I found this one incredibly hard, for three reasons. Firstly, I usually end up being the one running the games. Secondly, I don’t actually get to play - or run - that often. Finally, my memory is not so good as it used to be, probably related to the reduced amount of decent sleep I get these days.
I’ve used three examples already; the ballistic bowshot in the *RuneQuest 3 Glorantha* game, the monster that wouldn’t die in the *AD&D 2nd Edition* game with my old Paladin character, and the Werewolves through the Walls incident I mentioned in yesterday’s piece.
So, here is my shortlist:
1. I played in a BITS *Traveller* game quite some time ago (not sure if this was at a *TravCon* or a *GenCon UK*, along with my friend Derrick, and run by Andy. The game - if I remember - was called ‘Family Business’ and from my recollection, it involved a hostage situation. Anyway, it all got a bit out of hand when we wanted to get some information out of a non-player character. I think Derrick managed to completely shock the Referee. We needed information urgently out of a bad guy, and decided to intimidate it out of him. In fact, that was the only skill that we had that was any use.
So Derrick came up with a plan. He had my character drag out the victim tied up. We threatened him, and got told “I’m not going to talk”. So he was blindfolded and dropped on the muddy floor. Del’s character had mine get the spare tyre off the Land Rover analogue that the victim had seen already. The engine was stared, and then Del’s character used the spare tyre and someone revving the engine to pretend his character intended to drive over the person being interrogated. The guy spilled (and Andy was shocked at the approach), and he was returned to his cell blindfolded so he never knew it was a bluff.
2. Technically, the next one wasn’t so much an encounter as an extended set of small encounters. We were playing at the Chester RPG club, playing AD&D 2nd Edition in Jac W’s game. As a party, we were based in a port city and desperate to track down a contact who suspected in a theft. We think he had left the town in a certain ship, so yes, we spent the entire session chasing around town searching for a ship called “The Scarlet Herring”. Oh how the GM laughed when realisation dawned! And how we cringed…
3. Recently, I had great fun in Timothy C’s *Traveller* game at *TravCon 14* where I was playing a very stressed ship’s captain whose crew managed to keep on finding stow-aways. I ended up channelling a combination of Basil Fawlty and the stresses at work I’d been under as the Captain had a meltdown about the incompetents that worked for her. I nearly lost it in giggles towards the end. The other players seemed to enjoy it too. A combination of black humour and management-speak. I think that the scenario was called ‘Three Blind Mice’ and published by a German company.
And the winner?
It has to be the *Beat to Quarters* game I played one Saturday night at Furnace, run by Neil G and including other players such as Michael Reddick. Neil had decided to run a game based loosely on the lyrics of *The Irish Rover*, and he decided (and probably regretted) asking for us to give a number of ‘suggestions’ for plot elements. These included - if I remember correctly - the Holy Grail and possibly Moby Dick. The game sparked, flew around manically and the player all riffed off each other. The encounters are all blurred together now, but it was a truly marvellous game. Neil seemed to be like a rabbit stuck in headlights, trapped between laughter and horror at what we had done to his scenario and game. At the end, he banned us from playing again.
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