Best. Session. Ever.

This week in my occasional Sunday campaign, my two players (my wife and my friend Kevin) did something so spectacularly unexpected and unexpectedly spectacular that I have to share it.

Their goal was to eliminate the presence of a Zaryxan embassy in a lawless area of the game world called the Blood Isles. Some quick background: Zaryx is an oppressive Lawful Evil tyranny. The Blood isles are a northern archipelago that's best described as a cross between Mos Eisley and a 17th-century pirate haven like Toruga or Port Royale, but with much colder weather.

In other words, Zaryx represents tyrannical authority and the Blood Isles is a lawless place where all authority, tyrannical or not, is viewed as intolerable.

Going into this, I expected them to basically do a Mission: Impossible/Metal Gear-style combat infiltration, where they took the demolition charges they'd been given by the person who tasked them with the job in the first place, snuck in, and blew the place up. What happened was far more spectacular.

They turned the entire region against the Zaryxians.

To begin with, they spied on the Zaryxians, and managed to copy down some Zaryxian documents. Then, they started spreading rumor that Zaryx's true aim in the Blood Isles was to conquer it by degrees. Following that, they impersonated Zaryxian officials and backed up their own false rumors by "dropping" forged documents, hiring people at great expense and billing it to he embassy, and even conducting "inspections" and putting in offers to buy key pieces of real estate. The beauty of all of this was that Zaryx was attempting to conquer parts of the world at the time, just not the Blood Isles. (In fact, they'd wanted to use the Blood Isles as a place to resupply, rearm, and hire mercenaries.) They even created a purely fictional character, Guddrick Leadbender, a dwarven freedom fighter from the besieged land of Stormhold. (In fact, Stormhold is under a Zaryxian blockade at this point in the story.) In short, they told the most believable lies possible to the most sympathetic audience they could hope to find. The result of this was about what you'd expect. There was minor violence. There were insults. And then someone threw a bottle at an important Zaryxan Emissary and touched off a massacre. At that point, the PCs stood back and just let things percolate. As far as they were concerned, the more casualties on both sides, the better. (Considering the contenders were basically the Nazis on one side and a murderous outlaw motorcycle gang on the other, this wasn't a particularly bad view to have.) In the riot that eventually ensued, they joined the mob that rushed the gates of the embassy, looted the treasury and armory, sank a Zaryxian ship in the harbor, and then blew up the embassy, with all number of bad guys still inside. In one fell swoop, they dealt a major blow to Zaryx, weakened the pirates operating out of the Blood Isles, and assured that those groups would never again work together.

And they did this all in about 3.5 hours of real time and less than a week of game time.

Mechanically speaking, In order to keep things moving, I played pretty fast and loose with the rules; I implemented a jury-rigged skill-challenge system based entirely off of what I could tell about skill challenges from episode 62 of the Sons of Kryos, and allowed them to do other, minor stuff for circumstance bonuses on the rolls that "counted". Every time they made a roll that "counted" I gave them some narrative based on what they were doing and its success or failure. It worked out really well.

Best. Session. Ever.