I wish I was joking. But also, given our group’s track record, I’m not surprised by this turn of events either. I guess we should get into it.
We began the session with Brakken hacking his way through the corpse of the white dragon in attempt to find what remained of Poppy, if anything. What he found, however, was unexpected. Instead of the mangled, squashed corpse of his nymph companion, he found what he could only describe as a plant-like cocoon. He could figure out no more than that. And, erring on the side of caution, he and Monk (whom Brakken managed to revive) decided not to move or try to open the cocoon themselves.
Instead, they rested before taking another look at the shining object in the wall. After a couple of failed attempts to crack it open, which including Brakken smashing it with a hammer and fire being pressed against it to try to melt the ice, Monk finally tried using his pin. As he held it close, the wall opened like an icy curtain, and he was able to retrieve the party’s first shard.
Following this acquisition, and with no change in the cocoon, Brakken and Monk decided to take a long rest. They made sure to keep their fire nice and warm for the duration, and settled down to recover what energy they could. Meanwhile…
Somewhere in the Dream, Poppy found herself in conversation with an elf-like being of darkness and starlight. He explained, in a roundabout way, that he could send Poppy back to life, but because her body was destroyed, she would need a new one, and it wouldn’t be exactly the same. She agreed, despite him mentioning that there was also a chance she might explode.
Now, I’m going to step back from the story for a moment to explain something from a game perspective. D&D is a dice-based game, and while it is also an excellent storytelling medium, I firmly believe the dice gods should be appeased by always having a say. Nothing should be a guaranteed success or failure (except for the odd case that something is outright impossible, which, in the magical, weird, wild worlds that most D&D games take place in, is rare).
At the same time, I also wanted to explicitly establish that everything has a cost. I always intended that permadeath would be unlikely in Brightwind (but always possible), but at the same time, I’m not the biggest fan of the D&D trope of a character dying, someone casts a resurrection spell on them, and then everything is back to normal. Death may not easily be permanent, but I think it should always have consequences. To be honest, I believe that makes more interesting storytelling anyway, and depending on what the consequences are, possibly more interesting gameplay as well.
The bottom line of what I’m saying is, there were three key elements to Poppy coming back to life. First, she had the choice of whether to attempt coming back at all – I believe that final decision should always be up to the player. Second, if she made it back, she would have to suffer consequences – not necessarily bad ones, but there would be a cost to returning. And third, failure, though unlikely, was possible, and would come down to a single roll of the dice.
Specifically, Poppy would return to life on anything but a 1 on a d20 roll, and on that 1, she would explode. I’m sure you can guess what her player subsequently rolled.
Luckily, Brakken and Monk had just completed their long rest when Poppy went nuclear. This was quite important, because had they still been down on their few hit points from after the fight, the amount of damage the explosion caused would have killed Monk outright. As it was, it knocked him but not Brakken unconscious, so Brakken was able to heal him back up before he bled out.
Right after the explosion, the starlight-elf-dude told Poppy he could send one message to her friends in light of this failed attempt at resurrection, but then that was it. She basically said ‘sorry, but I can’t come back, good luck’ and that was that. Poppy bowed out of the campaign.
On this sombre not, Brakken and Monk explored the rest of the area and found some good stuff in White’s living quarters, before realising that the massive explosion had caused structural damage to the chamber and it was in the early stages of collapsing. They quickly fled, making it back to the airship and taking off just in time to watch the temple sink below the ice.
Once the ground below was just a flat white sheet once more, Brakken and Monk turned their ship east and began heading for the floating mountains, the location of the next shard on their list. Travelling faster than their car could, they made good, uneventful time, other than passing through a storm that had no lasting effect. However, about five days in, Monk awoke with the Bells, a disease that caused a perpetual ringing in his ears which he was pretty sure he must have caught from the last storm the party was caught in.
But, the following day, something finally happened. First thing in the morning, Brakken heard something strange coming from outside the ship. Going to investigate, he and Monk saw a gnome with a Faraday cage on his head riding a contraption that was sort of a motorbike crossed with a hot air balloon which was on fire and clearly in the process of crashing while being pursued by three creatures that looked like giant, horrifying mosquitoes.
Lucky for the gnome, he suddenly had something to crash onto. His bike-balloon smashed down onto the deck of the ship, and as the mosquitoes got closer Brakken and Monk leapt to his aid. The three of them (with the new guy using some strange mechanical gadgets to assist) defeated the mosquitoes, and then the gnome introduced himself as the guild master Mortimer Phinklestein, an artificer on his way to the floating mountains to ‘see how they tick’. And, with him examining the ship and examining Brakken (and attempting to take him apart to see what made him tick) we ended the session there.
So, RIP Poppy. She will be missed. But sometimes, no matter your desires or intentions, the dice just don’t wanna play ball.
But, welcome Mortimer Phinklestein. He seems like a very interesting new addition to the party, and I’m particularly excited for the fact that he’s an artificer. I have a soft spot for artificers, and the general design of Brightwind, which we haven’t touched on too much so far in the campaign, definitely lends itself to invention. But we’ll have to wait and see how things go.
Anyways, we won’t be playing this week on account of player unavailability, so be sure to tune in in two weeks to see how the new guy fits in and just what exactly the party finds when they reach the floating mountains. It should be interesting.