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Against the Idol of the Sun: A 5e high-level campaign log
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<blockquote data-quote="J-H" data-source="post: 8952425" data-attributes="member: 7020951"><p><strong>Session 18: 9/25/2021</strong></p><p></p><p>The players for Dmitri the Barbarian and Reybella the Cleric were both out. Unlike last session, we had very little fighting, partly because I forgot to roll random encounter dice some of the time (lots of travel). When I did roll, I’d get results like “A tendriculous”, which doesn’t matter because they’re flying, or an Aarakocra patrol, which I don’t want to deal with again right now, and which is up high while the party is under the jungle canopy.</p><p></p><p>The party reunites and, of course, surprises me by heading east and then south into the Cursed Forest towards the Phase Spider tower they had taken over. En route, they discover a hexagon of standing stones. It will summon a copy of a powerful enemy from the past of whoever stands in the middle; if the summoner is reduced to 0hp, the enemy becomes real and can leave the area. There’s some discussion of using it to bring Dracula back, but they decide against it.</p><p></p><p>They pass through another hex, and hear a big meaty thumping noisy. It turns out to be a pair of Clay Golems brawling with each other in an unsophisticated fistfight that has ruined at least half a square mile of forest. There’s discussion of coming back later to deal with them or find whatever made them.</p><p></p><p>The party pushes on in a forced march to rest in the old Phase Spider Tower.</p><p></p><p>They then travel south to a yuan-ti village. On their way there, they are attacked by two Hellwasp swarms, which do substantial damage but are ultimately killed off. Teador takes 38 damage from a critical hit when the hellwasps get inside his helmet. Malamir makes good use of Chill (fire) Shield.</p><p></p><p>At the village, they speak with the leader, Ilsa (snake/abomination swordmaster). They do not disclose Ssword yet, but do show off the body of the high priest, which they had put in the extradimensional crafting space to avoid scrying. Ila is impressed, and shares information about the party’s planned next target, the temple of Tlaltecuhtli. It’s in the middle of a city of at least 20,000, with two garrison outposts. From the exterior warehouse district to the temple is a distance of over 1,000 ft. The temple itself is a giant block of stone raised from the earth and shot through with tunnels, and it’s inhabited by some kind of devouring creature that goes through a lot of meat. Ila is about a hundred miles away and doesn’t have more detailed information.</p><p></p><p>The party starts planning how to handle this, and settle on a plan involving potions of Invisibility (they have 1) and creating scrolls of Dimension Door for fast in/out. The yuan-ti can contribute some forces to attack in a diversion, kill guards so they can get into the city un-noticed, or something similar.</p><p></p><p>Ila greets the party the next morning with the news that it has tried Sending to four different contacts in the village the party had visited before, and none have responded. They volunteer to investigate, fearing the worst.</p><p>En route, they pass through a hex that they have never explored, so they pause to explore it, discovering a 15’ diameter circular ring of flowers that seems fey-ish to them. They decide to come back to it later, and proceed to find the destroyed yuan-ti village. They move south to another village (I thought they’d found it before based on notes, but they didn’t recall the description). They visit briefly, find out that none of the others in the area were destroyed, and leave to not endanger this village, which has more kids and families.</p><p></p><p>On the way back up, they decide to stop in the fey ring. They step in, and find themselves somewhere else. It’s a beautiful summer’s night, but after consuming the Hero’s Feast, they depart without dancing with the fey, exploring the rainbow-colored forest, or doing anything else. They return to 1 day before they entered. The players were already suspicious about time passing, and I did note that they did not see the footprints they would have left. I forgot about Malamir’s spider-cart-wagon thing. It would have been fun to have it be “not there” and then show up a day later or something. Oops.</p><p></p><p>They travel on towards the coast to try to buy potions from the tortle potioneers. As they travel, they ask about the moon to see if time has shifted. It takes a while of “the moon looks exactly the same as it did last night” for them to catch on that they traveled back in time 24 hours.</p><p>There’s discussion of exploiting time travel, but there are challenges related to fey unreliability.</p><p></p><p>They explore their way up the coast, finding a bunch of tortle villages. Most of them are fairly small and boring; there’s not a lot to do with a bunch of 70-120-person fishing villages. They do get a few warnings about an area to the west in the forest being weird or dangerous, and they buy a Necklace of Fireballs that a hunter found in a shark’s stomach last year.</p><p></p><p>Each village typically has 2-4 hunters, a couple of monks, a druid, and maybe a sorcerer. Their casters go up to about 5th-level spells, so the party could try to get a bunch of them together and they’d have a good fighting force…but the logistics of persuading a few people from each tiny village to group up would be challenging.</p><p></p><p>We end the night with them finding a petrified Nalfeshnee with a maul near the edge of the cursed forest. Greater Restoration clears petrification, so they’ll probably free it next session – but maybe not.</p><p></p><p>In this session, I saw them moving from “tactical assault with just the party” to looking more at war-fighting and what the yuan-ti can bring to the table in terms of enabling attacks on cities. This is a good step forwards in their planning, and will definitely make them more successful. </p><p></p><p>I have a bunch of random encounter tables, but I find myself skipping a lot in favor of just moving the exploration or plot ahead. Random Plant monster #5 or Aarakocra Patrol #10 is too much filler right now. That’s fine, it’s a DM’s job to manage time and encounters for that sort of reason.</p><p></p><p>In the background, the calendar is still ticking away. They have a generous helping of time, and I hope they explore more and find more cool stuff, but if they dawdle for many, many months, they will be in trouble. The Shadow Cat followed them as far as the Phase Spider tower. I need to do some more rolling to see if it made it farther than that to the yuan-ti village. Per the calendar, they’re due for another Enemy Action, so I’ll probably have the Aarakocra trap the Phase Spider Tower. That might be a good way to trigger one of the enemy elite-type attacks – trap/alarm -> helm of teleportation strike force while party is dealing with a Symbol or something. It’ll also make them mad to lose one of “their” places.</p><p></p><p><strong>Session 19: 10/9/2021</strong></p><p>Players for Reybella (cleric) and Malamir (artificer) were out.</p><p></p><p>Ultimately, they decide to attempt a Circle Against Evil/Greater Restoration/Planar Binding on the petrified Nalfeshnee. Reybella’s player gives approval over the phone. Once it orients itself, the Nalfeshnee tries to bargain with them, and finds their terms of “We’ll use your desire for carnage for good, just hold still for an hour while we finish casting” to be insufficient. It teleports out, manages to miss most of its attack rolls for a round or two, and then teleports over and tries to grab Reybella to abduct or threaten her as she continues to cast Planar Binding. It’s knocked unconscious and placed back in the circle.</p><p></p><p>Planar Binding says nothing about knowing whether or not the target made the save, so there are some deception/insight checks. It plays along. Dmitri the barbarian makes a religion check to see what they could use to trap it. “Tell us your True Name.” “My name is You’reanidiot” (attempted teleport). Dmitri wins the opposed Initiative check and knocks the Nalfeshnee out. Something similar happens the 2nd time around, and they kill it, taking the Maul of Extreme Pain.</p><p></p><p>They then head north into the cursed forest, finding an old, abandoned, and thoroughly ruined temple to some ocean deity or spirit. They rest overnight in a Stone-Shaped concealed area. Ratel the monk walks out the next morning to find 5 lobster-creatures with big claws and poison tentacles on their face. The party ends up killing four of them – the last kill is run down as it retreats in the water (Ratel runs on the water until he runs out of move, then sinks and kills it) because it was spotted carrying an amulet that it had just picked up (the party had missed it in their investigation). The whole fight, the monk hears no talking from them.</p><p>After the fact, the creatures are identified as Chuul, believed to be old servants of aboleths who have the ability to sense magic and magical items, and are known to seek such items out and guard or hoard them.</p><p></p><p>Somewhere along here there’s a random encounter with disease-carrying bugs. Ratel is the only one on the ground, so they go for him, but he’s immune to disease.</p><p></p><p>The party moves on to the north, finding a set of stone pillars in the cursed forest in the next hex up:</p><p></p><p>You find a pair of stone pillars 4’ across rising thirty</p><p>feet high. Two more pillars are set just in front of</p><p>them, but only 8’ high, and another pair 15’ in front of</p><p>that. There are no markings on the pillars.</p><p>Investigation/Perception DC 10: There are some remnants of</p><p>stone benches in a large arc around the short pillars.</p><p>Investigation/Perception DC 20: Near one of the pillars, you find</p><p>a wooden chest. One side bears a mark like it was</p><p>damaged by a blow from a weapon, but it’s otherwise</p><p>untouched. It is not locked.</p><p>Inside is a Bag of Holding Type 1. The Bag holds</p><p>several old drums, drumsticks, and two guitars. One</p><p>of them is very strange – it’s a neon yellow color and</p><p>made mostly of metal. (It’s a Guitar of Electricity).</p><p></p><p>Proceeding north, they enter the North Desert for the first time. It’s a desert/badlands area with scrubby vegetation and lots of mesas and boulders. There, at the top edge of the map, they find a crater with a giant onyx meteorite in it not long before sunset. Malamir can determine that it has a magical aura of necromancy, but doesn’t know exactly what it’s for.</p><p></p><p>A random encounter produces an Aarakocra patrol spotted in the distance. It’s near sunset, so the party decides to head that way and attack them as they are grounded. It’s about a 1 hour forced march, which is pretty trivial to succeed on.</p><p></p><p>DM notes: No progress on the main quest right now, but that’s OK.</p><p>They really like the Panoply of the Shark set and requested more item sets for future campaigns. The last item in the set is a leather armor, so it’s not really great for anyone in this party, but that’s ok.</p><p>Teador has dropped his shield and AC to try out the Maul of Extreme Pain. </p><p>I wonder if they’ll make the Chuul/Aboleth connection ever?</p><p>The party is running low on gold, but hasn’t tried to sell any magical items at all.</p><p>The onyx meteorite gives a boost to Animate/Create Undead, including allowing it to function with bigger or different creature types than it normally would. Of course, getting a dragon corpse or something there would be quite a chore.</p><p>I expect them to handily kill off this patrol group, even though it’s the toughest type. Based on their conversation about someone always getting away, they’ll probably have 1-2 people on straggler patrol . The Aarakocra have worse Darkvision, a clear weakness along with their air-skiffs grounding at sundown.</p><p></p><p><strong>Session 20: 10/23/2021</strong></p><p>Malamir the artificer and Reybella the cleric’s players couldn’t make it.</p><p></p><p>The three PCs sneak up on the patrol, which has landed and is making a campfire. Their stealth rolls are okay. The one guard flying around notices “something” and flies over to investigate. Ratel the kensei monk drops him with a single poisoned arrow. The assault goes off as planned and they kill all the Aarakocra rapidly. Now they have an air-skiff!</p><p></p><p>There’s discussion of selling extra magical items to raise gold to pay for implanting troll hearts or, if they get adamantium, getting the adamantine skeleton graft. They communicate with the yuan-ti via Sending. They also try to sell the air-skiff, but nobody seems to be interested in such a high profile transport option. The yuan-ti will buy some items, but need time to gather cash on hand. We also decide to handle this via Discord.</p><p></p><p>They start exploring west and find an empty fortified campsite, and later encounter the Shabaka tribe of scorpionfolk as they continue to explore. The scorpionfolk are Large and have formidable natural weapons, but they observe that they are currently wielding mostly shortbows, and make frequent use of necromancy on the corpses of their own as well as dead Aarakocra. They are very interested in killing Aarakocra but desperately short on numbers. Their own undead are kept mostly outside the camp.</p><p> </p><p>Shabaka has a problem: His daughter (low level druid) is betrothed to a warrior from a neighboring clan, but the marriage is delayed because the warrior needs more seasoning. The two of them have disappeared, likely to “The Death Knight’s Tomb” in an attempt to prove themselves. He’s sent one of his top necromancers and the neighbors have sent one of their best warriors, but they aren’t optimistic.</p><p></p><p>They get directions and go.</p><p></p><p>Scrawled across the outside in crude carvings is “Death Knight Trapped Here. Time passes fast. Not worth the risk.”</p><p></p><p>The entry area is smashed, but seems warded against dust and bugs. </p><p>Carved into the wall near the door in elegant elven, with some letters filled in with silver, is the following (requires Elven or language magic to read):</p><p><em>Facility Rules</em></p><p><em>1. No temporal manipulation magic, including passive magical speed effects.</em></p><p><em>2. Do not leave the facility without checking with Manager Baartie.</em></p><p><em>3. Outsiders are not permitted to know of this facility.</em></p><p><em>4. We shall change the past to protect our future.</em></p><p></p><p></p><p>They also find a stone-shaped message in the ceiling:</p><p><em>Aryvandaar has fallen. We tried our best to undo it, but in the end, we have toiled these centuries, only to be undone by a Death Knight in service of some mortal kingdom that grew up while we focused on temporal manipulation. Senior Researcher Othshan and the others bought time, and smashed the Heart of Time, trapping the unliving here, and I alone have escaped. Its master is denied any prize and the service of a potent servant, but it is a hollow victory. The non-material planes beyond the Border Ethereal are unaffected, so the undead’s aura is beginning to permeate the area. If anyone of learning reads this, I shall abandon my heritage, change my name, and seek my fortune elsewhere. Perhaps I will return with an army one day.</em></p><p><em>--Junior Researcher Eliepiir Vyshaan</em></p><p></p><p>There are a few names here that go back to ancient FR history.</p><p></p><p>They find a room with some de-powered magical appliances, an elevator, and some Temporal Stabilization Discs. Malamir’s knowledge is called on to determine that these are important and should be synced with the rune circles in the room they were in, and worn.</p><p></p><p>The three take an elevator down and find a smashed storage room that appears a bit old and thoroughly looted. There’s a big greatclub near a giant splatter of old blood.</p><p></p><p>They take the elevator down again and find two adult scorpionfolk squaring off with a pair of Bodaks. The scorpionfolk (the rescue team) are surprised to have allies show up just moments after they stepped off the elevator and started fighting. The bodaks are put down pretty quickly and the teenagers/young adults rescued (they had used Invisibility potions and barricaded themselves in a room). Some decomposing elven corpses are found along with a lot of nice but old furniture and elven décor, as well as magic-powered washing/drying machines and similar.</p><p></p><p>They then go down to the 4th level (counting top as 1) and find two zombie ogres, another bodak, and two zombie wights. The zombie ogres explode when they die. Everyone makes a beeline for the bodak and kills it pretty quickly. Teador casts Haste. I have him roll an INT check and he gets a natural 1; that was his chance to remember the rules. He takes 5d20 (57) damage and loses his turn due to the inherent temporal properties of the area. The zombie wights do some damage with their greatclubs, but go down. One of them asks “Where did you come from?” at the party in clear surprise. The party loots the area, finding a +2 longbow, some +2 arrows, four wizard spell scrolls, boots of elvenkind, and mithril elven chain, and a few other minor items. The boots come off of a body where the blood is still leaking out. The rooms appear to have been barely searched. As the party loots, they get a very sped-up Sending from the yuan-ti asking where they’ve been and that it’s been months.</p><p></p><p>We left off there, and I think they are going to go up to the 1st floor to take a short rest before continuing down.</p><p></p><p></p><p>DM notes:</p><p><em>Hurray! This is the second actual dungeon they’ve gone into fully (the first was the fomorian/silver mine area). The single-room raid on the Tezcatlipoca temple doesn’t really count. It was brought up (by them) and they compared what they did to a guerilla/decapitation strike. </em></p><p><em></em></p><p><em>As you can tell there is some temporal displacement into the future going on here. There are two more floors, and the bottom floor is still frozen in time after thousands of years… 6 seconds there is like 600 years up top. They’re going to get some ominous sending from the future where they disappeared and Huitzopochtli won. There were some puzzled looks as they tried to figure out where time was passing at what rate, which way they should go, etc.</em></p><p><em></em></p><p><em>I think they’re going to head back up to the top floor for a short rest. Everyone’s down substantial chunks of HP from bodak aura, bodak glare, bodak scream, wight club, exploding zombies, etc. There is time pressure and if they leave, they won’t have enough Temporal Stabilization Disks to return… so there is no option to long-rest-recover their way through this.</em></p><p><em>If Malamir and Reybella show up next time, they’ll have no attrition, so it’s all manageable – but this is also a way to deliberately achieve the 5e paradigm of multiple encounters separated by perhaps one short rest, and preventing nova-ing. The paladin has mostly been sitting on his spells slots.</em></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p><strong>Session 21: 11/13/2021</strong></p><p></p><p>Malamir (artificer) and Reybella (cleric) did not join us tonight.</p><p></p><p>The remaining 3 characters, injured from their explorations, go to the top floor, having Reybella heal them along the way. On the top floor, their temporal stabilization disks start to emit a whine, which gets louder as they approach the front door. After a couple of arcane and religion checks, they decide to go on back down to finish what they’re doing instead of activating the disks early.</p><p></p><p>The 5th floor (4th down) has two zombie ogres snacking on a recently dead elf, and should have had two bodaks, but I made a mistake and only threw two more ogre wights at them instead. The battle was pretty one-sided, but the PCs took a bit of damage. This floor had a bunch of metal tables, lab equipment, and chalkboards covered in obscure arcane symbols, complex mathematics, etc. Even the INT-19 (headband) monk could not figure out most of it without needing a lot of study. </p><p></p><p>They then took the elevator down to the bottom floor. On the way down, they heard a triumphant shriek, like an eagle, in their heads, and got a headache… apparently Huitzopochtli triumphed.</p><p></p><p>The bottom floor was a single room, 90’ in diameter, with a shattered crystal mounting in the middle, crystal shards laying all around, and 3 dead elven wizards… plus a towering figure in black plate with glowing eyes, wielding a warhammer in one hand and a longsword in the other. Drezhar the Destroyer, the ogre death knight, told the party that their little mercenary band was too late… and that he was prophesied to have his name live for thousands of years, and that they faced a legend.</p><p></p><p>Dmitri charges forth first, wielding Ssword, the artifact, which still functions. It actually harms Drezhar, which surprises him. He goes next, disarming Dmitri and kicking Ssword away (towards an ogre zombie also in the room). Drezhar hits like a truck for 3d8+7 weapon damage + 1d8 necrotic damage, several times over. As Ratel and Teador (monk and paladin) advance into the room, they discover that none of their magic items function… everyone is under the effects of an anti-magic field. Except for Ssword, none of their weapons now count as magic against a foe resistant to non-magic weapon damage.</p><p></p><p>Teador grabs Ssword and tosses it back to Dmitri, while Ratel shoots a couple of arrows. Drezhar uses his legendary actions to slowly bash through the barbarian’s massive pool of hit points with 3 more hits. I think one was actually a disarm again, but since it wasn’t the ogre’s turn, Ssword remained in Dmitri’s space and was easy to pick up.</p><p></p><p>It is pointed out that Death Knights typically have paladin/divine casting, and should be subject to Ssword’s expanded critical hit rate. This is correct, and Dmitri crits once this round for a lot of damage, allowing him to attack 3 times. Teador hits the ogre zombie for not a lot of damage, and Ratel runs in to start punching with unarmed strikes (Ki fist means they count as magic) but has a flurry of misses.</p><p></p><p>Drezhar tries to disarm Dmitri, but can’t quite stick the opposed rolls. He doesn’t need to knock Dmitri prone due to Reckless Attack. They trade HP damage, and Drezhar is pretty low when Dmitri hits 0 and has to save to avoid dying. Dying when your soul is 2,000 years in the future means you can’t be raised from the dead…</p><p>He can tell Dmitri should be dead from HP damage but isn’t, and gives an order to “just go ahead and disintegrate the short one.” Cue minor freakout. Ratel uses his next to last Ki point and lands a stunning blow on the Death Knight! Teador dashes over and uses Lay on Hands, which doesn’t qualify as magic in an AMF, to burst-heal Dmitri up to 80hp.</p><p></p><p>The two zombie beholders in the back of the room then close their central eyes, allowing all magic items to function again. Each one fires a Disintegration ray at Dmitri, but he makes his saves. Drezhar is then stabbed to death while stunned, and the zombie beholders go down pretty quickly, with only one more ray fired.</p><p></p><p>The party loots the death knight and discovers that the crystals of the Heart of Time are very hazardous and shouldn’t be messed with. Ratel considers taking them with him, but the temporal interference means he might end up in another millennium.</p><p></p><p>They then activate the stabilization discs and return to the room and time at which they attuned to them. Leaving that room, they meet the four scorpionfolk who just stepped off the elevator from below…from the middle of last session. Confusion ensues. Time travel is fun!</p><p></p><p>They escort the scorpionfolk back to their camp, where the adventuresome young fools are yelled at by the clan head for a very long period of time. The group rests there and buys several Oils of Sharpness from the smith. </p><p></p><p>They decide to head west to find adamantine for skeletal surgery. They explore as they travel, finding several scorpionfolk camps. They rescue a couple of low-level druids who were trapped by some gorgons. Ratel saves against gorgon breath once, then finds out what it is, and after that the party decides to kite and avoid the petrification-causing iron bulls. They are given a Goodberry Bag (10 goodberries/charge, holds 1 charge, recharges at dawn on a 6 on 1d6).</p><p></p><p>They meet an old scorpionfolk woman who keeps track of locations and lore of the land (cartography) and get some general terrain info for about 3 squares around, as well as being told that something strange is going on in 07.02 in the mountains.</p><p></p><p>We leave off with the party about to reach hex 08.03.</p><p></p><p>DM notes: </p><p><em>ALMOST got a PC kill. It was close! I gave Drezhar about an extra 40hp on the fly so that he didn’t go down before the beholders were at least revealed.</em></p><p><em>This was really fun and I enjoyed having a chance to pull off some time travel.</em></p><p><em>The artificer’s player hasn’t been for several sessions. They are close to finding the Adamantine golem. If he’s there, I think they’ll discuss turning it into giant power armor, which I have planned for (cue Pacific Rim music). It seems like their main motivation right now is finding adamantine and troll hearts to become nearly immortal, and the wealth to afford the surgery. They’d rather pursue that than go ahead and make the attack on Tlalchantli’s city, which the Yuan-ti are ready to support.</em></p><p><em></em></p><p><em>They are due by the calendar for an Enemy Action, so I’ll have it target something close to them to remind them that the clock is ticking.</em></p><p></p><p>Teador took the Full Plate +2, bringing him to AC 20, 23 with shield. Ratel took Eclipse and gave Dmitri the Skyfall boots.</p><p><strong></strong></p><p><strong>Session 22: 12/11/21</strong></p><p></p><p>Fairly short session today. The party attacked the Adamantine golem, and after a long fight in which 3 players were knocked to <20hp, successfully stabbed, shot, and bludgeoned it to death. This is an Adamantine Golem that I came up with, not the one from the book. CR 26, a kick attack to knock enemies back and prone, a vibrosword that gets two attacks in melee, and a coilgun (gauss rifle) on the other arm with a long range. The coilgun does 3d20 bludgeoning + 1d10 lightning damage with a strength save to avoid knockdown. Ratel hung out at long range pelting it with +2 arrows, Teador flew overhead (losing his griffin to a cannonball, but retaining his broom) and used Chill Touch repeatedly to keep it from regenerating, and Malamir switched between a few tactics, including trying out Summon Construct.</p><p></p><p>After salvaging 3,000 lbs of adamantium, 28,000 lbs of steel, and 50 lbs of mithril, they headed east and then south to sell materials to the yuan-ti and then visit the Fleshcrafter to get adamantium coatings applied to their bones. En route, they were attacked by a Rodan-descended Roc. Teador Dimension-doored atop it and attacked it a couple of times before it spun and knocked him off; Dmitri managed to jump onto it too, and hung on for an extra round, but then got knocked off. As it flew away, Ratel the monk used his sharpshooter damage and long range to kill it.</p><p></p><p>We ended there… selling and buying to be handled on discord, as well as potentially who’s doing what surgery in what order.</p><p></p><p>There was also some discussion of what to do with the Aarakocra after they “win.” Ratel is in favor of wiping them out as well as killing the yuan-ti. Teador the paladin is not. Ssword is listening and the campaign’s long-term ending will depend partly on what sort of values they convince it to follow.</p><p></p><p>I had it written up so that someone who wants to do the extra work and take on the risk could potentially crawl inside it and disable it while it’s functioning, and then retrofit it into a giant mech suit. It’s at the high end of powerful, but this is high end D&D. Unfortunately, the players decided to just wreck it.</p><p></p><p>The player for Dmitri the barbarian was sick and couldn’t make it. The player for Reybella the cleric may be taking a break from D&D… and this was the last session for the player for Malamir the Artificer; his work schedule means he has to leave at 9pm, so he can only come for around 2 hours. Malamir is going to go work with Oztalun’s people on a way to teleport back to Europe, where he hopes to create some items and maybe send over reinforcements occasionally. It’s hard to DM for just 2 people, and Dmitri is definitely the party’s hard tank/carry (zealot + artifact sword), so when he’s gone someone has to play him or they are at risk of getting squashed (2 PCs vs. threats designed for 4+). We may try to recruit an additional player.</p><p>The next scheduled session would also be on Christmas day, so we may not meet again until January unless something lines up for everyone’s schedules. That’s kind of disappointing. </p><p></p><p>The party is now very rich, although I’m sure they’ll find ways to spend most of it.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="J-H, post: 8952425, member: 7020951"] [B]Session 18: 9/25/2021[/B] The players for Dmitri the Barbarian and Reybella the Cleric were both out. Unlike last session, we had very little fighting, partly because I forgot to roll random encounter dice some of the time (lots of travel). When I did roll, I’d get results like “A tendriculous”, which doesn’t matter because they’re flying, or an Aarakocra patrol, which I don’t want to deal with again right now, and which is up high while the party is under the jungle canopy. The party reunites and, of course, surprises me by heading east and then south into the Cursed Forest towards the Phase Spider tower they had taken over. En route, they discover a hexagon of standing stones. It will summon a copy of a powerful enemy from the past of whoever stands in the middle; if the summoner is reduced to 0hp, the enemy becomes real and can leave the area. There’s some discussion of using it to bring Dracula back, but they decide against it. They pass through another hex, and hear a big meaty thumping noisy. It turns out to be a pair of Clay Golems brawling with each other in an unsophisticated fistfight that has ruined at least half a square mile of forest. There’s discussion of coming back later to deal with them or find whatever made them. The party pushes on in a forced march to rest in the old Phase Spider Tower. They then travel south to a yuan-ti village. On their way there, they are attacked by two Hellwasp swarms, which do substantial damage but are ultimately killed off. Teador takes 38 damage from a critical hit when the hellwasps get inside his helmet. Malamir makes good use of Chill (fire) Shield. At the village, they speak with the leader, Ilsa (snake/abomination swordmaster). They do not disclose Ssword yet, but do show off the body of the high priest, which they had put in the extradimensional crafting space to avoid scrying. Ila is impressed, and shares information about the party’s planned next target, the temple of Tlaltecuhtli. It’s in the middle of a city of at least 20,000, with two garrison outposts. From the exterior warehouse district to the temple is a distance of over 1,000 ft. The temple itself is a giant block of stone raised from the earth and shot through with tunnels, and it’s inhabited by some kind of devouring creature that goes through a lot of meat. Ila is about a hundred miles away and doesn’t have more detailed information. The party starts planning how to handle this, and settle on a plan involving potions of Invisibility (they have 1) and creating scrolls of Dimension Door for fast in/out. The yuan-ti can contribute some forces to attack in a diversion, kill guards so they can get into the city un-noticed, or something similar. Ila greets the party the next morning with the news that it has tried Sending to four different contacts in the village the party had visited before, and none have responded. They volunteer to investigate, fearing the worst. En route, they pass through a hex that they have never explored, so they pause to explore it, discovering a 15’ diameter circular ring of flowers that seems fey-ish to them. They decide to come back to it later, and proceed to find the destroyed yuan-ti village. They move south to another village (I thought they’d found it before based on notes, but they didn’t recall the description). They visit briefly, find out that none of the others in the area were destroyed, and leave to not endanger this village, which has more kids and families. On the way back up, they decide to stop in the fey ring. They step in, and find themselves somewhere else. It’s a beautiful summer’s night, but after consuming the Hero’s Feast, they depart without dancing with the fey, exploring the rainbow-colored forest, or doing anything else. They return to 1 day before they entered. The players were already suspicious about time passing, and I did note that they did not see the footprints they would have left. I forgot about Malamir’s spider-cart-wagon thing. It would have been fun to have it be “not there” and then show up a day later or something. Oops. They travel on towards the coast to try to buy potions from the tortle potioneers. As they travel, they ask about the moon to see if time has shifted. It takes a while of “the moon looks exactly the same as it did last night” for them to catch on that they traveled back in time 24 hours. There’s discussion of exploiting time travel, but there are challenges related to fey unreliability. They explore their way up the coast, finding a bunch of tortle villages. Most of them are fairly small and boring; there’s not a lot to do with a bunch of 70-120-person fishing villages. They do get a few warnings about an area to the west in the forest being weird or dangerous, and they buy a Necklace of Fireballs that a hunter found in a shark’s stomach last year. Each village typically has 2-4 hunters, a couple of monks, a druid, and maybe a sorcerer. Their casters go up to about 5th-level spells, so the party could try to get a bunch of them together and they’d have a good fighting force…but the logistics of persuading a few people from each tiny village to group up would be challenging. We end the night with them finding a petrified Nalfeshnee with a maul near the edge of the cursed forest. Greater Restoration clears petrification, so they’ll probably free it next session – but maybe not. In this session, I saw them moving from “tactical assault with just the party” to looking more at war-fighting and what the yuan-ti can bring to the table in terms of enabling attacks on cities. This is a good step forwards in their planning, and will definitely make them more successful. I have a bunch of random encounter tables, but I find myself skipping a lot in favor of just moving the exploration or plot ahead. Random Plant monster #5 or Aarakocra Patrol #10 is too much filler right now. That’s fine, it’s a DM’s job to manage time and encounters for that sort of reason. In the background, the calendar is still ticking away. They have a generous helping of time, and I hope they explore more and find more cool stuff, but if they dawdle for many, many months, they will be in trouble. The Shadow Cat followed them as far as the Phase Spider tower. I need to do some more rolling to see if it made it farther than that to the yuan-ti village. Per the calendar, they’re due for another Enemy Action, so I’ll probably have the Aarakocra trap the Phase Spider Tower. That might be a good way to trigger one of the enemy elite-type attacks – trap/alarm -> helm of teleportation strike force while party is dealing with a Symbol or something. It’ll also make them mad to lose one of “their” places. [B]Session 19: 10/9/2021[/B] Players for Reybella (cleric) and Malamir (artificer) were out. Ultimately, they decide to attempt a Circle Against Evil/Greater Restoration/Planar Binding on the petrified Nalfeshnee. Reybella’s player gives approval over the phone. Once it orients itself, the Nalfeshnee tries to bargain with them, and finds their terms of “We’ll use your desire for carnage for good, just hold still for an hour while we finish casting” to be insufficient. It teleports out, manages to miss most of its attack rolls for a round or two, and then teleports over and tries to grab Reybella to abduct or threaten her as she continues to cast Planar Binding. It’s knocked unconscious and placed back in the circle. Planar Binding says nothing about knowing whether or not the target made the save, so there are some deception/insight checks. It plays along. Dmitri the barbarian makes a religion check to see what they could use to trap it. “Tell us your True Name.” “My name is You’reanidiot” (attempted teleport). Dmitri wins the opposed Initiative check and knocks the Nalfeshnee out. Something similar happens the 2nd time around, and they kill it, taking the Maul of Extreme Pain. They then head north into the cursed forest, finding an old, abandoned, and thoroughly ruined temple to some ocean deity or spirit. They rest overnight in a Stone-Shaped concealed area. Ratel the monk walks out the next morning to find 5 lobster-creatures with big claws and poison tentacles on their face. The party ends up killing four of them – the last kill is run down as it retreats in the water (Ratel runs on the water until he runs out of move, then sinks and kills it) because it was spotted carrying an amulet that it had just picked up (the party had missed it in their investigation). The whole fight, the monk hears no talking from them. After the fact, the creatures are identified as Chuul, believed to be old servants of aboleths who have the ability to sense magic and magical items, and are known to seek such items out and guard or hoard them. Somewhere along here there’s a random encounter with disease-carrying bugs. Ratel is the only one on the ground, so they go for him, but he’s immune to disease. The party moves on to the north, finding a set of stone pillars in the cursed forest in the next hex up: You find a pair of stone pillars 4’ across rising thirty feet high. Two more pillars are set just in front of them, but only 8’ high, and another pair 15’ in front of that. There are no markings on the pillars. Investigation/Perception DC 10: There are some remnants of stone benches in a large arc around the short pillars. Investigation/Perception DC 20: Near one of the pillars, you find a wooden chest. One side bears a mark like it was damaged by a blow from a weapon, but it’s otherwise untouched. It is not locked. Inside is a Bag of Holding Type 1. The Bag holds several old drums, drumsticks, and two guitars. One of them is very strange – it’s a neon yellow color and made mostly of metal. (It’s a Guitar of Electricity). Proceeding north, they enter the North Desert for the first time. It’s a desert/badlands area with scrubby vegetation and lots of mesas and boulders. There, at the top edge of the map, they find a crater with a giant onyx meteorite in it not long before sunset. Malamir can determine that it has a magical aura of necromancy, but doesn’t know exactly what it’s for. A random encounter produces an Aarakocra patrol spotted in the distance. It’s near sunset, so the party decides to head that way and attack them as they are grounded. It’s about a 1 hour forced march, which is pretty trivial to succeed on. DM notes: No progress on the main quest right now, but that’s OK. They really like the Panoply of the Shark set and requested more item sets for future campaigns. The last item in the set is a leather armor, so it’s not really great for anyone in this party, but that’s ok. Teador has dropped his shield and AC to try out the Maul of Extreme Pain. I wonder if they’ll make the Chuul/Aboleth connection ever? The party is running low on gold, but hasn’t tried to sell any magical items at all. The onyx meteorite gives a boost to Animate/Create Undead, including allowing it to function with bigger or different creature types than it normally would. Of course, getting a dragon corpse or something there would be quite a chore. I expect them to handily kill off this patrol group, even though it’s the toughest type. Based on their conversation about someone always getting away, they’ll probably have 1-2 people on straggler patrol . The Aarakocra have worse Darkvision, a clear weakness along with their air-skiffs grounding at sundown. [B]Session 20: 10/23/2021[/B] Malamir the artificer and Reybella the cleric’s players couldn’t make it. The three PCs sneak up on the patrol, which has landed and is making a campfire. Their stealth rolls are okay. The one guard flying around notices “something” and flies over to investigate. Ratel the kensei monk drops him with a single poisoned arrow. The assault goes off as planned and they kill all the Aarakocra rapidly. Now they have an air-skiff! There’s discussion of selling extra magical items to raise gold to pay for implanting troll hearts or, if they get adamantium, getting the adamantine skeleton graft. They communicate with the yuan-ti via Sending. They also try to sell the air-skiff, but nobody seems to be interested in such a high profile transport option. The yuan-ti will buy some items, but need time to gather cash on hand. We also decide to handle this via Discord. They start exploring west and find an empty fortified campsite, and later encounter the Shabaka tribe of scorpionfolk as they continue to explore. The scorpionfolk are Large and have formidable natural weapons, but they observe that they are currently wielding mostly shortbows, and make frequent use of necromancy on the corpses of their own as well as dead Aarakocra. They are very interested in killing Aarakocra but desperately short on numbers. Their own undead are kept mostly outside the camp. Shabaka has a problem: His daughter (low level druid) is betrothed to a warrior from a neighboring clan, but the marriage is delayed because the warrior needs more seasoning. The two of them have disappeared, likely to “The Death Knight’s Tomb” in an attempt to prove themselves. He’s sent one of his top necromancers and the neighbors have sent one of their best warriors, but they aren’t optimistic. They get directions and go. Scrawled across the outside in crude carvings is “Death Knight Trapped Here. Time passes fast. Not worth the risk.” The entry area is smashed, but seems warded against dust and bugs. Carved into the wall near the door in elegant elven, with some letters filled in with silver, is the following (requires Elven or language magic to read): [I]Facility Rules 1. No temporal manipulation magic, including passive magical speed effects. 2. Do not leave the facility without checking with Manager Baartie. 3. Outsiders are not permitted to know of this facility. 4. We shall change the past to protect our future.[/I] They also find a stone-shaped message in the ceiling: [I]Aryvandaar has fallen. We tried our best to undo it, but in the end, we have toiled these centuries, only to be undone by a Death Knight in service of some mortal kingdom that grew up while we focused on temporal manipulation. Senior Researcher Othshan and the others bought time, and smashed the Heart of Time, trapping the unliving here, and I alone have escaped. Its master is denied any prize and the service of a potent servant, but it is a hollow victory. The non-material planes beyond the Border Ethereal are unaffected, so the undead’s aura is beginning to permeate the area. If anyone of learning reads this, I shall abandon my heritage, change my name, and seek my fortune elsewhere. Perhaps I will return with an army one day. --Junior Researcher Eliepiir Vyshaan[/I] There are a few names here that go back to ancient FR history. They find a room with some de-powered magical appliances, an elevator, and some Temporal Stabilization Discs. Malamir’s knowledge is called on to determine that these are important and should be synced with the rune circles in the room they were in, and worn. The three take an elevator down and find a smashed storage room that appears a bit old and thoroughly looted. There’s a big greatclub near a giant splatter of old blood. They take the elevator down again and find two adult scorpionfolk squaring off with a pair of Bodaks. The scorpionfolk (the rescue team) are surprised to have allies show up just moments after they stepped off the elevator and started fighting. The bodaks are put down pretty quickly and the teenagers/young adults rescued (they had used Invisibility potions and barricaded themselves in a room). Some decomposing elven corpses are found along with a lot of nice but old furniture and elven décor, as well as magic-powered washing/drying machines and similar. They then go down to the 4th level (counting top as 1) and find two zombie ogres, another bodak, and two zombie wights. The zombie ogres explode when they die. Everyone makes a beeline for the bodak and kills it pretty quickly. Teador casts Haste. I have him roll an INT check and he gets a natural 1; that was his chance to remember the rules. He takes 5d20 (57) damage and loses his turn due to the inherent temporal properties of the area. The zombie wights do some damage with their greatclubs, but go down. One of them asks “Where did you come from?” at the party in clear surprise. The party loots the area, finding a +2 longbow, some +2 arrows, four wizard spell scrolls, boots of elvenkind, and mithril elven chain, and a few other minor items. The boots come off of a body where the blood is still leaking out. The rooms appear to have been barely searched. As the party loots, they get a very sped-up Sending from the yuan-ti asking where they’ve been and that it’s been months. We left off there, and I think they are going to go up to the 1st floor to take a short rest before continuing down. DM notes: [I]Hurray! This is the second actual dungeon they’ve gone into fully (the first was the fomorian/silver mine area). The single-room raid on the Tezcatlipoca temple doesn’t really count. It was brought up (by them) and they compared what they did to a guerilla/decapitation strike. As you can tell there is some temporal displacement into the future going on here. There are two more floors, and the bottom floor is still frozen in time after thousands of years… 6 seconds there is like 600 years up top. They’re going to get some ominous sending from the future where they disappeared and Huitzopochtli won. There were some puzzled looks as they tried to figure out where time was passing at what rate, which way they should go, etc. I think they’re going to head back up to the top floor for a short rest. Everyone’s down substantial chunks of HP from bodak aura, bodak glare, bodak scream, wight club, exploding zombies, etc. There is time pressure and if they leave, they won’t have enough Temporal Stabilization Disks to return… so there is no option to long-rest-recover their way through this. If Malamir and Reybella show up next time, they’ll have no attrition, so it’s all manageable – but this is also a way to deliberately achieve the 5e paradigm of multiple encounters separated by perhaps one short rest, and preventing nova-ing. The paladin has mostly been sitting on his spells slots.[/I] [B]Session 21: 11/13/2021[/B] Malamir (artificer) and Reybella (cleric) did not join us tonight. The remaining 3 characters, injured from their explorations, go to the top floor, having Reybella heal them along the way. On the top floor, their temporal stabilization disks start to emit a whine, which gets louder as they approach the front door. After a couple of arcane and religion checks, they decide to go on back down to finish what they’re doing instead of activating the disks early. The 5th floor (4th down) has two zombie ogres snacking on a recently dead elf, and should have had two bodaks, but I made a mistake and only threw two more ogre wights at them instead. The battle was pretty one-sided, but the PCs took a bit of damage. This floor had a bunch of metal tables, lab equipment, and chalkboards covered in obscure arcane symbols, complex mathematics, etc. Even the INT-19 (headband) monk could not figure out most of it without needing a lot of study. They then took the elevator down to the bottom floor. On the way down, they heard a triumphant shriek, like an eagle, in their heads, and got a headache… apparently Huitzopochtli triumphed. The bottom floor was a single room, 90’ in diameter, with a shattered crystal mounting in the middle, crystal shards laying all around, and 3 dead elven wizards… plus a towering figure in black plate with glowing eyes, wielding a warhammer in one hand and a longsword in the other. Drezhar the Destroyer, the ogre death knight, told the party that their little mercenary band was too late… and that he was prophesied to have his name live for thousands of years, and that they faced a legend. Dmitri charges forth first, wielding Ssword, the artifact, which still functions. It actually harms Drezhar, which surprises him. He goes next, disarming Dmitri and kicking Ssword away (towards an ogre zombie also in the room). Drezhar hits like a truck for 3d8+7 weapon damage + 1d8 necrotic damage, several times over. As Ratel and Teador (monk and paladin) advance into the room, they discover that none of their magic items function… everyone is under the effects of an anti-magic field. Except for Ssword, none of their weapons now count as magic against a foe resistant to non-magic weapon damage. Teador grabs Ssword and tosses it back to Dmitri, while Ratel shoots a couple of arrows. Drezhar uses his legendary actions to slowly bash through the barbarian’s massive pool of hit points with 3 more hits. I think one was actually a disarm again, but since it wasn’t the ogre’s turn, Ssword remained in Dmitri’s space and was easy to pick up. It is pointed out that Death Knights typically have paladin/divine casting, and should be subject to Ssword’s expanded critical hit rate. This is correct, and Dmitri crits once this round for a lot of damage, allowing him to attack 3 times. Teador hits the ogre zombie for not a lot of damage, and Ratel runs in to start punching with unarmed strikes (Ki fist means they count as magic) but has a flurry of misses. Drezhar tries to disarm Dmitri, but can’t quite stick the opposed rolls. He doesn’t need to knock Dmitri prone due to Reckless Attack. They trade HP damage, and Drezhar is pretty low when Dmitri hits 0 and has to save to avoid dying. Dying when your soul is 2,000 years in the future means you can’t be raised from the dead… He can tell Dmitri should be dead from HP damage but isn’t, and gives an order to “just go ahead and disintegrate the short one.” Cue minor freakout. Ratel uses his next to last Ki point and lands a stunning blow on the Death Knight! Teador dashes over and uses Lay on Hands, which doesn’t qualify as magic in an AMF, to burst-heal Dmitri up to 80hp. The two zombie beholders in the back of the room then close their central eyes, allowing all magic items to function again. Each one fires a Disintegration ray at Dmitri, but he makes his saves. Drezhar is then stabbed to death while stunned, and the zombie beholders go down pretty quickly, with only one more ray fired. The party loots the death knight and discovers that the crystals of the Heart of Time are very hazardous and shouldn’t be messed with. Ratel considers taking them with him, but the temporal interference means he might end up in another millennium. They then activate the stabilization discs and return to the room and time at which they attuned to them. Leaving that room, they meet the four scorpionfolk who just stepped off the elevator from below…from the middle of last session. Confusion ensues. Time travel is fun! They escort the scorpionfolk back to their camp, where the adventuresome young fools are yelled at by the clan head for a very long period of time. The group rests there and buys several Oils of Sharpness from the smith. They decide to head west to find adamantine for skeletal surgery. They explore as they travel, finding several scorpionfolk camps. They rescue a couple of low-level druids who were trapped by some gorgons. Ratel saves against gorgon breath once, then finds out what it is, and after that the party decides to kite and avoid the petrification-causing iron bulls. They are given a Goodberry Bag (10 goodberries/charge, holds 1 charge, recharges at dawn on a 6 on 1d6). They meet an old scorpionfolk woman who keeps track of locations and lore of the land (cartography) and get some general terrain info for about 3 squares around, as well as being told that something strange is going on in 07.02 in the mountains. We leave off with the party about to reach hex 08.03. DM notes: [I]ALMOST got a PC kill. It was close! I gave Drezhar about an extra 40hp on the fly so that he didn’t go down before the beholders were at least revealed. This was really fun and I enjoyed having a chance to pull off some time travel. The artificer’s player hasn’t been for several sessions. They are close to finding the Adamantine golem. If he’s there, I think they’ll discuss turning it into giant power armor, which I have planned for (cue Pacific Rim music). It seems like their main motivation right now is finding adamantine and troll hearts to become nearly immortal, and the wealth to afford the surgery. They’d rather pursue that than go ahead and make the attack on Tlalchantli’s city, which the Yuan-ti are ready to support. They are due by the calendar for an Enemy Action, so I’ll have it target something close to them to remind them that the clock is ticking.[/I] Teador took the Full Plate +2, bringing him to AC 20, 23 with shield. Ratel took Eclipse and gave Dmitri the Skyfall boots. [B] Session 22: 12/11/21[/B] Fairly short session today. The party attacked the Adamantine golem, and after a long fight in which 3 players were knocked to <20hp, successfully stabbed, shot, and bludgeoned it to death. This is an Adamantine Golem that I came up with, not the one from the book. CR 26, a kick attack to knock enemies back and prone, a vibrosword that gets two attacks in melee, and a coilgun (gauss rifle) on the other arm with a long range. The coilgun does 3d20 bludgeoning + 1d10 lightning damage with a strength save to avoid knockdown. Ratel hung out at long range pelting it with +2 arrows, Teador flew overhead (losing his griffin to a cannonball, but retaining his broom) and used Chill Touch repeatedly to keep it from regenerating, and Malamir switched between a few tactics, including trying out Summon Construct. After salvaging 3,000 lbs of adamantium, 28,000 lbs of steel, and 50 lbs of mithril, they headed east and then south to sell materials to the yuan-ti and then visit the Fleshcrafter to get adamantium coatings applied to their bones. En route, they were attacked by a Rodan-descended Roc. Teador Dimension-doored atop it and attacked it a couple of times before it spun and knocked him off; Dmitri managed to jump onto it too, and hung on for an extra round, but then got knocked off. As it flew away, Ratel the monk used his sharpshooter damage and long range to kill it. We ended there… selling and buying to be handled on discord, as well as potentially who’s doing what surgery in what order. There was also some discussion of what to do with the Aarakocra after they “win.” Ratel is in favor of wiping them out as well as killing the yuan-ti. Teador the paladin is not. Ssword is listening and the campaign’s long-term ending will depend partly on what sort of values they convince it to follow. I had it written up so that someone who wants to do the extra work and take on the risk could potentially crawl inside it and disable it while it’s functioning, and then retrofit it into a giant mech suit. It’s at the high end of powerful, but this is high end D&D. Unfortunately, the players decided to just wreck it. The player for Dmitri the barbarian was sick and couldn’t make it. The player for Reybella the cleric may be taking a break from D&D… and this was the last session for the player for Malamir the Artificer; his work schedule means he has to leave at 9pm, so he can only come for around 2 hours. Malamir is going to go work with Oztalun’s people on a way to teleport back to Europe, where he hopes to create some items and maybe send over reinforcements occasionally. It’s hard to DM for just 2 people, and Dmitri is definitely the party’s hard tank/carry (zealot + artifact sword), so when he’s gone someone has to play him or they are at risk of getting squashed (2 PCs vs. threats designed for 4+). We may try to recruit an additional player. The next scheduled session would also be on Christmas day, so we may not meet again until January unless something lines up for everyone’s schedules. That’s kind of disappointing. The party is now very rich, although I’m sure they’ll find ways to spend most of it. [/QUOTE]
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Against the Idol of the Sun: A 5e high-level campaign log
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