Release from the mortal coil.

Various and sundry noble titles. My ninja became a lord/baron after some time-traveling fun. My current character (Kobold priest/thief) is the "chamberlain" for my buddy's 3 INT ogre, who was recently crowned Regent of the Reef Giants, Lord of the Eastern Sea, etc. etc.

A cat minigun.

This is not a joke. Our troll, killy bastard that he is, lakcs a lot to do unless the run goes balls up. So I gave him a toy. It can fire on full auto (and HVAR), kittens that come compacted specially from EVO. 500nuyen per clip of 50. I'm not sure why I took a cat minigun instead of just having him awaken as an adept or somethingt, but having my players drowning their opponents in cats was awesome.

Hard to go wrong with bro tier sentient weapons.

My thief had gem stealer ... which was a quick sword (haste) and could detect gems at will up to some range (ages ago can't quite recall)

and my ranger had Heartseeker which was a short sword that did quad damage (or instant death) on a critical hit (but sadly did not talk like gem stealer did)

My dwarf had Stormbringer (Elric rip off but not quite as grimdark)
We found this sword on an Island of Iron dinosaurs that ended up being too powerful for our party but we had uber cool dmpc wizard for our guide. Just the iron dinosaurs were pretty awesome.

Rewarded my players?

If I could get them to focus, not try to have their PCs hump each other, and stop making constant comparisons to WoW, mmmmmmaybe then I would reward them.

I don't see it happening any time soon.

>>9543528
Oh, yeah, the profile: DV: 3S, AP: +5, RC: 5.

How about taking that airship idea and giving it a twist? Make it into a colossal-size Japanese-style dragon construct and have it shit fire and claw out angels' eyes and shit?

My players are quite content with what I throw at them normally.

Although I do throw in some references to (successful) earlier characters.

For example, the BBEG of one of my DH games had a Long-Las with one of the player's old character name (who was a snipey assassin) as the name of the design pattern.

Shit they still talk about that.

>>9543556

Hugeass warforged airship with its own personality and quirks. Have it dislike its new owners at the start, make them gain its trust.

Players animal companions becoming sentient

Players gaining the ability to skin the demons they kill. Bebilith hide becomes very sought after.

Recieve a crazy NPC to torment

Some excellent diplomancy allowed them to ally with an army of urskans. they then assaulted a frost giant castle with their help.

a natural 20 had a player cleave a frost giants nutsack in twain.

Walked shoulder to shoulder with the gods, as they lead an army back from the underworld.

a similar manouver caused another giant nutsack to be cleaved on another critical

Players sentient animal companion is revealed to be a paladin. Has attained divine rank

Players ascend to the universes pantheon at the end of the game. Replacing existing gods. Players animal companion replaces the head of the pantheon.

>>9543560

OP here. This would make an awesome twist, considering the world we're playing in is full of constructs despite the medieval-fantasy setting. I'd love to do this and the dragon idea, but I want to hold off on it in order to surprise them down the road. Or is this a bad idea, now that they know it's coming?

I was thinking of giving them an abandoned flying castle fortress.

>>9543560
>Xaar, open the pod bay doors.

>>9543560

A single Anti-Tank round in a post apocalyptic game.
They used it to take down a floating fortress, killing half a million people with a single shot through the reinforced canopy causing a Hindenburg reaction.
I'd forgoten they had it.
I was deepy amused.

>>9543560
This is an awesome idea.

>>9543577
Set the scene for battle. They activate the construct in a secluded countryside. Construct turns out to be much bigger than they thought. Reveal hatch.

THEY ARE INSIDE ME!!!

>>9543577
cloud giant's tower out of control tumbling slowly in the sky as it drifts towards the big city, PCs must get on board and stop it from hitting city. In my game they found the controls but could not change it's course. They used a one-shot device the castle had and shunted the castle into the Astral plane just before it plowed into the city.

'Terror in Skytumble Tor', IIRC. AD&D Book of Lairs or Adventure Pack

Have you heard of the Buxomize Pill?

>>9543482
This comes from a thread from some months ago.

The house-plant(seed)
a heart-sized piece of onyx, covered in engravings of buildings and plants of all kinds. Found under it’s stand is a small manual
Weight (30).
Value; (going rate for onyx of that weight)
-
Manual reads (once translated by a side quest NPC that recognizes the writing)
>greetings loyal customer. if you are reading this then you have spent over 100,000,000GP and have earned this free house plant seed.
>instructions for use:
1) initially plant seed in a box or pot full of ordinary soil.
-
2) water plant three times a week for 4-6 weeks (See appendix 1)
-
3) transplant sapling on desired site.
-
4) water plant twice a week till FRONT door opens or desired furniture size is acquired.
-

>>9543834

>appendix 1
>Please note; to determine architectural style or useful appointment. water seed with the following.
>>(all workrooms are fully supplied with masterwork appliances and equipment)
Human blood=generic castle
sweat=brick construction
Minotaur snot=includes underground labyrinth
maple syrup=house will continue to grow under own power as tree
river water=to include a waterwheel
oil=to include a forge
urine=to include a vented tannery
seawater=to include one dock and one self sailing ship
Dragon blood=treasure vault
kobold blood=artificers workshop
squeezed juices of beholder eye=hall of mirrors
Acid=alchemist's workshop
venom=bestiary
Semen=whore house(whores not included)
BEER=tavern front+ale cellar
non-animal poison=1 secret room or passage for each poison used(must find them yourself).
Fruit juice=orchard(of type of fruit tree the juice came from)
milk=stable adjacent
Mulled cider=inn with two rooms per clove used in the cider
censer oil=monastery
holy water=cathedral
Elf blood=stone walls
Orc blood=a motif of trees; natural lighting
Dwarf blood=a tower
Halfling blood=random hatches at all levels and handholds
Spit of a politician=a courtyard with an oratory balcony
Accountant's urine=a bank vault
Ink=a library (comes with a large encyclopedia set and 2 golem manuals)
Horse blood=a cartyard
Chicken blood=a very well made kitchen (full supply of masterwork appliances and equipment)
Tomato soup=a vegetable/herb garden

Ultimate Key. This normal looking key holds the essence of 'keyness' Things WANT to unlock in it's presence. Merely touching it to a lock acts as a knock spell. Somewhere is the Ubervault that only this key can open. Useful in Planescape as a trigger for any portal.

>>9543843
Nectar=a flower garden
Mercury=root tunnel basement
sap from an elder dryads tree=house will have it's own [homely]dryad-maid(never said she had to LIKE you, just clean up after you)
Varnish=carpenters workshop
Cerebrospinal fluid= biological lab, with equipment necessary to serve as anything from necromancer's lair to fully equipped complex surgical bay, with plenty left over.
Tea, Black=Elaborate ballroom.
Tea, Green=Training room, focusing on monks but with enough for any martial class.
Tea, Herbal=Solarium with bonus to any study or meditation that takes place within.
Assorted Alchohols=expands cellar/tavern setup, with a cellar devoted to each type. Proportion of drinks determines aesthetic of tavern.
Cologne=elaborately appointed warbrobery, with full selection of clothings and accoutrements.
Wine=luxuriant in plush and hardwood, with the colour of the wine determining the colour scheme of the place, though both kinds will be kept in the cellar.
Brandy=all brass taps and velvet upholstery.
Vodka=favours metal plating all over stuff.
Gin=involves marble-topped bars with lizardskin fronts. Think Milliways.
Whiskey=depending on the type, is varying levels of pine wood and hunting trophies.
Of course, whiskey and scotch are differentiated here.
Beers to some degree=Guinness gets you an Irish pub, German beer gets you something out of Oktoberfest, Coors gets you a rusting trailer home where the only thing on TV is Nascar, etc.
Sake=obviously gets you something really traditional Japanese.
Coffee=gets you a coffeehouse, although what type depends on the coffee you poured into it.
Batter=gives you a bakery.

And that's all I saved.

The Last Chance.

A single crystal of what appears to be ice, but is in fact an infinitesimally small fragment of the raw possibility from which the gods made the world. It has only one use. If this piece of the universal fabric is broken, the fundamental rules that govern the world are made wrong, and reality itself cracks. The universe acts to save itself, purging causality itself, and slowly restructuring the last stable state it knew. Every last component atom of reality is recreated in an identical state to the last valid window of time, some seven seconds before the crystal was destroyed. That fragment of potential reality is gone, become dumping ground for the corrupted reality that existed before and purged from the universe. Not even he who broke the crystal knows what he has done, and cannot, for the crystal will have never existed. The crystal would be all-but useless, save for allowing fate to run its course again in a single instance. In any normal case, it is near to useless, but when it is useful, it is so far beyond price the word has no meaning. After all, what price the dead and the failed would pay for one last chance?

The mechanical use of an items really isn't that interesting. Players love epic descriptiosn more than most practical effects. You can make what is essentially a one-shot reroll of a few dice seem like the greatest treasure the world has known if you call it that, and a sacred screaming blade forged from the frozen blood of a slain god is boring if you only ever call it a +1 bastard sword.

>>9543851
Could you put in a mixture of all these things to get the weirdest, strangest looking mish-mash melting pot of all the special-purpose facilities?

>>9543851
So, if I reroute a the sewerage from a major city I might be able to get all those things?

Can you draw me a map of my new home?

>>9543942

This thread just went epic.

>>9543482
Hey OP, I just wanted you to know I think it's time for you to cry a little:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knI4nYlLt0Y

P.S. I love you :3

>>9544377

Better version:

http://dod.vgmix.com/past/apr08/01-Kadmium,JimGrey-FF6-Aria-DoD.mp3

>>9543942
Is dat some save crystal?

I gave my PCs a ring of five mountains encircling some fertile jungle land on a continent inhabited only by primitive kenku and an even more primitive tribe of hostile intelligent dinosaurs with class levels.

They used magic and the ambient energy to construct a fortress there, and used the noble character's family rights toward international shipping of herbs to secure an alchemical and medicinal goldmine with all the rare plants.

Best part was making dinosaur D&D puns like Cleridactyls, Deinosneakus, and Tyrannosaurus regdar.

PCs ran with it, spend 4 sessions building their fortress with hirelings, followers, and druid magic (druid approved to be sustainable and spiritkosher). They hardly ever use it but it produces a GP trickle and provides a home base better than any inn.

>>9544444

Not a save crystal so much as an anti-GODDAMNFUCKIT crystal, since it only works once and only then.

I gave one power-tripping group an enormous number of these for a high-level campaign that involved fighting off otherworldly invaders with an inscrutable purpose and an incredible hatred for the PCs. They knew I wasn't telling them something about them, but the game never got far enough for me to do the big finale where they counterattacked the otherworld and found it was actually a vast pocket dimension made of every last one of the aborted realities slowly agglomerating onto themselves and steadily devolving into madness under the influence of the 'reality bugs' that had been dumped there. The otherworldly foes were in fact the citizens of these cripple drealities led by the many equivalents of the heroes, determined to stop them using these crystals at any cost, since each time they used one it basically killed an entire reality and everything in it.

>>9544419
Quite good. But it can be done even better:

Part I: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l31SUW-nP5U
Part II: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb_UPi5jcOk

Disregard the slideshow videos, they're not what matters here.

Next session I'm planning on rewarding my investigators with Yith technology, that crazy lightning gun, IF they can find it and IF they can figure out how it works, the former is pretty easy though.

>>9544495
Daaaaaamn. Nice.

>>9544094
>Could you put in a mixture of all these things to get the weirdest, strangest looking mish-mash melting pot of all the special-purpose facilities?
Yes, you can water it with something else every time.

I once received a deck of many things in one game. I still haven't used it, though everyone in the party who has has pulled beneficial things. I'm terrified of it, honestly.

>>9544495
wow, that is... awesome. Were there doppelganger versions of the party as well?

>>9544377

I always loved that scene. The bit with Ultros was hilarious, simply because landing in the middle of the stage part seemed like such a pen'n'paper thing to do.

"Roll a Balance check."
"... Uh. Natural one."
"..."
"... I, Locke, the world's greatest treasure hunter, have come to save the day! All according to plan!"

>>9544584

The first card you will pull is Death or The Void. Use it as a boon for others, and a Deck won't typically fuck you.

I dunno whether to laugh or scream in terror, that such a powerful magical item governed by actual randomness could be such a fae thing.

>>9544591

They were going to be the penultimate boss. I'd recorded the general stats every time the party had used one, and sat the entire army of them at the way 'out' of the pseudodimension, intending to have them try and stop the party from leaving. I'd been taking notes on how they acted and what they'd learn, intending on playing the various level incarnations as the way they'd been at the time. Had it come to pass I'd likely have removed a few of the higher-level ones for sanity reasons, and said the other denizens of the Spoil had started hunting and killing them after finding out their role in the events.

>>9544721
Holy shit that is just plain awesome
So they had to fight through copies of themselves spawned from every time they had used a save crystal?

>>9544721
Fuck yes. Basically the D&D version of the Mega Man "fighting-all-8-robot-masters-before-Wily" concept. Except here they'd be fighting all X incarnations of the party before the big bad.

OP here.

This is amazing.

>>9544743

They would have. The game fell out, and it was probably a good thing. I tend to run more serious games based on the story, not interactive progress quests. I hadn't worked with these players before and they turned out to be the sort that wouldn't actually see the dumping of every life in the universe into a nightmarish hellhole every time they wanted a reroll as a drawback, and the only thign they would have taken from having to slaughter themselves time and time again is that they could exploit this to dupe items.

I don't get that sort of playing. Why do you need other peopel to do it? There are plenty of video games that do that just fine.

>>9544842
That is an amazing shame, since I for one would have loved to play such a scenario.
However, this one requires food and takes it's leave now.

A Adept "surfed" a Blood Angel Terminator down a 3 kilometer liftshaft, while the two were emptying their weapons on one Traitor Valkyrie and about a dozen Chaos Raptors.

The two survived.

The Terminator was buried up to the waist in ceramic tiles, concrete and whatever the ground was made off and had minor damage to the mechanical parts of the legs.

The poor Adept... let's say it this way. The Blood Angels apothecary simply pumped him full of drugs and said "If he was a Space Marine, he'd be 50% cybernetics now."

So I gave the poor player some cybernetics.

He is now, a Imperial Guardsman. Only his brain and his lower body(!) remains as fleshbits. The rest is all cybernetics.

He can now also connect with the techpriest, and add his superior weaponskills to the techpriest, as the techpriest can share his superior techskills with the Guardsman.

>>9544842
Said video games are probably what instilled that sort of behaviour in such people in the first place. WoW syndrome, if you will.

inb4 shitstorm: I am not suggesting WoW alone does this, nor that it is the worst case of it.

>>9544910
>Twilight Nipples Terminator
>hurr derp

>>9544916

No, it's a symptom, not the disease. Seeing NPCs / monsters / mobs as loot piñatas is problem 1. Problem 2 being that character scaling by gear creates an impetus toward Monty Haul-style gaming, and problem 3 being that the two-dimensionality of most settings and encounters encourages metagame responses.

>>9544916

If you think that the psychological demographic that enjoys achievement no matter how arbitrary or rewardless doesn't predate the video games made to appeal to that demographic...

...then you don't know much about sports, card games, board games...

Why do you tell the players what kind of reward they can expect? Doesn't that kinda ruin the whole thing?

>>9545012

I didn't really mean to-- one of them saw my sketches on graph paper planning out the layout of the ship, asked me what it was for, and it kind of slipped out. Cat's out of the bag, and now I'm looking for something to give them in its stead.

>>9544996

Video games didn't start it, but I daresay the extent to which modern videogames have become integrated into popular entertainment exacerbates it. Pre-existing games of mindless progress for reward or victory weren't associated with the fantasy settings and narratives that form the mainstay of roleplay gaming. You wouldn't have seen this attitude nearly so commonly when most people got their introduction to the notion of fantasy worlds from novels and possibly television. Introduced that way, there is a much stronger association with storytelling and narrative-driven decisions, instead of pursuing arbitrary markers of progress.

>>9545048

I really don't think it's so hard to cater to both psychologies.

While it is a damn shame that your group wouldn't appreciate the awesome scenario you cooked up there, it's not hard to nip the "lol now we can dupe" nerve out though any number of handwaves... or, better yet, let them go ahead with it, and then later after they've become rich and fat by duplicating and selling a thousand expensive things, it turns out they all have <innate and horrifying drawback, like they explode or slowly take over the minds of their owners>, and the thousands of people they've sold this stuff too are *so pissed.*

>>9545104
Well, a logical sense would be for the items to begin to 'fade out' of existence once they'd leave that strange, chaotic realm. After all, no object should be able to be in 2 places at once

>>9544996
Oh, GN...I respect you, and this is how you reward me?

:V

More seriously, I can assure you that is not what I was thinking - although you are probably right that I don't know much about sports, but that is mostly incidental in this case.

I could attempt to flit together a lengthy treatise on what I was expressing above, but the dread Baron has already done so with the kind of succinct eloquence I am forced to assign to my most beautiful, fevered dreams:

>>9545048

>>9545104

I don't see how you can get more of a drawback than having killed much of the population of the world literally dozens of times over. If all they care about is the mechanical component of the drawback, then there's no real point constructing one. Some people can do both, and these players can be reeducated and saved, but those that can't, well... you might as well just hand them a calculator with the 20#ran function in it and say 'every time you get 20 you win and every time you hit 1 you lose'.

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/9543482/

This shit is too awesome to let die.

Anyone have any other stories? There's potential here for awesomeness.