Against the Idol of the Sun: A 5e high-level campaign log

[J-H]

Session 24: 3/12/2022
We’re back! Dmitri’s player couldn’t join us, and Ratel the monk’s player had to join via Discord chat on speaker.

Dmitri, Ratel, and Teador all got adamantine plating applied to their bones and troll hearts implanted. I skimmed this pretty fast instead of doing any description, because after the nearly 4 weeks of surgery and recovery time, the two new party members met up with them (coordinated with Sending in the background): Saqwam the tortle Fathomless warlock, and Rivkah the satyr Creation bard.

They discuss plans to attack Tlalcehutli, the city of the Aaracokra earth goddess, and we review what they know about the city layout (last discussed 3+ months ago). They decide to do some more reconnaissance before making a plan. The warlock had chosen Soul Cage as his 6th level mystic Arcanum. This lets him, as a reaction, grab the soul of a nearby humanoid that dies (no save).
There are several suitably unsettling applications, like draining life from a captured soul, but the big ones are:

Query Soul. You ask the soul a question (no action required) and receive a brief telepathic answer, which you can understand regardless of the language used. The soul knows only what it knew in life, but it must answer you truthfully and to the best of its ability. The answer is no more than a sentence or two and might be cryptic.
Eyes of the Dead. You can use an action to name a place the humanoid saw in life, which creates an invisible sensor somewhere in that place if it is on the plane of existence you’re currently on. The sensor remains for as long as you concentrate, up to 10 minutes (as if you were concentrating on a spell). You receive visual and auditory information from the sensor as if you were in its space using your senses.
A creature that can see the sensor (such as one using see invisibility or truesight) sees a translucent image of the tormented humanoid whose soul you caged.

They decide to go find an Aaracokra patrol, Soul Cage a priest, and use the priest’s knowledge to find out more about the temple they’re planning to attack. To increase their chances of success, they decide to watch and target the biggest enemy patrol they can find, on the (correct) theory that a larger patrol will have a higher-level priest in it.

The enemy patrol was 9 strong including 2 priests and a wizard. As usual, Ratel used long-distance archery to kill enemies, while the others used Dimension Door to appear on the back of the enemy air-skiff, after half the patrol had charged towards Ratel and was 2 rounds of movement away.
Some spells were thrown around, and Saqwam took some substantial damage, but nobody was in serious danger. Teador the paladin got hit with the Sky Nail spear, failed his save, and spent the last 2-3 rounds of the fight stuck to the sky (reverse gravity, single target) launching firebolts down and wishing he had his griffon with him. The enemy wizard spent most of the fight under Greater Invisibility, but launching magic missiles and blights. One of the enemy priests tried to Blind the 3 PCs who had landed on the air-skiff, and ate a 5th level Warlock counterspell. Rivkah pulled out See Invisibility, and the writing was on the wall at that point. It was also late and Spring Forward (lose an hour) night, so we called it because there’s no way the enemies would successfully escape. The 10th level enemy war priest was Soul Caged, and we’re supposed to get a list of questions between sessions (so I have time to compose answers).

DM notes:
One person on Discord slows things down a lot… things kept cutting in and out, so his turns took substantially longer.

We have two new players, both pretty new to D&D (they’ve been through a couple of lower-level 1-shots).
One is playing a satyr Creation bard, and she didn’t join in the one-shots until they were partway through (mom of one of the other players). Bard has a lot of options and levers but not a lot of damage. I think she’ll be re-working spell selections after tonight.
The other is playing a Fathomless warlock, serving Oztalun the aboleth. Warlocks are fun! He gets a big built in plot hook and some objectives and information that the rest of the party doesn’t know or understand yet. Nothing PVP, but he’s got the inside scoop on what’s going on with Ssword. His Mystic Arcanum are Soul Cage, Finger of Death, and Maddening Darkness. He’s definitely leaning into the ‘eldritch creepy’ side and I think the huge area of Maddening Darkness is going to occasionally totally shut down groups of enemies, especially in confined spaces.

We lost time with Discord setup and with item assignments and inventory checks that I’d asked people to do beforehand that nobody did, so we only got about 2-2.5 hrs of actual play in.

There was still a lot of “what do you do?” “Hey, what should I do? Opinions?” and looking up spell lists and options. Bard has a LOT of moving parts and options.
Fathomless is pretty useful… the watery tentacle is basically a free 3rd level Spiritual Weapon PB/day.
Both are still learning where to find things on their character sheets, and having custom items that aren’t on DNDB doesn’t help.

I’ve run several of these “fight an Aaracokra patrol” scenarios now, as they’re fairly common. In this one, the party faced 4 champions, 2 subcommanders, 1 wizard, 1 war priest, and 1 senior priest. That’s 5 different enemy types with 3 different spellcasting blocks to pick from. It’s good to have variety, but I’m thinking about going through and cutting down some of the variety to a smaller number of priest-types, and perhaps to shorter spell lists also. It doesn’t matter if they have cantrips ready because no fight is going to last long enough for them to run out of spell slots. I’ve also noticed that the “gish cleric” war priests are not good enough at offensive casting, nor do they have a good enough melee to-hit (+8) to make reliable use of their melee casting buffs like Holy Weapon. I think there needs to be a niche for a mid-level cleric, but I’d like to do it in an easier-to-run fashion.
I also keep making the mistake of putting all the enemy spellcasters in the same initiative grouping (because there are only a few of them), which means I have to pick and resolve 3 different spells all at once.