Fuzzybear
Explorer
The Winds and the Orb
So close to caught up... one more adventure. This has been tough.After the shock of near death in teleporting to Ostalin and meeting with the Khagan (multiple Death Wards were triggered), the party heads north with Three Weeping Ravens towards the Monastery. I wanted to make sure to have TWR talk about soul gems and events surrounding the temple coming up in adventure 7. I hope this preps the adventure over there a bit more so that it feels less random.
I also talked with Winry beforehand to figure out how much she wanted her family involved in things. While I wasn't planning on having them captured or killed or anything similar to that, I wanted to know how much to prepare for her wanting to hunt them down, spend time with them, learn more about them, etc. Fortunately, and I kind of had the feeling already of this, she didn't really want to explore that significantly as she wanted her story to be about Winry, not Winry's past. I did have her father and brother caught in Balance's aura, so technically in some minor danger if the party completely abandoned Eresh, I didn't tie them more explicitly to the story than that. I think this was something of a disappointment to the other players who drink up anything Winry related, but at the same time I can respect players who communicate their wishes for their characters with me.
As it was, the majority of this adventure follows along with the guide. There were some small changes, but I didn't feel quite as much of a need to completely overhaul it as @RangerWickett talked about in their separate thread roughly as I was started this. The biggest change that I got to make was incorporating Rev's ex-patron Aemon Ming further into the plot. Having departed Seaquen prior to the devastation of the hurricane, Ming was on a mission. His experiments into death and resurrection had hit a proverbial wall. Then he got word through his Ragesian contacts of another master of the craft and decided to take a chance on it. Ming takes up Rivenstone, Rev's clone brother, altering him with biomancy to grow large wings capable of carrying him in flight, and heads out to the Monastery to learn and grow his work. He arrives shortly before Balance's explosion, but is carefully intercepted by Caela anyway to avoid the town.
Unbeknownst to Ming, he was followed through Ostalin by another of Rev's clone brothers, Edric (now called Ric, the short R name joke continues). His appearance in Eresh is quite simply just a way to get Rev's paranoia up and sow the seeds for later. My plan is for Ming to be a part of the ending adventure with Pilus, helping to wrap up his whole arc. I still have more up my sleeve in regards to the future of them, but I won't be too open with those thoughts just yet as they are a long ways off.
Events in Eresh proceed, the party meets Balance, they talk to Caela at the gates, are annoyed by her, find out about the army, and then Balance snaps. However they didn't decide to aggressively fight the Ragesians, instead focusing on saving the villagers and extracting them out to the Monastery for help. This changed plans a little bit, but in the end I just combined the major encounter with Signus with the one en route to Castle Korstull in the next adventure. This ended up working perfectly as I will describe later.
Eventually the party heads towards the forbidden valley and find the laboratory. I got to hit them with the sucker punch of their previous adventuring party, the Band of the Badger, were turned into misshapen monstrosities. The wind-minotaur was a lot of fun, though they decided to fight it in the rafters instead of on the ground level. That made things a bit different, but giving the minotaur free reign in the air made for a very memorable encounter even though they didn't shatter any of the vats. We experimented with Pathfinders' version of critical hits when rolling 10 more than AC. In the end though, with bounded stats of 5e, it was just too potent. It made the easy encounters even easier for the players and the tough ones way harder. I wouldn't recommend it personally without the bigger accuracy ranges that Pathfinder uses.
Finally the group fought Caela and the combat was excellent. She used her mobility to frankly piss off and confuse the party massively. Winry was able to keep up pretty well, but it sowed so much confusion and separation for the party who was used to fighting defensively that it worked. Caela also got a great moment of alpha-striking the cleric Bryn, who flew up in the air thinking she was safe then to heal and buff, but Caela used Step of the Wind to jump double height, combo her and knock her unconscious, falling to near death, before blitzing out of sight into the vats. Overall, it worked like a charm to be difficult and ominous with the giant shark in the sky eyeing them through the skylight.
Long resting before returning to the Monastery, the party gave the Ragesians time to pressure the Monastery. To link up with the fact that they didn't fight them off initially, I had Longinus give in to the Ragesians to save the villagers and give up an orb of storms. The army retreated by the time the party made it back. They were confused until they learned that their mission had been undermined! This allowed me to combine the Signus fight with the road battle at the start of the next adventure in a chase through the mountain passes instead! While it was a random decision, it moved a seemingly random encounter that felt mostly for XP with story to create a very meaningful event instead. Under time pressure, the group hunts down the remnants of the army in the passes before they can make it back to the full forces and retrieve the orb, barely keeping Bryn alive in the melee.
From here the next steps were clear. After confirming with Simeon, they avoid the army and travel quickly to stay ahead towards Castle Korstull, orb of storms in hand, ready to step into the tempest to find the Torch of the Burning Sky and change the fate of the war.
Next time, we will be moving to more pure episode write ups! Technically we are 3 sessions into the Castle, but I will write them up as one episode instead and then move to reporting every couple of weeks instead of these huge block updates! Hurray! I hope that it was enjoyable for everyone to read and not too much skimming. Thanks for the encouragement and the prompting!