Funny situations in the Realm of Dread (Possibly Spoilers)

[Chris]

Well, i had a vision... it ist time to animate a thread for the funny stiuations of your ravenloft groups.

And it is up to me to make the first move:

When I DMed "Hour of the Knive" my players got the list of the persons who could be jack.

Then one player made a joke and said: "Lets think in Stereotypes, look for the names who sond most german..."
And so they narrowed Dr. Wolfgang Aturus and the Earl von Beeren....
Afterwards the Player said: These are only the Pawns, Lord Endmund Bloodsworth must be the main Villan, his name is to obvious.....

Well, Aturus was an evil Wolfwere and most dms in this forum know about Lord Bloodsworth...

The Players joked the whole module about this theory, and well, it went worst when their charakters found out that the joke went true.

My players still try to solve every ravenloft module due stereotype-divination...

[Ail]

Lesson learned, then. Always change the names of the NPCs in the modules

Alex

[HuManBing]

My PCs were on the homeworld, hunting down a rogue ArchMage who had colluded with the High Priest to bring down the avatars of their faith... and then trap them in a misty prison demiplane.

They had already made their way through the abandoned capital and then picked up clues of the ArchMage's flight by sea. As the fog thickened, they headed to the port and paid high coin to persuade a very reluctant captain to take them out to sea to pursue the ArchMage.

The ship headed out into the strangely calm seas, with nothing but the deepening Mists to accompany them.

Then... up ahead in the distance... they saw...

[MASSIVE INTERRUPTION IN THE NARRATIVE BY GROUP FEATHERBRAIN]

"Excuse me? Uh, Dee Em? Don't want to interrupt but... question! Are we entering Ravenloft at this point?"

[D.M. fights the urge to put lightning bolt through PC. Other players succumb to urge to roundly abuse the parentage of the misspeaking player and to belittle his pea brained intellect.]

[DeepShadow of FoS]

Sure, I'll offer a few:

+++++++++++++++++++++++

PC Monk falls all the way eight floors down the main tower of Avernus during major fight.

Monk: "I'm okay! I landed on someone soft!"

Other PC's: "Someone?"

Monk: "Well, he's soft now!"

(The monk managed to land on a zombie golem)


+++++++++++++++++++++++

Cleric Player: I'm going to use an augury spell. Let's see, I've never done that, and it says here we should pick an appropriate augury for the faith. I'm a sun priest, so I'll use a flower bud: if it blooms, that's 'yes.' If it wilts, that's 'no.' I'm going to ask if our party can forever destroy the fiend in battle.

DM (knowing the fiend can only be sent back to the Hells, and that the entire party can't ever leave RL to defeat it on its home plane): "The flower wilts, turns black and crumbles to dust in your hand."

PC's, gathered around the cleric: ......

Paladin PC: "Well, maybe if we set up some kind of ambus--"

Cleric PC (pointing at the ashes in his hand): "Does this look like a 'maybe' to you?! Does it look like, "Say your prayers and bring lots of holy water?"

++++++++++++++++++++++++

The one player unfamiliar with Ravenloft: "You know, this 'Strahd' guy's really starting to tick me off. I say we go kick his butt before he becomes a bigger problem."

[WolfKook]

The player who played the priest of the group learned about curses (Somewhat our DM had kept secret from us) while we were playing "Touch of Death" . He decided to use this new "power" to take revenge against the enimatic villain, so he stood up and started to act up the wording of his curse. With trembling voice and dramatic gestures, he described him as a rotting worm that had come from the deep reaches of hell, he told him about all the pain and the suffering that awaited him, and he even added an escape clause. After minutes of intense speech, he finished:

"...for the death of the sweet Melibea"

To this, all of us fell silent, looked at each other, and then him. With the laughter right on our lips, we said at unison:

"WHO???"

Too bad. The girl who had just died was named "Dulcimea".

[BigBadQDaddy]

I got a good one.

The PCs are sitting down to have a meal with my main NPC, a wizard who takes in the party as they start to discover everything in the realm is not what it seems.
Anyway, during the dinner, which was announced by the wizards servant to be Roast Beef, one of the PCs casually replies:

"Mmm, This Duck is excellent!"

To which I could not help but shout in the NPCs faux brittish accent:

"It's Roast BEEF!!!"

It was great to get such a welcomed response of laughter from the rest of the players in the room, and the look of shock on my friends face as he realized his little mistake. That line has now become a catch phrase at our gaming sessions. Whenever anyone says something that sounds odd or out of place in character, one of my players ends up shouting "It's Roast BEEF!!!"

[HuManBing]

The exact details of it are too lengthy for me to remember, but my PC group once was the butt of a feeshka joke played by a Kartakan village. The joke followed the usual "quest for a quest" type jokes, where the farmer asks for some cork to mend a hole in the bucket, and the corker asks for a shoe for his horse, and the blacksmith asks for an apple from the orchard, etc.

The PCs, upon realizing they've been duped, then set up a feeshka of their own that evening involving cantrips and dancing lights to make people think tiny little flames were flying around the city and gathering in the graveyard.

Their feeshka worked too well. The town was thoroughly spooked and tried to lynch them.

[Jester of the FoS]

I was running a group through Castle Ravenloft and had a character fall from the top of the tower (heart did it). I gave him a chance to catch the stairs on the way down. Natural 1. All the way to the lowest reaches bouncing and crashing.
He lived though. Small crumpled heap at almost no hp.

So the rest of the group worked their way down to him only to take a round about route. Then they entered a dark mist-shrouded room where something dark and brown-ish writhed on the floor. They shot it with an arrow. Of course it was him.
He lived, but took alot of spells to get him back up.

[Archedius]

I was running a game w/ 3 players- A fighter, barb and I believe a sorcerer dun remember- ANYWAY they were on the battlements of a decrepit fortress fighting a large composite undead made of a horse, several humans and lots of metal. They figured out how to weaken it by attacking a steel orb in it's chest that was animating it; it was intelligent enough to realize it wasn't going to last long and had nowhere to flee so it picked up the fighter and held him over the edge... the party stopped attacking it. The fighter urged them to kill it regardless of the fall. Well anyway they did and both the composite and the fighter fell 50ft or so. To reward the good RP I rolled a d20 to see if he would survive. I explained it that the fighter fell on a shack- with the composite breaking his fall. A few broken bones but the other players couldn't stop laughing when they found him alive.
In hindsight writing this- it was kind of an event you had to be there to find funny

[Rotipher of the FoS]

I think I've told this one on the boards before, but it bears repeating. This, BTW, didn't just happen in a home-played game, but at the original GenCon playtest of "Feast of Goblyns", the year that Ravenloft first became a 2E campaign setting. (Yep, it's old-fogey storytime... )

Minor spoilers from FoG follow:

The PCs are recovering a cursed crown from a dungeon complex. We find it suspended over a bottomless, fog-filled pit, on a platform that's held in place by chains between it and the pit's edge. The party includes a dwarf (I forget what class) and two human fighters; originally, there'd been just one, but two of the players talked Bill Connors -- yep, that's who was DMing -- into letting them use identical character sheets. (The guys were buds OOC, and had this goofy "twin barbarian brothers" routine going, imported from their own campaign.)

Apparently because he was lightest, the dwarf crawled out along one of the chains to the platform, with a rope around his waist for safety. The two "barbarian brothers" held the other end. When the dwarf picked up the crown, Bill described the moment in vivid "Excaliber moment" terms -- light glinting off it (ting!), etc -- and one of the goofs demonstrated how his barbarian set his hands on his cheeks, "Home Alone"-style, and stood gaping in wonder.

This, of course, meant Barbarian #1 had let go of the rope.

The dwarf started back across the chain, but with his hands full of cursed crown, he slipped and started to fall off. Not wanting to lose the item we'd come for, the dwarf's player said he would toss the crown to the other PCs as he lost his balance. At that point, the other goof got a little carried away, reached out across the table with a grabbing motion, and called out in classic Ungrammatical Gamer Barbarianese: "I catch!"

This, of course, meant Barbarian #2 had also let go of the rope.

Frankly, I think Bill was even more floored by this show of slapstick bone-headedness than the other players, but he still gave us a nice description of the dwarf's holler, fading away as the poor guy plummeted into the fog-cloaked depths....



The coda is that, after the adventure was over, Bill admitted that the pit wasn't actually that deep. The dwarf's cry had been a deceptive illusion, and the poor guy'd really been stuck at the bottom of a 20' pit -- his shouts for help, silenced by the eerie fog -- all the time the rest of us were ragging on the barbarians for getting another PC killed in such a memorably-stupid fashion.

FWIW, he got me pretty good too, by dumping my cleric into a pit full of bones and centipedes -- some of the wussiest monsters in the 2E game -- and then describing the pathetic little bugs as if they were acid-drooling monstrosities from a direct-to-video "Aliens" knockoff. Keep that sense of irony and misdirection in mind, next time you read one of Bill Connors' old adventures.

[Drinnik Shoehorn]

In a non-Ravenloft 2nd Ed game I'm in, two of our PCs where looking for a third who'd gone missing with a girl after the Spring Festival. We found a couple in a barn, naked and celebrating the festival with vigor.

When they saw us, the man standed, shouted and ran towards us naked, drawing a sword. My gnome, who's only the equivelent age of a 12 year old, shouted in fear, "Where'd he get that from?"

[WolfKook]

Remembered another one...

The PCs had just reached the chapel of an evil cult, where one of the cultists awaited for them.

"Where is the source of the evil in this cursed island?" - They asked.

"I will tell you nothing" - The dark priest said.

The elven ranger drew his bow and shot an arrow to the wall at one side of the priest, trying to scare him.

The halfling rogue (A novice player, whose character had an amazing dexterity that he just had to use) appeared behind the other characters, crying "I will scare him, I will scare him". He drew his bow and pointed him "just above the head of the cleric".

-- Dice Rolled: Natural 1 --
-- The DM (Me): "Roll again... You may have accidentally shot him" --
-- Dice Rolled: Natural 20 --

The party fell silent as their only probable source of information was shot on the head.

"Well, he looks pretty scared to me..."

[Ronia Sun]

I DM a Ravenloft campaigns most Saturday nights (that is, when I can actually write the darn adventure), and my group of players are absolutely wonderful. Intelligent, experienced, and always willing to have the crap scared out of 'em. They have a fantastic sense of humor, too, which makes for some fun play.

The party works for the Museum in Port-a-Lucine, and are currently trying to discover just *why* gargoyles and mysterious (and clumsy) thieves want a particular chalice the Museum recently acquired so badly. They got permission to explore the tunnels under the Cathedral where the cup was found. Long story short: they found some bones, and hauled them back to the Museum for further study. Now, one of the party is a half-elf druid from Darkon, and she is admirably role-playing the fact that her character's first language is NOT Mordentish. (As a result, she has what we have all termed "Yoda" grammar for the time being.) However, since she's the closest thing the group has to a bone-expert, she took a gander at the bones. Realizing she probably ought to ask the Museum's curator of Natural Sciences, she went looking for Dr. Schliemann--who is Lamordian. Mordentish is not his first language, either. The subsequent conversation went something like this:

Druid: "A body I have."
Dr. Schliemann: "Er...yes, I can see you haf a body."
Druid: "Examine it you must."
Dr. Schliemann: "Uh...you vant me to do *vhat*?!"
Druid: (realizing there may have been a miscommunication somewhere) "No, downstairs...a body we have *downstairs*."
Dr. Schliemann: "Good gods--vhat haf you been doing?!"
Druid: (getting frustrated, possibly because EVERYONE is giggling now--including her) "No, a *skeleton* we have. Examine it you must."

I could have gone on all night with poor Dr. Schliemann, but I didn't want to risk beating a joke to death, so he finally had a burst of insight. In retrospect, I rather wish I *had* run with it a bit further. Everyone was laughing, and after the horrors of dealing with a pair of child-eating bogeymen, it was much needed.

Anyone who says Ravenloft isn't funny...isn't playing it right.

[HuManBing]

I don't know if you'd consider this funny, or role-playing gone to absurd extremes.

One of my players played a vaguely Welsh-themed bard named Pwyll ab Mannywyden. Pwyll was CN in alignment, which his player took to mean he was flighty, whimsical, and somewhat self absorbed.

His frolics and detours provided much needed comic relief for the party, but he came to a bad end. We ran through Thoughts of Darkness, and at one point the party confronted the female villain in that module, first name Lyssa.

Pwyll stepped forward with the party's combat characters, ready for a fight, and then he stopped.

"What does she look like, this Lyssa?" he asked.

I showed him the picture in the adventure module.

The player stroked his chin, and the party whispered and muttered in consternation as the wheels of his brain worked.

The bard put down his sword and began serenading her beauty. Whatever Lyssa was expecting, it wasn't that. In the end, the PCs were down a character, and it was never fully resolved what happened to him after he vanished into the caverns at her side.

They all agreed that the player should get an XP bonus for the next character he rolled up though.

[Ronia Sun]

Goodness. Well, I guess it can't be said the player couldn't see what was coming. Kudos to a well-played Chaotic Neutral!