Planescape Redux - Through the first Planar Portal

 Last time, I decided that Theros would be the destination of the first Omenpath. This is fun for two reasons. There are many packs to crack to generate an adventure, but there is also a 5e book for Theros (Mythic Odysseys of Theros or MOoT) that we can mine for goodies!

So far our adventure has a few angles we could lean into. 

1. The Harpers are acting like the Planar Police and are gathering the keys to and researching more information about these Omenpaths.
2. Bane, the Lord of Darkness has an active cult in the Forgotten Realms that the players have already crossed once. For some reason, they too are interested in the Omenpaths. 

We don't need to get into #2 at the moment, luckily. I think it is best to let the campaign breathe for a while, no need to set up some end-game threat quite yet. But we can keep this cult in our back pocket for later. Let's start this Theros adventure by cracking a pack from the original Theros set.

This is a great pack. I think it would be great if the Omenpath the characters took opened up into a mountain range depicted in the land card. In these mountains lives an evil Gorgon, Hythonia the Cruel, and a Stoneshock Giant. 

When the characters are getting their bearings and journeying around the mountains the following encounters will be great to fill out a potential hex map around the mountains. The number of creatures per encounter totally depends on the level of the party you are running this for.

• Returned Phalanx - The Returned have four stat blocks in MOoT from CR 1/4 to 4. Lore-wise the Returned are quite literally people who have returned from the dead. The mask is left over from their funeral rites.
• Soldiers - Allied soldiers from the nearby town who are out hunting Hythonia.
• Led by a human named Elias who was sent on a scouting mission to find the cave of Hythonia.
• Blood-Toil Harpy - This is actually a CR 1/8 creature from MOoT.
• Two-Headed Cerberus - What better way to kick off a Greek-themed adventure than with an encounter with a Cerberus! It helps that it is also a CR 2 creature in MOoT.

I don't see any inspiration for villages or towns. But I'm sure we can turn to MOoT for that. After looking at the world map, I've settled on using Akros as the nearby town. I like it because it's basically Sparta, so it is easy to imagine. It's also geographically next to a mountain range which fits right in. 

So in summary, this is what this pack has given us for our next adventure:

    After the characters pass through the Omenpath, they come out on the other side deep within the mountains. They begin to get their bearings and some marching Returned come across their path. From here, you'd really only need 3 hexes of mountains, put a harpy nest in one, soldier camp in one, Hythonia's Cave in one, and have the Cerberus be a wandering monster they see off in the distance that is tracking them over time. Once they meet and hopefully offer to help the soldiers from Akros, they will lead them back to town once Hythonia is taken care of or scouted (the goal would depend on the level of the party if they could handle taking her down right now).

The only thing left to do is grab a map for Hythonia's Cave and put some encounters in it just in case the players decide to go head first. My favorite place to get maps is from Dyson Logos' blog Dyson's Dodecahedron. A quick Ctr+F and "cave" search led me to this beauty called "Gloomforge Caverns"

I typically don't do a lot of work when keying my dungeons but I do like to do the following:

• Sight: Dimly lit from sconces with a green flame.
• Smell: Mildew mixed with a harsh tinge of sulfur.
• Sound: Mostly silent, something sliding across a rock surface can be heard from all around. The faint echo of a snake's hiss can also be heard.

1. Entrance Room: Pharika's Mender from our pack is great here. This card tells me that she is going to be reanimating dead things and artifacts. Let's combine that, in this room, there will be statues of fallen warriors who succumbed to Hythonia's Gaze. The gorgon here, Pharika's Mender will reawaken them by weaving magic from the green flames around the room. 
2. The South Western Cavern: This could be a large snake nest similar to the ones shown in the card above named "Viper's Kiss".
3. The Central Chamber: This is where Hythonia is. This will be a shrine room to Pharika, the God of Affliction. 
4. The Eastern Chamber: Treasure Room: Have the northern entrance be a secret entrance but an obvious exit. For loot, we can add some gold based on the system you are using and the appropriate level, as for items I will open a few more packs and see what we get. 
   

              Prowler's Helm: A helm that casts Pass Without Trace once per day.

              God's Willing: Once per day, at dawn, you roll a d20 and store the number in the sword. As a reaction, you can replace the result on any d20 roll by you or against you in combat. 

This easily gives us 1 to 3 sessions worth of material. From here they will travel to Akros and go from there!

- Daniel

Alternatives to Planescape

 The recent release of Planescape left a lot to be desired for me. But, this is not a review of that product. Instead, I want to continue using Magic the Gathering to inspire my D&D game. I want to start with a disclaimer: I am not an MTG lore expert. This is not an attempt to port a mechanic or lore from MTG directly to 5e. The goal of this is to use the ideas laid out in the Magic lore to enhance our D&D games. Also, I do not DM my games with an entire campaign-spanning adventure in mind. I run 1-3 session adventures that may or may not have a throughline. The characters stay the same, but for me, a campaign is a collection of adventures, not one big long adventure. 

So, what do I want from a plane-hopping campaign?

1. Varied and thematic adventure locations.
2. Home base.
3. Adventuring is required to unlock other planes.

(This might sound like how the recent God of War games handle the Nine Realms. I am currently playing through Ragnarok, so it is at the forefront of my mind.)

Why MTG? 

    Magic the Gathering has characters that are called Planeswalkers. These characters have a special trait, called a Spark, that allows them to travel from plane to plane and go on these adventures and appear in multiple sets across multiple planes. In recent MTG lore, the MTG equivalent of Thanos from the MCU did the equivalent of snapping his infinity gauntlet and de-sparked or killed many planeswalkers. This was a multiversal story that was a long time coming. Now they have introduced planar gateways called Omenpaths that allow for characters to travel from plane to plane on a much more limited scale. Basically, they got Infinity War'd but there wasn't an Endgame cop out. 

This is where we have two options

1. Operate Pre-War of the Spark where our characters are planeswalkers and have a spark and can freely plane hop.
2. Operate Post-War of the Spark where our characters never had/no longer have a spark are rely on the Omenpaths to travel from plane to plane. 

These two options provide drastically different campaigns. The former will have less emphasis on the journey, and more emphasis on the action that's happening there. The latter will flip that, the journey of finding the Omenpath or planar gateway will be a larger part of the adventure. Both are great styles, but every DM has a preferred way to play the game. Personally, I prefer to slow everything down a little bit and let the journey breathe. So for this exercise, I am going to go with the second option. 

This is where I will diverge from MTG lore. Again, this is not an attempt to run a level 1-20 campaign set in the MTG multiverse post-War of the Spark and try and be lore accurate. Instead, I am skimming the top of the ideas that are being presented in Magic to run a fun campaign. 

Campaign Premise: A group of adventurers go on a short adventure (See MTG Pack D&D Adventure), and at the end, they find a key to an Omenpath (or whatever you want to call the Planar Gateway). They would then need to seek out a more knowledgeable NPC about said artifact. When they start poking their nose around and asking questions, two factions arise that both want this artifact. An allied and an enemy faction. The allied faction could potentially be the Harpers since it was in the last adventure. Maybe the enemy faction is the Cult of Bane. You can then choose a few things about this key. Is it tied to a specific plane? Is it general and this gains them access to the liminal space between planes and then get to freely choose their destination? Personally, just to keep the workload down would rather have the former option.

So let's assume we use the adventure from my previous article and we have started in the Forgotten Realms. Now, I get to use the list of MTG planes at the bottom of that article and pick a destination that I want the next adventure to take place. For this, I'm feeling Theros and a Greek Mythos-inspired adventure (notice this is focused on one adventure at a time, not an entire campaign. We will aim to spend 2-4 sessions here and then jump somewhere else.)

Key Campaign Notes so far:

• Allied Faction: Harpers as planar police?
• Enemy Faction: Cult of Bane or Cult of Darkness
• The characters have an Omenpath Key to Theros. Their allies will help them open it and traverse it safely, this time.

Next time I will go through the Adventure Building Process with another pack of cards and see where it takes us!

- Daniel