D&D 5E Need advice on running middle-top tier campaign from experienced DMs

[Remedy]

LONGPOST

My players, we have 5 regulars, have finished tomb of annihilation with flying colours, beating my pumped version of acererak due to some luck and great tactics, and as I planned I allowed them to come out into the "open world" sandbox game of forgotten realms with some storyline derived from their mishaps and choices during the campaign. Thing is, I might have made too much decisions without thinking them through to the end.

For the reference, I will include a relatively short recap of my homebrewed story changes.

(NOTE: SPOILERS FOR THE MODULE)

• there was a warlock of Titania and a harper in our starting group, so I decided that Arthus Cimber was a decent plotpoint, so I secretly gave orders to the warlock to find him and use a planeshift scroll to bring him to the summer court (that was happening due to a single line in ring of winter's description - that it can only melt on the finger of the queen of summer. (so she tried to get rid of the artifact), and the harper obviously needed to confront their former agent and had his scroll of "summon reinforcements" to capture the guy.
• during second third of the adventure they managed to get close to Arthus and my warlock planeshifted him and the party away. but the harper rogue didnt use his scroll right away. So, Titania herself offered Arthus to melt the ring. But unfortunately he didn't wantthat just yet, as he is using it to find a way to return his wife in his storyline, so after some emotional struggles he refuses and makes an ice tomb around himself to protect it. that was the moment whenour rogue summoned the harper SWAT in magical armor and a high-ranking wizard. Next there was a standoff between seelie fey, harpers, arthus and titania, with our priest desperately trying to calm everyone down. That was the moment when he got blinded and a sphere of impenetrable darkness was cast by someone from the fey side. The moment was right for spies/agents of unseelie court to make their move and kidnap both Titania and the ring of winter. She had a choice - to escape herself or to throw away the ring of winter. She chose the latter, believeing that Oberon could save her.
• next thing happened offscreen: Acererak, skulking around after some highmagic stuff happened in the feywild managed to find the ring, and offered the dark fey to exchange it for the queen. As for the queen of air and darkness the ring was more valuable at the moment, and the exchange also removed a lot of danger to her in form of a VERY angry archfey consort, she agreed. Acererak did this due to sewn sister's proposal of making some changes to soulmonger. Then he and the coven of hags managed to tranquilize the queen of summer court by putting her in a glass tank filled with running waters of the river styx, and later they made the atropal embryo smaller and sewed it inside Titania's womb, utilizing her immortal flesh to make the thing reborn as the dark god. The soulmonger still continued to feed it souls through tubes installed her body. (thing is, even Acererak didn't know that atropals are not stillborn gods, but vestiges of primordial Atropos, and though woudn't be reborn in its original sense)
• When the characters reached soulmonger (now a futuristic tank with the amalgamation of an archfey inside) they foun out that the waters below are the river styx (lava just seemed too cheesy then), and the woman inside was Titania (only the priest got there though). They fought the enhanced atropal fight, where actually they fought summer queen's unconsious body used as an exoskeleton for the being inside. Then they managed to cut the loose stitchings (made from soul bag leather by the coven of course), and banished whatever was "born" (I made the thing as vague as I could). Then the Acererak fight with a cool insert (their couatl guide, Eku, sacrificed herself to save the day in the process, and they escape with Titania's deformed body in the hands of their shield guardian.)

The sacrifice, drawn by my friend artist and printed on a t-shirt by one of my players

• Elminster, using a pseudonym, helped characters escape, after they left the tomb. Also, in the meantime, the warlock of Titania lost his powers obviously and reforged the pact with Oberon, and helped him tracking his wife. Unfortunately, he was too careless during investigation and was kidnapped by the unseelie fey with ring of winter too. The then, Elminster managed to find the warlock and offered him the same fey powers after making a pact with him (he can do so as he weilds all kinds of magic). Right after that he reunited the warlock with the group and took Titania's body (which was beyond repair after such unholy acts) to a pocket dimention to deal with it later
• After some epic level escaping to the port, they are treated as heroes and given tons and tons of money, enough to buy a tower (which they did).
• The hooks I gave them as of now: the priest of kelemvor, who witnessed everything from the beginning, is now hagborn (he was reborn with baggy nana after he accidentally triggered the resurrection sequence), they have Eku's egg (she sensed her death as couatls do, and made an egg to continue her work, and that is the egg that she was ultimately protecting in the final battle. The little baby couatl was just born a session ago), and Arthus, who made friends with them after the incident, started his journey to help them somehow. Also they managed to revive and save Starfallen from the lamp, using eye of Zaltec and a shitton of lich's phylacteries they found in the atropal room. (the party wizard got himself an alignment shift and mark of Zaltec)
• The main plot point is going to be this: the very same priest has a black opal crown (if Dendar gets released and takes it, he can turn the sun into a giant sphere of annihilation, and thus rendering faerun uninhabitable winter desert), and now all divination priests and wizards are getting the same vision of near future: the world is covered with snow, a magor ice age is followed by a complete freezing of the whole planet. And everyone gets almost the same vision.

My general plan for the major plotline is: players know that ring of winter is capable of such thing (the harper guy canonically finished storm king's thunder and was able to tell other players about that), they don't know yet about Dendar's capabilities with the crown, only vague statements about her "eating the sun" after being "released" with the crown. They start investigating the ring lead, and over time they realise the danger of the crown they were carrying all along. Major danger there.

The other plotline I started to slowly implement is the concept of an empty throne. Titania is gone. Queen of air and darkness have no physical form on the throne. Evermeet too has no queen to speak of. I thought that it was a clever overlapping hint towards more democratic type of government shift across the planes as the crisis of one world persists. I made a oneshot where they witnessed the two marid heirs to the throne of ten thousand pearls (the marid capital on the elemental plane of water) kill each other and destroy the throne in the process, and now they are heading to evermeet.

Thing is, to those who read the whole thing - can you help me with those:

1) tie all the plotlines into two or maybe three coherent arcs
2) give some advice on running the high level campaign (14 level+) in terms of encounter building and proper challenges without too much invention on the fly?
3) make any changes to my plans, without changing the facts that occured?

Also hearing some feedback would be nice as it is generally an entirely homebrewed take on the campaign progression

 

[Stalker0]

To number 2, the best advise I can offer is...all real adventures need a ticking clock.

At those levels, if the players have time to rest and plan, they can beat almost anything. Case in point, my 9th level group defeated a CR 30 level encounter of githyanki due to some expert prep.

So when you give them adventurers where they actually need to flex, and it’s not just to let them show off, then either ramp up the difficulty to insane (and then add some more because 5e is very kind to players), or ensure they can’t freely rest due to time constraints.

 

[Ashrym]

Ditto on running the clock. A person cannot overdo it and needs to make it organic to the story but it's one of he best ways to move the party forward and use up their resources.

Similarly, a structured timeline of events in an encounter can make it more interesting and complicated for the party. For example, round 1 "monsters A" engage the party while "monster B" rings an alarm. rounds 2, 3, and 5 "monsters C, D, and E" arrive. Make Y change to wandering patrols and give the following preparations to areas 3, 9, and 11. Two timelines based on whether or not the alarm is triggered is appropriate and that one simple action changes things significantly.

The gist is don't make fights simple PCs vs Monsters. If you are familiar with Tucker's Kobolds take inspiration from that.

 

[aco175]

you should give 3 ideas to pursue and each has a clock on when they are going to culminate with a world shaking event. The PCs work on one of them and the other get closer to completing their deed. The PCs work on the 2nd and the last thing gets more powerful and gets to almost finish the deed before the PCs come in and foil them.

Not sure on helping on tying your ideas together. You seem to have some giant events going off around the PCs and gods and such getting involved. You could have the gods pin the PCs against each other and see where the party takes the ideas.