DM Chronicles 17: This is the end, Fiend

It’s done, our D&D campaign is over and so is my playing D&D 3.5. Sigh*…

The game went exceedingly well, better than I had hoped.The players were clever enough to navigate the minefield that was a hall full of Demon Lord avatars and ambassadors and live!

It went so well that we actually managed to end the campaign, maybe not as dramatically as I would hope, but it was satisfying to have closure.

Feel free to skip to the end if you want to see the my patented ‘lessons learned’ format.

For the rest, here are the details.

I set up the players right at the entrance of the final chamber of the adventure, a Grand Hall that took up a whole battlemap. See picture here.

As I was setting the map, the players were obviously nervous. I said that it was possible that characters may die here and all players said that they were ready for it and accepted this. It’s not often that you get that kind of buy-in!

The room was guarded by a Stone Spider Golem that let the players enter once they showed their golden pass.

The room contained the following:

• a Vrock Ambassador of Pazuzu with 2 Vrock Guards. They had just killed a pair of Drow guard and dared anyone in the room to do anything about it.
• A classic-looking winged demon covered with Eyes (New Monster, Oculous Demon) attending a mass of claws and scorpion parts that was the avatar of Obox-Ob
• A Frost Giant ambassador of Kostchtchie.
• A Yugoloth called Sharlocke (my addition, it’s the campaign’s CR 18 big bad, PCs are level 11-12) awaiting to trade the PCs world so the Yugos can forge a permanent alliance with the demons (1st of many foreshadowing of 4e)
• An avatar of Baphomet along with 3 jet-black minotaur guards.
• An avatar of Demogorgon, alone, on a pedestal and exhorting the virtues of the Pact to the assembled lords and ambassadors.
• An avatar of Yeenoghu along with a full retinue of minions.
• An avatar of Malcanthet along with a trio of Succubus.
• An avatar of the mysterious primordial Demon Mother Pale Night.
• A Huge Bebilith Demon and 3 of Lolth’s most trusted Drow minions all of them guarding the way to Lolth’s envoy (another avatar).

Quite a lot to absorb, yes.

The players agreed to let Cruguer (The Hellbred Crusader) and Cixi (The Iron Hero Archer) be the group’s faces since they were the only ones to speak the local language (Abyssal).

As they entered the room, the Vrocks all linked together to start dancing in glee around the dead Drow guards. At that point the non demons NPCs fled deeper in the room. The PCs, having fought Vrocks 2 sessions ago, recognized the dreaded Dance of Ruin (i.e. after 3 rounds of ‘dancing’ a 100′ radius, 20d6 (vs non-demons) explosion detonates) and fled deeper into the room also.

After the blast, the PCs settled in an unoccupied area of the room and stared doing some recon.

I’ll spare the minute details, but suffice it to say that the players did some interesting role playing that led to Cixi making a fake pledge to Obox-Ob and became it’s ambassador to Lolth. This lead to the exposition of Malcanthet’s avatar being a disguised avatar of Grat’zt as Obox-Ob could see through the disguise.

When exposed, Grat’zt made a speech to the whole room, uncovering the player’s stratagem (The players were really surprised by that turn of event).

He knew all along that they weren’t really ambassadors of Orcus, he engineered everything to discredit Lolth.

Since they had managed to navigate the whole room without getting killed he made his move (he sorta hoped they’d be killed by now and he could have blamed Lolth for shoddy security and take over the Pact’s leadership… ohhh poor demon lord baby).

Of course the Demon Lords answered something in the lines of ‘Well if they’re puny mortals, why don’t YOU deal with it?’.

Fight!

The Demon Prince avatar was focused on avoidance (DC 27 to beat a permanent Sanctuary effect, man I’m going to miss the d20 SRD) and charm, forcing one character per round to attack an ally.

Things became grim really fast. On the 1st round, one succubus made a suggestion at Inigo (Failed Will save) to jump down the 20′ mezzanine and ‘go teach that smug Yeenoghu bastard’ and at the same time Cruguer got charmed by another who was saying “Come on big boy, wouldn’t you rather be kissing than fighting?”

Then the cleric cast dispel Magic on Inigo before he got to act (success) and the charming Succubus was slain in one blow. Not so grim anymore.

After that the avatar fell to 3 consecutive critical hits.

At that point, all hell (well Abyss) broke loose and the Demon lords all attacked each other viciously, Grat’zzt political maneuvering was the only thing keeping them in line and now that he was discredited (Avatar killed by mere mortals? Pfaa!) there was no incentive to keep the charade up.

As players were high fiving themselves, they seemed to have forgotten about saving their world for a minute so I had the Yugoloth scream ‘ENOUGH, I MUST SEE HER NOW!’… I told players that the Yugoloth would be in the room of Lolth’s envoy (3rd floor of room) in 5 rounds and make the deal to trade their world away.

The whole group reacted really fast. They concluded that if they killed the envoy first, the BBEG wouldn’t be able to forge his own alliance. (They had metagaming knowledge that the Yugoloth was way way more powerful than they were).

So they ran past all the drow guards, slid underneath the legs of the Bebilith and burst in the room of Lolth’s envoy. There she was, a 10′ tall Spider-silk clad Drow female standing suspended by 2 strands of webbings over a Huge Web stretched over the middle of a 100’x60’X60 Ovoid room.

When some players thought about parlaying with her (Role playing is deeply ingrained in some of my players) others chimed in that the Yugoloth was coming and that any deals with the avatar of the Goddess of Treachery and Deception was bound to be worthless.

Fight!

On the first round, Inigo used his newly acquired Swordsage power and flew 30′ forward and 20′ up to cut both strands of webbing, causing her divine envoy to fall on her Room-wide Web.

That was so cool!

Inigo then saved graciously and landed on the web too (a failed Reflex save meant a 60’ drop).

Aravard then hit the Envoy pretty hard with his Duskblade/Arcane Archer True-Strike, Vampiric Touched Fiendslayer Arrow combo!

The envoy, who was a magnificently built enchantment-focused sorcerer-like Outsider, cast Confusion on the 1/2 Dragon (Save failed) (He then hit her hard and then plummeted to the bottom of the room).

On the second round, a second avatar of Lolth (In Spider with Drow head form) dropped from the ceiling on top of Inigo. Than the Envoy called in the Bebilith.

It was an awesome fight. At one point, Cruguer jumped on the back of the Spider Avatar and stabbed it repeatedly!

The players managed to beat both avatars and the Bebilith. They were extremely happy to have killed 3 avatars in one evening.

At that point, I more or less went for a full Hollywood ending and had a portal open and a bunch of Celestials pour out to invade Lolth’s realm. Lillee (Yan’s ex Pixie character) appeared and brought the PCs back to the Beastlands.

We played one more hour, describing how the world was saved from complete destruction.

There I described how the whole Planscape Great Wheel collapsed (fueled by the Death of Primus of Mechanus while no one was there to take his place).

There also, Cixi managed to saved her people (Primus revoked the Imprisonment pact before dying). The PCs then forged an alliance with nature goddess Elhonna to fuse their mortally wounded world with the collapsing Beastlands to create a dual world (Physical world/FeyWilde), my transition to the 4e world was near complete.

That fusing of worlds needed to 2 essences of each worlds to power it. Elhonna’s avatar stepped forward, asking for the PCs to come up with their end of the bargain. Confused the players weren’t sure where I was going with this.

Then Kynes, Mike’s cleric’s of Bahamut stepped up and told the players that he wasn’t human, he was created by the ancient Wyrms from this world’s essence to save it. He said he had been created according to ancient draconic prophecy for this sacrifice and he stepped forward.

(I’m taking some artistic licenses here… but one of the greatest things about retelling is adding all the fluff!)

Then Elhonna and Kynes joined (complete with a Fifth element inspired sex scene) and both worlds were joined together, saved from the destruction while the multiverse collapsed in the Astral Sea, Ptolus still trapped in the Shadowfell.

Roll credits…

Lessons Learned:

• Keeping the pace is important as a DM, but sometimes a player needs to know the details of a given situation even if you feel it’s not necessary. Waiving that need away can lead to a frustrated detail-oriented player.
• As much as I riled against that adventure, the final was PERFECT for our needs, the avatars were well crafted and the final scenes were awesome.
• Woflgang Baur, I apologize, you can weave the crunch as adroitly as the Fluff… I bow to you in this round of our conflict.

What Players liked

• Killing Avatars (called Aspects in D&D 3,5) of Demon Lords and a God
• All them critical hits!
• Finally finishing a Campaign!

What Players disliked

• Mike remains unimpressed with the cleric. While his help was crucial in maintaining the group in the fights, it’s so damn passive.
• Me ignoring genuine need for details that I don’t find important and showing signs of impatience when the players insist on getting them.

There you have it. Have a great week.

*I’ll probably post a pair of Post Mortem articles, one on the campaign and one on my whole D&D 3.5 experience in the following days, weeks.

Also stay tuned for my Player logs (pre-game and post game) of Franky’s new McWod Shadow Chasers campaign starting next Sunday.