Last
Wednesday brought a close to the Dungeons & Dragons campaign Colleen and I
have been playing weekly for most of the year. Other games I’ve played in have
ended, but this one truly rounded out the story and gave us an ending that was
incredibly satisfying.
Because he
knew this game was coming to an end – and that many of the players wouldn’t be
returning for future games due to work or other reasons – our Dungeon Master,
Jeremy, wanted to make this a night to remember. It’s extremely difficult to
arrange a situation like that, especially when other people determine how it
plays out in the end, but he certainly pulled it off.
The game
was a high stakes game with a high mortality rate. The beginning of the
adventure started off with our heroes finding an item that place them all under
a curse. They had two choices: go insane, or assemble an object that would
bring about an end to the world. The characters were all willing to accept the
insanity, but they learned that if they didn’t complete this task, someone else
would. So they decided to assemble the object in the hopes that they could
defeat whatever doom they summoned. Bonded together by their common goal, they
called themselves the Onyx Order and made their heraldry the likeness of Manny,
the mammoth they had pooled together to purchase.
Their
adventures took them far and wide, leaving a swathe of destruction in their
wake – usually unintentionally. They were pursued by a cult that, for their own
reasons, wanted the item assembled.
After many
months, during which a town, a city, and the village one of the characters came
from were destroyed – not to mention the deaths of three of the original Order
members and two of the replacements – the item was finally assembled, and the
curse lifted.
Yet, though
the curse was gone, the heroes felt obligated to complete their task. They had
seen the enormous egg fall from the sky and knew it would hatch into giant
worms that would eat the world away into nothing. They had to prevent it from
hatching.
Luckily,
the egg had fallen onto a glacier and would need heat to hatch. Unfortunately,
the cult had arrived first and had brought fire magic to hatch the egg. This
was where the final night began.
It was an
epic battle that lasted nearly the full three hours we played for. The magical cultists
were channeling magic into a crystal that was superheating the egg while their
backs were guarded by a large number of minions. In the skies, two evil
denizens lurked.
The Onyx Order’s druid (played by
myself) turned himself into a giant eagle and carried the barbarian into the
midst of the spell casters – where he wreaked havoc – then spent the rest of
the battle using his speed and size to move his allies into favorable positions
while calling down lightning to smite the cultists. The bard opened up with a
powerful spell that did massive damage to the cultists’ rear guard, then fought
on as best he could – nearly dying. The fighter (played by Colleen) hacked her
way through the minions and took down one of the denizens. The rogue stealthily
picked off more of the minions, and finished off the other denizen. The wizard
helped where he could, then truly proved his worth by trapping the leader of
the cultists in a magical sphere she couldn’t escape from.
With the
lesser enemies destroyed, and the fire removed from the egg, it seemed the day
was saved. They escorted the cultists as far as they could from the egg before
the magical bubble dissipated, healing what wounds they could. The barbarian
stayed behind at the egg, packing ice into the hole drilled by the cultists’
fire to prevent further damage to the egg.
The rest of
the party prepared to strike down the cultist leader and released her from her
prison, but as they did so, the egg shattered, becoming a portal from which a
giant worm sprang to attack the barbarian. The rogue ran to help while the
others finished the battle with the cult leader – a battle that took longer
than expected. The cult leader did finally fall, and not long after the heavily
injured barbarian rent the worm in two.
But there
were more worms swirling in the portal. A book found on the body of the cult
leader revealed that only extreme cold could seal the portal. In that instant,
the barbarian knew what he had to do. This quest had claimed many of his
friends, destroyed his village, and turned his beloved grandmother into a
vampire he’d been forced to slay. Failure wasn’t an option.
Taking a
magical ice crystal he had, he leapt into the portal and swung his axe. When
the axe struck the crystal, there was an astounding blast of icy magic, and the
egg was sealed over the portal – with the barbarian inside.
The Order
was devastated, but they respected his sacrifice. Their long journey over, it
was now time for them to return to the world. Each player gave an epilogue for
what became of their character.
The rogue,
one of the two remaining members of the original Order, took to roaming the
world – reuniting with old friends when she felt like it, sometimes reliving
old memories.
The other
original member, the fighter, returned to the city she knew best. Suffering
from PTSD that she’d had even before the beginning of this adventure, she took
to drinking and fighting until she was banned from all the bars. One night,
alone in an alley, she died of liver cancer.
The wizard
built himself a tower of ice on top of the sealed portal, defending it from
intruders for the rest of his long elven life.
The druid
returned to the wilderness with Manny the mammoth and Balto the wolf (the
former companion of a fallen ally). Together they roamed the boarders of the
glacier where the egg resided, slowly collecting more mammoths and forming a
herd.
The bard
roamed the world, singing tales of the Onyx Order, with particular emphasis on a
great barbarian who had sacrificed himself.
Jeremy made
one addition to these epilogues.
In the dark
alley, where the fighter lay dying, a figure appeared – the same person who had
led the adventurers to find the cursed item that set them on this quest. She
knelt by the fighter and whispered:
“Not yet.”
Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.
Also, make sure you check out
my wife's blog and her
website.
If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.
