Carrion Hill Ending

[Zeromage]

Hi, everyone,

I wanted to slightly change the ending of the Carrion Hill adventure and I was looking for some advice.

Spoiler:

I wanted the final battle with the spawn of Yogsothoth to be more hopeless because I think that being able to physically beat him, even after weakening him takes some of the terror away. Basically I wanted to have them have to banish him back to wear he came from instead of physically killing him. I was wondering if anyone had any advice for how this would work.

Maybe they have to perform a ritual while they fight him. Open a gate and push him through it? How would the mechanics of that work though. I'm also open to any other ideas.

[Imbicatus]

Unbeatable monsters tend to lead to TPKs. I would run the adventure as written. If it bothers you, treat the spawn as a summoned monster. You aren't actually killing the spawn, just destroying it's body and sending it back to wherever it came from. Perhaps take a page from Bokrug and have it send vengeful dreams to those that dared oppose it.

[Claxon]

Worst case scenario, they damage it to 0 or less hp and instead of dying it "errupts into a ball of shimmering light that rips a hole in the fabric of space and time and disappears into another dimension".

Basically rule 0 it.

"There is no death, it merely slumbers. Regaining its strength. Biding its time. And there will be a next time.

But that is another story."

[Necromancer]

Since the spawn has natural invisibility, you've got several ways to unsettle your players:

- dispel magic just won't work (for the invisibility)

- don't let the see the book's art, describe the creature vaguely and maybe sketch out some parts of it that barely appear when it attacks

- get some music and a free editing program to overlap something instrumental with reversed human speech

- Heavily roleplay encounters with sane townsfolk and provide a lengthy epilogue; following their battle with the spawn, make each of them infrequently make fortitude saves and describe some unusal sights seen and/or sounds heard (by only that character). For example: character that rolls a ten sees veins emerging and pulsing before vanishing seconds later, character that rolls a one smells rotting corpses and hears inhuman moaning from time to time, but nothing's there. Keep it creepy and leave them with the impression that they barely won and the encounter will forever haunt them.

Horror isn't purely fear (although, it can be enhanced by it) as much as a feeling of unease and a kind of cognitive dissonance.

[Ascalaphus]

Since this adventure is strongly inspired by Lovecraft's tale of The Dunwich Horror, why not take a page from his book?

The Spawn doesn't belong in this dimension; it's not truly a 3-D monster, it's far bigger than that. It's natural invisibility is a product of this; because it doesn't really fit in this world, it's hard to properly see it. Likewise, when beaten, it's not so much destroyed as just "pushed out". The extension of the monster that managed to gain a toehold in this dimension, that part can be destroyed; the monster itself is much bigger, but it hasn't fully come across to our world.