The Session

The group, Kip, Barrai, and Bokken decided to head off in search of Narduk, but going to the bar. Which, it actually works out for them. The bartender doesn’t know Narduk but the older man who runs the fights does. Narduk was an adventurer who used to go into the tower. But after some accident in the tower she stopped fighting and adventuring, but set-up a shop that buys curios from the tower and sells them.

They head over to her shop and find a sign on it that says “buy something or stay out”. Looking around a little bit, most all of the items cost a ton of money. They eventually try and buy information on the man they were following and Nazhir. Turns out that she had sold Nazhir an amulet that would control a sphere of annihilation. And that the man they were following was actually keeping an eye on Nazhir because he didn’t trust him. They are able to get this information by Bokken trading his cloak of the Arcane Stalker for a Sun Sword and the info, hinting that he didn’t know it’s full potential.

They slipped up with something they said and pushed her too hard. I forget exactly what they were trying to get from her that she felt threatened. She dropped two high level spells on them before they could react and ended up banishing them to Malbolge, where Barrai had been from. The group ends up in Barrai’s old cell which is thankfully unoccupied.

With no better plan, they decide to try and see the ruler of that level, Glasya. They spend some time sneaking around before they find a few high priority prisoners. They bust out an elf with thoughts that they might use him as a distraction and the same thing with a half-giant. But they are surprised to see Barrai’s sister there as well.

Glasya meets with them at this point. She is annoyed that Narduk basically messed up her plans with Barrai. So Glasya pulls Narduk from the mortal realm and sends all of the characters back. As well as Barrai’s sister who now kind of looks like Narduk, but with a few tiefling traits still hidden about her to run Narduk’s shop and aid in Glasya’s plan for Barrai.

Behind the DMs Screen

This was generally another wing-it session because I didn’t have time to prepare. But I thought it that it worked well. There was no combat really in the session just some good role playing. I think it’s useful to create some sessions that are really for role playing. They could have fought in Malbolge, but that wasn’t their best plan. I thought it was likely they would though, so I was finding the correct devils for them to fight.

Would you play in a game session like this one? How have you used the different layers of hell before in your games?

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I don’t think that matters if they already have. Dungeons and Dragons is a great spot to borrow, steal, and ask the players to help create your story with you. I talk about this often, Dungeons and Dragons is a cooperative story telling game, and that means that you can tell whatever story you want. Even if you are ripping off something else, go for it.

But You Want It To Be Original?

I get that, I really do. When I say rip something off, I don’t mean fully do that. Stealing a whole story is not going to be nearly as interesting as stealing pieces that you like. But using pieces that you like, that makes it easier on you. You don’t need to come up with everything yourself. I use stuff that I’ve read all the time, because it is cool. If there is a giant set piece in a story that I like, I will use that to create a combat or encounter in my game.

Tower of the Gods is a great example of this, you can find what is happening in that in the Friday Night D&D Posts. What is stolen in there? Well, first off, the whole idea of the tower, that is 100% stolen from the LitRPG series Arcane Ascension and Towers of Heaven. Heck, I named my campaign Towers of the Gods, it’s a bit on the nose. But I didn’t steal the whole plot of either of them.

How Do You Keep the Balance?

That is the trickier part, keeping a balance so that you don’t rip off everything. I think it’d be easy to just try and create the beats from either of those stories and see what happens. However, if someone already knows the story, that isn’t going to be interesting to them. It would be like playing through the Lord of the Rings trilogy. If Frodo still needs to throw the ring into Mount Doom, that’s boring. And never give your players the One Ring, they will abuse the power.

Instead, pick and choose a few things. In Tower of the Gods, I took the leveling up or getting the class power from the tower from Arcane Ascension. In that book, you go into the power and you get a power of some sort and that is where it starts for the main character. But, I also took the idea of potentially fighting over the tower, but that was from Towers to Heaven. Two separate story ideas that I wove together.

Borrow Lightly

So, with that example, borrow lightly. From Arcane Ascension, I took the leveling and the school idea. The plot that I run is very different. On the flip side, Towers to Heaven, I introduced the idea of fighting over the tower. But how I run that is exceedingly different than how the author of that book wrote it.

Like I was saying, grab nuggets of things. A concept or a image that you really like from a story. Weave that into your game and it saves brain power for you. But just borrow a little bit, even if people don’t know what. Because I want to tell my own story, and most DM’s are going to want to tell something that is fairly well their own.

Steal Moments

This is basically the same thing as borrowing lightly. Don’t steal everything. But it is totally okay to steal things that stuck out to you. If there is an important moment in the story, such as the luck of the draw when getting your class in Arcane Ascension, steal that. I 100% just took that and put it into my story. They drink from a cup when they are about to exit the tower. My players picked a cup to drink from and that determined what class they got.

So that imagery, I really liked. It made sense to me for how you’d end up getting a class. Now, it totally went against how Dungeons and Dragons normally does it, but it was a fun way change things up for people who know D&D pretty well. I made it work different than it did in the book, though, giving the players more agency in potentially picking what class they ended up with.

Beg For Help

Now, this sounds silly, but asking the players to help will cause your story to verve at times towards story and tropes that have already been done. Most people who play Dungeons and Dragons know fantasy. You and I know all sorts of books, movies, and television shows that are fantasy. Whether we actively think about them all the time or not, that doesn’t matter, we know them. So when you ask for help in creating a location or character, you will find that tropes start to show up or ideas from books show up.

This is a good thing. Grounding your fantasy world and story into what people know is important. It means that you and the players are more connected to the world and can more easily understand what is going on. I get the idea to do something extremely out there and unique, but that isn’t always great. Sometimes it can take people out of the story, instead of keep them in.

Putting It All Together

So how much should you or shouldn’t you beg, borrow, and steal? That is a great question. For some stories, it might be a fair amount that is pulled in from other places. Or there might be chunks of the story that are and other chunks that aren’t.

In Tower of the Gods, the whole Dorin subplot, trust me, there is no way that is any published book. Or if it is, there is no way that I’d have made it to that part of a book, because it is just so weird. So while I borrow from Arcane Ascension and Towers to Heaven, there are other parts that you can blame the players for, or myself as the DM for letting it get there.

So don’t steal everything, people will know when you have the novel on the table with you. But borrowing a little bit, all of that is good. Stealing a memorable moment, that is amazing. And asking for help means that players will be even more engaged. Don’t be shy about it because what you do will never be exactly like that book, movie or television show.

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The Idea

This is something different, normally I pitch campaigns, this time I want to do something different. This would be three one shots that all come together at the end. I would put together three groups of two players, maybe three players, and take them through the opening part of the race. Let them get to the tower, but when you can see the tower, that is when you end the session. Then you get all three of the groups together and let them fight over and all the way up into the tower.

The trick for running this will be timing. It’s pretty unlikely that all the groups would arrive at the tower at the exact same time. In fact, I think in the one shots you’ll have to be keeping track of timed elements to figure out who makes it to the tower first. Of course, getting up the tower won’t be easy, and you can do things to delay the first group more than the other groups. Then that last session, you have the groups arrive at different times, tell people to start at different times. So if one group was fast, they get there and get an hour to get as far into the tower as they can. Or maybe half an hour, then the other groups show up. Of course, now that the first group has cleared the tower to a point that makes it really fast for the other groups to catch up with them. Now it’s a question of, will any of them survive to the top. Will they work together or will it all fall apart?

So that first session, what would be the plan for that? I think that it should be about finding where the Wizard’s Tower is. create a general map of the lands, and create some points of interest, different ones for each group that they have to get through. One should be focused on combat, give them a number of small missions and then a clue for where the tower is. The next one could be about puzzles and riddles, again getting a clue for where the tower is when they complete it. Another could fall more into skill challenges, and you guessed it another clue. I think that three things would be solid for a one shot, you want them to do enough and lose some hit points, spend some resources, but not have so much to do that you’d need two or three sessions leading into it. The wizard’s tower is magical, so it can get hidden anywhere, so the whole race, I think, makes sense to take place in a day or at most two, so that the players are a bit resource poor leading into the final session.

Then that last session, we’re going to be staggering when people arrive to the table, like I said. The fastest group will do the job of clearing part of the tower. And then it can be a free for all as players and groups try to make it to the top of the tower. I would make this session as crazy as possible. Make nuts puzzles with high checks for things like dexterity and strength. Give really open ended challenges and just see what the players decide to do to solve them. Let PvP happen if the players want it to happen. Or they can work together. Because when they find the top of the tower, there will be a giant monster for them all to fight or get devoured by. I’m thinking like how it’s a monster in the vault in Borderlands that you need to fight. Let them spend resources and just have a blast with it. Who knows, maybe no one will make it to the top.

Challenges

Now, I think this could be a good game to run. However, this is a very challenging game to run. You need more buy in from the people playing in the game. In a normal campaign, you can pivot a little as you realize what the players are really looking for in the game. But with this, it’s going to be harder, the game is almost on rails, though stuff like picking which spot to checkout first is going to be up to the players. If they fight the other groups, that’s going to be up to the players. But this would be more coordinating. How I’d probably do it is that I’d run the first session on the way to the tower over a single week and then that weekend, Saturday afternoon, I’d plan to meet up at a local FLGS that has food and drinks and make an afternoon and into an evening out of it.

Timing everything up as well is going to be interesting as well. I think that getting 30 minutes off of another groups time makes sense, so if one group is really late, they start an hour later than the others in terms of making it to the tower. Now, you could have everyone arrive at the same time, but it’d be kind of fun to have the groups show up to that last session at a staggered times to kind of create more of the feel of what happened in the game. Again, that makes it a bit trickier as you are trying to coordinate times.

Would You Run This Game?

Even for me, this game is a hard sell to run or play in. I like the concept a lot, but of all the people I have ran D&D for locally, I don’t know that I have enough to pull off a game like this. I’d really like to do it with nine people, three groups of three, and I could maybe make that work, but getting schedules to work together, that’d just be tricky. Even for six players, three groups of two, that is tricky. And I thought about this maybe at a con setting, but to commit to two sessions of a single game is a lot for a lot of players who really want to just get to trying as many things as possible.

How about you, would you run a game like this? Would you play in a game like this?

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The Session

Things don’t go like they hope during the night. After dealing with two parties of goblins they were hoping that it would be an uneventful rest, but they still had Fukuro Kuma, the owlbear that the goblins had previously used and who Bokken had since adopted. And the goblins wanted it back. Using the distraction of a siren the goblin boss and two goblins sneak up on the camp and try and take down Bokken. It doesn’t work, but they do manage to get Fukuo Kuma knocked out again.

The battle doesn’t go well for the goblins. Barrai, near death yet again, thunderwaves the three goblins who were creating the ruckus sending them flying through the air and to their deaths as they wonder why they had done this in the first place. Thrain casts darkness on the Goblin Boss’s armor and with only Thrain really able to see through that darkness, he just slowly Eldritch Blasts him while Bokken and the Goblin Boss swing wildly at each other in the dark and generally missing.

Once that battle is over, the rest of the night is quite restful. At the morning they continue to the ford. On the way they cross paths with a group of four gnomes who said they had camped at the ford that past night. They had seen a trunk go floating by and one of them who had been quite drunk that night and was suffering for it this morning, claimed to have heard the trunk singing something about a “pirates life”. It had continued to float down the river towards the waterfall they said.

The group rushes to the waterfall and they see the trunk, battered and broken, but still floating, not too far down the river. They surmise that it had gotten stuck on some rocks for a little bit and was now drifting further. Since there was a cliff to climb down, Bokken uses a rope to let Barrai and Thrain down while he watches Fukuro Kuma, the donkey, and the wagon.

Sure enough, they find Dorin in the trunk. He has thrown up in a corner of it from his bumpy ride, and now firmly believes that he is a feared pirate captain. But his old ship no longer meets his needs or sanitary requirements. So he gives the trunk a proper sendoff pushing it into the river, borrowing Barrai’s crossbow, and shooting a flaming rag into the side and watching it burn as it floats down the river.

They head back up the cliff with Barrai grabbing Dorin as he starts to fall while climbing the cliff. At the top Dorin knights Barrai his first mate and claims the cart as his new ship in his quest to become the terror of the seven seas. They had over to the ford and it isn’t too bad, they are making a plan when Dorin, still standing in the cart like a captain of a ship decides to send it ahead into the water with the donkey still attached to it. Bokken is able to stop it as the donkey isn’t too keen on swimming while attached to a cart. At that point in time they decide to go to the ferry. There is also a mutiny as Dorin is slapped in the manacles that Barrai has.

They make it to the ferry with no problem and get passage around 5 in the evening. It is an uneventful trip, through Dorin tries to get Barrai to do another mutiny so that he can get the ferry as his new ship to sale the seas in. Barrai instead uses words of terror and causes Dorin to become deathly afraid of krakens that might be living in the water. So much so that he’s afraid to drink his own water. That helps them get across safely. Dorin also decides that the sea has too many pirates, so he’s going to become a land pirate.

The group pushes on further until they find a spot on the road that they think is a camping spot, it turns out to be a scenic overlook. But it doesn’t have many entrances and they decide it’s probably a pretty solid spot to camp anyways. They settle in for the night and Bokken sends Fukuro Kuma off to hunt for their dinner. They bring back a deer which Dorin wants to eat the heart of because he thinks it’ll give him powers if he eats the heart of a deer that he killed, which he didn’t. Then they settle in for a peaceful night.

Behind the DM’s Screen

We were down Kip again this week. The whole siren thing at the end of last session was actually a way for me to bring Kip back in if the player could have made it. Kip previously has made the siren be attached to Bokken. So the thought had been that the players would recognize it. Instead, it worked nicely as a goblin distraction. Since I didn’t ever say it was Kip, I had the possibility to change it up.

The goblin battle was interesting. Thrain used darkness to very good affect and definitely changed the dynamic of what happened. I like a good use of a spell like that.

And a lot of the Dorin stuff was made up on the fly. I decided that I wanted to make it obvious that Dorin was in the trunk. I think had he been looking out of the trunk, those who saw him would be likely to try and rescue him. But having a drunk gnome claim to hear singing, that worked. The pirate song made sense and then I just decided to run with it. It turned out to be really goofy and now Dorin is scared of dragons, dragonborn, and kraken.

What is something weird in a campaign you’ve played in that you have just run with?

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But this idea, it isn’t that type of game. The world is peaceful and the characters lead normal lives. No one goes out adventuring to stop anything, there are no wars that need to be broken up. Goblins are nice, Chromatic Dragons are peaceful, deomons aren’t even a thing that cross people’s minds.

This, however, isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. And it kind of needs to be that way, because otherwise it’s a boring game. If there is no danger, what is going to push the players out adventuring? What is going to keep them going out instead of just starting a nice little school for adventurers? Where do you get even the skills for adventuring?

The Perfect World

The lands of Calagathra are beautiful. The crops grow and there is always enough food. While people get old and pass away, no one has died of an accident or illness. There are no wars between the neighboring rulers. Everything is amazing.

The players start out in the capitol city of one of the lands, and everything is amazing. They are part of a school which is focused on teaching about the history of the lands. But the lands of Calagathra only seem to go back about 1000 years. Before that, besides the creation story, there is no information. But there are rumors of ruins, at the edges of the Silver Mountains, in the middle of the Swamps of Carthak, and deep below the blue waves of the Estidial Sea.

That is the jumping off point for the campaign. The players, either because they are required to or because they want to, will pick one to go investigate. What they find is going to be a world that doesn’t match the rest of Calagathra. Going to the place is not a sanctioned activity, but a Professor can ask them to assist or investigate something if they need motivation. But the ruins are banned for people to go to, for some reason. But everything else is so perfect that no one cares. Most people who study are doing so because technology, magic, and knowledge of the natural worlds is growing at an amazing rate.

The Ruins

The ruins should tell the players that something isn’t what it seems. Which ever one they pick, it is going to be the first spot they encounter danger. The further they go into the ruins, the more danger there is. We are talking skeletons in some areas, traps in other areas, but also just injury, checks they need to make to avoid accidents. If you make a trap, maybe make it a poison or a disease.

With that, though, the player characters learn about the world as well. They find out that the perfect lands of Calagathra might not have been so perfect before. The ruins contain signs of battles, they find remains, unanimated, of people, they see ghosts and specters who either attack or beg for help. And the characters should be unprepared for this. I would let the characters buy weapons, but when they start, roll for gold instead of letting them pick equipment. Weapons outside of something like an axe or knife don’t exist in this world or are just toys.

The further the go into the ruins, the more weird that they find, like I have said. But what’s in the middle? I think there needs to be something that captures their attention. The adventure is kicked off by whatever they find. Bind a spirit of something powerful and hide it away deep in the ruins.

Break The World

That spirit, that is a good spirit. Or it was a good spirit anyways. The spirit tells a lie about why it was trapped and some of the truth when pressed. It was trapped along with three of it’s kin to create almost a protective field around the lands of Calagathra. Nothing bad is allowed to come through, no murders, no robberies, no diseases, no accidents, nothing of the sort. The players, by stepping foot into this area, are now free of the compulsion to be good, however. In fact, anyone who steps into the ruins, any of them will lose that compulsion.

The spirit asks to be freed. Basically talking about all the pain, suffering and agony that it is taking on, the stuff that could be happening to the people. Not that will, but that could happen, all the possibilities, and how it is slowly tearing it apart. The spirit promises to help them, promises to try and keep as much calamity at bay as it can, in exchange to being freed. It should only promise twice though.

Now, there are a few things that can happen. The players can free the spirit. If they don’t, someone else can free another spirit. Maybe have the professor leading one team and the players going on another. Either way, when one spirit is freed, you can either have the other two freed or all the pain and everything can crash into those two causing them to explode or something along those lines.

Either way, when the players come back to town, or come back to the world of Calagathra, things are going poorly. People are getting sick and something like a common cold is now a big deal because no immune system has had to deal with anything for years. People break a leg and that does them in because no one knows how to heal. The weather starts to become unpredictable versus a light shower most mornings and then sunny in the afternoon with a mid 70’s high. Basically the world is breaking up.

Where To Go From There?

There are so many ways you can go with this. Villains arise, dragons start to horde again and attack, demons could even show up. And of course, the players will be blamed at least in the capitol and at their school for what happened. So put the players on the run. Also, the good spirit, make it fey, and it didn’t promise three times, and it said it’d help as much as it can. However, the other two spirits did not. So even the helpful spirit, which should bounce between our realm and the fey realm needing to recharge, shouldn’t be that helpful.

The decision or the players asks if they should capture, basically torturing the spirits again, or if there is another answer. As well as they should be on the run, and they need to try and stop some power hungry people who happen to be ahead of the curve when it comes to being the ones in control.

At the end of the campaign, I think the players will face a decision that can go a few ways. They can capture spirits again and learn to trap them. Or they can do a never ending job of stopping power hungry wizards or dragons, but there will be a big bad who is going to try and destroy the world. That can be the one they focus on at the end of campaign and need to stop.

Heck, even make it their Professor who is stepping in wherever they create a power vacuum by stopping someone else, pretending to be good. Make it their scheme that set this all in motion. The Professor can monologue about how they had gone to the ruins before and been enlightened. They knew that they need a fall person to free the spirits, someone who everyone would blame. They could then be the good person coming in after, but really, they wanted to destroy it in a way where they ruled everything.

And that is the Perfect World campaign. Is this one that you’d be interested in running? As a player would you want to play in a game like this? Now, it hits some traditional things later on, how would you role play in the perfect world?

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The Session

It was finally time to bring Dorin back to his home. After a few days of carrying him around with them everywhere that they went, and trunk becoming more and more disgusting, they all decided to take him back. They rented a wagon for the trunk and hooked it up to Thrain’s donkey. Assendial, however, had questions to be answered and they decided to leave Kip, Karl, and Kraig behind, maybe to catch up with them later.

The travel started out pretty uneventfully as the group was just heading towards river that they’d have to cross. It was early in the year and the snows had just melted from the mountains. Their choice was to add a day or so to their journey in able to find a ferry to take them across the river instead of ford it. They figure if the water levels don’t look too bad, they can always follow the shorter route on the way back.

They reach a glade near a small brook where they decide to stop for the night. Barrai cleans out the clothes that Dorin had packed and cast mending on them, Bokken cleaned out the trunk down stream and Dorin was rinsing himself off. An owlbear with a rider on it charges out of the thicket and grabs at Thrain with it’s beak. A fierce battle ensues as Barrai tries to keep Thrain up, and Bokken charges in to stop the fight. Meanwhile Dorin rushes for his trunk and flips into it and starts floating down stream. The donkey spooks and runs back towards the town. Barrai heals Thrain and heals the owlbear which Bokken decides to keep as a pet, naming it Fukuro Kuma.

It takes them a while to realize where Dorin has gotten off to and knowing that it’s going to take some effort and that the ford is in the direction that Dorin will drift, they decide to go after the donkey. They take the owlbear with them, and they find the donkey a little ways down the road in a meadow where it’s headed more directly towards the town, but having pulled a wagon all day it has stopped to eat. As they get to it another group of goblins get there as well.

The party again faces off against goblins. This time Bokken and Barrai take the brunt of the attacks, which works out fairly well, though Barrai starts to get low on hit points. The two of them, mainly, manage to slash through everything and eventually, the time being around 10 PM decide to take their cart, donkey, and owlbear back to the road. Bokken keeps watch since he can just go into sentry mode, but comes out of it when he hears a siren off in the distance. He wakes the others but they aren’t sure if it’s a dragon siren off in the stance or maybe it’s the sire Kip has used before, but they decide to go back to sleep.

Behind the DM’s Screen

Honestly, not much for this time. I’m experimenting with something I normally don’t do. Since we’re not in the town, it’s less about social encounters and more about possible combat. So I wanted to see what stringing together a number of combats might be like. It’s interesting to do that and to see how quickly players spend resources.

How do you string combats together? Do you have a lot of little ones, a few medium ones, a little and a big one per day? Or do you do less combat encounters and more social encounters?

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The Session

So last session the group deciphered the code, and by that, I mean, they figured out how the code was going to work and I sent what they’d translated to them via e-mail, the information is at the end of the post.

They decide to take some of the information to Assendial, though they decide to hold a fair amount back just in case they need it. After a little bit of convincing, Assendial agrees to let them talk to Addrus. A few good rolls happened here, and some decent enough reasoning. Assendial, however, came along as an observer on the outside.

She cast zone of truth on the room where Addrus is, it also gets the area that she’s watching from. And half the party makes their saving throw against it and half fails. Barrai and Thrain are no longer able to lie, but Bokken and Kip take over with the interrogation with Bokken leading the way into a bloody mess. They slowly figure out that Addrus doesn’t seem to know anything about the dragon attack which they’d begun to expect from the notes that were passed back and forth between him and Kazhir. Things go sideways as Addrus decides to use a poison capsule after Bokken stabs him in the eye with a needle.

Assendial decides that was enough and goes in and casts cure wounds, but they tell her that he’s poisoned himself and she casts a lesser restoration on him to cure the poison. And she pulls Thrain and Barrai aside to question them, because their line of questioning had dropped the name of Kazhir and the fact that Addrus might not be from Adanac as originally thought.

Bokken and Kip continue their questioning and find out that Addrus and the people he was working with, their plan was to figure out how to make the towers go away. Bokken thinks back on what he knows about Carlsbekistan and what side they were on in the war. They were a loner country that really fought for itself during the war. While Adanac teamed up with a few other countries as the war went on, and they mainly opposed another two countries who allied together, Carlsbekistan always worked on it’s own until the four countries were able to beat the two countries, at which time Carlsbekistan fell into line.

Meanwhile, in the other room, Barrai and Thrain are asked questions about how they know this all and where they got the information. Assendial eventually gets most of the information out of them, because they have to tell her the truth, or not answer. But they manage to keep from her that Addrus had a medallion for the Crescent Ravens in his lock box as well.

As the interrogation wraps up and they head back to the school, they decide that it might be time to take Dorin back to his people and finally drop off the trunk with him in it. But of course, they decide to deliver it themselves. They also think that maybe what Addrus was dealing with and plotting might be less to do with their dragon issues and more to do with something at the national level. So it’s side quest time, that the players chose.

Before they head out, there are some fights that Bokken takes part in at the bar they attend, sanctioned fights. Barrai makes some money doing some fortune telling. And they decide to go buy some fancy clothes. They fine a shop that looks extremely fancy and has a long name, Lincoln Montgomery, Frazier, Alheim, Ostervold. It seems familiar to them and Bokken realizes that it’s the initials that were sown into the cloak that they’d found that the wizard, whom they now believe to be Kazhir, had dropped. They go in and it’s expensive but Bokken and Barrai get some fancy clothes and also get an address from the store for where they might find Kazhir, but that information cost them even more.

The Coded Messages

Kazhir
In place will contact shortly nothing to report
Addrus

Addrus
Keep an eye out there is rival as well
Kazhir

Kazhir

Any details who should I be looking for
Addrus

Addrus
No details keep an eye out prepare for phase one
Kazhir

Kazhir
Phase one is started the dragon attack messed things up will need to meet with contact again
Addrus

Addrus
Continue as planned I will look into the attack
Kazhir

Kazhir
Phase one is complete will await directions for phase two there are three students who are aware something might be wrong
Addrus

Addrus
Keep an eye on them hold off on phase two until I give the word
Kazhir

Behind the DM’s Screen

This was very much a wing it episode. I could have seen this going a number of ways. And I wanted to give them some options. Now they picked going to Assendial immediately, I could have also seen them trying to track down Kazhir somehow, or just deciding to take Dorin to his home, which might have had a name before but is now Castleveinea.

I also didn’t expect Bokken to immediately escalate their interrogation, though they have been prone to violence. It was an interesting thing because my first roll against their deceptions, persuasions, and intimidations was okay and then I went 1, 1, 20, 19, 20, 1, 16, and 20. So I hit extremes everywhere on my rolls, though that last 20 Bokken used an inspiration because it was his charisma (which is -1) Addrus which is +2 and it ended up being natural 20’s facing off and thinking they were about done questioning the player decided to use it and got up to a 24 (so rolled a five) which caused him to be Addrus’s check.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens on the side quest that’s coming up. I need to figure out my plans for it, because it could just be a straight up side quest where not much happens, there could be things happening at the school in the town while they are gone that will progress the story, it could be that the side quest yields some very useful information, we’ll just have to see.

So kind of a different session, but would you play in one like this?

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The Inspiration

Right now in Minnesota we’re going through a massive deep freeze, in the southern part of the state, we might not get above 0 Fahrenheit for several days, and the lows have been very low, -14 with -30 wind chill (-25 and -34 centigrade). So how can you create a game around something like that, and that is where The Frosts of Rhime come in.

The Setting

A deep magic, something long forgotten, has awakened throwing the lands of Rhime into an ice age. Frost Giants harrow the lands removing the smaller folks, humans, elves, halflings, and even breaking down into the dwellings of the dwarves deep below. A white dragon of an ancient stature sits on the remains of the largest city in the lands.

Deep deep below the rending claws of the dragon and delving of the Frost Giants, pockets of people huddle, always trying to dig deeper below, get closer to the center of the lands and further away from the ever increasing cold that is seeping down.

The Campaign

The player characters come from one of these pockets of people left down below. Just from that setting and telling them to come from one of the groups of people together is enough for the creation for a lot of good backstories.

Their goal, of course, is to return the lands to the ways that they were or at least stop them all from freezing to death. This means beating back Frost Giants, the ancient White Dragon, and more creatures of the cold before they freeze to death. Freezing is actually going to be one of the timers of the game. Unless they can make it back to one of the under ground settlements in time, which are moving, exhaustion becomes a real thing. This is a deep cold that even a magical resistance can only slow down a little.

There are two ways you can drop the players into this game. Firstly, start at level 1, give them small battles leading up to leveling up where they can start to deal with the bigger threats in the world. Or you drop them in at a higher level and let them start to deal with the bigger things. This is one where I might start at the higher level. I don’t know that survivability of low level characters is going to be that likely, even the most heroic.

When I talk about exhaustion, I’m talking about using those D&D rules where eventually you can die. Players at higher levels are going to have creative ways to deal with it more than characters at lower levels and they might be able to stay out for more prolonged times. It might be too deadly for lower level characters. I do want to tweak, a little how exhaustion hurts the players, instead of making their check for it at the end of the day, this is something from the middle of each day. And you need to spend a full day out of the elements deep below the ground to shake it. So no magical housing is going to get it out of your bones unless, maybe, the players spend a full 24 hours in there.

The players are going to battle their way up until they are eventually facing off against an ancient white dragon. At level 20, them versus the ancient white dragon should be in their advantage, but bring in some of the allies that the white dragon seems to have, like the frost giants.

Before that, they will need to get something, the mcguffin, something that the white dragon has used, somewhere in the lands to bring down this frost. Most likely at the top of a mountain that is treacherous to get up and could cause them to die just from exposure. So at the mid levels/early part of the campaign, make it about figuring out where that item is, what that item is, and how to undo what has already been done. Then as time goes on and they get better and stronger, let them go up there, deal with Frost Giants who are guarding the items for the white dragon.

How does this game sound to you? Do these post apocalyptic style of games where survival is key seem interesting to you or do you prefer more focused on high fantasy?

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The Session

We jumped into the game immediately after the battle and conversations from last time with Assendial, Castillia and Parrag about what had happened with Addrus and his group of friends. The party decides that their next, best, course of action is to try and find out what is in that extra bank lock box that Addrus had. In his stuff they had found the matching piece of paper they would need to get access to his bank account, minus the fact that none of them looked at all like Addrus. They are a Tiefling, Gnome, Dwarf, and Warforged, Addrus is a human.

But Kip, the gnome, does have the spell disguise self, granted, that won’t make him tall enough to look like a grown adult male. Bokken crudely fashions him some stilts and the following morning, they go out to put their plan into action. Kip leaving Karl the squirrel with Bokken and his new raven familiar Kraig with Barrai outside to watch what is going on, heads into the bank. Thrain conspicuously waits out in the front waiting area pretending to read a news paper.

Things actually go quite smoothly as Kip is able to, without any issue, get into the waiting room area and into where the lock box is. Bokken follows to the desk to meet with a banker about opening a lock box of his own. At this point in time, things start to go sideways for the group.

Outside the bank, Barrai spots the adult who had been with Addrus and his group and cast fireball on them all. However, he doesn’t seem to have noticed Barrai, so Barrai just drops back into the shadows using the spell message to give everyone a heads up that things might be getting dicy.

Inside, Kip fails a check for noticing something, but is able to get the lock box unlocked with their copy of the fifth key that Addrus had. Inside he finds a medallion on a string that basically looks like fishing wire. The medallion has three ravens on it with a crescent moon behind them. It looks vaguely familiar to him, but he can’t quite place it. There are also two notebooks, he grabs them and goes to ring the bell to let the banker know that he’s done and to put the lock box away. The reflection of the bell, however, shows Kip, not Addrus, and Kip realizes that there was a dispel magic spell cast on the whole room, probably for situations like this one.

Using his new familiar, Kraig, he warns Barrai that things have gone sideways and that he needs to a distraction to get out. Well, the bird really just mimics back what Barrai had said earlier, which was “red alert”. Thinking quickly Barrai messages both Bokken and Thrain to let them know and gives a merchant selling cabbages from a cart on the street 20 gold pieces and grabs the card and starts running pushing it through the bank doors, hopping onto the cart and blasting thunderwave out from the cart causing cabbage confetti to go flying everywhere.

With that, Bokken gets very upset that he’s having to wait to get his lock box, and Thrain follows Barrai who has ditched the scene outside. Kip discards his stilts and takes off running. Thrain and Barrai make it outside in time to get confronted by Addrus’s friend. They try and fight against him, but he blasts them with a chain lightning spell and then drops a fireball on them taking Barrai down before the man disappears.

Thrain casts spare the dying on Barrai and Bokken picks him up and they head towards Moody’s Bar. It’s not open yet, much to their dismay, it was about 8:45 in the morning, but they take the tunnel back to school. Karl along the way steals most of Barrai’s rations and drops out most of Barrai’s money onto the ground, but Thrain picks it up and gives it back. They make it back to the school and think about going to their barracks but spotting Castillia going back there, they hide out in the cellar beneath the cafeteria, which connects to the tunnels and while waiting for Barrai to come to start to look at the notebooks. Eventually cracking the cypher. Barrai also helps them identify that the three ravens and the crescent moon are a symbol of a secret organization from Carlsbekistan that Adanac, their country, has been at war with.

Behind the DM’s Screen

This was an episode where I basically decided to wing it. I thought there was a chance that they’d decide to deliver Dorin so I’d done minimal preparation on that. But it was still a blast of a session.

They cypher was interesting to do. They still don’t know what it says, because I hadn’t figured out what it said yet. This is mainly because the notebooks and cypher were created on the fly. One notebook has 10 pages with letters on them. The other has lots of pages with numbers on them. It wasn’t until they had gotten a few decent rolls in that they started to piece it together. Thrain noticed that the numbers would have breaks between them. Like it would go down half a page and then nothing until it started at the top of the next page. And that the last 18 numbers were the same between two of the chunks of numbers and then were at the start of a couple of others. They started to narrow it down finding a repeating 9 number chunk, eventually finding the most common three letter chunk. This was a nice puzzle for them to solve because it was blend of player knowledge on how cyphers might work and then rolls in character. This meant that I didn’t have to do anything before hand to come up with the cypher, which is good because I didn’t. Had I not given them rolls, this would have taken much longer. I think to note of how this worked is that it didn’t overstay it’s welcome, it maybe took them 20-30 minutes at most with the rolls to figure out what was going on. That seems like the right amount of time for a puzzle, unless they have their hands on it and can work it physically and it’s all about the player ability, even then, I think the rolls for hints are always a great thing for puzzles.

So that was the bank heist, what do you think of that session? Does it sound like something that’d be interesting to play in?

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The Session

After spending last session continuing their investigation, the party, Thrain, Barrai, Bokken, and Kip head back to the school to talk to Assendial. The school is still in chaos as the teachers are talking to the Half-Orc, Lasanial, whose room the group had found the second scarab in. Catching Assendial’s attention, they get her to come over and talk with them.

The chat is pretty brief. They fill her in on some of what happened and asked if they thought Lasanial was the culprit. Assendial says that he seems to be telling them the truth that he had no idea what had been going on. And they find out that Lasanial has made of lot of money in the fights which is why he had so much money and stuff in his room. They tell her a little bit about their suspicions of Addrus, but don’t go into full details as to why. But they do confirm that he should have only had four keys for the bank, from the school. Assendial says that she saw Addrus going to their barracks with Parrag while the party was out looking for him.

The party rushes over to the barracks to look for Addrus and confront him and try and get more information from him. They burst in and see Parrag lying face down on Barrai’s bed. Addrus is no where to be found in the room. Barrai goes to try and wake Parrag and Bokken steps outside to see if he can see anything suspicious. The place is still noisy, but Bokken hears something from the other side of the barracks and decides to investigate.

We drop into combat at this point; as Bokken goes around the corner and sees Addrus, the friends whom he’d met with in the market for a meal the time Bokken was following him, the adult whom had been with them, and Castillia. They are all making their way towards a wagon, though for Castillia it’s against her will. Bokken raises the alarm to the other three and charges into battle.

Things start out going well for the group. Bokken takes out one of Addrus’s friends in the first round and makes his way towards the wagon where it looks like they are going to try and kidnap Castillia. The other three come around the corner to see the battle in full swing. Turns out that Addrus friends can use magic and are slinging around magic missile spells at everyone and they do a fair amount of damage to Bokken. Everything moves along nicely for our players as Kip, Thrain, and Barrai keep things interesting for the friends and Addrus, including Barrai throwing down a sleep spell. However, that sleep spell knocks out the two friends who are moving Castillia and Castillia just as Bokken reaches the wagon.

The adult, clearly frustrated with how the battle is going, decides to join the fight and drops a fireball on everyone, minus himself and the horses. Most of them manage to make the saving throw, but with the damage that they already have taken, it takes down all of Addrus’s friends, Bokken, and Kip. Thrain casts a magical darkness over the wagon as Barrai heals Kip getting him back into the fight. Addrus comes charging out of the darkness and throws two daggers taking down Barrai. And the adult, in the darkness, disappears, which surprises Thrain as he can see through magical darkness. Thrain rushes into the dark, to avoid being attacked and seeing both Castillia and Bokken down casts Spare the Dying on both of them. Outside of the darkness, Addrus comes to attack Kip to take him out, but Kip casts the second sleep spell of the battle and Addrus falls asleep.

At this point in time we drop out of combat and the teachers, some second years, and Sanphire come around the corner to see what has happened. Thrain drops darkness so that they can see everything, and Assendial heals the party and Castillia getting them back to their feet. She tells all of them to come join her for a conversation. As they head back, Bokken grabs a few things from the wagon, Addrus’s trunk, a cloak with the initials L.M., F., and A.O., he also stops to check on Parrag and grab Dorin’s trunk again. Parrag is just unconscious, so Bokken lugs all of that to Assendial’s office. She heals them all again and that brings Parrag back to consciousness.

They fill in Assendial on what happened with the fight, but then say that Castillia might know more. She tells Assendial that she’d seen Addrus go out of the barracks with some people so she’d decided to investigate because Barrai and Kip had asked her about Addrus. Going into the barracks, she’d found Parrag unconscious and been grabbed two of Addrus’s friends who were still in the room, shortly after that the fight started, so Parrag might know more. He says that he wad spotted Addrus so he’d gone to ask him about the extra key, why Addrus had borrowed his shirt, and why he’d gone missing. Of course, Addrus’s friends had been there and they knocked him out. Assendial asks them some more questions, but nothing much more comes to light. The group tries to get paid for their investigation, but Assendial basically tells them no because she knows they’ve taken money from some of the other rooms.

Behind the DM’s Screen

I came up with this idea for a fight after last session. I had originally planned for them to run into Addrus at the bazaar, where he’d been before, but the group went to the bank and the bar to look for him instead. I figured, since time has passed, he’d have made it back to school, but with the year end, he’d probably be looking to ditch quickly as well, especially once he knows the party has been sniffing around.

I actually had a plan of how I wanted this fight to go, did it go that way, nope. In my plan it was going to be a countdown of a few rounds until something happened, the fireball, and then whomever was left in Addrus’s group would make a break for it on the wagon. However, I put in modified Acolytes into the fight as Addrus’s friends, they can do some things, but not take hits from Bokken when he attacks it turns out. I should have gone with less but tougher ones if I were to do it again. So when Bokken got close to the wagon and the boss who was based off of the [redacted] template. That boss decided it might be better, not really planning on fighting, to set off his attack early and drop a fireball on everyone. I let the players roll for that just in case it waited a round before it happened, but it didn’t.

I wanted this more set piece type fight also in this session as we’ve gotten through the first year. Now the players have their next mission that they decided, deliver Dorin home, and also have a villain who can come back. Overall a successful and fun session.

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