Tales of High Level Play

[Hicks]

So I just finished my second session DMing a level 15+ 3.Tome game. It was intense, but I was better prepared so it ran smooth. Let me further preface this by saying that at my table we use the most powerful interpretation of the rules possible.

The cosmology is slightly different from normal. The prime material plane is the observable universe as we know it. Contermonious to the prime is the astral plane, which also counts as the ethereal plane for all effects. The prime obeys all known laws of physics, and the astral obeys all laws of spirit, so though the speed of light is finite on the prime you can observe smoke singles from across the universe in the astral. The elemental planes are functionally infinite in a specific direction yet all physically boarder one another at a specific point, and you can seriously walk/swim/fly/teleport from one to the other.

The seers who peer in the the astral sea between stars have been troubled, countless galaxies once shining beacons burning bright with life in the astral sky are now dark. The darkness oozes across the sky each night, a visible wave devouring all life in the universe. Concerned, they send their greatest hero, Saffira the Aasimar Firemage, to find the cause of the destruction. Directed by the seers, she teleports across the universe to a distant star, examining every planet for any sign of life. On a frozen moon orbiting a gas giant on the edge of the system, she sees between the roiling black clouds the ruins of civilization. She teleported down and finds nothing except snow covering everything and falling all around; no plants, no animals, no people, nothing can be seen except more falling snow. Resolving to search more than just the immediate area, she flies around for hours until she clears the snow clouds to run in to a flight of 36 zombie wyverns. In twelve seconds she dispatches the lot and abandons the dead world.

Teleporting around this galaxy, all she finest are cold, dead worlds inhabited by limitless hordes of mindless zombies, so she goes to the leading edge of the astral darkness to find an inhabited world not frozen in eternal undeath. Teleporting down to the day side, she finds towns but no people, trees but no animals, ruins but no monsters. Next she moves to the twilight between dusk and dawn, but on closer examination the night of the planet was actually billowing smoke from innumerable fires across the dark side of the planet. Deep behind the roiling firestorms she spied uncountable undead wights feeding the fires every tree, timber, bush, and tinder; the back half of the planet was only dark because the smoke blotted out the firey hellscape from orbit.

She teleported down to a sleeping city on a world in a galaxy before of the crawling astral darkness, only to witness the whole city die in their sleep to wights in a matter of minutes. Another world in the icy death grip of a wight apocalypse.

She returned to the beseeching seers, telling the nature of the unnatural woe consuming the universe. Armed with this knowledge, they divined the agents instigating these dooms: revenants. Trillions upon trillions of invisible undead fiends teleporting from planet to planet painting cold death across the canvass of the universe. There exist far too many too organized for them to be isolated incidents, yet the malevolent master of the revenants is unknown, protected in anonymity by powerful magics. What magic cannot show skill can give, but the tale of finding and arresting and interrogating an invisible revenat with a whole planet to hide in is a tale for another time.