Hello everyone. I want to hear about your best non-combat encounter. Whether that be a strange merchant, puzzle, or anything else. Hit me with it!
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Velstitzen
I am a 40 something year old physician who DMs for a group of 40 something year old doctors. We play a hybrid game, mostly based on 2nd edition rules with some homebrew and 5E components.
My fiancee was playing a solo campaign that I DMed.
She was searching for a place for the merchant caravan she was guarding to weather a storm, and found a huge slab of rock propped up, with a sheltered space below. She approached, and saw a glow.
What she found was a huge, broad tree which was covered in candles and pieces of ribbon. There she met a Tortle Tea-Trader, who explained that it was a wishing tree. She told her to go into the cave below the rock and to offer something for a candle and some ribbon. I asked her to describe the candle that would call her character - the cave was full of them - and she described a large purple candle. She offered an Elemental Gem, and then wrote down a wish on the ribbon, tied it to the tree, and then lit the candle.
She then went to find the caravan and tell them of the place. They followed her back, and when she got there, the tree was old and long-dead, the space a little damp, and the cave and tortle were gone.
She didn't know that she had wandered into the Feywild, and in the end, her wish came true - she wished for a Natures Mantle, and one was found in her luggage not long after.
She still hates that she never managed to buy any tea, which would have had all sorts of effects!
Best social encounter: Magical candy shop. My players spent like 90 real-world minutes in there, taste-testing the flavors and playing with the shopkeep's blink dog.
Best puzzle: Party winds up in a locked room in a secure wing of a temple they infiltrated. A 9-square grid appears on the floor. The room is flanked by 9 doors (4 left, 1 center, 4 right). Each door has a different phase of the moon engraved on it, and three riddles on the walls give clues on how to solve the grid, which turns out to be a numeric logic puzzle. To solve the puzzle and escape the room, the party must walk through the correct sequence of doors, prompted by the grid. Wrong answers lead to damage and give the temple authorities time to find and subdue them. My players had a blast.
Best merchant: An immortal, planeswalking alchemist who offers bespoke and extremely powerful potions, but only accepts abstract methods of payment that end up being Faustian in nature. My players paid with things like a moment of their time (got sucked out of combat for one round at the alchemist's whim for a pleasant chat), a kind word (a Sanctuary spell on a creature of the alchemist's choosing), and their perspective (permanent loss of sight except darkvision granted by their lycanthropy...that was an extreme payment, but the potion was also equivalent to a Wish spell's permanent buff at level 10, so it had to be a steep price). My players never really knew how the alchemist would interpret their payment, and the potion effects were always better than they anticipated, so it was a bunch of fun surprises all around.
I am a 40 something year old physician who DMs for a group of 40 something year old doctors. We play a hybrid game, mostly based on 2nd edition rules with some homebrew and 5E components.
For me, my favorite was a code that my player's got off a lieutenant's body. I had just read a book on cryptography and wanted use a code, but knew it had to be pretty easy. Not a Roman cypher, even easier. So I used a scytale. The lieutenant had a message from the boss on a 5' long skinny strip of leather (printer paper cut into long strips and taped together). The paper had letters written all over it in a line in multiple, somewhat repeating colors. There was a hole on one end in the center.
They puzzled over this for a long time and couldn't come up with the answer. They tried every second letter, every 5th letter, all the blue letters, etc. After 30 minutes, they had decided to cut it into pieces and rearrange it (I had intentionally put some easily descrambled words in the gibberish part of the code) when I had to give them a hint. They searched the guys things again and found a 5 ' staff with a metal hook on one end. (I then produced a thin cardboard tube from gift wrap paper). Coiling the message around the tube with the hook through the hole lined up several words while the gibberish was not in a straight line and obviously extraneous. The message: "Woman dead. Attack at midsummer. Meet me downriver. I have boat."
This was rather cryptic but meant that the main NPC, a local wealthy woman, had already been killed. In fact, the main bad guy had taken up living at her house, disguised as her. His cronies, disguised as the noblewoman's new, beefy gardeners, were to meet up with the lieutenant and his men to attack a caravan transporting a newly mined, very valuable ore down river. Midsummer was only a couple of days away. They would then transport it downriver themselves and sell it at the larger town at the mouth of the river. There multiple hints beforehand about some of this and the main mission was to protect the caravan.
I think this was a very memorable moment for all of us.
I am a 40 something year old physician who DMs for a group of 40 something year old doctors. We play a hybrid game, mostly based on 2nd edition rules with some homebrew and 5E components.
Hm - there was a Goundhog Day-esque encounter. A grand masque, which would eventually devolve into mindless slaughter, and no one knew why. So every time someone died, the encounter would reset.
The mechanic behind it was relatively simple: There was a demon present, and it would possess the first character that rose above a certain threshold (and failed a save to resist). So, the ball was rife with rumor, and all the guests were scheeming backstabbers. So, essentially, the demon was actively spreading lies (a Jedi Mindtrick kinda deal, it could make Suggestions while non-manifest) in order to raise fear and suspicion, and once someone was fearful and suspicious enough, it could try to possess them.
So the encounter was to watch out for this pattern, identify the worst gossippers, and somehow avert the crisis, finding a way to keep them below the threshold.
Turns out the best way to do this was lure them into a backroom, and just knock them out. The GM expected us to use social skills, persuasion, reason and common sense. But it was just to much easier to get them away from everyone else, and either bonk them on the head, or use a sleep spell (they weren't levelled characters, just rich civilians).
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Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
Curious what people put in there - love the ones shared.
Last session I had a magical locked door with a scroll. Scroll was physical yellow paper with a printed "dance" on it. I crumpled it up several times, burned the edges and wrapped into a scroll and tied with twine. They were amazed when I handed it to them. Upon opening, inside is images from the "dancing dragon" sequence from Avatar, the last airbender. A couple players instantly recognized the dance. Two players had to get up and perform the dance in a circle around the game table. First couple attempts were lame and the door didn't open.
One of my favorites was from an old campaign, it was a series of encounters actually, but the first one, this flamboyantly dressed gnome named Umtix Hagglepoggle appeared out of no where. It turned out that he was an interdimensional traveling salesman that hopped from world to world selling wares from other planes. What made it funny is that the DM always managed to make him pop in at the funniest, most inconvenient times and we barely ever got to trade with him. We would be in the middle of a battle and he would appear and be like "Greetings stalwart adventurers I have some amazing new...oh my, is that a beholder you are fighting?? Uhhh, never mind, bye!" It was hilarious. (I know I'm probably not explaining it well, but the DM was very good at picking the timing that it was hilarious). I am thinking about having Umtix Hagglepoggle make a cameo appearance in my current campaign as an homage to that old campaign.
I like Umtix Hagglepoggle. I don't know if I have enough pizazz to pull that one off though.
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Velstitzen
I am a 40 something year old physician who DMs for a group of 40 something year old doctors. We play a hybrid game, mostly based on 2nd edition rules with some homebrew and 5E components.
I like Umtix Hagglepoggle. I don't know if I have enough pizazz to pull that one off though.
Lol, he was quite the character, think Gilmore from Vox Machina meets Ron Popeil, all done with a bad Irish accent, lol
Sounds hilarious
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“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbithole, and that means comfort.”
Can you give the details of the puzzle? Such as what were the riddles?
"Give what you take." "The natural order." "Truth and reason in all."
First riddle hints that the key to solving the puzzle is selecting a number for the middle of a given row/diagonal that leads to the same answer if you add or subtract the numbers flanking it. (9 - X = 3, 3 + X = 9, so X must be 6). A few numbers were already populated when they encountered the puzzle, so they had a starting point for guessing.
Second riddle refers to the phases of the moon depicted on the doors. None of the doors were actually numbered and all of the phases were mixed up, so the party had to match the symbol to the number they needed. "Natural order" is a clue that the final grid on the floor puzzle should depict the lunar cycle in order.
The third riddle was a clue about which symbol/number should be in the center of the 9-square grid. The lunar cycle symbols formed a circle starting from the bottom left square and going clockwise - and the center square was the odd one out. The temple they were breaking into was that of the god of truth and reason, and his symbol was a lunar eclipse. A quick religion check helped the party remember that fact and understand how to finish the puzzle..."truth and reason" was in the midst of all the other symbols.
My players loved this so much that one of them stole it and adapted it for his own campaign. I later used this puzzle (slightly simplified) with a group of college students who had never played D&D before, and they loved it, too.
I recently had my party encounter a group of Kenku Refugees in the wilderness. The Kenku were clearly no match for the party's level (3 lvl 6) but the encounter started as a desparate ambush attempt with one hooded Kenku crying for help then threatening the Party on the road an the rest fo them hiding nearby. My players have a habit of attempting to talk first, so the Paladin talked to them and realized with insight, that the imitated phrases of the kenku indicated experiences in a life of crime in a larger city (cries for help, threats, demanding valuables). I had more kenku approach out of hiding, especially some more curious and playful ones imitating sounds and phrases the party had made so far, like the sound of chainmail or questions and a greeting phrase they used.
As My players kept interacting and offering food and water it became more and more obvious, that these Kenku are on the run because they entered service within a criminal organization in some big City, possibly being taken advantage of with their skillset sometimes, and that these Kenku overheard the wrong thing at the wrong time, making them witnesses in some sort of political intrigue and forcing them to run. My Players gave them a phrase to introduce themselves and ask for the way in the nearby town, and sent them with directions to a local kobold's hoarder-tinker-crafting shop to offer their help. The possible alternatives for a kenku skillset were a forge, a tailor, a smuggler's guild trying to help the people repressed by the town master or maybe some musical entertainment in one of the taverns.
The Kenku used "Lord", "Madame", "Lady" or "Mister" as their Name-Titles and were able to not only talk in "gruff Thieves Guild and urchin street talk", but clichee "posh pretentious aristocrat attending a soiree or a ball" as well. The Paladin's Player found it especially funny, that a (small) Kenku called him (medium) human "hey little guy, are you looking for some work?" lacking the proper phrase to express that they themselves were looking for work and refuge.
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Hello everyone. I want to hear about your best non-combat encounter. Whether that be a strange merchant, puzzle, or anything else. Hit me with it!
Velstitzen
I am a 40 something year old physician who DMs for a group of 40 something year old doctors. We play a hybrid game, mostly based on 2nd edition rules with some homebrew and 5E components.
My fiancee was playing a solo campaign that I DMed.
She was searching for a place for the merchant caravan she was guarding to weather a storm, and found a huge slab of rock propped up, with a sheltered space below. She approached, and saw a glow.
What she found was a huge, broad tree which was covered in candles and pieces of ribbon. There she met a Tortle Tea-Trader, who explained that it was a wishing tree. She told her to go into the cave below the rock and to offer something for a candle and some ribbon. I asked her to describe the candle that would call her character - the cave was full of them - and she described a large purple candle. She offered an Elemental Gem, and then wrote down a wish on the ribbon, tied it to the tree, and then lit the candle.
She then went to find the caravan and tell them of the place. They followed her back, and when she got there, the tree was old and long-dead, the space a little damp, and the cave and tortle were gone.
She didn't know that she had wandered into the Feywild, and in the end, her wish came true - she wished for a Natures Mantle, and one was found in her luggage not long after.
She still hates that she never managed to buy any tea, which would have had all sorts of effects!
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Best social encounter: Magical candy shop. My players spent like 90 real-world minutes in there, taste-testing the flavors and playing with the shopkeep's blink dog.
Best puzzle: Party winds up in a locked room in a secure wing of a temple they infiltrated. A 9-square grid appears on the floor. The room is flanked by 9 doors (4 left, 1 center, 4 right). Each door has a different phase of the moon engraved on it, and three riddles on the walls give clues on how to solve the grid, which turns out to be a numeric logic puzzle. To solve the puzzle and escape the room, the party must walk through the correct sequence of doors, prompted by the grid. Wrong answers lead to damage and give the temple authorities time to find and subdue them. My players had a blast.
Best merchant: An immortal, planeswalking alchemist who offers bespoke and extremely powerful potions, but only accepts abstract methods of payment that end up being Faustian in nature. My players paid with things like a moment of their time (got sucked out of combat for one round at the alchemist's whim for a pleasant chat), a kind word (a Sanctuary spell on a creature of the alchemist's choosing), and their perspective (permanent loss of sight except darkvision granted by their lycanthropy...that was an extreme payment, but the potion was also equivalent to a Wish spell's permanent buff at level 10, so it had to be a steep price). My players never really knew how the alchemist would interpret their payment, and the potion effects were always better than they anticipated, so it was a bunch of fun surprises all around.
Can you give the details of the puzzle? Such as what were the riddles?
Velstitzen
I am a 40 something year old physician who DMs for a group of 40 something year old doctors. We play a hybrid game, mostly based on 2nd edition rules with some homebrew and 5E components.
For me, my favorite was a code that my player's got off a lieutenant's body. I had just read a book on cryptography and wanted use a code, but knew it had to be pretty easy. Not a Roman cypher, even easier. So I used a scytale. The lieutenant had a message from the boss on a 5' long skinny strip of leather (printer paper cut into long strips and taped together). The paper had letters written all over it in a line in multiple, somewhat repeating colors. There was a hole on one end in the center.
They puzzled over this for a long time and couldn't come up with the answer. They tried every second letter, every 5th letter, all the blue letters, etc. After 30 minutes, they had decided to cut it into pieces and rearrange it (I had intentionally put some easily descrambled words in the gibberish part of the code) when I had to give them a hint. They searched the guys things again and found a 5 ' staff with a metal hook on one end. (I then produced a thin cardboard tube from gift wrap paper). Coiling the message around the tube with the hook through the hole lined up several words while the gibberish was not in a straight line and obviously extraneous. The message: "Woman dead. Attack at midsummer. Meet me downriver. I have boat."
This was rather cryptic but meant that the main NPC, a local wealthy woman, had already been killed. In fact, the main bad guy had taken up living at her house, disguised as her. His cronies, disguised as the noblewoman's new, beefy gardeners, were to meet up with the lieutenant and his men to attack a caravan transporting a newly mined, very valuable ore down river. Midsummer was only a couple of days away. They would then transport it downriver themselves and sell it at the larger town at the mouth of the river. There multiple hints beforehand about some of this and the main mission was to protect the caravan.
I think this was a very memorable moment for all of us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scytale
Velstitzen
I am a 40 something year old physician who DMs for a group of 40 something year old doctors. We play a hybrid game, mostly based on 2nd edition rules with some homebrew and 5E components.
Hm - there was a Goundhog Day-esque encounter. A grand masque, which would eventually devolve into mindless slaughter, and no one knew why. So every time someone died, the encounter would reset.
The mechanic behind it was relatively simple: There was a demon present, and it would possess the first character that rose above a certain threshold (and failed a save to resist). So, the ball was rife with rumor, and all the guests were scheeming backstabbers. So, essentially, the demon was actively spreading lies (a Jedi Mindtrick kinda deal, it could make Suggestions while non-manifest) in order to raise fear and suspicion, and once someone was fearful and suspicious enough, it could try to possess them.
So the encounter was to watch out for this pattern, identify the worst gossippers, and somehow avert the crisis, finding a way to keep them below the threshold.
Turns out the best way to do this was lure them into a backroom, and just knock them out. The GM expected us to use social skills, persuasion, reason and common sense. But it was just to much easier to get them away from everyone else, and either bonk them on the head, or use a sleep spell (they weren't levelled characters, just rich civilians).
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
Curious what people put in there - love the ones shared.
Last session I had a magical locked door with a scroll. Scroll was physical yellow paper with a printed "dance" on it. I crumpled it up several times, burned the edges and wrapped into a scroll and tied with twine. They were amazed when I handed it to them. Upon opening, inside is images from the "dancing dragon" sequence from Avatar, the last airbender. A couple players instantly recognized the dance. Two players had to get up and perform the dance in a circle around the game table. First couple attempts were lame and the door didn't open.
It was the highlight of the session.
One of my favorites was from an old campaign, it was a series of encounters actually, but the first one, this flamboyantly dressed gnome named Umtix Hagglepoggle appeared out of no where. It turned out that he was an interdimensional traveling salesman that hopped from world to world selling wares from other planes. What made it funny is that the DM always managed to make him pop in at the funniest, most inconvenient times and we barely ever got to trade with him. We would be in the middle of a battle and he would appear and be like "Greetings stalwart adventurers I have some amazing new...oh my, is that a beholder you are fighting?? Uhhh, never mind, bye!" It was hilarious. (I know I'm probably not explaining it well, but the DM was very good at picking the timing that it was hilarious). I am thinking about having Umtix Hagglepoggle make a cameo appearance in my current campaign as an homage to that old campaign.
I like Umtix Hagglepoggle. I don't know if I have enough pizazz to pull that one off though.
Velstitzen
I am a 40 something year old physician who DMs for a group of 40 something year old doctors. We play a hybrid game, mostly based on 2nd edition rules with some homebrew and 5E components.
Lol, he was quite the character, think Gilmore from Vox Machina meets Ron Popeil, all done with a bad Irish accent, lol
Sounds hilarious
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbithole, and that means comfort.”
"Give what you take."
"The natural order."
"Truth and reason in all."
First riddle hints that the key to solving the puzzle is selecting a number for the middle of a given row/diagonal that leads to the same answer if you add or subtract the numbers flanking it. (9 - X = 3, 3 + X = 9, so X must be 6). A few numbers were already populated when they encountered the puzzle, so they had a starting point for guessing.
Second riddle refers to the phases of the moon depicted on the doors. None of the doors were actually numbered and all of the phases were mixed up, so the party had to match the symbol to the number they needed. "Natural order" is a clue that the final grid on the floor puzzle should depict the lunar cycle in order.
The third riddle was a clue about which symbol/number should be in the center of the 9-square grid. The lunar cycle symbols formed a circle starting from the bottom left square and going clockwise - and the center square was the odd one out. The temple they were breaking into was that of the god of truth and reason, and his symbol was a lunar eclipse. A quick religion check helped the party remember that fact and understand how to finish the puzzle..."truth and reason" was in the midst of all the other symbols.
My players loved this so much that one of them stole it and adapted it for his own campaign. I later used this puzzle (slightly simplified) with a group of college students who had never played D&D before, and they loved it, too.
I recently had my party encounter a group of Kenku Refugees in the wilderness. The Kenku were clearly no match for the party's level (3 lvl 6) but the encounter started as a desparate ambush attempt with one hooded Kenku crying for help then threatening the Party on the road an the rest fo them hiding nearby. My players have a habit of attempting to talk first, so the Paladin talked to them and realized with insight, that the imitated phrases of the kenku indicated experiences in a life of crime in a larger city (cries for help, threats, demanding valuables). I had more kenku approach out of hiding, especially some more curious and playful ones imitating sounds and phrases the party had made so far, like the sound of chainmail or questions and a greeting phrase they used.
As My players kept interacting and offering food and water it became more and more obvious, that these Kenku are on the run because they entered service within a criminal organization in some big City, possibly being taken advantage of with their skillset sometimes, and that these Kenku overheard the wrong thing at the wrong time, making them witnesses in some sort of political intrigue and forcing them to run. My Players gave them a phrase to introduce themselves and ask for the way in the nearby town, and sent them with directions to a local kobold's hoarder-tinker-crafting shop to offer their help. The possible alternatives for a kenku skillset were a forge, a tailor, a smuggler's guild trying to help the people repressed by the town master or maybe some musical entertainment in one of the taverns.
The Kenku used "Lord", "Madame", "Lady" or "Mister" as their Name-Titles and were able to not only talk in "gruff Thieves Guild and urchin street talk", but clichee "posh pretentious aristocrat attending a soiree or a ball" as well. The Paladin's Player found it especially funny, that a (small) Kenku called him (medium) human "hey little guy, are you looking for some work?" lacking the proper phrase to express that they themselves were looking for work and refuge.