#d&d stuff

Baldur’s Gate 3 is an victory lap for the DnD franchise because the culture war has moved so far past it that nobody has to walk on eggshells anymore to appease those types.

That last one was an especially interesting take in a sector of the hobby complaining of a DM shortage.

last week's sesh was the party finally entering the temple of a long dead dragon god. i basically just threw all of the weird esoteric symbolism that i know at them. everything in the temple was colored in alternating bands of black, white, red, black, white, red, with the black sections always having bas relief imagery of various afterlifes, the white images having intaglio relief images of the physical plane, and the red images showing hybridizations of the two.

like, the black section migth have flies buzzing over a field of slaughter, and the white section might show birds flying around a field of ripened grain, but then the red section might show horrific birds with fly eyes, or fly wings, or flies with bird wings and birds. just unsettling stuff like that. with all the fly parts jutting out of the stone, but all the bird parts being carved in.

idea was references to the alchemical processes nigredo, albedo, and rubedo, and the general dialectic processes of thesis, anthesis, synthesis, being applied to life and death. make something that isn't alive, or dead, or undead.

i didn't have a plan for this at the time, i just think it's neat and sets a very unsettling atmosphere.

boss arena was just a giant laboratory. the boss was a divine/arcane type caster that was trying to assemble a dragon shaped flesh golem about of hundreds of scavenged corpses. dragon golem was huge and a different motif i'd thrown in earlier to the campaign were these parasitic red crystals that they'd find growing off some corpses in the wood. sometimes partially harvested. sometimes found in living things that were insanely aggressive. again, no real plan, just creepy shit for its own sake. they'd kill people infested with the crystals and they'd babble about how it had made it too quiet to think. how good it felt to be able to think again, outside that silence.

anyway, i said the crystals were being used as scales for the false-dragon and they were all like AAAAAAAAAAAAAA

cue boss fight. still trying to figure out what to do with the silence thing. one of them gets downed. they're unconscious but they're not dead. cues my idea. i tell the unconscious guy he wakes up in a sort of silent pocket dimension. between life and death. and that there is something there with him. something huge.

so i had run like crazy around the purgatory space, trying to avoid the living-god dreaming-death mystery thing before it eats his soul, while the party fought the priest of that thing and killed it. then they could give him a healing pot. first thing he did after regaining consciousness was start babbling about the the silence and the dead god. they almost killed him again because they thought he was getting possessed or something. might come back to that later. it's a good idea to have in my pocket.

1.) The Warlock's ongoing beef with a 12 year old.

2.) An 'accidental' arson spree.