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 34 (Day 34) 

1. 

   The party entered the ground floor of the pyramid of the Temple of Howling Hatred, and with the distraction of Moony wearing the robes of the Skyweaver who they slew the previous session, they were able to get the jump on the Yan-C-Bin worshippers inside. Theren Fireballed a bunch of them to death. The others showed more advanced magic, but were soon put down.

2. A shaft of howling winds lay at the center of that ground floor, and a body rolled into it slowly descended into the darkness.
3. Moony scouted the upper level of the pyramid, which appeared to be a throne room. The group went up both stairs to that level. 

4. 

   Aerisi Kalinoth, the Prophet of Air, sat upon a throne there, her spear by her side. She attempted to engage the party in dialog, sensing their arrival, but they attacked instead, so she ordered them killed. 

5. The party quickly dispatched the incense-drunken Initiates, and Theren’s vitriolic sphere took down Aerisi’s cohort Windharrow. Aerisi got a bit panicky and vanished.
6. Aldrik was blindsided (literally) by an Invisible Stalker under Aerisi’s orders. That distracted from attempts to spot Aerisi where she was recovering the horn used to summon the djinn Ahtayir. 
7. Williams’s rain of water made the Invisible Stalker temporarily visible, letting folk whale upon it and defeat it.
8. When Ahtayir arrived, Aerisi commanded him to prevent the party from following her, then flew, invisible, out of the room. The djinn merely confirmed with the party that they would not pursue her while it was still meaningful; they, in turn, chose not to attack him. 

9. 

   Ahtayir, freed from the previous command to maintain the city, returned to his home on the Elemental Plane of Air — alone, as nobody was willing to enter his service in return for such an adventure. He took the horn with him, freed from his previous service by the new order that Aerisi had given. He warned the party that the djinn had no love for Yan-C-Bin but that the other elemental princes were far worse.

10. The chamber floor bore a map of the city of Tyar-Besil.
11. The party debated whether to continue to sweep the city for opposition, or move onward. The djinn had suggested that there were slaves of the Air Cult in the city, though some of the commoners encountered had seemed actively allied with the Howling Hatred. There was also concern that Aerisi had only fled, not been captured or killed. 

Player Recap

Step Up to the Pyramid!

They stand at the great doors of the step pyramid. After listening and checking for traps Moony, wearing the robes of the wyvern rider, opens the doors. There are a number of initiates, an Ascetic, and a Skyweaver levitating in a large open room. There is a pit with a howling wind coming from it in front of the worshipers. The Ascetic steps to the floor and calls out “Close the door, you are interrupting our prayers.” Moony’s bluff works and the Skyweaver only looks briefly before closing her eyes and resuming her prayers.

Moony prepares and attacks. Theren tosses off a Fireball from outside the door and removes the initiates from the fight. The group moves in and continues to attack the remaining air priests. They in turn damage the party with thunder and lightning. By the end of the round, the battle is done. Theren moves in and closes the doors. The air cultists are mostly armed with daggers and darts. Moony rolls the Skyweaver’s body into the shaft it slowly sinks down while the howling wind comes up through the well. 

Moony begins sneaking up the stairs and sees a large group of initiates and named villains. The groups split to go up both stairs. (Moony, Nala, William, & Ko on the North and Theren, Faith, and Aldrik to the South) Theren casts Invisibility on himself and takes the lead on the South Stair.

Aerisi Kalinoth taunts the group, inviting them up to play. When Theren prepares to cast his spell, she says “Of for pity sake, kill them all”. Theren casts Vitriolic Sphere and moves back down the stairs. An initiate moves up to attack Moony and misses badly. Nala then takes him out and moves further into the room. Faith calls up an Ice Storm and pelts Windharrow and several initiates with rock-hard ice. Aldrik races towards Aerisi in a rage. He is struck from behind. Aerisi disappeared. William steps into the room and casts Faerie Fire on the throne and the niche behind, in an attempt to uncover Aerisi if she is invisible.  (Notes cut off here.)

Game Notes

To Sneak or Not To Sneak

So I’ve commented on it before, but I’ll mention it again: this party has two modes:

1. Tentative sneaking and only engaging in combat if it cannot possibly be avoided.
2. Charging in and killing everything.

The third mode, which the book seems to assume will be a common one, is deception.  Every complex has note about “If the party pretends it is bearing an important message for the head honcho” or “If the party pretends it’s here to join the cult” or “If the party is wearing the local cult costume” as a way to get past checkpoints and through doors and into deeper potential trouble.

One problem is that the one character with a high CHArisma — Theren — was also playing the hermit fire-thrower who is afraid of losing control, and has a crotchety and antisocial attitude. Not the one to pull off a clever deception.

I eventually commented upon this in passing enough times that a couple of things happened.

One, the Dragonborn fighter, taking the Banneret sub-build, got some leadership skills to help with social encounters. But second, our Tabaxi rogue, who’d been collecting costumes as souvenirs, finally decided to use one.

Which is why the party got the drop on the group in the ground floor of the pyramid. Fireball online and the rest was history.

Well, not quite. While the Initiate mooks went down like tenpins, the Skyweaver and the Hurricane (which I was still referencing as an “Ascetic” since I’d originally done so at Feathergale Spire) managed to demonstrate with a Thunderwave and a Lightning Bolt that the days of “Oh, we can take these guys, we’re the only ones with AoE spells” were quite over.

Always good to deflate player cockiness a bit, just to retain that element of tension.

The Madness of Queen Aerisi

The party took quite some time scouting up the stairs to the throne room at the top of the pyramid, enough so that Aerisi was easily able to detect them. Which was great, because I had written, over the preceding weeks, close to a page of Aerisi dialog bits, and I was really eager to use them to (a) convey some interesting information, (b) muddy the waters, (c) drop some hints about Aldrik, and (d)  demonstrate that Aerisi really was cray-cray. E.g.,

• She smiles at Aldrik. “Good. You return. And you brought friends, good, good.”
• “It is good to see all of you, come to play. What shall we play today? Queen of the World?”
• “Do you like my wings? Aren’t they beautiful?  All the avariel have wings, but none so beautiful as mine.”
• “He says I will be Queen of the World. He says I will scour all to the bedrock and beyond, and fly with my beautiful wings over the empty land, and all will worship my beauty and … and queenliness.” … “Who? Yan-C-Bin.” … “Hmmmm … yes, that doesn’t make any sense. No, you don’t make any sense.”
• “They said I couldn’t play. They pretended they were my mother and father, but they were obviously imposters and kidnappers.”
• “The djinn. He thinks he’s so great and mighty, but he serves me. As everyone will, someday. It will be so much fun!”
• “Oh, those filthy, filthy foul Earthers. They soil everything they touch. They pretend to be my followers, play dress-up. But they aren’t. They try to trick people into thinking they are my subjects, but I rejected them. …. Would you be interested in going after them, be my brave knights against their fetid darkness?”
• “Thurl … Merosska?  Oh, yes, him. A sweet boy. He loved me, he did, back in the day. Worshipped me, like a goddess. But he wouldn’t let me play. He would want to be in charge. He’d lock me up in his tower and sit in my chair. I can’t let that happen, can I?” (Looks to Faith) “Well, between us girls, can I?”  
  • “He’s dead?  Oh. A pity. I was thinking of bringing him here, making long, languorous love to him, then sending him to fight against my enemies. Wouldn’t that be fun? Like … like … what is that game, with the checkerboard, but not checkers … right. He would be my … rook. That’s a kind of bird, you know.”

In the actuality of things, she only managed to get out that she wanted them to come up and play, and that they would get to see her bee-yoo-tee-ful wings. At which point, the party went with the “charge in and kill everyone” thing, slaughtering the drunken Initiates, taking down Windharrow the Bard pretty quickly (though he got a Discordant Whispers off that I enjoyed immensely), even before Aerisi’s Invisible Stalker got into play.

Things got mildly confusing there for a while, because Aerisi was being charged by Aldrik (who remembered enough about his captivity to want to even the score), and he’d reached the dais by the time she’d realized she was in danger. So she went invisible, flipped herself over the top of the throne to get to the horn to summon Ahtayir … just as the Invisible Stalker went after Aldrik. 

So people were looking for her, but also trying to figure out about what was attacking him.  The druid’s Faerie Fire would have been perfect in pinpointing her (and would have meant her death, most likely), except that she made her save. The druid made up for it by next round casting a Create Water in the area over the Invisible Stalker, and the outlines of the rain made it visible for one round — which gave everyone a chance to beat the airy tar out of it (Action Economy!). 

Aerisi had, meantime, sounded the horn, and had to hang on one more round for Ahtayir to show up. He did (going into the initiative count directly after her, fully legit), and she ordered him to Prevent them from following me!

A-ha.

If she’d been smart, she’d have told him to kill the intruders, and he likely could have, some of them at least. I mean, CR 11 creature. But she was, understandably, in a panic, personally threatened for the first time in quite a while. She, too, could probably kill any one or two of the party herself, with Windvane the Spear, if not with just a good Chain Lightning and Cloudkill … but, again, that’s not her way of thinking. Her plan was to high-tail it out of there, and fly down the shaft to the Air Node where she had more powerful warriors and could do … things.

And with Invis, and Fly, she could slip out of the room the same turn she tells the djinn what to do.

The party, wisely, decided not to duke it out with the djinn, when he made it clear that he would follow her command to the letter, and only prevent them from following her. He had some great restraint spells that would allow it (and could, if need be, kill anyone who escaped them). But as long as they stayed there until she’d fled this plane, he was copacetic about it.

They were more than happy to let his Large token hover over the throne until he said she was clear, and then engage in some quick dialog so he could depart back to the Plane of Air himself and catch up on e-mails after six thousand years.

What to do after not quite defeating Aerisi

The players debated what to do next — it was late enough, though, that I basically wrapped things up and told them they could figure it out next time.

There were two meta problems left:

First problem, the book is quite clear that hanging out in a Temple (just like in a Keep) is a Bad Idea, because, in this case, Yan-C-Bin would be torqued off and start summoning mooks to go after them. But, just as in the Keeps, I reaalllly didn’t feel like throwing wave attacks of mooks that would just get killed but chip away slowly at their defenses until they felt they had to flee. I mean, that’s what I should have done, but it sounded very much Not Fun, for me and for the players, which means it was out.

They didn’t seem inclined to a Long Rest (yet, though time-wise it was probably getting to be early evening), but even a Short Rest should have been problematic.

(A lot of parties seem to resolve this with the Tiny Hut. Which is an awesome spell … if you have a Wizard or Bard. Which we didn’t. Rope Trick would also work … if you have a Wizard or Artificer. Which I didn’t. I suppose I could have these artifacts for them to buy, or find. If that’s what I wanted.)

The meta goal from the book, of course, was to get them to leave the Temple back to the surface. This potentially let the Cult Retaliations start, as well as offer an opportunity for side quests. The party, I suspected, though, would want to head on to the Water Temple.

(I decided that I would mark the exits, at least to the other temples. First, the cultists would do so, marking their territory. Second, I didn’t feel like having the players stumble about. If they wanted Water — or Fire — they could do that. I did not mark the exits to the Fane or the Air Node.)

The module provided another prod to get folk topside: slaves/captives. In this case, they had managed to bypass the chapel with the various captives (including Bero the Halfling), who would clearly need an escort up (not only was the march dangerous, but up topside there’s a valley full of murderous gnolls). So one of my challenges, after the Short Rest, would be to encourage them to explore a bit. Ahtayir had spoken of “slaves,” so hopefully the homocidal maniac commoners in the capstan room wouldn’t discourage further exploration.

Second problem, I was dissatisfied with the resolution with Aerisi, for two reasons. First, it felt anti-climactic. BBEG, and she turns invisible and flees. Bah.

Second, even though the book actually offered that as a possibility, it left undefined what happened next. As written, when a prophet is “defeated,” the other three prophets retreat underground — one to the Fane, to summon the EEE, and the other two to their nodes, to summon their Princes.

While “defeated” is often a euphemism for “killed” — which made the most sense here — it could also mean this other “defeated” state (fled to the node). And while I prompted some FUD that she’d only been driven off, and might be back, it still didn’t sit well.

Besides, Aerisi was a fun character who still had more to say. Mad, vindictive, vain, delusional, a perfect Prophet for air. Better, I thought, if Aerisi was dealt with definitively, and in a way that would give the party a “W”.

Which suddenly gave me an idea … 

Maps, Maps, and More Maps

So Aerisi’s throne room (actually the once-and-future throne room of the King of Tyar-Besil in Besilmer) has on “a map of the ancient kingdom.” Sort of like, I imagine now, this:

But at the time, I misread this as “a map of the city.”

Cool! Now the players have a map they can use! Except, of course, the game provides no such map. (They didn’t provide a map of the kingdom, either, though that was more just passing color text.)

I mean, there’s what shows up on the Pyramid throne room floor battle map:

Which is utterly useless for a variety of reasons, leading of which is that’s not how Tyar-Besil looks (or, for that matter, how Besilmir looks, and it does more resemble a city map, maybe of Paris, than a kingdom map).

Actually, the idea of a map of the city in the throne room makes a lot of sense. And the party latched onto it immediately. “Can you give us a copy of the map, Dave?” “Um … sure, next game.”

This actually made me start looking at what maps I did have — one for each Temple — and figure out how they fit.

Part of the problem is that the connections between the Temple maps aren’t immediately evident without some good reading and note taking. Another part is that each Temple has different sorts of exits to other maps. Here’s the list:

Air (Temple of Howling Hatred):

• Surface:  passage in the SW to Feathergale Spire (or nearby environs).
• Temples: passage in the SE to Water; passage in NW to Fire.
• Fane: passage in the NE to the Fane (Purple Worm).
• Nodes: passage in W (inside the pyramid) to the Air Node.

Water (Temple of the Crushing Wave):

• Surface: passage in the SE to Rivergard Keep.
• Temples: passage in the NE to Earth; passage in the SW to Air.
• Fane: passage in the NW (stairs).

Earth (Temple of the Black Earth):

• Surface: passage in the NE to Sacred Stone Monastery.
• Temples: passages in the NW and SW to Fire; passage in the SE to Water.
• Fane: Passage in the W (huge stairs / mine).

Fire (Temple of Eternal Flame):

• Surface: passage in the NW to Scarlet Moon Hall.
• Temples: passages in NE and SE to Earth; passage in SW to Air.
• Fane/Node: passage in E to both the Fane and the Fire Node (elevator).

Or, put together visually (by me) …

Which, once I’d drawn that, I realized that you could actually paste together the four Temple maps to create one huge map that (mostly) fit together perfectly.

(I also came to realize how the Fane and Node maps fit together, as well as how the whole thing was kind of laid out under the Sumber Hills.)

But obviously I didn’t want to hand out full maps to the players. And, of course, while the dwarves might have crafted a literalist Google Map of Tyar-Besil, they might have instead done more symbolic stuff, labels, nicknames, things that might not be easily translated through damage or through linguistic drift over the last five thousand years.

Thus I put together as “notes” they party made from the map of the city in the Pyramid …

Which was in turn crafted from these individual maps:

These became the basis for the players to try to understand this underground geography and, the cool part is, it was somewhat vague and evocative of the past kingdom that crafted them — complete with some Book of Mazarbul-like inscriptions on the portion of the map for the damaged portions of the Black Earth temple (and its slow fall against invading forces). These maps let me refer to the ancient city and its landmarks and quadrants (the Palace, the Gates, the Forges), such that the players could begin to “know” the city and even possibly anticipate what was ahead … without actually knowing what was ahead or how even to get there directly.

(When I started doing “revelation” maps of each Temple, as they explored more, I simply borrowed the labels and pasted them onto the big black areas I put in for unexplored territory. Nobody was concerned that the dimensions had changed.)

Was it a lot of effort? Kinda-sorta. And it all stemmed from a misreading of the book (though arguably it’s something that the campaign could and should have included). But it more than paid off for the time I put into it in giving the players some sense of the space and the history, rather than just having them going on an endless dungeon crawl.

(Permission given to borrow all this stuff for your campaign, by the way, if you include a shout-out link for the source.)

Bits and Bobs

Okay, I might have taken the episode naming (“Session X, Scenario Name, Part Y: Episode Name”) to extremes at this point, but I couldn’t pass up a name like “Pyramid Power.”

(At the time I bragged that I could do that because the directions the players would go were a bit more under control. It was still sort of silly.)

In theory, the party could have short-cut directly down to the Air Node from here. Given where that tunnel beneath the pyramid leaves, it would have been somewhat disastrous. I was already starting, though, to consider how I’d get the party to mostly focus on Tyar-Besil and their level-appropriate foes, rather than delving too deeply and unwisely …

I did congratulate the party on meeting the Cover Star of the Campaign.

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