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. 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 15 (Day 21)

1. A Map of Sacred Stone Monastery
2. The party took a Short Rest in the Kitchen, while evaluating Spell Scrolls you found, the Necklace of Hellenrae, sifting through more Marlos Urnrayle info, and testing the local liquor.
3. The party invaded the central temple of the monastery, fighting two Black Earth guards and Qarbo, the Black Earth priest.
4. The party took a Long Rest in (they presumed) Hellenrae‘s quarters, sussing out the additional magic items in their pockets (including Spell Scrolls you found).
5. They began their descent into the space under the monastery, down past well buckets to look into a well chamber with a handful of figures in it, one of them particularly large …
6. Meanwhile Aldrik came up with a quick costume switch …

Player Recap

Better take the bread out of the oven

After the fight in the kitchen, Moony spikes the doors, William jumps in a washtub, and people (short) rest and recover. The magic users take a look at the scrolls while the other check out the other loot [noted with class that can use it].

In the locked chest:

1. D/S: Earthbind
2. S: Maximilian’s Earthen Grasp
3. C: Speak with Dead
4. D: Transmute Rock

In the Scriptorium:

1. D/S: Dust Devil
2. D/S

Other swag:

• Moony: The Necklace of Hellenrae: It is magical. It is … disturbing. It is a key. But it is incomplete.
• Aldrik: Leather pouch: a scrap of parchment, folded and refolded. “forgiven if only” and “please come home”
• Nala: The papers/scroll about Marlos Urnrayle: He is the self-described “Prophet of Earth” He was drawn to a place he calls “the Fane of the Eye” by powerful visions and promises of power. One of the things he found in the Fane was “Ironfang, the Holy Implement of Earth Power,” which he took as his own.
• Aldrik/Nala: The booze from the distillery: Rough, not well distilled or flavored. Nala trusts Aldrik’s assessment and declines to try it.

Once rested, the group debate their next move. It is decided that Moony should sneak into the main temple room and determine the threat level. As the group stands in the entrance room, Moony steps forward and sees two guards and a person behind the altar. Entering in further, Moony does a double take as the rock priest at the altar looks a lot like Larrakh. Moony motions the rest of the party into the room.

After Moony sneak attack shoots the Earth Priest, Qarbo (surprising both groups) the fight ensues. The party moves into the room. Qarbo opens the attack from Team Evil with a large damaging effect against a cluster of heroes near the door. After that the fight goes downhill for the earth priest and his guards.

William finds a lever in the northwest wall. Aldrik and Faith determines that the temple was once dedicated to Moradin, the all-father Lawful Good god of the dwarves.  Moony calls out that he is going to test the lever. The group scatters and the stairs down from the middle of the room turn into a slope. Pulling the lever back up, the stairs return. Moony removes the lever to disable the device. The party gathers the items from the alter and from Qarbo and head to Hellenrae’s room for a long rest.

Watch order

1. William & Nala
2. Moony
3. Theren & Aldrik
4. Faith

After (long) resting for 8 hours, undisturbed, they decide to take on the basement. It is night and the monastery is dark. Using the stairs that lead down to the well, they head underground. It’s dark, so they light up in their various ways. Moony opens the door …

Game Notes

A Key Innovation

As mentioned previously, one of the criticisms of The Sandbox That Is PotA is that it is waaaaay too easy for people to wander from their nice, safe, 4th level shenanigans into a 12th level hellhole — which they may not realize until it is too late.

In theory, players will spot such things and back out, but I didn’t trust myself not to inadvertently bring down a TPK.

So I stole and expanded on the “keys” idea from Sly Flourish. Basically, each Keep has a passage down to Tyar-Besil and that element’s “Temple” (portion of the city). Since we know the cults are all in a Cold War with each other, they wouldn’t want their opposition to have an easy back door (even if the security at the Temple level between the cults, let alone the joint stewardship of the Fane, make this slightly less plausible — but, then, I hadn’t read that far in full detail yet).  At any rate, each passage from a Keep to its Temple has a mystical mojo barrier, passable only in the willing presence of someone who has sold their soul to their elemental Prince (figuratively, or perhaps literally, speaking). Anyone else — from another cult, or just a wandering adventurer, is locked out …

Except that each of the keep holders has a portion of a “Fifth Key,” crafted by the fiends who set this all up. These look like their elemental symbol from the symbol of Elemental Evil (something which the party had only glimpsed in the Necromancer’s lair, and not yet had an opportunity to figure out). Join the four pieces, and the resulting magical item could let someone open up all the mystical barriers. A nifty weapon for any of the Keep Lieutenants. A nice way to keep the party out of trouble and, eventually, wanting to hit up all four keeps.

I cobbled together some imagery for the necklaces to serve as a handout. Because named items should have handouts. So we started with the “Necklace of Hellenrae” and went from there, adding some weird “attunement” effects that gave the indication that it was definitely a key to … something … but incomplete.

(I made it a mystical mojo barrier rather than an Iron Door because any barrier that could conceivably be penetrated will have breach attempts made on it for hours by my players.)

The overall effect image is trying to create a metal framework around the symbol as it appears in the full-out Elemental Evil thingummy that they briefly glimpsed in Oreioth’s stronghold. I was particularly pleased with threading it around a necklace image.

I’m the Map!

So along with game logs, and now that we were in dungeon territory, I started crafting maps for the players to review between sessions or even during the session (rather than zooming out in Roll20), stored in the public  journal entry for “Sacred Stone Monastery.” Unexplored areas were blacked out. E.g.,

For this session, I included it in the episode recap.

In these early days, I filled in the names of some of the areas (“Crispy Monks” being where they had popped the door and Fireballed the barracks). But the idea was to make up for the players not actually being there and having a sense of what the place looked like (and what areas were as yet unexplored). By the end of this episode, then, the two main areas left (on the ground floor) were a back room of Renwick’s (which nobody was interested in) and the main temple.

A lot of decision-making was done going over those maps, so it was worth the time (after each session) it took me to craft them.

Around this time, I think, I began having two journal entries in Roll20 for every dungeon (keep, temple, etc.):  the main one that came with the game (which I renamed, e.g., “Sacred Stone Monastery (GM)”), holding all the room contents and dungeon notes (as updated and modified by me), and a new public one for what the party knew about the place, what they had discovered, links to people they and met and (often) killed, etc. (named, e.g., “Sacred Stone Monastery”).

The Campaign Logo

So for various idiosyncratic reasons, I wasn’t thrilled by either the name “Princes of the Apocalypse” nor with cover art of Aerisi. It just didn’t do it for me.

So, for hopefully obvious reasons, I redubbed the campaign “Elementary,” and went with something intentionally cute.

That’s from u/shmeckerel on Reddit, link here.

It was going to be obvious quickly that elemental powers were involved in the campaign, so coming up with something preemptively cute felt like a fun move.

As time passed, and more elemental symbols were resolved, I did a bit of modification …

That made it a bit less cute.

I had this on the campaign landing page, and, by the end of the game, I had put (a la the meme), “Is this a material plane?” next to the butterfly.

Bits and Bobs

Although Qarbo was, I believe, pretty much the same level bad guy as Larrakh, the fact that the players were now 4th level rather than 2nd made the battle in the temple pretty anticlimactic, although lengthy enough to take up much of the session.

Of course, Qarbo isn’t actually the Keep holder. That would be Hellenrae … whom the party had dispatched previously, because they snuck in through the back door. Sigh.

While the party was murderhoboing, kinda-sorta, I wanted to emphasize that there were implications of same — not just Renwick registering a mild (if pointed) complaint about the noise, but the idea that not every cultist was a slavering mad dog hell-bent on destroying the world for their elemental master.  Thus the leather pouch that one of the monks carried, with a fragment of a letter they had gotten from their family —  a scrap of parchment, folded and refolded. “forgiven if only” and “please come home.” And while he clearly hadn’t gone home … he’d kept the note, or that fragment of it.  Yeah, that’s the dude you just killed before he could get out of bed — sweet dreams!

It was around this time that I realized the party was beginning to pick up magic stuff they needed to keep track of for purposes of investigation and attunement . So I created a Roll20 Journal Entry called Spell Scrolls you found, which later turned into Magic Stuff you found that I could pull up or point people to when Short or Long Rests occurred (with the notes about what each of the items did hidden in the GM section).

The party had to figure out a new watch order, now that they had (and, mostly, trusted) Aldrik, the 6th member. I eventually realized that both Marching Order and Watch Order were perfect for a Roll20 Journal Entry that anyone (including the DM) could reference.

The logical path forward / downward for the party was the large ramp opened up in the temple. So, of course, the party took the stairwell by the kitchen.

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