My group finished Hells Rebels!

[Brenden Falke]

After 67 sessions (most of them 5-7hrs) my players reached the Apex of Bone and defeated Barzillai. I'd built the apex of bone from foam and some electronics to create the hellfire columns, so it looked pretty good!

Some photos of the final fight: https://imgur.com/a/j5ooPAY

The heroes were:

- Zero the Hero, human reach cleric of cayden cailean (and champion of Thais)
- Dolores Fistweaver, human unchained monk with the drunken master archetype
- Ialon Holatris, elf conjuration wizard
- Majet Trig, gnome mastermind investigator (this character left after the end of book 4)

They were a very powerful group that worked together well, their only weakness was swarms.

Most of the AP I could run relatively unchanged (though usually adding details), with major changes being mostly driven by player choices. I added a completely re-written No Response From Deepmar module just before book 3. I also added an election after book 4 (which Zero won), for which I had to develop election mechanics I'm very happy with. So Kintargo has a different mayor than the books assume now.

The heroes have now been asked by Thais (the herald of cayden cailean) to recover her 6th wing from Hell, for when we want to play to level 20.

I've occasionally asked advice on this forum which definitely helped, as well as reading older posts when I needed inspiration or ideas, so thanks!

[Yakman]

Congratulations! What were some highlights?

[Warped Savant]

Fantastic!!

Those light up, pulsing pillars are amazing!

[Brenden Falke]

Yakman wrote:

Congratulations! What were some highlights?

Hm that's a hard question to ask about a 4 year campaign. There have of course been a great many little moments that were cool or touching. I made (some of) my players cry twice, once out of sadness, once out of happiness.

Every player has had a personal story woven through the AP which was very cool for them to go through.

I would say the one thing I might highlight was a relationship the group built up with a tiefling crime lord in the Devil's Nursery called Rator. I improvised this NPC early on in the game during the Murders In The Devils Nursery mission, when the players asked to go into a bar I had just made up asking for witnesses. I played the crime lord as a terse man who was a bit rude, since he really didn't have anything for my players.

However, especially one of the players for some reason took a liking to him, so this randomly improvised NPC became their go-to whenever they needed rumours about the kintargo underworld, or when they had stuff they needed to fence. So much so they as a group got a bit too comfortable in my opinion building a productive relationship with this crime lord.

So I wanted that relationship to backfire a bit. If you empower a crime lord, he's gonna have his own plans. He's not a nice guy, even if you act like he's your best friend. This all came to a head when his own plans were unveiled at the end of book 5. He'd been using all the things the players had provided him with (and even some favours they did for him) for his own dastardly plans, and the players were confronted with the fact they had been unwittingly helping this crime lord. They ended up fighting their way through his hideout and killing him.

It was our first in-person session after the pandemic, so I'd drawn an elaborate map in the old DnD style: https://imgur.com/a/vkbn8yf

[Brenden Falke]

Warped Savant wrote:

Fantastic!!

Those light up, pulsing pillars are amazing!

Thanks! It was my first time making a physical set like this, I'm very happy with how it works out.

Cotton wool looks really cool when lit up by LEDs, and if you use an RGB LED strip controlled via something like an Arduino (I used an ESP32 I had laying around) you can make a lot of very cool lighting effects. These were meant to be hellfire columns, but I noticed while developing it that changing the colouring to green or puple gave it a completely different, very cool feel.