To get my fair shares of abuse
So this is a tale of crushed hopes and evil, evil DMs.
My Tuesday D&D game is a homebrewed, low-magic 3.5 game set in Faerun; magic exists, but spellcasting is extremely dangerous ever since the goddess of magic was killed along with virtually all of the other gods a little over fifty years ago (the climax of the previous installment of this game, which has been going on for years now and is on its third campaign set in this world.) This leg of the campaign has been going on for two or so years now, and in that time the DM has given us a total of two magic items. Two. No one has magic weapons, armor, none of that. Keep this in mind.
We were hired by a group of loggers to find out why the various things living in the forest were suddenly freaking out and attacking their town. In the course of the investigation (I almost got swallowed whole by a T-Rex!) we discovered that the source of the problem was a mythal constructed by a batshit crazy elf druid named Elementus, a recurring nemesis of the party (mythals are powerful magic items that produce area effects, big ones. Usually they're giant crystals or other similar things, especially the ones built by elves, but they don't have to be.)
Elementus is a walking example of why prophecy is a bad thing. We previously met him as a member of a cult built around a string of prophecy, the main one for Elementus being "The Elves will rise." He thought this meant that elves were destined to rise up and become the dominant race on Faerun, as they were thousands of years ago. What this actually meant was that the drow (evil elves, like Jarlaxe there) were going to rise up out of the Underdark and wage war on the surface, a war we only just narrowly won.
Of course, being a crazy person he refuses to believe he was wrong and is determined to force the prophecy to happen the "right" way. His scheme this time was to use the mythal to siphon off the life force of everyone in the area and then, when it was full, use that energy to reanimate the every dead elf in the forest, in essence creating an army of zombie elves under his command which would then overrun the continent and rule. As you do.
Obviously we weren't cool any of this and battle ensued. Through some good strategy and two incredibly lucky failed saving throws on his part we managed to turn him to stone, buying us some time (he claimed that if we killed him, the mythal would explode, which could conceivably destroy the entire country.) After that we ransacked his lab (Elementus' hobby is cloning, so there was a lot of creepy wrongness to be found) and there were some very interesting things, among them 1) 25 magic items and 2) Nola, an NPC very dear to the party.
Nola looks human but due to the wonky way magic works is actually an earth elemental who is the consciousness of the country, like Uncle Sam in DC Comics. Every word someone says, he hears, as long as they're touching the ground. He's also for all intents and purposes Batman; he has a huge library filled with files on everyone who lives in the city, including things like enemy lists and who the most likely suspects would be if a person were found murdered. We even call his library the Batcave. He'd also been missing since the war with the drow, so we were understandably thrilled to find him, my warblade especially (she would absolutely be maintaining his fan comm were LJ in this setting.)
In fact, my girl was happy enough that she ignored the first signs of problems, like how he'd lost his memories or how the only way he could block out the voices of everyone in the country was for our bard to play for him (the bard eventually had to cast Mind Blank on him to block out the outside voices.) Then while we were going through Elementus' evil notes of evil to try to find where he'd stashed the mythal one of the other party members came upon a ritual to basically sculpt a person out of the Earth Wonder Woman-style and bind an elemental spirit into it, which started prompting people to go, "Say, maybe this guy isn't really....." (which of course my girl was having none of.)
Since we didn't have any hard evidence one way or the other, we packed everything up and went back to the logging camp. We then separated into groups and started to 1) pore over Elementus' notes, 2) sort and identify the magic swag, and 3) guard duty. Out of character, we then spent about an hour rolling up the individual items, some of which were very, very nice. In character, guard duty group eventually noticed that while the attacks had stopped the residents of the town were starting to exhibit signs of the same sickness that we'd seen in the forest (as were we, BTW. It just takes longer for these sorts of things to progress when you have 10 hit dice as opposed to 1 like Generic Logger #3.) After confirming that the mythal had in fact moved and not just expanded, we were faced with the realization that we must have taken it with us.
That meant it was either one of the magic items, which were already being divvied up, or Nola the elemental. Now, the only way to destroy a mythal is with a big explosion (or implosion), much bigger than anything that can be produced with mundane explosives short of a nuke. Now, one of the items was a magic backpack that has extradimensional pockets (basically, it's bigger on the inside than the outside); one of the quirks of these things is that if it's cut open it creates a chain effect that collapses the dimensional pocket and destroys anything inside it, and the more magical hoohaa that gets destroyed, the bigger the boom. Big enough to destroyed a mythal, even.
While we were all bickering about this (you can imagine how my girl felt about the idea of putting a friend in a magic bag and making it blow) Nola walked up and said that if there was a chance of his actually being the mythal (and it was looking pretty likely) he was willing to sacrifice himself rather than suck the life out of the entire continent (and remember, this is someone who'd essentially only been awake for a day.) Of course, since we only had one bag we only had one shot at this, and it was still possible that one of the magic items was the mythal in disguise. Basically, they all had to go.
So to sum up, a party of PCs, all of whom had probably never seen a magic item in their lives, actually voted to destroy TWENTY-FIVE of them to save the world. Such is the genius of our DM, who excels at giving characters what they want and then brutally uses it against them. As you do.
We ended game with our bard, Nola and my character (because if this came down to one sword cut, my girl was going to make damn sure it was gonna be done right) teleporting out to the middle of nowhere to do the deed, not sure if they even going to survive the attempt.
Wah. Sad storyline is sad.
My Tuesday D&D game is a homebrewed, low-magic 3.5 game set in Faerun; magic exists, but spellcasting is extremely dangerous ever since the goddess of magic was killed along with virtually all of the other gods a little over fifty years ago (the climax of the previous installment of this game, which has been going on for years now and is on its third campaign set in this world.) This leg of the campaign has been going on for two or so years now, and in that time the DM has given us a total of two magic items. Two. No one has magic weapons, armor, none of that. Keep this in mind.
We were hired by a group of loggers to find out why the various things living in the forest were suddenly freaking out and attacking their town. In the course of the investigation (I almost got swallowed whole by a T-Rex!) we discovered that the source of the problem was a mythal constructed by a batshit crazy elf druid named Elementus, a recurring nemesis of the party (mythals are powerful magic items that produce area effects, big ones. Usually they're giant crystals or other similar things, especially the ones built by elves, but they don't have to be.)
Elementus is a walking example of why prophecy is a bad thing. We previously met him as a member of a cult built around a string of prophecy, the main one for Elementus being "The Elves will rise." He thought this meant that elves were destined to rise up and become the dominant race on Faerun, as they were thousands of years ago. What this actually meant was that the drow (evil elves, like Jarlaxe there) were going to rise up out of the Underdark and wage war on the surface, a war we only just narrowly won.
Of course, being a crazy person he refuses to believe he was wrong and is determined to force the prophecy to happen the "right" way. His scheme this time was to use the mythal to siphon off the life force of everyone in the area and then, when it was full, use that energy to reanimate the every dead elf in the forest, in essence creating an army of zombie elves under his command which would then overrun the continent and rule. As you do.
Obviously we weren't cool any of this and battle ensued. Through some good strategy and two incredibly lucky failed saving throws on his part we managed to turn him to stone, buying us some time (he claimed that if we killed him, the mythal would explode, which could conceivably destroy the entire country.) After that we ransacked his lab (Elementus' hobby is cloning, so there was a lot of creepy wrongness to be found) and there were some very interesting things, among them 1) 25 magic items and 2) Nola, an NPC very dear to the party.
Nola looks human but due to the wonky way magic works is actually an earth elemental who is the consciousness of the country, like Uncle Sam in DC Comics. Every word someone says, he hears, as long as they're touching the ground. He's also for all intents and purposes Batman; he has a huge library filled with files on everyone who lives in the city, including things like enemy lists and who the most likely suspects would be if a person were found murdered. We even call his library the Batcave. He'd also been missing since the war with the drow, so we were understandably thrilled to find him, my warblade especially (she would absolutely be maintaining his fan comm were LJ in this setting.)
In fact, my girl was happy enough that she ignored the first signs of problems, like how he'd lost his memories or how the only way he could block out the voices of everyone in the country was for our bard to play for him (the bard eventually had to cast Mind Blank on him to block out the outside voices.) Then while we were going through Elementus' evil notes of evil to try to find where he'd stashed the mythal one of the other party members came upon a ritual to basically sculpt a person out of the Earth Wonder Woman-style and bind an elemental spirit into it, which started prompting people to go, "Say, maybe this guy isn't really....." (which of course my girl was having none of.)
Since we didn't have any hard evidence one way or the other, we packed everything up and went back to the logging camp. We then separated into groups and started to 1) pore over Elementus' notes, 2) sort and identify the magic swag, and 3) guard duty. Out of character, we then spent about an hour rolling up the individual items, some of which were very, very nice. In character, guard duty group eventually noticed that while the attacks had stopped the residents of the town were starting to exhibit signs of the same sickness that we'd seen in the forest (as were we, BTW. It just takes longer for these sorts of things to progress when you have 10 hit dice as opposed to 1 like Generic Logger #3.) After confirming that the mythal had in fact moved and not just expanded, we were faced with the realization that we must have taken it with us.
That meant it was either one of the magic items, which were already being divvied up, or Nola the elemental. Now, the only way to destroy a mythal is with a big explosion (or implosion), much bigger than anything that can be produced with mundane explosives short of a nuke. Now, one of the items was a magic backpack that has extradimensional pockets (basically, it's bigger on the inside than the outside); one of the quirks of these things is that if it's cut open it creates a chain effect that collapses the dimensional pocket and destroys anything inside it, and the more magical hoohaa that gets destroyed, the bigger the boom. Big enough to destroyed a mythal, even.
While we were all bickering about this (you can imagine how my girl felt about the idea of putting a friend in a magic bag and making it blow) Nola walked up and said that if there was a chance of his actually being the mythal (and it was looking pretty likely) he was willing to sacrifice himself rather than suck the life out of the entire continent (and remember, this is someone who'd essentially only been awake for a day.) Of course, since we only had one bag we only had one shot at this, and it was still possible that one of the magic items was the mythal in disguise. Basically, they all had to go.
So to sum up, a party of PCs, all of whom had probably never seen a magic item in their lives, actually voted to destroy TWENTY-FIVE of them to save the world. Such is the genius of our DM, who excels at giving characters what they want and then brutally uses it against them. As you do.
We ended game with our bard, Nola and my character (because if this came down to one sword cut, my girl was going to make damn sure it was gonna be done right) teleporting out to the middle of nowhere to do the deed, not sure if they even going to survive the attempt.
Wah. Sad storyline is sad.