I've just experienced my first campaign derail and it was amazing.

It's a long one so sorry, skip to "How the chucklefucks decimated a warband" for the campaign derail. Also first time posting this long of a post, sorry for any issues with it.

Our Mission

Let me set the scene: A party of 5 trainee Dragon Knights and their commander were hired to track down and gain intel on the war band that just raided the town Green-Nest. Our mission checklist goes as follows:

• Track down the warband
• Find out where they are going next
• Find out why they were attacking and looting
• Recover the stolen loot
• Rescue a captured monk

The Party

• Justyne - A lawful evil sword and spear duel-wielder who does as she's asked as to hide her rage and past
• Balanar - Her Evil dragon, a manipulative creature that wishes to break Justyne and turn the party into his minions
• Simona - A fearful archer bird person who Balanar is slowly molding, currently trying to overcome her fears with the help of the party's more supportive members and Balanar
• Kalmanar - Simonas over-confident dragon, focused on supporting Simona whilst also trying to act cool and brave, very headstrong.
• Liam - The Experienced Dragon Knight that was leading the party on their travels between the worlds dragon spires for their training, has "seen" some things so the party's actions aren't see as abnormal.
• Nazaerys - Liam's dragon, acts rather motherly towards the trainee knights and their dragons, mother hen style. Is injured and can't fly to do old war wounds.

The chucklefucks

• Artellus (Art) - Headstrong ex-palace guard, thicks up long convoluted plans to look cool for situations that could be solved subtly, lowest intelligence of the party (8)
• Saelyx - Artellus' dragon, not much character building yet but often seen as protective and honour bound of civilians
• Oztlec (Oz) - Lizard man greatsword wielder, follows the traditions of his tribe even when they aren't seen as sociotorially normal
• Quetzal - Oztlec's dragon, loyal to a T to Oztlec and often follows a lot of his traditions, unsure if dragon or just overly large chameleon
• (My PC) Bjorn - Dwarven smith healer, starting to act as the grumpy party dad, often the straight man to Art's stupidity and tries to keep the party members from trying to get hurt. Has a history with people being burnt and killed by fire.
• Daeneron - Bjorn's dragon, trying to be a helpful and supportive father figure to some of the party and prioritises the life and moods of children when protecting civilians. Has a slight fear of being useless due to ruining Bjorns peaceful life when they hatched.

The creation of the 'Chucklefucks'

It all started when we discovered a group of stragglers who had stayed behind to loot more allowing us to find their camp away from the main group. We create a plan to pincer movement them, Justyne sneaking around to the opposite side whilst the rest of us wait to attack from the side and front. Enter Oz and Art spying a large boulder on the side of the cliff surrounding the enemy camp.

Oz and art: "You thinking what I'm thinking?"

They then proceed to attempt to push the boulder off the cliff and into the camp, Bjorn joining in in an attempt to help so they shut up. Throughout all this Simona was trying to get them to stop but, due to being non-confrontational, does not have the courage to say anything. The three of them eventually manage to push the boulder off of the cliff, instantly killing one of the goblin mercs but blowing the party's cover and costing them the surprise round. This is where the term the three 'Chucklefucks' was coined due to their actions.

The party then proceeds to take down the small camp but two rather shocking events happen:

1. Oz attacks one of the Cultists with a bite attack, landing a critical that the DM flavours as him "Taking an ice-cream scoop" to the mans head with the bite causing Simona to have a mental breakdown out of fear from watching it.
2. Justyne goes to non-lethally take down the final cultist for information by breaking their legs with the blunt of her sword which thats a roll of 19 against an enemy with 1 hp causing the DM to flavour it as her slicing both of his legs off in one clean slash.

The party discovers the location of the main encampment and the location of the defensive guard from the cultist after Bjorn uses his skills as a medic to save the man's life by cauterizing the wounds to stop them from bleeding out. Liam and his dragon go back with the now legless cultist to the town of Green-nest whilst the rest of the party continues onto the main warband, avoiding the defensive advance force.

How the chucklefucks decimated a warband

The party comes across the main body of the warband later on in the day, taking a few hours to scout out the camp before using some of the looted shields of the mercenaries to sneak into the camp disguised as mercs, Simona and the dragons stay outside of the camp, watching from above a cliff and acting as an emergency escape route if needed. The party makes its way through the camp, handing in a small bag of loot to the camps loot pile as to not loot suspicious before heading into the Merc part of the camp.

Art attempts to start a rebellion of the mercs by acting as if their pay had been cut despite the fact no one was getting paid until all of the villages had been raided. After learning that Green-nest was the fourth village hit by the warband and spying a cave called the 'Nursery' at the back of the camp Art attempts to go walk up to it and bluff his way in, Bjorn seeing this stops Art leading to an argument and a slight falling out as they change plan.

Heading to where they believe the warbands prisoners were being kept the party manages to get into the prison tent by acting as if the big boss lady needed to see the monk. Once inside the captured monk divulges a lot of information he had overheard to the part as they unlock all of the prisoners shackles, telling them to wait until nightfall and until the party gave them a signal before returning the broken staff to the monk and turning to leave.

As they begin to leave Art starts to think up a plan on how to provide a distraction for the prisoners so they can escape. This plan is what derailed this part of the campaign.

Due to the history of the region Art comes from he decides the best way to cause a distraction would be to teach the warbands goblins how to eat and breath fire even though Art had never even tried the tricks before. Bjorn hearing this starts to freak out in a major way, trying to talk Art down and change the plan to the party getting drunk with the mercs and accidently knocking over a torch or lantern onto a tent. After about ten minutes of this not working Bjorn senses it's not a battle he can win, making note to confront Art on it later, and turns to leave the tent proper just as two of the games minor BBEGs enter the tent.

One of them had already ran Art through with a sword, almost killing him in the process so the party freak out slightly, fortunately for them he didn't notice the party there just telling them to leave due to how low he rolled perception. The party leave and hand back the keys to the guards before returning to the mercs camp to go through with the plan.

The party goes up to the goblin part of the mercs camp getting the attention of around a dozen of the goblins, one of which was getting held down and forced to chuck and large barrel of 85% proof rum. As Art approaches the group, Oztlec talks to the goblins, asking them if they want to play the fire game as Art pulls around 9 unlit torches out of his pack. He proceeds to take a mouthful of rum and lights one of the torches, successfully performing the fire breathing trick by spitting the rum out until the air through the torch. Watching this the Goblins being to grab the torches as Art lights them and try to imitate him.

The Goblin who was being forced to chug the rum stands from where he was laying and snatches one of the torches from another Goblin, bringing it to him rum soaked lips as time seems to freeze. THe Goblin was soaked with rum so as soon as the torch got near him he burst into flames, standing still for a moment before screaming and running towards the camps supply of rum.

As the party slink back away from the ground the rum barrels begin to explode, launching flaming debris throughout the camp and setting fire to tent after tent. The camps leaders leave the command tent to see what was happening before moving to try stop the fire. The party uses this as an opportunity to raid the camps command tent, taking all of their plans and a chest full of far too high level loot before running to the loot tent and beginning to order mercs to help "rescue" the loot from the fire.

The party is almost rumbled by one of the cultists before a high persuasion roll causes an ogre with a cart to run him over to help the party load up the cart with as much of the treasure as they could, the ogre thinking they're just mercs trying to move the treasure away from the rapidly spreading fire. The party take as much of the treasure as they can in the cart before running from the camp, stopping by the prisoner tent to pick up the monk on the way to their successful extraction.

Throughout all this Simona had been watching from atop the cliff hat looked over the camp having been talking with the dragons. As the camp explodes she takes a moment to watch it burn, marking the start of her change as a character.

Our DM told us that the fire had caused the death of at least 2 named villains and potentially one of the two BBEGs we had met within the prison tent and had moved the campaign forward further than it was meant to by the fourth session of the game.

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I will be sharing this with my DM, look out in the comments for anything I might have gotten wrong or missed out when he comments (I'll put his username here when I learn it).

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TL;DR A group of Dragon Knights teach fire breathing tricks to a group of goblins that then proceed to cause the camp of a large warband to go up in flames, potentially killing one of the campaigns minor BBEGs.