Carmen Schatz February 10, 2024 | 12:00 o’clock
Nadia, Castiel, Arianna and Markon stand in the burial chamber of Markon’s master vampire, ready to end his undead existence. The holy water is bottled, the blades are sharpened. After such extensive preparation, nothing can go wrong, right? Not even in a game like Dungeons & Dragons? Unfortunately, life often has its own plans and death is close on the heels of our heroes.
The master vampire
After the adventurers had laboriously overcome the well-secured entrance to the resting place of Markon’s master vampire, Rajo Evanora, they finally found themselves in the burial chamber. Rajo’s hungry vampire servants slept peacefully in eight coffins. On a pedestal stood another coffin and in it, sealed with magic, lay the Master himself.
Source: buffed With many creatures we often use dice instead of miniatures; This helps with coordination because of the numbering. Every die here is a vampire minion!
Castiel opened one of the smaller coffins. The vampire lying inside immediately rose and undead life also came into the other stone coffins. They began to jerk and wobble and the fight began. The monsters (with the statistics of Goblin Vampire Spawns = Goblin Vampire Spawn and a challenge level of 3) primarily attacked Castiel because he had smeared himself with blood in advance to attract the hungry vampires. However, they were unable to wound the angel because it was protected by the Sanctuary ability. However, one of the vampires did not lunge at the angel. Instead, he sneaked up on Nadia and bit the elf on the neck. In this way, fresh blood flowed and was the ingredient needed to break the Master’s spell.
The death of the elf
Source: buffed The D12 stand for the wolves that the master vampire summoned in battle – and which in the end were more dangerous to the heroes than the vampire himself. The vampire let go of Nadia and rushed to one of the pillars in the room. With a rasping voice he read the spell on it and smeared the symbols with Nadia’s blood. And with that the spell broke. Rajo Evanora was free! The Master pushed open the lid of his coffin, but Castiel reacted immediately and closed it again. Therefore, Rajo summoned a dozen wolves in the burial chamber to distract his challengers. As the battle continued, Castiel took care of the master vampire (vampire, challenge level 13) and made his life difficult with his war hammer. In this individual fight, however, he overlooked the danger that the summoned wolves represented. Before Arianna or Markon could react, the wolves pounced on poor Nadia and literally tore her to pieces. Nadia’s Spirit Guardian magic wasn’t enough to keep her alive. Arianna and Markon then made short work of the wolves and Castiel ended the master vampire’s life, but it was too late. Nadia was dead.
Markon was finally free from the pressure to obey his master. But at what price? To gain his freedom, he had lost his love. His heart had died with Nadia in that dark burial chamber.
Several unfortunate coincidences…
Source: buffed What looks so harmless on the playing field was actually a highly emotional role-playing moment: Nadia’s death! … led to Nadia’s death. It began with Castiel closing the coffin lid on Rajo Evanora’s grave before he could leave his resting place. So I decided to use one of the Master Vampire’s more interesting abilities: summoning magic. This ability summons 3d6 wolves in 1d4 rounds. In our case this meant: 11 wolves would appear in 2 combat rounds. Nadia’s Spirit Guardians spell was active at the time. She rerolls the damage from this spell for each round of combat. In the round in which the wolves appeared and attacked her, she only rolled 10 points of damage – and that is extremely low for the guardian spirit spell. Wolves in D&D have 11 life points. Therefore, each wolf survived with one life point instead of dying immediately in the circle of light from her spell. The wolves attacked them from all sides and I had better than average luck with my creatures’ attack rolls. Of the nine wolves that gathered around Nadia, they hit seven; one of them even critical. That was enough to kill the poor elf in one round.
Castiels Plan
Through a renewed pact with the demon Dantalion, Castiel is able to use the Revivify spell once a day. Unfortunately, in Nadia’s case, this doesn’t help much because the wolf pack ate parts of her body during the fight. Revive is the weakest of all resurrection spells in D&D and cannot restore lost body parts. But Castiel doesn’t give up that easily! After all, he managed to recover the powerful death train relic of his goddess Loviatar from the salt mine. Now he plans to travel to the burial ground with Nadia’s remains and negotiate a revival for his girlfriend. This unique and extremely powerful artifact must be valuable enough to trade Nadia’s life for! Hopefully.