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PrGo
2009-05-27, 05:22 PM
I have a question for the DM's. Have you ever made an entire campaign with an Elder Evil? I've just read about Atropos, and I really want to make a full campaign all the way to level 20 with the story they suggested there.

What are your experiences with them?

Salt_Crow
2009-05-27, 06:20 PM
I've been a player in the Atropus arc in a three-session scenario with 5 ECL 19 characters. It's interesting, somewhat reminescent of Ravenloft at times, quite enjoyable to be sure. However, in the end even the combined might of the PCs couldn't stop the eventual descent of Atropus...

The PCs all died like the heroes that they were :(...

RTGoodman
2009-05-27, 06:32 PM
I've got Elder Evils and have looked through it, but I don't really know THAT much about it.

That said, the problem I see with trying to do a 1-20 campaign just about Atropus is that, well, I don't know if you could come with enough interesting, diverse material to fill in twenty levels. Were I to run a campaign that culminated in the Atropus adventure arc, I'd probably do a normal campaign from the beginning (run some modules maybe, or come up with your own, whatever) that doesn't involve the Elder Evil, and then as the heroes start growing in level, the various omens and signs start appearing. The actual Atropus stuff wouldn't necessarily have to start until maybe 10th-12th level, I guess, maybe a little earlier or later depending on your taste.

Starscream
2009-05-27, 06:41 PM
I played in a campaign where we started out epic and fought Atropos. We knew we wouldn't be able to hold the group together long enough to start from level 1, so we just cut to the chase.

I've always regretted that we never got to do the whole thing properly. A full on Atropos campaign would be like the D&D equivalent of George A Romero's Dead movies, starting slow and ending with the shambling dead outnumbering the living. Pretty sweet.

Sinfire Titan
2009-05-27, 07:41 PM
Atropus makes for an excellent final encounter if you play through something like the original Ravenloft campaigns.

I prefer Pandyrom (sic), but that's because I'm a Chaos Cultist of Tzeentch.

SilverClawShift
2009-05-27, 10:04 PM
Our DM actually ran us through a really amazing Elder Evil campaign, but he didn't use any of the ones from the book. He cribbed the structure, the idea of signs, and the whole "The end is nigh" thing.

Threw us up against The World Spider (TWS). See, it turns out that all of the planes themselves, all of existance, heaven hell and the material combined, were just motes stuck in the strands in "TWS"'s web. Its web being the ethereal plane. A realm which was one tangled gossamar strand that all others stuck to to varying degrees.
When you travel between planes, you're actually trapsing across the linesof "TWS"'s web. And finally, when the worlds became large enough, when the hustle and bustle between realms reached a proper crescendo, it woke to suck our worlds dry.

The barriers between planes started fracturing, The City of Sigil (the center of the web) flew into chaos and everything spiral out from it. Tiny aspects of TWS began to puncture into our reality... in the form of tiny spider creatures bursting forth from inside living souls. Stronger creatures began to warp into TWS's visage, horrible multi-eyed-multi-limbed mockeries, even as they shifted randomly between planes and into alien landscapes as everything began to bleed together.

TWS's main aspect was the worst though. It would hijack other bodies at random, sucking them dry until they looked like hollowed out withered corpses wearing a black suit and a bowler hat. It told us just to call him "Mr. Sticks". Every body is stole slowly degraded into nothing but a husk of skin with black bristly feelers protruding ranomly from it until it could no longer move under its own power, at which point another soul was sucked dry by "Mr. Sticks".

We couldn't beat him either. We tried. We failed. There was a way. We weren't strong enough.

All we could do was shuffle as many living creatures as we could into a whole mess of tiny custom demiplanes, too small for Mr. Sticks attention as he finally gutted all of reality and ate it screaming.

Our DM mentioned as the epilogue, that the tiny demiplanes we'd formed would simply grow, as the lives and creatures we saved started over anew. Building up, spreading out, become more and more alive, more and more diverse...
Until Mr. Sticks woke to notice the activity once more. We'd just started the cycle over. As it had been done countless times before.

Sucked, yo.

Great game tho, great game.

RTGoodman
2009-05-27, 10:09 PM
Great game tho, great game.

It's probably cliche on these boards by now, but... damn. You've got like the best DM ever.

Starscream
2009-05-27, 11:00 PM
Great game tho, great game.

Epic stuff! I never have the sort of time to do big ones like that. I've only ever grown one character up from level one to epic.

The group I'm currently DMing with be having its tenth and final session this weekend, but I'm graduating in less than a month and need to quit move and find a real job.

Gaiyamato
2009-05-27, 11:05 PM
Great book. If you combine Elder Evils with Heroes of horror it make some interesting and scary stuff I fnid. :)