Recently, in Starbound D&D
The gang has a year to prepare before the local expansionist empire moves on their adoptive hometown
The gang gets really drunk and eats too much and engages in dubious storytelling contests and wacky tarot reading divination hijinks at the annual Midsummer festival
Every year at the midsummer festival the friendly local Wood Elves show up and show off their blink dogs and tressym (flying cats). Except not this year.
The gang is deeply disappointed. So disappointed that they head into the Deep Dark Woods to find out why the friendly local Wood Elves haven’t brought their good good fluffy babies to visit this year.
The gang runs afoul of classic d&d monsters such as owlbears and ogres
The gang befriends an ogre, whom they dub Frogre (friend ogre), who explains that she has been kept in thrall to some fey potentate calling himself the Winter King and he is keeping her from thinking proper ogre thoughts
Thoughts like ‘wait a minute I don’t wanna work for the winter king I wanna smash him and eat him’
The gang dispels the enchantment upon Frogre and she can once again think proper ogrey thoughts
Despite this, she remains friendly with them and accompanies them to the wood elves. The blink dogs and tressym are all there and react about as one would expect- the dogs are friendly and excitable, the cats are generally standoffish at first but warm to the PCs as they hang out and are chill.
The PCs cast Reduce on Frogre so she can get into the elven tree village safely. She is awestruck by how they all got so big all of a sudden.
The wood elves turn out to have been besieged by monsters and hobgoblins sent by the aforementioned ‘Winter King’ and as such could not risk sending their people off to entertain a bunch of festival goers with teleporting dogs and flying cats
The gang befriends some elves and agrees to go look into this since things are definitely Amiss with this whole winter king business
For one thing Winter has a Queen (as in the Unseelie Queen of Air and Darkness) and no one should be fool enough to challenge that least of all another fae
The gang runs into some hobgoblins. Rather than fight the hobgoblins they sow doubt in their military leaders and move on unharmed.
The warlock gets the party so lost that they blunder into a whole other plane of existence
In this Feywild pocket they encounter the Winter King’s dreaded enforcer/assassin, a Troll wearing a cloak of elvenkind and therefore sneakier than he has any right to be
They kill the troll, talk to some harried pixies who are rushing hither and yon to bring on an unseasonable winter (it is late summer) due to the weather-warping effects of the winter king, then return to the normal world
They agree to go stop the winter king because he’s clearly bad news, and besides, then the elves will owe them a bit, and they could for sure use some elven archers when their adopted hometown is attacked by the local expansionist empire next year
They stop off at a hobgoblin town/military encampment and things are going reasonably well until they realize that the hobgoblins’ highest eschelons of leadership have been enchanted to follow the Winter King
And their leaders are apparently being mind-controlled by immature illithid tadpoles who consume their hindbrains and control their bodies like puppets, while still able to access their thoughts to better pass as normal folks
The PCs try to remove an illithid tadpole from a hobgoblin and it kills him. At least he’s not trapped in a living hell where he’s a passenger in his own body anymore?
The tadpole also dies shortly thereafter with no host to live in.
The PCs skedaddle from the hobgoblin town before they can be discovered since it looks like they just assassinated one of their highest ranking commanders.
The hobgoblins end up catching on an hour or so later and pursue the PCs halfway up the mountain where the Winter King lives
The PCs sneak into the Winter King’s lair via a little-used back tunnel
The Winter King turns out to have gone absolutely fucking insane recently and literally devoured all of his guards in his insatiable hunger
His body, in the normal world where a true fey lord can’t exist without a meat body, is basically an emaciated really tall oni
They confront him and fight and in the process of the fight it comes out that he himself is controlled (at least partly) by an illithid tadpole that ate his brain and then completed the physical process of cereomorphosis such that his hideous fanged appearance is a glamour obscuring his horrible squidface
He’s an Onillithid
They manage to kill him after a huge battle, dispatching the body and releasing the Winter King’s fey spirit to return to the feywild and enventually re-corporate.
The winter king had a lot of loot, most of it taken from the elves. The PCs now have a lot of loot, taken from the winter king.
The PCs travel to the elven refuge of Paroneis, which is kind of like if Rivendell had a much more casual attitude and instead of being run by a grumpy ‘half’-high elf was run by a kindly old (very old, so old she even looks old) wood elven druid
The PCs greatly enjoy the company of said kindly old de-facto elf queen, who fills them all in on some lore and offers some good-natured advice and comfort to those who need it
Some dwarves show up from the nearby dwarven kingdom and ask the elves for help with their own problem- lately there have been weirdly coordinated attacks from below
The PCs smell mind flayer shenanigans and decide to get involved. Especially since said dwarven kingdom is the Paladin’s hometown.
