Long story short:
After dicking around for like 8 levels, our party has found out about a dark god rising that even the usual evil gods are scared of. There's a magical thingie in 7 pieces we need to gather and assemble to seal the dark god back up, as you do.

The first piece of this thingie is in the Elemental Plane of Fire, in a fortress made out of obsidian. We've been wandering around that for a few days (game time), killing monsters, bumbling into traps, the usual.

Eventually we found a ghost of a dwarf that used to worship/serve an evil red dragon that lives elsewhere in the keep. Evidently some other entity appeared and now the dragon doesn't care about its servants, etc. Dwarf has hidden Thingie in the secret castle basement.

Of note: Our band of adventurers is, uh, not great at adventuring. Due to a lot of differences in ethics and alignments, general foolhardiness, a wild mage, and a halfling rogue who gets bored REALLY easily, we tend to stumble into some bad situations regularly.

So, we had (after a *lot* of discussion) decided to not fuck with the dragon and sneak around to the Basement Wherein Lies the Magical Thingie. We decided this both bc we're only like avg level 9 and also bc my Good fighter wasn't cool with just killing a dragon.

We'd snuck into the basement, ran into the first trap (basically a couple of invisible Iron Giant types of automatons that punched my fighter so hard her chain mail had fused together), rested, and actually FOR ONCE showed some caution and used an Arcane Eye to scout ahead.

Today's session started with us knowing what the next room held. I'm not going to go into full detail of the fucking Tomb of Horrors deathtrap that the room consisted of, but I'll give a summary of the pertinent bits.

The *main* obstacle is that there was a 50 foot wide river of lava across the room, with a 5 foot wide obsidian bridge (with no railings, natch) across it. There were a lot of other stuff (including stalactites on the ceiling that we were convinced would fall) but: bridge.

Quick breakdown of our party in attendance (when a player doesn't come we just kind of shove their character into "assumed competence" space where they don't participate but also can't be killed. They may as well be in a Bag of Holding but with air in it).

Shandra: Me. Good half-orc fighter. Barely adult by half-orc standards. Noble and "everyone deserves to be free and treated with respect" etc. to the point of naivete at times. Swole AF.

Mad: Draconic barbarian. Not super smart but strong and caring.

Cloud: Tabaxi (cat-person) wild mage. Archaeologist of the Indiana Jones type. His wild magic constantly causes huge fucking problems (including him giving birth to himself via hairball-vomiting, long story). Photographic memory, spells pull us out of a lot of jams.

Andee: Halfing cleric. Book nerd, goes into almost fugue states where she is a living Wikipedia because she's mumbling facts to herself when presented with quandaries.

Fae*: Drow paladin, hasn't been with us too long. Noble but skittish about our foolhardiness.

*Fae's real name is longer and I can't actually remember it and it's the one name not in our Discord group so I'm just calling her Fae for short.

Beef Jerky/BJ/Ration: Halfing rogue. SHORT attention span. Impulsive. Just lets people name her whatever.

For BJ, imagine a kind and loving child but also one who can fucking shank you if you cross her (she once crit-snuck-attack an NPC quest-giver so hard they died on the spot because they sent us on a mission without warning us of how dangerous it was).

ANYWAY. The Bridge. We experimented a bit and found that when you got to the 20 foot mark of the bridge, a strong Gust of Wind would hit you from the left to try to make you fall into the lava below.

BJ had been the one to wander onto the bridge to test this, of course. When we figured this out, Shandra pulled BJ back and decided to try to shoulder through the wind to find out where it ended and help others get across. She handed the end of a 50' rope to Mad.

Shandra pushed most of the way across the bridge since she felt confident about the Str saving throw to not get pushed off. She found that after the 5' square of being Gust of Winded from the left, there was a break, then another Gust of Wind spot but from the right instead.

(I wouldn't go into this level of trap detail except it's about to become SUPER important.)

So, Shandra and Mad hold the rope taut between them, and the idea is the others one at a time, use the rope to help them make the Str checks to get through the Wind spots without getting blasted into the lava below.

At first it seems like it's working. BJ uses the rope to get across (getting advantage on the Str checks to not get Gusted off) and scrambles behind Shandra.

We comment that our plan is very straightforward but seems to be working ok.

Fae goes next and the dice are mad.

Fae steps into the Gust of Wind From the Left spot and fails the Str check, even with advantage. She is buffeted by the wind so badly she loses her grip on the rope and flies 15' horizontally from the bridge, and time slows to a crawl as we panic.

Fae can cast Levitate on herself but is caught so off guard that she can't do so this round, and in those 6 seconds she will hit the lava and may take so much damage there isn't a body left to reincarnate.

Cloud had pre-cast Telekinesis and has been watching from the side of the river just in case someone fell. But the Dice Gods are angry and he fails the pretty minimal Str check to grab her and hold her in the air. She's falling.

Shandra and Mad both act without thinking. With no time to consult or coordinate, they both leap from their spots (Shandra near the far side of the bridge, Mad from the close side) to catch Fae while holding onto their ends of the rope, hoping the other can pull them in.

Shandra, however, is moving through the Gust of Wind From the Right spot on the bridge and is partway in the air and not ready, and so gets blasted 15' in the OTHER direction, out over the other side of the bridge.

This, in fact, saves all three of them: the rope goes taut at 50' as Shandra flies to the left, while Mad grabs Fae and flies to the right. As they fall, the rope lands across the centre of the bridge

Since the bridge is just over 25' above the lava, they end up, instead of falling into the lava, swinging toward each other like a kinetic balls toy. They manage to not lose their grips when they slam into each other under the bridge, just over the lava.

They dangle just above the lava, the ends of the rope catching fire from the heat. Fae uses her magic sword that lets her Polymorph herself into a couple of different forms to turn into a chimera, and manages to get Mad and Shandra back onto the bridge.

(Imagine during this a lot of other mitigating factors, like the fact that everyone is taking about 1-10 damage per turn from the heat of the room and that all the spellcasters are making Concentration checks basically every 6 seconds to not lose their spells)

Anyway, we finally get everyone across the room with chimera-Fae in details I won't go over. Beef Jerky inspects the door to the next room, and we're all eager to GTFO so we can rest and pretend that we didn't lose about 50% of our party in 6 second span.

Unfortunately, as soon as BJ touches the door, she sets off a series of magical traps that basically mind-compulsion most of their party to go barrelling into the next room because we all feel a sudden urge to sit in the scary throne on the other end of the room.

The DM expected a sort of battle royale here as our characters fought to be the one to get to the throne, but instead Cloud manages to, using a combination of cat speed and Misty Step, traverse the entire room in a span of seconds and sit in the throne.

This causes a dais to rise up with the Magical Thingie on it. The compulsion has switched from the throne to Touching the Thingie. BJ manages to reach it right away and when she touches it, shit gets even worse.

A sort of Chromatic Whatever spell goes off. Shandra gets hit with acid for a lot of damage but she's a tank. Mad gets fucking sent to another plane of existence, but thankfully since we're on the plane of fire, planar inertia carries her back to our home plane where we came in

Andee gets blasted with lightning so badly she falls unconscious and is near-death.

The compulsion then lifts.

and the castle starts rumbling from an earthquake, with the obsidian that makes up all the floors and walls beginning to crack.

Everyone starts just fucking DASHING. Shandra picks up the unconscious Andee. The chimera'd Fae flies into the room to grab Cloud and BJ. Back in the Prime Material plane, Mad jumps into the portal to rush back into the keep to get to us.

Shandra gets Haste cast on her so she can move ridiculously fast (with all Dash actions it's like 180' a turn, it's kinda wild). Since she has an unconscious halfling in her arms and sees Fae has the others, she just bolts for it.

Mad climbs back into the castle the fastest way he can to get to us as the keep begins falling apart. Everyone is stumbling and making checks as pieces of the keep begin shattering and pelting people with obsidian and nearly throwing people off the bridge.

As Mad gets close to the room where the entrance to the basement is, he hears something above the intense "thousands of windows shattering at once" cacophony of the castle:

The roar from the dragon we had snuck around rather than killed.

Shandra, moving with her Hasted speed, makes it to the main floor just as Mad opens the door to the room where the basement entrance is.

Also just as the dragon crashes through the far wall from the two of them, furious.

Shandra chucks the unconscious Andee to Mad, who is in the doorway; Mad catches the halfling and stumbles back a few feet at the unexpected toss. Shandra drops her sword to her off-hand and pulls out her shield to try to make a barrier for the others against the dragon.

Right then, a back-to-drow-form Fae gets to the top of the basement stairs and sees the dragon and Shandra. She takes out her javelin that can turn into a bolt of lightning and throws it at the ceiling over the dragon. The ceiling crashes down, making a temporary wall between them and the dragon.

Shandra--who I may have mentioned is Good to a fault--takes this moment to *not* try to escape, but instead to bolt back into the basement because Cloud and Beef Jerky still aren't out of it.

She finds them near the bottom of the stairs and scoops one under each arm since she can, Hasted, run faster, and sprints back upstairs. Meanwhile, upstairs, the dragon has broken through the temporary wall as Fae and Mad (carrying the unconscious Andee) run for the exit.

The dragon starts to take a deep breath as Shandra--carrying BJ and Cloud--runs up the stairs and tries to run past it.

Cloud realizes that evil dragons hold grudges and "stealing an artifact and destroying its home" is likely to end poorly for everyone.

As a quick backstory aside, Cloud has a fucking awesome magic staff we found in a previous dungeon. It has a bunch of spells stored into it and gives him bonuses to rolls and a bunch of things.

His character and all our players (but, importantly, not the rest of our characters) also knew it had a "break in case of emergency" killswitch that would cause all its charges to go off explosively. It would have a 50% chance of killing him in the process, or 50% to send him to a random plane

So, in the split second that Shandra was carrying him under her arm, running across in front of the dragon, Cloud made his choice.

He teleported out of Shandra's arm and underneath the dragon.

Shandra stuttered in her step at the sudden change of weight distribution. Cloud screamed at her to run and then smashed his staff against the belly of the dragon, snapping it in two. A 30' radius explosion enveloped him and the dragon in white light.

When the light cleared, the dragon and Cloud were both gone. The dragon because it had failed its Dex save and taken 320 points of damage in a single moment.

Cloud because he had rolled above a 50% on his dice and been zapped to another plane right before being evaporated.

Beef Jerky, who had been extremely close to Cloud, *screamed* in agony, since none of the party knew his staff could do this or about the 50% chance. Shandra, sobbing, ran from the castle as BJ clawed and bit at her arm to be let free.

The party (minus Cloud) managed to escape the keep and get to where the portal had been to take them home. They finally had a second to heal the unconscious Andee enough for her to send the magical flare to have the portal opened, and they all fell through.

Behind them the keep crumbled to the ground.

On the other side, an obsidian-dust-coated Shandra screamed at Gran (an ex-PC of one of the players, who sent them through the portal) to close the gate, and that's where we ended the session.

There's going to be a LOT to resolve next session. Not the least of which is a 9th level party getting XP from killing a dragon and a lot of fucking PTSD from Beef Jerky, who saw one of her closest chosen family members get totally disintegrated. Also figuring out what happens with Cloud, who is on another plane of existence with no one knowing he's even alive.