J-H
Hero
Session 23: 1/8/2022
Happy New Year! Our Cleric’s player is dropping out. She has too many other games and things going on
This game may go on pause while we do a couple of one-shots to introduce new players, so we don’t throw them into the deep end of high-level play.
The party headed southeast to Oztalun’s Lair and sold all but 300 lbs of adamantium, as well as the steel. I priced the adamantium at 50gp/lb and steel at 1gp/lb, with 1000gp of adamantium traveling back to Europe with Malamir. Between that and a few other items, the 3 players got 113,000 gp. They then went north to meet with the yuan-ti, who have lost another village to enemy action.
They reviewed their plan for attacking the nearby city of Tlalchantli, which involved using potions of invisibility and scrolls of Dimension Door to get in and out. Ultimately, they decided that with only one person able to cast DD, it was too risky. I told them with all the complexity on the enemy side, I wasn’t going to run several friendly NPCs to fill out the party too. That attack has been shelved with apologies to the yuan-ti until we get more players.
They head north to the edge of the map, then west to the edge of the ocean, without exploring…specifically looking for trolls so they can get some troll hearts implanted for regeneration.
Heading south, they find a valley whose bottom is a circular(ish) sheet of glass. Not sure what happened, but something big happened here a long time ago. In the next hex south, they find a cliff face carved to resemble a humanoid skull. Inside the mouth was a small cave with a swarm of snakes and a circle carved to aid in extraplanar summoning. They kill the snakes, an old foe from the very first session of Castle Dracula. Four manticores land on the air-skiff, which is hovering near the entry. The manticores attack and last about 1.5 rounds. (random encounter)
Heading south, the group encounters a small tribe of nocturnal Halflings, who wield flint knives and are mostly fishers who try to stay under the radar. When asked about trolls, they point the party to two hexes south, and explain that ‘tricksters’ (faerie dragons) help keep the trolls away, and they help the faerie dragons.
The team heads south, and finds a small troll village with huts, wooden shields, javelins, and the like. Ratel the monk and Dmitri the barbarian drop down while sending Teador the paladin to go park the air-skiff someplace safe. The discussion this whole time (going back several sessions) was “Let’s go kill some trolls and take their hearts.” Now they’ve arrived, and the trolls actually have houses and lives of their own. “Are we the baddies?” is asked.
I look at the MM entry and confirm that they can take a troll’s heart out without permanently killing it.
After some extensive out of character discussions, they decide to offer the trolls some magic weapons in exchange for letting them harvest a few troll hearts. I have to clarify that they can preserve the troll hearts for up to 2 weeks in the little freezer-boxes they got from the Fleshcrafter, so they don’t have to convince the trolls to take a 3-week round trip to someplace far away to get their surgery done.
When presented with a Returning Greataxe, a +2 Spear, and the Kraken Flail +2, the trolls talk a bit, do some rock-paper-scissors, and then select 3 unlucky members of the tribe. Ratel, with the best medicine skill in the game, performs surgery. It takes help from other trolls holding the donors down, and it’s messy and loud, but by the end of the day, Ratel is washing off the blood in the ocean and they have 3 troll hearts on ice to implant.
I then roll another random encounter as they head south. A couple of lightning bolts lash out at the air-skiff as they fly above the beach. Looking down, they now spot a kraken along the edge of the beach. Dmitri and Ratel drop down to attack, while Teador steers the air-skiff farther over and sets it to land before getting off on his Broom of Flying.
Dmitri gets whacked by tentacles and thrown away, but gets back in melee range pretty quickly. The kraken does more lightning damage to the boat, and I notice that it has 120’ telepathy. I had picked the boat as a target because what does a power-hungry kraken hate? Flying people with weird heart-powered boats. The Kraken speaks in their minds (except Dmitri, he has mind blank) and calls the air-skiff an abomination and proclaims the death penalty. They answer in kind and do some damage, but Ratel also responds that they stole it and are killing the ones who made it.
The discussion goes on, telepathically, in a fraction of a second. Ultimately, they agree that the kraken would prefer the Aarakocra gods dead (in accordance with notes on the Kraken page in the MM), and wouldn’t mind helping attack them other than the mobility issue (crossing mountains, etc.). They strike a tentative deal to pay the kraken to help them in their fight. They need merely return to this beach and say his name, Huizhong, and he would come.
After checking, Teleport does not limit the size of the creature being moved, although I do say a kraken would probably count for all 8 slots.
So now they probably have a Kraken lined up to help with a single battle.
The party then travels south over the ocean (slightly safer), noting an area with undead sharks and little life, plus an island, and then turn east to visit the Giantish city of Athos. Here, they spend several days searching and finally locate a Cloud giant named Marva, a Celestial Sorceress capable of casting Heal as required for the surgery. The best Medicine check in the party is about a +7, so they look for someone who can do that. I think, and roll some dice, and ask them “in a world with magic healing, who has a high medicine skill?”
Since the 5e books don’t include “Deliver Baby” or “C-Section” or “Fundal Massage” spells, a midwife would definitely have cause to boost Medicine skills as high as possible…and they find a Goliath midwife named Kaamia.
They’ve now hired the assistants they need to get troll hearts implanted and their bones plated with adamantium. I owe them costs for those assistants, and they’re talking about possibly hiring some goliaths or giants to help guard them on the way there and during the surgery.
DM Notes:
Wow! I did not expect what happened. Hiring assistants wasn’t on my radar, as I assumed a party cleric would do it. It’s a good solution available to those with wealth, though. I also didn’t expect the approach they took with the trolls, although I really appreciated how the trolls having their own bit of civilization instead of being mud-dwelling near animals changed how they viewed things. I like it when my players have to debate and plan and make interesting choices to figure out “what is right?” and “what does my character think is right?”
They skipped over some really interesting encounters by not exploring along the way. This “get wolverine surgery” thing has really grabbed their attention as an intermediate goal. I hope they go back to some of these areas.
The Kraken was just a random encounter for the area…but the info in the Monster Manual was just enough, and the willingness to talk back to it took it from a combat encounter to something totally different. I think making the final attack with an anti-deist kraken on their side is a pretty awesome idea. The High Temple of Huitzopochtli is near a very large lake, so they could pre-position him.
Session 24: 3/12/2022
We’re back! Dmitri’s player couldn’t join us, and Ratel the monk’s player had to join via Discord chat on speaker.
Dmitri, Ratel, and Teador all got adamantine plating applied to their bones and troll hearts implanted. I skimmed this pretty fast instead of doing any description, because after the nearly 4 weeks of surgery and recovery time, the two new party members met up with them (coordinated with Sending in the background): Saqwam the tortle Fathomless warlock, and Rivkah the satyr Creation bard.
They discuss plans to attack Tlalcehutli, the city of the Aarakocra earth goddess, and we review what they know about the city layout (last discussed 3+ months ago). They decide to do some more reconnaissance before making a plan. The warlock had chosen Soul Cage as his 6th level mystic Arcanum. This lets him, as a reaction, grab the soul of a nearby humanoid that dies (no save).
There are several suitably unsettling applications, like draining life from a captured soul, but the big ones are:
Query Soul. You ask the soul a question (no action required) and receive a brief telepathic answer, which you can understand regardless of the language used. The soul knows only what it knew in life, but it must answer you truthfully and to the best of its ability. The answer is no more than a sentence or two and might be cryptic.
Eyes of the Dead. You can use an action to name a place the humanoid saw in life, which creates an invisible sensor somewhere in that place if it is on the plane of existence you’re currently on. The sensor remains for as long as you concentrate, up to 10 minutes (as if you were concentrating on a spell). You receive visual and auditory information from the sensor as if you were in its space using your senses.
A creature that can see the sensor (such as one using see invisibility or truesight) sees a translucent image of the tormented humanoid whose soul you caged.
They decide to go find an Aarakocra patrol, Soul Cage a priest, and use the priest’s knowledge to find out more about the temple they’re planning to attack. To increase their chances of success, they decide to watch and target the biggest enemy patrol they can find, on the (correct) theory that a larger patrol will have a higher-level priest in it.
The enemy patrol was 9 strong including 2 priests and a wizard. As usual, Ratel used long-distance archery to kill enemies, while the others used Dimension Door to appear on the back of the enemy air-skiff, after half the patrol had charged towards Ratel and was 2 rounds of movement away.
Some spells were thrown around, and Saqwam took some substantial damage, but nobody was in serious danger. Teador the paladin got hit with the Sky Nail spear, failed his save, and spent the last 2-3 rounds of the fight stuck to the sky (reverse gravity, single target) launching firebolts down and wishing he had his griffon with him. The enemy wizard spent most of the fight under Greater Invisibility, but launching magic missiles and blights. One of the enemy priests tried to Blind the 3 PCs who had landed on the air-skiff, and ate a 5th level Warlock counterspell. Rivkah pulled out See Invisibility, and the writing was on the wall at that point. It was also late and Spring Forward (lose an hour) night, so we called it because there’s no way the enemies would successfully escape. The 10th level enemy war priest was Soul Caged, and we’re supposed to get a list of questions between sessions (so I have time to compose answers).
DM notes:
One person on Discord slows things down a lot… things kept cutting in and out, so his turns took substantially longer.
We have two new players, both pretty new to D&D (they’ve been through a couple of lower-level 1-shots).
One is playing a satyr Creation bard, and she didn’t join in the one-shots until they were partway through (mom of one of the other players). Bard has a lot of options and levers but not a lot of damage. I think she’ll be re-working spell selections after tonight.
The other is playing a Fathomless warlock, serving Oztalun the aboleth. Warlocks are fun! He gets a big built in plot hook and some objectives and information that the rest of the party doesn’t know or understand yet. Nothing PVP, but he’s got the inside scoop on what’s going on with Ssword. His Mystic Arcanum are Soul Cage, Finger of Death, and Maddening Darkness. He’s definitely leaning into the ‘eldritch creepy’ side and I think the huge area of Maddening Darkness is going to occasionally totally shut down groups of enemies, especially in confined spaces.
We lost time with Discord setup and with item assignments and inventory checks that I’d asked people to do beforehand that nobody did, so we only got about 2-2.5 hrs of actual play in.
There was still a lot of “what do you do?” “Hey, what should I do? Opinions?” and looking up spell lists and options. Bard has a LOT of moving parts and options.
Fathomless is pretty useful… the watery tentacle is basically a free 3rd level Spiritual Weapon PB/day.
Both are still learning where to find things on their character sheets, and having custom items that aren’t on DNDB doesn’t help.
I’ve run several of these “fight an Aarakocra patrol” scenarios now, as they’re fairly common. In this one, the party faced 4 champions, 2 subcommanders, 1 wizard, 1 war priest, and 1 senior priest. That’s 5 different enemy types with 3 different spellcasting blocks to pick from. It’s good to have variety, but I’m thinking about going through and cutting down some of the variety to a smaller number of priest-types, and perhaps to shorter spell lists also. It doesn’t matter if they have cantrips ready because no fight is going to last long enough for them to run out of spell slots. I’ve also noticed that the “gish cleric” war priests are not good enough at offensive casting, nor do they have a good enough melee to-hit (+8) to make reliable use of their melee casting buffs like Holy Weapon. I think there needs to be a niche for a mid-level cleric, but I’d like to do it in an easier-to-run fashion.
I also keep making the mistake of putting all the enemy spellcasters in the same initiative grouping (because there are only a few of them), which means I have to pick and resolve 3 different spells all at once.
Session 24: 3/26/2022
Dmitri’s player was unable to make it, so Ssword has moved over to be with Teador the Paladin. They discuss and execute a modified version of the original plan for the attack on Tlalchantli, the city of Tlaltecuhtli, the earth goddess. They meet up with a large group of yuan-ti nearby and get some scrolls of Dimension Door and potions of invisibility, and then spend a couple of days sneaking to the city. The yuan-ti have a spy base nearby, so this goes pretty smoothly.
They decide to attack at mid-day, when the patrols are out of town and the temple isn’t full of sleeping priests in large numbers. The yuan-ti launch a couple of major raids on the north and south end of the city, closest to the garrisons, firing arrows, lighting warehouses of food on fire, etc. The group waits a few minutes, downs potions of invisibility, and slips through the roads until they are within Dimension Door range of the temple. They teleport up to the top, finding, as expected, a vertical flight shaft that connects all the floors and leads straight down to the altar, 120’ below.
Not everyone has flight, so 3 of them ride down in a Bigby’s Hand elevator (it moves 60’ per round and can grapple a huge creature, so it can carry a few willing medium creatures) while Ratel the monk slow-falls down. They did occlude sunlight on their way down, so the priests at the bottom were not caught totally off-guard.
We paused the fight due to time about 5 ½ rounds in (2.5 hours of combat, approximately). At this point, Cipactli is dead, the high priestess has Antilife shell up but is down about 100hp, and one senior priest is dead…and the altar is destroyed by means of Ssword draining divine energy through it.
Battle highlights:
The altar acts on initiative 20 each round, opening a 10’ wide pit 1d10+1x10’ deep under the closest target (Dex save to avoid falling in). On the next round, it opens a new pit and the old one slams shut. Only one character fell into a pit (Teador) and he misty-stepped out.
Someone fired Synaptic Static as an opener and did over 100 points of damage to 4 of the enemies. The debuff sticks around a long time with none of them having INT save proficiency.
High priestess opened with Bones of the Earth. The strength 12 warlock tortle is still pinned between the ceiling and a pillar (it’s a strength check to get out, not a strength save). He’s taken some damage, but also has been out of the way of the biggest threats and appeared incapacitated until he dropped Maddening Darkness on about 1/3 of the room, doing a pretty good amount of damage. It’s still up.
The battlefield has been too mixed-up for the lower-level priests to use Fireball effectively. They’ve mostly been missing with Sacred Flame and Guiding Bolt. Almost every single Inflict Wounds the priests tried to use has missed also.
The enemy priests did land a Banishment and a Hold Person, but concentration got knocked down fairly quickly for those.
Ratel the monk got swallowed by Cipactli and managed to do enough damage to get thrown up, as well as landing enough Stunning Strikes to burn through Cipactli’s legendary resistances and stun it. Cipactli died shortly thereafter.
Ssword spent 5 rounds draining the altar and is now back in play.
Psychic Lance is pretty good at disabling enemies… lots of INT saves failed in this fight.
I’m pretty sure we’ve hit the turning point in the fight, but several PCs have been knocked about quite a lot, and reinforcements are probably on the way relatively soon (it’s been about 45 seconds since they were spotted).
DM notes:
The party:
Rivkah, 16th level creation bard, satyr - has analysis paralysis and actually used her dagger once instead of a cantrip like Thunderwave. Still did some damage with Psychic Lance, Electric Guitar (lightning bolt), and I think synaptic static.
Saqwam, 16th level Fathomless warlock, tortle - still figuring out what he needs to do with stuff. Maddening Hex was a good pick though.
Teador, 16th level vengeance paladin, half-elf - Solid mobility and damage carrying the fight. Hasn't used Lay on Hands yet.
Ratel, 16th level kensei monk, wood elf - I think he's out of ki points. More stuns this session than the previous 24 sessions!
Enemy forces:
1 high priest capable of casting 9th level spells
2 senior priests capable of casting up to about 7th level
4 sun acolytes casting up to 3rd level spells
2 champions (melee)
1 Cipactli, a CR 20 huge crocodile creature covered in mouths that bites everything near it, and hits for +14 with a 3d12+8 bite attack, plus tail slap, etc. It also can burrow through the ground and is tough and scary.
I’m not optimizing my tactics too much here. The enemies are mostly focused on “biggest threat” rather than “lowest AC”, which means they were missing a lot. I had the two melee enemies do the same thing each turn, and the Sun Acolytes would all cast the same spell so I didn’t have to use as much mental bandwidth. The simplified caster statblocks seem to be working. The big slowdown is waiting on dice rolling and dice math, plus the newer players taking time to figure out what to do. They are getting faster!
The High Priestess has Mass Heal (700hp healing) on her list, and I’m not using it, as that would have wiped out all the damage the party did in 4 rounds of combat. This doesn’t need to stretch out further and the resources burned means it could turn into a TPK. This is the second session for 2 of my players.
I may edit her statblock to reflect some other earth-themed 9th level spell.
It may have looked grim for the PCs for a while, but with no DM fudging aside from sub-optimal tactics and ignoring one spell, they are going to win this. High level PCs are pretty tough and have ways to recover from problems. This is why I don't worry about "How will my players solve X;" they'll figure out a way. It's just my job to give them interesting problems to solve.
Happy New Year! Our Cleric’s player is dropping out. She has too many other games and things going on
This game may go on pause while we do a couple of one-shots to introduce new players, so we don’t throw them into the deep end of high-level play.
The party headed southeast to Oztalun’s Lair and sold all but 300 lbs of adamantium, as well as the steel. I priced the adamantium at 50gp/lb and steel at 1gp/lb, with 1000gp of adamantium traveling back to Europe with Malamir. Between that and a few other items, the 3 players got 113,000 gp. They then went north to meet with the yuan-ti, who have lost another village to enemy action.
They reviewed their plan for attacking the nearby city of Tlalchantli, which involved using potions of invisibility and scrolls of Dimension Door to get in and out. Ultimately, they decided that with only one person able to cast DD, it was too risky. I told them with all the complexity on the enemy side, I wasn’t going to run several friendly NPCs to fill out the party too. That attack has been shelved with apologies to the yuan-ti until we get more players.
They head north to the edge of the map, then west to the edge of the ocean, without exploring…specifically looking for trolls so they can get some troll hearts implanted for regeneration.
Heading south, they find a valley whose bottom is a circular(ish) sheet of glass. Not sure what happened, but something big happened here a long time ago. In the next hex south, they find a cliff face carved to resemble a humanoid skull. Inside the mouth was a small cave with a swarm of snakes and a circle carved to aid in extraplanar summoning. They kill the snakes, an old foe from the very first session of Castle Dracula. Four manticores land on the air-skiff, which is hovering near the entry. The manticores attack and last about 1.5 rounds. (random encounter)
Heading south, the group encounters a small tribe of nocturnal Halflings, who wield flint knives and are mostly fishers who try to stay under the radar. When asked about trolls, they point the party to two hexes south, and explain that ‘tricksters’ (faerie dragons) help keep the trolls away, and they help the faerie dragons.
The team heads south, and finds a small troll village with huts, wooden shields, javelins, and the like. Ratel the monk and Dmitri the barbarian drop down while sending Teador the paladin to go park the air-skiff someplace safe. The discussion this whole time (going back several sessions) was “Let’s go kill some trolls and take their hearts.” Now they’ve arrived, and the trolls actually have houses and lives of their own. “Are we the baddies?” is asked.
I look at the MM entry and confirm that they can take a troll’s heart out without permanently killing it.
After some extensive out of character discussions, they decide to offer the trolls some magic weapons in exchange for letting them harvest a few troll hearts. I have to clarify that they can preserve the troll hearts for up to 2 weeks in the little freezer-boxes they got from the Fleshcrafter, so they don’t have to convince the trolls to take a 3-week round trip to someplace far away to get their surgery done.
When presented with a Returning Greataxe, a +2 Spear, and the Kraken Flail +2, the trolls talk a bit, do some rock-paper-scissors, and then select 3 unlucky members of the tribe. Ratel, with the best medicine skill in the game, performs surgery. It takes help from other trolls holding the donors down, and it’s messy and loud, but by the end of the day, Ratel is washing off the blood in the ocean and they have 3 troll hearts on ice to implant.
I then roll another random encounter as they head south. A couple of lightning bolts lash out at the air-skiff as they fly above the beach. Looking down, they now spot a kraken along the edge of the beach. Dmitri and Ratel drop down to attack, while Teador steers the air-skiff farther over and sets it to land before getting off on his Broom of Flying.
Dmitri gets whacked by tentacles and thrown away, but gets back in melee range pretty quickly. The kraken does more lightning damage to the boat, and I notice that it has 120’ telepathy. I had picked the boat as a target because what does a power-hungry kraken hate? Flying people with weird heart-powered boats. The Kraken speaks in their minds (except Dmitri, he has mind blank) and calls the air-skiff an abomination and proclaims the death penalty. They answer in kind and do some damage, but Ratel also responds that they stole it and are killing the ones who made it.
The discussion goes on, telepathically, in a fraction of a second. Ultimately, they agree that the kraken would prefer the Aarakocra gods dead (in accordance with notes on the Kraken page in the MM), and wouldn’t mind helping attack them other than the mobility issue (crossing mountains, etc.). They strike a tentative deal to pay the kraken to help them in their fight. They need merely return to this beach and say his name, Huizhong, and he would come.
After checking, Teleport does not limit the size of the creature being moved, although I do say a kraken would probably count for all 8 slots.
So now they probably have a Kraken lined up to help with a single battle.
The party then travels south over the ocean (slightly safer), noting an area with undead sharks and little life, plus an island, and then turn east to visit the Giantish city of Athos. Here, they spend several days searching and finally locate a Cloud giant named Marva, a Celestial Sorceress capable of casting Heal as required for the surgery. The best Medicine check in the party is about a +7, so they look for someone who can do that. I think, and roll some dice, and ask them “in a world with magic healing, who has a high medicine skill?”
Since the 5e books don’t include “Deliver Baby” or “C-Section” or “Fundal Massage” spells, a midwife would definitely have cause to boost Medicine skills as high as possible…and they find a Goliath midwife named Kaamia.
They’ve now hired the assistants they need to get troll hearts implanted and their bones plated with adamantium. I owe them costs for those assistants, and they’re talking about possibly hiring some goliaths or giants to help guard them on the way there and during the surgery.
DM Notes:
Wow! I did not expect what happened. Hiring assistants wasn’t on my radar, as I assumed a party cleric would do it. It’s a good solution available to those with wealth, though. I also didn’t expect the approach they took with the trolls, although I really appreciated how the trolls having their own bit of civilization instead of being mud-dwelling near animals changed how they viewed things. I like it when my players have to debate and plan and make interesting choices to figure out “what is right?” and “what does my character think is right?”
They skipped over some really interesting encounters by not exploring along the way. This “get wolverine surgery” thing has really grabbed their attention as an intermediate goal. I hope they go back to some of these areas.
The Kraken was just a random encounter for the area…but the info in the Monster Manual was just enough, and the willingness to talk back to it took it from a combat encounter to something totally different. I think making the final attack with an anti-deist kraken on their side is a pretty awesome idea. The High Temple of Huitzopochtli is near a very large lake, so they could pre-position him.
Session 24: 3/12/2022
We’re back! Dmitri’s player couldn’t join us, and Ratel the monk’s player had to join via Discord chat on speaker.
Dmitri, Ratel, and Teador all got adamantine plating applied to their bones and troll hearts implanted. I skimmed this pretty fast instead of doing any description, because after the nearly 4 weeks of surgery and recovery time, the two new party members met up with them (coordinated with Sending in the background): Saqwam the tortle Fathomless warlock, and Rivkah the satyr Creation bard.
They discuss plans to attack Tlalcehutli, the city of the Aarakocra earth goddess, and we review what they know about the city layout (last discussed 3+ months ago). They decide to do some more reconnaissance before making a plan. The warlock had chosen Soul Cage as his 6th level mystic Arcanum. This lets him, as a reaction, grab the soul of a nearby humanoid that dies (no save).
There are several suitably unsettling applications, like draining life from a captured soul, but the big ones are:
Query Soul. You ask the soul a question (no action required) and receive a brief telepathic answer, which you can understand regardless of the language used. The soul knows only what it knew in life, but it must answer you truthfully and to the best of its ability. The answer is no more than a sentence or two and might be cryptic.
Eyes of the Dead. You can use an action to name a place the humanoid saw in life, which creates an invisible sensor somewhere in that place if it is on the plane of existence you’re currently on. The sensor remains for as long as you concentrate, up to 10 minutes (as if you were concentrating on a spell). You receive visual and auditory information from the sensor as if you were in its space using your senses.
A creature that can see the sensor (such as one using see invisibility or truesight) sees a translucent image of the tormented humanoid whose soul you caged.
They decide to go find an Aarakocra patrol, Soul Cage a priest, and use the priest’s knowledge to find out more about the temple they’re planning to attack. To increase their chances of success, they decide to watch and target the biggest enemy patrol they can find, on the (correct) theory that a larger patrol will have a higher-level priest in it.
The enemy patrol was 9 strong including 2 priests and a wizard. As usual, Ratel used long-distance archery to kill enemies, while the others used Dimension Door to appear on the back of the enemy air-skiff, after half the patrol had charged towards Ratel and was 2 rounds of movement away.
Some spells were thrown around, and Saqwam took some substantial damage, but nobody was in serious danger. Teador the paladin got hit with the Sky Nail spear, failed his save, and spent the last 2-3 rounds of the fight stuck to the sky (reverse gravity, single target) launching firebolts down and wishing he had his griffon with him. The enemy wizard spent most of the fight under Greater Invisibility, but launching magic missiles and blights. One of the enemy priests tried to Blind the 3 PCs who had landed on the air-skiff, and ate a 5th level Warlock counterspell. Rivkah pulled out See Invisibility, and the writing was on the wall at that point. It was also late and Spring Forward (lose an hour) night, so we called it because there’s no way the enemies would successfully escape. The 10th level enemy war priest was Soul Caged, and we’re supposed to get a list of questions between sessions (so I have time to compose answers).
DM notes:
One person on Discord slows things down a lot… things kept cutting in and out, so his turns took substantially longer.
We have two new players, both pretty new to D&D (they’ve been through a couple of lower-level 1-shots).
One is playing a satyr Creation bard, and she didn’t join in the one-shots until they were partway through (mom of one of the other players). Bard has a lot of options and levers but not a lot of damage. I think she’ll be re-working spell selections after tonight.
The other is playing a Fathomless warlock, serving Oztalun the aboleth. Warlocks are fun! He gets a big built in plot hook and some objectives and information that the rest of the party doesn’t know or understand yet. Nothing PVP, but he’s got the inside scoop on what’s going on with Ssword. His Mystic Arcanum are Soul Cage, Finger of Death, and Maddening Darkness. He’s definitely leaning into the ‘eldritch creepy’ side and I think the huge area of Maddening Darkness is going to occasionally totally shut down groups of enemies, especially in confined spaces.
We lost time with Discord setup and with item assignments and inventory checks that I’d asked people to do beforehand that nobody did, so we only got about 2-2.5 hrs of actual play in.
There was still a lot of “what do you do?” “Hey, what should I do? Opinions?” and looking up spell lists and options. Bard has a LOT of moving parts and options.
Fathomless is pretty useful… the watery tentacle is basically a free 3rd level Spiritual Weapon PB/day.
Both are still learning where to find things on their character sheets, and having custom items that aren’t on DNDB doesn’t help.
I’ve run several of these “fight an Aarakocra patrol” scenarios now, as they’re fairly common. In this one, the party faced 4 champions, 2 subcommanders, 1 wizard, 1 war priest, and 1 senior priest. That’s 5 different enemy types with 3 different spellcasting blocks to pick from. It’s good to have variety, but I’m thinking about going through and cutting down some of the variety to a smaller number of priest-types, and perhaps to shorter spell lists also. It doesn’t matter if they have cantrips ready because no fight is going to last long enough for them to run out of spell slots. I’ve also noticed that the “gish cleric” war priests are not good enough at offensive casting, nor do they have a good enough melee to-hit (+8) to make reliable use of their melee casting buffs like Holy Weapon. I think there needs to be a niche for a mid-level cleric, but I’d like to do it in an easier-to-run fashion.
I also keep making the mistake of putting all the enemy spellcasters in the same initiative grouping (because there are only a few of them), which means I have to pick and resolve 3 different spells all at once.
Session 24: 3/26/2022
Dmitri’s player was unable to make it, so Ssword has moved over to be with Teador the Paladin. They discuss and execute a modified version of the original plan for the attack on Tlalchantli, the city of Tlaltecuhtli, the earth goddess. They meet up with a large group of yuan-ti nearby and get some scrolls of Dimension Door and potions of invisibility, and then spend a couple of days sneaking to the city. The yuan-ti have a spy base nearby, so this goes pretty smoothly.
They decide to attack at mid-day, when the patrols are out of town and the temple isn’t full of sleeping priests in large numbers. The yuan-ti launch a couple of major raids on the north and south end of the city, closest to the garrisons, firing arrows, lighting warehouses of food on fire, etc. The group waits a few minutes, downs potions of invisibility, and slips through the roads until they are within Dimension Door range of the temple. They teleport up to the top, finding, as expected, a vertical flight shaft that connects all the floors and leads straight down to the altar, 120’ below.
Not everyone has flight, so 3 of them ride down in a Bigby’s Hand elevator (it moves 60’ per round and can grapple a huge creature, so it can carry a few willing medium creatures) while Ratel the monk slow-falls down. They did occlude sunlight on their way down, so the priests at the bottom were not caught totally off-guard.
We paused the fight due to time about 5 ½ rounds in (2.5 hours of combat, approximately). At this point, Cipactli is dead, the high priestess has Antilife shell up but is down about 100hp, and one senior priest is dead…and the altar is destroyed by means of Ssword draining divine energy through it.
Battle highlights:
The altar acts on initiative 20 each round, opening a 10’ wide pit 1d10+1x10’ deep under the closest target (Dex save to avoid falling in). On the next round, it opens a new pit and the old one slams shut. Only one character fell into a pit (Teador) and he misty-stepped out.
Someone fired Synaptic Static as an opener and did over 100 points of damage to 4 of the enemies. The debuff sticks around a long time with none of them having INT save proficiency.
High priestess opened with Bones of the Earth. The strength 12 warlock tortle is still pinned between the ceiling and a pillar (it’s a strength check to get out, not a strength save). He’s taken some damage, but also has been out of the way of the biggest threats and appeared incapacitated until he dropped Maddening Darkness on about 1/3 of the room, doing a pretty good amount of damage. It’s still up.
The battlefield has been too mixed-up for the lower-level priests to use Fireball effectively. They’ve mostly been missing with Sacred Flame and Guiding Bolt. Almost every single Inflict Wounds the priests tried to use has missed also.
The enemy priests did land a Banishment and a Hold Person, but concentration got knocked down fairly quickly for those.
Ratel the monk got swallowed by Cipactli and managed to do enough damage to get thrown up, as well as landing enough Stunning Strikes to burn through Cipactli’s legendary resistances and stun it. Cipactli died shortly thereafter.
Ssword spent 5 rounds draining the altar and is now back in play.
Psychic Lance is pretty good at disabling enemies… lots of INT saves failed in this fight.
I’m pretty sure we’ve hit the turning point in the fight, but several PCs have been knocked about quite a lot, and reinforcements are probably on the way relatively soon (it’s been about 45 seconds since they were spotted).
DM notes:
The party:
Rivkah, 16th level creation bard, satyr - has analysis paralysis and actually used her dagger once instead of a cantrip like Thunderwave. Still did some damage with Psychic Lance, Electric Guitar (lightning bolt), and I think synaptic static.
Saqwam, 16th level Fathomless warlock, tortle - still figuring out what he needs to do with stuff. Maddening Hex was a good pick though.
Teador, 16th level vengeance paladin, half-elf - Solid mobility and damage carrying the fight. Hasn't used Lay on Hands yet.
Ratel, 16th level kensei monk, wood elf - I think he's out of ki points. More stuns this session than the previous 24 sessions!
Enemy forces:
1 high priest capable of casting 9th level spells
2 senior priests capable of casting up to about 7th level
4 sun acolytes casting up to 3rd level spells
2 champions (melee)
1 Cipactli, a CR 20 huge crocodile creature covered in mouths that bites everything near it, and hits for +14 with a 3d12+8 bite attack, plus tail slap, etc. It also can burrow through the ground and is tough and scary.
I’m not optimizing my tactics too much here. The enemies are mostly focused on “biggest threat” rather than “lowest AC”, which means they were missing a lot. I had the two melee enemies do the same thing each turn, and the Sun Acolytes would all cast the same spell so I didn’t have to use as much mental bandwidth. The simplified caster statblocks seem to be working. The big slowdown is waiting on dice rolling and dice math, plus the newer players taking time to figure out what to do. They are getting faster!
The High Priestess has Mass Heal (700hp healing) on her list, and I’m not using it, as that would have wiped out all the damage the party did in 4 rounds of combat. This doesn’t need to stretch out further and the resources burned means it could turn into a TPK. This is the second session for 2 of my players.
I may edit her statblock to reflect some other earth-themed 9th level spell.
It may have looked grim for the PCs for a while, but with no DM fudging aside from sub-optimal tactics and ignoring one spell, they are going to win this. High level PCs are pretty tough and have ways to recover from problems. This is why I don't worry about "How will my players solve X;" they'll figure out a way. It's just my job to give them interesting problems to solve.
