80s campaign - During a fight at the Amityville house, one of the clerics revealed her Spiritual Weapon, which turned out to be a disco ball that plays ABBA's Super Trouper. My monk spent the rest of the battle using dance moves to dodge attacks. Unfortunately the battle turned against us and even if we escape next session most of us are probably werewolves now.

Well my players managed to roll 3 nat 20's in a row and discover the Deck of Many things hidden behind multiple secret doors. 

I’m in a campaign called “Grand World”- a hunger games-esque world where contestants are brought in and race to find a chalice that grants a wish to the winner. Each player is on their own, and can team up or fight as they seen fit... if they find each other. Meanwhile the DM throws everything in the book at us to see who can survive. We’re on the 4th season of this- someone’s won once in 4 seasons. My character- Greg from Customer Service, survived season 3 and was given a 10000 platinum prize. He used all 10000 platinum to create a mobile customer service kiosk-“an elephant with a wagon”, and all the tools to help people as he travels around the game world in Season 4. What that means is enough poisons, weapons, guns, armor, and jewels to fund and arm a small army. 1st session of season 4, Greg gets in a fight with a ghost- and fails his save to not get possessed. Now there’s a vengeful ghost named “Karen” going around creating an undead coalition of vampires and specters, and she has the funds and weapons to deck them out head to toe. Greg, who’s only purpose is to help everyone else, has inadvertently become the BBEG with an undead army at his back, and there’s no one strong enough yet to stop him or Karen.  Truth be told though, had Karen just asked him to help her, he would have gone along with things anyway...

So my rogue (who has more family issues than National Geographic and a bounty on his head set by dear ol' dad) was recognized in a tavern by a pair of bounty hunters. As it happens, one of those bounty hunters had defeated our ranger, a large and angry gnoll, in the arena. Said ranger immediately leapt in front of me and shouted that if anyone wanted me, they had to go through him.

'And me!' Said the paladin.

'A-and me!' The sorcerer said. Meanwhile, the other rogue said nothing and the fighter kept looking at his cool new sword.

Lucky for me, they were only in it for the money and didn't care about getting me home, so we instead hired them as mercenaries to help us find the Lanthorn of Ilmater. The ranger fought one of them for a lower hiring fee, which he won. He was quite happy. I did keep an eye on possible escape routes, but they didn't try and haul me away, which was nice.

Oh, also we fought some trolls.

This week my players agreed to go cleanse a city’s graveyard of a ghoul infestation, and try to find the source.  I had planned for it to happen in three waves: the first night, they would fight 2-3 ghouls, but find no evidence.  The second night, they would fight a ghast, and find a spellbook written in Abyssal.  The third night, they would interrupt the caster who had been summoning the ghouls: an elderly kobold wizard trying to attract the favor of Orcus, demon prince of undeath.  During the days in between, I was going to do some foreshadowing and breadcrumbing, to start suggesting the ideas that will be central to the campaign.  I checked and rechecked my CR calculations, and eventually satisfied myself that what I had planned would be a reasonable challenge for my five lvl 2 players.

Dusk of the first night comes.  The party heads out, and arrives at the graveyard.  They see the ghouls, the ghouls see them; no surprise round.  The party is on the other side of the 70 ft battle map from the enemy.  The PCs annihilate the ghouls before they can get close enough to attack.

I had completely forgotten that ghouls have no ranged attacks!

So out of one of the mausoleums, where the first round of enemies came from, two more ghouls and one ghast emerge.  They, too, are cut down before they get into melee range.  The PCs haven’t even broken a sweat; the three casters have used nothing but cantrips, and the two melee characters haven’t been hit even once.  In desperation, I send another wave at them.  This time, the ghast gets close enough to the paladin to use its Stench and Paralysis attacks.  Pally fails both his saves and goes down.

I thought the battle was finally turning.  I was wrong.  The party kills the remaining enemies without receiving so much as a scratch.  They still haven’t used any resources.  In a last-ditch effort, I decide to throw the kobold wizard at them.  Kobold rolls a nine to hide, and the lowest PP in the party is eleven; they spot him right off the bat.  He hits two of them with Tasha’s Caustic Brew and makes a dash for the sewer grate behind the graveyard’s chapel, but fails his acrobatics check and gets stuck in it.  Paladin makes both saves and is free to get up again.

Kobold wizard fails another acrobatics check, and the party catches up to him.  They tie him to the grate, pull the grate out of the wall (paladin rolled REALLY high on the required strength check), and carry it and him back into the city for questioning.

In all, my five lvl 2 players killed six ghouls (CR 1), two ghasts (CR 2), and defeated a CR 2 wizard, in less than one hour of in-game time.  I can’t imagine why it didn’t occur to me to bring the successive waves of enemies out of a closer mausoleum.  And I can’t figure out how to do my breadcrumbing and foreshadowing now.  At least they got lots of experience!

** Spoiler alert for Curse of Strahd **

Almost a TPK. 3 level 6 characters took on a medusa (CR6), but some terrible rolls for the party and a couple of crits for the medusa and we were shredded. The barbarian got cut down, the cleric got petrified and my warlock was alone on 5hp with no spell slots. I did the only thing I could, surrender. Bludgeoned unconscious and dragged off to the cells, the DM now has to figure out how he builds an escape story or an execution if he prefers. 

So my parties lvl 8 fighter decided to solo an Ancient Blue Dragon, it went about as well as you'd expect. Amazingly she survived thanks to the rest of the party literally dragging her away. The party then levelled up at the end of the session and the fighter took a level in Barb. The ranger said "It's a good thing you took a level in barb, it'll help you tank all the damage you'll be taking whilst we repeatedly slap some sense into you".

My character almost died, and is now depressed and terrified that they almost failed their god.

They are a 3rd level wild magic sorcerer aasimar. 

Before I tell the actual story, here's some background. If you want to skip it, scroll down to the bolded text.

So, a long time ago, I had this really, really stupid idea: a D&D character who was an old-west style Snake Oil Salesman. And the more I thought about this concept, the more I thought "Why stop there? Why not try to do a whole Western-themed D&D setting?" Okay, there's a painfully obvious answer here. In fact, there's several. D&D isn't built for that, there's other Western-themed systems, guns are only even close to balanced in small doses, how do you do armor, there's a whole bunch of homebrew you have to do, and so on. But I was determined. And thus was born Wyvern Gulch, a territory of the nation of North Zherilia in the land of Alemel (if you've heard me use that name before, that's because this setting takes place a couple centuries after my main campaign and in a different part of the world). I decided to use this world to craft a one-shot, combining many of the players from my main campaign with a few new players. 

TL;DR: One-shot go yee-haw + way too much homebrew

The Ballad of Wyvern Gulch: 
Dramatis Personae: 
Romero Sharpe: Changeling Fighter (Gunslinger): A criminal on the run from the gang he was once involved with. Currently disguised as a human man. 
Morora: Half-Elf Warlock (Pact of the Celestial): The daughter of a wood-elf man and a human seamstress. She herself is a seamstress who was saved by an angel of Lyren, the Sun King, and now serves him. 
Lucas: Human Ranger (forgot his subclass): A former soldier who left his unit after being given an order he could not in good conscience follow
Jason Kyle: Fire Genasi Fighter (Arcane Archer): A bounty hunter. That's about it. 
Silent Fang: Tabaxi Rogue (Assassin): Raised by a roving band of goblins, she is a feared assassin in town to murder and rob Dwarven railroad tycoon Adrian Vabsley
Sil Clawtooth: Tabaxi Bard (forgot her subclass): I... don't know really know what her deal is. Her player sent me her character at the last minute. 
Tringurg: Half-Orc Barbarian/Druid (Yes, I'm a terrible DM, I forgot his subclass too): A hunter who's obsessed with bears. 
Arthur "Orc" Morgan: Orc Fighter (Gunslinger)/Ranger: Literally just Arthur Morgan but an orc. Normally I would have pushed his player to do something more creative, but I decided to just drop it and move on. 
Me: The Dungeon Master. After a campaign that had run for about a year, has finally figured out what the hell they're doing. Also, unbeknownst to the players, is secretly using this one-shot as a backdoor pilot to end their current campaign and start a new one. Let’s begin!

Our story begins in the town of Phantom’s Pass, in the Silver Bullet Saloon. Arthur tells his backstory to anyone who will listen, but passes out drunk before he can finish. Lucas does the same, and passes out drunk on top of Arthur. Silent Fang approaches the bar to ask the barkeep, a dwarf named Maynard Truman, if there is anyone particularly wealthy in town. Maynard tells her about railroad tycoon Adrian Vabsley, as well as Emmitt Finnerty, the town’s banker, who left town late last night on an unexpected business trip with his assistant, Obidiah Moore. 

Romero looks around the room and sees Jason. Jason wears a metal mask in front of his flaming face, an image bearing a striking resemblance to the emblem of Romero’s old gang, the Hellfire Angels. Panicked, Romero attempts to leave the saloon stealthily and go to check on his horse, shapeshifting as he exits. Jason notices him, but pays him no mind, although he decides to check on his horse independently. When the two reach the stables, they notice that two of the horses (not theirs) are dead. Also, Romero realizes that Jason has nothing to do with the Hellfire Angels, that's just his face. Eventually, the rest of the group finds out as well, and once they sober up, they learn from Preston Hawdon, the town’s sheriff, that a conman named Dr. Thomas McLean passed through town selling bogus potions and fake magic items. He fled this morning for unknown reasons and is believed to have been behind the horses’ deaths. 

As the party (minus Morora, whose player was not yet present and who thus entered later) travels North, they detect the early signs of a coming Flaywind, and seek shelter in a nearby cave. Inside, Arthur and Romero feel the need to urinate at about the same time, so they both go to the back of the cave, where they find a small trail of blood. Romero follows it until he finds a corpse that the party recognizes as Finnerty, who has been stabbed in the front of his chest repeatedly, a bloody knife lying near him. 

The party follows McLean’s trail until they reached his wagon, which had broken down after hitting a rock. The townsfolk are in the process of taking the gold back to town to be returned to its owners. It seems that the horse ran off in one direction and McLean in another. After a lengthy debate, the party decides to follow the horse’s tracks. They find the horse. Tringurg communicates with the horse and learns that McLean did in fact run off the other way. 

The party follows McLean’s trail to a cave system. After avoiding a cave full of bats and finding a waterproof Wand of Magic Missile (which they refuse to call anything except the Wand of Never Wet), the party finds the cave where McLean once was, although he seems to be long gone. They pick up his scent and follow it to a series of rocks. There, they find his body, gun drawn, shot in the chest with a bullet that does not seem to match his weapon. 

The party returns to town and receives their reward, at which point they meet Morora. After participating in what essentially amounts to a carnival shooting gallery, the party comes face to face with Herschel Gibb, the most infamous outlaw in Wyvern Gulch. Gibb’s gang rides into town requesting a man named Luther Collins, a name no one in town seems to recognize. They leave, saying they will return in three days. The party is divided over whether to wait or pursue. Jason, Romero, and Tringurg chase after Gibb while the others remain. They kill a werewolf who turns out to be Clive Chapman, the co-owner of the saloon, knock out a woman who turns out to have been his business partner, Millie Galway, coming to save him, and after realizing their mistake, send them back to town on a horse, where Morora brings Clive back to life and force-feeds him a potion on Millie’s person that quells his symptoms. 

And that’s when we ran out of time. 

Initially, my plan was to pick up where we left off with a part two, but ultimately I decided that I had enough information. I started talking to my players individually about whether they wanted to continue with Starkarrow or start a new campaign in Wyvern Gulch. Results were mixed, but with a slight lean toward change. So I formally ended the new campaign, and my session zero for Wyvern Gulch is on the 27th. This will be a new campaign unconnected to the one-shot beyond being set in Phantom’s Pass (players were allowed to keep their characters, but with the assumption that these were different versions of the same character, not the exact same person). Based on the one-shot, I am excited for this new campaign, and I look forward to telling you all about it.

To be fair, I think that if you balance the dosage of fantasy with wild west tropes it could work wonderfully. Kinda like how someone compare the wolverine movie to a late-era western despite it not really having any of the usual western gimmicks. The frontier feel can be captured quite well. I do agree with the gun thing though (at least when you get past handguns and musket-level technology). I've more or less balanced them by making some enemies have a very high AC and resistance to piercing if I think they can be utterly gimmicked by them. Usually works.  
Sounds fun all the same though.

It was a lot of fun. There were definitely some balance issues, but I always knew that was going to be a work in progress. Thanks for the tips

My players caused a city-wide riot this week!

They were entering the city from the south, through the worst, most poverty-stricken part of town.  I described it: overcrowded, muddy, noisy, etc., ending with, “As they spot you, numerous beggars and children come up, each trying to prove themselves in the most desperate need of your charity.”  I figured the PCs would do something like give one gold piece to each person, and that would be that.  That’s not quite what happened.

The monster hunter, before anyone else even opened their mouths, declared, “I take fifteen gp and toss it out on the ground!”  He gestured, using a wide sweep of his arms to illustrate the wide area he wanted to throw the coins over.  I’m sure you can guess what happened next.

Everyone within several hundred yards of the party saw this, and began stampeding towards the rain of money.  Everybody rolled acrobatics checks; two PCs (including the monster hunter) managed to jump up onto the wagons they were supposed to be escorting through the city, but the other three were trampled down into the mud, taking bludgeoning damage.  I let them know that there was no room to move themselves, much less the caravan.  Then they started talking about trying to scare the crowd away!

The wizard asked if she could use Minor Illusion to make an image of a lion to scare them away!  The other party members had some objections to this, but since she and two of her companions were being actively trampled, she went ahead and rolled a perception check.  She got a four, and I ruled that she couldn’t see a space large enough to put a lion image where there wouldn’t be anyone standing in the illusion.  She then asked me what would happen if the church bells rang, and I told her that the commoners would probably assume they were signaling the early start of a festival I had planned for tomorrow, which includes free food and drink.  She thus cast the illusion of ringing church bells.

I didn’t bother rolling perception or insight for the crowd, because I didn’t want to punish my players too much for trying to be charitable!  We had all had a good laugh, and I decided it was time for the hungry peasants to head to the church.  The party got up, brushed off their clothes as best they could, and finished escorting the caravan to the inn on the other side of town.  I think they’ll be a little more careful about throwing their wealth around from now on!

And, I’m proud to add, they donated generously to the temple where the peasants had gone, to provide for all the hungry people that had been tricked into going there!

Currently running Out of the Abyss, but it's slowly turned more and more into homebrew while following the general storyline.

One of my players (player 1) made a deal with a devil to save the party, and is now essentially an evil cleric (wanted to keep cleric stuff instead of switching to Warlock so I let him). The character that his grew up with is a Paladin (player 2) and is obviously having issues with his best friends sudden change. Creating a little bit of party tension is a nice distraction while I hit them with a big threat to get them to put aside their differences while they band together again.

In my last session a player joined with his new character (player 3), a tiefling warrior directly serving player 1's Devil. This added a whole new dynamic to the party, now there is this small faction within the party still working towards the partys goals but is also trying to get the rest of the party to sell their souls.

My first ever PC that I got to play in a campaign just died on the final session, so it's canon now, and he won't be getting revived.

In an attempt to sneak our ranger's pet owlbear out of the inn we were staying in (don't ask), I sent my Eladrin sorceress' familiar  (an owl) to distract the innkeeper. He hit it with a broom "killing" it. She decided to play a prank on the innkeeper and burst into fake tears saying that he had killed her pet. The other members of the party don't know that her owl isn't really an owl so when the Artificer found out about it, he became very indignant and berated the innkeeper. This went on for a bit with the innkeeper becoming very distressed. My character excused herself to grieve (actually to cast Find Familiar). The artificer, ranger and the NPC barbarian decided to get her a replacement bird. The barbarian thought it should be a goose because they are "smarter" than owls.  Long story short, they went on a wild goose chase and presented a very pissed off bird to my sorceress when they returned. Also the innkeeper felt so bad that he gave us the keys to his inn by way of an apology so we now own two inns in Icewind Dale.

Quote from Nikoli_Goodfellow_King_Of_Random >>

My first ever PC that I got to play in a campaign just died on the final session, so it's canon now, and he won't be getting revived.

 Ouch, that stinks. First PC is always special :( RIP them.

We're playing hoard of the Dragon Queen and we've entered the cultists camp to stage a rescue. Our four man band have each taken a role in the camp to infiltrate and learn. Our ranger is scouting and bringing in food for the camp. Our druid and fighter (me) are on guard duty. Our priest is preparing food.

After learning where the prisoners are all located and that our major foes (4 of them) are all located in the command tent we come up with a plan. Our ranger finds poisonous berries outside the camp, our druid slips the prisoners goodberry's for strength, and our storm cleric prepares the evening meal using the tainted berries (scoring a nat 20 on preparing it so it smells delicious).

Our druid is wildshapped on the tent and waits to see chaos unfold. Three of the four bosses pass the constitution check but the fourth fails bad and is completely out of it as is the majority of the camp. The cleric releases the prisoners while the fighter distracts the bosses with a tale of the camp under some kind of attack. The druid sneaks into the command tent with the party's bag of holding and using detect magic to go loot crazy and rolls a nat 20 on perception (much to our DM's frustration) and the DM spends the next 15 minutes trying to find us loot that won't break the campaign. The druid slips out the back with loot in bag and meets up with the priest who is killing the two guards who passed the Con check on the side he's sneaking prisoners out of. They make quick work out of the guards and we escape without the bosses knowing what hit them.

So I introduced one of my characters to their Aunt, who I called Auntie Agnes. The Aunt was just a filler character to fill out their home, however the player of said character keeps making insight checks against the Aunt. He is convinced that 'Auntie Agnes' is actually a hag because "Hags always call themselves auntie". Agnes is not a hag, I have no plans to make her a hag, but he keeps making rolls to try make his character work out that this sweet Aunt his character has known most of his life, is actually some kind of child devouring monster whose used enchantment magic to infiltrate his family.

Now he and the rest of the party are preparing a trap to capture the Aunt and banish her to the Feywild, which will make an interesting next session. So yeah, this is a lesson in not metagaming kids.

our regular party of 6 was cut to 5 - my zealot barbarian (Tusk), a drunken monk/trickster cleric (Woof), a conjuration wizard that has one level of cleric (Dante), Oathbreaker/hexblade (Sully), and armorer artificer (Koffnic), all level 16 (the missing party member is a shadow sorcerer, Tone). 

the land we're in is cursed in such a way that a single 24 hour period actually lasts 5 days, and at dawn of each day almost everyone forgets what happened the day before. we're on our way to check out a lake that is inhabited by a giant serpent - we're unsure whether we're killing it or asking it for a favor at the moment, but we'll figure that out when we get there. we ran into three knights (red, green, and blue) on the road, all riding Nightmares. we've run into them before and while they didn't start a fight, they were definitely aggressive and got into our wizard's face. we step off the road to let them pass and as they do, Woof, our resident smart aleck, asks his sentient nunchucks (out loud) if we could kick their @$$es hard enough they wouldn't forget about it in the morning.

The knights turn around, and the red one approaches Woof, asking "what was that?"

Woof asks if he's deaf, then leans in close and yells, "WHAT'S YOUR WALKING SPEED?" and takes off down the path. 

i should take a moment to explain that our DM has been awesome dealing with the ever increasing difficulty of finding and creating encounters hard enough for us, which is typical at level 16. he's constantly homebrewing things to throw at us. these knights were not at all what we were expecting. our wizard has two levels of exhaustion, but otherwise we're at full power resource-wise and thought we'd be fine.

Woof gets 30 feet away before triggering an opportunity attack, as this knight's sword turns into a whip with a 30 ft reach. Woof gets hit hard, and then fails a con save and is magically aged 21 years (he was in his 50s). the fight went downhill from there.

long story short, killing the nightmares strengthens the paired knight. each knight has the ability to force a con save once per turn to age and 3 of us have failed it now. we've killed all the nightmares and eventually killed the two knights in the same turn of initiative. we're all bloodied or worse, some of us significantly older than when we started this fight, and now very short on resources. as the head comes off the second knight we all turn to face the remaining one that Sully was trying to face off with by himself. except the..."essence" of the two dead knights in the form of colored smoke flow towards the remaining knight. he is now huge, his weapon is a combination of the red knight's longsword/whip, blue knight's great axe, and green knight's lance, he looks mightily pissed off, and to put the icing on the cake, he has white hot flames spouting from his armor that will likely hurt anyone within melee range.

the fight continues tomorrow night. my zealot barbarian might have a chance to use his rage beyond death feature for the first time, which is both exciting and scary.