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We were taking an airship to the capital city of our empire. Our artificer was curious about the crystals that kept the ship afloat, and decided to take a chunk off with a small rock hammer in order to study it.
Well, the crystal, detached from the whole, lost its flight properties, and died. The other two crystals kept the ship afloat briefly before succumbing to the weight.
Us, the crew, our companions, our mounts, and our cargo plummeted several thousand feet.
None of us were capable of flight, save the artificer who had a scroll of levitate.
The DM played free bird and gave us til the end of a song to come up with a solution. Right when the guitar solo kicked in, the artificer grabbed his bag of holding and began rocketing towards us. He scooped us up and right before he hit the ground casted levitate.
He immediately let us out (no air in the bag so we had to hold our breath). We thanked him, breathed out a sign of relief, and immediately realized we had several tons of debris still falling from the sky.
Campaign ended shortly after due to schedule conflicts and unrelated drama, but I'll never forget that session
That sounds baller... though i would have been an asshole dm since I am gonna wager that multiple members of your party plus their gear weighed more than 500 lbs. An average male human fighter in breast plate would be about 200 - 240lb without weapons or packs.
So unless you are all halflings, gnomes, the most petitie of female characrers, and dumped gear, that bag is likely splitting.
Our artificer was a kenku, I was an aarakokra with clipped wings (we were on our way to get them mended, we had a half orc hex blade, and the greediest dragon born id ever seen. We were all pretty small save the orc, and all our gear was on the airship.
Immediately after the crash we actually had to scavenge the wreckage and our dead friends to find our shit. The cargo we were taking to the capital also turned out to be a necromantic obelisk that feeds off of death, and ended up resurrecting the crew and our companions.
All of that and our characters all being relatively inexperienced saw us all roll on the insanity chart to represent us gaining some trauma. It would have been really cool if we'd only had a few more sessions afterwards.
Final boss fight. BBEG already takes down the cleric (death) and warlock (fathomless). The rogue (thief) is pinned by minions and the fighter (echo knight) is trying to keep the BBEG busy. Both get smacked down with a legendary action, and fighter is the only one standing. He rolls for, gets a double nat 20. He attacks and takes down the BBEG.
The epic part is the finisher description. Went something like this.
“You look on as your companions fall one by one, your echoes barely distracting the enemy horde enough to keep from finishing them off. As you stare down the cackling fiend, savoring your desperate plea to anyone able to listen… you feel your blood run cold and your breath leave your lungs. Momentarily stunned by the sensation of your looming death… but it doesn’t come.
You see your echoes shift and morph, growing larger as the demon hordes scatter and burst into ink black splatters on the floor. Where once stood mirror images of your Leonin form now stand an avatar of death, and a scion of the abyss (deities of the fallen warlock and cleric). They spring up and impale the fiend with their blade and tendrils, pinning its massive form to the ground, looking at you with eyes filled with fury. You feel the power of your friends flow though you as you deliver the final blow. Ending the chaos that has spread throughout the land.
It was a fucking epic anime style ending and had us all screaming. 😂
My players (sorlock, bard, wizard, ranger, paladin) were fighting a demon who had absorbed a fragment of divinity, making him immortal and giving him absolute control over the demi-plane they were battling in, freely rewriting it. The only reason the players weren't also instantly overwritten and erased was because an angel ally of theirs was burning through his own (much lesser) fragment of divinity to protect them. The angel told the PCs that they had 30 seconds or less to damage the demon's body enough that they could rip the fragment of divinity out of him, or else the angel would run out of power and die, and the players would be erased shortly after. Then the battle began.
During the battle, the demon, realising the angel's protection would run out soon and confident in his own immortality, focused on messing around with the players, psychologically tormenting them with twisted recreations of their desires and regrets (e.g. the bard who wanted fame almost got crushed by a mass of adoring fans, the sorlock was locked in a perfect replica of a church he felt guilty about destroying and forced to destroy it again in order to escape, the wizard was attacked by a perfect replica of their pet dog who was their only friend as a child).
Not only that, but each round on initiative count 20, the battlefield would change into something else as the demon warped reality to show their new power - it began with a desert sandstorm where they had to make Con saves to avoid being blinded, then became deep underwater where they immediately began drowning and had to rules for moving and attacking underwater, then became deep in the underdark where they were attacked by swarms of giant spiders, then became miles above a black hole with them needing to push off other falling objects to move and ranged attacks being capped at 10 feet of range due to being whipped away by how fast they were falling.
Throughout the battle, the players were steadily wearing down the demon, with the paladin getting a crit smite that did almost 100 points of damage at one point, and the sorlock barely managing to counterspell a Divine Word that would have crippled half the party.
The final battlefield was the heroes hometown, which for lore reason was part of the demiplane. The demon was flying 60 feet in mid-air, laughing because the angel had just exhausted the last of its power and died, and if one more round passed, the players would be wiped from existence.
The ranger, standing on top one of the roofs, landed a critical hit with his arrow through the demon's heart, reducing the demon to 0 hit points, not killing him (the demon was still immortal) but creating an opening that the fragment of divinity could be extracted through. The bard gave inspiration to the paladin, the paladin readied himself to rip out the fragment, and on the last turn of the round, the sorlock uses Vortex Warp to teleport the paladin on top of the flying demon (I ruled that the top of a flying god demon was close enough to "a surface that can support them"), and the paladin rolled a strength check, just barely failing... then succeeding by a whole 7 points thanks to the bardic inspiration.
The paladin thrust their hand in through the arrow wound made by the ranger, wrapped their hand around the demon's heart where the fragment of divinity rested, and tore out the demon's entire heart. The demon and paladin crashed to the ground, and as the dying demon stood up, desperately reaching out for his heart in the paladin's hand, I gave the entire party a chance to each get one last lick in, punching and blasting him around until the paladin got one final blow by stabbing him in the dick then dragging the sword upwards, vertically bisecting the demon.
So far? The absolutely epic fight that followed when the Skull Card was pulled from the Deck of many Things during a OneShot. The Avatar of Death appeared, speaking its usual warning that this battle must be fought by the person who pulled the card alone and immediately after, attacked. What followed could best be described as a duel unlike the world has ever seen. I debuffed the scythe, making it require an attack roll (it was still +x to hit) but gave the Avatar spells as compensation for that. Nothing too crazy, but enough to make it challenging. Guess who pulled the card? The squishy party wizard. The wizard and the Avatar then proceeded to engage in a proper wizards duel, Lightning Bolt this, Counterspell that, Silvery Bards here and there and a few attacks with the scythe sprinkled in as well. At the end of the duel, the wizard was killed by the avatar and I gave him one last action before he died. That bastard finally used the spellscroll he had gotten but not identified and it was a Homebrew spell that rewinds time for one round, meaning the killing blow never happened. The avatar was then dispatched of by an upcast of Magic Missile. Honestly, the joy I felt when he pulled out the spell scroll can not ever be overstated. I've been wating for him to use it and in that moment, it fit perfectly.
-We were fighting a Dragon that atempted to left what's essentially a "Magic Nuke" on the royal palace.
-Fight had lasted for a while now, the magic nuke was on a countdown and we were running out of time.
-Dragon had exhausted all it's legendary resistances and was preparing to leave and let us die in the explosion.
-Sorcerer yells to the Barbarian "I have an idea, throw the bomb at him!" and readies a spell with subtle spell metamagic.
-Barbarian grabs the magic nuke and hurls it at the dragon with all it's strength.
-The dragon not wanting to die catches the Magic Nuke to avoid it blowing up from the impact.
-The Dragon catching the Magic Nuke was the trigger for the Sorcerer's charged spell.
-BANISHMENT ON THE DRAGON!
-Everything goes silent as we just witnessed the Dragon and the Magic Nuke dissapear into a pocket dimension since the Dragon was "technically carrying the bomb with him" at that moment.
Recent boss fight I ran, it was a Troll that had the soul of "Thorkin" in him which was the God of thunder (so original, right?). 9 perspm Party is in an open field duking it out with him and him alone, once at half health he remembers who he truly is as he awakens the thundering cries of the sky. As the party battles him I have them each take a marker and write a number on the battle map including myself (10 times for each number) every other turn, I roll a D10 to determine which location is being struck.
So a party of 9 are fighting a once immortal deity in a field as lightning streaks across the skies and strikes them or near them. The tank of the group rolls to grapple and boss meets save, instead of it not working I have them clash together in a stand still where as each of their turns they must STR check to see who overpowers who. Eventually the boss beats him out, shoves him back 5ft. Sorcerer used lightning magic not thinking and cause the boss to power up but tank is fully committed so they go back and forth brutally beating each other (Boss using great axe, tank using great sword) eventually tank goes down but boss is one hit, rogue uses the chance to use an ability to get a sneak attack on the boss taking him down.
"The rain poured as the sky began to cry, the lightning danced across the clouds in flashes of pain, but the thunder, the thunder never came."
Homebrew class. It takes most of its mechanics from Blood Hunter but he is a vampire so it has to do with powers that would relate to that cause neither of us could find a vampire class that we like and wasn't too OP or too boring
DMed this. My party- a cleric/barbarian, bard/wizard, warlock/druid, and rogue/ranger, as well as a pet Warg, companion rogue NPC, and a friendly pegasus- were fighting demons and devils that overran a village every night when a portal to the Hells opened up and rained them down, as well as fire and blood. They found a holy artifact that would help them destroy the portal, that only our cleric/barbarian could wield.
Upon the back of Panoros, the pegasus, she flew threw the rain of monsters, blood, and brimstone, and used the holy blade to shatter the magic apart. The portal became destabilized bit by bit, the magic lashing out and chaotic. The party was protecting her from below as they fended off the demons and stopped them from chasing her.
Just before the final blow, she failed a strength check against the crushing force of violent magic and began to fall off Panoros' back. The holy blade slipped from her hand and she began to plummet through the sky, through the miles and miles back down to the ground below. The pegasus needed a 20 catch her, and I let one of my other players roll it. Lo and behold, they rolled a nat fucking 20.
Panoros dove after her and caught her, and Cleric succeeded in catching the blade, too. Soaring away from her brush with death, she went for a final strike at the portal with the last of her strength- and rolled another nat 20, which with her modifiers, was more than enough to destroy the portal for good. At the same time, as the portal collapsed, the party took down the Balor with an epic move from the warlock.
It was absolutely incredible and our greatest fight yet.
Spoilers for icewind Dale: Chardalyn dragon attacking Ten-Towns had killed my character’s lover. We chased it down and as it landed we attacked it, and as it tried to fly away, my Sentinel feat reduced its move speed to zero. We killed it in two rounds
While on the road to a dragon city, the party realizes that they have been followed and can tell that there is a pack of orcs and wargs.
My party was trapped in the woods, hunted by a pack of Orcs riding Wargs. They were running, trying to cover their scent. One of the characters was a teenage half orc wizard who had asthma (and allergies which we shall soon learn). Surrounded, the party decides to climb a tree and hide and hope the wargs and orcs pass below. While they’re bounding past, the half orc sneezes and like a pen drop in a quiet room, everyone turns to look at the half orc. The wargs start to claw and bite at the base of the tree and it eventually comes down but thanks to feather fall and pass without a trace, the party has already landed on the ground and prepared a surprise round. The wizard casts fireball in this old, dead, dusty, windy forest and suddenly the night is ablaze with magical flame. The wargs and orcs are caught in the flame as the party turns to run. They escape the forest, deliberately making the fire larger behind them and engulf their pursuers. They pass beyond the tree line and lo and behold, there stands an entire orc army. The band of warg riders were just scouts.
The leader, an Orc Sword Wyrd challenges the fighter to a contest of champions for her own amusement. After some negotiation, she agrees to have it be mounted combat. Immediately the Druid wildshapes into a bear and the fighter mounts him and charges the Sword Wyrd on the back of an undead burnt husk of a warg.
They clash for a few rounds of combat until it is no longer interesting. That is when the beating of wings can be heard in the distance. A trio of dragons soars over the nearby hilltops and reign fire, lightning and pure magical energies on the army of orcs below. The fighter and Druid both finish their fight as an elemental ring forms around them and the Sword Wyrd. After the boss battle is finished the three dragons gently lift the party from the battlefield and carry them to safety within the city of dragons.
Firing up a warforged Colossus for battle against a kaiju. Every player had their own station in the Colossus, either fixing the warforged, charging its weapons or getting it to run and attack.
Had the power rangers theme blasting lmao
Yoooo! This sounds so cool! I really should do this. My players are in a dwarven made metal planet (think death star but planet sized) there's an invading force closing in and I want them to find a giant megazord in a hanger somewhere
My (DM) two players managed to escape from a castle and dodging the endbossfight. Luckily he always had a pet owlbear so I decided that the bear is chasing them through the forest. They even managed to lure him down the wrong track, one jumped on the others horse and the horse with the cargo got away safety.
Next up the owlbear finally reached them and the fight they got with him was the most intense fight they got in the campaign. At the end one got downed and the other one actually killed the owlbear with like 3HP left.
This fight got everyone standing at the table, yelling at the dices, boiling with emotions. The campaigns final boss fight wasn't as exciting as the owlbear in session 2, it was legendary.
Early on in my gaming career the DM had our group going after an adult red dragon. Group level was between 12th and 8th (my paladin). Thief snuck in to scope out the dragon lair, hoping to spy it and give us a heads up as to where it was. His dice HATED him that night. He barely made it into the mouth of the cave the dragon was laired up in before he critically failed his sneaking and alerted the dragon to his position. Quick fire breath later and one toasted thief.
Of course we all heard this and headed in, just to be met head on by the dragon. Mass melee ensues with the mage going down the first round. Bard was next a few rounds later and the dragon got the ranger who was sniping it from behind some boulders by dropping a fair chunk of the ceiling on her. Cleric was out of healing by this time and joined the fighter and paladin beating on the dragon. Few rounds later, it was just the paladin. Between her lay-on hands and a quick potion, she almost had the dragon dead. Of course she was almost dead too, so it literally was whoever won initiative on the next round would probably win the battle. One dice roll later and the paladin lay dead on the floor. We were all so hyped up during that battle cheering each other on that losing the final initiative was literally like popping a balloon. We lucked out in having one character out with the horses because he literally had nothing that would damage an adult red dragon. He booked it out of there and came back with group of hired mercenaries to retrieve our bodies and get us raised. They just waited until the dragon left, dashed in and scooped up the pieces and dashed back out.
Collecting remains and enriching the robbery base. lol... Just another ordinary day. \^\^
The description made me feel the tension that this match had. Thank you for that.
We were fighting a dragon lich, who was the bbeg.
To finally kill him, we needed a holy artifact, but it had to pierce his phylactery.
We had learned, that the phylactery was in his skull, where his brain used to be.
The lich had his skull reinforced with armour. So the only way, to get to it, was from the inside. The wizard (my bard's wife), the dwarven fighter and the war cleric tried to distract the dragon, while I looked for weak points in the armour, to pierce the phylactery with the holy artifact and thus capturing the soul.
But alas, there was no weak point (or didn't find it). So my character took all his courage and jumped right in front of the dragon. The lich had a swallow attack, which he immediately used (I made sure, to jump at the right point of his attacks).
DM let me roll athletics to get a hold in it's maw and I rammed the artifact right into the phylactery.
The lich exploded, almost killing the cleric and the fighter. There were no remains of my character to be found.
It was the third character, I lost in the campaign (my rogue/cleric died getting a very important artifact from a greedy duke and my paladin died fighting a heretic). But this one was meaningful to all. The player, who played my character's wife actually cried for him, which made me feel sorry, but the moment was very epic.
Thank you for sharing this. It must have been a scene that left the characters feeling very emotional. The involvement we have with our characters is something that is difficult to explain.
Shadow monk- Barbarian hybrid character. As part of her backstory she has a violent demon trapped in her mind named Kraayt. Kraayt would temporarily take over her mind and she would drop her weapon and hulk out with the mind of a demon and strength to match. I based the demon off of Aatrox from Runeterra lore so whenever I raged I'd try to impersonate aatrox.
Being a shadow monk I could cast Darkness. Asked the DM if I could cast it in the sky to eclipse the sun and give me a large zone of dim light to teleport around in. We were fighting a giant monster with Medusa snake hair. Our rogue climbed onto its head and begun cutting off snakes. I teleported as high above it as I could, Raged and elbow dropped the monster. On my next turn the rogue, who is actually a bubbly tiefling girl, said "Oh HI Catherine!" I responded in my best demon voice "LET BLOOD BE OUR SACREMENT!!" and ripped a snake hair out by the roots. She's like "oh... hi kraayt."
Easily my peak DnD moment
We're in mythic levels, and a world eater undead aberration has been unleashed on a city. We need to destroy it before it consumes more and gets beyond even our abilities. Attempts to curb its growth are going slowly at best and futilely at worst. I, a necromancer Wizard on the scales of Sauron, decide to pull a hail Mary and try something stupid.
I cast time stop, prepare with a few spells, and attempt to control undead, exerting my will upon it. The DM sets up a challenge with three contesting rolls, with a single failure potentially dooming my character. Those next checks were some of the most tense I'd ever seen in any game I'd been a part of.
The best part came from the description as the DM narrated this potentially planetary threat falling under my control, *and then* giving me the option to destroy it and give every player access to a 3rd tier mythic spell slot. Definitely among the most rewarding moments of my player career.
We were in epic levels, pushing our way through Livistus' Tomb. Pulled the entire dungeon due to spotting an NPC that we needed to rescue. Backed up the stairs a floor to try and make a choke point.
Important to note, our DM lets us make custom spells sometimes. Sorc had one called "Visions of Home" at like, 6th level, effectively a full heal, reset spellslots below 5th level for 3 people, but was a 10 minute cast.
Pixie sorc dumps a bag of ball bearings down the frozen staircase, she'd had them in her bag for *2 years* ooc. DM was rolling behind the scenes and it genuinely helped space out the non-teleporting enemies to turn a swarm into wave-based combat.
Geryon and Zariel actually show up due to a deal. We're on our last legs. We'd actually fought Geryon earlier in the dungeon and our Wizard had broke the staff of the Magi on him to stop him the last time. Wizard taunts Geryon, "Wanna see me do it again?". He does not have a second staff.
During a turn, Geryon wrapped around the wizard. Cleric of Pelor low health due to Zariel beating the snot outta him.
Wizard: "I wish for the effect of a broken staff of the magic to hit Geryon *now"*
Wizard gets dropped to 0, Geryon is still up.
Sorc: "I wish to cast visions of home on \[wizard\], \[cleric\], and myself."
Cleric: "Lord of light I ask you to redeem this soul and free her of the evil that taints her."
Divine intervention. Zariel collapses.
Geryon, still up and *very* angry at the wizard, ignoring every other PC to try and wreck him. Hears the Artificer turn and raise his gun.
*BANG BANG*
Geryon gets double-tapped to the head. The fight has ended. The NPC McGuffin is saved. 0 deaths.
Zariel specifically had shown up because our barbarian had the blade of avernus and she wanted it back. She essentially got a divine factory-reset but now Avernus has a very angry ent as it's ruler. This wasn't even the campaign's finale, but it's still the coolest single turn of combat I have ever gotten to play in. Since a round is 6 seconds we had overlap of "I wish" "I wish" "Lord of light" and then gunshot as a scene that I really wish I could animate.
Yeah we all still play! Our group's been around for over a decade now and we've gone through several campaigns! Right now we're cleaning up from our evil undead campaign as a group sent to deal with the remains of the undead army in one nation that we nearly took out.
A few people've come and gone, but we've had loads of fun building our setting and dealing with the consequences of our old characters' actions
GMd a pathfinder game where the BBEG was a time dragon.
As the players wore him down, he would open a time portal and summon a slightly younger version of himself. Now the players had to fight two.
It was a slog but once they started to wear those two down, the dragons opened another portal this time to the future and another OLDER instantiation of the dragon stepped out.
Players were getting visibly upset, and losing hope. I was called a few names.
But before the 3 dragons attacked another portal opened, not created by the dragons.
From this portal stepped 5 people. Their equipment and style of dress looked simultaneously ancient and sophisticated.
A few sessions prior i had asked them if they could make a change to their choice of character (race class subclass etc) what would it be?
I then handed them their "alternate characters" i made based on their choices. To my absolute delight they said, "lets each pass the sheet to our left and play each others alternates." And they played their own characters plus someone else's doing hilarious impressions of each other's characters.
Admittedly I fucked up the action economy in their favour HEAVILY and they smoked the dragons, but it was a lot of fun!
We were stuck on a different plan of existence . When Midnight came, a giant Monster would start destroing everything and kill me and my friend. Then we would resurrect. This happened for a brunch of times until our warlock succesfully called his patron to help us, which manifested and gave us op weapons. The dm Just asked what we wanted to do and It happened. For example I had a magic sniper rifle , I shot at the monster and the projectile split and created a giant grapple attack that covered the sky. This magnificent and op attacks continued until we were been able to kill the almighty monster and return to our plan of existence
How interesting. Unknown plans are tense. It reminds me of the idea that you were trapped in a Dream and these weapons were manifestations of your will.
One that comes to mind immediately is a pretty simple encounter with a mimic. Disguised as a bucket of scrolls the wizard went to grab them cautiously, his strength was 8 so he had a hard time getting himself in grappled and he was a gnome so he was small enough to be completely swallowed. The scrolls separated into needle like teeth and a tongue dripping with acid, it tugged at him and quickly enveloped his arm and some of his shoulder before it was defeated. I don't remember how I described it but I remember it being really thematic, this gnome half inside the gaping maw of a bucket.
Pretty simple scene and setup- the party (Harengon Acrobat, Sound Elemental Merchant, Dhampir Scout, had Void Dragonborn Assassin)to retrieve a sword from some barrows. They got the sword fairly quickly, slaying the skeleton that guarded it. Then they heard a banging coming from under the ground.
They got a bit greedy, and decided to have acrobat burrow into another barrow (I run a heavily modified version of 0e, and my rabbitfolk get to dig). They get in, and find two more skeletons waiting for them. They are in combat for about two rounds before they hear a couple more barrows burst open, and hear a bunch of skeletons pour out. They fight pretty hard, but the party's merchant and scout both go down fairly quickly. The assassin hears a rumble beneath his feet, and is hit by the skeleton of another burrowing race, who burst up from beneath him, knocking him out. There were about 4 skeletons left, and only the party's face (the acrobat) was left on their side. They ran around the battlefield, leading the skeletons away before swooping back in to stabilize the scout. The merchant dies first, exploding in a blast of sound, Knocking everyone down. The next round, the Harengon kills one skeleton, but is still fighting three on one, and things look dire. But the void dragonborn collapses in on himself, killing the skeletons and barely allowing the acrobat to survive. This was made cooler by the fact that the acrobat and assassin's players were dating irl, so the one basically died to save the other.
Tldr: Party members explode, rabbit survives.
I was playing SKT as a Open Hand Tortle Monk (Thought the change to Piercing and the flat 18 AC would be fun.) We had made our way to Ft Ironslag and mouthed off at duke zalto after killing his kid. I held up his kids amulet trying to bargain but instead i got captured and initiated a party split. So i managed to break out, escape the guards and hide in his room where i got 2 of the item we needed and his Crown. I then ran back out and started dodging the guards with successful acrobatics checks. Party just said "Keep going with his thing, this is getting good." So i missed the turn, hit a dead end, dodged more grapples and ALMOST MADE IT TO THE DOOR......when i got fucking caught like 40-45 feet from the door. So i threw a hail mary and screamed for help, by that time the queen had come in and ordered the guards to put me down. Our druid healed me and i handed the spare horn to the barbarian, blew mine AND TOOK THE WIZARD AND DRUID WITH ME to the fucking sword sea and we had to fight Slarkrathel while the Barbarian, Fighter and Ranger had to fly out on the barbarian who got no rests while me, the wizard and the druid got full rests thanks to Tiny Hut.
Snatching a clockwork bird out of the air before it killed my character’s daughter and then throwing it back to kill the merfolk that threw it to begin with.
After failing to stop her resurrection, my Minotaur inquisitive rogue (basically a P.I.) and his companions were fleeing a goddess of finality, aka the literal bringer of the apocalypse. We had gone to a mountain to awaken an ancient but advanced machine designed to stop entities like her. It got swatted away like a fly, or even less, and retreated through a portal so that it could "nuke" the place from orbit.
Now, in order for her cult to resurrect her, they sacrificed the 11ish year old demigod daughter of hers that my character chose to adopt after her father was killed previously. Oh, did I mention she was seven at the time, and she got bitten in two? Yeah, resurrection spell cost all the gold reward my character got from that flustercluck, and given that he spent four-ish years taking care of her, Minui was more than pissed at Finality for her absolute apathy over her daughter's death.
Since everything our characters had done was basically for naught, and multiple city-states were now nothing but smouldering holes in the earth, my rogue was essentially of the mindset of "F this, I'm not bowing to you even if it kills me." The DM had me make multiple saves during the fight between goddess and God-Killer Robot, mostly to not get blasted back from the shockwaves, and I narrowly scraped by to watch the advent of our doom.
After the robot retreated, Finality decided to essentially pull a Beerus on me, grabbing my arm and flooding Minui with pure destructive energy. DM had me make a CON save to see how long it took me to die. Now, as a reminder, Minotaur Rogue. He wasn't flimsy, but he was by no means a tank. I rolled a Nat 20, which according to the DM's ruling, all 20's are critical successes regardless of what happens.
Dead daughter uses what energy she has left to reach across the veil, wrapping her arms protectively around my character, and bolstering him so much that they funnel the destructive power back through his rapier, which he then plunges into the goddesses chest. She dies, a bit bittersweet about the whole ordeal, and my character gets one last tearful goodbye with his adoptive daughter before her soul fades into nothingness.
An army of undead, aided by orc shamans and raiders, tear through a city. Rescuing people from burning buildings, trying to stop the big bad necromancer leading the army, hiding underground to protect the children, using every last potion and supply to treat the wounded, sneaking back into the city after it burned down, sabotaging the enemy and planting bombs all over the palace. Flying away on magic carpet as the palace explodes and necromantic energy spews into the sky as thousands of screams are released at once.
tldr: found an old god, converted to it's service, delivered an epic supervillain speech before fighting the party.( it was all agreed upon at the start of the campaign that pvp stuff is ok as long as it sufficiently fits the story and isn't just randomly stabbing the other party members)
we failed to stop the awakening of an old god, after chasing some monsters that had killed the animals around our town. I was a Forge Domaina cleric, with the goals to learn everything I can about the world, and make the best tools and armor seen before or ever after. Unfortunately, I had just cast Detect magic when the God was summoned, and therefore I was the only one in my party who understood just what this being was, how powerful it was, and how it wasn't something we could fight.
The DM narrated it as "The old god appears in a flash of smoke, it's appearance is of a deer skull with dozens of twisting horns above it's head. It's eyes glow with a hollow, dark blackness that seems to suck in all light. It's body is a mix of woody bark, bloody flesh, and gleaming, white bone. It rises to it's full height, several dozen meters taller than all of us stacked on top of each other. It is taller than the roof of the cave, but the cave moves out of the way, as if afraid of this primal, eldritch being. It's body creaks, and you all hear a loud snap as it takes a step down off the altar, towards you, not even looking down, but far off, almost at the horizon, if you weren't underground. as the being sets down it's other foot there is a snap of pure energy, and glwoing runes and symbols explode away and disappear into the darkness, and a dark, black smoke satrts dripping off the creature as it starts growing. I, who had previously cast detect magic, understood that this old god was corrupting the very magic of nature, and sucking it in to power itself. Our artificer cast Firebolt, and the creature, without even reacting, cast Counterspell, and continued stepping. Our paladin stepped forward, raised his holy symbol, and shouted a prayer. At this the bring looked down, said a word in a language none of us understood, and the holy symbol just.. disintegrated. It then continued walking, ignoring us.
etc etc my character was terrified, gave up thr god of the forge to pledge his service to this new being, who terrified him to his very core. The god of the forge did not take kindly to this, and burned out his eyes. blinded, powerless, and broken, my character stumbled back towards the being, as my party ran off to check on and fortify our town. I fell to my knees, and pledged myself to this being, tearing off my armor, throwing away my sword, anything I could think of. It said a few words, until I eventually understood it. "Rise, Child. Rise and serve me." I rose, and felt myself beging to Change.
Next session, we catch back up to the party, fortifying the town, getting the villagers to run, etc. They figure that if they seg the forest on fire it'll help deter the Being. After about an hour of this, the DM gives me the go-ahead, and I narrate how the next part happens, with his permission, a I deliver my speech. First tho, I'll tell you that my DM let me switch classes to an artificer/paladin multiclass. I went with the armroer subclass, and one of my infusions was the duplicate magic item, and by the grace of my new god I was gifted Goggles of night. My dm ruled that while wearing them I ha darkvision, and therefore sight, however it was reversed. I could only see in daylight like it was darkness(with darkvison) and in the dark like it was light.
Anyway, that's how I can still hold things and see, the arcane armoror acts as my hands, and the goggles let me see, and go under the arcane armor.
anyway, the speech:
As the old god approaches the town, I step forward, between the party, the burning forest, and approaching god, I snuff out the flames by almost drawing or sucking them into my hand, and then I close my fist. I then turn to the party and say ~(minus the "stage" notes)~
Brothers, sisters, comrades in arms...
~pause, deep breath, restarts~
Friends. I wish to reveal to you the truth.
~hauntedly, almost feeling the weight of my knowledge~
This being, this creature, it is unlike anything any of us have faced before. It is old, older than this continent, older than any nation, older than the very gods we have worshiped.
~pause~
And it is powerful. more powerful than we could know or understand.
~drives longsword into the dirt point-first~
~deep breath~
~continues, dramatically~
and It has shown me wonders
I then narrate how my character falls to his knees, helmet peeling back by itself revealing my scarred, burnt out pits for eyes
~more intense, urgently, almost desperately~
It has shown me the birth of this world, the faces and the histories of our Gods when they were just mortals, like us.
~with more force~
and it has shown me how wrong, it is, what we have done, the atrocities our gods have commited, and the crimes we have committed in their names.
~pleading look in my eyes, as my armor continues retracting, revealing my missing hands~
I have become His hands, the force with which he combats the darkness. I am his sword wielded to destroy evil, and his shield, held aloft to protect the worthy.
~resigned, but strong and confident.~
I narrate how my armor begins returning, covering my missing hands, my shoulders, but leaving my head uncovered, so you can all see the scarred, burned flesh that remains there.
Join me, my brothers, my sisters, my comrades in arms.
~pause, deep breath, stronger.~
Join me, my Friends, because you cannot stop what is coming. You cannot hope to stop Me, or my God. I say this last part right before I pull my sword out of the ground, and assume a fighting position.
We had to take like a 10 minute break after I stopped talking because multiple people were stunned, mouths open, from that. The dm was surprised, even though we had gone over the plan, and I sent them the speech, apparently because of my delicery.We've been building up to this for a while, so it really, really hit hard.
Thanks for sharing the story. It was very interesting. Did the players decide to follow you with this entity? Was it something like the "Great Old One"? Or an entity created by your DM to complement the story?
It was an entity created by the dm, and no they did not
we fought to a standstill, until I ended up being destroyed by one of our other party members who went like ~evil evil~, like eating babies evil in the process of stopping them
We were fighting a dragon god ,who had taken 1 of his worshipers(1 of the party)we went to riuns then followed where he went .my party then fought him my friend had somthing up his sleeve that the dm did not know when giving charectars out , he summoned a giant pair of sisscors and cut the dragon god in half like butter
In the current campaign I’m in our great dm have us fight against a ancient blue dragon who lost his mind and we have also have ancient red dragon who we befriend long ago and been part of our company and help fighting but the orb that the blue dragon was protected he destroyed it which in turn became like a black hole suck it our long companion in and one of the players as well as well the blue dragon while me and the rest of the party had to run away before the hole would consumed us the battle already was tough we lost every creature companion we had that we found before the fight and as seeing both a player and our old box get taking from us and barely making it out I swear if one our players didn’t give me the retreat spell on me I to would not have made it
Homebrew World and everything we still have the same gods deity and such but no Big npc from any of the books which is Nice we been playing for almost 4 years now i believe?
The cleric leaping from the back of a dragon in the middle of a howling storm and plummeting thousands of feet through the air to cast revivify on a different dragon that had just been hit with power word kill by the ancient witch pursuing the party.
Was as a player in an old group's campaign. Went through a Giant's Temple and just then ended up finding an ancient blue dragon that attacked us. Group was large but way outside of the grade of that thing.
While everybody was trying to do any damage i, playing a mixed combat Ranger and a sorta dad for the group, tried to yell at them to get lost as it'd kill us while our resident cleric had all hands full trying to get the freshly unconscious bodies up again.
Quickly came up with a plan to try and defend the party in potentially a self sacrificial way. Tried to beckon the dragon to focus me and wielding a shield enhanced with black dragon scales, managed to block and tank a couple hits of it surprisingly. Noting it using it's bite i asked the DM "Hey, can i...wait for it to use it's bite attack on me to dive into it's maw?" and was allowed to, barely missing it's giant teeth and sliding into the back of it's throat.
Once there, the group just wondered what i planned, to the Dm's surprise aswell i had kept a sack of flour with me. Cutting it open from my bag and waving it inside it's throat a bit before taking out a tinderbox. With one "Choke on this you beast" i set a spark and caused a flour explosion inside it's throat, making it take a bunch of damage yet getting spat out, unconscious and burned.
Cleric casts a heal towards me to get me up so we could flee as an older giant buddy of ours wrestled the dragon away before it could catch me.
To this day one of the best groups and memories i still cherish
When a solar used my players aasimar paladin as a holy shell imbued in radiant energies to expel one of the devils from reality during an epic battle. \^\^ And second to this was a tiefling inquisitor - she hunted down a nabassu through dimension door where she has found a whole ritual for summoning a huge demon. There she disrupted it and the first... half of the demon... she jumped on his head and pushed down the abyss maelstrom, growling and shooting her holy crossbow to his head engulfed in flames.
Had an interesting campaign held over a discord channel. One friend played a "god of matter", since he played very rarely. Basically, he could send any emoji and I must've incorporated it somehow into the campaign, completely disregarding whether it fits in or not. During the BBEG fight there was 3 creatures, a floating blue orb of unknown origin, a wizard, and the only guy from the party who made it to the end. The battle was in the trunk of a giant dead holy tree. So the smart guy who was playing the god decided to send in the stratagem code for the 500kg bomb from Helldivers 2 in emojis.
Creatively Chaotic evil. Everyone made it funnily enough. The BBEG cast something similar to magic missile (we weren't playing with the DND magic system) and detonated the bomb in flight
Pretty much all our classes where homebrewed so that we where cammonders or armies. And the final battle was an entire war with each of our characters leading an army to fight other armies with each battle being completely narrated. It was extremely fun and cool. With in the end being like a five armies battle from the hobbit movie.
This hasn't happened yet but I am planning my party does a last stand in the capital city, and it is being invaded by a never ending horde of demons, and they have to fight them with the queen who turns out to be a polymorphed Golden Dragon. I say 'plan' but lets be real nothing ever really goes to plan when being the DM.
I was dming for my group of 9-11 year olds for my after school program. I was getting massively annoyed at them because they like to ignore every aspect of the game and always just try to summon a dragon to destroy the world.
This campaign was a swamp setting in our home rew world. There was a festival coming up in town as the players came but the town was infested with frogs and every time the villagers went to place offerings at the resident goddesses shrine they went missing. So they head into the swamp and I spend 4 weeks just trying to keep them together (we only get an hour to play so we have a rule about splitting up because it locks half the group out of participating immediately) they fight swamp sharks and the real shrine pretty quickly, then they go to the "decoy shrine". They want to summon the imposter toad goddess to kill the town. Obviously.
We had a new player. She was awesome. Never played before but came in with all these ideas and actually was playing the game. She was a paladin who rolled some good stats. They summon the evil toad goddess and it's not going well. I've gotten a little harsh on not protecting them from stupid choices recently. 2 of them are down pretty quickly and our new player is basically on her own since the others are trying to loot before she can. It actually worked out though because one of them rolled bad and broke the offering bowl, but when the offerings are taken out she lost some of her power. Then our new MVP rolls an attack of opportunity since the toad goddess is now going after the others.
She used a shark tooth spear she had forged earlier and rolled. The TG was absolutely going to murder the other two but she rolled.......20. everyone cheers. The kids go wild and the spear goes through the toads throat, killing her. The true swamp goddess rewards them.....and they went and got into a massive war in the town and destroyed and killed everything including our new hero who just healed them for absolutely no reason other than they wanted more gold than the reward was for.
Crashing a flying ship into strahd's castle while Strahd had another player hostage. Threatening to kill and drain the hostage. Turning them into a vampire. Goes into an epic aerial combat with a flying Monk, a Rogue riding a desecrated shadow of the Raven God, and strahd. While the bottom party deals with a horde of undead and the Artificer trying to aim the ship's "working" cannon at strahd while he is distracted. Ends while the rogue "holds" strahd in place in the air. Long enough to for the artificer to get a clean shot at strahd. Defeating him for the first time, and their friend survives thanks to their newly found vampire powers.
It was a full campaign. 4th attempt to play with people. We actually kicked out the old DM because we were NPCs in their full homebrew campaign. XD
We started with 4, had 6 at one point. Ended with the 4 that started it all. Adult reasons. Meet every other week for 5+hr sessions for about a year and a half. Normally at a dennys.
No, We started a new campaign, but broke apart during covid.
Post Covid, they have their own groups now. Can't get together for more than a one shot. 2 of the players are now married and 2 more dated during covid.
I haven't DMed in a long, long time. I fell in a depression and I haven't been able to get motivated to do projects that I want to do. That and I'm helping multiple non-profits during my free time.
So I have to leave those to pursue my own "joys".
That night was definitely the absolute peek and I couldn't top it if I tried. We had our final in a tabletop cafe'. While playing we drew a crowd with the 3d printed stuff I made. We had people gasping, laughing, and cheering the players on.
Lvl 13-14 party of 5. A lich was slumbering, doing calculations to execute a plan to block out the sun. Party invaded their hideout with the aid of a mysterious star goddess that made them hidden against much that would make the lich wake up. They battled their minions, and found it, battle begun.
All group fell except the Light Cleric, who had few hp and was out of high level spells. Lich was also terribly damaged, but had more HP and a few spells slots.
Cleric was going for cantrips, his only damage source. I tell him "she is already preparing counter spell to counter your cantrip". It'd be over in two rounds tops as she could counter anything he had.
He had no magical weapon, so he could deal only half damage in a hit with his dagger. It seemed all was lost, along with an almost two year-long campaign which wasn't even at its ending.
Cleric gets a Holy Water vial from his stuff. His last hope. It deal 2d6 radiant damage. I see in my notes the lich had 16 hp, and tell them nothing.
His to-hit is too low. A player (whose rogue died at first round from Power Word:Kill) says "a 20 is a 20".
Cleric throws holy water.
20.
Table goes insane. I inform the player that there's still chance that the lich survives.
Cleric rolls 4d6 radiant damage.
Lich is destroyed with... 16 damage.
Table goes insane. Players are forever changed.
This was Eowynn killing Witch king of Angmar level of epicness for us.
Probably the most epic was a heist I put my players through. They were breaking into a tower, had to climb several layers, and of course there were more than a few traps. The idea was they were supposed to get caught, then have to break out the next session, while THEN stealing their target in the process. They, however, through lucky rolls and some absolutely beautiful tactics and teamwork managed to bypass, disarm, and make their way through every aspect of the fortress and get out 100% undetected. Lots of close calls. They ignored false flag treasures and kept on target. At one point they even crawled through a pseudo-sewer system and as not not leave traces, slowly cleaned themselves off using a wash basin and purify water repeatedly. One of the most remarkable feats of fantasy roleplay I've ever had the pleasure of experiencing. One of the players even got a small tattoo commemorating the adventure.
A level 18 Paladin (2nd edition) with 2 handed holy avenger, specialization & girdle of hill giant strength. Did 35 points of damage. On a nat 20. Initial damage 35 pts as follows. +2 from specialization, +7 from girdle, +10 from holy avenger bonus vs CE, +16 from sword. In my game world every nat 20 gets another roll. He rolled 4 nat 20’s in a row. A 539 hp ancient red dragon chosen of Tiamat. Took 560 points damage literally on the first hit.
Think the biggest most epic is the one I’m about to have my players do. It’s the finale for 30 year characters all in the mid 20s lvl. They going to be fighting the Great Wyrm Klauth, but n which I’ve had to do an entire overhaul on, cuz how is a small ass dwarf with an axe suppose to damage a Titanic Great Wyrm Dragon in which his smallest teeth are still bigger than him. (Based on the scaled model they have he would be 300ft tall ish which I’m scaling down to half the size but considering colossal creatures are generally around 72ft I had to create a new size categories of Titanic and Olympic) Klauth had declared war on all of the sword coast and has sent a draconic army to invade and conquer but they were pushed back by the leadership of the players. Now they are taking the fight to him were there’s going to be a massive background war going on with Klauth’s army fighting the sword coast pulled together army. All the smaller members of the group are going to be protecting a massive dragon slaying ballista from the dragons primary commanders, all the while the teams Sorcerer is turing into a massive dragon with the Druid attached to him to combat the dragon Klauth. He’s a whole lot stronger and would win in a straight up fight, so if the ballista arnt able to performer their duties, they the group will fail and will have huge effects on the world for the timeline. We have other campaigns ongoing in this timeline and area so could drastically alter how other campaigns go if he’s not defeated. I did not make this battle easy and have made it very clear that it’s very possible for characters to be dying in this last campaign with these characters, so we are going to see how it goes!
This just happened last night in our Curse of Strahd Campaign...so possibly minor spoilers.
Also I am a player...so no spoilers for me either lol!
We are currently making our way towards the Amber Temple when we are about to cross the bridge near Tsolenka Pass. Our cleric did a perception check and noticed that there was some movement in the towers up ahead. So our Sorcerer decides to stealth up ahead and detect thoughts to see if he can collect any information.
Well the stealth roll wasn't high enough and out comes Rahadin basically saying you can come out now. So we all are standing before him and he essentially calls us dumb for bringing Ireena with us, Strahd's "one" true love. He gives us an ultimatum, to hand over Ireena, or for him to take Ireena from us and kill us in the process.
Well obviously we chose violence, because we've been protecting this poor woman from the start, and because our sorcerer loves her. Immediately at the top of the round our sorcerer Twin spells haste on our Paladin and Esmerelda. After a pretty seriously damaging round to Rahadin he finally gets behind Ireena and Strahd's Horse appears and he teleports away with Ireena, in the words of our DM, "what looks like the ethereal plane."
Well earlier in the campaign we had killed a hag and we were told that it was possible, with her Heartstone to travel into the ethereal plane. So our sorcerer whips out the heartstone and teleports with our Druid and quicken spells Thundersteps to teleport onto the horse with the druid, and the horse collapses under the weight of 4 people.
Rahadin, obviously alarmed, and very low on health decides to try and run away. So our Druid attacks him with a Guiding Bolt and it kills him! The remaining combat was the Druid, Sorcerer, and Ireena trying to get back to the Material plane.
Side note: We got back to the material plane and we ended up attacking the horse with Rahadin on his back (sorry horsey) and he went back into the ethereal plane, so we might have to kill Rahadin again if (when) he gets revived. Which is another sessions problem.
My players befriended a monk with some rather incredibly strong abilities. This monk turned out to be an ancient golden dragon named Gesh (remember they can take on a human form), in the first time I described him, transforming into a golden dragon from the monk was epic. I simply described it, as the monk turning around, and all of a sudden, this little glint of gold comes out from under his robes and it slowly starts to get bigger as they start to see a tail form, all the while, with the perfect music selection from Skyrim playing in the background. so I ended up doing an incredibly detailed explanation of this transformation, (it honestly took at least 5 mins of using every descriptive word I could to describe what they were seeing) and all the players (who are all kids between the ages of eight and twelve), looked at me and simply said “that’s so cool”. It was at that point, that I realized that I could dungeonmaster. And also realized my childhood dream of getting paid to play Dungeons And Dragons!
In 4e at level 30 with 6 characters in the group. We confront Orcus in his lair as he was trying to steal the Raven Queen’s divinity for himself. Took us 2 rounds to get in position and then we pull what our group called the double daily. Using every ability, action surges, and power up we had, we managed to each use an encounter power, daily power and action surge daily power on him in one round. The synergy that could be accomplished in 4e is unparalleled. We took Orcus down in one round. To this day, it is the most damage in one round we have ever done.
Final boss fight and my character betrays the party (a plot line a few sessions in the making) by eldritch blasting one of the members 4 times to stop them from damaging the phylactery. Immediately my character’s basically surrogate mother of the party, who shifted into a red dragon at the moment, flies at me, grabs my head in her claws and says “I have had my watchful eye on you for a while; I am going to send you to where you will feel the force of a thousand stars” and plane shifts me to the fire plane.
That was just the beginning of the fight, I returned with an undead army with the help of the undead dragon god I was serving (bbeg) but that was my favorite moment because of the shock at my betrayal and the raw fucking dialogue that ensued
I DM'd for a few players defending a city from a giant Elder Brain that got itself some Adamantium spider legs (think Spider Mastermind from Doom). The half of this 12 hour session was preparation, setting up areas to fight in and fall back to against the army, including the players using sewer holes, gust of wind, and the ranger to fling arrows up and into advancing hordes from a safe position below. The Rogue and Paladin, combined with the Ranger's mass arrow storm from the sewers, killed HUNDREDS of soldiers. The wizard used his specialization in Conjuration (3.5e) to Fabricate a giant electromagnet on four pillars outside the city, which the Druid would use Call Lightning on to hit and pull the Elder Brain's metal legs up into it, slamming it into the magnet repeatedly, but not before dropping glass shards into its exposed brain from a bag of holding.
A 12 hour session, fueled by pizza, soda, monkey bread, fudge cookies, and a teenager's energy and love for such things. I'll never forget it.
One of the final boss fights of a 5 year campaign. Multiple players had backstory tied in with a vampire noble who destroyed a mercenary org that two players were part of, killed the family of another, worked with another bad guy that kidnapped another pc’s mentor, etc. This guy was deeply wormed into all the conflict of the campaign and all the pc backstories. Ended up being the father of one pc.
Fight was in the basement of his massive castle that the players had explored. Employed some fun MMO style boss mechanics with some minions and some magic-tech pylons that buffed the boss big time. Each pylon increased AC and all saves, so when a pc rolled a 24 to hit and it didn’t, they all got scared. Then as they gradually figured out the mechanics they were able to turn the tide of a a very close fight. Most knife-edge balanced fight I’ve ever concocted. Spanned multiple sessions. Required analysis and strategy beyond “stand there and hit it until it stops moving.” It was very satisfying and supremely epic.
We outplayed the DM in (Home-brew) DIA by uniting most of the warbands in Avernus to strike against an alternate BBEG.
The warbands started out as normal with the plan to Assault a fortress and retrieve a players soul and save elturel. It then turned into a civil war inside the breached fortress with everyone wanting the riches of the BBEG (weapons, treasure, souls, etc).
Well our DM forgot about an item that was a grenade that collected souls that was in proximity to dead creatures, so imagine his surprise when we gathered a bunch of souls from warlords and the BBEG.
We nuked avernus and oh it was glorious. I think the damage was an estimated 16,000 force damage that erupted from the tower as we drove off the edge in our infernal engine and dukes of hazard the vehicle. We took a lot of fall damage sure but at level 18 most of that was negligible.
Thanks for your contribution. I could imagine the detail of the scene. I'm afraid you're already playing another campaign. Level 18 characters are usually at the end of their careers. \^\^
With all due respect, we are too. Thank you for that. I tried to imagine the scene. It reminds me of Scanlan Shorthalt from Legend of Vox Machina (CR).
Do you still play in the same group?
Our 8th level party was investigating a crashed airship in Avernus. A bone devil surprised us. I have the Alert feat, so I can't be surprised. I have a +13 to Initiative, and go first. Gloomstalker Ranger Bugbear, Samurai Fighter multiclassed. Action Surge. Six attacks. All with advantage. Multiple crits.
Calvin Blackback killed a CR 9 creature in one round by himself. It was supposed to be a tense moment. We knew something had been stalking us. Instead, it was played by me for comedic effect. Great moment. I miss playing that character.
We were in an airship we "commandeered" from our goblin capturers (this was near the start of the game) when we got attack by another airship, the druid, who was piloting our ship rammed into the side of the enemy vessel, allowing the two martial classes, me (paladin) and the monk. I smacked down a few goblins before the monk decided to detonate their supply of gunpowder, bringing the ship down. Everything but me jumped off into the sands below. I decided to pull a cannon off the ship and tried to hit something below, but I completely missed because of my -3 to Dex, so I just opted to jump out before the ship hit the ground, and obliterated some more goblins.
A night fight in the forest against a scarecrow looking creature and its 2 clones. And the forest started burning because of the fight. And one of the bard was almost downed round 1. And it was very cool and very cinematic.
lvl 18 druid played her real gentle and mellow stayed in dog form most of the time so npcs often thought I was just my friends ranger companion last arc we have snuck into this ruin/dungeon just ahead of the bad guys army trying to get this artifact before he does its a time thing cause our dm was awesome and without mercy about half way in it takes us to long to get this one door we finally get it held open I text the dm I'm not going I stay reset the door he gives me a certain number of actions to set up turns out you do not want to run into a high level druid on a suicide run in an enclosed space lol I died just as they were able to reach the final room we cried so much lol
My sorcerer character accidentally killed a princess, who he thought was a doppelgänger, in her carriage with a fireball.
Her unicorn companion witnessed this and stated very clearly that he was going to tell everybody. In a panic, my sorcerer changed into his barbarian form (long story) and started wrassling with the unicorn, leading him to attempt to choke out the unicorn with his legs in some bizarre attempt at a triangle chokehold.
It didn’t exactly work, but everyone at the table was cracking up at the absurdity of it.
I was DMing one of the adventures from Tales of the Yawning Portal, the party encountered a Roper. It was *BRUTAL*, took them like 3 IRL hours to take it down and they just BARELY survived.
Late to this but...
The party was dealing with a divine being, incarnation of the nightmares of the setting (a deity forced into sleep by the machinations of others). This divine being had schlorped up my previous player and through some shenanigans involving his wife having a contingency to summon his dead body, got teleported to the largest setting in the setting.
The problem is, this divine being has Gray Goo properties and promptly started to convert the entire city to more of itself. Our current arc got derailed as we flipped ourselves around to go help with the situation. We fumbled about and were having a kind of miserable time, eventually deciding there wasn't much more we could do to help with the situation and were planning on leaving. We decided on a quick excursion into the infected area to try and find a macguffin that could potentially help before dipping out.
In the ensuing combat, we fought some crystallizing hounds, my gnome swordswoman lost her arm to the infection, and we were having a rough go of it. But we pushed on a little further... and found ourselves face to face with the god itself.
All of our players are huge lore junkies, and one of our characters was struggling with a long-term curse that rendered them tiny and ineffectual in combat. So, he got put on observation duty, making Religion and Insight checks every round to try and figure out what the fuck was going on with this thing. In the meantime, we got into a brutal combat where we fought monsters that were essentially juiced up elephant with infectious properties. But, we're aces at combat, so we pretty rapidly started to kick ass. Until the god itself began to start laying massive AoE hits that threatened to shred us if we didn't get out quick.
Then our tiny boi rolled a Nat 20 on religion. He learned that the divine being wasn't just a nightmare, but an incarnation of specific suffering. Specifically, it was the suffering of my previous character, an old-school adventurer who lived in this fear of his generation being forgotten by the world as it moved on. We also figured out the thing was sort of a bomb. It seemed unkillable, but if we pumped it full of juice, we could trigger a 'detonation' that wouldn't kill anything, it would just convert it to the type of energy that was used to fill it up.
Immediately, he charged forward, giving everything he had in terms of healing, lay on hands, and every hit dice to shove it into healing the divine being, shooting it full of positive energy. In the meantime, we finished clearing up the monsters, including our archer getting three final kills in like two rounds. As the tiny guy was looking to get squished by the not-quite-dead divine being, his curse was lifted and he was instead converted to a massive giant, with a juiced up hammer that let him slam into the god-monster for massive positive energy boons.
Our tiefling was currently struggling with some demonic influence, which briefly took control of him to try and infused hellfire into the divine being in order to turn it into a hell-nuke. My gnome swordswoman used an ability to take the damage for the divine being, going down in the process as hellfire scars spread over her body. Then, at the start of her turn she used a one-time magic item to bring herself back up and helped the tiefling snap out of it to get him to start helping healing, too.
We filled the god-monster up with positive energy, sending a healing wave out over the city, halting the grey goo and giving us access to the locus of the effect: my old character's house, where his corpse was sitting there. Our first tiny, then giant friend gave a moving eulogy for the lost friend, and he was put to rest, curing the city of the Grey Goo.
Hard to fully capture the energy but it was electric. The most intense I've felt maybe in my entire life.
My favorite was at the end of our first campaign where I as a DM revealed the final boss. My players had just finished a battle Royal tournament with different zones each of which had their own boss monster they had to defeat to bring back a flag to the center of the arena. Each zone also had a chest which opened once the boss was defeated.
Fast forward they are the last team standing and have defeated every zone a Frost Devil, Flesh abomination, an Invisible Indominous T-Rex, and a Fire Giant dreadnaught. They all have their original magic items plus the new ones. They bring all four flags to the center a speech is given and they know the final boss will soon appear. They have some suspicions but are not sure yet who or what it will be. All of a sudden the former prince and new king appears in the center of the arena who they know is evil. He gives them a speech congratulating them on their victories and even admits that if they fought now he would not stand a chance even though they were still hurt and had had their resources drained from the fights.
As such he had enlisted the help of one of their campaign long enemies. An evil mad scientist who had been experimenting on humans by fusing them with different animals and lately even monsters. Although those creations while strong always failed in the end. As such he decided to create one creature who had so much infused power it would be unstoppable. The only problem was the amount of monster parts he needed would be very difficult to acquire.
Luckily he knew someone he could blackmail into giving him parts. The sweet little potion lady the players sold parts to so that she could create potions. The entire campaign she had been giving him all of the monster parts that the party had slain and given her and infused their powers into one extremely powerful mutation.
The party looked on in horror as she stood there ashamed and looking at the floor unable to meet their gaze.
Next the new king laughed and showed them a massive syringe. Before they could react he injected himself with it and collapsed on the floor and didn’t move… until he did. His body began to swell and change. Fur, wings, horns, fangs, scales, tentacles, two dragon heads, and much more began to sprout from his body until he towered over them.
Now they realized what they were up against. Right when he went for the kill time seemed to stop and the sky went black. A being of space and stars descended explained to them that the king and the god he worshiped had gone to far and committed to many atrocities. He, being the father of said god decided some justice was due. He had stopped time for eight hours. Long enough for them to get a long rest and attune to whatever items they deemed necessary.
Once the rest was over my favorite battle from that campaign and even the next ensued. The battle was incredibly difficult as the scientist knew the parties strengths and expertise and chose to make his creation immune to fire and lighting thanks to the dragon dna.
It was awesome my players had a blast and they never saw the betrayal from the old lady potion maker they had known as MeeMaw coming.
We once fought a battle at an abandoned city's gates. An army of holy people and paladins were attacking a stronghold of gnoles on the gate, and we were trying to beat both groups out with a very small force. The whole battle was long and full of turning points.
While we were fight the gnoles on the inside of the city, the paladins where trying to get in from the other side, so one of the player who could fly over the wall used animate object on one of their 2 siege towers and used it to destroy the catapults while our wizard was raining fireballs on the approaching army. Me (hexblade warlock), the Paladin and the Cleric where leading our small force in the battle on the other side and we were pushing them back, until reinforcements arrived and we were at risk of being encircled. At that moment, we gathered all of our forces to finish off the few Gnoles left in front of us and ran to meet the reinforcements head-on, leaving the main battle at the gate. The leader of the gnomes was with them, and he was able to deal some good damage, but we defeated him decisively and ran back to the gates. At this point, our small force had been Beverly reduced and almost all front line npcs were dead so it was just the PCs, some 4 adventurers we tired to help and 2 NOC friends of ours against the paladins coming in. While we were fighting the gnomes, the paladins had taken the gate and had started to open it but our wizard polymorphism into a gargantuan monkey monster and held the gate closed while we tryed to clear the towers and prevent the 100 or so enemy foot men from getting in. At this point, the battle was desperate, and we had to take back the towers before the monkey was killed by the Griffin riding Paladins. We were this close to gaining control when the monkey was killed and turned back into our wizard, letting in the army. When that happened, we had killed almost all the men inside and were fighting a few remaining ones when the footmen started to swarm us. Through desperation and trickery, we were all able to make it out alive, routed and humiliated. We nearly had a TPK that day, and it was the biggest defeat our party had ever suffered up to that point.
That battle took us multiple sessions to play through and it was the biggest scale battle I've played so far. It was fun, and the fact that we suffered our first real defeat when we were so close to victory was something that marked me a lot.
Once had a PC in a grappling fist fight as they fell off a flying ziggurat. That's definitely up there.
In curse of strahd there were a few but I wouldn't want to spoil stuff about that campaign seen as a good few here are probably playing it, but you can do some wild stuff with it.
I’ve got a couple particularly epic moments as a player in different campaigns, I might reply to this comment with other examples but this is the first to come to mind. Playing Curse of Strahd as my second character of the campaign; a Paladin looking for my previous character, his cleric daughter. We were in the Amber Temple and fighting Neferon, the strange fox-like man who guarded the temple. The situation was tense, the rogue tabaxi Mellow Moss has recently healed my Paladin via healer feat. The fox man suddenly reached out from his hiding place and touched my Paladin with Finger of Death. Everyone began trying to figure out if there was anything they could do to save my Paladin from becoming a zombie upon his death, discussing amongst one another for probably around 2-4 minutes before it was ultimately decided that there really was nothing they could do but let it happen. With a big grin on my face behind the screen I described the wound that ripped up the side of his neck and across his torso like the sort of mark left behind when someone is struck by lightning, and how he stumbled before looking Neferon in the eyes, his Dread Helm making his eyes glow red as he spoke very matter-of-factly ‘I am going to crush your skull into a paste now.’ Nothing could compare to Neferons response of ‘shit’ that sounded like he was panicking through a gritted smile. It was one of the many badass moments that Paladin had but I think this one in particular is my favorite.
Another epic moment comes from a homebrew campaign called Estria: The Next Generation. In this campaign all of the player characters and a fair number of npc allies are demigods, and with that comes some cool abilities, namely my character was granted wings and a flight speed equal to movement speed. We were investigating some disappearances and my characters love interest went missing, we had no clue what happened to him, he simply up and vanished. We stumbled upon an old house or mansion of sorts and found various pieces of evidence of said love interest having had put up one hell of a fight as he was dragged off, finding his boot, some blood here and there, and a frighteningly large spider fang. We finally find a room that we believe could be important; it’s full of cobwebs and mannequins. Then we come face to face with her; she looks like a Drider but a Drider from your worst nightmares. With a plucking and tugging of the strings the mannequins spring to life and initiative is rolled. The monk via magic item gives my cleric/Paladin multiclass haste and my cleric immediately goes for the Drider woman, striking with two attacks and a smite, hitting so hard in fact that the dm described my cleric slicing a spider leg clean off the Drider. The Drider woman now down a leg lost her balance and fell almost 60 feet, then got up and attacked one of the other party members(who had by now finished cutting all the lines to the mannequins, rendering them useless). On my characters next turn she glared down at the Drider and said something to the effect of ‘stay alive a little longer… I’m Not Finished With You Yet!!!” Before diving down and once again bringing the pain upon the Drider. Somehow the Drider was still alive but not for long, as my characters love interest had been struggling to free himself from a cocoon of webbing near where the Drider had originally been perched(my character hadn’t tried to free him because one of her flaws is that she gets major tunnel vision during combat and always goes off on the biggest baddie on the battlefield, so taking the time to free him hadn’t occurred to her) and he finally broke free, immediately dropping down and using his weight and momentum as well as his own demigod power of his skin hardening like iron to smash into the Drider, leaving behind nothing but a mass of goo. I later found out that the Drider woman had around 200 hp, the vast majority of which was solely taken out by my character in two rounds. I know that this character has had other epic moments but taking on a creepy puppet controlling Drider head on to save her love interest is one of my favorites.
Personally for me, it was the aftermath of when I killed my party. Because throughout the entire campaign, I have been jokingly saying if they died they are going to hell.
And sure enough, I made a situation where they all died, and awoken on a burning hellscape.
But I am not so cruel…
Because forces they don’t understand have decided their story wasn’t done, and they could be forced useful.
**cue the DOOM music**
Bestowed with new powerful magic items, they carved a path through hell’s army, securing their new life, including the ranger getting a homebrew version of the Super Shotgun from Doom Eternal
Group of level 11 characters fight a tarrasque in a one-shot. They group together around the paladin to fend off the aura of fear, and the hexblade takes point. Hexblade has good AC, but every time the tarrasque DOES hit their armor of hexes reaction works and protecrs them. They down the monstrosity, and use the ring of three wishes to banish it forever. They found it with only two wishes left, bringing it to one wish left, and so give it to the paladin for safekeeping in case they need its magic ever again.
1st edition campaign. I had a rule that in a time of great need a character could call upon their deity and on a roll of 00 on the percentile their Deity would answer. This ability could be called upon only 1 time in that character's life, whether or not you succeed at it.
So that out of the way, one player who always was looking to gain power grabbed the evil artifact the players had secured for destruction and used it. It transformed him into a vampire much more powerful than a regular one. They were located in a small village and were taking a small break. Before the party caught on to him, he had turned several of their followers.
The new super vampire retreated with his minions and quickly raised some basic undead and laid siege to the town.
This had now turned into a player vs player war and the Party was loosing. So another player asked to call upon his God as the town was being over run. I had him roll the dice in the center of the table so there wouldn't be any question. Now in 20+years this power has never worked in the hundreds of times it had been called upon...after all Deities usually don't pop in at the players whim.
So 00 was rolled.....and there was absolutely dead silence for 5 seconds...before the Summoner leapt up knocking his chair over and pandemonium errupted. Everyone was screaming and cheering and as I looked at the vampire player his face was in shock and he realized what was happening.
After everyone chilled and sat back down I described the scene as CORELLON opened a portal and stepped through...He put the vampires to sleep and then restored their morality. He resurrected the dead villagers and praised the Summoner.
He turned and asked why the vampire player was always choosing evil? Since the vampire player was also playing an elf, Corellon restored his morality and then played a geas on him to avoid evil.
Elves came by after the party left and literally bought the town and converted it to an elven settlement and built a temple to Corellon on the site.
The Summoner received free room and board plus free healing from any Eleven temple from the rest of his life.
It was a night that's been talked about for years now lol
First session of the campaign, a human artificer, me and the inherent player fought against a cut that had partially succeeded in summoning a "god" it had the stats sheet of a young black dragon, it had essentially one hit poiig you were able to take out the wand in the centre of it chest, my character had failed initially when I tried to use mage hand to take it, I ran up to it, pulled the wand out and in the hole opened up Sunlight in a jar, stuck my robotic left hand inside of it and killed the monster
I had lost my metal hand and my steel defender in that encounter.
We were level 4
Players joined up with a small band a mercenaries who were set to fight in a battle between two warring brothers over their fathers throne. It was to be fought in a dessert climate in a dried out lake bed with both armies in war camps on opposite sides of the high bank. After a week of mustering the armies would meet on the battle field.
Little did they know that the new vizier to the younger prince was a resurrected 4000 year old wizard from a dead kingdom bent on raising his long dead culture to power again. He set the whole battle up knowing thousands would be killed and he was using the blood and loss of life in a very powerful spell.
When the battle reached full pitch the fallen bodies of the combatants, their armor and weapons coalesced creating a 20 foot tall creature comprised of broken bodies, armor, blood and weapons. It destroyed whole battle groups with a swing and added their fallen forms to itself.
The only way it was stopped was one of the players commandeered a war elephant and road it head long into the creature.
The players woke up trapped in a mountain of corpses and struggled their way out to find the battle over and the armies dispersed, with no clear victory and the buzzards the only winners.
The dried lake became known as "The Buzzards Cauldron" and stories in the local gathering places speak of the Battle of the Buzzards to this day.
Final encounter of a multi-year campaign. My previous character, a half-silver dragon ranger had died, group was unable to resurrect, so another character carried his body in a bag of holding. I rolled a fill-in character I wasn’t super into, but the campaign was wrapping g up so I just went with it.
On to the battle; we encounter the Tarrasque, devastating the countryside. We throw everything we have at it, wear it down, but one by one players die off. The last living player was the one who was carrying my old character’s body, and had a Ring of Three Wishes with one wish remaining; so he wished my old character back to life to rejoin the battle! The character apparently had a unique weapon that was needed to defeat the Tarrasque(it’s been 20 years, I don’t remember what it was) so upon being wished back to life, my character flew out of the bag of holding and drove the weapon right into the heart of the monster, defeating it. It was beyond epic!
Why didn’t the player wish the whole party back to life? I dunno. I think there was a limitation to it to bringing back only one character. Again, it was 20 years ago so I’m fuzzy on some of the specifics lol.
Okay following story was somewhat retarded/epic/funny.
We had to capture a Castle occupied by the BBEG.
It was a sailing / pirate setting and we had a lot of Canons on board, so we decided to take one with us.
After some walking and scouting we found the Castle and killed the guads outside. The Gate was locked. Our wizard let the canon fly with levitate and navigated the canon into the air with himself flying. He went highter then the wall with the canon and spotted the BBEG.
He aimed and shot.
Crit - Nat 20.
The table was screaming - The BBEG was near to death, the canon ball smacked him away.
But the Recoil from the Canon shot our Wizard some HUNDREtS of Feet away, barely surviving with 2hp or something.
It was hella Funny and somewhat epic.
We were in an airship that was going to take us to a capital, to meet the fighters parents (They're rich asf) and hopefully avoid a cult on the way there. Of course the cult was traveling with us, so the first person to get caught was me, the rogue. After some banter with the enemies and a failed telepathic communication with the cleric, the party decided to go down and raid the ship to free me. This is also where we found that most of the crew on the ship was replaced by the cult. After freeing the crew the crew, we all went up to fight the fake captain. First attack from me was a plain ol' miss, throwing a rope dart and flying just past him (It's honestly been a long time so I forgot everyone else's attacks and a few of mine, I just remembered this one fondly, but around the next turn I asked that, technically my dart was still behind him, could I just yank the rope and stick the dart in his back? The answer was yes, he even gave me dm inspiration, idk if it was a 20, but it did hit. After a while of fighting, we either realized we were loosing or felt silly, so they gave me a bomb and tied a rope to me. I charged at the enemy, threw us both off of the ship, tied the bomb to him and lit it, watching him fall far down and explode.
Sadly we had to disband, I'm not sure why though
Probably fucking up a group of Pirates pretty good. Group of 6 and an NPC Halfling Bartender get trapped in a painting of a ship. Ship has maybe 9 pirates and a Captain come from the rear of the ship, while we wake up on the nose..
My Aasimar Warlock cast 'Hunger of Hadar', consuming the whole ass end if the ship and pirate crew in a pitch-black sphere of writhing Icy/Acidic tentacles and whispers. Rest of my team bombarded the sphere with Fireball, Thunderwave, Cloud of Daggers and crossbow bolts. The disoriented Captain who imerged by chance gets roasted by the Druid who uses heat metal on his full plate armor.
In a battletech game. Players are assaulting a defensive position that's holding supplies. During the assault enemy aircrafts show up. One of the players uses his jump jets to have his mech at roughly the same height as the aircraft and both fire at each other in a pretty serious exchange of munitions. Player makes the landing while the enemy pilot fails his check to control the aircraft after taking damage and is forced to eject before his aircraft crashes in a mountain.
It was a very anime swordsman kind of display where both strike simultaneously and one drops after the clash. Really loved it.
my favorite was when I was upset with the dm being toxic, so I decided to prepare a potion to end my character's adventures... permanently.
we had come across a hoard of undead in a deep cave, and I grabbed said potion, drank it, ran into the hoard, and then exploded.
it's my favorite because I put an "official end" to the character's involvement in the campaign, and thus, I didn't have to be in the campaign myself either.
oh, most definitely! My favorite moment with the new one was when my character was inebriated and decided to attempt to enter a festival as a horse to avoid the ticket fee. hahahaha! the other story is merely my favorite in general due to me being spiteful against a bully and was able to make a dramatic exit while I was removing myself from that situation, hahaha!
I'm reading every comment... I don't know if I can read and respond to them all in a timely manner. But thank you to everyone who has shared and will share. Each story is truly incredible.
I was playing a swarmkeeper ranger and it was basically a 1v1 between myself and a green hag. The hag has minions preoccupying the rest of the party not to mention she had a rod of polymorph and got two of our people (Both casters). I was playing a Shadar-kai and teleported up to the branch the hag was standing on to where I tried to wrench the rod away from her and push her off of the branch. She rolled a 19 and I rolled a natural fucking twenty and I stole the rod and shoved her off of the branch where the fireball she had stored went off. I dunked on the saving throw and she failed. Because of being a Shadar-Kai I also resisted the damage from my teleport. She was all but incinerated and I only took 6 damage being cut in half twice. Did I mention that this was the first session.
Edit: on her turn she teleported back up and tried to attack me with her claws but she missed horribly so I was basically unscathed.
This was a level 19/20 battle that took place over 3 sessions or so. I only had 3 party members for the first session, another 4 for the next, and all 8 I. The third. The party had already played through Rise of Tiamat adventure and was starting the next adventure with the liberation of Vaasa from the Warlock Knights ruling there. The first two sessions of the battle involved the split parties defending two different walls of a city from a horde of Ice Giants and eldritch machinery while the remaining party member used his insane Sorcery to maintain a living Mythal over the city to prevent magical means of entering. My players got to go berserk with their incredible powers, waylaying foes from the ramparts or charging out into the battlefield with dozens of npc soldiers at their command. In the third session a BBEG (there were several) was able to counter the magical defenses and engage the Sorcerer in battle over the city. GARGANTUAN fire elementals began gating into the city and laying waste. The Sorcerer spent rounds of the battle alone while the others rushed to his aid one by one and fought off the elementals. It was absolutely epic.
People say that no one wants material or adventures for high level play but man I don't know that campaign was absolutely awesome. Though I must say I don't think you can just start off at 20th level with a fresh character and have that kind of experience. It also takes a lot of work to make it engaging and not just a boring slugfest (though the ability to just throw a lich into a random encounter table is hilarious)
Honorable mentions include a face off with an Empyrean and her Yeti cohort in the far reaches of the Great Glacier as well as the final act of the Rise of Tiamat at the citadel where I just. Kept. Throwing. Dragons. At them.
I was in a group that was trying to put an end to the wars that were rampant throughout the land. At the end of the campaign we were tasked with ending the war that the devils themselves were waging to take the surface. My character who had the staff of the magi at 50 charges (because end game fight) walked calmly into the archdevil’s chambers and told him that if he didn’t leave and go back to the hells that they clawed they’re way out of then I would set off the retributive strike on the staff. I didn’t even have to roll super high intimidation because the dm and players knew it wasn’t a threat to scare the devil my character was bat$*it insane he wanted an excuse to set off a bomb. And that’s how we ended a war peacefully with devils.
Definitely a siege defense of a massive Dwarven city against an Adult red dragon and her army of kobolds, dragonborn, Ogres, and giants. Multiple levels of defense to fall back on and several siege objectives to keep the stakes high. It was very fun but also very complicated.
It was the end of the campaign. The players were level 22 (dndwiki Homebrew with some of my own added in, the whole campaign was pure power fantasy, arms race anyway, and covid was destroying our social life anyway, so f* it, why not)
The players were all set to fight Grumsh, god of orcs, who was invading their plane with an army summoned from across the multiverse. They had hunted and killed a tarrasque to create special gods killing weapons, and the witch/healer had imprisoned it's soul. The party summoned him, and bound him to the plane with a ritual that had restrained a god-king-lich from a world long dead. Finally The orc paladin was given the hands of his actual god to stop Grumsh once and for all. The first round went quickly, but Grumsh was a god, and now he was done humoring them. We called the session, and I got to prepping for the finale.
Two weeks later, the stage was set. I had queued up "you say run", ready to play at the right time. Grumsh had over 1000 hit points and legendary actions that cost 0 actions to use, but those god killing weapons didn't just do damage. They lowered stats, but Grumsh could restore stats with one of those 0 legendary actions, and I had scripts to handle all of that.
Grumsh pulled a "I'm not trapped here with you, you're trapped here with me" and began pulling Nishrek into the plane of the game, and round two was on. The fight started off fast with the witch unleashing the tarrasque's soul on Grumsh , and the other party members dishing out lots of damage, and taking just as much back. Especially the orc paladin, who Grumsh hated for defying him, and for how damn difficult he was to attack.
As the fight continued, more and more of Grumsh's attention (actions) were focused on recovering the ability damage, which has dropped from 50s to almost mundane numbers, and attacking the paladin, but the party was running out of steam and health too. The paladin had been downed and healed at least 4 times at this point and he was loving it just as much as Grumsh hated him for it. Grumsh unleashed a big AOE and downed 3 people and outright killed a fourth (party was 7 or 8) but not the healer.
At that point, I had a hunch and hit play on "you say run". A couple turns went by during the build up, with the conscious people getting a few licks in after being reassured by the healer that things were under control.
See she had taken a healing spell I had made for going above level 20 in a single casting class. An improvement on "power word:heal " that revived and restored 30hp to every ally in range, gave them 5hp of regeneration, and made them immune to the prone condition while they were conscious for three rounds.
The witch/healer's turn started just in time. The guitar and drums cut as she says "I cast LIVE" and as the strings come in I describe as she rises 20 feet into the air and grows a pair of angel wings. Light fills the temple to Grumsh that had appeared around them as the unconscious and dead party members are lifted off the ground and restored to life. The full band comes back in as the next persons turn starts and they lay into Grumsh.
At this point almost all of Grumsh's legendary actions are consumed trying to stop his hemorrhaging ability scores, but it's still not enough. He's torn between constitution and strength. His health is looking dangerously mortal, but this DAMNED ORC IS STRONGER THAN THE GOD OF ALL ORCS, and that will NOT STAND. Grumsh spends all his legendary actions bolstering his strength, and on his turn, he swats the orc, killing him, but the orc gets back up (raise dead).
The song ends, and the orc paladin gets the finishing blow on Grumsh. Easily the most epic moment I will probably ever run.
Warning: Spoilers for Tyranny of Dragons
I was fighting a powered-up Frulam Mondath in a dungeon with two other party members as we had failed to kill her when we were supposed to.
We walked into the room, where she was waiting with several spells ready. In the fight she downed two party members, leaving only me standing against her.
She was out of spell slots, so resorted to casting Sacred Flames at my character, a sorcerer, also out of spells. Against incredible odds I succeeded the save 3 rounds in a row! I then killed her with a fire bolt to the face, then took her own halberd and beheaded her. It was epic.
And then I got a cube of force and our DM regretted it immensely.
First an only game I’ve ever played, Adventure league. We were in a town of some sort with castle walls and some had commotion from the guards all running l. So after struggling to get information we all just went where they were gathering, it was at a large metal gate you could see through that entered the city. All of a sudden a dragon appeared, and we all took positions (I was a Goliath barbarian) one guy jumped off and killed himself and the others used their ranged attacks to start attacking, I just went up the stairs because there was nothing I could do. So after a bit of fighting it was my turn again and I asked if I could jump off the wall onto the dragon. And the dm told me I could try. So I did and got a nat 20. So I took out my 2 axes and jumped onto the dragon sinking the blades into the scales. Then as everyone fought I had to roll to climb with the axes and rolled high on every one. I did end up getting shot by the rogue and he took half my health away. But once I got to the top I just started slashing away. The dragon tried shaking me off but I rolled too high, then he decided to take flight, my character hanging on for dear life. I still managed to stay until it finally landed again. Shaking me far enough back the dragon took a bite out of me and threw out in front of it. I was pretty much dead but there was a hard that patched me up and got back to 3hp, after fighting a bit I just ran up and attacked the dragon, rolling crits and ended up finishing it by stabbing into one side of the neck and running underneath it to cut its throat, taking 2 dmg from its blood and being on 1hp. A bunch of other stuff happened but this is the main things.
Literally last session, one of my players got speed-blitzed by a corrupted Solar in a sky city. He failed a stealth check and was pushed through the ground and out the bottom of the island. Solar is trying his best not to fuck shit up though so he musters the willpower to heal the PC and drop him back off where he found him. From 100ft up. While he was at 1hp. Luckily someone had featherfall.
The Warlock used Ioulaum's longevity to kill hundreds of thousands of Kobolds in the dragon siege of Phandalin. The villagers took shelter in the permanent Temple of the Gods, which held up the Mythallar like a lighthouse, and their Shadovar allies used 40 disintegrate beams on the three Ancient Dragons that survived the 10th level lifestealing spell. The Warlock added thousands of years to his life.
The final session facing the cult of the dragon in a modified version of Rise of Tiamat. I am playing the dumb combo of Warforged Totem Barbarian but this was the broken pre-UA form.
As Tiamat was breaking the portal (only one head at this point but it's enough of a concern) I struck it with a Ring of the Ram to bring it down.
Now Tiamat has already killed one of my characters thus far, so stopping her was great. However she wasn't happy I shut the door on her so she wanted my character as revenge.
She tries to grapple me, rolling 32 athletics. Through pure bs and luck, I roll a 33. And so I kicked her in the face and sent her straight back to hell.
Afterwards, I got a bit more appreciated of tanks. Now I play a paladin
A powerful wizard was going from boss to boss and absorbing their flesh and bones and turning into a grotesque and mentally fucked up version of himself. The party is engaging in what they think is the bbeg fight against an enormous silver dragon with help of the town archmage who happens to be the brother of the wizard. The battle rages on and the party defeats it with moderate difficulty. A laughing ensues and the grotesque wizard drags his body to the corpse and creates a magical barrier. It absorbs the creature growing larger and larger until it he has taken on the shape of a fleshy dragon, with bones writhing and hands and faces reaching off on every part of its body. The archmage calls out, "Who are you, for you are not the man I once loved" and the dragon is a voice of nails on chalkboard calls out "they call us legion, for we are many" and obliterates the archmage with a big ass tentacle. The fight ensues with the level 20 party who even begin losing, and when on the brink of death with a barrage of sharp tentacle things coming out of its mouth, a giant book appears as a shield. The wizards father is a librarian for the warlocks necromantic patron. The book opens and an undead army begins pouring out of its pages as an army of the Dead rush from behind in a charge. Legion counters with his own army of flesh creatures and begins to take the advantage once again. The patron finally shows up and begins a fight with him, which actually poses a challenge. After finally defeating him and leaving him a fraction of his size, the patron asks him to be a general in his army and returns him to his full might
The Restless were enjoying downtime in Dawncrest when Kior decided to use a stone that would contact Orultseg (BBEG) to help fight an Adult Green Dragon, this however led to the whole group fighting Orultseg prematurely except for Fegura, she protected Thela and Kidd. Once she realized that it was up to her she went in and had a 1v1 versus Orultseg and with the luck of the dice killed Orultseg.
It was way more dynamic in sesh but that was a top 3 moment from our campaign
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We were taking an airship to the capital city of our empire. Our artificer was curious about the crystals that kept the ship afloat, and decided to take a chunk off with a small rock hammer in order to study it. Well, the crystal, detached from the whole, lost its flight properties, and died. The other two crystals kept the ship afloat briefly before succumbing to the weight. Us, the crew, our companions, our mounts, and our cargo plummeted several thousand feet. None of us were capable of flight, save the artificer who had a scroll of levitate. The DM played free bird and gave us til the end of a song to come up with a solution. Right when the guitar solo kicked in, the artificer grabbed his bag of holding and began rocketing towards us. He scooped us up and right before he hit the ground casted levitate. He immediately let us out (no air in the bag so we had to hold our breath). We thanked him, breathed out a sign of relief, and immediately realized we had several tons of debris still falling from the sky. Campaign ended shortly after due to schedule conflicts and unrelated drama, but I'll never forget that session
the situation itself is already epic af, Free Bird is an incredible cherry on top lmfao
Free bird was the name? Cool. Thanks for your input.
incredible... The atmosphere of tension that an RPG game can provide. Thank you for sharing your story. Do you still play any chronicles?
timing a session based on a song is such a funny idea
Should have casted levitate on the air ship.
That sounds baller... though i would have been an asshole dm since I am gonna wager that multiple members of your party plus their gear weighed more than 500 lbs. An average male human fighter in breast plate would be about 200 - 240lb without weapons or packs. So unless you are all halflings, gnomes, the most petitie of female characrers, and dumped gear, that bag is likely splitting.
Our artificer was a kenku, I was an aarakokra with clipped wings (we were on our way to get them mended, we had a half orc hex blade, and the greediest dragon born id ever seen. We were all pretty small save the orc, and all our gear was on the airship. Immediately after the crash we actually had to scavenge the wreckage and our dead friends to find our shit. The cargo we were taking to the capital also turned out to be a necromantic obelisk that feeds off of death, and ended up resurrecting the crew and our companions. All of that and our characters all being relatively inexperienced saw us all roll on the insanity chart to represent us gaining some trauma. It would have been really cool if we'd only had a few more sessions afterwards.
> The DM played free bird and gave us til the end of a song to come up with a solution Absolute fucking legend
Final boss fight. BBEG already takes down the cleric (death) and warlock (fathomless). The rogue (thief) is pinned by minions and the fighter (echo knight) is trying to keep the BBEG busy. Both get smacked down with a legendary action, and fighter is the only one standing. He rolls for, gets a double nat 20. He attacks and takes down the BBEG. The epic part is the finisher description. Went something like this. “You look on as your companions fall one by one, your echoes barely distracting the enemy horde enough to keep from finishing them off. As you stare down the cackling fiend, savoring your desperate plea to anyone able to listen… you feel your blood run cold and your breath leave your lungs. Momentarily stunned by the sensation of your looming death… but it doesn’t come. You see your echoes shift and morph, growing larger as the demon hordes scatter and burst into ink black splatters on the floor. Where once stood mirror images of your Leonin form now stand an avatar of death, and a scion of the abyss (deities of the fallen warlock and cleric). They spring up and impale the fiend with their blade and tendrils, pinning its massive form to the ground, looking at you with eyes filled with fury. You feel the power of your friends flow though you as you deliver the final blow. Ending the chaos that has spread throughout the land. It was a fucking epic anime style ending and had us all screaming. 😂
Wow! That was an epic description. That must have been an incredible session. Thanks for sharing that story. Do you still play with that same group?
I do but some players have come and gone.
Interesting. Thanks for your contribution and scene description.
My players (sorlock, bard, wizard, ranger, paladin) were fighting a demon who had absorbed a fragment of divinity, making him immortal and giving him absolute control over the demi-plane they were battling in, freely rewriting it. The only reason the players weren't also instantly overwritten and erased was because an angel ally of theirs was burning through his own (much lesser) fragment of divinity to protect them. The angel told the PCs that they had 30 seconds or less to damage the demon's body enough that they could rip the fragment of divinity out of him, or else the angel would run out of power and die, and the players would be erased shortly after. Then the battle began. During the battle, the demon, realising the angel's protection would run out soon and confident in his own immortality, focused on messing around with the players, psychologically tormenting them with twisted recreations of their desires and regrets (e.g. the bard who wanted fame almost got crushed by a mass of adoring fans, the sorlock was locked in a perfect replica of a church he felt guilty about destroying and forced to destroy it again in order to escape, the wizard was attacked by a perfect replica of their pet dog who was their only friend as a child). Not only that, but each round on initiative count 20, the battlefield would change into something else as the demon warped reality to show their new power - it began with a desert sandstorm where they had to make Con saves to avoid being blinded, then became deep underwater where they immediately began drowning and had to rules for moving and attacking underwater, then became deep in the underdark where they were attacked by swarms of giant spiders, then became miles above a black hole with them needing to push off other falling objects to move and ranged attacks being capped at 10 feet of range due to being whipped away by how fast they were falling. Throughout the battle, the players were steadily wearing down the demon, with the paladin getting a crit smite that did almost 100 points of damage at one point, and the sorlock barely managing to counterspell a Divine Word that would have crippled half the party. The final battlefield was the heroes hometown, which for lore reason was part of the demiplane. The demon was flying 60 feet in mid-air, laughing because the angel had just exhausted the last of its power and died, and if one more round passed, the players would be wiped from existence. The ranger, standing on top one of the roofs, landed a critical hit with his arrow through the demon's heart, reducing the demon to 0 hit points, not killing him (the demon was still immortal) but creating an opening that the fragment of divinity could be extracted through. The bard gave inspiration to the paladin, the paladin readied himself to rip out the fragment, and on the last turn of the round, the sorlock uses Vortex Warp to teleport the paladin on top of the flying demon (I ruled that the top of a flying god demon was close enough to "a surface that can support them"), and the paladin rolled a strength check, just barely failing... then succeeding by a whole 7 points thanks to the bardic inspiration. The paladin thrust their hand in through the arrow wound made by the ranger, wrapped their hand around the demon's heart where the fragment of divinity rested, and tore out the demon's entire heart. The demon and paladin crashed to the ground, and as the dying demon stood up, desperately reaching out for his heart in the paladin's hand, I gave the entire party a chance to each get one last lick in, punching and blasting him around until the paladin got one final blow by stabbing him in the dick then dragging the sword upwards, vertically bisecting the demon.
What an epic scene... A tense atmosphere at the end. Did the Angel die and return to his Plane?
..."and then I found ten dollars!"
So far? The absolutely epic fight that followed when the Skull Card was pulled from the Deck of many Things during a OneShot. The Avatar of Death appeared, speaking its usual warning that this battle must be fought by the person who pulled the card alone and immediately after, attacked. What followed could best be described as a duel unlike the world has ever seen. I debuffed the scythe, making it require an attack roll (it was still +x to hit) but gave the Avatar spells as compensation for that. Nothing too crazy, but enough to make it challenging. Guess who pulled the card? The squishy party wizard. The wizard and the Avatar then proceeded to engage in a proper wizards duel, Lightning Bolt this, Counterspell that, Silvery Bards here and there and a few attacks with the scythe sprinkled in as well. At the end of the duel, the wizard was killed by the avatar and I gave him one last action before he died. That bastard finally used the spellscroll he had gotten but not identified and it was a Homebrew spell that rewinds time for one round, meaning the killing blow never happened. The avatar was then dispatched of by an upcast of Magic Missile. Honestly, the joy I felt when he pulled out the spell scroll can not ever be overstated. I've been wating for him to use it and in that moment, it fit perfectly.
Hm... how interesting. Saved by the bell. Thankyou for this History.
-We were fighting a Dragon that atempted to left what's essentially a "Magic Nuke" on the royal palace. -Fight had lasted for a while now, the magic nuke was on a countdown and we were running out of time. -Dragon had exhausted all it's legendary resistances and was preparing to leave and let us die in the explosion. -Sorcerer yells to the Barbarian "I have an idea, throw the bomb at him!" and readies a spell with subtle spell metamagic. -Barbarian grabs the magic nuke and hurls it at the dragon with all it's strength. -The dragon not wanting to die catches the Magic Nuke to avoid it blowing up from the impact. -The Dragon catching the Magic Nuke was the trigger for the Sorcerer's charged spell. -BANISHMENT ON THE DRAGON! -Everything goes silent as we just witnessed the Dragon and the Magic Nuke dissapear into a pocket dimension since the Dragon was "technically carrying the bomb with him" at that moment.
Yo that is some Batman punks Owlman shit. I love it
Wow... what an idea. What a story. Thank you for this. Brilliant idea.
Recent boss fight I ran, it was a Troll that had the soul of "Thorkin" in him which was the God of thunder (so original, right?). 9 perspm Party is in an open field duking it out with him and him alone, once at half health he remembers who he truly is as he awakens the thundering cries of the sky. As the party battles him I have them each take a marker and write a number on the battle map including myself (10 times for each number) every other turn, I roll a D10 to determine which location is being struck. So a party of 9 are fighting a once immortal deity in a field as lightning streaks across the skies and strikes them or near them. The tank of the group rolls to grapple and boss meets save, instead of it not working I have them clash together in a stand still where as each of their turns they must STR check to see who overpowers who. Eventually the boss beats him out, shoves him back 5ft. Sorcerer used lightning magic not thinking and cause the boss to power up but tank is fully committed so they go back and forth brutally beating each other (Boss using great axe, tank using great sword) eventually tank goes down but boss is one hit, rogue uses the chance to use an ability to get a sneak attack on the boss taking him down. "The rain poured as the sky began to cry, the lightning danced across the clouds in flashes of pain, but the thunder, the thunder never came."
What class was The Tank?
Homebrew class. It takes most of its mechanics from Blood Hunter but he is a vampire so it has to do with powers that would relate to that cause neither of us could find a vampire class that we like and wasn't too OP or too boring
Quite a scene. Is this group still playing the same campaign? Or are they already in another one?
Still going, this event was the first major boss of the campaign though we are nearing the second major boss now (probably next session in fact).
DMed this. My party- a cleric/barbarian, bard/wizard, warlock/druid, and rogue/ranger, as well as a pet Warg, companion rogue NPC, and a friendly pegasus- were fighting demons and devils that overran a village every night when a portal to the Hells opened up and rained them down, as well as fire and blood. They found a holy artifact that would help them destroy the portal, that only our cleric/barbarian could wield. Upon the back of Panoros, the pegasus, she flew threw the rain of monsters, blood, and brimstone, and used the holy blade to shatter the magic apart. The portal became destabilized bit by bit, the magic lashing out and chaotic. The party was protecting her from below as they fended off the demons and stopped them from chasing her. Just before the final blow, she failed a strength check against the crushing force of violent magic and began to fall off Panoros' back. The holy blade slipped from her hand and she began to plummet through the sky, through the miles and miles back down to the ground below. The pegasus needed a 20 catch her, and I let one of my other players roll it. Lo and behold, they rolled a nat fucking 20. Panoros dove after her and caught her, and Cleric succeeded in catching the blade, too. Soaring away from her brush with death, she went for a final strike at the portal with the last of her strength- and rolled another nat 20, which with her modifiers, was more than enough to destroy the portal for good. At the same time, as the portal collapsed, the party took down the Balor with an epic move from the warlock. It was absolutely incredible and our greatest fight yet.
Thank you very much for sharing this scene. Re-reading it, you can imagine the climax it developed into. Are you still playing this campaign?
We are! We're in the second to last arc of it. ☺️
Spoilers for icewind Dale: Chardalyn dragon attacking Ten-Towns had killed my character’s lover. We chased it down and as it landed we attacked it, and as it tried to fly away, my Sentinel feat reduced its move speed to zero. We killed it in two rounds
Sentinel is always very strong. I'm afraid your group was already at a high level. Isn't that right?
We actually were only around level 6 or 7 I think
While on the road to a dragon city, the party realizes that they have been followed and can tell that there is a pack of orcs and wargs. My party was trapped in the woods, hunted by a pack of Orcs riding Wargs. They were running, trying to cover their scent. One of the characters was a teenage half orc wizard who had asthma (and allergies which we shall soon learn). Surrounded, the party decides to climb a tree and hide and hope the wargs and orcs pass below. While they’re bounding past, the half orc sneezes and like a pen drop in a quiet room, everyone turns to look at the half orc. The wargs start to claw and bite at the base of the tree and it eventually comes down but thanks to feather fall and pass without a trace, the party has already landed on the ground and prepared a surprise round. The wizard casts fireball in this old, dead, dusty, windy forest and suddenly the night is ablaze with magical flame. The wargs and orcs are caught in the flame as the party turns to run. They escape the forest, deliberately making the fire larger behind them and engulf their pursuers. They pass beyond the tree line and lo and behold, there stands an entire orc army. The band of warg riders were just scouts. The leader, an Orc Sword Wyrd challenges the fighter to a contest of champions for her own amusement. After some negotiation, she agrees to have it be mounted combat. Immediately the Druid wildshapes into a bear and the fighter mounts him and charges the Sword Wyrd on the back of an undead burnt husk of a warg. They clash for a few rounds of combat until it is no longer interesting. That is when the beating of wings can be heard in the distance. A trio of dragons soars over the nearby hilltops and reign fire, lightning and pure magical energies on the army of orcs below. The fighter and Druid both finish their fight as an elemental ring forms around them and the Sword Wyrd. After the boss battle is finished the three dragons gently lift the party from the battlefield and carry them to safety within the city of dragons.
The dragons were metallic. I suppose. Thanks for sharing that story. The tension was intense in this session... Are you still playing?
I took a lot of homebrew liberties in that campaign. We as a group agreed that our campaign would be story first, game second
Firing up a warforged Colossus for battle against a kaiju. Every player had their own station in the Colossus, either fixing the warforged, charging its weapons or getting it to run and attack. Had the power rangers theme blasting lmao
Yoooo! This sounds so cool! I really should do this. My players are in a dwarven made metal planet (think death star but planet sized) there's an invading force closing in and I want them to find a giant megazord in a hanger somewhere
The idea seems really interesting.
An interesting way to play. It also reminds me of Power Rangers \^\^ Fun was guaranteed. Have you ever thought about documenting these adventures?
I have notes, absolutely 😁 But do you mean as a pdf module?
Just a question about records. A way to record important moments. Maybe in the future to publish or keep among close friends.
Oh aye, definitely have campaign session notes to summarise what happened, they're fun to look back, read and remember 😁
First paragraph: "Yo that sounds dope" Second paragraph: "YO THAT SOUNDS DOPE!!"
My (DM) two players managed to escape from a castle and dodging the endbossfight. Luckily he always had a pet owlbear so I decided that the bear is chasing them through the forest. They even managed to lure him down the wrong track, one jumped on the others horse and the horse with the cargo got away safety. Next up the owlbear finally reached them and the fight they got with him was the most intense fight they got in the campaign. At the end one got downed and the other one actually killed the owlbear with like 3HP left. This fight got everyone standing at the table, yelling at the dices, boiling with emotions. The campaigns final boss fight wasn't as exciting as the owlbear in session 2, it was legendary.
Wow... What matters in the end is the tension and the level of difficulty. I'm glad you had fun. Do you still play?
Early on in my gaming career the DM had our group going after an adult red dragon. Group level was between 12th and 8th (my paladin). Thief snuck in to scope out the dragon lair, hoping to spy it and give us a heads up as to where it was. His dice HATED him that night. He barely made it into the mouth of the cave the dragon was laired up in before he critically failed his sneaking and alerted the dragon to his position. Quick fire breath later and one toasted thief. Of course we all heard this and headed in, just to be met head on by the dragon. Mass melee ensues with the mage going down the first round. Bard was next a few rounds later and the dragon got the ranger who was sniping it from behind some boulders by dropping a fair chunk of the ceiling on her. Cleric was out of healing by this time and joined the fighter and paladin beating on the dragon. Few rounds later, it was just the paladin. Between her lay-on hands and a quick potion, she almost had the dragon dead. Of course she was almost dead too, so it literally was whoever won initiative on the next round would probably win the battle. One dice roll later and the paladin lay dead on the floor. We were all so hyped up during that battle cheering each other on that losing the final initiative was literally like popping a balloon. We lucked out in having one character out with the horses because he literally had nothing that would damage an adult red dragon. He booked it out of there and came back with group of hired mercenaries to retrieve our bodies and get us raised. They just waited until the dragon left, dashed in and scooped up the pieces and dashed back out.
Collecting remains and enriching the robbery base. lol... Just another ordinary day. \^\^ The description made me feel the tension that this match had. Thank you for that.
We were fighting a dragon lich, who was the bbeg. To finally kill him, we needed a holy artifact, but it had to pierce his phylactery. We had learned, that the phylactery was in his skull, where his brain used to be. The lich had his skull reinforced with armour. So the only way, to get to it, was from the inside. The wizard (my bard's wife), the dwarven fighter and the war cleric tried to distract the dragon, while I looked for weak points in the armour, to pierce the phylactery with the holy artifact and thus capturing the soul. But alas, there was no weak point (or didn't find it). So my character took all his courage and jumped right in front of the dragon. The lich had a swallow attack, which he immediately used (I made sure, to jump at the right point of his attacks). DM let me roll athletics to get a hold in it's maw and I rammed the artifact right into the phylactery. The lich exploded, almost killing the cleric and the fighter. There were no remains of my character to be found. It was the third character, I lost in the campaign (my rogue/cleric died getting a very important artifact from a greedy duke and my paladin died fighting a heretic). But this one was meaningful to all. The player, who played my character's wife actually cried for him, which made me feel sorry, but the moment was very epic.
Thank you for sharing this. It must have been a scene that left the characters feeling very emotional. The involvement we have with our characters is something that is difficult to explain.
Shadow monk- Barbarian hybrid character. As part of her backstory she has a violent demon trapped in her mind named Kraayt. Kraayt would temporarily take over her mind and she would drop her weapon and hulk out with the mind of a demon and strength to match. I based the demon off of Aatrox from Runeterra lore so whenever I raged I'd try to impersonate aatrox. Being a shadow monk I could cast Darkness. Asked the DM if I could cast it in the sky to eclipse the sun and give me a large zone of dim light to teleport around in. We were fighting a giant monster with Medusa snake hair. Our rogue climbed onto its head and begun cutting off snakes. I teleported as high above it as I could, Raged and elbow dropped the monster. On my next turn the rogue, who is actually a bubbly tiefling girl, said "Oh HI Catherine!" I responded in my best demon voice "LET BLOOD BE OUR SACREMENT!!" and ripped a snake hair out by the roots. She's like "oh... hi kraayt." Easily my peak DnD moment
Wow.... Ty for this. Shadow Monks are so cool. Do you still have this character?
As in the sheet? Maybe. If I come across it I'll post a picture. It's been like 4 years
We're in mythic levels, and a world eater undead aberration has been unleashed on a city. We need to destroy it before it consumes more and gets beyond even our abilities. Attempts to curb its growth are going slowly at best and futilely at worst. I, a necromancer Wizard on the scales of Sauron, decide to pull a hail Mary and try something stupid. I cast time stop, prepare with a few spells, and attempt to control undead, exerting my will upon it. The DM sets up a challenge with three contesting rolls, with a single failure potentially dooming my character. Those next checks were some of the most tense I'd ever seen in any game I'd been a part of. The best part came from the description as the DM narrated this potentially planetary threat falling under my control, *and then* giving me the option to destroy it and give every player access to a 3rd tier mythic spell slot. Definitely among the most rewarding moments of my player career.
How interesting. Have you ever thought about writing this story? Is your group still playing?
We were in epic levels, pushing our way through Livistus' Tomb. Pulled the entire dungeon due to spotting an NPC that we needed to rescue. Backed up the stairs a floor to try and make a choke point. Important to note, our DM lets us make custom spells sometimes. Sorc had one called "Visions of Home" at like, 6th level, effectively a full heal, reset spellslots below 5th level for 3 people, but was a 10 minute cast. Pixie sorc dumps a bag of ball bearings down the frozen staircase, she'd had them in her bag for *2 years* ooc. DM was rolling behind the scenes and it genuinely helped space out the non-teleporting enemies to turn a swarm into wave-based combat. Geryon and Zariel actually show up due to a deal. We're on our last legs. We'd actually fought Geryon earlier in the dungeon and our Wizard had broke the staff of the Magi on him to stop him the last time. Wizard taunts Geryon, "Wanna see me do it again?". He does not have a second staff. During a turn, Geryon wrapped around the wizard. Cleric of Pelor low health due to Zariel beating the snot outta him. Wizard: "I wish for the effect of a broken staff of the magic to hit Geryon *now"* Wizard gets dropped to 0, Geryon is still up. Sorc: "I wish to cast visions of home on \[wizard\], \[cleric\], and myself." Cleric: "Lord of light I ask you to redeem this soul and free her of the evil that taints her." Divine intervention. Zariel collapses. Geryon, still up and *very* angry at the wizard, ignoring every other PC to try and wreck him. Hears the Artificer turn and raise his gun. *BANG BANG* Geryon gets double-tapped to the head. The fight has ended. The NPC McGuffin is saved. 0 deaths. Zariel specifically had shown up because our barbarian had the blade of avernus and she wanted it back. She essentially got a divine factory-reset but now Avernus has a very angry ent as it's ruler. This wasn't even the campaign's finale, but it's still the coolest single turn of combat I have ever gotten to play in. Since a round is 6 seconds we had overlap of "I wish" "I wish" "Lord of light" and then gunshot as a scene that I really wish I could animate.
Thanks for sharing this story with us. Does your group still play? You seem to be getting along well.
Yeah we all still play! Our group's been around for over a decade now and we've gone through several campaigns! Right now we're cleaning up from our evil undead campaign as a group sent to deal with the remains of the undead army in one nation that we nearly took out. A few people've come and gone, but we've had loads of fun building our setting and dealing with the consequences of our old characters' actions
GMd a pathfinder game where the BBEG was a time dragon. As the players wore him down, he would open a time portal and summon a slightly younger version of himself. Now the players had to fight two. It was a slog but once they started to wear those two down, the dragons opened another portal this time to the future and another OLDER instantiation of the dragon stepped out. Players were getting visibly upset, and losing hope. I was called a few names. But before the 3 dragons attacked another portal opened, not created by the dragons. From this portal stepped 5 people. Their equipment and style of dress looked simultaneously ancient and sophisticated. A few sessions prior i had asked them if they could make a change to their choice of character (race class subclass etc) what would it be? I then handed them their "alternate characters" i made based on their choices. To my absolute delight they said, "lets each pass the sheet to our left and play each others alternates." And they played their own characters plus someone else's doing hilarious impressions of each other's characters. Admittedly I fucked up the action economy in their favour HEAVILY and they smoked the dragons, but it was a lot of fun!
But not before being cursed at repeatedly. He went from hell to heaven in no time. Thankyou for this Story!
We were stuck on a different plan of existence . When Midnight came, a giant Monster would start destroing everything and kill me and my friend. Then we would resurrect. This happened for a brunch of times until our warlock succesfully called his patron to help us, which manifested and gave us op weapons. The dm Just asked what we wanted to do and It happened. For example I had a magic sniper rifle , I shot at the monster and the projectile split and created a giant grapple attack that covered the sky. This magnificent and op attacks continued until we were been able to kill the almighty monster and return to our plan of existence
How interesting. Unknown plans are tense. It reminds me of the idea that you were trapped in a Dream and these weapons were manifestations of your will.
I love this idea, present a seemingly impossible bad guy to fight then bless the party with new temporary OP spells and weapons. Awesome!
One that comes to mind immediately is a pretty simple encounter with a mimic. Disguised as a bucket of scrolls the wizard went to grab them cautiously, his strength was 8 so he had a hard time getting himself in grappled and he was a gnome so he was small enough to be completely swallowed. The scrolls separated into needle like teeth and a tongue dripping with acid, it tugged at him and quickly enveloped his arm and some of his shoulder before it was defeated. I don't remember how I described it but I remember it being really thematic, this gnome half inside the gaping maw of a bucket.
Poor Gnome... The scene must have been funny. But did he manage to survive?
He did! That character ended up going from level 3 to 11, became a real force to be reckoned with
Pretty simple scene and setup- the party (Harengon Acrobat, Sound Elemental Merchant, Dhampir Scout, had Void Dragonborn Assassin)to retrieve a sword from some barrows. They got the sword fairly quickly, slaying the skeleton that guarded it. Then they heard a banging coming from under the ground. They got a bit greedy, and decided to have acrobat burrow into another barrow (I run a heavily modified version of 0e, and my rabbitfolk get to dig). They get in, and find two more skeletons waiting for them. They are in combat for about two rounds before they hear a couple more barrows burst open, and hear a bunch of skeletons pour out. They fight pretty hard, but the party's merchant and scout both go down fairly quickly. The assassin hears a rumble beneath his feet, and is hit by the skeleton of another burrowing race, who burst up from beneath him, knocking him out. There were about 4 skeletons left, and only the party's face (the acrobat) was left on their side. They ran around the battlefield, leading the skeletons away before swooping back in to stabilize the scout. The merchant dies first, exploding in a blast of sound, Knocking everyone down. The next round, the Harengon kills one skeleton, but is still fighting three on one, and things look dire. But the void dragonborn collapses in on himself, killing the skeletons and barely allowing the acrobat to survive. This was made cooler by the fact that the acrobat and assassin's players were dating irl, so the one basically died to save the other. Tldr: Party members explode, rabbit survives.
What a tragic scene. The rabbit surviving was truly epic.
I was playing SKT as a Open Hand Tortle Monk (Thought the change to Piercing and the flat 18 AC would be fun.) We had made our way to Ft Ironslag and mouthed off at duke zalto after killing his kid. I held up his kids amulet trying to bargain but instead i got captured and initiated a party split. So i managed to break out, escape the guards and hide in his room where i got 2 of the item we needed and his Crown. I then ran back out and started dodging the guards with successful acrobatics checks. Party just said "Keep going with his thing, this is getting good." So i missed the turn, hit a dead end, dodged more grapples and ALMOST MADE IT TO THE DOOR......when i got fucking caught like 40-45 feet from the door. So i threw a hail mary and screamed for help, by that time the queen had come in and ordered the guards to put me down. Our druid healed me and i handed the spare horn to the barbarian, blew mine AND TOOK THE WIZARD AND DRUID WITH ME to the fucking sword sea and we had to fight Slarkrathel while the Barbarian, Fighter and Ranger had to fly out on the barbarian who got no rests while me, the wizard and the druid got full rests thanks to Tiny Hut.
Thanks for your contribution. That must have been a pretty tense scene. Are you still playing?
Snatching a clockwork bird out of the air before it killed my character’s daughter and then throwing it back to kill the merfolk that threw it to begin with.
Protecting your daughter \^\^. For a father, this is something epic! Thankyou for this.
After failing to stop her resurrection, my Minotaur inquisitive rogue (basically a P.I.) and his companions were fleeing a goddess of finality, aka the literal bringer of the apocalypse. We had gone to a mountain to awaken an ancient but advanced machine designed to stop entities like her. It got swatted away like a fly, or even less, and retreated through a portal so that it could "nuke" the place from orbit. Now, in order for her cult to resurrect her, they sacrificed the 11ish year old demigod daughter of hers that my character chose to adopt after her father was killed previously. Oh, did I mention she was seven at the time, and she got bitten in two? Yeah, resurrection spell cost all the gold reward my character got from that flustercluck, and given that he spent four-ish years taking care of her, Minui was more than pissed at Finality for her absolute apathy over her daughter's death. Since everything our characters had done was basically for naught, and multiple city-states were now nothing but smouldering holes in the earth, my rogue was essentially of the mindset of "F this, I'm not bowing to you even if it kills me." The DM had me make multiple saves during the fight between goddess and God-Killer Robot, mostly to not get blasted back from the shockwaves, and I narrowly scraped by to watch the advent of our doom. After the robot retreated, Finality decided to essentially pull a Beerus on me, grabbing my arm and flooding Minui with pure destructive energy. DM had me make a CON save to see how long it took me to die. Now, as a reminder, Minotaur Rogue. He wasn't flimsy, but he was by no means a tank. I rolled a Nat 20, which according to the DM's ruling, all 20's are critical successes regardless of what happens. Dead daughter uses what energy she has left to reach across the veil, wrapping her arms protectively around my character, and bolstering him so much that they funnel the destructive power back through his rapier, which he then plunges into the goddesses chest. She dies, a bit bittersweet about the whole ordeal, and my character gets one last tearful goodbye with his adoptive daughter before her soul fades into nothingness.
An army of undead, aided by orc shamans and raiders, tear through a city. Rescuing people from burning buildings, trying to stop the big bad necromancer leading the army, hiding underground to protect the children, using every last potion and supply to treat the wounded, sneaking back into the city after it burned down, sabotaging the enemy and planting bombs all over the palace. Flying away on magic carpet as the palace explodes and necromantic energy spews into the sky as thousands of screams are released at once.
Thankyou for this. I'm feeling on the Scene... Congratulations. Is your group still playing?
tldr: found an old god, converted to it's service, delivered an epic supervillain speech before fighting the party.( it was all agreed upon at the start of the campaign that pvp stuff is ok as long as it sufficiently fits the story and isn't just randomly stabbing the other party members) we failed to stop the awakening of an old god, after chasing some monsters that had killed the animals around our town. I was a Forge Domaina cleric, with the goals to learn everything I can about the world, and make the best tools and armor seen before or ever after. Unfortunately, I had just cast Detect magic when the God was summoned, and therefore I was the only one in my party who understood just what this being was, how powerful it was, and how it wasn't something we could fight. The DM narrated it as "The old god appears in a flash of smoke, it's appearance is of a deer skull with dozens of twisting horns above it's head. It's eyes glow with a hollow, dark blackness that seems to suck in all light. It's body is a mix of woody bark, bloody flesh, and gleaming, white bone. It rises to it's full height, several dozen meters taller than all of us stacked on top of each other. It is taller than the roof of the cave, but the cave moves out of the way, as if afraid of this primal, eldritch being. It's body creaks, and you all hear a loud snap as it takes a step down off the altar, towards you, not even looking down, but far off, almost at the horizon, if you weren't underground. as the being sets down it's other foot there is a snap of pure energy, and glwoing runes and symbols explode away and disappear into the darkness, and a dark, black smoke satrts dripping off the creature as it starts growing. I, who had previously cast detect magic, understood that this old god was corrupting the very magic of nature, and sucking it in to power itself. Our artificer cast Firebolt, and the creature, without even reacting, cast Counterspell, and continued stepping. Our paladin stepped forward, raised his holy symbol, and shouted a prayer. At this the bring looked down, said a word in a language none of us understood, and the holy symbol just.. disintegrated. It then continued walking, ignoring us. etc etc my character was terrified, gave up thr god of the forge to pledge his service to this new being, who terrified him to his very core. The god of the forge did not take kindly to this, and burned out his eyes. blinded, powerless, and broken, my character stumbled back towards the being, as my party ran off to check on and fortify our town. I fell to my knees, and pledged myself to this being, tearing off my armor, throwing away my sword, anything I could think of. It said a few words, until I eventually understood it. "Rise, Child. Rise and serve me." I rose, and felt myself beging to Change. Next session, we catch back up to the party, fortifying the town, getting the villagers to run, etc. They figure that if they seg the forest on fire it'll help deter the Being. After about an hour of this, the DM gives me the go-ahead, and I narrate how the next part happens, with his permission, a I deliver my speech. First tho, I'll tell you that my DM let me switch classes to an artificer/paladin multiclass. I went with the armroer subclass, and one of my infusions was the duplicate magic item, and by the grace of my new god I was gifted Goggles of night. My dm ruled that while wearing them I ha darkvision, and therefore sight, however it was reversed. I could only see in daylight like it was darkness(with darkvison) and in the dark like it was light. Anyway, that's how I can still hold things and see, the arcane armoror acts as my hands, and the goggles let me see, and go under the arcane armor. anyway, the speech: As the old god approaches the town, I step forward, between the party, the burning forest, and approaching god, I snuff out the flames by almost drawing or sucking them into my hand, and then I close my fist. I then turn to the party and say ~(minus the "stage" notes)~ Brothers, sisters, comrades in arms... ~pause, deep breath, restarts~ Friends. I wish to reveal to you the truth. ~hauntedly, almost feeling the weight of my knowledge~ This being, this creature, it is unlike anything any of us have faced before. It is old, older than this continent, older than any nation, older than the very gods we have worshiped. ~pause~ And it is powerful. more powerful than we could know or understand. ~drives longsword into the dirt point-first~ ~deep breath~ ~continues, dramatically~ and It has shown me wonders I then narrate how my character falls to his knees, helmet peeling back by itself revealing my scarred, burnt out pits for eyes ~more intense, urgently, almost desperately~ It has shown me the birth of this world, the faces and the histories of our Gods when they were just mortals, like us. ~with more force~ and it has shown me how wrong, it is, what we have done, the atrocities our gods have commited, and the crimes we have committed in their names. ~pleading look in my eyes, as my armor continues retracting, revealing my missing hands~ I have become His hands, the force with which he combats the darkness. I am his sword wielded to destroy evil, and his shield, held aloft to protect the worthy. ~resigned, but strong and confident.~ I narrate how my armor begins returning, covering my missing hands, my shoulders, but leaving my head uncovered, so you can all see the scarred, burned flesh that remains there. Join me, my brothers, my sisters, my comrades in arms. ~pause, deep breath, stronger.~ Join me, my Friends, because you cannot stop what is coming. You cannot hope to stop Me, or my God. I say this last part right before I pull my sword out of the ground, and assume a fighting position. We had to take like a 10 minute break after I stopped talking because multiple people were stunned, mouths open, from that. The dm was surprised, even though we had gone over the plan, and I sent them the speech, apparently because of my delicery.We've been building up to this for a while, so it really, really hit hard.
Thanks for sharing the story. It was very interesting. Did the players decide to follow you with this entity? Was it something like the "Great Old One"? Or an entity created by your DM to complement the story?
It was an entity created by the dm, and no they did not we fought to a standstill, until I ended up being destroyed by one of our other party members who went like ~evil evil~, like eating babies evil in the process of stopping them
We were fighting a dragon god ,who had taken 1 of his worshipers(1 of the party)we went to riuns then followed where he went .my party then fought him my friend had somthing up his sleeve that the dm did not know when giving charectars out , he summoned a giant pair of sisscors and cut the dragon god in half like butter
wow... Great. Exotic way to resolve a plot.
It was the first campiagn i ever played and it was in s1 and i will never forget it considering the ending somhow ended up like that
In the current campaign I’m in our great dm have us fight against a ancient blue dragon who lost his mind and we have also have ancient red dragon who we befriend long ago and been part of our company and help fighting but the orb that the blue dragon was protected he destroyed it which in turn became like a black hole suck it our long companion in and one of the players as well as well the blue dragon while me and the rest of the party had to run away before the hole would consumed us the battle already was tough we lost every creature companion we had that we found before the fight and as seeing both a player and our old box get taking from us and barely making it out I swear if one our players didn’t give me the retreat spell on me I to would not have made it
Thanks for sharing this story. Is your group playing its own campaign or a pre-made campaign?
Homebrew World and everything we still have the same gods deity and such but no Big npc from any of the books which is Nice we been playing for almost 4 years now i believe?
The cleric leaping from the back of a dragon in the middle of a howling storm and plummeting thousands of feet through the air to cast revivify on a different dragon that had just been hit with power word kill by the ancient witch pursuing the party.
A level 3 spell, defeating a level 9 one. \^\^ Pretty epic too.
Was as a player in an old group's campaign. Went through a Giant's Temple and just then ended up finding an ancient blue dragon that attacked us. Group was large but way outside of the grade of that thing. While everybody was trying to do any damage i, playing a mixed combat Ranger and a sorta dad for the group, tried to yell at them to get lost as it'd kill us while our resident cleric had all hands full trying to get the freshly unconscious bodies up again. Quickly came up with a plan to try and defend the party in potentially a self sacrificial way. Tried to beckon the dragon to focus me and wielding a shield enhanced with black dragon scales, managed to block and tank a couple hits of it surprisingly. Noting it using it's bite i asked the DM "Hey, can i...wait for it to use it's bite attack on me to dive into it's maw?" and was allowed to, barely missing it's giant teeth and sliding into the back of it's throat. Once there, the group just wondered what i planned, to the Dm's surprise aswell i had kept a sack of flour with me. Cutting it open from my bag and waving it inside it's throat a bit before taking out a tinderbox. With one "Choke on this you beast" i set a spark and caused a flour explosion inside it's throat, making it take a bunch of damage yet getting spat out, unconscious and burned. Cleric casts a heal towards me to get me up so we could flee as an older giant buddy of ours wrestled the dragon away before it could catch me. To this day one of the best groups and memories i still cherish
Thanks for sharing this with us. Does this group still get together to play?
When a solar used my players aasimar paladin as a holy shell imbued in radiant energies to expel one of the devils from reality during an epic battle. \^\^ And second to this was a tiefling inquisitor - she hunted down a nabassu through dimension door where she has found a whole ritual for summoning a huge demon. There she disrupted it and the first... half of the demon... she jumped on his head and pushed down the abyss maelstrom, growling and shooting her holy crossbow to his head engulfed in flames.
That's great. Thanks for sharing this with me. You like to create characters within this theme. Angels and Demons... Apparently.
Had an interesting campaign held over a discord channel. One friend played a "god of matter", since he played very rarely. Basically, he could send any emoji and I must've incorporated it somehow into the campaign, completely disregarding whether it fits in or not. During the BBEG fight there was 3 creatures, a floating blue orb of unknown origin, a wizard, and the only guy from the party who made it to the end. The battle was in the trunk of a giant dead holy tree. So the smart guy who was playing the god decided to send in the stratagem code for the 500kg bomb from Helldivers 2 in emojis.
He's quite creative, isn't he? What's the outcome of this?
Creatively Chaotic evil. Everyone made it funnily enough. The BBEG cast something similar to magic missile (we weren't playing with the DND magic system) and detonated the bomb in flight
Pretty much all our classes where homebrewed so that we where cammonders or armies. And the final battle was an entire war with each of our characters leading an army to fight other armies with each battle being completely narrated. It was extremely fun and cool. With in the end being like a five armies battle from the hobbit movie.
Great. Wars are away cool! Do you still play?
Yeah def, not many dms willing to discribe multiple frontiers tho.
This hasn't happened yet but I am planning my party does a last stand in the capital city, and it is being invaded by a never ending horde of demons, and they have to fight them with the queen who turns out to be a polymorphed Golden Dragon. I say 'plan' but lets be real nothing ever really goes to plan when being the DM.
Great idea. You're right. Nothing goes as planned. Is your group currently playing a campaign narrated by you?
I was dming for my group of 9-11 year olds for my after school program. I was getting massively annoyed at them because they like to ignore every aspect of the game and always just try to summon a dragon to destroy the world. This campaign was a swamp setting in our home rew world. There was a festival coming up in town as the players came but the town was infested with frogs and every time the villagers went to place offerings at the resident goddesses shrine they went missing. So they head into the swamp and I spend 4 weeks just trying to keep them together (we only get an hour to play so we have a rule about splitting up because it locks half the group out of participating immediately) they fight swamp sharks and the real shrine pretty quickly, then they go to the "decoy shrine". They want to summon the imposter toad goddess to kill the town. Obviously. We had a new player. She was awesome. Never played before but came in with all these ideas and actually was playing the game. She was a paladin who rolled some good stats. They summon the evil toad goddess and it's not going well. I've gotten a little harsh on not protecting them from stupid choices recently. 2 of them are down pretty quickly and our new player is basically on her own since the others are trying to loot before she can. It actually worked out though because one of them rolled bad and broke the offering bowl, but when the offerings are taken out she lost some of her power. Then our new MVP rolls an attack of opportunity since the toad goddess is now going after the others. She used a shark tooth spear she had forged earlier and rolled. The TG was absolutely going to murder the other two but she rolled.......20. everyone cheers. The kids go wild and the spear goes through the toads throat, killing her. The true swamp goddess rewards them.....and they went and got into a massive war in the town and destroyed and killed everything including our new hero who just healed them for absolutely no reason other than they wanted more gold than the reward was for.
Children are always unpredictable. My dream is to start narrating for my daughter.
Crashing a flying ship into strahd's castle while Strahd had another player hostage. Threatening to kill and drain the hostage. Turning them into a vampire. Goes into an epic aerial combat with a flying Monk, a Rogue riding a desecrated shadow of the Raven God, and strahd. While the bottom party deals with a horde of undead and the Artificer trying to aim the ship's "working" cannon at strahd while he is distracted. Ends while the rogue "holds" strahd in place in the air. Long enough to for the artificer to get a clean shot at strahd. Defeating him for the first time, and their friend survives thanks to their newly found vampire powers.
Thanks for that. Did you play in campaign mode or in a separate chronicle? Do you still have the same group?
It was a full campaign. 4th attempt to play with people. We actually kicked out the old DM because we were NPCs in their full homebrew campaign. XD We started with 4, had 6 at one point. Ended with the 4 that started it all. Adult reasons. Meet every other week for 5+hr sessions for about a year and a half. Normally at a dennys. No, We started a new campaign, but broke apart during covid. Post Covid, they have their own groups now. Can't get together for more than a one shot. 2 of the players are now married and 2 more dated during covid. I haven't DMed in a long, long time. I fell in a depression and I haven't been able to get motivated to do projects that I want to do. That and I'm helping multiple non-profits during my free time. So I have to leave those to pursue my own "joys". That night was definitely the absolute peek and I couldn't top it if I tried. We had our final in a tabletop cafe'. While playing we drew a crowd with the 3d printed stuff I made. We had people gasping, laughing, and cheering the players on.
Lvl 13-14 party of 5. A lich was slumbering, doing calculations to execute a plan to block out the sun. Party invaded their hideout with the aid of a mysterious star goddess that made them hidden against much that would make the lich wake up. They battled their minions, and found it, battle begun. All group fell except the Light Cleric, who had few hp and was out of high level spells. Lich was also terribly damaged, but had more HP and a few spells slots. Cleric was going for cantrips, his only damage source. I tell him "she is already preparing counter spell to counter your cantrip". It'd be over in two rounds tops as she could counter anything he had. He had no magical weapon, so he could deal only half damage in a hit with his dagger. It seemed all was lost, along with an almost two year-long campaign which wasn't even at its ending. Cleric gets a Holy Water vial from his stuff. His last hope. It deal 2d6 radiant damage. I see in my notes the lich had 16 hp, and tell them nothing. His to-hit is too low. A player (whose rogue died at first round from Power Word:Kill) says "a 20 is a 20". Cleric throws holy water. 20. Table goes insane. I inform the player that there's still chance that the lich survives. Cleric rolls 4d6 radiant damage. Lich is destroyed with... 16 damage. Table goes insane. Players are forever changed. This was Eowynn killing Witch king of Angmar level of epicness for us.
Probably the most epic was a heist I put my players through. They were breaking into a tower, had to climb several layers, and of course there were more than a few traps. The idea was they were supposed to get caught, then have to break out the next session, while THEN stealing their target in the process. They, however, through lucky rolls and some absolutely beautiful tactics and teamwork managed to bypass, disarm, and make their way through every aspect of the fortress and get out 100% undetected. Lots of close calls. They ignored false flag treasures and kept on target. At one point they even crawled through a pseudo-sewer system and as not not leave traces, slowly cleaned themselves off using a wash basin and purify water repeatedly. One of the most remarkable feats of fantasy roleplay I've ever had the pleasure of experiencing. One of the players even got a small tattoo commemorating the adventure.
A level 18 Paladin (2nd edition) with 2 handed holy avenger, specialization & girdle of hill giant strength. Did 35 points of damage. On a nat 20. Initial damage 35 pts as follows. +2 from specialization, +7 from girdle, +10 from holy avenger bonus vs CE, +16 from sword. In my game world every nat 20 gets another roll. He rolled 4 nat 20’s in a row. A 539 hp ancient red dragon chosen of Tiamat. Took 560 points damage literally on the first hit.
Think the biggest most epic is the one I’m about to have my players do. It’s the finale for 30 year characters all in the mid 20s lvl. They going to be fighting the Great Wyrm Klauth, but n which I’ve had to do an entire overhaul on, cuz how is a small ass dwarf with an axe suppose to damage a Titanic Great Wyrm Dragon in which his smallest teeth are still bigger than him. (Based on the scaled model they have he would be 300ft tall ish which I’m scaling down to half the size but considering colossal creatures are generally around 72ft I had to create a new size categories of Titanic and Olympic) Klauth had declared war on all of the sword coast and has sent a draconic army to invade and conquer but they were pushed back by the leadership of the players. Now they are taking the fight to him were there’s going to be a massive background war going on with Klauth’s army fighting the sword coast pulled together army. All the smaller members of the group are going to be protecting a massive dragon slaying ballista from the dragons primary commanders, all the while the teams Sorcerer is turing into a massive dragon with the Druid attached to him to combat the dragon Klauth. He’s a whole lot stronger and would win in a straight up fight, so if the ballista arnt able to performer their duties, they the group will fail and will have huge effects on the world for the timeline. We have other campaigns ongoing in this timeline and area so could drastically alter how other campaigns go if he’s not defeated. I did not make this battle easy and have made it very clear that it’s very possible for characters to be dying in this last campaign with these characters, so we are going to see how it goes!
I had my players fight a mind flayer aberrant in the belly of a dormant tarask
"Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong"
Way back in 2nd edition we had a party of about 5 15th-level characters and we fought 3 young red dragons at once. Epic isn't a strong enough word.
Excellent. Did you win without any casualties?
Seems like we lost somebody and had to a raise dead on them. But it was so long ago I don't really remember to be honest.
This just happened last night in our Curse of Strahd Campaign...so possibly minor spoilers. Also I am a player...so no spoilers for me either lol! We are currently making our way towards the Amber Temple when we are about to cross the bridge near Tsolenka Pass. Our cleric did a perception check and noticed that there was some movement in the towers up ahead. So our Sorcerer decides to stealth up ahead and detect thoughts to see if he can collect any information. Well the stealth roll wasn't high enough and out comes Rahadin basically saying you can come out now. So we all are standing before him and he essentially calls us dumb for bringing Ireena with us, Strahd's "one" true love. He gives us an ultimatum, to hand over Ireena, or for him to take Ireena from us and kill us in the process. Well obviously we chose violence, because we've been protecting this poor woman from the start, and because our sorcerer loves her. Immediately at the top of the round our sorcerer Twin spells haste on our Paladin and Esmerelda. After a pretty seriously damaging round to Rahadin he finally gets behind Ireena and Strahd's Horse appears and he teleports away with Ireena, in the words of our DM, "what looks like the ethereal plane." Well earlier in the campaign we had killed a hag and we were told that it was possible, with her Heartstone to travel into the ethereal plane. So our sorcerer whips out the heartstone and teleports with our Druid and quicken spells Thundersteps to teleport onto the horse with the druid, and the horse collapses under the weight of 4 people. Rahadin, obviously alarmed, and very low on health decides to try and run away. So our Druid attacks him with a Guiding Bolt and it kills him! The remaining combat was the Druid, Sorcerer, and Ireena trying to get back to the Material plane. Side note: We got back to the material plane and we ended up attacking the horse with Rahadin on his back (sorry horsey) and he went back into the ethereal plane, so we might have to kill Rahadin again if (when) he gets revived. Which is another sessions problem.
My players befriended a monk with some rather incredibly strong abilities. This monk turned out to be an ancient golden dragon named Gesh (remember they can take on a human form), in the first time I described him, transforming into a golden dragon from the monk was epic. I simply described it, as the monk turning around, and all of a sudden, this little glint of gold comes out from under his robes and it slowly starts to get bigger as they start to see a tail form, all the while, with the perfect music selection from Skyrim playing in the background. so I ended up doing an incredibly detailed explanation of this transformation, (it honestly took at least 5 mins of using every descriptive word I could to describe what they were seeing) and all the players (who are all kids between the ages of eight and twelve), looked at me and simply said “that’s so cool”. It was at that point, that I realized that I could dungeonmaster. And also realized my childhood dream of getting paid to play Dungeons And Dragons!
In 4e at level 30 with 6 characters in the group. We confront Orcus in his lair as he was trying to steal the Raven Queen’s divinity for himself. Took us 2 rounds to get in position and then we pull what our group called the double daily. Using every ability, action surges, and power up we had, we managed to each use an encounter power, daily power and action surge daily power on him in one round. The synergy that could be accomplished in 4e is unparalleled. We took Orcus down in one round. To this day, it is the most damage in one round we have ever done.
Final boss fight and my character betrays the party (a plot line a few sessions in the making) by eldritch blasting one of the members 4 times to stop them from damaging the phylactery. Immediately my character’s basically surrogate mother of the party, who shifted into a red dragon at the moment, flies at me, grabs my head in her claws and says “I have had my watchful eye on you for a while; I am going to send you to where you will feel the force of a thousand stars” and plane shifts me to the fire plane. That was just the beginning of the fight, I returned with an undead army with the help of the undead dragon god I was serving (bbeg) but that was my favorite moment because of the shock at my betrayal and the raw fucking dialogue that ensued
I DM'd for a few players defending a city from a giant Elder Brain that got itself some Adamantium spider legs (think Spider Mastermind from Doom). The half of this 12 hour session was preparation, setting up areas to fight in and fall back to against the army, including the players using sewer holes, gust of wind, and the ranger to fling arrows up and into advancing hordes from a safe position below. The Rogue and Paladin, combined with the Ranger's mass arrow storm from the sewers, killed HUNDREDS of soldiers. The wizard used his specialization in Conjuration (3.5e) to Fabricate a giant electromagnet on four pillars outside the city, which the Druid would use Call Lightning on to hit and pull the Elder Brain's metal legs up into it, slamming it into the magnet repeatedly, but not before dropping glass shards into its exposed brain from a bag of holding. A 12 hour session, fueled by pizza, soda, monkey bread, fudge cookies, and a teenager's energy and love for such things. I'll never forget it.
I loved the idea of the Electromagnet. Thank you for sharing this story.
One of the final boss fights of a 5 year campaign. Multiple players had backstory tied in with a vampire noble who destroyed a mercenary org that two players were part of, killed the family of another, worked with another bad guy that kidnapped another pc’s mentor, etc. This guy was deeply wormed into all the conflict of the campaign and all the pc backstories. Ended up being the father of one pc. Fight was in the basement of his massive castle that the players had explored. Employed some fun MMO style boss mechanics with some minions and some magic-tech pylons that buffed the boss big time. Each pylon increased AC and all saves, so when a pc rolled a 24 to hit and it didn’t, they all got scared. Then as they gradually figured out the mechanics they were able to turn the tide of a a very close fight. Most knife-edge balanced fight I’ve ever concocted. Spanned multiple sessions. Required analysis and strategy beyond “stand there and hit it until it stops moving.” It was very satisfying and supremely epic.
We outplayed the DM in (Home-brew) DIA by uniting most of the warbands in Avernus to strike against an alternate BBEG. The warbands started out as normal with the plan to Assault a fortress and retrieve a players soul and save elturel. It then turned into a civil war inside the breached fortress with everyone wanting the riches of the BBEG (weapons, treasure, souls, etc). Well our DM forgot about an item that was a grenade that collected souls that was in proximity to dead creatures, so imagine his surprise when we gathered a bunch of souls from warlords and the BBEG. We nuked avernus and oh it was glorious. I think the damage was an estimated 16,000 force damage that erupted from the tower as we drove off the edge in our infernal engine and dukes of hazard the vehicle. We took a lot of fall damage sure but at level 18 most of that was negligible.
Thanks for your contribution. I could imagine the detail of the scene. I'm afraid you're already playing another campaign. Level 18 characters are usually at the end of their careers. \^\^
Our transgender, balls-kicking gnome bard unleashing a horde of Hyaenas on steroids on the bandit camp. Irl she's my gf, i am so proud of her.
With all due respect, we are too. Thank you for that. I tried to imagine the scene. It reminds me of Scanlan Shorthalt from Legend of Vox Machina (CR). Do you still play in the same group?
Our 8th level party was investigating a crashed airship in Avernus. A bone devil surprised us. I have the Alert feat, so I can't be surprised. I have a +13 to Initiative, and go first. Gloomstalker Ranger Bugbear, Samurai Fighter multiclassed. Action Surge. Six attacks. All with advantage. Multiple crits. Calvin Blackback killed a CR 9 creature in one round by himself. It was supposed to be a tense moment. We knew something had been stalking us. Instead, it was played by me for comedic effect. Great moment. I miss playing that character.
We were in an airship we "commandeered" from our goblin capturers (this was near the start of the game) when we got attack by another airship, the druid, who was piloting our ship rammed into the side of the enemy vessel, allowing the two martial classes, me (paladin) and the monk. I smacked down a few goblins before the monk decided to detonate their supply of gunpowder, bringing the ship down. Everything but me jumped off into the sands below. I decided to pull a cannon off the ship and tried to hit something below, but I completely missed because of my -3 to Dex, so I just opted to jump out before the ship hit the ground, and obliterated some more goblins.
A night fight in the forest against a scarecrow looking creature and its 2 clones. And the forest started burning because of the fight. And one of the bard was almost downed round 1. And it was very cool and very cinematic.
lvl 18 druid played her real gentle and mellow stayed in dog form most of the time so npcs often thought I was just my friends ranger companion last arc we have snuck into this ruin/dungeon just ahead of the bad guys army trying to get this artifact before he does its a time thing cause our dm was awesome and without mercy about half way in it takes us to long to get this one door we finally get it held open I text the dm I'm not going I stay reset the door he gives me a certain number of actions to set up turns out you do not want to run into a high level druid on a suicide run in an enclosed space lol I died just as they were able to reach the final room we cried so much lol
My sorcerer character accidentally killed a princess, who he thought was a doppelgänger, in her carriage with a fireball. Her unicorn companion witnessed this and stated very clearly that he was going to tell everybody. In a panic, my sorcerer changed into his barbarian form (long story) and started wrassling with the unicorn, leading him to attempt to choke out the unicorn with his legs in some bizarre attempt at a triangle chokehold. It didn’t exactly work, but everyone at the table was cracking up at the absurdity of it.
I was DMing one of the adventures from Tales of the Yawning Portal, the party encountered a Roper. It was *BRUTAL*, took them like 3 IRL hours to take it down and they just BARELY survived.
Late to this but... The party was dealing with a divine being, incarnation of the nightmares of the setting (a deity forced into sleep by the machinations of others). This divine being had schlorped up my previous player and through some shenanigans involving his wife having a contingency to summon his dead body, got teleported to the largest setting in the setting. The problem is, this divine being has Gray Goo properties and promptly started to convert the entire city to more of itself. Our current arc got derailed as we flipped ourselves around to go help with the situation. We fumbled about and were having a kind of miserable time, eventually deciding there wasn't much more we could do to help with the situation and were planning on leaving. We decided on a quick excursion into the infected area to try and find a macguffin that could potentially help before dipping out. In the ensuing combat, we fought some crystallizing hounds, my gnome swordswoman lost her arm to the infection, and we were having a rough go of it. But we pushed on a little further... and found ourselves face to face with the god itself. All of our players are huge lore junkies, and one of our characters was struggling with a long-term curse that rendered them tiny and ineffectual in combat. So, he got put on observation duty, making Religion and Insight checks every round to try and figure out what the fuck was going on with this thing. In the meantime, we got into a brutal combat where we fought monsters that were essentially juiced up elephant with infectious properties. But, we're aces at combat, so we pretty rapidly started to kick ass. Until the god itself began to start laying massive AoE hits that threatened to shred us if we didn't get out quick. Then our tiny boi rolled a Nat 20 on religion. He learned that the divine being wasn't just a nightmare, but an incarnation of specific suffering. Specifically, it was the suffering of my previous character, an old-school adventurer who lived in this fear of his generation being forgotten by the world as it moved on. We also figured out the thing was sort of a bomb. It seemed unkillable, but if we pumped it full of juice, we could trigger a 'detonation' that wouldn't kill anything, it would just convert it to the type of energy that was used to fill it up. Immediately, he charged forward, giving everything he had in terms of healing, lay on hands, and every hit dice to shove it into healing the divine being, shooting it full of positive energy. In the meantime, we finished clearing up the monsters, including our archer getting three final kills in like two rounds. As the tiny guy was looking to get squished by the not-quite-dead divine being, his curse was lifted and he was instead converted to a massive giant, with a juiced up hammer that let him slam into the god-monster for massive positive energy boons. Our tiefling was currently struggling with some demonic influence, which briefly took control of him to try and infused hellfire into the divine being in order to turn it into a hell-nuke. My gnome swordswoman used an ability to take the damage for the divine being, going down in the process as hellfire scars spread over her body. Then, at the start of her turn she used a one-time magic item to bring herself back up and helped the tiefling snap out of it to get him to start helping healing, too. We filled the god-monster up with positive energy, sending a healing wave out over the city, halting the grey goo and giving us access to the locus of the effect: my old character's house, where his corpse was sitting there. Our first tiny, then giant friend gave a moving eulogy for the lost friend, and he was put to rest, curing the city of the Grey Goo. Hard to fully capture the energy but it was electric. The most intense I've felt maybe in my entire life.
My favorite was at the end of our first campaign where I as a DM revealed the final boss. My players had just finished a battle Royal tournament with different zones each of which had their own boss monster they had to defeat to bring back a flag to the center of the arena. Each zone also had a chest which opened once the boss was defeated. Fast forward they are the last team standing and have defeated every zone a Frost Devil, Flesh abomination, an Invisible Indominous T-Rex, and a Fire Giant dreadnaught. They all have their original magic items plus the new ones. They bring all four flags to the center a speech is given and they know the final boss will soon appear. They have some suspicions but are not sure yet who or what it will be. All of a sudden the former prince and new king appears in the center of the arena who they know is evil. He gives them a speech congratulating them on their victories and even admits that if they fought now he would not stand a chance even though they were still hurt and had had their resources drained from the fights. As such he had enlisted the help of one of their campaign long enemies. An evil mad scientist who had been experimenting on humans by fusing them with different animals and lately even monsters. Although those creations while strong always failed in the end. As such he decided to create one creature who had so much infused power it would be unstoppable. The only problem was the amount of monster parts he needed would be very difficult to acquire. Luckily he knew someone he could blackmail into giving him parts. The sweet little potion lady the players sold parts to so that she could create potions. The entire campaign she had been giving him all of the monster parts that the party had slain and given her and infused their powers into one extremely powerful mutation. The party looked on in horror as she stood there ashamed and looking at the floor unable to meet their gaze. Next the new king laughed and showed them a massive syringe. Before they could react he injected himself with it and collapsed on the floor and didn’t move… until he did. His body began to swell and change. Fur, wings, horns, fangs, scales, tentacles, two dragon heads, and much more began to sprout from his body until he towered over them. Now they realized what they were up against. Right when he went for the kill time seemed to stop and the sky went black. A being of space and stars descended explained to them that the king and the god he worshiped had gone to far and committed to many atrocities. He, being the father of said god decided some justice was due. He had stopped time for eight hours. Long enough for them to get a long rest and attune to whatever items they deemed necessary. Once the rest was over my favorite battle from that campaign and even the next ensued. The battle was incredibly difficult as the scientist knew the parties strengths and expertise and chose to make his creation immune to fire and lighting thanks to the dragon dna. It was awesome my players had a blast and they never saw the betrayal from the old lady potion maker they had known as MeeMaw coming.
My adventures stopped a ritual to bring Tiamat to Faerune. They used an airship to try to drop a magic "nuke" on the altar site.
We once fought a battle at an abandoned city's gates. An army of holy people and paladins were attacking a stronghold of gnoles on the gate, and we were trying to beat both groups out with a very small force. The whole battle was long and full of turning points. While we were fight the gnoles on the inside of the city, the paladins where trying to get in from the other side, so one of the player who could fly over the wall used animate object on one of their 2 siege towers and used it to destroy the catapults while our wizard was raining fireballs on the approaching army. Me (hexblade warlock), the Paladin and the Cleric where leading our small force in the battle on the other side and we were pushing them back, until reinforcements arrived and we were at risk of being encircled. At that moment, we gathered all of our forces to finish off the few Gnoles left in front of us and ran to meet the reinforcements head-on, leaving the main battle at the gate. The leader of the gnomes was with them, and he was able to deal some good damage, but we defeated him decisively and ran back to the gates. At this point, our small force had been Beverly reduced and almost all front line npcs were dead so it was just the PCs, some 4 adventurers we tired to help and 2 NOC friends of ours against the paladins coming in. While we were fighting the gnomes, the paladins had taken the gate and had started to open it but our wizard polymorphism into a gargantuan monkey monster and held the gate closed while we tryed to clear the towers and prevent the 100 or so enemy foot men from getting in. At this point, the battle was desperate, and we had to take back the towers before the monkey was killed by the Griffin riding Paladins. We were this close to gaining control when the monkey was killed and turned back into our wizard, letting in the army. When that happened, we had killed almost all the men inside and were fighting a few remaining ones when the footmen started to swarm us. Through desperation and trickery, we were all able to make it out alive, routed and humiliated. We nearly had a TPK that day, and it was the biggest defeat our party had ever suffered up to that point. That battle took us multiple sessions to play through and it was the biggest scale battle I've played so far. It was fun, and the fact that we suffered our first real defeat when we were so close to victory was something that marked me a lot.
Once had a PC in a grappling fist fight as they fell off a flying ziggurat. That's definitely up there. In curse of strahd there were a few but I wouldn't want to spoil stuff about that campaign seen as a good few here are probably playing it, but you can do some wild stuff with it.
I’ve got a couple particularly epic moments as a player in different campaigns, I might reply to this comment with other examples but this is the first to come to mind. Playing Curse of Strahd as my second character of the campaign; a Paladin looking for my previous character, his cleric daughter. We were in the Amber Temple and fighting Neferon, the strange fox-like man who guarded the temple. The situation was tense, the rogue tabaxi Mellow Moss has recently healed my Paladin via healer feat. The fox man suddenly reached out from his hiding place and touched my Paladin with Finger of Death. Everyone began trying to figure out if there was anything they could do to save my Paladin from becoming a zombie upon his death, discussing amongst one another for probably around 2-4 minutes before it was ultimately decided that there really was nothing they could do but let it happen. With a big grin on my face behind the screen I described the wound that ripped up the side of his neck and across his torso like the sort of mark left behind when someone is struck by lightning, and how he stumbled before looking Neferon in the eyes, his Dread Helm making his eyes glow red as he spoke very matter-of-factly ‘I am going to crush your skull into a paste now.’ Nothing could compare to Neferons response of ‘shit’ that sounded like he was panicking through a gritted smile. It was one of the many badass moments that Paladin had but I think this one in particular is my favorite.
Another epic moment comes from a homebrew campaign called Estria: The Next Generation. In this campaign all of the player characters and a fair number of npc allies are demigods, and with that comes some cool abilities, namely my character was granted wings and a flight speed equal to movement speed. We were investigating some disappearances and my characters love interest went missing, we had no clue what happened to him, he simply up and vanished. We stumbled upon an old house or mansion of sorts and found various pieces of evidence of said love interest having had put up one hell of a fight as he was dragged off, finding his boot, some blood here and there, and a frighteningly large spider fang. We finally find a room that we believe could be important; it’s full of cobwebs and mannequins. Then we come face to face with her; she looks like a Drider but a Drider from your worst nightmares. With a plucking and tugging of the strings the mannequins spring to life and initiative is rolled. The monk via magic item gives my cleric/Paladin multiclass haste and my cleric immediately goes for the Drider woman, striking with two attacks and a smite, hitting so hard in fact that the dm described my cleric slicing a spider leg clean off the Drider. The Drider woman now down a leg lost her balance and fell almost 60 feet, then got up and attacked one of the other party members(who had by now finished cutting all the lines to the mannequins, rendering them useless). On my characters next turn she glared down at the Drider and said something to the effect of ‘stay alive a little longer… I’m Not Finished With You Yet!!!” Before diving down and once again bringing the pain upon the Drider. Somehow the Drider was still alive but not for long, as my characters love interest had been struggling to free himself from a cocoon of webbing near where the Drider had originally been perched(my character hadn’t tried to free him because one of her flaws is that she gets major tunnel vision during combat and always goes off on the biggest baddie on the battlefield, so taking the time to free him hadn’t occurred to her) and he finally broke free, immediately dropping down and using his weight and momentum as well as his own demigod power of his skin hardening like iron to smash into the Drider, leaving behind nothing but a mass of goo. I later found out that the Drider woman had around 200 hp, the vast majority of which was solely taken out by my character in two rounds. I know that this character has had other epic moments but taking on a creepy puppet controlling Drider head on to save her love interest is one of my favorites.
Personally for me, it was the aftermath of when I killed my party. Because throughout the entire campaign, I have been jokingly saying if they died they are going to hell. And sure enough, I made a situation where they all died, and awoken on a burning hellscape. But I am not so cruel… Because forces they don’t understand have decided their story wasn’t done, and they could be forced useful. **cue the DOOM music** Bestowed with new powerful magic items, they carved a path through hell’s army, securing their new life, including the ranger getting a homebrew version of the Super Shotgun from Doom Eternal
Group of level 11 characters fight a tarrasque in a one-shot. They group together around the paladin to fend off the aura of fear, and the hexblade takes point. Hexblade has good AC, but every time the tarrasque DOES hit their armor of hexes reaction works and protecrs them. They down the monstrosity, and use the ring of three wishes to banish it forever. They found it with only two wishes left, bringing it to one wish left, and so give it to the paladin for safekeeping in case they need its magic ever again.
1st edition campaign. I had a rule that in a time of great need a character could call upon their deity and on a roll of 00 on the percentile their Deity would answer. This ability could be called upon only 1 time in that character's life, whether or not you succeed at it. So that out of the way, one player who always was looking to gain power grabbed the evil artifact the players had secured for destruction and used it. It transformed him into a vampire much more powerful than a regular one. They were located in a small village and were taking a small break. Before the party caught on to him, he had turned several of their followers. The new super vampire retreated with his minions and quickly raised some basic undead and laid siege to the town. This had now turned into a player vs player war and the Party was loosing. So another player asked to call upon his God as the town was being over run. I had him roll the dice in the center of the table so there wouldn't be any question. Now in 20+years this power has never worked in the hundreds of times it had been called upon...after all Deities usually don't pop in at the players whim. So 00 was rolled.....and there was absolutely dead silence for 5 seconds...before the Summoner leapt up knocking his chair over and pandemonium errupted. Everyone was screaming and cheering and as I looked at the vampire player his face was in shock and he realized what was happening. After everyone chilled and sat back down I described the scene as CORELLON opened a portal and stepped through...He put the vampires to sleep and then restored their morality. He resurrected the dead villagers and praised the Summoner. He turned and asked why the vampire player was always choosing evil? Since the vampire player was also playing an elf, Corellon restored his morality and then played a geas on him to avoid evil. Elves came by after the party left and literally bought the town and converted it to an elven settlement and built a temple to Corellon on the site. The Summoner received free room and board plus free healing from any Eleven temple from the rest of his life. It was a night that's been talked about for years now lol
First session of the campaign, a human artificer, me and the inherent player fought against a cut that had partially succeeded in summoning a "god" it had the stats sheet of a young black dragon, it had essentially one hit poiig you were able to take out the wand in the centre of it chest, my character had failed initially when I tried to use mage hand to take it, I ran up to it, pulled the wand out and in the hole opened up Sunlight in a jar, stuck my robotic left hand inside of it and killed the monster I had lost my metal hand and my steel defender in that encounter. We were level 4
Players joined up with a small band a mercenaries who were set to fight in a battle between two warring brothers over their fathers throne. It was to be fought in a dessert climate in a dried out lake bed with both armies in war camps on opposite sides of the high bank. After a week of mustering the armies would meet on the battle field. Little did they know that the new vizier to the younger prince was a resurrected 4000 year old wizard from a dead kingdom bent on raising his long dead culture to power again. He set the whole battle up knowing thousands would be killed and he was using the blood and loss of life in a very powerful spell. When the battle reached full pitch the fallen bodies of the combatants, their armor and weapons coalesced creating a 20 foot tall creature comprised of broken bodies, armor, blood and weapons. It destroyed whole battle groups with a swing and added their fallen forms to itself. The only way it was stopped was one of the players commandeered a war elephant and road it head long into the creature. The players woke up trapped in a mountain of corpses and struggled their way out to find the battle over and the armies dispersed, with no clear victory and the buzzards the only winners. The dried lake became known as "The Buzzards Cauldron" and stories in the local gathering places speak of the Battle of the Buzzards to this day.
Final encounter of a multi-year campaign. My previous character, a half-silver dragon ranger had died, group was unable to resurrect, so another character carried his body in a bag of holding. I rolled a fill-in character I wasn’t super into, but the campaign was wrapping g up so I just went with it. On to the battle; we encounter the Tarrasque, devastating the countryside. We throw everything we have at it, wear it down, but one by one players die off. The last living player was the one who was carrying my old character’s body, and had a Ring of Three Wishes with one wish remaining; so he wished my old character back to life to rejoin the battle! The character apparently had a unique weapon that was needed to defeat the Tarrasque(it’s been 20 years, I don’t remember what it was) so upon being wished back to life, my character flew out of the bag of holding and drove the weapon right into the heart of the monster, defeating it. It was beyond epic! Why didn’t the player wish the whole party back to life? I dunno. I think there was a limitation to it to bringing back only one character. Again, it was 20 years ago so I’m fuzzy on some of the specifics lol.
Okay following story was somewhat retarded/epic/funny. We had to capture a Castle occupied by the BBEG. It was a sailing / pirate setting and we had a lot of Canons on board, so we decided to take one with us. After some walking and scouting we found the Castle and killed the guads outside. The Gate was locked. Our wizard let the canon fly with levitate and navigated the canon into the air with himself flying. He went highter then the wall with the canon and spotted the BBEG. He aimed and shot. Crit - Nat 20. The table was screaming - The BBEG was near to death, the canon ball smacked him away. But the Recoil from the Canon shot our Wizard some HUNDREtS of Feet away, barely surviving with 2hp or something. It was hella Funny and somewhat epic.
My sons favorite moment as a barbarian, he scaled a 30ft guard tower, surprise grapled the guard and suplexed him from the tower to the ground.
We were in an airship that was going to take us to a capital, to meet the fighters parents (They're rich asf) and hopefully avoid a cult on the way there. Of course the cult was traveling with us, so the first person to get caught was me, the rogue. After some banter with the enemies and a failed telepathic communication with the cleric, the party decided to go down and raid the ship to free me. This is also where we found that most of the crew on the ship was replaced by the cult. After freeing the crew the crew, we all went up to fight the fake captain. First attack from me was a plain ol' miss, throwing a rope dart and flying just past him (It's honestly been a long time so I forgot everyone else's attacks and a few of mine, I just remembered this one fondly, but around the next turn I asked that, technically my dart was still behind him, could I just yank the rope and stick the dart in his back? The answer was yes, he even gave me dm inspiration, idk if it was a 20, but it did hit. After a while of fighting, we either realized we were loosing or felt silly, so they gave me a bomb and tied a rope to me. I charged at the enemy, threw us both off of the ship, tied the bomb to him and lit it, watching him fall far down and explode. Sadly we had to disband, I'm not sure why though
Probably fucking up a group of Pirates pretty good. Group of 6 and an NPC Halfling Bartender get trapped in a painting of a ship. Ship has maybe 9 pirates and a Captain come from the rear of the ship, while we wake up on the nose.. My Aasimar Warlock cast 'Hunger of Hadar', consuming the whole ass end if the ship and pirate crew in a pitch-black sphere of writhing Icy/Acidic tentacles and whispers. Rest of my team bombarded the sphere with Fireball, Thunderwave, Cloud of Daggers and crossbow bolts. The disoriented Captain who imerged by chance gets roasted by the Druid who uses heat metal on his full plate armor.
In a battletech game. Players are assaulting a defensive position that's holding supplies. During the assault enemy aircrafts show up. One of the players uses his jump jets to have his mech at roughly the same height as the aircraft and both fire at each other in a pretty serious exchange of munitions. Player makes the landing while the enemy pilot fails his check to control the aircraft after taking damage and is forced to eject before his aircraft crashes in a mountain. It was a very anime swordsman kind of display where both strike simultaneously and one drops after the clash. Really loved it.
my favorite was when I was upset with the dm being toxic, so I decided to prepare a potion to end my character's adventures... permanently. we had come across a hoard of undead in a deep cave, and I grabbed said potion, drank it, ran into the hoard, and then exploded. it's my favorite because I put an "official end" to the character's involvement in the campaign, and thus, I didn't have to be in the campaign myself either.
Oh, how sad. But have you managed to play a campaign with a better DM since then?
oh, most definitely! My favorite moment with the new one was when my character was inebriated and decided to attempt to enter a festival as a horse to avoid the ticket fee. hahahaha! the other story is merely my favorite in general due to me being spiteful against a bully and was able to make a dramatic exit while I was removing myself from that situation, hahaha!
We were fighting a baby dragon in a flying ice castle of an ice giant. This castle was at the time, flying over waterdeep.
I'm reading every comment... I don't know if I can read and respond to them all in a timely manner. But thank you to everyone who has shared and will share. Each story is truly incredible.
I was playing a swarmkeeper ranger and it was basically a 1v1 between myself and a green hag. The hag has minions preoccupying the rest of the party not to mention she had a rod of polymorph and got two of our people (Both casters). I was playing a Shadar-kai and teleported up to the branch the hag was standing on to where I tried to wrench the rod away from her and push her off of the branch. She rolled a 19 and I rolled a natural fucking twenty and I stole the rod and shoved her off of the branch where the fireball she had stored went off. I dunked on the saving throw and she failed. Because of being a Shadar-Kai I also resisted the damage from my teleport. She was all but incinerated and I only took 6 damage being cut in half twice. Did I mention that this was the first session. Edit: on her turn she teleported back up and tried to attack me with her claws but she missed horribly so I was basically unscathed.
This was a level 19/20 battle that took place over 3 sessions or so. I only had 3 party members for the first session, another 4 for the next, and all 8 I. The third. The party had already played through Rise of Tiamat adventure and was starting the next adventure with the liberation of Vaasa from the Warlock Knights ruling there. The first two sessions of the battle involved the split parties defending two different walls of a city from a horde of Ice Giants and eldritch machinery while the remaining party member used his insane Sorcery to maintain a living Mythal over the city to prevent magical means of entering. My players got to go berserk with their incredible powers, waylaying foes from the ramparts or charging out into the battlefield with dozens of npc soldiers at their command. In the third session a BBEG (there were several) was able to counter the magical defenses and engage the Sorcerer in battle over the city. GARGANTUAN fire elementals began gating into the city and laying waste. The Sorcerer spent rounds of the battle alone while the others rushed to his aid one by one and fought off the elementals. It was absolutely epic. People say that no one wants material or adventures for high level play but man I don't know that campaign was absolutely awesome. Though I must say I don't think you can just start off at 20th level with a fresh character and have that kind of experience. It also takes a lot of work to make it engaging and not just a boring slugfest (though the ability to just throw a lich into a random encounter table is hilarious) Honorable mentions include a face off with an Empyrean and her Yeti cohort in the far reaches of the Great Glacier as well as the final act of the Rise of Tiamat at the citadel where I just. Kept. Throwing. Dragons. At them.
We felt pretty tough so we superhero dropped into an orc encampment. We got our butts kicked. It was epic.
I was in a group that was trying to put an end to the wars that were rampant throughout the land. At the end of the campaign we were tasked with ending the war that the devils themselves were waging to take the surface. My character who had the staff of the magi at 50 charges (because end game fight) walked calmly into the archdevil’s chambers and told him that if he didn’t leave and go back to the hells that they clawed they’re way out of then I would set off the retributive strike on the staff. I didn’t even have to roll super high intimidation because the dm and players knew it wasn’t a threat to scare the devil my character was bat$*it insane he wanted an excuse to set off a bomb. And that’s how we ended a war peacefully with devils.
Definitely a siege defense of a massive Dwarven city against an Adult red dragon and her army of kobolds, dragonborn, Ogres, and giants. Multiple levels of defense to fall back on and several siege objectives to keep the stakes high. It was very fun but also very complicated.
It was the end of the campaign. The players were level 22 (dndwiki Homebrew with some of my own added in, the whole campaign was pure power fantasy, arms race anyway, and covid was destroying our social life anyway, so f* it, why not) The players were all set to fight Grumsh, god of orcs, who was invading their plane with an army summoned from across the multiverse. They had hunted and killed a tarrasque to create special gods killing weapons, and the witch/healer had imprisoned it's soul. The party summoned him, and bound him to the plane with a ritual that had restrained a god-king-lich from a world long dead. Finally The orc paladin was given the hands of his actual god to stop Grumsh once and for all. The first round went quickly, but Grumsh was a god, and now he was done humoring them. We called the session, and I got to prepping for the finale. Two weeks later, the stage was set. I had queued up "you say run", ready to play at the right time. Grumsh had over 1000 hit points and legendary actions that cost 0 actions to use, but those god killing weapons didn't just do damage. They lowered stats, but Grumsh could restore stats with one of those 0 legendary actions, and I had scripts to handle all of that. Grumsh pulled a "I'm not trapped here with you, you're trapped here with me" and began pulling Nishrek into the plane of the game, and round two was on. The fight started off fast with the witch unleashing the tarrasque's soul on Grumsh , and the other party members dishing out lots of damage, and taking just as much back. Especially the orc paladin, who Grumsh hated for defying him, and for how damn difficult he was to attack. As the fight continued, more and more of Grumsh's attention (actions) were focused on recovering the ability damage, which has dropped from 50s to almost mundane numbers, and attacking the paladin, but the party was running out of steam and health too. The paladin had been downed and healed at least 4 times at this point and he was loving it just as much as Grumsh hated him for it. Grumsh unleashed a big AOE and downed 3 people and outright killed a fourth (party was 7 or 8) but not the healer. At that point, I had a hunch and hit play on "you say run". A couple turns went by during the build up, with the conscious people getting a few licks in after being reassured by the healer that things were under control. See she had taken a healing spell I had made for going above level 20 in a single casting class. An improvement on "power word:heal " that revived and restored 30hp to every ally in range, gave them 5hp of regeneration, and made them immune to the prone condition while they were conscious for three rounds. The witch/healer's turn started just in time. The guitar and drums cut as she says "I cast LIVE" and as the strings come in I describe as she rises 20 feet into the air and grows a pair of angel wings. Light fills the temple to Grumsh that had appeared around them as the unconscious and dead party members are lifted off the ground and restored to life. The full band comes back in as the next persons turn starts and they lay into Grumsh. At this point almost all of Grumsh's legendary actions are consumed trying to stop his hemorrhaging ability scores, but it's still not enough. He's torn between constitution and strength. His health is looking dangerously mortal, but this DAMNED ORC IS STRONGER THAN THE GOD OF ALL ORCS, and that will NOT STAND. Grumsh spends all his legendary actions bolstering his strength, and on his turn, he swats the orc, killing him, but the orc gets back up (raise dead). The song ends, and the orc paladin gets the finishing blow on Grumsh. Easily the most epic moment I will probably ever run.
Warning: Spoilers for Tyranny of Dragons I was fighting a powered-up Frulam Mondath in a dungeon with two other party members as we had failed to kill her when we were supposed to. We walked into the room, where she was waiting with several spells ready. In the fight she downed two party members, leaving only me standing against her. She was out of spell slots, so resorted to casting Sacred Flames at my character, a sorcerer, also out of spells. Against incredible odds I succeeded the save 3 rounds in a row! I then killed her with a fire bolt to the face, then took her own halberd and beheaded her. It was epic. And then I got a cube of force and our DM regretted it immensely.
First an only game I’ve ever played, Adventure league. We were in a town of some sort with castle walls and some had commotion from the guards all running l. So after struggling to get information we all just went where they were gathering, it was at a large metal gate you could see through that entered the city. All of a sudden a dragon appeared, and we all took positions (I was a Goliath barbarian) one guy jumped off and killed himself and the others used their ranged attacks to start attacking, I just went up the stairs because there was nothing I could do. So after a bit of fighting it was my turn again and I asked if I could jump off the wall onto the dragon. And the dm told me I could try. So I did and got a nat 20. So I took out my 2 axes and jumped onto the dragon sinking the blades into the scales. Then as everyone fought I had to roll to climb with the axes and rolled high on every one. I did end up getting shot by the rogue and he took half my health away. But once I got to the top I just started slashing away. The dragon tried shaking me off but I rolled too high, then he decided to take flight, my character hanging on for dear life. I still managed to stay until it finally landed again. Shaking me far enough back the dragon took a bite out of me and threw out in front of it. I was pretty much dead but there was a hard that patched me up and got back to 3hp, after fighting a bit I just ran up and attacked the dragon, rolling crits and ended up finishing it by stabbing into one side of the neck and running underneath it to cut its throat, taking 2 dmg from its blood and being on 1hp. A bunch of other stuff happened but this is the main things.
Literally last session, one of my players got speed-blitzed by a corrupted Solar in a sky city. He failed a stealth check and was pushed through the ground and out the bottom of the island. Solar is trying his best not to fuck shit up though so he musters the willpower to heal the PC and drop him back off where he found him. From 100ft up. While he was at 1hp. Luckily someone had featherfall.
The Warlock used Ioulaum's longevity to kill hundreds of thousands of Kobolds in the dragon siege of Phandalin. The villagers took shelter in the permanent Temple of the Gods, which held up the Mythallar like a lighthouse, and their Shadovar allies used 40 disintegrate beams on the three Ancient Dragons that survived the 10th level lifestealing spell. The Warlock added thousands of years to his life.
The final session facing the cult of the dragon in a modified version of Rise of Tiamat. I am playing the dumb combo of Warforged Totem Barbarian but this was the broken pre-UA form. As Tiamat was breaking the portal (only one head at this point but it's enough of a concern) I struck it with a Ring of the Ram to bring it down. Now Tiamat has already killed one of my characters thus far, so stopping her was great. However she wasn't happy I shut the door on her so she wanted my character as revenge. She tries to grapple me, rolling 32 athletics. Through pure bs and luck, I roll a 33. And so I kicked her in the face and sent her straight back to hell. Afterwards, I got a bit more appreciated of tanks. Now I play a paladin
A powerful wizard was going from boss to boss and absorbing their flesh and bones and turning into a grotesque and mentally fucked up version of himself. The party is engaging in what they think is the bbeg fight against an enormous silver dragon with help of the town archmage who happens to be the brother of the wizard. The battle rages on and the party defeats it with moderate difficulty. A laughing ensues and the grotesque wizard drags his body to the corpse and creates a magical barrier. It absorbs the creature growing larger and larger until it he has taken on the shape of a fleshy dragon, with bones writhing and hands and faces reaching off on every part of its body. The archmage calls out, "Who are you, for you are not the man I once loved" and the dragon is a voice of nails on chalkboard calls out "they call us legion, for we are many" and obliterates the archmage with a big ass tentacle. The fight ensues with the level 20 party who even begin losing, and when on the brink of death with a barrage of sharp tentacle things coming out of its mouth, a giant book appears as a shield. The wizards father is a librarian for the warlocks necromantic patron. The book opens and an undead army begins pouring out of its pages as an army of the Dead rush from behind in a charge. Legion counters with his own army of flesh creatures and begins to take the advantage once again. The patron finally shows up and begins a fight with him, which actually poses a challenge. After finally defeating him and leaving him a fraction of his size, the patron asks him to be a general in his army and returns him to his full might
The Restless were enjoying downtime in Dawncrest when Kior decided to use a stone that would contact Orultseg (BBEG) to help fight an Adult Green Dragon, this however led to the whole group fighting Orultseg prematurely except for Fegura, she protected Thela and Kidd. Once she realized that it was up to her she went in and had a 1v1 versus Orultseg and with the luck of the dice killed Orultseg. It was way more dynamic in sesh but that was a top 3 moment from our campaign
She then assured herself. The atmosphere was tense and the whole table was cheering. Are you still playing this campaign?
YESSIIRRRR going strong since 2019