Episode 1504: The Rise of Tiamat

When we last left this team we were deep in the Cult of the Dragon's territory: The Well of Dragons. It's inside of a currently inactive volcano and completely in the control of the chromatic dragons. The Cult of the Dragon is mid ritual to break the seal keeping Tiamat in the Nine Hells, trying to bring her back to this world to wreck havoc and destruction. As a reminder this team consists of:

Tsedek, our charming Tiefling Rogue

Itanis, a devious High Elf Wizard, fond of controlling any situation we may find ourselves in

Leoven, our quiet but effective Wood Elf Ranger

Magnus, the Human Paladin of Heironious, he has followed a vengeance path

Elle, the small but sparky High Elf Wizard, fond of blowing things up with lots of fire

There are five wizards floating 50' above us, five more 50' above them, and the ringleader wizard floating 50' above the second tier, furiously concentrating on the sheer amount of power they're trying to funnel into a portal laying horizontally on the ground. This is the portal they're trying to bring Tiamat through.

Straight away Itanis starts controlling the stage so to speak, cordoning off some of the lesser mages so we can focus fire on a few at a time. Elle steps in and starts doing her damage to the lesser mages. And Leovan started shooting like mad as well.

But the stars of the show was Magnus and Tsedek. Magnus decides to grab Tsedek and Dimension Door all the way up the temple, above the top wizard, and then just let gravity do its job. Yes, he turned himself into a 300lb brick that slammed into the lead wizard. He then proceeds to try to "dispel magic" the brute force way: punching the crap out of the lead wizard. Somehow the lead wizard stayed flying though. Tsedek has the ability to fly so he hovered and started whipping the lead wizard.

Itanis commands a group of the lesser wizards to go to lunch ... and they did. Unfortunately for them they didn't know their "lunch room" was full of lava. So they popped into the room and burned to death. Leoven was a machine shooting other wizards, and Elle cleaned up some as well.

One of the lesser wizards, realizing they were losing, dove into the portal. And we realized their self sacrifice helped the portal a lot.

Towards the end of the fight Tsedek/Magnus are still battling (and winning) with the lead wizard, but the lesser wizards were reduced to just the lieutenant. In an epic move, the lieutenant dove past Elle to dive into the portal. But, she's a war mage, she has learned the ways of melee range fighting from watching Magnus, and she went big. She let off a disintegrate on the lieutenant. And it worked, so just the dust of his remains sprinkled the portal.

Seeing the cult's grand plan going down the drain so to speak, the lead wizard drops his fly mechanism and proceeds to dive straight for the portal. Yes, with Magnus still attached. So Tsedek throws feather fall on the wizard, giving us more time to destroy the wizard so he can't do his self sacrifice move.

As the last wizard died Tiamat is almost released into the world but as her heads started to poke through the portal it destabilized and failed.

We were successful. Exhausted, but successful. We spent some time getting the remaining captives out of the volcano and returned the dragon mask to Waterdeep for safe storage. And then we took our weary bones back to Dragon's Bane Keep for a long rest.