It takes a woman.
Message:Tasha ran the 'Thulhu campaign "Masks of Nyarlathotep." Good times. Some of my better characters. (A deliberate attempt to generate useful investigators from unusual occupations).
It's the Climax of the Campaign. Enter, "The Black Sphinx." Spawn of the Great Old One, Lord of a Thousand Faces, Nyarlathotep. We have a couple of shotguns and some blades. EVERYONE (4 players) rolls OverkillSAN rolls. (Cthulhu is a %100 game; >= 5%, Mishap, <=95% Overkill. House rule - roll percentile dice after fumble. >=5 not a Mishap after all, <=95, you just hit yourself, buddy. These collapse to single d20 values of 1 and 20. Low is good.
We scored minor hits, good for our ego (and the audience), but Tasha rolled a 20, and a 20. Changed dice. 20, 20. Picked up two new dice. Threw a 20, 20...
That's round one.
By round three the Black Sphinx has managed to rip off its own forepaw, bitten through its own tale, and disembowel itself. Every throw, a 20. We're taking pictures in heroic poses atop the beast, when the Ref, in a fit of pique (justifiably), had Nyarlathotep itself arrive, (we all Overkilled the SAN roll - and which, BTW, means just 1 point lost. Tasha, do you still use that house rule?)), say, "I simply must see that again," snap its fingers... And reset the Sphinx.
The player response was unprintable.
Then, within three rounds, Nyarlathotep saw it again. She's grabbing dice from player's hordes - she's *touching other people's dice!* Thus do the Great Game Ones drive the ref to madness, and Nyarlathotep itself itself away to whence it dwells, howls and slavers, and leaps upon cycloptian dodecahedrons covered in twisting runes could be seen as a "1," while from the the twisted rules of other realms with blasphemous rules of existence would read such a symbol of loathsome despair it would read as "20," whilst yet, from a third certain, twisted vantage one would sense, from the corner of one's eyes an endless chaos with one defining order - the twisting, improbable runes denoting the dual nadir/crest all aligned in a single direction. An endless sea of 20's, with an anticlimactic, "I never liked that kid, anyway," did the unimaginable and incomprehensible Nyarlathotep implode before the laughing eyes of the victorious PC's.
While the Ref couldn't believe how a multisession campaign crumbled under the weight of soul crushing luck.
Anyway, I don't remember the exact number of "20's" Tasha rolled in a row, but the player with the Master's in Mathematica (now PhD) in mathematics calculated the odds of throwing them at over 4.2^10-12.
Truly, I shall never have a run of dice as poor as that. Just being witness to that improbable of an event had a profound impact. Totally small thing, but the odds!
Oh, the unusual characters:
The Opera Singer. Multiple languages, money, and fame to sweet talk. Had some occult skills from research for an Opera he was commissioning. Good researcher. Good character.
The Teppanyaki/Sushi Chef (traveling as part of opera singer's entourage). A different set of languages, also some money/fame (A-list chef, real coup to get him to do a world tour), and...stereotypical martial arts skills, and nasty with blades. Also knowledgeable on marine biology. Still, more my Combat dude. Not as much fun as the Opera Singer. He was a Tony with useful skills.
Anyways, after that, craps 8 times in a row ain't nothing
Yours,
IronMike
27-Nov-2021