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[Let's Read] Odyssey of the Dragonlords
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<blockquote data-quote="Libertad" data-source="post: 7972724" data-attributes="member: 6750502"><p style="text-align: center"><img src="https://i.imgur.com/wpJVbl5.png" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></p><p></p><p>This is it, the final chapter of the adventure path! What dire foes await our heroes on their paths to godhood? What came of the new pantheon of empyreans?</p><p></p><p>Well, it turns out that one cannot simply kill the Goddess of Death: Lutheria has been climbing the yugoloth political ladder of Hades to regain her former power. She found a way to prematurely release the Nether Titans, primordial horrors tucked away in those cube-prisons in the Nether Sea. Additionally, she has allied with the Empyreans in helping defeat the PCs...even though she was responsible for imprisoning them in their temples, so these new gods would have to be really stupid to take her at her word again.</p><p></p><p>The empyreans’ motivations have completely changed since the last chapter. Instead of wanting to take revenge and destroy Thylea, they hope that the party will exhaust themselves in fighting the Nether Titans and swoop in to kill them and take the credit for saving Thylea. They will use this as legitimacy to cement themselves as the new pantheon and use the 3 recovered artifacts to help themselves ascend with Lutheria’s aid.</p><p></p><p>So did the empyreans just happen to change their minds upon coming to the surface? Is this poor editing/retcon? Or do they hope to get into positions of leadership and run civilization into the ground via deliberately poor policies? Unsurprisingly, the book doesn’t say.</p><p></p><p>The adventure starts after the recovery of the three artifacts but the passage of time is vague. The party is dropped in media res in taking out remnants of the Order of Sydon. By now their enemies are hilariously underpowered, and this encounter is meant to show off how badass the PCs are in comparison to their earlier quests. You’d think that this is the perfect opportunity for a Nether Titan to show up and wreak havoc, but instead the party gets summoned by Versi the Oracle who is panicking over visions of the Apokalypsis.</p><p></p><p>The four Nether Titans are all powerful, unique monsters. Two are easily recognizable as the Tarrasque and Kraken, but two are new: the Nether Dragon is an ancient red dragon with the shadow dragon template,* and the other is the Behemoth. Each monster is on a path of destruction to one of Thylea’s three major city-states while the fourth is poised to destroy the newly-founded settlements dedicated to the PCs. Unless the party splits up to simultaneously deal with 2 or more Nether Titans at once they will need to make some tough decisions in who to prioritize saving. The first and second cities saved will have quite a bit of casualties but nothing catastrophic, while the third city saved will be half-destroyed. The fourth city will be entirely destroyed by the time the PCs confront the last Nether Titan.</p><p></p><p>*which is not an entry in the core Monster Manual, nor is it in Volo’s Guide to Monsters, Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, or one of the new monsters in this book, so I have no idea where to find this thing’s stats. Trying to Google search it brings up homebrew material as the primary results.</p><p></p><p>The PCs have opportunities to use high-level magic, skill checks, and call in allied NPCs and resources to help them. The adventure suggests that said resources can help the PCs discover the weakness of these individual monsters and magic items that can prove highly useful against them. The adventure lists where said items are, who has them if applicable, and how willingly their current owners will be to give them up for the good of saving the world. Each monster has suggestions for how to ‘beef up’ the encounter in case the PCs may have too easy a job: the Tarrasque has flying chimera scavengers who worship the creature as a god, the Kraken gets Legendary Resistance to reroll failed saves, the Nether Dragon gets young black and red dragon minions, but the Behemoth has no buffs or reinforcements.</p><p></p><p style="text-align: center"><img src="https://i.imgur.com/Z7HxgZc.png" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></p><p></p><p>Let’s talk about the Behemoth. It was created at the beginning of the universe by long-forgotten gods who sought to make living weapons capable of killing their rivals. The Behemoth is a titanic horned beast whose very breath brims with the essence of creation, and can disintegrate all but the toughest material with an energy beam emitted from its mouth. If one were to compare it to the Tarrasque, it would be highly similar. It has slightly fewer hit points and a much lower Armor Class (20 vs 25), but it has better mental saving throws and a much higher passive Perception score of 19. Instead of a reflective carapace it has a rechargeable energy breath weapon that is 300 feet long and can do 16d8 necrotic or radiant damage to all creatures and objects affected (objects take double damage due to its Siege Weapon special ability). Finally, one of the uncovered weaknesses mentions that the monster is vulnerable (double damage results) to all forms of damage types, although this is not reflected in its stat block. Which makes me wonder if uncovered weaknesses are meant to be new debuffs applied to the monster’s statistics, but given that the tarrasque and kraken’s weaknesses are already part of their stat blocks (no ranged attacks and not immune to charm magic respectively) this is probably not the case.</p><p></p><p>To further complicate matters, Lutheria and the empyreans will move against the PCs in between their titan-slaying. At first yugoloth servants will attack sometime after the first Nether Titan is defeated, but after the second Lutheria herself will appear leading maenads and goatlings as a dramatic reveal to the PCs. She will talk about how she is eternal and one cannot kill death itself, retreating after having some fun in the fight via teleportation. Which is a spell neither she nor her minions can cast. Finally, three of the empyreans will come to attack the party after the third Nether Titan.</p><p></p><p>At this point it will be clear that the empyreans and Lutheria are responsible. If the PCs are still unsure, they can find this out via divination. These wicked gods-to-be built a majestic palace at the summit of the tallest mountain in Thylea, and it is a very minimalistic dungeon inhabited only by them and possibly the Kraken if it survived.</p><p></p><p style="text-align: center"><img src="https://i.imgur.com/BtxDV8P.png" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></p><p></p><p>The empyreans are scattered through the palace, but will come together to fight the PCs in the throne room once they become aware that their sanctum’s been breached. Lutheria swore an oath to use the Theogenesis spell to make the empyreans true gods, but she has plans of her own. The goddess created a sapient Sphere of Annihilation which will grow larger and larger with every empyrean killed, eventually so great that the PCs will notice its presence eating up much of the palace when they kill all but 2-3 of their empyreans who will surrender to the party at this point. Once the final empyrean dies, the sphere will grow to encompass all of the Material Plane and destroy the bodies and souls of everyone within, gods included. The empyreans will plead during the battle for Luetheria to cast the spell, but she’ll merely laugh and even cheer on the PCs.</p><p></p><p>Should the PCs spare the surviving empyreans, Lutheria’s plot is thwarted. The three Furies will appear to announce that Lutheria broke the biggest rule of godhood: never break an oath. With this proclamation she will slowly dissolve into nonexistance, laughing at the irony of being hoist by her own petard.</p><p></p><p>The ending to this adventure path is vague, although there’s a few paragraphs suggesting likely events. The surviving empyreans will swear oaths and become the PCs’ servants for eternity, and the PCs will most assuredly become the greatest rulers of Thylea. If they become the new pantheon of gods, the DM will ask them to write appropriate epilogues for how they became gods as well as appropriate dominions of reality over which they hold sway based on the domains they unlocked. The DM is encouraged to have these former PCs as new gods in future campaigns.</p><p></p><p><strong>Thoughts So Far:</strong> I like the idea of the PCs having to make a difficult choice in prioritizing which cities to save, and the use of the tarrasque and kraken as primordial weapons of destruction are thematically appropriate. I wasn’t as fond of the new monsters, given that I have no idea where to find a shadow dragon template and the Behemoth is basically a shell-less Tarrasque without a breath weapon. The use of empyreans as the final battle robs the climactic event of much of its emotional depth; these figures are more or less entirely new characters the PCs only briefly encountered in comparison to older foes. The return of Lutheria makes sense in a divine godly sort of way in that the Goddess of Death would surely not be felled so easily. But given that her destruction is entirely of her own making as opposed to being forced or tricked into it kind of robs the sense of cleverly outsmarting her. The fact that the adventure more or less spells out her plan in an obvious way makes it even less dramatic once found out. Her cheering on the heroes, combined with the last 2-3 empyreans surrendering and telling the party what Lutheria’s up to, is a very obvious metatextual “don’t choose violence or you get a Bad End!”</p><p></p><p><strong>Join us next time as we cover the remaining Appendices!</strong></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Libertad, post: 7972724, member: 6750502"] [center][img]https://i.imgur.com/wpJVbl5.png[/img][/center] This is it, the final chapter of the adventure path! What dire foes await our heroes on their paths to godhood? What came of the new pantheon of empyreans? Well, it turns out that one cannot simply kill the Goddess of Death: Lutheria has been climbing the yugoloth political ladder of Hades to regain her former power. She found a way to prematurely release the Nether Titans, primordial horrors tucked away in those cube-prisons in the Nether Sea. Additionally, she has allied with the Empyreans in helping defeat the PCs...even though she was responsible for imprisoning them in their temples, so these new gods would have to be really stupid to take her at her word again. The empyreans’ motivations have completely changed since the last chapter. Instead of wanting to take revenge and destroy Thylea, they hope that the party will exhaust themselves in fighting the Nether Titans and swoop in to kill them and take the credit for saving Thylea. They will use this as legitimacy to cement themselves as the new pantheon and use the 3 recovered artifacts to help themselves ascend with Lutheria’s aid. So did the empyreans just happen to change their minds upon coming to the surface? Is this poor editing/retcon? Or do they hope to get into positions of leadership and run civilization into the ground via deliberately poor policies? Unsurprisingly, the book doesn’t say. The adventure starts after the recovery of the three artifacts but the passage of time is vague. The party is dropped in media res in taking out remnants of the Order of Sydon. By now their enemies are hilariously underpowered, and this encounter is meant to show off how badass the PCs are in comparison to their earlier quests. You’d think that this is the perfect opportunity for a Nether Titan to show up and wreak havoc, but instead the party gets summoned by Versi the Oracle who is panicking over visions of the Apokalypsis. The four Nether Titans are all powerful, unique monsters. Two are easily recognizable as the Tarrasque and Kraken, but two are new: the Nether Dragon is an ancient red dragon with the shadow dragon template,* and the other is the Behemoth. Each monster is on a path of destruction to one of Thylea’s three major city-states while the fourth is poised to destroy the newly-founded settlements dedicated to the PCs. Unless the party splits up to simultaneously deal with 2 or more Nether Titans at once they will need to make some tough decisions in who to prioritize saving. The first and second cities saved will have quite a bit of casualties but nothing catastrophic, while the third city saved will be half-destroyed. The fourth city will be entirely destroyed by the time the PCs confront the last Nether Titan. *which is not an entry in the core Monster Manual, nor is it in Volo’s Guide to Monsters, Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, or one of the new monsters in this book, so I have no idea where to find this thing’s stats. Trying to Google search it brings up homebrew material as the primary results. The PCs have opportunities to use high-level magic, skill checks, and call in allied NPCs and resources to help them. The adventure suggests that said resources can help the PCs discover the weakness of these individual monsters and magic items that can prove highly useful against them. The adventure lists where said items are, who has them if applicable, and how willingly their current owners will be to give them up for the good of saving the world. Each monster has suggestions for how to ‘beef up’ the encounter in case the PCs may have too easy a job: the Tarrasque has flying chimera scavengers who worship the creature as a god, the Kraken gets Legendary Resistance to reroll failed saves, the Nether Dragon gets young black and red dragon minions, but the Behemoth has no buffs or reinforcements. [center][img]https://i.imgur.com/Z7HxgZc.png[/img][/center] Let’s talk about the Behemoth. It was created at the beginning of the universe by long-forgotten gods who sought to make living weapons capable of killing their rivals. The Behemoth is a titanic horned beast whose very breath brims with the essence of creation, and can disintegrate all but the toughest material with an energy beam emitted from its mouth. If one were to compare it to the Tarrasque, it would be highly similar. It has slightly fewer hit points and a much lower Armor Class (20 vs 25), but it has better mental saving throws and a much higher passive Perception score of 19. Instead of a reflective carapace it has a rechargeable energy breath weapon that is 300 feet long and can do 16d8 necrotic or radiant damage to all creatures and objects affected (objects take double damage due to its Siege Weapon special ability). Finally, one of the uncovered weaknesses mentions that the monster is vulnerable (double damage results) to all forms of damage types, although this is not reflected in its stat block. Which makes me wonder if uncovered weaknesses are meant to be new debuffs applied to the monster’s statistics, but given that the tarrasque and kraken’s weaknesses are already part of their stat blocks (no ranged attacks and not immune to charm magic respectively) this is probably not the case. To further complicate matters, Lutheria and the empyreans will move against the PCs in between their titan-slaying. At first yugoloth servants will attack sometime after the first Nether Titan is defeated, but after the second Lutheria herself will appear leading maenads and goatlings as a dramatic reveal to the PCs. She will talk about how she is eternal and one cannot kill death itself, retreating after having some fun in the fight via teleportation. Which is a spell neither she nor her minions can cast. Finally, three of the empyreans will come to attack the party after the third Nether Titan. At this point it will be clear that the empyreans and Lutheria are responsible. If the PCs are still unsure, they can find this out via divination. These wicked gods-to-be built a majestic palace at the summit of the tallest mountain in Thylea, and it is a very minimalistic dungeon inhabited only by them and possibly the Kraken if it survived. [center][img]https://i.imgur.com/BtxDV8P.png[/img][/center] The empyreans are scattered through the palace, but will come together to fight the PCs in the throne room once they become aware that their sanctum’s been breached. Lutheria swore an oath to use the Theogenesis spell to make the empyreans true gods, but she has plans of her own. The goddess created a sapient Sphere of Annihilation which will grow larger and larger with every empyrean killed, eventually so great that the PCs will notice its presence eating up much of the palace when they kill all but 2-3 of their empyreans who will surrender to the party at this point. Once the final empyrean dies, the sphere will grow to encompass all of the Material Plane and destroy the bodies and souls of everyone within, gods included. The empyreans will plead during the battle for Luetheria to cast the spell, but she’ll merely laugh and even cheer on the PCs. Should the PCs spare the surviving empyreans, Lutheria’s plot is thwarted. The three Furies will appear to announce that Lutheria broke the biggest rule of godhood: never break an oath. With this proclamation she will slowly dissolve into nonexistance, laughing at the irony of being hoist by her own petard. The ending to this adventure path is vague, although there’s a few paragraphs suggesting likely events. The surviving empyreans will swear oaths and become the PCs’ servants for eternity, and the PCs will most assuredly become the greatest rulers of Thylea. If they become the new pantheon of gods, the DM will ask them to write appropriate epilogues for how they became gods as well as appropriate dominions of reality over which they hold sway based on the domains they unlocked. The DM is encouraged to have these former PCs as new gods in future campaigns. [b]Thoughts So Far:[/b] I like the idea of the PCs having to make a difficult choice in prioritizing which cities to save, and the use of the tarrasque and kraken as primordial weapons of destruction are thematically appropriate. I wasn’t as fond of the new monsters, given that I have no idea where to find a shadow dragon template and the Behemoth is basically a shell-less Tarrasque without a breath weapon. The use of empyreans as the final battle robs the climactic event of much of its emotional depth; these figures are more or less entirely new characters the PCs only briefly encountered in comparison to older foes. The return of Lutheria makes sense in a divine godly sort of way in that the Goddess of Death would surely not be felled so easily. But given that her destruction is entirely of her own making as opposed to being forced or tricked into it kind of robs the sense of cleverly outsmarting her. The fact that the adventure more or less spells out her plan in an obvious way makes it even less dramatic once found out. Her cheering on the heroes, combined with the last 2-3 empyreans surrendering and telling the party what Lutheria’s up to, is a very obvious metatextual “don’t choose violence or you get a Bad End!” [b]Join us next time as we cover the remaining Appendices![/b] [/QUOTE]
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