***SPOILER ALERT***
I’m running Tomb of Horrors for this leg of the Storm Point campaign – indeed, for the rest of the campaign. You may not want to read on if you’re playing the game yourself.
***SPOILER ALERT***
A little over a week ago, we had our last session of our Storm Point campaign, wrapping up the Tomb of Horrors run. After eight-and-a-half years of running and playing D&D in this group, we’re giving it a rest for a while. So that meant that we needed to make the final session memorable.
I had ended the previous session with the group arriving at the astral engine to see the godflesh golem that Acererak had built to house him rising from its plinth. We picked up right there at the start of this session, with everyone rolling initiative, and battle being joined.
I knew from that initiative roll that things were going to go badly for poor Acererak. He rolled lower than Thrun, and Thrun is tooled up to be the ultimate one-foe tank. Once Thrun got next to Acererak, the big golem was kept prone and dazed for pretty much the rest of the fight.
That didn’t make it a push-over, though. Acererak managed to get up once or twice, and was plenty dangerous even with only one action per turn. He almost sucked the cleric’s soul out, and managed to keep a couple of other characters scrambling. However, once the group realized that it was his phylactery hanging in the middle of the astral engine, the two more mystical characters concentrated on shutting down the machine and destroying the phylactery ((The fact that they came up with this on their own surprised me, considering how many times they have ignored similar situations in the past and just stuck with their default plan, i.e., “Get ’em!”)), which put Acererak on the ropes.
After the phylactery was destroyed, the rest of the fight was a foregone conclusion. Milo managed to strike the deathblow, using the Ruinblade that they picked up in the abandoned tomb, and to which Milo had sworn he would destroy Acererak.
Once the final blow was struck, I went into narrative mode, with the room crumbling around them, and the group’s hippogriffs ((Now with black feathers and raven heads.)) flying out of the void to pick them up. I gave everyone the option of letting the hippogriff carry them off to safety or standing to meet the Raven Queen when she showed up. Milo, who has always said he worshipped the Raven Queen, stayed, but so too did Galvanys, our eladrin ranger, and Faran, our cleric of Pelor. Thus, those three were taken back to the Raven Queen’s lands in the Shadowfell to serve her for eternity.
I then blatantly stole an end of campaign trick from my friend Michael, and gave each player three poker chips to use in a Fiasco-esque closing exercise for the campaign. We went around in a circle, and the group got to tell how their characters ended.
Thus, we bid goodbye to:
- Thrun the Anvil, whose steadfast devotion and endurance through many battles and campaigns had Moradin claim him for his own anvil.
- Soren, who rallied the various disparate settlements around Storm Point and Belys and destroyed the Empire Reborn.
- Milo, who betrayed the Raven Queen to free his friend Galvanys from her servitude and was doomed to wander the earth, forever undying.
- Galvanys, who was freed to return to the Feywild and found his own kingdom there thanks to Milo’s sacrifice.
- Faran, whose dedication to Pelor’s radiance allowed him, after years of service to the Raven Queen, rise from the darkness and return to his god’s side.
Thanks to my players for sticking around for this campaign. And for being willing to try something new with our next campaign, a Fate Core Star Wars game.
I hope the rest of you stick around, too. It promises to be a fun ride.
At the end of the post, you write “gave each player three poker chips to use in a Fiasco-esque closing exercise for the campaign.” I’m curious as to what this was for and what mechanic you employed?
This is a trick that my friend, Michael, stole from the game Fiasco. In Fiasco, in a phase called the Aftermath, the players get to provide a little epilogue for their characters. They have a number of dice, and spend each one to say one sentence about their character’s denouement, starting each statement with the phrase, “This is [character name]…” and then finishing the sentence with a brief glimpse of what happens after the game finishes. This creates something like a closing montage in a movie or TV episode, as you get glimpses of all the characters and what happens to them in the end.
Michael used it to wonderful effect when he wrapped up an Iron Kingdoms campaign I played in. Instead of using the dice you earn (or are afflicted with) in Fiasco, he handed each player three poker chips, and they got to spend them to talk about the end of their character’s story. It worked great to provide a sense of closure and resolution for both the players and the characters, so I shamelessly ripped it off for ending Storm Point.