Keep in mind your response doesn't have to be overly Greyhawkish in content, just as long as it's set there. So non-greyhawk adventures/home-grown weirdness great as well.
Pour moi, it was when I DMed Queen of Spiders in 1992 or so...
Even to this day, I occasionally get e-mails from former players, talking about the bubble over Istivin, or of the statue of Sardock of the Mammoth (character in the party - snow elf) who defeated the mammoth and 'giant' bullies outside of some town,
or of the cavalier (another party member), who upon meeting Brazemal, teamed up with the dragon, attacked the party, and later destroyed said statue...
Gods but the party was peeved at that guy; I seem to recall him having difficulty getting a ride home after that game
Fun indeedy.
At first, they joined the 'loyal' forces and spread to cover the whole city. Then, the paladin of the team (from the church of Pholtus, no less) had a crisis of conscience. He decided that Archbold was no longer fit to be king (too many taxes, etc..) and switched to the 'rebels'. I was speechless!
Thanks to him, the rebels managed to make their way into the palace where they fought the other adventurers who had regrouped to defend it!
There was a splendid rp moment where the two sides faced each other and both the paladin (for the rebels) and another party member (for the loyalists) tried to convince their opponents to lay down their arms and surrender.
The paladin was so eloquent he managed to convince his friends and most of the loyalists to join the rebel side and together they stormed the throne room.
There, Lynwerd faced his father in battle and would have lost (he didn't really want to fight his father and certainly not harm him) if the paladin hadn't stepped in. They defeated Archbold (barely!) and Lynwerd was crownded king.
The paladin lost his status (as the god of Law, Pholtus couldn't condone what he had done) but became the 'hero of the revolution'.
That session was years ago but, to this day, my players still talk about it excitedly. I had to improvise a lot (given I had failed to anticipate they would side with the rebels) but I don't regret the way things turned out.
THAT to me is what GH is about: players taking their destiny into their hands and changing the world!
That made me think a lot about myself and if I would have done the same thing to another person.
I must confess that most of my adventures were not really worth telling (well, except that Hamster of Hepmonaland matter...), what I will always remember of those games will be that feeling of friendship, (beer, chips) and happiness... (Read to much Charlotte Bronte the last night...)
But wait, when we discovered a old Elven fortress in the Hraak Forest and just decided *Go to hell, scheduled campaign, from now we will live a life as bandits!* that was quite memorable moment...
One that stands out (which isn't much in the great scheme of things) is a time when my players had began to slowly discover a cult group forming in Hochoch. Most of the military was away trying to reclaim Geoff. This allowed the cult to spread... the PCs seems fairly uninterested in my plot, so they took odd jobs to earn money (1st level PCs), INSTEAD OF ADVENTURING! Anyways one thing led to another when the PCs constant ended up harrassing one of their employers for her famous fudge recepie. I'm not exactly sure why, but they started offering her lots of money to constantly make her fudge. The PCs started inventing way to mass market this old lady's fudge, and retire without any adventuring (this took place over 2 sessions mind you!). The PCs learned that the sweet old woman who made the fudge was actually a cult member, and a lizard mage in disguise trying to hide a shrine of an ancient "reptile god" in her cellar. When the PCs found out, they constantly considered themselves "cursed" for eating so much of her fudge. The PCs gathered up all of her fudge, and baking accessories and decided to rid themselves of the curse by comitting the fudge to the Lake of Unknown Depths... Yes, they did that, no joke ~ why? To this day I'm still not sure.
Another group of PC - another "old-woman" senario involved the PCs being hired to rid an elderly lady of "bats in her belfry." The "bats were infact stirges that infested her attic. The PCs cleared out the attic and then convinced that the old lady had something to hide, began tearing apart her chimney to see what was hidden in there... There was nothing. The stone chimney of the house collapsed... and the PCs never came back to Flen again because of that incident...
Again, nothing spectacular but something that puts a smile on my face even to this day.
Oh, here come the waves of reminicence... I can go on and on, but I'll save those stories for another time.
......................................Omote
FPQ
My PC owned three businesses: The Greenleaf Inn, The Drinking Horn and (through Roleplay and much spilling of blood and shenanigans) The Pit. My acquisition of the Pit was (indirectly if I remember right) from an unsavory character named Andrade Mirious (sp?), who was actually a priest of Nerull. He was one of those bad guys who got away to come back and haunt you later. Later he framed my character for unleashing a plague on the city and Valkaun was arrested (his Lt. handcuffed him with a surprise roll as he answered the door, Valkaun, who obviously wore a girdle of giant strength ripped that off and went willingly as a free man) and put on trial. GH laws are already draconic so he was banished from the city and it's environs. My DM had a pretty elaborate story with all kinds of intrigue. We had another group by then, The Brotherhood, who hired a hunchbacked learning disabled laborer named Andy to work at our base of operations. It was Andrade in disguise all along, right under my new PC's nose. The banished Valkaun, in disguise himself as Alkuin Vaund, with the aid of other PC's captured Andrade with a Rope of Entanglement and imprisoned him with Stasis (?)in the ground in the center of the Druid's Circle south east of the city, a place that's supposed to be scry proof. We never saw him again.
Valkaun left GH City, his reputation tarnished and "civilized folks" prejudices confirmed. At age 55 he died fighting an ancient Linnorm in it's mountain lair so he wouldn't die the straw death of an old man. The Linnorm caused the cavern to collapse on both of them to rob Valkaun of one last kill.
Since it didnt look like much fortune and glory was going to be gained down in the well... I convinced everyone that we could move on, actually most of the other party members didnt want me to mess with it in the first place.
Later that night we made camp not too far from said well. We started seeing these strange looking creatures around our camp but when one was spotted it would disappear before we could get another witness. The whole party started freaking out and we went looking for whatever was stalking us.
In the process of stalking the creatures, my character was taken by them. If you havent guessed so far... the creatures were meenlocks! So they took my character down into the well cavern and started scratching me and trying to graft some weird moss into my skin while my party tried to figure out what the hell was going on... they eventually did realize i was gone and figured the well must be connected since i was the only one who messed with it.
The came in time to save me but my character almost became a meenlock for good. I don't think my description does the DM or the adventure justice but i can remember white knuckling the table when the creatures started stalking us... it was so creepy... it was Awesome!
Some information: old weapon of Osson had been found in Medegia and was in possession of Montesser (See Ivid the Undying) orcs. Three factions wanted it: Almorian refugees, Idee Volunteers and Ahlissan government.
The module went fine, players got the Lance and returned to Naerie city. Then the module was completely broken down once players started to argue who they should hand it in. There were forgeries made out of the lance, PCs trying to rob it from safe location and lot's of behind the scenes scheming.
In the end two PCs made a run for it and were intercepted by Idee Volunteer terrorists/freedom fighters send by third player. Few seconds later half of them had been cut down and the two players gave the lance to Ahlissan officials.
Meanwhile remaining players tried to sell the forgeries to other factions, failiing quite miserably.
It was completely improvised, certainly a bit against RPGA guidelines and one of the best D&D session the players had ever been in or at least so they said :D
http://boards1.wizards.com/showpost.php?p=2866851&postcount=178
We played last night and the Player is still getting reminded of that even though it happened 2 years ago :D
The paladin went on to kick the doors open on the Temple of All Consumption resulting in an almost total party kill and cementing his place in history.
Maraudar
1e player still
We did a lot of that, actually - using other game boards, pieces, rules, etc. to make up totally different games. For example, during the 1984 Olympics, we used Avalon Hill's Circus Maximus board to make an Olympics game, buying a sheet of blank counters and drawing little running stick figures of Carl Lewis and others and then simply rolling a d6 for "speed" until someone crossed the finish line. And the sick part was that we'd create enough athletes to make up enough relay teams (those of you that ran track know what I mean) - that's a lot of athletes, lots of heats, lots of races. The REALLY sick part is we'd chronicle this by writing down results (who finished first, second, etc.) for about five different distances, and creating a story of the event - this format we stole directly from David Wallechinksy's "Book of the Olympics" from 1984. Good narrative style. Well, anyway, we kept up this methodology by using the 1e DMG grappling and punching rules to play out our geeky little Star Wars/GI Joe/Buck Rogers/Battlestar Galactica figure "High School Battles" where we segmented our high school society (this is in the early 80's) into the requisite cliques (jocks, preps, geeks, rednecks (we called them "grits" in SW Virginia) & what-have-you) and had them set up their fortresses in different corners of one of our rooms using whatever we had (shoes, books, tape cassette cases, large D batteries, etc.) and then start the fighting - we used to call them "tedium battles" because they took so long to play and they were quite tedious. It was sort of like a 6-player game of Risk, where one clique would form an alliance and double-up on another - lots of intrigue and treachery. It kept us amused and away from all that prescriptivist grammar we were being taught, anyway. After that got old, we settled into our great masterpiece, the Figure Football League, which is basically taking all your aforementioned action figures, assigning to each one a persona/character similar to professional wrestling, sometimes placing our peers as players, sometimes using real people (the Fridge, for example) and then applying Avalon Hill's football game Paydirt! rules (rolling for what offensive play to run/what defensive play to run given the situation). Again, more sickness in that we'd tape record these games, including pre-game and post-game shows (influenced greatly by HBO's early-80's "Inside the NFL" show) but most influenced by that classic wrestling show "Tuesday Night Titans" - for those of you that remember, it was a talk show similar to any other late-night show you'd see, with one of the ring announcers serving as host to a myriad of wrestlers, who'd eventually start attacking one another, creating quite the spectacle. Throw in Rowdy Roddy Piper and that's all we needed to round-out the kind of feel we wanted for our football game environment. We'd cut to commercials as well, imitating friends and family to sell cars, beer, whatever. Cut them off in mid-sentence rudely then back to the game! And during such games, we were "acting out" again by documenting everything that happened - every play - how many yards (the field was actually an old Missouri Tigers throw-rug we flipped over and ran masking tape across each end for a goal line - 4 downs for a TD or FG, that's it) - we created stats at the end of each game and created a season. Oops, I left out the draft. Line up all the action figures, assign to each a score for abilities we created for each player, then "pick" players for each team. Doing so created homogenous teams like "The Maulers" captained by one Captain Cruel, who was actually the "Major Blood" figure. When we'd imitate his voice on tape during a player interview, he took on this "Monty Burns, villan from Targoviste, Cruelvania (stolen from TSR's "Vampyre" minigame)" persona. The villan of the FFL. He tended to pick mostly the "bad guy" GI Joe figures (I can't remember what that group was called - flotsam and jetsom, mostly). There was the "good guy" team everyone hates (The All-Stars), the workingman's team everyone likes (The Brawlers, which somehow seemed to win most of the games... hmmm, maybe b/c my friend and I were "on" that team!!! ha ha ha ha). If an action figure had been abused by a little kid in the real world and was missing thumbs, we'd make that into "Keith, the all-pro safety who was born without thumbs - will you LOOK how far he's come in this league what a trooper?" If a figure, during our "playing" of the game (after rolling dice for advantage, speed, passing, whatever, just grab a handful of figures and bash them together - that's what it was - nothing special) had its rubber band broken, then it was a stop-the-presses on-field calamity special! "Oh my GOOOOD! Destro has been vivisected by that hit!!!" (Accompanied by either my buddy or myself in the background making ooohh ahhh crowd noise!). Followed by our uncontrolled geeky adolescent laughter, followed by "hit the pause button!" in high-pitched voices.
Anyway.... back to Greyhawk.
We set up this little deal where we defeated the Bandit Kingdom that nestled itself in that tight curve in the Artonsamy River (oh my God, I can't believe I actually remembered that detail) and then got out 10 sheets of graph paper and mapped out an enourmous walled city (New Orlean, stolen from "Orlean" in Against the Cult of the Reptile God, which is the town the party took over after "beating" that adventure module). After that, we took on the next Bandit Kingdom - the one next to the Great Rift Canyon. Had to make another walled city this time. Of course, the enemy came out of its city to meet us - we didn't want to bother with siege engines. Beat them, too. Then set about ridding the Rift Canyon of all resistance. Red dragons- loot, magic items. Found an artifact, got all the good powers - whatever.
By that time, we had grown weary of this and started in with cool modules like the Saltmarsh series and then Ravenloft - although, to be honest, I'm not sure if I have the chronology right or not.
I always tried to map the Giant series and the Drow series to exact hexes on the Greyhawk map and used to have little markers on my map hung on the wall to show where each module was located. That was cool.
Then I grew up, went to college (I majored in "Rolling-Up Traveller Characters with a minor in "Not Actually Playing Traveller") and became a "respectable" contributer to America's late-80's economy. Didn't really touch D&D (or Greyhawk) until the early 1990's when I started reading all about that Iuz business. By then, I thought "there's too much being told here - I wish they had left the imagination up to ME!" So, I stopped altogether. By that time, anyway, my friend, who had all the 2ed stuff said the "kits" were just too geeky for him. It was almost as if all creativity and imagination were gone from the game.
Greyhawk was pretty cool, we thought. Served our purposes.
The second favorite was a medium sized road campaign in which all characters were members of an impoverished Nyrond noble family trying to regain their honor and make some bucks. The group centered about two brothers (NE and LE), a CE cousin, and a CG servant, who happened to be a third brother, although a bastard. Again, with such a weird combination of alignments, the result was pretty funny as we crossed the continent in direction to the City of Greyhawk.
Finally, I liked a lot my last Greyhawk campaign, where all players were low class workers trying to get a space in the thieves' guild. This one was less messy than the other two as, although the PCs were thieves, most of them were honorable thieves.
I also have fine memories playing the Village of Hammlet and Against the Giants, specially G1 and G3. Although I don't think the sequels of those adventures keep the high standards.
When the group was ambushed by a group of gnolls he would say: ,,I wait.'' He fumbled in his spellbook (Players Manual) trying to find the right spell. When he actually found something useful, the battle was over.
Then the party entered a small tunnel and stumbled upon a group of trolls. He took his wand of fireballs and said: ,,I wait.'' Because he didn't want to hurt his comrades, he kept on waiting. The right moment never came and the other brave adventurers finished off the trolls.
All this happened the same evening and it was getting very late. I decided to throw in the last encounter. The adventurers descended slippery stairs spiraling downwards. They had to make saving throws to avoid gliding down in a pool of dirty water infested with rats feasting on a corpse. Somewhere in the pool they could find a magical sword, lost by an hero during an epic battle in the dungeon. The wizard stayed on top of the stairs and pronounced the heroic words: ,,I wait.'' His wise decision was met by several deep sighs from his companions.
For over an hour (real time) they searched the pool, fought against the giant rats, succeeded their saving throws against the stench, poison (bites) etc. In the meantime the wizard searched his tomes for an appropriate action. Eventually the players found the sword. Happy but exhausted they managed to get out of the pool and started climbing up the stairs. I closed my books and began counting XP.
Then the wizard/player exclaimed: ,,I charge down the stairs and jump into the pool.'' He tumbled down and took all the other players with him in his fall. Suddenly the fatigue was forgotten. Everybody started shouting around the table. I managed with great efforts to save the wizard from being thrown out of the window in the room. The wizard/player never showed up again.
But even now, twenty years later, nobody at the table can say ,,I wait'' without a grin.