This is part three of the recap of The Increasingly Misnamed D&D Campaign.
I’ll probably put some kind of table of contents here eventually.
So the Artificer of Dreams is a dais with “coffins” on it. The coffins are magic, nigh indestructible, and only openable from the inside. One is occupied. The party enters coffins and are submerged into the dreamworld from which Aline’s necromantic powers extended into Athas.
This ends up being kind of like The Matrix, they made new characters in Gamma World, and I heavily modified the pre-built adventure to be appropriate to a world taken over by Aline.
Having never played 4th edition Gamma World were were only a little surprised at the ridiculous lethality of the game… so to keep things fun, I just had everyone make a new character after every encounter (if they had died). Queue the end of the penultimate encounter and one of my newer players (who’s only played a couple of D&D sessions before) is dead. While everyone else tries to figure out the best way to distribute gear in preparation for the final fight, I help Alec build a new character. During this I discover something exciting, EVERYONE had been doing hit points wrong. They had all, independently, been adding their Constitution modifier, not their constitution score. No wonder everyone had been dying so often. We fixed everyone’s HP and then moved on to the final battle, the confrontation with the necromancer Aline.