Unfathomable! Session 24: Campaign Finale!

 As Fort Enterpirse burns, Ye Dogs of Destiny face the implacable power of the Imperial Elites!

The Campaign: Operation Unfathomable! and Odious Uplands!, both by Jason Sholtis

The Ruleset: 5e

Ye Dogs of Destiny:

• Brother Ded, a monk/political shit-stirrer. 
• Mort, a fugitive from Imperial justice. 
• Greta, a baby-eating hag-turned-Citizen Lich. 
• Ulther, a ranger and artifact smuggler. 
• Zinee, a wooly neanderthal druid/cosmetologist. 
• Toljin, a magical boy raised by pirates. 
• Doloth, an unwilling-Citizen Lich. (absent)

The Apis Irregulars:

• Auruna of House Apis, undervalued daughter of a Murian Noble House
• "Smash" Hannigan, hero from a pulp adventure, with a pair of Colts and a jetpack
• Krodok of the Standing Stones, mighty wooly neanderthal
• Shantora Lax, manipulative sword-cultists
• Kuwain Trylos, elemental wizard from across the Sea of Calamities

Also Present:

• Professor Ephraim Thontorius, uplifted bear from the far, far future

VS

The Imperial Elites:

• Captain Yeel Undying, a powerful fighter and commander, cursed by Greta
• Seberotzi the Mad, scarred inside and out by his gibbering mouther armor
• Lathë the Lich, daughter of Doloth
• 10 Imperial Elite Guards
• The Spirits of the Witch-iron Brazier

The Story So Far

Ye Dogs of Destiny have traveled into the Underworld, faced unspeakable horrors, and suffered hideous mutations in pursuit of the Nul Rod. Now, upon their return to the surface world, they discover that their reward is a death sentence by Imperial decree!

 Previous Posts

Session 24

The session began mid-round. Most of the party was engaged by Imperial Elite Guards, with a few engaged by the extraordinary agents of the crown down by the witch-iron brazier.

Mort, having decapitated Lathë with the Headsman's Blade and noting that the witch-iron brazier's necrotic energy was healing her, snatched up her head and threw it as far into the dark night as he could. He then dragged her body around the corner of a tent to get it away from the brazier's influence.

BOOM! There was a massive explosion from inside Fort Enterprise as Adola and her forces blew up the Governor's Manse. The shockwave knocked most of the combatants off their feet, and they noticed the familiar tingle of Chaos radiation from the blast.

Combat, combat, combat. Toljin was kept busy raising people as they dropped. Zinee, in bear form, savaged Lathë's headless body. Brother Ded was catching arrows and throwing them back, like a badass. Seberotzi and the guards in the camp were whittled down and dispatched, leaving only two guards outside of camp who were sniping at the Party with long bows. 

Even the mighty Captain Yeel was killed at Greta's feet. But Greta could see that one of the red jewels on Yeel's sword, Nine Lives, filled with red radiance as it drank a portion of Yeel's soul. Seven jewels now filled, two lives left. Yeel stood up, ready to fight again.

I'd been ignoring a fair amount of Yeel's statblock, in order to avoid a TPK. But with only two guards and Yeel herself having come back with half her HP, plus all the PCs and their allies still alive, I figured it was safe to unleash her. This coincided with my dice hitting a hot streak. She used legendary actions to command the remaining two guards to take extra, off-turn actions while she was zipping around the battlefield, ignoring opportunity attacks, dropping people with single blows.

The players started to look flabbergasted that they were expected to stand up to such a powerful opponent. "This is it." I said. "Yeel is the monster at the end of the book." A comment that was simultaneously cool and lame in equal measure.

Meanwhile, residents where pouring out of Fort Enterprise's gate. A low cloud of smoke hung over the Fort, it's underside lit red by flames... but also flashes of blue and green. Someone was casting spells inside the walls.

The fight continued. Brother Ded closed the distance between himself and the sniper-guards, with Krodok close behind him, and took them out. Now the Party could focus their attention exclusively on Yeel. And as powerful as she was, she could not withstand so asymmetrical an action economy for long. She dropped again, and another jewel on Nine Lives started to fill. But the Party grabbed the sword and brought it a nearly-depleted Greta, who was able to unmake the cursed sword and drink Yeel's soul.

For a brief moment, everything was quiet in the Imperial encampment, save the labored breath of the exhausted Party, and the crackling of fire. Then, above them, lit by fire and magic, the saw a great, bulbous shape rising silently over the palisade walls of the Fort. It was a living dirigible, like the one used by the Science Fungoids in the Underworld! And in its basket, was a harried-looking Gokorius, the powerful wizard who had treated Greta and Mort so poorly. He and the ballon were being targeted by spells cast from within the Fort. As the Party watched, a bat flew up to the ballon and turned into a hirsute vampire that clung to the balloon, screaming, "Gokorius! You bastard! You've room enough to take us, too!" Gokorious dislodged his stowaway with a cascade of eldritch energy.

The Party, who hate this man's guts, unleashed everything they had left in their arsenals at him, at the same time as a volley of fireballs shot up from the Fort. Gokorius and the dirigible exploded, showering the area in wizard scarps.

One Year Later

Brother Ded and Thontorius went back to the crashed saucer and spent the better part of the year fixing it. Thontorius remains dedicated to modeling the causal fallout of giving the Nul Rod to Primordial Gods, but has had his ethics and sense of propriety badly eroded by months of Ded's endless stream of spurious bullshit. With the saucer nearly ready to fly again, they plan on careening through the skies, spreading lowercase-c chaos and bringing down The Man.

Mort found a cabin in the woods to settle into and wrote a book, The Legend of Boomer. He got it published, and it found a small but respectable audience of artifact fetishists.

Toljin gathered a crew from the newly dispossessed residents of Tent Town, and returned to the sea. He sailed to the village he grew up in. He toyed with the idea of building up the Church of Twilight, but it seemed less urgent now that he was out of the Underworld. Instead, he found himself drawn to the fey woods he explored as a child...

Ulfer, still hideous to behold with repulsive fungal growths covering his body, accompanied by the ring-bound soul of his Uncle Henrik, returned to the Underworld and made his way to the Black Ooze River Valley, there to wage a one-person war against the Cult of Nul.

Greta pressganged Kuwain Trylos into being her new apprentice, stole most of the party's treasure, and ran off to research ways to contain and control the love of her unlife, the Sphere of Annihilation.

Zinee built a cart that she could haul around while in bear-form, and spent most of her days traveling between her far-flung friends, bringing them supplies and stories of each other's exploits. She never quite learned to control her flame, so the cart needed constant repairs.

Smash and Auruna made it back to his pulp-adventure universe, where she quickly latched on to a mid-Atlantic accent, a taste for haute couture and cocktails, and foiling the evil machinations of the Nefarious League of Dark Physicists.

Notes

And that's it! Campaign concluded!

I'm not sure I've ever intentionally ended a campaign, before. It's a good feeling! Being able to meet weekly for six months without interruption was really lovely (and probably won't happen again for a long time). It was satisfying, bringing as many threads as I could together in the last couple sessions, while still leaving a sense of an open world out there which could still be explored.

It was tremendous fun working with Operation: Unfathomable! and Odious Uplands! for the setting. The world is so rich, so weird, and so very, very playable. I added a lot of bits and bobs and tangents, as any Game Master must, but they were all rooted in implications and inferences drawn from the world Jason Sholtis created.

And speaking of Mr. Sholtis, he was kind enough to reach out and share that he was following these session write-ups. "I can't tell you how much I have enjoyed your campaign reportage and what you've done with the OU material. It has been deeply gratifying to watch world-class creative powers such as yours applied to something I've made. Moving, even. But I suppose all good things must come to an end. I'll still follow the Bottled Sea campaign as it unfolds, but...but.." Kind words from an amazing creator!

Speaking of the Bottled Sea: This will be a much more sporadic campaign, with a smaller pool of players. We've met once for chargen. I tried some new stuff, and kinda screwed it up by not have enough structure to it. I hope to continue writing about it, but I know better than to make any promises, as the screws are about to tighten on my leisure time for the forseeable.

Thanks, everybody, who has followed along!