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wearykatie · 4 months

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Journey Into the Wild Beyond Chapter 5: The Palace of Heart's Desire (Part 3)

This is it. The culmination of everything. Five chapters of adventure and loss have led to this. The final moments. The grand finale.

But first, the fuck is up with that name?

Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of War

Okay okay okay, permit me another weird tangent for just a moment because The Wild Beyond the Witchlight has some kind of cool references to older D&D things. The League of Malevolence and Valor’s Call are two opposing factions who were caught up in the whole fight between the hags and Zybilna. They’re also all characters featured in either D&D campaigns or the 1983 toyline, or the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. Warduke? Actually in the cartoon and the toyline. So my players who mocked his name were mocking history!

Nah, the name still sucks. Hey, tiny bit of credit to D&D writers of old, they didn't have access to the internet to come up with names. GMs of yesteryear didn't have resources like Fantasy Name Generators or Wikipedia or mispronounced words from Google Translate.

Seriously, check out Fantasy Name Generators. It's a fantastic resource if you're stuck on a name for characters, towns, taverns, ships, or whatever. The site has helped inspire or outright just named dozens of characters for me because I am notoriously bad at coming up with names.

Not "Warduke" bad, but pretty bad.

Anyway, back to the poorly named dorks from 1983. The party found members of Valor’s Call frozen in the palace and freed them. They feel like cameos more than anything because they aren’t really given much to do in the story. I was keeping them around as backup in case they were needed in the final battle.

LOL

LOL, I say.

Yeah, Yeah, I Suck At Encounters

The party found the incantation in a book titled The Wild Beyond the Witchlight. It was a children’s storybook that seemed to tell the tale of their own exploits through Prismeer. Also, the voice they heard speaking to them when they held the gems was sounding familiar to them. But they took their gem collection to the cauldron next to the frozen Zybilna…and found the League of Malevolence waiting for them.

Big team battle, right? Nope, speech checks to talk the League into leaving before they got their butts whipped by the party and then Zybilna. Hey, they like the nonviolence route, so I’m going to let them take it. They started the ritual but OH NO, HERE COMES THE JABBERWOCK! Can’t talk your way out of this one, can y–

Oh, Tom banished it. ‘Kay. Well, at least Artie made his triumphant return to you know, not fight the Jabberwock with his friends.

Alright, yes, the Jabberwock was supposed to have legendary resistances, but I overlooked them in the moment and also, it was just better for pacing because we didn’t have much time for a fight.

The incantation was read, the cauldron began to change its state, and they knew that changing a component of the original spell could cancel it out. There was a blinding flash of light to end the penultimate session.

Fairy Godmother

As the final session began, I did a different kind of recap. I told a story about how when the player characters were young, just after they lost their items, they had a nightmare about three scary shadows in their bedroom, but a kind woman appeared and banished the shadows, then read them a story until they fell asleep. The story was about a group of children who lost part of themselves and went on a magic journey to find the missing pieces.

When the recap finished, I described Zybilna being unfrozen and looking very confused at first, but soon catching up on what happened. She teleported away to fix the arcane anchors and returned just in time to send the Jabberwock to its room. Oh, did I mention it was her pet? Yeah, Zybilna has some messed up stuff in that castle.

The party caught her up on everything that happened, and she seemed sad that the hags, her sisters, were dead, but she understood. She had let her guard down, thinking they might legitimately want to reconnect with her, but they betrayed her. For their part, most of the party was understanding about that, but Elora was more than a little miffed. The lives of her and her friends had been drastically altered because of Zybilna’s mistake, and Ana’leth had died.

Early actually asked if there was a way Zybilna could bring back Ana. Zybilna said she couldn’t, but asked to see the letter and the Alice plush anyway. After an arcane examination, she called on another fey, a woman named Jessamine, and sent her to find her “mortal hunter” and send her to a certain place on a certain date.

Zybilna spoke to the gathered Army of Prismeer and the castle staff, coming clean about everything. The hags, her relationship to them, her past, everything. Then I turned it over to the players and asked them, knowing everything they had learned and been told about Natasha/Iggwilv/Zybilna, how they thought the people of Prismeer would react to learning the truth. Unanimously, they thought she was genuine in trying to be a better person, so the people of Prismeer accepted Zybilna for who she was, faults and all.

So, Good Night Unto You All

The party stayed the night in the Palace of Heart’s Desire, Zybilna promising to return them home in the morning. She spoke briefly with Elora, telling her to “have faith”.

This requires some explanation…see, the mission Ana’leth supposedly died on was one she survived in the continuity of our main campaign. She had been captured, sure, but thanks to the timely arrival of her old teacher, Faith, she was rescued before she could be killed. Leaving the Feywild can be tricky, time doesn’t move the same there. A fey who knows what they’re doing can actually send someone back to before they left the Material Plane…or send another fey back in time. Jessamine, who is one of Faith’s lovers, was sent to the past, gave instructions to Faith to be at the town where Ana died two days before it happened. Faith prevented the death from ever happening, Zybilna didn’t have to mess around with resurrection magic and potentially pissing off the goddess of death, and Elora got her sister back.

When the party returned to the Material Plane, I read off a closing narration that I had practiced for weeks, trying to get through it without crying. I failed, but at least my sobs weren’t audible.

Reena’s player, another longtime best friend, sent me a package weeks before the game ended and made me promise not to open it until the end of our final session. I opened it after the game while still on call and it made me cry more. I’ll share a picture at the end of this post, along with the final words of my closing narration.

Final Thoughts, but Far From the End

For my first long term DMing experience, I think the game went well. Could it have been better? Sure. Did my players enjoy it? They did. Did I enjoy it? Absolutely. Like every time I run a game, I learned a lot from this one, and I will use those going forward. I want to do something like this again soon. Maybe not on the same scale, maybe not a weekly game, but I want to do this again. I’ve already talked to the group about doing a short reunion campaign down the road, revisiting the characters, but I also want to try something new.

I feel like I accomplished more than I set out to do with this campaign. I tested my ability to run a longform campaign, I did a little creative writing with my edits and original content, I learned more about 5th Edition, I improved as a roleplayer, and I got really good at pacing things out into three hour sessions. I also gave K the break they needed and the chance to play in a campaign again, which was one of my primary goals.

But there were some unexpected things to come out of the campaign too. I had a couple of players tell me the campaign inspired them to make other characters or approach existing ones in a new way. I was told I lit a fire under the group. A player who doesn’t really care for 5e said I showed them new things that could be done with the system. And overall, it seems like the players got as much from this as I did.

As for The Wild Beyond the Witchlight itself, I recommend it. Obviously it’s good for someone running their first full campaign, but I think experienced DMs and players will get a lot out of it too. My problems with Chapter 5 aside, it’s solidly written and has some gorgeous art that inspired me every step of the way.

Before I end this, I want to say thanks to my players (some of you are reading this), and thanks to anyone and everyone who read this series. Writing about this was a good way to organize my thoughts in maybe the most disorganized writing project I’ve ever worked on. I swear, when I do this again, I will have a set schedule for posting. I’ll also get better at closing these posts out. A lot of these just sort of

~end~

#d&d #d&d 5e #dm #gm #journey into the wild beyond #the wild beyond the witchlight

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wearykatie · 4 months

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Journey Into the Wild Beyond Chapter 5: The Palace of Heart's Desire (Part 2)

To keep this from doubling the length of this blog just talking about this one chapter, I’ll mainly stick to the parts of the palace the party actually did visit and what I changed about them.

I mean, it’s still going to probably be a bajillion parts, but at least it will be shorter.

Even Shinji Mikami Would Call Bullshit

It’s said Zybilna has a lot of enemies, and I think that’s supposed to be mainly among demonkind, but the people she really needs to look out for are the castle staff who have to contend with a castle with a layout that makes the Spencer Mansion seem sensible.

I hate the Crown Locks.

Sorry, no, I don’t hate them. I like them in theory. See, they have this interesting mechanic where there are two creatures made of iron, a lion and a hart, and they’re the key to two types of doors in the palace. When a crown is placed on the lion’s head, the doors marked with the lion are unlocked but the doors marked with the hart are locked. When the crown changes heads, the lion doors lock and the hart doors unlock. Simple, right? Fun puzzle?

Wrong.

First of all, the crown is located in a pond (which is also referred to as a pool and a lake if you really want to confuse your players) inside the gate and held by a fey spirit who only appears if a character touches the water. Second, the crown is covered in sharp needles making picking it up without gloves extremely painful (though not dealing damage). Third, if the players don’t trust the random hand made of water holding a prickly crown, it doesn’t offer it again and they have to retrieve it from the bottom of the pond which is ten feet deep and the water is currently frozen in time and is malleable as soft dough, so sure, have a swim.

Fourth problem: the crown gives a little riddle to the person holding it. “The beginning of Whenever. The end of Ever After. The start of an Age. The finale of every Moment. The first in HIstory.” and assuming they figure out that’s one of those riddles where you’re looking for the letters indicated the players will come up with “wrath” and either panic at a perceived trap or wear the crown while throwing a tantrum to try to unlock its secrets.

Should the players figure out that you need to take the crown to one of the iron animals, they’ll find that the nearest and most accessible one is the lion housed in the tower with a plaque that says “Envy” above it. Envy will demand players leave if they don’t bow to it and it attacks those who won’t leave. It will mention its counterpart, Wrath, and if the players are on good terms and think to ask about the crown, Envy explains how it functions but says it only works in its gold form - and the crown only changes if it’s placed on the head of the correct guardian

Okay, so if the players then remember the Wrath riddle and somehow connect that the correct one to put it on his Wrath, they have to walk all the way through the palace just to get to Wrath because its tower doesn’t have an outside door and that’s assuming they get that right because guess what the fifth problem is?

Fifth: if the crown of silver needles is placed on Envy’s head, Envy and the crown are banished to Envy’s demiplane where they can only be retried by Zybilna who is currently frozen in time and can only be freed by touching her with the unicorn horn and speaking her true name (Natasha) but the likelihood of finding out that information without going into one of the room locked by the Crown Locks is slim to none, and that’s assuming that the players didn’t use the unicorn horn to restore Elidon back in Chapter 3. If they did, the only way to lift the curse and free Zybilna is to destroy the cauldron by first defeating Warduke, taking and attuning to his flametongue sword, and hitting the cauldron with that. And you find out how to do that in….one of the 50+ locations in this castle. Oh, and that makes Zybilna use her only Wish spell to restore her cauldron, and make her a little grumpy with the party.

Also, because so many door are locked, the only path to Wrath��s tower is walking all the way to the back hall of the castle, taking it to the east side, walking all the way to the front again, switching the crown over, then if you want to go back and unlock the Envy doors you have to walk all the way back the way you came.

ARGH!!!

How Fix?

My players found the crown sitting in front of Envy and were able to put it on the lion straight away with no consequence. Also, Elidon granted Tom Hakewood a portion of his magic so he could free people frozen in time.

You know what’s really funny though? The players can get a free Chime of Opening that unlocks ten doors if they completed a side quest to rescue the faerie dragon knight Sir Talavar back in Chapter 2. He leaves the chime for them just inside the castle gate. So someone realized the Crown Locks were bad and going to cause problems. Also, my players had done that side quest so they got the chime.

And then I put an extra door on the map mid session just to prevent 16 rooms of pointless backtracking.

So with locked doors being downgraded from “obstacle” to “annoyance”, I could focus on solving the other problems - giving my players a reason to care about Zybilna and making the puzzle to free her a little more engaging than finding out her real name.

Behold, the Seven Gems of Infinite Nonsense

The central tower of the castle has seven turrets, six of which are only accessible from the first floor. So…at least easily accessible. What’s in them? Well, five have jeweled coffers each containing one crystal that are really Zybilna’s crystallized desires. The crystals can each conjure a different fey being - a darkling elder (previously seen as an enemy), a quickling (also a previous enemy), a redcap (avoided enemy), a green hag (do I even need to point out the problem?), and a blink dog (bamfing good boy).

The other two turrets are empty. No really, the book’s description of these rooms are “this chamber is empty”. Yes, they both led to an adjoining turret with a thing inside, but I feel like they could have just had five turrets.

I liked the crystallized desires thing, so I changed that slightly. All seven turrets contained a coffer with one of seven gems. These gems each contained an aspect of Zybilna tied to an emotion. They were all locked, and didn’t even have a visible lock or a lid until the person wearing the Witchlight Monarch’s crown approached.

When one of them held a gem, they would hear a voice speaking. One was an angry rant about her enemies, another expressed sorrow over all she had lost, another told a story about finding a young harengon boy who had gotten lost and taking care of him until they found his parents.

I wanted to show the good and the bad of Zybilna. And finally, a hidden eighth gem (which was actually found quite easily by my eager explorers) talked about how Zybilna saw herself, and who she still considered herself to be - Natasha, the girl before Tasha, Iggwilv, or Zybilna ever existed.

Side note on the gems: Elora did an arcana check to determine the nature of the first stone and was able to get a magical signature which she then copied into a potion she created. The potion would change color in response to the presence of one of the gems and become more opaque the closer it got to one of them. She made a little gem detector, and started on her graduate thesis before her first official day of school. That’s the kind of thing I liked seeing - players using their skills in inventive ways.

Tower to Nowhere

This deserves its own section because unless I’m just really bad at reading, the central tower of the palace is the most bafflingly poorly thought out room in the whole campaign.

The central tower of the palace (the one the turrets are connected to) is in a large courtyard called the Court of Storms. This is a giant central area on both floor of the palace seen from multiple balconies surrounding it. The courtyard has no roof, and in place of a floor there is a vortex of dark clouds.

The Storm Vortex is massive, and isn't actually described as resting on the ground, so no indication that there even is a ground to it. If you fall into the vortex, you can’t be seen by others, your speed becomes zero, and you take 4d8 force damage at the beginning of your turn. If you drop to 0 HP, you’re ripped to shreds and your remains are scattered across every plane of existence.

Well, that sounds bad. Don’t fall off the bridge, right?

What bridge? The central tower isn’t connected to the rest of the castle at all.

More than any other chapter, it seems like Chapter 5 expects a level of preparation from the party that borders on clairvoyance. You have to have the right classes with the right spells and the right abilities or you will have some massive obstacles in your path. Now, I had a party full of spellcasters and one Fighter, so Fly wasn’t totally out of the question, but that assumes one of the casters even has Fly prepared. Even if they do have it prepared, that’s a 3rd level spell that only lets one person fly unless you upcast, and since the max level of the campaign is 8, the highest they can cast spells is 4th level, and 4th level Fly only affects two creatures.

Now, maybe one of your player characters was crowned Witchlight Monarch back in Chapter 1. That comes with the Charm of the Monarch allowing them to sprout butterfly wings and gain a flying speed equal to their walking speed for one hour. Assuming they haven’t used the three charges the charm provides, you have maybe one more flying character at best.

If by some miracle at least some of these things line up, you have maybe two or three players with the ability to fly to the tower. Split the party? Sounds fine. Oh, there’s an encounter on the first floor of the tower? Kelek (a sorcerer), Warduke (a fighter), and potentially Zargash (a necromancy cleric), three cockatrices, and four glasswork golems. They can be talked to rather than fighting but “hang on, give us a chance to ferry our other friends over” is a bit of a stretch.

By the way, cockatrices can petrify you. How do you get unpetrified? Greater Restoration - a 5th level spell that players do not have access to in this campaign.

There is another way to the central tower! On the second floor of the palace, there is a hall with hatches along the wall, and under each hatch is the severed head of a creature (seriously, what the fuck, Zybilna??) and every time you open their hatch, they’ll scream one of three things at you “yah!”, “bah!”, or “gah!”. Somehow, your players are supposed to figure out that these are syllables and not just random yells, and that they’re meant to open the hatches in an order that has the heads saying “Bah! Bah! Yah! Gah!” or “Baba Yaga” at which point, all creatures in the hall are teleported to the second floor of the central tower where the hags are if they were forced to retreat instead of being slain.

How do you teleport back? You don’t.

See what I mean about this chapter? Anyway, I gave the party a two-way teleporter on the central balcony and do not regret it. The central tower is the only way to get to the 7th turret so I just gave it to them.

Also, because I wanted to circle back to the concept, the storm vortex in my campaign was the untempered magic of the Feywild - the “Wild Beyond” that threatened to reclaim Prismeer should the arcane anchors fail completely. Early tossed her sword into it and tried to recall it with her class feature. I allowed it, and even gave the sword a little magical boon for the attempt, but stressed the rarity of such an outcome to dissuade the party from attempting that a second time.

Meet My Second Harengon OC

Before finding the first gem, the party discovered a library with a sole occupant - an elderly harengon librarian named Arvan. He had been in the library when the time freeze spell went off, and since the library existed in a pocket dimension, he was unaffected. Arvan was eager to see Zybilna freed, he’d known her nearly all his life (remember the lost boy she’d found?). He described the gems, how they all contained a measure of Zybilna’s power. If they were put in the cauldron, they might have enough power to shift it from its iron form into its gold form.

I realized a couple of chapters into the book that there were a lot of things described as being made out of iron. Things in the Feywild. Things owned by fey. Now, I don’t know if 5th Edition fey work the same way that fey do in myth, but typically iron is bad for them. A bit like Superman owning a kryptonite tea kettle.

Anywho, Arvan is another original creation and a late addition. The librarian in the book is a grouchy guy hiding a giant spider under a shawl, and as I’ve mentioned, at least one of my players is an arachnophobe. Also, there really aren’t very many ride or die Zybilna fans in Witchlight canon, and I wanted to introduce one the players could trust.

Arvan also pointed them to another library on the second floor that would have the incantation that needed to be read to change the cauldron. The incantation was in a book titled The Wild Beyond the Witchlight.

It was about this point that a whole bunch of really convenient things were starting to come together. Gems containing a fraction of Zybilna’s power were conveniently placed throughout the castle sealed away in boxes that could only be opened by someone with the Witchlight Monarch crown, and the incantation to change the cauldron and possibly free Zybilna was left in a book that one of the few unfrozen people in the palace knew about.

Someone planned this.

I mean, yeah, me, but besides that, someone in the story planned this.

I Swear I’m Getting To A Point With All of This

Barring any kind of “final thoughts” part, the next part of this blog should be the finale. I will try to condense everything down into that final one, and it may run a little long like this and some of the others. But an end is in sight!

#d&d #d&d 5e #dm #gm #journey into the wild beyond #the wild beyond the witchlight

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wearykatie · 4 months

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wearykatie · 4 months

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Journey Into the Wild Beyond Chapter 5: The Palace of Heart's Desire (Part 1)

If I drank alcohol, this is where I would insert a gif of me setting The Wild Beyond the Witchlight book down, picking up a bottle, flicking the cap off, taking a swig, and then picking up my dice.

Also, this is endgame spoiler territory, and I’ll be talking about one of the campaign’s big deal surprises as well as its ending in these final parts. If you want the bail out now to run the campaign or play it yourself, feel free. I understand. Have a great rest of your day and enjoy what is a really fun and interesting campaign.

For the rest of you, here we go.

Nice Job Breaking it, Hero

Despite the worries of some party members, killing Endelyn didn’t cause the arcane anchors holding Prismeer together to deteriorate. They had begun failing the moment Zybilna was frozen in time, it was just really convenient narrative timing that they started to demonstrably fail right after the last hag died. The hags were never powerful enough to maintain the domain. After all, it took all three of them working together and using Zybilna’s own magic against her just to cast the spell that froze her.

The party had heard most of this already, but learned additional information from Charmay who was getting ready to GTFO. She saw the writing on the wall and she didn’t want to be around when Zybilna woke up. Why? Charmay, or rather Skylla as she’s actually known, is a warlock whose patron is Baba Yaga, the mother of the hags, and she knows some things.

Zybilna is Iggwilv, aka Natasha, aka Tasha, adopted daughter of Baba Yaga. And if she wakes up, she’s not going to be happy.

So all of that stuff about the arcane anchors? I made it the fuck up. There are floating stones surrounding Prismeer, seen on many of the outdoor maps, and those are where I took the inspiration. The book credits the cartography to Stacey Allan and Will Doyle, and I don’t know their intentions behind some of the unmarked things on the maps, but I like that they included little unexplained things. It got my imagination going, and I imagined those giant stones as a sort of summoning circle for the domain and currently serving as the anchors maintaining its presence in the chaotic untempered raw magic of the Feywild.

Why add the bit about Prismeer falling apart without Zybilna? Well, because honestly, the book doesn’t really give a very convincing argument for freeing her. The hags suck and Prismeer is better off without them, but once they’re gone you go into Chapter 5 and learn that Zybilna is potentially just as bad if not worse.

Tasha’s Cauldron of Bullshit

So who is Zybilnda/Iggwilv/Natasha? Well, if you’ve played a spellcaster and you’ve used Tasha’s Caustic Brew, Tasha’s Hideous Laughter, Tasha’s Otherworldly Guise, or any other spell with her name in it, that’s her. She reached demigod levels of power, studied demonology in the Abyss, she had a love-hate relationship with a demon prince, had a few kids, made more than a few enemies.

Now, a bit of research on the Forgotten Realms Wiki tells me that Tasha and Iggwilv weren’t originally intended to be the same character, but Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk retconned that, and her entire history as Zybilna seems to have just come up in The Wild Beyond the Witchlight. The final chapter of Witchlight brings back a lot of characters from D&D lore, so that’s not surprising, and retcons are fine if you can make them work.

I just feel like this is trying to turn the Wicked WItch of the West into Glinda the Good Witch. Or maybe they were going for a White Witch thing. Either way, Chapter 5 really presents Yassified Witch Queen in a pretty dim light. I feel like maybe they were going for a more morally ambiguous character, but the lady has a prison in her castle where she slow dips prisoners into a sludge that turns them into mindless demons and the hallways outside has a 40 foot long Rug of Smothering that attacks you if you don’t take a flower from a nearby vase.

Threading the hell out of that “Chaotic Neutral” needle, Z.

What I’m saying is, there isn’t a lot of reason to free Zybilna and fewer reasons to trust her. Yes, a few NPCs speak favorably of her, and there’s the enemy of my enemy thing with the hags, but there’s no reason to free Zybilna after the hags are dead. And finding out her history may deter the party from doing just that. Sure, she can send them home or offer them a wish with the Wish spell, but that’s a gamble, and if the players have been exploring, they might have found one to four ways home already.

And so, I made it so they had to free Zybilna. Figure out if she’s worth a damn after she fixes Prismeer.

Shamelessly Ripping Off Everything

The party borrowed a couple of flying machines from Motherhorn and headed for the Palace of Heart’s Desire, Zybilna’s home. Outside, they found a massive army of arcane constructs led by Warduke.

They mocked Warduke for just being called Warduke. I made a point of telling them that it wasn't on me. Someone else made and named that character. Not my circus, not my monkeys…okay, I’m kind of borrowing the circus and the monkeys, and I’d feel bad about changing a character like that.

“But Katie, didn’t you just say you changed a lot of this chap–?”

ANYWAY, BIG ARMY. This is something else I added because for the entire campaign, the party had been making friends and helping people. People they didn’t even need to help. Even those they gained nothing from helping. So there four young people stand face to face with an army they can’t possibly defeat…

And then they get a telepathic message from a pixie they befriended in Thither. Portals start opening all around them and friends they’ve made from all over Prismeer step through: Jingle Jangle, the harengon brigands, the bullywugs of the soggy court, Tsu the innkeeper, Lamorna and Elidon, Will of the Feywild, Juniper the owlbear, the korreds, the brigganocks, Amidor the Dandelion, Gleam and Glister, the theater crew from Motherhorn, and the carnival hands of the Witchlight Carnival, including Mr. Witch, Mr. Light, and a now-human Diana the carousel operator, riding atop her warhorse.

With the Army of Prismeer at their command, ready to attack at any moment, what did the party do?

They talked. They convinced Warduke to stand down through intimidation. Have I mentioned how proud I am of my players?

The scene was a cheeky nod to Avengers: Endgame, but I had players who would get a kick out of the reference, and I wanted to reward how all of them had played the game so far with a grand display that showed off just how many allies they had in their corner. Also, I use Spotify for background music, and for that scene, I played “The Shepherd’s Boy” by Murray Gold, one of my favorite bits of music from Doctor Who, and amazingly, my narration of the scene lasted exactly as long as the song. I don’t know if any of the players noticed, but that was icing on the cake for that moment.

I Hope Your Desire is to Have No Idea Where You’re Going

Did I just spend this entire part talking about setting up Chapter 5, just to get the party through the front gate? Well, I have mentioned before how difficult this chapter was. Everything from the characterization of Zybilna through her backstory to the environmental storytelling of the Palace of Heart’s Desire complicates the narrative, but the layout of the palace is downright baffling in a lot of places. Navigating it is difficult, there’s little logical structure to suggest it’s a functioning home for anyone, and the DM might have to retcon things to bail out the players if certain choices are made.

I like this campaign overall, and even Chapter 5 has some high points, I just find this chapter lacking half the time and frustrating the other half. I don’t know if maybe they ran out of time and had to rush the chapter or if there was a mandate to include certain lore characters that never got fleshed out. When the chapter is good, there’s a grand hall full of glass statues that dance about, each depicting a mortal Zybilna aided as a fairy godmother.

When the chapter is bad, you get a 3000 square foot room with only a small table and three jars.

Creative liberties were taken, and I will talk about them more next time.

#d&d #d&d 5e #dm #gm #journey into the wild beyond #the wild beyond the witchlight

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wearykatie · 4 months

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When I was a teenager and still on Neopets I was part of a pretty big Star Trek guild and eventually became part of its council, with the solemn duty of creating weekly polls. Well one day I created the poll "Which would win in a fight? Borg Cube or Death Star?". Naturally, since this was a Star Trek guild, the answer was overwhelmingly "Borg Cube", but someone did have the rationality to point out we were biased.

So I look up a pretty prominent Star Wars guild and message one of their council and ask them to poll the same question and get back to me in a week. They do, and naturally the fuckin geeks said "Death Star".

So then I look up a Stargate guild and messaged the lead council member, saying the same thing, and they get back to me almost immediately saying that the Death Star would immediately one-shot a Borg Cube but they would never be able to do it again to another Cube. And I took that wisdom back to my guild and we were mollified, and for one moment the Nerd World was peaceful.

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wearykatie · 5 months

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Journey Into the Wild Beyond Chapter 4: Yon (Part 3)

So, blanket disclaimer up front that probably should have been present on previous parts, but this part deals with death, particularly death related to family members. This had been brought up previously, and I let the player whose character was affected know prior to even beginning the campaign. I made the “It’s Trauma!” joke in the last part (a reference to an extremely tacky sticker in the interactive Silent Hill: Ascension webseries) and I joke about inflicting things on my players, but I cannot stress enough how important it is to communicate with players and make sure they’re okay with the things you’re putting them and their characters through. It may be make-believe, but people get invested in fantasy, especially when they’re roleplaying.

That said, K was onboard with Elora’s arc throughout the campaign, gave back as much as I was dishing out, and has since paid me back in the main campaign.

All the World’s a Stage

Endelyn is big on theater. In fact, she has a giant amphitheater in her castle and regularly has people put on shows for her amusement. The book give the opportunity for the party to put on a play of their own, something I used as a substitute for combat encounters because my players liked to avoid those.

When they got into the basement of the castle, they found a prop room with a large moon prop, one of the options for creating an artificial eclipse. They were also found by a stagehand who told them he needed them to perform a play because the scheduled act (Charmay) was bombing hard. He gave them scraps of paper from a script that had been torn to shreds and told them to go out there and wing it.

I gave each player a list of lines from the book that they could choose from on top of personal improvisation to put on a play wherein they were trying to kidnap a councilman by the name of Balduran. Shenanigans ensued, the players got into it, read some improvised lines, used an alchemy jug for some fake blood, and acted alongside three goblins in a trenchcoat. The play ended with Balduran receiving an awful leg wound which led to him walking with a limp, and that was the origin of Baldur’s Gait.

Yes, I did this in the year Baldur’s Gate 3 released, and yes, I’m proud of what amounted to a laborious 90 minute journey to a pun.

Betrayal and a Bitter End

The play caught the attention of Endelyn who had been watching from the balcony. The players were welcome to explore Motherhorn further before confronting her, but I wanted to make her presence known and give them the option to confront her early. They went upstairs to a large circular room with a spinning device taking up much of it - the Orrery of Tragedies, the device Endelyn used to peer into the future. Early could tell her item was within it.

Endelyn didn’t seem too bothered by the party’s presence, or that they had killed her sisters. In fact, she gloated, she had helped orchestrate those events herself. She had seen the fall of the Hourglass Coven, and she manipulated events to make sure that she would be the last, and that she would be prepared for the party when they arrived. How? She had help.

Alice walked in and aimed an arrow at the party.

Now, I wanted to throw in this misdirect at the end. Yes, the party knew Alice was Endelyn’s creation, but they didn’t know why she created her. And yes, it initially was to guide the party into killing her sisters so she would be the sole ruler of Prismeer. But something happened along the way, and Elora had noticed it. She stepped forward and dared Alice to shoot her. She knew Alice was more than what she had been made to be.

She was right…sort of. I’d kept a little checklist through the campaign of different kinds of interactions the party could have had with Alice. Treating her like a person, accepting her help, showing her kindness, treating her like a friend. There were also checks for ignoring her, being cruel to her, hurting her, treating her like an enemy. Positive checks would increase Alice’s free will and personhood, allowing her to act against Endelyn’s wishes. Negative checks would push her further into Endelyn’s control. The cutoff for that chart was the last time they saw Alice before entering Motherhorn, so I had tallied them up between sessions to determine the outcome. There were an overwhelming number of positive interactions, which led to what happened next.

When Endelyn offered to use the Orrery of Tragedies to tell Elora how she would die, Alice put four arrows into the hag and told the party to head back to the amphitheater, that she had left something for them there.

The party went back downstairs while Alice kept Endelyn busy. There, they found the moon prop they saw earlier attached to a pulley system that had been repaired that morning by a mystery person they had heard mentioned earlier. They worked to raise the moon into place in front of a spotlight, creating the illusion of a solar eclipse, and prepared themselves just as Endelyn came downstairs with Alice’s broken bow in her hands.

I Suck At Running Encounters

What followed was a curbstomp. It’s fine, I’m not even mad about it. The narrative elements were more important to me anyway, and they were more important to the players too. Endelyn got surrounded, really had some bad luck with rolls, and ended up dying inside of two rounds. One of these days I’ll figure out how to make these things fun and challenging.

The killing blow actually came from Elora and Early, and in the final moments, I described the multiple eclipses the party had created. The moon prop and spotlight, the Flaming Sphere floating around the battlefield, but one other that no one had counted on as Elora and Early stood shoulder to shoulder.

The name Elora means “sun ray”, and under the dark overcast skies of Yon, Early’s silver scales were glittering like pale moonlight. It was the last thing Endelyn Moongrave saw.

Here’s Where It Gets Sad, Y’all

Elora ran upstairs trying to find Alice, but there was no body. Presumably, with her killing blow, Endelyn had unmade the harengon of her creation. Elora began to cry, but out of the corner of her eye she saw a figure in a blue coat walking up the stairs. A blue coat a lot like her sister’s. She followed, and eventually found her way to Endelyn’s room with that spooky wardrobe in the back. But standing in front of it was Alice, except for the first time, Elora could see through the enchantment that prevented her from looking at Alice’s face, and she saw the face of her sister, Ana’leth.

“Hey, sis.”

This was my big payoff. The thing I had set up from the very beginning. “Alice” explained it all to Elora. Ana had died on a mission, like the letter said, but somehow Endelyn had used a fragment of her spirit in the creation of Alice because of the bond Elora and Ana shared, represented by the plush toy Endelyn had stolen. She hadn’t been able to tell Elora at first, and by the time she gained the strength to, it felt cruel to tell her knowing what would have to eventually happen. But Ana’leth had been Alice the entire time.

When I talked about communicating with players and making sure they were on board for certain things because of how invested we get in fictional characters, this is the type of thing I’m talking about. I was sharing this moment with one of my best friends of nearly a decade, playing a character I’d been playing for the past six years and delivering an emotional goodbye to her little sister who K had brought to life through their own roleplay.

Yeah, there were tears in character and out of character.

Ana told Elora she was proud of her for coming as far as she had, but that there was one more job to do, and she couldn’t be there to guide her. She led a reluctant Elora to the wardrobe, and faded away as Elora opened it, discovering the blue bunny plush inside. It was then Elora remembered that Ana’leth had given her the bunny on the day she’d left home, and that it was an enchanted talking doll that played a list of phrases recorded by Ana when she was fifteen and Elora was only five. She hugged the bunny and it played several of these lines, ending in:

“Goodnight sis, I love you.”

Finding Time

Early had ignored her own item for the moment to follow Elora upstairs because I have players who care about each other and each other’s characters and Early wanted to support her friend. When Elora needed some space, Early returned to the Orrery of Tragedies and pried it open. Inside, she found a pocket watch.

Touching the watch, Early saw a long forgotten memory, of getting lost in the Witchlight Carnival’s Hall of Illusions as a child and panicking, then running into a mage who took her by the hand and led her outside. The mage was a friend of her sister’s, and both were members of a warband that Early looked up to. She wanted to be like them when she grew up.

Years passed, and early was back in that classroom from the dream. Last class of the semester, last class before graduation, 12:05pm. And then the clock ticks over to 12:06. She attends graduation, and then she goes out into the world and uses her training to do some good. She becomes a sellsword, taking jobs she can get. Nothing glamorous, nothing like saving the world, but she’s making a difference.

Two more years pass, and she sees a poster advertising the Witchlight Carnival coming to Magewood. Feeling nostalgic, she returned to her alma mater.

Endelyn didn’t just steal Early’s sense of time, she stole five years of her life. She’s been in a never ending loop of the final year of her time at Magewood. Well, never ending until now. To outside observers, Early seemed to age up a little. Then she took out her frustration on the Orrery of Tragedies, demolishing it.

World’s Ending, No Time for Therapy

Navigating around tragedy in tabletop games is more difficult than you would think. As players, we have days or weeks to get past revelations and jump right into the next part of the game’s story. As the characters we play, it’s difficult to accurately play a character whose worldview was just shattered by five years worth of new memories, or a fifteen year old girl who lost her sister twice in the same week.

We found the way forward in this instance was to take a moment, cry it out, wreck some shit, then finish the job at hand so they could go home and actually fucking deal with their problems. Elora kind of put it best when she said something like she was going to see this through, then go home and not be okay for about a week.

Through some arcana rolls and alchemy rolls, the party managed to reverse the mask-making machine, turn everyone back to normal, and blow a hole in the side of the mountain. That part wasn’t planned, but it worked out, and provided a much needed laugh.

Then an earthquake hit. More arcana rolls, and some observations of mountain-sized stones along the border of Prismeer led the party to a terrible conclusion: the arcane anchors that created the domain of delight known as Prismeer were failing. The only one who would be able to repair them was Zybilna. The party had one last job to do, but they were running out of time.

This chapter was important to me, and kind of personal. I know, I know, DM player characters are a very slippery slope to Mary Sues and awful writing, but it was important for me and for Elora’s journey to make Ana’leth/Alice a part of this story. K is the DM of three games and rarely gets to play theirself, so I wanted Witchlight to be memorable for them. And since the character they were playing was the little sister of my character from our usual game, I had kind of an easy way to get in their character’s head.

The final chapter of the campaign would be taxing, both in actually running the game mechanically (I promised I’d go into it, and I’m going to go into it), and in wrapping up a campaign I’d been running for most of a year. I’d become invested in this world and these characters, so as excited as I was for it to end in a grand finale and eventually get back to our other campaign, I was sad to see it go.

#d&d #d&d 5e #dm #gm #journey into the wild beyond #the wild beyond the witchlight

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