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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fuzzybear" data-source="post: 9566746" data-attributes="member: 6917259"><h3>Annihilating Annihilation</h3>I actually thought I had finished up the last adventure when I responded, so here is the actual end of Trilla's dream world.Heading into the dream within a dream (Inception anyone?), I decided that I didn't want to do most of the events that happen within the dream. It felt very nebulous at the time and hard to run effectively. I also wanted to challenge the party a bit more as they were expecting a big boss fight at the end. In the end, I decided that even though this wasn't going to be the last adventure, I wanted to run the Annihilation fight anyway... likely at least.While I removed all of the chasing around and running, I did leave the option for the party to abandon or kill Trilla while still being successful. I would have been very surprised if my group had done either of those options, but they were possible for them. As expected, they wanted the fight.I changed the fight a fair bit here as well, taking some inspiration from the Sin fight near the end of Final Fantasy X. I wanted to make things terrifying, and I thought that between the HP total and the damage a group can put out at this level Annihilation just wouldn't be truly scary. Instead of just having things disintegrated if they are touching Annihilation at the start of its turn, I had Annihilation destroy the map slowly each turn. I made a darkness radius starting just off the side of the map that would grow by a random amount of feet each round. Anything in the darkness would lose all their vision and take disintegrate damage at the start of their turn. The idea here was that the normal attacks that it did were less threatening than the slow, impending doom that the darkness represented. I also buffed the attacks, focusing on dispelling buffs, knocking prone, and max HP reductions, which did add to the concerns, but the real threat was time.Even this ended up being too slow how I had drawn it up, as it just doesn't take long for 5 level 18 heroes to chew through 600 HP in 5e, even with resistance to all, especially when the creature gets stunned every other turn and doesn't move. I ended up doubling the amount of ground that it covers each turn once it went below half health. All of these changes made for a great moment when I rolled the max distance on the last turn and the creature ate up more than half of the remaining ground in 1 turn, swallowing up a couple of the heroes (Myetharia and Winry) at the same time. Myetharia had her turn shortly afterwards and was disintegrated... thankfully she was just a projection of a dream and not real. Winry was in real danger, but the fight ended just in time for her to stay alive.Slaying the creature, saving Trilla and escaping, the heroes were presented with the choice of how to repair the Torch. While things initially hinted towards killing her to do so, they eventually figured out that it just needed some of her blood, not necessarily all of it. Trilla then blasts it with her draconic fire and reforge the artifact as she is purified. Exiting the dream world and heading back up to the surface, the group finds out that a full month has passed since they entered. The war has ground on, but things were quickly coming to their end. This was mostly because I realized the timeline was weird as things were going too fast. I know it didn't really matter, but I also wanted this to be strange and mysterious. I had allowed Myetharia to do something else while this happened, so if it was just a day things weren't going to work out. The month let me play with timelines a bit as well as to make what messages they got and such even more weird.As soon as they make it back out, they are contacted and told to come to Seaquen quickly as Pilus' Tempest airship is on the way...</blockquote>

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