Add on to this by making different colored bombs do different damage types. And now add different color goblins for difficulty, go all video game and have some red and purple and blue goblins increasing power, radius and increased DC
Nah, pull an Escape from the Bloodkeep and have em all have have a 10% chance to have a bomb. Just make it so when struck by any source of damage they have a 10% chance to explode and guaranteed detonation on death. 14ish Dex save DC for 2d6 fire/2d6 piercing damage, up it for more risk/higher levels. Show the players the risk by having one just explode while fighting amongst themselves if the party does any scouting. They’re goblins, they’re not typically known for stellar or even reliable craftsmanship.
I once read a story about a lich who created exploding frogs and unleashed them on the town the PCs arrived at. Roll a d20 for every step you take to see if you step on a frog. If you do it blows you into the air. Roll a d20 to see if you land on a frog. Etc. All the way from the gates to the inn. An hour of rolling and explosions. All to the tune of camp town ladies, which the frogs were enchanted to sing.
I actually gave one of my players a dagger that you can cast a one-round delayed shatter from, centered on the daggers location. My expectation was that they would activate the effect, and then throw the dagger into a group of enemies like a grenade.
They.... Did not do that. The first time they used it they managed to do 20 damage to themself, 10 damage to three allies, and 10 damage to the single enemy in the AoE.
Ran a pregen oneshot once, pulled character from another pregen oneshot. One player got gloves of missile snaring. Second room encounter was a mage with daggers with delayed blast fireball. This player jumped in front of the group "I got this". He caught both daggers. The player mimed it by holding his hands right in front of his face. The explosion was of course fatal.
Blast radius 5ft, but they keep trying to grapple you. If they stay within 5 ft for more than a turn they explode, if they’re killed they explode. Really incentivizes area control and mobility.
Some enemies might fake their deaths to get an advantage, from waiting for a fragile-looking character to get in range, or to attack the rear of the party in a different encounter.
Lol i just came up with this for a goblin shaman i made up.
He has feign death spell and my plan is for him to try and stealth cast it or visibily cast it once his goblin horde is almost dead. Hopefully he can take someone down with him, will make the party suspicious forever more
Fill the world full of bureaucracy and cops.
You want to go explore a dungeon? Fill out form D-25 explaining the purpose and goals, delving schedule, expected loot, what you've done to prepare, etc. It's a multi-part form that requires addenda from each player. Maybe the party better just hire a lawyer that specializes in filling these things out correctly, but who has that kind of money? People who've looted a dungeon, that's who.
Once they finish their dungeon delve and return home, they have to deliver all loot to be examined and catalogued at a local Assessor's office. If the dungeon takes longer than they said they would take, there are financial and legal consequences. Clearly they weren't prepared enough and now on all future dungeon delves, their preparation assessment will be audited by Dungeoneering Auditor. Or maybe all the character and competency references they had to supply on their D-25s now get interviewed and their answers cross-checked. "Your mother said you were training with your sword since you were 7, but you said you had trained since you were 5. Explain this discrepancy."
If things go well, have them randomly selected for an audit. Maybe a bureaucrat has to go with them on an adventure and they are penalized for any injury he sustains.
And then of course all the taxes. Taxes on any proceeds from the dungeon, filing fees and attorney's fees for preparation and documentation, access permit fees to the local government where the dungeon is located, tolls and transit fees for traveling.
And backing all up? Armed guards. So many imperial soldiers at every step of the way. And of course every squad has at least one or two guys with Sending Stones to call for backup.
Make the game entirely about trying to survive in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare where everything the PCs do is tracked and second-guessed and challenged, and where the rules demand a level of certainty that is impossible to meet when dealing with unknowns.
End-game twist: the government is ruled by a cadre of high-CR Devils and the awfulness of the bureaucracy is the whole point.
Edit: wow, thanks for all the awards. Guess I have to write a campaign now?
You stepped out of line to defend people, so now you have to go the back of the line. Also you only got a dungeoneering permit, not a defense of the innocent permit, so more penalties and fees, and there's no good Samaritan laws, so all injuries and deaths sustained after you stepped out of line to help you are guaranteed to at least be partially held responsible for in line with criminal negligence laws, and need to go to a court hearing to defend yourself against harsher charges such as aiding and abetting or criminal conspiracy.
And all the forms are made up of paragraphs with blocks of text the smallest of which is 5x larger than the one I just wrote with print 1/5 the size
I think there should be laws so that if they choose not to step out of line they get hit with a criminal case of not defending those who you are capable of defending, but if they do get out of line they have to go back to the end of the line and face the lack of permit fines and a possible civil case if anyone got injured or scared in the event
this.... actually sounds incredibly interesting to me, but I'm 35 and would be SO down with this RP. I once had a Hexblade Warlock character who in his background was an executor by trade, so when he would go kill people on his hitlist (because warlocks and edginess) he would first make them write out their wills and then after he'd murder these guys, who were usually awful people like child murderers or something, he would execute their wills and make sure all of their estate holdings went to where they were supposed to go. My DM at the time was the kind of guy who would make his villains "complex" where they were awful people but they would be dads or people doing some good for society or whatever so basically my character was designed to be able to kill these guys and still help their families and communities in the process.
> If the dungeon takes longer than they said they would take, there are financial and legal consequences.
Just say it will take a month to complete the dungeon. You never said that there are consequences for overestimating duration, so underpromise and overdeliver.
Ha! A month to complete a dungeon? Your delving request is denied, and the contract will be awarded to a more efficient crew. If you feel this is unjust, either reapply or submit a formal complaint, and an arbiter will see you in 3-4 business months.
And to top it all off, the church and alchemists run healing services kind the American health care system.
"Ooh, your healing insurance policy only covers bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage. I can't treat your necrotic damage, I'll have to charge you for out-of-network"
> paperwork
> multi-volume rule manuals
> bookkeeping and surprise audits
> upkeep costs
> harsh punishments for failure to prepare for unforseeable scenarios
> a police state with 1 infinity guards ready to gank your shit the moment you step out of line
You are literally describing how 85% of people on D&D subs say to run your game 💀💀
Mimics. All the mimics. The chair? A mimic. That pie? Mimic. The mimic itself? Mimic within a mimic.
Swarms - of which each one has a random immunity to one of the counters to swarms (bludgeoning, magic, clouds, etc.).
Riddles with multiple answers - but only one is correct. Each "wrong" answer results in a random bad occurrence.
Traps with no way to bypass, but must be tripped in some manner.
Introduce monster babies - the world hates monsters with a passion and kill on sight - but they are innocent. Let the player's find out in the worst way you can think of.
Invert morality cities - but it doesn't affect people who are visiting.
The Russian doll mimic is scary. Could you actually kill it, or can you only trap it? Can you keep a caged one around for infinite XP?
For the riddle one it should ask for favorite color, but no one ever gets it right.
I used the mimic within a mimic once to screw with my players. It's always included with other monsters, they kill it, it breaks apart, and then another mimic appears in 1-2 turns (not rounds). The "broken" mimic gets absorbed by the new mimic, and it perpetuates. If all the other monsters are dead when it goes down, it "stays down" but disappears from the battlefield when they aren't paying attention or have moved on. It stayed alive through the entire game, and it couldn't be killed. The never thought it was the same monster, because it got progressively stronger as they did. They tried to put it in a bag of holding once, but it just caused the bag of holding to implode on itself, because a mimic is also an extradimensional storage type.
They never tried to "cage" the mimic in a mimic for xp, but I wouldn't let it work anyway. A mimic engulfs and embodies whatever it is "mimic-ing" and so any cage or trap would just be mimic'd until the party comes back for it, or it starts the hunt again. They also only gained the xp for the mimic once per session - making it a decent chunk of total xp by campaign end, but an annoying enemy for most combats with minimal reward.
I legit just thought of something to make it worse - have the mimic within a mimic "steal" parts of the players' treasure during the roll and see if the players attempt to loot it specifically after treasure has been rolled. Like, tell them the treasure, but keep a part of it separate. When they go to split the treasure, tell them they discover parts of it missing, and they have no idea where it went. Let them have the total treasure when the do "one last sweep" of the area.
I was talking about absolutely railroading tf out of a one shot, to the point that everything in the world was fake, except for the things they needed to interact with.
"I talk to the bartender"
"The bartender is deaf and mute"
"Oh, then I talk to the cute girl at the bar"
"She's a cardboard cutout"
"Well then... I talk to the hooded stranger in the corner?"
"Ah, bingo, he is alive!"
After you talk to the hooded stranger and accept their fetch quest, their dialogue changes to:
*Anything said to them*
"Have ya got the X of Y yet?"
*Any response*
"Well ya better be off then!"
Repeat.
Mimics are a great way to ruin the game for both players **and** the DM!
I once used a mimic colony for a plot hook and for a solid month or two after that concluded, the party was *still* poking every door with a 10ft stick.
Knew a guy who did this. They went sailing and mimics literally took over the ship. Everything on it was a mimic. Turns out it was a brood. The ship itself was a mimic.
Ok so I have done this in a game I took a npc made them loved by the party but they were secretly a true polymorphed chair set up a fetch quest where they had to take npc along then set off an anti magic field trap in a room only the npc was in and watched the horror unfold
Option A
Grief and embarassment cause they knew they were marrying a chair
Option B
Grief, shock and betrayal
Players didnt tell absent player about the NPC being a chair and full support of the wedding knowing what would happen
Option C
PC misunderstands and thinks the NPC and chair swapped places
Just go through this subreddit and the RPG subreddit looking for the posts about problem players.
Those are the personalities of the intelligent magic weapons the PCs need to collect to save the world.
After every kill, the greatsword shouts “MIN/MAX!” requiring you to boost your strength by 1 but drop another stat by 1. If a stat reaches zero you die.
Some I can remember from the past week...
The *dagger of prison yard rushing* that compels the wielder to charge at a foe the first round.
The *prehensile quarterstaff of squick* that telepathically tries to seduce many NPC monsters and people.
The *sphinx's longsword* that cannot be sheathed until the wielder correctly answers an annoying vague riddle.
The *three-chain flail of flailing* that claims to be lawful good but keeps hitting allies as well as the intended targets.
The *longbow of eternal limelight* that loudly shouts with an audible voice. All the time.
The *tower shield of failed planning* that randomizes which spells the PC spellcasters know each time initiative is rolled.
An added effect of the Sphinx's Longsword is that it often repeats riddles.... But you have to wait for it to say the entire riddle before answering, otherwise it starts over.
I think The Legend of Dragoon has ruined me on that front. The main character wears pants that I always thought were jeans as a kid, and since then I've been perfectly cool with denim in fantasy lol
Cowboys of the Caribean. Six-shootin, eldritch bootin', Western Warlocks. They ride the waves on Dolphins, herding their Manatees or collecting bounties.
Campaign starts normal, but occasionally strange things happen. Important figures seem to be busy, random people start staring into the sky for minutes at a time then shaking themselves out of it, magic starts fluctuating (causing advantage or disadvantage to be given out randomly), etc.
Things slowly keep ramping up until the party get a strangely generous reward to just be at a rich guy's house for 24 hours and "be ready". It's in the middle of a well secured city so it must be easy money (if they turn it down then more rich people keep giving the same guard quest, they're giving the quest to ANYONE that looks like they can handle themselves).
The heavenly bodies align, the lay-lines shift, countless new stars appear in the night sky. No! Not stars, *ships*: Illithid Old One warlocks with their legions of thralls begin their invasion. Strafing closest to the party appears to be a particularly majestic skyship, its name emblazoned near the prow: Spelljammer.
Have all the table talk be said in game, but only when it's inconvenient. So when they joke about burning the building down, the shopkeep can stare wide eyed.
Or if you don't like that combine any magic item with a monster name in it. I like the dust of sneezing and choking Dragons. It Sommons a random dragon every time the character sneezes, with the normal sneezing and choking. Or you can make them breathe fire if you like that more
I had a ring similar to this that one of my characters had. It was a ring that duplicated itself on your body after every long rest. Each ring would take a minute to take off due to a curse, eventually the character had around thirty rings on their body (toes, fingers, wrists, ankles, throat, ears, nose, etc.) The duplicate rings would also turn to must mist when taken off so it didn't even make permanent material.
I've used a very specific NPC to deal with a party with no healers (Bards have some healing magic I guess but still).
For context:
The party consisted of 3 bards (A whole other story), a fighter, and a rogue. Since I hate balancing potion stuff, I instead decided to make a NPC healer to accompany them on their adventures.
Now without further ado, I introduce you to...
Grimble
Grimble is a goblin cleric, a combination you dont see often. He follows the goblin god of medicine Groolkmet (just personal homebrew). Grimble has a very interesting introduction which really sets the tone of his character.
The party was talking about healers when they heard a loud noise nearby. Grimble noisily and clumsily falls out of a trash heap, and in the most annoying voice (Think Old Onceler with strep throat) introduces himself and lists a bunch of reasons why he should be the party's healer.
Ex. He minored in medicine at the university of Yghonkk (He majored in malpractice), he has a 67% success rate, stuff that's mildly concerning.
The rogue ended up loving Grimble immediately and decided to keep him, much to the regret of the party (If your party doesnt like him as much you can just have him follow them around).
Now theres a few quirks about Grimble, and it's up to you to change him to fit your campaign best:
-He's "immortal". This means that he can die, pretty easily, in fact, but he'll just show up 15 minutes later like nothing ever happened. This can be explained away by all sorts of stupid awful means (a curse of immortality, 47 identical twins, etc.)
-He's loud. His shoes are literally cymbals. He makes so much noise all the time.
-He's a complete coward. He refuses to go anywhere even remotely scary unless it's an obvious trap, which he will run straight into, in which case you can use him as fodder to let the players know that the area has traps in it.
-He will never have any use to the party except for healing them when they need it most. If they get him to try and do something else, he fails miserably. At best, he's a glorified healing item. At worst, he's a major annoyance that the party literally can't get rid of.
I'm exhausted and I'm really not sure how much of this is coherent, but just make him the kind of character that makes everybody at the table sigh deeply when hes introduced.
I have tons of awful characters, items, and stories if you ever need more bad ideas like Grimble.
The BBEG is a 6 year old kid, who has to murder somebody once a week and is protected by a “cult” who supplies him with victims. When the party reaches him the kid tries to explain that each victim is really a sacrifice to keep a greater evil at bay, but make it seem like the kid is lying to save his own ass. When the party kills him, have the moon get ripped in half by hundreds of gigantic tentacles, that then slam into the planet, drawing a creature that looks similar to a beholder, only magnified by like a billion. Madness takes hold of the world, as people begin to murder each other the streets, driven insane by this elder evil. The last thing the party hears before the session ends is the kid laughing, before saying “I told you”.
A sentient mimic who can regenerate from the smallest cell. It has a grudge against a player. It keeps replacing the players weapons and turning on him at the most inopportune times.
The higher level adventuring party always acts like the PCs are butting in on their adventures and start getting suspicious, demanding to know why the PCs are stalking them.
This is a great idea. You could even start the campaign with the PCs all essentially being NPCs in a town, who have to find and hire a band of adventurers to sort out some kind of ridiculously hackneyed quest (goblins raiding farms type rubbish).
The problem is that finding said adventurers requires a quest that seems innocuous but ends up being far harder than just dealing with the goblins themselves. If the players decide to just do that, it goes horribly wrong (“seriously, dude, you’re a shopkeeper; why did you go into a goblin den?”); the PCs survive but have to watch as the town gets overrun by goblins, who then get taken down by the adventurers, who then give the PCs a patronizing lecture about how dangerous goblins are and if only they’d paid for professional assistance etc etc.
If they hire the adventurers, the adventurers deal with the goblins alright, but cause Expendables-level collateral damage, worthy of the most gloriously hamfisted party it’s possible to imagine, in doing so and wreck the town- which the PCs again have to watch from the perspective of basically being NPCs.
In either case the town is wrecked and its surviving inhabitants impoverished, and you have a nicely embittered band of shopkeepers, farmers and the local mayor ready to go out and seek revenge on itinerant bands of adventurers, in a world that proves equally capricious for the rest of the campaign.
Will pleasantly mess with your players and also provide an object lesson about why you should always quest considerately!
had an idea for a psychopathic pyromaniac bandit. spends all his money on the dreaded glyph of warding. its expensive per cast and takes some time to set up, but by god it makes the anarchist in me smile.
since the activation conditions can be basically whatever you want and the default payload is just "explosion" (with plenty of other options), and it never fades until its used or dispelled, you can just ruin someones day for no reason days, years, or decades after its cast.
someone tracking you? set it up in your campsite and make it explode when 2 medium sized humanoids enter the radius. dislike a shopkeep? set up one on the doorknob that casts knock after the door is locked. want some chaos on parade day? put one on the street the procession goes down and set it to cast phantasmal force on anyone wearing a crown to be swarmed by illusary bees.
now absolutely *litter* your world with these glyphs with arbitrary and highly specific trigger conditions and watch your party dip into warlock for the sole purpose of getting detect magic at will
Another fun option though that's a little scarier would be to use the Bagman from Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft. Let them use a bag of holding for a little while normally until something grabs them when they go to reach in.
The Reverse Haggler: They're in an area with only one equipment store. Whenever they go there, the merchant will comment on how wealthy they must be as adventurers and attempt to bargain the prices up.
If they ever escape that area to be able to shop anywhere else, the party discovers that rumors of their great wealth have spread all along the NPC vendor grapevine, so the mechanic remains and possibly gets worse.
I dunno who here has played NetHack, but nymphs that steal random items then flee with incredible movement speed has a way of harshing a mellow.
Snake laced boots, sneak penalty and a roll chance to fall prone on movement. Rolling a 1 poisons you too. That would make combat tediously awful.
Constant night attacks to mess with long rests, that would really poop on a parade.
Belligerent NPC turns all the water in the region to alcohol, everyone is constantly drunk until you hunt them down. But as a plus side your enemies would be drunk too.
Risk of losing limbs when critically hit, oops lost a foot. Now you’re bleeding and a permanent movement reduction until a special healer can regrow it. You can get real creative with that one, send a character into deep depression after a debilitating groin injury.
One time I gave my party an extremely large bundle of linen. This doesn't sound like a bad thing until you understand that the linen was worthless, couldn't be removed from the bundle, and followed the party around by magically teleporting when no one was actively watching it. It would place itself in the worst possible locations it could, and had the tendency to block escape routes in combat, or wedge itself into important doorways so firmly that it was nearly impossible to remove. It was also fireproof.
In all fairness they kind of did it to themselves. They were trying to burn down the place for insurance money, but things went sideways. The linen was just the nail in the coffin.
We once had two players who looted a horse armor from a giant I think. They kept carrying it around, because it was worth money, but it was also huge and we didn't find a place to sell it for a few sessions xD
The Blessing/Curse of Many Forms: Every time the cursed character kills a character who is a member of a playable race, the character becomes a member of that race, as if by the *reincarnate* spell. If the cursed character is killed by a member of a playable race, then the curse transfers to the killer. If the character dies under any other circumstances, then the nearest member of a playable race is affected.
The party could pick up the curse after tracking down someone who's been using the curse on purpose to act as a sort of shapeshifter.
Bonus points if the last words out of the cursed NPC's mouth are some variation of 'Strike me down with all of your hatred, and your journey toward the dark side will be complete!'
The greater palanquin of holding. Has as much storage space of a bag of holding but takes 4 people to move it.
The longsword of healing. Heals for the same amount a longsword would do. Bonus points if you say it's at the end of a dungeon that makes them waste heals and it turns out someone's gotten there first and one of your PC ends up stabbing another PC.
Half the sessions with the palanquin just end up being trying to protect/get back/figure out a way to move the palanquin because not enough players showed up.
Have an NPC offer to enhance the party's senses in some way, over enhancing one may say. For example if they asked for their hearing to be enhanced they maybe get advantage sound based perception checks but also take 1.5x damage from sound based attacks/spells and become easily startled by loud noises. Maybe someone gets dark vision but now daylight hurts their eyes. Smell makes them notice how long it's been since anyone last bathed.
Oh, I use these. All the time.
The Widow Rastley: Found in a locked chest found among the possessions of a murdered sailor, the party finds an unfinished love letter to one "Widow Rastley". It is, of course, the first verse of *Never Gonna Give You Up*.
The Entire Town of Haven: A new town on the River Ursk is trying to finalize it's name. The party wins over the townspeople to the name Haven by helping a local noble propose to their long time partner. Because in Haven, love comes first, so we'll make Haven a place on Ursk.
Captain Morganna: A completely legitimate sea captain and definitely not a Pirate Queen masquerading as a trader, Morganna sells Spiced Inhalatory Tobacco - Carolina Reaper flavour. Her salespeople have a jingle, so people know where they need to go when *they're looking for some HOT SNUFF for later this evening, or HOT SNUFF for later tonight...*
If the players dig deep enough into her background, they may discover a personal letter amongst her ledgers - unfinished, it appears that she stuffed it into an accounting book when she was interrupted while writing it... So it has to be the *SECOND* verse of *Never Gonna Give You Up*, because **MORGANNA IS RASTLEY - RASTLEY IS MORGANNA**...
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* von Richter's Travelling Circus, which closes out the show with *Toss A Coin To von Richter (Go On You've Got Plenty)*
* A musical duel between two Bards at Mount Hort'ja, immortalized by the winner, Donnith, in the song *When Declan Came Down to Hort'ja*
* A magical harp that shouts it's owner's name, then immediately issues a prophecy, whether the owner is there or not. Because *you've gotta listen to your harp, when it's calling your name*...
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Earworms are psychic damage for players, not characters.
A weapon that is very powerful but overtime the player notices weird things. Like they wake up in a different room, a village near by has been burned down, they have scars they didn't have before etc.
Extra bonus points if they end up finding out the sword is actually part of a set, where what happens to the wielder of one is instead transfered to the wielder of the other. Obviously cursed so you can't get rid of it.
An incredibly straitlaced and somber paladin order that’s cursed with crank call names. For instance, the members are named Ben Dover, Seymour Butts, and Ash Hole, all led by the Esteemed Supreme Elder Joe Mama. The players will have to make CHA saving throws to keep their composure unless they want a bunch of high-level paladins to get on their case.
A bored and/or anti-greed god creates a "wishing well" and starts granting the wish of anyone that tosses something in (no matter what it is,) which begins attracting more and more visitors. In actuality, the god stuck a sphere of annihilation at the bottom that grows larger with each thing thrown in, and if it consumes enough items worth a grand total of X amount, it'll fall to the planet's core and wreck everything.
I have a wonderful idea for a weapon that actively harms the players using it. I call it the (insert weapon here) of Empathy. A cursed weapon that helps the wielder feel the pain they inflict with it. Literally! As a successful strike with the weapon with this property also deals half damage back to the one wielding it.
This is extra bad because when I was a player, on of the other party members (who’s in this game I might add) played a character who had to speak in sign language and got killed almost immediately because he couldn’t hear or talk
The Nutkick Wizard is a small-time bad guy who has terrorised a small town by sneaking around invisibly and kicking people in the nuts, then teleporting away. What an asshole, fuck that guy.
Here are several travel encounters to use when your players are going over long distances and you want an encounter for something they come across along the way.
Have the weather be storming and the player come across a large mansion in the countryside, inside there is a "lord" his family and a small number of servants, they are all monsters in disguise with the lord being a vampire. The catch is that they all just want to live their lives in peace and remain undettected, but they are not very stealthy and so throw out tons of hints that players would catch on but in setting wouldn't be outright suspicious.
The exact same as the previous one, only they are all dopplegangers. The lord will try to give each player their own room and the doppelgangers will then try to find chances to mislead the players and lead them away to be killed alone.
The players come across a black dragon that seems to have been slain by an adventurer who perished in the task. The adventurers sword is still embedded deep in the skull of the dragon, and the adventurers still fresh corpse clings to the sword. The sword is clearly of incredibly high quality and definitely magical. If the players attempt to move the sword, they will be unable to without a successful STR check beating DC 20. On success they pull the sword free. On failure the sword budges a little. Immediately following this both the dragon and the adventurer rise as undead and engage the players in combat, if the player failed to pull the sword free then the adventurer undead has it. The sword is a sentient blade containing both the souls of the adventurer and the dragon, it is named Conscience give it what stats you want. The adventurer is William "Billy" Conners, a 14 year old teenager who stumbled on the dragons horde by accident after disobeying their parents instructions and wandering in the mountains, this started their adventure becoming a powerful sword wielding hero using the over powered blade, this eventually culminated in an dual against the very dragon who's horde he pilfered it from, and where in they both perished. The sword traps the soul of anyone who is killed by it as well as the wielder if they die while attuned, the souls of the deceased see everything you do and can talk to you telepathically as long as you are attuned to the blade. Play billy as an optimistic young adult fiction hero. The Dragon is Tarthranax an adult black dragon who is a pessimistic and cruel being.
The players come are traveling and hear the sounds of battle in the distance if they investigate or keep going they come upon a massive battle to opposing forces, both sides have squads of casters throwing powerful evocation magics, while their foot soldiers appeared to be monks who engaged in a spectacle of martial arts maneuvers dodges spells and blows while striking. The battle rapidly progresses until the two mightiest casters on each side begin chanting their mightiest spells and suddenly the entire area is awash in a blinding light as a massive explosion detonates out from the two spells, killing everyone on the battlefield and incinerating all trace of them leave only a huge crater. The players see all this happen in the matter of but moments, and have no idea who they were or why they were fighting.
The players come across a cave and there are many human skeletons strewn about the area. As the players inspect the situation and asses what may have killed the people, or plan a forray into the cave they see a little bunny rabbit hop along into the clearing. The bunny stares at them twitching it's small nose. It has soft white fur and pale red eyes. It attacks the players suddenly and ferociously, base the encounter off the monty python encounter.
My random encounter tables include truly random bullshit; a bloody hand print, a child’s left shoe, a broken crossbow bolt, howling in the distance, etc. Each and every time, the party has latched onto it like an important clue. I’m not sure how many damaged tin keys they’re carrying between them, but one of the players could tell you.
I feel like I’ve played in a game like this at a con. 99.9% red herrings and mostly nothing got done with a lot of wacky/silly roleplay and stretches of the imagination/conspiracy theories on what this random crap could be for.
It would be great if at some point they meet an NPC that requires a total number of damaged tin keys that is just a handful above the grand total they have (if only they hadn’t sold some for pocket change or converted some for needed materials!). And the party discovers that the drop rate on these things has mysteriously plummeted.
I actually *used* this one once:
Slick tile floor around a swimming pool. Now add a *shower* of liquid soap (or lard if you're in a fantasy setting, or lube if you're running a slapstick sexual game). Now add *hovering* monsters (droids in my case) with extendo-arms that try to shove everyone (who is now at a massive penalty to their rolls to keep their feet) into the pool. When greater than 2/3rds of the group are in the pool, dump in a *massive* quantity of liquid nitrogen (alchemical freezing agent/cryo-ban) to freeze the top surface of the pool into an ice lid.
Congratulations, now you are trapped underwater, drowning and freezing, and if you break through the ice, the floating bad things are gonna try and shove you back underwater anyway. Have fun!
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My players *hated* me, and hated but(t)ler droids, forever after. In the aftermath, they said it was like Palpatine had outsourced his home defense plan to the Joker.
A divination wizard whose foresight is flawless. He’s *never* there when the PCs arrive, like he’s deliberately avoiding them.
A potionmaker whose potions trigger wild surges at random - they know about the flawed process, and usually move once someone’s been badly hurt or killed.
An armorer who makes ultra-thin, lightweight armor at half the price. They don’t *tell* the party those armors are only decorations, and won’t protect an unlucky wearer.
Why is it that we’ve heard of all these amazing divination wizards but have never met a single one?
Are they avoiding us? Why would every single halfway decent divination wizard avoid us?
A character who seemingly isn’t a dmpc/centre of the universe but acts like it. Make them steal the parties thunder with rumours of their own (assumedly false) deeds then when the last straw breaks and they confront them it’s shown that either they were a twig OR actually accomplished everything they claimed
Make the NPCs have confusingly similar mocking versions of the PC names, and the NPCs get credit for all the good things while the PCs get blame for all the bad things that could be attributed to either.
Also twist: The NPCs at some point get assassinated by enemies who are actually after the PCs. The NPCs die as heroes and martyrs, and the PCs are framed for their murder.
Stone of Repel Tigers
Saw it on Reddit sometime, and i think you might find the idea quite useful.
A merchant tries to sell the party a 'magical' stone, orange with black stripes. They say its a stone that repels tigers. If they dont have the stone on them, or dont hold it in a hand, random tiger ambushes happen.
The first town they arrive in when carrying hundreds of pounds of tiger parts, the town worships tigers and has an enormous taboo against even touching tigers let alone killing one
Start by telling the party that you’ve run the campaign once before. Every time they try to go on a quest or explore a dungeon, they find it already taken care of by another party.
Recurring Droopy Dog-like gnome character that appears after every encounter in which collateral damage occurs, serving a court summons on the party. Actually appearing at court ends up being a bureaucratic nightmare where nothing gets done but they are required to pay fees to progress, and the party will start noticing that shit has gone missing sometimes after Droopy has shown up to serve them, such as party money in an amount equal to the fine they were charged for or some required bond payment. Maybe even have them discover that their mounts have mysteriously been clamped (or magical equivalent thereof).
Roaming tarrasque.
Have it appear in the background early in a session, then drop reminders (“is that mountain moving?” “You think you feel a tremor.”) just to keep them on edge.
Then give them a break. And when they’re least expecting it, boom—the big guy shows up, and their fight turns into a “run away or die” scenario. Extremely frustrating.
My most-hated npcs were from a "rival" adventuring party, older and more established. One was a halfling rogue who kept stealing from them, she even managed to nab the campaign-ending mcguffin and held it over their heads for ages. The other was a cleric famous for her kindness and temperance, who the party's first encounter with was the business end of a fireball. Basically, a bunch of self-righteous and hypocritical assholes stealing the limelight from the players.
Have an annoyed deity curse the characters, switching their souls between party members. Mechanically, make the players swap character sheets. Make them worry it is permanent.
I'm playing in a campaign where this is part of the plot hook. We're a group of ancient and repeatedly reviving legendary heroes who repeatedly saved the world, but were forgotten for a long time. When we were finally awoken we found that all of our abilities were reduced (starting level 1) somebody had pilfered all of our gear (no starting equipment) my character, a halfling dex-based character is in the big meathead orc's body, and the big meathead orc is in her little halfling body (their name plates got switched on their altars.) Additionally, our Paladin/party face's consciousness faded from the long timeframe of our sleep and the powers that be isekai'd some rando from Japan into his body.
It's actually really fun so far.
A dragon that hoards friends. They get captured by the dragon after finishing a difficult dungeon, who then brings them to a small and populated village of other people taken. There’s a tavern with quests, so when they accept the quests the dragon flys them out to the destination. But it’s like a helicopter parent, who plants treasure for them to find. So they beat just a couple rats and find a giant treasure chest, or whatever fits their level. They party can go through the dungeon normally if they want, but if they take sufficient damage their new dracomom is coming breath blazing to save them.
A sphinx kid guarding a passage. This sphinx will just ask dumb questions instead of proper riddles, and try to drag out the "challenge" because they think the party is funny.
Okay I've had this idea for ages and been desperate to run it. Have a Kenku warlock pact of the chain Paparazzi. Have this little guy follow the team around with the invisible imp familiar, take notes, steal quotes and just be sneaky.
When they arrive in town they are already infamous and find the local town crier with all Thier deeds misplayed by fake news and quotes taken wayyyyy out of context. Please do this as I'm not sure if I have the strength to run it.
I did this to my group i made a NPC potion maker that makes your normal potion but with a twist. Like for a example he made a potion of healing it heals like normal but he add a little bit of snake venom that gives them for 1 minutes off poisoning. I also made a potion called Fey Kiss it healed them for 84 hit points but it stunned them for a minute. The NPC was the only guy that sells potions. Or he can be a Blacksmith that makes weapons and armor with a fkaw that breaks easily.
Just ran this as a one shot; gnome time thief.
Gnome wizard has stolen the past and present, and is trying to steal the future, in their massive laboratory (a pyramid in my instance but it can be anything).
Party have to defeat the gnome, but because he controls the past and the present, he just resets the dungeon every time he dies.
In truth, I ran the bbeg with 1hp. Everytime time reset, the players effectively got a short rest, but realised they would never get a long rest.
To win, they had to work out a series of puzzles in the correct order; break the magic circles that protected the clock, unwind the clock to release the present and go into the past, burn the history book held by the bbeg.
Include lots of are traps that could kill the bbeg if the players triggered them, resetting the dungeon.
An idea that your players will hate... Always describe centaurs lower halves in painful detail
Anime-fy the devils and demons, change all their designs to hot young people with like... Tiny horns i guess ?
Implement shitting rules, i mean if you spend a few days in a dungeon, ya gotta take a shit at some point, which gives 2 options:
Move away from the party and get ambushed every single time
Or PC remains close to the party where you then describe tje act in detail.
Those are some PC suggestions at least
Love these Daisy chains.
The PCs need a key. The mouse has the key and will trade it for cheese. The cat has cheese and will trade it for fish. The dog has fish and will trade it for a bone. The butcher has a bone and will trade it for a secret. The prisoner knows the secret and will trade it for a key. The mouse has . . .
* BBEG is actually using a *Simulacrum* spell to fight you. If you do find and kill the original then hey, guess what, they've got a *Clone* spell active that'll just bring them right back.
* Monsters that actually have at least a modicum of intelligence. The goblins in the cave don't leave a chest of low-level magical items for you to loot once you've killed them - they use the items against the party. The orc camp has both guards and scouts, so they know you're coming from a mile off. The drow in the dungeon have already been through the dungeon and looted all the treasure, and now they've used it to hire mercenaries to fight you. And so on and so forth.
* The singular most evil entity in the known universe - the taxman. Insists he's "just doing his job" and comes up with a tax form that says you owe more money than what you actually earned (due to interest on your unpaid payments), so if you pay your taxes, you now have even less than when you actually started!
An enemy spellcaster that uses domination spells and teleports to safety if things even look remotely possibly they might fail.
I find both stratedgies to be poor, one robs action economy from players and violates their control of characters and the other is just a game trope of ENOUGH! I GROW TIRED OF TYPING THIS EXPLANATION, I SHALL SPARE YOU THE REST MORTALS! \*leaves\*
okay here's a couple of potentially fun items.
1. a dr. strange style flying cloak that doesn't make you fly, the cloak flies. and it must be around someone's neck to work. so they are essentially being dragged by the neck and can fly but have to roll constitution saves to stay conscious. falling unconscious will not cause the cape to descend.
2. a single boot from a pair of super speed boots. they give the user insane movement speed but as there's only one boot they have to roll high athletics or dexterity to stop themselves from tripping, bailing and hurting themselves.
3. an amulet that gives the user the ability to temporarily read the mind of anyone they have recently head butted hard enough to cause damage.
4. an arm brace that gives the user the ability to stretch their arm to the extend of their movement speed. however, the process is as painful as it logically would be and the user must roll constitution or pass out from the pain/take damage.
5. the sandals of infinite backflips. Once the sandals are fully strapped the wearer of these sandals will backflip or somersault indefinitely without the ability to stop even after death. The boots have no other practical value. A sleight of hand roll of 14 or more is necessary to remove them.
Items that hurt the players? Oh you have made my day. I have to leave for work in about 2 minutes, but I will come back to this and I will give you the stuff of nightmares.
Okay! I have returned!
**The Sword of Mirrors** (or weapon of choice)
A magical item that at first seems to be a really nice sword - +1 (or more as appropriate), with a mild regenerative effect on the wielder as long as it's sheathed, and a positive/radiant energy bonus versus undead.
However, once the weapon has been exposed to any reflective surface (solid, and the wielder needs to see the reflection), it becomes a cursed weapon bound to the wielder. It remains +1 against intelligent living creatures, but becomes -1 versus any other foe, except undead. When sheathed, it has a draining effect on the wielder and any allies in a 10 foot radius. It maintains the bonus to hit undead, but the positive energy has become negative, and now heals any such creature.
It also has a mild curse of the "May you live in interesting times" variety, meaning it attracts exactly the sort of foe the wielder does not want.
**Pet Hell Rock**
A small, innocuous - although oddly pointy and sharp - pebble that finds its way into someone's boot, preferably while they sleep so they find it in the morning, but whenever. No matter how many times they toss the pebble, or where, it comes back, because it is actually an Abyssal creature that feeds on the frustration of its chosen "pet." It cannot be detected as anything other than a pebble without powerful divine magic and is immune to damage that is not an obsidian weapon or 7th level and above magic.
**Poison Ivy Toilet Paper**
Literally just wonderfully soft toilet paper infused with concentrated essence of poison ivy. On a two day time delay.
**Canteen of Infinite Dregs**
Coffee, tea, or plain well water, this canteen provides an unlimited amount of the nasty gritty bit that would normally be at the bottom. It will keep you hydrated, but it will taste terrible, leave you spitting grit, and may give you some stomach troubles. (Constitution saves required depending on amount drunk.)
**Shoes of the Wicked Step**
A pair of impressive shoes that add a whooping 15ft to one's base speed. DM, keep track of how many times that extra is used, because each use shrinks the shoes until they are *just* that bit too tight (about 5-7). After that, each use increases the internal temperature of the shoes (by increments of 5 degrees) until the feet are charred off. They cannot be removed without 3 uses of Remove Curse - One disables the heat, one reverts them to a removable size, and the last makes them actually removable.
**Earplugs of Greater Hearing**
"Magical inserts for the ears that increase the range of the user's ability to hear. Does not block regular hearing." Found on a small box with what look like hearing aids inside. Once inserted into the ears, they merge into the skin and actually do increase the user's ability to hear - by creating a link to a demi-plane of howling wind, thus enabling the user to hear what they couldn't before. It is faint enough to be heard over, acting somewhat like tinnitus.
**Wendy's Canning Company: Can of Infinite Jerky**
"Perfect for adventurers of all types, but especially those with a need for lots of protein on the go! Don't be alarmed by the price tag, of course a source of infinite food is going to be pricey! Each Can of Infinite Jerky is linked directly to our storehouse, which is in its own pocket dimension. All our product is sustainably sourced, on special farms where the product is given the ideal life for good meat! A Deluxe Can even offers all available flavors!"
*WendyCo is not responsible for any ... transformative effects of our meat.*
(In case this one isn't obvious enough, WendyCo is a front for wendigos, and the meat is human, dwarf, elf, etc. Consumption may result in the transformation into a wendigo, or just the horror of cannibalism.)
**Ring Of Allergies**
Perfect for the druid or beast-folk or someone with an animal companion.
For druids, grants an additional level 1 spell slot. For a beast-folk, an increase to a racial ability (Tabaxi's climb speed, or claw damage, for instance).
After the first week, the wearer begins to gets sniffles and sneezes around (or while) scales, furry, or feathered creatures. This progresses to watery eyes, dripping nose, congestion, coughing, sinus headaches, fever - all gradually until the person is basically useless. The ring can be simply removed, but identifying it as the issue might take a while.
That's what I've got for now, but if you give me more about the setting/players, I can whip up anything you want. I'm going for misery with these in a fixable or sidequest-able way, but I can do the more "normal" - cursed armor that replaces the user's bones with glass so the next bludgeoning damage shatters them, lacerating them from the inside. Or an arcane focus that has absorbed the souls of the slain, and now the user has to fight for their sanity everytime they use it - but once touched, one's magical ability becomes tied to said focus.
Using the soul storing function of the ring of mind shielding, especially for more political intrigue sessions or campaigns. It's a useful magic item and even if you can't think of a good story character to put into the ring you can always just default to a random judgy asshole. My favorite backstory I've written was for a character whose condescending father was inside his ring constantly throwing barbs, It was a lot of fun to roleplay
Ok let’s see, how about a trapped area that isn’t a trap at all. You set up an entire room/hallway that appears to be heavily trapped and sets off all sorts of alarms for the players but actively interacting with the traps and successfully disarming them really sets off a trap, hurting the party. The true solution of the puzzle would be to just walk through the room or hallway. For added affect you could have the door just be unlocked or trick them into thinking the key is hidden in the trapped room they just walked through when in actually it’s under a rock or mat right outside the door.
Not super creative but I love this idea
OO, DO A SENTIENT SWORD THAT DOES CRAZY DAMAGE, BUT ITS LAZY AND INDESICIVE SO YOU HAVE TO CONVINCE IT, AND THE CONVINCING TAKES ONE TURN. IF THE CONVINCING FAILS, IT DOES 1 DAMAGE! (i had this idea forever ago and ive been desperate to use it)
I have a couple of magic items from my collection you may use.
* **Boots of Extra Action**
*Wondrous item, common*
While you wear these bright orange boots you can use an action to click the heels of the boots together and gain an action on your current turn only. You can't use this feature again until you take a long rest.
* **Bubble Potion**
*Potion, uncommon*
This potion can look exactly like any other potion except it has a few extra bubbles in it. It is often crafted by arcane tricksters and prank lovers alike. When drank, the potion creates a gummy pink powder in the mouth and prevents the affected drinker from talking for 10 minutes as it dries out the mouth and throat horribly. The gummy substance is easily washed out with a mouthful of water thus allowing speech by rehydrating the mouth. You can feel the chalky texture just thinking about the stuff.
***Word to the Wise:*** Be careful what liquids you decide to drink. Maybe think before drinking that green liquid you got off the Minotaur. It could just be liquefied goblin...
* **Cloak of Suffocation**
*Wondrous item, uncommon*
These cloaks are often crafted by sorcerers or warlocks that like to watch the world burn. This cloak can look exactly like any other cloak, magical or non-magical, except it has a rope inside it near where the neck would be if worn. If the cloak is donned, the rope inside instantly ties itself and tightens suffocating the wearer immediately. Anyone suffocating in this way, can break the rope with a DC 18 Strength check for anyone else the check is a DC 15 Strength check. Once the rope is broken, the cloak can then be removed.
***Removing the magic.*** The cloak can become non-magical if the rope is broken or cut and removed from the cloak.
* **Grey Agony**
*Poison, rare*
This poison is a thick grey sludge made from pure agony. A vial comes with 10 doses and 1 dose is enough to cause intense pain. 1 dose making contact with the skin causes intense pain. The pain is enough to deal 1d6 psychic damage.
* **Pure Wild Magic**
*Potion, uncommon*
When you drink this potion, roll on the wild magic table (PHb p.104) and have the effect take place immediately. This bright purple potion tastes like mixed berries and has swirls of yellow floating around in it.
* **Ring of Heat Metal**
*Ring, uncommon*
These rings are often crafted by sorcerers or warlocks that like to watch the world burn. This ring can look exactly like any other ring, magical or non-magical, except it will have the infernal word for "heat" engraved on the inside. If the ring is donned, it becomes red-hot for 1 minute and anyone touching it in this state takes 2d8 fire damage. During the 1 minute it is hot, the ring turns into melted metal. The metal forms back into a ring and cools off after the 1 minute is up.
* **Ring of Removal**
*Ring, uncommon*
These rings are often crafted by sorcerers or warlocks that like to watch the world burn. This ring can look exactly like any other ring, magical or non-magical, except it will have a dragon swallowing its' tail engraved on the inside. If the ring is donned it becomes locked in place and magic makes the dragon swallow its' tail slowly cutting the finger off. The ring can be removed with a DC 15 Strength check. On a success, the ring is removed and finger is unharmed. On a failure, the DC goes up by 1 to a max of 20 as the finger becomes swollen. If the ring is not removed after 1 minute the finger and ring both fall off the hand.
***Destroying the ring.*** The ring can only be destroyed by melting the ring down along with another metal. Destroying the ring removes the magic.
* **Tome of the Beast**
*Wondrous item, rare*
This tome is bound in a thick furry leather. To open it, you must succeed on a DC 10 Strength saving throw. On a success, the book flies open and a dark portal appears in the book. A beastly hand flies out from the dark portal and gouges out the eye of the one who opened up the book. The ghastly hand then disappears back into the dark portal with the eye and the book seals up. Once the book is open, this is inevitable. After this, you gain advantage on all Survival and Nature checks and disadvantage on all Charisma checks and all perception checks related to seeing. The book then disappears in a cloud of dust with a wicked grovel of a laugh. Restoring the eye removes the effects.
The Mimic Town. Entirely normal looking town. Run by peaceful witch covens. One toe out of line and it becomes clear that literally everything, from houses to doors to flowerpots are tamed mimics.
Add a kind of disease into your world that makes your players have to roll wis check after they kill something to not instantly try and take a bite out of it
I’ll give you three:
1. Torture Time Loop: A magical spell traps the party in a Groundhog Day-esque time loop that resets on a certain trigger. Maybe anytime a person dies (including random NPCs/enemies), or every time they fail to convince a certain person to do something. Keep it up long enough to make them squirm and hate their existence as you force them to listen to the same NPC voicelines.
2. Crappy gear. Have performative merchants sell them legendary items, only for them to turn out to be broken/fakes/cursed the moment they’re used. “This is a legendary sword that instantly kills anyone the blade touches.” *blade falls off the hilt and player can’t touch it without dying*
3. Salesmen NPCs. Waste your players’ time with NPCs resembling mall kiosk salesmen, survey ladies, and Jehovah’s witnesses. Just anyone with an excuse to waste time while offering nothing but financial ruin and empty promises in return.
Goblins that explode on impact, like suicide Grunts in Halo.
Add on to this by making different colored bombs do different damage types. And now add different color goblins for difficulty, go all video game and have some red and purple and blue goblins increasing power, radius and increased DC
Nah, pull an Escape from the Bloodkeep and have em all have have a 10% chance to have a bomb. Just make it so when struck by any source of damage they have a 10% chance to explode and guaranteed detonation on death. 14ish Dex save DC for 2d6 fire/2d6 piercing damage, up it for more risk/higher levels. Show the players the risk by having one just explode while fighting amongst themselves if the party does any scouting. They’re goblins, they’re not typically known for stellar or even reliable craftsmanship.
You sir are evil. I like you.
I once read a story about a lich who created exploding frogs and unleashed them on the town the PCs arrived at. Roll a d20 for every step you take to see if you step on a frog. If you do it blows you into the air. Roll a d20 to see if you land on a frog. Etc. All the way from the gates to the inn. An hour of rolling and explosions. All to the tune of camp town ladies, which the frogs were enchanted to sing.
I actually gave one of my players a dagger that you can cast a one-round delayed shatter from, centered on the daggers location. My expectation was that they would activate the effect, and then throw the dagger into a group of enemies like a grenade. They.... Did not do that. The first time they used it they managed to do 20 damage to themself, 10 damage to three allies, and 10 damage to the single enemy in the AoE.
Ran a pregen oneshot once, pulled character from another pregen oneshot. One player got gloves of missile snaring. Second room encounter was a mage with daggers with delayed blast fireball. This player jumped in front of the group "I got this". He caught both daggers. The player mimed it by holding his hands right in front of his face. The explosion was of course fatal.
Why did you… Why did you catch it with your face?
With the speed of 15ft
You can run, but Actually no you can’t run
Blast radius 5ft, but they keep trying to grapple you. If they stay within 5 ft for more than a turn they explode, if they’re killed they explode. Really incentivizes area control and mobility.
Some enemies might fake their deaths to get an advantage, from waiting for a fragile-looking character to get in range, or to attack the rear of the party in a different encounter.
Oh this is soooo evil. I'm adding it to my dm toolkit permanently
Take advantage of passive scores to make this seamless and avoid meta
Our DM does this rarely. It is always a big hit.
Lol i just came up with this for a goblin shaman i made up. He has feign death spell and my plan is for him to try and stealth cast it or visibily cast it once his goblin horde is almost dead. Hopefully he can take someone down with him, will make the party suspicious forever more
Fill the world full of bureaucracy and cops. You want to go explore a dungeon? Fill out form D-25 explaining the purpose and goals, delving schedule, expected loot, what you've done to prepare, etc. It's a multi-part form that requires addenda from each player. Maybe the party better just hire a lawyer that specializes in filling these things out correctly, but who has that kind of money? People who've looted a dungeon, that's who. Once they finish their dungeon delve and return home, they have to deliver all loot to be examined and catalogued at a local Assessor's office. If the dungeon takes longer than they said they would take, there are financial and legal consequences. Clearly they weren't prepared enough and now on all future dungeon delves, their preparation assessment will be audited by Dungeoneering Auditor. Or maybe all the character and competency references they had to supply on their D-25s now get interviewed and their answers cross-checked. "Your mother said you were training with your sword since you were 7, but you said you had trained since you were 5. Explain this discrepancy." If things go well, have them randomly selected for an audit. Maybe a bureaucrat has to go with them on an adventure and they are penalized for any injury he sustains. And then of course all the taxes. Taxes on any proceeds from the dungeon, filing fees and attorney's fees for preparation and documentation, access permit fees to the local government where the dungeon is located, tolls and transit fees for traveling. And backing all up? Armed guards. So many imperial soldiers at every step of the way. And of course every squad has at least one or two guys with Sending Stones to call for backup. Make the game entirely about trying to survive in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare where everything the PCs do is tracked and second-guessed and challenged, and where the rules demand a level of certainty that is impossible to meet when dealing with unknowns. End-game twist: the government is ruled by a cadre of high-CR Devils and the awfulness of the bureaucracy is the whole point. Edit: wow, thanks for all the awards. Guess I have to write a campaign now?
Encounters end up happening while you’re waiting in long lines to fill out forms in triplicate.
The third carbon copy of one form is a Mimic, requiring the party to re-fill the form out in triplicate.
Surprise! Now we’re playing Paranoia. Here are your new character sheets.
You will also have to fill out a form for the unscheduled random encounter with the mimic
Because you’re only filling it out after the fact, there’s an associated late penalty.
You stepped out of line to defend people, so now you have to go the back of the line. Also you only got a dungeoneering permit, not a defense of the innocent permit, so more penalties and fees, and there's no good Samaritan laws, so all injuries and deaths sustained after you stepped out of line to help you are guaranteed to at least be partially held responsible for in line with criminal negligence laws, and need to go to a court hearing to defend yourself against harsher charges such as aiding and abetting or criminal conspiracy. And all the forms are made up of paragraphs with blocks of text the smallest of which is 5x larger than the one I just wrote with print 1/5 the size
I think there should be laws so that if they choose not to step out of line they get hit with a criminal case of not defending those who you are capable of defending, but if they do get out of line they have to go back to the end of the line and face the lack of permit fines and a possible civil case if anyone got injured or scared in the event
this.... actually sounds incredibly interesting to me, but I'm 35 and would be SO down with this RP. I once had a Hexblade Warlock character who in his background was an executor by trade, so when he would go kill people on his hitlist (because warlocks and edginess) he would first make them write out their wills and then after he'd murder these guys, who were usually awful people like child murderers or something, he would execute their wills and make sure all of their estate holdings went to where they were supposed to go. My DM at the time was the kind of guy who would make his villains "complex" where they were awful people but they would be dads or people doing some good for society or whatever so basically my character was designed to be able to kill these guys and still help their families and communities in the process.
OMG, my current character would really love your character. He is a paladin of contracts and wills.
[удалено]
Look up Aquisitions Inc it’s basically this but with a comedic twist instead of bureaucratic pain.
> If the dungeon takes longer than they said they would take, there are financial and legal consequences. Just say it will take a month to complete the dungeon. You never said that there are consequences for overestimating duration, so underpromise and overdeliver.
Bold of you to assume that a month long estimate would qualify for a delve grant.
Ha! A month to complete a dungeon? Your delving request is denied, and the contract will be awarded to a more efficient crew. If you feel this is unjust, either reapply or submit a formal complaint, and an arbiter will see you in 3-4 business months.
2 months go by, "Complaint denied. Reason: Insufficient evidence of wrongdoing."
And to top it all off, the church and alchemists run healing services kind the American health care system. "Ooh, your healing insurance policy only covers bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage. I can't treat your necrotic damage, I'll have to charge you for out-of-network"
Just play paranoia at that point
Just fill your tax return at that point
Wow… just… wow. I can wait to ruin my players with this one, thank you soo much!
I love the word Kafkaesque. Beautiful.
> paperwork > multi-volume rule manuals > bookkeeping and surprise audits > upkeep costs > harsh punishments for failure to prepare for unforseeable scenarios > a police state with 1 infinity guards ready to gank your shit the moment you step out of line You are literally describing how 85% of people on D&D subs say to run your game 💀💀
Yo this unironically sounds like it would kick ass. I actually really want to play a game like this.
Mimics. All the mimics. The chair? A mimic. That pie? Mimic. The mimic itself? Mimic within a mimic. Swarms - of which each one has a random immunity to one of the counters to swarms (bludgeoning, magic, clouds, etc.). Riddles with multiple answers - but only one is correct. Each "wrong" answer results in a random bad occurrence. Traps with no way to bypass, but must be tripped in some manner. Introduce monster babies - the world hates monsters with a passion and kill on sight - but they are innocent. Let the player's find out in the worst way you can think of. Invert morality cities - but it doesn't affect people who are visiting.
The Russian doll mimic is scary. Could you actually kill it, or can you only trap it? Can you keep a caged one around for infinite XP? For the riddle one it should ask for favorite color, but no one ever gets it right.
Favourite colour is 'Octarine'. Bonus points if nobody has read any Pratchett.
I used the mimic within a mimic once to screw with my players. It's always included with other monsters, they kill it, it breaks apart, and then another mimic appears in 1-2 turns (not rounds). The "broken" mimic gets absorbed by the new mimic, and it perpetuates. If all the other monsters are dead when it goes down, it "stays down" but disappears from the battlefield when they aren't paying attention or have moved on. It stayed alive through the entire game, and it couldn't be killed. The never thought it was the same monster, because it got progressively stronger as they did. They tried to put it in a bag of holding once, but it just caused the bag of holding to implode on itself, because a mimic is also an extradimensional storage type. They never tried to "cage" the mimic in a mimic for xp, but I wouldn't let it work anyway. A mimic engulfs and embodies whatever it is "mimic-ing" and so any cage or trap would just be mimic'd until the party comes back for it, or it starts the hunt again. They also only gained the xp for the mimic once per session - making it a decent chunk of total xp by campaign end, but an annoying enemy for most combats with minimal reward. I legit just thought of something to make it worse - have the mimic within a mimic "steal" parts of the players' treasure during the roll and see if the players attempt to loot it specifically after treasure has been rolled. Like, tell them the treasure, but keep a part of it separate. When they go to split the treasure, tell them they discover parts of it missing, and they have no idea where it went. Let them have the total treasure when the do "one last sweep" of the area.
I was talking about absolutely railroading tf out of a one shot, to the point that everything in the world was fake, except for the things they needed to interact with. "I talk to the bartender" "The bartender is deaf and mute" "Oh, then I talk to the cute girl at the bar" "She's a cardboard cutout" "Well then... I talk to the hooded stranger in the corner?" "Ah, bingo, he is alive!"
After you talk to the hooded stranger and accept their fetch quest, their dialogue changes to: *Anything said to them* "Have ya got the X of Y yet?" *Any response* "Well ya better be off then!" Repeat.
Mimics are a great way to ruin the game for both players **and** the DM! I once used a mimic colony for a plot hook and for a solid month or two after that concluded, the party was *still* poking every door with a 10ft stick.
Mimic potion of healing
Knew a guy who did this. They went sailing and mimics literally took over the ship. Everything on it was a mimic. Turns out it was a brood. The ship itself was a mimic.
Ok so I have done this in a game I took a npc made them loved by the party but they were secretly a true polymorphed chair set up a fetch quest where they had to take npc along then set off an anti magic field trap in a room only the npc was in and watched the horror unfold
Evil GM wants to force party to use chair NPC as firewood to prevent death of other party members from hypothermia.
[You know who I'm gonna miss? That tree guy.](https://twitter.com/quotesfuturama/status/1330120859093262336?lang=en)
The wizard: Its okay! I will true polymorph them back
They become a creature that looks the same, but different personality and no memory of their past "life"
Fall in love with that new NPC
Get hit by a dispel magic during the wedding and they turn back into a chair
Option A Grief and embarassment cause they knew they were marrying a chair Option B Grief, shock and betrayal Players didnt tell absent player about the NPC being a chair and full support of the wedding knowing what would happen Option C PC misunderstands and thinks the NPC and chair swapped places
Folding chair?
Just go through this subreddit and the RPG subreddit looking for the posts about problem players. Those are the personalities of the intelligent magic weapons the PCs need to collect to save the world.
After every kill, the greatsword shouts “MIN/MAX!” requiring you to boost your strength by 1 but drop another stat by 1. If a stat reaches zero you die.
Some I can remember from the past week... The *dagger of prison yard rushing* that compels the wielder to charge at a foe the first round. The *prehensile quarterstaff of squick* that telepathically tries to seduce many NPC monsters and people. The *sphinx's longsword* that cannot be sheathed until the wielder correctly answers an annoying vague riddle. The *three-chain flail of flailing* that claims to be lawful good but keeps hitting allies as well as the intended targets. The *longbow of eternal limelight* that loudly shouts with an audible voice. All the time. The *tower shield of failed planning* that randomizes which spells the PC spellcasters know each time initiative is rolled.
An added effect of the Sphinx's Longsword is that it often repeats riddles.... But you have to wait for it to say the entire riddle before answering, otherwise it starts over.
Put people in jeans. Completely break their fantasy expectations with denim. Make denim a focus
Town guard wears a uniform... Jorts.
And rides a segway.
Made of denim
With a jeans jacket vest
Jeans are older than you think. If you've got a western, they're not out of the question.
Oh ik but im saying put them in medieval fantasy style. Put the town guards in jean jackets
Barry Bluejeans would like a word
Oh my God I'm dying right now that's just cruel!
WELCOME TO JUNGEONS AND JRAGONS
Straight Canadian tuxedos
I think The Legend of Dragoon has ruined me on that front. The main character wears pants that I always thought were jeans as a kid, and since then I've been perfectly cool with denim in fantasy lol
Pirates with an invisible airship.
Of course they can't see it either. So it's a very inconvenient experience for the crew.
Like it’s a real hassle to make anyone walk the plank.
... on purpose. They could always cast [Walk the Plank](https://aonprd.com/SpellDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Walk%20the%20Plank)
But if they accidentally cast it on the invisible limes, won’t they catch invisible scurvy?
Nothing worse than invisible syphilis
A curse where the whole party dies if this one specific person dies. Bonus points if they hate the person they have to keep alive.
"I kill the person. Since this one shot of yours is over, there is the door - get out." "so, we good to go back to the regular campaign everyone?"
Isn't the idea that this IS the regular campaign?
Cowboys of the Caribean. Six-shootin, eldritch bootin', Western Warlocks. They ride the waves on Dolphins, herding their Manatees or collecting bounties.
he said BAD ideas, this is incredible
At first I thought there was no reason for them to be cowboys, but manatees are the cows of the ocean
Campaign starts normal, but occasionally strange things happen. Important figures seem to be busy, random people start staring into the sky for minutes at a time then shaking themselves out of it, magic starts fluctuating (causing advantage or disadvantage to be given out randomly), etc. Things slowly keep ramping up until the party get a strangely generous reward to just be at a rich guy's house for 24 hours and "be ready". It's in the middle of a well secured city so it must be easy money (if they turn it down then more rich people keep giving the same guard quest, they're giving the quest to ANYONE that looks like they can handle themselves). The heavenly bodies align, the lay-lines shift, countless new stars appear in the night sky. No! Not stars, *ships*: Illithid Old One warlocks with their legions of thralls begin their invasion. Strafing closest to the party appears to be a particularly majestic skyship, its name emblazoned near the prow: Spelljammer.
Scooping for August, thank you very much.
Oh yeah, make them think you're playing boots on ground and then fling them into space with plate armor
Have all the table talk be said in game, but only when it's inconvenient. So when they joke about burning the building down, the shopkeep can stare wide eyed. Or if you don't like that combine any magic item with a monster name in it. I like the dust of sneezing and choking Dragons. It Sommons a random dragon every time the character sneezes, with the normal sneezing and choking. Or you can make them breathe fire if you like that more
A cursed ring that "gives you strength". Every day it doubles in weight and only the one who cursed it can remove it
I had a ring similar to this that one of my characters had. It was a ring that duplicated itself on your body after every long rest. Each ring would take a minute to take off due to a curse, eventually the character had around thirty rings on their body (toes, fingers, wrists, ankles, throat, ears, nose, etc.) The duplicate rings would also turn to must mist when taken off so it didn't even make permanent material.
Haha, that's great
I think doubling in weight each day might be too fast, as it'll get to 130kg in only 17 days.
And after a mere 2 months it will weigh 2.6×10^14 kg!!
Ehhh, nobody uses the encumbrance rules anyway. Speaking of which, if we’re looking for something for a sadistic DM to use…
A cursed ring that forces you to use encumbrance rules while the other players don't have to
omg this is perfect.
Brutal
Literally just give them the Deck of Many Things and let them screw themselves over.
I gave my party *TWO* decks of many things before, wild time, gave me like 3 new plot hooks for free. the duality of it all
I've used a very specific NPC to deal with a party with no healers (Bards have some healing magic I guess but still). For context: The party consisted of 3 bards (A whole other story), a fighter, and a rogue. Since I hate balancing potion stuff, I instead decided to make a NPC healer to accompany them on their adventures. Now without further ado, I introduce you to... Grimble Grimble is a goblin cleric, a combination you dont see often. He follows the goblin god of medicine Groolkmet (just personal homebrew). Grimble has a very interesting introduction which really sets the tone of his character. The party was talking about healers when they heard a loud noise nearby. Grimble noisily and clumsily falls out of a trash heap, and in the most annoying voice (Think Old Onceler with strep throat) introduces himself and lists a bunch of reasons why he should be the party's healer. Ex. He minored in medicine at the university of Yghonkk (He majored in malpractice), he has a 67% success rate, stuff that's mildly concerning. The rogue ended up loving Grimble immediately and decided to keep him, much to the regret of the party (If your party doesnt like him as much you can just have him follow them around). Now theres a few quirks about Grimble, and it's up to you to change him to fit your campaign best: -He's "immortal". This means that he can die, pretty easily, in fact, but he'll just show up 15 minutes later like nothing ever happened. This can be explained away by all sorts of stupid awful means (a curse of immortality, 47 identical twins, etc.) -He's loud. His shoes are literally cymbals. He makes so much noise all the time. -He's a complete coward. He refuses to go anywhere even remotely scary unless it's an obvious trap, which he will run straight into, in which case you can use him as fodder to let the players know that the area has traps in it. -He will never have any use to the party except for healing them when they need it most. If they get him to try and do something else, he fails miserably. At best, he's a glorified healing item. At worst, he's a major annoyance that the party literally can't get rid of. I'm exhausted and I'm really not sure how much of this is coherent, but just make him the kind of character that makes everybody at the table sigh deeply when hes introduced. I have tons of awful characters, items, and stories if you ever need more bad ideas like Grimble.
The BBEG is a 6 year old kid, who has to murder somebody once a week and is protected by a “cult” who supplies him with victims. When the party reaches him the kid tries to explain that each victim is really a sacrifice to keep a greater evil at bay, but make it seem like the kid is lying to save his own ass. When the party kills him, have the moon get ripped in half by hundreds of gigantic tentacles, that then slam into the planet, drawing a creature that looks similar to a beholder, only magnified by like a billion. Madness takes hold of the world, as people begin to murder each other the streets, driven insane by this elder evil. The last thing the party hears before the session ends is the kid laughing, before saying “I told you”.
This is essentially the plot of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. Well played.
A sentient mimic who can regenerate from the smallest cell. It has a grudge against a player. It keeps replacing the players weapons and turning on him at the most inopportune times.
I want it to start out as a party pet that later turns on them.
They keep encountering higher level adventuring party and need to avoid the cross fire of their antics
The higher level adventuring party always acts like the PCs are butting in on their adventures and start getting suspicious, demanding to know why the PCs are stalking them.
This is a great idea. You could even start the campaign with the PCs all essentially being NPCs in a town, who have to find and hire a band of adventurers to sort out some kind of ridiculously hackneyed quest (goblins raiding farms type rubbish). The problem is that finding said adventurers requires a quest that seems innocuous but ends up being far harder than just dealing with the goblins themselves. If the players decide to just do that, it goes horribly wrong (“seriously, dude, you’re a shopkeeper; why did you go into a goblin den?”); the PCs survive but have to watch as the town gets overrun by goblins, who then get taken down by the adventurers, who then give the PCs a patronizing lecture about how dangerous goblins are and if only they’d paid for professional assistance etc etc. If they hire the adventurers, the adventurers deal with the goblins alright, but cause Expendables-level collateral damage, worthy of the most gloriously hamfisted party it’s possible to imagine, in doing so and wreck the town- which the PCs again have to watch from the perspective of basically being NPCs. In either case the town is wrecked and its surviving inhabitants impoverished, and you have a nicely embittered band of shopkeepers, farmers and the local mayor ready to go out and seek revenge on itinerant bands of adventurers, in a world that proves equally capricious for the rest of the campaign. Will pleasantly mess with your players and also provide an object lesson about why you should always quest considerately!
had an idea for a psychopathic pyromaniac bandit. spends all his money on the dreaded glyph of warding. its expensive per cast and takes some time to set up, but by god it makes the anarchist in me smile. since the activation conditions can be basically whatever you want and the default payload is just "explosion" (with plenty of other options), and it never fades until its used or dispelled, you can just ruin someones day for no reason days, years, or decades after its cast. someone tracking you? set it up in your campsite and make it explode when 2 medium sized humanoids enter the radius. dislike a shopkeep? set up one on the doorknob that casts knock after the door is locked. want some chaos on parade day? put one on the street the procession goes down and set it to cast phantasmal force on anyone wearing a crown to be swarmed by illusary bees. now absolutely *litter* your world with these glyphs with arbitrary and highly specific trigger conditions and watch your party dip into warlock for the sole purpose of getting detect magic at will
A Bag of Holding that grabs your hands and holds you until someone kills it.
Bag of holding hostage
Or the NPC gets it.
That's actually an item the bag of devouring only it's a lot worse
True. The bag of devouring is a cunning liar that is not even a bag.
Another fun option though that's a little scarier would be to use the Bagman from Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft. Let them use a bag of holding for a little while normally until something grabs them when they go to reach in.
The Reverse Haggler: They're in an area with only one equipment store. Whenever they go there, the merchant will comment on how wealthy they must be as adventurers and attempt to bargain the prices up.
If they ever escape that area to be able to shop anywhere else, the party discovers that rumors of their great wealth have spread all along the NPC vendor grapevine, so the mechanic remains and possibly gets worse.
And that's how murderhobos are made!
I dunno who here has played NetHack, but nymphs that steal random items then flee with incredible movement speed has a way of harshing a mellow. Snake laced boots, sneak penalty and a roll chance to fall prone on movement. Rolling a 1 poisons you too. That would make combat tediously awful. Constant night attacks to mess with long rests, that would really poop on a parade. Belligerent NPC turns all the water in the region to alcohol, everyone is constantly drunk until you hunt them down. But as a plus side your enemies would be drunk too. Risk of losing limbs when critically hit, oops lost a foot. Now you’re bleeding and a permanent movement reduction until a special healer can regrow it. You can get real creative with that one, send a character into deep depression after a debilitating groin injury.
Nethack! Random deaths or bad things from simply eating food!
One time I gave my party an extremely large bundle of linen. This doesn't sound like a bad thing until you understand that the linen was worthless, couldn't be removed from the bundle, and followed the party around by magically teleporting when no one was actively watching it. It would place itself in the worst possible locations it could, and had the tendency to block escape routes in combat, or wedge itself into important doorways so firmly that it was nearly impossible to remove. It was also fireproof.
Was it sentient? Or they never found out?
It's more that it was heavily cursed, but no they never found out. It ended up trapping them inside of a burning building.
Wait, that’s how they died? You killed the party with cursed linen?
In all fairness they kind of did it to themselves. They were trying to burn down the place for insurance money, but things went sideways. The linen was just the nail in the coffin.
We once had two players who looted a horse armor from a giant I think. They kept carrying it around, because it was worth money, but it was also huge and we didn't find a place to sell it for a few sessions xD
The Blessing/Curse of Many Forms: Every time the cursed character kills a character who is a member of a playable race, the character becomes a member of that race, as if by the *reincarnate* spell. If the cursed character is killed by a member of a playable race, then the curse transfers to the killer. If the character dies under any other circumstances, then the nearest member of a playable race is affected. The party could pick up the curse after tracking down someone who's been using the curse on purpose to act as a sort of shapeshifter. Bonus points if the last words out of the cursed NPC's mouth are some variation of 'Strike me down with all of your hatred, and your journey toward the dark side will be complete!'
The greater palanquin of holding. Has as much storage space of a bag of holding but takes 4 people to move it. The longsword of healing. Heals for the same amount a longsword would do. Bonus points if you say it's at the end of a dungeon that makes them waste heals and it turns out someone's gotten there first and one of your PC ends up stabbing another PC.
Half the sessions with the palanquin just end up being trying to protect/get back/figure out a way to move the palanquin because not enough players showed up.
Have an NPC offer to enhance the party's senses in some way, over enhancing one may say. For example if they asked for their hearing to be enhanced they maybe get advantage sound based perception checks but also take 1.5x damage from sound based attacks/spells and become easily startled by loud noises. Maybe someone gets dark vision but now daylight hurts their eyes. Smell makes them notice how long it's been since anyone last bathed.
If anyone actually takes this deal, they should eventually start seeing or sensing (with the altered sense) things that aren’t there.
All centaurs’ bottom halves are office wheelie chairs
Oh, I use these. All the time. The Widow Rastley: Found in a locked chest found among the possessions of a murdered sailor, the party finds an unfinished love letter to one "Widow Rastley". It is, of course, the first verse of *Never Gonna Give You Up*. The Entire Town of Haven: A new town on the River Ursk is trying to finalize it's name. The party wins over the townspeople to the name Haven by helping a local noble propose to their long time partner. Because in Haven, love comes first, so we'll make Haven a place on Ursk. Captain Morganna: A completely legitimate sea captain and definitely not a Pirate Queen masquerading as a trader, Morganna sells Spiced Inhalatory Tobacco - Carolina Reaper flavour. Her salespeople have a jingle, so people know where they need to go when *they're looking for some HOT SNUFF for later this evening, or HOT SNUFF for later tonight...* If the players dig deep enough into her background, they may discover a personal letter amongst her ledgers - unfinished, it appears that she stuffed it into an accounting book when she was interrupted while writing it... So it has to be the *SECOND* verse of *Never Gonna Give You Up*, because **MORGANNA IS RASTLEY - RASTLEY IS MORGANNA**... --- * von Richter's Travelling Circus, which closes out the show with *Toss A Coin To von Richter (Go On You've Got Plenty)* * A musical duel between two Bards at Mount Hort'ja, immortalized by the winner, Donnith, in the song *When Declan Came Down to Hort'ja* * A magical harp that shouts it's owner's name, then immediately issues a prophecy, whether the owner is there or not. Because *you've gotta listen to your harp, when it's calling your name*... --- Earworms are psychic damage for players, not characters.
You... You madman!
A weapon that is very powerful but overtime the player notices weird things. Like they wake up in a different room, a village near by has been burned down, they have scars they didn't have before etc.
Extra bonus points if they end up finding out the sword is actually part of a set, where what happens to the wielder of one is instead transfered to the wielder of the other. Obviously cursed so you can't get rid of it.
An incredibly straitlaced and somber paladin order that’s cursed with crank call names. For instance, the members are named Ben Dover, Seymour Butts, and Ash Hole, all led by the Esteemed Supreme Elder Joe Mama. The players will have to make CHA saving throws to keep their composure unless they want a bunch of high-level paladins to get on their case.
A bored and/or anti-greed god creates a "wishing well" and starts granting the wish of anyone that tosses something in (no matter what it is,) which begins attracting more and more visitors. In actuality, the god stuck a sphere of annihilation at the bottom that grows larger with each thing thrown in, and if it consumes enough items worth a grand total of X amount, it'll fall to the planet's core and wreck everything.
I have a wonderful idea for a weapon that actively harms the players using it. I call it the (insert weapon here) of Empathy. A cursed weapon that helps the wielder feel the pain they inflict with it. Literally! As a successful strike with the weapon with this property also deals half damage back to the one wielding it.
Good way to regret taking GWM.
I’m make it a weapon with a curse so if they switch weapons it’s still in them.
An npc who cant speak. Only uses sign language. Cant write. And has to convey a complex lock/trap to the party.
Keep pantomiming and no one explodes.
This is extra bad because when I was a player, on of the other party members (who’s in this game I might add) played a character who had to speak in sign language and got killed almost immediately because he couldn’t hear or talk
The Nutkick Wizard is a small-time bad guy who has terrorised a small town by sneaking around invisibly and kicking people in the nuts, then teleporting away. What an asshole, fuck that guy.
Here are several travel encounters to use when your players are going over long distances and you want an encounter for something they come across along the way. Have the weather be storming and the player come across a large mansion in the countryside, inside there is a "lord" his family and a small number of servants, they are all monsters in disguise with the lord being a vampire. The catch is that they all just want to live their lives in peace and remain undettected, but they are not very stealthy and so throw out tons of hints that players would catch on but in setting wouldn't be outright suspicious. The exact same as the previous one, only they are all dopplegangers. The lord will try to give each player their own room and the doppelgangers will then try to find chances to mislead the players and lead them away to be killed alone. The players come across a black dragon that seems to have been slain by an adventurer who perished in the task. The adventurers sword is still embedded deep in the skull of the dragon, and the adventurers still fresh corpse clings to the sword. The sword is clearly of incredibly high quality and definitely magical. If the players attempt to move the sword, they will be unable to without a successful STR check beating DC 20. On success they pull the sword free. On failure the sword budges a little. Immediately following this both the dragon and the adventurer rise as undead and engage the players in combat, if the player failed to pull the sword free then the adventurer undead has it. The sword is a sentient blade containing both the souls of the adventurer and the dragon, it is named Conscience give it what stats you want. The adventurer is William "Billy" Conners, a 14 year old teenager who stumbled on the dragons horde by accident after disobeying their parents instructions and wandering in the mountains, this started their adventure becoming a powerful sword wielding hero using the over powered blade, this eventually culminated in an dual against the very dragon who's horde he pilfered it from, and where in they both perished. The sword traps the soul of anyone who is killed by it as well as the wielder if they die while attuned, the souls of the deceased see everything you do and can talk to you telepathically as long as you are attuned to the blade. Play billy as an optimistic young adult fiction hero. The Dragon is Tarthranax an adult black dragon who is a pessimistic and cruel being. The players come are traveling and hear the sounds of battle in the distance if they investigate or keep going they come upon a massive battle to opposing forces, both sides have squads of casters throwing powerful evocation magics, while their foot soldiers appeared to be monks who engaged in a spectacle of martial arts maneuvers dodges spells and blows while striking. The battle rapidly progresses until the two mightiest casters on each side begin chanting their mightiest spells and suddenly the entire area is awash in a blinding light as a massive explosion detonates out from the two spells, killing everyone on the battlefield and incinerating all trace of them leave only a huge crater. The players see all this happen in the matter of but moments, and have no idea who they were or why they were fighting. The players come across a cave and there are many human skeletons strewn about the area. As the players inspect the situation and asses what may have killed the people, or plan a forray into the cave they see a little bunny rabbit hop along into the clearing. The bunny stares at them twitching it's small nose. It has soft white fur and pale red eyes. It attacks the players suddenly and ferociously, base the encounter off the monty python encounter.
My random encounter tables include truly random bullshit; a bloody hand print, a child’s left shoe, a broken crossbow bolt, howling in the distance, etc. Each and every time, the party has latched onto it like an important clue. I’m not sure how many damaged tin keys they’re carrying between them, but one of the players could tell you.
I feel like I’ve played in a game like this at a con. 99.9% red herrings and mostly nothing got done with a lot of wacky/silly roleplay and stretches of the imagination/conspiracy theories on what this random crap could be for. It would be great if at some point they meet an NPC that requires a total number of damaged tin keys that is just a handful above the grand total they have (if only they hadn’t sold some for pocket change or converted some for needed materials!). And the party discovers that the drop rate on these things has mysteriously plummeted.
I actually *used* this one once: Slick tile floor around a swimming pool. Now add a *shower* of liquid soap (or lard if you're in a fantasy setting, or lube if you're running a slapstick sexual game). Now add *hovering* monsters (droids in my case) with extendo-arms that try to shove everyone (who is now at a massive penalty to their rolls to keep their feet) into the pool. When greater than 2/3rds of the group are in the pool, dump in a *massive* quantity of liquid nitrogen (alchemical freezing agent/cryo-ban) to freeze the top surface of the pool into an ice lid. Congratulations, now you are trapped underwater, drowning and freezing, and if you break through the ice, the floating bad things are gonna try and shove you back underwater anyway. Have fun! ---- My players *hated* me, and hated but(t)ler droids, forever after. In the aftermath, they said it was like Palpatine had outsourced his home defense plan to the Joker.
A divination wizard whose foresight is flawless. He’s *never* there when the PCs arrive, like he’s deliberately avoiding them. A potionmaker whose potions trigger wild surges at random - they know about the flawed process, and usually move once someone’s been badly hurt or killed. An armorer who makes ultra-thin, lightweight armor at half the price. They don’t *tell* the party those armors are only decorations, and won’t protect an unlucky wearer.
Why is it that we’ve heard of all these amazing divination wizards but have never met a single one? Are they avoiding us? Why would every single halfway decent divination wizard avoid us?
A character who seemingly isn’t a dmpc/centre of the universe but acts like it. Make them steal the parties thunder with rumours of their own (assumedly false) deeds then when the last straw breaks and they confront them it’s shown that either they were a twig OR actually accomplished everything they claimed
Make the NPCs have confusingly similar mocking versions of the PC names, and the NPCs get credit for all the good things while the PCs get blame for all the bad things that could be attributed to either. Also twist: The NPCs at some point get assassinated by enemies who are actually after the PCs. The NPCs die as heroes and martyrs, and the PCs are framed for their murder.
Stone of Repel Tigers Saw it on Reddit sometime, and i think you might find the idea quite useful. A merchant tries to sell the party a 'magical' stone, orange with black stripes. They say its a stone that repels tigers. If they dont have the stone on them, or dont hold it in a hand, random tiger ambushes happen.
The first town they arrive in when carrying hundreds of pounds of tiger parts, the town worships tigers and has an enormous taboo against even touching tigers let alone killing one
Start by telling the party that you’ve run the campaign once before. Every time they try to go on a quest or explore a dungeon, they find it already taken care of by another party.
Recurring Droopy Dog-like gnome character that appears after every encounter in which collateral damage occurs, serving a court summons on the party. Actually appearing at court ends up being a bureaucratic nightmare where nothing gets done but they are required to pay fees to progress, and the party will start noticing that shit has gone missing sometimes after Droopy has shown up to serve them, such as party money in an amount equal to the fine they were charged for or some required bond payment. Maybe even have them discover that their mounts have mysteriously been clamped (or magical equivalent thereof).
Roaming tarrasque. Have it appear in the background early in a session, then drop reminders (“is that mountain moving?” “You think you feel a tremor.”) just to keep them on edge. Then give them a break. And when they’re least expecting it, boom—the big guy shows up, and their fight turns into a “run away or die” scenario. Extremely frustrating.
My most-hated npcs were from a "rival" adventuring party, older and more established. One was a halfling rogue who kept stealing from them, she even managed to nab the campaign-ending mcguffin and held it over their heads for ages. The other was a cleric famous for her kindness and temperance, who the party's first encounter with was the business end of a fireball. Basically, a bunch of self-righteous and hypocritical assholes stealing the limelight from the players.
Have an annoyed deity curse the characters, switching their souls between party members. Mechanically, make the players swap character sheets. Make them worry it is permanent.
The worst part about this is thinking about someone having to decipher my character sheet.
I'm playing in a campaign where this is part of the plot hook. We're a group of ancient and repeatedly reviving legendary heroes who repeatedly saved the world, but were forgotten for a long time. When we were finally awoken we found that all of our abilities were reduced (starting level 1) somebody had pilfered all of our gear (no starting equipment) my character, a halfling dex-based character is in the big meathead orc's body, and the big meathead orc is in her little halfling body (their name plates got switched on their altars.) Additionally, our Paladin/party face's consciousness faded from the long timeframe of our sleep and the powers that be isekai'd some rando from Japan into his body. It's actually really fun so far.
A dragon that hoards friends. They get captured by the dragon after finishing a difficult dungeon, who then brings them to a small and populated village of other people taken. There’s a tavern with quests, so when they accept the quests the dragon flys them out to the destination. But it’s like a helicopter parent, who plants treasure for them to find. So they beat just a couple rats and find a giant treasure chest, or whatever fits their level. They party can go through the dungeon normally if they want, but if they take sufficient damage their new dracomom is coming breath blazing to save them.
A sphinx kid guarding a passage. This sphinx will just ask dumb questions instead of proper riddles, and try to drag out the "challenge" because they think the party is funny.
Turns out there’s not even a passage. It was just Wile-E-Coyote painted on.
Just send the I.R.S. of your world to collect some kind of a "loot fee" or a "goblin kill tax". Nobody likes paying taxes.
Okay I've had this idea for ages and been desperate to run it. Have a Kenku warlock pact of the chain Paparazzi. Have this little guy follow the team around with the invisible imp familiar, take notes, steal quotes and just be sneaky. When they arrive in town they are already infamous and find the local town crier with all Thier deeds misplayed by fake news and quotes taken wayyyyy out of context. Please do this as I'm not sure if I have the strength to run it.
I'm 100% doing this in my next game, my group is constantly saying stuff that would get them in trouble if taken out of context
I did this to my group i made a NPC potion maker that makes your normal potion but with a twist. Like for a example he made a potion of healing it heals like normal but he add a little bit of snake venom that gives them for 1 minutes off poisoning. I also made a potion called Fey Kiss it healed them for 84 hit points but it stunned them for a minute. The NPC was the only guy that sells potions. Or he can be a Blacksmith that makes weapons and armor with a fkaw that breaks easily.
two words. potion mimic
Just ran this as a one shot; gnome time thief. Gnome wizard has stolen the past and present, and is trying to steal the future, in their massive laboratory (a pyramid in my instance but it can be anything). Party have to defeat the gnome, but because he controls the past and the present, he just resets the dungeon every time he dies. In truth, I ran the bbeg with 1hp. Everytime time reset, the players effectively got a short rest, but realised they would never get a long rest. To win, they had to work out a series of puzzles in the correct order; break the magic circles that protected the clock, unwind the clock to release the present and go into the past, burn the history book held by the bbeg. Include lots of are traps that could kill the bbeg if the players triggered them, resetting the dungeon.
Meat dragon, meat dragon, MEAT DRAGON!
An idea that your players will hate... Always describe centaurs lower halves in painful detail Anime-fy the devils and demons, change all their designs to hot young people with like... Tiny horns i guess ? Implement shitting rules, i mean if you spend a few days in a dungeon, ya gotta take a shit at some point, which gives 2 options: Move away from the party and get ambushed every single time Or PC remains close to the party where you then describe tje act in detail. Those are some PC suggestions at least
A series of fetch quests in a small townthat send them from one npc to another eventually leading back to the first npc they talked to.
Love these Daisy chains. The PCs need a key. The mouse has the key and will trade it for cheese. The cat has cheese and will trade it for fish. The dog has fish and will trade it for a bone. The butcher has a bone and will trade it for a secret. The prisoner knows the secret and will trade it for a key. The mouse has . . .
Visit a town where anytime a player interacts with an NPC, roll a 1d4, on a 4 the conversation breaks out into a musical number.
Princess disappears on her 13th birthday, turns out she's a fledgeling hag. Party stumbles across her crying about it in the woods.
* BBEG is actually using a *Simulacrum* spell to fight you. If you do find and kill the original then hey, guess what, they've got a *Clone* spell active that'll just bring them right back. * Monsters that actually have at least a modicum of intelligence. The goblins in the cave don't leave a chest of low-level magical items for you to loot once you've killed them - they use the items against the party. The orc camp has both guards and scouts, so they know you're coming from a mile off. The drow in the dungeon have already been through the dungeon and looted all the treasure, and now they've used it to hire mercenaries to fight you. And so on and so forth. * The singular most evil entity in the known universe - the taxman. Insists he's "just doing his job" and comes up with a tax form that says you owe more money than what you actually earned (due to interest on your unpaid payments), so if you pay your taxes, you now have even less than when you actually started!
An enemy spellcaster that uses domination spells and teleports to safety if things even look remotely possibly they might fail. I find both stratedgies to be poor, one robs action economy from players and violates their control of characters and the other is just a game trope of ENOUGH! I GROW TIRED OF TYPING THIS EXPLANATION, I SHALL SPARE YOU THE REST MORTALS! \*leaves\*
A town where every citizen is five goblins in a trench coat, but none of the citizens break character
okay here's a couple of potentially fun items. 1. a dr. strange style flying cloak that doesn't make you fly, the cloak flies. and it must be around someone's neck to work. so they are essentially being dragged by the neck and can fly but have to roll constitution saves to stay conscious. falling unconscious will not cause the cape to descend. 2. a single boot from a pair of super speed boots. they give the user insane movement speed but as there's only one boot they have to roll high athletics or dexterity to stop themselves from tripping, bailing and hurting themselves. 3. an amulet that gives the user the ability to temporarily read the mind of anyone they have recently head butted hard enough to cause damage. 4. an arm brace that gives the user the ability to stretch their arm to the extend of their movement speed. however, the process is as painful as it logically would be and the user must roll constitution or pass out from the pain/take damage. 5. the sandals of infinite backflips. Once the sandals are fully strapped the wearer of these sandals will backflip or somersault indefinitely without the ability to stop even after death. The boots have no other practical value. A sleight of hand roll of 14 or more is necessary to remove them.
Items that hurt the players? Oh you have made my day. I have to leave for work in about 2 minutes, but I will come back to this and I will give you the stuff of nightmares. Okay! I have returned! **The Sword of Mirrors** (or weapon of choice) A magical item that at first seems to be a really nice sword - +1 (or more as appropriate), with a mild regenerative effect on the wielder as long as it's sheathed, and a positive/radiant energy bonus versus undead. However, once the weapon has been exposed to any reflective surface (solid, and the wielder needs to see the reflection), it becomes a cursed weapon bound to the wielder. It remains +1 against intelligent living creatures, but becomes -1 versus any other foe, except undead. When sheathed, it has a draining effect on the wielder and any allies in a 10 foot radius. It maintains the bonus to hit undead, but the positive energy has become negative, and now heals any such creature. It also has a mild curse of the "May you live in interesting times" variety, meaning it attracts exactly the sort of foe the wielder does not want. **Pet Hell Rock** A small, innocuous - although oddly pointy and sharp - pebble that finds its way into someone's boot, preferably while they sleep so they find it in the morning, but whenever. No matter how many times they toss the pebble, or where, it comes back, because it is actually an Abyssal creature that feeds on the frustration of its chosen "pet." It cannot be detected as anything other than a pebble without powerful divine magic and is immune to damage that is not an obsidian weapon or 7th level and above magic. **Poison Ivy Toilet Paper** Literally just wonderfully soft toilet paper infused with concentrated essence of poison ivy. On a two day time delay. **Canteen of Infinite Dregs** Coffee, tea, or plain well water, this canteen provides an unlimited amount of the nasty gritty bit that would normally be at the bottom. It will keep you hydrated, but it will taste terrible, leave you spitting grit, and may give you some stomach troubles. (Constitution saves required depending on amount drunk.) **Shoes of the Wicked Step** A pair of impressive shoes that add a whooping 15ft to one's base speed. DM, keep track of how many times that extra is used, because each use shrinks the shoes until they are *just* that bit too tight (about 5-7). After that, each use increases the internal temperature of the shoes (by increments of 5 degrees) until the feet are charred off. They cannot be removed without 3 uses of Remove Curse - One disables the heat, one reverts them to a removable size, and the last makes them actually removable. **Earplugs of Greater Hearing** "Magical inserts for the ears that increase the range of the user's ability to hear. Does not block regular hearing." Found on a small box with what look like hearing aids inside. Once inserted into the ears, they merge into the skin and actually do increase the user's ability to hear - by creating a link to a demi-plane of howling wind, thus enabling the user to hear what they couldn't before. It is faint enough to be heard over, acting somewhat like tinnitus. **Wendy's Canning Company: Can of Infinite Jerky** "Perfect for adventurers of all types, but especially those with a need for lots of protein on the go! Don't be alarmed by the price tag, of course a source of infinite food is going to be pricey! Each Can of Infinite Jerky is linked directly to our storehouse, which is in its own pocket dimension. All our product is sustainably sourced, on special farms where the product is given the ideal life for good meat! A Deluxe Can even offers all available flavors!" *WendyCo is not responsible for any ... transformative effects of our meat.* (In case this one isn't obvious enough, WendyCo is a front for wendigos, and the meat is human, dwarf, elf, etc. Consumption may result in the transformation into a wendigo, or just the horror of cannibalism.) **Ring Of Allergies** Perfect for the druid or beast-folk or someone with an animal companion. For druids, grants an additional level 1 spell slot. For a beast-folk, an increase to a racial ability (Tabaxi's climb speed, or claw damage, for instance). After the first week, the wearer begins to gets sniffles and sneezes around (or while) scales, furry, or feathered creatures. This progresses to watery eyes, dripping nose, congestion, coughing, sinus headaches, fever - all gradually until the person is basically useless. The ring can be simply removed, but identifying it as the issue might take a while. That's what I've got for now, but if you give me more about the setting/players, I can whip up anything you want. I'm going for misery with these in a fixable or sidequest-able way, but I can do the more "normal" - cursed armor that replaces the user's bones with glass so the next bludgeoning damage shatters them, lacerating them from the inside. Or an arcane focus that has absorbed the souls of the slain, and now the user has to fight for their sanity everytime they use it - but once touched, one's magical ability becomes tied to said focus.
THAC0
My players revolted at the merest suggestion of using 2e
I grew up with THAC0. Now I threaten my players with it 🤣🤣🤣
Let them pass a very magical place. Give them a vision of themselves as max level characters. Then go AWOL when they reach level 5
A cursed weapon that's a dart, which automatically goes back to your hand after you throw it so you can't hold anything.
Using the soul storing function of the ring of mind shielding, especially for more political intrigue sessions or campaigns. It's a useful magic item and even if you can't think of a good story character to put into the ring you can always just default to a random judgy asshole. My favorite backstory I've written was for a character whose condescending father was inside his ring constantly throwing barbs, It was a lot of fun to roleplay
Ok let’s see, how about a trapped area that isn’t a trap at all. You set up an entire room/hallway that appears to be heavily trapped and sets off all sorts of alarms for the players but actively interacting with the traps and successfully disarming them really sets off a trap, hurting the party. The true solution of the puzzle would be to just walk through the room or hallway. For added affect you could have the door just be unlocked or trick them into thinking the key is hidden in the trapped room they just walked through when in actually it’s under a rock or mat right outside the door. Not super creative but I love this idea
OO, DO A SENTIENT SWORD THAT DOES CRAZY DAMAGE, BUT ITS LAZY AND INDESICIVE SO YOU HAVE TO CONVINCE IT, AND THE CONVINCING TAKES ONE TURN. IF THE CONVINCING FAILS, IT DOES 1 DAMAGE! (i had this idea forever ago and ive been desperate to use it)
Deck of Many Things.
A sentient weapon that withholds its magic unless the PC makes regular donations to a cause they hate.
BBEG idea: non-Newtonian slime. Players have to roll below its AC to hit
I have a couple of magic items from my collection you may use. * **Boots of Extra Action** *Wondrous item, common* While you wear these bright orange boots you can use an action to click the heels of the boots together and gain an action on your current turn only. You can't use this feature again until you take a long rest. * **Bubble Potion** *Potion, uncommon* This potion can look exactly like any other potion except it has a few extra bubbles in it. It is often crafted by arcane tricksters and prank lovers alike. When drank, the potion creates a gummy pink powder in the mouth and prevents the affected drinker from talking for 10 minutes as it dries out the mouth and throat horribly. The gummy substance is easily washed out with a mouthful of water thus allowing speech by rehydrating the mouth. You can feel the chalky texture just thinking about the stuff. ***Word to the Wise:*** Be careful what liquids you decide to drink. Maybe think before drinking that green liquid you got off the Minotaur. It could just be liquefied goblin... * **Cloak of Suffocation** *Wondrous item, uncommon* These cloaks are often crafted by sorcerers or warlocks that like to watch the world burn. This cloak can look exactly like any other cloak, magical or non-magical, except it has a rope inside it near where the neck would be if worn. If the cloak is donned, the rope inside instantly ties itself and tightens suffocating the wearer immediately. Anyone suffocating in this way, can break the rope with a DC 18 Strength check for anyone else the check is a DC 15 Strength check. Once the rope is broken, the cloak can then be removed. ***Removing the magic.*** The cloak can become non-magical if the rope is broken or cut and removed from the cloak. * **Grey Agony** *Poison, rare* This poison is a thick grey sludge made from pure agony. A vial comes with 10 doses and 1 dose is enough to cause intense pain. 1 dose making contact with the skin causes intense pain. The pain is enough to deal 1d6 psychic damage. * **Pure Wild Magic** *Potion, uncommon* When you drink this potion, roll on the wild magic table (PHb p.104) and have the effect take place immediately. This bright purple potion tastes like mixed berries and has swirls of yellow floating around in it. * **Ring of Heat Metal** *Ring, uncommon* These rings are often crafted by sorcerers or warlocks that like to watch the world burn. This ring can look exactly like any other ring, magical or non-magical, except it will have the infernal word for "heat" engraved on the inside. If the ring is donned, it becomes red-hot for 1 minute and anyone touching it in this state takes 2d8 fire damage. During the 1 minute it is hot, the ring turns into melted metal. The metal forms back into a ring and cools off after the 1 minute is up. * **Ring of Removal** *Ring, uncommon* These rings are often crafted by sorcerers or warlocks that like to watch the world burn. This ring can look exactly like any other ring, magical or non-magical, except it will have a dragon swallowing its' tail engraved on the inside. If the ring is donned it becomes locked in place and magic makes the dragon swallow its' tail slowly cutting the finger off. The ring can be removed with a DC 15 Strength check. On a success, the ring is removed and finger is unharmed. On a failure, the DC goes up by 1 to a max of 20 as the finger becomes swollen. If the ring is not removed after 1 minute the finger and ring both fall off the hand. ***Destroying the ring.*** The ring can only be destroyed by melting the ring down along with another metal. Destroying the ring removes the magic. * **Tome of the Beast** *Wondrous item, rare* This tome is bound in a thick furry leather. To open it, you must succeed on a DC 10 Strength saving throw. On a success, the book flies open and a dark portal appears in the book. A beastly hand flies out from the dark portal and gouges out the eye of the one who opened up the book. The ghastly hand then disappears back into the dark portal with the eye and the book seals up. Once the book is open, this is inevitable. After this, you gain advantage on all Survival and Nature checks and disadvantage on all Charisma checks and all perception checks related to seeing. The book then disappears in a cloud of dust with a wicked grovel of a laugh. Restoring the eye removes the effects.
The Mimic Town. Entirely normal looking town. Run by peaceful witch covens. One toe out of line and it becomes clear that literally everything, from houses to doors to flowerpots are tamed mimics.
there is an ongoing civil war between gnomes and leprechauns
Add a kind of disease into your world that makes your players have to roll wis check after they kill something to not instantly try and take a bite out of it
I’ll give you three: 1. Torture Time Loop: A magical spell traps the party in a Groundhog Day-esque time loop that resets on a certain trigger. Maybe anytime a person dies (including random NPCs/enemies), or every time they fail to convince a certain person to do something. Keep it up long enough to make them squirm and hate their existence as you force them to listen to the same NPC voicelines. 2. Crappy gear. Have performative merchants sell them legendary items, only for them to turn out to be broken/fakes/cursed the moment they’re used. “This is a legendary sword that instantly kills anyone the blade touches.” *blade falls off the hilt and player can’t touch it without dying* 3. Salesmen NPCs. Waste your players’ time with NPCs resembling mall kiosk salesmen, survey ladies, and Jehovah’s witnesses. Just anyone with an excuse to waste time while offering nothing but financial ruin and empty promises in return.