Last night was the latest installment of the Storm Point game. It was even more scattered than usual, because we started later, and had two missing players. Still, we got through the initial bits of the adventure to the surprise twist I had planned, which was good.
The combat we started with went on far too long for the challenge level it represented*, primarily because two of the players were running two characters each, and weren’t overly familiar with their capabilities. This meant they took substantially longer to decide what their characters were going to do on each turn, and slowed the combat a fair bit.
After the combat, we ran into a stumbling block. I’d been describing the increasingly bad weather as the floating island drifted through the eternal storm at the centre of Lake Thunder, and we got to the point where I told them that soon they wouldn’t be able to fly on their hippogriffs in it, and visibility was down to about twenty feet. I did this so that I could run an interesting exploration scenario, with the party wandering through the jungles and climbing the hills and creeping through the rain-drenched ruins of the dockside, all underneath the dramatic raging of the storm.
But I guess I overplayed it, because instead of setting out to explore any of the other adventure sites I’d dotted on the island – and on their map – they decided to wait out the storm in the ruined fort, then head up to explore the temple on the peak when the weather cleared. I tried to tempt them, because I had some things planned, by showing them a glimpse of what might be a blue dragon flying overhead in the raging storm, but that didn’t do the trick.
So, I had to advance the plot without them.
After they thoroughly searched the fort, they settled down for an extended rest. About an hour into it, the entire island shook, and started to vibrate, and a loud, long peal of thunder sounded. I gave each player two seconds to tell me what his or her character was doing at that moment, and several of them ran outside to look at what was going on. That’s when they saw the pillar of lightning stabbing down from the heart of the storm to the crystal spires of the temple on the peak, and a strange ripple rolling out from it to cover the whole island. As the ripple moved, the trees seemed to fall into the ground, and when it reached the fort, they saw the surrounding jungle shrink to a sparse brush covering the nearby hills, and the fort itself vanished, leaving everyone standing out in the rain.
They immediately realized that they had been thrown back in time to an era before mortals had claimed this part of the world, and only elementals ruled the islands. The big clue about this was the fire elemental and pack of hellhounds coming over the hill toward them through the hissing, steaming rain.
This is the twist I had been planning from the beginning of designing this adventure, about a year ago. This is a moment when the entire campaign might take a real left-turn from what everyone has been expecting. See, the lightning striking the temple causes it to jump through time erratically, and it might not get back to the “present” before the island moves out of the storm. The party’s going to have a chance to try and steer themselves home, but if they fail, then the rest of the campaign (or at least a good chunk of the next part of it) is going to take place some time in the past – possible during the establishment of the Arkhosian Empire, or during the war with Bael Turath, or even at the height of the Empire of Nerath.
So, I don’t know where things are going to go after this, and neither do the players. It’s fun. I look forward to seeing what they do and how things play out.
*5 ghouls and a rotclaw, 1600 xp, a level 6 encounter for 6 characters. Back