D&D 5E OotA Sloobludop: Looking for Advice

[Uller]

I'm running a PbP OotA game. (My players: please stay out of this thread!!!)

SPOILERS AHEAD!

It is looking like after a great deal of RP the PCs are going to participate in the ritual/battle between the two factions.

I want this to _feel_ like the climactic scene of the chapter (until what is lurkinging in Darklake shows its head(s) and that becomes the new point of concern...)

We are playing TotM so I don't want to over complicate things.

Here is what I am thinking:

The forces of the two factions largely negate eachother. There will be enough over flow from the Leemoogoogoon faction to give the PCs a Deadly+ encounter (I think they spent one spell slot so far). The two archpriests will be locked in a battle of magic that largely doesn't effect the PCs directly except in the following manner:

If the PCs manage to hit and damage the enemy archpriest then at the top of the next round the friendly one can cast a spell in support of the PCs.

If any character (PC or monster) from either side drops to 0 hp then the enemy archpriest can cast a spell in support of her side.

After three rounds I'll describe something bad happening in the water to foreshadow. After the fourth round it's crazy time.

Anyone who ran this: what did you do? How did it work out?

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

My take on that section was to try to give the PCs more agency in the final encounter, rather than having the NPCs suggest the plan of attack as written in the module. I didn’t really sweat the difficulty level of the encounter as I decided that the “crazy time” would trigger when they managed to kill the opposing forces’ priest.

In retrospect, I feel like I should’ve given them even more of a reason to get in on the conflict…maybe some of their gear got lost on the Darklake and it ended up in the hands of the cultists. But I used a funny burbling fish-man voice for the kuo-toa and regret nothing.

It all went pretty well, though at the end there was some debate over actually directing facing the crazy time. I wasn't surprised, but it could've been very bad had they decided to really do so.

 

[Uller]

I pretty much presented the scenario as described in the book (I combined the opening encounters with the two factions into one and took the combat out of it because we just had a combat encounter before arriving and they get a bit old in the PbP format).

The PCs have taken quite a liking to Topsy and Turvy and so were motivated to find someone that could remove the curse on them. So that was their initial motivation to help Plooploopeen. But during the ritual to remove the curse things went badly because I added some trinkets to the pile of offerings under the Sea Mother statue. One of the PCs couldn't help himself _during_ the ritual and pilfered one (which is actually the EGG from D3 - Vault of the Drow but he hasn't gotten a look at it yet).

So Topsy was cured and Turvy became a full on wererat and had to be put down. This nearly lead to violence or the deal being off at least. But things are back on now.

Anyway...with all the lead up, I don't want it to feel anti-climactic. It's a good group though so I'm guessing they'll have a good time no matter how I present it and fill in any gaps on their own.

If anyone is curious the whole thing starts here and goes on for 20 pages of posts...

PbP is slooowww but a lot of fun. They arrived at Sloobludop a month ago in real world time! Who knew you could get about a month of gaming out of about 2 pages of material...

 

[CapnZapp]

For anyone starting up this module, there is this thread:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?469640-Out-of-the-Abyss-Thread-Collection

 

[MarkB]

I ran the encounter largely as written - my players had a choice as to how to set things up, and they went pretty much with the archpriest's plan. One wrinkle was that I decided to make this encounter the 'big reveal' for Topsy and Turvy - the party knew there was something odd about them (in particular, that they seemed to be amazing damage sponges), but not what they actually were. So, I had it mentioned that the sacrificial ceremony was timed to coincide with Spring Tide on the Darklake, and then let the players roll Survival checks to figure out why that seemed to have alarmed their gnomish friends so much.

As it happened, it was a Drow character who got the high roll, so I had to describe how she wasn't sure exactly what a moon was, or what it looked like when it got full, but she'd heard that spring tides always accompanied a full or new moon.

During the fight, the twins 'hulked out' into wererats, and one lost control and went feral, but nevertheless prioritised the enemy kuo-toa. One of the kuo-toa got infected with lycanthropy, and since I couldn't find anything about onset time in the Monster Manual, I went ahead and let that one go furry immediately, and it went for its fellows.

The two arch-priests did mostly duke it out with each other, but the enemy priest did cast Spirit Guardians, and that is a really rough spell that can chew through a third-level party's hit points quite ferociously. I had it manifest as dozens of skeletal shark jaws biting at people.

In the end, their allied archpriest killed his daughter, and things progressed from there much as in the book. It coincided with the end of our last session of that arc ( run it at a gaming club, so we change games every couple of months), and made for an excellent finale.

 

[wedgeski]

I couldn't see my PC's taking to the "fake sacrifice" plan, so to give them a stake in the fight, I made an actual sacrifice of one of the Society of Brilliance, whom the PC's had been asked to watch out for in their travels, and then in audience with the Archpriest, the party devised an ambush to take place during the ritual.

The encounter then entered full-on mass battle mode, with the paladin battling (successfully) to save Skriss's life, while simultaneously fighting off Ront, whose simmering hatred of the party's de facto leader finally came to a head. When His Demonic Eminence arrived, the whole thing turned bat-guano crazy as Sloobludop was torn to shreds and the party retreated to the lake and escape.

Shuushar turned from a figure of some ridicule to a deeply troubled and sympathetic companion, and their efforts to ensure his survival paid off handsomely in their navigation of the Darklake.

All-in-all, lots of fun.

 

[Uller]

For anyone interested, we finished up the Sloobludop sacrifice/Demogorgon encounter today. It went well, I think. I think the potential for a TPK was there.

I used a Deadly X 1.5 XP budget for the enemy, plus the two archpriests (one to each side). So it was a monitor (700), a whip (200) and 4 guards (50 each) for a 2,200 XP encounter.

The PCs were a barbarian, paladin and arcane trickster (level 3) and a light domain cleric (level 2...he's a PC of a player that abandoned the game so I run him as a cohort of sorts).

The party faked their bounds (sleight of hand check) to try to gain surprise. The arcane trickster used disguise self to hide the party's weapons. It was decided the cleric would start the fight with a faerie fire spell and the paladin would attack the archpriestess. He decided at the last minute he'd try to palm a dagger (there was some arguement here after the fact).

The cleric pulled off enough of a slight of hand check to not alert the guards but the archpriestess noticed the paladin's dagger so she was not surprised.

The party lucked out in two big ways: All four kou-toa failed their saves against the faerie fire spell (the archpriestess, monitor, whip and one guard) AND the friendly archpriest beat his daughter's initiative and managed to get off a 4th level hold person spell that got her for two rounds and the whip for one.

Over the next two round the party lit up the enemy archpriestess with a series of crits. The paladin went down to a crit from the monitor and one from a guard. The light cleric wrecked havoc with a Radiance of the Dawn channel divinity and then the friendly archpriest got off a spirit guardians spell, wiping out the guards and then charging in. His spell was disrupted by the monitor but a couple more crits from the barbarian and rogue pretty much ended things.

All in all, I thought it was a blast.

Now my players are dealing with the aftermath. Half of them failed their madness check and they left most of the NPCs in a camp outside the village (and a lot of them failed their madness check).

You can read it here if you want but it goes for about 70 posts in all:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...of-the-Abyss&p=7002707&viewfull=1#post7002707

 

[Werebat]

I ran it mostly as written. Do not forget the Madness checks forced by Big D! They resulted in some pretty important developments for the combat -- in particular, Prince Derendil went nuts and fled the scene (never to be seen again, as the PCs fled to the Darklake on boats with Hemeth), and Topsy started fighting Turvy on the docks. The twins were ABOUT to reveal their true natures to the party when Big D rose up out of the water and smashed them to a pulp.

Fun combat, even if it inevitably ended in a rout for the party.