I love when my players bypass a setpiece battle, and that’s not even sarcasm.
I’d prepped a Catoblepas herd for this past week.
While making their way into the mountains proper, Nim the ranger suddenly slowed the party to a stop at the edge of....a putrid, festering swamp that absolutely should not be there, and absolutely was not here a month ago when they left for Requiem along this exact route.
Use of their interplanar spyglass confirms a strong fae presence. Nim can sense several dozen fae, scattered loosely throughout the surrounding few square miles of suddenly marshy forest. Andromeda, our aarakocra paladin, uses this information to fly a recon mission. There’s three of them along the road they need to follow.
Nim, the one with animal handling, sneaks ahead to see what these weird warthog-cow creatures are, on the logic that if they’re just normal animals (unlikely, because only strong fae are able to get through the barrier for more than an hour or so, and to cause this kind of ecological change they must have been here for weeks) he’s best qualified to correct the situation if they panic or turn aggressive.
This Is A Mistake. The first catoblepas hits him with an attack to which I am forever grateful for the opportunity to say “Okay, it’s going to use its Death Ray ability--” “ITS WHAT?!” and takes out a third of his HP instantly.
The party is beginning to panic, prepping to fight but freaking out, when we get to Audie’s turn in initiative order.
She casts Banishment.
In the following 60 seconds the party heals Nim, gets him to cast Pass Without Trace, and gets themselves past the creature’s position and hidden in the brush. They wait and observe while Audie times it.
The catoblepas reappears. This is a very bad sign. It was sent back to its native plane; it’s supposed to stay there. The veil is getting thin. It’s getting very, very thin. They need to hurry.
And as it turned out, stopping to fight the herd would have cost them time and hitpoints that none of them could afford to spare.
Rhett C. Bruno, Jaime Castle and Roger Clark at the 2023 Audio Publishers Association's Audie Awards.
Rhett & Jaime are masterminds behind the popular Black Badge series of books, which includes the titles Dead Acre, Cold as Hell, and Vein Pursuits. Roger has lent his talent to the series and is the voice of protagonist James Crowley.
Cold as Hell was nominated in the Best Fantasy category, but ultimately the award was given to The Monsters We Defy.