Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="ichabod" data-source="post: 9116272" data-attributes="member: 1257">Session #21, Dungeon of the Mad Mage.About 10 sessions ago the party went through a portal they found on the second level. They ran into a group of gnome cultists. Their gloomstalker ranger got separated from the rest of the party and went down. The others fled to avoid a TPK. They recently went up a level and found a raise dead scroll. So the cleric wanted to retrieve the body and raise it. The rest of the party was fine with this, as the ranger had their bag of holding, with all sorts of useful stuff. Including the skeleton of Nimraith, which the (grave) cleric had become rather attached to.So they go down to the portal again, after going through a brutal fight with two two-headed trolls Halaster left guarding the stairs down to the second level. They get through the portal, taking numerous precautions, including casting aid and using the dust of disappearance they recently found. On the other side, they find the gnomes dead and half eaten. They are then attacked by an invisible creature (at this point, everyone in the combat is invisible, which is a bit confusing). They are having some trouble fighting it, especially after it nearly kills their rogue in the surprise round. The cleric casts spirit guardians, and the paladin gets some good hits in, and the invisible thing is on the ropes.On the invisible attacker's next turn it fails it's wisdom save and takes 20 points of damage. This kills it. As it writhes in the grasp of the spirit guardians, it's invisibility drops, and it is revealed as a werewolf (a mistake on my part, it should have been a wererat). It drops to the ground dead, and reverts to it's true form: the gloomstalker ranger they had left for dead.They had forgotten that he had failed a save while fighting a group of wererats who were trying to start a rat infestation in their tavern. It's just that the new moon hadn't happened until after they went through the portal the first time. And when he went down in that combat, he had made his death saves and stabilized. So the gnomes had kept him captive against the adventurers returning. However, he had transformed into a wererat in the middle of the night and killed them all.Anyway, they took him back to their tavern, revivified him, and removed his curse of lycanthropy.In retrospect I realize that I really handled this poorly. It doesn't make sense for one wererat to kill a bunch of cultists who nearly TPKed him and his other three buddies. Especially since [SPOILER="stuff about the cultists the PCs don't know"]the cultists were a splinter group of the rat god, and would have welcomed a wererat into their ranks.[/SPOILER]It should be noted that when the character first transformed, I contacted the player privately. The Monster Manual says when they first transform they get the choice to fight it (and remain a PC) or embrace the lycantrhopy (and become an NPC under DM control). The player felt that the character would totally embrace it.</blockquote>

Verification