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 47 (Day 40)
In … The Temple of the Black Earth! (Mostly)

1. In the Gargoyle Fountain chamber, the party attuned to various magical items, then took a Long Rest. Dreams were had by Nala, Moony, and Faith. William just enjoyed the tinkling fountain.

2. 

   In the morning, an Augury bade good fortune to destroying the Orb of Red Larch in the forge of Xharva Deem. The party traipsed back into the Temple of Black Earth, only to be ambushed by a bulette and rider, along with a trio of hobgoblins, who apparently had found the previously slain bulettes. The party triumphed, but William nearly died, and Moony and Nala both took major hits (while Theren got Large)..

3. The party headed for the forge, only to hear that someone was back at work inside, presumably Xharva Deem. Moony checked out the doors from the pool room; to the south, it sounded like a barracks (someone talking about rotating beds); to the east, something deep-throated and gutteral.
4. They chose the south, in an area on the map marked for “Healers,” to find the stonemelder Heldorm, who presided over the prisoners and torture chamber there. Moony kept him calm long enough to tee up the team attacking. The cultists went down quickly; Heldorm took longer (and did some damage along the way, not to mention exploding after he died and turned to stone), but was eventually vanquished.
5. The party freed the four prisoners:
   • Orna, angry human prisoner in rags, who laid claim to the Black Earth guard armor in Heldorm’s treasure chest.
   • Droth, tattooed human who was suffering from major head trauma; Faith fixed his dementia, but not his vision.
   • Wulgreda, dwarf, so far fairly quiet.
   • Gervor, elvish noble, grateful to the little people for freeing and healing him, now, can he have his nice armor and sword back?

Player Recap

Where the weal takes us

The group has retreated to the gargoyle fountain room. After they have dinner and some time attuning to the new magic. When sleep comes it is filled with ominous dreams for all but William. He enjoys the soothing sound of the tinkling fountain.

In the morning William case augury and asks “Should we destroy the orb in the forges of Xharva Deem.” The onyx raven hops out of the gargoyle fountain, shakes it’s wings off and says “Weal! Weal!” 

When they reach the hall where the bulette were, the group is surprised by the last bulette with Burrowshark, a human fighter, riding it. The bulette lands on Moony. A hobgoblin also joins the battle wielding a long bow and then two more hobgoblins. The group suffers from the attacks. William is gravely wounded, but the group fights on and finally takes down the bulette, hobgoblins, and fighter. 

They move onto the room outside of the forge. There is hammering within the forge. Stepping away Moony checks the East and South doors. At the Eastern door he hears guttural sounds and the other sounds like a guard’s quarters. The group decides not to leave potential enemies at their back and choose to start with the barracks.

Through the Southwest door there is a villain and several prison cells. Holderm: “I’ve told Mallow more than once that they, Yarsha, are not to be trusted.” Opening the door they shout “Drown yourselves water scum.” Mooney calmly explains that he is not a water cultist. They pause long enough for the group flows into the room and attack. They quickly take down the jailer. There are cages in the room occupied by gaunt humanoids. The prisoners include several humans and an elf. Faith and William race forward to heal the wounded while the other check out the rest of the room. The jailer has some gold and is holding a rod. While Moony is searching the body it begins to shake violently. Nala reaches for the rod and removes it from the corpse. Shortly after that the body turns to stone and explodes. Moony and Theren open a treasure chest in the corner. The prisoners claims several of the items in the chest. 

Game Notes

Not as much happened here as I expected, though some of that was because of my own actions.

All I have to do is (give) dreams

I had dreams set up for the players, which, of course, took some time. I continued my motif of Faith’s dreamscape with Windvane as a sulky chargirl. Nala had a dream where she was being pursued (Jesus in the “Lepers” scene in Superstar) by people who wanted various things from her (including Xharva Deem). Moony had a weird dream of being in a museum, being lectured by the grizzled Tabaxi (the Library God, Denier) about the history of Tyar-Besil, hinting about the Dwarvish love/healing goddess, Sharindlar.

William the Druid just had pleasant dreams of the babbling Gargoyle Fountain he was sleeping beside.

The Gargoyle Fountain

I was playing here (and elsewhere) with trying to noodge the players into learning that the Gargoyle Fountain is actually a Short-Rest generator, something that there’s no non-trivial way for the players to figure out without, y’know, taking random drinks, which my naturally cautious group of adventurers was reluctant to do.

 One kinda-cool thing I did was play around with the nascent AI image generating tools out there to craft an image for the Gargoyle Fountain. It wasn’t great, but it still felt more interesting than just a verbal description. 

The Orb

The party has not forgotten they are still carrying a deactivated Orb of Devastation. They took an Augury to determine that, yeah, melting it down in Xharva’s forge would probably work.

I don’t recall precisely what my thinking was here — the Orb had been disabled by Faith’s Dispel Magic back in Red Larch (and, no, that shouldn’t have worked, but I’d ruled at the moment it did). On the other hand, it’s not necessary that I now, or then, had a coherent story — as far as the party was concerned, they were holding a nuke with the pin put back in the trigger, and making sure that the bad guys didn’t get it back was a fine idea.

And then they did something reckless

Wandering back into Earth Temple, I was surprised the party wasn’t more on-guard, having left a room-full of dead bulettes (that had clearly been under some sort of care) for the previous 8+ hours.

But, even with a couple of Passive Perception checks, they just sort of marched in to continue their explorations — and promptly got ambushed. Bingo!

The bad guys were taken down, eventually, but the party knew it had been hit.

(Most amusing moment of the night — the Sorcerer’s Wild Magic finally caught up with him, and he got basically stuck in the corridor coming in by growing too large.)

Exploration

Healing up, they returned to their course, and were disturbed to hear the sounds of Xharva Deem back in her forge. Rather than immediately attacking (the DM quietly applauds), they scoped out the rest of the room with the pool. I had added some decor, or expanded on what was suggested.

As the former dining hall, the walls were full of brag scenes of the bucolic wealth of King Torhild’s domain — echoing what Deneir had been lecturing Moony about that night in his dreams.

By one door were marred images of Sharindlar, the dwarvish goddess of mercy, healing, and love. That door led to what had been the infirmary (and was now the prison/torture chamber). I added in some symbology that tried to hint back to the gargoyle figure at the Gargoyle Fountain (healing!).

Kudos to the party for approaching the next encounter with something other than “We kick in the door and start fighting.” Being able to get everyone into the room before the balloon went up made for a much easier encounter.

That said, I wasn’t thrilled by how the encounter went with Heldorm and the prisoners. I felt like I rushed things, or had too many balls in the air, or something. As a result, I failed to have Heldorm explode when killed (it happened later). I hate it when that happens.

Also, throwing in four NPCs cause my brain to seize up a bit, and some of the reveals with them didn’t quite work right. I knew I’d need to practice a bit before the next game to make them come a bit more smoothly.

The NPC prisoners actually get reasonable write-ups in the book, enough to RP them. Of course, they also get generic tokens in the Roll20 instance, so I had to find/craft some for them. I additionally gave them their own journal entries — because, again, if someone doesn’t have a journal entry, the players know they aren’t important and can ignore them.

I also crafted custom tokens for each of the Stonemelders in the dungeon here, because they are high enough level to deserve them. Not finding anything through a simple search, I used Hero Forge to pull something together quickly, then with variations.

What will the party do with a mixed set of prisoners that wants help out — and likely won’t take “there’s the door, we don’t think there are any monsters over there” as an answer? We’ll see!

Not much added to the map this time around, but I was still enjoying how the marred and added inscriptions on the map they’d copied from Aerisi’s pyramid throne room were both informative and obscure.

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