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Message: <blockquote data-quote="THEMNGMNT" data-source="post: 8232905" data-attributes="member: 6809274">Six players, all with 5th level characters. 22nd session in what used to be my Dragon of Icespire Peak campaign. Now that the players want to continue the story, I'm expanding the scope across the entire Neverwinter region. So I'll be titling this the Reign of Neverwinter campaign for reasons that make sense to me and my players. Or maybe I'll just call it the Neverwinter campaign for short.Anyway, after completing Dragon of Icespire Peak, the feedback I got from the players is that they were looking for a wider variety of challenges. Less combat, more problem solving. I admit that as a DM I have a bias toward action adventure. In the last two session I've tried to make a hard pivot into challenges that can't be resolved with force.The session started with the players arriving in Phandalin after having slain the white dragon of Icespire Peak, only to find a rival party of adventurers claiming to be the killers of the dragon and angling for the reward. The PC orc vengeance paladin was infuriated and immediately threatened the leader of the rivals with bodily harm. (This is hilarious because, as noted above, the players had claimed they were looking for non-combat challenges and as soon as they got one they threatened to start a melee. And from there it only got worse.)I turned to the newest player, who has a human genie warlock, and told her she knows the leader of the rival party. Mechanically, he was a CR 9 war priest. Narratively, he was a noble exiled from Waterdeep for trading slaves who relocated to Luskan. The player decided he had been a suitor of hers, but she discovered his slave trading and threatened to expose him to the authorities, leading to his hasty departure to Luskan. The warlock partnered with the PC dragonborn sorcerer to send telepathic messages to the exiled noble threatening to reveal his secrets if he didn't GTFO, now. The noble war priest gracefully turned the spotlight on the PCs and slunk out of  town. On the outside, he was all smiles. On the inside: murder!The players soon learned that the town had a new ruler. Several sessions ago the town master, Harben Wester, had been consumed by a black pudding (long story) that may or may not have been the fault of the PCs. No one's telling. The new town master, Mayor Pete, has been supplanted to an appointee of the Queen of Neverwinter. This is Lady Taneth, the new Warden of Phandalin. Secretly, she's part of a cabal of Luskan infiltrators who are arranging the deaths of local rulers, then engineering their appointment as replacements. Their goal is to seize power from the Queen of Neverwinter and turn that city into a vassal state of Luskan's. Taneth had a series of hard questions that cast the PC's previous actions in a dim light. The players were having none of this. They wanted their reward, now, and they threatened Taneth's life. Unwilling to comprise her longterm plans, Lady Taneth backed down. She said she would have their reward money in the morning. She also asked for their help discovering the fate of a local garrison that had gone ominously silent. The PCs agreed to look into it.Lady Taneth had posession of one half of the Pyramid of Valanthara...a mysterious artifact that the dragon of Icespire Peak had sought. The PCs had the other half. After shaking it loose from Taneth, the PCs reassembled the Pyramid's fragments. As it flared to life, an answering flare came from within the ruins of Castle Phandalin. (That's my version of Tressendar Manor.) So, next session, the players will enter the ruins of Castle Phandalin in hopes of claiming the secret, lost treasure of the dragon that once protected the town.Finally, the orc paladin gave Lady Taneth a decorative lamp, falsely claiming it was an apology for the earlier threats. He rolled a nat 20 on his Deception check. Taneth graciously accepted the lamp. Hiding inside was the warlock. Next session promises some infiltration shenannigans. The PCs might even discover the truth of Lady Taneth. But that won't help them know what to do about it.I'd say it was a fairly successful two hour transition episode.</blockquote>

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