SAGA 1455: Tomb of Dead Gods

The RPG SAGA continues with...

DM's Note:

First, I want to say how happy I was to find the module ST1: Up the Garden Path. I thought this adventure was pretty much lost to time and that I would never be able to get a copy or run it since it had such a small release. I modified it for higher level play, though it mostly consisted of puzzles/thinking RPG encounters. The players sped through the situations.

Second, I have to admit I took on too much with this session. I prefer to play for 6-8 hours, which is great since I know most RPG groups these days only play for 2-4 hours. Last week the time just ran away from us and we actually had to stop mid-combat. They used the rival NPC and enemy groups against each other, but in the end, we had to admit it was time to stop after rolling initiative and starting the first 2 rounds of combat.

SAGA Log 1455: Tomb of Dead Gods

Modules: ST1 Up the Garden Path

& 4E Tomb of Horrors Campaign (Modified for 5E)

Since Blueblood III (Daria) & Oran had been adventuring in this reality, they had heard a rumor that some monsters had captured Holic & Ryali in mortal form; Pylia and the rest of Force Green suspected that it was a lie constructed to distract them from their quest to stop Caperaktis (which was, itself, a distraction from the vengeance quest against Veersalla).

They decided to just spend a day investigating this side quest. The group tried praying to Ryali, used their scrying mirror, and cast legend lore (to learn of the white dragonborn Chosen of Semuanya). They plane-shifted to Waterdeep, to the Yawning Portal, and spoke with the Chosen of Semuanya. He spent an hour going to check intel about the situation. With the intel from the Chosen of Semuanya and Bloodblood III’s knowledge of hidden elemental planes, they used Garble-Garble to help break into a steam-based paradoxical imprisonment dimension of a primordial quark named Iffanbutt.

In the paradox demi-plane, the Force Green team (Pylia, Drizmar, Blue, & Blood) and the Chosen of Semuanya collected paradoxical objects and presented them to the quark in order to force him to release Holic & Ryali (who turned out not to be the gods in mortal form, but the twin quarter-elf children of Elaida and Vandomar - named after their friends from the Sapphire Circle Adventuring Party; they destroyed the demi-plane, releasing all of the people inside back to the prime material plane. They made sure the twins and the Chosen of Semuanya would be fine and then departed for their next quest.

Force Green plane-shifted to the Shadowfell to destroy Cap’s soul engine there. The team fought off the undead guardians and destroyed the Shadowfell soul engine, but the Caperaktis construct took the soul of Drizmar and teleported out to an Astral Plane base called the Tomb of Dead Gods (which he mentioned because he assumed Pylia already knew about it from the Acererak books the group had stolen).

At the Tomb of Dead Gods: Pylia, Blue, and Blood met up with some Vecna cultists who told them Vecna was upset about Cap stealing the Eye of Vecna artifact; the team sent the cultists in first to defeat many of the undead guardians and a team of devils inside. The ice devils told the team they worked for Mephistopheles, who sent them to “help” the group. The devils were soon defeated by other guardians inside. Vecna himself appeared and tried to work a deal with the group. An eladrin gambler also tried to get them to make deals with him. Pylia went with Vecna to fight Cap, who had left, to his actual lair. Blue and Blood stayed and destroyed the soul engine there, but then left because the area was also guarded by powerful undead bodies of Orcus and Demogorgon.

Blue and Blood had alerted the Alpha-Omega Organization about Vecna potentially interfering in mortal affairs. They arrived at Cap’s lair at the same time as the AO Agents; Vecna left. The cultists went to fight the large Cap construct body and the undead demon lords while Pylia, Blue, & Blood stayed behind to finish searching the lair for Cap’s phylactery. Before they could find the phylactery though, Cap showed up controlling an undead lich body and started fighting them [to be continued]...