this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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See, this shit wouldn't throw me. As a DM I love improve in my plot lines. Hell, I often don't plan things out past laying out the world and enemy motivations.
Sure my big bad has goals, but they have to work for them just as much as anyone else does. One of the most fun (for me) campaigns I ever ran was where the big bad conducted a ritual off screen, and botched the roll. He ended up killing himself.
The party knew that he had been planning a ritual of some sort and had gone into seclusion. They had decided to dismantle his organization before tracking him down.
So weeks of fighting and taking out little hidden cells of the cult, they finally find info about where the big bad was doing his ritual. Only to find a mangled rotting corpse and a closed hell portal.
That story made me actually laugh out loud, thanks for telling it.
So what....happened after? I mean, that had to be a huge letdown, you can't just end the campaign with the villain dying offscreen by himself and then we all go home.
The survivors of the cult splintered and became a bit of a running gag, but yes, the players were a bit pissed that the big bad of that part of the campaign was dead off screen.
I don't really do a singular big bad... Just groups and factions and madmen wanting power.
The players run into some of it. And hear tails of other adventurers solving some of it off screen. Which is what they thought happened at first until the wizard made a great roll and spotted an error in the ritual circle.
I might have left the portal permanently open or broken
That was an option, but it was funny to not do it that way.
The guy was trying to do a sort of reverse possession on a prince of hell.
I had a little chart drawn up for all the ways such a thing could go wrong. (And a few ways it would succeed)
The roll ended up being that he screwed up, got killed and the demon prince had no anchor to stay, so thus was pulled back into hell.