Favorite Monster (aberration)
Aboleth.

Favorite Monster (undead)
Ghouls
I think ghouls are under-utilized. Or, maybe in the era of vampire movies, zombie shows, and mummy games, they just aren’t over-used. But they are generally presented as corporeal, thinking undea who can even sometimes pass for human. Of course ghouls aren’t even always undead. In Lovecraft mythology, they are just cannibalistic underground humanoid dwellers, and can even be allies. Other courses give them vast empires, and sometimes portray them as herding humans as livestock, interbreeding with them, or both. They adapt well to non-fantasy games – it’s not hard to see Firefly’s Reavers as ghouls, or some creatures that show up in zombie games as more ghoulish than shambling, rotting corpse. Sometimes they have a special stench, sometimes they can stun with a touch, sometimes they spread diseases, and sometimes they wear armor and cast spells while dedicating a kill to an elder god.

I think they’re creepy, dangerous, flexible, and ripe for use in nearly any setting.

Favorite NPC

Larcun the Blue
The very first 3e D&D game I ran was at WotC, with some folks from the company. We started at low levels, and when the PCs had enough money to be interested in buying some magic items, they discovered the most famed artificer in town was Larcun the Blue. They went to his shop and discovered he wasn’t in. But his apprentices were happy to help the PCs with their needs.
The campaign went on for a bit, and moved to a new area with a new city. And there the most famous artificer was… Larcun the Blue. They went to his shop and discovered he wasn’t in. But his (different) apprentices were happy to help the PCs with their needs.
The PCs never managed to meet Larcun the Blue, but they became wildly curious about him. Did he have a franchise of magic item shops? Was he even real? Did the apprentices use his name to deflect efforts at divination on who owned the shop? The character was much, much more interesting because the players never met him.

It’s a trick I’ve used other times as well, or a variant of the trick where an npc is mentioned far more than they are on-screen. Cantor Mazeborn, a minotaur cleric, is one of my most successful recurring villains because he almost never recurred. Player would hear about him messing with allies of theirs in different places, or run into his agents and allies, or just have weirdly bad luck they attributed to him. Unlike Larcun, Cantor *did* actually show up, but only rarely in a situation where combat was a realistic option. My minimizing his actual presence, I was able to both keep him around longer (those PCs were *very* good at killing things), and make him seem more competent and mysterious.

Favorite Trap/Puzzle
“Speak, friend, and enter”
Yes, that’s from Lord of the Rings rather than an RPG, but it illustrates my favorite type of puzzle – the self-contained, clever not-quite-riddle. Something that gives the players all the information they need to overcome it, doesn’t require in-depth knowledge of a specific culture or 17-pages of background history, and if a group of players sit around and work on it someone is likely to spout out the answer and (15 minutes later) the group is likely to try it.
It’s a tricky balancing act to pull off as a puzzle, and I’ve failed more often that I have succeeded in creating something like it as a GM. In most cases when I have succeeded, it’s as a bit of mythology or background, when I have the players discover some such puzzle that was completed by a hero in times or yore as a historical note. I think I have pulled this off once as a PC challenge, in the tomb of Nibul for Dungeonaday.com, and I’m pretty proud of myself for that one.
Honorable mention goes to any of Grimtooth’s Traps, which I generally think are like cayenne pepper – not appropriate for everything, best as at best a dash of spice, and not to everyone’s taste.

Favorite Dungeon Type/ Location

The Lost Necropolis.
It’s a concept that can be applied to nearly any setting. In the realm world, it’s a city of the dead buried in the sands or lost in the mountains… or it’s the underground that was destroyed in an earthquake and the new city built on top of it. In science fiction it’s the derelict starship drifting dead in space… or the ancient civilization that left only empty monuments. In fantasy, it’s often, you know, a Lost Necropolis.
I like it both because it’s flexible (is it full of undead? Do cultists now worship Uhluhtc in its dust tombs? Was it turned into a bandit hideout? ), and iconic. Indiana Jones, Space Marines, and Gandalf have all had their turn in the Lost Necropolis, so it’s easy for players to envision their heroes doing so as well.

It’s also a great chance for worldbuilding. Who built it? What were their burial traditions? Why was it lost? Who found it, and what are their plans for it? You can have a typical dungeon-stomp, but you can also craft a narrative that fills in the dark corners of the campaign setting.

Favorite Adventure You’ve Run

That’d probably be The War of the World Oak.
Very short form. I ran a heavily-modified 2e D&D game for about a decade. One of the major story threads was that an ancient evil had, generations before, tapped the power of the World Oak, one of the primal sources of life and a prison for a powerful force for death and decay. That ancient evil had created a siphon for the World oak’s power to go to a group of its servants who gained vast nature-controlling powers.
The servants survived the fall of the ancient evil, and went on to become druids: powerful defenders of nature and greenery – who in time forgot that their powers were stolen from the World Oak. And who spread. And grew. And became a religion with no need for gods because they had a separate divine source of power. And eventually (over centuries) were drawing enough power that the World Oak began to die.
If it died, a massive force for death and decay would be released. So the PCs from about 4 different games all played on the same campaign world, with different (but overlapping) players and different levels and even different themes, had to find the World Oak, stop the cult trying to kill it (to release its prisoner), and do so while knowing that success would require them to cut off all of druidkind from the core source of their power.
It was one of about 3 major plot arcs in that world, and at the climax I had a weekend-long game/party with a massive battle that included a built-up 3D set of two roots of the World Oak, where the final battle took place.

Craziest Thing That Happened That You Saw.

There have been a lot of memorable moments over the years. A Rolemaster player rolling 01-03 on % dice three times in a row that caused a failed spell in a barroom brawl to go from putting a guy to sleep to blowing his head off. The Wild Surge that rolled a “random encounter,” which then rolled “Small Fortress,” which caused a full-armed-and-operational super-agent compound to fall on a group of drow slavers in a 2nd Ed D&D game. The unbelievably bad luck of Jacknife, a HERO system villain who was “on paper” the most dangerous psychopathic killer I had ever thrown at any heroes, but in practice was such an ineffectual sad sack the players actually felt bad for him.

But I think the craziest thing I ever saw actually *wasn’t* the result of fringe die results.
It was a 1st ed D&D game I played 20 or so years ago. It was a pick-up game at a friend-of-a-friend’s house, one of very few such events that I went to. I honestly don’t remember the names of anyone involved. I was playing Buskirk, my high-level Cleric of St. Cuthbert that was my go-to character at the time.

There were about 5 of us. We sat in the sunken living room of the DM’s parents’ house. The parents themselves either weren’t there, or never interrupted us. We were in our early teens, or just pre-teen. They had a fireplace, and it was on, so it must have been fall or winter. There was Kool-aid, and one of the players was a girl, the sister of another player. She was playing a multiclass spellcaster based on the main female character from the movie Dragonslayer. Someone else (not her brother) was playing a paladin with a Holy Sword of Sharpness. The sword may have been named Cutter. I don’t remember anything else about the venue or players.

The DM insisted that if someone’s character died, we had to burn the character sheet (which is why I remember they had a fire in the fireplace). This was before easy electronic records. Buskirk was more than two dozen pages of notes and items and spell lists. It was, ultimately, fairly childish, but we were fairly close to children. I felt a thrill of real fear, in any case.

The setup: A castle has suddenly had devils and other dark creatures appear in it, including evil air elementals, and great winds have blown in the doors and shutters. The king is pissed, and we are to go in and find out what is going on, and fix it.

We later discovered that the castle’s sewage system was chutes that lead to a bag of devouring, and someone who didn’t know that had flushed a rival’s bag of holding. A rend to the outer planes had occurred, and was sucking in air, while devils used it to invade the place. The vortex sucking everything into the planar rend got worse as the adventure went on. We had to make some kind of ability checks the DM had created a houserule for. I don’t remember for certain, but I think it was roll 3d6 and roll under your ability score for success (easy enough), but each roll against the vortex you took a -1. So the longer we searched, the worse things got.

The details are fuzzy – it’s been a LONG time. It felt epic at the time. There was both a dragon (interested in claiming whatever new magic this was) and a lich (who had hidden his phylactery in the castle and was now concerned for it.

The climax came as the afternoon wore into early evening, and we knew the game would end soon. We found the planar rend, and lowered a spidersilk rope into it. The paladin slid down the rope. The multiclass spellcaster was right behind him on the rope. Most other characters were helping to anchor the rope. Buskirk was one room away, holding a horde of undead at bay with turnings and high-level spells. I wasn’t even involved in the “crazy” final scene.

The paladin and spellcaster saw that the space beyond the planar rend was filled-to-the-brim with devils. A whole army of the things, with polearms that had hooks and blades and points, waiting for the planar rend to get big enough they could flood into the castle, and teleport away from the vortex. The bag of devouring was visible in the center of them, powering the planar rend. Someone could leap down and destroy it (we’d figured out how, and it required you to be close, but I don’t remember the details anymore–it may have just needed a magic sword). But whoever did that would be killed by devils, in hell, their soul trapped there forever. We’d taken too long to find the rend and figure out the problem. Fixing it was now a suicide mission.

The paladin failed a roll against the vortex, and fell. The spellcaster caught him. He told her to let him go. She refused, convinced we could find another way. We just needed to regroup, and reconsider.

Another PC failed a roll, and got sucked toward the vortex, but at the last second grabbed something. The penalties were rising. We were running out of time.

The paladin begged the spellcaster to release him, so he could save all of reality. She refused, not wanting him to sacrifice himself when she was sure we, we band of adventures who had killed a dragon and a lich on the same day, we could find another way. The DM said we were about to have to make rolls against the vortex, at a huge penalty.

So the paladin used his sword of sharpness to cut off his own arm.

We pulled the spellcaster out of the rend. The paladin, bleeding and surrounded, fell onto and destroyed the bag of devouring. As the planar rend closed, we saw him stand, and tell the devils he would accept their surrender if they wished to give it.

The rend closed. The game ended.

Favorite Character You Haven’t Played
La Cucaracha, an immortal vigilante with two extra cyber-arms and a black leather trenchcoat. You can’t get rid of him. He’s like a cockroach.

Since I haven’t ever played him (that I recall, I wrote him up once), that’s really all I can say about him. And I rarely make characters other than for a game I am about to play anymore, so he doesn’t have a lot of competition.

Favorite Character You Have Played

Hey! Let me tell you about my character!
😛
Okay, the question is the question, and this is a tough one. I have had many characters I loved to death, in many game systems, in many genres. Lord Brevic Falkavian. Gideon Kane. El Grande. Gibraltar. Gray Lensman. Kilroy. Orion. Lieutenant Penrose. Professor Power. Rowen. Jessica Steele. Troubleshooter. Whitewolf. Valravn.

But if I have to pick just 1, all-time favorite character, it’s oddly not one that fits my favorite race (human), favorite class (heavy armor), or favorite edition (Pathfinder).
Because it’s Solnira -a Czechoslovakian (when that nation existed, and then adopted Polish) Supergirl pastiche I played in a friends very-long-running Champion game, the International League of Heroes (ILH).
There are lots of reasons she shouldn’t be my favorite. First, I love spotlight time and special status, and there was already Stalin, a Russian Superman pastiche who was stronger, faster, smarter, and more dangerous than my character. Indeed, I carefully made sure Solnira was under his benchmarks when I made her, because Stalin was the older character I and I didn’t want to steal his thunder. Her one advantage over him was that she just grew somewhat weaker in the presence of their Kryptonite analogue, rather than disabled, and even that I loved because it only came up once (which let it have real impact when it did). Of course Stalin later died saving the universe (in a scenario I like much better than the death of Superman, which also predated it by years), and in a game based on 350 points she got 178 xp out of roughly a decade of play (sorry, but that’ll make sense to people who play Hero), so I am sure she grew to be more effective eventually…
Indeed, it’s her growth that made me love her so much. She was originally a back-up character, a Beta Flight, Justice League Europe, or West Coast Avenger, who got thrust forward when the #1 person in her slot died. She became a staple of the ILH, and I believe a leader trusted by other players. She tried her best to live up to an ideal, and tried harder when *her* hero died. She was present for nearly every major world-ending crossover game, became known worldwide, and helped define being a hero for a world. The GM, other players, and circumstances helped her evolved into something more than I ever could have made her on my own.
I haven’t played her in more than 10 years, and I still have her character sheet…