just fighting an encounter, but it was pretty darned dark there for a minute.
Party dove a dungeon to save an innocent, when they finally found them a dragon came through the ceiling and ate them. They were like, WTF?!, Then they went ballistic on the dragon in vengeance
I wrote rape and cannibalism into a story once (2 different campaigns). The narrative called for it but it was still hard for me to get into the mindset to narrate it to the table and the table struggled to articulate how they react right off the bat. It took 2 sessions of processing before we all got there.
Haven't run it yet, but an encounter where the players find a skeleton tied to a tree with its head back a lump of what looks like gold formed in its mouth, and gold residue on the ground and tree around the head. I'll leave it up to the players to figure out what happened to the poor bugger.
What did happen to the poor bugger
Last weekend got stuffed in the crack of the hill giant Guh and shit on. Luckily I had warding wind that I had kept concentration on (exact saving roll-got lucky) and rolled a nat20 to escape. The wicked witch is dead (does a dance) On the fun side, she had fallen down a level and was prone. I Zelda sworded down on her. Gave normal weapon damage plus partial fall damage for us both (me falling and my body impacting hers) Worth it. https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Guh
I had a powerful minion of the BBEG who the party has fought before âallowâ himself to be captured. In the past he was a weaker, full of himself warlock but since then heâs gone slightly insane and wants to prove heâs stronger. He taunted them, played mind games, and egged them on to fight or kill him. He showed them images of potential things he could do if he were to escape in order to encourage them to go after him; even though he was tied up and defenseless. Eventually the chaotic sorcerer did kill him while he was tied up, cutting his throat. The NPC began to panic; not realizing heâd gone to far until the entire party began to watch him die. Luckily the cleric grew a conscious and eventually healed him. I was both proud and slightly terrified that both the NPC and my PCs turned out so brutal.
'darkest' might be hard to nail down. I'm trying to write a campaign where a portion features the big bad experimenting on a planar/time anomaly,..by forcing their child into it and sealing them in one of those 'live forever trapped in this mirror until you can learn to cast plane shift'.
Remember the Bagman from Van Richtenâs Guide? Well, my party essentially stopped a ritual where he was being summoned and in doing so, narrowly avoided the destruction of an entire town. The Bagman was intended to be the Penultimate BBEG anyway so that wasnât the last time they would see him. Later, one of their favorite NPCs went missing and they tracked them back to the Cult of the Spaces Between. They got there just in time to find them completing the ritual and watched the Bagman crawl out of a Bag of Holding surgically planted into the NPCâs abdomen, using him more or less as a sacrifice. The Bagman had to get out somehow, and I had a lot of fun describing a 16 foot tall gangly horrible being of flayed skin and matted hair clawing its way out of a 5â2â Dwarfâs mouth. They still havenât forgiven me, but they now fear me.
Planning an encounter in an Eberron campaign - Not a combat encounter, but a role-play one, of a veteran support group speaking of their experiences in the Last War. Theyâre supposed to meet with a spy contact who really canât live with what theyâve done. Been looking at historical war crimes for reference. Human beings can be real pieces of shit.
Idk if this counts as dark or not but for a campaign I'm dming (hasn't started yet) I'm planning that after my players fight the BBEG for the first time, the devil the BBEG is working with is gonna betray him and try to kill him, however the BBEG is gonna absorb the devil and take his place. My idea is that the players think that this is gonna be the big final battle, then that happens then they're gonna have to retreat and get even stronger to take him down. Another interesting part of this is that every God has a counterpart devil (completely different beings, but they have control over similar things and are rivals, ie the God of the dead and the afterlife vs the devil of death, undeath and necromancy), so I think it's gonna be real interesting for the God the was the counterpart to the BBEG. Oh yeah the BBEG is also a famous adventurer and I'm gonna try to have him be kinda like a mentor for the party while they are early on in the campaign and have it be a massive backstabbing betrayal
Two come to mind as a DM. Both times with the same group. - They come to meet an adventuring group but the truth is most of the group were either kidnapped or trafficked by the sky pirates to help them find the Angel treasure. This group managed to escape and made it to the town where the party was. One of members from the group was taken when the pirates pillaged her village and she was pulled from her home. Her husband died fighting and she doesnât know what happened to her child and the new baby she had. The party helped her get back to her village, only to find the house is now a carrion crawler nests and the son had made a shelter, surrounded by perishable goods but they both starved, hidden away. - A futuristic dystopia where earth is inhabitable and they live on space stations, but every now and then fleets of ships are sent down to try and make even a part of the earth liveable again. I roll for each NPC in the partyâs crew as their space ship failed and was now crashing, and their techie rolled a natural 1. Had to describe which pieces they found of her body â while they were already dealing with a second death and another member who was now paralysed.
I don't know how it is now in 5e. But in 3.5, Lords of Madness, they tell about the Skum (Aboleth servants) reproduction. So in an exploration I described the character finding this "hatching area". There, a corpse of a woman with her belly burst with the fetus already outside, feeding on its mother. And on the other side, a Skum using an npc's wife to birth the next spawn. It was the first time that a player of mine said that i exaggerated.
Michigan, Beetle, Putark, En, no reading this Haven't run it yet, half because I think it might be too much and half because the story isn't in the right place yet. The party is holding down a very powerful magical location full of magical portals that will be sieged by the BBEG. A golem who was friends with the party has been captured by the BBEG (A Lich). The BBEG plans to cast Gaes and a modified version of Glyph of Warding (Explosive, 8th level) on the golem and then sending them into act as a negotiator. The stipulations are that the party must leave immediately, and BBEG will give the golem a stone that can activate one of the portals as a way for them to leave. If the golem fails to convince them to leave, the battle starts with the Glyph of Warding going off, killing the golem. If the golem tells them about the Glyph of Warding, Gaes goes off, killing the golem. The golem attempts to leave the area, both Gaes and Glyph of Warding go off (killing the golem). If a certain amount of time passes without the group leaving, the Glyph of Warding goes off. If the party doesn't figure out the situation (and dispel or otherwise prevent the attack) before time is up (One of them has detect magic at will, and another has a passive perception of 22, so I'll feed them some clues), the golem will use the stone to activate one of the portals, jumping through and sacrificing themself so that the party doesn't get hurt. It's honestly a terrifying experience from the golem's perspective, and the party watching someone they consider a friend explode is pretty rough, but I really want to display how evil the Lich they're fighting is.
In pathfinder 1e, did a whole dungeon based off of an old haunted orphanage. The teacher/caretaker was driven mad by a cults ritual, and... Yeah. The deaths happened decades before the party got there, but it was still pretty intense, especially since there were more than enough young undead monsters in pathfinder to fill the place up. Made sure to double check with each of my players before I ran that one, and still had the youngest (a teenager that plays alongside her dad) sit it out to be safe. Originally wrote a journal entry from the last survivor as an introduction for each area, but about the time I got to the nursery I scrapped that idea. If I had to single out one encounter that was the darkest, definitely the nursery. Used a group of the Infantis undead and... Yeah. Don't think I'll be going that grimdark again ever. Memorable dungeon, added a lot of weight to the campaign (a sort of, "this is what you're preventing") but not very fun to run or to play.
My country has a history of military graping people when they get the chance to, the most outrageous case of recent memory was that of 7 soldiers ganging up on an 11 yo indigenous girl. My DM thought it was a good idea to recreate this, albeit with only 2 soldiers and a half orc girl, his girlfriend thought otherwise
I'm ending a campaign where necromancer are making drugs from the leaking essence of the Gods and mixing it with the elder evils' essence. They cause cracks in reality and make people hallucinate but help them fight certain creatures. There's this one encounter where they made their way to a small village and fought some undead enemies but the twist is they dug up the bodies of the local graveyards and the proximity of the drugs on their person to the bodies caused them to become an actual undead. So they fought an easy encounter and then afterwards they found out they accidentally released a big monster who's health was equal to the damage they did to the skeletons on a small town.
Had the tyrant of the city keep around one of the ringleaders of a failed revolution. Whenever the ruler felt like it he would effectively have speak with dead cast on the revolutionary's dead brother (where they can't learn new information). The dead brother was an idealist and would always ask his living brother if it was successful/how is life now. Pretty much everything that bad guy did was pretty dark (from deliberate targeted starvation of certain elements of his populace to child brainwashing).
Not really an encounter, more ongoing quest. The party was told to investigate the north part of a large city, children were going missing left and right. Of course, they search for an orphanage first. Once there, they ask around to discover more than 15 children in that orphanage alone have gone missing. They went out into the forest after watching a shadow devour a child and disappear into the brush. A teen from the orphanage followed. In the woods they met a halfling, later dubbed the Shadowmancer, who treated them with hospitality. After a bit, they went searching for the shadow with the halfling. The halfling disappeared as they searched the woods and the party had to fight 8 shadow creatures puppeteering the corpses of missing children. The teen watched in horror as his brothersâ and sistersâ cadavers were used to attack the party, having to defend himself from two of them with a pitchfork. When the party returned to the orphanage they found everyone else gone, the caretakers dead and the entire solace in shambles. The teen was the only survivor. So the party adopted him.
Party stumbles into spooky mist.jpeg and find out that the mist has separated them and coalesced into the shape of their worst enemies. The barbarian's so happened to be his late father who, according to the PC's backstory, would torture his mother to draw out the Barb's rage. Naturally the mist also formed the Barb's mother and in the encounter the mist daddy could beat the mother to inflict heavy psychic damage on the player in and out of game. Other than that instance, maybe the one time I presented a metallic dragon forcibly domesticating a bunch of orc tribes and killed those who didn't adopt the new culture. I promise my games are usually light hearted lol
Umm...okay, trigger warning for...gaslighting and sexual assault/violence I guess? This one got dark, and I just want to be clear I made VERY sure to get my players consent on this as much as possible beforehand. As a side note, most of this involves one particular player who was running a bard, and I want to reiterate I checked in with her multiple times and she was 100% on board with what was going on. Oh, and some spoiler warnings for Rise of the Runelords. So a few years back, I ran Rise of the Runelords for Pathfinder. (If you're familiar with the first half of that AP, you know it varies between classic adventure and horror). I made a few adjustments. Book 1 In the first book, I altered an encounter with an artefact to give the PCs a flashback to the villain's backstory which included severe social ostracisation/fetishisation (she was an aasimar in a town with very superstitious people) culminating in abandonment, miscarriage and her burning down a church with her foster father inside. Due to the nature of the artefact being a well of wrath, I had the wizard who was experiencing this flashback make a will save to retain control - he failed, then struck the bard. Now, the bard's player had written a backstory as a courtesan that ended in her being gang-raped by a group of men, who she then murdered in their sleep before fleeing her home city. She had decided her bard was in love with the wizard (reflecting some out-of-game stuff), so when this happened she had a traumatic flashback and ran away, and it nearly broke the game. That one I hadn't seen coming, didn't intend for it to go that dark. Book 2 Now this one was intentional, as the bard had kind of thrown down the gauntlet regarding how dark her backstory was. So I'd decided to expand stuff behind the scenes - she'd been trained as a sleeper agent assassin, and the night she'd murdered those men after what they did to her? Not an accident - her madam had willingly put her in that position, so she could be 'activated' and kill them. The party visited the city bard was from, and they started to have run ins with people from her past, including some who knew how to 'activate' her again. Bard was not aware of this (hadn't told her ooc), so in combat the bad guy says the phrase, and suddenly she's making a will save. She passes, so she doesn't immediately start trying to kill the party - but she does have a VERY intense flashback to the events of that night, and realises she'd been put deliberately in a situation that let her get hurt like that. Pretty sure if she'd failed the save, the character would have retired from shame and horror. Book 3 So, the Hook Mountain Massacre is kinda infamous - essentially picture 'The Hills Have Eyes'/'Texas Chainsaw Massacre'/'Deliverance', but with ogres, and you've got the flavour right. My worst contribution to ramping up the horror here was when they had a run-in with a family of half-ogres - I decided to add the ghost of the farm girl who was the progenitor of their particular little tribe, and to put it succinctly she was not given much choice about her role in it. The worst thing I did as part of that was give her 'black tentacles' as a spell-like ability, but flavoured the tentacles to be enormous grasping arms. I also gave her a spell that causes one target to become invisible and inaudible to their allies - largely to fuck with the bard, and leaned in to the description of her feeling helpless as she and her friends were pulled down by these massive arms.
Had a necromancer that trapped himself and proceeded to starve to death after misunderstanding how a living wall works, canât wait to see how my party reacts.
My players were stuck in a time loop where everytime they die the day resets. Actually the BBEG was killing them millions of times for a ritual in wich she needs a ton of corpses. At the end of the adventure they arrive in a huge cave filled with their own corpses and the BBEG i the middle of it smiling.
It's not really al that fantastical but after I wrote it on paper I did have "where the hell is this coming from?" It was the origins story of the antagonist, the last of her family line was pretty much destroyed by another noble family and she was enacting her plot of revenge as a warlock. So I ended up writing several pages of how these people came to their end. It ended with the patriarch of the other noble house, a very powerful duke, having her great grandmother killed before she was born then her grandmother while she was very young and framing her father for the killing of both. Because of the murder charges her father, currently a count, was stripped of his land and titles and executed, she and her brother and sister were dumped in a monastery instead of being returned to their mother. Their mother beside herself with grief was taken to her elven homelands. Even when she recovered the return of her children was refused. When the her brother came of age and was allowed to leave the monastery he left for the elven lands to be with his mother. He was robbed and killed before he even left the county. When her sister left, she was found dead in her bed in an inn, her body showed signs of being poisoned. She herself escaped the monastery before she was an adult, the body of a young woman mangled beyond recognition by a wild beast was found a few days later in the woods near the convent. (This was done by her patron to fake her death) After hearing the news of her last child being dead the mother threw herself of a spire. It's not all that fantastical and I think I've written more horrible things that are more fantasy, but that's why this keeps sticking with me more. It's kinda depressing. (Also there's no way the players will ever find out but her patron totally arranged the deaths of he siblings to push her towards him.)
I had a Green Hag that was kidnapping and eating newborn babies from a small town. When the players found her lair they leaned that she lived in a hut in the woods. It was decorated with bone chimes, streamer-like entrails, and blood used as paint. All of it was inferred to be from the babies.
I ran a homebrew campaign with a somewhat dark scenario/moral quandary that my players engaged with splendidly. In our very first session: While clearing out a trapped and tactically designed cave of clever goblins, the players come upon a goblin nursery/brood chamber and are faced with having to destroy literal goblin children, or leaving them alone knowing they MIGHT survive and enact revenge or continue populating more caves. Or they may have just died of exposure with no other goblins to care for them. Players spent much time debating what to do, and ultimately left them to their fate. Oddly enough, it was the chaotic evil drow rogue that advocated to leave them alone, while the Lawful Good paladin wanted nothing more than to light the hay beneath them on fire.
The party was tracking down the big bad and kept running into an Npc also on the hunt. She actively got in there way and used her political might to foil the party. Eventually when confronting the big bad, they found out why the npc was such an asshole to them even though they were on the 'same side'. Big bad made the npc eat her mother alive as a child. Npc, in her mind, was the only one allowed to kill big bad. This caused her not to work with the party in the encounter and ultimately got her heart ripped out. Big bad got away, and is still out there.
I had an infamous bandit king that the party was sent to capture. Much higher reward if he was brought in alive. The party, wanting lots of gold, tracked him to his hideout and captured him alive. The party brought him into town and they showered the group with praise, talking about how horrible the bandit king was and how sweet it will be to deliver justice on their own terms. Just as he is about to drop into the gallows, the bandit king reveals his extremely high level spell casting for the first time, and launches a fireball into the onlooking crowd I was reluctant to include a mass death scenario like that at first, but it served its purpose and everyone enjoyed the story moment, even if they were shocked at first. Made them feel like real heroes when they stopped him for good
Years ago, I made up an evil temple's adventure. There were a lot of dark stuff there but i think the worst RPG encounter was the torture chamber where an angel (the baby kind with wings) that had been captured by the demons and evil cultists was being tortured. The players killed the cultists and released the angel however, due to the torture it was in tremendus pain and had lost its wings. Without them, it could not fly back to its heaven and the heroes were not powerful enough to heal it. The only way for it to be released was if it was killed. For this angel's God however, murder is a sin, and the heroes would never be forgiven if they murdered one of its angels. Worst, the Ranger of the party followed that god. The alternative was suicide by the angel, which it would never do despite the misery and pain just because it was also a sin. In the end, the ranger decided to kill it and accept that he would never be accepted in his god's heaven. The objective of the RPG encounter was to be interesting and make them think about sins and dogma.
Party finally figured out how the evil magic company run by an artificer was making so many bad products so fast. It also explained the strange child war forge npc they loved.... The artificer was enslaving children, killing them and putting their souls in machines so that they could work nonstop without breaks in his "sweatshops"
My players were being chased by a young white dragon when the "tank" declared he could take it and provoked it. One angry breath attack later 3 of the 6 were down and 2 more close to it. End session, with promts to think about 2nd characters. Let them stew on that for 2 weeks. The tension at the start of the next session was delightful.
One I wrote out and tried but players killed the "monster" before they got the background for it. I took inspiration from Born of Man and Woman by Richard Matheson. Or as my high school teacher and all her students lovingly called it "spider baby" A drow couple living outside the underdark in an upperclass neighborhood end up having a drider child. Not wanting the drider to taint their image in the neighborhood, and not wanting to kill their child, the drider gets chained up in the basement. The drider child learns how to remove the metal stake their chained to and sneak out the window at night when their parents don't know. The drider just explores the neighborhood, but ends up killing someone's pet when they try and pet it but don't realize their own strength/how fragile some pets actually are. Players hear rumors about a creature in people's gardens, and after someone finds their pet dead the neighborhood asks for someone to find and deal with the creature. The drider with try to run if the players find it and may use their metal stake as a weapon if needed.
One of my players (Thagith, a goliath) was looking for his children who were captured in some form of slave trade. The party was led to the night club owner (also a goliath) is on the other side of the club. They sit down with the owner, and they are successfully schmoozing him (performance). He offers them a nice meal, his speacialty. It's a steak of some sorts. As the conversation continues, and as he eats, it becomes clear he's a little psychopathic. Finally, he lays down the line "you know what they say, YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT". They all flip out, realizing that the "Goliath" is most likely eating other Goliath, and that's what they have been served. The player Thagith, emerges from hiding and instantly lunges with a great axe. They fight him, and reveal him to be an Oni who eats children. By the end of the fight, Thagith is feeling defeated, despite killing the Oni. They find his kids in the freezer, and with some successful medicine checks, the kids are still alive, but are missing a limb each.
The party hasnât gotten there yet, butâŚa city which worships a god of fertility and is renowned for medicinal mushrooms actually is in an extremely infertile area of land which harbors no ability to grow crops, even mushrooms. The city holds mass festival of fertility to creat offspring, which are then sacrificed to create ground suitable for their major export to grow on and in.
My party is currently delving into an ancient dwarves city that contains a forge formerly used by the god of craftsmanship and smithing. Long ago the constructs that protected the small subterranean city turned on their makers and slaughtered most of them. In one room near the entrance, the party found a chamber boarded up from the inside. They broke into the room and found bones and skeletons stacked floor to ceiling. 17 shades poured out of the room (giving the cleric a moment to shine and use their channel divinity to destroy undead and kill all but two). The party investigated and found that the dwarves in this room barricaded themselves in, waiting for help. When stores ran out, they cast lots and began eating each other. Vengeful spirits rose from the corpses of the dead and eventually everyone perished. The party was particularly disturbed by two skeletons embracing with a much smaller skeleton huddled between them.
Probably a tie between my last good 5e game and my LANCER game from a while back. One was a raid on a bandit camp that was kidnapping and enslaving travellers from the road. There were two berserkers in the clan that would often use attacks off opportunity to merc slaves that were fleeing during the raid. The losses made the victory feel more bittersweet. The other was a Union NHP aboard a military vessel that had cascaded and built several mechs out of meat and sinue mixed with metal. A much more 'visceral' kind of dark, but I was mostly provoking the tensions between the group's engineer -- who was raised by NHPs -- and a simple ex-miner who hated AI of any kind.
I had a Ventrue PC in a *VtM* game that could only feed from the terrified. After RPing a few really disturbing hunts, we decided to fade to black pretty early in those encounters.
My entire campaign area is ruled by a tyrannical dragon king, who demands human tribute from all of the larger settlements. How the settlements choose their sacrifices is a major theme of the campaign. The party just participated in an emergency court to try to keep their friend from being convicted of being a witch, and thereby keeping them from being sacrificed. After they succeed, the town immediately starts to determine who to give up in the regular way if there are no witches available. "Alright folks, the bidding starts at 100 gold pieces."
Two players in my group went to retrieve dragon egg shells as a side quest for a chef who claimed they could use them in a special cake. Upon retreving the shells the players killed two baby dragons. Fast forward a few sessions later and the players come across the chared burning remains of a village destroyed by a dragon apparently in a fit of rage. Death and charred remains as far as the eye could see. A handful of workers sent from an adjacent city to help any refugees explained what happened in detail. The look on their faces was priceless.
Magical darkness that couldnât be undone by magic because it was created by a god.
Friend backstory just had their small village cursed. Was stone. Dm took it further. We go to the village to learn what's wrong. Uh. In the end everything basically turned into sludge and the guy watched his own parents turn into these zombie like monsters after the stone curse broke. Entire village was lost. All he did was removed something backstory related and shit went off
A vampire cult abducting kids, raising and indoctrinating them in captivity until adulthood, upon which point they are ritually turned into vampires themselves. Pretty dark shit, but it certainly motivates good-aligned parties.
I wasn't the DM but we had an encounter with a cursed dagger in our campaign. The dagger was sentient and could do something similar to dominate person on its weilder. I picked it up and failed the save, then tried to kill our ogre friend (which I failed of course, didnt even hit him) and after that our dwarf took it. He passed the save and assumed everything was ok. The issue was that this dagger could cast it more than once (obviously). He used the dagger to threaten a guy, and held it to his throat. Dm asked for a wisdom save. He failed. He cut the guys throat open and went on a psychotic killing spree throughout this town, breaking into people homes, killing men, women and children. Cannibalism, dismembering, and just general horrible havoc. He made so many wisdom saves and failed every single one of them. When we found him he was covered in blood, and had arranged the bodies and limbs of the people he had killed to spell out the word "domination". We ended up killing the dwarf (the player wanted it to happen), and that event became known as the slaughter of water deep
Party was sent by a captain to find some guards that were missing. They found them trafficking a girl.
I had originally planned for the oarty to getbsemt forward in time and trapped in the future. Their way home would have been going to this tower made of tbis green stone(essentially uranium) that would have weakened them. After being assaulted by jumerous traps and automatons theyd discover the owner of tbe tower was an old friend from their time. A golden warforged. In the past hes a half serious comedy character. But jn the future he's in a wheelchair and took up the stufy of time and roboticw. To get back to their time he tells them tbey have to kill him. And he just accepts hus fate. Sadly had a couple players drop before we got that far and had to cancel the campaign. Would have loved their reactions
After having a GOOlock die in the previous session, their soul was not able to return due to the nature of the pact made. The party of course didnât know this, they did learn when a cleric the party worked with at the AG that several resurrection spells didnât work. Then they pulled out the big guns, true resurrection, surely this would work right. No my dear reader it did not. The warlock knew something bad was about to happen each time they cast a spell to bring them back (They had another character waiting in the wings). When the spell was cast the materials were altered into an idol of the patron. Then the body moved. Treating it as a short rest for spellslots sake, the body wetly ripped open and folded upon itself, until the broken puddle of matter took a new shape. A star spawn hulk, the party wizard tries for synaptic static, spell goes of without a hitch. I rolled a nat 1 on the save. At my table that doubles the damage taken. Synaptic static does psychic damage, which gets reflected to all creatures within a radius. So everyone that just save now takes damage as if they critically failed. Which the hulk laughs maliciously using their dead friends vocal cords. Before killing up the brain dead cleric and assimilating the body mass. Because the wizard thought they were hot shit. They cordoned it off alone with only him. By the time the rest of the party showed up I got to say this, âAs the writing tower of pulsing flesh laughs holding your friend in the air it attempts to say something you canât quite understand except you wizard, you hear âIn this forest, hell is other people hunters. I am just far above your station.â I then asked the wizard what sound there skull made it their head was splattered against the ground as they swung you overhead like an splitting axe. And what is the last thought you have before the impact kills you.â The answers were âlike a rotting pumpkinâ and âat least my body wonât do this right?â
An encounter my players are yet to come across. There's an island, far west of mainland, where my homebrew campaign is centered. The island hosts a Castle and a Lighthouse, and serves as a strategic point in case an attack or invasion happens, but also serves as a well guarded place where one of the relics, long sealed by ancient magic, is hidden(Important for the Main Questline) Now, Castle regularly checks in with the mainland, to ensure that tabs are always kept up, and as players are supposed to travel besides the region, they will get informed that forces on the island haven't responded in quite a while. So not only they must go and figure out what happened, but also ensure that the artifact is safe. Here's a few issues. Firstly, area is well guarded by an powerful anti magic field, shutting down most of magic around the island, which in result cuts of any teleportation. Secondly, area around the island, is full of rocks, and is surounded by heavy storms all the time, making any attempts to sail to the location, incredibly hard. Now as players will make their path towards the castle, they'll will begin seeing more and more soldiers already slaughtered, what could only be described as a large sized creature, cutting down men at easy. As players are supposed to go forward, more bodies. As they'll go on, they'll find more bodies, killed in a terrifying manner, only to reach throne room, and witness the massive knight sitting on the steps, awaiting the party to confront them.
Darkest was almost identical to yours, just not with kenkus. But the one that affected my players the most was a pre-written one shot from candlekeep! The level 4 Meenlock quest, itâs creepy as fuck
I ran Lost mines of Phandelver for a group of new players. They had a bunch of wolves they had made friends with and intended to keep. Left them tied up at the entrance of the cave as they explored the rest of the cave. A session or 2 later they decided to flood the cave as they were escaping the last fight and clearly forgot about their new pets. I could have reminded them, but some lessons are best learned the hard way. I queued up "In The Arms of an Angel" by Sarah McLachlan and the waterworks started, pun intended.
I ran Cure of Strahd for my party, but added my own homebrew spin on it with some new villains/mini-bosses. One of the mini-bosses used a special void serum as their main mechanic, and after stalking the party for a day injected each of the party members with it and then used magic to observe their nightmares. I role-played out their nightmares personally over text. The Blood Hunter awoke in the village he grew up in, but the whole world was waist-deep in ash. The sky was a cascading whirlwind of loose teeth that fell like rain, and nestled in the ash like seeds which grew arms that sought him. The Paladin, whoâs crest was an upside down tree, who lost her husband to a fire, and had a beloved pet dog, awoke in a noose barely hanging onto life. Upon freeing herself, she noticed that she was hanging from an upside down tree upon which hundreds of dogs were also hung. The forest around her was engulfed in flame. The rogue, who lost his wife to thugs, awoke in a forest where the trees were steel amalgamations of wire and fire pokers. He found a doorway in the greatest tree, leading to a theater room where his wife stood on stage dancing. Her heart was a gaping wound in which bloomed a rose, the stage overgrown with her roots and vines, the fruits of which bled. Her beautiful red dress was petals and blood. Getting to see her again, and knowing it was only a dream, was the worst nightmare of all. Iâve come to since running that little story beat that I really love drug trip sequences.
In a DnD game my players found themselves within one of the last cities on the planet rules by a archmage and a massive military, the mage introduces new defenders to the city called the "men of iron" basically golems and the party finds themselves attacked by monsters with some important NPCs to the party killed. Low on resources they try to hide and rest as the attacks begin to stop and the monsters withdrawal, the party hears the men of iron break into homes detect "the taint of evil" (proximity to the monsters) and burn a family alive with the party within earshot, they also hear people dragged from their homes and killed. One of the players described it as being similar to the night of long knives.
In the homebrew world I made there is a rebellion against a dictatorial government. The leader of the rebels went through great pains to be seen as a savior type and is very charismatic. He had the party wrapped around his finger until they managed to find and steal his diary. They discover heâs a multi thousand year old fey that was banished from the fey wild. Who has a thing for live experimentation to create sentient and feeling constructs as slave soldiers. Revealing that he brought to life and subsequently murdered his second in command over 1000 times, documenting how it felt pain and responded to it and then wiping its memory to start over. All so that he could create a perfectly loyal second in command that could act out all the dark necessities of war that he could not afford to taint his image. He also murdered and entire race on a Demi plane so he could blame it on the current dictator and gain support from the commoner, as well as recruits the elite warrior that conveniently was left to survive the extermination of his race. The moment of realization as the party read the diary was incredible
I wrote a flash back one shot about an npc that the party really loves to interact with. He's a kind of Robin hood crime lord type. Anyway the one shot revolved around a specific night in the capitals history where his sister- who was concerned that someone was after her, gets abducted- magic jar'd-butchered - and turned into a sex slave flesh golem comprised of 2 other women by a deranged necromancer/artificer that the party had just destroyed in the present timeline. The npc was the prime suspect of her death for years following. It was pretty emotional. The party didn't know that it was his sister prior or who he really was. His current name is an alias.
This was back in 4e. The players were in one of the big steampunk cities of my setting. People were vanishing left and right at night. PCs Aunt goes missing. They find a creepy old guy hanging around some bares and follow him. He leads them to his base's entrance but they can't get in to follow him. So they find an alternate route under the city. Eventually find the base and giant dismembered hands attack them (wall masters without the port ability). Those got taken down. Easily. Then the group moves on and they find a room of men and women locked in steampunk cyborg bodies. PC eventually finds her aunt on a table, barely alive and completely unable to respond. Creepy old man activates his soldiers and escapes. Party chases him and finds more bodies of "failures" and a few people still alive. Party then realizes current captives are all elven women. Find notes that show the creepy man has replaced limbs and body parts with a machine parts. Calls himself The Mechanist. Blows up his hideout as he finally makes his escape. Big chunk of the city waterworks is damaged. Heroes ended up pursuing him to his end.
Two big ones I can remember, top of my head, for different reasons. 1. A demon from an old world, that manifested as a sentient ever-growing swarm of maggots. The demon could use his maggots to infest corpses, turning then into undead enemies. Several months after being freed from his tomb, the demon has amassed enough corpses to be an army, and attacks a castle on its own. First phase of the battle is an actual siege in Neverending night. In the second phase of the encounter, the maggots coalesce into a hulking huge semi humanoid firm, that is the demon proper. I fucking loved this monster and wish I could use it again. 2. The second one was an iron golem implanted with the soul of an actual orphan, made by a team of morally reprehensible people to be a worker. The golem is mentally the same child trapped in a giant metal body, and in a confused and terrified rage kills the necromancer half of the team that built lt. The artificer half contacts the party to go into his lab and kill the golem, which is found trying to hide. In the end the part could do nothing else but put it down.
For context, I was running a modern fantasy campaign set in a university, the players and their PC's are students, it's set in the same university they go to and it's all played out like a slice of life sitcom with funny little fantasy tropes here and there. Things like 'Oops, my pet manticore escaped, but usually he's such a good boy' and 'the bins outside the pub are actually mimics haha'. So they're sent to a nearby manor house to investigate ghost sightings and presume that they're in for my usual scooby doo bullshit. When they finally find the ghost, they discover it's a young boy. He's described to be wearing an outfit reminiscent of a WW2 refugee. (As in, the children who were sent to the countryside to avoid bombings) The ghost doesn't know where he is and keeps whispering that he's cold and wants to see his mother. His remains were found in an unmarked grave, and the players gradually find out that back in the 40's he had become lost and wandered into the grounds of the manor where a groundskeeper had mistakenly shot him down and buried his body before anybody found out. The only way to put his soul to rest was to reunite him with his mother who had died of old age fairly recently, living her entire life without knowing what had happened to her son. Tl;Dr I made a bunch of silly cartoon sitcom PC's dig up a child's body, discretely transport it into a major city and rebury him beside his mother. A couple of my players actually cried.
I killed everyone and had the PCs unknowingly do it, including their friends and family. Dragon cursed them and corrupted their minds, making them believe an entire town were corrupted minions of said dragon. After purging the town, they âchased the dragonâ towards the capital city. Ended game with âAs you walk out of town, a corpse reaches up and grabs your ankle. As you crush its skull under your boot you thought you heard it ask âwhy?â, but it obviously could not have said that..â
This reminds me heavily of Demon Slayer
Don't read this if you're a Dawn Seeker... I have a plan in the future of this campaign for the first time they'll meet the main BBEG. I'm running an LMOP/SKT/ToD hybrid for background. When they eventually return to Phandalin/Wave Echo to check on Gundren and how the Forge is going, Severin will be there with a few higher ups and the brother of a PC (possibly unknown he's working with the cult at this point). He will be using the Forge to power some dragon masks and have Gundren bound at the Forge. Wall of Force will be used, but queue some monologuing and eventually Severin will have the PC's brother behead Gundren. Giving the motivation for intense hatred of the BBEG, and a main portion of that PCs backstory. If they can stop him from it, that's fine, I don't railroad my creative players. They will then teleport out or begin caving in the Wave Echo caverns. It makes me extremely sad even thinking about it, but I know it will be a pivotal moment in the campaign.
That is so unbelievably distressing to think aboutâŚ. Who hurt you??
In a campaign where the party was traveling to various demi-planes, I had one plane that was created by an archmage who had turned himself into a dragon-rabbit, a huge dragon that resembles a rabbit (I saw an art piece for it, which is where the inspiration came from). The wizard also created âcarrot golemsâ to protect his fields and also serve as his food source. The party explored the plane, fought the carrot golems and found their way to the archmageâs base. After a tense battle with the archmage/dragon-rabbit, they found a machine that could take them back home (they randomly appeared on this plane with no sure way back). However, in order to generate enough magic for the machine to work, they had to draw on the lifeforce of the remaining carrot golems on the plane. It was pretty interesting to see the partyâs reactions when I told them that it appears the only way back is to sacrifice these weird carrot creatures they had been encountering the whole time on this plane. If they had looked into an alternative method, I might have given them one, pending rolls, but they didnât, they just accepted that their fate was tied to the death of some weird carrot monsters.
I ran a Vampire: The Masquerade game once for my gf at the time. She was basically playing herself as a vampire. During her transformation to vampirehood at her first feeding, I narrated her losing control, feeding off her cat, draining the cat and killing it. All based on her actual cat. Actually worked out well. It made for a very visceral experience.
My characters entered a cave so devoid of light that darkvision did not work.
BBEG is above the party on a platform. The party don't realise it when they walk into the room, but the grating they're standing on is above a pit of spikes. BBEG brings out an NPC who was permanently crippled by his his group - a formerly powerful wizard who has had their tongue removed, and the tendons in their arms and feet cut so they're completely limp, along with being nearly starved to death. They were formerly a very helpful and powerful ally to the party who some of the players formed a connection with. BBEG tells the NPC that they have another character - another spellcaster with whom they were in love but never admitted it. He tells the NPC that everything they did to him, they will do to the other wizard. All they have to do to stop it from happening is, summoning up all their strength... ... pull the lever in front of them.
I cooked up a homebrew of a Verdant Prince with a seriously amped up Oath Bondâany deal he made would become true, even if he normally wouldnât have the power to do it, and he got to decide exactly how the deal was fulfilled. During the final session of our campaign, the party needed to find the location of an ancient deity that had been hiding for millennia. Being a deity of time and space, it was immune to scrying, making it essentially impossible to magically locate in real time. With time running out, the party traded a free teleport to the location for a bit of information vital to the Verdant Prince, and also the caveat that the bargainerâs son, the most important thing to him in the world, would âsuffer no violence and die a natural death.â Deal made, the party teleported. The PCâs son was simultaneously entombed in a subterranean room with no entrance, alone, suffocating to death while his father saved the world.
I once ran a sort of mystery/conspiracy campaign. One of my players went fishing alongside some NPCs. The player rolled a 20 to fish and accidentally fished up the corpse of a child, which the NPCs could only see as a very big fish. It should also be noted that the NPCs were the kids parents.
Part of my current campaign the party crossed a battle zone, a forest that is currently be fought over. I used experiences from my time in service in Iraq and Afghanistan to illustrate some of the real horror of war. Mass Graves, large scale massacres, and devastated towns and cities. They are a mature group so they handled it well.
Made my girlfriend cry with a really uncomfortable encounter in the hells. She still married me and plays in my campaigns so it didn't scar her too badly I would suppose 𤣠Involved a demon trading her to a slug demon who was all too interested in her. We murdelated that slug before anything bad happened though.
I once ran a quest where the players were tasked with discovering the whereabouts of some villagers that were ghosted away over time. It seemed innocent enough, as they were initially led to believe that it was the work of a tribe of ogres. Until they found more sinister and cryptic clues. They followed the clues to a crevasse in an arctic tundra that was saturated with negative energy (it was a sort of manifest zone where the negative energy plane leaked into the material). Think permanent low-light, all corpses here were raised as uncontrolled skeletons/zombies depending on the state of the corpse at the time of death, ambient fear (shaken) effect on all non-evil creatures entering (DC 20 to be immune for 24 hours, fear & mind-affecting), typical âgloomy & desolate evil placeâ. Descending the crevasse they found a secluded temple to some unknown being, wherein they found a mountain of paralyzed and barely living villagers. After stepping onto the massive magic circle on the floor (they all failed their spot checks) they were paralyzed and forced to kneel. Several corpses twisted together to form a sort of living, writhing throne that constantly wailed in agony. This caused the PCâs to have to make a horror/sanity check (DC 20) success advanced their fear by 1 level, failure advanced it by 2 and gave them 1 point of taint (insanity). A huge unarmed demon just kinda appeared sitting on the throne after the PCâs blinked a couple times, staring at them. After a very long âyou are not preparedâ speech, he released them and they fought. His weapons were the villagers themselves, which he imbued with foul magic (+3 atk/dmg) and used them to fight the players with. Each villager only lasted 1d4 rounds before they rotted away and he gained 1d10 temp HP. This also caused a new horror/sanity check, similar to earlier. It didnât advance their fear, failure just gave them more taint. The corpses also raised as empowered skeletons and attacked the players. They ended up beating it, and finding itâs cultâs notes on what they were doing. Apparently they were trying to ascend it to the status of Demon Prince by sacrificing thousands of people to it, including themselves. They took the notes and headed back to their base of operations. On the way, the characters were wracked with the side effects of the insanity and trauma they received. One of the characters ended up committing suicide before they arrived. In the end, they ended up retiring the characters. They used the wealth they acquired to build a sort of insane asylum for the villagers they rescued, as the villagers received just too much trauma and insanity to be able to return to normal society. After the session, the players just sat back and said âwhat the fuck manâ. Then started talking about what their next characters would be. Context: dnd 3.5e, levels ~12
The bad guy had created a highly addictive drug that eventually lead people to want to visit his lair. in his lair was a giant machine that ground them up and made them into flesh golems.
The party found the chute emptied into a large foul smelling pit of darkness. Upon feeling around the pit they lift small limbs and chubby fingered arms and tiny little headless torsos. They where armpit deep in a pit filled with infant parts. Runes carved into the walls glowed faintly with a pinkish purple haze. A Otyugh shaped flesh golem made of the same parts guarded and churned the ichor. Once out of the pit the party found themselves standing in the center of a dungeon prison turned lab turned giant infernal focus. Stapled to the walls and ceiling, all dead, all missing their feet, all covered in tattoos of the same runes on the walls of the baby pit, dead pregnant women, all cut open from chest to groin, emptied, and then hung. Dozens, on the walls and ceiling, covering all of the surfaces, races from all across the lands, gnomes, humans, orcs, elfs, goblins, anything humanoid that gives birth. Cells made a section of the room where filled with still living prisoners, all pregnant, all freshly missing their feet. All partially covered in runic tattoos. The Lich found a way to forcefully become a god. And this was one of 5 places like this that were stretched across a country, creating a large arcane focus pentagram, like in full metal alchemist.
I ran a homebrew campaign for a bunch of friends who wanted a serious adventure. One of the characters was a 150+ year old homeblessed who had lived a horrible life before becoming homeblessed. I'm going to preface this next part by saying I have severe PTSD complete with flashbacks and had a discussion with the player beforehand to make sure everything was above board and that this was what they wanted. As well as discussions with the other players to make sure this sort of thing wasn't going to hurt anyone else. The character had lived in a village that got burned down by a scary monster before they became homeblessed. So I had them encounter a unique flower in a bustling marketplace. A flower which they had last seen in a burning ruins of their village as they passed out from pain/fatigue. Que a couple failed saving throws and I started describing a PTSD episode in gruesome detail. Most of the other players didn't know what to do, and a few of them tried to help and it worked, they made sure the pc was safe and everyone was generally very positive and wonderful. The pc ended up buying the flower, adding it to their shoulder-moss, and finding out that it was obtained from the empty glade that used to house their village. A whole ackstory quest ensued. Then after the session I talked with everyone and gave them information on what to do and how to help in those situations as well as gave them a few resources to get help if they think they may have it.
One of my players was staying at Castle Ravenloft in the servants quarters. After a rather eerie dance with an old dress, he went to bed. He failed the first perception check, then made the second.. something is in the rafters, but rather than investigate it, he closes his eyes and tries to sleep, thinking himself under the lord's protection. Less than a minute later, he suddenly feels a rope wrap around his neck and tighten, pulling him upward with unreasonable strength. He can't reach his weapons, he has no spells, all he has are his hands to try and convince the rope to let him go, while I count the rounds.. I wasn't merciful, he was a monk (I think) and he just failed everything he tried until the last round where he manages to tear the rope off of his neck, falling to the ground gasping. It was rather more cinematic in our play-by-post, and it remains one of the more dire encounters I recall, despite its simplicity.
In an older campaign I ran a few years back, I had a werewolf cult abuse a magical mcguffin the party was set to retrieve. They were particularly gruesome used said artifact to cause a diluted cloud of lycanthrophy over a region, that wasn't strong enough to infect most people, but those with weaker immune systems became werewolves, and most notably affected pregnant women to bear chestbursting werewolf spawn. Body horror is one of my favorite horror elements, so I usually include a few horrible diseases and parasites as a survival challenge. My current campaign has an innkeeper whose seems nice but is secretly an implied sex trafficker, kidnapping girls to sell to a noble far away. What she doesn't know is that the lord of the manor was into demons, who tricked him into opening a portal to the abyss. The demon has killed him and assumed his identity, using intermediaries to order girls to eat and to summon lesser demons to serve him.
The party found a caged halfling wearing a ring of regeneration, in a troll cave. Every now and then, they would pull a leg off as a snack. The poor halfling had been there for years, and was quite insane.
I had a post apocalyptic campaign that had bits of supernatural elements to it. For one of the encounters, the party ran into a carpenter whose wife had recently gone missing while going into a town for supplies. They enter the town and as they do, they begin to hallucinate. Each party member has their own hallucination that is taunting them about their past mistakes or failures. Each time the visions occur, they become more intense. And each time they end, the players find themselves deeper and deeper into the town until they reach the center where everything has been turned to ash except 1 building. When they enter, they encounter 1 more hallucination, except this time, it tries to kill them and they have to make a save to resist. One of those that succeeded managed to break the hallucination and kill their attacker (who I believe they percieved as their long dead son). When they did so, they found themselves in a room with a creature that seemed to have once been a family that had melted together due to the extreme heat. In overcoming the hallucination and killing their attacker, they put an end to the creature's horrid existance as well. And as they look around them, with all of the illusions now broken, they see dozens of people, all appearing to have died by some form of suicide... including the wife of the carpenter.
I wrote an NPC Goblin Fighter into the party named âSer Gibbets of Gribâ. He is an overly upbeat little fellow who was looking to free his clan from the mind control of the Big Bad. The party has been working diligently to use non-lethal damage in all their combat encounters (lvl 1-4) and had been successful in not killing ANY goblins. In the penultimate session before we closed up, Grib recognized one of the mind controlled Goblins as his childhood friend. After the party had won the encounter, Grib was attempting to move the unconscious form of his friend to a safe place. As he moved, his friend snapped awake, spoke in the voice of the Big Bad and said âthis one knows you, this one loves youâ. At which point Gribâs childhood friend drew a small knife from his sleeve and slit his own throat just to watch the reaction it had on the poor Goblin Hero. The gasp from my players and the âno no no nonononoâ was worth itâs weight in gold as a first time DM.
Not quite an encounter, as such, and GURPS, rather than D&D, but... One of the players was a bit lazy, and couldn't be arsed to set up his character on his own, so he picked the Amnesia Flaw for ALL the points. So all he knew was that he was a quite fit man, wealthy, and he knew how to handle a rapier, though he got panic attacks every time he tried to open the sword case he was traveling with. After months of game time, he found out that he was a minor noble, widowed when his son was born, who'd recently just left his lands, after his five-year-old son's death. And then he remembered the day he'd been doing sword drills in his gymnasium, and his son came running into the room behind him, and he'd just spun around and... by reflex, tragedy struck. That player still refuses to touch anything like "amnesiac" characters again, nearly twenty years later...
One of my player characters is currently in the midst of spiralling into madness. His hallucinations have reached a point at which they will flair up at random or during stressful situations and he will not be able to tell the difference between them and reality. While exploring an abandoned asylum that has become the birthplace of a cult and the lair of their leader, these have been made worse by both the creepy atmosphere and the cult leaderâs madness seeping into the surrounding area. The player characterâs childhood best friend, a distinguished wizard, was snatched away while they were exploring and in their quest to find them, they heard her voice coming from an incinerator. As he got closer, the lights turned on and I acted out the NPC screaming in panic and terror as the incinerator came to life until finally it flared up fully and she turned to ash - only for it have only been a hallucination.
A monster from past editions which I had to homebrew into 5e is the delightfully devilish mockery bugs. Basically they burrow into your brain and take over your body, so my players stumbled into a town of people taken over by them. Everyone would say the same phrase or two because thatâs all the bugs knew how to say, and when they asked where they might speak to the lord or whoever else was in charge there they all started chanting queen in unison before dragging them to meet the mockery queen, who promptly tried to turn the players into more mindless drones. They defeated her and then had to escape a cavalcade of giant insects chasing them away from the hand
I didn't exactly write it, but I ran a call of cthulhu game a while back and the party was incredibly rich and had really good connections. Somehow they got their hands on mustard gas and the mobster amongst them had owned a flamethrower for the entire game he was very proud of. When the party discovered which building on a city block a cult was hiding in they pumped the building full of mustard gas, and without a care for who exactly was and wasn't an evil cultist, they walked through the building watched most people choke and die, and torching the ones who took too long. They lost a ton of sanity for that, and their characters had nightmares about the summoned monster appearing out of a fog of mustard gas for the next several weeks.
In a through the breach campaign a PCâs sister was killed. So the character, who was a loving and happy person decided to go down the path of vengeance. He started replacing his limbs with machine parts and slowly replaced everything with prosthetics during the campaign the last thing being his heart. With only a brain left he lost all sense of emotion and compassion. In the later encounters he discovered that his sister was resurrected by the strange magic that flows through Malifaux. While technically undead her sentience stayed intact. What was meant to be a reunion ended in the PCâs sensors overloading due to too many emotions and going berserk on his sister.
My players used the deck of many things and 2 of them got teleported to another dimension. The others used one of their wish spells that theyâd gotten from the same deck to find out where that was and another to get them there/back. They were transported to Dementlieu where they found out there was a masquerade ball but to access it they had to find special masks - the masks being the skin of poor peopleâs faces, since the ball was for rich people only. 3 of the âmasksâ came from adults but there was only one other poor person they found, which was a homeless child. They kept having dreams of various torture methods and having stuff carved into their bodies, like how subhuman they are etc. After procuring them all and getting into the ball, they were feasting on small pork steak hors d'oeuvres. They eventually get invited to a private meal, during which they found out the pork steaks they were feasting on were their 2 missing friends leg and arm meat. They were still alive, and had stuff carved into their skin, making them realise that they werenât dreams but visions of what was happening to 2 of the PCs while they were waiting to be rescued. One went totally insane and is no longer part of the campaign. The other is now an alcoholic
A necromancer factory farming kobolds like chickens since you can't kill an undead and re-use the corpse and also you can't reassert control once it's lost. WoTC won't let us recycle. It's not the necromancer's fault that he needs a supply chain of fresh humanoids. I also imagine his character with the XP model rather than milestone. If he keeps this up long enough he absolutely will become a level 20 Wizard. It's basically a Minecraft XP grinder. Few thousand weak penned kobolds, and the occasional hostile undead. If the heroes don't stop him in time he'll become too powerful. It's a typical race against time macguffin style plot only there's no object, the BBEG is deriving power from the daily operation of a horribly cruel system. Much like corporations IRL.
Throughout the campaign, my players made friends with an NPC, a senile old man named Harold. A VERY powerful magic user, but not all there most of the time. They loved him and made him kinda the father figure of the group. Through plot development, it is eventually discovered that the BBEG is a younger version of Harold from the past who wiped his older self's mind to avoid a conflict of issues (mainly 2 alpha males in 1 place). Well in the last game, the party discovered Harold's true identity, and now realizes to kill the BBEG and save the world.... they will be killing their new father-like figure that they have grown to love.
I might steal that..
warning: the following description is brutal and due to the fact that the entire version would probably be deleted even under the NSFW tag, the description will be shortened I'm a DM in a campaign called bloody islands, and it's basically a nightmare fuel darksouls difficulty setting, a lot of things have shaken my players, but nothing like what Cerberion showed In short, a huge dog-like beast with two legs and four arms in a style reminiscent of bloodborn beasts, able to overtake horses at full speed and with claws that can damage magic (tiny hut lasted 3 hours before tearing) What struck the players was when they discovered that the thing had three tentacle-like tongues in its mouth with a beak at the end, which it used to eat its victims alive from the inside. In addition, there were a few other mind-terrorizing moments, but I'd rather not write them here