Rappan Athuk: The end of things

The group I recently finished up our campaign of Rappan Athuk, albeit a condensed version. In total the campaign spanned nearly two years of monthly games, each session about 5 hours in length. That is a lot of content regardless of how you look at it.

So how did it finish up....well quite easy for players, surprisingly err....maybe not that surprising given the 5E system. When we left off from the last session, the group faced a choice: live with the fact that the land was tainted with evil or open the portal to the abyss and face Orcus at the peril of their souls. Of course the heroes faced danger like they should! 

The characters decided to take the three keys back down the well to the portal that was discovered and discussed with the ancient wraith wizard Zelkor. Opening the portal they were drawn as if by gravity into far layers of the abyss, the layer of Orcus! The level is somewhat of a let down for the culmination of such a massive megadungeon and book, essentially a huge maze with the chance for random encounters. My group and I are playing through Roll20 and I really did not want to subject them to picking their way through a maze, so I set up a skill challenge with high DC's where failure prompted an encounter or bad event. This actually worked out pretty well, meeting the success push them closer to the exit while the failures gradually weakened them.

Ok before I go on let touch on where my players were at from a level perspective. All five of the characters had just reached level 12, this level of the dungeon as written assumes the players to be 18+. A long time ago in this campaign I had tossed out any notion trying to balance, because the players had a number of magical items at this point, including some of the custom / quested magic items I had created for them to pursue in their travels through Rappan Athuk. Let me be blunt here: magic items break 5E in a sense that players, which are already extremely powerful in 5E, become virtually invincible.

Exiting the maze, the group encountered a pair of CR 16 maralith demons sent to test the group. These were dispatched of without much fuss, onto the big guy himself. The final layer of Orcus is filled with undead (no CR undead sadly as written by FGG....this is something they do a lot...A LOT). Orcus greets and offers the group to join him like any other evil deity would do, sadly no takers and the fight was on. This was a crazy, many combat, very worth of a final boss fight, but I really don't feel as if the players were really challenged that badly, they were just so powerful at this point and this further reassured me of the need to go ahead and wrap up the campaign.

There were a lot of moving pieces and much fun was had (see above picture from the game that night), I really can't thank the group of guys I have as players enough, they are just amazing and I'm blessed to run games and play games with them. In the end Orcus was defeated, the portal out of the Abyss started to lose it's power but I presented one last moral decision before the group, the aspect of Death appeared and advised that one of them must now sit upon the throne of bone or all the dead in the world would revolt. The halfling druid Remus, thinking quickly took the Rod of Orcus, ran back towards the maze and in one final act of sacrifice he ignited his flaming heart (custom magic item) into a massive explosion blowing the rod apart, the group escaped just in time as he did. The final scene of the campaign though, was the dead hand of Remus twitching...perhaps the new Orcus!

In the end, I'm happy to be done with Rappan Athuk, the more we played through it, the more I wish we had not started on it (see my review in another blog post), but the group had a blast, so I must of been doing something right in the end. So onto something new: I kicked around a few ideas as to what to run for the next campaign, but I opted to take a break from 5E for a bit....so.....we just ran our first session of Age of Worms, converted for Pathfinder (1E) last week. Look for a review of that epic adventure and session highlights to come on the blog soon!