This session turned out to be a bigger deal than I thought going in. In fact, this is the last full session with all three players of the campaign. So let's get into it.
Brokk bull rushed Horton after Aurora's unsuccessful attack and bear hugged Horton from behind, heavily damaging him with a casting of Blight. Horton then broke free of Brokk and tried to speak with Aurora, who was unwilling to play games with Horton, so Horton cast Feeblemind on Aurora, dealing damage but failing to render Aurora useless. Lethanin also withdrew from his hiding place and blasted Horton with a burst from the bagpipes, replicating a Sonic Scream which sliced Horton severely. Hriskin hacked at Horton with her sword, scoring some nasty blows. Niela slipped Horton into a full nelson and held him for Aurora to finish him off. Over a few tense moments, Aurora repeatedly cast a spell that undid the binding force that held Horton together, and he eventually dissolved into component elements that blew across the clearing with a smell of lightning. Horton was dead.
Out of game, this combat moved fast. We did exactly one round of combat that was slightly elongated by the fact that Horton was held helpless for a few seconds leading up to his death. It even got to the point that Aurora's player spoke to me after the session about it. She said that it seemed like I was unreasonably nice to the party, always granting advantages and boosts and underpowering enemies. I chuckled. I had to remind her that Horton was surrounded by five dragons and one of the most powerful spellcasters ever to live, and that Horton never really stood a chance. She did eventually agree that this has some solid logic to it, but I could see that she still had a sense that Horton had been too easy a fight. So I also pointed out that Horton was held motionless for half the half, and my wife did agree that in fact Horton hadn't been a surprising fight.
I want to drill down on this for a second because it's been a theme in this campaign. My party started the campaign at level 12. At the beginning of this fight, Lethanin and Brokk and level 20 due to being promoted to dragonhood, and Aurora is level 16 with a class that allows for huge potential for destruction. Aurix is level 50, Niela is level 40, and Hriskin is level 30. Let's get technical with challenge rating for a second. Horton has a challenge rating of about 40. But what's the challenge rating of the party? 172. This is the same problem that came up with Thomas and Regg. With a high powered party who has high powered friends, few combat presences will pose a threat. So what do we do with imbalance in power?
We may not need to do anything at all. What exactly is the source of power the party has? It's not their level. If the fight was Lethanin, Brokk, and Aurora against Horton, they differential in challenge ratings would be so much closer that a close fight was possible. But Aurix, Niela, and Hriskin were there too. That massively shifts the scales. So what's their real power? Working together. Most of this campaign was the party getting the dragons assembled before they really did anything. And everything after that fell into place easily. Fixing the fabric of reality, wiping out evil dragons--not a huge sutrggle after dealing with the metallics they needed to work together with. But the hard work is done--the party can call on these massively powerful allies for things that would be otherwise impossible. I plan to make that theme explicit in the epilogue sessions that will follow this.
Brokk turned to Aurora, asking what came next. Aurora began to plan for attacks on Pelor's Mercy. Aurora suggested arming the prisoners of the camps in the city and having them revolt, but Niela countered that arming the prisoners was a quick way to get them killed. This shut down the conversation pretty thoroughly for a while, no one sure how to proceed. Everyone started the discussion over from scratch, working step by step on a new plan. They decided they would sweep through the town and deal damage to the city, fight the guards across town, and freeing the prisoners. Aurora suggested waiting until after sundown to attack so that the prisoners could safely evacuate their camps; Hriskin said the time was now, and waiting could complicate things. Niela added to this that Horton could be missed at his law offices, and after some debate, she forged a note claiming Horton was off fishing as he liked to do and sent it to his workplace.
Meanwhile, Aurora messaged a dissident in one of the camps, Peggy, a halfling who had helped Aurora with basic apothecary work, telling her to get all prisoners out of the camps and into the woods beyond immediately. Peggy asked for ten minutes and set to work. After some final discussion and a quick map traced by Aurora in the dirt, Aurix announced it was time, and each member of the group partnered off and teleported to specific locations spread across Pelor's Mercy.
Aurora's player requested a showdown at Pelor's Mercy before her first intro session, so I'd been imagining what the battle might look like. I could see the player characters charging across the fields of Pelor's Mercy and cutting down the horrible guards. I could visualize the licking flames foretold in Aurora's backstory, the frightened prisoners, the furious nobles. I didn't sit down to plan a real battle in full since it seemed far away and I wasn't sure how my players would go about it, but this session moved fast. The group was in Pelor's Mercy about a third of the way through our session time, and there hadn't been a lot of discussion confirming that Pelor's Mercy (what we'd established would be a final moment in the campaign) would immediately follow Horton. As DMs are, I was taken by surprise. But the levelling issue I mentioned above with combat? It came into greater effect here.
Lethanin and Hriskin appeared at the southwest edge of town, and guards were immediately called on Lethanin, who was a non-Daltoner. Lethanin then transformed into his sound dragon form, taking off and spewing fire and ice down on the town below; Hriskin sent to fighting guards who approached. Meanwhiule, Brokk and Niela transformed into dragons and flew across town, burning the three bridges in the city and then joining Lethanin in destroying the city. Aurix set to helping destroy town, and Aurora took a place near the center of Pelor's Mercy and cast a spell calling for fire to rain down on the town. As she cast the spell, a brilliant and intense column of light shone down on Aurora, a blessing from Pelor who rejoiced to see a blow down to the mockery of them. The light allowed Aurora to increase the number of glyphs used in a spell, and she added one to focus the fire on the city. From the sky, flames, lava, and the occasional burning piece of debris fell. Pelor's Mercy was ignited and burning to the ground.
This happened in about ten or fifteen minutes. Not a single die was rolled. If five dragons and a powerful, angry spellcaster descend on your town, you have few options. The guards from the camps couldn't help in the town because Brokk destroyed the bridges. The guards in town and the camps could do little to fight five swarming dragons hellbent on destroying everything. A dragon flying quickly over guards who are shocked to learn that dragons really exist is hardly vulnerable to a few guards on the ground. And what the group did made people from the prisoners to the prisoners' families to political groups to religious groups to literal gods very happy, and that final one meant Aurora could destroy Pelor's Mercy in one fell blow. Was it tense and exciting and satisfying in the way that good combat it? No, absolutely not. But Pelor's Mercy had been on the group's radar for a long time, and absolutely dominating it was a different kind of satisfying.
Aurora wandered the short distance to what she now remembered was her childhood home. A few servants stumbled from the burning building, and then Aurora's parents followed. Her father did not recognize her at all, and her mother only figured it was her daughter after a long moment. A tense conversation followed in which Aurora's mother tore into Aurora for not following the strictures of the Dalton Church of Pelor and judging her for her gender. Her father simply grew agitated and confused, pushing Aurora to get away. But Aurora broke his arm and sent him sprawling. She yelled at her mother for judging her and watched as her parents left. The massive crest of Pelor atop the house burned and fell, and slowly, Aurora's wooden sword turned to ash and drifted away in the air, mingled with the ashes of Pelor's Mercy.
But it wasn't over for Aurora, for whom time stopped. ABC, the fae who'd given her her powers years before, appeared again to thank Aurora for doing as she had been asked. Aurora seemed distant and dissatisfied, which ABC inquired about. Aurora was coy and didn't commit to much but did suggest she was interested in the fae dragonhood. ABC happily offered it, and Aurora agreed and followed ABC to the fae realm, which was a mass of intersecting planes and stark colors that was confusing to see. Aurora followed ABC with tunnel vision until they arrived at a jagged crystalline stone with a draconic inscription that, when read, transformed Aurora into the fae dragon. ABC brought Aurora back to the mundane realm, where Aurora created a statue in the center of Pelor's Mercy of the Dalton Church of Pelor's deity kneeling to Aurora.
This is where the panic set in. Pelor's Mercy was pretty much dealt with. I had nothing to add. Once the cleanup after the battle was done, I had no material to offer my players (without unnecessarily stringing the story along). So I just kept asking what else they did. Here's what they did:
Lethanin made it a personal mission to see that town was destroyed, breathing flames and fury down on any standing building. Brokk saw to dealing with the last of the guards in the town and in the camps. Niela suggested to Brokk that they tend to the prisoners, and she and Brokk flew from camp to camp, sending the prisoners safely north. As the city lay burning to the ground, Lethanin perched atop an archway and played the violin as the embers smoldered. Once the dragons had reconvened, they headed north and met up with the traveled prisoners. The prisoners emphatically thanked the group and spoke with hope of a new life in Vestry and beyond, and for an hour, the long stream of thousands of freed prisoners marched past with thanks and smiles. Aurora, tired, tried to summon her wooden sword to lean on and couldn't, much to her delight. Brokk heard a familiar dwarven voice in his head--Moradin's--who thanked him for doing a good job. She said she'd originally wanted the rift left open, but she ended up agreeing with Brokk in the end. Brokk said he hoped to speak to her again soon, then said his goodbyes and said he planned to spend some time with Niela; Lethanin stated his interest in pursing other mysteries of the universe such as the globe possessed by Calies Tasselman during his intro session; Aurora simply wanted to spend some time with her mother, Heather, at the old apothecary shop. Content that their joint purpose was served and that Evanoch was a better place, they departed to enjoy their own pursuits.
And so technically the bulk of this campaign is over. But it's actually not really over in any way that matters. Each of my players will now complete two more sessions with me one-on-one. Each of these sessions will cover two time periods for a total of four big moments. Those moments will take place immediately following the campaign, one year later, ten years after the campaign, and one hundred years after the campaign. This accomplishes two big goals:
1. Dragonhood is basically immortality, and I want a sense of how that impacts the players. How do they deal with staying the same as others age? As they lose people? As they really begin to see that the power of dragonhood comes with a sacrifice? As a one hundred years later moment really lets us see who the player characters become after the polish of dragonhood has worn off?
2. I have vowed to leave D&D alone as a DM for a long time after this campaign. It's been the culmination of almost 20 years of DMing, it's made me immensely proud, and it's changed my world forever. I need some time to detox, and so does Evanoch. I'm breaking tradition--whereas every campaign I've run has happened immediately following the last (lots of massive world-changing things in a week and a half), my next campaign (whenever that happens) will take place one hundred years after this campaign. And so having an idea what my dragons are up to then will be especially important.
I also want to spend some time just giving this trio real endings. I want their players to feel like their characters ended up where they should, and that means giving them more time to breathe. I want to see how Brokk and Niela's life together looks and see how the bullet points Brokk's player already gave me for the epilogues get played out. I want to see Lethanin interact with his family again after the dinner party and see what his music career is like now and what he does with all the strange information he collects. I want to see Aurora enjoy time with her mom and experiment with spells and hang out with the fae and her Edmund Fitzgerald friends. I don't want to just feel content imagining all that either. I want the players to share those moments with me so they know that their character really did get to be happy.
The truth of it is, Of Gods and Dragons is my favorite thing I've ever run. Maybe it's because I'm playing with my two best friends and my wife. Maybe it's because this campaign puts together ideas from almost two decades of gaming. Maybe I'm more talented than last time I DMed. I don't know. But my players gave me the time of my life with these silly little gods and dragons, and I want to feel confident that they had a great time too, one they'll remember. I'm sure the epilogue sessions will be as radically different as the intro sessions, and I look forward to that. And that's because they'll be totally that character. These characters attained dragonhood--they should get to end on their own terms.
So while Pelor's Mercy's destruction marks the end of the campaign, there is still more. Together, Brokk, Lethanin, and Aurora will write the history of my world for the next century and beyond, and so the three epilogue sessions that follow will give you a conclusion for these characters and a foundation for what eventually comes next. Stick around to see what endings our trio chooses for themselves, and so--until next time, happy gaming!
Brokk's Epilogue
Aurora's Epilogue
Lethanin's Epilogue
The Finale Session
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