Area 77

The atropal takes one player out of their body in the first round, and the other five have a crystal to break over a hundred feet of lava.

The fall

The floor goes. Time stops, and a devil makes Akira an offer.

The arena

They land in Acererak's own realm. One round of looking, then a hundred undead.

The shadow trials

The dead fold together and stand up as five shadows, one for each character, each with a scene of its own.

The guards, the sphere and him

Three guards hold his invulnerability, a sphere of annihilation floats beside him, and he fights to zero.

The ending

The jar, a golden god, the boons, an ending for every corner of Chult, and one last line.

One scoop each

During the final battle, each character may take one scoop, one time. They reach into the jar and take it themselves.

Roll it and add it up

Say before you roll whether the souls come as harm or as healing. The total is what they do for you.

And it costs them

A soul you spend is a soul that does not go home. Whatever is still in the jar at the end is what gets to leave.

Count the sixes

When Acererak drops, tip out everything left in the jar and count the sixes only. Each six is one soul that makes it home.

The count never decides whether they win, only what it cost them. My plan was to say that out loud before the first scoop. Otherwise they hoard the dice, and the whole thing stops working.

The atropal's first action is the Death God's Gaze. No save, no roll, no attack. One chosen character's body crumbles to ash, and their soul is dragged into the Soulmonger. It works best on a player who will enjoy it.

Untouchable

They are a spirit inside the crystal. Nothing outside can harm them.

Attack the core

Every strike on the Soulmonger from the inside is an automatic critical hit against AC 10.

Help from inside

As a bonus action, give one living ally advantage on their next roll.

When it breaks

They describe the final blow, and come back at full hit points.

My plan was to hand them the rules on paper the moment it happened, so they never stopped playing for a single turn.

The cylinder

AC 15, 200 hit points. Vulnerable to radiant, immune to non-magical weapons. Akira and both paladins are built to break it.

Three struts

AC 20, 100 hit points each, and wide enough to walk along. When one breaks the other two snap, and the whole thing drops into the lava.

Four tentacles

They lash anyone who lands a melee hit on the glass, with 30 feet of reach, and they can grapple and drop a character into the lava for 10d10 fire. They exist to punish flying.

★ Territorial

The tentacles don't care about the battle. They ignore a character beating the atropal senseless and go straight for whoever tapped the cylinder.

The offer

The devil saves all six of them, in exchange for 49 per cent of Akira's soul and Akira becoming his cleric. Akira may not tell the others.

The roll

A DC 15 Charisma check to improve the terms. It changes the terms, never whether they survive.

If he refuses

His own goddess saves them anyway, and the die comes to him as her gift instead. I never punish a player for playing their character well.

They land

The pieces of the disc reassemble into the next map, with the dead already clawing up through it.

A die that only ever rolls a 1, handed over with a certificate as the fall resumes. Once, at any point in the night, Akira can give it to me and force one enemy to use it for a single roll.

I wanted him to know early that Acererak has three Legendary Resistances, so forcing him to fail a save just burns one. The die is worth far more on a roll that simply must not land.

One hit point

AC 13, and any hit of any kind kills one. I don't track them.

Cleave

Divide the damage dealt by five. That many drop to one swing, so a 25-damage hit mows down five.

Horde Attack

At the end of the round, anyone standing in the middle makes a DC 15 Dexterity save or takes 3d10 from the sheer weight of claws.

★ Enthusiasm over ability

They have waited centuries for this and are not very good at it. At least one trips over another every round. One of them is wearing a bucket.

Two rounds

Three at the most. I want them to feel unbeatable, so I count it down out loud as it falls. Sixty left. Forty. Twelve.

Every ten that fall

A dozen of the dead collapse inward and stand up as one thing wearing a player's face. That is where the shadow trials come from.

The hit is the trigger

When a shadow lands a hit on its own person, everything stops and that character's scene begins. The dead stop too. They turn and watch.

The lock has no roll

Each trial is a decision, and no die can take it away from them. The roll that follows decides what the moment cost, never whether they had it.

They never lie

If a player argues with their shadow and the shadow would have to lie to answer, it stops talking instead.

They only talk to their own person

A shadow never taunts anyone else. It is a private conversation, held in front of everybody.

In the player's own voice

Flatter and more patient than a monster, and slightly kinder than feels comfortable.

Once, for ten minutes, Zagorath becomes a huge crocodile: AC 17, 60 temporary hit points, a bite that grapples, a tail that knocks people prone, and a death roll. He keeps his own hit points, saves and psi dice, and can still spend a psi die to take a hit for somebody else. He loses speech, spells and hands.

★ He will try to talk anyway, every round, and what comes out stops everyone within forty feet.

Saurials have no voice a human can hear. Dragonbait talks entirely by scent, and he is not subtle about it. I describe the smell instead of the sentence, every time, and let the table work it out.

Honeysuckle

Joy.

Rotting vegetation

Grief.

Burnt tar

Anger.

Baking bread

He approves of what you just did.

When the last chain lets go, he puts a hand flat on Johnathan's chest-plate, and the whole room smells of baking bread.

A die that only ever rolls a 20. At the end of the trials it goes to whoever played their scene best, the one who made the whole table lean in. I wanted them to know it was on offer before the trials began. The stage runs much better when six teenagers are competing to be the most dramatic about their own trauma.

Bound guardian

AC 19, 120 hit points, two jagged greatsword attacks. While one lives, Acererak cannot drop below 1 hit point. When one dies, its jar cracks loudly and the green tether thins. I describe it every time.

The edge

Every hit carries a curse, rolled on a d4: Rust (−2 AC), Leech (half speed, and the guard heals), Grave-chill (disadvantage on the next attack) or The Jar (no speaking, so no verbal components).

Tactics

Played straight, they rush the squishiest target, and the rogue dies in round one. So each one attacks whoever last damaged a phylactery instead.

★ Strict rotation

The three of them have guarded this room for a very long time and have worked out a rota. They attack in order, and they get visibly annoyed if a player kills one out of sequence.

The Lean

At the end of every round, I say which way the room is leaning. The dust is going that way, the torch flames are bent. Then I draw the forty feet it will travel on initiative count 20. That is a promise, and I keep it.

Feed it something small

A dagger, a torch, a boot. It takes ten feet off its move this round.

Feed it something big

A corpse, a slab of pillar, a dead guard. Twenty feet off. It only has one mouth, so twenty feet is the most it loses in a round.

Push someone in

A creature can be shoved into it like any other hazard. A Phylactery Warrior that goes in is gone, jar, tether and all.

Take the leash

Break the talisman, take it over with a counter-ritual, or disarm his staff and feed that to the sphere. None of these destroys the sphere. I wanted it loose in the room for the whole fight.

It never deletes a player

If the sphere moving would take a character to zero, they are shoved clear at the last instant and go to death saves instead.

★ Villain monologue

He has waited nine thousand years for an audience. If a player interrupts him mid-speech, he stops, stares, and starts the speech again from the beginning, as many times as it takes.

★ The staff

He carries the Staff of the Forgotten One and names it out loud at least four times. There is a great deal of pride tied up in that staff.

Mage hand

He uses it to applaud slowly.

If it is going badly for them

He monologues instead of casting. A round of gloating costs the team nothing and buys them a turn (and nobody at the table needs to know it was on purpose).

No classes

"A ranger, a druid and a wizard" describes three strangers. I use the one detail each player would know instantly: the weapon, the scar, the animal, the hat. One detail each, and no names.

Then I wait

Somebody at the table is going to say a name out loud. I don't say it for them, and I don't confirm it or nod.

Nobody rolls

Not initiative, not Perception. The sentence ends and the campaign ends with it. I close the book and let them argue about it in the car.

After the horde, Acererak tilts the whole arena to 45 degrees. A portal to the negative energy plane opens at the bottom edge, and every round everybody slides fifteen feet towards it. Three 800 lb Arcane Anchors have to be pushed up the slope into sockets at the top to level it out. They cannot be levitated, teleported or carried while flying, so the strong characters push while the flyers act as blockers.

The disc shattering in the fall did the same job in thirty seconds of narration, instead of forty minutes of Athletics rolls. I kept it in my back pocket in case the horde died fast and I wanted another beat.

In the first draft, every shadow trial paid out a power-up for the final fight: maximum-damage spells, bigger sneak attack dice, endless focus points. I took all of that out, so the gods pay out after the battle instead, as the boons. The only one left was Zagorath's crocodile, because his trial was about accepting the beast.

Phoenix's trial was first written as two DC 16 saves that both had to land. With her saves, that resolved about one time in twelve, so the dice could have dragged a player who wanted to say no into saying yes. Every trial now has the same shape: the decision cannot be rolled for, and the check after it only decides the bruise.