Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Baron Opal" data-source="post: 3228632" data-attributes="member: 10433">This is for the Kherindal game, so if any of you serve Baron Argus, vacate!As players are wont to do, mine are proceeding in a direction that I am not wholly prepared. The situation is they have recently liberated a crystal mine, that they have a stake in, from an invading army of gnolls and their human ocular adept aide. After thourough questioning of the aide, and then his corpse, they have figured out that he was the thrall of a beholder a couple of days that-a-way. Part of the directions are the ruins of the Twin Temples are a little south of that-a-way. The miners have fled to the village of Fairhill.At the end of last session the party had split. Half went to Fairhill to encourage the miners to return and to hire new managers / leadership. The other half stayed to rally the miners who were enslaved. They are also interested in finding the unusual crystal that is hidden in the mines. This crystal is what the beholder hired / charmed the gnolls for and why the aide was sent to make sure all went well. It is not any particular crystal, but rather one section of the Rod of Seven Parts. The beholder discovered its hiding place and sent a capable yet somewhat ignorant army to fetch it. They did not by the time the PCs arrived.The PCs at Fairhill are going to find out about the friendly goblin tribe that had their meteroic idol stolen from them. Its actually a stale plot hook from about three real years ago that a long dead party failed at, but currently it's a distraction. The party currently has the first section of the Rod, but they don't realize it yet. The first part is bound up as a wand and they haven't been quite curious enough to take it apart yet.So, the party has the first section of the Rod of Seven Parts, but they don't realize it.They are standing at the spot where the second section is, but don't realize it either.They have been show the route to "the ruins of the Twin Shrines", which doesn't interest them.They know that past the shrines is a beholder's lair, which they don't really want to pursue.They will find out next session that there is a cult of Orcus worshippers hidden out that-a-way, who have been stealing healing and restorative magic items.What they really want to do is dig through the mines and find that special crystal that the beholder wants.Which, of course, is the one thing I'm not prepared for, and what I'm asking help for.I don't want it just lying there, of course. I'm going to adapt a part of the Age of Worms, that one adventure where you find a section of the Rod, as the location of the fourth piece. So I don't want to necesarily tie the second section directly to the Wind Dukes. It is a natural mine, so a vault or tomb would seem out of place.So how did that piece end up in the depths of a crystal mine? And, I need to hash this out before late Saturday afternoon. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />PDF solutions are acceptible.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification