Finished Red Hand of Doom (spoilers)

Friday night my fellow players and I defeated the minions of Tiamat.

One little caveat is that the GM gave us all "DM Chips" -- little poker chips with 'DM' on them -- as presents for Christmas one year. Once per session we can show our chip to reroll a d20, or we can turn them over permanently to get an automatic Nat 20, or to stop a character death. He also gave two of us "PC Chips" as prizes for having the longest-surviving PC in his zombie-survival-horror Halloween game. You can use a PC chip once per session to get a +2 to a roll, or you can turn it in to regain some hit points.

And you can turn them both in simultaneously to restore any PC to full health immediately, as a divine miracle.

Well, for those of you who are familiar with the end of RHoD, there's a chamber with the ridiculously rules-jank of a silence spell that only affects the PCs, not the bad guys. To reach this chamber, you must ascend a 130-ft. shaft with no easy handholds. And in the chamber, the bad guys are preparing to open a portal to Hell.

Well, we see this shaft, and figure there's got to be a trap or something, so we're going to be clever and dimension door into the chamber, to throw off whatever plan the villains have. Instead, we arrive in the middle of silence, where our spellcasters are all useless. We spend two rounds running around, looking for places where the silence doesn't affect us, until we realize that the spell doesn't seem to be hindering the villains at all. The high priest of Tiamat is throwing devils at us, and our melee fighters aren't tough enough to hold them all back, and even if they were, the erinyes can just unholy blight us from across the room.

The evoker goes down. Then the cleric goes down. The duskblade, knight, and ninja are all being worn down by claws, bites, poison arrows, and unholy energy, all in perfect silence. My dwarf sorcerer is very low on hit points, and I realize there's only one way to turn the tide.

I run back to shaft and jump down it. Then, as soon as I can hear myself screaming, I cast dispel magic up into the chamber, targeting the unhallowed silence. Suddenly the party can hear me wailing and hooting in victory, for a second or two before they hear the loud thud of my death.

Then I toss in my two chips to bring the cleric back to full health, and sit back to enjoy the end of the adventure.
 

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Awesome! And now I have this picture of a smug ewok leaning back at the game table smiling at everyone. :D
 



Wow,sounds like an amazing end to a great campaign!

However. correct me if I'm wrong, but couldn't the duskblade still use his channel spell in a silence zone?

And I guess your evoker will probably be taking silent spell feat asap. :D
 


It required the celerity spell. Which I happened to have. Me personally, if I was the GM and I was already killing the entire party, I would've cut the PCs some slack and let them cast in freefall without a check. It's not like I'm trying to dodge anything, and it takes more than half a round to fall 100 feet. But he didn't like it, so I used celerity, and had a Smash Bros.-esque 'air dodge' where I hovered for a second and cast my spell, then went back to falling.
 

***Heavy spoiler alert***

When our group did that room, we miraculously managed to whack the main bad dude and his henchies with very little damage (a combination of lucky rolling and the DM being fairly new, not exploiting the villains to their fullest).

The BLAMMO! Tiamat bamfs in and snatches away his body before we can loot it, we cop a massive amount of damage from inadvertantly standing on the wrong squares as her aspect ports in, and then it's game on.

We figure (aside from the aforementioned energy damage) that we're pretty primed to take the aspect out, so we decide to duke it out, rather than plunge down the shaft in reatreat. A little over 2 or 3 rounds later, all four PCs (human cleric [me], dwarven fighter, gnome sorcerer and 1/2 elven rogue) are smears on the dungeon walls. Dead as the proverbial dodo.

...most disappointing end to a "mega-module" ever. :\ It was a real bummer - apparently the module assumes that you'll be so freaked out by an aspect of Tiamat that you'll run for it, even though it involves plummeting down a shaft for quite impressive amounts of falling damage. It was a shame, because other than that, we all really enjoyed the module. :(
 

When it actually came time to fight Tiamat, yeah, we fled down into the pit, hoping to lure her down. She didn't come, so we teleported back up there, and spread out. It wasn't that good of a monster, honestly. She's not got that many tricks. She just deals a ton of damage. Kinda lame, I think.

So the module kinda crapped out at the end, but we as the PCs rocked!
 

And some people wonder why a lot of players complain about GMs cheating. I'd have walked out. If you can't fight acording to the rules, just tell the players that their characters are dead/failed/whatever and be done with it.
 

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