Funny story, the healing shiv

"I have to stab myself with that thing to feel better? Well, if your so sure its safe"
The late (and only slightly lamented) party fighter



Now I'm sure you all know the head of Vecna story, where one group of Pcs is able to totally destroy the other by planting a false "head of Vecna" for the second group, who then killed themselves for the power it held.
If you haven’t, its here
http://www.blindpanic.com/humor/vecna.htm

So I was playing a game, and it was two groups fighting each other. Our group was trying to bring a powerful artifact (holy Grail) to our master, while the other one was trying to catch us (technically there were three groups, a third trying to destroy it). Along the way, half of our group is killed, and the survivors knew that they were much weaker than the other group (we were pretty newly made characters). So we are weak, we are out numbered, but we are rich because we were able to loot the high members of our group for cash. One of the magic items we found was a magic knife our ranger, that he always kept on his person (playing with it, cutting his nails with is, tossing it around). Now the knife was a plus 3 vorpal knife that did triple damage on odd rolls (special effect), which logically nobody would ever be playing with, but the ranger just wasn't very bright (lost a finger once when playing around with it, didn't stop him) group two knew he played with it, and always had it, and determined it must be magically powerful because it was his signature weapon. So we spent all of our cash in order to make it identify as a different weapon, and for some really powerful poison.

After that, (before coating the blade in poison) we "demonstrated" its powers in a city center, where they knew the second group's familiar was watching. First they found an injured man in town (in reality they bribed him before hand, his injury was self inflicted, with an illusion to make it look nastier than it was) and pretended to use the knife to heal his wound (actually he had a ring of regeneration upon him. Before the "ritual" every member of the party cut their hand with the knife before using it.
Then when the second group caught up to us, one of us "accidentally" dropped the knife, (after the knife was poisoned) but made sure we wounded one of them in the process. When the second group identified the knife, it was said to be the "healing Shiv" used to heal folks instead of harming them. In order for it to work, at least six people had to cut their hands with the knife, and then the wounded man had to be stabbed as hard as possible. The amount of damage the knife would normally inflict, would instead be healed. So they all cut their hands, then stabbed their wounded fighter, instantly killing him. When they figure out what had happened, they had already accidentally poisoned themselves, so we came back and slaughtered them as they squirmed

Anyways, funny story that

The moral is of course, trust nothing, because everything is out to kill you
from
EE