Sorry for the extreme delay in reporting on this - last update was in April 2022 apparently. Oops!
They had ticked over to level 16 in April 2022 and reached level 20 by October 2022.
In the last entry in April 2022 they had acquired the final crystal, the Crystal of Water, and ended the drowning of the land. All 3 of the crystals in their possession pointed them toward Steel Mountain in the west where the first crystal they had acquired, the Crystal of Fire, had been taken to by the enemy.
Climbing Steel Mountain, fighting Giants; the Crystal of Fire (Session 60 - 62)
Session 61 had them systematically destroyed the giants at the 'wedding'. Erin the rogue shot down a dragon, ARI the fighter at level 16 was a welcome return and they beat everything into powder. Scorch the wizard and Ephrim the barbarian were well able to hang. Victory was followed by some plot explaining from Ari then up to summit.
Inside, FGK cast meteor swarm; only scorch was downed everyone else tanked it. Incredible.
Session 62 had thefinal battle v FGK and WARFORGED COLOSSUS. They started to bash the FGK and the Warforged pinned Ari and Ephrim down, lasered the rest. They recovered and Precis banished the FGK with a smite. They ground down the Colossus eventually. They all gathered and bashed the FGK when he popped back into the material plane. Crystal of Fire back with Ari and they got some loot randoms then left. Rest, some healing potions added and as they flew away the airship was pulled to ground - evil party!
Entering the HellMouth, destroying the evil essences of the Crystals (Session 63-70)
Session 63
Battle with evil party. I made a party of opposite to fight them, just because I had to do it. They were sent by the Queens or some shit. They defeated not-ephrim and ari easily enough, the enemy fighter and barbarian were in the open. Not-scorch psychic meteor swarm was tough, as in, he did a psychic flavoured Meteor Swarm thanks to a Wizard ability. Nobody was downed but not-erin still alive after all that. they eventually hunted down not-erin, ari shot them to death. I got to play a bit of reverse stealth rogue on them. Gaius arrived; the crystals combined and opened a 'hellmouth'; he paid them 1.4 million gold for services rendered thus far. They went on ashopping spree; they bought loads of good stuff from Eastport which had recently fallen to the revolutionaries and then got back to business. Precis gave them 5 slot attunements and custom weapons. Artificers!
Session 64 - Dealing with Hellmouth of Crystals
They flew into hellmouth and things very hot - fire demiplane! Enemy phoenixes died easy but imix was tough. Very fun to run. 2 fire storms, a fireball on himself, teleporting into them and back, smokescreen; he did everything he could. Ari got him with bow, fire shard rewarded reality shifted to air demiplane. One crystal destroyed, 5 to go. The shards acted as better, less volatile Crytals. They got a short rest of sorts in the transition and will continue to do so for the next few fights. They immediately start falling, all of them can fly except Gaius and Bobot... what does this mean?
Session 65 - Air demiplane and beyond
There is no ground in the Air demiplane" They briefly fought elder tempest/yan-c-bin. Despite his nonsense they win easy. Of course. Zaratan-ogremoch-tarrasque is tougher on the Earth plane afterwards! They are all grounded but whittle him down. Tough shots but everyone lived. They short rest and go to water plane.
Session 66 water part 1
The Kraken-Leviathan faces them. Lightning vulnerability and damage doled out to some party members. Kraken manages to ingest Precis, then Ari, then Gaius. He had not been having a good day.
Huge damage being dealt to both sides - Session ended after 1 hour due to technical issues mid battle.
Session 67 water2 and light
They defeat kraken-leviathan hybrid and onto light as their choice over darkness. Three opponents gave them hassle, including the mighty marut Gaius downed, everyone injured. They defeated the trio of holy angelic beings and onto darkness! They were now level 19!
Session 68: darkness
They flounder in a maze, especially erin-ari-gaius. They lacked the extra dark vision. Ephrim, scorch and precis take out death knight as they were in two separate parties in the maze. The lich is a constant nuisance, they are hit by big and small spells from a mechanism on the ceiling. Erin joined session and Ari smashed darkness machine. They manage to corner lich and defeat him. They arrive in one final section, a circus, cards for all for admission!
Session 69 - Jolly Polly circus
They move forward into the weird sights. Ephrim eats spider legs; gets excellent 3 cards from fortune lady (moon, xp,items,something else) is level 20 now. Scorch discomfitted by all this; they enter circus tent. Erin joins session; they go through 'Eyrie' and arrive in court, they defend themselves excellently against queen judges and jolly polly. Like, a real mock court session. Scorch in beholder inn, caught there a bit; Ephrim was back at were-cart scene from session 1 and defeats weretiger and advances to final section; lost all his money again via Ruin card. Erin gets Gaius back as a reward (he was donjon'd by Erin) and advances to final section to PJ.
Session 70 - Jolly Polly fight
Scorch finally extracted himself from the pub and Jolly Polly attacked. Scorch 'drew' the fool -10,000 exp but no matter. They ganked him, partially as Eoghan the GM forgot to help him much. Reality dissolved and they made it back, rest in desert, rescued by airship, planning final attack on Moonwheat with second queen there, Erin scouted it out.
Defeating the Second Queen and the Final Queen, Final Battle (Sessions 71-75)
Upon exiting the hell mouth and defeating the evil party they attacked Moonwheat again for the final time. They slaughtered a ton of soldiers and a Tarrasque until finally coming face to face with the Second Queen, the Queen of the West, who split herself into two parts, a giant dragon and a powerful mage. Despite the anti-magic field, they managed to defeat the Queen and all that was left was the Final Queen, holed up in the capital city.
They marched south at the head of the revolutionary army and the royalists folded without a fight, except in the Grand Palace. There they fought all her fanatics including many Light and Life themed enemies. After dispatching them they fought her (twice) and then she ascended into the heavens and combined with her sisters’ essences for one last scrap.
The Three Queens dished out tons of damage but were ultimately defeated by the Crystal Warriors, Ephrim and the Ephrimettes, whatever they went by.
Gaius ascended to the throne but was a much more humble man and renounced autocracy for constitutional monarchy, but not before acquiring Ephrim the barbarian’s services in attacking the Confederacy with a great army. Erin would return to Hell to resolve some unfinished business, accompanied by Scorch and Precis. Ari would continue her journey to overthrow the Elven Republic, which it is foretold she will succeed in one day, but she’s only young, at 70 years old she has maybe another 400 years give or take to get that job done. Various friends and former foes gathered in the capital to celebrate the unthinkable, the fall of the vicious Three Queens, after almost 2000 years of rule.
Some other stats:
Final bestiary kills from previous entry:
Session # #kills/experience gained
The bestiary - I was happy that I used way more monsters in this campaign. In my first and only prior major campaign 2007-2009 I used predominantly humanoids, mainly because I didn’t have a full grasp of the rules of 3rd edition.
Tiamat was a great final boss, dishing out tons of damage and managing to down one or two of the party members in the process. I had flirted with putting together my own homebrew final boss which had way more spells but short of time and patience I opted for a ready-made end boss. I re-skinned Tiamat not as a dragon goddess but as the combined essences of the Three Queens.
Level versus session analysis:
So was about right, some estimates have campaigns lasting about 70+ sessions and talking about that length of time to complete. We started in June 2020, then had a long hiatus in the autumn time, then back into it by the start of 2021 and kept it pretty consistent until November 2022 which is kind of mad to think about.
Most sessions were roughly 3-4 hours, very few of them ran short. Though I wanted one or two sessions to be started early and last longer, we never did any session greater than 5 hours. I thought maybe for one or two of the battles we’d start in the afternoon and get it done by the evening but it never came to pass.
But yes, if you look above the level progression is about right for the amount of sessions. They spent so long at level 14 as they were in the gigantic Water Dungeon. After that it escalated fairly quickly as they collected the last two Crystals and things went to hell. They reached level 20 a few sessions prior to the final battle.
I won’t repeat this in the next campaign but I encouraged them all to be the absolute baddest versions of themselves: for example the barbarian had the Earth Crystal which rose his Constitution to 30 by level 20 (24 plus 6 from the Crystal) so with other stuff his HP was 385 at the end. Likewise the Rogue had Dexterity 30, the Wizard Intelligence 28 and so on. Just allowed me to throw stronger stuff at them - they were never in deep trouble but there were a handful of times where they were dropping like flies and started to panic a bit and make elaborate plans to retreat, which they did one time infamously from a particular battle over a town they needed to infiltrate.
I dropped a Tarrasque on them mid-battle and they cut it down so I wasn’t too worried!
Roll 20 final maps:
Roll20 was a revelation, it still is; I have loads of maps archived there and have the next campaign partially set up. I will continue to use Roll20 and DND Beyond for the next campaign, which is another Warhammer 1st edition campaign modified for 5e. I thought about doing Spelljammer but am currently a player in one of those campaigns so will leave it for now.
I could start it anytime but am waiting for the bug to bite me as it usually does. That and am completely snowed under by my two college courses so when one is finished in June and the other calms down at the same time, I will probably pull the trigger on it.
Final scene:
The menagerie:
Conclusions:
So in sum, it was a good campaign. What more can I say, it kept me going from June 2020 to November 2022. I made frienships with two cool new people and got to hang out with my two besties as well.
I had wanted to run something for ages but finally built up the juice again by summer 2020. I was on night shift at a quiet point in work putting together the first few sessions.
I was quite please at how I adapted the Doomstones campaign. I used the entire first book for sure as written, the Fire Crystal book including the fight with Torgoch and the Waterfall complex etc. They moved passed book 2 unwittingly so I swung over to the Eyrie and book 3, which I mostly adapted as is. I modified some of the fight to suit DND but there really were 400 Orcs or whatever marching up the mountain.
Book 2 they circled back to and I dropped the Ogre-Dwarf feud and just had a megadungeon instead. Same with the Water Dungeon, it has a Dwarf civil war plot in the books but I ditched that in favour of a gigantic map I found on DeviantArt and elsewhere.
So that made up a lot of the story, combined with my own 'Lacour Revolution' which some of the shit they did is now in the canon and others... not so much. But the Queens do rule Lacour for 2000 and were overthrown by Gaius so it was nice to explore that timeline, even if they spent most of it in the wilderness. Which actually suits a DND campaign, because the 'Core' is now so civilized quests and monsters are not exactly abundant.
Some of the plot too was player-driven, so that completes the third and final strand of the campaign. The Elf fighter wanted to become Queen, which they nearly ran off and did but I reined them in. The Elven Republic is too robust for that, yet. But canonically Ari will be the Queen Mother to the Emperor who does (briefly, 21+ years) overthrow the Republic. She will be 475 and almost dead when it happens but nonetheless! The barbarian did it for love of fighting and money and succeeded at everything. Even if he died 3 times (shh). The Wizard was not from this Plane so just took it all in and reported back to his God. The rogue has unfinished business in hell, which may be expanded on (watch this space).
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So in sum a good campaign, bit of an abrupt ending and there are a ton of things I would have done differently but I loved the fights, loved the monsters and loved the craic we had. Will hopefully run a new campaign in the summer and beyond when I get a bit more time again - an adapted Enemy Within campaign (more Warhammer Fantasy 1st edition woohoo!) combined with the 'Scramble for Africa'-like history of the Terra Majestus....
