So, my 14th level PC's were on an epic MacGuffin quest into Niflheim. The thing that was going to make this quest different was that it was going to require some puzzle solving and out-of-the-box thinking to survive and succeed.
They found a guide that could lead them to Yggdrasil, which is sort of a nexus of existence, and can lead to all of the Nine Worlds via the different transitive planes. The guide, a Xill, turned them all ethereal, at which point the impressive-but-normal-sized ash tree was seen in its true form, with a height and canopy bowl the size of a small mountain. He led them up to a hole in the tree trunk up in the branches.
Inside, the tree was hollow and had a spiraling staircase heading up and down. The Xill led them down, passing a few other doorways (the other material worlds that also had an ethereal plane), and finally came to the bottom, with a door leading to Niflheim's ethereal plane. They crawled out and crept away. As soon as the Xill turned them back material (each of the Nine Worlds is its own material plane, with one, two, or all three of the standard transitive planes; Niflheim's ethereal plane is a different plane than Midgard's ethereal plane, etc.), Níðhöggr (represented as a Great Wyrm Force Dragon), swooped down and snatched up the Xill, eating him, and inflicting an auto-quickened Feeble Mind on one of the party members.
The party dallied around and took several turns to escape via a dimension door; I made it clear that had they stuck around for another round or two, Níðhöggr would have killed them. I also made it clear he was an obstacle to be avoided, not something to be faced openly.
All of Niflheim is covered in a fog effect that is basically Kelgore's Grave Mist from the PHB2; it fatigues those within it, and deals 1d6 points of cold damage per round; it also limits vision to approximately 100 feet. Compare to Cania (the level of Hell) with does 10d6 points of cold damage every minute. So, problem number one that needed to be solved, was surviving the night without freezing to death; in the morning the Druid could prepare Attune Form and they would all be fine. But they had to survive the night first.
Between a Wizard//Rogue, a Beguiler//Barbarian, and a Druid//Sorcerer, you would think they could save themselves. They nearly didn't. It took a lot of prodding from me over e-mail during the week between sessions for them to figure out a way to save themselves. Possible solutions:
• There was a dying Jarilith demon that the party had just defeated; they could have charmed it, healed it, and gotten information, including a place to find shelter from the mist.
• The sorcerer could try disintegrating a "room" into the side of a cliff-face, getting a bit of shelter (two castings would have made a deep enough "room" that the fog would have not reached the back; it doesn't go "inside," sort of like the mist from the Mistborn books)
• They could use disintegrate to make a room with a "wall" made of stone, then have the Beguiler cast Phase Door to make an ethereal pocket in which to camp out (they weren't subjected to the mist until they crossed from Niflheim's ethereal to its material plane). This is the method they finally used.
Having survived the night, they must find the MacGuffin location. All they know is that "it is a troll fortress in a mountain hard upon the River Slid." A Knowledge (the Planes) check tells them that the River Slid is one of 11 rivers in Niflheim, that it flows toward the east, and that it is full of knives and blades. It takes them a while, but they eventually find it and make use of Lay of the Land to start getting an idea of what is around.
With no transitive shadow plane on Niflheim (it only has the ethereal), their normal tactic of Shadow Walking wasn't going to work. The vegetation on Niflheim is quite sparse; perhaps only two of the same species within every 50 miles or so. Due to the sparseness of the trees, the Druid doesn't want to Transport via Plants. After 3 or 4 days of walking east, they finally decide to transport via plants, first using Lay of the Land, then Transporting, then using Lay of the Land again to see if any landmarks overlapped, so they can accurately judge how far they had traveled. This worked out well, and they found the mountain after a few transports.
The "trolls" in question are "demon blooded," and are statistically Slaadi. I won't get into exactly why, but the Slaadi fortress is actually inside the mountain, and is composed of rooms and "apartments" that have been disintegrated into the stone of the mountain. The original creators of this place all racially had spellcasting, so for security purposes they made use of Passwall, then would disintegrate a "room" into the stone. Once the Passwall ended, you would have a fully-enclosed cubic void. Rinse and repeat, and you end up with a mountain filled with rooms, but no hallways (the original inhabitants would just dimension door and teleport around).
At some point the army of Slaadi invaded and took over the mountain fortress, as the Blue Slaadi can use Passwall at will. Thus, my PC's have an oddity of a "dungeon" to explore, with hallways that would disappear (8-hour duration on Passwall), eventually "trapping" them in a small quadrant. This was another puzzle to solve, with a few different solutions:
• The Wizard Dimension Doors the party around, getting shunted into the open spaces and taking a small bit of damage, but finding new sections to explore, and slaadi to encounter.
• The Beguiler uses Ethereal Jaunt to investigate nearby rooms to help direct the Wizard's Dimension Dooring.
• The party jumps into the Bag of Holding type 4 I dropped into the loot just before they came on the quest to Niflheim, and the Beguiler Ethereal Jaunts, taking the party with him.
• The party jumps into the Bag of Holding, the Beguiler takes it ethereal, then dumps the party onto the Ethereal Plane. The Beguiler becomes material again, but the others can explore the fortress ethereally as long as they want.
• The Rogue//Fighter uses his brand new Ring of Blinking to blink back to the material plane and pick up the bag of holding... which has the Beguiler inside... hey look, the band's back together again!
• The Beguiler charms a Blue Slaad, and gets him to make hallways for the party. Oh, and the party looks like Slaadi, thanks to Veil. This is the method the party used, waltzing through the whole fortress, only fighting the BBEG with the MacGuffin (which is the tactic I was trying to discourage, because my PC's are too damn good at infiltration). At least they are good at what they do.
The PC's get the MacGuffin (a Hammer of Thunderbolts), then teleport back near to Yggdrasil. End of the third session in Niflheim. They have a week to chat over email and brainstorm ways to get safely past Níðhöggr. Again, this is a puzzle with two parts. They need to figure out a way to get past the ultimate sentry without facing him directly. They also know they need to be on the ethereal plane to access the pathway through the Tree, but only have access to Swift Etherealness (any touched target, lasts one round) and Ethereal Jaunt (personal range). The Ethereal problem had a few solutions:
• Bag of Holding/Ethereal Jaunt shenanigans. My PC's didn't figure this one out, even though they had earlier while in Niflheim made use of putting someone in a bag of holding to get their party under the creature limit for Dimension Door (the Tiger was large; they later resorted to Aspect of the Wolf to make him medium).
• Find another Xill (they knew they were from Niflheim), and get him to turn you Ethereal. This is what they ended up doing. They had a good plan of lending the Rogue's Ring of Blinking to the Beguiler, who cast Locate Creature, then blinked back and forth, basically searching both planes simultaneously. Two hours in a search pattern, and he detected some that were in a natural cavern underground.
Lastly, the puzzle that got the whole party killed. They had to sneak past a very tough sentry that could kill them outright with very little effort. Doing this safely was going to require testing and probing carefully with spells to find the "holes" in his senses. I guess I expected too much of the PC's, though. I had devised two workable solutions, but there's always the possibility that the PC's come up with something else that works.
• Overwhelm Níðhöggr with targets. The original idea came from me watching
Serenity and thinking how awesome it was that Mal Reynolds brought the whole Reaver fleet after him to confront the Alliance blockade. You can read more on my initial idea
here.
• This could also be accomplished by summoning a boat-load of summed critters, and sending them all the dragon's way, and slip through while he's distracted.
• Find the hole in his senses, and exploit it to slip past him.
He was tough, and finding the hole in his senses was going to take some careful probing with spells
from afar to gain more information on what he can detect, and what he can't. What ended up happening was an hour of hypothesizing, and NO testing of anything, until they go for broke, and it failed.
He has nigh-unbeatable spot and listen checks (bonuses over 100), he has blindsense, and he always has See Invisibility up, which allows him to see ethereal creatures. Being a "creature of pure force," a great wyrm force dragon can attack creatures on the ethereal plane, as can his breath weapon. I'll tell you the hole right now: although he can sense material creatures (via blindsense) even if his vision is obscured, his blindsense doesn't cross over into the Ethereal plane, and if his vision is obscured by, oh, say... fog (hello control weather), he would not be able to see the party as they approached ethereally.
Before they arrived at the tree, they found their Xill helper, charmed him, and got the whole party ethereal.
The Wizard sends out some Prying Eyes. One comes back. What it showed was Yggdrasil off to the right as the eye approached the area, and another eye floating even closer to the tree. Although it could not see Níðhöggr (he is naturally invisible), it did see rippling waves of concussive force as Níðhöggr breathed at and destroyed the other ethereal prying eye. As no other eyes returned, one should be able to figure out Níðhöggr destroyed all the others. Hey, look, the dragon can see and attack ethereal things.
They debate walking though the ground, both with their heads sticking out like alligators swimming through the water, and blindly while completely underground. They have a general idea of where the doorway into the tree is, amongst the roots, but they can't see it from where they are (Níðhöggr has the advantage of being able to see ethereal creatures up to 100 feet away, while ethereal creatures can't see him until they are 60 feet away).
Should they use clairvoyance to look at the area (cast by the Beguiler)? But that doesn't help the Wizard teleport them there with any more precision. The topic of high-level wizards never being caught surprised comes up, as well as Anticipate Teleport specifically. I heavily imply that Níðhöggr might have such a spell up and running (he does, and it is a Transdimensional spell version, so even though he is Material, he will still delay and know the arriving location of Ethereal teleporters).
After much debate, they came back around to their original idea, which was to try teleporting directly into the middle of the tree. This idea was based upon the very flawed assumption that it's all one ethereal plane. In truth, the nexus that is the center of Yggdrasil is sort of a world unto itself, and though reached through the ethereal plane (or other transitive planes, depending upon your location), you can only actually enter it through the doorway amongst the roots. Trying to dimension door into it is like trying to use dimension door to travel from the ethereal plane of Niflheim to the ethereal plane of Midgard.
So, they dimension door into what is effectively a solid object, and get shunted to the nearest open space, right beside the tree. But that pesky Anticipate Teleport comes into play. Níðhöggr puts down a quickened force cage, then readies a Dimensional Lock over the cage once the PC's arrive inside it. Fish, meet barrel. After a few moments of sparse conversation he grows board with the attempted escapees, and breaths on them for 391 points of force damage.
My big
mea culpa is that I, a scientist, designed this puzzle in a way that seemed logical to me. You do not under any circumstances want to directly encounter Níðhöggr, and I made that abundantly clear. To me, the logical thing to do is to test how good he is at sensing things using prying eyes and/or summoned creatures. Don't rush it; take a day or two if need be, gather more information before planning your method of sneaking past. Come up with hypotheses, then use your spells to test them, without putting yourself in direct danger.
It's possible other solutions would have worked, too. Although inter-planar travel between the Nine Worlds is hampered (ala remote planes from Eberron, but harder), Banishing themselves back to Midgard would have worked eventually, though would have taken several failures along the way. Perhaps days. Just blindly "swimming" toward the Tree while traveling underground on the ethereal plane would also possibly have worked. I did mention that when blind, people tend not to walk straight, and thus they would have diverted off course somewhat, but I didn't specify how much. If they had actually given it a try, they would have probably run into the roots (which are physically there on the ethereal plane) and could have followed them toward the main body of the tree's base.
They did a whole lot of talking and thinking, and not much trying things out. Maybe the puzzle was just too hard, and if so, that's my fault. Regardless, they didn't really die "in battle," as they were effectively prisoners who got executed. Thus, they didn't go to Valhalla; they washed up on the shores of a lake nearby to Yggdrasil in Niflheim (for lack of a better term, they are "Undead," but really they are just a corporeal form of a soul). They have a slight nagging pull toward the east (where Helheim is located), but it's not a consuming urge yet. If they are killed in this "Undead" form, they will be destroyed for good (I guess, I haven't given it that much thought) and if they follow the urge to head to Helheim, then these characters are effectively retired.
They have no equipment at all, but otherwise have all their abilities (no spells wiped from their minds or anything). They did walk back and find the River Slid (which is full of blades) and find some basic, mundane swords. They have the problem of having no material components, but I allowed that one of the daggers they pulled out of the river had a copper wire-wrapped handle. A copper wire happens to be the material component for Sending.
They have an out... they helped some Hathran save the world. A single Sending to them could get them True Resurrected, though they would owe the Hathran a debt for it, and they would lose all their equipment, and fail the MacGuffin quest (meaning a former player character-turned-NPC will likely die; he was kidnapped and would be released upon delivery of the MacGuffin).
I had devised the "Undead" thing when I was truly worried they would freeze to death after first getting to Niflheim. It works just as well now, since they didn't die in combat, even if only on a technicality.
Anyway, the Druid//Sorcerer player is pissed; the others are just bummed. We break for three weeks as some people go on vacations, and we will decide what to do between now and then. If some of them want to be resurrected, and some bring in new characters, I'd be fine with that. They can get resurrected and try to free their captured former party mate, but they probably aren't looking forward to fighting things higher than their EL, especially given they have no equipment. (If they get resurrected, I plan to run them against creatures 2 or 3 CR lower than their party EL until they rebuild their wealth at a semi-Monty Haul pace.)
Anyway, don't know what I'm looking for in this thread. Maybe I need a chiding for being a ridiculous TPK'ing DM, maybe my expectations weren't unrealistic, and my PC's just jump head-long into things when they should be a whole lot more cautious. This really is the first time they've actually "failed" in this campaign, which stings for them, I'm sure. Regardless, here is the tale of what happened. Learn from it.
