#eshebala

The next part of our adventure is taken from Mirrors of the Abyss, by Ryan Durney. I highly recommend it as a rare high level adventure. Very much worth a purchase. I will be covering huge aspects of it and it will not be spoiler-free, though it is a random enough adventure that there is PLENTY we won’t see on this playthrough and some additional material for our own story. Art is taken directly from the module and is illustrated by Ryan Durney. The purpose in using it here is to show off how beautiful and professional the product is, not to claim such images as our own. I sincerely hope it inspires you to purchase the product!

Chamber 00: The Fossil Ossuary and the Woods Beyond

The first chamber is made up of two challenges. The first is trying to figure out a way to escape from the about-to-collapse cave the players find themselves in. The second is to confront two potential allies and figure out which one is telling the truth and is safe to bring along and which one is a demon in disguise.

Light reveals brown strata of crumbling clay and 3 sets of petrified skeletons pressed into the walls, floor and ceiling. The total size of the traversable corridor is only roughly 8 feet by 16 feet, ending on all sides with rubble and tiny alcoves that may or may not be natural. Your arrival has disturbed heavy stone above you, as you can hear the sound of straining rock and sometimes the trickle of powder and grit spilling downward onto you from the cracks above. It would appear that you don’t have a lot of time to find your way out before all of it collapses.

The first puzzle is a pretty straightforward riddle, and easy to solve if the players can find the clues spread around the cave. Our group does and there isn’t much more to say about it. The riddle is about a set of fox skeletons (Esheballa’s whole theme is about fox creatures) and which of the dead foxes was her favorite. They solve the riddle together and get a fox’s skeletal paw as a reward and the cave opens into a mysterious forest. Here they find all their food and water has dissipated and they must find a way out or starve.

Before long, they come to a series of standing stones and here find a familiar face: Remus, the Paladin friend of Carrick. He is still bleeding from a head wound and facing off against another crew member, one they don’t recognize, who calls himself Janson. The men tell the players that in order to proceed, one of these two has to be killed at their hand. The other must go with them.

Now, this is a really tricky puzzle. Before the game begins, the DM has to roll for this encounter to determine, randomly, which of the two men is telling the truth and which is a traitor in disguise. After this is determined, another roll tells you WHAT the traitor is (whether demon, doppleganger, ooze, or any number of other interesting possibilities) and a third roll tells you what their motives are. But it gets even trickier than that. Depending on the roll, both men may be traitors, or NEITHER may be traitors.

In this case, I won’t say what I rolled, but the players are stumped for a long while on this. Remus (if it really is him) seems confused and doesn’t have access to his magic to prove he is a Paladin. Furthermore, as Janson eagerly points out, Remus would be the perfect disguise to fool the party, as Carrick has a deep bond with him. Janson himself they don’t know, but he tells them that Remus murdered the crew in front of him, questioning them first to get details of the ship so that he could impersonate the Paladin. For his part, Remus claims to remember nothing of how he got here, only that Janson was never aboard the ship, he’s never seen him before.

Some basic questions don’t help the situation: Janson and Remus both seem to know enough about the crew and the ship to verify their stories. Finally, Daymos asks a great question: "The crew who were murdered, tell me their names.” Daymos then looks to Carrick and Imoaza to see if they can verify the names. Janson starts going through a list of names and he mentions Star. This is a hint to the players, because they know Star was left behind on the Air Planet. With this, Imoaza comes up behind Janson and strikes him with the Drosselgreymer.

Janson screams out and runs off into the woods, Imoaza and Milosh giving chase. The woods are confusing, though, and Imoaza is soon turned around and has to go back or else get lost. Milosh, with his tracking abilities from his Ranger class, manages to catch up to Janson inside a huge mushroom covered patch of woods and there he confronts him. 

Janson is a doppleganger, a special one, who extends his arms into mauls and tries to use the environment to catch Milosh. He smashes Mushrooms and they release Hallucinigenic spores. Milosh is actually resistant to such things and manages to escape this trap, but the Doppleganger rolls poorly and falls prey to the effects of the spores, giving Milosh time to get some free hits on him. Still, Janson is beefy and finally leaps across the woods at Milosh, mauls raised to strike... and Milosh blows his head apart with a blast from his gunarm.

The players regather at the standing stones. Here they give Carrick a longsword and heal him but are still cautious, not sure they trust him. They are instructed by him to dig up keys around the area (instructions left in his head by Eshebala). They do so and are informed that these keys are needed to traverse the 193rd layer of the Abyss safely. With that, portals appear between the standing stones and the players enter a random one.

Chamber 15: Her Chambers

Chamber 15 is where the players go next, randomly. It is actually a resting point, with the opportunity for two players to gain big bonuses in the dungeon, one granted by Eshebala herself and the other granted by one of her rivals, her brother and former lover.

This is an odd room to roll for the first real challenge of the dungeon, as it is a respite from action and a chance for players to rest and recover, which right now they don’t need. The chamber is filled with, ah, lewd objects and art and the players are supposed to touch these objects. What they touch determines Eshebala’s reaction and whether she decides to try and, ah, bed one of the players.

In this case, she chooses Daymos, who is attracted to a number of, ah, toys in a drawer by Eshebala’s massive bed. She appears, whisks the other players away, and offers to teach Daymos the dual meaning of pleasure and pain. Daymos chickens out, though, not willing to commit to the act without knowing exactly what he’s getting himself into, and putting in a plea for the safety of his companions. All of this makes Eshebala extremely bored and boredom leads to annoyance. She decides to punish Daymos by attacking him, clamping down on him with jaws turned gigantic and vulpine. Daymos manages to dull the onslaught somewhat by surprising Eshebala, saying she is acting out on him what her baby foxes did to each other (a reference to the fox riddle, earlier). This shocks her and she teleports him away before she can tear him limb from limb.

Daymos, even at level 15, is NOT a tough customer. He has incredible magic and psychic powers, but his hitpoints are merely 50 (a combination of poor Constitution and bad hitpoint rolls). This attack takes nearly half his life away, even halted as it was.

Meanwhile, Imoaza has been in a different chamber. When Eshebala sent most of the players away, Imoaza was snagged from limbo and brought before Eshebala’s brother, Daragor. 

You have been whisked into some kind of bizarre and tumultuous cafeteria for demonkind. All manner of dangerous archetype turns spits or clutches huge rib cages as if they were holding a mere sandwich. Demons the size of barns carry trays of globular, clotted foods to tables, wading through a foot of discarded bones. The biting coppery smells, and the sound of ripping and gnawing, en masse, is enough to push you over the edge, if not for your mind's blatant curiosity for why you sit at the fanciest table in this nightmarish mess hall for monsters.

Daragor tells her he is giving her a “cheat,” something she can use to survive the dangers ahead. Why? He wants her to win Eshebala’s game so that he can win a bet he foolishly placed on the players. He tells her to keep her eye open for his mark as he has hidden items around the games that can help them. Then he sends her teleporting off and the party is reunited in the next chamber.

We are more than three years into the game, now. Maybe it’s time for a little recap?

I envision our adventure as taking part in multiple arcs. The first arc Preludes and Portents was mostly set up for the story, taking Karina, Shando, and Targaryen/Daymos up through the death of Shando at the hands of Reeves Testain.

The second arc An Unintended Quest follows Tywin (renamed Lorin in our podcast), Karina, and Abenthy on the first part of their quest for Haggemoth’s tomb, ending with the death of Tywin.

The third arc The Forgotten Past follows Karina, Abenthy, and crowd pleaser Tyrion (to be renamed at a later date) through the desert of Thud and up until the reveal of Abenthy’s demonic father at the monastery.

The fourth arc The Hidden Hoard follows the same party as they finish the quest of Haggemoth, gain Trakki the elven monk as a companion, and lose Abenthy to his own machinations. With Reeves Sar Testain finally defeated, the third arc ends, and Karina finally leaves the party to pursue her own destiny.

The fifth arc Into the Maw involves a new party of Tyrion (for our story, renamed Bitterberry), Trakki, and Nysyries as they pursue the Red Hand into the lands of Rhest. It ends as they become infected by the will of Nazragul.

The sixth arc Redemption takes us through the evil arc, ending with the death of Tyrion and the arrival of Aldric, and concludes with the purging of Nazragul from Nysyries.

The seventh arc The Fall into Night covers the battle of brindol, sees the newest party formed after the death of Nysyries: Carrick, Aldric, and Imoaza, and goes up through the party blasting (unintentionally) into space.

The eighth arc Hellspawn covers the party’s adventures in Hell and the elemental planet of air..

The ninth arc Crossing the Void begins with Aldric’s death. It covers the githyanki fortress and will end with what is about to come next, described in this post. Because there are a planned total of eleven arcs (after this there is Tears and Torments, and finally The Coming of the Three), this really brings us close to the end. It’s been a huge, epic adventure, but now it’s time to start pulling all the players together for the inevitable endgame, which is why we are going to start with the return of a character from long ago...

The Return of Daymos

Centuries ago, Daymos was killed on Faerun by Lorin, Karina, and Abenthy, and Abenthy sent his soul to Ia’fret to be tortured for eternity. Only, eternity didn’t up being all that long in the grand scheme of things. Ia’fret was called by Asmodeus to do battle in the final days of the blood war and so Ia’fret took his cavernous domain and transported it like a giant arc into the Abyss, using his souls to power him as he cut through swathes of demons alongside Asmodeus. However, while this gambit ultimately won the war, Ia’fret himself was cut down in battle and his “arc” left abandoned, sandwiched three quarters between the 9th and 10th layers of the abyss, the wayward souls he brought with him exposed to the depravities and hunger of an entire population of demons now cut off from the material realm.

Many of the souls perished in those early days, but Daymos was not among them. He hid through most of the initial carnage and when that was over, he emerged and made the now empty cavern his own lair. He could not command it the way Ia’fret had, but he could use it as a secret refuge. He wanted to get back to Faerun, to find his sister, Jade, and to restart his life. But he could not find a way out of the Abyss: it seemed shut off from the outside world completely. So he bid his time and wait, and in his waiting, he hunted. What did he hunt? Demons.

It may have been sixty years. It may have been a hundred. Time is... difficult... in the Abyss. Daymos aged, but he kept himself young by locating caches of potions of youth and using them. This was somewhat dangerous: sometimes the potions backfired and aged him. Other times, they deaged him too much and once he had to hide out until he grew back from a child into an adult again. Overall, though, he managed to keep himself in his young 20s and 30s. And he hunted demons, stalking them through many layers of the abyss, learning their secrets and building his psychic powers back. He quickly found that his powers were growing beyond his ability to control: he needed a focus. In Ia’fret’s lair he found a demonic spellbook and he poured his energy into this. This meant that he needed the book to cast most of his psionic powers but it removed the threat of his powers tearing his mind apart. He acquired other items during this time, such as a robe of stars, a ring of cold resistance, and a baleful dagger that he used to slit the throats of a few demons, but his greatest power lay in ranged ambushes, using his mind to dominate lesser demons and then slay them. He remained physically weak and would not long stand up to the direct attacks of even a mid-tier demon.

And so Daymos learned to be clever, and he learned to be silent, and he learned, above all, to be patient, while he waited for his opportunity to escape. And then, suddenly, it came. He felt the Abyss expand, reconnect to the outer world. And so he left Ia’fret’s cave, following his psychic senses to a newly opened portal. He leaped in, and escaped.

Not the Expected Homecoming

"What’s that?” Imoaza pointed through the frozen air and pounding sleet. Carrick, next to her, squinted towards the sky but it was like trying to see through a physical object.

“You’re going to have to describe it,” he said.

“It’s a light, human shaped, and it’s moving fast back towards the camp.”

“Could be trouble. We should head back. This hunt for a sabre-toothed tiger hasn’t done anything except make me colder.”

“Don’t mention the cold.” Imoaza was trying not to think about it. Her metabolism was not built for cold climates.

Heading back towards the camp, the two find Daymos waiting for them. He tells them the light they saw was him, that it is a way he can choose to travel when he has “a mind” to.

Daymos is mostly excited to be out of the Abyss and back on Faerun, but he is disturbed when he learns from Carrick that he has landed in the Sword Coast.

“Last I checked, the sword coast wasn’t frozen,” Daymos says. “How long has it been?”

But Carrick and Imoaza aren’t the best source of information, as they are new to this Faerun as well and can only tell Daymos that the last time they set foot on Faerun it was DR 1475. Daymos nods at this, telling them that he died in 1474, and he knows that was at least a century ago.

Ultimately, Daymos decides to travel with the group. The other travelers who are leading this pilgrimage don’t mind, they say anyone is welcome to “visit the lady.” He spends the evening gambling with Carrick, and using his psychic powers to turn the dice to his favor, a trick Carrick eventually catches. Carrick lets him keep his winnings, saying that he has paid to learn something about Daymos.

Milosh spends the evening weaving leather armor into his body, patching himself up, though he remains looking like a Frankenstein-ian monster. Imoaza curls up as close to a fire as she can and watches the strange and unfamiliar weave that the magic in this time creates in the air, visible to those who know how to seek it.

The morning is wet and miserable. The caravan soon comes to an inn outside of Baldur’s Gate and the players are warned it is haunted. But Daymos is keen to explore it and Carrick sees his paladin friend from the ship inside, his head bleeding from some kind of wound. The party as a whole decides to investigate, running through the rain and inside the arch of the inn:

The main doorway is unbarred, and the archway is as silent and gloomy as the exterior of the keep. Any wafting mists or ill weather seems to halt abruptly within 10 ft. of the open doors. There are no sounds of clattering dishes nor the bustle of inn keepers. Rain drips upon you as you pass under the keystone of the arch. From the glow of hundreds of candles that are lit in the lobby, though, you realize this passing has instead anointed you in red, dripping blood.

 The lobby is an expansive space, broken up by a dozen hearth stations, and the dual stairway across the room, which converges into a landing and slopes to the floor. Once you are all inside, it’s as if a veil of shadow has been lifted from your sight, and you see a vast array of strange, stirring shapes around you. The scene has the aspect of a monstrous court of deformed demons dressed to nobility. Your nose warns of the unpleasant possibility that human blood is being used as perfume, and flesh is being roasted or consumed raw from the many spits planted over the hearths. In the air, there rises a crescendo of guttural chortling that you cannot comprehend.

A woman of undeniable beauty makes a dramatic entrance down the stairway. Her footsteps echo with the clack of thigh-high, studded leather boots and she carries an immediate air of dismissive authority. She is showing a generous amount of skin between silver plating that has been polished to a mirror surface, adding a shimmering effect in the firelight. She is wrapped in a shawl of white fox fur, and although she appears youthful and walks with a brash, flippant strut, her shortcropped hair is white and her unnaturally blue eyes betray some sort of ancient malevolence. She takes her place by the grandest hearth and reclines against two huge, muscled men in chained collars who kneel to form her chair. Her baleful gaze has never parted from all of you as she made this fashionable entrance.

The woman is a Demoness, really a Demon Goddess, named Eshebala and she explains that this isn’t Faerun, but rather a good possibility for what Faerun could look like if they ever return, based on what she has taken from the minds of the players and from Milosh’s prophecy, which is still buried inside of him and which she claims to understand better than he does. She offers them a chance to see for themselves by returning to Faerun, but first they have to play her game. Eshebala doesn’t mention her true motives yet, which are... well, no, I shouldn’t say now. My players could be reading. We’ll get to that in a later post.

In any case, her game is simple: the players have arrived on the 193rd layer of the Abyss, a place called Vulgarea. Now they have to survive 20 of Vulgarea’s most deadly locations. All the demons chant as the room goes dark, “...all will enter, one walks away…all will enter, one walks away…”

This is the beginning of a new dungeon, one created by a third party designer and illustrator, Ryan Durney. It is called Mirrors of the Abyss, and it is intensely interesting.

I choose Mirrors because it is the only campaign I’ve ever read that actually captures the chaos and insane deadliness of the Abyss. It is a player killer dungeon, make no mistake about that, but with enough personality that an enterprising DM can easily adjust the difficulty down simply by playing the personalities up; a haughty demon might not use all of its powerful attacks on a party it views as too weak to harm it, allowing them to gain the upper hand, bargain with it, or escape it’s grasp; a obsessive compulsive demon may have powerful melee strikes but will refrain from approaching a human because “they are gross and full of germs.” And there are lots of nooks and crannies in which to fit long rest options.

Regardless, the descriptions, the illustrations and handouts, and the sheer ambition of the dungeon makes for a truly unique experience for anywhere from 3-12 players and the dungeon has a ton of randomized elements that make it replayable. You can insert this into your own story (just make sure players are at least level 15) or run it once a year as a special grindhouse game for a big group of players. There are even rules for continuing to play if you are killed, at which point you become a wraith who is given a chance to get their life back by screwing over one of the party members. It makes for a memorable experience, to be sure.

The way the dungeon is laid out is that there are 21 rooms. The 1st room is always visited first and sets up the rest of the game, but after that the room order is randomized. Each room represents one challenge or series of themed challenges which the players have to solve or survive in order to progress. Along the way are hidden rooms and treasures and some of the deadliest (but avoidable) encounters I’ve ever seen penned in Dungeons & Dragons. And at the end... well, that’s another thing we’ll have to get to later.

This is the continuing saga of three (sometimes hapless) adventurers who are beginning to find out they are part of a greater story, one that began eons ago and one that will shape the destiny of the entire world of Toril. In today’s post, we begin to move towards the end of our current story arc and the beginning of the final chapter of our game. But we’ve still got some business to take care of first...

Last time, our players were left on the brink of entering Stardock, so named because it is literally built into an asteroid floating in space. Perfect for our setting! Now, here’s the thing... coming into Stardock, they are in a funny position. They’ve restored most of their hitpoints and Imoaza has her spell slots back. They have several health potions. But they are also missing a team member, Milosh, whose whereabouts are unknown after his capture by the Githyanki. And they have been warned that a mighty brood of Red Dragons patrols Stardock. Their chances of success in a fight are minimal.

So that leaves sneaking around. Imoaza still has a Githyanki soul trapped from the last battle and now she questions it, asking what the best route to the prisoners is (their intentions are to get them and get out... they don’t plan on dealing with Al’Chaia). The answer she gets is honest, but also a little uncertain. One way will take them through a rarely occupied part of Stardock but then into a training center. The other takes them through the usually occupied mess hall. Both choices may lead to sneaking or, failing that, a fight. Ultimately the heroes chose to go through the training center.

There’s some good moments on the way to the center. The ambiance gets set really well: they start on the edge of a dragon’s lair and can feel the heat emanating all around them. They are terrified that any moment they will come across the dragon! As they leave the dragon’s lair, things get cooler and darker and eventually they trade the tension of the heat for the mystery of cold, abandoned caverns. At one point, while wandering through a rocky cavern, a strange floating eye pops up out of nowhere, observes them for a moment, and then disappears as rapidly and mysteriously as it came. They have no idea what that means, but figure it can’t be good. At another point, there’s a moment of humor, when Carrick finds a secret door in the floor of a cavern and tries to lift it... forgetting he’s standing on it (the result of a critical failure in the strength roll).

But eventually they come to the training center, find it VERY occupied (7 or 8 Gith warriors are here, training), and have to decide what to do. They end up coming up with a plan to use a mixture of the Mindflayer’s mind blast skill and Imoaza’s summoned Cthulian darkness to blind and entrap as many of the combatants as possible, then hopefully take down the stragglers and get through the room. It’s not a bad plan, but it doesn’t go off well, thanks to some poor rolling on their part and some great rolling on my part.

This leads to a mighty mess of a confrontation that takes up most of the session. Githyanki are leaping out of Hadar’s darkness while tentacles reach for them and try to pull them back in. They use jump to latch onto handholds on the walls and ceilings and from there leap to attack the players. Imoaza is using her eldritch blasts to knock them back into the pool of darkness, where they are pulled, screaming, to their deaths. The Mind Flayer levitates around the room, trying to eat brains and blast minds, but ends up rolling so poorly he is pretty much just an extra target for the Githyanki to focus on instead of the players. Carrick wades into battle and takes down two of the Githyanki before being surrounded and struck down himself. Imoaza can’t seem to summon Drosselgreymer: every time she tries, the Rod of Storms leaps into her hands instead and eventually, frustrated, she unleashes its potential, blasting the arena with lightning and thunder. There is a great moment when two more combatants enter the fray, powerful Gith magic users, but the door they enter through leads directly into Hadar’s Darkness and they spend a couple rounds getting slammed around in there before they break free.

Ultimately, the situation doesn’t look good: Carrick is stable, but unconscious. Marky the Mind Flayer is set upon by an injured Githyanki knight, who finally chops his head off. Imoaza is pinned to a wall by the telekinesis of the Gith magic users (one of whom is invisible) and two Gith are descending on her with the intent to knock her unconscious and take her prisoner. The players are badly outnumbered despite their good plan!

The way this fight progresses is part of D&D’s unpredictability and that’s not bad, but there are a few things I have taken from the combat to improve in the future. Let me cover those before I get to the conclusion of the fight.

Improving Combat

The combat we have this session is epic and less one sided than the players think... but the perception that it is one sided is a problem, and when this happens in a game it almost always comes from miscommunications between the players and the GM. In this case, there are several things that don’t get communicated well:

This room has many straw dummies in it, spread around and big enough they could potentially be used for cover or lit on fire for a distraction. I only mention the straw stuffing once, and so the players don’t connect the description of this to a potential tactic. I’m also not clear about where they stand around the room.

The Gith are training in full armor and weapons. The players don’t realize this and when I mention the straw dummies wield wooden staffs (another hint that fire could be good here), they think I’m talking about the Gith. So they aren’t that afraid of darting into the middle of them!

The Githyanki are totally surprised by the players, and while they react quickly due to their training and battle expertise, they are afraid for most of the combat.

The ultimate lesson is to be clear, to be OVERLY clear. Players won’t always ask questions, even if you encourage them to (as I usually do) because they may not have any questions, but that doesn’t mean the picture in their head matches yours. Describe everything TWICE, lay out potential plans to illustrate the scenario (but don’t spoon feed the players ideas of what you want them to do), and make sure the players know their options. I talked about this a bit on a recent episode of Adventurous Appetizers, that knowing their options is what keeps players from feeling frustrated at the outcome of a fight. In this case, they felt a little frustrated because they didn’t fully understand the scenario and so, even though their plan was a good (if poorly rolled) one, they felt a little cheated out of the opportunity to enact other plans which maybe they would have used instead if they better understood the situation.

Similarly, throughout the combat, I could have made things seem more frenzied for the opponents: if they had been screaming in fear and confusion or crying out that this might be the first wave of a larger attack (as they probably feared it was), it would have highlighted how well the players did against the odds and even given them a chance to roleplay during combat, maybe using intimidation to increase the enemy’s fear and halt their good tactics. I hate missing roleplaying opportunities but combat is an easy place to do so what with everything else going on and you having to use the other side of your brain to do all the logistics. I’m always trying to remind myself to roleplay during battle. Easier with 20/20 hindsight having had a few weeks to think over the combat though.

The other thing I could have changed is lowered the difficulty of the room on the fly by giving the Gith the wooden staves the players thought they had, but I didn’t realize this was what the players thought until combat was over and they asked about it. This one is their fault, though, as I said a number of times during the fight that the Githyanki had blades and if the players had mentioned it early in the combat, I probably would have changed that, or at least given them a chance to use an inspiration point to put that into effect (tangent: I’m allowing inspiration points now to change the story slightly for things that have no rules, like knocking Githyanki off perches and into the tentacles of Hadar). 

I wanted to post these notes because these are all helpful hints for DMs and good notes for me for next time! Still, at the moment, we have a TPK on our hands and we need to give the players a way out of it.

Ah! New Information!

At the beginning of this session, I took Milosh aside and we went back in time before the short rest to roleplay a little interrogation scene between him and Al’Chaia, whom he is brought before as a prisoner. Milosh ends up being a pretty hilarious prisoner. He takes things so literally and has so little ability to deceive or lie that Al’Chaia quickly dismisses him as a threat and instead tries to entice him to work with her. She wants him to free the prisoner, Ezria, and "escape” with him, at least to the point where he opens a portal to the Githzerai homeworld, at which point she intends to step in, kill or recapture Ezria, and secure the portal for her own uses. In return, she offers to take him to the homeworld of the Gith, where he can speak to their queen, peruse their libraries, and learn more about the Surveyors who built him.

Milosh agrees, but just to be sure he stays honest, Al’Chaia gives him a scrying crystal, allowing her to know where he is at all times. She doesn’t tell him what it does, but she warns him not to discard it. Milosh suspects its true purpose, and agrees to carry it. Then, Al’Chaia sends him to the jail cells, where he awaits Ezria, who is currently being mentally tortured in a vain attempt to get information out of him.

What Al’Chaia doesn’t tell Milosh is that she is using the time that Ezria is being tortured to set a trap: she summons the Great Mother Dragon of her brood (insert unpronounceable dragon name) and connects the crystal to her, with instructions to hover outside the asteroid wherever the crystal is and be prepared to use her spell of passwall to enter and attack if the crystal is discarded or the portal is opened. She also knows that the portal can only be opened in “weaker” space, a place where the fabric of time and space is weak enough to pierce and travel through. The one place this is is at the entrance to Stardock. So she goes there to wait, with two young red dragons and a platoon of Githyanki. She tells the other Githyanki not to fight the robotic Milosh and Ezria, but she doesn’t give them the same instructions about any other intruders. These she says “kill on sight.” She knows those intruders are there, but she figures the less companions Milosh has, the more likely he is to adhere to the plan.

Side note: in retrospect it would have been fun if there was a secondary place that the players discover on Stardock where the veil is weak and could be pierced, but I think it would have disrupted the pace we set for the mission. But a good thought for a future playthrough of Stardock.

All of this culminates in Milosh using a key Al’Chaia gave him to free Ezria and join the fight just as things look hopeless. Milosh darts into the training room and begins firing his mega-buster gunarm at the Gith wizards while Ezria unleashes the fury of a Githzerai monk against his enemies.

Then things get complicated. Milosh also freed two Mindflayers as he sped out of the prisons. This infuriates Ezria, but Milos h manages to convince him to stick to the mission and think of them as tools to use against his enemies. This goes against everything Ezria believes, but the Githzerai is wounded, exhausted from multiple psychic tortures, and terrified of the Githyanki gaining access to his homeworld. So he tentatively agrees.

This alliance is tested further still when the Mindflayers burst in upon the room and immediately set upon one of the injured Gith wizards, pulling her down and cracking open her skull to feast on her brains. Ezria’s most inner instincts tell him to fight now, to turn on the Mindflayers, and in a blind rage he nearly does so, with Milosh desperately begging him not to give in to his rage but to let the other Gith kill these Mindflayers, or come back later with an army of Githzerai. Only one set of words finally gets through to Ezria: “It is not the warrior’s way to lose the war just to win one battle.” With this, Ezria finally tears himself from the horendous death of his distant kin and joins Milosh in fleeing through the trapdoor, Imoaza and Carrick close behind (Imoaza killed the Githyanki knight who was dragging Carrick’s body away and revived him during the action with the Mindflayers).

As they come up through the trapdoor, they halt for a moment to heal each other and cast haste spells to let them speed through the dungeon. Then Milosh makes a mistake: he throws away Al’Chaia’s crystal.

Immediately there is a roar and the mother dragon appears in the room with them, blocking the exit. But the three race away, using haste to bypass her and tear down the final hallway to their exit. The mother dragon sends a blast of fire after them, a blast that severely wounds Ezria, nearly killing him, barely catches Carrick, and...

... kills Imoaza, who fails her dodge rolls.

Only, Milosh’s player asks if he can spend an inspiration point and change the story, intentionally failing his roll and throwing himself in the way of the blast. This sounds super appropriate to the story and they have one last inspiration so we allow it and Milosh takes incredible damage, his armor and outer layer melting, giving him a permanent -2 to Charisma, and leaving him looking like something out of Terminator. But he survives and Imoaza survives and the three race on!

But then they come to the Stardock portal and find Al’Chaia and her forces waiting for her. She opens her mouth to speak and Milosh launches a volley of arrows at her and her crew. Taking advantage of the distraction, Ezria opens the portal underneath the party. He turns to join them and gasps as a knife hits him in the back: a poisoned blade thrown by Al’Chaia with perfect precision. His life force fading, he knows that he still needs to protect the portal from being kept open by Al’Chaia and her Gith. So he leaps in and makes the ultimate sacrifice: he spends his life force to close the portal behind him. And because he gave his whole soul to do this last dead, he arrives back in his homeworld dead, unable to be raised by the powers of the Gith.

A Short Rest

The players get a long rest, courtesy of the Githzerai, who are grateful for their heroic actions in returning to them one of their one. The players sleep in the strange Githzerai world set in the Limbo in between space and time. They recover and they dream.

In fact, they dream the same dream, all three of them, of a statue of a woman, set in a garden surrounded by people making love. The love making turns violent and the people begin tearing at each other’s flesh, though still crying out in ecstasy, while the statue of the woman slowly changes its expression into a smile.

Only Imoaza, schooled as she is in dark magic, recognizes the dream as more than just a fancy or an effect of being in the strange environment of Limbo. There is a lingering of magic, almost like a suntan or a burn, left on her aura which tells her that she inadvertently touched powerful magic in her dream last night. This means something has contacted them, or brushed up against their sleeping minds. The thought perturbs her, but she keeps it to herself, not accustomed to having companions to help her think through her problems.

The three are taken back to their ship by the Githzerai and deposited on the bridge, while the Gith go to the reactor core to power up their crystal and send them, finally, home to Toril. How long has it been? In player time, seven months since they fought the Mind Flayer space marine that launched them into space. In game time... well, that is less certain. Knick Knack and Immerstal have given them impression that hundreds of years may have gone by on Toril in their absence. Only Milosh is not disturbed by the thought: “Ah! I have been asleep for hundreds of years already. A few hundred more will not hurt as long as the prophecy is still unfulfilled.”

But they have little time to contemplate or celebrate. As Krisp congratulates them on a job well done, Carrick notices something bareling towards the bridge from between asteroids. It looks like...

“It’s a ship!” he cries out, moments before it slams into the bridge and everything goes crazy.

Family Matters

Crashing through the bridge is a familiar gunship: it belongs to Hecate, Imoaza wayward daughter who has hunted her since Imoaza joined the party. Unsuccessfully hunted, I should add. Hecate has been a difficult encounter to design. As a boss encounter, she has had to walk a fine line between being not strong enough to TPK a party while being strong enough to withstand their brutal attacks. You would think that the answer here would be high HP and AC with maybe a low but consistent damage output, or having her use special abilities to target group weaknesses.

And yeah, you wouldn’t be wrong. That’s pretty much the basis for any Hecate fight. The funny thing is how inconsistent it is in practice, but then that’s pretty much been the take away of this entire post. D&D is unpredictable, unstable. It is not linear story telling: it is improv theater.

For a brief recap, here are all the various scenarios the party has encountered Hecate in and a basic rundown of how they were designed and how they went:

Encounter 1: Mountainside This encounter took place on the mountain path on the way to the Fane of Tiamet right after the Red Hand campaign. Here, I used Maralith statistics for Hecate, with the snake body option, and gave her a special sword that could cut through space, allowing her to basically dimension door/misty step in and out of combat. She was accompanied by a group of Yuan Ti and their Broodguards. The thought was that the multitude of enemies would make the combat harder. It didn’t. Imoaza and Aldric decimated the group enemies, while Carrick provided a nice unhittable target for them with his high AC. It was pretty much a disaster for Hecate, but gave me ideas of how to run future fights. Basically, everything needed an upgrade.

Encounter 2: Hell’s Tavern This encounter took place in the City of Ghosts, with a new and improved bounty hunter verison of Hecate. She had lost her blade, but she had gained a gun arm. I basically upgraded her to a mix of Orthon stats (Mordenkainen’s Tome) and the Marilith States, with some multi-attack thrown in to allow her to be competitive in the action economy. She also fought alongside an acidic troll. This was probably the most balanced fight the players had against Hecate and it took them using all sorts of tricks to beat her, leading to a tense and prolonged encounter which almost killed the party.

Encounter 3: Gunship This was the most interesting fight, as Hecate fought the players from her gunship while they controlled the demon train. I don’t know how balanced the fight was because it didn’t really use in book statistics but was more fluid with some of the moves and attacks being designed on the fly to fit the situation, but it didn’t really matter because it was heavy on spectacle, with the emphasis being on all the cool shit both sides could do to each other and how epic the whole thing felt. When Hecate’s ship went down in the desert, that didn’t feel surprising, but it didn’t feel unsatisfying, either.

This new fight with Hecate is supposed to focus on a few new things: one, she has Blackrazor at full power. Two, she has legendary actions. Three, she still has access to her gunship’s weapons (limited). And four, there is an environmental challenge based on the bridge depressurizing and also something... else. These black portals keep appearing in the bridge during the fight, sucking everything they touch into nothingness.

The fight ends up not going the way I expected. I expected it to be a challenge, maybe too much of a challenge I was afraid. Hecate is most interested in fighting Imoaza alone but of course Imoaza doesn’t go for that (much to the rage of Hecate) and the team takes her on as one. Even this was a little unexpected, as I thought some of the group would be held back by obstacles.

See, first thing that happens is Tinia and other magic users rush forward to secure the bridge from the pull of outer space, using their magics to erect a force field between the bridge and the vast expanse caused by the crash of the gunship. When they do, a number of heavy objects that were being pulled towards the void drop suddenly. One, a Fiona droid, slams into Carrick, knocking him down. A heavy computer bank crushes Milosh (he rolls a critical fail), trapping him underneath. Only Imoaza escapes the carnage, rolling exceptionally well and leaping across various objects to land in front of the gunship and taunt her daughter to come down and fight.

So for a moment, I think this is going to be a one on one fight, which I hadn’t anticipated but awesome! So Hecate uses her gunship to lay down suppressing fire in a line of plasma blasts behind Imoaza, turning this into an arena. But no: I forget how many movement options higher level characters have. Carrick misty steps away from an encroaching black portal and right past the plasma and Milosh misty steps out from under the heavy computer banks and rushes through the plasma, taking damage, but emerging with enough health to feel comfortable closing with Hecate. Within a round, Hecate takes something like a hundred points of damage from their combined onslaught. She uses some of her legendary actions to try and fight back, but bad rolls screw her over. The one thing she gets off is she uses a charm attack on Milosh and she convinces him to target Carrick, whom she says murdered the real surveyor. Milosh turns to attack Carrick. Meanwhile a black portal opens up underneath Imoaza and it looks like this fight is going to end up between Hecate, Carrick, and a charmed Milosh. But then Imoaza uses the group’s last inspiration to try and change the story. She tells me what she wants to do, and I declare a strength contest: not Imoaza’s strong suit, and something Hecate’s pretty good at.

And Hecate rolls a 3. Hah!

Imoaza leapt over a swing from Blackrazor. “You let Aldric die!” the sword screamed. “I was supposed to kill him!” Imoaza would have landed back on the floor of the bridge, but it was suddenly gone, sucked away into a black portal that yawned underneath her. So instead she landed on Hecate, gripping her daughter’s shoulders, their faces mere inches from each other. Hecate hissed. “You were never one of us,” she said. “You stole our weapon so that you could play pretend.”

“No,” Imoaza answered. “I stole the weapon because you weren’t worthy of it.”

Then she swung around to Hecate’s back and pushed off, leaping backwards and sending her daughter screaming into the pit.

And with that, the fight is over. That’s actually suitably awesome, and I love the way the fight ends before it really begins. Still, seeing how badly the fight went for Hecate even before this move, there are a few things I would do differently here in retrospect to make the fight better:

Give Hecate some better armor. I needed to bump her AC up a bit to make her harder to hit, something she totally would have thought to do after her last fight with the players. Oops.

Bring along some minions! Why oh why didn’t I have the ship launch little mechs into the arena or have Hecate hack some of the Fiona units? I can’t believe I missed a chance to have androids fight!

Have Hecate hang back. Yeah, I know Blackrazor is a close range weapon, but she should have known to fight this smarter. Hang back, keep range, use her gun arm to disable opponents and her charm to take over Milosh, then move in for the kill.

Overall, I think this would have made for a far more tactically interesting fight, with Milosh charmed and fighting Carrick and a couple of androids distracting Imoaza while Hecate moved around using range and occasionally closing in for a strong attack. With the players having had a long rest, I think they could have handled this and it would have been a more tense and memorable fight (maybe even with the same ending, which would have been even more impactful, if it interrupted Hecate in the middle of kicking butt). Sorry, players. But hey, maybe you’ll get a chance for a better one in the future.

In any case, the fight ends but the players still have dangers to face. Portals are opening up all over the bridge! Carrick is sucked into one, and Milosh dives in after him, using his grappling hook arm to attach to Hecate’s gunship. When he doesn’t emerge, Imoaza sighs and slides down the grappling steel wire after him.

Home...?

Darkness, and sound. Wind whistling might be how some would describe it, but it would be a kindness the wind didn’t deserve. This wind was howling, howling madly like a tortured thing. Milosh activates his eyes to see that he is in a hut of stone with a single heavy blanket forming a door that is flapping in the raging wind. His grappling hook has retracted, though he doesn’t know when that happened. In fact, he doesn’t know the when of anything. How long has he been... asleep? Is that the right word?

When Milosh eventually pushes past the blanket, he finds himself in another world. A world of grey and white, surrounded by shadows. Snow and sleet rains down upon them, picked up and spun into a flurry by the howling wind. Others are here, too, humanoids that seem to be preparing to leave on a journey. Wagons are being packed and hitched to mules. Provisions are being packed. There is a mighty fire that people huddle around, though others are preparing to dump buckets of snow and ice to put out the flames. Among the people huddled for warmth Milosh spots Imoaza and Carrick.

Their experience is the same as his: they remember entering the portal but nothing since. They do not know where they are, so Milosh grabs a passing man, a man with a weatherworn face and a thick beard with grey at its edges, and asks him where they are.

“Torill,” he barks. “Along the sword coast, on the pilgrimage.”

This has the players reeling. The Sword Coast in the Forgotten Realms?! The world they’ll been trying to return to for... well... for a long time.

“Pilgrimage to what?” Milosh asks. 

At this the man scowls.

“You’ve forgotten our lady?!”

“We’ve forgotten many things,” Imoaza says quickly and the man softens.

“I shouldn’t have judged, I’m sorry. The affliction takes us all in different ways but, ah gods, to have forgotten her ladyship you must truly be miserable. Here, you are on your way with the rest of us pilgrims to see the goddess Eshebala, so that she may claim our spirits and usher us into her bright kingdom away from all this suffering.”

Eshebala... Milosh searches his databanks and realizes he does know the lady Eshebala. In his time (which admittedly was centuries ago) she was already an old goddess, worshipped by lovers and would-be lovers for her power to recognize and bring true lovers together, and as a fertility goddess. But Imoaza also knows Eshebala, only she knows her as a Goddess of horror and despair, a dark name shunned even by the hardiest warlocks, for she is known as a being incapable of granting any power excepting that of wild uncontrollable chaos, whose own followers she has forsaken and to whom she grants no gifts or insight, except the gift and insight of madness.