The Serpent Witch: A Challenging Antagonist for My D&D Players, Along With a Pleasant Surprise
“The object of Amarth’s fear is a lithe, feminine figure wearing shining blue robes, her face hidden from view by a scarf, save for two glowing cerulean points of light in her eye sockets. Her arms and body are covered with mottled, mummified flesh, as pallid as birch and stretched thin across the bones beneath her fine clothing. She is holding a staff capped with a human skull and carved from bone in her right hand; the skull’s forehead pulses with a blue cross sigil. A dark green bat rests upon her left shoulder like a hawk.”
That was the description I gave of the Big Bad Evil Guy (BBEG) for The Draconomachy, my Theros-set Dungeons & Dragons campaign, when she made her first physical appearance. In my postings on this fair website, I’ve rabbited at considerable length about some of the nasty pasties I’ve written — or in Zariel’s case, interpreted — but even I had my work cut out for me yesterday. I’ve hyped her up to an immense degree, both in the campaign itself and the memes we’ve all created and posted thereof. The time came for me to live up to that hype.
My introduction came in the form of a visitation by Deniz Maron, the party cleric, to a derelict temple of Thassa in the Underworld. He has come here in his search for the Horn of Humenades, a powerful relic which will call forth an ancient and powerful kraken to aid him. By his side are his allies Amarth Nightedge, a potent shadowblade mage, and Merothrax, a white dragon halfway through rehab. A powerful fighting force by any standard. But then they happen upon the temple’s dead guardians, and the pools upon pools of demon ichor. And, most critically, the rotted skull of a barlgura demon.
There’s just one problem: barlguras don’t naturally occur in Theros’ underworld. Suddenly Amarth freezes in panic. An ancient and powerful presence he hasn’t felt in sixty years overwhelms his senses. And then, out from the temple steps the blue-robed wizard — an archlich of absolutely frightening power. She says nothing as she beholds the trio, staring Deniz dead in the eye as she begins her approach, walking with refined nonchalance towards him. Oh, and she has the Horn of Humenades.
My poor player is scrambling to muster his response. A fight is out of the question, because he’s well aware that the Serpent Witch could literally grind him into paste with a waving motion (she could, too: I’ve calculated her DPS when she’s fully ramped up, and the figure I got shows how stupid I went with her powers). But then she makes just a waving motion right at Deniz. And so I deliver the line that never fails to send a horrible chill racing down a player’s spine:
“Please make a Charisma saving throw.”
Now, such a request only means one of a few things, and none of them are pleasant. The specific spell I’ve just had the Serpent Witch use on Deniz is plane shift, used alongside a metamagic that allows a spell with touch range to be used at short range instead. And he fails the saving throw. She can send him anywhere she pleases at this point. What does she do? Toss him into the centre of a screaming vortex blazing through the Elemental Plane of Fire? Throw him down at the feet of Demogorgon, demon prince of madness, and leave him to his sparse mercy?
No, she takes him to a harmless patch of space within the Negative Energy Plane. For you see, the Serpent Witch has a special and interesting offer just for him: a chance to serve at her side in exchange for unlimited power. A classic pact, in other words. Steeling himself, Deniz rebuffs her offer, even though he’s half expecting this to end in his total annihilation. Much to his surprise, the Serpent Witch grants him the Horn of Humenades anyway, before sending him back to where he was with another plane shift.
What follows is confusion from all parties who hear of it. It’s mind-numbingly obvious that there’s some greater scheme at work here, but what exactly is afoot eludes them. Religion checks are made out of the wazoo on the poor Horn of Humenades, as Deniz expects the artefact to have been tampered with in some way by the archlich’s touch. He finds nothing of interest. So why on Earth would the Serpent Witch give one of her archnemeses such a powerful artefact?
There is a reason for it, as it happens. It’s actually a masterstroke of subtle genius, to the point I gave myself a pat on the back for coming up with it. And that’s the point: the Serpent Witch isn’t supposed to be scrutinised so easily by mortal minds. Even if the motive is obvious, her current scheme could encompass many different means. Add that to her obscene power, and you realise that she could approach victory from almost any angle. She can appear when you least expect her to, and you can safely guarantee that such an appearance will come at a deeply inconvenient time for you.
I am absolutely ecstatic in the knowledge that so far, the Serpent Witch has been so well executed as an unnerving presence looming over the party’s heads. As each cog in her plans becomes more visible, such a presence will metastasise into consummate terror. They might crush the Skaroan Empire and save Theros from draconic domination. They might even destroy the Empire itself. But will they ever defeat the interplanar conqueror who is manipulating everything to serve her grand goal of apotheosis — one whose power already borders on godlike as it is?
In other news, one of my players has made a video on YouTube summarising the first act of the campaign!
I’ll freely admit that my initial reaction was a surprised “WTF?”, complete with my head jerking back and face scrunching with indignant curiosity. Dungeons & Dragons campaigns don’t usually gain prominence on YouTube! Except if your name happens to be Matt Mercer or Craig. So I check out the video, fully expecting something between a heaping of praise and an ear-blistering rant. Fortunately, it turns out to be mostly the former, with only a small handful of inaccuracies (for starters, it was a black dragon, rather than a green one, and Artemisia the Burnt is definitely not a dragon. The stupid ‘fired’ pun, however, is gospel truth, and I regret nothing).
I didn’t know this at the time, but Grub Slime, who stars as the Pharikan druid Eld, has his own gaming/vlogging channel, where the rest of my party feature in some of his gameplay videos. If you want to support smaller channels, you should absolutely check out some of the videos he’s posted. From what I’ve seen so far, there’s a good mix of gameplay and amusing horror stories.
And with that, I will bid you farewell for this week, and I shall see you in the next world.
~ Harry