This story is from our campaign in the city of Thane, an interdimensional trading hub that may or may not have been heavily inspired by the Ravnica setting from Magic the Gathering as well as some other stuff the DMs (as there were two) were really into at the time. Our party had been summoned to do some investigation into various things on behalf of one of the noble houses in the city, and this included going deep into a local mine to hunt down a specific artifact.
To be honest I'm not 100% on the specifics as it has been a while, and I'm going to be paraphrasing a lot, so if it seems like some details don't add up, blame my spotty memory. That being said, bottom line is the only way into this part of the city was by riding a very old elevator, the oldest one in the city. It was rickety and unstable, but it had gotten the job done as long as anyone could remember.
Sure would be a shame if a bunch of adventurers came and screwed that up.
Though being fair, it's not as if the DMs planned for this. But I'll illustrate that in a bit.
So, important players in this fight are Skyerrow, an aarakocra monk, and I'm only illustrating his race because as a bird-person he could fly (and yes, we made a lot of Rick and Morty jokes at his expense), and Flora, a firbolg barbarian. Firbolgs are essentially mini-giants, and Flora, though having the personality of Fluttershy from My Little Pony (exactly what her player was going for), got by by smacking stuff with a giant club.
Other characters include Minato Hiruma, a human samurai (whom I had lifted from an entirely different campaign from an entirely different game), Phylas, a half-drow warlock (essentially the main protagonist of this campaign considering how many important events happened because of and/or relating to him) and Tyrial, an aasimar paladin. The last three were in this fight, of course, but the real stars here were Skyerrow and Flora, as we'll see shortly.
So, we carried out our investigation and were about to leave the mines when we were met by our original employer near the elevator. I don't remember his name, but that doesn't make much of a difference, because he's not going to be around for very long, as an assassin appeared from the shadows, knifed the contractor, stole the thing we were trying to find, and made a break for the elevator, which Flora ended up clinging to as it began its rickety ascent.
Flora and the assassin began trading blows while Skyerrow quickly flew to the platform to offer support and the rest of the party quickly began scrambling up anything they could to catch the platform, including the chain above the elevator's counterweight. For you see, in a brilliant move of nobody actually communicating what their individual strategies were for this fight (as it was in the beginning of the campaign and we were still trying to figure out our individual combat roles) Phylas decided to blast the counterweight to force the elevator back down.
While Minato was still climbing the chain.
At this point the elevator had made quite a bit of distance (since the counterweight was close enough for Phylas to blast it in the first place). This combined with Flora accidentally smashing the control console for the elevator itself while swinging at the assassin, and you can already see where this is going.
Basically, the elevator was sent careening into the abyss. Skyerrow and Flora were able to escape the elevator at around the same point Minato was clinging to another rope for dear life (which, if we were playing super realistically, Minato catching the two of them probably would have ended with all three plummeting to their deaths following Minato dislocating his shoulder)
Oh, and the assassin? We never were able to get close enough to him to see this for ourselves (considering the smashed elevator and him more or less turning into paste) but the thing he stole from us ended up in the hands of the villains as tends to happen in these stories. As for us? Well, not only were we pegged for the destruction of one of Thane's priceless artifacts (the elevator, not the thing we found and then immediately lost), but also people who had it out for Phylas in particular stuck us with the blame for the death of our employer as well, he being an important noble in the city of Thane who perished not long after coming into contact with a group of ruffians affiliated (though very loosely) with the illegitimate son of another noble with connections to the drow.
This was the beginning of the campaign, mind you, and already we had smashed a priceless artifact and were soon to be on trial (a very, very unfair trial) for murder.
D&D is fun, I swear.
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