Real life ran down my Runelords campaign in September, and we’ve just now gotten back to it, with the party fighting their way through the Runeforge, trying to wipe out the last of the surviving apprentices in the Hall of Gluttony.
And things aren’t going well.
They struggle to get their feet under them after the three-month skip in time, get just hammered – twice - by the mummies, almost lose the sorcerer to the ravenous zombie, and then suffer a near total wipeout to the negative energy trap battling the apprentice.
And despite the screams and the laughs, and their ultimate success, something’s… off.
That done, they take a day to heal up, de-mummy rot themselves, and start up the process of making some runeforged weapons to take the fight to Karzoug. They finish the first one, Karzoug possesses the statue and starts snarking in his dry, ‘been there, seen that’ way, and the players are all <yawn> “Yeah, whatever, baldy.”
That’s when I figure it out. They’re not scared of him anymore. The three-month skip has disconnected them from the worry and fear they’d built up.
So I keep talking when I reach the end of the scripted threats: “…your destiny is death, here, in the Runeforge, at my hands and those of my new friend. Say hello, Arkrhyst.” <insert draconian roar as the shielding spells on the dragon drop and he starts to force his way into the Runeforge Pool area through the passageway the party entered through>
And there, in that moment, facing the animated statue and the reanimated dragon, as I told them “We’ll pick it here next time,” they found their fear again.
Player commentary:
P1, P2, P4: “WTF?”
P3: “Arkrhyst? We killed him!”
P2: “K-Man must have raised him.”
P1: "Oh we are so getting our butts kicked."
P3: “How? He’s still stuck wherever, right? And he’s a mage; he can’t raise anything except his hairline.”
P1: “He possessed that statue, right? Maybe he did the same thing and got someone to do it for him?”
P4: “That takes a lot of cash, where’d he get it? Not like it’s just lying… around.” <horrified look>
P3: “Auuggghhh! That <censored> SOB used the dragon’s horde to pay for his resurrection! I *knew* we shouldn’t have left it outside the Runeforge door like that!”
P2: “Well, he *is* the Runelord of Greed; makes sense he’d pay with someone else’s money.”
P4: “Dammit! I remember why I hate this guy, now!”
P2: "Wait, I bet the dragon has a rune on it, too! We kill it, and K-Man gets his 'Get Out Of Jail Free' card!"
P3: “Dammit! I hate him more than I did before now!”
Sometimes the magic just works.
That was awesome! I am still laughing.
