Our heroes approached the Well of Dragons for the finale of our campaign. Naturally, with the overt acceleration of events leading up to this moment, a monumental dungeon crawl isn’t what my table is looking for as they arrive at the caldera. They’re ready to begin the ultimate battle to decide the fate of Faerun!

The unfortunate truth is I haven’t run this dungeon either time I’ve finished this module. Back in 2015, my players opted to crash Skyreach Castle into the mountainside and skipped it that way; this time, I never planned to run it. At a different table with a different DM behind the screen, I’m sure a final crawl is exactly what the moment calls for. It just hasn’t been the case for me running this module.

Instead, the players were given the opportunity to decide where their allied forces would be deployed, then we were right into the Caldera.

Phase 1: The Ritual

A Clash of Legends

Our heroes arrived during the final moments of the ritual. Right at the top, I had a volunteer roll 1d4 and subtracted the result from 10. This number gave us how many rounds the party had to accomplish their goals: disrupt the ritual, clear the field, and prepare to battle Tiamat. A few specific goals with defined effects on Phase 2 were given to them, but more on that later.

The party was also accompanied by a handful of allies I had the players pilot in the battle: Brok Stonebrow, Cyanwrath, Maccath the Crimson, and an aarakocra rogue our Owlin Ranger PC was romancing. This evened out the field against a truly incredible number of opponents within the caldera.

Lastly, this battle was joined by several villainous characters who would all have Legendary Actions if encountered alone. Running all these foes with that resource at their full disposal would’ve been keenly unfair. (“Alright, at the end of your turn, the party is struck with three Fireballs. Dex saves, please.” No.) Plus, the heroes are legendary themselves at this point! They’re battling to determine the fate of the very world! If that isn’t the stuff of legends, I’m not sure what is.

So here’s what I did instead. At the beginning of each round, I had a volunteer roll 1d4, and we subtracted that result from 10. The villains had a shared pool of Legendary Actions that they could use at the end of a heroes’ turn as normal equal to the sum of the equation, while the players gained the number they rolled as a shared resource of Heroic Legendary Actions they could take at the end of an enemy’s turn. Then, any creature that took a legendary action that round couldn’t take another until the beginning of the next round. For instance, in the first round a player rolled a 3 on that d4, gaining them 3 legendary actions and setting the villainous pool to 7. At the end of a player’s turn, Rath Modar could spend 3 of the villain’s pool of Legendary Actions to cast a Fireball at the party, leaving 4 in the pool for the villains for the rest of the round. Then, at the end of any villain or minion’s turns, the heroes could use one of their pooled Legendary Actions to do one of the following:

1. Take a Dash action
2. Make one weapon attack
3. Cast one cantrip

This gave the battle a sense of momentum, too. Sometimes, our heroes were ascendant and active; other times, the villains were in power and striking back with all that they could muster.

Speaking of the villains …

The Roster

In addition to a smattering of minions at each altar, the potent enemies our heroes faced were as follows. Each had their own suite of Legendary Action options and priorities during the battle.

• Rath Modar and his simulacra could Cast a Cantrip (Cost 1), Cast a Chromatic Orb (Cost 2), or Cast Fireball (Cost 3).
• Serevin Silrajin could Cast a Cantrip (Cost 1), or Cast Magic Missile (Cost 1). (I let him do the latter because I gave him a Staff of the Magi.)
• Talis the White could Cast a Cantrip (Cost 1) or Reduce a Creature’s Speed by half (Cost 2).
• Iskander the Blue could Cast a Cantrip (Cost 1) or Cast Lightning Bolt (Cost 3).
• Naergoth Bladelord could Make a Weapon Attack (Cost 1), Make a Shove Attack (Cost 1), or Disengage and Dash (Cost 1).
• And finally, Serevin’s young red dragon Seladrius could Move up to half his speed and make 1 Rend attack (Cost 1) or Cast Scorching Ray at 3rd level (Cost 1).

A few of these creatures were additionally under a handful of effects for mobility purposes from items or spells. Rath Modar had one of his simulacra concentrating on a Fly spell for the three of them, whereas Serevin wore an Amulet of Levitation.

Finally, each minion group acted simultaneously, but only the ones disturbed from their ritual opposed the heroes. These groups were the Red Wizards of Thay, Clerics of the Profane Dragonflame, Cultist Guardians, Cultist Talonblades, Hellhounds, additional abishai, and a second young dragon (green).

The Map

The caldera as it exists in the module looked like it would be annoying to recreate in Talespire (though this user on Talestavern seems to have done a good job of it!), so I decided to make my own alternative inspired by the one in the book.

I imagined structures from Tiamat’s Temple in Avernus were being pulled through by the ritual, and if it was successful, the deity’s seat would exist wholly within the Well of Dragons. Between these structures was a lake of lava, proving to be an exciting hazard for my players to overcome and employ! Several cultists ended up taking a dunk before too long. But they say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s an angled overhead screenshot of the map. I’ve additionally uploaded it to Talestavern here should you decide you’d like to use it on the VTT yourself!

Phase 2: Tiamat

The Goals

When I ran this module before, when Tiamat arrived on the field, she went down a little too easily. My players at the time had accomplished many of the things that would weaken her before even arriving to the ritual, and her taking the field didn’t redefine the battlefield in the way that I believe a summoned god should. So, I reworked Tiamat’s statblock and made the party fight for each and every step to weaken Tiamat. In the first phase of the encounter, they had a number of specific goals to attain.

First, for each round the party dimmed two or more altars (present at the outlying five islands on the map), Tiamat’s total hit points were reduced by 25. (Each platform had 3 spell casters concentrating on the ritual; if at least two of them lost concentration, the altar dimmed.) My heroes successfully dimmed two or more altars on five rounds, reducing Tiamat’s health by 125 points (down from 1025 to 900).

Next, if all five shrines were dimmed during a single round, Tiamat’s Limited Spell Immunity trait was removed. With the use of Dimension Door and the party’s fighter proving very adept at pushing channelers into the lava, the party accomplished this on one of the final rounds of the battle.

Lastly, removing the Mask of the Dragon from the ritual site would reduce the number of Legendary Actions Tiamat could take per round by 2 (from 5 to 3). The aarakocra rogue NPC managed to pull this off just before the ritual completed.

Additionally, my party successfully cleared the field of all the major and minor threats. It would be them and their allies against Tiamat alone.

The Goddess

Even with their great success in the first phase of the battle, Tiamat proved her strength all the same. With access to three casts of Divine Word per day, Tiamat managed to get a few of the NPC allies in the battle low, then speak a single word to slay them and remove them from the fight. Maccath and Brok were both killed outright; Cyanwrath was blinded and deafened, and the PCs fought hard to keep themselves above the threshold of the spell’s worst effects. They effectively spread out to avoid being multi-targeted by the breath weapon attacks, and overcame the goddess with a satisfying final blow from the draconic lineage sorcerer.

However, her defeat was not the end of danger! With the goddess sent screaming back into Avernus, the caldera began to rumble violently. Our heroes collected their fallen allies and fled as fast as they could, arriving on the mountainside. With no good path down the mountain and the inability to carry their fallen comrades all the way, they cast Revivify on Brok and Maccath, and Maccath Teleported them to Skyreach castle to escape the volcano’s eruption!

What followed afterward was the epilogue of our adventure; one which will remain the tale of the table alone.

As always, thank you for reading. Thank you for joining me on the adventure of retelling my experiences running this module. I hope you have something to take away from this series: either for your own run of the module or for your own campaigns. In the end, this finale was immense. The first phase of the battle straddled two sessions of our game, with Tiamat’s defeat and our epilogue filling the final session.

For those of you who’ve enjoyed the little snippets of this series as it alluded to the campaign I ran, I may begin working on a campaign diary style series to continue to explore ideas and lessons learned from running my games. After all, we can always improve.

As to other module reworks, I’ve not run too many other full campaign books. I had the benefit of playing in a complete run of Rime of the Frost Maiden, and a friend of mine hopes to run Curse of Strahd in the future, but I’ve seldom been short on ideas myself. I am presently running through the Delian Tomb to learn Draw Steel with my friends; perhaps I’ll have some thoughts as we approach the conclusion of that short adventure.

Regardless, good luck out there heroes. See you again soon.

When I first ran Oyaviggaton in 5th edition’s infancy, I found the dungeon a bit repetitive and unchallenging. In my opinion, a party of 8th-level heroes have well-outgrown combat encounters with kobolds, and trolls have shifted more toward minion-tier than being challenging on their own (though, it looks like now the module references the Ice Troll statblock added in Rime of the Frost Maiden, which looks a bit better). Its saving grace was Arauthator, with a challenge rating of 13 he’d be a challenging fight for many tables at 8th level, but with the other encounters proving so trivial, they might arrive with most of their resources intact and dispatch the dragon easily. (After all, dragons in base 5th edition dealt a lot of damage but couldn’t sustain much themselves.)

With my adjustments to the plot of the module, my party was arriving to Oyaviggaton at 11th or 12th level rather than 8th, and they were covered in powerful magical items. One CR 13 dragon and several kobold encounters weren’t going to cut it. A duel with one CR 5 gladiator wasn’t going to cut it.

We had to make some sweeping adjustments here to address both of these issues.

Resetting the Scenario

In the module, Oyaviggaton is home to the white dragon and the tribal Ice Hunters. The former is a deadly foe known as Old White Death, and the latter are unwelcoming and unkind, with their people having been enslaved by Arauthator for generations. Additionally, the Draakhorn was last seen on Oyaviggaton, and it has been taken away to the Well of Dragons, which isn’t the first or final time that an item our heroes are sent to collect is already out of their hands.

So, first up, we gave Arauthator a promotion into an ancient dragon. My party would’ve mopped the floor with an adult dragon at their level, so he got a valuable elevation (and he still died shockingly fast, more on that later).

Second, I wanted to change the Ice Hunters pretty substantially, too. One of the players at my table is the guy who ran Rime of the Forstmaiden previously, and one of his regrets was he didn’t use the werebear very much during his run. I’m also fond of werebears, so I decided that the tribe on Oyaviggaton were lycanthropes living in self-imposed exile. They were in control of themselves, but they remained away from civilization all the same. They visited Oyaviggaton yearly for a coming-of-age ritual, and Arauthator pressed them into his service. Rather than having laired on the iceberg for generations, I decided he’d come at the behest of the Cult of the Dragon, who wanted to place the Draakenhorn there (more on why in a moment). These warriors, the Urrasa tribe, were unwelcoming not because they served the dragon faithfully, but because they witnessed what became of Maccath the Crimson’s allies and they wish to spare our heroes from that gruesome fate.

Lastly, the Draakenhorn is here on the iceberg, but it is well defended. The purpose for its stationing here is that an artifact on the stolen Hosttower of the Arcane in Arauthator’s lair is adversely affecting magic. Prolonged exposure is completely muting one’s connection to the weave. It’s why no one has heard from Maccath the Crimson; it’s why the Urrasa tribe has grown somber from the silence of the ancestors.

Now, this last adjustment wasn’t as necessary as some of the others as fallout from the restructuring of the module. However, I really enjoyed the episodes of Critical Role exploring Eiselcross and dealing with the weirdness of magic there, and I had a fun idea for a puzzle-based dangerous encounter that’d help break up the monotony of fighting dragons and dragon servants all the time.

So, altogether, we have a pretty decent dungeon of 4 encounters: a trial of strength by the Urrasa tribe, the ancient white dragon, the Netheril Accumulator I invented, and the defenders of the Draakehnhorn.

Arriving at Oyaviggaton

After the council reconvened and set them on their new task, our heroes were teleported to Oyaviggaton by the apprentice of on the wizards on the council, Taern Thunderspells. This apprentice was a new NPC, an orcish woman named Tsorina. Through this NPC I was able to give an in-character reaction to the weirdness of magic and provide a new tension: the heroes could not teleport away from the island until they dealt with the accumulator (not that they knew why magic was so strange here, yet). Tsorina, not a wizard for battling in the field, started freaking out. They calmed her down and made their way to a distant firelight on the horizon.

These fires were those of the Urrasa tribe. After a brief social encounter, the three leaders of the tribe invited the heroes up to the Ridge of the Lost. Here, they tested our party’s strength, then revealed the gruesome reminder the White Death had installed here: the frozen corpses of their tribesmen who tried to flee and Maccath’s allies, the only other outsiders to have come to Oyaviggaton in many years. With their fortitude proven, the chieftain gave them a heading for Arauthator’s lair.

Then, on a roll of a natural one and an eight on a d8 for a random encounter, they were ambushed by the dragon himself in the snowfields. Despite my intent to escape with Arauthator, the Owlin ranger pursued the beast himself. He nearly died for it, but survived with a mere 2 hit points and managed to take the dragon down. He’d flown far ahead of the party in this chase, too, so it’d have been lights out if he hadn’t secured the kill, perhaps permanently.

The heroes continued on to the dragon’s lair, where they found the kobolds were not reverent followers of the dragon but were slaves themselves who celebrated his demise. Within, they met Maccath the Crimson who’d lost her ability to cast spells from her exposure to the accumulator but was still an expert in arcane matters.

The Netheril Accumulator

Atop the stolen Hosttower of the Arcane was the arcane mechanism exerting pressure upon the weave across Oyaviggaton. This battle consisted of three “Lodestones” that needed to be simultaneously deactivated (within the same round). Each lodestone had 300 hit points, but due to the collected arcana, they had taken on something like a personality and would expend their accumulated magic to defend themselves. To deactivate the lodestones, a character needed to spend their action performing an arcana check whose DC was equal to the lodestone’s current hit point total divided by ten. So, an unharmed lodestone had a DC 30 check, while one with 131 hit points left had a DC 13 check.

These lodestones became much more dangerous the lower their hit point totals were, however. The table below was my reference for the encounter.

The lodestones didn’t roll initiatives, instead they acted on steps 20, 15, and 5.

And their explosion was an apocalyptic threat (at least for Oyaviggaton). If any were reduced to 0 hit points, then after one round (unless stalled by some miracle), it would erupt in a burst of pure arcane energy. All creatures within 30 miles would need to make a DC 15 Intelligence saving throw. On a failed save, they were Stunned and would suffer 30d10 force damage. Any creature reduced to 0 hit points by this damage would be reduced to ash. Creatures that succeed on the save take half damage and are not stunned. Additionally, magic items would’ve had to make a saving throw or cause a secondary detonation based on their rarity (like that moment in EXU: Calamity at the start of the 4th episode).

Luckily, my players heeded Maccath’s warning and did not break any lodestones. One almost got to use a 9th level spell, but they completed their checks right before its turn. Oh, and each time a successful check was made, that lodestone was pacified until the end of the round.

Maccath couldn’t do much to defend herself in this battle, but she added an incredible +13 to her arcana checks and she was willing to aid our heroes. So were a pair of kobolds they’d befriended, but they died pretty much immediately. (They were using the baseline kobold statblock; after the Owlin ranger convinced them to join the battle, they were doomed.)

Attacking the Draakenhorn

With the accumulator fixed and the dragon defeated, our heroes decided to rest overnight to recover before battling over the Draakenhorn. This had its own consequences. An additional enemy joined the retinue defending the horn: a fresh simulacrum of Rath Modar, equipped with knowledge of our heroes and their abilities. With the planned Blue Abishai here, that placed two powerful spellcasters opposed to the heroes. They also had to contend with ice trolls, and the commotion drew an unaligned Remorhaz to the battle.

Our heroes prevailed, though a failed Wisdom saving throw allowed the true Rath Modar to observe them once again, and it was a great opportunity to showcase an abishai’s abilities to them, as one was soon going to be a major threat, but more on that next time.

As always, thank you for reading! I’d meant to get another post out between this and the last one, but. Well. I’ve been playing a ton of Midnight. Even this post was drafted close to last minute! Here’s hoping I find the time between now and next month to get some other posts up.

Good luck out there heroes.

It’s a common experience in D&D that we DMs make magic items we don’t fully understand the ramifications of. In this run of the module, nothing surprised me more than an Amulet of Shared Sight my players looted off of the Rath Modar simulacrum they defeated in Skyreach Castle. When I made it, I thought, “This will be a fun way to let the party understand that Rath Modar watched them kill his simulacrum.” Then they used the damn thing all the time to let their allies scry upon them.

Such was the case after they defeated Neronvain. My party used this amulet to inform King Melandrach, and with a king’s resources at his disposal, a court wizard arrived swiftly to bring them to the king’s palace. The stayed overnight in the palace, resupplied, and asked that the wizard take them as close as he could to the Tomb of Diderius so they could try and rescue the Zhentarim agent before her fall.

A side-effect of how I presented this quest made my party feel the pressure of a ticking clock to a degree I didn’t fully intend. Don’t mistake me, I’m glad my players were invested enough in the campaign that they pursued their quests with haste; I just hadn’t considered the extent to which I accelerated their actions with the situation I presented. Either way, after a quick teleport, my party arrived in the ancient debris of a long-crumbled town outside the Tomb of Diderius.

Scrapping Ss’tck’al

I didn’t care for the Yuan-ti dungeon the first time I ran this module. Besides being a bit out of leftfield, it also contains what would end up being some repetitive encounters for this run of the module, given how I changed Castle Naerytar.

The Tomb itself also contains some design choices I find are more aligned with an adversarial DM’s style. As an example, the last time I ran this module, my players were worn out by the time they reached the room filled with Bearded Devils. These fiends have express orders to attack anything that leaves from a chamber to the side, so they don’t attack the party when they first arrive here. My table at the time decided to try to take a short rest in this room, with the exception of their barbarian. He, uninjured, decided to explore the room the Bearded Devils were watching, and discovered the Wraiths and Specters within. His party tried to aid him, but unfortunately, the specters killed him before they could intervene, and the Wraith turned him into another specter. This was one of the only permanent deaths I’ve had at a table in all my years running D&D, and afterward, the Bearded Devils followed their command and attacked the wounded party as they tried to flee with the corpse of their fallen ally.

That, of course, all happened over ten years ago. Were I to encounter a similar situation again, I’d definitely do a lot differently; I’d call for an explicit Insight check to understand the devil’s motivations; I’d give more clues that something nefarious was behind that door the barbarian entered alone; I’d have had a disclosure during session 0 about character death and ensured we were all on the same page about such things. Live and learn, right?

This isn’t to mention that I’ve completely changed the scenario here. There’s no question that the White Dragon Mask has been taken inside the tomb; there’s no need for divination pool, no need for gathering information at Boareskyr Bridge, and with my party’s teleport, no need for roadside travel or random encounters. Ultimately, I needed an entirely new dungeon.

The (New) Tomb of Diderius

After absconding with Varram’s mask, the Zhentarim agent fled into this old and ancient tomb home to a terrible curse of my own making: Lich’s Breath. I reimagined Diderius as a wizard of a long-forgotten age who defeated a powerful lich. However, in that creature’s death throes, it laid a curse upon Diderius and all his allies, one that would see them eternally undead, and that their touch would spread the curse to others. To save his homeland, Diderius led his warriors away, where they settled and built the tomb that would house them all. With the aid of a Hallow spell, the undead were trapped inside forevermore.

Lich’s Breath was a simple enough curse. Any time my players began their turn within 5 feet of any of the cursed undead, they needed to make a saving throw against the curse. It wasn’t a terribly high DC, but a few still fell prey to its effect, though they wouldn’t know it immediately. Instead, they only felt an unwelcome chill settle upon them, and after time, they’d see a slight green glow upon their eyes in their reflection. Luckily, we also had a cure on hand: Holy Water. Imbibing Holy Water forced a character to make a Constitution saving throw (one which they could elect to fail), and on a failure, they suffered 1d6+1 radiant damage and felt the curse leave them.

This revealed that our Zhentarim agent only fled within because she must have had no other options. Over the centuries, the undead had been lulled into inaction; something close to peaceful rest, stirring only when their tomb was plundered. Thus, our rogue agent was able to proceed through the dungeon with relative ease, whereas her first and second pursuers faced greater and greater danger, and our heroes faced the worst of the lot (more on those two pursuers in a moment).

When my party entered the dungeon, they discovered the entryway mostly empty. Therein, there were two defeated undead and tablets that revealed the story of Diderius and his people. They realized the defeated undead within were slowly reconstituting and decided to smash one’s skull and consecrate the remains with Holy Water to try and prevent it. I improvised a small encounter with an Allip in response – to try and stave off my party thinking their goal here might be to permanently eliminate the undead.

Mostly because their first (planned) encounter within the tomb wasn’t meant to be a battle, but a mad dash through a horde of undead to reach a safe space on the other side: a shrine to a forgotten goddess that had its own hallowed ground and an ever-filling bowl of holy water. With a truly absurd number of undead on the board and a hallway stretching just over four-hundred feet, the party needed to engineer some creative solutions to get through the horde. This is a type of encounter I’ve been experimenting with for a while; this version of it worked pretty well, but if I were to run the module again in the future, I think I’d decide to do something else instead. Perhaps a wave-based encounter and multiple rooms in sequence, rather than one long hallway. (Talespire did a lot for making this encounter function at all, too.)

In the hallowed shrine, my party managed a moment’s rest. Then, they discovered the sarcophagi of Diderius’s Honor Guard. There were eight sarcophagi within the room, but three of the undead had already risen and been defeated by those who’d entered the tomb before our heroes. So, our party battled five of the undead warriors made from a retooled Knight statblock, edited to be undead, have more hit points, deal bonus necrotic damage instead of radiant, gained a recharge 6 Life Drain attack equivalent to a Wraith, and a Zombie’s Undead Fortitude. This gave us a good encounter, and the threat of having to battle an additional three of them if the party decided to rest again urged them further into the dungeon, rather than back into the hallowed shrine behind them.

Back-to-Back Boss Battles

In the following room, they met Varram. Our White Wyrmspeaker found himself utterly stuck by a door proposing a riddle – a riddle he figured out quickly, but one that required more than just the answer. My party didn’t approach quietly, so Varram turned and faced them down with a mighty enchanted axe and his Orb of Dragonkind (White). I intend to have future post in the series devoted to the ways I tweaked statblocks for this run of the module, so I’ll save  the specifics for later. Ultimately, my party succeeded, and they too answered the riddle quickly.

The door read, “I am a shadow which rests upon thy shoulders like a heavy, dragging cloak. By thy own agency am I donned. In thy ear I whisper of the words unsaid and the roads untraveled. Haunted by me, perhaps evermore, I may still grant thee perspective or absolution, if thou might quiet the darkest of my musings. Speak aloud my name, and this door will open.” After a few guesses, my party landed on “Regret,” and I confirmed the answer by saying they hadn’t heard it clearly before, but when they’d entered, Varram had been saying the word over and over.

The trick was that one needed to consider a regret as they spoke the word, and rather than open, the door simply became immaterial to the speaker. Over the years, I’ve enjoyed employing a puzzle with a simple solution, but one that requires a bit of roleplay from the players to fully solve. One by one, my players spoke of one of their character’s regrets, and they were able to enter the true Tomb of Diderius.

Within we battled a Mummy Lord, a creature of a CR well beyond what my party could theoretically handle at their level, but one they conquered all the same, given the lack of additional enemies in the room and well rolled saves against the Command casts from his Legendary Actions. An upcasted Chromatic Orb dealing fire damage absolutely rocked him, too.

With his defeat, my party proceeded to the final room of the tomb, a private space Diderius had here as he waited for the end of his life. Within, they found a final inscription from Diderius, musing over his terror of mortality having given way to his fear of this tomb one day being plundered and leading to the spread of Lich’s Breath. He implored any who entered to look into a mirror and check for the signs of the curse before leaving, and this was his final gambit. It was a Mirror of Life Trapping, which successfully snagged one of the members of my party. When they left, they ended up taking the mirror with them, having discovered in their work to free their ally that several other would-be graverobbers had been ensnared within the mirror, and many of them (if not all of them) were cursed.

Ultimately, my party arrived too late for the Zhentarim agent. Having hurried into the tomb before Varram’s arrival was another rival of both his and my players: Talis. With the mask stolen, she pursued the thief and reclaimed it to become the White Wyrmspeaker herself, leaving a note to taunt Varram. That allowed our sorcerer to recognize the handwriting, and know who’d gotten the best of them here.

This had always been the way I intended to end this dungeon; hell, in the module the mask is already back at the Well of Dragons by the time Varram uses the Divination Pool in the tomb. However, had my players elected to act with pragmatism, I think I’d have given them the chance to oppose Talis here in this small room to try and take the mask for themselves. I think she’d have had the upper hand with the spells at her disposal, and preferably she’d still teleport away before she could be slain; that still would give the party information on the new White Wyrmspeaker, who they’d be certain to encounter again in the future. And, hey, if they somehow pulled it off, well. The next post in this series will reveal my contingency. Stay tuned.

As always, thank you for reading. Good luck out there, heroes.