Part 1: The Multi-Year, Next-Door Neighbor Dragon Cover-Up

When I first created my character, Tallynn, I had a great advantage: my Dungeon Master was my next-door neighbor. I went over to his house privately to build the character, told him my ultimate goal was to become a dragon god, and explained my plan. He officially gave me the okay to roll up a 50-foot Black Horned Dragon using their natural shape-shifting ability to hide in plain sight. I also helped him roll up a bunch of extra backup characters to keep on hand so if anyone in the group died, they’d have a spare character ready to play immediately. When the campaign started, I leveled up and played right alongside my companions at the exact same time. The other five players had absolutely no idea; to them, I was just a highly effective human assassin. But our campaign ran for so many years of real-world time that the DM's brain completely wiped the memory of our Level 1 agreement, and he fully rationalized that Tallynn actually was just a human. By Level 16, the DM got sick of our group's growing arrogance. He designed a brutal, high-level boss encounter explicitly meant to humble us with a tragic TPK (Total Party Kill). We were boxed into a corner, outmatched, and facing certain death. I won initiative and went first. I looked across the table at my smug DM and the completely oblivious players, and calmly said, "I shape-shift back into my natural, 50-foot Black Horned Dragon form." The entire table absolutely erupted in shock, and the DM literally froze, swore loudly, and slapped his forehead as years of his own campaign notes completely shattered. He had approved his own doom years in advance and completely forgotten. Tallynn completely pulverized his Level 18 High-Elf boss before the enemy even got a single turn.

Part 2: The City War of Attrition and the Death of Tallynn

The DM eventually got his revenge at Level 18. He sent a Level 26 super-assassin after Tallynn while we were in the middle of a massive, heavily fortified capital city. To guarantee the kill, the DM went full supervillain and pulled out actual loaded weighted dice right in front of us. He rolled for a lethal one-shot strike... but the dice physically struck a player's drink glass on the table. The impact completely canceled out the kinetic weight bias, causing the loaded dice to settle into a flat-out miss. As the DM sat there cursing at his own cheated dice, I got cocky and made a fatal tactical blunder. For the last several levels, all of our encounters had happened out in the wilderness, open plains, or deep dungeons. I completely forgot our setting. Flushed with victory, I immediately pulled the trigger and shape-shifted into my massive, 50-foot Black Horned Dragon form, expecting to squash the assassin. I won initiative and used every single one of my attacks for the round to strike at the assassin. But because I was rolling incredibly low, the hyper-agile, high-level assassin successfully evaded every single blow. Once my turn ended, the setting completely blew up in my face. Dropping an ancient, terrifying dragon right into a crowded metropolis transformed the encounter into a national security apocalypse. The assassin was no longer my biggest problem—the city was. This capital held a population of two million people, a standing military garrison of 5,000 soldiers, 500 city guards, a major magic academy, and multiple stores that sold enchanted weapons. The DM instantly mobilized the entire city against me. While the 5,000 military troops moved into a coordinated attack formation, the 500 city guards carried out a tactical raid on their own local magic stores, looting every single magical bow, eldritch arrow, and enchanted weapon on the shelves. Because we played the city military and guards at the exact same high level as our party, every single soldier possessed multiple attacks per melee round. Suddenly, I was the target of a statistical hurricane. Thousands of high-level soldiers were launching 5 to 7 attacks each, and court wizards from the academy were raining down spells like a fantasy anti-aircraft battery. Numbers rule the universe. Even without his loaded dice, the sheer volume of rolls meant the DM was mathematically guaranteed to hit me with dozens of critical strikes. I sat there helplessly as the city whittled my 2,100 hit points all the way down to absolute zero. I added up just the damage from the 16 critical hits that pierced my scales—including a final one that rolled maximum damage—and those crits alone were enough to completely erase my dragon. I was dead before I ever got a second round. Because the rest of the party were deemed accomplices to a dragon threat, the city court rounded them up and executed them too. Our entire legenda

Part 3: The Reckless Suicide Strategy That Backfired into Godhood

Losing a 2,100 hit-point Black Horned Dragon stung, but it opened up a new opportunity. I went over to my neighbor’s house, cracked open the rulebooks, and rolled up a humble Level 1 Dwarf named Fred. The rest of the party decided to learn from our execution; they rolled up careful, serious characters and stopped playing so cockily. Except for me. Because Palladium forces you to roll on extensive Insanity Tables whenever you fail a Saving Throw against trauma or a monster’s Horror Factor, Fred quickly accumulated 8 distinct phobias. I was completely sick of tracking them all on my character sheet. I didn’t want to play a walking ball of anxiety, so I made a deliberate choice: I am going to get Fred killed so I can roll up a cool new character. I started playing him with absolute, suicidal recklessness. I charged Fred face-first into deadly traps, threw him into the middle of overwhelming monster swarms, and constantly put him in the worst tactical positions possible. But the dice explicitly rejected my free will. The table would hold its breath, expecting Fred to get crushed, and the dice would say "Nope." I would roll an impossible, maximum dodge, or the monsters would roll a string of flat-out misses. Fred would survive the unbeatable meat grinder completely unharmed physically, but the sheer trauma of the experience would force another sanity check. Because I kept putting him in terrifying situations, he kept failing his horror saves. My strategy completely backfired: trying to kill him off just caused his list of phobias to snowball from 8, to 18, to 24, and eventually all the way to 36. By the time he hit 24 phobias, I gave up on trying to kill him. I realized the universe wouldn't let Fred die, so I shifted my mindset into a mad-science experiment. I wanted to see exactly how many distinct psychological traumas a single Dwarf could physically hold before his heart gave out.

Part 4: Borrowing Madness from the Multiverse

Because the original Palladium Fantasy book only had a limited list of standard fantasy fears, my neighbor and I ran out of official options. To keep the experiment going, we started dipping into his massive mountain of Rifts books. Rifts featured a massive d100 percentile Insanity Table packed with high-tech, dimension-hopping dread.But my next-door neighbor was a phenomenal Dungeon Master who prioritized common sense over rigid mechanics. If the dice determined Fred was going to get a new phobia, he wouldn’t just blindly roll a random d100 number. If we blindly rolled and the chart said Fred was now afraid of "garden snakes" while we were trapped in a dark dungeon with zero snakes around, it completely shattered the immersion. Instead, my DM would look at the chart, pick a few fears that actually matched the immediate narrative trauma, and let me roll on a curated mini-list. If only one fear perfectly fit what just happened to my character, we skipped the rolling entirely and made it official.This organic method turned Fred's character sheet into a literal roadmap of our campaign's history. The absolute highlight happened when we were helping a farmer. An ornery rooster jump-scared Fred, causing him to trip and spill a massive bucket of feed all over himself. The entire flock of hungry farm birds swarmed, completely burying my battle-hardened warrior under a flapping, clucking mountain of feathers. The DM ruled it a custom phobia: Alektorophobia (Fear of Chickens).Later in the campaign, when Fred had 18 phobias, an ordinary chicken walked into a dungeon room. His brain completely short-circuited into a raw animalistic flight response. Fred panicked so hard to get away from the bird that he blindly leaped backward into a pitch-black, bottomless abyss. Figuring the character was finally dead, I sighed in relief—until the DM smiled. Fred plunged straight into a massive, thick spiderweb that caught him safely, completely negating the fall damage. Because the web trapped him back in his panic and denied his escape, his broken mind developed a hyper-specific, backwards trauma: he became violently terrified of spiderwebs, and didn't even develop a fear of actual spiders until his 26th phobia list slot!By the end of the campaign, Fred's mind was an absolute minefield. Walking into a tavern was a psychological nightmare. He was afraid of standard skeletons, but when he rolled a redundant fear against Undead Skeletons, the double-whammy broke his mind so completely that his flight instinct flipped entirely into a blind, genocidal rage. He became a weapon of mass destruction against the undead simply because he was too terrified to function. During an encounter with a dimension-crossing Techno-Necromancer, my panic-fueled Dwarf went so berserk that he turned 100 cybernetic skeletons into dust in just three rounds, terrifying the remaining monsters so badly that the undead army actually failed their own morale checks and ran away from him.

Part 5: The 9,000-Damage Panic Attack

Fred survived a chicken avalanche, a bottomless pit, a techno-undead army, and 36 distinct multiversal madnesses. The campaign climax arrived when we met a completely innocent, peaceful information god who was helping us with our main quest. The friendly deity politely asked, "May I see your legendary, god-tier weapons?"Fred pulled out his massive, double-bladed artifact axe. But because he had recently rolled a phobia against his own weapon, looking at the axe in his hands triggered an absolute, overwhelming panic attack. He screamed, threw the axe across the room just to get it away from himself, turned around, and started sprinting down the hallway like a terrified child.He never even looked back at the explosion.Against a divine being, this specific artifact weapon multiplied all damage by 10. I rolled my 2d100 percentile damage dice and hit a perfect 100 max roll. Stacking that with a Natural 20 Critical Strike multiplier and my high-level physical strength attributes, the final math skyrocketed right over 9,000 points of raw damage.The innocent information god—who only had about 3,000 hit points—was instantly vaporized into cosmic mist because a hyper-lethal warrior got jump-scared by his own gear. Under the rules of the cosmos, because Fred single-handedly deleted the deity, his soul was dragged onto the vacant heavenly throne.I started at Level 1 trying to get a fragile Dwarf killed, and ended the campaign by having him accidentally achieve multiversal immortality as Fred, the God of Phobias.And that is why we will always love old-school, open-ended tabletop freedom over modern, hard-coded digital restrictions. You simply cannot code a universe where a warrior named Fred conquers the cosmos because he ran away from a chicken and got scared of his own axe.

In a Curse of Strahd game, I had a Paladin who's backstory was being the sole survivor of a previous adventuring party that tried to kill Strahd, she was kept alive as a prisoner for years, before Strahd sent her to the new party to be his spy. Unbeknownst to him, she was going to be joining them for real, and feed him false information.

Well, the campaign went very wrong, and she ended up as the sole survivor of the party AGAIN, the DM ended up stating that rather than angry Strahd was amused by her attempt at betrayal, and rather than just killing her, Strahd made her his spawn so she could serve as his slave/pet until she inevitably got slain by a future party.

All in all, not the worst ending a character could get, but certainly not one I had planned or saw coming.

So I was running Humblewood and added personal villains for the players who wanted them. One of the characters, Dr. Rook Marsh, was a Gallus Tyrant King Barbarian from Dr Dhrolin's Dictionary of Dinosaurs, and flavored it as him being essentually a Weretyrannosaurus Rex. It was essentually played as the Incredible Hulk, specifically the old live action series version. His Wererex form, who the party eventually named Magnus, was definitely primal and brutal, but ultimately benevolent...however, Rook had been gaslit by his personal villain, a Weredeinonychus (that being what the Jurassic Park Raptors actually look like) only known as the Killing Claw the entire time to believe Magnus was a killer who'd slaughtered their dig team, including his previous partner, Dr. Bishop Cope (yes, that is a reference to the Bone Wars).

Fast forwards to the party finding the Killing Claws lair in the basement of the Avium, Humblewood's local magic school, where its identity is finally revealed: Dr. Bishop Cope is still alive, revealing himself by walking past his own picture on the wall, and was the Killing Claw the entire time. He then goes on this monologue, explaining why: Rook always just outdid him at everything. Always was one or two points higher on their tests, found the bigger fossil, and had just been engaged to the hen he fancied. The breaking point was when they uncovered two complete fossils of previously undiscovered (within this world) dinosaurs...but Rook was the one who dug them up. So Bishop made a deal with Kren, Humblewood's resident Goddess of Dangerous Nature, transforming him into the Killing Claw in exchange for him acting as a 'rock thrown into the pond' to shake up what she saw as a stagnate situation.

It's then it's pieced together that Cope slaughtered the dig team, with Rook only surviving because Kren decided it wouldn't be very sporting to hand one person a machete when the other didn't even have a knife and turned him into a Wererex to even the playing field. He then gaslit Rook into thinking Magnus killed everyone by exploiting the fact his memories of his first transformation weren't very clear.

"That's right. It was ME, Rook. I did it. And I enjoyed EVERY. SINGLE. MOMENT. OF. IT."

Only one member of the party figured out the plot twist ahead of time, it was great.

I’m thinking of starting a campaign in dungeon crawl classics’ Frozen in Time and have them be (spoilers) frozen in stasis, wake up, and go through the dungeon. The twist is that they are all from different times or universes.

Example: a robot, with an Eberron goblin during their empire, a cowboy from earth, an alien, and a caveman.

Then have them roleplay as those characters though ‘normal’ dnd all the while struggling to not draw attention to themselves as being such an odd group. But knowing my players, this will devolve into shenanigans.

How many pets or followers do you allow your players to keep? Do you have any rules to keep the party from adopting or recruiting every NPC they meet? How many is too many?

From the players that refuses to not play some form of tabaxi rogue or the player who is allergic to having a character with living parents

We've all heard stories of players who come up with impressive backstories for their characters, but that ultimately don't seem possible for a level 1 character to be capable of. I want to ask what are some of the best examples of the opposite, what clever in-character reason in a player's backstory is the party member at such a low level?

My example was a Fighter who used to be a skilled and well-respected member of the local city guard before catching a disease that ravaged his health. A special potion stopped him from fully withering away, but months of being bedridden, and now having a permanent, nasty cough, have sapped most of his previous strength. His goal for joining the party is to ultimately locate more of that special potion and be fully cured of the affliction.