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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tauton_ikhnos" data-source="post: 1428797" data-attributes="member: 16195">Lord of the RingsSummary of PlotHeroes dwell in paradise (Hobbiton). An artifact of power comes into paradise. Powerful BBEG wants artifact, and is planning to sweep whole continent into war to get it. BBEG is essentially undefeatable by ordinary means, but destroy the artifact, and you destroy him.Unfortunately, BBEG's army is sweeping continent, using all of their resources, and OWNS the one place in world where artifact can be destroyed. Worse, artifact is pretty darn nice, and most folks don't want to destroy it... they'd rather use it themselves. Even though if they keep it, BBEG will eventually get it.So our heroes are, for various reasons, charged with task of destroying the artifact while armies of Men distract and hold off BBEG's forces for as long as they can.ArtifactFirstly, a ring of invisibility is not impressive in D&D. My idea was a ring of spellfire (with spellfire redefined as brilliant energy), that provided extra spell level charges per day to power the spellfire abilities. That's got combat utility, yeah, but it won't harm the ringwraiths.It also warps minds, but for some reason (race, Chosen, whatever), the PCs are "immune". Or maybe just one of them is. Or is just TOLD he is. Have them make Will saves every once in a while, don't tell them what it's for. Let paranoia produce desired effects.Ring WraithsThe ringwraiths have trace teleport and the ability to teleport one or two times per day; they ride dragons who can fly hundreds of miles per day; and they can sense any use of the ring (direction only) within a thousand miles or more. One use in a single day won't lead them directly to you, but they spread out and triangulate when they can, and more than one use pretty much WILL lead them to you.JourneyOrcs are everywhere. And the PCs have tens of thousands of miles to cover to get to Mordor, including an ocean that is too far to teleport across in one go. Killing orcs is easy with the ring, but draws ring wraiths. Without the ring, there's an awful damned lot of them.Teleporting will take (given 3-4 teleports per day) a week or so, and Mordor itself is essentially "fenced off" from teleporting with Forbiddance (not because of a nerf, but because that's what the BBEG would DO), making the last 100 miles or so really tough. The journey will happen in a few stages: the easy part (escaping from the ring wraiths, fleeing a long ways), the hard part (ring wraiths trace teleporting after the PCs, temptations to use the ring), and the really hard part (ring wraiths teleporting/flying in, and the PCs can't just teleport away anymore, temptations to use the ring, and entire armies of orcs all around).If you have a roleplay-and-angst player, give him the opportunity to ham it up with the artifact at the last moment, of course <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />.Regardless, MOST IMPORTANT THING is that this is players' story, not Tolkien's. Maybe they throw "corrupted character" into fires along with ring. Maybe they have impassioned argument over the ethics. Maybe they take war to BBEG and lose horribly.Either way, good fun, and still very mythic.</blockquote>

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