Ok, I know I said I'd post some tasty morsels from my own campaign, but annoying distractions (like work...) have stolen my board-time lately, (
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
) but here comes a few memorable moments now:
Way back at level 18, the PCs allied with a temple stronghold the size of large town. It's construction started 60 years ago, and finished only a couple of years ago. It was financed by a high-level orc blackguard. His dream was for the forces of evil to stop fighting among themselves and unite against the forces of good instead.
The temple now housed roughly 5000 orcs, goblinoids and kobolds, plus a few handfuls of lizardfolk, ogres, hillgiants and minotaurs. It had a rich supply of clerics (all of whom had a squad of undeads each under their control) and they had "schools" for blackguards, ravagers and warriors of darkness.
These were the people my PCs hired to build them the biggest ship the world had ever seen. Two weeks journey inland... A lot of the evil creatures living in the temple had never even seen the ocean! However, the PCs had plans sail the ship through the
air.
The ship was eventually finished, the PCs added the neccessary magic so that it levitated. In addition, whoever is at the helm can use
Control Winds at will,
Planeshift 1/day and
Storm of Vengeance 1/week, and the ship itself is fire resistant.
The day the ship first levitated off the ground, even Fahrlanghn himself, the deity of travel, came to witness the launching of the mightiest means of transportation in all of history. Of course, such an event had to be celebrated!
In the evening the dreaded pirate captain Karu pulled out a bag of holding full of booze and threw a party for the entire temple. The high point of the evening came when Karu conducted a massive sacrificial ceremony to thank the PCs' vile deities for the fortunes that had allowed them to build this amazing ship... Several demons were summoned to witness the act and provide guidance to captain Karu as he conducted the "service".
The ceremony started with the destruction of a number of good-alligned weapons, armors and other items the PCs had looted off their defeated foes. All the items were piled into a huge granite "bowl" and a small army of evil clerics (Rasputin among them) all cast
Flame Strike to melt the items in unholy fire. After that came the sacrifice of 50 humanoid slaves to further please the evil deities, and finally they sacrificed 7 of their long-time enemies. (They had finally managed to capture them alive, and figured that by giving their souls to Erythnul, Nerull and Tiamat they didn't have to worry about anyone ressurecting them...
)
The sacrificial rules in BoVD states that once in a lifetime, a deity might reward a mortal with a wish for a particularly impressive sacrifice. In front of thousands of drunken, evil creatures, captain Karu pulled that of that night. The sound of huge bass drums seemed to be coming from down in the ground and the PCs started to slowly levitate...
The temple grounds and the sky both split open with a deafening boom! Flickering orange light, like that from a raging fire, shone upon the PCs from above and below. Fiends of all descriptions appeared from the cracks and watched silently as the five PCs started to transform...
Captain Karu underwent the greatest transformation, as his already impressive muscles rippled and swelled, his eyes turned yellow, his skin became scaly and massive bat-like wings started to grow from his back.
The others changed in less obvious, but still noticeable ways; the evil inside them seemed to become manifest on the outside. Their teeth became sharper, their ears pointier, the nails longer and sharper and their eyes seemed to gain a malignant spark...
Eventually the five started to slowly sink towards the ground again. The fiendish spectators withdrew back into the cracks in the ground and in the air above just before they closed and drums faded away.
Captain Karu soon realised he had gotten his greatest wish fulfilled; he now shared some of the powers of the demons that serves his master Erythnul. Not only that, but his companions also seemed to have gained a little of that power! ...and of course, their reputation within the temple was beyond all they could ever have hoped for!
The next day, 3000 of the inhabitants of the temple voluntared to join up as crew for the new ship! Obviously, the PCs couldn't take them all onboard, so captain Karu spent a couple of weeks picking out who would be allowed to join. They eventually sailed of with 120 orc and hobgoblin warriows of darkness, blackguards and ravagers, goblin assassins, kobold sorcerors, a few clerics and assorted craftsmen.
********
As I said in the beginning, this was before the PCs actually turned epic, but it was such a pivotal event in the campaign and explains so much about the characters, I figured it was a good place to start.
Game technically, Karu gained the half-fiend template and the others got the fiendish template. If you look at my discriptions of the PCs in the beginning of this thread, you might notice the drow rogue doesn't have any template. That's because that guy played a shifter at the time, but he retired that character after 3.5 came out.
)
