It's always gratifying to know that my campaign has had a positive impact on people's lives, whether it be inspiring their own games, or inspiring them to get married.
Morningstar, I can assure you that I was at least as nervous as you going into the final session. Every night for a week I would lie in bed, unable to sleep, thinking about how things would wrap up. Was I remembering all the plot threads I wanted to tie off? All the characters whose arcs needed to find resolution? Would the final confrontation be exciting enough? Too deadly? What about my highly experimental plans for a certain antagonist? And, over all, would my players feel like I was providing adequate closure?
When you work on something for 15+ years, you
really don't want to screw up the ending!
Also, here's an update:
Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 336
Sand
Aravis jumps up onto Dranko’s shoulders, thinking that the blood fox form is a safe way to travel. But once perched upon his friend, he begins to be overcome with a terrible hunger. Dranko smells so… so delicious! He must eat! A small part of his mind remembers that he’s also a wizard (…so… hungry!...) and just before he starts to burrow into Dranko’s warm, succulent muscle tissue, he changes back into himself.
“Ugh,” he exclaims. “They truly lead an awful life.”
The amethyst hallway takes them another hundred yards or more, always sloping gently downward but otherwise on a perfectly straight bearing. Every few yards is a small bloodstain, carrying the faint whiff of Essence. Then ahead they can see that the hallway levels out, though it continues straight on as far as they can see.
Something crunches beneath their feet – it’s sand. The hallway has not only become flat, but is now covered with a film of sand – not solidly packed like a beach, but as if someone ahead of them had scattered large handfuls on the floor as they went. There are no footprints in it, and no more bloodstains. Dranko scoops up some of the sand and puts it in a pouch. A vaulted ceiling now soars high above them, and the hallway is twenty-five feet wide, but there’s still an oppressive, almost claustrophobic aura about the place.
At last there is something to break the monotony: a side passage, fifteen feet wide, precisely perpendicular to the main hallway, branching to their right. Morningstar instinctively drops a
thought capture before remembering that most divinations don’t work here. The ceiling in this side passage is lower and flat, and they can see it ends in a chamber about fifty feet down. Dranko moves to investigate.
The room is mostly empty. Its only feature is a large sarcophagus, big enough to house a hill giant’s corpse, upon a pedestal in the center of the room. A stone slab lid rests deliberately against the side of the pedestal, which itself is eight feet high – meaning Dranko can’t look inside it without climbing up. This he does, and inside – nothing. Aravis thinks this place is waiting – waiting for a divine being to die. Unconvinced, Dranko dangles his arm inside the empty sarcophagus, and still feels nothing. Finally, he ‘accidentally’ falls into it, and this truly convinces him that it’s empty.
“You fell in on purpose!” Ernie accuses.
“I wouldn’t have jumped in if I hadn’t known it was completely safe,” says Dranko, grinning.
Flicker, who has been checking the place for secret compartments while Dranko has investigated the sarcophagus, comes up empty. “Not that I was going to loot anything, of course!” he says.
Dranko frowns. “What kind of person builds an empty tomb with no secret doors!” Not only are there no secret doors, but the walls and ceiling are perfectly smooth amethyst. There are no carvings, symbols or adornments to be seen.
Reluctantly, the Company leaves this uneventful side-passage behind and continues down the long straight corridor. The whitish-brown sand crunches beneath their feet. Not much further along, they encounter a second branching hallway, to the left this time, but with the same dimensions as the previous one. This second turn-off, however, is more interesting. Two words are inscribed, one above the other, on the wall above the opening where the new hallway begins. They are written in different languages, neither of them familiar. Grey Wolf, possessed of permanent
comprehend languages that is unaffected by Naslund’s anti-divinatory nature, can read the top name:
Leantha. The bottom word still defies his understanding. Above the two words is carved the image of an open book.
Dranko wants to scout down the new hallway, but he cannot. Even before he can take a single step that way, his mind balks, and he is filled with a great antipathy toward whatever waits in the chamber at the end of the hall. Somewhere in his soul, he knows that to go there would be…
wrong. He looks helplessly at the others.
“It’s to keep people from disturbing the resting places of the Gods,” says Ernie.
Kibi peers down the new branch. He can faintly see that there are tapestries hanging in the chamber at the end. “But what if Tarsos and Meledien are down there, or have been there already?”
Aravis feels a revulsion similar to Dranko’s, but for him it is milder. He is able to walk down the side-passage about half way, though it feels like a psychic headwind is beating at him as he does so. At last, like Dranko, he is able to progress no further. And for him, it is worse: he feels – senses, somehow – that there is a great source of knowledge in the chamber, but it is out of his reach. Having a better look than the others, Aravis sees that the scenes on the tapestries are of people seated in a great library, all of them reading books. He also sees that there is a sarcophagus there, as in the previous chamber, but that the lid is not leaning neatly against it. Instead, it lies on the ground at an irregular angle, and is cracked in several places. Immediately the Company suspects that Tarsos and Meledien have indeed visited this tomb.
Aravis utters a quick prayer to Leantha. “We are here to destroy the looters of this place.” But he can still get no closer to the chamber; something has allowed him to go this far, but no further. He has a strong feeling of a divine presence in that room that prevents his approach.
That is, of course, troubling. Was their enemies’ infusion with the Adversary’s blood enough to make them that much more divine than Aravis? How did they get in there to loot the coffin of Leantha?
Aravis turns and walks back. “Pardon me for my presumption,” he says quietly.
“I didn’t sign up for this,” Dranko mutters. “Nobody told me that someday I’d be walking through a huge amethyst filled with dead Gods.”
They leave the tomb of Leantha behind and continue along the main corridor. They pass another empty chamber on the right, and a few minutes later they spot a second one ahead on the left. But before they can walk that far, the sand on the floor starts to move, sliding and shifting and making a sound like an army of asps.
In a matter of seconds it rises up and congeals into six humanoid shapes, twelve-foot-high sand-warriors, three on either side of them. Swords of sand form at the ends of their arms, and those these drip sand upon the ground, they are constantly replenished by more sand sliding up through the feet to maintain the creatures’ mass.
No one doubts that, like the Tree, these beings are guardians set to protect the tombs from interlopers like themselves.
Kibi reacts instantly, dropping a 50’ high
wall of force that extends from wall to wall, with half of the sand warriors on the far side. One of these walks forward and when it meets the wall, it deforms and spreads. Individual grains roll about against the invisible barrier, but find no crevices through which to pour. A second of the creatures does the same, and when neither meet with any success, they reform themselves into humanoid shapes. All around, the rasping sound fills the hallway, sand upon stone.
That leaves the three on the near side of the force wall. One of them walks directly past Aravis, ignoring him, to swing its sand-sword at Flicker. The halfling ducks, and the swords shatters against the wall, spraying sand out in all directions. There is no core, no solid part of the creature’s blade; it’s all sand. But it quickly reforms into a sword-shape at the end of its arm.
Flicker reacts by slashing with his own blade. One swing sends a spray of sand outward and upward from the creature’s body – and it nearly stops, oddly, hanging like a cloud of tiny gnats in the air. The scattered volume of sand drifts slowly at about the height of Flicker’s head.
Dranko flicks out his whip several times at the creatures nearest to him. Some of his attacks go through the thing’s body with no effect, but two of them have results similar to Flicker’s attack. Blasts of sand are sent bursting from the creature’s torso, where they hover, clouds of granules, slowly rotating through the air as if unaffected by gravity.
Grey Wolf casts a
disintegrate at the same one, but it only makes a tiny hole through its shifting body. Ernie has more luck dropping a
blade barrier that cuts through all three of the guardians; they move quickly out of its cutting field, but not before huge swathes of sand are send to float among them like misty tendrils.
One of the sand guardians on the far side of the wall of force disperses again, this time sending its sand upward. Kibi was unable to have the wall extend to the ceiling, and so the creature reaches the top of it and starts to pour itself down the near side. The sand-creature assaulted by Dranko raises its non-sword “hand” and unleashes a conical blast of sand that envelops Dranko, Grey Wolf, Kibi and Ernie. Dranko whips his cloak around and avoids the blast entirely, but the others feel the scouring sting of the sand scraping away their skin. It looks afterward like their faces had been drawn upon in thin lines of red ink, and they have trouble seeing with the sand in their eyes.
Yet another of the creatures swings its sand-sword at Ernie, but the shifting blade smashes harmlessly against his armor, scattering and reforming in an instant.
Aravis blasts the three present enemies with a maximized chain lightning. All of them have shovelfuls of sand blasted from their bodies, and now the displaced grit is so thick in the air that it’s becoming difficult for anyone to see. Anyone who moves can feel it brushing against their skin. Morningstar quickens a mass curative before tossing a chill seed holly berry into the body of the closest assailant. There is a tiny pause, and then it detonates, blowing the creature entirely apart. The sand of its body fills the air, and now the party has to brush it aside in order to see anything.
Kibi uses Mordenkainen’s lucubration to get back his wall of force, and stacks a new one on top of the original, one that allows the combined wall to go floor to ceiling and wall to wall. The remaining two sand-creatures are thus unable to find any seam, and drop back to the ground, waiting.
The sand-creatures seem to be suffering no ill-effects from the increasingly-thick particulate floating everywhere; one blasts the party with another scouring cone. Morningstar is nearly blinded by the grit in her eyes., and finds it easier simply to fight with them closed. Flicker and Dranko launch minimally-effective weapon attacks, but Grey Wolf loads a maximized acid orb into Bostock and swings with a quickened true strike. A large part of its shoulder erupts in a miasma of sand and acid, its granules joining the ever-thickening cloud. Bostock rejoices. We will smite these creatures together! We can end this fight!
Ernie remembers he’s still carrying a wind fan. He uses it to cast gust of wind, and manages to clear a wide line of space through the middle of the debris field. The fourth sand-creature, the one that had made it over the original force wall, drops down upon him, scraping his armor but otherwise failing to cause harm. The one nearest Grey Wolf, perhaps peeved at the acidic sword-swing, returns the favor with a brutal flurry of swings from its sword. Grey Wolf’s face is lacerated, blood caking the sand in his eyes. He wipes it away, wincing, but a second later his pain is eased, along with everyone else’s. Morningstar has cast mass heal.
Aravis blasts two of the enemy with a lightning bolt. Kibi follows up with a maximized earth bolt, and another one of the sand creatures bursts into pieces. Two left, not counting the pair that prowls on the far side of the wall of force.
Make that one left, after Dranko unleashes a hasted full assault with his whip, releasing the sand from another guardian to float with all the rest. Now it’s getting hard to breath; each breath inadvertently sucks in sand particles.
That last attacking sand creature is able to get one more attack, blasting Grey Wolf, Kibi and Ernie with a shredding cone. But the combined attacks from the rest of the party bring it down immediately after.
There are still two more, prowling on the far side of the wall of corce, splashing nearly continuous sprays of sand against it, waiting.
Everyone gets ready to attack, and Kibi drops the wall. The sand-creatures are first to react, and the Company endures two overlapping sand-blast cones. But thanks to Morningstar’s recent palliative, they endure this fairly well, before returning fire. Flame strike. Maximized cone of cold. Maximized lightning bolt channeled through Bostock. Searing darkness. Another maximized cone of cold. The last of the sand-guardians is ripped apart by magical energies, and their collective bodies now float around the party in a single enormous cloud.
Their cheers of victory are short lived. All of the hovering sand begins to slide past their faces, and in a matter of seconds has congealed into an enormous compact ball some 15’ in diameter. The new sand-sphere sprouts tentacles, and something like an enormous eye opens in its center and regards the party balefully.
Dranko returns its stare and gulps. “Ah, crap.”
…to be continued…
