cellio | yesterday's D&D game

Yesterday we played the penultimate game of our D&D campaign, and it was wonderful. I've never before played in a long-term campaign that had an overall story from beginning to end; we didn't know it had a single story at the beginning, but looking back on it it's obvious that Ralph had planted clues in the very first session. This was very neat. I guess it's sort of like writing a series of books or scripts that span years, with the additional complication that you have players who may take your plot and turn it sideways. I don't know if I'd be able to do that.

At the previous session, we had killed the big bad wizard who was holding the Dragon's Heart, the artifact we needed in order to heal the dragon Agondre. (The Dragon's Heart is a big ruby the size of your head that glows with an inner fire. Or so legends said, but they actually understated it somewhat.) The dragon and the land are symbiotically linked, and the vampire Garrett had stabbed the dragon with the disease-carrying artifact dagger. So the land has been dying along with the dragon -- crop failures, pools of slime spontaneously appearing, monsters ravaging the land, etc. Or at least we thought we were setting out to heal the dragon.

The wizard, in addition to stealing the Dragon's Heart, had also imprisoned the wizard Elyssisoriel, who's an elf and 500+ years old. She was an eye-witness to the history we'd only heard about. We knew she was being held in a (different) gem, and after we killed the wizard we found that gem and freed her. Fortunately, between this wizard and the vampire's pet wizard, we had a lot of spellbooks to give her. We'd also saved up a few other things to outfit her with once we found her. So she joined us on the next part of the adventure.

The wizard had also been keeping Turok's old girlfriend, Dorla, but had, ahem, modified her in unpleasant ways. We spent some time trying to undo that, and Lori did some really good role-playing as the party's healer. It was neat to watch.

We had come to the land we were in by way of the flying city of Aulos. The evil wizard had built flying ships powered by the same magical crystals that powered the city. (In fact, he had taken over the city and put its people to work as slave labor harvesting those crystals.) I was hoping to capture one of those ships for Agondre. We did, but we knew it would take a couple weeks to fly it back and we wanted to heal Agondre quickly now that we had the Dragon's Heart. So we had a bit of fun when my character, Larissa, used a crystal ball (and message spell) to contact the mayor of Aulos. "Hi. We've got this flying ship, and you've got people who understand its magic. We need to run back to heal the land; could you assemble a crew that I can fetch tomorrow? I can carry six people at a time via teleport. Ok? Good. Oh, by the way, don't be alarmed when I appear; I'll be polymorphed as a troll. You'll know it's me becuase I'll be carrying a huge red gem the size of your head that burns with an inner fire." It's amazing what you can get away with when you have a charisma of 22. :-) (The polymorph was necessary so I'd be strong enough to carry such a rock. The rock was necessary because it boosted my magical ability (effective caster level).)

After we teleported back to Agondre (two steps due to distance worries, but the flying city is handy that way) and reunited Elys' with her family briefly, we went back to Oakhame, the home of Liandra (the druid). Oakhame is home to two very-well-developed NPCs, and we had good conversations with them and they gave us some magic to help in our attempt to heal the dragon. Then we headed to the capital to do the deed.

The first sign that something was wrong came when Tobin the cleric met us with news of some divinations he'd done. Divinations are not known for their clarity, of course, but it sounded like things would be both very good and very bad. We'd already been told (by the oracle) to enter the dragon's chamber "with [your] loins girded for battle"; we had assumed this meant for battling the creatures that we'd found down there on every past trip.

So we did all sorts of buffing magic, including getting some help from Tobin, and entered the chamber. We saw only two creatures there this time, many fewer than we expected. We assumed more would appear (as in the past). When they didn't I was suspicious ("this is too easy"), but we asked the dragon what to do and saw a vision of us using Turok's sword (made from one of the dragon's teeth) cutting open the dragon's chest and us pushing the gem into it, so we set out to do that.

You know, it's all fine and dandy for a dragon to tell you "cut open my chest and install a new heart", but that doesn't mean that adrenaline and reflexes won't kick in once you start to do that. So Turok made a big gash (aided by power attack and true strike and other things), and the dragon went into a rage and started attacking us.

Ah. That's why this isn't going to be too easy. :-)

We didn't want to kill the dragon, given its tie to the land. So others started trying to strike to subdue while my character dove in and tried to push the gem in. But with all the thrashing about I didn't get it on the first try (nor the second), and meanwhile someone noticed something funny about the gem. As I pushed it into the unbelievably-hot blood of the dragon it was starting to crack -- the way an egg does before hatching.

Ok. All along we'd been thinking "heal", but the correct idea was actually "rebirth". We realized we had to kill the old dragon so the new one could come forth and fill his place. That took me completely by surprise but it makes perfect sense; there has been a strong theme of rebirth in this campaign, so it makes sense that we couldn't make the old dragon as if the wound had never happened.

Ralph set this up beautifully and did a good job of conveying the dragon's reactions during all this. When, in the end, we held a funeral for the old dragon and a welcome-to-the-world ritual for the new one, I could tell that all the players were really affected.

This was the climax of the campaign. We'll play again to do the epilogue; in particular, our 500-year-old elf still has someone to be reunited with. and the land still needs a new emperor.

I don't know how soon I'll be able to bring my character's in-character journal up to date, but I didn't want to let this game pass without comment.

I'm a little sad now that this game is ending, but on the other hand, it would be a much weaker story if it didn't have an end. Maybe every now and then we can do some one-shot reunion adventures or something.

yesterday's D&D game

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