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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hypersmurf" data-source="post: 911564" data-attributes="member: 1656">Mine is still in progress - it's a PbEM, so events move slowly.The PCs all had their own reasons for being out and about in the world, before fate brought them together.The cleric was walking the earth, like Caine in Kung Fu, doing good while hoping to find a lead on her paladin lover, who had been dragged through an Abyssal portal by fiends a couple of years ago.The rogue, with Mob connections, was investigating the disappearance of a drug shipment, along with the couriers, somewhere along a route that passed through the area.For whatever reasons, they and several others got together to investigate the strange goings-on at the old keep.Along the way, they found one of the rogue's dead couriers, mauled by something big and nasty.  (The rogue was keeping his background mission a secret - nobody else knows about the drugs.)They also met a man who had found the courier first, and appropriated a few of the doses that had ended up scattered when the courier was killed... and who was suffering one of the side effects - he had the disconcerting habit of talking to people who weren't really there...Now, to the keep.  In the first major battle, the PCs won... but the cleric and the archer were both brought negative - the cleric -4 and bleeding, the archer -7 and bleeding.There was nobody else in the party who could cast any sort of cure spell, and nobody had a decent untrained Heal check.Someone rummaged through the cleric's pack, and turned up scrolls of Cure Light Wounds, but no potions.(As it happened, the only person in the party with any cure potions was the unconscious archer, and nobody checked his pack.)And then I sent a private email to the rogue, reminding him that he had a few doses of this highly addictive drug on him, and that one of its effects was a temporary alchemical bonus to Con... which would provide the cleric with just enough hit points to hit zero, whereupon she could cure herself, and then save the archer's life.He slipped her a pellet - she came awake, and felt really good, even down on minimal hit points.Not long after that, her long-lost paladin lover started speaking to her in her head, and telling her he was still stuck in the Abyss - his captors let him watch her as a form of torture, he said, but he had figured out how to use it to speak with her.  He was still alive, he knew she was looking for him, he still loved her, he had faith she's rescue him, etc etc.You know, all the things she most wanted to hear.The party went to sleep, and got woken up by a midnight attack... by which time the drug had worn off, so the 'paladin' isn't talking in her head any more.  But the rogue has just confessed to her in private what he did.And the roleplaying result was exactly what I hoped the player would run with... the cleric is agonising over whether to ask the rogue for another dose, because she chooses to believe - however implausible - that perhaps the drug puts her into the mental state that the paladin needs her to be in before he can break through the planar barrier to speak with her...And even if she accepts that it's not real, maybe the illusion of having him near is worth the addiction.I'm just glad I have a player who can pull it off <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />-Hyp.</blockquote>

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