May 28, 2021 by [ "James R. Miller"
]
Categories:
rpgs
Tags:
5e
tiamat
My long-running Tyranny of Dragons game is coming to a close. My 3 PCs, along with some NPC help and some risky deals with a chain devil, were able to defeat Tiamat at full strength with a minor movement penalty, and to banish her back to Avernus.
Honors go to Lothar Hammerfist, our life cleric, who tossed Whelm and with a spiritual weapon, both hit Tiamat, bashing her down. Logan Ninefingers, our rogue, also got a fatal jab in with his rapier, slicing open the blue head as he caught onto Whelm returning back to Lothar.
Varatas, was off to the side taking a nap, courtesy of Tiamat’s blue-head breath weapon.
It was a blast seeing them succeed, as about the only penalty I gave her was a period of rounds where she was still “exiting” the summoning portal. I did not run her RAW in Rise of Tiamat.
We’ll do a wrap up session to role-play the end, but for all intents and purposes this campaign is now over. It was a bittersweet ending; this was my long-term in-person campaign that we had been playing for years. When the pandemic hit, it took a long time to get us back together online. I think some groups do better online and some do better in person, and likely we would do better in person since we started that way.
I know a lot of people shun the Tyranny of Dragons campaign, and while it did have its faults, it was easy to “fix” its shortcomings. I don’t regret running it one bit and we had many memorable moments during the campaign.
One of my favorite moments was where they kept some the bullywug “grenades” from Castly Narytar. I had slotted in White Plume Mountain as a sidequest and the party ended up in the floating-stream room and managed to catch the PCs, Sir Bluto, and his guards with the grenades. They were doing all sorts of hijinks, and even some riding a kayak round and round through combat while affected by the grenades. Here’s the stats of the “grenades”. I know it says pots, but I let my PCs take some with them (and I rolled secret checks throughout the campaign to see if they would break at an inopportune time).
Every creature in the chamber that is neither a frog nor a bullywug must make a Constitution saving throw with a DC equal to 11 + the number of pots that broke. A creature that succeeds on the save is unaffected. A creature that fails the saving throw succumbs to the hallucination that all other creatures in the chamber have been transformed into nightmarish, froglike monstrosities. While affected, the creature cannot take reactions and must roll a die at the start of each of its turns. If the die result is odd, the creature must use its action and all of its available movement to move to area 6, enter the pool, and remain underwater. If the die result is even, the hallucinating creature attacks the nearest creature to it, treating it as hostile. The effect lasts for 10 minutes.
I had them treat the floating stream the same as the “pool”. Great fun and great times to be had by all!
I’ll miss the campaign greatly, but new and better adventures await for our upcoming campaign.