Age of Worms, Precrime Division

Foxwarrior · Post by **Foxwarrior** » Mon Dec 17, 2018 7:13 am

So, this is the story of how the age of worms was stopped before it began.

We start in chapter three or so, a level or two behind to compensate for everyone using classes that are as strong as a normal wizard or stronger. Allustan the 8th level wizard NPC is leading the party to a keep to go visit a friend. They get there, and see lizardmen besieging the keep: Allustan follows the recommendations in the book, and goes "I'm going to go for reinforcements, you go deal with the lizardmen. Bye" and teleports away with a scroll before the party can react. The party looks at this army of dozens of lizardmen, flies over them, and slaughters them with arrows mostly from outside the lizards' attack range. They land to investigate the keep, and guards tell them that the friend they're trying to visit has been captured by the lizardmen and taken to the swamp. The party heads out to the swamp, slaughters a few random encounters, butchers lots of scaly people in the lizards' home, rescues the friend, and meets a shaman who they persuade to be not so mean to humans. (They don't check out the basement though, so presumably weeks after they leave a bunch of worms come out and kill everyone). They return to the keep, where they meet and are almost killed by two wormy zombies, and the friend tells them to head to the city for more information.

They go to the city and talk to the contact, who says he'll get right on the research, but that it'll take weeks. Time for a shopping trip! I consult with Gryphonheart's player, who I think is most likely to enjoy pranking the party, and tell him that the module says someone gets to be replaced by a doppelganger. He goes along with it and roleplays as a doppelganger pretending to be Gryphonheart for the rest of this module. None of the other party members notice that his archery is now only a fraction as effective when he helps them defeat an evil doppelganger who tries to frame the party for something, and they seek out the doppelganger lair to do some rescuing. They traipse through the lair, killing doppelgangers left and right. "This module is so dumb. They have us fight lots of doppelgangers, which are supposed to be a sneaky enemy, not bruisers. Maybe if they'd replaced one of us with a doppelganger, the module would have something to it, but they didn't," they discuss, as they slaughter a group of doppelgangers disguised as all of the party members. Fake Gryphonheart takes this moment to escape as the party looks at a bunch of dead doppelgangers and a dead Gryphonheart.

Don't worry, he gets better.

They finish off the remaining doppelgangers and go on to fight a mind flayer, whose cool underground base they take as their own.

I forget why they go under the arena to beat up a worm and a cleric, but they do that.

They also locate fake Gryphonheart (who still had all of real Gryphonheart's stuff) with some circle dances. He's apparently been continuing to pretend to be Gryphonheart because Gryphonheart is just so cool, and even found an Awakened Tome Fighter Crow (a Tome Fighter is like a regular Fighter, but awesomer) to substitute for an animal companion. The party kills the crow, and give fake Gryphonheart a stern talking to. He has to go by Hippogriffspleen now. Who knows how long it took him to afford the raise dead after the party took all Gryphonheart's stuff back.

Ding! You hear that sound? That's the sound of Contact Other Plane level. By asking some good questions, they determine that the contact who's supposed to tell them where to look next is going to be murdered by the right-hand man of the ex-gladiator running the arena. They beat up the right-hand man, and eat the ex-gladiator's soul. Since there are still several days before the contact's research is done, they look to the future for guidance instead, and find out that a black dragon is coming to raze Allustan's town. So of course they meet her over the middle of the ocean, and now the party wizard is a black dragon. Turns out one of the characters can eat people's souls and get all their memories, so his memories are 90% black dragon memories now.

They go to talk to Allustan, because they precrime that he's going to get into trouble somewhere. He's not sure what they're talking about at first, but eventually realizes they must mean his explorations of some old tomb. They go into the old tomb, and easily slaughter a bunch of enemies, including a demon who can deal infinity damage per round due to a typo. They collect some old artifact they never actually use for anything, as well as 50 million gp worth of adamantine doors.

The party takes a quick trip to Alhaster to pick up all of the black dragon's loot, from the lair that would have been destroyed if they'd waited until the module said to go there. Some pretty sweet stuff, the early bird gets the worm.

Allustan tells them about his old master, Manzorian, who might be able to help them out with researching Kyuss, the god of worms. They visit Manzorian's town, but he's "busy" doing whatever it is 20th level wizards do instead of saving the world, so they ask the gods what it is Manzorian would have told them, and find out about an ancient jungle temple.

They hop on over to the temple, where they slaughter a bunch of worms and wormy undead monsters, and get some visions of Kyuss's origins. They meet a lich, who has been contacting other planes every day for thousands of years, but he must have been using them on dealing with other things because he apparently didn't manage to find the right words to convince any party members to defect. The party soul eater's memories are now 70% those of some angel who got corrupted, 29% memories of being a lich imprisoned in a temple, 1% memories of being a black dragon, and roughly 0% memories of being himself. He manages to keep it together pretty well though.

The party divines that the next step is to defeat some dracolich and collect some parts of some dead guy called Balakarde. They go visit the place, beat up the inventor of owlbears (soul eater adds more memories to the pile), combine the three parts of Balakarde's spirit, immediately destroy him because the description of the combining sounded ominous, and kill off the dracolich. They skipped two or three modules about locating the dracolich's phylactery, but it's no biggie because they just eat his soul before he can get anywhere.

Kyuss is still trapped in his obelisk at this point, because it's several weeks before his plan to unleash the age of worms. The party hops into his wormy prison dimension and kills him.

Hicks · Post by **Hicks** » Mon Dec 17, 2018 9:57 am

So I played a kaelik wizard intermittently during this adventure. Magic Jar'd the... ex gladiator? I thought he was lord of the city? Then I got to pokevolve into a black dragon. Then I got to pokevolve into a red dragon. Good times. Balacarde seemed spooky when manifested, and something about how ghosts are "always evil" in the monster manual, so I think his soul was eaten before he could give us TEXA$ bonuses to fight the red dragon, who we stun locked and ate his soul after I took his body with magic jar.

Good times.

Foxwarrior · Post by **Foxwarrior** » Mon Dec 17, 2018 6:17 pm

Close, but not quite. Balakarde was supposed to give a huge bonus against the dracolich to compensate for it being an impossible fight according to CR guidelines. But since the party was a few levels below the recommended level for that module, you of course had no trouble beating up the dracolich without any special bonuses.

The Red Dragon was someone else, the big boss of a module that you skipped, just chilling out in his lair because you hadn't done the thing to reveal the dracolich's phylactery.