Impressive Deeds
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Created On 17 November 1997
Last Updated On 17 November 1997
Copyright (c) Simon E. Phipp 1997
Over the years, I have seen many impressive deeds in the RuneQuest game, most involve lucky dice rolls and lucky combat, but all stuck in my mind. Here are a few of my favourites.
Aegis
This was a Storm Khan/Wind Lord, one of our favourite combinations. Aegis was your typical Orlanthi/Storm Bull, loved to go berserk and attack Chaos. Anyway, he was in a scenario where the finale was a pyramid with Chaos creatures on each step, three Chaos Demons on the next to top step and a pair of vampires on the top. The Vampires and Chaos Demons were ready to rain Death from their lofty positions while the party fought the spogs below. Aegis, however had other ideas.
He cast his Shield, Protection, Bladesharp, Truesword and Beserker spells and Teleported to the Chaos Demons with two iron bastard swords. He split his attack and rolled three criticals which, thanks to Anti-Parry the Chaos Demons failed to Parry, this being RQ2. Each blow hit a vital location and killed a Chaos Demon. End of round one. Round two saw him Teleport to the Vampires, roll INTx1 to come out of Berserker, delayed to the head critical - dead, other hand, delay to the head, critical - dead. All 5 killed in two rounds as the GM sobbed into his beer.
Soltak
My main PC did something similar. In a previous scenario, we had gained some abilities against Scorpionmen and Broos (Zak had taken 20 rounds to kill a single Scorpion Queen in hand to hand combat, Soltak had killed a Broo Hero in 3 rounds and Apollo had failed to kill a Vampire - the spog!) and were about to use them for the first time. We met the Scorpion Queen again, but this time she had three Rune Lord Priests of Bagog with her to absorb the hits while she could use her Sever Spirits and other nasty spells against us. Zak was with us and chickened out as he had faced her before - "We don’t stand a chance!" was his attitude. Soltak, however, was made of sterner stuff. He cast much the same spells as Aegis had done, but had more weapon enhancing spells and used them too. He Teleported Berserk to the first Scorpionmen. He then doubled his chances to hit Scorpionmen for 10 rounds, this gave him something like a 1000% RH Bastard Sword and 700% LH Bastard Sword attack. He split and hit the three leading bagogi in the head, chest and thorax, feeling fairly sure that 400% AntiParry would ne enough to give him a chance - it was. The next round he hit the Queen with the 1000% Attack and when it criticaled in a Vital he doubled the damage done, the other of his abilities. The Queen exploded n a shower of blood and used DI to escape, not wanting to return to the mincer. Soltak then made an INT roll of 4% to come out of Beserker (he had some special abilities which made it harder to escape from berserker) and met the applause of the party.
Derak
When fighting a Spitting Hydra which regenerated all damage in locations under water, Derak plunged into the pool armed only with a dagger and killed the Hydra single handed. He walked out using only Vigour to keep him alive, having used all his Healing magic and a few gained through Mind Link. (This was not the first time he had fought a Hydra under water - in the Acid Pits he did the same, but this time had a number of zombies with him who absorbed some of the attacks and acted as reservoirs for the Hydra Venom. Once again, he survived with Vigour keeping him alive and managed to pull all the other PC corpses out of the water before his spell ran out forcing him to DI out. And the treasure was "just around the corner......".)
Derak (2)
When the party were on a scenario flushing Uzarl out of her hiding place in Snakepipe Hollow, they attacked her Fortress a number of times, only to be driven back each time by her Vampire guards. Finally, they appealed to Derak to help them as they needed his awesome firepower, magics and luck. With Derak’s aid, they managed to get further than they had ever done and reached Uzarl herself. Now, they were on a reconnaissance mission, and had been told in no certain terms that to attack Uzarl would be suicide. Nobody had told Derak who saw the Ultimate Abomination - a Mistress race Vampire. He hated vampires anyway and this was a corrupted UzUz. He immediately attacked and realised his mistake when he saw the look on my face (I was GMing at the time and had a look of horror and shock on my face, apparently).
The first thing he did was to cast Sever Spirit at Uzarl, at the same time as Uzarl used her Basilisk Gaze at him. Both died. Pektok threw hios dagger with Infinte POW Turn Undead at Uzarl and they closed the coffin and sealed them both in to fight it out. The Turn Undead sent her fanatical. Derak came back with stored DI and asked for a CounterChaos to block the Basilisk Gaze. They fought some more, killing each other again and DI-ing back again. Finally, Uzarl cast a Sever Spirit on Derak as he used a Fear on her which rolled 01 - killing her again. This time she DI-ied away, having used all her stored DI up. Derak DI-ied back and used his fist to burn a hole through the coffin taking damage each round from a Safe spell designed to keep Uzarl IN. Finally, he looked through the hole to see a Centaur Vampire appear and start to attack the very weakened party - they had no Rune or Battle Magic left and were already using First Aid to keep going. Derak pulled his Siege Engine off his back (I kid you not, he used to carry one around with him) and fired off one bolt at 50%, aimed at the head (25%) and scored a critical - 01 and one dead Vampire. He still gloats about that one and thinks that Uzarl was his most impressive deed to date.
Brankist
He faced the Son of Thed and doubled his attacks against Broos. He went in at 1200% or so, boosted his chances to 2000% and had a Powered Sword. End of the most gross Chaos Demon I had ever written up. To date, the Son of Thed has never lasted more than one round against Brankist who sees it s his sworn and solemn duty to kill it on sight. Maybe one day......
Hmmm, not many impressive deeds, really, but I am sure that people will remind me of more when we next get together.