I sat down yesterday to prep and I’m a bit out of ideas for custom scenes and hacking ideas for the adventure we’re playing (Expedition to the Demonweb Pits).
I therefore decided to play the next session almost directly from the adventure and I set out to read it once again to familiarize myself with it.
(It’s still rather bad, but bearable… )
However I had one issue to tackle.
At the end of last game, I had ripped out the player’s Base of Operation (the City of Ptolus) and I crashed it into the Demonic City of Zelatar on Demon Prince Grat’zz’s domain in the Abyss.
While it was a flavourful, catastrophic definitively Epic plot twist, I did rob the players of their points of references/safe house.
When I asked Yan how his character will react in such circumstances he told me that he would write Ptolus off and find a way back to the bigger world to try to save it.
That gave me the warning I needed because I would rather have the players stay in Ptolus for the rest of the campaign (i.e. about 4 games) than have them waste time hunting for a new base of operation.
So anyway, I got an inspiration to keep the whole ‘OMG Ptolus was stolen!’ feeling and still allow the city to be a rallying point for 10-11th level adventurers.
That’s when I remembered that one of Ptolus Noble House is known as ‘House Shadow’ because of it’s ties with Shadow magic. Plus, in a recent discussion with my good buddy Graham, we explored a few ways to introduce some of the cool 4e world concepts like the Shadowfell and the Feywilde in our late game to have a cool transition to the new game world this summer.
So here’s what I cooked up:
The City of Ptolus was sitting over a forgotten Seal called the Shadowseal. This seal kept the world of Shadow completely seperate from the material world.
Those who engineered the ‘kidnapping’ of Ptolus to send it in the Abyss found that seal and blew it open, using the eldritch/divine energies it released to propel the city into the greedy hands of the Demon Prince.
When my lase game session faded to black, the demon hordes of Grat’zz were moving in Zelatar’s new neighborhood… all seemed hopeless.
What I proposed to my players by email yesterday was that the head of House Shadow, discovering that the not only existed but was now opened, rapidly channeled part of the released shadow energies to weave a spell that partly snatched Ptolus from the Abyss and dropped it in a Shadowy demi-plane…
The city is still visible from Zelatar’s walls… but it’s structures and citizens are intangible to the corporeal demons and soldiers.
So the city is still in big trouble, away from it’s ‘home’ but no longer exposed to the imminent dangers of being wholly absorbed in the horrors of the Abyss…
The players accepted and we’re off tomorrow for the next adventures to try to save the world from a fate similar to what is happening to Ptolus… they just need to find a way to get out of that shadow world.
…plus it just so happens that the next part takes place in Zelatar… what are the odds?
😀
Sounds like it’s working for you guys. Might need to add in something later on that the G man has which your group will want though. I’m not real clear on some of the terms mentioned so I’m just guessing but I’ve usually found I get better results when I use carrots and sticks and this sounds like it’s all stick so far.
Wow. Sounds like one very cool plan you’ve got there! 🙂
@ Lanir: It’s been very stick I agree… I’m making the players walk through fire to save a very wounded world. I’ll make it up to them soon and I think they trust me… as I said a few weeks ago, if we pull it off, this campaign is going to be legendary… if not… we’ll there’s always 4e.
@Lupis Gris: Thanks man!