Angels fall from the sky. Shimmering beams of light pierce down through the clouds. Demons flee before the wrath of God.
And from below, the tentacles of Shub-Niggurath rise. Great fissures cracking the Earth as the great tendrils emerge.
And in between, a city starts to walk. An apocalypse dragon cracks its floating mountainous coccoon. Humanity's final army is crushed by the Dead. A deadly poison spreads across the land, killing a third of all trees and all green grass.
And amongst it all, my players are trying their absolute fucking best to cancel the apocalypse.
In broad strokes, the party's key goal has been to travel to Dwimmermount and find a source of Azoth to fuel a giant stone golem.
This neatly ties together a few things that wouldn't otherwise be related. The Slaughtergrid is a module they were stuck in for mooooonths, but they know it's a big fuck-off mech which would be massively helpful in the current apocalypse if they need to punch something big.
Azoth made its first appearance in the distant past of 2014, predating any of the current players. It's one of Dwimmermount's big deals. Azoth and Dwimmermount have cropped up a fair few times in the game, and by now I'm pretty sure everyone's guessed that this is the Holy Mountain that is central to the Termaxian faith.
The secondary goal - help a dragon cult to create a super-poison that will kill Shub-Niggurath.
This came up after some delves and a couple of tragic deaths due to spider venom. The first level of Dwimmermount is host to the Spider Queen Arach-Nacha whose bite is a a sort of hyper-powerful omnipoison and whose kiss is a hyper-powerful antivenom.
The plan is to capture her and take her to the Drakencult in Moondin so they can milk her for use in poison research. Not as easy as it sounds... and it doesn't sound easy.
This is only really possible because they managed to unite the various factions under Ninhursag late last year, allowing them to focus on poison research instead of fighting the Rebel Dead.
Stealing a horrible boss monster from a dungeon in order to drag it overland to somewhere else is just so great.
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| beep boop i am an angel |
Angels have already gotten a rep as being dangerous and strange.
Because my idea of angels has been coloured forever by Evangelion, I wanted to make angels be more along the lines of weird eye-covered wheels and unfathomable plans as opposed to winged dudes with tortured souls.
They're sort of holy magic-immune robots with stasis beam weapons. They're all unfolded spheres and communicate in choir-like Angelic Binary.
I'm leaning hard on modrons for these guys, but with a few twists. Upgrade when a higher-tier angel is destroyed and all.
The anti-magic thing is the most worrying to my players. The Muscle Wizard's otherwise-unstoppable Magic Missile punch has no effect on them.
Luckily Sir Robyn the magic lawyer can understand their song-language, so that's led to lots of shenanigans.
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| -- boss angel online -- |
As for Demons, the party's travels through the mountainous demon territories have seen them run into a fair few.
What I call Demons are perhaps more rightly called Devils by D&D nomenclature, but fuck that. You've got smart demons and you've got dumb demons such as those dragged forth by the Summon spell. They're all demons. I think mine have ended up somewhere between Perdition and Kill Six Billion Demons in terms of influences.
Most importantly, demons feed on sin. The most powerful demons wear masks, a different colour depending on which Sin they eat. They tend to be quite friendly and try to persuade you to indulge in their sin in order to feed them.
I love chatty enemies. While initially unintended, the chatty demons vs the unfathomable angels creates a nice dichotomy.
I feel like there's a modern tendency to think of angels and demons as sort of evenly matched oppositional forces. Constantine, Supernatural, Diablo. Evenly matched inhuman entities locked in an eternal war for the souls of man.
But not here. Demons flee from the light of God, and a single strike from the lowest Angel will destroy the mightiest Demon.
The demons are scared.
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| HE BIG |
Other than angels and demons, Dragons are the big force on everyone's radar right now.
I've been pleased with how the mechanics of becoming a dragon cultist have been working. This stuff is based directly on Patrons in Perdition, so anyone joining a cult has to obey their strictures and suffer an increasingly hefty experience tax.
My game has ended up with a sort of tacit level limit at Level 7. Nobody has ever managed to breach that limit to reach level 8.
That's meant that joining a drakencult has taken on a sort of alternate leveling system. Since you're not going to reach level 8 anyway, might as well just eat the exp drain. It's only an advantage!
We've got POWERLAD who has been the most active dragon worshipper, trying to convert everyone he meets and spreading the good word of Ninhursag.
He's been unsuccessful at converting the party at time of writing, but did manage to convert a whole town to worshipping the dragon, uniting warring factions under its aegis. Real cool.
He's high enough in the dragon's esteem to see heartbeats, gain subcutaneous green scales, and deciding to take the dragon's rune-aspect of Size has given him the ability to hulk out for +4 Strength mod. Pretty rad!
The other dragon worshipper in the party, Galaxy Johnson, has been too far away from his patron to really visit and level up. One of the fundamental issues with joining a drakencult is that you have to return to the dragon or a higher level drakencultist in order to level up your dragon powers, and Galaxy Johnson hasn't managed to get back to Ereshkigal since he was first inducted.
In other news we've had the arrival of Timothy, who immediately grokked the shenanigans.
He's playing a Magic-User lawyer, and is probably the first one to abuse cantrips to their intended extent.
It's fun having someone new to the game because it suddenly puts how bizarre the campaign is at the moment in perspective. To everyone else it's been a slow increase in stakes over time, to a new player you're suddenly explaining "yea so the world is cracking like an egg, there are angels, she's playing the son of her previous character, this guy's maybe an alien, and they're trying get dragons to start destroying the world but stop them before they've gone too far".
Shit's wacky.
We also had the return of Ollie who'd been away for a good long while due to life stuff. He back!
Unfortunately his long-running character Andromeda soon died to spider venom alongside other long-running character Nix. Poison is OP, man.
He's now playing the campaign's first Inheritor and becoming a real menace.
Speaking of Nix, shoutout to Fraser whose character Nix has been with us ever since the time skip. Long may she rest. He's playing a furtive Elf character now who's managed to get massive Stealth, so a big change from his previous Barbarian. He's really getting a lot out of the Evade / Combat Stealth rule which is nice to see.
New player Issy has juuuust arrived at time of writing. She's completely new to this, so I don't know what she's like in play yet. Strong start with calling her Dwarf character Sturdy though, A+!
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| oh shit yea and Ollie's got into 3D modelling and is looking at starting a miniature business! |
Mini Reviews:
The Magma Lake of Ninhursag:
Some bullshit I made up. High level open air area made up of vine bridges hung between enormous crystal trees above a lake of magma. Lots of chatty enemies, LOTS of treasure.
Sort of intended as a heist or high level shenanigans area, currently it's been mostly POWERLAD coming here to pray before the great green head of Ninhursag which sightlessly dozes in the pool of magma at the centre of the area.
Maybe I will write this up one day.
Sort of intended as a heist or high level shenanigans area, currently it's been mostly POWERLAD coming here to pray before the great green head of Ninhursag which sightlessly dozes in the pool of magma at the centre of the area.
Maybe I will write this up one day.
I like this module a lot. I ran it again because I was caught short one session, reskinned to be the abode of a Gluttony demon.
It was entered via a tavernkeeper so enormously fat that he was stuck behind his bar. He sobbed and whispered for Our Heroes to save him, and they obliged by crawling into his mouth and delving the interior dungeon.
Everything inside as written but reskinned (with very literal skin) to be a floor of rotting and mushy food, corridors of throat, pus, stomach linings, as much gross stuff as I could manage.
It's a pretty natural fit, actually.
It was entered via a tavernkeeper so enormously fat that he was stuck behind his bar. He sobbed and whispered for Our Heroes to save him, and they obliged by crawling into his mouth and delving the interior dungeon.
Everything inside as written but reskinned (with very literal skin) to be a floor of rotting and mushy food, corridors of throat, pus, stomach linings, as much gross stuff as I could manage.
It's a pretty natural fit, actually.
Once Christmas, one of the players murdered Santa Claus.
As per famous Tim Allen docudrama "The Santa Clause", Lulu Spiderbite became the new Santa.
Then the timeskip. Lulu's fate unknown.
A false Santa arose. A demon Santa. "Our" Santa. A demon of Greed, feeding on the greed of children come Christmas.
Lulu did not like this. She became the Krampus of Santa is Dead.
The 4-D art gallery was the main thing we saw, since the players didn't follow Lulu Claus's trail of destruction across the land.
A+ module and PWYW!
As per famous Tim Allen docudrama "The Santa Clause", Lulu Spiderbite became the new Santa.
Then the timeskip. Lulu's fate unknown.
A false Santa arose. A demon Santa. "Our" Santa. A demon of Greed, feeding on the greed of children come Christmas.
Lulu did not like this. She became the Krampus of Santa is Dead.
The 4-D art gallery was the main thing we saw, since the players didn't follow Lulu Claus's trail of destruction across the land.
A+ module and PWYW!
Of this megadungeon, much has been said.
I like it.
So ok, real talk, that thing that megadungeons do where they start off normal wooden-doors-and-stone-corridors and get weirder as they go down?
I get why they do it. Megadungeons are meant to be campaign-spanning centrepieces so you want to start with the normal stuff before you get weirder as you go down, bringing across a sort of mythic underworld vibe.
It makes sense if your megadungeon is a tentpole, but for me it's just a very big dungeon that someone else already made for me.
Which is to say - I've amped up all the space-fantasy vibes and made the doors made of slide-back metal and various other bits iris open or have some blatant plastics and keycards and stuff thrown in.
Thematic innit.
I like it.
So ok, real talk, that thing that megadungeons do where they start off normal wooden-doors-and-stone-corridors and get weirder as they go down?
I get why they do it. Megadungeons are meant to be campaign-spanning centrepieces so you want to start with the normal stuff before you get weirder as you go down, bringing across a sort of mythic underworld vibe.
It makes sense if your megadungeon is a tentpole, but for me it's just a very big dungeon that someone else already made for me.
Which is to say - I've amped up all the space-fantasy vibes and made the doors made of slide-back metal and various other bits iris open or have some blatant plastics and keycards and stuff thrown in.
Thematic innit.
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