Troper Tales are no longer accepted on TV Tropes.
Any examples for this must be taken from published Dungeons & Dragons material, not your personal experiences in a game.
open/close all folders
The Film
- Ridley running the Guild Maze. True, it's a blatant Indiana Jones ripoff, but it's still cool to see him clambering across swinging pendulums and dodging blasts of fire, and the music is appropriately cool. He even shows off at the end of said pendulum run, dismounting with a backflip and giving a bow to the spectators. It's also the part where Marina starts to warm up to him: she starts horrified that any minute she's going to watch someone die a gruesome death, but by the end she's gleefully cheering Ridley on.
- Snails' death. For those who can't stand him, it's a breath of relief to see him go. For those precious few who can, he may have died, but he went out swinging, refusing to submit to Damodar even as the evil mage soundly thrashes him. He then defies Hostage For Macguffin as he reveals he manged to snag the map from right under Damodar's nose, tossing it to Ridley and sealing his own fate, grinning as he does do.
- Marina getting her shining moment after spending most of the movie as The Load: with Snails dead and Damodar with his sword over Ridley's head, she manages to grab the magic powder Snails had swiped. She knocks Damodar on his ass with a single magic blast, opens a portal and drags the much bigger Ridley to safety.
- Any time Norda fights: at the bar fight and against Damodar's flunkies, nobody can get anywhere near her. The only time she loses is against Profion, who's so much more powerful than any of the party it's entirely understandable.
- Ridley's climactic fight with Damodar: the choreography isn't anything spectacular, but it's still Ridley savagely pounding away at the Evil Sorcerer who killed his best friend. It ends when Ridley takes advantage of a clumsy swing on Damodar's part to Tumble over his head: by the time Baldy McBlueLips realizes that he's lost sight of Ridley, the thief has shanked him with Snails's knife.
Games and Guidebooks
- On the Wizards.com D&D boards, Raz the Rogue mage (played by Rickel) is generally considered purified awesome. He got so popular that Rickel wrote an original story starring Raz here
- Example from an Eberron novel (not really Literature CMOA material, because the book is just a tie-in to the setting): a human has been enslaved by one of the less pleasant Valenar clans. Because the clan is being called back to the service of the Darkwood Crown, and the king wearing said crown doesn't approve of slavery, said human began suspecting he was about to get deaded. So he immediately calls the leader of the clan a disgracer of the blood (Vadis nia). This is literally the worst insult in the culture of the Valaes Tairn. As a result, the clan leader goes apeshit berzerk and begins attempting to dismember the slave with a knife in each hand...our plucky slave, Cutter, because he served as a woodcutter, duly grabs hold of the clan leader's wrists and forces him to slit his own throat. Beating the leader of a clan of elves who are feared all over Khorvaire as its scariest combatants.
- Another canonical Eberron example: the initial response of the elves of Valenar when a group was hired by Cyre. Rather than sending a note saying "OK, we'll go hurt people for cash on your behalf", they kill a Karrnathi general, engrave "We accept" onto his skull in Elven, and send it to the Cyran queen. Eberron has the greatest spin on Our Elves Are Different in the history of the universe.
- Pun-Pun the Kobold, otherwise known as the ultimate optimized character build. By taking advantage of an obscure flaw in the Dungeons & Dragons rules, this thought experiment managed to gain infinite stats, every special ability of any creature ever, and unlimited divine rank all at character level 5. Koboldoid Abomination, yeah.
- Quite possibly the most famous article in Dragon Magazine's history covered the topic of "Tucker's Kobolds," an editorial that revolutionized how many DMs and players utilized low-level monsters - while they may only have 1-4 hit points, you can damn well make them terrifying through tactics, great dungeon design, and atmosphere. Not only was it an awesome article to utilize, a moment of awesome for the author's dungeon master "Tucker," it made the previously overlooked and underwhelming kobolds into something akin to Memetic Badass trapsters and guerrilla fighters a la the Viet Cong.
- Pretty much all the Beyond the Impossible stuff made possible through the Epic Level Handbook. Your Rogue successfully going unnoticed despite standing in the centre of a room bathed in broad daylight? Your Monk obliterating a castle with a single punch? Your Bard practically reading someone's mind just by getting a look at their face, or convincing an entire army to fight for them? Your Barbarian swimming through lava?
- Asmodeus is such a Magnificent Bastard that he once manipulated the entire heavenly host into a trial he easily won.
- One of the potential ways players can solve the conflict in Descent into Avernus is by way of Summon Bigger Fish. Specifically, Tiamat! Zariel may be a powerful archduchess of Hell, but she's nothing compared to a deity.
- The third-party sourcebook Grim Hollow is based around gothic horror, so for the trailer for the first book they amped up the helplessness, with a vampire gleefully narrating how the world is lost. The second trailer starts of much the same, with a father finding that his daughter is kidnapped by a monster, a mage being nearly killed by the inquisition and a couple soldiers helplessly besieged by zombies. Then, the narrator drops her cape to reveal she is a Seraph, and the tide turns; The father grabs an axe, stating his intention to save his daughter. The mage breaks out, throwing fire on the inquisitors and shielding the kind people who tried to protect her, and the soldiers get a second wind, battling the undead with the Seraph at their back.For while there is still breath left within us, Etharis is not truly lost.
