1. Notes

The Party and The Deck of Many Things

Campaign Story

So on a completely unrelated note, I played D&D today, and the session basically played out like a super cool time travel episode of Star Trek/Doctor Who/Stargate. So in the previous session, we had just acquired the Deck of Many Things, which is a super rare item that kind of has a reputation of being a "campaign ender", cause it's basically this deck of cards that your characters can draw from, resulting in a whole bunch of potential effects, some fairly mundane, some deadly, and some universe altering. So this session we couldn't resist drawing from the deck.

First player was cursed so that they took minuses on all saving throws, and then also drew another card that made a powerful fiend consider them their enemy, and the fiend would torment and attempt to seek out and kill the player's character until either the player's character or the fiend were to die.

Second player drew a card that removed their soul from their body and hid it in a location that we wouldn't be able to find by any ordinary means.

Then I was up next. I drew a card that summoned an avatar of death who I would have to defeat without any help. I beat him and continued to draw cards. I then drew the same card as the first player, causing a fiend to try to seek me out and torment me. Other than those I actually came out pretty good, because I proceeded to draw cards that bumped me up 3 levels (putting me at level 16, with the rest of the party at level 13)

Fourth player up drew a card that allowed them to at any point within a year of in universe time, to be able to receive a truthful answer from the DM to any question. He then drew a card that made him lose all of his non-magical items, and then another card that flipped his alignment. Which is particularly hilarious because he was a lawful good paladin, so he got flipped into chaotic evil, forcing him to effectively become an oathbreaker.

Final player to draw is this crazy chaotic evil guy, who's kind of behind the scenes sort of just a straight up villain in the campaign. He draws some cards that grant him treasure and XP, then he draws a card that puts him in suspended animation in an extra-dimensional sphere. Much like the other player who's soul was ripped from his body by the deck, the location of this sphere can't be determined by normal means, and we're not really inclined to go looking for his character anyway, cause again, he's basically just straight up evil.

So then, we kind of establish what we're doing immediately afterwards, and we work out with the DM that we're going to do a narrative time jump, since we had kind of reached the point in the campaign where we'd achieved our major campaign goals, and the members of the party who didn't fall victim to the party went their own separate ways. The player who's alignment was flipped and the player who was cursed met up after 5 years in an attempt to once again draw from the Deck to try to turn around how terrible it had made their lives. I decided not to, since even though I was also being tormented by a fiend, I was in a far better situation to deal with it than the other guy, since I wasn't cursed, and the deck had also leveled me up to the point of being pretty powerful.

So anyway, like I said the oathbreaking Paladin, and the cursed/tormented guy met up 5 years after the original draw and drew again. The paladin ended up getting his soul ripped from his body. The remaining player then drew 4 cards. The first 3 were of varying quality, none too terrible, but then the last card was Fates, which allows you to alter reality by erasing one event from history.

So he made it so that we never found the Deck of Many things. So now the timeline has been altered, so that everyone's alive again and everything's normal, but we maintained the time skip so that it's still 5 years later. The player character who altered reality retains a residual memory of his suffering, but nothing too specific