Thursday, August 28, 2014

RPGaDay 29 "Most Memorable Encounter"


This fucking guy,  right here. 





We all know what this bastard is right? Old smoke and flame himself. A goddamned Balrog. Not sure what our GM was thinking, a bunch of mid level MERP characters traipsing through some anonymous dwarven ruin for some reason. Mind you we had to skip a bunch of BS so we could get in a good lunch hour session during school. 

So through this ruin we wandered, every day at lunch, killing off whatever random shit was thrown our way. A few orcs here, a goblin there. Giant Spiders gave us a bit of trouble but we overcame no worse off than we'd started. GM took it easy on us at first, but as the lunch hours ticked away and we'd suffered very little at the hands of his planned encounters he'd started to get angry. Not a good trait for a GM, but we knew how he was...

Anyway, so after one his clever plots fell to shit at our deft heroics (With the help of some terrible dice rolling on his part), he'd muttered out loud "Goddamnit". He paused for a moment as if considering the outcome of his future outburst. "THAT IS BULLSHIT" He wailed as the experimental d100 went flying against the wall of the classroom we used, shattering into pieces.

Breaking his proud little die made him angrier, our muffled laughter didn't help either.

We started looting our latest conquest when suddenly Scott (The GM) says to us "You smell smoke and fire coming from around a bend in the hallway and can see flickering shadows against the wall." We all looked at each other and decided to look for some cover, but only after we finished looting the bodies.

The illusion that this was just a number of Orcs carrying torches was quickly dispelled when we started to feel the heat from ahead, still around the corner, whatever it was made the floor shake.

Adventurer or not, I looked for an exit, back the way we came. The same hallway as our demonic looking enemy was in. We were a bit dismayed when it came into the room. We were on the far side when he started describing the creature, almost verbatim from the book. Didn't take us long to figure out that he'd tossed a Balrog in here, just to kill us.  

We'd planned on making a run for it, Davids character shot an arrow at it, doing absolutely nothing except drawing its ire. 

As it attacked Davids character in a brutal fashion I took the opportunity to bolt the fuck out. The others didn't hesitate to follow. 

The puddle of gore that was once an Elf didn't keep it distracted for long, it began to catch up to us as we made for escape. A Dwarf with an axe and a Dunedain with a sword was all that was between me and that frightfully scary thing.

I had a longsword and a crossbow, the dwarf fell soon after and my other party member and I knew we were doomed so we stood to face the beast. As a joke I leveled my crossbow at the thing, rolled my dice and let loose a bolt at it.

"Critical hit!!" Scott just shook his head, no way were we getting out of this with one little crit.

Rolling the dice to consulting the puncture chart I roll another 100! the chart returns with:

"Strike Through Eye. Dies Instantly. A Real Eye Full" My fellow players roared with delight as I'd single handedly killed off the big bad with one shot. Scott vowed never to run this stupid game again and as far as I know, he never did. He'd argue, years later, that it wasn't a legal kill because the bolt would have turned to ash before it hit. I told him he held on to things too long.

Looking back on it, I'm sure that if we'd followed the rules to the letter, that kill wouldn't have occurred, but man was it awesome.





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