This report will unfortunately need to be truncated, because it’s taking way too much time to produce.

First Two Sessions

The first two of these sessions were not terribly impressive, nor were they content rich. The first was cut short by another game I had to get to, which was the fault of my poor prep. The players flew up past the frost wall, to journey inwards and attempt to locate another sun shrine. This was after the party learned from their wizard liason Corrigan that the sun shrines he “located” on the map were actually just things which could stop the frost; there could be more than just the shrines out there!

Maia and Sierra on a cobalt dragon
Jaster and his Warden on a white dragon
Jaster’s mage and mage apprentice on a white dragon
Perra and Gunther on a white dragon
Morgan on a white dragon
Zhianna on a white dragon

While searching, the enchanted golden plate these party’s been using to find sun shrines begins vibrating, but not glowing, as it has in the presence of sun shrines. Diving beneath the cold mist, the party finds an underdark spire, collections of rock reaching up from where the surface has sunken into the World Below. But something’s different about this particular spire; it’s covered in coral, an

Within the coral spire is a chamber with 4 small doors, 1 large door, and an additional chamber (no door). This additional chamber holds a colossal organic structure resembling a heart, made of the same coral as the spire. It beats irregularly, at most once per minute.

Jaster Sokolov, the party bloodhunter, uses a a rite to turn himself ethereal. When he enters the first room small chamber, he can see signs of seawater, even through the ethereal plane. There’s a tremendous pressure he can feel in this state, the sign of something supernatural.

“Like pressure from the bottom of the sea?”
”Precisely like that. The hairs on your arm are practically transparent, but you can feel them stand on-end nonetheless.”
”I’d better not go back to normal in here.”
”mhm.”

The rest of the sesison was uneventful; the warden came back with a suggestion (Lord above I love hirelings).

The second session was slightly more eventful; the party decided to track the beams of light impacting the coral spire. What’s more, their Deep Elf allies from House Kreilus wish to tag along. They send a unit of wyvern riders along, allowing the party to coordinate their efforts. Because the wyvern riders are actually quite sneaky, they prefer to operate alone; the party agrees, and sends them to follow a different beam of light. The implication is, the party will cause some noise, and give the wyvern riders a better shot at dealing with whatever they expect to find.

Speaking of which, the riders are expecting to find more deep elves. They’re not aware of which house is (in their words) “starting trouble”, but they’re happy to make introductions with a show of force.

The party moves on, and discovers a 10-story tower embedded at the edge of the underworld spires (the edge of the 24 mile-wide hole). From its bottom, a beam of light is streaming out towards the coral spire.

I’ll be real with you folks, I really screwed the pooch on encounters here. The party found nobody in the opening foyer, nobody in the hanger (except for a sick wyvern), nobody in the mess hall (except for a single, whistling cook the party decided to spare and didn’t pick up until later), and everyone in the barracks were sleeping. Morgan activated an elemental ley tap, doubling all elemental damage vs anyone. The party then started slicing throats, some of the guys wake up, and the party tosses fireballs too potent for any of the deep elves to survive (along with a dawn spell).

The party goes up the next level to find an observatory, another level up to find a room of total darkness, and up another level to find the command room (which has been cleared out). They travel back down to the 0 floor, and progress to the tower’s sub-levels. The first floor beneath is a checkpoint; the party is fireballed by 2 drow mages upon coming out of the elevator. Due to the still-active elemental tap, the drow immolate themselves and nearly wipe out the party. If you take enough damage to equal your current hitpoints and maximum hitpoints combined in 5th edition, you die instantly. A few of the party got uncomfortably close to this threshold, and would have died if not for successful Dex saves. The second floor beneath has a teleportation circle. The third floor beneath has holding cells, in which a summer sylvan, winter sylvan, and merchant are being held. Nothing of import happened here, because this tower (and session, by extension) were ill prepared. The party freed these 3 captives, and perhaps they will make an appearance in future sessions. The party ventures to the 4th level, which is a control room for the room housing a massive crystal beneath.

While examining the controls, the party hear’s a large explosion echoing from far away. Maia at this point receives a missive from her diplomat’s pouch. It’s signed by the commander of wyvern riders from House Kreilus, who accompanied the party here. He tells the party of a way to overload the crystal, which brings the tower down (along with two of his men). A short missive appears a few seconds later, to follow up: it reads “three men”. Perra decides she doesn’t want the tower to detonate, and has a different solution in mind. She (using an artifact recovered many sessions prior) casts teleport on the crystal, sending it to one of the artifact’s teleportation circles. The beam instantly shuts down, and the party returns to the coral spire, successful.

Change

This two sessions got me to declare no creature under CR 7 in the game should have more than 50 hitpoints. I chose CR 7 because creatures of a higher CR tend to be more exotic. Most of the critters below that CR (especially between the CR 4-7 range) are suitable to deploy en masse, were it not for their ridiculous hitpoint bloat.

Session 3

We’re going to speedrun this session, because it lasted 6.5 hours with a ton of encounters. This was the most fun I’ve had in the campaign up to this point. The party started this session intendeding to visit another Drow tower. Ever since they shut down the previous two towers, the coral spire has been growing outwards. Gone is the dead and pumice-like ashen coral. Renewed are all the colors of the rainbow and more, shimmering as they feed on dust and floating algae through the air. Two of the primary chamber’s doors opened as well, containing a small horde of gold (10k) and one of the Dreaming artifacts (which the party learned about ages ago). This one is a compact boat that turns into an airship. It’s magnificent! The coral animals are also returning to the spire. The party sets off, and I have them all make intelligence saving throws. Half the party fails, and follows what they think is the beam of light. The rest of the party sees them fly off towards nothing. They’re indecisive, so by the time they actually follow their party, they enter our first battlemap at a different end!

Amethyst Dragon

Our very first encounter was an amethyst dragon being ridden by a drow favored consort. Both are nasty on their own, but the spellcasting focus of the drow and the unique attack options of the amethyst dragon were stunningly complimentary. Remember, the party is riding dragons; this was a dogfight between the massive pillars within the underdark. The party quickly resorted to spells of their own in hope of defeating the pair of baddies as fast as they could, which was much appreciated on my end. The number of combat encounters I include in a given night usually depend on how fast the first encounter goes. If it takes longer than an hour (if it’s a relatively simple/straightforward encounter), I’m likely to not bother with any more. The party managed to chase off the dragon (and its rider), before running the amethyst dragon down and killing it. Thanks to invisibility and dimension door, the consort got away. Harvesting the amethyst dragon netted an egg from the dragon. I can’t wait to see where that goes!

Landing at the Tower

The party arrived at the tower, and (correctly) assuming it was fortified and its guards were active, attempted to draw the combatants within outside. One of Landie’s characters (I can’t remember which) cried for help and crawled up to the door. A guard opened the door, failed his insight check, and indeed believed there was a human woman on the tower’s doorstep, crying for help!

This was the opposite of “task failed successfully”. The deep elf laughed, and closed the door. Combat started off, and the party quickly got one of the ranking officers to surrender. Once the grunts had barricaded themselves inside another room, they killed the officer, and moved on to an alchemy storeroom. Inside was a green hag and another deep elf officer, and a gelatinous cube the party didn’t notice (which was currently levitated above the doorway). During this combat, Maia (one of Landie’s characters) took the elevator to the top floor.

The Matriarch

The party ventures up the elevator, going straight to the top. Nobody’s seen nor heard from Maia since the previous encounter started. When they arrive, they see Maia bound in dimensional shackles. There are 6 deep elves in the room with her, one or two of which is dead, and another of which is badly injured. Maia is at half health, sitting between a drow matron and her favored consort (which escaped from the party earlier).

The matron has a simple proposition for the party; help her kill the matron of House Marda, and she’ll shut off both remaining towers. The party gets some information from their allies in House Kreilus via diplomacy pouch, and while Kreilus was initially quite willing to investigate who was stirring trouble up north, they don’t want to get directly involved in a war between House Caene and House Marda, if it’s just about to pop off. Unfortunately for them, the matron of House Marda isn’t the real target, and the party is none the wiser.

Betrayal!

Normally, gate doesn’t work on the same plane as you. But as the matron of House Caene knows, Sierra (and her allies) have quite the haul of unicorn horns. These horns can be used to bypass spell restrictions, if used as components. They can even serve as diamonds for the purpose of resurrections! The matron pulls through the supposed matron of House Marda. I have all the players make history checks; they’ve never met the matron of House Kreilus, but they are allied with the faction. I figured a history check would serve as a nice proxy for recognizing any identifying creatures of House Kreilus. All of my players rolled low, and didn’t recognize the What follows is a round of beating on the new matron, until her turn comes up. Matron-K casts gate herself! Matron-C casts counterspell, Matron-K counterspells her counterspell, and the gate goes off successfully. Enter a pit fiend, just in time to watch the last of Matron-K’s hitpoints fall. One of the remaining deep elf inquisitors takes a few swipes at the pit fiend, and even manages to crit until I’m reminded the pit fiend has a fear aura, which the inquisitor fails their save against. Most of the damage is restored, and the pit fiend murders the inquisitor in about half its turn.

The remaining deep elves run for the elevator, along with Jaster’s hirelings (Jaster’s player has turned in for the night at this point). All except Matron-C and her consort, that is; the consort casts dimension door with his matron, making a swift and smug exit.

The players meanwhile spent 9 full rounds trying to not die vs this pit fiend. The module of Chill Mist Valley roughly doubles player resources off the bat (thanks to secondary class progressions and exploration abilities, not to mention the greater presence of magic items and companions), and the party was still almost completely tapped out just at the start of this encounter! The players immediately attempted to corner the pit fiend, with martial characters surrounding the pit fiend, and Perra using one of her last available slots to cast guardian of faith. The martial characters opened up with a decent salvo of damage, so the pit fiend decided to avoid eating the guardian of faith’s damage in favor of focusing down the monks and druids in front of it. About half way through, it made the fight even more intense by casting wall of flame, to counter the players attempting to box it in. Several party members got yo-yoed up and down, just narrowly missing death by failed saves or massive damage. Additionally, the pit fiend’s bite is poisonous! You can’t be healed while poisoned by a pit fiend, and the save DC is quite high (even for 10th level characters)! Perra attempted to cast darkness on the pit fiend with her artifact-cloak, but pit fiends have truesight; this resulted in the pit fiend getting several advantage attacks (and several critical hits) before Perra remembered she could drop concentration on the spell between turns.

The fight ended with everyone on their last hitpoints, and permitted the players a single round to resurrect what they now assumed to be the matron of a different house than what the matron of House Caene said they’d be fighting. Using some consumable resources, the players searched down the druid spell list until they found an appropriate spell to solve their problem (with not a moment to spare), casting revivify on the matron.

Saliel, Guardian of the Reef

When the party returns to the coral spire, they find all 5 doors have been opened (one of which they didn’t actually investigate), and watch as the heart contained here bursts open. The whole chamber is filled with salt water that tastes like taffy, and they have no trouble breathing in. The creatures calls themselves Saliel, Daughter of Kalinne (the previous Queen or Consort of the Clover Court). In one of the adjacent rooms the party finds Iscarious, Outcast of the Hyboreal Court, who stopped by for some fishing (and to see the birth of his implied relative). Saliel gives them a bunch of information, and warns the party she’ll be attacked by Baenassus, Lord of the Chained Runnel, Hunter of the Hyboreal Court soon enough.

XP for this last session was 18,450 xp per character.