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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Synchronicity" data-source="post: 4876969" data-attributes="member: 10070">They pretty much swept the board for best result, in the end. I think they went into the final book on 130 VPs, so after dealing with Leska's ward they had 145 VPs. The resistance was pretty much all aces, all the time. They didn't get Ostalin or Longinus's help, but I think that was about it. As for the killing blow...well, that was a bit interesting. A bit of context; I use homebrew death and dying rules, because I like my games more cinematic and don't like players having to deal with bringing in new characters or falling behind in level, so it's very tricky to actually kill PCs. Leska was dropping people to negative hit points pretty much every round, and she had Shalosha helping her due to the test of the ritual she'd performed on her. However, the party still had one fully charged rod of absorption from 'O, Wintry Song of Agony', so the cleric was desperately draining out its power to fuel near-continuous mass heals. Every so often (by which I mean every other round, or thereabouts) the cleric would drop, and there would be a race to UMD a heal scroll on her. Eventually, the Heart had been destroyed, and Leska was running seriously low on offensive spells. I think she had 2 cacophonic bursts, a wall of fire and a telekinesis left. Her clerical healing was almost totally untouched, and she was on 18 hit points. At this stage, I made a decision to let her go, because all I'd be doing by healing her was prolonging the fight to no good cause - she had almost nothing left she could do, and I wanted her to go out with a bang. So she looked  them in the eye, said something along the lines of "This changes nothing. There will always be war." and then dropped a cacophonic burst on herself, killing herself and blasting the party as they closed in. The players seemed cool with it, and didn't appear to feel I'd cheated them of satisfaction or anything, which was good. I figured it was either that or a shift from 'epic final conflict' to 'Benny Hill sketch'. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />I skipped over the Aurana and Shaaladel fight at the end, because after that, everyone was shattered. I just narrated how they defeated them - which was a little bit of a shame, since I'd rebuilt Aurana as a sorcerer/shadow adept, as it appealed to my sense of whimsy - and then we had the wrap-up. They'd freed Trilla, so Hope was wandering around, and had generally kept everyone they could alive, so it was a pretty positive ending. I'm afraid this is all a bit general, but I'm afraid there were rather too many awesome bits to really pin down, or even to fit in a short list! All in all, my group found War of the Burning Sky to be an unqualified success! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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