Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6225898" data-attributes="member: 4937">Have you played the module (blind)?  It's not so much that anything happened at the door, it's that we managed to get it open.  It doesn't take you long to get paranoid, shaking, and energized by Tomb of Horrors.In my opinion, nothing really.  Psionics as presented in D&D and most other forms of fiction aren't actually psionics, but simply magic.   The real differentiation between psionics and magic in 1e was that psionics presented a magical system where power was to a large extent divorced from the class and level system.  This is essential aspect of the system has never really been captured since, and as such, all modern D&D/D20 psionics systems simply have psionics as a variant magical mechanic.This was a Chill campaign.  Our team had been sent to investigate rumors of a group of shape changers.   Opening the paper gave us the answer to why this particular group of shape changers was particularly worrisome and what their goals would be.We were using Battlesystem.Rex's player had in mind a more direct approach.I used the D20 rules presented in 'Hot Pursuit'.  Well worth checking out, though as always, I have a few quibbles with the rules and need to formalize my changes at some point.Tarkus was the man villain behind the scenes during the first 2+ years of my current campaign.   He had been introduced even in the back story of one of the PC's, and was known to be necromancer involved in some dark and mysterious work.  All plot threads seemed to connect to the mysterious Tarkus.   Unbeknownst to my players, Tarkus had been introduced to them in session 1 of the campaign as the neighborly undertaker Master Findel who lived beside the parties Cleric.   I had managed to work several conversations with Tarkus into the game, and at one point they'd even sought him out as a resource - since he proved 'surprisingly knowledgeable and well educated'.  Tarkus in turn covertly made several attempts on the life of the party and did kill one of the Priest's other neighbors, a seemstress, and as his signature ability was known for summoning large numbers of Hell Hounds (which at one point involved a chase over the roof tops of the city as the party fled a pack of hellhounds).  Eventually however, their suspicions regarding Master Findel awoke, and investigations lead to a series of increasingly violent confrontations and eventually fireballs and small armies of the city guard.   Tarkus managed to escape each encounter, however the party learned Tarkus's motive and means.  He was in the city on the behalf of the even more mysterious Keeropus to obtain from the Lower Catacombs, indeed from the tomb of a Menes III, a sample of Dark Fire to be used in powering the still mysterious engine Keeropus was known to be creating.  This was the same Lower Catacombs where at a sealed entrance they'd discovered a rune warning that behind this seal lay necromantic hazards that poised a threat to the very existence of life.    To this end Tarkus had arranged over the course of the prior two years to tunnel into the Lower Catacombs, and was now searching for the Dark Fire in their labyrinthine depths.   The party attempted to head him off by finding the dark fire first, encouraged and aided in this plan by their contact the Wizard Master Aiden who served as a sort of 'fix it' man for His Benevolent Despot Falster Dikelgard.   Long story short, after several forays into the catacombs, the tomb of Menes the III was breached and the dark fire extinguished just minutes ahead of Tarkus.  Tarkus - unaware that his quest was now futile - proceded to engage the party in an epic fight involving Hell Hounds, Juju Zombies, and fiendish wolves (and fireballs and various necromantic nastiness) that resulted in one PC death and which only avoided a second by the expenditure of a destiny point and timely divine intervention in the form of an angel of Showna (the Sun goddess) before finally taking a sword through the back as his pets were beaten down.   In short, I managed to pull off the sort of epic reoccurring villain that I'd been striving to pull off (without cheating mind you) since I was a kid and much high fiving and hooraying occurred.</blockquote>

Verification