The party, due to swinging more towards the good end of the spectrum, slowly make their way to the prince's location, avoiding orc patrols and warbands along the way, and by the grace of every god they could bother naming, manage to break the prince free, at the cost of being discovered.
So they make their way north, to the only mountain pass open at that time of year, prince in tow and orcs gaining on them, until, at the narrowest point of the pass they can actually hear the war cries of the innumerable orcs behind them.
There was no way we were going to outrun them, with the prince in the shitty condition he was in, and we were sure this was either going to wind up as a TPK, or the GM would have the cavalry come charging in at the last moment.
All of us well aware of the shitty situation we were in, IC and OOC, we were surprised beyond measure when Michael, a quiet guy who usually followed the paladin's lead, stopped at the middle of the pass and told us he'd buy us the time we needed to get to safety.
We pleaded with him, OOC for a good five minutes, IC until we could see the first torches make their way up the path, then decided that, if he wanted to use this as an excuse to re-roll, fuck it.
At this point the rest of us take a 30 minute break while the GM plays through the Michael's actions with him, and when we come back, he's already working on a new character sheet.

>Also, sorry for the lack of introduction.
>Character stories thread

We shrug and keep playing, eventually making it to the nearby fort, prince intact and no signs of any orcs.
As soon as we get there, the prince commandeers pretty much all of the cavalry present at the fort, as well as horses for what's left of the party, and rides out to take the fight to the orcs, should they be foolish enough to cross into his lands.
And so we ride, for three full hours of in-game time, until we're finally back at the place we left Michael.
And there are orc corpses everywhere, by our estimates at least fifty, each of them a match for any of the party in close combat.
After a good twenty minutes of digging through the snow, looking for the Michael's corpse, we finally find his sword.
A few minutes later, we find his shield and armour, some fifteen feet away, covered in orc blood, but without any signs of the wearer being injured, and with no sign of Michael.
We keep looking for half an hour, until we finally get fed up of the wizard whining about the cold and decide that, even if we can't find his body, there's no way he's still alive.
We return to our employer, collect the reward for finding the prince plus a hefty bonus for bringing him back alive, and decide to return Michael's weapons and armour to his parents, for lack of a son.
So we make our way to his birthplace, a small, nondescript village of farmers living in Bumfuck, Nowhere, and eventually find his parents.

Naturally, they're upset that their son has died, though proud of the way it happened, and, to the party's surprise, they adamantly refuse to accept the armour, stating that, if we must dispose of it, at least we should do it in a way that their son would agree with, and donate it to someone worthy, the same way he got his starting set of banged-up armour off a passing knight, who'd been impressed by his selflessness (as it was apparently stated in his backstory).
We shrug and figure “why the fuck not”, and spend the rest of the day looking for someone to take the armour off our hands.
Eventually, we come across a boy, around twelve, getting slapped around by his father for giving a week's worth of food to a passing beggar.
We laugh at how generic the situation is, the dwarf pats the GM on the back and tells him how smoothly he's pulled that one off, and all agree to give the armour to the boy, despite him being over a foot too short to fit into it, with a token reminder from the paladin to “keep up the good work”.

Time passes, sessions pass, and eventually the party has become pretty damn impressive, with a good ten years having passed in in-game time.
The party is storming the keep of a chaotic evil wizard who is trying to unleash the primal forces of magic upon the world, for whatever reason, and are doing very, very poorly.
The paladin is unconscious, the wizard is starting to run out of spells, my rogue is hiding in a corner, and God only knows what the artificer was doing, but it wasn't helping much.
Suddenly, the door behind us opens, and in walks Michael.
Or, rather, in walks Michael's armour, carrying his sword and shield and being worn by a farmer's son from Bumfuck, Nowhere, but we, of course, can't see that.
Instead, the party watches in awe as their friend, who disappeared over a decade ago, marches right up to the demonic horror in front of them and, with a single swipe (and some GM cheating for added awesome) cuts it down.
The party rallies, and, with the help of Michael version 2.0, manage to defeat the BBEG.
Turns out the GM had been keeping the kid up his sleeve for just such an occasion, with the GM having decided (for reasons unbeknownst to us at the time), that the armour was blessed.
In short, we'd given the kid armour easily worth more than a reasonably-sized castle, armour that had then helped him become a shining paragon of justice, travelling the kingdom and helping the needy, as the paladin had told him to do all those year's back.

We continue adventuring, thanking the kid for his help and wishing him the best, and eventually, over a year of real-world time later, reach the point where we and the GM decide it's time to start messing with the gods' business.
Our paladin is given a vision, compelling him to find a portal to “The world beyond ours” in order to help the gods battle a force from beyond existence.
Aight, sounds cool.
We slaughter our way through a (literally) endless horde of demons to finally find the portal we were looking for, pop through and, hey presto, we're in...
A field of grass.
We look around, and there's a road leading to the person realm of each of the gods, walled off from the area we'd found ourselves in.
We follow the paladin's lead, and walk to the home of Razanu, our setting's god of Generic Good.
And standing in the doorway to the home of a god is none other than Michael, clad in armour the colour of purest gold, a gemstone-inlaid scabbard at his side and a shield decorated with Razanu's symbol slung over his shoulder.
He walks right up to the dumbstruck paladin and embraces him, then tells the rest of us how glad he is to finally see us again, and that he's sorry he wasn't able to keep travelling with us.
He then tells us Razanu is waiting, and asks us to follow.
And while we're walking, essentially following an angel on our way through heaven to meet God, he starts explaining exactly what happened all that time ago.

Now, as mentioned earlier, Michael had always been a quiet guy, usually following the paladin's lead.
As it turned out, this was not because the paladin outranked him, in the strictest sense of the word, but because he felt he would never be able to live up to the paladin's example.
He had grown up thinking of paladin's as the embodiment of good, and had never lost that point of view, even as he travelled with a paladin who was, in his own words, “far from perfect”.
With that in mind, he had dedicated almost all of his spare time, when we were in a town, to helping the poor and needy, often giving away the gold we'd given him, which was already a pittance compared to what we'd take for ourselves, rather than buy a shiny new sword or a flashy helmet.
He never asked for anything, not from us, or any other people, and certainly not from the one towards whom he felt the greatest shame at his own perceived inadequacy, his deity of choice, Razanu.
That is, until he found himself standing alone on a cold autumn day, snow falling all around him and the wind chilling him to the bone even through his clothes, facing an army of orcs out to kill him, his friends, and the prince he'd sworn to save.
That was the first time he prayed.

Now, the party's paladin would take any chance he could to spit out one litany or another, and the GM (and by extension, Razanu), was less than impressed at such a rehearsed display.
This, however, was not the case with Michael.
The GM decided to houserule it a bit, and let him roll for how well his prayer was received.
And the fucker rolled a twenty.
And so it came to be that, when he stood alone on that mountain pass almost twenty years ago, praying for nothing but the courage to do what he needed to do, a god personally stepped down from the heavens, granting him the power to beat back the orcs before finally asking him, with as much respect as a god can show a mortal, to return to the Empyrean with him, to guard His realm with the same dedication as he'd guarded his friends.
How could he refuse?

The party eventually completed their task and returned home, settling into as quiet a retirement as one can expect after being summoned by the gods, and we decided that, since everyone but the GM and me were moving out of town, we'd start a new campaign with some other people.

The campaign took place forty years after the previous one, and the party generally consisted of good characters, a bard, fighter, wizard and myself, playing a cleric of Razanu.
We all met when we were swept up in the former prince, now king's war against the orc tribes in the south, and I have to admit I grinned when I learned we'd be marching through the same pass I fled through in the previous campaign.
We reached the pass towards the end of the last session, and the army had slowed to a crawl as we moved through the narrow pass.
As we got closer to the bottleneck, we noticed soldiers breaking off from the main column to put offerings at the foot of something we couldn't see.
Now, I knew the setting, and I knew that last time, 50-60 years back, there wasn't anything there that might incite anyone to leave an offering, so I was curious as to what it was, right until we made it past the cliff wall blocking our view.
Standing there, carved into the mountainside, was a one-hundred-foot statue of a warrior, sword in one hand and shield in the other, looking south, guarding the passage.
The rest of the party is sure we'll wind up TPK'ed, as the orcs outnumber us 3-1, but I know better.
Michael protects.

... ... ...

OP I want your DM.

>decide to check out /tg/ for the first time in months if not years
>see this thread first

oh shit yes

Someone archive this shit.

>Dat last line

I love you.

OP here, and I have to say, never has a natural 20 had this sort of storyline impact in my games before.

And obviously, manly tears were shed when we saw that damn fighter again.

>>17260648
I already took screenshots of all the posts just in case.

I'm just sad that most groups I've tried playing with ended terribly.
I'd post some examples, but I've gotta go in about an hour, so I don't really have the time to type it up.

Touching story. Well done.

This post gave me a feel

Damnit OP, your story was so good that now NO ONE will contribute.

>>17260889
That's what's kind of frustrating me right now.
Damn it, people, I played the campaign, I want stories!

>read last couple of lines
>cold shiver up spine

damn you and your touching stories.

Well, it's on suptg now.

That was fucking awesome, OP.

>>17260717
Could you post a pic of the thread?
I just know I'll never be able to find it again.

>>17261033
I was just using Gyazo, so I had to split it into four pics. Playing vidya, so I don't have time to edit it together right now. But here you go.

>>17261057

>>17261068

>>17261057
Thanks, anyway.

>>17261083

Well, I'm out.
Kind of sad nobody contributed, but oh well.
Such is life in Mother Russia.

Probably not as epic as Micheal's bad-assness, but I also have a story of awesomeness to share.

-Party consists of me, neutral good alchemist,
-lawful neutral fighter, also admiral of a small fleet of airships.
-lawful neutral rogue paladin, friend of the admiral and pirate hunter.

The group was currently in a war with a kingdom to the south, wanting to retake lands it had stolen a few years ago. Our group of airships was sent on a side-mission to try and take out the ennemy's secret weapon, some sort of facility that was creating half dragon hybrid beasts that could almost fight toe to toe with the average warship because of it's maneuverability and breath weapon.

As we approach the massive mountain where said creatures and lab would be, some of our boats start to blowup, as a powerful wizard kept sniping fireballs at them, forcing us to land.

Stranded near the mountain's base, close to the dangerous mist, host of dangerous and horrible monsters, the 3 PC's decided to leave the ships there, let them make a makeshift camp and bring attention to themselves, all the while keeping safe. The 3 characters went down below the mist and found a cave leading inside the mountain's base. Days of in-game adventuring later, and with our food supply almost empty, we had battled dragons, drow and number of horrible monsters in the mountain.

Feeling a sense of duty, all 3 character skipped 70% of the GM's side-quests and areas, eventually finding a strange wall of steel in one of the cave complex's hallways. The group destroyed the wall using a powered down artefact they possessed, a gigantic hammer which could break down walls and mostly anything, but had lost it<s true magical powers.

To the PC's surprise, they had stumbled in the wizard's sealed off basement area. Later on, and with the alchemist's whole stock of invisibility potions, we slowly walked trough 6 floors of dragon making labs, gnoll baracks and other odd places until we reached 5 room, each of them containing a druid.

Having realized the druids were using their powers to control the half dragon half dire wolverine ]or bear or other dangerous animal), the group managed to kill them by surprise. And in passing, the alchemist stole every magical and alchemical formula he could find about their experiments.

This would lead them to the BBEG's room, where he had captured a powerful cloud dragon and kept it locked in a force cage, torturing it as it drained some of it's blood for experiments. While the fighting was harsh, the wizard was obviously too powerful for the tired weakened group. With no one having the powers to free the dragon, nor the skills to use the magic key made to keep in held, the admiral had a plan, a foolish awesome plan.

He grabbed a necklace of fireball he had found earlier in the mountain and threw it at one of the cage's runes, dealing such massive damage that it erased one of the room, having made a crater in the room's stone floor. With the cage weakened, the 3 gave the key to the dragon, who used it to free himself, and kill the wizard. He then proceeded to destroy the entire complex while the alchemist looted the guy's formulas, secret plans, books and everything of intellectual value. As they drank the last 2 remaining Fly potions, they jumped from the mountain as the complex fell behind them, both flying character's holding the last one in a 7 minute slowfal down the mountain.

As they reached the camp, they learned that the war was about to be cancelled, their king having been assassinated, and the general calling back the troups to regroup. But with the secret weapon down, they pulled back and won the war, earning all 3 of the characters titles, property and fame. And to top it all off, the 30 or so books and hundreds of sheets of plans, magic formulas and diagrams the alchemist looted helped him start his own project of human evolution in glorious half-dragon beings, not to mention start his own business empire with the knowledge he possessed now.

>>17261420
Awesome.

bump