A couple weeks ago, my party of eight level eleven PC’s finished the Storm Kings Thunder Campaign we been running for about a year. Since that was my first experience as a DM, I wanted to make a final recount of the whole campaign and my experience trying to balance a final boss for such a powerful group.

First of all, I want to thank all my players for keeping up all this year with this hobby. We started as three friends in Colombia with little idea about D&D and finished as a big group of eight constant players. We all had our problems outside the table, but each Saturday was a little scape for all of us where we could kill some dragons, solve some mysteries and make friends. I also want to thank Matthew Colville, that Dungeon Master that make me stop looking for a DM and start being one, now I have a new group of friends thanks to D&D and thanks to him.

I want to talk about the campaign in general first. When we were looking for a published campaign to run we were between Storm King’s Thunder and Curse of Strahd. Now, I personally believe that the main reason that I was looking for an already published campaign is because I was scared of creating something boring or unbalanced. Finally we picked Storm King’s Thunder for thematic reasons, but because of that fear I tried to follow the campaign book as if everything it said had to be done. I couldn’t be more mistaken.

Later I realized that Storm King’s Thunder is famous because you can develop your player’s stories during the firsts chapters of the campaign, where there isn’t a really urgent goal to achieve. Instead of doing that, I just skipped must of it and left my players without that character development that they all wanted. The beauty of D&D lays in creating your own story and developing as it was real. Fortunately my players had fun regardless of that mistake.

I realized that mistake later in the campaign, so I decided that the end had to be special. After all, that was the first of many campaigns that we’ll finish together and I wanted it to stay in my player’s memory. At that point, I had eight constant players that wanted to finish the campaign together. They were all very strong and were way too many for a regular Ancient Blue Dragon. So I decided that they shouldn’t face an Ancient Blue Dragon, they should face the Doom of the Desert.

First, I said that Lymrith was using the war between the giants and the small folk to have time to create a massive Gargoyle army. When the players arrived to Lymrith’s lair, a massive wall of animated constructs was creating a Gargoyle wall around the lair of its master. To face the war machinery that Lymrith had created, the heroes had to call upon the few allies that they could make during the giant wars. Hill, Could and Storm giants went in their aid to end the thread of the Doom of the Desert.

However, Lymrith wasn’t the only blue dragon in the desert. She called all of her kin that wanted to help her end the giants and the small folk for once and for all. Adult blue dragons came to her aid, fighting the cloud giants and taking the war to the skies. In a rush, the heroes disabled the long range weapons that were destroying the armies of the giants, but when they finished, their allies were more weak than they had expected. The now weak giants had to face now the rest of the dragons while the heroes went to finish Lymrith, they all knew that if she left her lair and joined their kin the fight would be over.

Now, for Lymrith I intended a couple of things. I wanted to take players to their maximum and had them change their regular strategies, for that I added two legendary actions to her. The first was called “Electrifying Link” that made an electric link between two players, making damage if they come close together and to those that entered the link, this effect could be dispelled. The second one was called “Summon Protonic Bolt” who created a bolt that made damage to all creatures in a 20 ft. radius and could be killed. The point of these abilities was to diverge player’s damage away from Lymrith and taking away space for player’s to maneuver. Eventually, the point was that the player’s realized that she could take away more space that they could clean, having to kill Lymrith fast before she killed them.

I also give an ability to her breath called “Overcharge” that removed all the Lightning resistances to every creature it hits. This was inspired in the one of Mrs. Colville videos and had a very good effect in my players.

I knew that my players were doing a ton of damage already, so I gave Lymrith the maximum hit points that an Ancient Blue Dragon can had, thinking this would be enough.

All this seemed good in my head but I underestimated my players again, they managed to rethink their strategy and saved their bard before she was killed for good. I also didn’t think about the effect that flying would have in the battle, giving players a huge advantage. Never the less, we all had a great time on that fight that took all the afternoon and the store where we were playing was full of yelling and laughing when I finally said “How do you want to kill her?”

As a final touch, I wanted to have not only memories but also souvenirs from our first campaign. We always played with paper miniatures since the 3D ones are really expensive in Colombia, but Lymrith was more important. For her, my girlfriend and me 3D printed and painted Lymrith, she turned out very good since she was the first miniature we painted. Also, we made everyone that played sign under Lymrith miniature so we remember all the people that were there that they, took a bunch of photos and grabbed some pizza in the way out.

This year was the first one I started to play D&D in a regular basis. The friends I made and the adventures we had will always be remembered. We already have bigger plans for 2018 and hope we all stay together one way or another. I just want to thank again all the people that made this possible, without them this year would been less exciting.

Finally, I’ll let the document I made describing Lymrith statistics for anyone interested.

Keep on gaming!

Lymrith, The Doom of the Desert