Drink Talk Roll Extended #8: Snakes On A Demiplane

Session Recap

After Khorr discovered the entrance to the dungeon in the last session, the party ventured inside. They walked up a long staircase in the darkness dimly lit by glowing crystal embedded in the walls. At the top of the staircase, they found a rundown living area patrolled by humanoids that seemed more snake than human. They quickly attacked the creatures and despite taking some serious blows, they managed to come out victorious. Deciding not to rest, they explored a little more of the area and found another two creatures, these more human in appearance and another battle ended just as quickly as it started.  

The continued exploring the rest of the floor, discovering a small treasure hoard containing magic boots, a special lockpick and a gem that radiates light along with a mountain of coins and nonmagical gems. In other rooms, they discovered the remains of the people who so old that even touching them would cause them to become dust in the nonexistent wind. Some seemed to be in the middle of dinner. Others seemed to have suffered in their chambers but across all these inhabited rooms, they found various paintings depicting a king and queen. In various drawings scrawled across the walls, this queen was also depicted with a giant snake and going through a transformation into a snake person not unlike the ones they had seen before. The last thing they found was a locked door that couldn’t be opened by conventional means.

And in the final room they explored, they found the Stone Queen herself still sitting atop her throne with her petrified king in the one next to her. Despite the thousand-year language barrier, the party did their best to communicate with her via gesture but somewhere along the line, they made her angry and battle started. She attacked with a combination of the snakes that made up her hair and her own petrifying gaze. Over the course of the battle, she managed to petrify both Jedah and Khorr and nearly finished off Amra and Ulrich. However, Ulrich’s cool head was able to keep Amra from fleeing and the two were able to finish her.  

Luckily, the Stone Queen had a vial of liquid that could fix the petrification. Why did she have that? I like to think that she hoped one day she might a change of heart and want to restore her late husband and face the consequences of her dealings with the snake. They used the liquid to restore their petrified friends and decided to take a rest before venturing upstairs.  

At the top of the stairs, they found a very small floor with another room that seemed tailormade for resting and another with an altar lit by a shaft of light. The Earth Topaz around Khorr’s neck seemed to tug him towards it like a child towards a candy shop. As he approached, a giant snake descended from the ceiling…And that’s where this week’s session ended.

Wow! Let’s Do That Again.

I think I’ve mentioned it a few times before both on stream and in this column that I’ve run this campaign once before for my other D&D group and am using that to inform a lot of my prep work. For example, the things with the kids being experimented on by the School of Continued Progress and the people behind it were basically made up as the campaign went along as many great plotlines are. Here, I’ve been able to more properly lay down the beginnings of the subplot and I hope we can still see it to its conclusion.  

On the other hand, it’s always very interesting to see how things go differently in this version of the campaign compared to the other one. I noted on stream that because we didn’t have a party member drop out between sessions one and two, I just skipped over the entire events of the second session of the last campaign which was just explaining what happened to that player’s character. Those events really only came up once later so I don’t expect that to snowball into anything.  

However, in a recent session, I won’t say which, there was a minor deviation that is going to snowball pretty quickly and I’m very excited for it. The plotline I have in the back of my head is a big what if that the party avoided in the last session. Depending on how long it takes them to finish off the temple boss, it could very well be the next episode.  

I really bring this up because the last session was one that varied greatly between the two campaigns both because of what I did but also how the party went about it. The set up was the same. I even used the same maps for both floors of the dungeons and the fight with the Stone Queen was in both though I used different stat blocks of similar creatures with similar CRs. However, in the first campaign, I played the Stone Queen in a more comedic manner. She was able to speak modern Common and was devastated that a wish she had made was corrupted to turning people into stone. I’ll leave that as a though experiment to you as to what that wish was.  

As I described in the first section, I went with a more serious tone and added in the two earlier fights to make this a bit more difficult. I didn’t expect the party to charge in as recklessly as they did. I’m still in the process of refining my DMing style for this campaign as I have to manage players at various levels of intoxication. It’s going to be a long and complicated process but I think I’ll come out a better DM in the process. Maybe through reading this, you will as well.
 
Well, that’s the end of today’s Drink Talk Roll Extended. We’ll be back next time with the tower boss fight and we’ll see what happens afterward. Until then, keep on rolling.

-J.D.