(Now I am the DM) Gimme some ideas...

[studderingdave]

So my current DM is feeling the fatigue after DM'ing 7 years straight in the same campaign. He is also my childhood DM when I first started playing many years ago. I have taken the reigns as DM for a spell, and I have a pretty good set of prepared encounters and storyline. I ran a single session so far and the players like what I am doing so far, and I have material for 3-4 more sessions (we only meet once every 2-3 weeks). So while I have a lot of ideas, I could always use some more. Here are the parameters:

- Realms based, would like to stay (mostly)on the realms
- Primary antagonists are a former PC of mine (druid) who turned evil. There is also a strong Tharizdun subplot. Also using Thoon Mindflayers as a separate threat, linking "Thoon" to Tharizdun.
- I do not want to deal with chronomancy
- Party is currently in Forest of Wurms where I have placed a large earth node
- Party will eventually travel to Chult to confront above stated druid

Party consists of:

- Cleric of Mystra (beatstick)
- Wizard of Mystra (My DM)
- Redshirt Fighter
- Cloistered Cleric Archer

Gimme whatever you have, feed off other points, I will add it all in somehow.

Thanks!

[StevenC21]

If they get high level, you could always have them attract the ire of Szass Tam for traveling in Chult.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

If you start pulling in psionic monsters, you could always pull from Elder Evils and have yuan-ti, illithids, and quori all attempting to find, free, and subsequently capture the mind and body of Pandorym for their own ends. The mind is hidden somewhere deep in the Anauroch Desert, while the body is deep, deep underground beneath the forests of Chult, reachable through a seemingly bottomless rift in the rainforest, choked with greenery and hidden from mortal eyes for millennia.

They're each attempting to use it for their own ends.

The yuan-ti wish to make a deal on behalf of their god, Merrshaulk, and use its combined mind and body to destroy his deific enemies, while sparing their lord and master.

The illithids desire to feed the mind to their elder brains and use the body as an energy source to rebuild their ancient civilization and bring all the lesser slave races fully under their tentacled rule, or, failing that, to create a cascade to destroy time and space and return them to their glory days in the distant past.

The quori wish to use it to open a rift into the Far Realm and pull the Realms in, where they can sacrifice the inhabitants to the insanity that "lives" there.

They're all working at cross-purposes, and the PCs are caught in the crossfire. Meanwhile, their machinations are weakening Pandorym's prison, and the party has to deal with the whole "Elder Evil Apocalypse" thing.

Perhaps the druid, despite being evil (and working for Tharizdun?), is attempting to stop it, but he ends up screwed pretty hard, what with Pandorym's effects on divine magic. He's looking for an artifact of some sort to help him keep his spellcasting and other divine abilities. Meanwhile, the party (consisting of 50% divine casters) could really use that artifact themselves...

[studderingdave]

Psionic creatures are fair game. I have a subplot of aberration hunters currently tracking the Thoon Mindflayer threat, lead by a "redeemed" Mind Flayer who wants nothing more than to see the Mind Flayer "disease" wiped from the realms. Thanks to help from another thread I have developed the main character as "Salt" A mind flayer adept in killing his own kind. He uses an item to sustain his body but goes through "withdraws" from not eating brains. I marked him as Chaotic Good, since I picture him as a crusader with a good ideal but coming from an unlikely history, and the fact that he might seem quite crazy from his ordeals.

The party is 12-14th level, containing one optimizer and three players of average 3.5 experience.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

Psionic creatures are fair game. I have a subplot of aberration hunters currently tracking the Thoon Mindflayer threat, lead by a "redeemed" Mind Flayer who wants nothing more than to see the Mind Flayer "disease" wiped from the realms. Thanks to help from another thread I have developed the main character as "Salt" A mind flayer adept in killing his own kind. He uses an item to sustain his body but goes through "withdraws" from not eating brains. I marked him as Chaotic Good, since I picture him as a crusader with a good ideal but coming from an unlikely history, and the fact that he might seem quite crazy from his ordeals.

The party is 12-14th level, containing one optimizer and three players of average 3.5 experience.Oh, yeah. I remember that. I'm the one who suggested that he's a recovering addict. Heh.

You could tie him into the 'flayer subplot, and then use that to introduce the conflict with the other aberrations, which just seems like a regular war, at first, until it becomes apparent that it's starting to cause a LOT larger problems than just a bunch of powerful monsters fighting amongst themselves. The PCs explore a bunch of truly ancient ruins, far beneath the ground, that start cluing them in to the fact that the thing they're fighting over is a bit nastier than they thought, at first.

[studderingdave]

@Maxi

I enjoy your input. The party is currently at the base of a mountain inlet inside the Forest of Wyrms. They had an initial enounter with Thoon warshipers and Salt and a few members of his crew. Salt is characteristically silent in the aftermath, choosing to communicate through is team towards the party and being avoidant of his nature. I have him using an item to disrupt arcane/psionic items in his vicinity, and the item also sustains his body, which is covered in a glossy bodyglove and a goggled mask. One of the Pc's have already described him as having a "predator" style to him. I opted to make him a martial character, with the punch daggers and throwing darts.

The next session will see the party enter into a cavern system to discover the mountain is hiding a great earth node, guarded by more flayers, minotaurs, black triskelions and other creatures. Afterwards I plan on implementing a Thoon infiltrator and thralls in a town if they venture in that direction, supported greatly by a well established clergy devoted to the Earth aspect.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

Does the Elder Evil idea sound good, or would you prefer something else?

To be honest, I'm not that familiar with FR. I've never played a game there, aside from Neverwinter Nights and the Baldur's Gate series. I've read the Drizzt books (pre-4e, since 4e sucks), the Cleric Quintet, and...that's about it, really. I know that Chult is very rainforesty, and not much else.

So if you want something steeped in FR lore, I'm not the tanuki man for the job. However, I can help in other ways, maybe, depending on what you need.

[studderingdave]

Elder evils is fine, but i don't want to work three separate race plots. I would want to work the Thoon angle since they are already in the plot, and I plan to have an Aboleth working behind the scenes to help the party with information, as the aboleth sees the Thoon incursion as a precursor to the possible awakening of Tharizdun, since I am using Thoon and Tharizdun as an entwined "end of the world" scenario. I have't developed the Aboleth yet directly. He is currently implanting visions into the dreams of the players, directing them in certain areas of information, but I do not know how much I want to flesh him out. Chult is going to happen eventually, because the Druid antagonist is there trying to awaken Dendar at the Peaks of Flame, bringing an end to the world in another entirely different way.

So I want to focus on the Thoon, but I am open to other Aberration based ideas, as well as cosmic entities coming into play since the greater machinations of the plot include utter and total world destruction. I have a feeling that another plot I am not currently exploring is the blatant "greater good and greater evil" types will be drawn to the struggle. I plan on fleshing that out as time permits, but I don't want to make this into a huge cluster of "Named persona X and Y intervene at this plot point to save the world from certain destruction".

Realms is really the only thing I know in DnD so its going to be the mainstay. But keep the ideas coming, they are great!

[MaxiDuRaritry]

Do you have any reasons why all the hundreds of thousands of epic characters in the setting aren't intervening directly?

Having the PCs act as errand-boys makes sense if the big players are on the board, but there has to be some reason why, say, Elminster isn't just casting wish a few times and fixing everything.

[studderingdave]

I guess i haven't tackled who I want to be represented yet. The former Dm had out party on "not the greatest" terms with Elminster, so I don't want to rely on that again. I do plan to look over realms superpowers and decide on who/what I want to add. As an interesting note I want to have some "not so good" entities ally with the party, since Tharizdun is an enemy to basically every known being since he wants to destroy EVERYTHING. I think it will be an interest way to have so, a demon lord or something find ways to impact the flow of the party.

I also don't have any active NPC's acting with he party, so I could tie in a long standing NPC to help push the plot more, maybe you could suggest something there Maxi since it doesnt require realms knowledge directly to make a BA NPC to help the party/further the plot

[MaxiDuRaritry]

I guess i haven't tackled who I want to be represented yet. The former Dm had out party on "not the greatest" terms with Elminster, so I don't want to rely on that again. I do plan to look over realms superpowers and decide on who/what I want to add. As an interesting note I want to have some "not so good" entities ally with the party, since Tharizdun is an enemy to basically every known being since he wants to destroy EVERYTHING. I think it will be an interest way to have so, a demon lord or something find ways to impact the flow of the party.

I also don't have any active NPC's acting with he party, so I could tie in a long standing NPC to help push the plot more, maybe you could suggest something there Maxi since it doesnt require realms knowledge directly to make a BA NPC to help the party/further the plotGiven Tharizdun's lack of ability to make friends and influence people, I would think several very powerful NPCs and organizations would be interested in stopping him, and said parties would probably end up butting heads hard enough that they actually distract each other from actually accomplishing anything. Elminster, the Seven Sisters, and the Harpers are all coming to save the day, but so are the Red Wizards of Thay and a few unsavory demigods. Actually show them all swooping in, butting heads, and generally making a mess of things, and the PCs' low levels and lack of notoriety actually allow them to sneak in under everyone else's noses to get the job done while they're all outside fighting?

I'd give the party at least one very rich and fairly powerful NPC backer (a mercane from Sigil with a vested interest in Abeir-Toril? -- if nothing else, it makes him a LOT of money), who gives them access to a portable magic mart of sorts. Since things are a bit tense and time is an issue, give the party some small planar ring gates they can toss stuff through to sell, along with lists of stuff they want to buy with their credited balance, maybe.

Or maybe you could come up with something a bit more memorable and off-the-wall than that. Have the aboleth actually be an old acquaintance of your recovering illithid addict, and it's trustworthy -- to a point. For certain things, at least. Maybe it devoured the mind of something particularly powerful that tainted the way it thinks, and now it's far less like its insane kin and more like whatever it ate. Like the aforementioned mercane. It has the mercane's memories and most of his personality, and now it's more interested in saving Toril for the purposes of its own enrichment than letting it be destroyed by some trumped-up dretch with delusions of adequacy.

[studderingdave]

I like where this is going, Im going to put a few days into the NPC and see where it goes. We don't session again for another 2 weeks so I have some time.

Thanks Maxi!

[MaxiDuRaritry]

I like where this is going, Im going to put a few days into the NPC and see where it goes. We don't session again for another 2 weeks so I have some time.

Thanks Maxi!Perhaps spend some time on turning Tharizdun into an Elder Evil, if he doesn't already have a write-up somewhere? Pattern him off of some of the other ones in the book, or...

Hmm. Oh my. I just found something. Go look at Dragon #362. There is an Elder Evil in that issue named Shothragot (https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Shothragot) associated with Tharizdun, and I think it could work well with your campaign if you did it right.

[Endarire]

What about Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil due to its Tharzidunic connection?

[studderingdave]

What about Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil due to its Tharzidunic connection?

My Dm ran us through the TOEE adventure already with the culmination being the destruction of it. I want to continue to use tharizdun though.