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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aeolius" data-source="post: 5518955" data-attributes="member: 2072">In my undersea campaign, the party is currently in the region of the Sinking Isle (World of Greyhawk) in the company of humans once enslaved by a kraken. To defeat the enclave of tentacle-tailed mermaids who now command the kraken’s power, the party must fashion a weapon of Oerthblood in a forge known as the Hearth of Hearts.While the Sinking Isle is mentioned in Greyhawk Adventures, I pretty much play the game by ear. On-the-fly DMing is my bread and butter, I enjoy plucking things out of my brain that fall in to place at a later date. I tend to run three hours of adventure with a handful of rough notes at the most. Scia, the elderly druid leader of the imprisoned Drylanders, presented the party with a proposal. She knew the Isle would rise from the bottom of the ocean, if an intelligent being was sacrificed on an altar hidden in the depths. She offered her own life, so that the Isle might rise and the weapon might be forged. That’s how the game ended two sessions ago. In yesterday’s game, she presented the party with a ceremonial dagger, with which to perform the sacrifice. I decided that the dagger was made of a substance similar to blue sea glass, the same substance from which the altar was fashioned. The altar is briefly mentioned in Greyhawk Adventures, but I made it one of three similar sets of ruins, each capable of summoning an extra-planar maelstrom. Then I decided that the dagger was actually made from a shard of the altar (yes, Dark Crystal reference). As a description seemed forthcoming, I googled images of obsidian knives and daggers. In the end we ended up with a dagger of blue crystal with a hilt made from the bone of a leviathan. Scia mentioned the dagger held “potent magics”.Uh-oh. The PCs would want more information than that. Then it hit me. Scia didn’t really want to die. She knew that she was old. She knew that anyone who lived in the caverns of the Hearth could never leave, for while the mysterious radiation of the Heath granted near immortality, one could never leave the caverns or all of their years would come rushing back (yep, borrowed from “War-Gods of the Deep”). She found a way to escape. On a whim, I have the dagger powers similar to a demi-lich’s soul gem. If you were slain by the dagger, it would absorb your soul. The next victim of the dagger would  present an empty shell for the soul to inhabit.Yes, I have too much fun, for people.I was waiting at the credit union, earlier today, when it hit me. There was already a soul trapped in the dagger. Okay, that could be fun. It would be released into Scia’s body, when she sacrificed herself. It would be the sacrifice of this entrapped creature, now released into a body rapidly aging and wounded, that would fuel the altar.So, what might tomorrow bring? What happens when this trapped soul is freed, even for the briefest of moments? Will it be friend or foe? Will impart ancient wisdom or reveal the location of treasures untoward?Mind you, I DMed this game for over three years knowing that the BBEG wanted to use the planar maelstroms to drain the Solnor Ocean. I never knew why. It seemed an evil enough act in and of itself. Over time I decided that the waters would travel to the interior of a hollow world, in this case the lesser moon Celene. It seemed like a lovely place to visit; an adventure for later days.Then I discovered a bit of buried lore. The demon lord Dagon and elemental princess Olhydra had twin daughters. That was it. All there was. All mine. I decided that Dagon imprisoned his daughters within Celene, each trapped in separate subterranean lakes now tended by kuo-toans. Only if the lakes were joined, would the daughters be joined once more. Together, they are a force to be reckoned with.Oh... guess where all that water to join the lakes will be coming from?  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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