Ok, More Like a 5-Shot

Oh man.

Subbing in for our usual DM for the Sunday game, I ran a "one-shot" that was only just getting started when we ended it after 3 and a half hours.

The party (the same characters who had done "Horror in the Skies," a D&D mashup of Agatha Christie and H.P. Lovecraft set on an airship) arrives in Gonquista, the only real settlement in the Parthalian Wastes - a post-apocalyptic landscape where the best-preserved remains of the Parthalian civilization (a technologically-advanced civilization that collapsed 20,000 years ago) can be found. Unfortunately, one also finds mutants, ruthless bandits, wandering killer robots, and eldritch aberrations.

The party is sent by a university to find one professor Rupert Evermoore, an archaeologist who is attempting to discover a cistern like the one that Gonquista is built around - allowing for some new settlement to form.

As they arrive in Gonquista, however, they are attacked by a trio of Eonic Drifters and their Warforged mercenaries. Eonic Drifters (found in the Kobold Press' Tome of Beasts) are time-travelers, who can summon future versions of themselves to then try to blip party members forward in time - effectively taking them out for a number of rounds.

I'll say this: Only use one of these in an encounter, because they are mechanically complicated.

The party caught one of the Drifters, named Kallak (and thus forcing me to make it canon that in my setting all Drifters have palindrome names - happy 02/02/2020 everyone!) and forced him to divulge a few things:

That they need to stop Evermoore - they intend to kill him, because his presence leads to events in which the Great Barrier is shattered, unleashing cosmic horror upon the universe.

What the party may or may not have come to understand at this point is that the Great Barrier doesn't' hold things out, but in. Or, perhaps more accurately: the Great Barrier does hold things out, but their world is on the outside of that barrier, and the rest of the multiverse considers their world to be just the doorstep to the yawning maw of madness that is the Far Realm.

The party got some cool stuff in town, including making an order for an electrically-powered fist weapon (that might also be a sex toy) before setting out into the wastes on their Wasterider vehicle.

Sadly, I have not yet attacked them with Gnoll biker raiders wielding shotguns, but we'll have to save that for later.