Story time:
I had some trouble scheduling the group together, so I ran some one-on-one adventures with each member so they’d still get a chance to roll dice.
So the cleric is cruising around town one night when this man runs out of his house yelling for help. Some horrible goober (later identified as a bodak) snatched his son out of bed and absconded into the spooky cellar. The man can’t go far to summon the watch because his invalid father is upstairs and can’t be left alone, so isn’t it fortuitous that a locally well known adventurer happens to be strolling by?
So the cleric goes down into the basement to get the baddy. The bodak has the boy hostage and has a deadly gaze attack.
My expectation was that the cleric was going to Turn Undead and scare off the monster. The cleric’s expectation was that they were going to cast Pillar of Fire and cook that sumbitch.
Pillar of Fire is a cylinder with something like a 20 foot radius and 40 foot height. I ask if he’s sure, and he is, so the monster, child, cellar, first, and second floors burst into flames.
Realizing he’s toast if he stays here, the cleric leaves the cellar and bumps into the frantic man on the street. He asks if he got the monster and the cleric shrugs.
The man then agonizes over whether he should save his father or his son, and then plunges into the cellar. Moments later, the burning house collapses on itself.
And that’s how our cleric wiped three generations of a bloodline off the map with a single spell.
I mean credit to the cleric here, when stumbling on a bodak by surprise, Pillar of Fire is a pretty good reflex. That’s one of those monsters where you open the fight with your secret weapon, we do NOT want to turn this into an extended battle.
Shame about the location though.
When “God will recognize his own” is an expectation.
To be fair, that’s a lot of xp they just gained.
lol that kind of logic is why I switched to milestones instead of xp when running campaigns
if wiping out three generations of a bloodline with one spell isn’t a milestone, I don’t know what is
If it was several generations of a family of high-level adventurers, sure. But a bunch of villagers who dont fight back? No reward
Efficiency is its own reward
I mean there will be other generations…right? Yeah.
Like my brother playing a superhero RPG broke into an building trying to catch the bad guy and in the process murdered two innocent residents with a sawed off shot gun at close range because he was startled? He demolishes the building to hide the evidence. But later on part of his character development is that he spends time alone in his apartment with mannequins reenacting the murder scene.
That superhero? Homelander
Older versions of D&D used to make a bigger deal about Fireball causing fires. So I started doing the same thing in my sessions. In a flammable locale, the fireball would cause 1d6 lil fires that would spread. Combat gets more interesting when the battlefield is burning, collapsing, and filling with smoke.
Those little guys are so cute
I need to know the outcome
Fire. Round fire.
The kids were cooked 🔥
There wasn’t even a monster. He just felt the unstoppable urge to werf flammen.
Ready for the weekend!
That’s what I thought about when I saw this. Ignore the Calvin Harris-ism lyrics (outside of Ready for the Weekend) and I swear the jams even kinda mix with the style. But also this kind of reminds me of an old flash animation where a guy cast’s magic missile to attack the darkness.
