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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fuzzybear" data-source="post: 9501638" data-attributes="member: 6917259"><h3>The Truth in Dreams</h3>Now short one party member, the group gets together to discuss the next step. Talking with Metamorphosis and Vigilance, they learn that the best way to get where they need to go is to bargain with the elemental deities for safe passage to the entrance to the dreamworld. After heading back to Seaquen to get prepared and talk with Simeon, they head to a place of power nearby (in "the ballsack" as they love to call the south area of Megadon's lands) and spend time attuning with the elements of water and earth to call forth the kraken and worm. Jack's connection with the Eagle through Parallax helps calm their annoyance and eventually they agree to help the next day.Into the depths of the earth they travel and arrive at the entrance to the crystal dragon's home. Things start with some bartering and offers, though I was not as kind as [USER=7031495]@Tolamaker[/USER] was apparently as I had them eat up a diamond for revivify first before calmly telling the party they still can't go past. It eventually turns to combat. Honestly, I feel like I did a quite poor job in this fight. I started it in a bad spot and only got the walls involved a little bit. Running it online was really cool with the invisible walls creating all sorts of chaos. In the end, the party was inconvenienced more than actually in danger, but it was a fun time for everyone as they figured it out.From there they headed into the dream world. They went for the castle first as the only obvious direction and met up with the tiefling there. I do agree with [USER=7031495]@Tolamaker[/USER] that it felt very disjointed and random. I probably should have worked more to attach it to someone's story elsewhere, but I didn't have that idea. We had some fun talking with an evil not so evil dude, but the biggest reveal was something that came up randomly at the end. In exchange for the help from Sagramar, Rev decided to give away his secret that he is a clone, and one of a handful that all seemingly came from the same death. Sagramar did some testing as this was information that was fascinating to him, and learned that Rev was born as a fragment of a soul, seemingly split into many peices. As only a fragment, his soul was fraying faster than normal and would fade far before his body normally would. I shocked the party and gave him a 5 year prognosis on life. But not without hope. Sagramar also gave Rev an obsidian knife capable of reuniting the soul fragments in his clone twins to his to prolong his life.This was something spur of the moment, but I wanted to build on one of the themes of this campaign that I felt that my players were avoiding - is it okay to do evil in the name of good. I know this comes up more with the restored Torch also, but what is the worth of a life? Is it diminished if that life is owned by a bad person? I thought this was a good primer for that later discussion on if the Torch is worth using or destroying based on the cost. It has at the least spurred on some more good roleplay among the party as they talk about the future after the war and what that will be for Rev.The rest of the trip to the prison palace went pretty close to the book. They met Flight who they liked but won the game very quickly, took the trip through to the resting spot, saw some weird things before and after, though largely tried to avoid interacting with all of them, fought off a group of lesser trillith, befriended a few who nearly instantly betrayed them, held off a horde, and killed the corrupted trumpet archon. I feel like this whole section could have been improved by tying it much more obviously and directly into what is going on in the rest of the campaign, but again, this is hindsight. It did not go badly at all, but it does feel very much like a side quest is happening that isn't as connected as it probably could be.After the first handful of sessions, Myetharia even joins up. As I said before, the plan was always to have her join in when she could and stay away when she couldn't. The dream world gave a very simple explanation for how and why this could happen, so an apparition of Myetharia basically was fighting with them. I told her player what was going on so that she could answer questions appropriately, but I wanted to have the party feel confused and disconnected from reality while all of this was going on. One idea I had came up when Bryn tried to message her son during the night spent resting on the mountain top. From one sending to the next, I had Keth tell her that 2 weeks had passed when it was only seconds for Bryn. Myetharia's arrival but without any knowledge of what was going on save that she went to Calanis also helped sow confusion. I plan to have a few weeks have passed since they went into the dreamworld even though they will have only spent 1 night there. Partly this is to get back closer to the timeline in the adventure path (we're around 5 months at this point, not the 9 or 10 we should be at apparently), but also just to add mystery and chaos to the dreamworld. Following the path of blood, the palace came into view. They head in and talk with Freedom, but quickly refuse her offer. It was pretty vague, though there was a moment of consideration from some of them that this might be a way to end things without a fight. Disappointed but not surprised, Freedom begins the assault. The party tried to focus on her, but with her darting in and out of sight, along with the resistance from all damage from rolling a natural 19 on initiative, Freedom easily tanked things for a while. When she went below 3/4, I had her retreat a bit more and the party eventually focused down the hydras in the entrance hall. In the meantime though, the enemies had done a ton of damage; enough that Bryn was forced to use her 9th level spell slot to Mass Heal everyone back up. Even after that, the hit and run tactics continued and whittled away at the squishier members of the party for a while.It took a lot of discussion, but once they started moving around they did figure out the puzzle fairly quickly. They made the very aggressive decision to split up, open up every room, aggro every enemy, and then just run. Despite taking hits, a couple people getting rough, I didn't want to actually disintegrate anyone, so I had Freedom use that on Bryn to get her back to dangerous health totals. Speedrunning things though worked far too well honestly! Though it did require me to decide that the room enemies couldn't make it into the central prison. If they had, I think it probably would have been a TPK honestly, though getting through that Twilight Cleric aura with a bunch of low level enemies is tough once the combat draws to a small area like the central room.Running out of time in a session and not wanting to make that combat with Freedom last over 3, she decides to give up when below half health, alone, and seeing no way through the temporary hit points without further uses of her disintegrate knife. A brief argument with the statue trillith ends with Freedom ominously telling the heroes that it doesn't matter if she lets them in anyway as they will never stop the Annihilation that is coming.Healing up a little with some goodberry wine and potions, the heroes use the red keys to open the portal into Trilla's nightmare seeking to save her and prevent Annihilation from being unleashed upon the world.Next time I'll wrap up this adventure as I did change things up quite a bit from here.</blockquote>

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