“Yes, I worship the majestic mother, bringer of life, she who brings all colours into the world. No, I don’t feel inclined to tell you her name.”
You’d be a great addition to our spring fertility festival. Would you be able to bless the virgins as they leap over a bonfire?
“I would like to apologise for my actions during the recent spring fertility festival. While I hope we can agree that the virgins stumbling and falling into the bonfire was nobody’s fault, I should have taken greater actions to save them. Indeed, it was far too soon for me to open my arms to the flames, offer their pure souls to the quint-coloured mother and beg her eternal blessing. It was an inappropriate time for funerary rites. I hope you can forgive me.”
Meanwhile the village idiot is being flogged for heresy for daring to suggest that the prayer this stranger priest was chanting moments before his sister tumbled into the fire may have been responsible.
I think the real problem is that they were using virgins for a fertility festival. They should get that one couple that has fifteen kids but can only keep track of two at a time.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa! It was a fertility. Festival! It is my job to offer prayers as the fertility rituals are being performed, and now you want to condemn me for it? When I was some distance from the entire event? Are we then to assume that every famine our village suffered before I arrived was due to you drinking in the local tavern, Ser Idiot? I can understand this is a difficult time for you, but don’t let your grief blind you! I will overlook this baseless accusation this once, but only once.”
I’m playing a character at the moment, one of my favourites, but as it gets more powerful I can’t ignore the current dissonance.
I’m playing as a headband of intellect whose previous owner was engulfed by a gelatinous cube. The headband then granted the cube intelligence, who sees itself as a cleric of Jubilex.
I’ve ended up playing this cube as a happy go lucky explorer who just wants to see the world and be friends with everyone. And the party healer, of the life domain.
But then I read into Jubilex. Not exactly the loving life domain type. So now I’m not sure where I want to take this thing.
Fuck, I love this game.
Lol my first character was a cleric of Tiamat. My DM and I worked out a blend of PHB domains so that I had appropriate cantrips, spell unlocks and CD’s. It was a lot of fun playing through the Rise of Tiamat with her, haha 🐉
Oh that sounds pretty awesome! HotDQ/RoT was the first experience I had with DnD and I was the DM, I couldn’t escape constant thoughts that
-There were no dragonborn in the module
-There were barely any dragons in the dragon cult
But that said the module does still have some good concepts! Your cleric, were they helping Tiamat achieve her goals? I’d love to hear more, if they were a pro-dragon adventurer.
Haha it was a funny dynamic, we had a heavily good aligned party, I was the only one out on my own as “evil”. However her whole shtick, as was slowly revealed, was that she had ambitions to take down the leadership of the cult and then replace them with herself and those loyal to her. This meant that the party, who wanted to generally find non-violent means of dealing with conflict, aligned just fine with her own goals of not killing too many of her future minions. So she always acted in what she saw as the best interests of glorifying Her Chromatic Majesty, while still working with the party to stop the cult. Our DM peppered in more dragons and encounters with dragon magic than were in the official books I think, and we all tried to solve them through stealth, negotiation and avoidance. She hated to kill dragons, but if we had no choice but to fight then so be it. If they were too weak to kill us they were culled! She didn’t mind stopping the ritual to keep her from ascending because she believed Tiamat wouldn’t want the world to end, and just wanted as much treasure and followers as possible. So in the end the cult of the dragon queen became the Church of Dragonology, and her influence on the material plane had a net gain 😋
Interesting, I had the opposite impression regarding the number of dragons. RoT was part of a longer campaign that is still going on, and I always find myself struggling to put another dragon into the game because we already had so many of them, lol.
Overall I loved our time with RoT, picking only some of the cooler given missions and substituting the others with some stuff I had written up myself. So they got to fight a beholder (Xanathar) in its natural environment (Waterdeep) when they had an appropriate level to make the encounter a challenge. Also giving them the chance to obtain the White Wyrmspeaker Mask that had found its way to Xanathar‘s Guild.
Sadly, the module offered no possibility to interact with both Severin and the possible ally faction of giants before the final fight. Solution: Diplomatic showdown to convince a cloud giant of their respective cause. Along with a full-grown battle in the dorms.
Mammon saving the PCs‘ asses from a green dragon following a pact made in a swamp cleared for refugees; the Black Wyrmspeaker as a double-agent who tried to overtake the Cult… God, I loved those ten months. I even got to use the labyrinth from Xonthal‘s Tower at a later point in the campaign because it didn‘t go with our very own version of RoT.
