Consequences For (In)Actions

The wind howls as snow whips about the narrow mountain path leading up to Sunblight Fortress. So far the party has approached completely undetected. These surface dwelling Duergar can’t even imagine people crazy enough to assault their seat of power.

Suddenly the sounds in the air change. The wail of the wind begins to be drowned out by the loud cracking of ice, and the slow grinding of metal on metal.

A light appears dozens of feet above at the pinnacle of the fortress. The soft yellow glow of lanterns and torches spills out into the dark night sky as large metal shutters are pulled apart opening a portion of the fortress’ peak to the air.

The sounds of scraping metal and ice plummeting down the side of the mountain fade away allowing the group to hear a new bizarre tone. A thrumming that increases in volume over the course of a few moments before exploding into the boom of an otherworldly horn.

Rising out of the gap atop the fortress is a dark shape with beating wings. Shimmering slightly, reflecting the torchlight below this dragon made of what appears to be a dark stone lifts itself into the air. Hovering some distance above the apex of the fortress it begins to emit light of its own. A deep, powerful orange spills out between the pieces of what the group has identified as chardalyn.

As soon as the light has reached the tip of each of its appendages the beast immediately points its head in the direction of the Ten Towns and begins its descent into Icewind Dale.

The group has a decision to make. Do they continue their assault on Sunblight Fortress, or rush to the aid of the Ten Towns and hope they can defend some of it from the destruction this creature is sure to rain down?

The group I’m running for decided to chase after the dragon to defend the Ten Towns, forgoing any possible information or potential counter-measures that may be contained in the fortress where the construct was made in the interest of having as much time to defend the people of Icewind Dale as possible. At least that’s what I assumed they’d do.

Instead what happened was a short jaunt back to Bryn Shander and a whole lot of standing around waiting for the dragon to show up. Eventually survivors from the earliest attacked towns began showing up with horror stories of what the chardalyn dragon had done to their homes and loved ones. In the interest of conserving their strength the party continued to stay holed up behind Bryn Shander’s walls.

As more and more refugees began pouring in, one player did decide to sprint off into the night to warn a couple of towns of the incoming danger and bring them back to Bryn Shander as a rallying point.

Eventually the dragon showed up and burnt large portions of Bryn Shander to a crisp, blowing holes in the walls to allow Duergar ground troops that had approached under the effects of their invisibility to storm into the town and engage its defenders.

The party held back the Duergar as best they could at the flash points they showed up at until the dragon decided to engage them itself. After an unlikely ally reappeared to aid them, the group eventually destroyed the dragon and pushed the Duergar back.

As they licked their wounds and made preparations over the next couple days to return to assault Sunblight Fortress I described in depressing tones how few survivors continued to show up where Bryn Shander’s gates used to stand as well as the loss of life to the Duergar ground forces and hidden assassins in the town itself. All in all Nine out of the Ten Towns were razed to the ground and somewhere around 75-80% of the population of the now One Town of Icewind Dale died in the attacks.

The group survived which considering their less than heroic dispositions is all they really intended to do from the outset, but some of them were wracked by guilt pains over the loss of so much life due to their inaction while the dragon ravaged the outlying towns.

Remember that the player characters are people in a (to them at least) real world. They often are involved in high stakes situations and if they mishandle things then reality has to play out and they and the other people in the world must suffer the consequences.

While the somewhat ambivalent players may not care about the statistics of the loss of life, their characters will feel the effects of it. Most of the leadership structure that existed is gone, a large number of tradespeople and what standing army there was have been wiped out.

Getting armour and weapons repaired, finding appropriate amounts of travelling supplies and equipment, mustering allies to aid in dealing with the Frostmaiden and who knows what other problems in the Dale are all going to prove almost impossible now that the local populace has been decimated.

To paraphrase a favourite game of mine “The thread of prophecy has been severed and you must now exist in the doomed world you have created.”

Who knows though, maybe it’ll all be okay in the end.

Place No Limitations

I love being a DM for a lot of reasons, but this week I’m being reminded of one of them a couple of different ways and it sort of highlights a mind set I think every person who runs the game should try to have even if it seems scary a lot of the time, especially for newer players.

What I’m talking about is not letting yourself be tied down to what’s written in this or that book for a rule, or what the predefined content of the game is. Let me give an example that came up in my Rime of the Frost Maiden game this past week that I think illustrates what I mean. Spoiler warning for Rime of the Frost Maiden I guess.

One of my Players generated the Slaad Tadpole secret during character creation. What are these secrets? Rime of the Frost Maiden has a bunch of secret backstory stuff PCs can start play with. Some rather mundane, some pretty out there. My group ended up rolling some rather cool ones including this player having been implanted with a Slaad tadpole prior to the start of the adventure.

The player in question has been adventuring as a custom class I’ve made called a Sanguinor, a class based around using hit points and hit dice as resources, mostly involving blood magic and the manipulation of vital energies. This leads to a lot of strange body horror type situations that his adventuring companions have been numbed to over time though their horror is occasionally refreshed.

Okay, background information out of the way on on to the point. This week that character died screaming in horrible agony.

After weeks of escalating chest pains with no solutions sought, the tadpole burst forth from the character’s chest cavity in a spray of screams and gore, ending his life as it begins its own. The party didn’t really understand what was happening. Was this intentional on his part? Did one of his spells backfire horribly? Travelling with a blood mage is strange so they often don’t know what to expect or how to react to the things he does.

With no Revivify prepared or the materials at hand, there was little the group could do for their now fallen comrade as the creature slipped away to finish its maturation process elsewhere in the fortress they had invaded.

While the party finishes clearing out this fortress and perhaps comes up with some scheme to resurrect their fallen ally, the Sanguinor player needs a new character to play in the interim. Introducing a new character in the middle of a dungeon can often be ham fisted and forced but I always try my best to make it interesting.

When the player asked what they should make as a character to continue this leg of the adventure I noticed they didn’t seemed super enthused about playing a bog standard PC that the party meets randomly in the fortress for “reasons”. So I suggested they play one of the Duergar warriors that have allied themselves with the party to overthrow their insane overlord. That or they could play the Slaad that just killed them.

“Both of those sound cool, but how would it work? Neither of them are playable classes.” Notes my observant player.

This is where understanding that the game is what happens at the table, not what’s written in the books that can make all the difference in someone’s enjoyment of D&D.

“You just tell me you want to do it and I’ll worry about the how later.” Is all I said in response.

“Okay, I’ll be a Slaad!” They reply back with some enthusiasm.

Now I’m going to have to figure out how to make a playable character class out of a monster stat block and will probably lose sleep thinking about it the next week or two. But seeing the player enthusiastic about being something completely unique makes it worth it, and the pain of losing the character they’ve spent the last few months with is already fading.

As long as it isn’t going to ruin someone else’s fun, or completely disintegrate the verisimilitude or an important idiosyncrasy of the world you’re presenting, just figure out a way for awesome and strange stuff to happen. Other kinds of fun have all sort of limits imposed upon them, the greatest part of tabletop is that you’re only limited by what you can think of.

POST SCRIPT THOUGHTS:

I haven’t actually had the player decide what variety of Slaad their tadpole will grow into. But my initial thoughts are if they decide red, I’ll just smash together the existing Red Slaad monster block with some stuff from a Barbarian. If they say green it’ll probably that smashed together with some extra wizard stuff. Slaad in their monster stat blocks clearly lean towards certain classes but with their own twist based on their innate species abilities. Shouldn’t be too difficult but knowing which colour will at least let me get started.