This Chult's Got a Death Curse!

The final session delivered the ending in the only way this campaign could have ended: with everything poured into one impossible shot. The party committed the Diurna Varun’s remaining strength to the chest laser while the mech still had only a sliver of life left, and the charge count crept upward to 101 on the final roll. It was barely enough. Two points less and the weapon would not have fired at all, and the notes make clear how narrow the margin truly was.

With Dendar defeated, the surviving heroes turned from apocalyptic battle back toward the world they had saved. The airship was given to the Fisher family, Vogun took the ordinary ship, and the monkey’s-paw wishes were spent in ways that reflected each character rather than the grandeur of the war. Philomena wished for friendship with all dinosaurs, Bart wished away his crippling indecisiveness, Jewel wished for lives of happiness, prosperity, and peace, Vogun wished that Soggy Wren could drink forever, and Pizza wished for a Tim Hortons. It was absurd in exactly the right way after such a long and brutal campaign.

The session closed not on tragedy but on release. The Death Curse had been broken, Dendar had fallen, and the heroes were left not with one solemn coronation but with gifts, departures, and strange little wishes that made the ending feel human again. After all the tombs, prophecies, flashbacks, betrayals, and engines of death, the campaign finished with survival, victory, and the right to want ordinary things.

The kaiju battle escalated into its most punishing phase as the Diurna Varun faced multiple colossal foes and finally Dendar herself. Donar carved at the mech’s legs with razor winds and predatory speed, Nogarab attacked with temporal distortions, afterimages, wild surges, and lightning, and Emperor Gonk turned brute force into a system-killing art through grapples, roars, and hammering blows. The Omuan engine was not just being damaged; it was being systematically crippled, arm by arm and leg by leg.

Then Dendar entered the exchange in earnest. Her attacks were on another scale entirely: psionic crushing force, nightmare visions, entropic venom that seized the mech’s limbs, and a terrible beam that bled away its auxiliary power. Worst of all, she dragged the sun closer with every breath, turning the battlefield itself into a source of punishment as heat and exhaustion mounted inside the metal giant. The fight had become cosmic in the old Chultan sense, with ancient myth manifesting as direct physical pressure.

Even so, the party endured. The Diurna Varun kept standing through wounds that should have crippled it, and the heroes inside continued weathering fear, damage, and system failure long enough to keep pushing the fight forward. By session’s end the battle had narrowed toward its final outcome: either the machine would break under the gods’ remnant fury and Dendar’s terror, or the pilots would find one last way to turn all that surviving into a killing blow.

With the Diurna Varun awakened and Dendar already loose, the campaign shifted from dungeon crawl to kaiju war. The party took their places inside the ancient Omuan machine and learned, in practical terms, what it meant to pilot something built to trade blows with gods and monsters. Every action mattered twice over now, once against the enemy and once against the strain threatening the mech itself, and the rhythm of the fight became a constant contest between damage dealt and structure preserved.

The first phase of the battle appears to have been dominated by raw endurance and system management. The Diurna Varun had to survive incoming punishment while still hitting back hard enough to break the kaiju guarding Dendar’s path, and the pilots had to decide when to risk more strain in exchange for better offensive returns. Even in these sparse notes, the shape of the session is clear: this was where the group stopped being merely adventurers standing inside a machine and began acting like the crew of one.

By the end of the session, the mech battle had established its tone. Victory was going to depend not on a single heroic strike, but on keeping the Diurna Varun functional under monstrous pressure while building toward the final exchange. The party had crossed into the campaign’s last battlefield, and from here forward every round was part of the end.

The group arrived at the entrance to the Diurna Varun mine only to discover that Mwaxanare had sealed it shut, and Ras Nsi and his crew were waiting with her brother and a bomb to lure her out. Pizza gave Artus back his Ring of Winter, and everyone began trying to kill Ras Nsi swiftly. Harold succeeded in knocking him into the lava before he even had a chance to fight back, and Syndra blasted the ring off his finger to prevent him from reviving.

Salida ran over and jammed the ring on a different finger in an attempt to save her boss, and a devoted yuan-ti granted his sinking corpse invisibility to give him a fighting chance, but to no avail as he was blasted again - this time for good. Scix turned Sekelok causing him to run away while others focused on the Zombie T-Rex. Phyrne, Jewel, Philomena, and Leafinwind all worked to defuse the bomb before it could collapse the tomb entrance, killing Prince Na and dooming Toril.

Once Ras was gone and the bomb defused, the party was able to convince Mwaxanare to move the boulders and entered the underground mech. Jewel convinced Artus to give up his ring to activate the Diurna Varun, as well as convince Syndra to give her blood. The Diurna Varun came online.

Vogon and Vogun placed well-positioned spheres of Silence to both prevent the effects of the atropal’s wail as well as prevent Acererak from casting spells. Acererak time-stopped the group, placing most of them on one of the platforms full of stolen lich phylacteries and fireballing them. Bart and Scix together provided the group with a number of critical heals as well as life-or-death bonuses to their concentration checks and counterspells. Acererak thunderstepped to the middle of the party and disrupted their life before flying to the other phylactery platform.

Philomena and Phyrne teamed up to punch and grapple Acererak, releasing the atropal from Philomena’s grapple that had been keeping it in the silence. Syndra quickly contained the atropal inside a wall of force before focusing on counterspelling Acererak’s magic, a fortunate turn, given how vital her magic proved. Acererak became enraged and focused on the group, causing the tomb to begin collapsing, rocks and debris falling and water from the lake above seeping in. Pizza and Harold kept up pressure on Acererak by counterspelling his magic, counterspelling his counterspells, and rolling well with the help of their allies.

In a final desperate move, Acererak tried to unleash Psychic Scream but failed. Jewel launched a series of magic missiles at the lich, downing him so that the starving atropal could tear him apart and feast on his soul. Leafinwind was also there.