Category: Gaming Stories

Gaming Stories: Dancing Half-Fiends and the Glory of Infinite Choices

On By Charlie BrooksIn Role-Playing Games, Gaming StoriesLeave a comment

Originally published on Sicdekickcast.com November 17, 2015

Easily my favorite part of tabletop RPGs is the fact that they have so much latitude and room for player agency. No matter how robust a computer game is, there are always a finite number of choices. Because tabletop RPGs rely on human adjudication, the possibilities are limitless…like that time the PCs in one of my games inspired a pair of half-fiends to become vaudeville stars.

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Gaming Stories: Curse Your Sudden but Inevitable Betrayal!

On By Charlie BrooksIn Gaming Stories, Role-Playing GamesLeave a comment

Night Below: An Underdark Campaign is a classic AD&D adventure that I purchased when it came out in the 1990s but which I never got to run all the way through until the 2010s. Beginning with D&D 3rd edition and eventually converting to Pathfinder, my final version of the campaign saw some changes, including revising the Rockseer elves and adding a secret villain behind the aboleth conspiracy: the Red Mage.

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Gaming Stories: Pirates of the Astral Sea

On By Charlie BrooksIn Gaming Stories, Role-Playing GamesLeave a comment

Well, that was certainly unexpected.

Last fall, my players greased up a rowboat and sent it hurtling down a waterslide of doom. They wound up in an entirely different world that used a version of the classic AD&D module Dungeonland, tweaked to fit with Pathfinder 2nd edition. And, well…they found a way out of Dungeonland. And now they have a bigger boat.

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Gaming Stories: A Contract with Mind Flayers

On By Charlie BrooksIn Gaming Stories, Role-Playing GamesLeave a comment

Over the course of several years, I ran Night Below: An Underdark Campaign in a multi-year game that spanned the gap between Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition and Pathfinder 1st edition. As we entered the endgame, the PCs learned that a group of aboleths had been kidnapping spellcasters in a bid to power a mighty structure that will extend their natural psychic domination abilities across the globe, effectively taking over the world.

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Gaming Stories: Ride of the SS Stupid

On By Charlie BrooksIn Gaming Stories, Role-Playing GamesLeave a comment

The beauty of role-playing games lies in the stupidity of the PCs. Sometimes they will act with tactical precision and annihilate their foes, but often they will come up with the most ridiculous harebrained schemes imaginable. Those moments of glorious foolishness are where RPGs shine the brightest. Such was the case when the players in my Pathfinder game created the SS Stupid and set it off on its maiden voyage.

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Clydesdale

Gaming Stories: The Evolution of Claude the Clydesdale

On By Charlie BrooksIn Gaming Stories, Role-Playing GamesLeave a comment

A long-running campaign of mine transitioned from several weeks in a massive dungeon to a cross-country trek. The party featured a paladin with a celestial horse and a sorcerer who rode a phantom steed. The final PC didn’t have any mount. She wasn’t really interested in getting one, but the rest of the group twisted her arm and convinced her that she needed to buy a horse. She did, and she named it Claude Awesome the Awesome Clydesdale.

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Deck of Many Things

Gaming Stories: Pick a Card

On By Charlie BrooksIn Gaming Stories, Role-Playing GamesLeave a comment

Every once in a while, I like to send the PCs against a monster that’s just out of their league. When you’re low-level, encountering an adult dragon or a lich can still be fun. The only difference is that the goal stops being killing the other guy and taking his stuff and becomes a matter of survival. After all, sometimes the monsters want to kill some adventurers and take their stuff.

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Council of Thieves Carriage

Gaming Stories: The Ignominious Death of Machiavelli

On By Charlie BrooksIn Gaming Stories, Role-Playing GamesLeave a comment

This is a story about chaos and mismanaged expectations. It involves the death of a PC whose player had only started gaming two sessions ago. Somehow, my botched GMing didn’t drive him away from the tabletop for good and in fact became a tale that many who were there recall fondly.

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Dryad

Gaming Stories: The Evil Tree Spirit

On By Charlie BrooksIn Gaming Stories, Role-Playing GamesLeave a comment

Originally published in Knights of the Dinner Table #146

The quest was a simple low-level affair: men in a small lumber town were disappearing into the forest. All the PCs had to do was find out what was going on and put a stop to it.

The culprit was a lonely dryad that had been luring men into the forest and charming them to keep her company. I had planned the session out as a diplomatic session, since I figured the PCs weren’t going to outright slaughter an apparently innocent dryad. This was going to be the session that taught the adventurers that not every problem needs to be solved with swordplay. A nice thought on my part, but not a plan that would endure the night.

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Cyberpunk 2020

Gaming Stories: Plastic Explosives in the Mattress

On By Charlie BrooksIn Gaming Stories, Role-Playing GamesLeave a comment

I used to really like games that had long, in-depth character creation systems. My theory was that if you were going to spend an hour or more making your PC, you were really going to treasure that character.

Then I went and killed one of those PCs in less than half an hour.

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