#othiat

So, I'm a DM for a homebrew campaign (Othiat) with 3 players (@everdreamart, @traumallamarama, and @blazingjuniper). We live very far away from each other (the closest player to me is over 400 miles away), so we play via Discord. Whenever a map is needed, I've always turned to Owlbear Rodeo.

Last session, I ran the biggest encounter I have ever run.

The party had to stopped to spend the night at an inn in a small town they'd passed through before. They noticed that something was off; flies were buzzing around even though it was winter, there was a general smell of decay in the air, the townsfolk mentioned that the well had turned foul, etc., etc. The players knew something was up, but I don't think they realized just how bad it was gonna get.

Long story short, that little town was about to be at the center of a demonic invasion.

The PCs were woken in the middle of the night to screams and a poisonous green fog flooding the streets (and their room). They rushed outside, not having had time to put their armor on (so AC was low af). They almost immediately got attacked by a Bulezau, barely dodging out of the way in time.

That's when the map came out.

It's an absolutely monstrous thing: probably 50x100 grids, with each grid representing 15x15 feet. The entire town was on this thing, and the party had free reign to hide, fight, or just run and leave it all behind. Problem is, that green fog made it so they can't see jack.

Owlbear Rodeo had a huge update relatively recently, and now there's a bunch of new extensions and features. One of those extensions is called Smoke and Spectre (by Battle-System and Armindo Flores). I've always been a fan of using fog to hide things on maps, but Smoke and Spectre took things a step further. Each PC had their own independent radius of visibility, and I set it so that everyone could only see out to a radius of 30 feet. I also gave them a few visible points on the map, representing locations they knew of, but the vast majority of the map was empty nothingness to them.

I had been worried that the lack of visibility would turn out to be too frustrating for the players to enjoy the encounter, but it actually worked out well. Everyone was forced to slow down and plan out their moves carefully; the town as swarming with demons, and getting too close to one would prompt an attack. Everyone was going one grid at a time, anxious and terrified (in a good way!) of things lurking just out of sight. Movement also became an issue in general, since one of the PCs (a tabaxi monk) is a lot faster than the others, and another PC (a fairy druid) could fly over certain obstacles.

The party actually got split up in the chaos, leading to them desperately trying to coordinate when they couldn't see each other or even their own surroundings.

They eventually individually made their ways (makin' their way) to the town center, where the invasion had begun. There, they encountered a Wastrilith in the well, which was way too high level for them to actually take down. Knowing that there were still survivors in hiding, though, the level 6 party was determined to end the threat.

See, this wasn't necessarily meant to be a combat encounter; it was meant to be a survival encounter. The demonic invasion has ties to the larger plot, and is supposed to serve as set-up/lead-in to certain things the players are still only vaguely aware of (things I will not be spoiling via tumblr). I expected the players to engage in combat here and there, and they did had combat with some of the lower CR demons around the town, but the overall point was to set up plot and give the players a unique encounter.

They almost had a TPK with the Wastrilith? ^^;

The thing downed two of them, but the druid had just enough spell slots to keep the others from dying. The party was doing decent damage, but there was no way they could survive more than two or three rounds of this thing's damage output. Finally, low on HP and spell slots, the satyr bard pulled a clutch Dissonant Whispers. Wastriliths have great Strength and Constitution, but their Wisdom isn't all that impressive.; it failed the saving throw and was forced to flee, giving the party a chance to escape its radius.

A whole lot more happened (little Opportune Moment has a rough night ahead of him, courtesy of a Tlacatecolo), and the encounter isn't technically over (next session, the party is going after the Sibriex that started it all), but holy crap was it a good session! X'D

My laptop almost caught fire trying to process the map and all the tokens on it, but this was a planed event I'd been excitedly dreading for so long, and it worked!

The limited visibility is what really sold it. Fog effects only go so far, and this encounter would not have worked if the players had been able to see their surroundings. The fear and anxiety about the creatures lurking in the dark heightened the experience for all of us, myself included; I got to play around with the visibility of the demons, figuring out how much they could see and hear.

(DM) @ashes-to-asher Suffer >:)