Adventurous Tales
“So, tell me about some of your heroic exploits,” says the cute wench or hunky stableboy as you settle down for a few drinks at the local tavern. “I’m sure a mighty adventurer like you has lots of stories to tell.”
Unfortunately, if you didn’t start at first level (or even if you did), you might find yourself chatting with NPCs who expect you to regale them with tales of your past heroics… which you may not actually have played through, and it can be hard to come up with good stories on the spot. And, honestly, even if you do have stories of your adventures with that character, most likely everyone else at the table was there, and already knows them, anyway.
So, if you find yourself in need of a tale that won’t bore your other players, or to account for time your character was adventuring but you weren’t actually playing, you might start with one of the ones below.
1. The Kobolds and the Ambush. The character was hired to clear out a warren of kobolds that had been plaguing a stretch of road between two villages. The character, badly outnumbered, laid a clever ambush for the kobolds, rigging up several crossbows in hidden tree perches to be fired into a clearing with the pull of a wire, leading the kobolds to believe that they were outnumbered and surrounded, when in fact it was only himself and maybe one or two companions against over twenty kobolds. He made use of the confusion to pick off nearly half their number as they panicked, and hunted down the rest over the course of a few days.
2. The Rats in the Cellar. The character was hired to deal with an infestation of “very big” rats that had taken up residence in the basement of a seedy tavern which, ironically enough, was named “The Rat Hole.” The character killed a half-dozen rats which seemed at the time to be big, but just as she was collecting their bodies to show off to the owner, she was attacked from behind by a rat that was bigger than she was, which pounced on her and tried to drag her into a small hole in the corner, before she narrowly defeated it by the skin of her teeth.
3. The Skeletons and the Ladder. The character was exploring an old tomb and ran afoul of a pit trap that dropped him down a twenty foot shaft into a room full of reassembling skeletons. He fought the skeletons for hours, but they just kept getting back up again, and he wasn’t having any luck getting out. Finally, he had an idea, and used lengths of rope and twine he had in his pack to tie the bones from the skeletons into a makeshift ladder, which both kept them from reassembling and let him climb out of the pit.
4. The Goblins and the Stew. The character was attacked in her sleep and captured by a group of goblins. Upon waking, she found herself bound and hanging over a stewpot, as the goblins discussed how to cook her. Thinking quickly, she convinced the goblins that their stew wouldn’t be complete without a certain local mushroom, describing it so the goblins could find it. They were skeptical, though, accusing her of trying to poison the stew, so she advised them to try eating a few to prove they wouldn’t ruin it: naturally, they were, in fact, poison, and the goblins died, leaving her to free herself.
5. The Lemure and the Candlestick. The character was hired by the local mage guild to check on one of their students who had not been in for some time. Arriving at her home, he heard a commotion inside, and rushed to find that the student had summoned several lemures, who turned out to be too powerful for her to control, and that she had locked herself in a closet to stay safe from the fiends. When attacks against the blobby things proved useless, the character fell back on knowledge of the devils and grabbed a silver candlestick to overcome their damage reduction, beating the things to death with it.
6. The Zombies and the Dare. The character was attempting to put a stop to a rogue necromancer who had been terrorizing a small town by raising zombies from the local graveyard and having them drag innocent folk from their beds. The clever character tricked the necromancer during their fight, daring him to animate the corpse of a giant whose burial cairn the town was built around. The giant zombie proved too powerful for the necromancer to control, and it killed him. With the necromancer dead, the magic ended, and the zombies all returned to corpses.
7. The Orcs and the Contest. The character got involved after a group of orcs attacked a small village and captured several innocents as slaves. After killing a few guards on the perimeter of their encampment, the character was surrounded in the camp, having to fight off several of the brutes at a time. Just when it seemed that all hope was lost, the orc chieftain made his way through the crowd and began speaking in orcish. The character had some trouble understanding, and some details were lost in translation, so while he learned correctly that the orc chief was impressed, and wanted him to undergo a series of trials to claim the slaves and take them home, what he didn’t realize was that he would also become an honorary clan member, and that he would need to accept a tribal tattoo in order for the chieftain to honor their arrangement.
8. The Flumph and the Mob. The character was hired to deal with a horrible tentacled monstrosity that had been seen flying through a small town in the evenings, making odd noises and menacing the local populace. When she tracked the creature down, she was confused by its unwillingness to fight her, and eventually discovered that it was a kindly creature that simply was unable to communicate in Common. By the time she determined this, the rest of the town was in an uproar, and she had to shield the flumph from a mob until she could get to the local hedgewizard, who granted the thing the ability to communicate.
9. The Bugbear Lumberjack. The character was hired to deal with a bugbear that was menacing a group of local lumberjacks, attacking them and their camp. He barely survived his first battle with the creature, which proved stronger than he’d anticipated, and nearly killed him, so he prepared for their second meeting, fighting defensively and luring the axe-wielding brute to a certain tree. When his back was to the tree’s trunk and the bugbear swung, it looked like it was all over, until the character fell to the ground, dodging the blow and letting the axe hit the tree, which had already been weakened, and tumbled down on the bugbear, crushing him but sparing the character.
10. The Exploding Toad. The character was attacked by a giant frog while travelling through a swamp. The frog grabbed her with its long, sticky tongue and was reeling her in to swallow her, but before it could, she pulled four vials of alchemist’s fire from her pack and threw the lot of them down the creature’s gullet, causing it to explode with flames from the inside.