Lost And Found

Players have their characters to boast about, GMs usually boast about the great games that they officiated over. What about those games that you had something great planned and you knew it was going to be a legendary story arc and then the characters lose the trail or there’s a TPK?

This is a picture of some of ours. Some of them were really something that I planned to do something with, others were the results of stupid things I said as GM but the players latched onto and wouldn’t let go of.

First we have good ol’ Votusk. A brilliant scientist that was driven to make a sword for his ruler, made a device that contained all his hate for the ruler and imprinted on anyone that used the sword, then put his consciousness into a robot (Kerdi) to prevent anyone from using it. It’s even more complicated than that, my players destroyed the sword instead of ever trying to use it and took Votusk along with them.

Then we have the cure for cancer, the players couldn’t figure out what the device did (since none of them had cancer) and because it was taking up cargo space, left it in an uninhabited wilderness. It’s not like they didn’t know it was important, they were offered a lot of money to bring it back but their other loot was viewed as more valuable.

There’s the Chocari, or what’s left of the Chocari. A massive building sized creature that literally crashed into the surface of the planet, was mostly vaporized by a Chezbah orbital cannon except for a few chunks that rearranged it’s cells to make an autonomous creature. It kept asking the PCs where it’s brain was (after learning english), meaning it’s main brain mass that was blown to bits. They didn’t have the heart to break the news to it. Or maybe it was that it had six limbs that had rows of razor sharp teeth and they didn’t know if it would freak out.

There’s the super computer, far more advanced than anything they had ever seen except they couldn’t get it to do anything except sing what sounded like whale song. Well they did get it to do one thing. They got a Chezbah Hound to connect to it and the hound became intelligent. They named her Sandy.

They found a legendary sword of Lee. And cut up a lot of stuff with it.

The other things are weird little things that I said something goofy and it stuck.

One time the character’s were requesting extra equipment and the CO told them he didn’t have anything else he could give them. They pressed him over and over “Nothing? You don’t have anything?” So he responded “Look, I have this broken half of a lawnmower wheel, you can have that.” They carried that broken lawnmower wheel around with them everywhere.

One time the PCs were ransacking a Kelrath home and I was struggling to come up with things they would find. I told them they found a vial that was labeled “Burn bumps.” They didn’t know if the stuff in the vial caused or cured burn bumps. Or even what burn bumps was that it should be cured or caused.

Then there was the Bucket O’ Rocks. The PCs chased off some Geetin workers and they left a shovel and a bucket of rocks. One of the players said “I’m going to dump out the rocks.”  I responded “OK.” To which he asked “Does the bucket empty?” It was such an odd question (why wouldn’t it) I answered “No, for as long as you tip the bucket over, pebbles and rocks keep falling out. It’s an infinite bucket of rocks.” They hung onto that bucket for forever, never finding a good use for it (open a gravel pit?).

Anyway, those are some of mine, do you have any great/weird story threads that were abandoned?