There are times when a little side-quest can really get a gaming group in a bind, and my last gaming session was one those. In my D&D campaign, the party has tracked down the cult of Bhaal that indirectly stole the Spectre’s Lantern from them, and while the group recovered the lantern and killed a lot of cultists, the leader of the cult escaped, using dimension door. I thought the group might just let this go, but they are determined to see this through, and have plans to unmask the leader and bring him to justice.

But first, I had to deal with the fact that I was facing a gaming session where over half the group was missing, leaving me with three players. This is not only not enough to take on the BBEG, but I also wouldn’t want to have the big plot pay-off be missed by so many of the group.

Ergo, a quick side quest, courtesy of DM Dave. I don’t want to say which one I’m using, because a big reveal is in the title of the adventure, but suffice to say there’s some strong charm/geas magic involved. Those kinds of spells can be pretty devastating if you manage to get them to work, which is exactly how two of the three PC’s are now under the control of the antagonist, with one PC and an NPC ally (I needed a filler character to be a healer) on their own. And of course when we got to that point, we had to call the game for time, leaving everyone on a cliffhanger.

Now the good news is that the next gaming session is going to have the rare occurrence of having all the players show up, so five PC’s are about to airdrop in on this situation, and will likely settle the whole thing in fairly short order. But in the meantime the group is savoring the attention that three of their crew are really in a bind–a rare event for them so far.

More to come!