the GM ask thing: 1, 6, 8
nat 1. most memorable crit fail by an NPC?
so a couple of sessions ago the airship the party was travelling on had been sabotaged by long-running antagonist aria nemo, the separatist mage– though this time she wasn’t after the party, but rather there in assistance of barrett antoine the privateer, who’d been commissioned to hunt down the fleeing deposed prince of the xeanid empire travelling on that very airship. aria had destroyed the ship’s elemental engine and aux power, and after a brief battle she teleported away with barrett and the prince. barrett’s ship fled too, leaving the party and the bevy of NPCs they were travelling with (this was the biggest battle i’d done to date) stuck on the deck of an airship that was rapidly losing altitude, plummeting into the icy mountain range below. the ship’s engineers, spurgeon bennett and yu cheng, had come up with a harebrained plan to open a portal to the plane of magic and use the energy to power the ship, but it required a series of difficult arcana checks (aided by the players). all the checks to properly construct the portal went fine, the two mage players knelt around the circle, spurgeon took the helm of the ship, and everyone made their checks to see if they could properly open the portal—
but my players rolled well! what ended up happening was that yu injured himself badly opening up the portal, and the responsibility for keeping the airship aloft fell fully onto the players. i had them make a straight up-and-down spellcasting check, and then based on that roll damage on their highest-level spell a couple times to see how much magical juice they could pump into this thing to keep it open— and because one of the players was a sorcerer focused (as sorcerers are wont to do) entirely on Making Big Explosions, it was a lot of juice. yu’s natural one meant that the airship came perilously close to crashing, and the sorcerer, a sixteen-year-old half-elf who’d spent her whole life in the shadow of her famous mage parents, threw everything she had into physically forcing it back into the sky, aided by the warlock who’d at that point become something of a surrogate parent. it was an amazing “captain america holding down a helicopter” superhero moment, and it would not have happened if not for that nat one.
6. proudest improvised moment that the players had no idea was improvised?
so for halloween we did a special spooky mystery session, right? it was set in the aftermath of the harvest ball, where someone (they didn’t know who yet) had summoned a chimera to wreak havoc and also knocked out the pcs’ mentor, a very powerful sorcerer. the players managed to defeat the beast and save the injured NPCs, barely, but the next session they realized that something funky was going on, because 1. the only pc up after defeating the chimera had seen something strange and 2. their mentor was now drained of all his magic through some kind of necromantic curse.
they stayed the night in the mansion of the host, an autumn eladrin noblewoman by the name of margueritte julien, and the next morning decided to check out the house to see if they could figure out what was going on. cue haunted house antics! eventually, the PCs figured out that
there was once a very powerful mage from this family by the name of jean-henri julien, who ascended to lichdom, was defeated by a knight of the raven queen, and then had his existence wiped from history so thoroughly that the only remnant of his memory was a letter by his grandson in the family archives;
there was necromantic activity happening in the crypt beneath the house— the crypt lady julien adamantly denied the existence of;
the person lilith had seen after the chimera was defeated was a necromancer.
from these facts they drew the conclusion i wanted them to draw: namely, the fellow lilith had seen was attempting to raise jean-henri julien (whose lich name was dominicus) from the dead, for uncertain-but-definitely-nefarious purposes. however, they then realized that they hadn’t seen their mentor, james (yes it’s the same james i play in another game), all day— and jumped quite quickly to the notion that montague, the necromancer, had kidnapped him.
now, this was totally not a part of my original plan! i knew i needed to get james out of the picture, because as delightful as the pcs’ interactions with him were, one cannot simply have an 18th-level spellcaster hanging around for your level 4 party to call on whenever, as they say, shit gets real. i’d intended just to have the draining of his abilities by a curse to be semi-permanent (maybe a later arc would deal with trying to cure him), but when the players assumed (on account of me failing to mention his whereabouts for most of the session) that monty had nabbed him, i very quickly incorporated that into the ending of the mystery. dominicus needed the body of someone accustomed enough to magic to not burn up when possessed by an arch-lich, but unable to resist him— of course james was the natural choice!
so the session ended with the party arriving to monty’s necromantic lab, right in the middle of his ritual to summon dominicus from the astral plane. cue a frantic struggle to kill monty before the ritual could be completed and their mentor possessed— a struggle which failed when malia, our sorcerer, missed with a last-ditch desperate chromatic orb that almost certainly would have killed him, giving monty just enough time to funnel the rest of his life-force into the completion of the ritual and fall dead at the party’s feet. james was possessed, they’d failed to stop the ritual, and to top it off lilith was dead (but that’s another story).
james-dominicus has become a biiiiig plot point for the rest of the campaign— malia keeps having dreams of playing illimat with him, where james is tapping out a message in the code he taught her when he trained with her, but she’s unsure whether it’s really him or dominicus trying to trick her. recently the party had an audience with james’s progenitor, king john the ancient gold dragon, where they begged him to intervene and he declined, citing his obligation to stay uninvolved as a ruler, and djedi spent a good twenty minutes arguing ethics with him. all the party members had really fascinating relationships with james— he’d been around since session 1— and their emotional reactions to his loss and the prospect of saving him have been super dynamic and amazingly fertile ground to drive the story forward.
8. coolest NPC you’ve designed that your players haven’t met yet?
oh, it’s gotta be jack bailey! they’ve met his younger brother edward, the halfling divination wizard and very nervous grad student, because he played a pretty central role in the last arc— it was his mentor whose mysterious death they were investigating. but where edward is notably nonconfrontational and bookish, jack’s the exact opposite. he’s a swashbuckling charmer who works as a travelling entertainer with a troupe of trained swordsmen— his act is acrobatic rapier and cutlass duelling. the brothers are a bit awkward around each other, as tends to happen with siblings who are close in age but not at all similar, but they love each other a lot. i’m looking forward to their reunion, and how they deal with the fact that edward came very close to sacrificing his life to protect the city of aelia capitolina from the diviner’s bomb that he’d unknowingly helped build.
