Chaos Running Amuck

The party:
Human cleric 8
Human barbarian/sorcerer 1/6
Elf fighter (archer) 7
Human cleric 4 [NPC]

Important note about the campaign: The PCs are “Eternal Heroes”: they can raise themselves from the dead the morning after they die. They all know this, and the barbarian/sorcerer has risen from death twice before this game session. (The penalty is identical to the raise dead spell, but they can come back even without a body.)

The group was searching a sewer complex for the McGuffin, and they’d had an unpleasant experience so far. They came to a chamber where they fought and killed two gibbering mouthers. Beyond that chamber was another, in which they saw a large chest surrounded by a shifting dark cloud. In the cloud they got glimpses of eyes, tentacles, claws, mouths, and chaotic colors. The 8th-level cleric identified (Knowledge Planes) the cloud as a planar bleed, but didn’t know the plane.

They stayed back out of the room and lassoed the chest. When they started pulling it, the cloud belched out a mass of tentacles and claws: a chaos beast (though the 8th-level cleric failed to identify it). The fight was short (just two rounds), but the barbarian/sorcerer got clawed and affected by the creature’s corporeal instability. He fell into an amorphous blob, flopping around on the floor. Everyone in the group was stunned—no one knew anything about the creature or its powers.

After a few rounds, the barb/sorc pulled himself together (with a Charisma check), but he had lost some Wisdom. There was discussion about the situation, and two Players considered the end result of whatever was happening to the barb/sorc might be worse than death—especially since he can come back from death. The suggestion of killing the barb/sorc was mentioned, but no one attempted to act on the idea. The 8th-level cleric deduced (Spellcraft check with help from Knowledge Planes) that a restoration spell might help, but he didn’t have the spell prepared for the day.

After a minute, the barb/sorc fell back into the blob state, but made his Charisma check again after just a few rounds. The barb/sorc ran from the chamber and through the sewer tunnels. The elf followed on his heels, but the clerics were held up by environmental obstacles. The barb/sorc, with the elf following, ran all the way back to the entrance of the sewers. The elf then suggested running out into the sunlight. They both ran out into the city street, but nothing changed.

The elf had a weapon ready to slay the barb/sorc, but held back using it. The fear that the barb/sorc would eventually turn into a chaos beast was mentioned at the table. When the barb/sorc dropped to blob again, still the elf held off killing him. The barb/sorc had never consented to being killed.

A couple rounds later, the barb/sorc went from sloppy blob to chaotic monster and attacked the elf. The brief fight ended with the elf falling to a blob state, and the new chaos beast running off into the city.

The elf eventually made a Charisma check to take his normal form. He asked how near the local temple was (for a restoration spell), and I had him roll 1d6 for the number of minutes it would take for him to get there. Three minutes. He ran through the city but fell to a blob after the first minute. He managed to make another Charisma check, and took off again toward the temple. But then he fell to a blob after another minute of safety, and a couple rounds later, he became yet another chaos beast loose in the city.

By the time the two clerics emerged from the sewers, a general alarm had sounded through the city. Citizens were hiding in their homes and businesses, and the town guards and soldiers were patrolling looking for the dangers. I described a scene of a guard patrol killing a “blobbed” soldier.

I called the session to end at that point. Now I’ve got to consider what happens when two chaos beasts run amok in a populated city. The results could be catastrophic. I’m considering have the “secondary” beasts die after an hour or something. That way the “plague” is limited to only a few people. I never, ever, considered that the PCs would bring a chaos beast into the city, much less bring two!

They had the answer to the problem, but no one did what they had already admitted was necessary. Why didn’t they kill the barb/sorc when they talked about it? Why did the barb/sorc run out of the sewers and into the city? Why didn’t they kill the barb/sorc in the city street? Why didn’t the elf kill himself when he had two chances?

Now, I could understand if they were playing low Wisdom (the affliction drains Wisdom each round), but no one mentioned they were doing that. No one mentioned anything about the lowering Wisdom other than to speculate what would happen when all their Wisdom was drained.

* * *

Several years ago, as a Player, myself, my party encountered a chaos beast in my first D&D3 campaign. We were a group of five 5th-level PCs, and none of us knew what a chaos beast did. But when the monk got afflicted (my dwarf cleric got hit twice, but made his saves) and turned to a blob, we had the same concern that the above Players had: would he turn into a chaos beast? We decided to execute the monk. We then took the monk’s body to a temple and had him raised.

I remembered the encounter as very exciting and memorable. It didn’t affect the world outside our party; it didn’t wipe out half the party and set the stage for a city-wide epidemic.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com