[tacticslion]

Story One:
So recently I've been playing a 4th Ed Lawful Good "Platinum Tongue" (a hybrid class created by the GM [effectively a half cleric/warlock], specifically worshipping Bahamut the Platinum Dragon, the idea being kind of like a prophet without any actual prophecies for others...) and the party all met at the town of Undercloud, soon heading up a local mountain - we had each recieved visions from our (respective) deities that something bad was going on there (we'd started at 1st level). At first it seems a typical 'beat-'em-up' 4E campaign.

We head up the mountain - named Cloudskill Peak - and soon can't see anything. I mean anything. Fortunately we were riding creatures that could make their way through the pertenaturally thick fog. We fought off a jump spider in the fog, managed to make our way to the top and instantly got clobbered/caught by Umberhulks (level 11 or higher creatures) just waiting for pissant adventurers like us.

We wake up in a jail cell (get our fourth party member) and trick the orc guard into coming close enough to steal his keys and kick the crap out of him... but we take him alive. We kill one imp and take another alive. We begin a strike-and-fade campaign, taking three more orcs, two dragonborn, and two rage drakes, all alive. Umberhulks burst through, led by a powerful dragonborn and start to take everyone back. We bring the Dragonborn unconscious too, causing them to retreat only with the drakes and dragonborn.

Now by this point we've been blindsided with the Umberhulks' undefeatable power twice, but we've totally hammered the fact into this (until now) hidden organization that you don't want to mess with us. Unbeknownst to us, it looks like we beat the Umberhulks and their boss, too. So the queen (an evil unique character) decides to parlay. My character decides 'sweet, I got an idea' and everyone listens to him. Come to find out, this queen worships Gruumsh, Lolth, and Tiamat (calling them the 'dark trinity') while we worship Moradin (the dwarven wizard), Sehanine (half-elf paladin) and Bahamut (human platinum tongue) - hers were the eternal enemies of ours. The queen had built a very minor 'queendom' out of dragonborn, drow, and orcs (she was mixed of those three races herself) under the mountain - and racial tensions were high because the three racial leaders (one for each, each secretly a consort of the queen) didn't like eachother. In defeating the dragonborn, I'd unwittingly caused an even greater rift in the organization - the dragons were saved, but the orcs were left behind.

My guy's back story was that he used to (before being imbued with power by his god during a dream) infiltrate gangs in his old city, then bring them down from the inside, ultimately blowing the wistle to authorities that weren't on-the-take. So: I do the same here!

We talk to the queen and I (by bluffing/using very precise language) convince her that I had a vision of glory, power, and wealth that I had to follow here (she believes it was her) and ultimately I become her fourth consort. Enter the LONGEST PART OF THE CAMPAIGN where my character basically convinces the queen of stuff, the rest of the party basically hangs around waiting, and I become friends with the other consorts and convince each of them to hate eachother forever, but I'm their friend. This gives me power over the umberhulks, the authority to command resources for my party, and enables me to ensure that our enemies are looking the other way when we want them to be.

We manage to secretly rescue a bunch of kidnapped people although only part make it out and the majority were recaptured, it was blamed on one of the trusted drow - we have a shapeshifter. Those who escaped came back in with a raiding part (well informed by my group where things were and how they were guarded), killed a lot of guards, took the remaining prisoners and escaped cleanly. The orcs (the most numerous group) were already down by half their force as the other half was out raiding with their leader. So then my group made their strike. Because I was friends with each of the leaders, I was able to set up individual 'meetings' where we lured a particular leader to talk with us, took them down, then used our shapeshifter (the fourth member) to pretend to be the other leader, making the meetings look legit. We took the queen and the drow leader alive, used a ritual to alter their minds, and replaced the orc chieftan with the orc guard from our cell - who I, via perfect 20's made my 'blood brother' and loyal friend forever (also my willing dupe, as he's smart enough to know I'm smarter - I make the policy, he commands, and it's done). Oh, and the death of the dragonborn leader was successfully blamed on the orc leader, who'd "gone berzerk" (totally true!) and "assaulted the queen" (our shapeshifter in that form at the time).

To review: My lawful good follower of Bahamut lied his way into a position of prominance in an evil organization, seduced the ruler, betrayed all of his new 'friends' (killing two of them, with a third killed on false pretenses) and installed a puppet governor instead, granting me virtually limitless power over a bloodthirsty mob.

My party: just watched and thwacked bad guys every once in a while on my say-so.

Also, my character is currently wracked with guilt for how he treated everyone and is thinking of raising three homocidal maniacs who hate him forever from the dead (technically only two are homicidal maniacs, the third is just criminally negligant and selfish). Also, technically he never lied, exactly (well, he did once, but that was on accident and was minor) - he simply told the truth in such a way that everyone heard what they wanted to hear. So, you know.

Story Two:
I was recently reviewing a one-shot 4E campaign I DM'd. I'd taken two basic pre-published adventure-sites: one in the back of the DMG, and another in the Draconomicon, stripped them of the most powerful creatures (each ended by fighting a dragon I removed), and blended them together to create a large and dangerous first level adventure set in a home-brew world (a 4E variant of the one being developed by Rich Burlew, incidentally). The first-level party was made of a gnome bard, a deva invoker, a shifter rogue, and a protoss (made-by-me race similar to a shade-genasi) sword mage - the last basically a 5th level NPC to take blows for the rest of the party (she didn't do much else) to help them live (and it almost worked!).

So my players were ready to assault a crumbling castle inhabited by kobolds and (they thought) a young dragon. Unbeknownst to the players or the NPC, SOME STUFF MY PLAYERS SHOULDN'T READthere wasn't really one there, it was a trick by another very young dragon to get an assault against the kobolds to prevent them from creating a dragon from one of their own (dragons in my version of this world are mostly created by rare and dangerous ritual), presumably leading to the death of the adventurers as well (MORE SECRETS, OH I'M SO CLEAVER FOR HIDING IT THIS WAYhe actually thought there'd be only one - the NPC he'd been manipulating without her knowledge). So instead of taking the castle head on, they decided 'it's a dragon, let's make this sneaky so we live' and proceeded to find ways underground, to fight the gelatinous cubes there (they set themselves up really well), and then proceeded to infiltrate the place in one day. The Shifter (the gnome and deva weren't always present as they couldn't stay for the whole thing) took a page from Solid Snake's book and began to stealth around and occasionally rapier lone kobolds off the castle walls into the pit below, cause the hommunculi guardians to kill eachother, and generally assassinate three quarters of the fortress silently.

When the final confrontation came, the players managed to take down every bad guy, and the shifter was nearly dropped (1 hit point remaining) and was facing a boar that was also nearly dropped (also 1 hit point remaining). He killed it, but it made a on-death-final-stabby-attack and nearly killed him. The players, out of healing potions (he was out of healing surges) had no idea what to do, so they threw him into the boiling ritual dragon-making potion, completed the ritual (the gnome had unwittingly acquired the necessary components through random silliness earlier), prevented him from dying, and gained a dragon wyrmling in the party! ... who (because he's half purple-dragon) can't live in the sun very long and thus must travel by the NPC at all times, unless they find a way to fix it.

I have a ton of 3.X stories, but I think I'll stop here for now.