Everyone Dies at the End

[hwango]

Once upon a time, I started running a D&D 4th Edition campaign which I called The Mountains of Madness. It was plagued by canceled sessions due to weather, sickness, demonic possession, and any number of other problems. Still, I carried on running it even though my enthusiasm suffered from time to time. My civic obligation from hell sucked some motivation away as well, and it was decided by all involved that the game would be suspended once we finished the current story arc, which is to say the characters' descent into the nightmarish tunnels within Blood Mountain. (I deliberately chose the name because it's so ridiculous, and also so for a session I could steal the awesome title "Bad Night on Blood Mountain.") Anyway, last night's session was intended to be the last one, during which we would wrap up the final encounters.

I've been using Monsterpocalypse minis for a lot of the adversaries, because they are awesome. The characters had already fought their way through several dinosaurish critters represented by some Terrasaurs, an array of horrible tentacle things portrayed by the delightful Lords of Cthul, and most recently they've been fighting the things that the tentacle things were summoned to contain (before they themselves got out of control and started eating people). The ultimate villains were represented by the Planet Eaters, who are awesome shiny bug things and whatnot. In the previous session they fought Destructomites, Scorchers, and the mighty Rogzor and Zorog.

I knew that there were 2 encounters left for us to deal with. The first would feature Constrictors, Explodomites, a Crawler, and Xaxor. The final battle would be vs. Gorghadra. I had long claimed that no matter how discouraged I became trying to run the game, I would keep running it until I got to use Gorghadra.

Well, unfortunately, I accidentally killed everyone in what was meant to be the penultimate encounter. This was due to a combination of "Explodomites and more dangerous than I thought they'd be!," "Everyone's bottled up on the edge of the map and can't get away from the Crawler!," and of course "Oh, crap, I keep rolling unlikely to-hit rolls coupled with alarming damage, and the players' dice are totally failing them at every turn! How many consecutive turns has Kuori been on fire?!"

So, yeah, everyone died. My first TPK. Everyone took it rather well, thankfully. In fact, it's quite possible that I'm the most disappointed one, partly because I miscalculated the lethality of the encounter, but also because I STILL DIDN'T GET TO USE GORGHADRA! AAAARGH!!!

Comments

[fenris-lorsrai.livejournal.com]

It could be worse. Everyone could have been killed by a single wild boar. We had that happen with a low level D&D party.

[hwango.livejournal.com]

Yes, that would have been considerably worse. At least my group was slain by interplanar invaders that were tossing fire and lightning all over the place. That probably gets you more street cred in the afterlife.