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View Full Version : DM Help Faerzress, Crystal Caves and Xorns - How it all comes together?



gandwarf
2019-11-13, 10:48 AM
Hi y'all, I need a little help for my next session this weekend. I've spent so much time having ideas for this that I got completely lost on what's good and what's not.
Let me just give you a quick recap on what's goin' on with our game.

The BBEG is a evil necromancer, he recently got his hands on the Wand of Orcus, and the player's witness that happend. They wanted to do somethin' but where quickly overpowered by the powers of this villain.
The group is currently in adwarven city, they are working for together with the dwarfs to find out how the city got infiltrated by fiends. One of the players is a member of a importante Clan/Family and is trying to prove himself for his peers.
There's also an adult red dragon (inspired by the concept of a younger Themberchaud) deep within the mountains, near the city. The group doesn't know that.

But anyway, they were exploring some of the city mining caves, and after an encounter with some umberhulks and a fiend (that managed to escape) they found some weird glimmering crystals. So here's some of the ideas that I brainstormed last couple of weeks

There was an ancestral to the dwarfs that lived near this crystal cave, a hermit If you will. He was there, minding his own business when he found out about this weird crystals. I thought about this studies leading him into a creature from the Far Realm, and maybe that encounter drove him crazy.
The idea is that this crystals have some sort of powerful magic similar to faerzress and were created to close a gap within' this plane and some horrible nightmarish creature. Maybe the one from the Far Realm. Note that this is completely different from the main story arch they have been persuing, so that makes me wonder If It's not a bad idea to put this here. But they are lost in the caves, and things, weird things live in the upper and middledark, maybe this will give them a perspective of the world being a dangerous and populated place. I don't know.
Recently, maybe a foulspawn (star spawn) found this location and started to follow his Far Realm Patron commands, trying to break this barrier and destroy the crystals. To that end he employed a couple of elementals, he got them making a interesting deal with a Dao.

But the fact is that, this crystals react to magic, they already experienced some of this. One of the players used a spell near one of them and some weird **** happend. He got blind (Wild Magic Table). And they finished last sessions as they noticed some elemental monsters eating and crushing some of this crystals. Those are Xorn and they are here to, as mentioned before, destroy the barrier.

That's pretty much it. Help me! :redcloak:

Hopeless
2019-11-19, 03:51 AM
Xorns are trying to remove the crystals as they've grown too numerous due to the effect they had on that dwarf for their own safety.

Some have been corrupted by the expanding Far Realm influence as the crystals have achieved sentience as a hive mind and your players have to locate and destroy key node points to disrupt the effect they're having that's allowing the Far Realm more access to that area.

However the Xorn are also adapting with one actually mind swapping with the dwarf which restores his sanity and HE/IT is trying to obtain your parties help to prevent the Far Realm gaining a permanent portal between there and near his home city thereby dooming them.

Does that help?