When the campaign started back in Sept 2014, Bearchief was one of two players that gave me a top-notch backstory. After reading it, I knew we’d be doing something to try and recover that relic, and my brain immediately started percolating ideas... Unfortunately, Bearchief moved away after the Sealers of the Stone Maw concluded (late December 2014). Setting up a session to recover the relic was still on the list of things to do… but was going to take some extra effort, so I put it on the back burner.
The Eberron campaign progressed after his departure (as you have read), and we even started another campaign with a friend trying to DM the Lost Mines of Phandelver (the 5e intro campaign). We alternated sessions, and so it was June by the time I wanted to get bring Bearchief back.
It was going to be a dungeon-crawl, but an in person session wasn’t feasible for Bearchief, so I decided to give the physical attendees minis and a map, and Bearchief, who was participating via Google Hangout (I think) astral project himself into the fray. He wouldn’t have to reference the grid dungeon much, but could:
· Cast spells as normal
· Give a temporary 20 HP to anything he projected himself into and inhabited.
· Add or subtract a D8 to attack rolls, skill checks or saving throws once a round on stuff he inhabits.
I figured he’d be a massive “Mark Target” kind of effect, returning to the bodies of the party only when they needed some form of healing. Mostly he just stayed with the party. Bearchief would need to post how fun this attempt was to incorporate him; I think it did a decent job, though there is room for improvement.
The last wrinkle was physical attendees. Turnin was going to have to leave early, and Shadowale was (again) unable to make it. In retrospect, it would have been best to abandon Shadowale with the cult or have him kidnapped along the way (the Bag of Holding isn’t really supposed to hold people…), but since every absence was last-minute, we never retconned anything and just kept dragging him along… Despite these setbacks, I didn’t really want to reschedule. I had introduced the spiders as a test/teaser a while back and wanted to get on with the show. So on we went.
I had originally drawn up a massive, warped cave dungeon, but ended up cutting about half the rooms/encounters/ideas in order to make this fit into a single (albeit longer) session, and less grindy than the Sealers dungeon. I ended up with 4 main chunks:
1) Spiders/introduction
Generally speaking , we have at least a week between sessions. Sometimes more based on holidays or other campaigns. Subtleties are often lost on the party. I wanted to explicitly tie the unusually large and vicious spiders (and spider wranglers) the party had been seeing into the relic’s story so they would (maybe) recognize the hook and payoff.
The fight wasn’t as dynamic as the last spider throw down, but there was still a lot of cooperation and movement. This also served as a quick field test of Bearchief’s projected powers, which I ended up being pleased with, so changed nothing. A few checks later, the party traversed the winding path and found themselves in the dungeon proper.
2) The floor is lava (acid)
Basically, the room would be a big cave room, with acid from outside dripping down the wall. If wheels were turned, however, mechanisms would stop up and acid would pool instead of draining (mostly) harmlessly. Each turned wheel/stopped mechanism would raise the level of the pool and increase the acid damage for stepping in it. At two stops (where the party started), the pools would have coalesced, and the only safe paths would be few, though the room would still be navigable. At three stops, these paths would succumb to the pools, and the party would start taking damage as the entire floor became covered.
I made this room needlessly big, and the combats were rough (the shifting druids hit HARD and the party was NOT sticking together) but it was a cool idea, I think. If we had a full crew, this would have gone a bit better, as the larger encounter space would have been a little more justified.
3) Dragon Hoard/acid elementals
I wanted to mess with the party a bit. Each stoppage in the room above would remove one potential elemental in the room below. They opted to remove all the stoppages, so they got three corrupted elementals!
I like the concept of having one room impact the others, even if this was kept secret from the party… I’ll need to explore this further I think. I really liked the fight here; the party was failing checks and getting dragged all over the place. It was frustrating for them, but they played it well, and pulled out some tricks of their own.
4) Boss fight with a view
They were going to level to 5 after this session, and this was also going to culminate in the semi-conclusion of a player’s personal quest, so I wanted to make it memorable.
Bearchief’s backstory had him thinking that some aspect of the Cult of the Dragon Below was responsible for the murder and relic-swiping, so I settled on the idea of a group of deceived/corrupted druids being the grunts/culprits. Led by some deceitful mindflayers, these druids though they were doing good (murdering some “evil” druids, “reclaiming” a relic), but really the opposite was true, and they were corrupting the world around them.
Mayhem seemed like a poor goal for the mindflayers, so this being D&D, having encountered no Dragons previously BUT having an Arrow of Dragon Slaying… I figured it was time to have some kind of dragon in the mix. Unearthing/reanimating an undead dragon for a sweet pet/mount seemed like a sufficiently cool goal for the baddies, and off we went.
I was hoping to foreshadow the ritual a bit, but the party failed all of their (increasingly easy) perception checks, and was caught off guard by the ritual.
The boss fight was brutal, and long. My bad. I had built up the dragon/mindflayer(s) up from the ground up again, since they were a bit too powerful for the party to face right out of the monster manual. None of them had too many attacks, but the party was beat up, rolling attacks poorly, and Shadowale, who does crazy-high damage was absent. Oops.
I was pleased with how the session progressed, how we were able to incorporate an old player, and how the session itself ended. It was a pretty good session.
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