What is your favorite encounter?

Gunnar

Squire
What was your favorite encounter during your time here at AllianceLARP? Tell us the story :).
 
Alliance HQ back when it was NERO Ashbury.

A camp so old that I have forgotten its names (not the original camp, but one of the ones we jumped around between in Connecticut in the mid 90s).

We were playing at an event where we had been transported to a realm where magic was illegal. Casting magic was punished by these pitch black creatures, one of which was played by John (I forget his last name, but he was REALLY tall).

As per tradition at the time, the Mage's Guild cast free Detect Magic spells multiple times per day. Sorceress Shalizar (head of the Mage's Guild) was about to cast one, but she had used up all of her strikes (which meant if she cast magic again, the black creatures would kill her). At that point, they knew about the tradition and were waiting just outside the Mage's Guild to punish her.

Since I was a Mage's Guild member, I decided to protect her. Just before the Detect Magic time was about to happen, I very loudly berated a tree ("You've insulted me for the last time!). Then I cast a flame bolt at it in full view of all three black things.

I took off like a jackrabbit and they followed suit. I was a fast sprinter, but these three were, too. They were nipping on my heels as I circled the town. I thought I had a chance after about a minute of running when I turned a corner and John was standing right there in front of me. I stopped dead and said I would take my 1st strike. Instead, I got my second strike because I ran (beat down to bleeding out).

Still, the Detect Magic happened without Shalizar getting hurt, so I succeeded. Getting clobbered was never more fun or satisfying.

-MS
 
Alliance Kalamazoo, 2005 or 2006 I believe.

Winter event in Michigan, the weekend after a blizzard so the whole camp was still heavily snowed under. We were still at Camp Rota-Kiwan (the best site I've played at to this day), and were circled up in the clearing outside of the cabin owned by the local Kings of Town, the Order of the Emerald Flame while they were trying to cast some sort of ritual magic. If I recall it was a Whispering Winds with a flaw that could kill the target. The target, a drider (Brooks in a rep that looked like a bustle with spider legs, it was pretty cool), was stalking around the woods outside the clearing and sending in waves of dark elves against us to try and break up the ritual.

So we spent what felt like hours in the freezing snow, in the dark. It was a one of those winter nights where everything seems hushed with stars above us in a clear black sky, and us fighting a line battle on a snow field. After the first half hour, I had footholds kicked into the icy packed down snow to keep me in place while I worked a polearm to keep the enemy back. Between waves, the high orks and scavengers in the line next to me kept themselves amused by taunting the enemy whenever they saw it, sing-songing "Drider's got a big ol' butt!'" at it and then ducking the death spells that flew in response.

It was glorious.
 
I have to name just one?

Jeeze.

Okay, my favorite encounter was a solo-mod where my House had to go deal with a thing, by getting rifted out by a banner. So no advance warning. Also, my House population at the time was me. So I went to this mod by myself, because -that's- smart.

I get there and I end up getting an NPC ally to help me with the thing. The thing ends up being in a fight with an undead thing with a whole bunch of phases, making it rain wither carriers on it's bow. I'm running, fixing my limbs, running, fixing my limbs, fixing my armor, my NPC gets dead, and I'm looking around a corner and I realize...

"Dude. You're...you're a healer. You have morts and crits in memory. THIS THING IS UNDEAD WHAT ARE YOU DOING?"

I immediately turned around the corner, said something to the effect of, "Okay, I'm all of out craps to give," and dumped enough healing into the bastard to full-heal two Zehnyus. It dropped.

So did I, though from exhaustion of running what felt like a half-marathon.

This fight was actually even more chaotic than this, but it was immensely satisfying once it was over.
 
Mine's a toss up: both of them occurred in Deadlands.

One of them was a fight inside of a Void Shard - essentially six of us volunteered to go into the Death thing to go retrieve a friend, while the rest of town fought things coming out of the Death thing. It is, without a doubt, one of the nastiest fights I have ever been in, with everyone going absolutely all out with whatever kitchen sink we had in us. The story goes that you could hear the screaming long, long after the fight in town was over, and we were still going.

The second was my farewell to the east coast. The New Hampshire chapter had been very generous, and given me an 'out' that was absolutely beautiful, and staged amazingly. It also included my character's wife screaming her name, immediately followed by one of the loudest thunderclaps I've ever heard at game while the rainclouds were still gathering. I hope the NH team didn't go over budget paying Mother Nature ;).

(I'll put these in more detail when I'm not at work.)
 
The mod where my first main, Maxvell, died.

So no bull, there I was: Minotaur slavers were trying one last attempt to take the throne of the land. I kiss my IG love (and OOG wife) before it kicks off and tell her I love her, so if I fall I wouldn't go without letting her know. The fight is intense, and I really shouldn't have been a front line fighter with these high level folks, but fearless Max is fearless. I'm doing okay after I steal a polearm from an enemy (Yay Weapon Maaster!) and I'm plugging holes with damage. Then I see the Family friend Ashok dead on the ground. I go out to save him, but the ranks close. I get gunched. I get drug off, and the NPCs ensure rez. I go to plot and draw the black, welcome to the 10% club.

So after a bit, they take me as my dead body back out to the field and toss me into the fight. I roll and do my best dead man flop to come to a stop. Someone throws a Life and I call "no effect". Finally someone drags me to the back of the fight where my wife has to come to terms that her beloved is dead. Oh... oh man the feels. Didn't know dead bodies could cry. She goes full grief berserker and gets killed as well. Then here comes this little elf woman, a black diamond on her forehead, and she starts singing this song some of you may know.

It's kind of funny to say it, but my character's death has been the absolutely best, most awesome, amazing thing to EVER happen to me in game.
 
So many possibilities.

I will take this on two avenues: NPC and PC

I mostly NPC:
One of the funniest is when I was playing one of the local noble, and the other NPCs knew what I was going to tell the king.
The thing is English is not my first language, and I started talking to the king, and everybody was laughing. I had not realized that what I was telling him had a sexual undertone, and I started analyzing why people were laughing in my head and figured what it may be, but it was too late, everything I said just made it worse. The NPCs were snorting their drinks, and I could feel myself turning a bit red. To this day, I still laugh at the awkwardness of that discussion.
Summary: I wanted the kingdom to have my strong wood that grows in the bushy grove.

PC:
My PC is a dryad and during the nationals in 2014 I ended up in a land where undeads are normal and accepted. A land where the living stand out. It was very interesting to play my character in this setting. The poor dryad literally speechless and feeling uneasy. When one of the undead(the gardener) approached me and started pruning me; I just freaked out. A moment my character is not about to forget. Although he wishes, he would.
 
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I have quite a few favorites, but I had a really good experience this last event due to some character stuff that had happened beforehand.

To set up the story, I have to explain why my character has an intense fear of anything related to Blood-based magic.

A little over a year ago, I was Gypsy cursed by a player. The actual details of the curse are irrelevant, but what matters is the roleplay involved. See, I am not a tall person, about 5'8". The other player TOWERS over me, somewhere in the 6 foot range. Now, he and I are friends in-game, and at the beginning of the event, he asks me for a hug. I was cautious, but said sure...which is when he pulled his blood-drenched hands out from behind his back and GRABBED MY HEAD. He starts cursing me with his blood, and I'm screaming trying to get away, and we both fall while he finishes his curse. Everyone is yelling, people are about to start killing each other, it was a whole big mess, and for Taios (my character), this instilled a fear of blood-based magic that has only grown with time.

Fast-forward to this event. We were attempting to stop a spirit creature from manifesting on our plane and doing all sorts of bad stuff, and I agreed to go take care of a part of it without knowing what I had signed up for. We rift in to the area, and wouldn't you know it, it's the most horrifying thing that Taios could have to fight.

Blood Constructs.

I'm flipping out, but I push through it so that I can help my guild, right? Well, some of the constructs, it turns out, require a killing blow, or else they regenerate. I decide to do so myself, and that's when it happens. As I strike the blow, the construct explodes, covering me with blood and ichor.

I screamed. It was bad.

Not only that, now that I am covered in the blood, I CANNOT BE HEALED. Purify does nothing, no healing can get to me. And I was stuck with KB duty for the rest of the mod so that we didn't have too many people unable to be healed.

Luckily, when I died later that mod, I was able to take a hit to my max health as part of a deal with the powers running the constructs to become immune and to wash away the blood that was already on me, so that mitigated the damage to my character's Psyche. Still, being covered in magic Blood was the most scarring thing my character has ever had to go through, and I loved every second.
 
Some of my favorites should remain top secret but one of my most memorable encounters came in a mod in which John Finnegan was playing a creature that spoke no English. We adventurers had to teach him to communicate. For the rest of the event "happy" (I think was the name) would wander around camp periodically and hug the teachers.

A couple years later I moved to korea and started teaching English. I often think back to that encounter and wonder if there's any connection.
 
My favorite encounter was at an Alliance Seattle game about 2 years ago.

An NPC guild member (Chloe M. for those who know her on the WC) was playing Heart Drinker, the leader of the Skree, which are like smarter, rogue-ier goblins. We had been fighting them for the last 2ish years in the campaign, but my character Kasuni had been trying to find a common ground so the PCs could find a way to cohabitate. At a previous event, Kasuni went out deep into the woods alone with maybe 10 skree to deliver food since they had been starving due to the adventurers killing them and chasing them out of places they used to habitate. Kasuni had been at their camp just that morning with no trouble. When Kasuni entered their camp, Heart Drinker thanked her for the food and then said that the skree were going to kill Kasuni since the other adventurers had been killing skree all day. That was the first time Kasuni ressurected. (That was the lead up - not the favorite encounter!)

The favorite encounter was the next event at the 4-day Seattle game. Heart Drinker was spotted during the big wave fight between a skree army and the PCs. Kasuni ran down Heart Drinker with her gypsy pal Raganzi, and borrowed Zodiac's cabin to have a "conversation" with Heart Drinker. I had made a decision that since "doing the right thing" got Kasuni killed, she was going to cross over a little bit to the darker side and... Not do the right thing so much. Kasuni told Heart Drinker how everything she had done made her feel, blah, blah, and was about to start breaking fingers, which is not at all the type of thing she would generally do.

My favorite RP moment, probably ever, was when Heart Drinker looked up at Kasuni and said, "I always thought you were better than us," and resigned to whatever was going to happen.

Kasuni completely lost it, got Heart Drinker all healed, and helped her sneak out of town from the fight. From then on, Kasuni and Heart Drinker met over subsequent events to try to form an alliance between the town and the skree (which, Heart Drinker permed instead... To this day Kasuni doesn't handle seeing skree very well!)

It was really neat to be on the verge of completely shifting a character in another direction (complete idealist to something darker) and to have a conversation so emotional and profound that it makes you re-evaluate everything your character has done and will do moving forward.

Shout out and thanks to Chloe for that one - the whole Heart Drinker plot line was probably the most character-building thing that's ever happened to Kasuni.
 
Alliance HQ back when it was NERO Ashbury.

A camp so old that I have forgotten its names (not the original camp, but one of the ones we jumped around between in Connecticut in the mid 90s).
...
-MS

Ceadercrest?
 
Nope. Not Cedarcrest. This was the camp that had a very steep set of stairs at one end of the "cabin lane". It also had a rather steep hill. Cedarcrest was a rather flat camp (but arguably had the best loop of any camp we ever had).

There was a camp between Cedarcrest and Awosting.

-MS
 
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I was the wife in Ali's story, and my throat hurt for days after that scream. The thunder was perfectly timed, especially given that there wasn't a hint of rain when the wave battle started. Several high orcs are now convinced that character controls the weather.

And I have to concur on the Void mod. That was absolute insanity, no stopping once it started, "I'm going to die trying to break this stupid artifact as a celestial scholar backpacking a golem," realizing I was the level dip (she was 28th or 29th level?), monsters constantly coming out of the darkness and pushing forward because it was go-and-try or fall-back-and-irreparably-fail. I'd never been on a mod where there wasn't time to refit armor, or do more than activate some healing, take a breath and keep going. Fighting with Jesse Hennessey as Kainen's backpack was almost surreal, because I couldn't tell him which way to turn so I had a hand on his back guiding him. I healed him with my right hand and fought lefty around his shield with a slayer. It was one of those fights where you're not entirely sure it's actually over, because your senses are on such high alert.

Other than that, I ended up on a solo mod in CT when my character was maybe 16th level? Keep in mind, she's got a 4 block, a bunch of broken weapon build, and then lots of rit, so she's not built for combat (or wasn't, high magic changed that a little.) Monster camp expected a fighter loaded with items, and had to restat when I showed up. I snuck through the woods, bribed guards, used a CoP to separate myself from a thing that should have left me a smear on the ground, free a prisoner, and managed to get back with the thing I was sent to find. And on the way back, I got asked the best question of all time: "Do you want to **** with your friends?"

Always yes. My character's "permanently dead" body got rifted into the tavern. I got to listen to the ensuing "Wait what?!" and it was glorious.
 
Nope. Not Cedarcrest. This was the camp that had a very steep set of stairs at one end of the "cabin lane". It also had a rather steep hill. Cedarcrest was a rather flat camp (but arguably had the best loop of any camp we ever had).

There was a camp between Cedarcrest and Awosting.

-MS
Oh god I know which one know, we had that epic fight with Panselore which was the most badass barfight ever (though I believe it became the reason no fighting in the tavern exists. We knick named camp breakaleg do to the constant injuries
 
Can the discussion about campsites please be moved to PM, or let me know and I'll split it off into a separate thread? It's getting disruptive to the flow of the topic.

Thanks!

-Chaos
 
I've been thinking about all the crazy things that have happened over the years and thought it would be impossible to pick a favorite before I remembered this one:

Late late Saturday night at SoMN, probably 2-3 AM. There was a Lich or some other kind of undead who had for some reason trained lesser undead to like sunlight, I don't remember the specifics. His spirit bottle was a little lamp that the other NPCs would follow around like moths, which was kind of adorable despite the undead part. He welcomed us graciously into his lair and told us excitedly about his sunlight-loving minions, and we explained that he seems nice and all but he's undead so we were pretty much going to kill him. We then proceeded to beat the crap out of him while he ran around yelling "Why are you doing this???"

A minute later he regenerated out of his bottle and we killed him again. We went through every charge on his bottle this way; most of the time he didn't even get the chance to stand up before getting smashed again:

..."Hey, why did you do that--" Dead.
..."I'm not hurting anyone! Why are you doing this--" Dead.
..."Guys... Hey... Stop killing me!" Dead.
..."But I do good things too! I... I make cupcakes!" -- "What kind?" -- "... Red velvet?" -- "WRONG ANSWER." Dead.

Turns out Asher hates red velvet cupcakes.
 
Just one? But... but... Brave Cookie, and Zaka.... :(

As amazing as both those were, my favorite encounter was with a handfull of little Goblins. Amory, as is her usual, goes on a mod with a couple much higher level characters. Her teacher and friend Zeth, and her friend Vishkin. They had heard some voices down by the lake, and went to investigate. What they find is a group of Goblins trying to find food. It took some talking, but we managed to convince them that none of us would be good to eat {Vishkin is pointy, Amory's a vegetable, and Zeth is not the kind of Racoon you can eat. Plus Death wasn't a gift they actually wanted}.

I don't remember the specifics, but somehow a pile of gold gets mentioned, and Amory offers to teach them to fish in exchange for the most talkative one, Green, leading them to the gold. While she's explaining the basics of fishing, /somehow/ fighting breaks out between Zeth, Vishkin, and the Goblins not paying attention to Amory. So, of course the ones she's teaching start shouting about lies, and attacking Amory, who is now confused as all get out and trying to deescalate the situation without killing everything.

When it was all over, Green was the only one left standing of the Goblins. I recall healing them all back to stable before we went after the gold, but could be wrong on that. Green was.... *cough*... convinced.... to lead us to the gold. Amory spent the time there apologizing and finishing her fishing lesson.

Later in the weekend, we find out that the gold the Goblins had planted was actually payment for a mercenary group being hired by the Bad Guy of the story whose plans we had thwarted by taking it from the Goblins.
 
I have a LOT of favourite moments, both on the PC and the NPC sides, but I've settled on two tiny moments to share here.

- PC: I was a wee babby Irina healer during a wave battle in Caldaria, and despite my better judgment I somehow ended up on the front line. Naturally, I was cut down pretty quickly. Henry as Irina's friend Enko/Ryban, his painfully sweet Chimpkin-turned-MWE, made to the front, scooped my body into his arms and ran to the back of the line so I could be healed. I got the Cure Light before he put me down, so Irina woke up in Ryban's arms feeling like a total princess.

- NPC: At Deadlands we'd written a crazy Dragon weekend and I was playing one of the three prismatic Dragons, Cerulean. There was a mod where the PCs had to prove themselves worthy by going through a series of trials, and I was waiting at the end to talk to them. I noticed one of the PCs hanging back and approached them. Walt, who has been playing at least twice as long as I have and has seen it all, was playing his farmer-turned-fighter Ahurak and was so moved to be in the presence of a true Dragon that he had been brought to weeping. So many PCs are so jaded and impossible to impress, that to see this veteran character overcome with emotion was beautiful.
 
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