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Prompted by another thread which reminded me of a d20 Star Wars game I played in some twenty years ago. Please add your own stories.
*****
The setting was about the time of the initial Yuuzhan Vong incursions. The GM wisely warned us that the campaign would not be canon, since the rest of us were better versed in the EU than he (although I had not, and still haven't read the books with the Yuuzhan Vong), and he knew he'd be getting, "That's not how that works etc", if he did not stay away from EU canon.

My character was Tum Tum, an Ewok Scout. I made him to be annoying, but then I started thinking about what it would take to be a survivor in a galaxy with Wookies, and people with creepy mind powers, and thought, "hey, this could be a cool RPG challenge." Tum Tum's equalizers were a scope-sighted blaster rifle, and thermal detonators. Non-combat, his skills were more about planetary surveying and roughing it, but he could still fly or pilot a spacecraft. Since the other Scout (from Greedo's species) had focused on the space side of scouting, that's how we divided the labor. This was to prove important later.

The party was composed of the two scouts, three Jedi Knights, and a character I've forgotten. Our first mission was to investigate some obscure backwater planet which had some Force anomalies. This was where Tum Tum first demonstrated he was more than comedy relief. Our other scout ran a survey from space to find the anomaly, but it effected the accuracy of the scan, so we could only narrow it down to a 200 kilometer area, so we had to land and hike in. Only Tum Tum knew how to work a SW equivalent of a tricorder. This became a running joke from the Jedi Councilor, "Analysis, Mr. Tum Tum? "Fascinating, Councilor, it appears to be a Force anomaly we have not previously encountered."

Eventually we found pre-Sith (the species) ruins, and the tricorder readings indicated our Force anomaly was inside (surprise, surprise). At some point, we encountered a Yuuzhan Vong commando team on the same mission. An exciting combat ensued, with our less combat capable characters at the spear tip, and the rest of us trapped in cul-de-sacs and the like. The party fought to reunite and we overcame enough of the commandos that their Leader fled. Or tried to. We'd cut his line of retreat, so he had to retreat into an area we'd explored. Tum Tum had mined the door. *BOOM* At this point, Tum Tum pulled out a cigar and said, "I love the smell of cordite in the morning."

At a later date, we had to negotiate with a Huttese crime syndicate, and guess what? The friggin' Jedi Councilor, who was supposed to be the trained diplomat, had neglected his language skills at character generation. Only Tum Tum knew Huttese ...
Hutt Crime Lord "Grib grob morbog hathac. *har har har*"
Jedi Councilor "Que pasa?"
Tum Tum: *sigh* "Councilor, what he said was, <etcetera>"

Me: You didn't take any languages?!
Jedi Councilor's player: *shrugs* I didn't think they'd be important.
Me: *throwing hands up in air* Your character is supposed to be the freakin' negotiator!
[No, I did not f-bomb the table.]

And one last thing, you know how "Fire in the hole" is the explosion imminent warning, at least for English speakers? For Ewoks, the equivalent phrase is, "Boulder in a Tree!"

I was the GM for this one, but two heavily armed and none two bright characters slaughter there way through a lobby of goons to get to the objective.

They come the elevator and hit the button to summon it. They are at the ready.

GM: "The elevator dings on their level and begins to open..... as they open you start to see what looks like a pair of heavily armed....."

Them: "We open fire"

GM: "You start shooting?"

Them: "Yes"

GM: "Don't you want to..."

Them: "No. Full auto."

GM: "Okay roll your dice....."

Them: "Hits with X and Y successes"

GM: Pretends to roll some dice and nods sagely....

"You open fire and your rounds tear through the small elevator and your target's shatter into pieces and descend to the floor in small, flashes of light. The elevator is riddled and wrecked by your full automatic bursts.

Them: "What, we killed them?"

GM: "You take a moment to survey your handiwork and suddenly realized you iced a mirror and wrecked the elevator up.

I hope you guys like taking the stairs."

I had a game just a few weeks back in DnD where the druid cast a spell that cuts all movement by 1/4. We though we could kill our enemies before they got to us, but the DM was smart and had them run away!

The field was pretty big (100 foot radius) so it wasn't long before the fleeing enemies were out of our range. We'd never catch them trying to run through the field and unfortunately it's a spell the caster can't drop at will.

Someone else: Can we go around?

Me *wide eyes*: Wait! Who remembers how to calculate the circumference of a circle?

Someone else else: It's 2 times pi times the radius right?

Me: This is it! The moment the math teachers foretold!

And so we calculated the circumference of the circle and found out we couldn't possibly catch our enemy by going around XD But it was good to know before we did all that running!

This was in RuneQuest campaign I run. The group was penetrating a small dungeon which was a Thanatar cult hideout and encountered various guards, traps and Chaos beasts on their way to the Inner Sanctum.
In one room I had prepared for them a nasty surprise: a large Stoorworm was there, with Chaos Feature 'explodes upon death, causing 3d6 damage within 1d6 metres'. In addition, the room had bunch of Broo assassins next to the entrance, waiting on ambush. My plan was that the PC's will charge the Stoorworm which will use its Breath weapon on them (an area poison gas attack), the Broos will ambush them in a pincer movement and when they finally kill the Worm, it will blow up and hopefully damage the whole group. All in all, very damaging and resource-eating encounter. So I thought anyway.

So the group cautiously advances the corridor and sees that the corridor opens into a dark room, and I describe how in the edge of their light they see glimpses of very large, snake-like creature slithering in the room.
Our Humakti Duck: "I can see the worm thingie? Can I shoot it?"
Me: "It's a dark, large room, but yes, occasionally it seems to wander within your sight. You might be able to get a quick shot off-"
Duck: "OK, when I see it, I will Sever Spirit it immediately."
Everone else: "WHAT?" To clarify to those who don't play RQ, Sever Spirit immediately kills the target if the caster can get it through. The Duck had only one such spell, and it was usually reserved for the final bosses and such. Others tried to talk the duck player out of the idea, arguing that it was pointless to waste a valuable spell to a single critter they can easily kill with arrows and melee. (Note that they didn't know about the ambush party waiting for them, or the Worm's special feature.) But the Duck persisted and cast the spell. Me: "Ok, roll if you get through the Worm's Magic Points - ouch, I guess you do. Well, gnnnn....the Worm dies then...now, it so happens it has this special Chaos Feature...you see the Worm's body suddenly bulge, as if it's about to explode...and then it does."

So I rolled the explosion radius - 6 metres! Oh crap, every Broo is in the explosion radius. Well, 3d6 is still survivable - I roll 17. Ummm...

End result was that after the smoke cleared and bits of worms stopped raining, couple of still conscious but badly burned and near-death Broos staggered out to meet the fresh PC's who finished them off in a single round of combat without taking a scratch while the Duck lighted up a huge cigar, lecturing about how he loved little smell of death in the morning.

A Dark Heresy game I ran many years back, beginning with a near miss assassination attempt against the party psyker.
The initial investigation was erratic including the psyker spectacularly failing a divination attempt in the middle of the grand cathedral (killing all plant life within and nearly summoning a daemon) and several botched raids, including the sharpshooter grapnel-gunning the legs of the tank out from under them during a chase and another where the plan appeared to be 'annihilate the building with heavy weaponry and then search inside for someone to question'.

Eventually with as much luck as judgement they snagged the real assassin, a meek but devout believer in 'suffer not the witch' who tried to confess several times during questioning but the PCs had at that point latched onto another false lead and just kept reassuring her as to her faith before sending her off with a pat on the back and advice to suffer the witches even less.

What followed was an ill-advised drop pod assault on a backwater civilian location (using a boarding torpedo, not a drop pod) and of course the tech guy couldn't resist messing with the guidance system on the way down, nearly killing half the party with their fumbling, particularly the tech guy who had to get out of his grav harness to screw with the controls and didn't make it back before impact. Ultimately the group killed the local civil rights advocate and kicked off some fairly brutal uprising and crackdowns across the planet.

This was their cue to declare victory and a few weeks later they got a nice gift and letter of thanks for their words of support from the actual would-be assassin, off on a pilgrimage on any of a hundred ships after the PCs ended the embargo they had declared at the start of the investigation. All this all came about because the psyker wanted an in-game reason to suddenly have bionics legs.

Re: Easy E & Lord of Hats. Funny!

Re: Backfire. Yes, the best laid plans o’ Mice an’ Men Gang aft agley,. As GMs we've all been there. And apparently Apocalypse Now has left its mark on more than one gamer!

As for Runequest. Very cool, it was a system I wanted to play, but it is not that popular in my part of the U.S.. AD&D (the original) was the game of choice then.

Re: A.T. *smacks forehead* The other side of being the gamemaster, when the players are too stupid.

On a more positive note, here's one of those times when your players come up with something better, so you run with it.

This was in a Legends of the 5 Rings game I ran. For those of you who are familiar with the original AEG storyline, this was set after the end of the Clan Wars storyline, so Fu Leng [Lucifer/Satan in this cosmology] was dead. For my game, I made his father, Onnotangu, Lord Moon, the cosmic big bad for my story. The players were yoriki (deputies) to a crooked Magistrate in a Crane coastal city. They had a number of run-ins with the local tongs, one of who was a front for Onnotangu's cult, and was opium-running to finance their operations. The Moon Cultists had also kidnapped a number of people, some very prominent such as Shiba Tsukune, the new Clan Champion of the Phoenix Clan. Her blood was important to the cult's scheme of making mind control tattoos. The characters were puzzled by the new tattoos appearing on members of the lower classes. They soon found that the Moon-themed tattoos gave the user powers, much like those of the Dragon Clan. But those of the Dragon Clan are rare and difficult to earn. Here were several dozen tattoed laborers, that they knew of, and while some were tong members, others were not. They had a breakthrough after a night of cult-inspired riots.

The Kitsu spiritspeaker called upon on a soul of a slain tattooed rioter. That soul was still loyal to Lord Moon, and was uncooperative when questioned.
Now the deputies had captured a former NPC ally, a monk who had been sent undercover into the Moon Cult, and had been turned. During the riots, they had captured him. The city's governor, who had sent the monk undercover, wanted to question him. The monk, who had been given a cult tattoo, then broke free and tried assassinating the governor. The players stopped him, killing him in the process. The Kitsu spiritspeaker then called upon the soul of the slain monk. His soul was cooperative, and it transpired that he had not turned willingly, it was the tattoo. He provided some valuable information gathered prior to his being exposed and tattooed, and was concerned about his forthcoming reincarnation because of the crimes, many very spiritually degrading, he had committed under the influence. The Kitsu gave him some reassurance, essentially saying, 'I cannot say for sure, but I spoke to another soul who also had a tattoo. He was completely unrepentant, but you are repentant. While your karma has been damaged by your actions, you have returned to the Way of Shinsei (the state religion of Rokugan), and wish to make amends. The karmic burden should not be insurmountable in your next life. The monk's soul thanked the spiritspeaker, and the spiritspeaker released him respectfully, wishing him a better life in his new incarnation.

This was where the breakthrough happened. The players were discussing the significance of the monk's soul being able to throw off the tattoo's influence, which they attributed to his monastic discipline and strong faith. The Unicorn player went "Oh my god! That's it, Lord Moon is binding the souls of the dead to him. It does not matter if he wins in this generation, or in three generations. He's a god, and time is on his side! Eventually, he'll control enough souls that when they reincarnate, most of the population of a future Rokugan will be loyal to him, and he can easily accomplish anything he likes in the mortal realm! *The rest of the players gasp in horror.* Much frenzied excitement from the group as they start discussing the ramifications of this and what counter measures can they undertake.
Meanwhile, I'm sitting quietly, watching all this thinking, "That wasn't where I was going with the Cult and the tattooes, but that's so much better, I am so stealing that."

The most recent campaign I was DMing, I had two new players. One was a rogue and one was a sorcerer. A trading caravan had been attacked by orcs and they then lay an ambush for anyone coming to investigate, which my players happily obliged. The sorcerer decided to hop onto the cart midway through the skirmish in order to fire off some spells.

After she did the Orcs got their turn and I figured one of the archers would immediately target the magic wielding elf, cue the immediate natural 20, critical hit.

Of course I described the sheer joy of the orc archer who isn't usually very accurate landing the perfect shot on the tall elf who just stood up on top of a broken cart.

She survived the hit (just) but an important lesson learnt!

While DMing a game of 4th edition we had a human, an elf, a dwarf and a pixie. Various classes but one was a druid. During a rest after a battle with skeletons, I described a small bird landing on the druids shoulder in order to give him a message.

At which point, another player sputtered “A bird can talk to the druid? That’s totally unbelievable. “

The rest of us all just stopped playing and looked at him.

To be fair, it was 4th edition. No one had a 'power' for that.

Animal Messenger was a 10 minute ritual that cost 10gp, all for the 'benefit' of passing along a 25 word message, and the effect expires in 24 hours or less (6 with a low roll, 'low' here being 'less than 20'), and gives the animal no particular ability to find the recipient or speed up travel to the location where the caster guesses the recipient is.

A friend was DMing a game of 3rd ed DnD. He didn't want to deal with the encumbrance rules so he just tells everyone "I don't care what you carry as long as you use it."

The group Paladin: "Can I have a door?"

Dm: "As long as you use it."

In the first dungeon they come up to a door. The paladin puts his door in front of the door.

Then he knocks on the door.

The goblins inside open their door and find a door.

The paladin kicks down the door.

It knocks down the goblin in the doorway who then gets trampled under the door as the party piles in with a free surprise round of combat.

The paladin kept that door with him for the rest of the campaign.

Oh, I've a few from Thoruk, my half-orc barbarian.

My favourite has to be when the party was charged with clearing out a household for a pair of dwarves, who had a kobold problem. Thoruk wasn't really listening, so asked one of the party what we were doing - they said "go in there and kill everything".

So we happily slaughter a load of kobolds on our way through the house, and Thoruk opens a door and finds a shrine. He's raging, and has already destroyed some furniture on the backswings, so I say "I attack whatever's closest and start moving to the next room". I'm expecting this to be a chair, kind of a petulant swing at an inanimate object like sir lancelot in monty python and the holy grail when he storms the castle and stops halfway up the stairs to swipe at the flowers. But instead:

DM: "ok, you swing at the shrine with your greatsword. Make an attack roll."

Thoruk: "19, so 24."

DM: "Ok, you swing your sword down onto the shrine with a resounding clang, now roll a strength test" (he is wanting Thoruk to be flung backwards like Gimli in lord of the rings)

Thoruk: "Nat 20."

DM: "...ok, you feel a force pushing you back but you just brute-force through it, and the shrine cracks in half."

Other players: "oh no..."

DM to other players: "Any of you who know magic can feel an enormous power swirling around the room. The candles go out, and the power grows."

At this point some players decide to just run. One stays to identify the shrine.

DM: "It's the shrine to the dwarven goddess of homely protection."

Other players: "oh no, what did you do?"

DM: "The magic suddenly coalesces in the form of an elderly dwarven woman, with a finely groomed beard. She steps up to Thoruk."

Thoruk (seeing a dwarf with a beard): "Stay Back Sir, there could be more!", before kicking the next door open and charging in.

At this point, the Kobolds are running. The other players are trying to stop Thoruk who is running after them. One of them manages to succeed. The dwarven goddess approaches Thoruk.

Goddess: "So, would you mind telling me why you have defiled my shrine?" (the DM put on the perfect tone of a mother trying very hard not to throw their disobedient child our of the window. It silenced the table, there were genuine avertes eyes and awkward shufflings).

Thoruk: "Well, we were told by the dwarves outside to come in here and destroy everything, so I came in and destroyed everything!"

DM: "Roll for deception."

Me: "But Thoruk truly believes that's the truth"

DM: "Ok, roll for Persuasion."

Thoruk: "Nat 20."

And that's how Thoruk managed to convince a dwarven goddess of homely protection that he had been asked by the dwarves whose home this was to come in and destroy her shrine.

She later battered thoruk's head against the shrine, and his blood fixed it. She then told him to sleep, which he did, and gave everyone else a blessing.

When we left, the Dwarves found themselves mysteriously locked out of their home.

I was running a Dresden Files game set in Calgary in the aftermath of the extermination of the Red Court. One of my PCs built his character around being the owner of a low-end pawn shop with psychometry. He then proceeded to ignore the responsibility of owning a pawn shop in the Calgary metro and thus his place in the petty crime-to-drug-addicts pipeline.

I had a track as to how far the people waiting to fence their illicit goods for drug money would take things based on how long he ignored his pawn shop. By the time he finally visited his store to try to search his inventory for an item, the entire area had been declared a religious sanctuary for the Children of the Great Return, a new age cult that had sprung up around the idea that maybe he might come back and buy their stuff.

There were religious mosaics made out of discarded teeth and fingernails covering the entire front of his store, and a massive squatter encampment he had to fight his way back out of as his adoring public swarmed him as the messiah.

We were playing the German RPG "the dark eye", kind of relatively low fantasy medieval setting. Our very highly experienced rogue plans to break into a house that serves as base of some mercenaries in a big city by going through the chimney. But as usual the player has much less forthsight than his character should have after years of adventuring and does nothing to check, if the room he is entering really is empty. So he drops down the chimney, looks out of the cooled down fireplace and right into the eyes of a Mercenary on watch.
Player "Wait... so just to get the image. I just landed through the chimney... with my big bag of utensils on the back... I adress the mercenary with the deepest voice I can make "HOHOHO, I heard there was one nice boy amongst all these naughty ones... Do you want a present?""
He rolls a critical success and tears of joy roll down the mercenaries face as he cries out "Finally! After all these years!"

We had to fight a household of mimics. I do not recall the context exactly, but I have never had so much fun just randomly smashing any furniture I came across "just in case"!

Another one that came to mind was a D&D lite game where the players started as teenagers in a small village as level 0 characters. They were a farmer's daughter, a shopkeeper's son, a blacksmith's helper, and a day laborer who was son of the town drunk. Character abilities were pre-generated as was starting equipment. The character sheets were handed out randomly to the players.

Hamlets on the outskirts of town were no longer attending the weekly market, and during the annual harvest festival several families were not there.

This was a free wheeling, open world style focus. Eventually, the players realized an Ogre was prowling the edge of the village and picking off isolated hamlets.... one of the players family was from an isolated farm.

They gathered the local farmers and the town sheriff to confront the Ogre. He promptly squashed the sheriff and the players took off.

Afterwards, they decided to trek to the local Duke's castle to ask for the protection of his knights for the village to slay the ogre.

They trekked across the valley and fought off a pack of hungry wolves, but some of their companions were killed or badly injured; including some family members. They eventually made it to the Duke's castle and made their petition.

At the end of this 2 session adventure, they were rewarded by the Duke for their bravery by sponsoring them into the Guild, Temple, School or Army of their choice. The players were then able to choose their class and we time jumped to level 1. This gave them all the "why we are together" backstory.

It was a big change of pace from what we had been playing before and really was a low fantasy game to start with. Since it was open world, they players spent some good time exploring their small village world like the local temple to the harvest goddess, a local temple to a fishing god, the marketplace, the shop owners, the sheriff, the harvest festival itself, the isolated hamlets, etc.

Consequently, the players were far less "murder hobo" in later games since they had started life as NPCs themselves and they all had a reason to be together. Plus, the first two sessions were so RPG focused it set the tone for the rest of the campaign as it evolved.

 Easy E wrote:
<Snip> It was a big change of pace from what we had been playing before and really was a low fantasy game to start with. Since it was open world, they players spent some good time exploring their small village world like the local temple to the harvest goddess, a local temple to a fishing god, the marketplace, the shop owners, the sheriff, the harvest festival itself, the isolated hamlets, etc.

Consequently, the players were far less "murder hobo" in later games since they had started life as NPCs themselves and they all had a reason to be together. Plus, the first two sessions were so RPG focused it set the tone for the rest of the campaign as it evolved.

That sounds great. I'd like to play in a campaign that started like that!

re: Olthannon. And that's why squishy spell-casters need to stay in cover! Or learn appropriate defensive spells!

re: privateer4hire. Funny!

re: Pyroalchi. That's a nifty story! Now I wonder if one could use the story of the Krampus in a similar way ...

*****
This was from a 1st ed. L5R campaign. In that game I was playing a Mirumoto bushi from the Dragon Clan. Now in L5R, a character chooses a School, and that determines your starting technique (if bushi or courtier) or spells (shugenja)*. The 4th rank technique for the Mirumoto bushi school is "The Unrighteous Shall Fall". If an attack by this character kills its target, the attack action is not lost.

We were attempting to reach the False Emperor when we encountered a large number of its guards. I asked the GM, "How many of those archers can I reach if I run?" "Hmmm ... about 5 of the ten on that side of the room." "Okay. I charge, and I'm calling head shots." "Your Target Number (TN) is 30 for each of them." [Mechanically, I was rolling 7d10, and keeping 4d10 of my choice (the attribute that governs the skill determines how many dice you keep, so Agility IIRC). In 1st ed. L5R, a "10" explodes, so you roll it again and add. If that same d10 gets another "10", you keep going. I've seen some lucky players get 80+ on a single d10!] I made all five rolls at TN 30, so five decapitations, thus five kills.

So Mirumoto Hiro charged into the room and decapitated all five of the archers he could reach. This caused a certain amount of panic, and Hiro drew the arrows of the five surviving archers on his side of the room, and the ten on the other. But the diversion had been made and the rest of party entered and wreaked their own havoc. Eventually we did reach and kidnap the False Emperor. Of course, since only about 10% of the powers that be in Rokugan know that the False Emperor is really a Shadowlands doppelganger, we now have the challenge of getting back to our allies with the doppelganger, then revealing to the rest of the Empire that the "Emperor" is not the true Emperor. That was the real challenge.


*shugenja while outwardly mages in the western sense, are actually priests who are invoking the spirits that are found in all things. So spells are really prayers. Mechanically it does not make a difference, but role-playing it can mean a lot. "You have failed to show the proper respect to the Earth spirits. They no longer answer your prayers. You must embark on a quest for spiritual purification and atonement."