The D&D thread

Currently the group I am running is trapped on a boat at sea. The single mast is broken, they are low on supplies and the captain and his mercenaries were killed in a large naval battle when they were ambushed by lizard men riding wyverns and pteranodons. They survived by rowing away from the fight. They were pursued for a while but when it was apparent no one on deck was still alive the riders turned back to the larger battle.

There was a wyvern that was killed on deck and it's corpse was left draped over the bow.

The blood trickling into the water attracted a predator. The bow of the boat got partially crushed when huge tentacles burst from the water and dragged the wyvern corpse off. I almost grabbed several people on deck but everyone rolled really good Dex saves. I did flatten the player playing a kobold though.

They think that what attacked them was a kraken, and they think it's gone. They are wrong on both accounts.

The wyvern will keep it satisfied for a few days, but as long as they are adrift, it will return once it gets hungry.

If they hurt my creature enough it will simply fuck off to the deep to nurse its wounds. I am hoping to eat a player or some NPCs before that happens though. Should be fun.

one time we fought a bunch of fiends that had started attacking some small town church. we were pretty low level and the head priest sort of functioned as like a lvl 4 cleric with limited abilities because he was just an npc, but he was someone our characters definitely had made a connection with. the fiends started showing up one or two a round, then more and more each round. at the end of the day all we had to do to "beat" the encounter was to kill all fiends, but they started showing up faster than we could kill them, and so they started going after commoners in the church and then the head priest. we realized innocents were going to start dying so we had to change our strategy up pretty significantly in order to save as many people as we could. in the end, we only had 1 or 2 losses and the DM gave us some extra rewards for each person we saved. he said the encounter was designed as a Pyrrhic victory, we would win but how many villagers would we have lost in the process. we did way better than he expected and so he rewarded us accordingly.

we also fought some weird demi-god plant thing, i can't remember. the campaign was eldritch themed so it was like an eldritch tree or something. anyway, we fought our way into the main chamber/boss lair and as soon as we attacked it, the entire chamber filled up with fluid. we had to dps this thing down before we all drowned. it didn't have any physically damaging attacks, but these tentacle things would shoot out at us and try to restrain and/or "charm" us. it wasn't trying to hit us to death, it was just trying to slow us down so that we'd drown.

in my current main game, we were basically captured by this high ranking lord of the hells. (homebrew campaign with some homebrew monsters, this one is the greek echidna and her mate typhus the hyrdra). millennia ago, asmodeus imprisoned typhus and echidna and made a deal that he would let them out if she presented him with some hidden super artifact. so she finally was able to narrow down where the pieces were (a staff that was broken into 3 pieces) and kidnapped a bunch of adventuring parties from across the plane to send them to find the pieces. we were one such party but we had made friends with some of the other parties in the past. we all split up and focused on different leads, and blah blah blah we ended up finding all of them. we kept in lose contact as we don't have a cleric in our party but have access to 1 sending spell per day. the group (called the blackhammers, a bunch of surprisingly honorable duergar) that we were the best relations with we ended up together for the very last leg of the whole thing. we had been daisy chaining sending spells basically to help alleviate one group spending 8 spells slots on communicating.

so we are about to do the same thing, send a message to one of the few other groups who had survived the hells to say "hey, we got everything we need, head to the boat we getting out of here" except at the very last minute, our bard decides that he doesn't quite trust the situation (because that's how our DM rolls) and he says "i'm going to cast sending to that group, and tell them where to meet us. but i'm also going to tell them we haven't seen the blackhammers (a lie, they were standing right next to us) so could they use sending to tell them where we are all meeting up."

the DM just smiles. "I am so proud of you." we're like, wtf? what? what's going!?

and he says, "you cast sending and tell them the plan. in a minute the leader of the blackhammers starts cussing loudly and angrily. as it turns out, that group told the blackhammers that everyone was meeting at some ruins about 5 miles east of where your boat is." he's like, i was going to surprise you guys with that, but you figured out IT'S A TRAP!