#haggemoth

[zippdementia]

Part 90 Alignment May Vary: Pieces of the Past

There is an adventure for 4th Edition called something like The Return to the Tomb of Horrors. It is an adventure centered around the infamous lich Acererak and his various Tombs of death. One of the more fun parts of the adventure takes PCs to the Tomb of Horrors... only it’s decades after the Tomb’s first opening and the tomb has been raided and destroyed by the thousands of PCs that have come to it since that time.

I mention this, because ever since I read that module, I’ve wanted to do something similar: bring players back to a place that was familiar to them. The Tomb of Haggemoth, which featured so heavily in our campaign and plot, was the obvious choice and there was at least one loose end left in the Tomb that I felt would serve as a good hook: an ancient celestial being, trapped in a rock. Around the time of this session, I had finished working on a revival of Haggemoth, bringing it into 5th Edition with its original creator, Robert Kendzie (you can learn more about that here). As we updated a lot of the final dungeon, it felt like I now had an appropriately “changed” setting to bring the players back to.

So for this next section of the adventure, we return to the past. We return to Haggemoth. 

New Waterdhavians

The set up for this return begins in Waterdeep, with Imoaza and Milosh morose after the failure at Maakengorge and the sacrifice of Ruze. Milosh especially, has lost his entire sense of identity and nearly quits the group entirely. His only consolation is that armor has been left for him by Vraath Keep’s smith, who had promised to build him a new face. It is a wonderful piece of armor that gives him a humanoid looking face shield to cover up the damage done by Dragon fire back on the asteroid. But he also saw that smith dead in the Maakengorge temple. Everything reminds him of his failure at this point. Only one thing keeps him involved: Illrastayne. 

This is the blade he took from the Abyss, the blade which contains the soul of the bard-turned-warlock Bitterberry (and his Demonic patron) and which Milosh used extensively in the Abyss but has shunned since. He decides to rid himself of the blade, almost on a whim. He is aware that it has a demon inside of it and wishes to have no connection to anything which might impede his freedom, whether it be Surveyor, Primus, or this accursed sword. But when he tries to rid himself of it, he finds he cannot. The sword will not leave him. More than that, it taunts him, telling him in a demonic voice inside his head that in his despair, the blade has latched ever more deeply onto his heart and soul and that soon it will have him completely. Determined to find a way to destroy the blade, Milosh seeks out the Shaman from the ice tribe, who survived the events at the Maakengorge and is with the refugees in Waterdeep. The Shaman tells him there is a place called Rori Rama, where the first contract between the Demon was struck and that is the only place now where the blade can be destroyed.

It is around this time that Carrick returns to the party. Yes, Carrick! If you don’t recall him, he was the prior character that Ruze’s player had created and played for many many sessions, finally losing him in the Abyss during Esheballa’s insane game. But that was only the end of the original Carrick. Carrick’s backstory involved the inadvertent merging of his soul and personality with the energy of the final Surveyor, and so when Carrick died, his soul was borne back to Faerun to awaken in the last vessel the Surveyor had left there: a final body left safely in the ruins of the Fane, whose Yuan Ti temple had been reduced to rubble by the actions of Imoaza, Aldric, and the original Carrick during the final campaign of the Red Hand.

Carrick comes to Milosh and asks him to accompany him on a final task. You see, Carrick has worked out a good portion of the prophecy and its meaning. He believes that the players haven’t actually failed to stop the prophecy. Instead, he tells them that this is what HAD to happen in order to stop it: the three had to be one. Only when together could they be defeated. To recap, according to the prophecy, the PCs will need to bring together four objects to destroy the three and halt Chaos’ advance into the world. The pertinent lines are thus:

Four things must gather to alter fate’s course The Sword, The Shield, the The Stone, The Source Then upon the throne the three must be Before they can meet their destiny

Carrick says the sword is almost certainly Imoaza’s Black Razor. The Stone he believes is a piece of the Surveyor’s Jade stone that caused so much trouble early in the campaign, years ago. He went out on a mission of his own to retrieve it (one that wasn’t played in the course of our adventures, but was occurring while the players were at the Sea of Moving Ice). In speaking with Imoaza and learning what she found out from the library on the iceberg, Carrick now believes the Source is a piece of Primus himself. Karina, before her demise, had spoken to him at length of her past adventures and mentioned that Abenthy had begun calling himself an “Inevitability of Justice” after surviving Haggemoth’s tomb. Carrick, with the knowledge of the Surveyor living within his own memories, knows of the creations of Primus, and Abenthy’s wording stands out to him: “Inevitability.” Carrick believes an Inevitable is still in Haggemoth’s Tomb and that Abenthy encountered it. The Inevitables are celestial beings, created by the hands of Primus itself in the plane of Mechanus, where Law and Order is unquestionable. And there is one being, Carrick believes, who can channel the power of that Inevitable.

“Oh great,” Milosh said, seeing the visage of the surveyor looking down at him from the alley’s entrance. “This again.”

Years ago, a surveyor had taken Milosh from the depths of failure and despair and built him a new identity. But now Milosh had remembered, remembered everything, and again he had failed. He didn’t want a third chance. He wanted to go away. He wanted the world to go away.

Carrick knelt beside him. “We’re not very different, you and I,” he said. “Both of us have experienced death. Each has had our own failures. And we’ve been brought back to do more. We have been brought back to save the world.”

Milosh scoffed. “I have no world.”

“No. You have a million. Every world is yours to protect. That was your mission. It is your mission.”

“I’ve lost a lot already.” Milosh paused. “You remember Aldric, right? Did you know Imoaza killed him? I found it out from a book we got, from this old elf in a frozen library. You trust this group to save a world? We can’t even trust each other.”

Carrick stopped and considered what Milosh had said. “We all have to answer for our past actions,” he said. “Some answer in different ways. I believe Imoaza is going through her own changes. And I... I am no longer exactly who I was before. I am not Carrick. But I am not the Surveyor, either. But I am both. Do you remember the sacrifice I made as Carrick? Sometimes sacrifices have to be made. Sometimes we can avoid them. But if you walk away here, you walk away from the sacrifices we have all made.”

“Maybe I don’t care.”

“You’ll also walk away from yourself. You want freedom? Then you need to face what it is that you are afraid of. Or else you’ll never be free from it.”

While Milosh is struggling to come to terms with what he should or should not do, Imoaza begins to investigate the politics of Waterdeep, concerned by the boast from Nazragul that he had agents in Waterdeep’s council, planted there to change the teleportation destination from Vraath Keep to the Maakengorge, which is how he trapped Karina. Her investigations, which involve her ingratiating herself to certain people in disguise and exploring the homes of certain nobles, reveals to her that Yuan Ti have infiltrated Waterdeep and are turning its citizens and lords against the cause for which Imoaza and the companions fight.

These discoveries will have importance for upcoming sessions, but for now they linger as unresolved hints of danger, for it is time for the group to head to the tomb.

Return to the Tomb

“The island was warded against dragons,” Argent explained, as the bronze dragon circled down towards the island of Rori Rama. “We knew where it was, we could practically taste the magic and gold Haggemoth had accumulated, but we couldn’t get close to the island. Like an itch you couldn’t scratch. Even now, this is as close as I can come.”

For three weeks, the companions (plus Breath Giver, Milosh’s personal healer from the ice tribe) had flown via dragonback away from Waterdeep, across the Moon Sea, and towards Rori Rama, to find the Inevitable trapped inside the old tomb. They had stopped at several locations which would have been familar to Karina. They had stopped to buy provision in Ottoman’s Docks, which had changed little in a hundred years, except that it had doubled in size. They had roosted one night on a beach of a deserted island with a huge spire rising out of its middle (the site of the LaCroix mansion, though they didn’t know it). They had flown to Celaenos and spent a night as guests of the Sisters, the Keepers of the Library, who had taken over the monastery after the Knights had been murdered decades earlier. They spent a night at the island of the Oracle, and though they lacked the money to see the ageless Oracle, the monks who protected her let them at least stay on the beach for free.

Eventually they reach Rori Rama, but the closest Argent can get them is at the base of the inactive volcano which contains Haggemoth’s tomb. Breath Giver stays with Argent while the three companions use fly spells to reach the volcano’s crater and there find a way down a mysterious shaft delved into the mountain itself. The shaft takes them directly into Haggemoth’s inner sanctum, skipping the first level of the tomb entirely (I intend this to be a revisit of this infamous area, not a full rerun of it).

This high ceiling of this long chamber is held up with stout columns and the floor is tiled in marble. The rotting remains of a pair of couches can be seen towards the center of the room, along with some long-dead potted plants. Several doors lead off of this room, though some are damaged. The space is lit by arcane-looking lanterns hung from the columns, but the far end of the hall is lost in shadow where part of the ceiling has collapsed and the lamps have failed. Strange sounds echo in the distance – sounds of movement and the occasional animal like cry.

I am not going to detail all of the explorations the players make of the old tomb. There are many little rooms and surprises the players encounter, but only a few are of key importance to the plot, and I want to focus on those, the things that have changed for the worse since the last time they were here.

First, there is a new character that makes his appearance in this ruined tomb. His original name is unknown, if in fact he ever had one, but the group comes to know him as “The Painted Mummer.” He lives in paintings left behind by Haggemoth, and takes multiple disguises, different for each painting, from a feasting king to a hunchbacked dwarf. He interacts with the PCs as they explore the Sanctum, sometimes giving them dubious advice, at other times leading them through interactions with some of Haggemoth’s left over magics. For instance, they try to make a potion of invulnerability in his old study, guided by the Mummer in the guise of a twitchy scholar in a painting in the room. This ends in disaster as the potion explodes, due to them not identifying the proper heart needed for the potion (they use a Grell heart instead of a Hook Horror heart). They do get some hints that not all is well, such as when they identify some dead bodies hidden in a painting of a snowy mountain, and occasionally even get a glimpse of the Mummer’s real persona, a gaunt, tall figure dressed in skin tight black and wearing a theatrical mask, one half of which is sobbing and the other half is giving a menacing and angry snarl. Eventually, they learn to be wary of the Mummer and start burning his paintings whenever they find him in them. This only angers him the more and he begins to stalk them from room to room, not always able to do anything to them, not always even seen by them. But he watches, and he waits.

Cliff notes: The Mummer was an idea Robert and I came up with for the 5th Edition version of Haggemoth. He wanted to do more with the Inner Sanctum and was interested in maybe using the paintings to have some effect on the environment. I was thinking of GladOS from Portal, and liked the idea of an insane groundskeeper, something which was initially built to be helpful but has become broken and corrupted by time.

Secondly, while they explore, the PCs are occasionally accosted by otherwordly purple tentacles, that seem to sprout from the air itself, or the floor. The Ethereal, they discover when Milosh tries to enter it, has been completely dominated and overtaken with these tentacles, and they attack the PCs on two major occasions, sucking out not only their life, but their spell power, draining their spell slots and destorying their magical shields and other effects. The most memorable fight against them takes place in the old dining hall, where an unnatural darkness forces the PCs to fight blind against the tentacles, all the while looking for a key to a special door in Haggemoth’s Sanctum. The PCs get very creative here, with Milosh destroying parts of the ceiling to drop on the tentacles, Imoaza using the Weave Sight to be able to locate the Tentacles, and Carrick using fire and ingenuity to set up a kind of napalm effect that he uses to keep the Tentacles away from him. The scariest part is when the Mummer causes dozens of animated knives and dishes to animate around the room and swarm the players, only to have the Tentacles latch on to this living magic and erupt from the cutlery and dishes, surrounding the players with swarms of essence draining tentacles!

Another scary room involves an illusion created by the Mummer with the aid of some hallucinigenic spores. This grabs Milosh especially, and he runs into what he thinks is a vision of his old life on Eberron, where he is at a ballroom dance. He happily joins in the merriment, and takes a bite out of a thick pastry of some kind, bursting with whipping cream and flavor.

Only, what’s really happening is that he’s surrounded by Rust Monsters, absolutely attracted to his metallic form, his addled mind showing them as laughing and dancing humans. Imoaza and Carrick see through the illusion before he does, and watch as he takes a bite of what he thinks is a pastry... it is actually a larval Rust Monster, its guts and ichor spraying across his face as he bites into it.

Suffice it to say, this is not an encounter that the PCs end up liking, but it is a memorable one. By the time it is over and they flee the room, Milosh has had half his face (just restored!) eaten off. 

They eventually discover a scrap of painting in a room which also contains the broken summoning circle Haggemoth used to summon the Inevitable of Justice, centuries ago. The painting shows a gnome, who swears he is not the Mummer, but seems terrified of the Mummer. He tells them his name is Lhu-Ee and he is the last surviving painter dweller, aside from the Mummer, who murdered all of the others. He explains that the paintings were created by Haggemoth to hold his knowledge and to keep him company. They are like phylacteries, holding the souls of creatures Haggemoth pulled from beyond the grave to shape to his purposes. When he prepared to depart this plane, he “turned off” the paintings, intending to let the souls rest forever. But something went wrong. Others (Karina, Abenthy, Xaviee, and Bitterberry) came into the Sanctum and their presence awoke the Paintings again. But with no Master to direct them, the Mummer went mad. Originally designed to entertain Haggemoth and be a companion for him, in his absence he declared that the paintings had failed their master and needed punishing. Only Lhu-Ee escaped his wrath, by hiding in a torn scrap of painting. He offers to go with the party in his scrap, if they’ll keep him safe from the Mummer. 

Lhu-Ee knows more than just the history of Haggemoth. He is an expert on the Abyss and the Ethereal, filled with Haggemoth’s knowledge of those planes. He tells them that what’s happening to the Ethereal now is a sign of a being trying to weaken the boundaries between this plane and the Abyssal plane, with disastrous results.

“Why,” he says, pushing his oversized turban back up on his head, where it promptly falls down again. “It could be the end of the world!”

* * *

This is part one of a two part post. There’s a lot that needed to be set up this time, so I wanted to break the posts up to make it a little more manageable. And ya know, maybe also stretch this blog out just a little more. We are coming close to the end.

But not quite yet! Haggemoth’s final resting place still awaits the players, and more beyond that!

[zippdementia]

Part 86: Alignment May Vary: Back to the Future

This post begins Chapter 10, which used to be called Tears and Torments, but which I’ve renamed “The Coming of the Three.” It marks the last chapter of our game and focuses on the prophecy of the three. For a reminder, the prophecy was created by a Surveyor who foresaw that Primus’ great mission to bring stability and order to the world would end in Chaos and sorrow. He passed down a prophecy of how this would come to pass and how it could be countered. The prophecy is as follows:

Three shall be the kings who sit the single throne And Order's rule by Chaos shall be overthrown The Universe will end by their divine hands Chaos will devour every woman, child, and man

Each shall be seen by a singular sign Each shall be born of a different line. The devil's blood runs in the first of the three They bear the eye that can seek but cannot see The second will by heaven be blessed But wings of black will mar their pureness The third contains the dragon's flame What was dead will rise to live again Three to rule, Three to lead, Three to destroy and make the universe bleed. Removing one will not lead to the fall To end the curse you must destroy them all Four things must gather to alter fate's course The Sword, The Shield, The Stone, The Source Then upon the throne the three must be Before they can meet their destiny In the time these things come to pass The future will be decided by the ones from the past

As this is the last chapter and there is a lot of call backs and wrap ups, I’m going to focus more on the big picture narrative and less on individual mechanics. I’ll try to put in reminders, too, of who everyone important is as I coe to them. One day I will finish the Encyclopedia but until then, I’ll do everything “in-post.”

Through the Woods to Grandmother’s Fortress

There was something wrong about this place, but what was most disturbing was that the wrongness hadn’t been there a moment ago. The very earth was becoming infected beneath him, with him as witness to its corruption. The wrongness wasn’t an attribute of this land, it was a living malice, moving through the land and turning it against all living creatures. Imoaza tensed and stood quickly, spinning around to face the horrors that were emerging on all sides of her, from the sudden mist that had settled upon everything. She held up her hand to summon Blackrazor to her and then stopped, noticing that where she had pressed it into the earth fresh blood had stained it. The very ground was bleeding... that was her first thought. But then she gasped as hands erupted from under the earth, seeking, grasping for any flesh they could find.

~ Imoaza facing the Blighted horrors of the Wytchwood

The first part of this chapter is about introducing the players to the end game set up. This means introducing them to the key NPCs and situation. But I don’t want to be blunt about it. It’s more engaging if it’s not just one big exposition but rather an experience of what’s at stake.

So we start with them not sure if they’ve made it back to Faerun. They wake up in the woods being stared at by a Forest Giant. Daymos isn’t with them, and Ruze has undergone a change: no longer a fox faced man, he becomes an elvish looking female with black hair. She does not explain the transformation or the choice of her new form, but it reveals something about her nature: she is a Changeling, a mysterious race of dopplegangers that is rare on Faerun, but which does have clans spread around the world. A rather large one existed in Brindol, and as a matter of fact, that’s where Ruze is from. 

The Giant is soon joined by a lean female Half Orc. The two are allied, their names are Grimoire and Sierra. Sierra tells the characters that they have been waiting for them and that their coming was foretold by Carrick, who found his way to these woods after he awoke in the Destroyed Temple of the Yuan Ti. Now they are to take them to the Lady of the Wood. Also, they are in for a shock: 80 years or more have passed since they left Faerun.

Cliff Notes: Carrick was the character originally controlled by Ruze’s player. He had a really in depth plot tied to the backstory of the game, as the players discovered that Carrick had long ago been possessed by the soul of the last Surveyor. The Surveyors are creations of Primus who helped usher in the age of Humanity on Faerun and who are indirectly responsible for many of the major events of the campaign, like the powers of the Jade Statue, the downfall of the Yuan Ti society, the arrival of the Mind Flayer who creates the Red Hand, and the Prophecy.

The players accompany Sierra on a short side quest, first, as she scouts out Skull Gorge, where it is said that the Enemy was recently spotted. Who is the enemy? They are told that only the Lady of the Wood truly knows, but that it is said to be the revived form of some old dead warlord, a Dragonborn who tried to conquer the world long ago.

Cliff Notes: All of this is referencing back to the PCs adventures with the Red Hand campaign. Skull Gorge Bridge was blown up by Nysyries in a very memorable moment decades earlier. The Dragonlord is Nazragul, whom the party served for a while when they were turned evil. The fact that he is mentioned to be returned is dark tidings indeed, as his power was shown to be pretty intense even from beyond the grave. How did he return, though? It should be noted that none of these PCs actually know of Nazragul or met him. The last PC who would have worked for his cause would have been Aldric.

While out scouting by the bridge, the party encounters a strange plant creature pouring some sort of necrotic energy into the land. The land becomes infected and the party is set upon by awakened trees and blights and Grimoire, whose connection to the forest causes him to be infected as well. The PCs win the battle but Hecate disappears during it. The PCs track her to a spot where they discover many prints that Imoaza recognizes as belonging to other Yuan Ti. Before they can investigate further, they are attacked by a Death Knight. He surprises Imoaza but when she draws Black Razor Alpha he retreats, and the party, taking advantage of the sudden reprieve and wondering who this mysterious helmed knight is, follows Sierra to Vraath Keep. They are about to meet the Lady of the Wood.

Cliff Notes: Vraath Keep was last seen 80 years ago, during the Red hand campaign. Xaviee, companion of General Twyin... renamed Lorin by us later... became its ruler and restored it to glory. But he died some time ago and who runs it now?

The Keep is revealed to have been expanded upon greatly in the past decades and has become a refuge for creatures of all manner, from humans and elves to giants and fey and even changelings. Really, it is a last bastion, a final hope of resistance to the forces that are growing in the Elsir Vale and swiftly taking it over. The major cities of the nation have fallen, Brindol most recently, and now Vraath Keep is all that remains, the only place housing an army left to fight back against Nazragul and his swarms of undead. Around the entire keep is a magical shield, meant to keep out all invaders and their magics.

And the Lady of the Wood? None other than an aging Karina, one of the original companions for the entire campaign and a major player in the Tomb of Haggemoth adventure. She retired from adventuring after Haggemoth and set  about creating an adventuring school in the former Desert of Thud, believing that she would one day need an army of adventurers to combat Abenthy, who turned to a dark path when last she saw him.

The PCs meet with Karina and it is a solemn meeting as she fills them in on the history they have missed. She knows much of their story from Carrick (who is currently out on a mission of his own) and she knows of the prophecy. Discussing the prophecy becomes the focus of most of a session for us, while the players read over the lines and try to make sense of it with Karina. She also reveals that Nazragul has arisen after taking over the body and mind of a former disciple of hers: Jade, whom she last saw nearly 80 years ago, when she left to travel to the Elsir Vale because she sensed Nazragul’s power and sought to defeat him. With her went Verrick, Karina’s lover, and Lee, their pet slime. Abenthy she hasn’t seen in years either, and his presence seems to have disappeared from the world of Torril, or is otherwise blocked to her scrying. She believes some ill befell him, but she cannot be sure. She says that the Yuan Ti have joined with Nazragul in a religious Jihad, for they believe the end times are coming at last and the Night Serpent will finally swallow all light.

At hearing the news about Jade, Daymos suddenly appears, still in his Quasit form. He reveals that he has been invisibly following the party since they left Esheballa’s realm and now rails against Karina for not keeping his sister, Jade, safe. He then uses his prodigious abilities to phase through her protective shields around Vraath Keep, claiming he will find a way to save Jade. 

There are some really amazing roleplaying moments while at Vraath Keep, as I ask each player what their character does in between their meetings with Karina. Each choice is a really interesting look at the character’s psyche. Here’s the brief of each one.

For Imoaza, the Weave has started to become visible to her. She can see it shaping the magic of the world around her, the way it coalesces around Karina and is tightly knit in her magical energy shield surrounding Vraath Keep. She spends her time examining her surroundings with this new found sight, but it drifts in and out and ultimately she is left without access to it, only a feeling like she has had an incredibly important thought, but cannot retrieve it now. She talks with Black Razor alpha, too, and gains a further understanding of her bond to the sword. He considers her his “mother,” a word that has uncomfortable past associations for Imoaza. And finally, I ask her what she seeks out for food, as it has been, in Faerun years, a very very long time (decades) since any of our companions have actually eaten food. They did not eat in the Chaos world (and good thing, too). Imoaza, true to a character beat that was established back on the air planet, seeks out sweets to salve her addiction to sugar, and gorges herself on fruits and baked goods made by some of the best bakers from Brindol, now refuging in Vraath Keep. 

Cliff Notes: The Weave is the magical energy that powers magic in Dungeons & Dragons. It’s never been fully explained in canonical text in order to leave its inner workings more mysterious and up to GMs to develop. The idea of seeing the Weave came to me in a moment of improvisation as I tried to find ways to picture the level of magical power that Imoaza has reached after spending time in the Chaos plane.

For Ruz, she seeks out the company of other Changelings, looking to see if she has any family left in this world. She finds a tribe of Changelings, but she does not know any of them. Too many years have passed since last she set foot on Faerun. Ruz also is given a set of magical robes by Karina, which Karina’s used to wear on her own adventures. They have a lot of powers and incorporate her old Mariner’s Armor from back when she was level 3, so many real time years ago. Ruz also donates a huge amount of wealth, her spoils from Esheballa’s realm, to the war effort, which does not go unnoticed, though does not effect the current session. My favorite thing about her downtime, however, is her description of Ruz’s reaction to normal food. Ruz was in the Abyss far longer than the others and did partake of its food out of neccessity. But food on the chaos realm is hardly sustenance. It is soul energy and it is poisoned, like a drug that worms its way inside your heart. It almost drove Ruz to insanity and suicide, but she survived, her hope restored by the companions when she found them wandering Esheballa’s dark beach. Now, the player describes in beautiful detail how Ruz reacts to real food: real vegetables and meat. She asks for a simple meal, that of beef stew, the more generic and normal, the better, for it is “normal” that she has lacked and sought all of these years.

For Milosh, he does not eat. He is no longer a biological creature and hasn’t been since the Surveyor built him so many aeons ago. But something has changed in him: he now is beginning to remember who he was before he was a machine. His manner changes, no longer naive and friendly. He is now dour and quiet. His characteristic “ah!” with finger upraised has been replaced with a cool intellect and assessment of each situation he finds himself in. And he has recently gone through several shocks: first Carrick is dead, then he finds out he is still alive and on Faerun, and now Milosh is no longer certain of his mission. He goes to the keep’s forge, which Dwarven refugees have expanded into a mighty operation in the basement. Here, Milosh requests armor be made to help cover up his disfigurement (gotten at the fiery breath of the dragon on the Githyanki asteroid) and then he falls into a deep slumber. While he slumbers, he is visited by a beardless dwarf: Haggemoth. Haggemoth tells him that he had tried to forge a better future for the world but he failed when Aldric died and Blackrazor escaped into the void to work terror and mischief in unseen ways. Now he says that Milosh is the one who can change the future and forge a better path and that if he needs a new purpose, then this should be it.

What Does the Prophecy Mean?

In a long meeting with Karina, the PCs discuss the prophecy and its meaning. Here is what they come up with...

Three shall be the kings who sit the single throne And Order's rule by Chaos shall be overthrown The Universe will end by their divine hands Chaos will devour every woman, child, and man

This section seems to be fairly obvious. It is a warning and a reference to Primus’ war against Chaos, a history that was given to them in full by the last remaining Surveyor they found on the air planet. The three kings are the catalysts for a great and terrible destruction.

Each shall be seen by a singular sign Each shall be born of a different line.

The devil's blood runs in the first of the three They bear the eye that can seek but cannot see The second will by heaven be blessed But wings of black will mar their pureness The third contains the dragon's flame What was dead will rise to live again

The three are identified. The first has devil’s blood and the eye that can seek but cannot see. Karina acknowledges this must be her, as a Tiefling (Devil’s Blood) and known by the moniker “Seeker of Callax,” and indicates the gem that is fit into her empty eye socket.

The second, Karina suspects is the Assimir Abenthy, a companion she once sought a great treasure with before he “turned his will to darker ways.” She says that Abenthy was whom she feared was leading the undead army before she discovered it was the possessed Jade.

Which brings her to the third... she believes the third is Nazragul himself, the one possessing Jade. He is Dragonborn and was dead, but has risen again.

Three to rule, Three to lead, Three to destroy and make the universe bleed. Removing one will not lead to the fall To end the curse you must destroy them all

This part Karina is contemplative about. She does not know what it means to “destroy them all.” She admits she has contemplated suicide in order to remove her from the possibility of being used to end the world, but as the PCs point out, “removing one will not lead to the fall.” They all wonder if perhaps the three have to be destroyed at one time or if there is a riddle hidden in this line.

Four things must gather to alter fate's course The Sword, The Shield, The Stone, The Source Then upon the throne the three must be Before they can meet their destiny

This is where most of the discussion takes place. What are the four things that must be gathered? Karina says that Carrick has been out in the world searching for the answers to this riddle. The Sword they think is probably Blackrazor, as it is the most powerful blade they have ever encountered.

The Shield... Imoaza wonders aloud if it could refer to a person, like “Jon Snow, the Shield of the North.” But if it does refer to a person, they have no idea who that person is.

The Stone Karina says that Carrick figured out and believes is one of the crystals that the Surveyor used to power his creations, like a certain Jade statue from days gone by. He’s searching for a piece of one of the Crystals now.

The Source is another stumper... none of them have any idea what it might mean. Milosh wonders if it is the source of the prophecy, or maybe the source of the troubles. Ruz wonders if it is a place, like a river’s mouth or a source of heat or power. Imoaza wonders if it is the Rod of Storms... a different kind of source of power.

In the time these things come to pass The future will be decided by the ones from the past

This one seems pretty obvious to the PCs. The ones from the past are themselves. They are the ones destined to determine the future.

In any case, the PCs stay up late into the evening with Karina before retiring to get some much needed sleep. But they are awoken early by a summons... Karina has dreamed of Dragons, and one in particular to whom she long ago traded the Rod of Storms when it was briefly in her possession. She was told that when the time was right, she would be given something in return and in her dream she had been told that time is now. And so she has a mission for the players.

Next time, the heroes tackle their final dungeon crawl of the campaign (not the final dungeon, mind you...) in a scenario lifted directly from Tyranny of Dragons, The Sea of Moving Ice.

[zippdementia]

Part 23 Alignment May Vary: Justice

The set up: having infiltrated the Monastery of Celaenos on orders from the Abbot himself to uproot the conspirators and slavers amongst the knights, Abenthy, Karina, Tyrion and their followers locate Dickon, supposedly a supporter of the conspiracy. However, talking to Dickon reveals that the true conspirator is Berthold, seneschal to the Abbot. Rushing to the Abbot’s side to defend him leads to another cruel twist of fate—the Abbot knows full well of Berthold’s betrayal, because he himself ordered it. His name is Mordekai of Keltos, and he has begun the slavery ring. With a command, he has Berthold slay Dickon and then Mordekai draws a cruel looking dagger and a large black mace to join the fray, calling for his knights to aid them...

Abenthy reached for his blade instinctively, but it wasn’t at his side. Dickon had forced him to leave it in the watchtower as part of the condition to take them before the Abbot. A well intentioned decision—one that might be the death of them, Abenthy thought as Mordekai moved towards him, his mace swinging for his skull. Abenthy backed up until he bumped against the room’s large table, knocking over a candle (thankfully unlit) onto the gorgeous, colorful rug.

“Verrick! Take the half-elves and get our weapons!” Karina shouted.

“We have names, bright-eye,” the rogueish half-elf said.

“Yeah, but I didn’t learn them,” Karrina admitted, letting some of the distaste she held for the two seep into her voice.

“Fair enough,” the half-elf said, and laughed, but his silent hulk of a brother moved not for the door but for Mordekai, snarling as his back arched and he dropped to all fours. Fur burst from his skin and his jaws elongated into a snout. Muscles expanded to twice, then three times their normal size. The mask he wore over his burned face seemed to sink into the fur and skin, leaving a peculiar pattern over half of the bear’s (for that is what the half-elf had become) face. He roared and leapt for Mordekai. The Abbott fell backwards, putting all of his might into his mace swings, cracking into the bear’s skull with little effect except to keep the beast from tearing into him.

Music suddenly filled the room as Tyrion brushed the strings of his lute, strumming a melody that was familiar in unique ways to each person’s ears, demanding their attention like a memory of something important struggling to force its way to the surface. But to no one in the room was it as loud or demanding as it was to Berthold. A spell fell over him and the Abbot’s right hand man found himself unable to come to the Abbot’s aid, found himself instead rooted to the spot as if paralyzed. Sweat poured from Tyrion’s brow as he concentrated on the holding spell, his fingers stepping in stacatto rhythyms over the strings, not missing a single note of a song that was being pulled out of the weave of magic whose loom shapes the world, a shape which Tyrion’s eyes could not see but whose ears could hear the soudn it made as it spun life into death and back again.

The non-bear half-elf had sped away with Verrick. Karrina didn’t know how long it would be until they could return with their weapons, so she reached into her bag of holding and retrieved the best thing she could find—a beaten up longsword taken from some forgotten fallen foe. She tossed the sword to Abenthy who, momentarily freed from Mordekai’s attentions by the Druid’s transformation, snatched it and strode towards Berthold. The Seneschal was so entrapped by Tyrion’s spell that he couldn’t even voice a protest as Abenthy drove his blade into his armpit, where his plate mail did not protect him. Blood trickled out of Berthold’s mouth as he died. Only after his spirit left him did the spell end, his body crumpling to the ground. Tyrion breathed a sigh, no longer needing to concentrate on the musical spell.

But the respite was short lived. The door pushed open and three knights entered the room. Quickly assessing the situation, they made their decision: drawing their fine, masterworked longswords and moving forward to attack, two heading for Abenthy, and one moving for Tyrion, crouched near Karrina at the back of the room. At the same moment, Mordekai laughed and darkness spread out from around him to engulf Abenthy and the bear, plunging them into blindness. Abenthy could see nothing. He felt the bite of Mordekai’s blade between his armored plates but could not see from which direction it came. He swung his blade, cursing his opponent’s cowardice, cursing the darkness like it was a living thing, but his swings found no purchase.

“Let there be light!” Tyrion shouted, and channeled his light cantrip at a higher level, blasting away the dark in a sudden burst of light. The room was revealed again: Mordekai snarling as he fled towards his bed chambers, his cover gone; the three knights blinking against the sudden light; Karinna, having retrieved a goblin’s short bow from her pack, planting arrows into two of them; Tyrion already running forward to try to fell the other, his belt of giant strength pulsing and vibrating with magical might. The bear, too, moved to attack the knights. And Abenthy gave chase to Mordekai.

“You cannot flee from me, coward!” Abenthy called as he rushed after the dark knight. But his words caught in his throat as he came to the threshold of Mordekai’s room. Standing just past the doorway, in a row, were five of the Celaenos slave sisters, girls who Abenthy now knew were controlled by Mordekai through forbidden magics, his commands channeled through the intricate golden bands locked around their wrists.

“Come, Abenthy,” Mordekai said, arms wide. “I am waiting. You can strike me down here. All you need is to cut through them, first.”

Abenthy felt rage build inside of him. “The lives of innocents are not worth the life of a monster,” he said. “And justice always find a way to punish the unworthy.” With that, the wings burst from his back. He leapt over the heads of the sisters and landed in front of Mordekai, striking with his longsword as he dropped. Mordekai flung up his blade at the last moment, just barely turning the attack. “You have learned nothing!” Mordekai hissed. “In all your years of life, you have not learned to do what is necessary!” But Abenthy did not hear him. His rage and desire to end this person of evil transfered itself into his blade and suddenly a white fire engulfed Mordekai. The Abbot cried out in pain as the ethereal fire bit at him. He pushed Abenthy away, turned, and fled. Abenthy again gave chase, rushing through the Abbot’s bedroom and down a staircase into darkness. Pure black darkness, like a thick cloud of it. Mordekai’s deranged laughter rang out through the darkness but Abenthy could not find him, nor did the attack he braced himself for ever come. He was just lowering his blade when a crash behind him made him jump.

“Goddamn it!” Tyrion shrieked. “Can’t see a fuckin’ thing.” The bard often relied on profanity when words failed him and, ironically, they seemed to fail him quite a bit. He had claimed, during their time in the desert, that the cursing made its own music. He also claimed that he had never cursed quite so much as he had since joining the party. Adventure had not turned out to be the fun jaunt he had expected. 

Another crash made them both jump and Tyrion felt something wet splash against his leg, accompanied by an awful snapping sound.  “Blackened hells,” he said, feeling for Abenthy in the dark, finding his cloak, and gripping it tightly. “What was that?”

Abenthy thought he knew. Mordekai had sent the sisters after them though they could see no better than he or the halfing. And one had just met her end by crashing down the stairs. Which, he wondered? Was it the young serving girl with the pretty hair? Or maybe the young woman whose eyes seemed scared even while she was enthralled by Mordekai’s magic? In his heart, Abenthy promised himself they would be the last casualties this night. No more innocents would die. Only the unjust.

“Mordekai is not here,” Abenthy said to Tyrion in the darkness. “The coward has fled again.”

“Good! Then let’s do the same. We can go upstairs, take a quick peek at the library, and go before things get worse.”

“I won’t give my enemy the satisfaction of such an easy victory.”

“What about giving me the satisfaction of living another day?”

But Abenthy was moving on, the hem of his cloak slipping through Tyrion’s fingers as he went. Tyrion cursed again, and ran to catch up.

While Tyrion and Abenthy hunted for Mordekai (unaware that he had slipped away from them into a hidden sanctuary and was even now healing himself and preparing for a final stand), a middle-aged knight named Herzog was finishing a workout and was heading for the sauna for a relaxing soak before turning in for the evening. He left the training room, wiping his brow with a sweat-stained rag, when ahead of him the door to the Abbot’s chambers burst open and one of his brothers-in-arms—a friendly man named Ethaniel—tore down the corridor towards the library with a fearful cry. Herzog did not hesitate, did not even think. His blades were in his hands and he was chasing after his brother. He had trained these men, all except Berthold and the Abbot himself, and knew each like a parent knows their child. To hear his brother cry out so—it tore at something deep within Herzog, awakening a blind rage that turned the edges of his vision blurry and red. And so he gave chase—but not fast enough. 

The bear got to Ethaniel before Herzog had quite registered its presence. Claws raked the young man’s back. Jaws, powerful as a vice, bit down on his face and the sound of screaming was sharply cut off with the sound of bone splintering. Then Herzog couldn’t hear even this, and he realized it was because he was screaming in anger. His blades cut into the bear, Herzog slashing with one and stabbing with the other, always moving around the bear so that it could not strike him with full force, but was reduced to batting ineffectually at him from odd angles. Then the bear did a curious thing. Rearing up on its back legs, it leaned backwards and placed a kick at Herzog. Herzog easily dodged the clumsy move, but the manuever left him stunned for a moment, nonetheless. Had a bear just tried to kick him? Stunned as he was, he didn’t react immediately when the bear began to run away, heading further down the hall. Realization dawned on him, then. This was no bear.

“Wait! Stop!” A voice was calling to him. He turned to see one of the Celaenos sisters running towards him. Herzog often found himself preoccupied these days, and the sisters were already below his notice most of the time. Little mice, he thought of them as, that ran around the monastery using its various passages and dungeons, to deliver meals and warm the baths. He’d given no thought to learning the sisters’ faces, let alone their names. So he wasn’t so much surprised that he didn’t recognize this one as he was that she had addressed him at all in the first place. He was slow to respond.

“Who... who are you?”

“One of the sisters, m’lord,” the girl said. She was plain looking, except for maybe her height, which was taller than most women. Dark brown hair, plain oval face. Pretty, maybe. “The Abbot... he has turned on you all! I was there, serving him, and saw it all! He has begun killing the knights, but there are people here to help stop him. The bear is one of them. Please listen!”

“The Abbot? The plot goes deeper than I had thought!”

“Yes! You must help the others defeat—”

“—oh I will! This plot against the Abbot will go no further, I assure you. You have been duped, young one, by powerful magic. The same magic, no doubt, that has put a shapeshifter in our midst. This bear has torn the life from one of my men, but the next blood he shall taste will be his own, pouring from his lips as my sword finds his heart.”

Herzog brushed past her, then, running for the bear.

Karrina cursed as the burly knight sped from her. That he had not seen through her disguise was little better than a consolation prize. Piss in a crystal glass is still just piss. The phrase came to her suddenly. It was something Raiden had been fond of saying, one of many little sayings her old commander had attributed to his own wit. Karinna was determined this would be more than piss, though. She would convince the knight of the truth of her words, and prevent further bloodshed. Her life had seen quite enough of that.

Life is funny, though, and full of irony. As she raced to stop the fight, Karinna passed an entrance to the library. The entrance was imposing: a large hallway hung with portraits and tapestries that led directly into the cavernous repository of knowledge. Large iron gates blocked the entrance, but still allowed one to see behind it to the stacks of books beyond. And here Karinna saw the old man Athos splahing a black oily liquid over the shelves, and over himself.

Oh shit.

Karina halted her rush for the bear and Herzog and moved instead to the library gate. “Master Athos!” she called. “What are you doing?”

“Move away, child. If the monastery is to be taken, I at least won’t allow its greatest treasures to fall into the hands of the unrighteous!”

There was no time for further argument. Karinna flexed her fingers in the quick and complicated motions of one of the first spells she had mastered and then sent the spell at Athos with a barely breathed word: Sleep.

The master fought the spell, but he was old, and Karinna’s magic was strong. Falling backwards into the pool of oil, master Athos sighed once, and then was stlll. Karinna used the keys Berthold had given her and opened the library gate, shoving it aside roughly as she rushed to the master’s side. No damage done, it seemed. He had landed halfway against one of the shelves and so had missed cracking his head on the hardwood floor.

A crash took her by surprise: the bear had come into the room and slammed the gate behind him. He was now holding it against Herzog, whose muscles throbbed as he wrestled with the held gate, pitting his strength against that of the bear in an impressive, if maybe ill-advised, contest. Still, Karinna saw that the druid had taken the worst of the fight. His fur was matted with blood, and saliva drained from his mouth with every heaving breath. One of his arms seemed almost useless—blood pooled and dripped from a bad wound underneath the arm.

Two knights were with Herzog. He leaned back and said something to one of them, a blonde youth with just a hint of stubble on his chin, who nodded and ran off, as Herzog continued to match strength with the bear. And, to her amazement, Karinna saw the gate begin to open, ever so slowly.

Karina had to talk to the crazed knight. But what to say? What could possibly convince him to lay down his arms against a beast he had watched slaughter his man?

“What’s the move, chief?” The half-elf crouched near to Abenthy on the stairs. He and Verrick had caught up to the paladin not long before, finding him wandering through the dungeons in search of Mordekai. The search had not succeeded.

“Haldur,” Abenthy had made a point to memorize the half-elf’s name, and that of his silent brother, Dorgon You could not expect a man to follow you if you did not at least pay him the respect of knowing his name. “Do you hear that?”

“These aren’t just for show,” Haldur said, grinning as he ran a finger over one of his long, jewlery-pierced, ears. The voice drifting down from above was plaintive, almost souding like it was begging. A gruff male voice answered it, sharply.

“It’s Karina,” Verrick said, refering to the plaintive voice. “She could be in trouble.”

“Wait!” Abenthy said, but Verrick was already moving up the stairway. Abenthy followed quickly, and Haldur moved silently into line behind him. They emerged into the library, having used its back entrance, probably the servant’s entrance. The bookshelves ahead blocked their vision of the confrontation, but they could hear it as they snuck closer.

“—I believe you think you know what you say, sister,” the gruff voice was saying. “But you have been tricked by a powerful magic. Fear not, we will soon rescue you from its grasp”

Coming around the edge of a bookshelf containing tomes of (among other things) Orcish Poetry, Abenthy saw the scene revealed. A middle-aged, powerfully built knight, was standing at the entrance to the library, holding two bloodied blades, one in each hand. Dorgon, in the shape of the bear still, was lumbering away through the stacks, but the knight hadn’t yet pursued. Standing nearby, speaking in exasperated and desperate tones, was a young Sister of Celaenos. Abenthy recognized the form Karinna had chosen for their mission.

“You must trust me!” she said. “There is no spell! The bear is trying to help, and there are others as well, a paladin, and a halfling bard.”

“And where are they? What are their explanations for this carnage?”

“I am here,” Abenthy said, and stepped forward from behind the bookcase. Summoning all of his charisma, he willed himself to appear regal and strong, though he was acutely aware of the blood staining his white chainmail, where Berthold’s life had splattered across his chest. “What Ka--the girl says is true. We have come to free the slaves the Abbot has made of the sisters.”

The knight did not balk at Abenthy’s words as he might have, and Abenthy wondered suddenly if he had known. “Surely you must have noticed something wrong,” he pressed, hoping that the knight hesitated out of suspicion and not collaboration with the conspiracy. “Surely some doubt has entered your mind.”

His words had had an effect, he realized. The knight looked down. “I do not take much notice of the sisters, not much,” he murmured. “Berthold was in charge of their keeping.”

“Exactly. Berthold was the very man behind the plot. Please, let us shed no more blood. We are allies, you and I. I serve Tyr, the God of Justice. We are like brothers in our cause. Let us work together to right the wrongs done here.”

The knight looked up, and Abenthy did not like the shrewdness he saw on the hardened features. “You serve justice? In that case, I will listen to you, on one condition.” He pointed his blade past Abenthy, into the forest of shelves. “The bear--shapechanger--who slew my knight. That knight was a good man, and the shapechanger will pay for his death with his own life,” he shot a look at Karinna before she could interrupt, “no matter who he is allied with.” He looked back at Abenthy. “Help me bring this creature to justice, and you will prove your good intentions.”

Abenthy heard the slight scrape of metal on leather behind him and could picture Haldur drawing his double edged daggers, waiting to see his response. The choice was obvious: betray the two mercenaries, and gain a chance at peace. They were most likely not just souls. Murderers, more like. But Abenthy had hired them, knowing their faults, and he would not be drawn into such dishonor as to betray men he had made companions.

“I cannot do that,” he said sadly.

“Then I must count you as guilty as the rest,” Herzog said, and came at him.

Abenthy let his wings unfold, the angelic power within him release, as he rushed to meet Herzog in combat. But he never got there. A roar came from the side, and Dorgon, still in bear form, crashed into the knight before he could reach Abenthy. Herzog was pinned to the ground with the bear seeking to get his jaws around his throat.

“Finish him!” It was the shrill voice of Tyrion, who had entered the library while the others were distracted. He was half hidden behind a rounded bookshelf, watching the scene unfold. This was Abenthy’s chance. The Paladin had an easy strike while the knight was pinned, restrained. “Finish him!” He repeated.

But Abenthy did not. “You believe your cause is ust,” he said to the knight. “I cannot fault you for that. So yield, and we shall end this violence.”

I am going to die here, thought Tyrion.

“Never,” snarled Herzog and, getting an arm free of Dorgon, he drove a shortsword up through the druid’s skull and into his brain, killing him instantly. Haldur screamed in fury as he heard his brother’s death cry and saw the body of the bear shrink back into the form of the half-elf, the elf’s wooden mask splintered now, falling away from the face and hitting the floor with a hollow thunking sound. Herzog pushed the body off of him and turned to face Haldur’s charge, leaving him open to Abenthy’s blade, but still the Paladin did not strike. Behind Herzog, one of the knights that had followed him stepped forward as well, blade leveled cautiously at Abenthy. His eyes were wide as he looked at the Aasimir’s wings. He mumbled something that sounded like a name or maybe a curse under his breath and then strode forward. Abenthy blocked his strike, a two-handed swing for his face, but did not return it.

This is not how the stories go, Tyrion thought. In the stories, the heroes defended themselves. They shouted things about justice, sure, but it always ended with a fight and no one questioned afterwards whether the right thing had been done, the right man killed. That was because the heroes didn’t die. Tyrion felt a flash of anger. He had trusted this Paladin! Trusted him to protect him, to be self-preserving enough to defend himself—and by extension, to protect Tyrion. Now for the first time since joining the party, Tyrion found himself disgusted with the adventure. There was no song to write about this. It didn’t fit the template. He pressed himself against the wall and tried to play his lute, trying to conjure up a magic to inspire Abenthy to fight for his life, but his own heart was hollow and heavy. And for what was only the second time in his short life, the music would not come.

It had all gone to hell.

Karinna watched the mayhem unfold in front of her. Abenthy was blocking blow after blow from a knight, but would not return his attack. Maybe it was for the best: the less blood they had on their hands here, the better. She still held out a dim hope that Herzog would listen to them yet, but the hope was quickly fading. Herzog was engaged in deadly combat with Haldur, his two shortswords against the half-elf’s long daggers. Haldur was faster, and blood sprayed multiple times across ancient texts as Haldur’s knives sliced through Herzog’s thin armor. But Herzog was stronger, and eventually he let himself get cut in order to drive one of his shortswords down through Haldur’s left foot. Herzog lost an ear for his trouble, but the half-elf lost his footing and with it his advantage. Herzog’s next blow took his head clean off.

Tyrion, Karina saw, was in a corner of the room, cradling his lute and shaking—whether from fear, rage, or injury, she did not know. She was about to go to him when a hand grabbed her shoulder.

“You are safe now, my sister,” an earnest voice said. It was the knight Herzog had whispered to earlier. He must have snuck in another entrance to set up a flank attack. He thought she was a sister—but the thought did not last long. Karinna’s disguise was not quite the same size as her actual body, so as to avoid attention she had made her slightly shorter and less muscular, and when the knight put his hand on the disguise’s shoulder, he actually was groping somewhere around Karinna’s left breast. As he saw his hand stop mid-air, yet felt soft skin beneath it, realization came into his eyes and he stumbled backwards, drawing his blade.

“Sorceress!” he said.

“I do not want to hurt you,” Karinna said, holding up her weaponless hands. “I am trying to help.”

The knight must not have been one of the conspirators, because he actually hesitated, as if he wanted to believe her. But a cold voice cut sharply across the room: “Do not be taken in by her lies, captain. She will beguile you and then murder you like she did the others.”

Mordekai strode into the library, no longer wearing his bedclothes. He was clad now in black full plate mail from head to toe. It shone darkly in the lamp light of the library. He still weilded his mace and his dagger, and he looked—for the first time since they had started fighting—angry. The knight attacking Abenthy backed away from the angel to stand near his Abbot.

“It is the I’afret tamoor,” he said in a low voice, nodding towards Abenthy. Mordekai shook his head.

“It is just a wasted opportunity,” he said, and his voice was ladden with disappointment. “You had a chance, Abenthy. You were destined for greater than this. Your father would be weeping with shame. Go after the others,” he added to the knight. “Herzog. To me.” With that, he said no more but let his blades do the talking. The knight moved away, heading directly for Tyrion, who had been watching the affair with a look of horror on his face. Herzog came up next to him. From both sides they struck at Abenthy, coordinating their strikes like pack hunters. Karinna wanted to go to him, to help him, to do anything other than watch, but the youg blonde knight threatening her would not let her pass. He struck hesitantly, and did not strike her, but he moved quickly to block her path away from him.

Things happened quickly, then. Karinna spun out of the way of the young knight’s next blow and, with the momentum of her movement, slammed the hilt of her dagger into the side of his head. He stumbled and fell, dazed. At the same time, Abenthy—finally fighting back—cut a slice into Herzog’s leg, dropping the knight. But the move cost him. Mordekai used the mere second of distraction to smash his mace into Abenthy’s helm. Then, as the paladin stumbled backwards, he deftly drew his dagger in a precise slice across his neck. Abenthy’s life spilled out from his neck and his head lolled forward, into Mordekai’s outstretched hand.

“I’a’fret.” Mordekai said the word coldly, with the same intonation that Abenthy had said it with when sending Targaryen’s tortured soul to his new god. Abenthy’s eyes rolled back in his head, he twitched once, and then went still and limp.

“May you be judged an eternity for your failures, and punished for your crimes,” Mordekai said. He turned to the sister. “You joined against us,” he said. “Traitor.”

He came at her then, his massive frame and black armor looming over her like an eclipse. The armor slowed him down, but not nearly as much as she had hoped for. His mace she dodged, but damn him if he wasn’t quick with that dagger! The blade, honed to a razor’s sharpness, moved quickly for her heart and would’ve found it if not for her own speed. She took the blade in her shoulder instead. It did not kill her: but the pain was incredible. She gasped and sucked in air painfully. It was the last breath she got. Mordekai let go of his dagger and grabbed her throat with one gauntletted hand, squeezing the life out of her. Karina struggled vainly to get free, and her struggle amused Mordekai. He laughed as he slammed her head back into the backshelf behind her with a force that clacked her teeth together and blurred her vision. Behind Mordekai, she could see Tyrion running for her with his sword drawn, the giant’s strength belt at his waist vibrating as it lent strength to his arm. But before he could reach her, one of the knights stepped behind him and cut him down.

She was alone.

The thought brought her back years, to when she had been abandoned in the War of Seven Sorrows. Left as a prisoner of war for a war that was ending. The betrayal still burned inside of her and now it began to burn outside of her, as well. Mordekai felt the heat but it was too late. Karina was a Tiefling and had he realized this, he would have not been so eager to harm her—or if he still decided to harm her, would have done so more quickly. The game he played now was a torturer’s game, and that was a dangerous thing to do with a demon.

He realized his mistake in the end. As Karina’s retirbutive power caused his blood to boil and his armor to heat to the temperature of a blacksmith’s furnace, her disguise dropped for a moment and the man who had killed an angel saw that he now held a demon.

Then there was flames and screams and Mordekai of Keltos let go of her, spending his last few seconds of life desperately trying to remove the armor which cooked him alive.

Before Karina could catch her breath, there was a bright spark. The flames of retribution had reached the oil Athos had spread over the library and with a flash they caught. Flame and smoke filled the library. A flash of heat washed over Karina like a crushing hand and the world went black.

***

There is more tale to tell. Next post, see what has become of our ailing adventurers and whether any have survived to continue the adventure.

[zippdementia]

Part 24 Alignment May Vary: A Dark Place

Last time, our heroes were at the end of their ropes, defeated in battle by the corrupt leader of the Celaenos monks, Mordekai of Keltos. Even as Mordekai himself succumbed to the fire of Karina’s retributive rage, the last of the party fell into unconciousness. But behind the scenes, something has been brewing for quite a while, and fate (and Mordekai, unwittingly) choose this moment to bring it to fruition...

It was dark. What was odd was that he was aware of the darkness. It wasn’t like being asleep. It was like being awake, in a room with no lantern. He could feel, too, unlike when he slept; could feel cold stone beneath his fingers. His usual ability to see in the night was of no use here--this was a blackness that he could not pierce.

Abenthy stood, then, because there seemed no better thing to do. The battle still rang in his ears, as did the terrible word Mordekai had spoken. But they were echoes following him here to this nothingness.

He placed a hand out and felt a stone wall, dry, but cold as the floor. He left his hand on it as he walked. A few steps forward and Abenthy began to think of the ones he had left behind. The bard, and...

Thoughts of Karina sent an unusual ache through him. He didn’t recognize the feeling, nor did he like it. It was too heavy, too sad. He had fallen in battle, had failed both her and the bard, yet he couldn’t deny it was Karina he thought of first, and it was that failure that truly struck him.

Light suddenly appeared ahead. Had he turned a corner, or was someone else approaching from the distance. Abenthy continued forward, curious, and suddenly the wall was gone and he was stumbling forward into a larger space. The light ahead flared and for a moment he saw the cavern he was in. It was monstrously large, an ocean of emptiness stretching out for an indeterminate distance. The floor he could not see, but the ceiling was close and from it hung bodies. They were not dead. They writhed and wriggled, but they were stuck, upside down in the stone. All humanoid, they were. Many Goblins there were, and Lizardmen, even some Merpeople, and others he did not recognize, some like giant walking insects, others with multiple arms or heads. One seemed to be a centaur but it was too far off to make out clearly in the brief flare of light.

There were many normal people, too. Too many to count. They made no sound, except for a distant shuffling like a soft wind, caused by their gyrations from their resting places.

“My subjects,” a deep voice said. it came from the distant pinpoint of light. As Abenthy stared, he could see a shape in its flickering.

“Come closer, my son,” the voice said, and before Abenthy could even think to be surprised, he was being drawn forward fast, as if yanked across the canyon, to stand before a massive man sitting on a throne made of stone. Around him blazed torches, illuminating his features. He was not human. He looked more like a bat, his whole body covered in a coarse fur, his face elongated into a snout, his eyes black marbles which looked down on him with impassivity. He had wings, though one was white feathered like Abenthy’s own and the other was webbed and leathery, and black as the darkness.

“It has been more than a hundred years since I left your mother,” the creature said. “I have searched for you for all that time, and now fate brings you to me.”

Time for a little backstory...

Ages ago, during the Age of Baldur, a powerful Aasimir was born into the Forgotten Realms. Gifted with incredible charisma and strength, even for one such as he, he united many warring kingdoms of man into one nation and led them on a great expedition to rid the world of evil. With such a mighty host and with his own battle prowess (picture a level 20 hero) the mighty Aasimir was successful in his conquest for quite some time. But as he swept across the land, he left cities and governments behind him to hold the peace and here is where his plans began to fail. For men could not hold to the high standards he did, nor could they understand justice the way he did. Even as he continued to move forward, the Aasimir now also began to look back upon his own people and he saw corruption and imperfection there.

Perturbed, the Aasimir tried to root out the cause of this evil. During this time, he was approached by a lesser devil lord named I’a’fret, who saw the rage and distrust burning in his heart like a beacon. He spoke careful words to the Aasimir, convincing him that the evil in men’s heart was put there by other devil, and he named his rivals in positions of power in the Nine Hells. Incensed, the Aasimir entered the Nine Hells and did battle with the lords there, striking down the devils in their own halls. I’a’fret was overjoyed. At first. The Aasimir did not end his conquest with I’a’fret’s rivals. Instead he came next to I’a’fret’s cavern and struck him down, too, taking his power and then took his name, and becoming a devil prince himself. For the Aasimir had taken the devil’s words to heart and had decided that evil could only be struck from the world by attacking it from within, like a cancer that would slowly eat alive the host. By becoming a Devil himself, he could gather evil souls to him and deal them out justice for an eternity, while slowly building his power to eventually strike out at the other Devils. His ambitions had grown: he would now only be satisfied when all of the Nine Hells were under his control, ready to be purged.

Now this new I’a’fret shows Abenthy his domain, and asks him to join him, in bringing justice to those who deserve it. He shows him some of the men stuck in his ceiling. This one was a rapist. This one stole from his neighbor, who starved to death as a result. And he shows him men Abenthy recognizes, men he has sent here himself. Some pirates, guilty of murder and theft. And Targaryen: guilty of being corrupted by power (not true, in fact, but Abenthy was not present for his unwilling turn to evil).

“Who am I to judge these men?” Abenthy asks. I’a’fret laughs.

“You are my son! You are no judge: you are justice itself.”

Before he took to the Nine Hells, the Aasimir had loved a human woman, a witch of the Fangorian Forest. He got her with child, but then he left to conquer the Hells, and she became afraid of his purpose. She ran from him and used her magic to hide herself and to keep the child inside of her. For a hundred years, she held onto the child until finally her power and life gave out and in desperation she took her last journey, to a monastery, where Abenthy was born to be raised by monks.

“The Gods would not approve of this,” Abenthy protests. “Venthusias would not approve of this.”

“You do not know the gods as I do,” I’a’fret answers. “You cannot comprehend their most base desires, let alone their grand purpose. They think in ways that defy your understanding. And anyway, what care you for the whims of the gods? Have you not already sentenced men to this justice? Have you not already judged them? If you had defeated Mordekai, would you not have sent him to me?”

“Gods help me, I would have,” Abenthy whispers. And with that, he makes his decision, to join his father and live up to his fate.

Playing Evil

Paladins always walk a thin line between justice and vigilantism. We worked together (Abenthy’s player and I) to see where he was comfortable taking his character, and I set this encounter up as an opportunity for him to roleplay out his inner tormoil and figure out what would become of Abenthy.

What became of him was that he is now a Lawful Evil Hell Knight in the service of I’a’fret. Playing an evil character is one of my favorite topics to debate in Dungeons and Dragons forums. A lot of people simplify evil down to destructive maniacs who kill for fun and are one wicked laugh short of becoming the Joker (I’ve played my fair share for sure). While this can be entertaining in a fantasy environment, it often doesn’t make for a very long lasting game and is tough to do in a party where evil and good characters are mixed. For that, a subtler, more realistic kind of evil is needed.

Evil doesn’t have to mean crazy. Evil doesn’t have to mean killer. Evil doesn’t have to mean screwing others over. And even if it does mean those things, the character doesn’t have to think of it that way. Realistically, outside of demons, most evil characters probably don’t think of themselves as “evil.” They don’t laugh maniacally and twirl a mustache while looking for the next virgin to tie to a tree outside a dragon’s lair. They have wants and desires just like any character and these motivate their actions towards good or evil. Most of these characters think of themselves as the heroes of their own stories.

For Abenthy, he thinks he is doing “good.” He believes that he is bringing justice to a world bereft of it and punishing sinners. That he has joined the service of a Devil Lord to do this occurs to him for sure, but he has logic’ed this out already with himself, and with the Devil Lord in question. If anything, he questions his decisions less now then ever before, and it is this blind adherence to his desire for justice that will cause him to do evil. That, and the fact that he is feeding souls to I’a’fret. But nether of these things will keep him or the other players from having fun and playing a good/evil mixed campaign. Abenthy still has his reasons for wanting to find Haggemoth’s tomb....

For now, the power of I’a’fret brings him back to life in time to murder one of the knights and send the others running, Herzog and the young blonde among them, carrying Athos’ unconscious body between them.

And that is how the whole fight concludes. The fire is eventually put out, and the other players healed. Men at arms enter the building and determine that this is WAY above their pay grade and respectfully ask that everyone, the sisters and the heroes, remain in the monastery until a Justicar can be called from the mainland to sit in judgement of the situation. This works for the players for the moment, as they need to do their research in the library anyway. However, there is a time limit placed on them, for they soon have a visit from Clem, captain of Twyin’s Revenge, who warns them that the knights who escaped have already poisoned the world against them, making their version of events very publicaly known. The Justicar chosen to judge them is planning to end the trial quickly and declare them guilty of murder of the former Abbott and his men. And he is only days away.

Next time we will conclude the story of Celaenos and see whether the heroes make it out in time with the information they need. Next time: Shattered Expectations.

[zippdementia]

Part 32 Alignment May Vary: The Beginning of the End

This is the post that will take us to the very final moment of the campaign of Tomb of Haggemoth. A year ago, I found this campaign by reading a number of forums online, looking for something adventurous and seaworthy to fill some time while I prepped Red Hand of Doom. I was originally looking for a simple set of one shot adventures with time gaps between them, but once I read the final room description in Haggemoth, I was hooked, and thus began a nearly year long side quest which has taken my players, moment by moment, up through the levels. Because we are nearly at the end and I want to catch up with them, I’m going to gloss some of the final level of this dungeon. The big events come at the end, and that’s where my focus will be.

To start us off, we found the dirge Tyrion sang for Samuel and Biggs, the fallen comrades of Twyin and Xaviee:

Homeward Bound:

A Dirge to Fallen Soldiers ​Bright shines the sun over the morning crest, A scattering of rays glistening as sparks in the valley below. The soldier’s arms capture the light, imbuing them with the power of the stars. ​Humble mortals, handed the keys of greatness.

​The road home, the road home! Always out of sight around the corner. ​The singular soldier wanders a quiet path Which always leads home. ​Whether above the ground, or below.

​We call their names, Biggs! Samuel! Their presence the eager tear through the dark. ​With them, we feel keenly their passing. ​Without them, we’d feel nothing at all. ​The soldier’s life holding true to burden.

​For no soldier stands alone. ​Each is a brother, in a line of brothers For whom the plight of a one is a plight of all. ​A wolf pack! A pride of lions! An army of ants! ​One should fear the gathering of these men against them.

​We bid farewell this day to two brothers in arms. ​Without you, we must carry on. ​Our homes aboveground lie, Our battles not yet ended. ​But Samuel and Biggs have found their home, here. ​And take thy rest.

Long ago, Haggemoth the dwarf mastered the arts of his ancestors, perfecting and in fact improving on many of their designs for armor, weapons, musical instruments, and artifacts. Then, still thirsty to learn and create, he began studying magic. His brethren discouraged him in this pursuit but Haggemoth’s curiosity soon turned to infatuation as his quick mind picked up the intricacies of first one school of magic and then another. When he began studying the school of necromancy, his tribe had had enough. Banished from his homeland, Haggemoth wandered the world, continuing his studies. He never had trouble making money, for he still knew the secret arts of his people and could make powerful magical weapons, which he sold to the highest bidder, following wars around the world like a wolf chasing sheep. His beard had been shorn off as part of his banishment and he determined never to regrow it, wearing his bald face as a sign of pride. Eventually, as grew his power so too did his reputation. He did great things, and terrible things, in his pursuit of power. He befriended great wizards, too, and his closest ally became the elf Udo the Grey, who sought to control the weather of the world.

After many great adventures, Haggemoth began to grow old and in his old age his heart began to yearn for the one thing his power could not grant him: a return to his home and acceptance by his people and gods. Determined to make amends, Haggemoth began a long and difficult process of cleansing his soul. It would take a lot: a lifetime of sins against his gods had brought him much of his knowledge, and a simple attonement spell would not save him. And so Haggemoth took on his greatest challenge: the challenge of erasing sin.

Removing himself from the world was his first act in the process. He needed time to think and to plan and furthermore he wanted to isolate himself from having any further impact on the world. Rori Rama was the perfect location, a vile jungle island at the edge of civilization. Using powerful magics, Haggemoth raised a reef in front of the island to serve as his “wall,” eventually people would come to live here (these would become the ancestors of the natives which took in Rayden after his doomed journey came to an end) but no one ever came to live on the island except for Haggemoth.

The island was isolated, but more importantly it was geothermically active. The whole island was an old volcano and Haggemoth built directly over its source, harnessing its power to build his fortress, his tomb, his sanctum, and his sin-erasing contraption. The inner sanctum was his only home during these long years. He only had a single visitor, and that was Udo the Grey, who came once at Haggemoth’s behest, to take from him a silver key and use it to lock Haggemoth forever inside the sanctum. Udo the Grey would be the last humanoid to ever see Haggemoth alive.

Still, Haggemoth did not live in discomfort. His sanctum was equipped with a magical kitchen so that food would never run out. His rooms were spacious and the furniture had been enchanted to be his servants, brooms and dustpans cleaning up after him, chairs rearranging themselves to his liking, and tables setting themselves for his repasts. Above all other treasures, Haggemoth valued knowledge and his library was filled with histories and philosophies, tales of ancient heroism and future musings. He captured the power of the volcano to light his lamps, an early form of electricity, and to heat his baths. A veritable zoo was kept in his lower dungeons, the creatures there all in some way essential to his work: an otyugh dispensed of his waste, and a cockatrice provided rare alchemical and magical supplements. A grey ooze, carefully contained, put off a chemical that was particularly useful for making magical weapons and armor. One creature roamed the sanctum more freely: a clever phasm named Lhouee whom he mostly kept trapped to talk to and keep him company.

There were also darker things down there. Haggemoth had long ago achieved the highest level of power that could be gained through study, and so he had then turned to more infernal means of acquiring it. A Herzuo demon lay trapped in his sanctum, bound so that it could never claim the soul that was promised it in exchange for its power. There it sat, roaring all through the days and nights until Haggemoth moved it outside of his sanctum into a hidden hall and cast a spell of silence over it, then locked it away, forever.... or so he thought.

With the demon bound and locked away, Haggemoth continued his work. Some of it was yet done for pleasure, works of carving and mosaics and painting, but most of his efforts were put to use at his grandiose forge, creating the things that he hoped would set his soul free. And there was the treasure, too. A lifetime’s worth of it, the accumulation of Haggemoth’s wealth both ill-gotten and good, that Haggemoth intended to put to a final use. Worth well over a million gold pieces, it was, enough treasure to buy a kingdom (or break one), to establish a line of heirs going far far into the future, enough to outlast even the most voracious spender. Or possibly, just enough to save a soul.

Day after day Haggemoth worked, forging first a set of massive scales, then gears, then a huge chain which he put runes on to make it susceptible to lightning. He ripped his soul from his body, setting it into a phylactery, and this became the very focus of the object he was building. Last he made a forge hammer, imbued by days of ritual casting with the power to activate his machine. And then the day came when it was done and he prepared to free his soul, once and for all.

But on this day, misfortune struck. There are beings known as the Inevitables, constructs built by the gods to have divine insight and truly neutral perspective, to be able to properly judge the world. Three of them, there are, and they represent the realities that all men must face. The Inevitability of Fate, that all must face the consequences of their actions. The Inevitability of Justice, that upholds divine contracts and the general laws of nature that govern the world. And the Inevitability of death, which all men must face. When a person attains such power that they are able to break these inevitable truths, these constructs activate and seek to right the wrong done.

In this case, Haggemoth’s demon was his undoing. For in breaching this infernal contract, Haggemoth attracted the attention of The Inevitable of Justice, who descended upon his sanctum via magical teleportation and sought to forced Haggemoth to free the demon that Haggemoth had imprisoned. A great battle was waged in the sanctum, then, as the Inevitable chased Haggemoth through his lair, each of them casting powerful magics upon the other. The battle destroyed the main halls and released the monsters from the dungeons. Haggemoth moved defensively, working his way back towards his final creation. He summoned Earth elementals to cover his escape, but the Inevitable nimbly darted around them. Haggemoth used a golem to attack the Inevitable, but the Inevitable had the upper hand, even when weakened. Finally, Haggemoth used a powerful spell to turn the hard rock around the Inevitable to mud and then back again, trapping the celestial inside a prison of stone.

The Inevitable let loose one final spell as it was trappeed and the cavern they fought in shook with the force of its command. Stalactites freed themselves from the ceiling and fell to crush Haggemoth underneath. Pinned, with his left side crushed and trapped. Exhausted and already gravely injured, Haggemoth could not survive the blow. He made one attempt to command his golem to help him before expiring. The golem made it to him but with its master dead, it simply knelt by his side and waited, still executing his last clear command: Expell the Intruder.

Meanwhile, the sanctum slowly filled with the creatures Haggemoth had kept for his work. Trapped here, they fought over what territory was available to them. The Cockatrice settled in the bedroom, turning Haggemoth gorgeous bed into their nest. The ooze ate the creatures too stupid to avoid it and then settled into a hibernative state. Rust Monsters ate much of Haggemoth’s forge and stash of metals, growing large and bold in the process. They dug tunnels that lead all through the sanctum, though none find their way up to the surface. A strange intelligent mold grew rampantly in its keeper’s absence, consuming the old monster cages and killing anything that dared return there. The Otyugh fought a grand battle for the magical kitchens and eventually set itself by the enchanted pantry, screaming every moment for food to fill its insatiable hunger. Eventually it grew to such bulk that it could no longer move. Filling one corner of the massive kitchen, it lived in its own excrement and filth and eventually the magic of the place became corrupted, spewing forth only maggot infested or rotted food. Lhouee the Phasm was worst off: more intelligent and self aware than the others, it recognized its predicament for what it was—an eternity trapped in a dungeon. For a while it amused itself by transforming into furniture to mock and mimic the enchanted furniture that still sought to tend to Haggemoth’s lair. When it grew tired of stomping around as a comfy armchair, It tore through Haggemoth’s books, seeking some spell or power that could free it. But his greatest books had been given to his device, and Lhouee could not reach that, as it was still guarded by the earth elementals and the golem. So it despaired, and slowly grew strange and gloomy in its solitude.

The demon, meanwhile, still raged against his prison, his screams falling silent against the spell that held him still. His contract was not completed. The Inevitable had failed. Haggemoth was dead, but his soul did not pass on, trapped as it was in the phylactery he had set in his grand device.

And there his soul waits, still, for a group of adventurers to find it and pass final judgement.

Critical Success

This large vaulted chamber is ringed with braziers that flicker with the glow of unearthly fire. At the north end is an imposing set of massive Stone doors, reinforced with Iron and covered with runes. A complex locking mechanism holds them closed.

The adventurers use the silver key they got from DenDen (Rayden), which originally was given to Udo the Grey. It unlocks the great double doors and they enter Haggemoth’s sanctum, the end destination of the journey they began months ago. Each comes with their own story, a story that has developed over the course of our adventures together. 

Abenthy, Aasimir born and once a great innocent, has switched alleigance from Lawful Good to Lawful Evil, believing himself to be the ultimate arbiter of justice, in service to his father, the fallen Angel I’afret. His once pure white wings have broken and rotted, becoming skeltal husks... though, ironically, the rest of the party has yet to see this, due to a comic level of irony. They have all been knocked out each time Abenthy has triggered his new true form, and thus are mostly unaware of their friend’s changed nature. It is worth noting that Abenthy is not a common lawful evil villain. His transformation began with self doubt at the beginning of this adventure. He put up his sword many a time rather than strike down a foe, for fear of straying from the narrow path he walked. But much death has occured on this adventure. He has lost allies, seen innocents harmed, and seen how villains will go unpunished. In this, he found the strength to strike without question—little thinking that perhaps the questining was his true strength and not his weakness.

Karina began this quest seeking answers. Instead, she has found only pain and more questions. Rayden’s mind is lost to her, forcing her to think on what her destiny might be, if not revenge. She has become hardened over the course of the adventure. Indeed, she is the only survivor from its start, back on the prison ship. Her original team was murdered by the Demon Pirate on the Moonsea and she carries the burden of survivor’s guilt. Whereas Abenthy has questioned less and less, more and more she finds her thoughts plagued with uncertainty. Was this worth it? Should she turn around? Will others be hurt because of her actions? Beginning as a Chaotic Neutral character, she has begun the slow but sure road towards Good. She is also becoming a legend: the legend of the Seeker of Callax, whose right eye shines brightly with the jewel given to her by the giant of Friezorazov. Each scar on her body tells a story that she knows the telling of, but not the ending of.

Tyrion’s change has been drastic. Once a well spoken dandy, he has morphed into a foul mouthed cantankerous lech, hungry for power, abandoned by his college, convinced by what he has survived with this party that he is destined for greatness beyond what others can offer him. The demon that he has taken inside of him fuels this desire and feeds in him an inner rage and disappointment that questing has not been as romantic or as heroic as the songs say it is. Determined to shape the world the way he shapes music, Tyrion has lost his originally Chaotic Good alignment and shifted into Chaotic Neutral, not caring for the world around him or the cosmic battle for good and evil as much as for how to best gain power. Ironically, this is the very path Haggemoth walked, perhaps why the demon that Tyrion inherited from Haggemoth has found him such an appropriate vessel (and letting him multi-class as a bardic warlock). The demon will continue to push for him to fall into evil, though Haggemoth’s Sanctum may contain the very thing Tyrion needs to cleanse his soul and remind him of the purity of music that first set him on his quest.

Xaviee, too, walks with them, a man who went from soldeir to shipwrecked to found. Xaviee has been through a hellish trial: everything he thought he had lost forever was given to him again, then snatched away, this time with a note of finality. Tywin is dead. Samuel and Biggs are dead. All that remains to him now is to survive, to serve, and to one day cross again the Dragonfang mountains to return to the land of his birth and reclaim in the name of those who are slain the old fortress of Vraath Keep, where his life first took a tragic turn. 

As these companions make their way through the sanctum they encounter many of the creatures Haggemoth kept here. Lhouee escapes in the guise of a armchair, goofily making his way past the bemused players who, not understanding his true nature, let him go without much fuss. He escapes to the surface world, perhaps to be seen again in another story. The cockatrice they leave well alone, but the Otyugh they engage in combat, Tyrion actually leaping inside of it and cutting it open from the inside, pushed on by the power (and insanity) of the cursed Battleaxe of the Brave. They restore the ktichen to somewhat working order, using Purify Food and Drink to restore the magic to the pantry, and take the magical lid to the pantry with them for possible use in the outside world. There is even some emotional growth for the party, as during a long rest in Haggemoth’s library in which they are interupted and nearly killed by the Grey Ooze, Karina grows closer to Abenthy, huddling next to him for warmth and comfort as Tyrion snores away and Xaviee stoically watches the entrance to the library.

But there are dangers, here, too, and the longer they spend in the sanctum, the weaker the party grows. They quickly discover that the weapons and armor they took from upstairs is fake and are thus left a little more defenseless and a little less powerful. The cursed weapons Karina and Tyrion weild are strong but Karina has a tendency to roll either critical failures or successes and each one now leaves her blinded by bloody tears. Tyrion, too, though made very strong by the Battleaxe, now rushes into combat headfirst and often goes down quickly. His health is detiorating rapidly as well due to a mysterious unidentified illness, his hit points dropping permenantly after long rests and leaving him with a bloody cough that worries them all. The rust monsters decimate their armor even further before being pushed away in an action-heavy battle which includes this wonderful scene:

“Tyrion!” Abenthy shouted. “There are more coming from your left!”

Tyrion spun at Abenthy’s words, spinning the battleaxe with his momentum, grunting as the blade cut through the legs of the Rust Monster leaping at him. The flea-like monster was mid leap as its legs were cut from under it and its final jump carried it over Tyrion’s head and into one of its fellows attacking him from the other side. They were everywhere, and he couldn’t now remember why it had felt like a good idea to rush into their midst alone. Yet he was oddly glad to be here, with the smell of blood and battle around him. Now if only they would stop chewing on his damn armor.

Behind him, Abenthy raised a fist skyward and the black gauntlet around the Assimir’s wrist began to glow red. With a roar, Abenthy spun and punched the Rust Monster closing in from behind him square in the face. The beast went flying backwards.

Karina, meanwhile, was behind the rest of them, still making her way onto the battlefield. She was just now squeezing through a gap between the two rooms, pushing past a narrow space left by a hole in the wall.

“Are you all still alive in there?” she called out. Her answer was a squeal of pain as the Rust Monster that Abenthy had punched flew into the wall in front of her, then comically slid to the ground on its back, legs pumping furiously in the air.

“Nevermind,” she shouted again, drawing her rapier and burying it deep in the monster’s exposed belly.

The biggest disaster comes in the battle with Haggemoth’s modified Earth Elementals. Two guard the chamber leading to where Haggemoth met his end and they nearly TPK the party, rolling exceptionally well and smashing through the players’ weakened defenses. With their ability to move through the stone walls and pillars of the chamber they quickly gain a tactical advantage and surround the party. In the end, it becomes a game of Karina healing Tyrion, getting knocked unconscious, and then Tyrion healing her before being knocked unconscious, with this keeping one of the elementals occupied long enough for Abenthy to reveal his true form and take out the other. Abenthy himself goes down before Tyrion and Karina can come aid him (again missing his true form because of him falling unconscious). It’s a constant game of attrition and one they only barely win. It chews up their resources and leaves all of us feeling uneasy about the Golem that still awaits them. They find out about the Golem by sending Moonglum alone into the next room, where he promptly fails a dodge roll and is crushed to death in the Golem’s massive fists.

Inevitability

I go into the Golem fight a little concerned. The Golem is a CR 10 and nothing to scoff at. It rolls a +10 to attack and hits for an average of about 25 damage a strike. It’s immune to many attacks, resistant to magic, and has an incredibly powerful ability to slow the party, drastically reducing their effectiveness. In addition, Tyrion is bound by his curse to charge it, Karina’s arrows will have little effect, and everyone is badly armored and fairly hurt (though they take a long rest after the elemental fight). I never know what will happen in Dungeons and Dragons but I know that there is a possibility for a TPK here and it would be a shame so close to the end. I have a plan in mind in case the party dies in the Sanctum to keep us in the story for a while, and I think tonite will be the night to use it.

Except I end up not needing to. Not only do I roll abysmally, but Karina comes into this fight on fire (not literally). She uses Chill Touch, which bypasses magical resistance, and ends up with a nat 20 on her first roll. As her magical skeletal hands tear at the Golem’s eyes for somewhere close to 40 damage, her curse kicks in and she started to cry tears of blood, blinding her for a couple rounds... ironcially, just as Abenthy lets loose with his skeletal wings. Yup, as fate would have it, Karina yet again missed his transformation. Tyrion sees it: but Tyrion is deep in battle rage at this point and barely takes notice. He and Abenthy move in close. The Golem opportunity attacks as they come and... totally misses, despite only needing to roll an 11 to hit either of them. It tries its Slow spell next and both of them roll 18s for their saves. Karina is stumbling around blindly but decides to take another pot shot despite her disadvantage and... rolls a nat 20. Using inspiration dice to get rid of the disadvantage the attack counts as another hit and, yup, she’s blinded some more. Abenthy and Tyrion start beating on the Golem and for a while they trade blows. But the Golem is much stronger and when Abenthy and Tyrion miss four attacks in a row, I mentally declare the battle over. The Golem fells Tyrion with a single blow and turns to finish off Abenthy.

Only Karina’s blindness has worn off by now and she rushes in behind to take advantage of sneak attack and flanking and pulls her cursed scimitar free to do battle. And Nat 20s again. With sneak attack.

The battle doesn’t last much longer than this. The Golem tries to once again rally and use its slow ability to buy it some reprieve, but the lowest save roll comes back 17 and so again this plan is thwarted. It retreats, to try and put some distance between it and the fight and Karina uses Chill Touch on it as it goes...

... and once again Nat 20s. Two skeletal hands emerge from thin air, wrap themselves around the Golem’s head, and crush it with one decisive movement, into a fine dust.

The extreme variable is one of the selling points of the D20 system for me. It doesn’t work as well for gritty realistic games, like Shadowrun or Fallout, but for a fantasy setting it gives those nice heroic moments or massive party killing disasters that the things of legends are made of. I know my players will remember this fight and Karina’s crazy rolls during it.

Speaking of legends, a while ago I gave my players a crystal orb that can show them the past and all throughout the dungeon they have been using it to keep track of the decades old battle between Haggemoth and The Inevitable. They have seen the Inevitable, a tall mechanical figure weilding a large blade and wearing a dramatic cloak, but they have not been able to recognize it for what it is. Only Abenthy has come close and then only because he grew up in a monastery, where stories of such things are common. Even so, he doesn’t realize what is trapped in the huge boulder in this room, the one that keeps shaking and moving as if it has a will of its own.

Exploration of the rest of the area reveals that Haggemoth was working on something big. The party finds giant molds for making humongous gears. They find large chains inscribed with reactive runes, causing them to explode and disintegrate upon contact with lightning. In Haggemoth’s skeletal hands they find a magical forge hammer, imbued with the power of lightning.

While Karina and Tyrion are focused on the mystery of what Haggemoth was building, Abenthy turns his attentions back to the boulder. Using his extra-ordinary senses, he perceives that a Celestial is trapped inside the rock and suddenly he puts two and two together. Not telling the rest of the group what is going on, he approaches the rock and uses his helmet of telepathy to reach inside and find the mind of the Inevtiable.

The voice that booms inside his head is beautiful and terrible at the same time. It prods at his memories, touches his fears, digs deep into his concsciousness to pull free thoughts Abenthy didn’t know were his own. And then it addresses him...

“I was sent to bring Haggemoth to justice for his crimes,” the Inevitable tells him, his voice booming inside his mind. “Release me, so that I may finish my task.”

“What has Haggemoth done that has decided his judgement?” Abenthy sent back. “I also am a follower of justice. Perhaps I would understand.”

The feeling that struck him gave Abenthy the impression of mockery, that he was being derrisively laughed at. “You? You do not understand, cannot understand. You were not built for such understanding. You think you can deliver justice? You are wrong.”

“I deliver justice,” Abenthy protested. “I have many times, in the name of my father, I’afret.”

The voice inside his head hissed like an angry cat. “You follow false gods and mete out flawed judgement. You cannot see the way I do. You think you are above the pettiness of mortals?” Images flashed suddenly inside Abenthy’s mind. He saw himself murdering pirates, sending their souls to his father. He saw himself taking patches of skin off the pirates and wearing them as badges of honor and of fear. He saw himself keeping Tywin’s blood soaked rags. He saw himself sending Targaryen to his father. He saw Verrick die as he fell from the bridge, and heard Karina’s scream of dismay again, and smiled because now he could claim her for his own.

The images slowed suddenly, and the voice returned, full of confidence and judgement. “I can see all that you have done. Even you doubt yourself. So how can you judge another? Release me, so that I may do justice.”

“No,” Abenthy responsed, his mind filled with cold clarity and a deep sense of purpose. “You are the old way. I am the new. You are obsolete. I am the new arbiter of justice. I will leave you here, old creature, and I will take your role as the new Inevitable. The world does not need your justice anymore.”

And then he cut the connection and turned, leaving without a backward glance or a word of explanation to the others, who had only seen him with a hand on the boulder, the boulder which now shook violently as if it would tear itself apart. But it did not, and Abenthy did not stop, and the world continued to turn.

On a Grand Scale

Past the golem’s cavern there is a cave lit by a red glow. The players step into it and finally I get to read the words I’ve been waiting a year to read, that first intrigued me about this adventure:

A 10’ wide stone bridge arcs into this enormous subterranean space. A mighty river of lava roils violently through the cavern 60’ below, and the roof can only dimly be seen 60’ above. Situated in the middle of this river is a significant hunk of dark, glassy stone, and upon the stone is what appears a colossal set of balance scales. The scales are a complex mass of huge gears and pulleys, but instead of rope they are threaded with sturdy metal chain, and the entire device is covered in faintly glowing runes and magical symbols. From either side of the massive apparatus, the chains support circular platforms of iron-braced marble, each 20 feet in diameter. The entire artifact is ornamented with appointments of silver, gold, and adamant, and sitting on the balances are huge piles of treasure: weapons, magical artifcts, great tomes and books, jewlery, chests of coins and gems. Too much to count, the worth must well exceed a million gold pieces.

The stone bridge extends over the lava towards the center of the scales, where a mighty anvil appears to have been built into the device. A crystal set into the top of it glows brightly, and branching out from the anvil’s sconce are bridges allowing access to the two hanging marble platforms.

This is, of course, what Haggemoth was building—a grand set of scales to balance his soul (currently resting in the phylactery in the anvil) and erase his signs. The entire device is inscribed with powerful magic, making it in essence a massive attonement spell. The treasure is the key to the spell: each side balances the other, one with magic and knowledge the other with forge items and cunning of the hands (though it also includes magical weapons). The scales need to be in balance to work—if at any point one side exceeds the other by 40lbs, the scales begin to tip. Tipped too far, the scales will rip themselves apart. 

To activate the magic of the scales, the anvil must be struck with lightning magic (like the forge hammer Abenthy claimed from Haggemoth’s corspe). If in balance when this happens... well, that’s for my players to find out.

The treasure here is truly tremendous. All of the weapons are ungodly strong, the spell books go up to level nine with rare and powerful magics, and probably the pinacle gamebreaking item is the Staff of Power tucked into the magic scale—a +2 to everything (including AC) weapon that can expend charges to do massive spell damage—which in Tyrion’s warlockian hands would wreak havoc on enemies. It’s amost too much to actually put into the game, but hey they’ve earned it. Now they just have to go get it.

Of course, there is more than just treasure here. Haggemoth’s soul hangs in the balance, too, and that in itself is a prize (albeit more of a roleplaying one) to certain members of the party...

The group knows none of this, of course. They see the scales and the treasure and are smart enough to piece together the purpose of the device, but only experimentation will tell them how it works. Karina begins using mage hand to lift items off of the scales. She gets one of the powerful spell books, a book of histories, and a jeweled harp for Tyrion (who begins to cry at the sweet heartwrenching sound it makes) before the scales tip out of balance... and also we remember that mage hand cannot lift more than a few pounds and Karina suddenly cannot cast the spell anymore today. Oops.

By now, Tyrion is walking towards the balances, a hungry look in his eyes. He halts himself just before reaching the one holding the magical items and shakes his head as if to clear it. Something inside him was yelling for him to rip, to tear, to destroy. He pulls back, suddenly disconcerted. But the hunger inside him does not go away: it shifts. He begins to think of the phylactery. If these items are the work of the soul entrapped there, then how powerful might the soul itself be?

Karina was watching him, her sweat cold despite the heat of the chamber. “Do not move any further!” she warned, gesturing towards the balances. “They have fallen out of balance. I don’t know how much more they can take. We have to balance the other side.” She looked at the balance and the thin bridge that led to it, and the 60′ fall into the lava below. Crossing would take concentration and willpower. But without her mage hand, what choice did she have?

So focused was she on the task of moving forward that she did not see Abenthy behind, standing by the anvil and staring down at the crystal phylactery, its blue light casting eerie shapes and shadows over his face. She did hear him, though, as he placed a hand on the crystal and spoke a name: I’afret. The name of his father.

A chill went through her and she turned, the plea on her lips, but Abenthy had already raised the forgehammer and, with the scales yet unbalanced, he brought it down on the anvil. 

What happens next we will discover next post.

[zippdementia]

Part 29 Alignment May Vary: Things Left Undone

Welcome to post 29 of our now year-long adventure, that has taken us from such varied locations as a prison ship, the barren landscape of Thudd, and a frozen wasteland, and finally now to the titular Tomb of Haggemoth! Last time, our players broke ground in the tomb and fought an army of undead. Now they seek to venture deeper, which means passing through a deadly spinning blade trap, all the while dimly aware that the final words of their fallen comrade, Samuel, warned of something hunting them...

There are wounds only a Bard can heal. Xaviee, their NPC companion, has just seen the death of Samuel and Biggs, marking the end of their long comraderie. With Tywin dead, he is now the sole remaining survivor of Vrath keep and the last person alive who can carry on commander Tywin’s last wishes to reclaim the keep. He now mourns, and seeing his mourning, Tyrion composes a dirge for Samuel and Biggs...

... no really. The player actually composes a dirge. It’s brilliant, but unfortunately we have lost the words to it, or I’d share them.

Regardless, it goes perfectly with our play session. I put on a random piano song in the background and every beat seems to match the words Tyrion has written, finally even concluding at the exact same time in an unrehearsed moment of coalition. Xaviee feels new resolve pour into him and gains a one time use ability to lay some decent damage on an enemy. Gone after one use.

With the party reinvigorated, they move on. Ahead looms a dark hallway, the soft sound of metal scraping ever so gently on stone drifting from it towards the players. They know about the trap, which has the dual effect of damaging them AND blocking their progress, and decide there must be a way to turn it off hidden in one of these rooms.

Now, they are correct, but if there is one thing my party does not excell at, it is wisdom and thus perception. Even our spy, Karina, leans on Intelligence instead of Wisdom, and all of them have rollen notoriously low when it comes to finding traps, secret doors, and hidden treasures. They have, in fact, missed a couple powerful magic weapons throughout the adventure because of it, but on the plus side it often leads to comedic moments and has presented a challenge for them in out-of-combat situations.

In fact, there are three major traps hidden throughout the tombs, all of them controlled by generators hidden behind secret doors. Each can be passed without turning off the traps at the source, but they are all deadly.

The players spend about a half hour (in game time) searching the rooms and finding nothing before they finally give up and decide to try and pass through the spinning blade trap.

Three Strikes and You are Out

Tyrion goes first. The bald halfling psyches himself up, gauges the movement of the blades, and sprints forward. And rolls a critical fail. He leaps when he should duck, and faceplants directly into a blade, the wet sound of his flesh being sliced from his face accompanied by a brief choking scream as his head is ripped from his neck.

Or that is what would happen, if halflings didn’t have the ability to reroll 1s. Instead, Tyrion rerolls and as luck would have it the blade trap momentarily jams, allowing him to leap safely past the danger zone and roll to a dramatic halt on the other side of the trap.

“Tyrion!” Karina yells. “Did you make it?”

“I’m okay, stop yer bellyaching,” Tyrion shouts back. “But it’s strange over here... I hear something...”

Several moments pass, but no further sound comes. Finally, Karina has no more patience. “I’m going over there,” she tells Abenthy and Xaviee. “Use caution,”Xaviee says. “I did not see the thing that Samuel warned us of, but I heard it clawing its way up on the roof. It could reappear at any moment. Be vigilant.”

“And you,” Karina says.

“No need for vigilance here,” Abenthy answers in a soft voice. “Justice is on our side. We need fear no dark creature.”

Karina then took a deep breath and made the sprint forward. Time seems to slow and had one been able to witness it her movements would have seemed a dance. She took no more movement then was necessary and when she darted around one of the spininng blades it was like a planned move of a ballet more than a sudden reaction. She did not dodge the trap, she danced with it. And then she was through.

No call of safety comes back to Abenthy or Xaviee and after a time Abenthy begins to fidget with the straps of his shield.

“Doing us no good to sit over here,” Xaviee ventures.

“No,” Abenthy says and with a sudden movement he ran forward, his shield up. The first blade cracks against its twice forged surface and he takes the sound as a sign that the time is right. He dives forward, sliding across the floor in an attempt to get underneath the blades. And rolls a critical failure.

The timing is not right. Out of the darkness there is a flash of silver. It is the last thing Abenthy will ever see as the blade slices across both his eyes. The edge of the blade is honed to a razor and Abenthy is blind before he even feels the pain. But then it is there, a red flash across his face, and he is rolling to one side, a guantleted hand pressed to his eyes, hearing a soft squelching as the armor crushes the remains of his eyeballs against his cheeks, where they have fallen. And then a sharper pain across his back as three blades pierce the Blackguard armor he stole from Moriarty and rip apart his spine.

Or this is what would have happened, had not the group had an inspiration point from an earlier session, allowing them to reroll the failure.

As it is, Abenthy sees the blade coming at him at the last moment, and swings a guantleted fist forward, catching it and for the barest of moments stopping its progress. He is up then, and jumping over the blade, darting under another, and finally charging the last ten feet towards an opening to another room, wherein he can see the shine of Tyrion’s magical light and Karina crouched over something on the far wall. Then he is there and his companions are pulling him inside, checking him for wounds, congratulating him on making it through, and asking after Xaviee.

“Me?” A voice answers, as Xaviee calmly strides forward. “Oh I just walked through. No problem.”

Such is the way with NPCs.

Set in Stone

(No I didn’t use Dark Souls creatures in the dungeon. But that’s stupid cool someone is converting that. Could not find credit for this, but it wasn’t created by me. If it was, it would be far deadlier, based on how many times those things killed me in Dark Souls.)

This part of the tomb I think is maybe the most difficult, at least psychologically. The players feel trapped because of the spinning blades behind them, and the way forward is not clear. And they know there is something hunting them.

They find themselves in a room which is described as simple stone in the original module, with three gargoyle statues at the far end holding scrolls. These are supposed to come to life and attack as soon as the players try to exit through either of the two doorways leading south or north, deeper into the tomb. I find this a little bland, so I mix it up a bit...

You find yourselves in a empty tower of a room, much higher than the hallway you came from, its craggy walls jutting up around you to a height of at least sixty feet, the roof not visible from where you are. Statues line the room, statues of demonic creatures glaring down at you or regarding you with sneers on their puggish faces. They line the walls, filling the empty spaces on the crags above you, perched like birds of prey. Across from you, on the ground floor, are three statues that seem to be of more draconic origin. They grasp stone scrolls in stone claws and there are runes carved in the stone.

Now that’s a room that will draw a player’s attention. And it does. Of course the gargoyles are foreshadowing an attack, but with my revamped room the question becomes “how many?” and “from where will they come?” In addition, while Tyrion is waiting for everyone to pass the spinning blade trap, I keep describing how he hears shuffling above him and he keeps thinking he sees something move in the shadows high up near the cave roof. This isn’t a gargoyle. It is something else...

The stone tablets are warnings, basically saying TURN BACK OR DIE, but a little more elegantly. One is written in Ancient Dwarven, one in Ancient Elvish, one in Draconic. Once everyone is there, they quickly work this out with the help of Karina’s knowledge of Dwarven runes and her spell Comprehend Languages. They debate for a time what to do next. Climbing up the room is raised, and I have added in a secret tunnel up there to bypass a good chunk of the dungeon, but they also rightfully recognize how dangerous the climb will be and the near certainty that they will be attacked during the climb and possible knocked off their precarious perches. Instead, they pick a direction and start to head North. And this is when the gargoyles attack.

I’ve never had the chance to use Gargoyles in combat before. They make for an interesting monster. Tough as nails, they can take quite a bit of damage and their own hit is nothing to scoff at, though they don’t have the best attack bonus to really challenge my party. Their most interesting feature is their ability to fly and to appear identical to stone statues, something my redesigned arena lets them take incredible advantage of. With this room’s high ceiling and being littered with statues like them, the gargoyles employ a strategy of dropping down to surprise players, then darting away to hide back amongst the statues. With successful hide rolls, they can drop down again next round with surprise advantage or, if they fail that, flank the players and get hits off that way. One of them focuses on trying to grapple Karina and lift her into the air to drop her for extra bludgeoning damage.

This arena and this strategy make the fight much more dangerous and appropriate for the current player character level, without adding any extra buffs to the gargoyles themselves. It also forces my players to think about the situation and not just blindly fight. They make a good decision and retreat down the north, forcing the gargoyles to either follow them into the hall where they lose their advantages, or to retreat to the rafters to await their return. Between Tyrion and Abenthy, they taunt the gargoyles enough to draw them forward and finally dispatch of them in the northern hallway, which will save them a bigger, nastier fight later on.

The north hallway is also where they want to go, but the design of the dungeon is clever and makes players think this is the wrong way by placing a very obvious trap in their path. So far, the players have encountered four traps: the moldly room near the front of the tomb, the skeleton room, the blades, and the gargoyles. So when they come to a damp room with a pile of bones in the middle and a strange door with a simple door handle in its exact middle, it screams BEWARE! The players figure out through investigation skill checks that probably this trap has something to do with filling the room with water, and by doing some clever manipulation with a rope tied to the strange door handle, they more or less confirm this:

“Alright,” Karina directed Tyrion. “Pull.”

The halfling gave a tug on the rope and almost immediately they heard a grinding sound and the doorway only inches in front of them suddenly was closed off by a thick metal plate that dropped down swiftly, leaving frayed edges of hemp hanging limply in Tyrion’s hand. Karina pressed her ear against the metal, listening to what was happening inside the room. She heard swooshing sounds, the clear sound of gushing water, and then nothing for several moments until with a loud clank and a final swoosh, the metal door opened to reveal the same room as before... but the walls were now glistening with moisture and a small pool of water was in the center of the room, where the bones of fallen explorers rested.

Another Way

To the south of the gargoyle room, the corridor wraps around a corner and extends into a long dark hallway. This is the path the players choose next, hoping to find another path deeper into the tomb.

Tyrion went first, with Abenthy close behind and Karina lagging near the back, turning around every so often and beginning to raise her bow, in tandem with the hair on her neck beginning to rise. Yet each time, nothing appeared, no shot was fired, and she settled back into a persistant unease.

“Wait.” Abenthy’s voice was stern, tinged with command. He pushed Tyrion back and knelt briefly, running a guantletted hand over the dusty floor, clearing a thin path of grime.

“Trap here,” he said, rising and pulling free a javelin. “Probably shoots poison darts or drops the floor out underneath whomever steps there,” he tapped the stone with the butt of the javelin to indicate. “Stand back.”

Tyrion backed up, nervously unslinging his lute, touching the magically enhanced strings, strings that were said to have the power to never snap. “Shall I play us a song for some fuckin’ good luck?” He’d taken to swearing with every sentence these days. Abenthy sometimes wondered if it was one of many small signs that his mind had snapped, much like the strings on a less magical lute.

“No need for luck,” Abenthy said, and pressed down on the stone.

The trap activated, but it was not as expected. The floor did not fall, instead it lifted, tilting suddenly downward as it rotated on an axis a littl ways behind them, tilting them towards a dark abyss.

Tyrion yelled an indistinct soud with all the fervor of a curse and leapt forwards, vaulting with all his strength towards the end of the hallway and making it by a bare margin. Abenthy was close behind, running and leaping at the last moment, crashing into the edge of the abyss and scrabbling for hand holds on the smooth stone floor. Behind him, he heard a cry of dismay. Karina and Xaviee had been behinbd them both and now they rushed to react. Xaviee was close enough to the end of the trap that he leapt backward, jumping off the lifting edge of the floor and landing unsteadily at the start of the hallway. But Karina was trapped in a bad place, moving back and forwards as she tried to decide which had the better chance of success. Too late she made her decision to run forward and instead of making the leap as Abenthy had, she tumbled and fell into the darkness.

“NO!” Abenthy yelled, and released his hold, dropping in after her.

“Oh crap,” Tyrion muttered. Thinking fast, he uncoiled his rope and flung it at the  quickly closing gap. Moments later, the floor finished its rotation, coming down over the hole like a tight plug. Again, Tyrion was left holding frayed hemp.

Karina’s fall is bad. She takes falling damage and spike damage (because of course the pit is lined with spikes). It is close to an instant kill. The spike that would have pierced her brain is stopped only by the hard stone of the eye of Callas that the Giant King of the Frozen Lands gifted her. But the spikes still find purchase in her left lung, her liver, her stomache, and the flesh of her thighs and chest. Impaled, she lets out a hollow moan before passing into unconciousness... and then screams like a banshee as Abenthy rips her free of the spikes and brings her back around.

This is a massive blow, massive enough that I decide it warrants a little mental trauma. We roll on some tables and decide that for the next hour or so, Karina’s mind is playing tricks on her. Paranoid, she may mishear what her companions say. We hook her player up to a different speaker (we play long distance, using Roll20, ever since I moved to the desert) and occasionally I feed her some lies about what the other players are saying. Some are subtle, but some are also her hearing her companions whispering about leaving her behind or even needing to kill her. The tension in the party builds as Karina reflects on the ease with which she believes the misinformation and realizes that she no longer fully trusts her companions. And why should she? She has witnessed massive shifts in their characters ever since Celaenos: Abenthy has become cold and withdrawn, still protecting the party, but seeming now to fight for a different form of justice. And Tyrion has morphed from a verbose but well spoken dandy into a foul-mouthed creature hungry for battle, relying less on flattery and cunning in battle now and more on insults laced with psychic damage and cutting things into ribbons with his blade.

The final insult of this hallway is that it leads nowhere except to the trapped door. There is nothing beyond, no hidden doors, no secret switches, no precious potions. Just (literal) dead ends. The group must go back. They must proceed through the water room.

Left Undone

So around the time of this session I’d been playing a lot of Alien: Isolation and I started to think a lot about the monster in that game, the eponymous and infamous Alien from the film franchise. I wanted to recreate the fear that the creature inspires in my game. Creating fear in a pen and paper game is a challenge. It starts with good description and setting, but it goes beyond that ultimately: you have to the players feel like the monster is alive in their gameworld, that it is thinking beyond the GM’s control, and is acting of its own volition.

It can be tempting to build a beast of a monster and then hit the players over the head with it until they are dead. Wham wham wham. Wasn’t that fun? Well, no, not really. And it isn’t frightening, either, just frustrating. Emasculating the players isn’t fun for a good GM. Instead, you have to try to build an out for them—a way for them to escape. Because once they are running, they can be chased. And it is the chase where the fear takes hold.

Think of a cat and a mouse. A cat does not immediately crush a mouse with its superior power. It lets it run, before catching it again. It makes a game of it. And sometimes, because of this, the mouse escapes. This is the game that you have to play with your group to get them to feel like they are in a world far beyond their control.

The players proceed back down the hall towards the water trap room and as they pass under the gargoyle statues, they hear a rustling above them. They prepare for battle against more gargoyles and are completely unprepared for the creature that pushes its way out of a crack high up on the wall and skitters down to meet them. It is a gigantic beast, an amalgram of all the twitch skeletons that occupied the bone room, pulled together now in a mockery of unlife—a centipedian monstrosity topped with the torso and head of a skeleton with four mandibles that click together wildly as it waves its many arms around, each arm ending in a sharp spike instead of hands. It immediately attacks, leaping for Karina and easily incapacitating her with two strokes, then using its third attack to snatch her and begin to climb back up the wall.

Holy shit. The players first reaction is one of desperation. This thing just destroyed one of the group with very little effort and now is making off with her. Desperate times call for desperate measures: they send in Xaviee with his new ability gained from the dirge and with a mighty strike he knocks the creature from the wall and frees Karina (there’s that out I was looking for). Still, the players feel desperate. With a single turn, they have seen this thing take a full health player down to unconscious. The way they look at it, they have three turns to survive and there is no way this thing has less than a hundred hit points (they are right, it has 129). So they prepare (Abenthy even says it out loud) for their deaths.

Except for the bard. Tyrion thinks fast and casts a minor illusion, forming a false wall between them and the skeleton. It makes an intelligence check... and fails! And there is the second “out” that we’ve encountered. This hideous beast hisses, it clicks its mandibles, but as far as it knows, an impassable wall has suddenly blocked it from its prey. It could rush the wall immediately, according to the rules, but then that would feel like the GM playing this creature, instead of letting it live on its own. No, instead it roars a challenge and when the wall does not respond, it skitters back and forth in a warning display. Only then, two turns after the illusion was cast, does it rush to break the wall down, sliding through it with surprise and crashing into the hallway that leads to the water room. The players are already retreating, Tyrion darting into the room just as the beast slams into the doorway, shoving its head and torso through, slashing with its bony arms at the players. But it cannot fit through, and it cannot reach them. And so we come to yet another “way out” for the players.

This is a set up I am giving them to do some massive damage to the skeleton. If one of them activates the trap here, the door will slam shut on the beast, cutting it in half and leaving them to fight the disembodied torso here, a much easier fight than taking on the whole creature. But the players either don’t think of this or don’t want to do it: instead they lob spells and arrows at the beast until finally it decides it has had enough and it pulls back, rushing back towards its hole high up in the gargoyle room.

I don’t think it has happened before in the campaign that the players have had a monster retreat from their assault and yet leave them still terrified of its return. Its the cat and mouse game again: they defeated the monster not by their own strength, but by running into a hole in the wall where it could not follow. They know they are outmatched and now they are being stalked.

Still, there is nothing for it but to move on. And a battle like that deserves a little bit of victory. The water trap room they get through with ease, activating it and having Karina ready to disarm the strange door handle which keeps the trap going. She does so easily and the players move on into the second part of the tomb.

Next time, the players are In for the Long Hall (sic) as they encounter more traps and face once more their new stalking nemesis.

[zippdementia]

Part 28 Alignment May Vary: The Rocks Speak

Welcome to post 28 of our long running adventure! We started back on the Moonsea coast with three prison ship survivors who washed up into adventure. Since then, there have been many twists and turns and only one of the original party is still alive, Karina the Tiefling Spy. Her path has taken her with two others towards the legendary Tomb of Haggemoth, where she hopes to find riches and (more importantly) answers to questions that have plagued her since she was betrayed in the war. Meanwhile, her companions have their own quests: Tyrion the Halfling Bard needs to record a tale to impress his college directors and secure his place in the famed halls of song, and Abenthy seeks the ultimate justice in the name of his father, a Fallen Angel. This post marks the beginning of the last dungeon of the campaign and will walk with the players through each room, detailing what they discover and what adjustments I have made to the dungeon. I hope players of D&D find it entertaining and dungeon masters find it helpful in running their own dungeons!

Haggemoth is a conversion from 3.5 and I’ve talked about some of my methods for conversions to 5th edition in the past. Monster conversion, in particular, is more of an art than a science, with the end goal not being perfection so much as it is to capture the correct feel for a scene or battle. One hard and fast rule to keep in mind, though, is the rule of DC. You can pretty nicely get an appropriate DC from 3.5 to 5 by taking the original DC, subtracting ten, cutting the number in half (rounded up) and then adding ten. For example, if the DC for avoiding a trap from 3.5 is Dex Save DC 19, then the conversion is

19 - 10 = 9

9/2 = 4.5 (round up to 5)

5 + 10 = 15

New Dex Save DC = 15

I use this method for every DC conversion so I want to throw it out there immediately so that it is assumed throughout the remainder of the adventure.

Anyway, the bridge across the chasm is destroyed, Tyrion is unconscious, and Karina and Abenthy are badly hurt from their battles with the Bugbears. Verrick is gone, the three soldiers are dispirited, and everyone is hungry. After eating and then collapsing, exhausted, into a long rest, the party awakens the next morning to find themselves staring at a massive door in the cliff face:

Built into the side of the mountain is an immense portico that features a pair of gigantic stone doors, each one twenty feet high and ten feet across. There is a single massive, steel-reinforced stone bar across the door, but a great deal of stone and wood debris has been piled up against the door as well.

It doesn’t take long to clear the debris, I assume this was placed there by the designer in case the players try to run past the Bugbears without stealth or fighting them: then the Bugbears can charge them, or lob arrows at them from across the bridge while the players try to clear the debris. A nasty end for anyone who thought to rush past the fight!

As it is, the players clear the door and enter the first hall. It is moldly inside, and damp and cold, with a smell like age and decay. Every so often earth tremors rock the place and bits of rock and dust fall from the ceiling:

Beyond the main doors is a large vestibule with a vaulted ceiling. The walls look like they once bore runic carvings, but these have all been defaced. Plants from the hillside have infiltrated the tomb here, and bits of root and moss hang from cracks everywhere. This chamber is filled with refuse of all kinds: plant matter, the carcasses of small animals and insects, and the desiccated corpses of several species of humanoid. As light spills into the chamber, the floor comes alive with movement.

Attacking the players are some giant centipedes. This is the first adjustment I have to make. Insect creatures are treated very differently in fifth edition than they were in third. In third, poison was a really big deal, a threat to even high level parties. It’s still not great in Fifth edition, but saving throws are all around easier and because fifth edition has done away with the touch attack (which ignores armor) creatures like this have a much harder time landing hits. So even though I can (and do) describe gross bugs falling over Karinna from the ceiling, I can’t really simulate them being “on her” as I could in Pathfinder, and as the module intends.

I compensate by bringing back touch AC for this fight, letting the centipedes crawl inside armor and up leather jerkins to get their attacks. It’s not a perfect solution, but it keeps the proper difficulty for the fight, letting the centipedes land some hits while still bring pretty tame. In the future, I’ll probably take insect fights and use swarm statistics for them, as this seems to be the way that Fifth Edition “buffs” its insects at higher levels. That said, the only rule I miss from Pathfinder is the touch AC—it just makes so much sense in certain circumstances and creates a nice difficulty balance for parties that have a mixture of speedy rogues and tankish paladins. I don’t think it necessarily needs to come back as a hard rule applied to every combat, but it would be cool to see some monsters in future DnD 5 supplements gain abilities which ignore armor and rely on pure dodging by targeting AC + Dex directly.

Mine! Mine! Mine!

Tomb of Haggemoth is my favorite kind of dungeon, in that nearly every room in it (and most of the monsters) has a reason to be there. I love dungeons that are more natural settings, rather than just endless turns and twists of caverns. My earliest experiences with Dungeons and Dragons was when my father bought Undermountain for me when I was four. I didn’t play the game, but I read through each description of every room. They were like short stories, and one of the joys for me as a player to this day is when I come to a room in a dungeon and can ultimately puzzle out the history of what this used to be and how it came to be what it is now.

There is a really interesting logic to Haggemoth that results in the first half of the dungeon being harder than the second half, but as my players aren’t there yet, I’ll talk more about that later. For now, they come to the next hallway, after cleaning bug gunk off their boots:

This hallway is similar to the vestibule. All kinds of miscellaneous debris is scattered over the floor. The doors to the south and east have been battered and smashed beyond hope of repair, but the door to the north seems to be somewhat solid. The corridor narrows to the west, proceeding deeper into the mountainside.

There are a few dead ends here. West is the actual path forward. To the north is storage, but a vicious mold has overtaken it, turning everything to poisonous rot. To the south, a Xorn has recently burrowed into the area. Originally from the Elemental plane of Earth, he covets the gold and gems in the mountainside and has stayed, slowly gathering some precious rubies and diamonds. If he ever spots Karinna, he’ll lust immediately after her “Eye of Callax,” as it is an extremely large, extremely rare, and extremely beautiful gemstone. He also knows, intrinsicially, some of the secrets of this place, and can be compelled or bargained into sharing them if treated with proper respect and offered rewards. He knows one of the biggest secrets that my players still don’t know...

My group takes the North route and almost immediately is overcome by the mold, taking massive damage as the spores tear at their lungs. Fire kills the stuff, and one of them uses a torch to light up enough of the mold to render it harmless, but the damage is done. They decide to pull back and take a rest before adventuring further. And during the night, the Xorn attacks, snatching one of the soldiers (Biggs) and pulling him back inside the tomb. The players awaken and give chase and a quick combat ensures.

Xorns are cool. Old school DnD monsters, they represent a nice bit of world building in that they come from the elemental plane of earth, thus suggesting the larger universe that the fantasy game situates itself in. They can be a tough kill in DnD 5 because of their burrow ability, in which they disappear into the earth around them, becoming completely immune to all attacks. In one round, therefore, they can disappear into the earth, appear right below someone, and get an attack off. If they wait a round and successfully make a hide check, they can get the attack off at advantage for surprise. And depending on how you want to play it from there, you can add all sorts of bonuses to their attack and/or defense because they are burrowed (DnD 5 is intentionally loose on how these things work, letting DMs adjust the rules to their own style and game). I like to add some defensive AC bonuses, but I also like to be fair about retreating: if they reburrow while they are right underneath someone, it counts as a movement and gives the players opportunity attacks. Picture all the tentacles disappearing into the ground while the players hack at them...

The players don’t seek to barter with the Xorn, but go at it headlong, getting off some very good strikes very quickly. Before long, they have defeated it, even with it burrowing and opening up right under Abenthy (that crazy high AC is helping him immensely here).

Sadly, Biggs has perished in the attack, leaving them with only two of their NPCs to carry on through the dungeon. Which brings me to another topic.

Character Cards

Our campaign has never been without allies and helpers. some may remember the half-orc barbarian woman that the group hired in Ottoman’s Dock, who lost her life to Rose of Ottoman’s Dock, or the bodyguard of the Butcher of Skagos, who perished in the Icy Wastes during a fight with Worg Riders. These early NPCs were stated out fully, like Player Characters and taken over by one of my players. I didn’t like this system, because it made a lot of extra work for us. I had to create the characters, which made it difficult to throw in improvised NPCs and companions at any given moment, and put an extra burden of roleplaying and stat tracking on my players that I felt left either the NPC or their own PC with a little less investment. At the same time, just having NPCs be “background extras” that fit into description but had no actual effect on gameplay, didn’t feel right either.

My solution was to create Character Cards. I talked about this back around the time the party was going through the Desert of Thud but since then I have refined the process. Character Cards now give a multitude of in-combat and out-of-combat options for players to use. The current cards look like this:

Xaviee, Human Fighter

Once per combat: do 1d6 slashing damage to any opponent.

Once per combat: roll 1d6. If the result is a 5 or 6, then +2 to all ally attacks and damage this round.

Reaction: Block an attack completely. Roll 1d6. If the result is 1-4, Xaviee is permanently dead.

BLAZE OF GLORY: Sacrifice Xaviee to add +4 to all ally attacks and Damage this round.

Samuel, Human Guard

Once per combat: do 1d6 slashing damage to any opponent

Once per combat: do 2d6 slashing damage to any opponent. Roll 1d6, if result is 1 or 2, Samuel dies, permanently.

Once per combat: do 3d6 slashing damage to any opponent. Roll 1d6, if result is 1-4, Samuel dies, permanently.

Reaction: Block an attack completely. Roll 1d6, if result is 1-4, Samuel is permanently dead.

You can see how Xaviee is a little more powerful, because his abilities carry less risk of dying when he uses them, representing his higher level. This is a quick and surprisingly clean way for me to represent a usable NPC/retainer with very few stats. We don’t worry about placement of the NPC on our maps, or try to simulate enemies targeting them in combat. If they die because of their roll, it’s assumed they were hit enough times by the enemy to perish. If there are certain situations where it just doesn’t make sense that they can be used, like the heroes are fighting underwater and Xaviee has been left on shore, then we take them out of use for the combat. Simple is best.

It also builds more of a connection I feel between them and the players, as these are decently powerful “items” that they do not want to lose. I am reminded of Final Fantasy Tactics, where most of your party never have a single word to say during the story, but yet you care about them simply because you use them in combat. Because they are a part of your gameplay they actually end up being more a part of your story than the actual story, as for the most part 70% of an RPG is combat and gameplay and only 30% is cutscenes and exposition. Possibly that number is even lower in Dungeons and Dragons, depending on your play style.

The character cards will continue to morph and change as we continue to play and I seek the correct balance between gameplay and function.

Halls of Bone

Progressing forward, after a brief mourning for the lost Biggs, the players come to a gigantic hall filled with bones:

This large, columned hall is replete with various carvings and relief sculptures depicting traditional Dwarven motifs: the forge, the anvil, the pick and axe, the tankard, and so forth. What was once a reflecting pool down the center of the hall now contains a thick layer of slime. At one end of the room is a 10’ tall statue of a clean-shaven dwarf, wearing a studded belt and a rune-encrusted crown with three black gems set in it. To either side, a balcony looks down on the central chamber. Phosphorescent mold on the walls and ceiling provides a dim, greenish light. What strikes you most, however, is that the floor is littered with bones – uncountable skeletons of man and beast lay scattered around the room, some still clutching to the tattered and rusted remains of armor and weapons.

“This is a trap,” Abenthy says, and the others quickly agree.

They aren’t wrong, though it is an unusual trap.

In the original 3.5 module, crossing a line within 30 feet of the statue activates the bones, which become 3d6+1 miscellaneous skeleton creatures and 1 large skeletal creature. This happens every time the line is crossed, up to a maximum of 50 skeletons and 5 large skeletons, all armed differently. These are stated out so that the little skeletons are weak hitters but very hard to kill (with damage reduction and very high AC) and the large skeletons are brutally heavy hitters and also pretty tough to kill. The design of the trap is that the players will be surrounded and overwhelmed by a bunch of regular undead who soften them up for the killing blow done by the big skeleton. When this horde emerges, some players will fall back to ranged position, while others will move up to tank and deal damage. Problem for them is, every time they cross that invisible line, whether retreating or advancing, the trap reactivates. Soon players will be terrifyingly outnumbered. Quick thinking players will realize that the statue is creating the effect and target that, but even then, the summoned skeletons don’t disappear, and players can be left in a whole heap of trouble.

Overal, the intended effect of the trapis to terrify players and set them up to be wary moving forward. They do have the option of running away deeper into the tomb, but the very next hallway is filled with spinning blades. If the players can roll high enough dexterity, they can pass the blades and effectively put a unpassable barrier between themselves and the skeletons, but it will be a tense moment, as failing the roll does grave damage and knocks them backwards, right into the waiting hands of the undead.

Translating this encounter into a 5th edition battle appropriate to six or seventh level characters is a challenge. Skeleton hordes don’t pose quite the same threat in 5th edition. In 3.5, a horde of this size could roll enough dice to grapple or trip even high level characters, setting them up for deadly coup-de-graces by the large skeletons, or weakening their AC enough to allow even the weaker skeletons to get hits off. Trip doesn’t exist in 5th edition, though, and while grapple can set up for a deadly “grapple, force player to prone” combo, it doesn’t give all the bonuses or options that exist in 3.5. I could emulate this by giving the skeletons bonuses to their grapple checks and some special abilties once they have the players grappled, simulating the “Night of the Living Dead” aspects of this encounter, but it feels like it will cause this room to devolve into a series of mindless rolls, the players rolling much less dice than me, but with bigger bonsues. That game quickly can become old, especially if they are facing fifty skeletons.

Instead, I try to figure out what frightens me. I think of the Silent Hill games and those twitchy nurses. Then I think about a room with dozens of them and I have my answer.

I design three skeletons for this encounter. The basics are below:

Twitch Skeletons

These skeletons are small in statue and their arms end in sharp points rather than hands. They gyrate as they move across the floor towards you, their jaws clicking open and closed in a silent protest of the horrors their afterlife has become.

The Twitch skeletons make up about 16 of the skeletons in the room. They have a very high dexterity and a 40 ft movement speed. They also have multi-attack, letting them get off two attempts to deal damage. The damage is not high, nor is their life, but their attack bonus is +8 and their AC in the high teens. The point is that they can close quickly and surround a foe, and after that, they can easily wear them down. As an added bonus, if enough of them are killed, the rest of them do something... interesting...

Normal Hitter

Out of the bone piles emerge skeletal warriors, wearing tattered remains of armor and wielding rusted weaponary and ancient bows. As you watch, one reaches into the bone pile at its feet and pulls free a straight arm bone, which it then nocks to its bow and fires at you from across the balconied room.

Basically regular skeletons, but I improved their attack a little to let them get off the occasional hit. These guys are truly here to hamper and physically get in the way. I also give them a little bit of an interactive option with my third skeleton...

The Minotaur Colossal

Lying broken against the dwarven statue is a large creature, tendons and strands of muscle still connecting its various bones into a humanoid shape with a massive bull’s head. The horns of the skull are stained a dull red with dried blood and across its lap lies a massive axe. As the humming in the room subsides, you see to your horror the creature stirring. When it stands, it is nearly eleven feet tall. It moves its head about and one of its empty sockets fixates on you. With a grunt, the creature begins to move forward, slowly at first, but quickly gaining speed to a charge.

This is my version of the “big hitter” in the room. I only use one of him, and as such I’ve buffed him up a little bit. He is, at core, a Skeletal Guardian as described in the monster manual, but with boosted stats and I added in a bull rush ability that can gore a player and knock him prone. His big weakness is his size, making it hard for him to manuever around the room and easy to hit, and while he hits hard he is not as accurate as his twitchy buddies. He does have the ability to heal however by grabbing a normal hitter and reworking their bones into his own, healing himself for whatever hitpoints they have left (but of course destroying them in the process).

A Clean Sweep

Unaware of exactly what the trap is, the players proceed cautiously. First, they clamber up onto the balcony, thinking that will at least give them the higher ground if it comes to a sudden fight. Then they start using Abenthy and Tyrion’s shields as makeshift brooms to sweep the bones in front of them and off the balcony as they move, trying to avoid having any behind them. This proceeds well for a good long while. There are rooms up here, too, each one leading to a small chamber carved with murals that represent the journey towards power in Haggemoth’s life. There is a depiction of him learning all the schools of magic, there is a room showing his accumulation of massive wealth (it also holds a mimic that gives them some brief trouble), there is a room showing him forging great weapons of power (including, oddly enough, a set of scales that he seems keenly interested in), and there is one showing the banishment of Haggemoth from his people and his sailing on a golden ship towards the remote island of Rori Rama.

Eventually, the players come close enough to trigger the trap. They end up triggering it twice before Karinna finally has the idea of putting an arrow into its gemstones, smashing them until she hits the correct one. This stops the trap, but not the 36 or so skeletons that have arrisen to fight them, including the massive minotaur skeleton, who easily clambers on top of the balcony to give battle.

“Hold your ground!” shouted Abenthy, placing his shield in front of him and staring down the massive bone creature that stalked the upper balcony towards him. Behind the minotaur, the masses of twitching skeletons gathered like the sea held back by a dam.

“Fuck that,” Tyrion shouted in his shrill, nasally voice. He began to play his lute and light exploded suddenly behind the minotaur, so bright that Abenthy squinted and turned away. When he looked back, the skeletons were stumbling into each other, swiping at nothing, and had stopped making any forward progress.

“They are blinded!” Abenthy called out. “Now is our chance.”

“They are distracted,” Tyrion corrected, and then followed as Abenthy moved forward, the two of them raining down blows on the minotaurian skeleton until it leapt off the balcony to escape the onsault. Even as it leapt, though, skeletons gathered below it, climbing up onto it, shifting and becoming part of it. Here, a rib that Abenthy had shattered regrew, and there the arm that Tyrion had knocked sprawling as the creature leapt was reforming out of the bones of another skeletong. Meanwhile, more skeletons were clambering up the steps to the upper levels, and they shook their twitching fellows free of their spell and turned them towards the companions. Xaviee and Samuel were the first to see them coming and the two soldiers shouted warnings before falling back towards Karinna, who was quickly disappearing inside a cloud of darkness.

Karina has used this trick before, to strong effect, in the battle against the Bugbears. The skeletons are a little more “programmed” though; when they can no longer see or hear their targets, they quickly revert to “stand by” behavior, all except the minotaur who is in a rage and goes wandering around inside the cloud of darkness, searching for the players. He finds Abenthy and takes a swing at him with a huge axe. Samuel jumps in front of the blow (using character card here) and miraculously survives, but is tossed backwards by the force of the swing, disappearing deeper in the darkness. With no hope of finding him, the players beat a haphazard retreat, making their way up the stairs towards the tomb entrance. The minotaur follows for a brief moment but after finding himself surrounded and taking some solid hits, he flees back to the bone room to recover.

Now there is a moment to breath. The players have been badly hurt. No one has fallen unconcious, but their spells are depleted (from healing, mostly) and their two companions do not seem to have made the escape with them.

“We cannot leave them in there,” Abenthy states. 

Tyrion doesn’t share his dedication to companions. “They’ll be fine,” he says in his heavy accent. “Just let’s get some sleep and I’m sure they’ll find their way back to us.”

But Abenthy is implacable and begins making his way back towards the room. The others hurry to follow, Karina’s cloak of darkness wearing off and trailing wisps of ink-black fog behind her as they descend the stairs towards the bone room.

It breathed. There in the center of the room, crouched with the other skeletons crawling over it like ants on a hill, it breathed. The creature had grown two extra arms, fashioned from the bones of its fellows. And it looked up as they entered.

“Shit,” Karina said, nocking an arrow to her bow. But Abenthy was already striding forward, his arms flung wide, roaring a challenge that was answered in kind by a shriek from the minotaur. It rose, stamped its bony hooves, and then it charged.

Karina was not sure how it happened, but suddenly Samuel was back at Abenthy’s side, and Xaviee was charging out from behind a pillar as well. The blow that would have skewered Abenthy, armor and all, instead shattered Samuel’s spine. The horn that impaled him was wide as a man’s arm and long as a spear. Samuel was lifted into the air as the beast raised its head and shook from side to side until the body of the poor soldier was flung away. Then Xaviee was there, striking at the creature’s back, and Abenthy was moving now, too. His blade shimmering with dark flame, he struck at the creature’s four arms as they reached for him to pull him apart. Behind her a mournful song was being song. Tyrion had pulled free his lute and was singing, each word soudning like sobs, like childhood, like wine spilled in rain, like sadness. She was crying, whether from the song or from everything that had happened to her in her entire life, but she was also fighting, loosing arrow after arrow at the great skeletal beast. And finally, with a mournful sound like the wind escaping a dark cave, the skeletal minotaur collapsed and was still.

Abenthy ran to Samuel, preparing a spell to heal him, but the damage was too far gone. The man was broken beyond basic healing and was taking his last breaths.

“There is another creature,” he said, blood bubbling between his lips. “One formed of the many. It escaped, into a crack in the wall. It is waiting, watching...”

Nothing more did he say. His final warning hung over them and they all felt cold.

Next post takes our players deeper into the tomb, as they encounter deadly traps and deal with the Things Left Undone in the Halls of Bone.

[zippdementia]

Part 26 Alignment May Vary: A Not-So-Random Encounter

Today's post will discuss when and how to use random encounters. It's a topic I've covered before, but the session we played highlights some of the key points. 

First of all, to catch us up... after successfully defeating the Giant Crabs and making it to Twyin’s Vengeance, the party sets sail for their final destination, the long lost island of Rori Rama. After a week or two of uneventful travel, they come to a narrow island blocking the passage forward. The island is shaped like a crescent, with its horns pointing away from the ship. It slopes upward from the beach to a massive cliff that fills the entire ring, creating the impression of a great curved wall protecting something beyond it. Making shore here, the party explores the island only briefly before being greeted by a fat, tanned, islander with a key around his neck. He seems to be a simpleton, but he introduces himself as “Den Den” and offers to take them to the village chief.

The chief tells them that beyond this reef lies the island of Rori Rama but that no one ever returns from it, save one. Karinna guesses this one is Raiden, her old commander who betrayed her during the War of Seven Sorrows, and the entire point of her quest. The chief confirms this, but tells her cryptically that the man who returned from Rori Rama was both Raiden and not Raiden anymore, that the jungle burned away what he once was. Slowly the clues dawn on Karinna: a man calling himself Den Den, a silver key around his neck, the glowing of the pendant Zennatos gave her to find Raiden... the simpleton that greeted them at the island’s gates was Raiden, or what is left of him. His mind has been burnt away by jungle fever and the answers she seeks as to why he betrayed her may be forever lost in that mind.

Karinna has to decide what to do. As GM, I expect there are two options: either kill Den Den, knowing that he was once the man who betrayed her, or move on—unsatisfied, but perhaps empowered by knowing that satisfication is not required, that Karinna could allow herself to let go of something without resolution. Instead, Karinna creates a third option: find the truth no matter what, even if it means tracking Raiden’s steps in the jungles of Rori Rama. And since I strongly believe that a GM should listen to their players and think about the kind of game their players want to be in, I decide to run with it and start working on a way for her to access Raiden’s memories.

Karina, Abenthy, and Tyrion head into the jungle, leaving most of the crew back on the Gate Island. They do take Tywin’s old shipwrecked companions, Xaviee, Samuel, and Biggs, and Verrick of course refuses to leave Karina. Several days of travel ensue, with some encounters I’ll describe later.

Then, a little ways into the jungle, Karina decides to make use of an item I invented a while back and added to the Pit of Thudd treasures. It is like a crystal ball, only it shows events from the past as ghostly re-enactments of these events (if the emanations of the event are strong enough, ie. they have a strong emotional significance attached to them AKA I’ve got some history to share on that area or some story to tell there). I don’t actually have anything planned where Karina uses the item, in the middle of a large lake fed by two jungle rivers, but I decide to make up something on the spot to push forward the Raiden plot. So she sees a ghostly boat manned by Raiden and a strangely dressed man. The image makes no sound, but it looks like Raiden and the man have a fight and Raiden cuts the man’s throat and drops the body in the lake before rowing to the far shore.

This is meant to set them up to find Raiden’s camp (which I’ve just invented), a journal he’s left there (also just made up), and a special hand crossbow for Karina (spoiler: improvised on the spot) which will let her use her reaction to shoot projectiles out of the air as they come. But what I don’t expect is that Abenthy will leap off of their raft and dive into the water to search for the corpse and loot it.

Random made Reasonable

Random encounters are best used to either break up monotony or force the team to action. Instead of using "random" encounters, I suggest DMs make a list of monsters that they would be alrite using in their environment (and based on the level of difficulty they wish to present). If you are using a campaign module, like I often do, and it has random monster tables, then half the work is done for you: pick and choose from that table what seems most interesting. You don't have to use every encounter. If you can't decide, roll a few times on the table and use the results. Stat these encounters out as "just in case" encounters, then use them as you best see fit. 

In our session, we had several. The first day on the river, I throw some  Stirges at them. I knew they wouldn't be too difficult of an encounter, but I liked the way it fit with the theme of the jungle and would break up the monotony of travel. I make it a little more exciting by having them carry disease, jungle fever that gets contracted when they bite.

Next up is a T-Rex encounter, occurring when they try to ford a waterfall. The T-Rex encounter I knew was probably going to be a tough fight. But it was listed on the random encounter table for the campaign and I thought it too cool to pass up, so I worked it in as an escapable combat. In this case, the players hid under their boat and the T-Rex, on the prowl for big game, overlooked them. They didn’t end up fighting, but they didn’t have to to leave an impression. It was one of those "what the hell are you going to do?" situations where I genuinely did not know how the players would respond. If they had a good plan and good rolls, they could escape notice. If not, they would fight. And who knows? Maybe Tyrion would use his animal control spell to make it his pet for a while, ride it into combat or something. In general, I keep my eyes open for encounters that I, as a player, would like to be a part of. If I see one, I usually mark it for inclusion in the game. And in addition to the fun of meeting a T-Rex, the monster serves as a great way to push players forward. If they rest too long, or don't seem to want to move forward, I can have the T-Rex show up to nudge them in the right direction. It's in the category of Big-Frickin'-Monster. They are useful tools.

Lastly, when Abenthy decided to unexpectedly dive to the bottom of the lake to search for treasure, I felt there had to be a guardian. So a Giant Alligator shows up, tracking him through the water, pulling him into the lake just as he reaches shore, and forcing the players to deal with trying to free their friend in an environment (the water) that they are not accustomed to. The Alligator was also on the random encounter table supplied with the campaign and simply made the most sense for the situation. I had thought it a cool encounter, so I’d stated it out before the session just in case I needed it. Didn’t know I would, yet out of it came one of the cooler fights of the session. Unplanned, but prepared. That's the key to a good random encounter. They are set pieces you can throw in to make your game better at key moments.

In the last case, Abenthy is pulled under water by the alligator and has a difficult struggle ahead of him. Tactically, he is grappled and drowning and without his armor (which he left in the raft). Breaking the grapple means he still has to swim to the surface of the lake to breath, and that gives the alligator a chance to use an opportunity attack—which, if it hits, reinstates the grapple. Abenthy is a tough son of a gun, so he can take the hits, but he can’t survive drowning. Meanwhile, his companions on shore cannot do much. The alligator keeps diving underwater to hold Abenthy down, and that means Karina’s arrows won’t hit it and Tyrion can’t target it to cast most of his spells.

Eventually, Abenthy manages to break the surface of the water just long enough to attract the Aligator within line of sight of Tyrion, who quickly casts Hypnotic pattern, freezing the alligator long enough for Abenthy to power swim towards shore and for the party to flee before the spell wears off.

Abenthy surfaced, spluttering and thanking the gods (chief among them his father) for blessing his body with a resistance to disease. He had no idea what sort of filth or amoebas he had swallowed during his battle in the lake and he didn’t like to think long on it.

“Well, fucking hell!” Tyrion exclaimed. The halfing had become more excitable since the monastery and much of his music had been replaced by shrieks and curses, though the magic of his voice still seemed to have the desired effect on his enemies. “I hope that was worth the little side trek.”

Opening his hand, Abenthy looked down at the strange circular device he had retrieved from the bottom of the lake, where he had found the body they had seen in the vision. “We shall see,” he said.

Raiden’s Demise

Beyond the lake lies an abandoned camp. A quick search among it surprises a young lizardman, who cries out in fear and goes racing off into the jungle. Karina and Abenthy give chase and after a short time succeed in rolling high enough to cut the lizardman off, tackling him to the dirt and threatening to kill him if he does not tell them what he was doing there. Fortunately, Karina has comprehend languages as a spell, and casts it.

The lizardman (naming himself as “Small Threat”) doesn’t know what happened at the camp, but he is surprisingly forthcoming about his tribe, who lives in the jungle by a second lake and knows the true paths of the jungle. He offers to take them there, and they agree, setting us up for the Next Session: Tinkering.

He also gives them a backpack he stole from the campsite. In it is Raiden’s journal, and as Karina studies it over the next few days, it tells the following tale of Raiden’s fall, filling in the gaps of what he did before his mind was burned away, leaving him the witless Den Den on Gate Island:

“I will take the job, for Karina’s sake.”

Raiden’s diary begins with a summons to Zennatos, his old comrade during the war of Seven Sorrows. Zennatos tells him roughly the same story he will later tell Abenthy, Karina, and Tywin—of his search for the Tomb of Haggemoth—but also elaborates on the curse that will kill him if it is not found. Raiden agrees to take on the job. He does not elaborate on what he means when he writes he will do it for Karina. He also writes of another woman, Monita, but briefly and sadly. Though the name seems familiar to Karina, she cannot place it.

Raiden’s journey mirrors the players’ in intent, if not in content. He does not go to the oracle. Instead, he heads straight for the monastery, Zennatos having told him that he stole the book about Haggemoth from the monastery. There he disguises himself as a scholar, gets access to the library, hides until eveningfall, and breaks into the secret room, getting the location of Rori Rama and of the Pit of Thudd, which he realizes contains the key to the tomb.

His trip to Frezerazov is also one of secrecy and stealth, and he manages to find the back way into the giant’s cave and catch a look at the star map while the lord of the snow snores in his chambers. Raiden also manages to hire on three dwarven adventurers here, enticing them with tales of Haggemoth’s tombs and discovering their ancestor’s riches.

Next is the Pit of Thudd, which he clears and gets the key to the tomb—but unlike Karina, he does not take the Rod of Storms, leaving it in place and thus keeping the desert as it was. Owing the leader of the Oasis a large sum of money as part of his ploy to get into the desert, Raiden pretends he has perished—sneaking away at night with his Dwarven companions by enticing a merchant ship to his cause.

With the last of his money, Raiden pays the merchant ship to take him to Rori Rama. He also takes on the services of a tinkerer who is traveling on the ship. The tinkerer claims he can make periapts of health, which will protect against any disease that may lie in the jungles of Rori Rama. Raiden sets him to work making the devices. During the voyage, Raiden has nightmares, always of Karina, that she has returned to murder him for his crimes against her.

At Rori Rama, Raiden and his men are attacked by Stirges and one of the men falls ill, despite his periapt of health. The Tinkerer saves his life, but the dwarf’s mind is gone, burned away by the fever. The Tinkerer claims he can save him and designs the circular device Abenthy found on the bottom of the lake. The Tinkerer proposes that through blood magic the device, which he calls an Essence Recaller, will let them enter the man’s essence and free him from his trapped mind. Raiden, fearing the dwarves will turn on him if he does not try to save their nephew, agrees and they all participate in the blood ritual. Nonetheless, the device is flawed and the ritual fails. Shortly after, the other dwarves fall ill.

One of the dwarves catches the Tinkerer at work on the device and realizes that when he said blood magic, he literally was taking blood from the sick man and mingling it in the rations of everyone. When confronted, he says that they all had to imbibe the man’s blood to enter his essence, but the dwarves are furious, knowing this is how they have contracted the fever. They mutiny, and Raiden and the Tinkerer flee on board a raft, heading out to the lake and leaving the dwarves to die in the jungle.

Here, the tinkerer admits he is only an apprentice, and that he never knew how to build the periapts of health properly. Raiden, in a fit of anger, murders him and throws him into the lake with his final, flawed device. Rowing to shore, he sets up camp and plans to head back to civilization, hire a new crew, and try again. He thanks the gods he has not caught the fever.

Alas, he gives thanks too soon. The next morning he wakes up ill and realizes that while his took longer to gestate, he is nonetheless sick as the dwarves were. He begins to hallucinate and his entries become more erratic and less precise, many of them describing events as if they are still in the War of the Seven Sorrows, and he often speaks of Karina coming for him through the Jungle. His final entry regains some clarity:

“How fitting, that I have been abandoned here, the same way I abandoned her. I would tell her everything, if only I could see her again.”

[zippdementia]

Part 25 Alignment May Vary: Shattered Expectations

Today’s post talks about making sure there is tension in your scenes, so they don’t devolve into just rolling dice to hit a target number. We also resolve the Celaenos situation and move our players onto their final destination in this campaign.

As a GM, I am always asking the question, “where is the tension in this scene?”  A scene without tension is just players rolling dice until they hit a target number. I talked about this a little bit before during the desert expedition, which can easily devolve into rolling numbers on a chart until they either die of thirst or make it through to the Pit of Thudd. In that instance, we broke up the monotony with some infighting amongst the characters and some roleplaying. The tension there was between the characters themselves. I’ve also touched on it a bit with random encounters (and we will talk about this aspect of it more next time). Battles make up the heart of the excitment in Dungeons and Dragons and yet even they can get old if there is no deeper tension behind the fight. That’s why the most memorable battles have some extra piece to them, something at stake that is forcing this fight, whether immediate (the princess is slowly being lowered into a pit of fire while the players fight the Baal Demon guarding her), or eventual (they have to take this cutthroat alive if they are to interrogate him as the whereabouts of the secret hideout of the Shadow), or a culmination of past events (after many adventures, the heroes are finally fighting their dreaded foe, the pirate Testain, who killed their friends Targaryen and Shando so long ago).

One of my most memorable battles as a player was during the new 5e Elemental Evil campaign, where we went off book by leaping out of the stained glass window of a boss chamber, only to be followed by the boss and his henchmen! We had an aerial combat as we fell down the humongous tower, the ground getting closer each round as we traded blows back and forth mid air. That was a very immediate tension, as we only had so long to complete the fight and cast feather fall on ourselves. I still remember nearly every move of that fight, and it was well over a year ago.

When my players completed the battle at Celaenos, I had the option to have them move at their leisure, find the information they needed in the library, and push them forward in the plot. But I wanted there to be tension in that progression, and I wanted their actions to have an impact on the world. That is why I devised the plot about the Justicar coming to mete out punishment on them for defiling what the world viewed as an incorruptible holy order. It (a) shows that their actions have been noticed in the world and are being judged by its inhabitants; and (b) gives them a time limit that is pushing the action forward, so that searching the library suddenly has pressure behind it.

With this time limit, rolling every day to see if they can find the information they need becomes a lot more exciting. A few other events occur in the meantime, the biggest being that Tyrion gets a summons from his college, saying they are revoking his bardic license and asking to reclaim their property, his magical lute, until such a time as they can judge his actions at the monastery and determine them to be for good or ill. If he does not show himself before them within 60 days, he will be seen as guilty in the eyes of his college and lose his right to a hearing.

This puts Tyrion in a foul mood and his alignment begins a slow shift from Chaotic Good towards Chaotic Neutral. “Every man for himself,” becomes his new motto, and spurred on by the fact that he saw his party nearly die at the hands of the knights, he makes a vow to do WHATEVER is necessary to stay alive.

Just Claws (for using low CR enemies)

The players know they have to get the heck out of dodge before the Justicar arrives, so they plot with Clem to meet them outside of the monastery sea cave, which they know was used to transport the slave girls in and out of the monastery and thus is a back door to freedom. The caves turn out to be unexpectedly dangerous, however.

Blackness in front, blackness behind, and all around them the scent of salt and the sound of the sea. Abenthy sniffed the air, but it gave no further clue. He listened carefully, but could not tell the direction in which their exit might lay. The sea is close, his senses said, but how close? The sea is around the next corner, they said, but damned if they hadn’t passed two dozen corners without finding it. His eyes could pierce the darkness, but they could not tell him where to go. So focused was he on leading his companions to safety that he never saw the quiet shape floating down towards him, tendrils silently pulsing in the air like a spider spinning silk on the wind. All he knew was that the blackness grew darker, the sound of the sea was muffled, and a heavy thickness pressed against his lips, choking him as if a wet cloth had been forced into his throat.

GMs take note: if your party is getting too powerful to find your adventure challenging anymore, consider throwing some conditions at them. This happened quite unplanned in my campaign: if you go by CRs, then a handful of Darkmantles should not pose too much of a threat to level five and six characters (especially Abenthy, who has AC 24!). But all it took was one critical hit and Abenthy was grappled, suffocated, blinded, and made deaf. The same thing happened to Karinna, and not much later to Tyrion. With spellcasting cut off (because of the silence), it left the party with little options to fight back. But fight back they did, and eventually they won through, though the ordeal nearly killed them.

Next they encountered two giant crabs (boosted a little from their stats in the Monster Manual to match the creature suggested in the 3.5 module) as they tried to swim out from the sea cave to the waiting Tywin’s Vengeance. This encounter saw some clever use of Tenser’s Floating Disc to carry Tyrion as an archer hovering above the water, and Abenthy threw himself into combat like a madman, leaping from the disc to downward strike one of the crabs. But once the party is in the water, it’s like having a constant condition. The crabs grapple and then try to drown them, diving down towards the bottom of the sea with the players held in their claws and at risk for getting regrappled every time they try and swim away. Ultimately, Abenthy wins this one with some fun use of Thunderblade, whose sonic boom pushes him backwards towards the surface of the sea and lets him pull himself and Tyrion to safety before they can drown.

Anyway, it’s a good note to taking easy CRs and making them still exciting to fight, and the whole notion falls in line with what I was talking about earlier in the post, about making scenes TENSE rather than just rolling dice back and forth. For instance, in the fight against the crabs, you could run this as a simple back-and-forth roll fest: with the players unable to move much in the water, especially once grappled by the crabs’ claw attack, and the crabs unwilling to retreat. But having the crabs act more dynamically, using their grapple to pull the players deeper into the water, makes this more than a fight, it makes it a situation where the environment is part of the fight, too. As much and as often as you can, make the players think about more than one thing in a fight. Those fights will be more memorable for it, and you can do this with almost every fight in your dungeon/game. It doesn’t always have to be as crazy as fighting while steering a boat down a waterfall—in fact, doing this for too many fights in a row will end up fatiguing your players and put you in a space of constantly one upping yourself. But for every fight you think the players will get into, try asking yourself the following:

is there something about the environment that can make this fight more interesting or tense, something about the environment that threatens the players outside of the enemies? Examples: it takes place underwater, or on a narrow mountain ledge, or in a dungeon room filled with a dangerous fungus that reacts to sound.

can you create a mixture of enemies that makes a fight more exciting and gives your monsters more options in combat? Examples: instead of a troop of thirteen goblins, make it a troop of five regular goblins who will charge, three goblin archers who will hide and shoot with sneak attack damage, one goblin mage who will buff his allies, a goblin boss who hits hard, and three goblin riders mounted on their wargs who will dart in and out of combat for flanking attacks (now that’s a battle to write home about!)

can your battlefield be adjusted to let your monsters use interesting and clever battle tactics? Examples: a dungeon room filled with spiders is thirty feet high, letting them climb down from out of sight; a group of slimes is encountered in an old well with lots of cracks in the walls that they can disappear into.

can you add something unusual to the fight to make it stand out? Examples: your party fights a dragon while riding ON TOP OF the dragon; your party fights giant spiders while climbing a giant’s castle, 100 feet in the air; your party is trapped inside an impenetrable magic shell with an angry demon, and the shell is floating down a volcanic lava flow towards a portal to the elemental plane of fire.

can you add a time limit to the fight to make it more tense? Examples: you are fighting undead in a locked room, while a spiked ceiling slowly descends to crush you all; you are fighting gargoyles on a damaged airship that is going to crash into a mountain unless someone gets to the controls; you are trying to break through a horde of hobgoblins to shut down a portal to the nine hells before Tiamet can get through it.

is there a sensical way the players could end this fight without combat, or at least tilt the odds in their favor by bringing something new to the fight? Examples: an assassin sent to kill them is willing to turn around and kill the guy who hired him, if they pay him double; the giant territorial ape they saw in the woods earlier can be tricked into attacking the bugbear fortress, distracting both forces while the players sneak inside; a blue dragon, having just fed on an entire cavalry, is open to bartering for some of the party’s magical treasure instead of murdering them for tresspassing on her desert.

You can also mix and match some of the items off this list. For instance, if the players are going to encounter Treants in the woods, you could make the battlefield AND the enemies more interesting by having the woods be old, dead, rotted woods (maybe destroyed ages ago in a fire) and make the treants undead, hiding amongst the ruined and petrified trees. A much more atmospheric and interesting scenario!

You can find examples of this kind of combat adjustment all throughout the campaign, going at least as far back as the Dire Shark encounter. Keep your eyes open for these opportunities in your own campaign, and you’ll have something to write about, too!

[zippdementia]

Part 96 Alignment May Vary: A Farewell to Friends

If you’re reading this post after having read all 95 other posts, bless your heart. This is truly the final post, the last one in the Alignment May Vary series. If you are just stumbling upon this randomly, you may want to go back to at least the previous post “The End of All Things” as this is a direct continuation of the final battle described there. Also, many previous posts are linked there to help give at least some context to the encounter. You may even want to go back to the beginning and read the whole epic story. It’s the internet’s most massive and complete campaign journal!

This ends with the final lines of our campaign. I will not say farewell then, so I will say it now. The goal of this journal was to bring some small measure of the enjoyment and wonder we felt making this story and playing this game for four years to you. I hope it achieved that, and thank you for reading.

The Destruction of All Things

Meteors, the debris of a hundred destroyed worlds, or maybe worlds that had yet to be destroyed in this timeline, rained down upon the Maakengorge tower, breaking it into dust, revealing the infinity of space behind it. Imoaza tried to pull a barrier around them, made of the weave, but the weave did not obey her here. It did not even exist here. Nazragul had cut its strings. Imoaza fell under a maelstrom of heat and rock. Milosh survived a little longer, smashing the rocks with Haggemoth’s forge hammer, Haggemoth’s greatest weapon. If he could only get a clear shot on Nazragul, he thought he might be able to unleash Primus’ power on him and end this now. But Nazragul himself was engulfed in flame and Milosh drew close only to be burned and fall away into ash.

Carrick was the last to struggle on. Imoaza’s fly spell died with her, and yet momentum continued to carry him towards Nazragul. He raised his blade, knowing he would only have time for a single decisive strike. Then from the flames a skeletal hand shot out and gripped his wrist, holding him. Nazragul leaned forward, his face a grinning skull.

“I win,” he said and held Carrick as the meteor swarm crashed through them both, sending Carrick to join his companions in death.

Darkness surrounds the players. Wonderfully, they think they have lost this fight. But in reality, they have won. They brought Nazragul down to the point where he had to use his most devastating attack in a desperate gambit to destroy them forever. It ripped apart his body, as well, but he can regenerate. The players cannot. Or so he thinks.

In fact, this would have been the end of the party, except for a particular deity they helped some time ago. Now, that deity appears to them on the border of life and death. Asmodeus, lord of the Devils, and his new queen, Alyss, come to the players in purgatory. When the call comes from darkness as to who would claim the souls of the players, it is Asmodeus who answers. And then, having laid his claim, Asmodeus grants their souls new life, a return to their bodies, each of them at a single hit point.

“This is my boon, my one and only repayment for the service you rendered me. You returned me to my body and my realm, now I do the same unto you,” Asmodeus says.

“Save my daughter. Bring her soul peace,” Alyss says.

And then they go back.

A Decision Made

The players return to a world destroyed, a universe ending, a time that could come to pass, but hasn’t yet. A space between time. And in this space Nazragul sits. The body of Abenthy that he wore is destroyed. What squats on the last remaining piece of ground in that floating nothingness is a shadow, a whirling of darkness. 

And now, in front of it, stand Carrick, Imoaza, and Milosh.

“N-nooo....” the dark shape mutters. “Y-y-you are a-a-ll... d-dead...” it can manage no more. But its power is growing by the second, its body repairing, rebuilding.

There is no time to waste.

“One of us must be the shield, the sacrifice,” Carrick says. “We must take on the soul of Primus.” He holds up the Surveyor’s stone, containing the spark that can link Primus to one of them.

“It’s me,” Milosh says. “I’ve already lived a life. This is all borrowed time. It is what I was meant to do.”

“But I have lived a life as well,” Carrick begins to protest.

“No,” Milosh says, the half-orc shaking his head somberly. “You never got to live your own life. The Surveyor took it over from you when you were still young. It needs to be me.”

Except, it doesn’t, Imoaza realizes. It doesn’t need to be any of them. She is peering at the weave, magic made tangible to her special abilities. And in that weave she sees a line that has not always been there. It is like a silver thread, allowing for a different path. She recognizes the lifeforce in that thread as having belonged to Ruz. Ruz, who used her wish spell to save everyone at the Maakengorge, who has become part of the weave itself in order to work that magic. Now, the last remnants of that powerful wish are there for Imoaza to use. She grips it, and instantly she can see everything, the way the weave ties together not just magic, but the whole universe. She pulls on those threads carefully, for they are delicate and she could easily do more damage than good. She pulls, and three souls emerge from the darkness that is the thing in front of them, the thing Nazragul became, the Three who rule as One.

Nazragul is the first soul and this soul Imoaza chooses to be their shield. This will forever erase him and Primus from existence, which will also destroy Chaos. But even after this, Imoaza has a little of Ruz’s power left to use. She can, she realize, bring one of the other two souls back to life: either Karina or Abenthy. They are fading fast though and the decision must be made.

Abenthy and Karina stand now before the group, and I ask their players (who now play Milosh and Imoaza respectively) to give them voice, to have a conversation between them about what choice they should make. And so the players roleplay the moment as Karina and Abenthy get to see each other one last time. 

“I am sorry,” Karina said, seeing Abenthy again, seeing his grim mission lifted from him. “I am sorry I could not save you.”

“It was never your fault,” Abenthy says back. He kneels and places his sword on the ground then, turns to Imoaza. “It is time. Rebalance the scales.”

This moment is too much for all of us at the table, and the tears start again. Also, Imoaza cannot decide which of them to save. The player ends up having to roll a die to decide for her, it is too heavy a burden to take full responsibility for.

And the die decides it is to be Karina.

And so, in the final moments they have before the souls retwine and the body of the Three in One rises again, the deed is finished. Milosh opens his chest panel and the power of the Inevitability of Justice emerges from him to engulf and destroy forever the souls of Nazragul and Abenthy, as well as Primus and Chaos. Karina is reborn into her body and lands next to them, naked. Carrick wraps his cloak around her.

Then, as the final wave of power leaves Milosh, the space time that they are in collapses. They are rushed back to the world they left behind.

They return to a world saved.

The portal opens, the mountain collapses. The four emerge in a sea of white snow, wondering if their actions doomed their friends outside, who may have been buried when the mountain was destroyed. But then the ships of the Githyanki land around them, and there is a great cheer, for the armies were loaded onto the ships, and their friends saved. The last Surveyor approaches Carrick and Milosh and tells them they are both free now. Everyone is free, free of the creators, Primus and Chaos, to form their own future. All bonds are broken, except those kept in the name of honor and of love. The Surveyor then lays down in a patch of snow and closes his eyes for the last time, telling them all to seek their destiny wherever they feel it is best found.

And so the companions do. Each player makes a choice as to what their character does next, and we get some wrap ups on some of the NPCs, as well.

Carrick speaks to Roger Krisp, saying he would like to join the Green Company to keep a promise he made to Aldric. Roger gives him the Anope and lets anyone who wishes to follow him do so. For Krisp, he has spent decades trying to return from Hell back to Faerun and he takes his second in commands, the adventurers who long ago trialed the Tomb of Horrors (and died doing so) and buys a new ship: the Mankey Bastard Mk II (AKA the Mankier Bastard). He returns to sailing the seas.

Carrick swears his services to Aldric’s daughter, Sasha, and says that he will be off to sail the galaxies with the Green Company to do good throughout the universe.

Imoaza has responsibilities here on Faerun. She approaches the Yuan Ti, who are unsure of what to do next. They ask her who they will be conquering next.

“No one,” she tells them, knowing this is a moment that will define the rest of her people’s existence. “We will find a new way, a better way. The way of the dragon. The way of peace.” And Hecate is the first to bow and swear fealty to her mother, now the mother of all Yuan Ti, Imoaza. 

For Karina, this return to life is full of emotion. Verrick and her embrace. Verrick’s bonds that made him a Death Knight are broken, and he is able to resume a life with her. Karina also greets many old companions whom she has not seen in generations. Roger Krisp, Daymos, and Jade. Jade in particular Karina is overwhelmed to see, as she felt responsible for her loss to Nazragul in the first place.

Milosh’s chest plate is gone, his full body finally restored to him as a last act of Primus. He is given many choices now. Carrick says he could have a place among the Green Company, or if not, he would be happy to find his home planet of Eberron and drop him off there to resume his old life. Breathgiver the shaman offers him the Blackstaff, saying he could stay and rule Waterdeep, help rebuild Baldur's Gate, Ottoman’s docks, and the other cities which were destroyed by the Tarassque. Milosh thanks everyone and says he will decide in the morning.

But in the morning he is gone, and no one is quite sure where he left to.

Epilouge: A Farewell to Friends

This scene takes place 16 years after the final battle. The player characters are asked to come to Karina���s academy on the old island of Thudd, now called Oasis. It used to be a school for adventurers, trying to train people to eventually face a darker world, in case Nazragul’s plan came to fruition. Now it is a school of knowledge and philosophy and healing magics.

Karina was old before the final batle, and though restored to her body, she still only had scant years left. She is now passing, and everyone has been called to honor her in her final hours and say goodbye.

Of the companions, we follow Carrick, who arrives with the Green Company in the Anope. He wears shining emerald armor under a green cloak. Under one arm, he holds a small, wrapped package. 

He finds some new additions to the school grounds. There is a hall named for Shando, one for Daymos, and one for Lee. And in the central plaza is a bronze statue of Abenthy, not as the final terrible thing he became, but as Karina remembers him at their first meeting, and their last. A noble paladin. On the plaque at the statue’s feet is inscribed the words: “Justice is Inevitable. Friendship Does not Die.”

“Swords are easy,” a familiar voice said behind Carrick. “Capturing the look in someone’s eyes? Now that’s hard.”

Carrick turned to see a smiling half-orc standing beside him, wearing a simple tunic.

“Milosh!” Carrick said and embraced his old companion. “Where have you been all these years?” he asked, once he had let him go.

“Learning the trade of blacksmith,” Milosh said. “It seemed an honest profession, and Karina agreed to let me stay on and keep my secret.”

“I would have thought you’d be ruling Waterdeep, or Baldur’s Gate, or out adventuring even. There is still always a place for you among the Green Company.”

“You are still riding with the company?”

“Mostly. I leave most of the running of it to Sasha. She has the knack for leadership. I have focused on teaching. I have created a new order of Paladins, based around the tenets of an old friend of mine who taught me some dear lessons when he was alive. The School of Remus.”

Milosh smiled and nodded. “There is much to be learned from old friends. Your offer is a kind one, but the night we defeated Nazragul, the Surveyor told us to seek our destiny where we felt it was most likely to be found. I realized then that I had spent more years than most people get to live fulfilling other people’s destinies, solving other people’s problems. I thought maybe it was time for me, for the first time in two lifetimes, to live a life for myself. I settled here with a wife and we have a child. I am living every day filled with a contentment that I thought was not mine to have.”

Carrick clasped his shoulder and smiled. “I have watched you go through pain and loss. It is good to see you gain something. Good to see you happy.”

“Have you seen Imoaza yet?” Milosh asked. Carrick shook his head. Milosh’s own smile softened, became a little sad. “I’ll take you to her.”

Together they walked into the main hall, the hall of Heroes, where a line of tapestries depicted famous events in the history of Faerun. Before one tapestry, which showed humans breaking free of Yuan Ti slavery in the days of yore, stood an old Yuan Ti Pureblood, her hair white, her skin wrinkled, one hand holding a quarterstaff to support her weight. On one shoulder fluttered a greying ball of fuzz, that chirped softly: “chi chu!”

“There’s a tapestry of us three,” the old Yuan Ti said. “In our final battle at the Jarlsberg. I think they went a little dramatic with me, though.”

“Imoaza?” Carrick asked. The Yuan Ti turned and nodded her greeting. She had always been reserved, Imoaza, and time had not changed that. But it also looked like she had aged seventy years in the fifteen since last they met.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Imoaza said. “All three of us cheated time when we left the Abyss and ended up back on Faerun. You two paid for it with your lives. This is now my price. I am not yet gone from this earth. Time has just caught up with me, at last.”

Carrick found his eyes watering. He wiped at them as discretely as possible, but Imoaza, who had always had the sharpest eyes of them all, of course noticed. “It is alright,” she said gently. “I have accomplished what I set out to do. My people will go on. They are not powerful, but they are stronger, and better. They walk the path of balance and of nature. We are farmers, gatherers, druids. Peace suits the Yuan Ti. We take to it as seriously and studiously as we took to war.”

Carrick nodded, then said, “I have something for you.” He held out the small package. “I made a special stop at an old favorite of yours on the way back to Faerun.”

Imoaza unwrapped the package to reveal a host of sweet pastries, beautiful in their presentation, the smell of cinnamon and baked sugars rising into the air. Imoaza giggled like a little girl. “Air pastries!” she exclaimed, and reached into the bag, tearing off a piece of one of the gooey rolls, leaving strands of maple training in its wake, then popped it into her mouth and chewed, her grin growing wider.

“I’m sad they did not make a tapestry for that place,” she said.

A door at the end of the hall opened then, and an attendant of the school hailed them.

“It is time,” the attendant said.

The players enter through the door to find themselves in a grand room with pillars open to the outside, looking out upon a fabulous view of falling waterfalls and green trees, maybe one of the greatest signs of change that Karina ever brought to the world, her successful changing of the Desert of Thud into the Oasis. There is a bed here as well and on it lies Karina, her white hair braided, a cool breeze blowing through the room caressing her brow.

Many people are gathered here to say goodbye.

Daymos and Jade are there, and with them Reeves the Quasit. The brother and sister hold hands, and both are crying. Karina had witnessed both of their deaths, but also their rebirths.

Hazelwood, Ruz’s daughter and the inheritor of the power of Esheballa, has come on behalf of the Changelings whom Kaerina once sheltered when no one else would. 

Milosh and his family stand in the back of the room, his half-elf wife and child both holding his hands, hands which once were literally guns, now which create instead of destroying. 

The Green Company is in attendance along with Carrick. Aside from Carrick, they did not know Karina personally, but they have learned of her deeds and come now to be her honor guard as she passes. 

Imoaza is the only from the Yuan Ti here to say goodbye. Hecate was left to run the Yuan Ti kingdom in her absence. Imoaza uses her weave vision to see that Karina’s life is fading but she also sees the way that life has touched so many others. 

Captain Krisp comes, with the full crew of the Mankier Bastard, his new ship. He tells Karina he will name a new brand of his cereal in her honor. “Karina Krisps?” he mumbles, liking the ring of it. 

Immerstal the Red is present. Knick Knack comes in his fire form all the way from the Planet of Fire. A Red Wizard arrives, holding a framed portrait of Lhu Ee. Senator Nakir, once Karina’s Apprentice, arrives from Waterdeep, with Blackstaff Breathgiver. Traki's brother is here, as are many other elves, for Karina was a great ally to them. 

There are monks here, too, from Abenthy's old monastery, as well as the sister's of Celaenos, come to honor the one who saved Abenthy’s soul and to record this moment in time. 

Giants and kobolds and orcs and hobgoblins all arrive, those who repented after the final battle with Abenthy.

Most surprisingly, there are dwarves here: the distant descendants of Haggemoth’s line, who have heard of how their ancestor's soul was finally saved and their family line restored to honor. They are here to give thanks to those who helped that come to pass, which includes Karina.

And finally, there is Verrick, kneeling at Karina’s bedside, holding her hand. He does not know how long he might wander the earth without his love, and he cries to think of life without her. But he is also happy, for the life she lived and the time they were able to share. And he believes they will be reunited one day, even if only to rejoin the weave that souls are built from, and be knit together into a new story, a new life.

Karina looks around her, at all these varied people, all the lives she has touched. She squeezes Verrick’s hand. Then she closes her eyes, and smiles, and Karina who had once thought she would always be alone passes, surrounded by friends.

[zippdementia]

Part 20 Alignment May Vary: The Red Eye Watches You

Welcome to the ongoing adventures of Abenthy, Karina (Seeker of Callax), and Tyrion, as they hunt for the fabled Tomb of Haggemoth in order to save Abenthy’s friend Zennatos, to find and bring to justice Karina’s old commander who betrayed her, and to create an epic song for which Tyrion will forever be remembered. Last time they were about to leave the newly rejuvinated desert of Thud with their bounty from the Grey Tomb and head for Celaenos, a monastery of good knights where, in a library, there are to find their last clue to the location of Rori Rama, the final resting place of Haggemoth.

As GM, I’ve pulled back on rolling for random sea encounters. We are late in the adventure now, and there is good momentum built up. To throw in another encounter will, at best, slow us down and, at worst, accidentally kill the party, which is something that at this point I’d like to reserve for the remaining two main locations, not some random fight against a sea siren.

I was, in reading the possible encounter list, intrigued by one of the possibilities: a friendly bronze dragon. Encounters with dragons are going to be a big part of Red Hand of Doom and I thnk this would be a nice lead in to that. Also, Bronze Dragons are enamored with rare and unique treasures and as it happens Karina is carrying around the Rod of Storms.

The Dragon slides into the water, its gigantic body pushing through the water with slow deliberation. In only a couple strokes, it is at the Ghost Ship (now named Tywin’s Vengeance) and only now do the adventurers realize how truly huge the creature is. It leans in close, its head tilted so that one gigantic eye, large as a horse cart, stares at Karina.

“I smell the magic on you, little one,” he says.

The Rod of Storms is a cursed legendary item, one of a kind, meant to give Udo the Grey control over the weather. With it, he altered the atmosphere of the green land of Arctavia, slowly transforming it into the desert of Thud. He never had full control over the Rod, though, and it comes with a heavy curse, ensuring that any who carries it will never be free of the damp and the cold. In addition, using the Rod is difficult and can backfire, releasing powerful uncontrolled lightning, wind, and thunder magics. Only a legendarily powerful mage could hope to control it... or something which had direct communion with the weather, like a Bronze Dragon.

Karina is not fully aware of the Rod’s curse, but she does remember the warning in Udo’s tomb: “Beware the Rod of Storms, I created it but was never its master.” I decide this is an interesting opportunity for her to steer the course of the game. The Bronze Dragon, Sauros, wants to trade the location of one of its treasure stashes for the Rod of Storms. Meta-game, the decision is this: keep the Rod of Storms and both the power and risk that comes with that, or trade out a very powerful weapon for the promise of future riches (which I will create as a side adventure at some point after they find the Tomb of Haggemoth).

Karina chooses to give up the Rod. It’s the safest choice, actually, and gives me a little more control over the adventure, as the Rod is one of those wild card items that can turn the tides massively either in favor of or against the players. It forces bad weather, too, which can affect future scenes. On the downside, it is always fun to play with legendary items and tons of side adventures can come out of the mahyem they cause. For a little fun, and to share my pain, I give Karina a flaw: Having given up this powerful item, she feels its loss palpably, and believes she has made the wrong decision. She becomes obsessed with finding another powerful item like it, to replace its loss.

Sauros gives one more cryptic clue before departing. He tells Abenthy that there is a Red Eye watching over him greedily, that the Eye symbolizes great power and a dire destiny, and that Abenthy can learn more at the Monastery.

With that, the players move on to Celaenos.

Shackles of Gold

The Island of Celaenos is a rather austere, craggy piece of land jutting sharply from the ocean. There is barely enough vegetation to support the goatherds who live there and the place has a shabby, drab air about it. There is a small rocky harbor and a single impoverished village. Looming over the harbor On a nearby hill is the fortified monastery of Celaenos, where the Knights of Celaenos dwell. Their flag—a black field with a Red Half-moon and two stars—can easily be seen by any approaching ship. The harbor has a tiny dock, which can only be approached by Jollyboat or Dinghy. There are two tatty-looking vessels in the harbor, and one of them looks familiar to the players who have encountered the Ratzotto pirates before.

The people of the village respect and fear the Knights of Celeanos, and they are generally furtive and close-mouthed around strangers. The Knights are putatively in control of the island, but it is rare for them to ever leave their monastery.

The players make their way to the monastery, Karina using her magic to disguise herself as a tall Amazonian woman. They gain admittance to a vestibule which—with the doors closed behind and in front of them—seems like a deathtrap. Above them, through a glass window, two knights stare solemnly down at them. They wear white half capes, capes which cover only their right side, leaving the red and black doublet underneath visible. The crossbows they hold and the swords on their backs are of the finest make.

“Who are you? Why do you come here?”

The voice comes from a newcomer to the room. Opening the door and speaking before even fully entering the room is a young, blonde knight. His eyes, a bright blue color, hold no love or joy in them, and he stares at the players suspiciously, waiting for their answer.

This is Dickon, and he will come to play a strong role in what happens to the party at Celaenos. For now, after hearing they wish to use the library, he begrudgingly takes them to the Abbott. The Abbott, a powerfully built knight named Mordekai who looks younger than fifty years of battle hardened life would usually leave a man, is friendly and eager to banter with the party. His mood shifts, though, when they mention Zennatos.

“Scum. Thieving scum,” he hisses.

Turns out, the book that began this whole quest was stolen by Zennatos from the Celaenos monastery. The book had a curse on it, and this is what has compelled Zennatos to find the Tomb of Haggemoth, for only by doing so can he be cured. Not only is Mordekai not inclined to help anyone associated with Zennatos, he also warns that the quest for Haggemoth rings of a cursed, evil, thing:

“Think about it. A quest that is started by reading a cursed book, compelling good men to die for cursed men, sending them to a place rumoured to exist, to a tomb of a powerful mage, one who was banished from his own people... what sort of creature, tell me, would lure good men to their deaths?”

While they are debating this. A servant comes in, and Karina happens to recognize the bracers she wears: the same ones, at least from the look of them, that Rose used to control her servants back in Ottoman’s Dock. Karina bristles and accuses the Abbott of keeping slaves. 

Aaaaaaand... shit. It kind’ve goes downhill from there. The Abbott, as might be expected, does not appreciate being accused of slavery by strangers who are known associates of a thief. The party, for their part, is vastly suspicious based on seeing the pirate ship in harbor and the bracers, but willing to concede that a conspiracy could be going on under the Abbott’s nose. Abenthy uses his powers to try and detect evil on the man, gain some insight into his motives, but the Abbott only exudes an aura of good. 

The end result is that the Abbott refuses them access to the library, but says he will consider their words, and will send a verdict for them in three days. Dejected, the party heads to the only inn in town.

Cover Bands Suck

“How about some music?”

Tyrion looks around at the few sullen customers in the rugged tavern, the wood exuding the smell of sea, salt, and stale ale, and decides that livening up the place can only gain them favor. He gets up from the party’s table and heads to the corner of the barroom, passing three disheveled men with familiar Rat Tattoos on their necks.

“This is a cover of an old song, hope you know it, hope you like it!” he says in a chipper voice, and begins to play.

The Ratzottos are not impressed. They almost immediately begin calling out expletives and taunts, challenging him to “play faster!” or “play better!” and “cover bands suck!” Finally, one of them picks up a full bottle of rum and chucks it across the room.

And I roll a critical hit.

The bottle karoooms off of Tyrion’s head with a dramatic spray of blood. The music ends in a haphazard jangle of notes and piratey “yar har hars!” Tyrion is nearly killed, taken down to one hit point. And then all hell breaks loose.

Abenthy launches himself at the pirates, fists out and slamming into flesh. He takes on two at once: one a scraggly scrapper who first threw the bottle, the other a hook-handed man who uses his disability as a boon, scratching and clawing with his metal hook. A third, a hulking black man with a braided beard, charges him from the side. Karina tries to launch into combat as well by getting fancy with parkour (one of her flaws), but only succeeds in dramatically flinging herself unceremoniously over the bar and into a shelf of bottles. 

The tide turns when Tyrion uses his dissonant whispers to send the scrapper into a fit of brain bleeds, breaking his spirit and turning him into a slobbering mess. Abenthy uses COMMAND to halt the other two, and Karina puts the icing on the cake—trying to be dramatic again, she flourishes her blade, accidentally rolls a critical hit, and tears out hook hands’ eye. After this, the pirates are ready to talk under the influence of Abenthy’s Zone of Truth. What they learn distresses them.

Seems that these pirates are part of a slave ring being run from within the monastery. No mention is made of the Abbott, instead it seems that a man known as “The Seneschal” is behind the slave ring and coordinates it from within a secret cave underneath the monastery, accesible from the sea. And in three days, they are to meet the Seneschal there and prepare for “a special shipment.” Three days... the significance of the number does not escape the attention of the group. Three days is how much time the Abbott gave them before a promised response to their problem. Seems like someone has overheard of this and decided to act first.

Abenthy rewards his informants with a trip to hell—murdering the pirates and sending their souls to a master he himself does not fully understand. But this time, it feels more right than ever, like he was meant to do this. Karina and Tyrion look on, nervously, not altogether comfortable with their friend’s newfound bloodlust.

Then the players prepare for sleep, feeling that they have enough information to get the drop on their foes, not realizing how powerful the evil is that targets them, not knowing they are already one step behind in a game being played out by experienced schemers.

Next week, Weave a Song for Me.

[zippdementia]

Part 79 Alignment May Vary: Safety in Numbers

We are more than three years into the game, now. Maybe it’s time for a little recap?

I envision our adventure as taking part in multiple arcs. The first arc Preludes and Portents was mostly set up for the story, taking Karina, Shando, and Targaryen/Daymos up through the death of Shando at the hands of Reeves Testain.

The second arc An Unintended Quest follows Tywin (renamed Lorin in our podcast), Karina, and Abenthy on the first part of their quest for Haggemoth’s tomb, ending with the death of Tywin.

The third arc The Forgotten Past follows Karina, Abenthy, and crowd pleaser Tyrion (to be renamed at a later date) through the desert of Thud and up until the reveal of Abenthy’s demonic father at the monastery.

The fourth arc The Hidden Hoard follows the same party as they finish the quest of Haggemoth, gain Trakki the elven monk as a companion, and lose Abenthy to his own machinations. With Reeves Sar Testain finally defeated, the third arc ends, and Karina finally leaves the party to pursue her own destiny.

The fifth arc Into the Maw involves a new party of Tyrion (for our story, renamed Bitterberry), Trakki, and Nysyries as they pursue the Red Hand into the lands of Rhest. It ends as they become infected by the will of Nazragul.

The sixth arc Redemption takes us through the evil arc, ending with the death of Tyrion and the arrival of Aldric, and concludes with the purging of Nazragul from Nysyries.

The seventh arc The Fall into Night covers the battle of brindol, sees the newest party formed after the death of Nysyries: Carrick, Aldric, and Imoaza, and goes up through the party blasting (unintentionally) into space.

The eighth arc Hellspawn covers the party’s adventures in Hell and the elemental planet of air..

The ninth arc Crossing the Void begins with Aldric’s death. It covers the githyanki fortress and will end with what is about to come next, described in this post. Because there are a planned total of eleven arcs (after this there is Tears and Torments, and finally The Coming of the Three), this really brings us close to the end. It’s been a huge, epic adventure, but now it’s time to start pulling all the players together for the inevitable endgame, which is why we are going to start with the return of a character from long ago...

The Return of Daymos

Centuries ago, Daymos was killed on Faerun by Lorin, Karina, and Abenthy, and Abenthy sent his soul to Ia’fret to be tortured for eternity. Only, eternity didn’t up being all that long in the grand scheme of things. Ia’fret was called by Asmodeus to do battle in the final days of the blood war and so Ia’fret took his cavernous domain and transported it like a giant arc into the Abyss, using his souls to power him as he cut through swathes of demons alongside Asmodeus. However, while this gambit ultimately won the war, Ia’fret himself was cut down in battle and his “arc” left abandoned, sandwiched three quarters between the 9th and 10th layers of the abyss, the wayward souls he brought with him exposed to the depravities and hunger of an entire population of demons now cut off from the material realm.

Many of the souls perished in those early days, but Daymos was not among them. He hid through most of the initial carnage and when that was over, he emerged and made the now empty cavern his own lair. He could not command it the way Ia’fret had, but he could use it as a secret refuge. He wanted to get back to Faerun, to find his sister, Jade, and to restart his life. But he could not find a way out of the Abyss: it seemed shut off from the outside world completely. So he bid his time and wait, and in his waiting, he hunted. What did he hunt? Demons.

It may have been sixty years. It may have been a hundred. Time is... difficult... in the Abyss. Daymos aged, but he kept himself young by locating caches of potions of youth and using them. This was somewhat dangerous: sometimes the potions backfired and aged him. Other times, they deaged him too much and once he had to hide out until he grew back from a child into an adult again. Overall, though, he managed to keep himself in his young 20s and 30s. And he hunted demons, stalking them through many layers of the abyss, learning their secrets and building his psychic powers back. He quickly found that his powers were growing beyond his ability to control: he needed a focus. In Ia’fret’s lair he found a demonic spellbook and he poured his energy into this. This meant that he needed the book to cast most of his psionic powers but it removed the threat of his powers tearing his mind apart. He acquired other items during this time, such as a robe of stars, a ring of cold resistance, and a baleful dagger that he used to slit the throats of a few demons, but his greatest power lay in ranged ambushes, using his mind to dominate lesser demons and then slay them. He remained physically weak and would not long stand up to the direct attacks of even a mid-tier demon.

And so Daymos learned to be clever, and he learned to be silent, and he learned, above all, to be patient, while he waited for his opportunity to escape. And then, suddenly, it came. He felt the Abyss expand, reconnect to the outer world. And so he left Ia’fret’s cave, following his psychic senses to a newly opened portal. He leaped in, and escaped.

Not the Expected Homecoming

"What’s that?” Imoaza pointed through the frozen air and pounding sleet. Carrick, next to her, squinted towards the sky but it was like trying to see through a physical object.

“You’re going to have to describe it,” he said.

“It’s a light, human shaped, and it’s moving fast back towards the camp.”

“Could be trouble. We should head back. This hunt for a sabre-toothed tiger hasn’t done anything except make me colder.”

“Don’t mention the cold.” Imoaza was trying not to think about it. Her metabolism was not built for cold climates.

Heading back towards the camp, the two find Daymos waiting for them. He tells them the light they saw was him, that it is a way he can choose to travel when he has “a mind” to.

Daymos is mostly excited to be out of the Abyss and back on Faerun, but he is disturbed when he learns from Carrick that he has landed in the Sword Coast.

“Last I checked, the sword coast wasn’t frozen,” Daymos says. “How long has it been?”

But Carrick and Imoaza aren’t the best source of information, as they are new to this Faerun as well and can only tell Daymos that the last time they set foot on Faerun it was DR 1475. Daymos nods at this, telling them that he died in 1474, and he knows that was at least a century ago.

Ultimately, Daymos decides to travel with the group. The other travelers who are leading this pilgrimage don’t mind, they say anyone is welcome to “visit the lady.” He spends the evening gambling with Carrick, and using his psychic powers to turn the dice to his favor, a trick Carrick eventually catches. Carrick lets him keep his winnings, saying that he has paid to learn something about Daymos.

Milosh spends the evening weaving leather armor into his body, patching himself up, though he remains looking like a Frankenstein-ian monster. Imoaza curls up as close to a fire as she can and watches the strange and unfamiliar weave that the magic in this time creates in the air, visible to those who know how to seek it.

The morning is wet and miserable. The caravan soon comes to an inn outside of Baldur’s Gate and the players are warned it is haunted. But Daymos is keen to explore it and Carrick sees his paladin friend from the ship inside, his head bleeding from some kind of wound. The party as a whole decides to investigate, running through the rain and inside the arch of the inn:

The main doorway is unbarred, and the archway is as silent and gloomy as the exterior of the keep. Any wafting mists or ill weather seems to halt abruptly within 10 ft. of the open doors. There are no sounds of clattering dishes nor the bustle of inn keepers. Rain drips upon you as you pass under the keystone of the arch. From the glow of hundreds of candles that are lit in the lobby, though, you realize this passing has instead anointed you in red, dripping blood.

 The lobby is an expansive space, broken up by a dozen hearth stations, and the dual stairway across the room, which converges into a landing and slopes to the floor. Once you are all inside, it’s as if a veil of shadow has been lifted from your sight, and you see a vast array of strange, stirring shapes around you. The scene has the aspect of a monstrous court of deformed demons dressed to nobility. Your nose warns of the unpleasant possibility that human blood is being used as perfume, and flesh is being roasted or consumed raw from the many spits planted over the hearths. In the air, there rises a crescendo of guttural chortling that you cannot comprehend.

A woman of undeniable beauty makes a dramatic entrance down the stairway. Her footsteps echo with the clack of thigh-high, studded leather boots and she carries an immediate air of dismissive authority. She is showing a generous amount of skin between silver plating that has been polished to a mirror surface, adding a shimmering effect in the firelight. She is wrapped in a shawl of white fox fur, and although she appears youthful and walks with a brash, flippant strut, her shortcropped hair is white and her unnaturally blue eyes betray some sort of ancient malevolence. She takes her place by the grandest hearth and reclines against two huge, muscled men in chained collars who kneel to form her chair. Her baleful gaze has never parted from all of you as she made this fashionable entrance.

The woman is a Demoness, really a Demon Goddess, named Eshebala and she explains that this isn’t Faerun, but rather a good possibility for what Faerun could look like if they ever return, based on what she has taken from the minds of the players and from Milosh’s prophecy, which is still buried inside of him and which she claims to understand better than he does. She offers them a chance to see for themselves by returning to Faerun, but first they have to play her game. Eshebala doesn’t mention her true motives yet, which are... well, no, I shouldn’t say now. My players could be reading. We’ll get to that in a later post.

In any case, her game is simple: the players have arrived on the 193rd layer of the Abyss, a place called Vulgarea. Now they have to survive 20 of Vulgarea’s most deadly locations. All the demons chant as the room goes dark, “...all will enter, one walks away…all will enter, one walks away…”

This is the beginning of a new dungeon, one created by a third party designer and illustrator, Ryan Durney. It is called Mirrors of the Abyss, and it is intensely interesting.

I choose Mirrors because it is the only campaign I’ve ever read that actually captures the chaos and insane deadliness of the Abyss. It is a player killer dungeon, make no mistake about that, but with enough personality that an enterprising DM can easily adjust the difficulty down simply by playing the personalities up; a haughty demon might not use all of its powerful attacks on a party it views as too weak to harm it, allowing them to gain the upper hand, bargain with it, or escape it’s grasp; a obsessive compulsive demon may have powerful melee strikes but will refrain from approaching a human because “they are gross and full of germs.” And there are lots of nooks and crannies in which to fit long rest options.

Regardless, the descriptions, the illustrations and handouts, and the sheer ambition of the dungeon makes for a truly unique experience for anywhere from 3-12 players and the dungeon has a ton of randomized elements that make it replayable. You can insert this into your own story (just make sure players are at least level 15) or run it once a year as a special grindhouse game for a big group of players. There are even rules for continuing to play if you are killed, at which point you become a wraith who is given a chance to get their life back by screwing over one of the party members. It makes for a memorable experience, to be sure.

The way the dungeon is laid out is that there are 21 rooms. The 1st room is always visited first and sets up the rest of the game, but after that the room order is randomized. Each room represents one challenge or series of themed challenges which the players have to solve or survive in order to progress. Along the way are hidden rooms and treasures and some of the deadliest (but avoidable) encounters I’ve ever seen penned in Dungeons & Dragons. And at the end... well, that’s another thing we’ll have to get to later.

For now, the players are left in the dark as the inn collapses around them. When the dust settles, they find they are in a dark cave, with a riddle and a clue and room #1: the start of Esheballa’s Game. Next time, Welcome to My Game.

[zippdementia]

Part 13 Alignment May Vary: Combat and Character Hooks

Welcome to another Journey Log! This week takes my three players through an intense combat as they wrap up some loose ends. It is the climax of the first act of Tomb of Haggemoth, after which they will truly strike out across the Moon Sea to follow the Oracle’s cryptic instructions. In this post, I’ll be focusing on how to build effective encounters in D&D 5th Edition and also the importance of using character hooks in your game. But fist, some catch up with the story...

Return to Ottoman’s Dock

The Butcher of Skago now considers the players to be his “investment,” and he intends to ensure that they make good on their promise to bring him the treasure of Haggemoth. So he decides to sail alongside their ship, while his sniper (Haymish) sails onboard the Mankey Bastard with the players.

The journey to Ottoman’s dock has one event: Abenthy has not been feeling well ever since leaving the LaCroix mansion and now the players discover why. The key they picked up from the Ooze house was actually the last piece of the Ooze and has been hiding on board their ship disguised as Abenthy’s belt. From there, it has been slowly draining him of his life! The group works out what has been happening and destroys the Ooze, once and for all, completing a sidequest and ending a possible plotline if the ooze had made ity back to civilization...

At Ottoman’s dock, the players discover that Marcus, the priest they had left to deal with Rose the Slaver, has been murdered. They are presented with a plan for revenge by Lisa, one of the slave girls they freed last time who was living with Marcus. She tells them to either help her burn Rose’s establishment to the ground, or enter by stealth and try and find evidence of Rose’s wrongdoing to present to the mayor of Ottoman’s dock.

The group vacillates over what to do. Twyin and the half-orc Rhazel are in favor of the burning—it’s simpler and, to Twyin’s mind, cleaner. But Karrina thinks it is riskier and when Abenthy realizes burning will mean the death of the innocent slaves who are still working the establishment he refuses to go along with that plan. Majority rules, and they move in via stealth, through the basement passage they found last time.

This doesn’t go quite as planned. Rose is transporting a special “guest” this evening, and so has the basement under guard by Ratzotto pirates. The players try to dispatch them quietly, but let one get away. He instantly runs upstairs to warn Rose. Worse, they try to take the special guest, a young girl, with them. This goes incredibly bad when the girl suddenly turns on them (Rose’s mind controlling orders) and attacks them with the power of her mind, killing Rahzel (their half orc, colorblind mercenary) in the ensuing fight. During this, Rose arrives with reinforcements and a massive fight breaks out that nearly kills Twyin (he becomes the target of Rose’s imp, who takes spider form and continually bites him, while Rose holds Twyin still with her spells). This battle also presents a problem for Abenthy: Rose sends her enslaved bodyguards at him. He knows these are innocents under mind control, so he tries to hold back and knock them out, but thanks to a couple HUGE damage rolls, he accidentally kills one of them, cracking his skull open like an egg. Falling to his knees in the midst of combat, Abenthy begins to pray for his salvation while the others desperately try to fight off Rose (for two whole rounds he prays, an excellent bit of roleplaying)!

In the end the players persevere and force Rose to flee in the form of a dark green magical mist (she quaffed a potion of mist form). Where she departs to is unknown to the players. In fact, she makes her escape to a ship that is waiting for her and from there across the sea to answer to her master, a person far more devious than she. How that goes you may discover in a future blog.

Defeating Rose breaks the spell on the psychic girl, a mysterious young human named Jade, who has come looking for her brother, Targaryen. Remember him?

This unexpected revelation gets more complicated when the players head back out onto the open seas, searching for the ice land that the oracle hinted at. Halfway there, they are attacked by Ratzotto pirates, and they seem to have a new leader—Targaryen himself, revived from the dead or saved from its brink, commands the pirates from the bow of the ghostly Red Hand ship Karrina helped sink over a month ago. Holding the Jade Figurine Karina recovered from the watery temple aloft, he seems to use it to gain control over some monstrosity of the deep, a tentacled horror that tears apart the Butcher of Skago’s ship while the players fight off an attack of pirates.

The battle ends with Haymish gripping the rails of the Mankey Bastard, watching his master’s ship sink below the waves as the players make their escape from this frightening new Targaryen. 

Lesson: Building Encounters in Fifth Edition

Despite its dual emphasis on story and gameplay, D&D has never truly left behind its roots as a one-shot tactical battle game. Which is great, when you play out a battle and then go home at the end of the day with a winner and a loser, back to do it next time y’all meet up. But when you mix character and story into that mix... well then things get a little complicated, don’t they? There are times you don’t WANT your party to die, because it would wreak havoc on your story. Yet, if every battle is a guaranteed win, then your game suffers, because there is no more risk.

I struggled with this for years as a GM, until one day I came to a very simple conclusion: it is okay to let your players die. In literally any situation, it is okay, because you can’t predict what those players are going to do. This is a roleplaying game, which means if your players are doing it right, they are following an internal narrative you won’t always have access to. That narrative may dictate they run head first into certain doom (”Barbarian smash!”), or that they do not take an opening to escape when they have the chance (”My creed is that I will never flee from justice!”), or they bring the proverbial knife to a gunfight (”Die fire elemental! Fear my fireball!”), or they provoke the Brass Dragon into eating them alive (”Damn, but you are hideously ugly!”). Your job isn’t to hand hold the players, improvising ways for them to survive against all odds. Leave that to the natural 20s they roll!

However, it is your job to roleplay the monsters as well as they play their characters. Do that, and you will find that instead of your story coming to a dead halt when you unexpectedly get a total party kill, it will feel like a part of the story. When your monsters act like monsters instead of figurines with the knowledge of the Dungeon Master, it won’t feel unfair if your players fall to them. This also lets you change the difficulty of encounters on the fly.

In the pirate battle in our session, for instance, Abenthy leapt immediately onto the pirate ship and taunted all of them. They chose for many rounds after this to focus their attacks on him, even after he retreated—which worked in the party’s favor because Abenthy is a tank who is hard to hit and can soak up damage even when he is. The players took further advantage of this and used clever positioning to keep Abenthy in front while Karrina gave rear support as an archer and Twyin came in from the side, doing devastating damage with his multiple attacks. 

The pirates lost that battle, badly, but things could have gone differently. What if I had rolled well enough to take Abenthy down and suddenly the remaining players were faced with overwhelming odds? If I felt the battle was no longer fun, I could have used in world explanations to slightly make things easier—given courage by their success, perhaps the pirates split up and start rushing heedlessly into battle, spreading out where their sneak attack damage isn’t as useful.

In fact, I did use tactics to make things harder: once Twyin started taking down a pirate each turn, they started focusing their attacks on him, which did make things more tense. By doing this, I was able to break away from pure statistics and use changing tactics to keep our battle balanced throughout the fight.

To go along with this, here is some mechanical advice I have found in the last two years of tinkering with the D&D 5 system:

Go harder than you think: The Unearthed Arcana encounter builder does a much better job of giving appropriate challenges than does the complicated CR calculator that the DMG provides. That said, any kind of guideline someone publishes is based on average characters. It can’t take into account a player who rolled above average stats, or who selected powerful feats, or who took the best options their class has to offer, or is playing perfectly in synch with the rest of their party. It also can’t take into account items, magical weapons, and improved armor. Thus, I find that players tend to outperform these charts. It has often happened that combats I thought, on building them the day before a session, are far too deadly for the players to take on end up dealing no damage to them at game time. So, don’t be afraid to make combats hard! If the fight comes about and it is truly brutal, you can always use the above mentioned “change of tactics” mid fight to tone things down. Don’t underestimate the tendency of your villains to stop and give mighty speeches on their turns instead of attacking, when they realize they are wiping the floor with the players. After all, what villain can resist a good taunting of fate? In all seriousness, though, it is easier (and more acceptable to players) to describe how some of the goblin horde they are fighting back off because things got too hard (”a hush suddenly falls over the goblins as their champion comes forward, chuckling darkly that he will take down these fools himself”) then it is to scramble to roll up reinforcements when the players are making what you wanted to be an epic fight too easy. Oh, by the way... if they do make the epic fight too easy, don’t try to “fix it” and take that victory away. Just make a mental note that future fights will probably need to be tougher because you underestimated your players, and prepare the next session accordingly.

Action economy is king: I say it, designers say it, players say it, and it is worth saying again—in D&D it is the character who gets to strike the most who will win the most. Not all bonuses are built equal. High health points don’t matter much when a team of players can easily dish out 60 damage a turn. The damage your monsters can deal doesn’t matter much when the players can heal it all in a single cure wound spell. And the players will eventually get these powers, if they don’t have them already. But what never stops being powerful is when one of your monsters gets six attacks per turn. Do you want TPKs? Because that’s how you get TPKs. D&D 5 does a great job of making it harder for players to get seven attacks a turn (in Pathfinder, this tendency led to many monsters having ridiculous resistances and ACs just to stay alive) and instead gives such powers to the monsters. I’ve talked in the past about how doing this effectively brings back the “boss monster,” meaning that a single higher CR monsters can take the place of what in older versions would have been a horde of high CR monsters. I like this a lot, as I think it lets individual monsters have more personality. Some DMs dislike it, because it gets harder to build hordes with higher level monsters. And that is fair, because it does get much harder. And so, that is my advice—as you start to look at higher level monsters, just keep in mind that their multi-attack ability, if paired with high damage, can wipe a party in the first round of combat. As your monsters get more attacks, things are going to start scaling upwards in difficulty exponentially. So pay attention to these monsters when horde building. Similarly, remember that your players have access to extra attacks and will get exponentially tougher as they get them. If you have a party with a lot of fighters or other classes that grant extra attacks, you may need to adjust your difficulty higher.

Magic is a wild card: Somewhere on Reddit I read a great thread about all the ways a CR 5 enchanter could kill a party of higher level adventures without ever entering combat. Once you start getting into enemies with spells, you can really start messing with your game’s difficulty. On its basest level, magic in combat can buff your monsters, debuff the players, or deal damage. But think outside of the box, and the possibilities become far more interesting—and deadly! Picture the mage who follows after the players, taking on their appearance using disguise self, and visibly killing guards in every city they are to visit, so that when they arrive, they are immediately targeted by the King’s best men. What about the divination mage, who scries out the seas the players are sailing on, and uses her powers to summon a storm the likes of which hasn’t been seen on those seas in ages? There is the warlock who plants an item in the bag of holding the players carry with them, an item stolen from a powerful demon, a demon which will kill anyone who it thinks has the item... there is the illusionist who makes it look like the bridge across the chasm of doom didn’t collapse last week... there is the crazed evoker who has placed a rune of blasting on every door in his tower, and who has rigged the entrance to be one way only, emptying players out onto the elemental plane of fire when they try to leave...  Some of these possibilities go far beyond simply rolling a dodge in combat and using your massive reflex score to avoid damage. Magic is unpredictable. Because of this, there is really no good way to give a CR rating to a magician based purely on what magic they have. More important is to think about how they will use that magic in your game. A magic who is going to stand in one place casting fireball... well, you can easily factor in their added damage per round to their CR using the DMG and figure out their difficulty rating is. But far more deadly may be the mage that the players don’t even know is targeting them...

Lesson: When to Use Character Hooks

Short answer: whenever possible.

Anyone who has ever been a player in D&D knows that there are two characters you build when you make a new character. The first is one of stats and numbers, a list of abilities. The second is a story, a reason to journey, a purpose, a personality. The first is easy to bring into play—any time there is combat, or an obstacle requiring a roll, you get to use this character. When you level, you directly affect it, adding to stats and gaining new abilities. The second is harder. It doesn’t level up at specific milestones, or gain experience from killing monsters. There aren’t monsters that are weak to it, or campaigns pre-built to favor it. The first character will never go away. It will always be there on paper, easy to access and analyze until it falls beneath the axe of some crazed Drow. The second character, if not tended to, often is dead long before the axe falls, forgotten after a session or two of not being used.

This second character, the story of a character, is often what has separated memorable games from forgettable ones in my player experience. When I build a character, I am building a set of hooks and suggestions on the kind of story I want to play out. If I say I am a gunslinger searching for his father, then I am telling you (a) that the easiest way to get me to go anywhere in your game is to drop a hint about my dad, and (b) that I’m hoping this search will be a part of the game. Maybe not a huge part, but at least get enough of a focus that I will feel like I’m really playing a man on the hunt for family. Because obviously I have some interest in that, if this is the story I’ve come up with. Here’s an example...

I remember one game I played where I built a thief (Xaviee) whose village had been burned down by werewolves. One of the werewolves Xaviee remembered, because the beast had bitten his mother and turned her into a werewolf. It was a simple back story I just came up with for fun, in the hopes that if we ever ran into werewolves or any supernatural creature, I could roleplay treating them with extreme prejudice, maybe even attacking them on sight. I figured, too, that my mother might be used sometime as a hook—for instance, if the GM needed us to go to Phandalin, maybe a werewolf attack would be reported in the area. My player would easily agree to go, just on the off chance that the attack involved his now lupine mother.

With all this, I was pleasantly surprised to learn the GM had actually selected a werewolf campaign for us to play. Good fortune! Except in twelve sessions of the campaign, my mother was never mentioned. I mean, we FOUGHT werewolves. We came across tribes of them. At first, I just waited for the GM to throw some hint in, like “that werewolf over there, you recognize from the attack!” As time went on without any of this, I started asking for it: “Xaviee asks the tribe leader if he recognizes the name of his village or of his mother...” without hesitation the DM would say, “nope.”

We had fun at the table. It was a good game. But by the time it was over, I had stopped caring about Xaviee’s werewolf mother and, in doing so, stopped caring about him, too. When he eventually was killed by a quagmire troglodyte, I rolled up a dwarf who hated elves and liked getting drunk a lot. The DM seemed much more comfortable working this into the game.

This is why I like to work in as many of the hooks my players have given me as possible. I will add new scenes to bring their bonds into the campaign. I will replace blah NPCs with people from my players’ history. And I can’t think of a reason NOT to do this. It doesn’t take much time, and the sense of involvement it will bring your players is incredible. Otherwise, you really might as well just be playing a tactical battle game with their stats.

Stats are fun to play around with. They are what make your character feel powerful. But story is what makes your character feel alive.

And now, some news. This post will mark the end of the adventure blog... for a while. The game continues, but I am currently trying to design and publish the Ooze adventure for DriveThru RPG and I want to devote my attentions to that in the free time I have for writing. When I complete it, I may well return to the blog—either weekly again, or as a once in a while thing, if I think a session has some particularly good lessons in it for GMs. Until then, happy gaming!

[zippdementia]

Part 30 Alignment May Vary: In for the Long Hall (sic)

The water trapped room slams shut behind them as they exit, Karina’s tampering having disrupted it for now. They cannot go back, so the players must go forward. But first, they decide to add a new member to the team.

Long ago, the players defeated an enchantress known as “Rose,” and Karina stole her magic book, setting her on the path to multi-classing into wizard. Now, Karina decides to cast one of the spells she studied so long to learn. She casts find-familiar.

Guts of Barghest. Ground bone dust. A hot fire. Blood of a demon. Purified water. Such were a few of the items in the list of components needed for the spell. Karina did not know where she would have found the guts of a Barghest, but she had seen plenty of bones in her journey, and she happened to have a steady supply of demon’s blood, being a Tiefling. Anyway, Rose’s component pouch (which she had also stolen) had the remainder of the items (at least she guessed the dried out entrails which looked like fat worms were the guts of an unfortunate Barghest).

The rest of the instructions were as complex as the ingredient list, but Karina had studied them for weeks and found, as she did with most things magical, that understanding seemed to come to her less than a gut feeling that led her movements and gave the words she spoke power.

The ritual took an hour to complete, while her companions rested on the landing as best they could, their armor loosened so as to give some relief from its weight.

Near the end of the ritual, things became loud. Booming laughter echoed from the circle she had drawn in chalk on the floor. Smoke exploded in small puffs with sounds like the cracking of skulls. And then, in the midst of one of the puffs of smoke, a shape formed.

It was small. It had wings and also a tail. Its body was humanoid with a few distortions that made the whole thing seem wrong somehow, a hodge podge of elements like the tail and the horns and the flat pig nose and the sharp row of needle-like teeth that lined the too-large mouth.

“Mistress Rose?” the small creature asked. “Moonglum has come back to answer your call!”

It takes a little explanation to get the imp caught up the speed and a little cajoling to get him to agree to work with the party. Then, with her new imp familiar, Karina begins to scout out the remainder of the dungeon, as they plan their next move. Their goal: find the end of the tomb. The obstacle: this isn’t the real tomb.

Haggemoth always knew that his legend would attract tomb robbers and he needed to be left in peace to complete his master plan, his life’s opus. Furthermore, because of the many blockades he had put in place to actually finding his tomb, he knew that anyone who did come would be either (a) a powerful and hungry monster from the jungles of Rori Rama, or (b) a proven group of adventurers who likely had experience in traversing deadly places deep under the world.

Because of this, he built two tombs. First, he dug out tunnels inside the mountain and layered these halls with traps and the trappings of a crazed wizard, hoping to frighten adventurers away (or kill them) before they could get to his real tomb. Only this wasn’t meant to be a tomb. Deep beneath the mountain, Haggemoth has his true home, a place of magical comforts and research, only dangerous because Haggemoth’s final preparations didn’t go as planned and chaos ensued as a result. But more on that later.

For now, the players begin exploring the second part of the upper levels, rooms 17-25 on the map below. With Moonglum looking for traps and dangers, they soon discover that there are dangers all around them, including walls that slam together and a strange fungal growth breaking through the secret door leading to room 19. Room 20 controls the water trap, but there is a dead man here with his face burnt off from steam. They take his helmet of telepathy and some unidentified healilng potions he had on them, which they get very nervous about when I tell them (innocently) to record them as “Dead Man’s Potions” (note to self: if you want your players to drink a potion, maybe don’t put “dead” in its title).

The biggest threat comes from the shaded hallway to the east, amrked 23 on the map. This is a complex conveyor belt trap whose function they discover by using the crystal ball from the tomb of Udo the Grey and some experimentation. When activated, it  turns the floor into two conveyor belts that run towards the middle of the hall, depositing anyone unfortunate enough to be caught on them into a set of industrial strength grinders that can easily be an instant kill (or at least a permanent loss of a limb). This terrifies them, rightly so, and they decide they need to find a way to turn this trap off before proceeding.

Eventually the players proceed north, which they deem the most safe passage, taking a winding set of stairs down to a large room with a single solitary statue...

Cloaked

“That has to be a trap,” Karina said to the group.

“Oh most certainly,” Tyrion said.

“It would seem to make sense,” Xaviee added.

“Why would it be trapped?” Abenthy asked, the one voice of dissent. 

The statue in question was tall and seemed very old, judging by the battered feet and the areas where paint had peeled away and become mildewy in the cold damp of the chamber. They couldn’t see much beyond the feet, for draped over the statue was an old leather cloak, large enough to cover most of its features.

Karina’s mind went through a half dozen possibilities, none of them good. Was the statue a hibernating gorgon, having been defeated at last moment by a cloak of slumber wrapped over it? Would they release its terrifying gaze when they removed the cloak? Or was this the sign of a lurking basilisk, who waited for adventurers to wander into its lair and then trapped them here? Karina quickly looked over her shoulder at the one entrance to the room, almost sure she could hear soft padding footsteps descending the stairs towards them. Maybe the cloak was magically cursed, set here to entice adventurers, and then  draining them of their abilities the longer they wore it.

“Let’s leave,” she said. “This is too obvious, too easy. We need to leave this room now.”

If Abenthy heard the panic in her voice, he ignored it. “We leave no stone unturned. It’s the only way we will find Haggemoth. Justice will protect us.”

And saying no more, he reached for the cloak. They had a glimpse of the statue underneath, the face either worn smooth by the years or left blank intentionally by its creator. Either way, it was non descript, and it did not come to life to attack them. But the cloak shifted in Abenthy’s hands, wrapping itself around his arm, his chest, his face. Before any of them could react, it was pressed tight against him and they could hear a terrible grinding and gnashing, accompanied by a muffled yell of dismay, as something wet and messy happened underneath the cloak.

Xaviee ran forward, but suddenly a whiplike tail emerged from the folds of leather and its spiked end caught him in the chest. He coughed once, then collapsed in a crumpled heap. Tyrion ran to help him.

Karina lowered her bow and instead conjured up a skeletal hand, which clawed and pulled at the cloak, leaving dark red splotches where its necrotizing touch damaged whatever the thing was, but it was unable to break it away from Abenthy.

Abenthy fell to one knee, making a deep choking sound.

“It’s suffocating him!” Karina yelled.

“Working on it,” Tyrion mumbled, as he drew his lute and began to strum madly at the instrument. The melody that came forward sank deep into Karina. It raised the hairs on the back of her neck and made her feel ill, like the world was tilting madly. The sensation passed quickly, thankfully, but that was because it wasn’t targetted at her. The creature left Abenthy with a deep sorrowful moan, peeling away to reveal a wingspan like that of a Manta Ray, and a pale underbelly with a gaping fanged hole. The creature drifted into the air as if on an unseen wind and gracefully floated from the chamber. Karina darted forward behind it and slammed the door shut.

“A Cloaker!” Karina said. “We have to hold the door!”

“What in the bloody hell is a cloaker?” asked Tyrion, running to join her. Xaviee limped after him, to add his weight to the door.

“What we just saw—that’s a Cloaker. Abominations, they inhabit the old places of the world. Not very common to see one anymore. They live on rodents, mostly, but aren’t adverse to a larger meal when they can get one.”

The door suddenly shuddered, as the fear spell wore off and the Cloaker came back, seeking its prey.

“For something that seemed made of cloth, it certainly packs a punch,” Tyrion said as the door shuddered again and cracks appeared in the thick wood.

“Open them, and I will tear the beast in half,” Abenthy growled, getting to his feet. The Aasimir’s face was a hideous red color, punctured in multiple spots by deep circular wounds from which blood flowed freely. He staggered towards the door, drawing his longsword with a schinking sound that hung in the air like a spell. He flung open the door and raised the blade... but nothing was there.

“Tricky creatures, cloakers,” Karina said quietly. “We have to be on guard. They can disguise themselves in the most clever of ways. I read about them in that book from Celaenos. One man, Vollo, describes how a Cloaker settled over a pit trap, looking just like the floor. When Sir Griswald stepped on it, it dropped him onto the spikes and then floated down while he was impaled to feast on him. It kept him alive while it ate, and left him ultimately to bleed out on the spikes. We need to keep our eyes open.”

As she talked, the four companions had begun to ascend the spiraling staircase out of the room, keeping their eyes everywhere: ceiling, floors, walls, cracks in the walls.

Then, as they came to the top of the stairs, they saw in front of them a hanging leathery curtain. It definitely had not been there before and its level of conspiciousness in the setting of the tomb was ridiculous.

“Clever, huh?” Abenthy said, and strode forward to rip the Cloaker in half.

And that’s what happens when a Cloaker rolls a critical failure on a hide check.

The Long Hall

“We are not alone.”

Moonglum was shaking as he said it, the tiny imp looking over his shoulder and biting his long fingernails in a display of fear that would be comical if they weren’t inside a deadly tomb.

When he described the creature that had pulled itself from a crack in the ceiling back near the water room, the three companions knew that the skeletal centipede-like monster had caught up with them. They stood in the place where the four corridors came together, the only light Tyrion’s magically illuminated hand. Their voices were soft but still cast unsettling echoes all around them.

“We are dead,” Abenthy said.

“Not so,” Tyrion chided. “What if we run? We have the headstart on it? We could lock ourselves in the statue room and hold our ground, or run through the long hallway.”

Abenthy scoffed. “So we either make a last stand or sprint over a deadly trap? Doesn’t seem like that would improve our odds.”

“Where is your optimism?” Tyrion asked with a grin that was more than half manic.

“I am practical, not optimistic. False optimism only leads to grave dissappointment.”

“I believe you about the grave part, certainly.”

“Quiet, all of you,” Karina said, who had been studying the hallway in front of them with rapt attention. “We have only moments to pull this off.”

In seconds she explained the plan. They would bait the creature, using her illusion magic to create a false image on the trapped long hallway of the party. If the skeleton bought the illusion, it would hopefully charge and then be caught by the trap. There was only one catch...

“To cast that spell, you have to be within sight of the hall,” Tyrion said. As a fellow student of magic, he knew the restrictions. “Which means it will walk right past you.”

Abenthy looked from one of them to the other. “Can you drink our potion of invisibility?”

“No,” Karina responded. “The casting of the spell will cancel the effects of the potion. I will have to trust that it is more interested in the illusion than in me. I have my boots of Elvenkind and my cloak, I may be able to—”

“No.” Abenthy’s voice was firm. “No, we will come up with another plan. We will make our stand in the statue room. I do not like this. It puts you in too much danger.”

Karina tilted her head slightly and regarded Abenthy with the deep black pools of her eyes, hearing somethign in his voice that she had never detected, or suspected before.

“I don’t like it either,” she said gently. “But we cannot stand against that thing, nor run from it. We are weaker and slower. But we may be smarter. It is our only chance.”

Before she could say more, Xaviee emerged from the darkness, breathing heavily. “I saw it. And it saw me. It’s coming. We have moments to run.”

Abenthy looked sideways at Karina. “We are not running,” he said. “Karina has a plan.”

Thirty seconds later, Abenthy, Tyrion, and Xaviee had disappeared down to the statue room, using the helmet of telepathy to keep in touch with Karina, who was now alone at the crossroads. Down the hallway, an image of Tyrion and Abenthy sat with their backs against a wall, seeming to sleep. She hoped it was enough. The image seemed distorted to her eyes. There was a limit to this kind of illusion, and she was pushing it past its boundaries. Abenthy was squatter than in real life, Tyrion’s clothes less colorful. They made no sound—she wished she could make them make sound—and altogether she felt that if she were to see the image in the hallway, she would question it. But then, these were her companions. To her they meant friendship, comraderie, and life. To the monstrosity they were food, perhaps, or maybe just interlopers in its world, something to be killed. To such a beast, the details might not matter.

She heard the sound of bone scraping against stone as the creature emerged into the fourway corridor. She pressed herself back against the wall, not daring to breath, trying to control her shaking. It was huge. It didn’t have hands. The bones that made up its arms and legs were sharp and stunted into tusk-like appendages that it slammed into the floor and wall to steady its bulk as it moved along the corridor. This close, she could see the dried blood on its front arms. Her blood, she realized, from when it had attacked them before.

The creature pulled itself along the corridor, barely ten feet from her. Its skeletal head turned back and forth and she heard a raspy sigh emerge from it. It looked at her and paused. But it was only an instant. Then the head moved on and saw what she had put down the hallway. It rasped again. Its four front arms lifted up like the mating sign of a praying mantis. It tapped the bones against the walls in a stacatto beat.

And then it turned back towards her hiding place.

No, she thought, and it was all the time she had before the thing was moving. But it wasn’t moving towards her. Its head snapped back to center as it screeched and charged the illusion she had made. And a moment later the hallway was filled with noise as the floor came alive. The floor stones lifted and sunk back into the wall, pieces of granite and an ocean of dust cascading off of it as it shifted. Underneath the stone was a moving belt. The floor tilted downward slightly and the belt was pulling the creature forward towards the grinders at its center, massive metal discs that cracked together like the teeth of some angry god. The skeleton’s own momentum was its downfall. It tried to skitter to a halt, but its speed was incredible and its body whipped around on the belt, turning it to face Karina, pulling it backwards until it got caught by those teeth and with a scream began to be eaten by them.

Karina watched in fascination as the bones exploded into fine white powder as half of the skeleton’s body was pulled between the grinders. Only briefly did they seem to halt under the enormouse beast being fed them. But they never truly stopped and the speed at which they decimated the bone was shocking.

But then the beast was moving, pulling itself up. Appendages dug into the stone walls and it ripped itself front half free from the lost back half. The torso began to climb up to the ceiling and then back towards her. She tried to raise her bow, but fear had finally taken hold of her mind. It was coming, so fast for something so injured, and she could do nothing, and her plan had failed afrer all.

Not failed, a voice in her head said.

Abenthy was there beside her, then. He tapped the telepathy helmet on his head knowingly and smiled for the first time in weeks. A flash of light erupted near him as Tyrion cast spell after spell at the creature, his bardic voice singing out the words to the spells. Xaviee was firing arrows at the beast. And then Abenthy cast his own spell and a massive spectral greatsword appeared in front of the creature. It sliced and the bones came free from the ceiling. It fell with a cry and was carried backwards again, into the grinder, into its doom.

And then the halls of Haggemoth echoed for the first time in their history with the sound of cheers and victory.

Noxious Growth

The companions cheer does not last forever. They have just seen a massive beast get chewed to dust by the trap in front of them and are understandably wary of approaching it themselves. They know that there are devices in this dungeon which shut down traps and so they determine to find the one for this hallway.

On a (correct) hunch, they head south, to the room where they found a secret door with a fungal growth coming through it. Abenthy, immune to disease, opens the door, enters room 19, and...

Even knowing that whatever spores or infection lingered here could not hurt him due to his divine background, Abenthy could not help but cover his mouth and nose as he entered the room, as if it could actually help protect him.

The room was thick with fungus. Every spot of the floor and walls were covered in a violet tapestry of interwoven strands of mold. Every step he took, his steel clad feet crushed the delicate rug and sent up explosions of a violet dust—more of the spores, he knew. It was impossible to tell what the room’s purpose had once been. Its only decoration now was a body.

It was a curious corpse. It hung suspended at the far end of the room, wrapped in a thick web of the mold strands. It was definitely humanoid, but its features had eroded, leaving fungal growths where limbs should have been. The feet were still barely discernible, though melded together into a fleshy mass. The head lacked most features except a gaping, too-wide hole where perhaps the mouth had once been.

As Abenthy stared, that mouth suddenly closed and then opened and a clicking sound began to emerge from it, like a tongue rapidly tapping against the roof of a mouth. The body began to gyrate madly in its prison. Abenthy raised his shield and only this saved him from death. Acid spewed forth from the mouth in a projectile vomit that went fifteen feet across the room, splashing against the shield. Even so, the air around Abenthy suddenly shimmered with heat and his lungs burned as spores began to burst into small explosions all around him. He grabbed a javelin from his side and threw it, cleanly impaling the gyrating corpose. It clicked at him in response and continued to push at the confines of its webbing. Abenthy backed up and bumped into something. He spun, ready to see another of the creatures having snuck up behind him, but it was Karina, her eyes wide at the sight of the horrendous room.

“Out!” she commanded, and then she pointed a hand at the creature. A skeletal hand ripped at its chest and the effect was terrifying to see. Where the claws touched, the fungus rotted and died, almost instantly. A gaping wound was left in the creature’s chest and it screamed for the first time, a horrible half human sound like a man trying to cry for help from underwater. The creature strained again and this time the webbing broke and it fell to what passed for its feet. Then it was charging them...

This is yet another time I have dipped into Kobold Press’ Tome of Beasts. It really is the second monsters manual I always wanted from DnD 5 and my most used third party supplement. First of all, it has some tough monsters, nicely filling out the later level gaps left by the original MM. Also, each encounter, whatever the CR, is simply interesting. Each monster has a mechanic that adds to the tactics of the system, whether it is dealing with poisons, grapples, pushes and shoves, or diseases (as in this case). I drew inspiration from this book to create several of my own monsters, including the Skele-Pede and I can’t recommend it highly enough for 5th Edition DMs.

This particular beastie is a Mindrot Thrall and I cannot detail exactly what its infectious spores do, because it is very possible that at least one of my non-Aasimir players has become infected by it and I don’t want to spoil the surprise when they read this.

Suffice to say, they do end up defeating the creature, as it vomits forth acid and spores and makes a mess of the rooms. They then push on, find the trap mechanism, and clear the way for next time’s post: Ever Deeper.

[zippdementia]

Part 62 Alignment May Vary: Valley of the Fane

This is the ongoing journey log of my longest running Dungeons and Dragons campaign, started in October of 2016. The campaign will be broken into five parts, the fourth of which you are currently reading. For the first part, which focuses on adventures in the Moonsea, click here. For the second, which focuses on the search for the Tomb of Haggemoth, click here. For the third, which focuses on the confrontation with the Red Hand of Doom, click here. 

Imoaza leads the companions to the Vale, a large valley looking down upon a ruined tower that reaches into the sky like a man-made mountain. Before they can go down into the valley, they are waylaid by five serpentine figures: Imoaza’s brethren have been waiting for her to try to enter the Vale and had one of her daughters, Hecaté, a Yuan Ti who hatched after Imoaza left her people, set a trap for her. 

Hecaté weilds the Malnora, a hexblade scimitar capable of cutting through space time to allow Hecaté to warp all around the battlefield. Still, it proves no match for Imoaza’s Drosselgreymer and Hecaté was not preparing Imoaza to come with companions. Because of these missteps, the players make surprisingly short work of the Yuan-Ti, defeating them while taking barely any damage. Only Hecaté survives, using Malnora’s power to dive through a tear she makes in space, promising that she will return. After this, the players make their way down to the tower.

The part of the adventure is meant to be a puzzle. Getting into the tower is the first part of that puzzle. This leads to a climbing sequence which becomes unintentionally funny when Aldric continually fails his strength check despite his massive strength score and keeps plummeting down a hundred feet or so to the last climbing check point he made. Level 11 characters are built tough!

After the fight, Aldric has a sad moment as he realizes that he can’t bring Anope, his horse (and second to bear the name), with him. So he releases her into the wild, telling her to “find her way back home.” She runs off, leaving behind this adventure, but maybe starting another one... more on that in a future blog.

Carrick also notices a few very odd things as they climb the tower. First, in their journey to this valley, they have seen nothing indicating the presence of an army. No marks on the land, no signs of campgrounds, and definitely no hobgoblin encampments. Are they actually heading to the right place? Also, this tower is odd. It’s made of a a strong material, maybe like iron, that Carrick cannot identify. What was its purpose?

Finally managing to scale the tower and create a path for the others using rope, Aldric pulls himself through a crack in the tower wall and onto a huge ledge. The companions find a nest here, filled with large warm eggs, and a skeleton near it that gives Aldric quite a shock: when he finds the skeleton’s magical +2 longsword, he realizes that he knows the blade and its owner.

The sword is Mistreaver and the man is Longrimor. He was a member of the Green Company, a chronicler of their exploits, who left the Company not many years before it was destroyed by the Behir, saying that he was seeking a great treasure, the “greatest of treasures” in a lost valley. His journal details his final days:

... found the tower, precisely where the legends and the sage suspected it would be. If my theory is correct, this changes everything we thought we knew about (here the writing is illegible). I cannot turn back now. I will sleep in the shleter of the (illegible) tonite, meditate on my discoveries, and in the morning press on.

And then there is one final hurridly scrawled entry: THE LIGHTS!

Aldric mourns the man’s death and keeps the sword but continues to use Blackrazor for the time being. Which, speaking of Blackrazor, the dark sword has gone eerily silent on Aldric, refusing to speak or to use any of its powers outside of its base magical strength. This began right after Aldric first witnessed Imoaza summon her Drosselgreymer during the fight against Hecate and the blade’s sudden change in nature concerns Aldric, though he has no idea what it means.

The inside of the tower contains a forest, at the edges of which they can see a small lake. The sun is setting fast, the rising peaks surrounding the vale cutting off the light that much faster, and the shadow of the tower hangs thickly on the woods beneath them. A roar and the sudden movement of trees below signals that the woods contain unseen dangers and the companions decide to settle for the evening here on the ledge rather than face those dangers in the dark. Also there is the note to contemplate: what did Longrimor mean by his final words? What are the lights?

Oakshadow

“I grew up listening to stories about you, mother. I heard what you tried to do. It was admirable, impressive even. But you failed and you should have accepted what that meant. Instead you stole our most holy of weapons and fled from us, like a coward. You made your choice back then, mother: you chose to die. Now rejoice, because you finally get what you asked for.”

~ Hecate

I need to note that the next bit of the adventure was inspired (and in parts copied) from an MT Black adventure called Expedition to the Lost Peaks. It’s not my favorite MT Black adventure (it ends a little too quickly and the pacing isn’t great) but like most of his adventures, it is unique and interesting and I recommend checking it out!

 The night does not pass without incident. The nest turns out to belong to two mated Wyverns, who attack during the night, divebombing the companions. The fight goes exceptionally well for them: none of the heroes take damage, though Carrick narrowly avoids being shoved off of the tower when a Wyvern charges him. Aldric blocks the attempt and Carrick is only pushed to the very edge of the tower, teetering for a sickening second on the edge of a deadly fall.

With the Wyverns dead, the companions decide to eat the eggs. It’s not a good idea: Wyvern eggs are vastly poisonous. Only Imoaza thinks it is a delicious meal, but then she is immune to poisons.

Rather than clamber down the tower again, Imoaza casts fly on the three of them and they all float down towards the lake. Why the lake? After the Wyvern fight, Aldric was too enervated to sleep. He decided to stay up all night and during this watch saw lights in the distance, coming from the lake. They lasted for hours, only fading with the dawn.

Right before reaching the lake, the party is startled by the trees moving beneath them. They land, prepared for a fight, but instead meet a friendly Treant. The Treant, who calls himself Oakshadow, is surprised to see the three of them and isn’t quite sure what they are. Oakshadow has been here for as long as he can count time. He says he simply remembers sprouting from the ground and seeing stars falling around him. The world as he knows it only exists within the walls of the tower. He cannot comprehend anything beyond its walls. When he awoke, his world was one of destruction and decay, but over many years he has used his powers to grow the forest, which he cares for deeply. The lake is not his doing: that was once a deep crater, but centuries of rainfall have filled it.

It seems he has no knowledge of humanoid creatures, saying that it is only him, the hunters, and the Black Beast in the forest.

“They come at night, mostly,” he rumbles. “They hunt along the edge of the lake. They seek flesh, so they do not bother me nor my plants. But they would make quite the meal of the three of you.”

He does mention something that perks all of their interests: there have been many little earthquakes lately. It seems like a small thing but it does make them think that something might be going on underground.

Heeding Oakshadow’s warning that the night around here is dangerous, the trio decide to move forward and tackle the lake right away, while the morning sun is still shining down on them all.

Submerged

The lake ends up being my favorite part of this part of the adventure. Now that we’ve left book material behind for the most part, I’ve changed the style of my DMing to being more of a sandbox scenario presentation. This means that I present a challenge to the players and then after that I become almost entirely reactive, improvising responses to their solutions rather than running them through pre-built encounters. To prepare for this, for each situation I write down three or four “interesting” ideas, things that I think would be fun or exciting or cinematic for the players to encounter and then I use these if the situation feels like it is appropriate.

For the lake, the secret is that the lights at night come from actual giant lights embedded in the ground at the bottom of the lake. Finding them and following them reveals a hidden passage that leads out of the lake and into the next area. Some things I felt would be interesting here were an encounter with a huge black beast, the thing that was pushing through the trees in the evening, who chases the players through the water, some buried treasure in the silt of the lake, a deer which can the players can save from a predator to gain some unexpected help from Oakshadow in getting to the next area, and a storm passing through the area which disturbs the lake waters and makes swimming difficult.

That last scenario would have been really easy to instigate with the Rod of Storms but, honestly... I forgot that they have the rod of storms at this point! The problem is that no one is attuned to it right now because no one is the right class to use it and they all have other items they want to use. So I keep forgetting that it should be making the weather poor. Instead I describe a sunny day, with a lone deer peacefully drinking from the lake’s edge a litle bit away.

As usual, the players surprise me. I think their most likely choice is to camp by the lake until night, so they can see and try to understand the lights. But they are too nervous about what might be coming at night, so they take the safer route and Aldric dives solo into the lake to explore, using a potion of water breathing to make it a little easier.

This creates a really fun underwater adventure, where Aldric is trying to figure out what to do in the lake. He quickly finds the great black beast and recognizes it as a huge version of the one he faced at Brindol. However, I want to reward the players for being smart, so the beast is asleep, simply a looming threat that makes the entire underwater journey a little more tense.

Also, because I didn’t expect the party to split up, I have to find something for the other players to do. So I grab a creature out of Kobold Press’ Tome of Foes, the Vapor Lynx, and stage an attack by two of the predators.

Carrick tapped Imoaza on the shoulder. “The deer,” he said. “It’s run off.”

Imoaza immediately began sniffing the air, opening her mouth slightly to let the taste of the air run over her tongue. She looked then off into the woods, narrowing her eyes at a mist that was rolling through the trees. She didn’t tell Carrick to be ready. In her mind, if the Half Elf couldn’t see what was coming at them, then he deserved to be ambushed.

The mist reached them far too quickly to be a normal fog and as it came it formed teeth, claws, and a long sleek body that sat low to the ground, its powerful back legs curled under it in readiness to pounce.

This is a fun fight. The Vapor Lynx can release a poisonous cloud of fog and then hide in it. Being able to see through it, they can launch a sudden surprise attack from almost anywhere. Carrick and Imoaza display their very different fighting styles. Carrick likes to use ready actions to let enemies come to him, using his high AC and health to take a hit in trade for getting them close and striking them with a readied action. Then, once they are close, he tries to keep them there, unleashing a barage of physical attacks and only healing at the very last moment. You can tell the character is used to fighting alone, as he sometimes strays too far from his other companions to be of use to them in healing, a cool little character trait that makes him feel more individualized than “just another paladin.”

Imoaza, on the other hand, is a boss killed. Once she pulls out Drosselmeyer, she has so many options for attacking. She can hook them with the scythe then launch eldritch blasts directly into her enemy’s face. She can pull it apart into two weapons, spinning and swirling in a dance of death. She has unusual magic, too, that can change the combat situation in a single action. She uses one of these magics here when the Vapor Lynx gets in past her swirling scythe and mauls her, leaving her badly injured. She encases herself in an ice crystal for a turn, removing her from combat until the Vapor Lynx gets bored trying to cut through her crystal and turns to join the fight against Carrick... at which point Imoaza bursts free from the prison and attacks again.

It’s a tough combat and there are no real victors: the Vapor Lynx’s eventually flee back into the woods, having been dealt enough damage to chase them off. Imoaza and Carrick are hurt, but neither fell in combat, and as they take stock of the situation, Aldric paddles back to shore: “’Sup guys?”

Enter Stage Left

What Aldric found in the lake was a series of glass circles embedded in the floor of the lake. He doesn’t know that they are lights, but he suspects a connection. He followed them across the lake floor, coming eventually to an opening covered by a jelly like substance that he eventually gathers enough courage to push through. It’s not a slime as he at first thinks: it is a forcefield!

He leads the other two now to the other side of the lake, roughly right above where this opening lies, about 20 feet down. The companions all dive into the lake: Aldric does a cannonball; Carrick does a graceful swan dive; Imoaza painfully belly flops on the surface of the water.

Finding and entering the forcefield, the companions find themselves in a long cylindrical tunnel, down the middle of which flows a small stream of water, coming in from where the forcefield is not perfectly sealing off the tunnel. The tunnel is cold, the walls (made of the same material as the tower) doing little or nothing for insulation. They travel it for several hundred yards before their way is blocked by massive cobwebs. Aldric lights a torch and tries to burn away the webbing, but then...

Imoaza looked up and hissed a challenge (and a warning). The ceiling above was pulsating, unfolding its dark mass into eight massive legs attached to a giant fur covered body. The lazy yet deliberate movements of the giant tarantula   reminded her of a hand slowly opening and stretching. The beast shuffled and shook and bits of its fur fell down around her, all of them thin and razor sharp, one of them leaving a trail of blood across her cheek where it sliced her. There was other movement now, too, and clittering and clattering. Soft padded feet moving on metal. Mandibles clicking together. They were coming: a horde of spiders to drink them dry.

There are nine giant spiders here, led by one giant tarantula (a creature I converted from Pathfinder). The fight was designed to be even sided, but my players didn’t heal after their lake escapades, putting them at a disadvantage.

Five of the spiders swarm Imoaza, webbing her in place so they can get close. Carrick is targetted by the rest, while Aldric strides forward to block the giant Tarantula’s way. The Tarantula has its own defenses: its barbed hairs act like a razor sharp shield, cutting Aldric every time he lands a hit on the creature and eventually poisoning him. However, he keeps fighting, not only bringing it down to half life, but stopping it from getting past him to attack his waylaid party members. Eventually the Tarantula retreats up the wall to launch barbs at range at Aldric instead of engaging in melee. Aldric blocks them with his shield and turns to help his fellows.

But by now, things have gone poorly. Imoaza falls under the swarm of spiders, her last action a spinning death whirl with her blades that takes three of them with her. Carrick, poisoned and webbed, continues to fight off his own spiders, killing them surely, but not quick enough to come help Imoaza. So it falls to Aldric to save her. He runs over to the pile of spiders about to feed on her and slashes Blackrazor in a wide arc, slashing through hairy legs and bulbous bodies alike. With the spiders cleared, he takes a defensive stance over Imoaza and...

“Kill her.”

The voice surprises him and it takes Aldric a moment to recognize that it is Blackrazor speaking to him.

“Stab her in the back, man.”

It’s been a moment since the sword last spoke to him. Now Blackrazor’s harsh rasp holds an element of command and determination that makes Aldric raise his blade over Imoaza’s prone figure.

“Take her down. Take her down and inherit the power she wields. Do it.”

Aldric actually has to roll a Charisma save at this point to see if he will do it or not. He fails, badly. Still, he manages not to murder Imoaza and to ignore the blade. But his failure leaves him influenced by Black Razor: a new flaw he gains is that he doesn’t like Imoaza and will actively work to oppose her. And a time may come in the future when he will again be compelled to arrange her demise. Now, if he had rolled a critical failure here...

While this drama is playing out, Carrick finally dispatches the last of the giant spiders and the Tarantula, enraged, stomps back into the fray. Aldric and Carrick face it together, Aldric bravely using his alchemy jug to spray the Tarantula with oil and then setting its face ablaze with his torch. But a critical hit from the Tarantula brings Aldric down and Carrick is forced to flee back up the tunnel to heal himself and consider his options while the great beast rages in pain from the fire. It is certainly going to murder Aldric, who set it ablaze and made so many cuts on its body, but then it pauses as a whistle sounds up and down the tunnel. Despite its still aflame face, the Tarantula goes mostly still, its back bobbing slightly as it lowers its face to the stream and rests it in it, putting out the fire.

From past the cobwebs emerge several tall slender figures garbed in grey and black. Elves, but dark skinned elves that Carrick recognizes immediately as Drow. They point poisoned arrows towards him and order him to surrender and with no further choice, he does. Then one of them approaches, a tall female warrior.

“You certainly did a number on our pets,” she says, and her voice is not kind.

“They certainly did a number on us,” Carrick answers, but before the words are fully out the female drow has driven a needle into the side of his neck and the world goes black.

[zippdementia]

Part 61 Alignment May Vary: A Harshness of Harpies

This is the ongoing journey log of my longest running Dungeons and Dragons campaign, started in October of 2016. The campaign will be broken into five parts, the fourth of which you are currently reading. For the first part, which focuses on adventures in the Moonsea, click here. For the second, which focuses on the search for the Tomb of Haggemoth, click here. For the third, which focuses on the confrontation with the Red Hand of Doom, click here.

Having been told that they need to travel to the legendary Hidden Fane and see if they can find and kill Azor Khul, the three companions prepare for a long journey. But before they head that direction, Aldric receives word from Lady Kaal of where he can find Varanthian, the Behir who killed his troop, the Green Company, and his former commander, Vincent. The beast lairs in the Giant Shield mountain range, near the Red Rock mountain.

Our three companions are.....

Aldric Alwright: A former mercenary turned hero of Brindol, who wants to avenge the slaughter of his former companions, the Green Company, at the claws of the Behir now calling itself the Mother of the Horde, Varanthian. He has faced her once, now, at the Battle of Brindol, where he grievously wounded her with Black Razor.

Carrick the Risen: A half elf paladin who has joined the party as part of a longer trial of self-redemption. His background is mysterious and sinister. Unknown to the others, he did terrible things. The black rod at his side, a weapon whose name is not spoken, is a reminder of such times. Once in a while, he runs his hand along its surface, but he never uses it.

Nysyries Soul Seeker: Dragonborn Druid, once the thrall of Lord Nazragul of the Maakengorge and also the servant of the Mistress of the Wytchwood, she is now free of their influence, free to seek her own destiny once more. The land cries out to her, begging her to remove the cancer that has dug itself deep inside of it. Nysyries hears the cry and seeks answers. She carries the Rod of Storms, an artifact of grave and dangerous power, which gives her some control over the weather but also draws disaster to itself.

A Harshness of Harpies

It is a dangerous criss-cross of paths and half-hidden trails to climb to Red Rock and the trek is made harder by the Rod of Storms. The artifact attracts bad weather to its wielder, drowning the players in rain and fog for their entire journey, leaving them feeling despondent and weary.

The fog pressed against Aldric’s face like a wet rag, leaving frost in his blonde beard and leaving him blind as he tried to carefully lead his horse, Anope, across the rickety bridge. He looked down only once, but saw only the thick white cloud stretching out beneath him.

When he heard the screech, Black Razor was in his hand instantly, swinging through the fog, slicing the mist apart and briefly giving him a glimpse of the creature that had emerged from a hole in the rocks ahead.

It was a harpy, though one unlike any he had ever seen. Instead of the beautiful body of a woman sitting atop the distorted vulture legs the upper body of this one was thick with feathers, obscuring her breasts and other shapely features. Curling from around her head were two fur-tufted horns, like the horns of a great owl. Her voice was a powerful purr that he felt in his groin:

“Leave your horses,” she demanded. “We will take them as toll for your passage through our land.”

Aldric shook his head, trying to clear the voice from his mind. “No,” he said, though it took him a moment longer to remember why he was disagreeing. “They are... our horses.” His thoughts felt sluggish, his body tight and tired, like he had run miles over the mountain.

The harpy smiled, seeing him shake his head again. She scratched one talen idly against the hard stone of her perch. “Come to me, man child,” she said. “If you will not pay the toll, then you will give me your life.”

And Aldric listened, and  obeyed.

The layout of this battle is on three narrow and rickety bridges that cross between islands of stone and eventually to a more secure stretch of mountain pass. The companions are separated: Aldric is almost to the pass, Carrick is on a bridge, and Nysyries hasn’t crossed the bridges yet.

There are six or seven harpies who hover above the bridge, hidden by the Rod of Storm’s fog, and use their wings to create a magical gust that almost knocks Carrick off of the ledge. Meanwhile, Aldric becomes charmed by the Harpy Queen, failing his saving throw miserably. It’s actually pretty in character: Aldric has been played as a horn-dog who can’t resist a pretty woman (or man) under the best of circumstances. And these are not the best of circumstances. The harpy’s charm forces Aldric to try to move towards her at all costs and with no thought given to his own safety. He totally ignores combat while doing this.

To Aldric’s credit, he tries to turn this failure into some kind of success. He mounts Anope and launches himself towards the Harpy Queen, leaping from his horse to try and grab her. He fails miserably, literally rolling a critical fail and faceplanting into the stone wall while the Queen, laughing, takes flight and heads into the fog. Aldric’s crash breaks the spell over him and, bloody faced, he stumbles towards the bridge to join in combat.

Carrick has been trying to fight off the harpies. He takes a defensive stance, forcing the harpies to fly close to him, at which point he slashes out with precise and deadly strikes, cutting two from the sky. Aldric rushes towards him then, prepared to aid him. But one of the Harpies casts charm on the hapless mercenary and once again Aldric is unable to resist, even with a Paladin near him with his powerful aura (darn those critical failure saving throws). Aldric this time throws himself off the bridge in an attempt to grab one of the harpies and literally ride her, trying once again to turn a failure into an attack.

And he rolls another critical failure.

Aldric plummets into the fog, completely missing his mark. Carrick rushes forward, unsure of what to do but feeling like he must do something. But then suddenly he is set upon by a huge flying beast: a Quetzalcoatl. It is Nysyries, also fallen prey to the Harpy Queen’s charm as she transformed into a beast. She slashes at Carrick with her spear-sharp beak and the half elf is nearly driven from the bridge by the assault before Nysyries regains her composure and, screeching, lunges back towards the Harpy Queen who used her magic on her.

The Harpy Queen is taken by surprise, unbelieving that Nysyries could break free from her spell. The Quetzalcoatl’s talons rip feathers from the Queen’s flanks and the Harpy screeches in indignation. She stretches her wings out and puffs up her feathers, releasing a cloud of dust and dander that Nysyries breathes deeply into her lungs. The effects are instantaneous: Nysyries falls into a deep sleep and drops from the sky like a stone and a moment later the fog, created by the Rod of Storms, dives after her.

Carrick, blinded by the sudden reveal of the sun and unaware of what has happened, continues to fight bravely, but the harpies overwhelm him and when their Queen joins the fray, there is nothing he can do. Talons claw ribbons of flesh from his face and the weight of three Harpies bears him to the ground, unconscious, as the bird-women prepare to feed.

But then suddenly they all look up, their screeching halting. The Harpy Queen hisses. “It’s her,” she snarls. But though there is hatred in her voice, there is no fight in it. Fear and frustration mingle together to push out anger and the Queen takes flight, her coven soon following, snatching Nysyries’ horse as they depart (Carrick’s mount was actually a summoned magical being which disappeared when he fell unconscious, and Anope is strong enough to rear up and kick the harpies away, clocking one in the face with its hooves).

And something approaches Carrick...

Decisions

Aldric opened his eyes. How was he still alive? He looked around and saw he was on a thin path that practically hugged the cliff side. The fog was still present here, but not as thick as it had been above. Still, it showed him only that there was a drop bare inches to his left, a drop that most likely he would not be fortunate enough to survive as he had this one.

He strained his ears, trying to hear the sounds of battle, but nothing came to him from above. Or almost nothing. There was a rasping sound drifting through the air, like the quiet pained breathing of some great beast.

“The next time you are going to jump off of a mountain, do me a courtesy and give me to Nysyries,” growled Blackrazor, startling Aldric.

“I don’t know,” Aldric told the sword cheerily. “That seemed to go pretty okay for me. Maybe I have a new career in mountain jumping.”

Aldric fell about one hundred and fifty feet, but the damage rolled is surprisingly low, less than sixty (and he has over a hundred hit points). So while the fall hurts, it doesn’t phase him, and so he gathers himself up and heads up the skinny path towards the sounds, his boots trailing mist as he walks. The sounds get worse the closer he comes and eventually he realizes they aren’t quiet rasping sounds at all, but roars of pain muffled by layers of stone.

He follows the roars into a cave and eventually comes to a place where Varanthian lies on a treasure hoard, writhing in pain. She notices him almost at once and hisses at him that their last encounter left her painfully wounded and the wounds of Blackrazor are refusing to heal. Now she can’t move enough to throw herself from the cliffside and her strength is gone so that she cannot beat her brains out on the cave ceiling. All that is left to her is slow starvation, and Behir can survive for months without food and water. She begs Aldric to finish her off, and the mercenary obliges, cutting her head off with a single blow.

As Blackrazor pulls in the soul of this powerful creature, her body turns to ash and blows away, much like what happened with the other powerful foes he defeated at Brindol. And then Aldric is left alone, his revenge completed, feeling elated... and completely lost as to what to do next.

He wanders for a while, then, traveling aimlessly through the caves, until he finds himself looking down a path that spirals past waterfalls, glistening in the light of the moon coming in from somewhere high above. A pool rests at the bottom of the path and in the middle of the pool is a stone island. And on the island stands a man, waiting for Aldric.

Aldric’s old leader, the commander of the company, beckons him to join him on the island of stone. He tells Aldric that the company has been avenged and can finally rest, and that Aldric is now the new commander. He must go out and rebuild the company, “for better or for worse, the choice is his.” He leaves Aldric with a silver horn that he can use to call the souls of the company to join him in battle and, surrounded by the ghosts of his old companions, Aldric is made the new commander in a short ritual.

Carrick, meanwhile, is in a deep sleep. The half elf wanders a grand temple of his god in this sleep, following the sounds of hammering to a humongous side room where a small man (made smaller yet by the ridiculous god-sized room) stands at a huge anvil, hammering away at something. The man is not just small, he is a dwarf, though it is hard to tell at first because he has no beard. Carrick first mistakes him for a halfling, but when the dwarf speaks, his rough accent betrays his species.

“You’ve finally come.”

Carrick speaks slowly in response: “You... know me?”

“Aye! Your god put me here to give you a message.”

“Who are you?”

“One who sought balance, and failed to find it. The world had a chance, old man. It had a chance to be saved. Balance could have been had. But the moment was lost when a decision was made, a decision that tore my soul apart. Only a piece of it was able to escape the destruction of my device, and it made its way here, to you.

“Now balance can never be had. Good and Evil will fight and one WILL win. The world will fall either forever into darkness, or be cleansed by the light. There is no longer one way or the other. And when that moment comes, which way it falls will depend on the actions you take, Carrick.

“You will be traveling with two companions and they will become forces of either good or evil, turning the tide of the battle to come. You must make sure they fight for the forces of good, Carrick, or all will be lost.”

The dwarf looked up briefly from his hammering. “Will you take on this mission, Carrick?”

Carrick nods. “I will try.”

The dwarf nods. “When the time comes, we will meet again. For now, awaken!”

Imoaza

Carrick startled awake to find himself in a cave, a small fire burning next to him, keeping him warm. Aldric crouched over him, smiling. “I wondered when you would get up.”

Carrick ran his tongue around his mouth before speaking, feeling how thick it felt. “Water,” he croaked and Aldric obliged, opening his waterskin and pouring some over his parched lips. Carrick swallowed and this time when he spoke it was less like speaking through cotton. “You survived... how?”

“Manly bravado,” Aldric said.

“I survived... how?”

“That would be her.” Aldric nodded to a corner of the cave where, when Carrick turned his head, he could see a figure crouched in the darkness. The figure moved then and Carrick unconsciously pushed himself away from her, his entire mind reeling from the way the figure seemed to uncurl from the darkness and move towards him.

She was not human. Despite having two legs, two arms, and a head, he could see that at once. Her skin had a sickly greenish hue, small scales flecked in random patterns and configurations at seemingly random places over her body, and her facial structure was far too narrow and thin to be considered normal. Her eyes were the largest feature on that narrow face and they stared at him unblinking, their pupils not circles but slits.

“Your friend says you are looking for the Vale,” the snake woman hissed at him. “I know the way.”

This is Imoaza, a Yuan Ti Pureblood and Nysyries’ new character. Intrigued by the Warlock Hexblade, she built Imoaza as a back up character only a session or two before Nysyries unexpectedly fell to her end. Actually she was originally intended for another game entirely, but I’m glad she ended up here. Her story will help shape the next chapter of the game.

Imoaza comes from a tribe of Yuan Ti obsessed with the Hexblades. She attempted to ascend into a higher form of Yuan Ti, an Aberration, and challenge the leaders of the tribe in a bid to take over with her own brood. However, her son betrayed her, taking the power of transformation for himself and becoming an Anathema, an extremely powerful form of Yuan Ti. Imoaza remained a Pure Blood and was ordered killed by her son. As the rest of her children hastened to cut her down, Imoaza stole one of the greatest Hexblades of the tribe, the  Dosselgreymer (Dah-sol-grey-mur), a huge scythe that can fire Eldritch blasts as well as separate into two smaller curved blades for use as a rapid, close up, weapon.

Cutting her way free of the tribe (literally), Imoaza fled into the mountains and became a hermit, but she dreams of one day returning for revenge on her family. She has become obsessed with finding the source of the Hexblade power and to this end has been searching for the place where her tribe came from, the Vale Where the Stars Fell, also known as the Fane where the horde of the Red Hand is thought to have their base of operations.

With this goal in mind, she decides to lead Aldric and Carrick to the Fane, in hopes of finally achieving her revenge. She dared not go alone, for her people still hunt for her, but with these two companions at her side, she believes she is safe enough.

Before they leave, Aldric insists on searching for Nysyries and Imoaza reluctantly takes them through her network of caves down to the base of the area where Nysyries fell. For a day and a half they search before Imoaza refuses to waste any more time on sentiment.

They do not find Nysyries. They do find the Rod of Storms and a piece of the jade statue...

... the statue that long ago Karina, Shando, and Targaryen found in an undersea temple; that Karina, Abenthy, and Twyin took from the resurrected Targaryen; that Karina, Trakki, and Tyrion used to fight and defeat a dread pirate raised from the depths of hell; a piece of which Karina gave to Tyrion for safekeeping and from whose bag Nysyries took to remember her fallen companion.

That jade statue. A statue which will soon come into play once again, forever changing the lives of three new companions: Aldric, Imoaza, and Carrick.