Narrated D&D Story: How The Shrewd DM Lured Clueless Party To Destroy A Town
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- Опубліковано 3 вер 2019
- "If in doubt set it on fire."
You can watch the first part of this story where how the DM sowed seeds of deception to completely fool the party here:
• Narrated D&D Story: Ho...
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Watch the gripping tale of The Gray Necromancer 'Astoshan' here:
Part 1- • Narrated D&D Story: Ho...
Part 2- • Narrated D&D Story: Th...
Watch how a player managed to outsmart his jerk DM and entire party here:
• Narrated D&D Story: Th...
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Imagine if it ended with the DM saying "As you leave the town you all wonder about your last unanswered question. Why would a town of this size not have a priest?"
I'm slow. What's the twist here?
@@lorien6205 It would imply that the monster was still alive and ate the prominent priest character as they forgot about him.
@@MandatoryMarten I figured out that the monster would still be alive but I don't remember there being a priest. Was he mentioned earlier in the story? What's his relevance?
@@lorien6205 The priest was a reoccurring character 17:54
@@MandatoryMarten i think that was a joke, like... he doesn't remember the priest because it was eaten by the false hydra
Druid: "Just be safe in the knowledge we saved all your lives."
Priest: *points at all the people on fire* "Really?"
Umm....What fire? I don't remember any fire...
69 likes, nice
Wait, isn't this how the first episode of *Slayers* ends? (Except that Lina tries to get paid afterwards.)
"Daniel-san... NOOOoooobody perfec." (In my worst and cheesiest vocal impression) ;o)
whitch people?
"I did this for many reasons. Firstly because I'm a dickhead."
I like the cut of your jib mu friend lol
My party took 2 long rests in a dungeon while trying to save a old man who was going to be used in a ritual. Needless to say when they got him he was already dead for 12 hours
Good DM. Players will have a better sense of time management (useful irl too)
@@alekvillarreal3470agreed. my party was in a town being raided by bandits and they were looking to save the priest that assisted them. one of my players asked about what would happen if they took too long to save him and i answered with, “that depends on how you go about it. he could just be bruised up and smacked around or something worse. better hope its the first option”
“What’s my bear companion doing?”
“What bear companion? You’ve never had a bear companion.”
Well played, DM, well played.
Also, making the playlist a part of the narrative like that is freaking genius. I love this story. Thank you for pointing me in it’s direction, All Thing DnD!
And the DM pointed it out in reddit that the Ranger had SILENCE PREPPED THE ENTIRE TIME. Fucking gold!
@@NineteenNinety I guess that depends on how the follower functions in the game. Is he a friendly NPC under the command of the DM, or an extension of the PC played by the player? If it's the former, I can definitely see people asking questions like this.
@@NineteenNinety I get that line all the time. It partially depends on how the GM and player uses the animals, often GMs will use animal behaviour to set the mood (especially with spooky supernatural events) and many players like to use animals to have small mini interactions. So that doesnt seem off at all to me.
I didnt like that response the DM gave. He should have said "characters name foes t remember having an animal companion."
PC-"Didnt I have one, DM?"
DM-"yes you did but your character doesnt have memories of it anymore"
This would have been better than straight up lying. But yeah maybe it was scripted and made that way for this video.
It'd have been even more genius if he had been able to make it seem like he forgot without actually lying to the players.
False Hydras always make for a chilling tale, allow me to share something similar in Pathfinder:
The party arrives at this old town that, by all means should be more inhabited than it first looked, rumors of disapperances, not being able to remember the person who brought us here to begin with, franctic messages on the walls and suspicions of something eldritch and terrible haunting the port city. It all climaxed one terrible night.
We took turns to take watch over as we rested for the night inside an abandoned tavern,
at first nothing happened, until my character Jadid, a young human swashbuckler barely 16, got his turn.He was aware there might be something haunting this place and, as a show of concern for his friends climbed to the next floor close to the roof to keep watch on the street outside hoping to warn them should the thing come and ambush them as they slept . Suddenly, the sounds of the night stop as Jadid sits next to the window. Will save, the GM lets out an evil laugh,
Jadid turns around, and against the glass he sees it: A horrific, eyeless face with a grin full of white, massive, disturbingly human teeth that nevertheless looked straight at him as JAdid's heart was filled with horror. Sanity Damage, not enought to drive him mad however. He blinks, and as soon as he saw it, the creature was gone, and as far as he knew it never existed, just a night terror product of his sleepless mind as he kept watch. The GM then asks "Is Jadid carrying anything small and sharp with him" I say yes, a dagger. Will save. Jadid's arm springs to life as if having a mind of its own and grabs the dagger. Jadid can only watch as he is compelled to slash his wrists and write on the rotten wooden wall with his own blood: IT IS HERE. IT IS WATCHING YOU RIGHT NOW.
I describe as JAdid faints from both shock and fright. Will save...Cut to next morning, Jadid wakes up at the inn, exhausted out of breath but alive. Serana, our party's Scholar and appointed medic checks on him. His pulse is rapid, his clothes are stained and torn in places, and his knuckles reddened and sore as if he had clutched hard unto his scimitar. It looked as if Jadid had spent the entire night fighting for dear life. But Jadid remembers nothing but that face he saw on the window. That horrible horrible face. And he would have dismissed it as just a night terror were it not for bruises and cuts on his torso, caused by large, blunt toothmarks...
And that's how Charmed Life saved my character from being devoured by a False Hydra.
DM: fire won't solve your problems!
Party: what?
Wizards around the world: what?
My party accidentaly setting ablaze a village during an infiltration mission: what?
Just fireball.
JUST FIREBALL.
*JUST FIREBALL*
@@Taneth is that a JoCat reference?
@@DelgadosNEOCorp Indeed
What?
Me missing the enemy with a nat 1 as the firebolt heads into the mill...: whaaat!???
I don't know a lot about False Hydra but I think it should return in a few sessions.
Make sure you watch the first part of False Hydra!
Took me a minute to register.
Lol
Liam Heston register what? There’s never been a first part.
@@paladin_2164 1000 iq
What would a false hydra be, wouldn't a dangerous real one be worse?
Hmm... I have a player whose character has no backstory... Maybe now I know why.
Brilliant!
Untill you forget the player had a character at all.
what player?
@@phylippezimmermannpaquin2062 you made it
@@Nothing-1w3 Who are you talking to?
Party: Kill it with fire!
Town: 🔥🔥🔥
Party: Oops...
And one of the party just burned down her home town
@@thelonggame9166 her parents had only recently moved there.... she and Sophia hadn't stayed with them in that home yet... so it wasn't really her home
@@ithalathegayguy wait... Does that mean her family got eaten?
@@dsandoval9396 yes, yes it does. Suppose that's one way of giving someone a back story 😆
The one time Control Flame needs to fuckin matter and no one has it. Womp womp. BITCHIN monster DM, well played
DMs are master manipulators.
Showing you only what they want you to see.
only good DMs tho lol I suck
Well... Good DM's are at least.
There are some that aren't.
DnD is like playing poker or haggling. Never show your true intentions.
im a master debater myself
Dastardly
Manipulator
I'm totally using a false hydra one my group wraps up the storyline they are in now.
Okay, this is cute and all, but any real DM knows that the hard part is convincing the party to *not* burn down the town.
@Hamza Ali To that end, make sure you provide
ANY OTHER SOLUTION!
Seriously, what were they supposed to do? Was there any alternative?
After all, are you even really a D&D player if you've never torched a single town?
@@christopherwilson88 No, no you're not.
@@billskinner7670 pretty sure the DM gave alternatives. Pyshical damage with penalties due to fighting it like Medusa and Anti-Charm Magic. It's not like they were gonna kill it by burning its building it probably just moved to a new town.
@@Lord_Phoenix95 In D&D 5th, attacking with disadvantage is mathematically equivalent to losing 13 levels. (Also, in this case, one handed.) Under those circumstances, I think the most "reasonable" thing to do is to set the town on fire.
Kinda disappointed in the PCs for taking such a brash approach, after all that work the DM put in.
Personally I'd be bringing the false hydra back since they didn't deal with the issue properly and there's no way the flames would've killed something that burrows underground.
Yeah, especially given that, at the end, when everything was ending, he told his players that they remember the bear and barman’s wife, but not Sophia, likely meaning that they didn’t kill all of it, only part of it.
Also, I’m pretty sure that that was just one long run-on sentence. I’m proud of myself
If they managed to get it stuck on the ground, the fire would consume all the oxygen and the hydra would asphyxiate to death. Not pretty, but a clever enough approach I say.
@@cwovictor3281 That's assuming it needs air, which for an aberration might not be the case.
Ashers well, I’d say it requires oxygen, as caves exist. Its lair is underground after all
Flyingturret208: The Cannon
Having looked through the original Reddit posts comments, air isn’t even its biggest problem. All of its food just left as well as it’s mode of transportation, the remaining people of a town would be enslaved and made to drag the False hydra to a new location. With no food (the whole town having burned down and what not) it would also be lacking people to move it.
Source: goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2014/09/false-hydra.html?m=1
“They say that each lie makes it grow...”
I raise my Xtreme Teen Bible and cast Zone of Truth!
Everything you typed just looks like static?
Davenport? DAVENPORT
Me:tune to fox news
Me:"yes my babies,grow,GROW"
Man I needed this after finishing Amnesty, can't wait to see what new campaign the boys and Clint got cooking up! And I hope it's long like Balance. While I loved both campaigns I definitely was only half as invested into Amnesty as I was invested in Balance by the end.
"I did not have sexual relations with that woman."
False hydras are one of the few horrid ideas which I just hate to even contemplate.
False hydras are fucking terrifying
same, if it grows into long story, it becomes more and more scary with each disappearance
Aberrations are the best!
Same for Bag-Men. Especially when everyone in your party has gotten used to being loot goblin murder hobos and have multiple holding bags for all their “procured” goods.
Also Mimic hoards, becoming basically anything, remaining dormant, continuously acting as the thing they’re pretending to be, until there’s nobody else around to hear them feed.
"He comes out with bleeding hands holding the largest shard up" someone rolled a nat 1 for removing a mirror
Imagine if they had the spell silence, that would have changed things wildly.
Tell me more about Jack's cabbages. I suspect they have something to do with this mystery.
They are very large, perhaps suspiciously so...
They did describe the hydra as a potato without a seed. It was Jack all along!
@@theapexsurvivor9538 insight check into the cabbages. I have -3 on that sooo... *rolls* ... negative 1.
@@chaosdeviant62 "You can tell that there is *Definitely* something fishy going on."
The false hydra is created by, and originally feeds on, repeated lying. Jack was lying about his cabbages.
"Can we just plug our ears?" ... No, but if someone in your group knew Blindness/Deafness you could literally deafen yourselves for a minute or so and do that. It was so frustrating seeing no one come up with that solution. :P
Of all the horrible, monstrous creatures I would throw at my players, the False Hydra is the one I will never use.
The wrong kind of players?
Even the most brilliant of stories can be destroyed by a bunch of murderhobos with a lucky roll.
"You forgot that wood burns"
Murder-hobo’s. Unite!!!! At the bonfire 🔥!!!
I would like to congratulate you for your huge uprise in subscribers. I'd like to give you this imaginary play button that looks like a D20. :)
Thank you so much! Yeah the uprise is all a result of people loving our stories. :)
Right? I'm so glad to finally see him hit the 500k mark!
Funnily enough, I thought it was a pretty cool way to get the party to Gullykin. They went to "save" the town from bandits, when in reality they were there to probably to meet/save the Druid's parents. Since they were eaten, their brains had to rationalize another reason for being in the town, and thus the false bandit map came into play.
Agreed, way to mess with their heads.
Sheesh, after the False Hydra description, I would’ve torched the place sooner. That thing sounds terrifying.
"Wait, what does that do again?" - me every session
"At that point the paladin asks me to put a different song on, because the 28 Days Later soundtrack is beginning to put her on-edge. I comply, and put on the Koyaanisqatsi soundtrack" I laughed so hard I had to pause and walk around my apt for five minutes. I adore Philip Glass and love his Koyaanisqatsi soundtrack, but God, that's definitely a case of Out of the Frying Pan, Into The Fire.
This is great. I love the DnD stories. Really makes me wish I had a group to play with. Never played before but love hearing DnD stories.
It's too bad they don't remember that there were two of them...
...That's fantastic!
fucking awesome
Or an entire field of extra large cabbage growing and we all know babies come from cabbage patches.......
that hydra aint dead y'all the DM said multiple times that a fire wouldnt burn down into its lair and at the end of the session Sophia is still missing from their memories = one pissed off memory feasting beast
Correction: it's part dead. They killed the head(s) that ate the bear and other remembered characters.
The best way to kill these things is to starve them so burning down the town must have killed it at some point
@@the24thcolossusjustchillin39 assuming that it wasn't still small enough to move out and hunt somewhere else...
@@theapexsurvivor9538 Fair point
@@theapexsurvivor9538 it was big enough to command people, so it was already grown up.
"As you ride away the paladin's armor catches a reflection of the city, the home you never knew, behind you. Abandoned.... and intact."
Intact....? Oh no.
I’m now wondering what the DM’s intended method for the party to fight the False Hydra was originally. Surely burning the town wasn’t the endgame here. Great example of how the adventure changes based on the players’ actions!
Is there silence related spells in DnD? Maybe that's how they were supposed to do it.
Personally I would have taken all the party’s gold and equipment to the best blacksmith in town (if the FH hadn’t already gotten him) and had him put the finest polish he could on the items so the armour and weapons have a mirror finish. That way if you’re in the presence of it you can see the false hydra in your parties equipment. Counter to that as a dm is make the reflection of the high polished metal slowly fade starting the false hydra off with maybe a little lower than its actual AC but as the polish fades through the battle and it’s harder to see the FH it’s AC starts going up making it harder to hit. That way there’s a time limit to fight if you choose to fight but I believe there should always be allowed non direct conflict option if it is played well enough and within reason.
@@jacklang3314 yes, silence and blindness/deafness could both work, as could wax in your ears, and true sight, arcane eye, and several other spells like true sight and counter charm.
A new reply to a old comment but in mythology there existed a monster called a siren who charms all with their voice causing ships to wreck and they would eat the straglers and survivers, odesseas and his crew only survived by plugging their ears with ball of candle wax blocking the sound
Day 1 DnD: it's not the dm vs the party
Agreed.
It is supposed to be fun for EVERYONE.
The Mimic used to be my favorite monster. Now it’s the False Hydra because that is scary asf.
To everyone who thinks the PCs should have killed the hydra directly: after so much mind fuckery, I think it would have been the most realistic solution anyone could have come up with under such circumstances. Seriously, even just the fanart of this thing is nightmare fuel... imagine seeing its reflection behind you live in your hand mirror. Fort save to avoid shitting your pants, with disadvantage
I mean, they could have tried to drown it instead of setting the town of fire...
I ran a false Hydra for my group, and one of their first plans was to burn down the village. Then they found out that truesight counters the song and found it's lair.
Still had trouble finding it, till they dropped in on its home cavern... Almost all got ate, but just barely killed it in time.
When the solution requires a specific 6th level spell, in an even partially Vance-Ian magic system, you should expect you town to be burned to the ground.
@@billskinner7670 Or you can use ear plugs.
@@GregorySmith23 Earplugs don't substitute for Truesight. Even with Truesight, they "Still had trouble finding it", and "just barely killed it in time". I stand by my comment.
What you can't realize is, I am not raising 1 objection; more like 4.
"If in doubt set it on fire" - Too much relatable, eh?
What do you think about this story? Don’t forget to share your thoughts and theories in the comments section.
You can watch the first part of this story where how the DM sowed seeds of deception to completely fool the party here:
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Ya know for d&d the best parts about it are the stories that are told
@@swiftbiscuit8624 Agreed! We all love to share our adventures, don't we?
3t33t3t35355t34
Can you record your dnd games so we can hear or watch it
Also try using the deck of many or some version of it
That was freaking amazing!! I loved the entire buildup leading to it, and then even when the creature was identified it was still really creepy. I'm not a fan of scary things (though I do enjoy writing the occasional ghost story, and I love writing cozy mystery genre stories), but I absolutely loved this.
Also, our DM always played music (and when things got really creepy, it actually caused me to have a panic attack a couple of times XD ).
Damn. That's genuinely terrifying.
So on the last part I loved the mystery, but in this part my favourite thing is "BLEEP SAKE!"
Damn ... A little anticlimactic and am I the only one that feels bad for Sophia? The fact that they don't remember her is depressing.
Yeah but bear in mind that she was orphan before, so she never had a sister. And I agree about the anticlimax, could have had the false hydra emerge after the destruction of the town, as that's the only time it comes out, and had a battle.
@@satansbarman or just make it sprout all of its heads out of the rubble and attack the party untill they some how find a ways to destroy to main body while each head destroyed makes 2 more so they would have to learn not to set all of their problems on fire
who's Sophia?
It seems to me to be a clear set up for there being two false hydras, and one of them escaped.
@@austinmonreal2331 or triplets 1 runs away 2 fight the party and the town helps out in the fight
Does the False Hydra remind anyone else of the rumor weed from Vegitales?
That must be some wack weed
I was thinking closer to the giant fib, since it grows with every lie.
The fib and rumor weed are bith very good comparisons. I was thinking aboout this the entire time. Glad to see someone else suffer through it.
why yes it does
And it is now that I realize that Deadhand is a False Hydra... thanks Zelda...
"We did it, Patrick. We saved the town" -Spongebob
"It was an orchestral version of the Lavender Town song."
Me: Oh s%^t! Things got interesting.
so... i'm definitely gonna try to run a false Hydra one of these days for my party, maybe not as good as this Dm has but i'm sure as heck gonna try
Wow. I'm just hearing this story second-hand and it was legit freaking me out.
Of the DM killed my companion without even acknowledging it i'd be beyond pissed at the dm 🤐
Good thing that ranger was solo!
Good thing the ranger didn't have one I would've been angry if that happened lol
Yup
All jokes aside, these things can typically be brought back to life fairly easily.
@@elianas1121 False Hydra's CONSUME people/creatures, they don't just leave them unconscious and unharmed lol. I don't know how you plan to bring a pile of bear bones back to life but I imagine the ranger wouldn't be happy with how you did it.
Was a great story but honestly I want to hear more of that grey necromancer again. Honestly it's a viewpoint that's really interesting but not done alot. Good example like it is a recent slime anime.
But this was a good side story to that.
Don't worry, the legendary Gray Necromancer will be back again! :)
@@allthingsdnd Awesome Gothem
Doesn't get played a lot because it's hard to find a group that will go along with it, even harder a GM.
THINKMACHINE also talking as a story concept in general.
I don't remember a grey necromancer
“For all intents and purposes, this is a small town with not a lot going on.”
_There’s not a lot going on,_
_Look closer baby you’re so wrong._
*Look Patrick! We saved the city!*
Stupid ranger! And shouldn't the paladin need to adjust alignment off LG? At least NG or CG? He just took part in razing a city! He should at LEAST need to do an atonement quest.
Stanley Jointer II what city?
@Natasel Razing the town isn't the LG solution. The LG solution would be to tell the remaining townsfolk what's going on and organize them into defeating the creature. Example. Everyone in town grab a mirror and head to the town square. We use our mirrors to lure the monster into the square. Townsfolk surround the creature with mirrors while the party gets to fight for free with no disadvantages because the whole fight is surrounded by mirrors. THAT is a Paladin. :D
@Natasel Chaotic much?
As a Paladin, with CHR as my main trait, and likely some persuasion points, along with a person that is a resident of their town based on their own town records? I don't think it would take a Paladin very long to convince people to make the choice to help us defend their own town. And, again, if the Paladin alone can't do it (yes, it is a half-orc, after all), certainly the combination of a Paladin and a Druid that grew up in the town...based on their own town records...should be enough to do the convincing.
More importantly, though, the last choice a Paladin would make is to **raze the village** where people in it are innocents. I'm not certain what paladins you've played, but, in the times in my past where I played Paladin, *razing a town* is assuredly not LG. In the games that I've run in the past, I've forced Paladins to go on atonement quests for far less than **razing a village**. The only reason I can think of that a Paladin would take part in **razing a village** is if that village had been overrun with undead and there was no hope in restoring the town to its rightful owners in any way. We are talking about a **Paladin**. Champion of Justice and Light? This ain't your every day kinda good, but LG.
The party had letters with himself, his druid companion, and a twin of that druid, referred to as "The Holy Trio". The **Paladin** (a class that would never **raze a village**) must be known to someone here. After all, the paladin isn't eaten by the false hydra...yet. And yes, **razing the village** as a **Paladin** was an "accident", but, as a paladin, accidents are one of the main reasons why atonement quests are set up. A **Paladin** that **razes a village**, by purpose or by accident, definitely has some atoning to do. The real problem is that the Paladin didn't object to this razing the town hall that led to a **Paladin** **razing a village** in the first place.
I'm not saying the idea is perfect, but for a **Paladin** this is certainly better than **razing a village**
@@thelonggame9166 nah, LG tending towards TN, burning the town to the ground without being certain it would kill the monster is a very True Neutral action, so if he keeps down that path he'll become either: NG, LN, or TN.
"When in doubt, set it on fire"
Ah yes.
I want to see more of this story
Because now I'm Invested
Loved the last vid your art style is amazing!
Ok that Hydra is coming back for sure, since as you said the hydras lair is underground and fire goes upwards not down
Has to be a part 3. The hydra could sneak up on them and by that time they have a new ally, a pact of the Old One Warlock/Witch with them. Now that would add some more intrigue as the warlock remembers other people's memories through visions and hallucinates when an abberation approaches.
Man, that image reminds me of the one time i casted a tornado to extinguish fire, rolled a 1 and received a big fire tornado, destroying the whole town we were working for. We were playing a own creation of our dm and i tried to cosplay a magical girl, after that happaned i lost my mind and got corrupted, so i had to roll dices against my dm to keep control over my character. the biggest problem was that my charakter was like a living tree with a weakness to fire, so i really had a hard time surviving at all. At the end he was controlling my charakter, casting my strongest spell, oneshotting half of my party. Well it was a very fun oneshot and i apparently killed the most enemies (and the most of my companions aswell).
magical girls getting corrupted?
were you, by chance, offered a wish by an albino cat?
I would be so livid if my DM said that my animal companion is just gone... like...wtf...i'm glad it payed off in the end though... That was such a gamble....
That would have been my first red flag something fucky was going on, rangers typically always have an companion. The DM saying the bear never existed should tell you right then and there something's wrong. If I had a DM that pulled this dumb scenario on us, I'd have done pretty much the same thing and just do everything I can to get the party to just burn the place down and tell him to not try bullshit like that. I'm all for using the backstories of your characters in the plot of the campaign, but don't fucking change things in it just to make a stupid monster like this fit in.
@@caiusdrakegaming8087 how is it changing anything.... it's not like the companion never existed, they just forgot it ever did
@@alexarthur371
Imagine your DM told you, an 8th level wizard, mid session, when you tried to cast a spell, that you don't know how to cast spells. That you've never been able to cast spells.
Yes it can be used to set a mood, but randomly taking class features away from a player, with no fight, and telling said player that they have no memory of said class feature would be a huge dick move.
Edit: I also agree with the nuclear option. If some shit like that happened the only thing i would agree to do would be to raze the entire location I was at, down to its foundations. Then preferably leave the continent.
@@C00kiesAplenty it wasnt just randomly though. the mood was set for something having to do with memory already. if that happen to me id wait to see were the dm was going with it before i start baby raging.
@@alexarthur371
Letting the players know something is up memory wise is entirely different than perma removing an animal companion, then saying nobody remembers it at all. The players can't do anything with that information, because their characters now have no memory of the bear. It just vanished out of thin air, and the players are supposed to just pretend it was never there in the first place? Thats not setting a mood, thats stealing from the players, with the express intention that the players use meta knowledge to affect in game decisions, because again the characters don't know the bear is missing. If the purpose wasn't to have players use the "bear is missing" knowledge, then why take the bear? The players know that something is missing, but the characters don't. Meaning the DM just stole from the players for no reason.
This is the most terrifying thing you can put in a game
I'm genuinely scared, chilled and all kinds of creeped out
I really want and not want to exprience this
Definitely going to be the next game I'll run
Just listening to this was unsettling, now imagine being in the game.
I know how that feels. My party skipped an entire chapter out of ToA and even straight up ignore me at times.... So yea players can throw your ideas out the window
The idea was unfinished. There was no other solution.
@@billskinner7670 hahaha I guess so yo
The memories of all the Victims should have returned.
if there is only one hydra, yes
Or the hydra isn't completely dead.
Well, yes, but...
No-one ever said the Hydra was dead.
Holy Crap you guys are Gina give me nightmares
@@AMPMASTER10 good.
That means the story had impact.
And you won't... Forget.
Right?
Our Gm made me into some kind of a "Pavlov's Dog" with the Burnt Village song of Mulan. Creeps me out to the max! Everytime he plays this song i get so nervous...
"but they still don't remember Sophia"
Does that mean there was more than one False Hydra?
Or was it another head that ate Sophia?
That's the DMs way of saying they did not kill it.
i wish i could pull off stuff like this dm did with the bear, my players out of character would flip and just leave.
@Natasel huh? I'm just talking about my own dnd sessions how my players would never go along with this very interesting madness.
@@boombox219 what players? You never had any players?
This is literally The Dungeons & Dragons equivalent of SpongeBob and Patrick saying they saved the city while it burns in the background
6:15 in and I figured out what this is. Excellently done False Hydra.
So generally when the DM tells you that by their interpretation of physics, logistics, etc. something won't work and makes no sense it's a poor choice to insist on doing that thing. I too would figure that even though fire burns up the collapsing of a large, heavy, burning building usually destroys if not burns what is below as well, particularly if it is a vast, unstable cavern. But if the DM has already telegraphed that he is not going to interpret the consequences that way it's time to have a different plan. God decides how the universe operates.
I would like to hear more about farmer Jack's cabbages
They're surprisingly large this year.
It was nice of the DM to let the party kill the first hydra by dropping on unstable burning building on it.
Heh. Technically, they removed its food source when they evacuated the town. :)
"If in doubt set it on fire" Lmao that is my DND philosophy
If in doubt, set it on fire seems to be a common theme in pen and paper.
Also, great work with the playlist. This is another good DM lesson.
I once played in a pirate themed game and when we escaped from cursed island xy with a hold full of loot we played the ride of the valkyries from sea of thieves.
I believe I found a plothole in the False Hydra:
If the False Hydra moves and exists through "lack of attention" and imediate memory loss, making it so no one can ever know it's there, what it does, nor think about it in any way without looking at it through a mirror.. how are there detailed articles about it in books?
Aside from this plothole, I loved this story to death.
if you cant hear its song you can study it, likely came down to a far to brave wizard chronicling it at some point
There are 3 ways to remember it: stop it's song, deafen/countercharm yourself against its song, let it grow its 7th head and save against its _dominate_ spell.
Presumably scholars could also dissect and study dead ones
It's also possible that the people writing did so by spells like Ancient Lore.
If they found a ghost town and use divination spells like those to know what happened they could get a pretty detailed description even if they never get anywhere close to a living False Hydra.
the really scary thing about this is that you can actually pull off a real-world version of the false hydra's method of preventing detection...the closest I can get to a valid description is that when your body language does not convey any indication of what you are paying attention to or trigger a recognition of a category of action people looking at you just sorta gloss over you. this persists as long as you don't slip up and do something to trigger recognition even in extreem situations like 2 people walking towards each other in an otherwise empty hall.
the REALLY strange part is that this doesn't just work on other humans, back when I could do this at-will I found it worked almost infalliably on pretty much any mammal (only for sight and noise, you simply can't do this for scent so smell will trigger active pattern searching in most animals once you get close enough, unless you smell like your surroundings). it worked on birds too but less reliably (know why but its a looooong explanation, short version is different visual processing methods) it didn't do much at all for fish as near as I could tell, and I never even bothered trying with insects.
in short the trick to being sneaky is not to be Sneaky, you aren't trying to avoid being seen you are trying to avoid being noticed.
I like to call this "psychic invisibility". You might be interested in looking up stuff about "gray man theory", which is about how to not be noticed.
GUYS I WAS LOOKING UP FALSE HYDRA CAUSE I WANTED MORE INFO! AND I FOUND THIS GUYS PLAYLIST FOR THIS!
Care to share?
too bad the 3rd song seems to be gone. what was it called? I can't figure out how to spell it
What 3rd song?
Probably find out that only when all songs are gone is when the hydra is finally fully gone.
One of the few waeknees the false hydra have is that when it eats, it stop singing it's song making everyone notice all that did, when the PC's stop hearing the noise is because it's eating the receptionist
I've been anxious to hear the entire thing. Thank you!
Omg im getting chills this episode is so engaging
15:30 change fire for explosives and you have described our party. Last season our main contractor even said to us "can you go one day without blowing up a building? "
Out of character our DM told us later that we would have been more successful of we used more explosives so it's not like he has a problem with it.
That was wicked awesome and I loved it. I know the silence from Doctor Who, I think they're my favorite enemies.
Aw man this is fabulous.
In my own game, the warlock’s once passionate twin sister has grown distant, reserved, and more aged ever since being given the immense honor of becoming an Oracle.
I can’t wait for them to realize what really happens to young priests in the Rite of Knowing.
Now iam paranoid that every time lost focus something erased my memory
You know something important is about to happen when the DM says "Suddenly.."
This was such a great video. I loved how you said you used music to enhance the mood for your players. I also liked how you maintain that you had no recollection of the bear familiar. The whole story was exceptionally well done. I wish I could play D&D with you as the DM. Thank you for sharing.
I actually remember reading this story on reddit. It's a really good DND story!
It is an oft' forgotten or overlooked feature about Players, particularly when a solution isn't so readily presented for them. They have a peculiar tendency to overthink everything and then become worse menaces than the very things they're supposedly trying to save people from...
AND the second rule in heroic games, "You can't save everybody."
I believe the first rule is, "They don't all offer gratitude for being saved."
AND yes, if you're interested, I have monkeyed with manipulating Players into misguided and highly ill advised activities and even worse advised locations, especially for the ill advised activities.
Never ran a false hydra, but invisible stalkers have wreaked absolute havoc around towns full of paranoid magic users... by leaving just enough evidence of something being "present at some point recently" just to attract the less than stellar Party's attentions... I'm not generally quite cruel enough to burn a whole town to the ground over a single building being torched... maybe a block or two full of less than happy locals.
I won't go so far as to slander them as "utterly gullible fools", but they won't be missed by NASA. (lolz)
Among my earliest lessons in D&D (or any RPG, for the matter) was to build a Group's general attention and awareness as you go. That means starting easy and small scale, and get more complicated and difficult as the Campaigns carry on. Allow the Players to work their way up through varieties of mind-games, rumor-milling, and sneaky or subtlety tests. In "shop talk" even out of Game, I engage in word-play actively to see who's on their toes... rewarding those who catch the innuendo and trying not to punish missing it too much.
Some of this process (if you want the Players to have a tough time but be successful) must be repeated for every Campaign, BUT the low level of new PC's tends to help curb anything too complicated at first... It's important to keep a few lighter and simpler tricks as you can handy for those lower middle grounds that can get dangerous to PC's quicker than expected... around 4-8 ish... That's a territory that gets kind of weird in predicting between Player creativity (ambition) and actual PC juice. ;o)
This whole story is so creepy and well done, but it's also kind of sad. The druid was so close with her family, but in the end didn't even remember her twin sister who was always there, and thought she grew up an orphan. I'd like to see the conversation that ensued after they met up with the rest of their group, who wouldn't have been affected by the memory wipe.
Good stuff, Keep it up! I genuinely love your stories!
Honestly, with those plot holes (the map, the fact that they remembered random people like the barman's wife but not someone like Sophia, the druid's parents or the Ranger's bear) plus the automatic killing of the bear and the near-railroad the GM did (or at least it looks like he tried railroading them into fighting the False Hydra, luckily it didn't happen) makes it look really messy. Had I been one of the players it would have been a pretty terrible session (Had I been the ranger I would have been preeeetty pissed off for just murdering the pet).
Homewever as an outsider considering that his group apparently had fun I'd say nice job, a bit too overzealous with the mysteries (The maps, the potions... the Ranger's animal companion...) but good.
They should have checked for a corpse just in case though :v
...What False Hydra?
What corpse? Did someone die?
There's a quote from Matt Colville's Running the Game series at the beginning of this video.
This has to be one of the best stories I've heard in a long while!
The thought that if i were to die, not a soul would remember me would be terrifying. I didn't know False Hydras were a thing, but they are high on my favorite monster list now!
I learned, running a Cthulhu game, that I had to keep the players confused and feeling like they were losing their mind OOC. One of the people in that game has sworn off playing in any horror themed game I ever run again. The trick of messing with the players to immerse them is very powerful.
"When in doubt, set it on fire!"
Ah, I see this party has learned from the best of the Adeptus Sororitas.
I must say that I l just learned about these False Hydras ... and that the idea is awesome ***
Thanks !!!!
ABSOLUTELY AMAZING !!! Gave me chills. Best run false Hydra ever!!!
Our party destroyed a city once, however it was the most unfortunate and comical line of events that we had no control over. Even the DM was like, "How did things go so wrong that fast."
Dang, my party only destroyed a King’s castle.
I'm running a slightly more difficult version of Against the Cult of the Reptile God for my players. They just arrived at Orlane at last night's session (though I changed the name of hte village to Eastroad to fit my world's maps) after three and a half days of travel on the road. They, predictably enough, decide to go to the tavern to recover from their travel fatigue. What they don't know is that the inn they chose out of the two in town was the one that just HAPPENED to be run by the cult of Explictica Defilus, the self-proclaimed Reptile God. By the end of the session one of the players ended up captured and taken by the cult, and the others were left with the realization that they could trust literally no one in town, since it was the Innkeeper who had orchestrated the captured player's kidnapping.
damn. that is insanely clever of the DM, and was amazing as a story. had me on the edge of my seat!
That last bit about the scrambled memories is amazing. So they remeber what they know OOC but stuff that never happened they never remember. It’s like you knew they would kill it and retroactively compensated. Jesus that’s amazing
Oh my goodness that was intense! Bravo!
from the fact that they still can’t remember sophia i’m guessing there is more than one false hydra and the one that ate sophia didn’t die
now that i thought more about it i’d say they were dealing with a nest of false hydras afterall the book was saying something like they grow like plants and feed on lies getting bigger and bigger while growing what better place than a town of people for a false hydra to grow up and the towns folk did mention how the farmer had grown very big cabbages i’d say that cabbage patch was full of unborn false hydras hiding as cabbages don’t know if it’s true but it certainly makes one think of how horrible it would be if any of the false hydras survived
Nah, probably only killed one or two heads, so they can only remember the kills of the dead heads.
after listening to that story i feel like that party just burned down a town and now there is a false hydra on the somewhere in the world looking for another town to devour.
No, there is a false hydra dying underground incapable of moving by itself at most