Favourite Quest Spice

[Egon the Monkey]

In response to this reminder by Howland, I thought I'd post my favourite examples of spiced quests, and ask what other players have had dropped on them and thought "hey, that's cool!"

My favourite was likely the Castle Vrazdn run where Mort:
-Stuck trapped barricades ahead of us before we'd even got to the QA (Saida blew them up).

-Deployed lots more Pyromancers, including in the Towers, leading to a fireballing right back.

-Placed a "statue" that turned out to be a stoneskinned Goblin that ran when we killed all the rest.

-put four Stargazer Warrior NPCs inside the usually empty holding cells, and assigned them to four of our team as temporary henchmen.

It was cool because in addition to the Enemy getting upgrades we got dropped a bunch of allies to command, too, showing off the command ally tool. This is something that I'd love to see DMs use more, be it by spicing a Wild Orcs run with a lost patrol of the Order in the end part and spawning more orcs coming FROM the Mill direction, to some non-dominated sailors on harpies.

On right the other end of the Epic Scale, one of my PCs once had Infested Farmlands spiced after one of his 3 man team permaed. The other guy was a gnome. The DM threw two more waves of wolves at us but posessed BARON MATTERHEIM to turn up and save the day for gnomes everywhere! :D No gigantic ogre challenge, no epic reward, but really cool.

[Diagnosis]

I can't recall having experienced DM spice, but I love it when a DM possesses an NPC and turns the quest into something involving dialogue.

Like a goblin betraying other goblins, and showing the adventuring party a secret route around to their treasure.

[Drakill Tannan]

Or a troglodyte sentry trying his best to keep the attackers away, seeting ambushes and traps. That's nice too. Dialog FTW, i enjot dungeon RP the most.

[Letsplayforfun]

I enjoy the little things in spiced quests: that example of the goblin stoneskined statue was a little pearl: i was standing next to it, and it ...whispered.... freaking the hells out of me.

Or while exploring the UD with an invisible mage, getting a playful tell from a DM 'Ohhhh, a lonely little mage...' that got me running even faster.

Or in the UD brewery quest, meeting up with dice/card playing drunken hobgoblins: "if you roll a 7 with your 6 sided dice, i won't kill you"

Or Kobolds demanding a child as sacrifice and my gnome being given as a decoy...

Or that leprechaun just strolling in to joke. (Whatever happened to it??)

That's fun spice, gets your nerves tight, without anything actually "big" happening.

Then you get the fight-spice: Seer's Quest by Wiggyboy (imagine...), Harpies with charmed stoned giants (ouch), the baths invaded by water elementals and imps (lol), the Red Eleint War (excellent waves after waves after waves of enemies, so long i couldn't even stay logged for all of it).

Lots more. I can't say i've a favorite, they all got cool situations.

[Gippy]

I like the mechanical challenge of DM's spicing with massive amounts of creatures, propagating the need to go wild on consumables, just so that you can look like a total badass.

[Drakill Tannan]

That be good too.

[Damien]

I like trying to be badass.....

....but not the dying that follows.

[Cruzel]

This thread seems like it could easily turn into a festing pool of resentment as some people see all the cool spice some people get and they may not.


Anyways, the Spice I most fondly remember are :

Charmed Ogres being added to the harpy quest with a magical trap on one of the urns at the end. There was probably some way to disable it, but before my pc (Larry, halfling wizard) could attempt anything serious, some other jerk (Screw you krunto) just picked my PC up and tossed him on the trap, which brought me to like -7. It was still pretty sweet though. (I miss you ebok :'( . )


The other most fond memory is a double team by Calculor and Ninelives (Maybe even Calculor's last spice!??) where my group for pestilent scourge failed so terribly they spawned a NPC gobsquat goblin to help us (which we killed the first one) and then another to replace him, which aside from insulting us and being pretty lol, it led us through the quest where we eventually completed it.


And of course:

FLYING SHARK ISLAND.

[Arthurian_Spark]

Charmed Giants on Harpies.

I remember fondly buffing my guy to the blazes at level four, and charging at the nearest giant alone, only to be fugued with a crit on the giant's first hit. Needless to say, the DM felt somewhat sorry for me.

[Listen in Silence]

Stoned giants? Duuuude...

[derfo]

my favorite was in old efu, the quest where you kill a bunch of rats with burning hands, a group of people and i killing all the rats for Ubel

little did we know behind us laid a "Strange Siege Operating Rat" who uses the catapults near the entrance against us, but we prevailed

[djspectre]

My most memorable moment, came back in the Underdark during the Portal-to-the-Surface quest. I went with two other low level characters and we had a rough time getting through the quest.

There was that little room with the big stone lizard that had a few chests off to the side, we let them out and chaos ensued. We survived, but used up most of our healing and still hadn't faced the boss or the rest of the quest.

A DM showed up, seeing our situation and allowed us to RP our way out of the quest, by giving up valuable items we had on our person at the time. So simple, but such a much better way to play than to hack-n-slash-n-die.

[IxTheSpeedy]

Colonel Spitfire

Loved it.  So much fun.  Did it with my greatsword wielding fighter chick, Aishling.  

Thanks again to Mort for running it.  Speaking of Spitfire, I think he should make an appearance on the surface...

[Mort]

Sergeant Spittlefire did make an appearance once or twice.

[Drido Asher]

His son, Sgt. Spittlefire did, but he got away. That was a DM quest where DrDs Guard PC both did the most hilariously stupid thing possible on a steath assault (noisily and aimlessly smashed up a load of furniture above the hole full of goblins) and tried the most ridiculous way of fixing the problem:

"OKAY WE SHOULD GIVE UP GUYS LETS JUST GO"
*sneaks off and stands quitely away from the hole*
DM: Roll move silent check
*fails with something like -8 MS*

Gotta love 8 WIS goons and DM quests :D