The latest session of my 5E Greyhawk campaign saw the players investigating a pocket of the Demiplane of Shadow that was accessible beneath their hometown.
In our previous campaign, the town of Brusington was endangered by Shadow Fey, before the heroes of that game managed to negotiate a treaty with them. This time around, the Shadow Fey had requested a favour of the townsfolk: that they send heroes to investigate a pocket of the Demiplane of Shadow that had once been a Shadow Fey holy site. However, the Shadow Fey no longer had access to it – indeed, there was some ward preventing them from entering.
The first couple of sessions involved crawling around in the caverns beneath the town, until the heroes found a statue that they could replace the obsidian eyes to access the portal to the shadow pocket.
Our last few sessions have then been exploring the shadow pocket – which in form is mostly a set of spiraling caves leading downwards. The foes within have been challenging, to say the least. The party are about 6th level at the moment, just hitting 7th level. Greg’s discovered that playing a Paladin 3/Warlock 3 has caused him to fall behind in power significantly, so I allowed him to rebuild his character as a level 6 straight paladin. Extra attack is a thing!
One thing the players discovered is that when they left the shadow pocket the first time to take a long rest, they were followed by a host of shadows that attacked the town, transforming some of the townsfolk into shadows themselves – all of which attacked the heroes! So, taking additional long rests was complicated.
They were also becoming aware that they might not be the only ones in the shadow pocket – a few of the monsters they encountered had new jewelled, magical collars. What type of magic? Mind control.
(I note that the main antagonists of the campaign are turning out to be priests of Incabulos, the god of Plague, Sickness, Famine and Nightmares).
This particular session saw the characters moving deeper into the twisty caverns, and facing off against various shadow fey foes that were not on the same side as the faction that sent them here. Though, admittedly, there were some mind control collars involved.
The first battle was against a Fey Revenant (CR 7, Tome of Beasts 2). Do you know what a drider is? Well, imagine a shadow fey with the lower torso of a giant wasp, and that was the creature they fought. It was lurking on a ledge above them, although almost everyone saw it and was able to act in the first round of combat. Unfortunately for the party, it stayed flying for almost the entire combat. This was not great for the paladin. It was resistant to piercing and bludgeoning damage. Oh, look what every ranged attack was? This was the combat where the sorcerer came into his own, aided by the bard granting Bardic Inspiration every so often. It had a good AC, good saves, and was also magic resistant – but if the sorcerer could hit it with a chromatic orb, he could do significant damage.
That said, it was a longish fight, and the party were very low on resources by the end. (This was continuing an expedition from the last session, so they’d already lost resources).
I was curious to see if they’d try any tactic that could potentially curtail its ability to fly. Unfortunately, not the case – I’m not sure exactly what they’d use (Nets? Lassos?), but it was able to stay out of melee combat until the last moments. The revenant was wearing a control collar.
With two characters on less than 10 hit points, it was time for a short rest – they retreated out of the pocket before resting, at which point they noticed signs of recent undead and human activity.
Returning into the pocket, the next encounter brought them to a chasm that they needed to cross. There was a path thirty feet above them, but none of the characters were particularly good at climbing. “Do we have rope?” “Yes, we do!” “Do we have pitons?” “What’s a piton?”
It also led to this deathless exchange:
“Do we have anything that can help us climb?”
“Will this potion of climbing help?”
They could have potentially bridged or jumped the chasm as well but climbing turned out to be the solution – the artificer used his magic to climb up and drop a rope for the others. (With the aid of a rope, I wasn’t asking for Athletics checks. The players were happy for that!)
Although they’d climbed up to continue, the exit they found led to a spiralling tunnel leading even further down. They came out onto a large cavern with signs of recent combat – dead undead, humans, and spider-like fey. It seemed that the humans and undead were the intruders, and the fey lived here – and hadn’t been so happy about the intrusion.
The party scanned the area and found one of the fey surviving, and not particularly happy to see even more intruders. They moved to engage, and then were jumped by two more fey who had been more successful in their hiding. These were Somberweaves (CR 5, Tome of Beasts 2), and they were a lot easier to face than the Fey Revenant.
However, the combat did have its complications – particularly when the rogue was ensnared in a web and then abducted by the last remaining Somberweave. Where had it gone? Somberweaves have the ability to move between the Demiplane of Shadow and the Material Plane, so it had just returned to the entrance. I allowed characters who were trained in Arcana to roll to see if they could determine this, and they were able to!
The artificer and his steel defender (okay, it’s a metal wombat) remained in the chamber, while the rest hurried back to the entrance. There they found the corpse of the rogue and the Somberweave getting ready for its meal. They forced it back, and it abandoned the corpse as it returned to the shadow pocket. Unfortunately for it, the artificer was incredibly effective and slew it before it got another attack! (No mean feat – he rolled well).
The artificer looted its lair before returning to the rest of the party. They then removed the eyes of the statue to close the portal behind them (wise!) and went in search of a cleric to raise the rogue.
I awarded XP for both combats, as well as for their solution to the chasm – and their realisation they could close the portal!
They found a few magic items in the Somberweave’s lair – some rather minor and unattractive, others quite useful. All were rolled from Vault of Magic, another Kobold Press book. (I actually reviewed this one – it’s an awesome book).
We ended the session there, as the characters took a much-needed long rest. They were almost out of spells and hit dice. Although no shadows would come out of the portal this night, it’s possible some other interested parties may appear next session.
The session was played on Roll20. The battle maps I used came from The Crawling Caverns map pack in the Roll20 marketplace, which add a suitably gloomy look to the proceedings. I will say that I’m not quite sure of how they fit together, which led to some weird directions at times!