Drink Talk Roll Extended #17: Almost Fey-mous

Session Recap

We cut back to a few hours before party’s arrival at the Winter Court at the end of last session to Amra waking up in his cell. He’s tied up and it’s too dark for him to see anything clearly but he can hear someone laughing at him: Darius. By rolling well enough on his Intelligence check, Amra finally remembers that Darius is the man he saw in the flashback he had of being chained up in a similar area. Darius taunts Amra some more before departing.

Amra sees that there are other Elves in the holding area and if the one who bothers to talk to him is anything to go by, some of them have been down there for decades if not centuries with little hope of getting out. Knowing that he escaped once, Amra remains confident that he can do it again.

Back at when we left the party, the two queens of the Winter Court: The Snow Queen and the Queen of Night and Magic, hear what the party has to say to them but first, they claim Jedah as their property and send him down into the same cell where Amra is tied up. Using his knowledge of the Fey from his time with his patron, Ulrich is able to comport himself well with the court and uses his charm (and high Charisma score) to convince the queens that they would be better off sending Jedah and Amra with him.  

They agree to his terms but add their own stipulation: As long as he has the two of them, he has to provide whatever information he provides to his patron on the Spring Court to them as well.  Ulrich agrees to this and Darius is forced to sate his bloodlust elsewhere as he is sent to fetch Jedah and Amra from their cell. 

With their friends freed for now, the party decides that the next thing to focus on is getting back to the Material Plane but they have no idea how to do that. They could wait until the next Planar Conjunction but they have no idea how long that could take or if it would even take them back to the outskirts of the Menagi Wastes where they entered the Feywild. Instead, they decide to head to the Spring Court and ask Ulrich’s patron for passage back. There’s just one little problem: Ulrich has no idea where that is so, step one is heading back to Khanya to hopefully find another agent of the Spring Court to take them there.

Thanks to distance and position being more of suggestions than rules on the Feywild, the trek back to Khanya takes much longer than the journey to the Winter Court. The party arrives at night and decides to rest before looking for a Spring Court agent and take in a show being advertised in the street.

The show is a variety presentation. The first act is among other things clowns, acrobats and poets performing bad limericks. Act two is a pair of old women performing dramatic monologues before they start revealing the secrets of the audience members.  At first, it looks like it might just be cold reading that “psychics” in our world use but they start to get more specific even referencing Jedah’s abandonment by his parents and his killing of his captain.  They speak of Khorr’s multiple times walking the line between life and death and how he will die an ignoble death sometime in the future.  

Finally, the third act is not an act at all. From behind the curtain, the herald of darkness, a large, female Elven figure, emerges and with the help of two priests in the audience begins to suck out the life force of the audience. The party quickly moves into action taking out the priests whose deaths each cause an explosion of energy.  They then move onto the herald of darkness who puts up a good fight with her powers that frighten or blind anyone close to her. In desperate act, a blinded Amra rushes the stage and swings wildly and through sheer luck, manages to hit her enough times to kill her.  

The audience regains consciousness and thanks the party. The owner of the theater promises refunds for everyone. On the herald’s body, the party finds a magic ring with a snowflake on it.  Amra and Ulrich deduce is a sign that this is related to the Winter Court. What are they actually planning? That’s a story for another session.

Be Prepared #NotSponsored

I would like to thank the good folks at Kobold Press for saving this stream.  

I had not anticipated Ulrich to roll so well on his Charisma (Persuasion) check to convince the Winter Queens that he could monitor Amra and Jedah while also feeding them information. I figured it might come down to more of a Fey Duel with either Ulrich or Amra (as Ulrich’s designated champion) fighting Darius as the Champion of the Winter Court and was ready to play that out over the course of the session so when that roll happened, I was very happy to have panicked right before stream and set up one of the adventures from their Prepared series of one-shots.  

This specific adventure is “Dark Night at the Odeum” from Prepared 2. I picked it because it was the right level for the party as well as Dark Fey themed. This meant I didn’t have to use any of their advice on how to work the adventure into your campaign but it would have been very helpful especially if I didn’t have their Tome of Beasts book which contains the herald of darkness’s stat block.  

The only part of the basic structure I changed was instead of being invited by a third party, the players came from advertisers trying to fill the seats. I also filled in the first act with a limerick I found online. I actually had a few more ready to go if they kept asking for more. Had I known I would be filling in most of the show with the one shot, I would have added in more content for the second act including more personal readings for each of the party members.  

The only change I made to the third act was making the priests explode with dark energy when they died. I just thought it was neat. I was worried that the herald of darkness would be too strong since the adventure seemed to be design for four players and we were down to three that night.  In the end, it all worked out though so I’m happy.

The Prepared books have more adventures like these that I’ll have to keep in mind for future sessions just in case something like this ever happens again. Once again, we’re not sponsored. (Though our inboxes are open, Kobold Press) I’m just a fan.

Anyways, that’s it for this week’s Drink Talk Roll Extended. Until next time, keep on rolling.

-J.D.