Primal/Within Chronicles: A Master’s Wrath, Part 1

Summer always makes gaming a bit harder.  Getting a full group of players becomes a challenge and usually, by the time June hits, I’m well into my annual DM burnout.

Weirdly enough, I don’t feel burned out this year.  This is mostly because our current Primal/Withing campaign is so damn fun.

This week I found myself with prepping a game for only 4 PCs as two of them, Mike and Eric, couldn’t join us.

Since there was no way to know who would show up from one session to the next, I elected to create a short, 5-scene adventure to be played in one session.

As I was brainstorming for adventure ideas, I kept coming with cool ideas for one of the missing PCs.  Try as I might, I couldn’t shake the ideas away and I finally decided to embrace them.

However, as you’ll see in the next few paragraphs, I ended up creating a set-piece adventure where PCs had no significant choice to make, not usually a sign of good design.  While we enjoyed ourselves, this might have been one of my most railroaded adventure ever!

Obligatory cheesy dream sequence

The primary goal of this adventure was to set the scene for the next season.  One of the ways I wanted to do that was to forge a link between Corwin (Math’s halfling Chaos Sorcerer) and the Primordial that gives the whole Dungeon life.  So I started the game with a dream sequence.

Corwin saw a personification of the Dungeon (a chained colossus) bleeding out in some sort of pool.  It asked for Corwin’s help, not expecting it… But Corwin accepted, but only in exchange for a future favour.

At the same time, Corwin saw the female halfling sorcerer he met in the last adventure.  She seemed to be seeing something different because when he got her attention, she cried ‘Can’t you see how much she bleeds?’

I’m sparing you the details of the dream but the PCs got the message that some new entity was leeching the essence of both the Dungeon and the Nexus (the divine energy source protecting the city).

Gimme a #2 Quest combo, hold PC choices

Shortly after, the PCs were summoned by both Jarl Botten (Hobgoblin Mercenary leader) and Radik Whiteblade (Elected candidate of the Preserver faction).  Radik wanted to hire the PCs and when he asked Jarl to contact them, Jarl told him that he too had a job for them.  They decided to team up to deliver a pair of quests:

First, Jarl told the PCs that the mad wizard that created the Silvered Bulette (from the Font of Sorrows adventure) was deemed a  ‘critical threat’ to the city and had to be brought dead or alive (but whole) to the City’s Incinerator.

I wanted to test how my players would react to a blatant ‘Seek and Destroy’ quest.  It turns out that Rocco (Halfling Rogue) was fine with the idea (he’s working up to the Assassin Paragon path).  However, Dworkin (Dwarven shaman) wasn’t so cool about it and insisted that they would deliver the Wizard to the authorities to let them.

Secondly,  Radik  Whiteblade explained that there was a possible link between the Mad Wizard and a new entity that moved into the dungeon.  He wanted this investigated.  Also, the PCs were asked to find what happened to Fangs (Eric’s Warden, absent in this game) as he was possibly captured by this new entity before escaping without any memories.

I also took a risk with the second quest as you’ll see in part 2.  Eric never created a background for his Shifter Warden.  We joked that he was found dying  in the Dungeon, with no memories of past events.  Yet, for various reasons, the joke became reality.  However, one of Eric’s motivation in a RPG is to explore the psyche of his character, which isn’t really possible with an amnesic PC. So I thought I could sprinkle the story with a few hooks and see how it would pan out.

Close Quartered Artillery Blues

The PCs had no trouble finding the lair of the Mad wizards.  In a previous game, Jaiel had asked his colleagues of the Foundation faction to keep an eye on the wizards’ activities so it was only a matter of asking them.  The wizard lived in a ruined library in a cave somewhere in the gray areas where City and Dungeon met.

The PCs made it there without any incident.  The wizard’s lair stood in front of the PCs with boarded windows and the front door falling off its hinges. I used the ‘Black Library’ battlemap from the Frostfell Rift map pack so I put it in the table at this point.

As the PCs came in, they heard rustling on the first floor.  As they entered, they heard the mage’s broken voice “You’ll never take me alive! Kill them all!”

The PCs were attacked by 2 battle Wights (slightly refluffed, with ghostly swords and amour bolted on themselves).  On the next round the mage, standing on the second floor mezzanine sent a Chaos Flare in the middle of party, blinding most of them.  The mage’s stats were those of the Gnome Entropist, without the gnome’s invisibility power.  As the PCs recovered from blindness, an armored Brain in a Jar (I kid you not) floated down from the second floor.

The fight went well, the wights managed to drain the Shaman’s soul a few times while the Brain in a Jar did its trick of stealing a Healing Surge from a PC and inflict it on another.  However, I quickly realized that having 2 artillery monsters on such a cluttered map (there were bookcases everywhere) was less than ideal.  I often had a hard time getting a clear shot.  Also, the wights had to fight in very cramped quarters so I had a hard time setting them for their ‘Immobilize then drain soul’ combo.

Of course, it didn’t help the players either that the Avenger kept rolling 3s and 4s, even with it’s Oath of Emnity (allows 2 d20 rolls for each melee attack).

Once both Wights and the Brain were dealt with. Corwin the Sorcerer sent a ranged attack at the Mage that dealt a lot of damage and teleported him 15′ in the air over the first floor.

However, at the same time, an horizontal portal opened up in the midsection of the Wizards!

The only thing that fell down was the Wizard’s bloodied lower half.  The Portal stayed opened, suspended in the air.

With the fight finished, I left the table to go to the bathroom.  When I returned, Franky said:

“Dude, you’re so evil!  You told us that we need to bring the Whole body back right?”

Me: “Did I?  I might have mentioned it”  🙂

I love those moments!

Up next: The PCs jump in the portal and make several worrying discoveries.

Image Credit: Wizards of the Coast