Princes of the Apocalypse - The Believers

In our store, three of the four D&D Encounters groups are still playing through the Tyranny of Dragons adventures. Mine is the only table playing Elemental Evil. I am noticing that seems to be the case in other stores too - most people haven't jumped into the new storyline.

I bought the actual Princes of the Apocalypse adventure tonight. I'll try to have a review of it up by tomorrow. It is loaded with art (which is good) and seems to be packed with dungeons/adventure scenarios (also good, imo).

Tonight, my plan was to get my group through the rest of part two of this adventure and then go on to do the first section of part three. The organization is so odd in this pdf. The description of the lands surrounding the tower in part three comes after the tower description. But you have to go through the lands to get to the tower.

I made a lot of bad "dad" jokes tonight. I consider myself a very low quality combination of Michael Scott (from The Office), Peter Griffin (from Family Guy) standing on a solid foundation of Simpsonian humor.

The Players

• Elf Rogue: Played by a 4th grader, her character's name is Lucky and she has a black cat named "Bad Luck".   
• Dwarf Cleric: In real life, played by Lucky's dad. He has a scottish accent.
• Tiefling Sorcerer: Middle Schooler. His character is apparently a jester.
• Drow Rogue: Middle Schooler. Wants to be evil, but Adventurer's League rules restrict this.
• Goliath Barbarian: Middle Schooler. Really nice guy.
• Human Bard: The player is about 25 years old, knows the rules pretty well. 
• Human Paladin: Played by the bard's dad, who played old D&D and is new to 5e.
• Human Rogue: The new kid. Taking to the game very well.

Moving Stones

The adventurers had found a dungeon under the town of Red Larch. It turns out an earth cultist was up to no good down there. Our heroes had freed a kid, who explained to them the vast conspiracy of madness amongst the Town Elders. Lucky put on her sunglasses (her player had sunglasses on in real life) and began opening doors with no regards for the consequences.

In the next room, the heroes battled 6 bandits. In the room was a petrified dwarf and a magic dagger with a lot of cool flavor - it has a name, it can glow, all sorts of stuff. It is nice that they added in more magic items in this adventure compared to the previous one.

They found a room where a rock was hovering in what turned out to be a magic gravity field. Lucky put "Bad Luck", her black cat in it. Bad Luck at first hated it, but then after some dice rolls found it to be warm and comfortable and the cat fell asleep while hovering 2 feet off the ground.

In another room, corpses were being chomped on by giant rats. The heroes made quick work of the rats and noted odd symbols carved into the heads of the dead bodies.

Larrakh

The heroes eventually found themselves in the final room. Larrakh the earth priest lurked past a hovering, slowly rotating stonehenge! What a cool idea! The priest has an AC of 17 and 45 hit points. The PCs could not hit this dude early on, and he cast a couple of devastating shatter spells that dropped the cleric and the paladin. Then, the players' dice got red hot and the evil priest was slain.

The next part of this scenario is tricky. The PCs need to deal with the whole Town Elders/conspiracy thing. My group is made up largely of kids, and this kind of stuff doesn't generally go too well. So I steered them through it quickly, asking pointed questions and offering a suggested course of action. They took it. Constable Harburk now runs Red Larch.

The heroes rested for a few days. I described the townsfolk looking up to the new player's rogue, as he stepped forward against the Elders last session. He gets free drinks and kids follow him around. I also described kids playing in the street, pretending to be the players' characters from the last campaign. I wanted to demonstrate that their old characters are now very famous and people talk about them and dress like them.

The players leveled to level 3 and we jumped into part 3.

Searching for Feathergale Spire

There's a caravan that is missing. Our heroes go to check it out. It's going to turn out that the Air Cult is responsible.

If you remember, I foreshadowed the earth cult by having a groundhog burst out of the ground and stare ominously at the heroes. Tonight, an owl perched on a branch dramatically turned it's head and stared into the soul of a random PC. Lucky climbed the tree and petted the owl.

Moments later, I read some flavor text! Three air cultists riding giant vultures swooped down from the sky and attacked. The Feathergale Knight is extremely cool. He has this gliding cape... it's a very cool and fun item. He had a decent amount of hit points, but magic missiles did the poor fellow in. The whole fight was over in less than a round.

Unfortunately we didn't even get to the Sighing Valley tonight, as we ran out of time. Next time, we'll do that as well as the tower.

Now that I have the book, I can start putting this whole thing together and we can really get Elemental Evil into gear!