I wanted to share what happened during our last D&D session because I'd been preparing it for quite a while, and we finally got to play it. I'm running a homebrew campaign set in a kingdom called Vardesia, and my players had been getting increasingly suspicious of me over the last few sessions. They'd been finding magical items, making quite a bit of gold, and generally doing pretty well, so they kept joking, "Guys, we're screwed. The DM is giving us way too much stuff. Something terrible is definitely coming." I wasn't helping either, because I kept telling them I was working on something big and that they should be excited for our marathon session. They were convinced I was preparing some ridiculous boss fight or a TPK. Well, they were right about something terrible coming, just not in the way they expected. For context, the party consists of an Aasimar Fighter, a Moon Druid, a Drow Ranger, and a Barbarian with 5 Intelligence who has a habit of touching things he probably shouldn't. They even spent ages arguing about their party name when registering with the Adventurers' Guild, eventually settling on "The Lunatics" because of all the ridiculous things they'd done.
The whole situation started when the Barbarian used an ancient artifact containing a fragment of the First God's primordial creation energy. In my setting, the First God created the universe from his own essence, so the energy inside this thing was far beyond anything a mortal could reasonably control. Naturally, the Barbarian saw a glowing magical object and decided to use it. He gained access to a tiny fraction of its power, but it slowly began destroying his sanity. At one point, he hallucinated that his father was sitting in a tavern with them and told the Druid to get up and give his father a seat. That was when the others realized things were getting serious. Eventually, they traveled to Arakan and met with Lord Edric and his court wizard. The wizard examined the Barbarian and warned them that he might not even make it to the end of the month with his mind intact. He couldn't find a solution, so he recommended going to the Royal Magic Academy in Rodonlin, the capital. Edric pointed out that Rodonlin was almost twenty days away, which was a serious problem considering the Barbarian's condition. He initially ordered his wizard to teleport them, only to learn that he wasn't powerful enough to cast Teleportation Circle. So instead, Edric gave them permission to use the royal horse relay system, allowing them to change horses at stations along the road and reach the capital much faster.
The journey was pretty entertaining. The Drow experienced some racism, they passed crossroads with signs pointing toward Zendar and Starhaven, and a group of bandits tried to stop them but quickly changed their minds when the party confronted them. They also met a merchant whose daughter and merchandise had been taken by goblins. Despite knowing that every day mattered, the party decided to help and rescued his daughter. Eventually, they reached Rodonlin, and I spent some time describing the capital. It was a massive, wealthy, crowded city, completely different from the settlements they'd visited before. They genuinely seemed impressed. The Druid's response to the crowds was to Wild Shape into an Elk and basically force his way through the streets, which was hilarious. At the Magic Academy, they met two important NPCs: Orin, an ancient bronze dragon and extraordinarily powerful wizard, and Athelred, an eccentric old elven mage. They spent almost an hour talking to them. Orin recognized the First God's energy because he'd encountered it before, and he had developed a theoretical ritual to remove it from a living creature. However, the ritual had never actually been performed, so he couldn't guarantee the outcome. He explicitly warned them that things could go very wrong, even though he couldn't predict exactly what might happen. During the conversation, they discovered that Athelred was an old friend of the Druid's mentor, Aunt Emeril, and the founder of Starhaven. All three were elves, each around 600–700 years old, and had known one another for centuries. The party also handed over the Book of Vile Darkness to Orin for safekeeping. At the end of the conversation, Athelred casually announced that he'd come along to help.
Athelred ended up being one of my favorite parts of the session. He suggested using an ancient temple designed to contain magical energy for the ritual, and Orin agreed that it might work. First, they needed special crystals, so Orin teleported them to a crystal cave. There was a Water Elemental inside, and while the party fought it, Athelred literally sat down, watched the fight, and occasionally cheered them on. He kept saying things like, "Bravo! Well done, lads!" My players were getting annoyed because this supposedly powerful wizard had promised to help them and was now just sitting there enjoying the show. The funniest part was that Orin had already told them Athelred would need all his spell slots for the ritual, so he couldn't afford to waste them in combat. They knew that but were still annoyed. After collecting the crystals, Athelred used Teleportation Circle to take them to the temple, where they fought an Earth Elemental. During the fight, the elemental damaged part of a wall, and the Druid decided to check the magical runes. Some were damaged, so he repaired them. Later, they entered the main chamber and encountered a Shield Guardian. They debated attacking it, but the Druid started explaining that they weren't there with hostile intentions. The guardian just stood there doing absolutely nothing until Athelred laughed and said, "Don't worry, I built that thing." By this point, my players were simultaneously irritated by Athelred and genuinely enjoying his ridiculous personality.
Then came the ritual. They prepared the crystals, activated the ancient containment system, and Athelred began channeling the energy out of the Barbarian. And here's the important part: the ritual actually worked. The Barbarian was cured. They'd achieved exactly what they'd spent the entire adventure trying to do. Unfortunately, the containment system couldn't handle that amount of primordial creation energy. The crystals began to fail, and the energy started escaping. Athelred stayed behind, desperately trying to contain it long enough for the party to escape. He bought them the time they needed, but he was too close to the energy when the system collapsed and burned to death. The party escaped the temple, but the catastrophe had already begun. The energy released from the temple resonated with other fragments scattered throughout the world, triggering enormous explosions and unleashing creation energy on a scale nobody had anticipated. The kingdom was being torn apart, and reality itself was being reshaped. Eventually, the players were caught by the effects of the catastrophe and lost consciousness.
When they woke up, they weren't in the temple or Rodonlin. They were in a house inside a Kenku village. I started describing their surroundings: trees reaching 200–250 meters into the sky, wooden houses connected by bridges high among their branches, enormous chunks of rock floating in the air like mountains, and strange creatures they'd never encountered before. They started talking to the Kenku villagers, trying to understand what had happened. Eventually, they learned that Arakan had been devastated, the Kingdom of Vardesia no longer existed, and approximately 70 years had passed since the catastrophe. The world had completely changed. New kingdoms had risen from the ruins of the old one, the geography was radically different, magic was far more widespread, and enormous regions had become incredibly dangerous. This was the moment I'd been waiting for. I'd spent a lot of time designing the new world's history, geography, kingdoms, political conflicts, and the consequences of the catastrophe. My players had spent the session traveling through a living, prosperous kingdom, visiting its magnificent capital, and meeting people who'd existed in that world for centuries. Now the world they knew was (almost) gone. The Druid was particularly overwhelmed and said something like, "What the hell are we supposed to do now? We don't know anything about this world!" The others had similar reactions, while our Drow player was quieter, which is pretty normal for him.
One of the funniest moments came afterward when the Druid started blaming the Barbarian for everything. He was basically saying, "Look what you've done to us! You're the one who absorbed that energy! This is your fault!" And the Barbarian, with his glorious 5 Intelligence, defended himself by saying, "How is this my fault? The wizard picked the wrong place! The rock was glowing, so I used it! If I hadn't used it, you would've!" I was trying not to laugh because the whole discussion happened completely in character. What I liked most was that they were genuinely arguing about who was responsible for the catastrophe rather than simply accepting it and moving on. They knew I'd been planning something big, and Orin had warned them about the risks, but they still hadn't expected anything like this. Now they've successfully saved their Barbarian, lost a wizard they'd grown attached to, and found themselves stranded 70 years in the future without understanding the world around them. The Kenku villagers advised them to avoid Veridion and suggested heading toward Zendar instead, so we'll see what they decide.
I was a little nervous about making such a massive change to the setting, especially since we'd already spent quite a bit of time establishing the original kingdom, but the session turned out to be a lot of fun. The players seemed to enjoy the NPCs, the ridiculous moments with Athelred, and especially discovering how different the world had become. One of the main reasons I decided to make such a drastic change was that the campaign had originally started as a relatively low-fantasy setting. Most of my players were completely new to D&D when we started, so I wanted to introduce them to the game gradually without overwhelming them with too many unfamiliar things. But now they've gotten comfortable with their characters, learned the mechanics, and started getting into roleplaying, I felt it was the perfect time to take the world from low fantasy to full-on high fantasy. And rather than just introducing more magical elements over time, I thought it would be much more interesting to let them actually experience the event that transformed the world.
I'm really excited because they now have an entirely new world to explore while still carrying their memories and connections from the old one. Some of the cities they saw on road signs are now capitals of independent kingdoms, and places they visited before the catastrophe have become dangerous ruins. I'm planning to let them explore the new world at their own pace rather than immediately pushing another main quest on them. I genuinely can't wait to see what they do next.
There are actually a few more things I'd love to share, especially about what I've planned for the upcoming sessions, but I've already written way too much, and unfortunately my players know my Reddit account, so I can't really talk about those without spoiling things for them. And if any of you guys are reading this, please leave my Reddit account alone!
