Tuesday, October 27, 2020

Briefly Killing a PC and then Giving Him a Bit of a Solo RP Mission

 When I was 3, my sister (who was 5) and I watched the 1959 Disney (I think) movie Darby O'Gill and the Little People, starring a young Sean Connery. In it, the thing that stuck with us the most was the Banshee, the figure of Irish folklore that terrified us to our very cores (our mom was largely Irish American, and so I think we're genetically susceptible to scary "sidh.") Banshee is a bastardization of "bean sidh," which translates to "spirit woman" in Irish Gaelic (S's are often an "SH" sound and dh is often either silent or a kind of Y sound.)

Anyway, the party found themselves in a burned-our ruin of a Boros Fire Station (I figure the Boros seem like the most likely to act as the city's fire brigade) which, as they discovered, was burned down and cursed by a Rakdos blood witch to punish the fire fighters for stopping his arson performance-art productions. The curse trapped the spirits in the station and essentially kept them in a constant inferno, with the fire elementals as kind of spirits conjured by the curse to torment them in their Flameskull forms.

The party fought a reasonably balanced assortment of Fire Elementals and Flameskulls (they're level 11) but on the first floor, thrown in just for some more ghostly fun, I added a banshee to the mix (I figure this elf lady had been the captain of the station.)

Thing is, Banshees have the nastiest freaking ability, which they can use once a day. Their wail makes anyone nearby who can hear it make a Wisdom saving throw. On a success, they take 3d6 psychic damage. On a failure, they drop to 0 hit points.

Everyone but the Rakdos goblin bard succeeded. And then, almost immediately, one of the Flameskulls showed up and tossed a fireball into the party, giving the bard a failed save. Then, when the druid or maybe the barbarian stepped away to fight the banshee, a fire elemental burst through a door and saw the bard. I rolled a die to determine if it went after him, and even with the advantage for hitting an unconscious person, the first attack missed, but the second hit, and for the second time (and the first in an actual long-running campaign,) I killed a PC (who happens to be played by one of my closest and oldest friends.)

The good news is that Artificers have Revivfy on their spell list and I've ruled that Artificers can use a Mizzium Apparatus, so the group's Izzet Artificer used their next turn to attempt to cast Revivify... and failed the check, thus resulting in a fireball cast directly on the body (it had been hit with gentle repose, and given that fireball's just fire damage and not a concussive force (which thunder damage would signify), I didn't have this blow the body apart, so in fact the goblin was essentially fine - he couldn't get more dead,) so the next turn, the Artificer was able to actually make the roll and after 12 very tense seconds, the group's chaotic evil bard was, thankfully, brought back.

Once the party fought their way through to the top floor, they came to the roof and found the manifestation of the curse in the form of a jack-in-the-box. The bard, worried that ending a Rakdos curse could get him in trouble with his guild, made use of his renown to journey to Rix-Maadi and speak with Judith, the Scourge Diva, who in my headcanon (and thus the campaign's canon) is the head of the Blood Witches.

So though I had killed his character early that session, I managed to give that player a nice little solo trip where I dropped some hints at future adventures, some character lore, and got to describe Gore House (which I imagine as a sort of fucked-up version of the Los Angeles House of Blues,) the Demon's Vestibule, and Rix-Maadi itself, which was super fun.

Anyway, it was actually a really fun session to DM, and while there was a bit of repetitiveness to the combat, I think it went fairly smoothly.

Our next game is on Halloween, so I've got to make a facebook poll to see if people want a spooky one-shot or to stick with the regular campaign.

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