Dungeon week one: Okay, we’re going to clear out this whole place!
Dungeon week two: Quick, grab the alhoun and drag it into the anti-magic zone so we can negotiate peaceful passage.
I… should have known better. I had a general idea of why the illthid lich was in the dungeon. He’s helping build up the dracolich’s undead army. I didn’t have an OGAS written out for him. It was supposed to be a hard fight – alhoun, death knight, plague spreader zombies, and a few zombie clots. My party was immediately terrified of the alhoun, who didn’t even attack them, just waved the rest of the room to do so while he went back to work. I had put an anti-magic “clean” room two doors back, and the party was still suffering its effects, being impatient as they are, so fell back on old tactics. Grab the mage and drag them away to physically attack, all the way into the anti-magic zone.
We then had a quick conversation about what this means to a lich and decided it just shut his magic off, like it did theirs, but not his self. In a panic, both in character and as a DM, as the characters started lighting torches to slowly burn his body to bits, the alhoun immediately asked for parlay. “Hey, so, is there anyway we could not do this?” And the bardiplomat was immediately hooked, as I decided the alhoun was more interested in survival than these seven bodies joining his army.
The conversation was happening in undercommon, so the gnome contingent, including the bard’s most strident dissenter, could not understand. A deal was struck to allow them safe passage through his lab, a map to the dracolich included, so long as they left the place to the alhoun to run after they were done. I mean, who doesn’t want an evil fortress that once belonged to the Betrayer Gods?
This, of course, led to a long, in character, argument once the bard told the rest of the group about the deal. I love these moments. I can just sit back and relax while they play their characters to the full. They also drop theories about what might go wrong that help me plot, too. A group of seven is much more creative than my one brain. Eventually, this lead to a vote 4-3 to accept the offer. Which is where we ended.
Zoom back to me a day or two later, actually writing the OGAS for the alhoun and the death knight, and finding another problem with the deal. The death knight isn’t going to agree to it either. He works for the dracolich, not the alhoun, overseeing the work and protecting them both. It was just supposed to be the hard fight for this level of the dungeon, but now that it’s not, motivations come into play.
It just reminds me how much work I have to do for the next/final dungeon of the campaign. It’s a mind-affecting, wild-magic, deep spiral of aberrations, humanoid cultists, and a demigod. Everything with an intelligence needs an OGAS in case they try to talk to it or cure it. I really do need to dig in and get to some proper design.