This is part of a series about my DMing Princes of the Apocalypse, a D&D 5e adventure by and copyright Wizards of the Coast.

Table of Contents ● The Party

There will be SPOILERS. If you are playing in a PotA game, please don’t read this. But if you are DMing a PotA game, or are a DM who wants to see what the ride was like … read on!

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GM Recap

Session 35 (Day 34-35) 

1. 

   The party entertained Victrid the sylph, who gave them a reward from Ahtayir: seven flasks of Bottled Breath.

2. The party camped out in the “dorms” to the southeast for a Long Rest, interrupted a couple of times by patrols, one of which was deterred by Moony’s deception.
3. Strangely enough, nobody remembers any of their dreams.
4. They explored further into the area, and found a dwarvish shrine to Moradin that was occupied by Kenku torturing a group of captives. After dispatching them, one, a halfling named Bero Gladham, talked about some prisoners — his wife Nerise Gladham, a fancy human, and some other cantankerous prisoners — had been taken “down below” where they would be “useful.”
5. The freed captives wanted to be escorted safely back to a town, but the party was split on what to do. There was a strong interest in forging forward into Tyar-Besil to thwart whatever plot was going on. But sending the freed captives back to the surface meant they might be attacked by the gnolls in Sighing Valley. Having them hole up in a room meant they might be recaptured, and they had no supplies. The majority of the adventurers still wanted to proceed toward the corridor marked with the Crushing Wave symbol. 
6. Ultimately, they decided to send the freed captives back to the surface on their own, but with supplies. The party, with the captives following, circled around the back side of the pyramid, only to be faced by an encounter with Aerisi Kalinoth and her cultists, where she demanded that they surrender and serve her. They demurred, and an intense fight (featuring AoE attacks from both sides) ensued. In the end, Aerisi was slain (at Aldrik’s hands) and her troops with her, fanatically fighting to the end.
7. The party regrouped in the plaza dominated by a statue of Moradin. While none of the cultists had anything of much worth, Aerisi (whose wings vanished a moment before she did, her death transforming her to a briefly screaming gust of air) left behind both extensive jewelry, Aerisi’s spell book, and her spear, Windvane. The last was taken by Faith.

Player Recap

The Rewards of Victorid

The image of Tyar-Besil is etched on the floor of the pyramid temple. Parts are marred by gashes and chips.

The group is debating what to do next. Suddenly a loud knock sounds from the door to the pyramid. They assume combat positions and Moony slowly opens the door. There is a blue bag in front of him. It is attached to a small fey with dragonfly wings, Victrid. She greets the group including Ko. “And hi to you. Don’t worry your secret is safe with me.” She continues “Smells wrong dirty dirty dirty, I’m not supposed to say that word, but he can’t hear here.” “All hail master Atahyir …”

Moony: “go ahead and put down your bag and stay on this side of the pit.”

“With that I am away from this terrible terrible place.”

In the bag, there are 7 blue flasks. Bottled Breath Potion, “These bottles contain the most precious of all gifts, an hour of breath. With it you may blow a mighty gale, or else savor its sweet purity for that span. What mortal being has ever been given such a rare thing?”

The party leaves the pyramid and heads to the rooms south of the Djinn’s room. It is empty and the group decided to hole up for the evening. About 4 hours later, there is a rattle at the door and some conversation followed by banging. Moony listens at the door to try and figure out who is there. It sounds like Common. Moony chants “I am one with the air and the air is me.” There is a pause in the banging. A voice says ‘Who is that, what are you doing” “Aerisi sent me down here to practice being one with the air, otherwise I will join the chorus. Leave me be!” After a long moment, the voice says “Very well, be careful there are intruders in the temple.” Moony “That’s why I locked the door. Thank you.” Two hours later, there is another rattle at the door and a different voice says “Open this door at once” Moony goes back into the chanting routine, but it doesn’t fool the new combatant. 

After a brief battle, the air priests are dispatched and the bodies are staged in the Djinn’s room. The remaining 2 hours of rest passed uneventfully. In the morning, the party eats some crumblecake and decides to explore the remaining room on the southern side of the temple of howling hatred. Down the hallway, there is a door with screams coming from behind it. Moony opens the door and commands them to stop. There is an altar on the far side. There are prisoners inside being tortured by a group of Kenku. Moony draws his bow and the action starts.

Theren casts fire bolt at the Kenku standing on the altar and kills him. The second Kenku attacks Moony and the third stabs at Aldrik as he comes through the door. Aldrik attacks back and then moves further into the room. Faith steps up and casts Word of Radiance and Nala wades in swinging. Kenku 2 goes down. The last Kenku is hanging on by a thread until Moony finishes him off.

This is an ancient dwarven shrine. The workmanship is stellar but the gems and valuables have been chipped from the walls. The hostages are mostly humans from Yartril and a hobbit from Westbridge.

The group decides that they don’t have time to take the hostages back to Red Larch. Nala insists that they get them supplies before sending them off. The hostages do not want to be left alone, so they follow the party.

As they move around the pyramid, Moony sees a group of ascetic and initiates are in a room ahead. He warns the followers and then sneaks ahead. A familiar voice calls out. Aerisi has returned and is not happy. Aerisi is hovering about a dwarven statue with minions around her. 

Faith kicks things off with a hail storm. Pounding the attackers with large hailstones and turning the floor into difficult terrain. A wild battle ensues. Lightening flies and the earth shakes. In the end Aldrik races through a poisonous cloud and gets the final attack on Aerisi. She calls out to Yan-C-Bin and disappears, leaving her silken robes, jewelry, and the spear Windvane.

Four streets converge at this point with a statue of the dwarf lord Moradin. There are shops arranged around the square. 

Game Notes

What to do, what to do?

We resumed the player debate about which way they were going once the game started. Finish exploring? Short Rest? Long Rest? Where? Find the hinted-at Captives? 

So I love being able to do remote gaming through a Virtual Tabletop. Even though all the players were in the same metro area, distance and travel time (and, ugh, Fridays) would make this a bigger lift if we were playing in person around the table.

But something that the VTT doesn’t do is sit everyone around the table and having to look at each other. Indeed, to save bandwidth for multiple players per household, nobody was running video (and even if they did, it would be buried in another window).

While that means folk can eat a sandwich or step away from the keyboard or pick their nose with nobody being aware of it, it also means that it’s really easy for contentious decisions to fall into a slough of silence, where most (?) folk have made their point, but nobody (especially in this group of friends) wants to be the bastard who insists on the party following their lead.

That’s a place where I, as the GM, need to step in, and I tend to be a bit slow at it, not wanting folk to feel I am railroading them into a particular decision or even making a decision …

For Victrid!

Fortunately, I had a distraction, a flighty little sylph named Victrid who arrived with the djinn Ahtayir’s reward to them for enabling him to get free: a flask of Bottled Breath for everyone.

(The reward is out of the book, the sylph was my own imagination — I felt it a nicer option than “you find some bottles tucked under the throne” or something.)

Everyone instantly got paranoid about when they might need Bottled Breath. Since at this point I was doing my first review of the Plunging Torrents (the water node), it seemed like a fabulous gift … if it lasted that long.

Developing a token for Victrid and everything probably took only slightly less time than she was on-stage, but I still think she as a fun, hyper, “magic pixie dream girl” character to trot in.

Camping out

Once Victrid had flitted off, the party gelled around the idea of taking a Long Rest, and doing so in one of the dorms in the southeast, which would let them clear the black spot they’d not explored. Since I’d prepped and set up for the big battle in the Square of Moradin (see below), I wasn’t thrilled, but, hey, player agency.

They trucked over  to the spot, checked out the one dorm room they hadn’t previously investigated, and camped out.

Now … damn. The party should not be encouraged (indeed, the module specifically discourages) camping out inside one of the temples. It’s just dangerous. There are patrols and other threats, all the time.

I could do what the book says, and roll wandering monsters / patrols every ten minutes. On the other hand, nobody wants to play constant mook battles, least of all me.

I could send them all Bad Dreams. But that starts being a bit too pushy, unless I want to dictate effects. (Do the Bad Dreams disrupt their Long Rest? Harsh. Maybe when they get down lower.)

In the end, I did random monster rolls every hour, which resulted in two encounters — some folk who Moony managed to talk into leaving (he was becoming our deceitful rogue, which was awesome), others who kicked in the door and got promptly taken down. (Though not before I got to cast Dust Devil and have my new DD AoE token show up. Fun!)

They decided to dump the bodies nearby, rather than bring them into the room. I could have cause them trouble, but decided not to. The patrols were pretty light because Aerisi was gathering her forces …

Freed captives are a pain in the ass

On rising, they found the shrine and the captives of the Kenku there. Pretty short order battle. But that left them with a new problem.

Small digression: Not long before this session, I had been doing my first review of the Howling Caves (the Air Node). Toward the end, you run across a couple of people being teed up for sacrifice. One is the inconsistently-named Deseyna Majarra. The other is a peasant woman, Nerise Gladham, who expresses concern over her husband, from whom she was separated.

I worked up a unique token and handout for her, because I suspected she’d be around for a while. (I mean, what do you do with captives you’ve freed inside the Air Node? You can’t exactly let them try and wander home. Hold that thought.) It was only after I had done all of that that a thought occurred to me that … well, heck, Nerise was the wife of Bero Gladham, the peasant they free here at the Shrine of Moradin in the Temple of Howling Hatred.

Except that I’d done up Bero as a halfling, and Nerise as a human.

And so what? First mixed-race marriage of the campaign, huzzah, vive la différence, and we’d see if anyone ever noticed. End of digression.

At any rate, we now have five freed Level 0 peasants/merchants. What is the party going to do with them?

And once again the game came to a screeching halt while the question was debated.

1. Arm them (hey, here are some short swords the kenku aren’t using any more) and escort them to the gatehouse … to let them ascend on their the several miles to the surface, ending up in the Sighing Valley that the party already knows has hungry gnolls with bows and arrows?
2. Go with them and get them to safety (maybe to the end of the valley, maybe to Feathergale Spire, maybe all the way to Red Larch)?
3. Tell them to lock themselves in a chamber and “we’ll be back for you real soon, we promise.” Except there are no supplies. And it’s not like this place is safe.
4. Have them trail along behind. How well is that going to work, and how safe will it really be for them?

And how do the peasants/merchants actually feel about these options? (Answer: only #2 garners any enthusiasm from them.)

Part of the issue here was that some of the players really didn’t want to deal with the problem. Short of killing them (nobody was quite there), any solution that got them out of sight and mind was fine, because it would be done with and/or let the party continue with its (important!) quest. Conversely, some of the players kind of took that whole Lawful and/or  Good thing seriously, and wanted to be sure these folk were safe.

(Part of the issue as well is that the party really didn’t know how this is laid out ahead — if they leave this temple, they were likely not coming back any time soon.)

I probably let the debate go on too long (I probably should have done another Wandering Monster roll). I did try to summarize the options and make sure that everyone had spoken up if they wanted to.

In the end, the decision was to get some supplies for the peasants/merchants (since they were pretty starved), arm them up, and send them to the surface on their own. That meant a delay while the party searched the rest of this zone for said food and water (not wanting to give any of their own), with the freed captives in tow. Maybe at that place marked like it has supplies up in the NE corner of the map …

Which meant … (GM grins.)

The Return of the Aerisi

So I’d been unhappy with Aerisi fleeing the previous episode, both because it felt anticlimactic and because it left unresolved the whole disposition of prophets.

I’d been casually mentioning that, well, she hadn’t really been taken down, just driven away.

What, it occurred to me, if I ran with that? What if, while the party is lounging about for their Short Rest, then a Long Rest, Aerisi is busy gathering up all the troops she can in short order, and getting ready to confront them?

Initially, I thought I’d let them finish exploring (if they chose to) and then have her and company waiting when they got back from the Purple Worm room (“SUPPLIES” it says on the map). But … why not have her just set up in the Plaza of Moradin for a show down? Take care of most of the clearing (though leaving the various hazards around the plaza, as well as some mocking kenku), and give it a real blow-out.

I did some CR balancing, and … 

The party circled around the back of the pyramid (scenic waterfall into the shadowy depths!), and up to the concourse to the north of the structure, where they encountered Aerisi and the various soldiers she had managed to pull together. Huzzah!

I’d gauged the combat difficulty carefully, not wanting to make it potentially fatal. In retrospect, I could have made it harder. Part of the problem was that it was mostly as distance fight — arrows and spells (and some AoE in the latter), which favored the party, mostly. Aerisi was the only significant spellcaster (and she did manage to get off a Chain Lightning, which was tons of fun, plus the weakest CloudKill ever, 10d8 poison damage and half of that was 1s being rolled). The party popped a Fireball and an Ice Storm, plus a Moonbeam and a very helpful Silence, the net of which was that half of Aerisi’s folks were taken down without getting into combat, the other half relegated to futile charges and doing some damage to one of the fighters who’d moved forward …

(For a brief moment, it looked like Aldrik might be Thunderwaved into the river, which opened the prospect that he would get swept away and over the waterfall … which would be an awesome way for his character to disappear off to the Spring Semester, albeit an episode early. Didn’t happen, but I could have forced it …)

The oppo all had lines written for them, half of which I forgot to deliver.

• For the Winds!

• We purify the world for Yan-C-Bin and his Prophet!

• Breathe through me, my Queen!

• We avenge your subjects, Great Lady!

• We serve to our deaths!

Cultists are fun!

The columned causeway at A10 was interesting, because it was a choke point for attacks, allowed my own AoE (such as it was) to be more effective, and created some great visual blocking for the dynamic lighting in Roll20.

Eventually, it came down to Aerisi, and even with her abilities and wielding Windvane, she couldn’t stand up to the Action Economy and went down. (Worse, a Skyweaver who had been hanging out toward the back, just outside the Silence, was lined up to do a spiffy Lightning Bolt that would catch three, maybe four players … and got gacked by the Moonbeam just before she was going to do it. Curses!)

When the dust settled, I was much happier with this being Aerisi’s exit moment than her flight from the Pyramid last time. She got some great monologuing at the start of the battle …

You! There you hide!  You burnt, dirty, sweaty fleshlings! This is your fault! You’ve slaughtered my noble subjects! You’ve killed my lovers! You’ve stolen my djinn! You destroyed my beloved Whisper! And now my master, my teacher, the Shadow of the Four Winds, the Howling Hatred — he will not hear my words! You have taken EVERYTHING from me!

Bow! Bow down, swear allegiance, swear to fight and die for my cause, and I might show you mercy. Give me your love, and I will care for you in return. Refuse, and be scoured!

Yeah, Yan-C-Bin wasn’t thrilled when she high-tailed it back to the Air Node. And, of course, she sees it all as unfair treatment of her.

If the party had chosen to talk, rather than immediately fight, I had some conversational gambits where Aerisi once again offered (as in that second paragraph) to become their beloved queen.

• FAITH – friend, besties, Sisters of the Storm.
• WILLIAM – handsome enough, if sweaty. a decent consort.
• THEREN – you shall be my ambassador to the Cult of the Eternal Flame, for as long as they’re around. 
• NALA – bodyguard, I suppose. I mean, what are you good for, really?
• MOONY – you shall make a delightful pet. I will feed you fine food, and pet and stroke you upon my lap, and you will do tricks and kill things for me.
• ALDRIK – you … need punishment. then you can be my … well, no king, prince, perhaps, or (ew) consort in name. master of the city, at any rate, its tricks and traps and powers. but, yes, punishment first.

Alas, on the list of could-have-beens. But I still think it was cool. Generic offers of “Follow me and live, spurn me and die” are a dime a dozen. Tailored appeals to character flaws, needs, wants (correct or not) make the story about the characters, not generic villains.

She also had a series of lines in combat (I was maybe overprepped for this, though some of this material was left over from her first appearance), half of which were cut off by that damned Silence spell.  (Though that did have the effect of driving her toward the party and in reach of Aldrik, who, perfectly, as the guy she had kidnapped and enslaved, was the one who took her down).

• I’m a queen! A queen, I tell you!
• They laughed! They laughed at me! Now they laugh no more!
• The Howling Hatred will love me! He will!
• Mother and Father were wrong. Wrong!
• Only I see clearly! Only my eyes penetrate the air!
• (Dying) If only I could see the Pure Sky again …

All pure Aerisi — entitled, defiant, insecure, a few billows short of a cloud. A woman so delusional that her primary magic focus is an illusion of wings because she thinks she should be is an Avariel and she absolutely must be that incredibly cool.

Alas, sic transit gloria Aerisi.  We shall not see her kind again (largely because the other Prophets don’t get nearly the onscreen role that she does — they’re all interesting characters, but with little opportunity to be so in front of the players).

I’d have loved to have had someone in the party on the brink of death during the battle, but that just tells me I need to turn the amps up to 8.1 instead of just 8.

Where to now?

That seemed like a great moment to wrap up for the evening, the battle complete, and a couple of additional complications:

First off, Aerisi dropped a shit-tonne of jewelry when she turned into a howling, dissipating, blast of air on her death. That could hopefully be a big temptation for the party to head back to town — Beliard and Red Larch both now have access to adventuring equipment, and getting some upgraded weapons/armor would be a good thing (and a good thing for the story).

Aerisi also left behind Windvane, the first of the Prophet weapons, and it’s pretty damned kick-ass (and, of course, also cursed, containing a spark of Yan-C-Bin inside). Time to start whispering in the ear of whomever is carrying it (looks like Faith, who is perfect thematically as a tempest cleric and as someone trying to discover herself.

I did up a token, just to have it on the ground there, post-battle.

Really, I suppose, it should probably have gone to Nala as the actual fighter (and leadershippy sort) on the team. Next Prophet weapon, perhaps, though Prophet weapons will now be less available.

Aerisi was now dead, which triggered some storylines in the book:

1. 1. The other Prophets would withdraw from their temples, so those temples will now be run by lieutenants and other threats. Two of the Prophets will go to their nodes to summon their Princes; the other one will be in the Fane, calling on the Elemental Evil Eye. I hadn’t decided how that would be divvied up.
   2. On the outside, we would start getting Cult Reprisals (Devastation Orbs in the town square). I decided Womford is first on the list, because we needed to get some dramatic tension when Red Larch was targeted. But this all depended on the party stepping outside for some fresh air (so to speak).

Short term, there was still a bit more of the Air Temple to explore — Ghouls in the graveyard, an Umber Hulk in the old royal quarters, a Cloaker in the shops. To the north was a passage to the Temple of Eternal Flame portion of the city.  To the east, there’s the feasting hall (which won’t have any people in it, having been stripped for the battle we just fought, though I did plan to have some Kenku over there being obnoxious).  There’s also a chamber with the skeletal Purple Worm passageway down to the Fane of the Eye.

That makes four exits into further trouble here:  the Water Temple, the Fire Temple, the Fane, and the Air Node. Which would be a lot to refresh myself on, given the party’s unconscious glee at going off in direction I was not expecting. I gave odds that they would go for the Water Temple, in part for meta reasons that they  know that’s kinda-sorta the sequence intended. But who knew with this group?

I also needed to deal with Aldrik’s player departing for Spring Semester. I’d been consistently joking about a Purple Worm suddenly swallowing him up … without considering that there’s that skeletal purple worm up in the supply rooms, so that might be a fun double-twist. We’d have to see how I get inspired before the next Friday. Maybe when they were in that room with the skeletal Purple Worm tunnel, the whole thing would collapse with Aldrik in it, trapping him down in the Fane, the rest of the party above …

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