Angry Bob
2012-03-28, 10:35 PM
A campaign I was running ended the past weekend, one that took the players from 2nd level to 50th. Despite obstacles on and off the table to the players, characters, and DM, the game wrapped up its last few sessions surprisingly well. There's no point to this thread except me celebrating my second game run and first campaign finished, to accept praise and congratulations for said game, and discussing a few things I would do if I ran it again.
The World:
A world divided in two by a vast ocean and "The Rift," an effect spanning the entire great wheel preventing teleportation and planar travel between the two halves. One continent has eons of history and a surface mostly conquered by the Theron Empire. The other side has two continents, one of which has some colonies from the old content and some lingering tension between the locals and the colonists from 500 years ago when they arrived, the other of which is mostly rainforest with some mountain ranges, given a cursory examination and not found terribly valuable. Deep within the rift itself is a largely unexplored island covered in feral nastiness of every variety.
Part I: Adventuring... Adventuring Never Changes.
- To begin with, the party consists of a nerfed LA+3 Magic-blooded pixie sorcerer, a large template(modifier half-minotaur) goliath warblade, some kind of shifter charger-build abomination, and a Shifter Hugh Jackman ripoff.
- Clear the first dungeon. Discover that a chivalric order called the Knights of Cerberus was hiring outlaws to threaten the outlying villages enough to necessitate requesting assistance from said knightly order and expanding their sphere of influence.
- Travel to the capital of the the imperial enclave, Metis Sophion, clearing a village infested by kythons(and losing the party's Hugh Jackman knockoff in the process) on the way, to get a closer look at this order.
- Learn that the leader of the order, Exitus Decimus of Sanctaphrax, is only alive because of a mess of legal "things" preventing him from being charged, found guilty of, and executed for dozens of war crimes. Decide not to directly assault the Knights' headquarters. In the city, hear rumors of a hobgoblin army, the largest since the offensive a generation ago, rampaging through the southern confederacy.
- The group is contacted by a local noblewoman, Lady Torashana en Sentaris, about an unrelated quest to retrieve a minor artifact from an ancient temple on the jungle continent mentioned above. She contacts the sorcerer via telepathy, inviting him for "dinner" later. He ends up spending the night with her, and wakes up the next morning spooning her and a minotaur in a gimp suit.
- En route to their destination aboard an elemental vessel, encounter another adventuring party seemlingly dispatched to retrieve the same artifact. The other party mentions that the PC party must be "the group they hired to get the other one." The PCs decide to confirm their suspicions.
- Reaching the temple the party eliminates the entrance guardians and is interrupted by the entrance of the Hugh Jackman player's new character, a githzerai "machinegun ninja," by having his elemental vessel crash near them. He reveals that something weird had happened to his crew that ended with their mutation into horrible tentacled creatures and eventually the elemental deciding to crash the ship, and that he had been sent to the temple by hostile dreams from something he only described as "the critter."
- The group clears the temple, retrieves the artifact, and returns to the city, to learn that the hobgoblin army has turned its sights on the capital in the time they were gone and will arrive in days. After some drama where the githzerai attempts to steal the artifact, the party presents the artifact to the Lady. When pressed about what she wants it for, she brushes them off.
- The party learns that the other group they encountered plans to use the diversion of the siege to assassinate the leader for various reasons - the warforged crusader suspects Exitus may be using the siege for some nefarious purposes, while the binder and his girlfriend are just pissed that he didn't really pay them. The party decides to help them instead of defend the walls with the other parties in the city. That night, the rest of the party starts getting harassed by nonspecific but threatening nightmares from "the critter."
- The party learns that the Lady's villa has been raided by the knights of Cerberus. They are stopped by the surviving members of her bodyguard and decide not to press the issue until the siege has been dealt with.
- The siege occurs, along with a threatening dream from the critter, insisting that the party "RESCUE HER 0R 1 STR1P Y0UR FLESH FR0M Y0UR B0NES," which the party can be accomplished while they infiltrate the tower. The party fights their way through the streets and starts taking occasional inflict light wounds with no apparent source. Also, at this point, the player of the charger creature stopped showing up, so we decided his character jumped off the battlements to solo the sieging army. He probably succeeded.
- The other party leads the group into the sewer, where they've discovered an entrance to an expansive cavern system under the citadel, where the citizens have been evacuated to. The entire place is warded by a hallow effect. En route, the group is hit with another inflict. The Binder gets annoyed at this and takes his party's archivist's protective amulet, provoking the archivist to transform into something horrible, which is then defeated by the party. The binder goes ethereal, stands still, and refuses to corporealize.
- Now on their own, the party fights their way into the tower and finds imprisoned not only Lady Torashana, but the critter as well. Though they don't have a name for it yet, it's a dream master quori in its ethereal form, bound and imprisoned by the Knights. Torashana is catatonic, uttering one word when prompted: "Sicerax." In the chaos, the critter breaks its bonds and plane shifts.
- The party secures Torashana, now completely comatose, and heads to the top of the tower. They decide on the direct route, heading to the top of the adjoining smaller mage's tower and jumping across, Kool-Aid manning into the room with the red veil(Iot7V) on, where they see Exitus sacrificing people to an insidious device. To make a not-so-long story short, the foot soldiers died by the dozens running into the veil, the githzerai killed Exitus in one round, and the Warblade and the pixie finished off the iron golems. The crossbowmen in the balconies just fled.
- They learn that the insidious device was a weapon of mass destruction that would annihilate the legions of low-level hobgoblin soldiers and any citizens unlucky enough to have not been evacuated. They search the tower and discover from his journal that Exitus had planned the siege and intended to use it as an excuse to move the population of the city underground and rule them as a dictator, eventually becoming a lich. Mainly as a way to escape prosecution once his term as military administratus ran out. Then, a visit to a healer reveals that Lady Torashana, now completely comatose, is displaying the effects of some ongoing debilitating effect. Probably due to the weird psionic crystals grafted to her bones.
- The party sticks around long enough to see the beginning of emergency reforms to the bureaucracy, and then heads to Chiromemnitos, a city in the Confederacy with psionics as its hat. After doing a sidequest for one of the psionic researchers there, they leave Torashana in their care. They are called back after weeks of downtime to her kidnapping. They dungeon crawl the sewers beneath the city before coming upon some weird psionic cult - likely one of those Inspiration cults mentioned in the Knights' records(basically, cults that disguised themselves by pretending to be this pre-existing horrible demon cult called the cult of the Soulthirster, but hinted at something being worse. To top it off, when the party went back to Torashana's manor after the siege, they discovered a hidden shrine matching their description of a shrine of Inspiration. And slash fiction of themselves, but that's for another day).
- The party fought their way to the central chamber to discover the Critter, who they now know as Sicerax, in the flesh, leading a psionic ritual of some sort. They defeat everyone in the room too late. Torashana's body shines with intensely bright blue light and she rises off the altar as the fully-awakened Exarch of Dal Quor on the prime material. The party spends a round ineffectively trying to do anything at all to her and fails, before teleporting away and fleeing to the old continent aboard their elemental airship, the Geminus. Did I mention they had an airship now? One of the senators of Metis Sophion. gave them it as a token of gratitude.
- End Part I
Part II: DREAMS D0N'T D1E
- The party retreats to the old continent to figure out their next steps. In real life, time has passed between this segment and the last, and the player of the Goliath Warblade can't keep playing. Additionally, I decided, with the party being so small, they they could rebuild their characters into gestalt characters. The Githzerai adds wizard casting while the sorcerer adds cleric casting. Regular castings of Discern Location reveal that the Exarch has destroyed a wide swath of settlements in the confederacy before retreating to Dal Quor for reasons unknown. The party decides, in and out of character, to level grind some, an established practice in my setting.
- To this end, they depart for the island in the rift. On this island, they locat an ancient temple and do what comes naturally to adventuring parties faced with ancient temples. When they leave the island, they are epic level.
- After a brief sidequest involving an astral hulk, an inhabited mass of rock floating through the astral plane, and acquiring an artificer pseudo-cohort, the sorcerer decides to duel the reigning archmage before setting off for the new continent and the endgame. I as the DM was expecting the archmage to mow him. The crowd was expecting a beatdown on one side or the other. Neither of us expected what amounted to a draw, which actually ended up making a better story than either of the other options.
- The party, now sufficiently overleveled, returns to the new world and quickly defeats the Exarch's lieutenants, crippling the Dreaming Dark's hold on this plane. A traitorous lieutenant gates the party to Dal Quor.
- The party finds the realm of dreams shaped into a tropical paradise, decorated with a tower of amethyst. At the top of the tower, predictably enough, is the Exarch.
- Boss Battle! The party quickly takes her down, but as when they do, she predictably transforms into an advanced paragon gibbering orb having "swallowed" an advanced paragon kalaraq quori. The party has problems with its over 10,000 hp before the sorcerer spams moon bolt enough to bring its strength to zero.
- As its strength hits zero, its body is swallowed by the quori spirit inside it, whose true form was an advanced paragon umbral blot with the psi-likes of a kalaraq quori and the supernatural abilities of a Pandorym Mind Shard. As it transforms, the plane begins to accelerate around them. The trees die and rot away, the cliffs start to erode, etc. With little difficulty, they defeat that, popping it like a gargantuan, malevolent soap bubble. As they do, the plane begins dying, up to and including its sun going out. The traitorous lieutenant appears to rush them back to the prime material before the plane collapses entirely.
Part III: It's The End of the World as we Know it(And I Feel Fine)
- The party heads back to the prime material and parts ways with the Lieutenant. The pixie has a rematch with the archmage, winning by a landslide and earning himself the magister template. Then he duels the archmage's psionic archnemesis and wins in the surprise round. I looked everywhere and couldn't find a psionic foresight.
- The party dungeon crawls, for old times sake. As a self-imposed challenge, the sorcerer decides not to use spells, and the githzerai decides not to throw anything. I throw them a randomly-generated dungeon. Fun is had.
- Years pass. The rift flickers once or twice, causing widespread but quickly suppressed panic.
- The party battles the Gibbering Cluster, a +19 headed lernean pseudonatural gibbering orb with a bunch of other templates I can't even remember. All of the githzerai's 13 contingent true resurrections are eaten. The pixie has obtained Cha to AC and spell penetration at least twice, making beam spam the only chance the cluster has of hitting him at all, never mind his veils.
- More years pass. The party fights the bronze chain, a voltron demilich made of many(252 but probably should have been more) Great Wyrm(+5 virtual age categories) force dragon draco-demiliches. After getting their asses kicked at least once, they realize its weakness: Demiliches are basically talkative skulls in an antimagic field. The sorcerer creates an epic miles-wide antimagic field he called Cryoarcanum, and several more brute destruction style epic spells to deal with the soul gems and phylacteries. The thing had emerged from The Core, a mysterious planar region accessible from the rift with extensive epic rituals. In the past, great heroes had imprisoned enemies there, with the understanding that the only way they'd ever get out is if the great wheel itself was fragmenting. Anyway, the demiliches had just piled their phylacteries in such a way that each of them had 13 extra bodies to repossess. They never got to, though, because the sorcerer destroyed them all.
- Finally, the great wheel begins fragmenting. A neutronium golem appears, mainly as a formality. The githzerai and the sorcerer both defeat it in their own way. The sorcerer had known of its existence, trapped eons ago by the former archmage, and had prepared an epic spell that was essentially avasculate for constructs. The Githzerai simply pumped strength and abused time stop/time stands still/greater celerity.
- As the great wheel collapsed, the sorcerer cast his greatest epic spell: One that would assume all of existence, living, dead, gods, and demons alike, into his consciousness, and set him adrift in the void beyond the far realm. His player won't be able to play with us in the future, but I already have plans for future campaigns for what amounts to a living backup of an entire universe looking for a new home.
The World:
A world divided in two by a vast ocean and "The Rift," an effect spanning the entire great wheel preventing teleportation and planar travel between the two halves. One continent has eons of history and a surface mostly conquered by the Theron Empire. The other side has two continents, one of which has some colonies from the old content and some lingering tension between the locals and the colonists from 500 years ago when they arrived, the other of which is mostly rainforest with some mountain ranges, given a cursory examination and not found terribly valuable. Deep within the rift itself is a largely unexplored island covered in feral nastiness of every variety.
Part I: Adventuring... Adventuring Never Changes.
- To begin with, the party consists of a nerfed LA+3 Magic-blooded pixie sorcerer, a large template(modifier half-minotaur) goliath warblade, some kind of shifter charger-build abomination, and a Shifter Hugh Jackman ripoff.
- Clear the first dungeon. Discover that a chivalric order called the Knights of Cerberus was hiring outlaws to threaten the outlying villages enough to necessitate requesting assistance from said knightly order and expanding their sphere of influence.
- Travel to the capital of the the imperial enclave, Metis Sophion, clearing a village infested by kythons(and losing the party's Hugh Jackman knockoff in the process) on the way, to get a closer look at this order.
- Learn that the leader of the order, Exitus Decimus of Sanctaphrax, is only alive because of a mess of legal "things" preventing him from being charged, found guilty of, and executed for dozens of war crimes. Decide not to directly assault the Knights' headquarters. In the city, hear rumors of a hobgoblin army, the largest since the offensive a generation ago, rampaging through the southern confederacy.
- The group is contacted by a local noblewoman, Lady Torashana en Sentaris, about an unrelated quest to retrieve a minor artifact from an ancient temple on the jungle continent mentioned above. She contacts the sorcerer via telepathy, inviting him for "dinner" later. He ends up spending the night with her, and wakes up the next morning spooning her and a minotaur in a gimp suit.
- En route to their destination aboard an elemental vessel, encounter another adventuring party seemlingly dispatched to retrieve the same artifact. The other party mentions that the PC party must be "the group they hired to get the other one." The PCs decide to confirm their suspicions.
- Reaching the temple the party eliminates the entrance guardians and is interrupted by the entrance of the Hugh Jackman player's new character, a githzerai "machinegun ninja," by having his elemental vessel crash near them. He reveals that something weird had happened to his crew that ended with their mutation into horrible tentacled creatures and eventually the elemental deciding to crash the ship, and that he had been sent to the temple by hostile dreams from something he only described as "the critter."
- The group clears the temple, retrieves the artifact, and returns to the city, to learn that the hobgoblin army has turned its sights on the capital in the time they were gone and will arrive in days. After some drama where the githzerai attempts to steal the artifact, the party presents the artifact to the Lady. When pressed about what she wants it for, she brushes them off.
- The party learns that the other group they encountered plans to use the diversion of the siege to assassinate the leader for various reasons - the warforged crusader suspects Exitus may be using the siege for some nefarious purposes, while the binder and his girlfriend are just pissed that he didn't really pay them. The party decides to help them instead of defend the walls with the other parties in the city. That night, the rest of the party starts getting harassed by nonspecific but threatening nightmares from "the critter."
- The party learns that the Lady's villa has been raided by the knights of Cerberus. They are stopped by the surviving members of her bodyguard and decide not to press the issue until the siege has been dealt with.
- The siege occurs, along with a threatening dream from the critter, insisting that the party "RESCUE HER 0R 1 STR1P Y0UR FLESH FR0M Y0UR B0NES," which the party can be accomplished while they infiltrate the tower. The party fights their way through the streets and starts taking occasional inflict light wounds with no apparent source. Also, at this point, the player of the charger creature stopped showing up, so we decided his character jumped off the battlements to solo the sieging army. He probably succeeded.
- The other party leads the group into the sewer, where they've discovered an entrance to an expansive cavern system under the citadel, where the citizens have been evacuated to. The entire place is warded by a hallow effect. En route, the group is hit with another inflict. The Binder gets annoyed at this and takes his party's archivist's protective amulet, provoking the archivist to transform into something horrible, which is then defeated by the party. The binder goes ethereal, stands still, and refuses to corporealize.
- Now on their own, the party fights their way into the tower and finds imprisoned not only Lady Torashana, but the critter as well. Though they don't have a name for it yet, it's a dream master quori in its ethereal form, bound and imprisoned by the Knights. Torashana is catatonic, uttering one word when prompted: "Sicerax." In the chaos, the critter breaks its bonds and plane shifts.
- The party secures Torashana, now completely comatose, and heads to the top of the tower. They decide on the direct route, heading to the top of the adjoining smaller mage's tower and jumping across, Kool-Aid manning into the room with the red veil(Iot7V) on, where they see Exitus sacrificing people to an insidious device. To make a not-so-long story short, the foot soldiers died by the dozens running into the veil, the githzerai killed Exitus in one round, and the Warblade and the pixie finished off the iron golems. The crossbowmen in the balconies just fled.
- They learn that the insidious device was a weapon of mass destruction that would annihilate the legions of low-level hobgoblin soldiers and any citizens unlucky enough to have not been evacuated. They search the tower and discover from his journal that Exitus had planned the siege and intended to use it as an excuse to move the population of the city underground and rule them as a dictator, eventually becoming a lich. Mainly as a way to escape prosecution once his term as military administratus ran out. Then, a visit to a healer reveals that Lady Torashana, now completely comatose, is displaying the effects of some ongoing debilitating effect. Probably due to the weird psionic crystals grafted to her bones.
- The party sticks around long enough to see the beginning of emergency reforms to the bureaucracy, and then heads to Chiromemnitos, a city in the Confederacy with psionics as its hat. After doing a sidequest for one of the psionic researchers there, they leave Torashana in their care. They are called back after weeks of downtime to her kidnapping. They dungeon crawl the sewers beneath the city before coming upon some weird psionic cult - likely one of those Inspiration cults mentioned in the Knights' records(basically, cults that disguised themselves by pretending to be this pre-existing horrible demon cult called the cult of the Soulthirster, but hinted at something being worse. To top it off, when the party went back to Torashana's manor after the siege, they discovered a hidden shrine matching their description of a shrine of Inspiration. And slash fiction of themselves, but that's for another day).
- The party fought their way to the central chamber to discover the Critter, who they now know as Sicerax, in the flesh, leading a psionic ritual of some sort. They defeat everyone in the room too late. Torashana's body shines with intensely bright blue light and she rises off the altar as the fully-awakened Exarch of Dal Quor on the prime material. The party spends a round ineffectively trying to do anything at all to her and fails, before teleporting away and fleeing to the old continent aboard their elemental airship, the Geminus. Did I mention they had an airship now? One of the senators of Metis Sophion. gave them it as a token of gratitude.
- End Part I
Part II: DREAMS D0N'T D1E
- The party retreats to the old continent to figure out their next steps. In real life, time has passed between this segment and the last, and the player of the Goliath Warblade can't keep playing. Additionally, I decided, with the party being so small, they they could rebuild their characters into gestalt characters. The Githzerai adds wizard casting while the sorcerer adds cleric casting. Regular castings of Discern Location reveal that the Exarch has destroyed a wide swath of settlements in the confederacy before retreating to Dal Quor for reasons unknown. The party decides, in and out of character, to level grind some, an established practice in my setting.
- To this end, they depart for the island in the rift. On this island, they locat an ancient temple and do what comes naturally to adventuring parties faced with ancient temples. When they leave the island, they are epic level.
- After a brief sidequest involving an astral hulk, an inhabited mass of rock floating through the astral plane, and acquiring an artificer pseudo-cohort, the sorcerer decides to duel the reigning archmage before setting off for the new continent and the endgame. I as the DM was expecting the archmage to mow him. The crowd was expecting a beatdown on one side or the other. Neither of us expected what amounted to a draw, which actually ended up making a better story than either of the other options.
- The party, now sufficiently overleveled, returns to the new world and quickly defeats the Exarch's lieutenants, crippling the Dreaming Dark's hold on this plane. A traitorous lieutenant gates the party to Dal Quor.
- The party finds the realm of dreams shaped into a tropical paradise, decorated with a tower of amethyst. At the top of the tower, predictably enough, is the Exarch.
- Boss Battle! The party quickly takes her down, but as when they do, she predictably transforms into an advanced paragon gibbering orb having "swallowed" an advanced paragon kalaraq quori. The party has problems with its over 10,000 hp before the sorcerer spams moon bolt enough to bring its strength to zero.
- As its strength hits zero, its body is swallowed by the quori spirit inside it, whose true form was an advanced paragon umbral blot with the psi-likes of a kalaraq quori and the supernatural abilities of a Pandorym Mind Shard. As it transforms, the plane begins to accelerate around them. The trees die and rot away, the cliffs start to erode, etc. With little difficulty, they defeat that, popping it like a gargantuan, malevolent soap bubble. As they do, the plane begins dying, up to and including its sun going out. The traitorous lieutenant appears to rush them back to the prime material before the plane collapses entirely.
Part III: It's The End of the World as we Know it(And I Feel Fine)
- The party heads back to the prime material and parts ways with the Lieutenant. The pixie has a rematch with the archmage, winning by a landslide and earning himself the magister template. Then he duels the archmage's psionic archnemesis and wins in the surprise round. I looked everywhere and couldn't find a psionic foresight.
- The party dungeon crawls, for old times sake. As a self-imposed challenge, the sorcerer decides not to use spells, and the githzerai decides not to throw anything. I throw them a randomly-generated dungeon. Fun is had.
- Years pass. The rift flickers once or twice, causing widespread but quickly suppressed panic.
- The party battles the Gibbering Cluster, a +19 headed lernean pseudonatural gibbering orb with a bunch of other templates I can't even remember. All of the githzerai's 13 contingent true resurrections are eaten. The pixie has obtained Cha to AC and spell penetration at least twice, making beam spam the only chance the cluster has of hitting him at all, never mind his veils.
- More years pass. The party fights the bronze chain, a voltron demilich made of many(252 but probably should have been more) Great Wyrm(+5 virtual age categories) force dragon draco-demiliches. After getting their asses kicked at least once, they realize its weakness: Demiliches are basically talkative skulls in an antimagic field. The sorcerer creates an epic miles-wide antimagic field he called Cryoarcanum, and several more brute destruction style epic spells to deal with the soul gems and phylacteries. The thing had emerged from The Core, a mysterious planar region accessible from the rift with extensive epic rituals. In the past, great heroes had imprisoned enemies there, with the understanding that the only way they'd ever get out is if the great wheel itself was fragmenting. Anyway, the demiliches had just piled their phylacteries in such a way that each of them had 13 extra bodies to repossess. They never got to, though, because the sorcerer destroyed them all.
- Finally, the great wheel begins fragmenting. A neutronium golem appears, mainly as a formality. The githzerai and the sorcerer both defeat it in their own way. The sorcerer had known of its existence, trapped eons ago by the former archmage, and had prepared an epic spell that was essentially avasculate for constructs. The Githzerai simply pumped strength and abused time stop/time stands still/greater celerity.
- As the great wheel collapsed, the sorcerer cast his greatest epic spell: One that would assume all of existence, living, dead, gods, and demons alike, into his consciousness, and set him adrift in the void beyond the far realm. His player won't be able to play with us in the future, but I already have plans for future campaigns for what amounts to a living backup of an entire universe looking for a new home.