Now that they’re through, or at least at the bottom, having won the final fight, it’s time to talk about how I set up the Miskath Pit. Blightshore itself has a lot of wild magics going on all over the surface, and thing that alter perceptions or affect the mind. I decided that, to make the Pit interesting, I would go down the levels of the Temporary Madness chart for dungeon level effects. Everyone making the save when they got to a new level, and then failures in navigating would be indicated by another saving throw as they were overwhelmed by the chaos of the particular level.
Now, my party is good at saving throws and full of buffs, but I didn’t want to make it too high and unfair. So, I started reasonable (15) and increased it by one for every level they went down. To make it slightly more interesting, I also increased it by one if you had previously failed – you are more susceptible to the call. Because I was playing with Wild Magic, I also increased the DC if you had set off a Wild Magic surge, as well. The Wild Magic surge number, on the other hand, only went up one per surge, instead of including wisdom failures. Perhaps I should have included both here, too. I had increasing durations, as well, but as people generally didn’t let the conditions run their course, it rarely mattered. Unfortunately, they also didn’t fail often enough for my “madness protects” effect to matter either – monsters avoid those who have given into the madness.
We have one more dungeon effect to go. The party has gotten to the bottom of the pit. Ceratos has been defeated. But we had to end the session at that point, having run long by an hour an a half already. This week will likely be looting and escaping the pit before our campaign denouement. Once they’re out, there will be one more roll, based on all wisdom save failures to determine if anyone picked up a long-term madness.
That final fight was great. Appropriately threatening for an end of campaign grand finale, and yet. with creativity and grit, they pulled through. Managing to save the only character who fully died early in the fight in the very last round of revivify after defeating The Many the round before. It was an epic end to this dungeon. I did have to pull back a little on the homebrew boss mob, but that’s always the danger. It was still a plenty good fight, with lots of eating of the PCs and last moment saves, and even a cube of force. Very proud of my group. They even took the social solution on one level, avoiding that fight and the next, to arrive with some resources intact to the final fight.
Campaign wrap up to come after game tomorrow night.