My play-experience was very disjointed--I ended up playing at three different tables through the course of the campaign. Played some parts twice, some never.

@nitsua60 But you also ran it, yes?

Running it I had the heads-up so I spent a week doing a deep-read and generating my "what if the PCs don't..." document. I use that liberally to have rumors, refugees, and other info flowing toward the PCs as to what's going wrong.

@nitsua60 Hmmm, interesting.

Prong two: fleshing out a lot of the Alarums & Excursions stuff. I went ahead and dropped people, villages, &c. in places where they were interested in spending more time.

But all along, Black Wave is doing X, or Ogremoch is doing Y.

It really got its legs when the PCs took hold of Riverguard Keep.

Now they were stakeholders, and had a place to dump their cash (rebuilding after an orb), and had repeated contact with NPCs.

(Of course, I think now that would violate some AL stuff? When I ran PotA it was Encounters, and technically only the free-pdf portion of it needed to follow AL rules.)

Wow, I went in completely different directions when it came to adding stuff.

So, I'm not great at coming up with stuff. Fortunately for me, I had a couple of things happen that naturally created storylines.

The first was that the party explored and found the Dark Lady really early on.

At that point, they didn't really know what was going on.

So she offered them information in exchange for a promise that they'd give her any orbs they found.

Which allowed me to basically dump the Background section of the book onto them, as well as (once they got their hands on an orb) creating this ongoing tension of "Is it really a good idea to give these this thing to her? Can we get away with not giving it to her?"

Er, oops, they only promised to give her the first orb they found.

@Miniman That's nicely serendipitous.

Which was important, because once they gave her that one, she offered them fabulous rewards for any more they came across.

So when they found some more, that tension got really thick, since they were no longer obligated or feeling threatened, but just deciding whether the benefits outweighed the risks.

← 11 messages moved from RPG General Chat

Especially once they found out what she actually was.

@Miniman What sorts of rewards? I struggle with this in AL, because other than a magic item so obviously-tailored to the character that it defies credulity I have a hard time getting them out of a "let's grind the plot and advance along the levels" mindset.

Note: I don't have a problem with that mindset per se, it's just that I have had tables that explicitly want to get away from that, and AL seems to make it tough.

@nitsua60 A Helm of Teleportation :D I was sick of travel time, random encounters, and so on, so I thought I'd give them something that benefited the party as a whole, that they'd really like, and that made my life easier.

The second thing that happened was the party acquiring one of the Elemental Weapons. (Windvane.) And, luckily, the character who the party decided to use it was perfectly suited to it.

So I talked to her, and we did this whole thing of her being slowly corrupted, since she was carrying it for a really long time.

Which culminated in her attempting to summon Yann-C-Binn herself.

@Miniman oooer

Everything else I did was sort of minor, except that I added a friendly Storm Giant who gave them some great advice - "Yeah, you should totally go after the fire node before the water node!"

So, now that the water node is all that's left (we're one session away from finishing), he's going to reveal his true allegiance to Olhydra.

Did you have anyone try to fight Ogremoch et al?

And, the delay he caused the party will have allowed Olhydra to be summoned before the party gets there.

Oh, you're still going.

Excellent.

@SevenSidedDie ty

@nitsua60 Nah, they stopped the summoning of Yann-C-Binn (I have a question about that, btw), defeated the prophet of fire in the Fane of the Eye, and got to the earth node with plenty of time to spare.

But, since they bought the Storm Giant's filthy lies, they're going to have to fight Olhydra, or accept the deal he'll offer them.

"Olhydra is patient, we don't have to fight, walk away and nothing terrible happens during your lifetime."

I fully expect them to fight, of course.

It's hard not to insta-kill, IME. What's their level?

@nitsua60 12th, from memory. (RL has made it a while since we played.)

@nitsua60 I did notice Yann-C-Binn can basically guarantee a dead party member per round.

Olhydra looks a bit more tame.

@Miniman The suffocation thing?

@nitsua60 But yeah, I wanted to ask you, did closing the nodes work the same way in the original adventure? Cos one of my players has been playing D&D for 40 years or so, and I was a bit suspicious of how quickly they worked out the trick.

@nitsua60 Yeah, especially when you consider that that's one of five actions he gets to take every round.

Ooh, I dunno. I never got that far. But it's only 8 feet from where I sit.... [brb]

[creaking open thirty year old pages...]

hmm... 4 barrels salted meats, 137 arrows, 200 x-bow bolts, 3 battle axes, 1 mace.

@nitsua60 I mean, it's entirely likely they just came up with the right answer. They're great at puzzle-solving, and all that experience gives them insights into most situations in D&D. (It's hard to come up with anything truly original, after all.)

Pardon the interruption, but is this essentially the 5e version of Temple of Elemental Evil? It sounds really familiar.

Yeah, pretty much exactly.

@Karelzarath It's an explicit re-treatment for 5e. From the foreward: "adapting a classic is never an easy job.... We decided to consider Elemental Evil as a cosmic threat. As creatures of the planes, the elemental princes can reach almost any of the many worlds of D&D. What if they turned their gaze to Faerun?"

@Miniman in the original, it's (in order, in quick succession) it takes a 50mph wind, a strike with a granite mail, flame >1000 deg. F, and immersion in ice-water.

@nitsua60 Then, presumably, one of the ludicrously powerful NPCs who lives in Faerun would stop them before they really got anywhere.

@nitsua60 So, quite different then. Excellent!

Thanks for checking for me!

@Miniman Trip down memory lane: here're the charsheets from the aborted ToEE I was in: Ftr4/Cl4 (me), M-U8, Ftr6, Pa8, Ftr7, and two HD5 henchpersons.

Guess I was always partial to multiclassing.

@nitsua60 And so you should be - it's fun!

4/4, though =(

@nitsua60 I don't know how things worked back then, so I can't comment.

@Miniman I don't really remember!

XD

In that case, there's nothing to be done except assume 4/4 was the perfect build.

Looks like I'm going to get to run the final session on Friday! Hooray!