D&D. · 11:37pm Mar 24th, 2019
Co-DMed a campaign with my friends. The squad decided to throw a wrench into my plans to kill all the players in a icy spiked labyrinth by realizing that the wolf pelt that one of them was wearing still applied to an early-game mechanic that was introduced.
What was this mechanic? To force the players to head in a certain direction, we DMs decided to introduce into the game three wolves. The twist? Every time you killed a wolf, its corpse would spawn two more wolves, and so on. Think hydras. Like, Greek mythology hydra. Except instead of regrowing heads it's respawning wolves.
So. We also ruled that wolf pelts and any severed bodily part of a wolf count as an individual corpse, even if the parts all came from a single wolf. Due to a particularly bloody encounter with a second pack of wolves, there were body parts strewn absolutely everywhere. As the timer we set for the wave of wolf respawns ticked down, the players all decided to storm into "Santa's workshop", where they discovered orcs disguised as elves building more wolves. Like as in, assembly-line manufacture of a biological, living wolf. Don't ask. It's D&D.
So after fighting off the sweatshop guards, and every elf but two (who ended up crying/panicking in the far corner of the room), I managed to trick the party into opening a trap that dumped them into the earlier aforementioned room filled with ice and spikes. The room was meant to be completely dark to everyone, including magic users so that they'd all either die in the room or take significant damage from trial and error as they found the exit.
So this is the part where the wolf pelt one party member was wearing comes in. The countdown timer had just reached 0 as they entered the room, and given the combined bodily parts besides the pelt that the party had in their inventories, suddenly they had a literal stack of 16 more wolves, stuck inside a wall because of how I drew the layout of the trap room. After a few rounds of taking damage from stumbling (and sliding) into spikes, they came up with a brilliant idea:
Wolf minesweeper.
Basically, using the 16 wolves, (and clever waiting periods so that the wolf corpses would multiply again), the party would one-by-one pick up and just chuck the wolves at a random space in the room. If the wolf died, then they'd know that there were spikes there. If it survived, then they'd know that it's a safe area to walk in. And so, they repeated this until they were down to 12 wolves. Because much of the room was also covered in ice, wolves that had a delay before dying meant that they likely landed and slipped on ice before getting impaled on the spikes.
What happened next?
Party gets another brilliant idea.
Helicopter wolf rockets.
As part of a gag joke, I and the other Co-DMs decided that if any limb of any character was cut off, then the remaining stump of that limb would spurt blood anime-nosebleed style, at a velocity large enough to rival small jet engines in terms of thrust.
So with the next wolf, the party chose a member to swing the wolf by its tail to clear out a 3x3 area. To futher add onto it, they then cut off said tail to let the wolf essentially rocket to the other side of the room, where it just so happened to fly straight out the exit.
Now, here's the real issue.
The wolf corpses left outside from earlier encounters had continued to multiply into additional wolves every fifteen minutes for the past three or so hours.
Those wolves, without any source of food, as the logic of the party went, would've turned to caniballism, in return multiplying the wolf population even further, and so on exponentially until the entire world is overrun by wolves. From there, the wolves would begin to stack on top of each other like they did in the trap room, until they reached space where the outer layer of wolves would suffocate and die. From the corpses of those wolves, more wolves would spawn and then die in space, and the cycle repeats until the wolves inevitably collapse under their own gravity to form a black hole consisting of nothing but wolves. The wolves who died to create this black hole would continue to multiply exponentially, growing the black hole at an exponential rate until the universe itself is consumed by wolves... er... the wolf black hole.
And that's how a gag joke and quick thinking in a death trap room led to the end of the campaign's universe via wolves.
Also, we ended up joking about riding wolf rockets for transportation for the next half an hour or so.
But holy crap. Talk about animal abuse. But then again, it's D&D with four DMs and next to no planning whatsoever. Almost the entire campaign ended up being improv.
EDIT: Also, wolf railguns. Stuff the corpse of a wolf inside a bag of holding and let the wolf multiply inside. Ideally, have the wolf corpse be eaten by another wolf, and stuff the live wolf inside that bag. As the wolves spawn from the corpse, they instantly kill the live wolf, creating another corpse. Being newly spawned, they'd be hungry, and tear the corpse to shreds and eat it. From there, the cycle repeats, spawning an exponentially-growing number of both live wolves and wolf corpses. Since according to the wolf mechanics we made up, wolves will only attack one at a time in a single file line, opening the bag of holding after a large number of wolves have built up would not only release the wolves, but fire a cluster of wolves in a solid beam of fur at a target.
Therefore, wolf railgun.
Also, it's auto reloading since the wolves keep respawning until you remove all corpses from inside the bag.
Feels like a great way to intruduce a new character as a werewolf
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Another thing is, we decided to keep the campaign materials so that we could do it all over again. Everyone agreed that this was by far one of the most, if not the most insane D&D campaign we'd ever had.
And that's after we've been through a campaign where a single Captain Crunch berry gave incomprehensible power to one of the party members, leading to the complete demolition of the entire dungeon that the crunch berry came from.
I laughed so hard I started coughing.
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Added a new section about wolf railguns. I forgot to mention it the first time around, but we were discussing how they'd work after the campaign ended.
*stares blankly at the screen trying to comprehend what I just read*
Sooo... how much xp is a wolf worth, and how many wolves died?
--Sweetie Belle
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Since everyone's characters were at best level 2, we nerfed the wolves to a fraction of what they'd normally be as far as stats go. We ultimately decided to give each party member 150 XP after the five of them killed 20 wolves.
Also, as far as overall wolf deaths, they're still dying to this day. The entire universe of the campaign has been overrun with wolf corpses.