Squares on Cubes Parts 2-5: Behind the Screen

This was an adventure months in the making.

The players wanted Acheron, so they got it. A lot of this adventure came from the Planes of Law supplement (the Acheron adventure Hand of Fate in particular). The Ice of Ocanthus lore titbit was in the book, so replacing Desert’s Night was easy. I made General Xo an orc called Moragrek, because I thought players would prefer working with an orc, and because orcs makes it easier when you just want to play a scene for laughs. Istvarhan seemed the coolest location to use.

As for the coolest activities in Acheron, I offered players a choice between riding rust dragons into battle, or leaping into battle from one cube onto another mid-collision. Between the big epic battle and Istvarhan was a skirmish with some hobgoblins where the slave-killing mechanic (see below) was introduced; and a small dungeon. Acheron has highly homogenous terrain, so I used the same small dungeon map for each of the two quest options, but populated them with different enemies:

 

Black cube is a provender stone; circles are holes to lower layers.

Planar Rules: Divination spells cannot be used to spy on enemies in Acheron. Area of Effect fire spells do an extra 1d8 damage (DC13 CON save for half). The radius of this damage is equal to 10 feet per level of the spell. Planes of Law has more rules, but this was all that was relevant for my party. I took the 5e DMG Bloodlust rule for Acheron, and after reading a reddit post on the topic, made it apply to non-hostiles as well, placing defenceless slaves at regular intervals throughout the adventure. Would the players kill innocents to get temporary hit points? They enjoyed the dilemma, and leaned into the moments when their characters’ self-preservation instincts overpowered their consciences.

For the big battle, I found a huge battlemap on reddit full of siege weapons, which made a decent “behind enemy lines” map. The players’ battle objective – “destroy the siege weapons” – was taken from this.

I did end up making a map for the three floors of Istvarhan Keep, which took a lot of time. But at least the keep is deliberately kept largely empty, and it helped my descriptions:

 


The players liked Moragrek a lot at first, and her later pessimism and resignation annoyed their characters immensely. It was a bit railroady, but not too much. I made a point for the players to meet the coup leader, Moraster Darkeye, before the event. He had a Southern drawl. Before the attack, I also made clear that Moraster would let the characters have their promised reward for standing aside; and that if they went a step further and attacked Moragrek they would receive an even greater reward.

All in all, the Acheron games are ones the players will remember. They rode dragons into battle; came close to death on several occasions; fought alongside a psychopathic orc; did things that will traumatise their characters for years to come; and their reward included the Manual of Bodily Health.

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