Several years ago, I played in a D&D game with a group of friends/co-workers while we were working on a ship out to sea. The ship was out for several months and we wanted something additional every week to look forward to as a means of passing the time and breaking the monotony. We ended up with a group of about eight or nine people to play, which actually worked out since our work on the ship made it so only four to five of us could play at any one time.
Now, I liked our DM. He was a pretty cool guy and worked hard on the campaign, but the natural rivalry that tends to form between DM and players has a significantly higher bar on a ship with a bunch of dudes you’re out to sea with for months. And like any good sailors, if the DM did something we didn’t approve, we simply mutinied mostly by doing the opposite of whatever he wanted us to do. Bear in mind, we weren’t so much being hostile towards him as we were just messing with him. He understood what was going on, and, while to the outside observer it may seem harsh and mean-spirited, it was just us having fun with the situation.
The issue was that kept sprouting up was that our DM wanted us to play our characters essentially like straight lawful good paragons that had our own little quirks. We in turn responded by quickly turning the campaign into an anti-hero campaign if not sometimes an evil campaign. We still fought for the overall good objective, but our actions tended to lean heavily towards the neutral to evil side of the alignment. I can’t say what it is our characters ended up doing, but I will say it was brutal efficient with very few lines that weren’t the party wasn’t willing to cross. To give an idea of how ridiculous and out there this whole thing was, our group name was the KegBoyz, abbreviated as the KGB. Definitely not a campaign for the faint of heart or really anybody with a modicum of dignity and restraint.
Anyway, so while there was some tit-for-tat between the group and the DM, it was mostly pretty tame by our standards. Most of the banter came from our party’s de-facto leader who played a tiefling warlock with a fiend for a patron. He was an appropriately-charismatic guy who loved to rib the DM and the two constantly tried to mess with each other. However, one thing the DM did – or rather what one of the NPCs did – actually seemed to tick him off. We were around level 10 at the time and just arrived at a distant kingdom to continue our quest. I don’t know the exact circumstances as due to work on the ship I had been absent from the session it happened in, but apparently our party had an interaction with the ruler of the kingdom, and he had viciously insulted our tiefling leader due to them being a ‘demon-spawn’.
Whether by pettiness or vindictiveness, or a little of both, the leader had decided to forgo our main quest and spend however long it took to remove the king from his office. He then spent his downtime working on a plan to overthrow the king and replace him with a puppet oligarchy. From that point on, the party would end up meeting weekly before each session to discuss our roles and moves for the following session including what people’s characters who could not make the next session would be doing. We kept the plan secret from the DM who, though confused and no doubt suspicious of what we were up to, was unaware of the deeper machinations in play. The details are a little muddy due to the broken attendence of sessions and the years that have passed since this campaign, but I still remember most of the steps we took.
First, we befriended the local Thieves’ Guild and merchants of the Black Market. This was primarily to gather information of the important members of court and to gather the rare items we’d need for his crazy plan to work. We ended up identifying a few ministers, the king’s regeant, the captain of the guard, and the head of the noble houses as our primary targets. Session by session, we’d gather information on them learning who could be turned and who would need to be removed.
Through our intelligence with the Thieves’ Guild, we had learned that one of the ministers had been suspected of funding a large local bandit group that stalked the area. We ended up locating one of their camps and after… gathering information from the survivors, we targeted their main compound. Between a warlock casting eldritch blast at 300 feet, a flying swarlock who nuked everything from the air, an aquatic elf ranger with an absurdly good bow for his level, a human barbarian charging in with full rage, and a goliath fighter in +2 plate armor who, due to a quirk of his build, could keep pace with the barbarian while he was raging, it was absolutely no contest. And that was just the group we had available that day. From evidence we gathered from the hideout, some of which that may or may not have been forged, we were able to get the minister locked in prison and it would take some time before his successor was chosen. Simultaneously, we became heroes to the capitol city due to taking out the bandits. One down.
We happened upon the captain of the guard by accident, but when it became apparent that he was loyal to the king, our leader comes through again and uses dominate person on him gathering as much information about how the king’s guard functions as we could in the allotted time. We got patrol routes, names of guardsmen, equipment, a map of the palace, and much more. Studying this, we were able to find and interact with each member of the guardsmen figuring out who was loyal and who wasn’t. Our leader kept notes on these names as they’ll become important when it was finally time to make our move.
Now, friends with the captain of the guard, we were able to meet with head of the noble houses, an intelligent woman who was loyal, but only so far as it benefited her. Due to her impressive influence over the nobles, she was vital to get on our side. Our leader had a plan, though, and the political intrigue involved baffled me. Even more so when it somehow actually worked. Through a string of impressive string of stealthy corespondences with some timely help by the Thieves’ Guild, we were able to convince the king that the head of the hoble houses had been conspiring with the guilty minister and the other minister, possibly seeing a chance to avoid any condemnation himself aiding in locking her up to investigate her dealings. While she began her house arrest, our leader visited her and, with her ‘help’, we were able to clear her name. This led to us gaining a vital ally in our coup as well as additional information about the remaining ministers and the regeant.
Finally, due to monster hunting and other side quests the party had been performing in the meantime, we had racked up enough gold buy to the final piece of the plan from the Black Market: a ring of spell storing. With that, after 6-7 sessions of planning and set up, we were finally ready. Our leader assassinated the captain of the guard and the regeant when it became clear turning them to our side, in spite of everything, wasn’t going to happen. He used his spells to disguise himself and the swarlock as the captain and the regeant respectively to attend a meeting with the king.
As it turned out, right after we bought our new rare magic ring, the king received word that a gift had arrived from a neighboring kingdom as a sign of good faith. The throne room was set up so that the ‘captain of the guard’, the regeant, the head of the noble houses, and the remaining ministers were lined up near the king, who was surrounded by guards. The guards that had been posted there just so happened to be loyal to the king and the ministers, loyal but self-serving as they were, also happened to be closer to the king than the other three courtiers were. Of course, this was absolutely coincidental.
A messanger then arrived with a box which was presented to the king with all the splendor he deserved. The king, excited, opened the box to find a unique looking ring within. Once he had done so, the swarlock, who just so happened to have been attuned to the ring, cast mage hand using subtle spell metamagic and slipped the hand onto the ring. Before anyone could register what was happening, he cast the spell that had been stored into the ring: a level 5 fireball. The king, the messanger, and the loyalist guards and ministers all died in the blaze and, in the confusion, our leader conjured a demon to spawn upon the corpse of the dead king.
At the same time, the rest of our party, led by the goliath fighter, who just so happened to be a known demon hunter, burst in through the front door after being led there by some of the guards that were now under our payroll.
“That demon killed the king! Slay it!” the goliath roared and all hell broke loose. Needless to say, though, the fight was no contest. We defeated the demon that had ‘slain’ the king and were now heroes of the kingdom.
However, the king had no heir, so what now? Well, with guidance from the kingdom’s new heroes, we set up an oligarchical system ran by the head of the noble houses to rule the nation. A system that just so happened to work for us. It was a sweet victory for the ‘heroes’ of the kingdom, made even sweeter when after everything we sat down and explained detail after detail to our DM of how the warlock had this all planned out from the day the king had insulted him. He was on the floor laughing at the obsurdity of it all.
We ended up continuing the quest with the support of a nation at our back, and though we never finished that campaign as our time at sea came to an end I will still fondly remember that series of events that turned that silly, over-the-top campaign into something truly memorable.
[zombify_post]
0 Comments