Looking for some scenario assistance.

[GorogIrongut]

So I've kind of been struggling recently. The group has been going through a traumatizing and incredibly difficult set of adventures and I decided to send them to a relatively relaxed and free wheeling city. The kind of place where they could recuperate, gain their bearings... maybe even put down roots.

It has however backfired. They seem to have no clue what to do with themselves. They got trapped into a paranoid cycle of survival with the previous adventures and now they're looking at this fairly risk free city and expecting it to be a portal down to the 666th level of the Abyss. This is both gratifying and annoying as you can only describe the innkeeper as being innocuous in so many ways before you want to hit yourselves over the head with a hammer.

To help remedy this problem, I've had them invited to a dinner party with a pimple faced, prepubescent but surprisingly high level Nethermancer... named Archie the Fair. Nethermancer is an omage to the following quote from Dr Who:

The Nethersphere, also known as the Promised Land or Heaven, was a virtual reality housed within a matrix data slice — a Gallifreyan hard drive — used by Missy to upload the minds of the recently deceased, changing and rewriting them, removing their emotions before re-downloading them into their Cyber-converted bodies. ...

Archie lives on an island in the middle of this free thinking city. His tower is made/carved out of the single tusk of a massive creature almost impossible to conceive of in size (couple hundred feet tall). At the top it's shaped a bit like Sauron's Eye but it a blinding white light that Archie is tasked with directing at any potential ships that approach the city to identify potential ne'erdowells. The party haven't fully realized it, but wherever this light is shown, the ship/piece of ground is taken a year back into the past (the power levels can be ramped up to the upper limit of a century period). This time 'sphere' is tangible and you can interact with anything from that time period that happened to be on that ship/piece of land/building/etc.

For my group they'd captured a ship belonging to a group of pirates in control of most of the archipelago they're currently in called the Brotherhood. Not wanting to be seen as part of the Brotherhood, they removed all of the paraphernalia that identified the ship as such... but when the light shown on them, the ship returned back to it's Brotherhood ways and they had to talk quickly to explain how they weren't really Brotherhood. What the group failed to notice during the brief window they were put in the spotlight is that the crew from a year ago was on board the ship with them.

So... Archie has an important job. He's privy to very powerful magics. He's also an enigma. Prepubescent human teenagers don't wield high level magics normally. He's very prone to peer pressure. He sent them the dinner invite because he heard there were strangers in town and he didn't want to get overlooked. He will be very clingy and overly eager. His voice will be grating and he will try to ingratiate himself. It is likely that he would accept a dare. He has a deaf half elf assistant who will cater the party.

So my question and what I'm asking assistance with is the dinner party. They're about to enter the tower and see Archie's ostentatious adventures. In my opinion a Nethermancer (see the quote) is all about collecting his adventures and freezing them in a stasis bubble (which also links with his time bubble spotlight. He plays with time and energy and should have a wide ranging collection of conquests to show the party.

I mention this not because I want to impress the party with his conquests... but because I want, somehow, for a couple of those conquests to break lose from their stasis bubbles and start running rampant inside this pivotal point of the city's defense.

So, I would like to know your thoughts on how you would:
1. Have those conquests break lose from their stasis? It could be Archie, the assistant or the group... Or all of the above. Again I'm a fan of amusing.
2. What creatures would you have break free? What should I throw at them? It should preferably be amusing and fricking scary. The guys in my group have been at a loss as to what to do for the past couple sessions, so I want to throw some seriously dangerous stuff at them because that seems to be what they respond to.

For reference, we've got them all at level 8... WElf Druid, WElf Ranger (UA), Winged Tiefling Paladock, Dragonborn Draconic Sorceror, and a H Dwarf Shadow Monk/Arcane Trickster

For clarification, Archie is a shadow of his former self. While he was an epic level wizard in his past, he ran afoul of magicks that caused him to lose many years, a fair whack of intelligence and lots of experience. He has severe self confidence issues because he knows he's essentially an idiot version of his formerly mighty self. Coupled with all of the above, puberty is doing a real number on him.

That said, he should be able to handle one of the escaped conquests by himself using his esoteric magic, but I want a good handful coming free and ruining this dinner party so the rest of the party have to join in.

While I don't want a tpk, I wouldn't be sad if one of them died.

So what are your ideas guys and gals? How would you make this funny and still make it a challenge? Can we make the released creatures synergize?

[ThurlRavenscrof]

My first thought is to have something like a kraken pop out... It's still a threat but it's lying on the ground like a slug and has disadvantage on all rolls or something.
My second thought is to have dinosaurs. They don't get played much but there's actually a lot of them if you include Volos and can be an interesting challenge for players who haven't fought them yet. Plus it sort of ties in with the time element. I would make the end fight be against a pack of allosauruses. Pretty sure they have a walking speed of like 50 which could lead to a lot of bedlam in the city before the party puts them down

[GorogIrongut]

Thurls, thanks for the advice. After I read it I got excited at having the guys play a version of Jurassic Park throughout the city.

That said... plans are exactly that. Not a reality till they happen.

I figured the Nether magics rife throughout the tower would have an effect on the psyche of the players. As such, every couple minutes I had them roll an intelligence saving throw. Each failure had them becoming more and more inebriated. The worst it got was a couple of my players attempting to prove that they could walk around the room examining each individual 'nethersphere', but doing so while walking in a handstand.

I provided them a couple options of the examined 'netherspheres', describing them in detail. I went out of my way to make the dinosaur one to seem the safest, most interesting one. What I didn't take in to account is the fact that my fiercely religious bahamutian draconic sorceror is a fiddler. When they saw the 'nethersphere' with an ancient bronze dragon in it, the dwarf did a double take at a 'good' dragon being 'imprisoned'... but he let it go for the time being. The sorceror, who was amongst the most inebriated, started fiddling with it and did so i such a way that not only released the Ancient Bronze Dragon, but also temporarily knocked out Archie the Fair (i.e. the party were faced with a very confused, very angry Ancient Bronze Dragon with no one to interpose themselves and save them).

The dragon in it's confusion began triggering some of the 'netherspheres' and the first thing to come out was a high level aboleth. By this time, I had Volo's and the MM out and was just randomly rolling what came out of the spheres. What had been a massive tower was now very cramped with the bulk of a gargantuan dragon, an aboleth, etc.

The long and short of it had the aboleth infecting half the party and enslaving a couple of them just as the bronze dragon decided it was time to kill an aboleth. The enslaved party interposed themselves between the aboleth and the dragon and got very bloodied. The aboleth did a runner and called for backup in the form of the Kuo Tua in the sewers under the city. One of the party had previously begun a ritual swearing allegiance via a dark blood ritual to the Voice, which the party was unaware was actually a completely different Aboleth. Said character was in the process of turning into a Kuo Tua. So he sided with the Aboleth.

This was about the time that Archie was awakened by a party member and the skinny, knock-kneed wizard began throwing around high powered magic.

It wasn't Jurassic Park, but it was a ridiculously overpowered and completely random free for all that was friggin hilarious, with allegiances changing at every turn. It messed with the party so much that half the party didn't wait for the combat to end and they started readying their ship to depart regardless of who won.

Archie managed to get the ABD back under control and returned to it's 'nethersphere', but at the expense of letting the Aboleth go. The party finished off everything else... and now have a standing offer from Archie. Shinies in exchange for helping him track down the Aboleth.

So all in all, I'm content with what happened.even if it wasn't the Jurassic Park fun that I had planned.