"We Could Siege the Abyss", a Pathfinder story. Or how my GM learned to stop worrying and love the deck.

So I enjoy storytelling and have a bit of time to myself, so I'm going to relay one of the funnier stories from a game of Pathfinder I played.

As an introduction, this was a homebrew world we were playing in, where the power level was generally lower, though the PCs broke that and were basically just slowly gaining power. I was playing a Warpriest of Urgathoa, named Siegfried. There was also a half-orc cavalier who accidentally became king of orcs, a changeling witch who liked to kill people in their sleep, a gold obsessed halfling, and a perpetually perturbed Drow summoner who was actually chaotic good.

The big hook for the campaign was an impending invasion by Demon Lord Orcus being headed by the corrupted versions of heroes of old. The heroes of old included a paladin, now antipaladin, a gold dragon now umbral, a bard now vampire, a swashbuckler made red jester, and a sorcerer now ghoul. Together they called themselves the Circle of Dis.

Now, about midway through the campaign, we decided to take the fight to one of these heroes of old. The Red Jester who was sieging the orc kingdom. He had a boneship, and an army of Orcus worshipping orcs. One by one we knocked down his power structure, cleansed the kingdom of the Orcus worshippers, and eventually our orc cavalier accidentally became their king. In order to deal with the boneship however, I got creative.

So, as a Warpriest of Urgathoa, I had access to a lot of undeath spells, and while I was neutral alignment, I wasn't afraid to use evil spells if I had to. In this case, I found a thing called a Necrocraft, which is basically this Frankenstein creation made of dead bodies. Typically the limiting factors are found in the sheer number of bodies needed to fuel these things, the time it takes to sew them together, and the onyx gems needed. None of these were a problem for our group.

Because my Warpriest was basically the avatar of Urgathoa at this point, I had full access to the onyx gem stores of the church. And, because we had just cleansed the orc kingdom of a few thousand evil orcs, we had plenty of access to dead bodies. And, it turns out, our Halfling had purchased a Lyre of Building from a group of dragons. We had our weapon.

I gathered together a few clerics capable of casting animate dead, and created 4 colossal necrocrafts which I dubbed the Circle Breakers. They were basically the perfect weapon against what we were dealing with, and here's why. Even though the Boneship is a CR 19 monster, undead have this habit of using a lot of mind affecting spells, and a lot of negative energy. Things undead are actually immune to. Now, this doesn't do the typical party a ton of good, but the circle breakers which didn't utilize spells, and only used their godlike strength to punch things, were basically immune to everything the boneship could bring.

So, we sent the 4 of them underwater, and when the Boneship came around for another attack, they rose like godzilla out of the water, dragged the boat to the bottom of the ocean, and broke it over their knee.

The GM had planned a contingency for this though. After the Boneship broke, it went into recovery mode and tried to drain the charisma out of the breakers. Unfortunately for the bone ship, we rolled straight crits on the saves and what SHOULD have destroyed the breakers, instead ended up with the secondary phase being destroyed, and the red jester being ejected into the sea, and promptly eaten by the circle breaker controlled by Siegfried.

Where the GM made a mistake, was in the swashbuckler villain. See, there's this thing about Red Jesters, where they have an attack that involves them throwing cards. When they do this, their opponent randomly is given a deck of many things effect. So there's this very desperate jester stuck in the bowels of a colossal godzilla undead about to bring him to his master for execution. So, the Jester does what any sensible insane man would do and began throwing cards.

The first card he throws gives the Circle Breaker ends up being The Sun. Which immediately gave the thing 50,000 exp, and a +3 magic colossal claymore. Normally, mindless things can't take class levels, so we decided that the deck wasn't going to be anyone's fool, and it also made the thing sentient. It rolled an 8 for int, and now was a lvl 10 fighter on top of originally being a CR 11 monster.

The next card was the 3 of cups, which gave the Circle Breaker the ability to avoid his next problem. Because the problem was the guy inside of him, the GM decided that meant he was going to learn constrict, and basically crush the poor guy. So the Red Jester was dead, his bone ship a pile of rubble at the bottom of the ocean, and in the end the only person's circle breaker to survive was mine, so I got solo EXP for all of this (minus the red jester).

So, now the question ends up being what to do about the Circle Breaker. Well, now that he has a mind, he calls himself The Apocalypse and decides he exists purely to destroy (because that's how I built him). Luckily, I hold onto control of him, but it's going to be hard to continue doing that for long. We bring him to the church of Urgathoa, and Urgathoa decides that she just has a new herald. She gives him the template Instrument of the Gods, because he is exactly that, and now he has 10 mythic ranks, bringing his CR to 26.

Soon after, the demon invasion begins in earnest. And that's when we unleash The Apocalypse, who is literally untouchable to the majority of these demons. He goes on a walk over to the main portal, killing just about every demon sent through. He's followed behind by the armies of good (elves, dwarves, angels, and good dragons), but they actually can't keep up with this demigod of destruction.

At the end of a week, the demons have retreated into this portal, but before they can close it, he kills the demons in charge of it. The party was also following closely behind, and we meet with him at this portal to the abyss. Our first instinct is to immediately close it, but then we all realize something. This guy basically works for the same god I work for, and now we have a portal straight to the abyss, where there's basically infinite loot, and this guy is straight up stronger than the majority of the demons down there. By this time, The Apocalypse had killed enough to reach lvl 20, bringing his total CR to 36.

So, using knowledge religion, I go through the list of demon lords, and we pick out Kostichiche, the demon lord of frost giants. Urgathoa divines a control rod for The Apocalypse, which only had like a 10% chance of working, but hey we didn't want him to just become another demon lord.

So, after debating for about 2 hours in real time, we decide to hop into the portal, and proceed to scry and fry a demon lord. The battle is really short. Nothing Kostchiche packs in spells really could do much to The Apocalypse, who downed him in 2 rounds. Then we used the control rod on The Apocalypse, who rolled a nat 1 on his save, and was then forced to abdicate his rise to godhood. We then decapitated Kostchiche, took the exp for ourselves, and proceeded to loot the ever loving shit out of his castle.

We came out of it with enough loot to break the game, and while we chose to leave the Abyss afterwards, wanting to actually solve things on our own plane of existence, needless to say the demons weren't going to be trying again any time soon.

The game goes on after that, but I found it hilarious as to how off the rails an up until then serious game ended up getting due to a deck of many things, and a few really really lucky rolls.