Completely Derailed Campaigns: What was your best?

[Alden Loveshade]

What was your best completely derailed campaign?

I ran a science fiction GURPS campaign where the players were very afraid of the nearly-sentient, nearly-sapient interactive in-game-prototype computer program I gave them. The program was actually pretty harmless, but....

Later I ran a different group of players in the same campaign world with the same program. Instead of being afraid of it, they worked to upgrade it, uplift it, etc.--without putting in safeguards. There was actually more than one game session where they did nothing other than try to upgrade the program to full sentience/sapience. Well, with some time (and three out of four rolls in a row being natural critical successes), they succeeded. It was still a nice program and wanted to protect people, so it decided the best way to do that would be to put people in suspended animation. Before the players found that out, one of them told it to "be fruitful and multiply," so it started spreading everywhere, and....

So what was your best derailed campaign?

EDIT: The actual campaign was a great deal more complicated and involved than the above, but that should give an idea.

I got the idea for this post from the below.
https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comment...iled_campaign/

[Brandy]

I posted about this on the forums 14 years ago (eep!) in this thread.

This tale comes from a Champions campaign that I ran for several years.

In the campaign, all superheroes had a common origin and were called Transhumans. A year or so into the campaign, I was introducing the beginnings of the big story arc -- the appearance of a new kind of superpowered person, the Subhumans, who were on the scene to declare war with the Transhumans for the fate of humanity. As the Subhumans were coming onto the scene, I had really emphasized the idea that the player characters and their actions were vitally important to the fate of the world. There were other superhero groups, but theirs was one of the most powerful, best organized, etc. They mattered.

The characters were based in Atlanta and had gone to New Orleans to investigate several disappearences. Their investigations lead them to a Subhuman with vampiric powers called (predictably enough) Vlad.

That's when it all went wrong. Vlad and his minions were tough, but well within the capabilities of the group. Vlad was possessed of all the usual vampire weaknesses, which I thought that the players would avail themselves of.

The players, against my wildest expectations, made the decision to raid his mansion at night. Furthermore, they decided (for reasons which still elude me) to split up, and invade the upper and lower stories at the same time.

The fight, needless to say, did not go well, and I (as the GM) was really in a bind. If I manufactured a victory for them, I neuter the subhumans as a threatening storyline. Heck, if I kill them all off, and leave the world unchanged by allowing them to blithely create new characters that would kill the idea that the players' actions matter.

So, I took the battle to its natural conclusion (i.e. the defeat of the heroes) without any real plan in mind. The player character brick, Tank, boldly ran away (and so lived). The final scene that we played was Vlad siezing control of Chill, a Transhuman NPC with cold powers, and commanding him to blast the last remaining PC, Influence. Queue up the sad music, fade to black.

As the GM, I tell the players give me a few weeks to see where we go from here. I was determined to make the death of the PCs mean something, but I wasn't really sure how to do it and keep the continuity of the original storyline.

The idea that I came up with was to advance the story about 60 years in the future and ask them all to create new characters (except for Tank's player -- Transhumans do not age, so he continued with his old character, though advanced in skills). In this future, the war with the Subhumans was still going on but not going well -- the total defeat of the Southern Knights back in 1987 was a huge blow from which humanity and transhumanity never recovered. America's government had fallen, and subhumans were in control of large areas of the United States.

I had an idea at this point for getting the original story back on track but needed to let the future setting play itself out for a while.

We played in this bleak future for a few months, and during those months the PC heroes had had some success against one band of subhumans or another but it was clear that they were losing the war. They felt cornered -- the future setting forced them to be reactive to the Subhumans' plans, and they knew they had to do something. They decided to strike out against the enemy in an attempt to score a major victory that could possibly turn the tide...or die trying.

They made a plan to strike deep into the heart of the Vlad's territory, which in the future covered much of the southern US. I couldn't have been more pleased -- this was exactly what I had been waiting for.

They knew that Vlad had many minions and that the journey, crossing his territory to get to him, would be extremely dangerous -- to say nothing of facing Vlad himself. One of the characters was a teleporter with the ability to teleport others -- a power they had used to their advantage in several other encounters -- and they spent a lot of time trying to figure out a way to get an image of Vlad's mansion that would allow the teleporter, Gateway, to take them there directly.

A Transhuman villian from their past, Morpheus, now an ally against the Subhumans, provided the means to do this. Morpheus could synthesize nearly any drug that he could imagine (he had set himself up as the great drug lord of the west coast, and the PC's in the original campaign had had many unpleasant encounters with his minions). Morpheus provided Gateway (the teleporter) with a drug that would allow limited telepathy, to steal an image from a person's mind.

With that in hand, they set out to attempt to capture one of Vlad's chief lieutenants Wraith, who was known to patrol the northernmost part of Vlad's territory so that they could steal an image of the mansion from his mind. They found him and had a quick fight -- Wraith by himself was no match for them. They gathered 'round Wraith, removed his cowl, and lo and behold Tank recognizes "Wraith" as Chill(!), who had been under Vlad's control for the last 60 years.

Chill comes to, sees and recognizes Tank and says, "Tank, what happened? The last thing I remember was Vlad trying to control me..."

Thankfully, Gateway's player was on the ball. He took Morpheus' drug immediately, and told me he was taking the image from Chill's mind of Vlad's mansion at the time of the PC's original raid, 60 years ago.

I told him that he felt like he could reach it -- that he could travel through time as he wished to -- but that the image was fading, and fast. (I certainly didn't want them trying to take back any future tech or useful knowledge, after all!). So, he immediately opened a portal to the past, and the new PC's rush through right at the moment of their previous defeat and dispatch the already weakened Vlad and his minions.

The campaign was able to now continue as I imagined it half a year earlier, and the stakes had been raised for the players. Perhaps a little over-the-top, but definately (IMHO) true to the four-color comic genre. Plus, the players never saw it coming until it was right on top of them. Very satisfying.

[kdtipa]

Wow Brandy... very cool campaign story.

My most derailed campaign was more of a learning experience as a GM for me than it was something I would describe as "the best". It was probably the late 90's, so I was in my very early 20's, and I was pretty new to GMing. I had played in a lot of campaigns in a lot of different games, and I wanted to come up with a setting that would allow my group to keep the same characters but play in a lot of different settings.

I came up with what I called the Origin... a sort of proto-reality where all realities come from. And I invented a species called the Orin. The Orin were the only living thing born directly from the Origin, and were powerful beings that could visit any reality they wanted to visit.

I ran three groups of players in this campaign setting, and if I remember correctly, they all started out as 1500 point characters... so... ridiculously powerful. It was my lesson in trying to run an over powered campaign, and I won't do that again.

One of the groups decided specifically they wanted to be evil though. And this is the source of the derailment. I kept setting up exciting heroic adventures for them, and they kept doing astonishingly disgusting villainous things. They never progressed any story... they just kept doing extremely immoral things to the NPCs.

I'm sitting here trying to decide if it's okay for me to type this stuff out on the forum, or if I'll get in trouble and offend people.

It was enough that I ended the group. I had no interest in running evil characters; I had no interest in writing a bunch of content for people who were just going to ignore it in favor of imaginary violence that makes them laugh; and I didn't really want to be part of a story like that... it wasn't fun for me.

[Alden Loveshade]

Brandy, that's what I call "epic." That could be a movie.

kdtipa, that's unfortunate, but yeah, sometimes players go off on tangents, and sometimes players/GM don't mesh.

[Black Leviathan]

I built a Low Steampunk world where the Crystal Palace exhibition had an accident where a pair of brothers trying to bend a beam of amplified light blew a hole in reality into a a fairytale world and England decided it would discretely colonize it. The players were ladies and gentlemen with singular abilities working for organizations allied with the crown to explore the New Imperial Territories, engage with the natives, and find new remarkable resources.

The players came late to the conspiracy. There was already a colony on the other side of the rabbit hole filled with remarkable characters from the period and newly discovered materials that could more efficiently power steam engines and a peculiar metal that could be hardened more rigid than steel. There was a lot going on in the game world. Colonists were smuggling New Imperial Territories goods back to England, the crown was exploiting the native populations, the crown turning a blind eye to strange experimentation and labor exploitation in the New Imperial Territories, Native populations were waging a civil war, what appeared to be a single hole between worlds was slowly expanding and creatures from one world were mysteriously appearing in the other. And ultimately the New Imperial Territories was the same place as Victorian England just short of 10,000 years apart from one another, and it's monsters and magic were just sufficiently advanced technology run amok.

My players have a monkey-barrel of fun being inappropriately scandalous for the age and casually racist and chugging narcotics to cure their mild discomforts. They engaged in class warfare and had a ton of snide dry dialogue. Most of them weren't huge anglophiles but the more they dug into their characters the more gold they came up with.

My players arrived, found common bonds that brought them together, dipped their toes in a plot that revolved around underground blood sports in the colonies but hadn't picked a side to back, went on a brief trip into the wilderness to gather resources and then flung themselves at the edge of the map when they discovered a strange road to the weirdest and least defined area I had written to deal with a regent who was intended to be the late game big-bad. They had a run in with shapeshifting illusionist bastards that they really didn't like and it left a bad taste in their mouth that ultimately crashed the game.

[whswhs]

My initial thought was that I didn't have campaigns that were derailed. But when I look back, I can identify one clear case, which I think would have to count as "best" by default. I ran a campaign set in Zimiamvia, E.R. Eddison's high fantasy world, using the Amber Diceless engine. Unfortunately, while the players were enthusiastic, only one of them actually succeeded in reading even one of the books; the rest found Eddison's emulation of Renaissance prose too challenging. So they didn't really have a good feel for the setting or the idiom.

* Things began to go off the rails during the initial auction, when one of the players bid something like 60 points (out of 100) on Psyche, shutting out any bids from anyone else.

* One of the players, a man, had his character become attracted to the women characters played by two of the three women players, even though neither of them gave him any encouragement. In fact all three women were annoyed, two because he did pursue their characters and the third because he didn't.

* I allowed two of the players, whose characters did become attracted to each other, to have access to the magical extradimensional house of wish fulfillment that the original novels described. Unfortunately I didn't spot the problem when they wanted to use it to come out somewhere else than where they went in, so they now had what amounted to a teleportation engine and plot short-circuiter.

As I ran the campaign, it evolved from Eddison's spirit of high tragedy to something more like Shakespearean comedy, ending up with the two characters who fell in love marrying, and the other two women characters getting together with the NPC chancellor of the realm, one as his wife and the other as his mistress. The male player who had annoyed everyone was left out in the cold, and there was much rejoicing.

[coronatiger]

This campaign wasn't derailed in the traditional sense, rather it was brutally tipped off the tracks before it even left the station:

The five of us (four players and I) drove to one of the players' cabin, where we planned to spend a weekend playing. Most of them were new to role playing, so the drive was spent discussing role playing in general, the rules of the particular game, and everyone came up with a basic character concept. After arriving, we statted all the characters, and then got down to business.

The campaign was a contemporary one, starting in a noisy nightclub where the characters were meant to enjoy themselves for a bit before receiving their first mission. And that's when things went wrong.

One of the players decided to pick a fight with a random NPC and ended up shooting him. Rather than fleeing with the rest of the people at the club, the players delayed until they could hear the police sirens approaching, at which point they panicked and ran to their car, in full view of the incoming law enforcement officers. If I remember correctly, the killer was still waving his gun around. Anyway, the police gave chase. The players decided their best course of action would be to outrun the police. I warned them that high speed driving rolls through city traffic would be very difficult, and suggested that they should try to come up with a less dangerous strategy, perhaps tricking the police in some way, but they went for it anyway. The dice didn't roll favorably, and one of the players, who saw the writing on the quickly approaching wall, jumped out of the car. He could have survived if the damage roll was very lucky, but alas... The rest of them met the aforementioned wall; the one wearing his seat belt woke up in handcuffs some time later and learned that the others had been scraped off the wall.

The entire campaign lasted for about half an hour. We played board games for the rest of the weekend. To end the story on a happy note, three of the four players joined my regular RPG group, where they were much more successful.

[Alden Loveshade]

Originally Posted by Black Leviathan

...flung themselves at the edge of the map when they discovered a strange road to the weirdest and least defined area I had written...

Leave it to players to somehow manage to do that.

Originally Posted by whswhs

The male player who had annoyed everyone was left out in the cold, and there was much rejoicing.

I've been very fortunate that, with the exception of a couple of players at gaming conventions and a person who developed a serious mental health issue, I've had very few major problems with players.

Originally Posted by coronatiger

....One of the players decided to pick a fight with a random NPC and ended up shooting him....To end the story on a happy note, three of the four players joined my regular RPG group, where they were much more successful.

The first GURPS adventure I ran went something like that. In mine, the PCs actually completely succeeded in their assigned rescue--until a security guard (who was on their side) came around the corner and one of the PCs shot him....

[quarkstomper]

I once ran a campaign for my wife in which Sherlock Holmes is brought to our present day and her character becomes his "Watson". Because the emphasis would be on the interpersonal relationship between the characters and because Holmes would need her assistance due to his unfamiliarity with the Modern Age, I thought I could balance the roles well enough.

And for the most part it worked; except a few sessions into the campaign we veered off into the unknown.

I explained Holmes' arrival in our era by saying that Professor Moriarity had invented a dimensional travel device and tried to use it to escape when he and Holmes were grappling at Reichenbach Falls. No not only is Holmes in the Present Day, so is Moriarity, with a D-Hopper. Holmes would naturally make it one of his first priorities to capture Moriarity.

So before I fully sussed out what I was doing, I found myself in a situation where the logical place to take the campaign was to make it a D-Hopping one, with Holmes and his "Watson" traveling to different timelines.

The campaign actually lasted a good run, and we had some good adventures in it. In one of them, we visited the Sherwood Forrest of Robin Hood, where Holmes was mistaken for the Sheriff of Nottingham (because they both resembled Basil Rathbone; later I remembered that Rathbone wasn't the Sheriff in the movie, he was Sir Guy of Guisborne, but it was still a good bit). In another one, they arrived in London during H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds and found that Moriarity was helping the Martians; (a plot device I've used in more than one campaign; I think this was the first time).

In yet another, they were in the DC Universe. At the time, Bruce Wayne was accused of murder in the BATMAN comic, so I had Holmes solve the case. The solution I came up with was different than how it played out in the comic, but I liked my version better.

If I remember correctly, eventually I folded the campaign into the Horatio Club and brought them home that way.

[Ji ji]

One campaign of mine has a complex supernatural conspiracy slowly going on behind the curtains. As the events unfold, their huge scope become more clear - it's some apocalyptic stuff! So the characters find themselves fighting to avoid the beginning of a neverending night.

Well, not really. It seems that these characters are more of an entrepreneurial kind than white knights. They find much more interest in carving the biggest, baddest slice of the pie for them, tricking and killing and plotting all the way. They just love the huge opportunities brought by apocalyptic times.