Gilladian
Adventurer
This is a 5e game, but your responses don't need to limit themselves. I just ran a little adventure called "Storm Keep"; in it the PCs fight an elemental that has more-or-less taken over a wizard's keep. There are some apprentices hiding in their room, and one of them will become the new keep owner/senior wizard if the PCs allow, at the end of the adventure. The keep gets its name from a fairly powerful magic item that draws down storms and charges itself from them. It is capable of summoning elementals, of creating elemental-based magic items, etc... So really an artifact.
At the end of the adventure, my PCs drop-kicked and smashed the thing, despite the young wizard's frantic pleas that they not do so; they were certain that leaving such an artifact in the hands of a naive, young, untrained wizard was a bad idea, and they were not interested in taking the place over for themselves. So they destroyed it. Now, there just HAVE to be repercussions. I mean, this item HAD to be sitting there doing more than looking pretty. The previous owner had just tried, and failed, to summon and bind a major fire elemental to his command. HE got thrown into the interplanar void, somewhere. The elemental had then tried to burst through to our plane, hoping to create chaos and burn everything in sight. And now he's been banished home again. Mighty pissed off is how I'd describe him.
So I'm wondering if maybe a couple of things shouldn't go on... maybe the expelled wizard is trapped somewhere, and smashing the crystal did something? What could be going on with him? A ghostly thing? Doing what? And what would the elemental be able to do? And what else could this crystal have been binding in place? Was it a ward, a key, or something else?
At the end of the adventure, my PCs drop-kicked and smashed the thing, despite the young wizard's frantic pleas that they not do so; they were certain that leaving such an artifact in the hands of a naive, young, untrained wizard was a bad idea, and they were not interested in taking the place over for themselves. So they destroyed it. Now, there just HAVE to be repercussions. I mean, this item HAD to be sitting there doing more than looking pretty. The previous owner had just tried, and failed, to summon and bind a major fire elemental to his command. HE got thrown into the interplanar void, somewhere. The elemental had then tried to burst through to our plane, hoping to create chaos and burn everything in sight. And now he's been banished home again. Mighty pissed off is how I'd describe him.
So I'm wondering if maybe a couple of things shouldn't go on... maybe the expelled wizard is trapped somewhere, and smashing the crystal did something? What could be going on with him? A ghostly thing? Doing what? And what would the elemental be able to do? And what else could this crystal have been binding in place? Was it a ward, a key, or something else?