Dec 8th, 2025
Welcome to Prismeer
Dec 8th, 2025
Welcome to Prismeer
Through the looking-glass
Through the looking-glass
Yesterday, I had my friends over for the next D&D session in our Wilds Beyond the Witchlight campaign. The weather's quite cold now, so I'm pretty pleased to host since it means we don't need to lug all the various books/supplies/snacks elsewhere in the bitter cold and wind. It's very nice of my friends to travel to hang out and play pretend with rules with me, so we like to spend some time before playing the game chatting and eating food for a late lunch. We made a bunch of pizzas and cinnamon buns, and our friends brought some homemade basque-style cheesecake, and some pastries from a bakery nearby. We had a great time catching up on the previous week while stuffing our faces.
Our session started off with the party putting together the last details on their plan to snatch Mr. Witch's magic pocketwatch during the Crowning of the Witchlight Monarch. They visited Dirlagraun the displacer beast and convinced him to assist with the plan. The plan was pretty well thought out: Snuffy and Bramblewine would attend the Crowning while Red and Hemlock laid in wait for the end of the ceremony when Mr. Light would be escorted back to the staff area by Dirlagraun, relatively separated from the winner's parade. At that point, Kettlesteam the Kenku would appear and "heckle" Dirlagraun, who would separate from Mr. Witch to search for the heckler. Mr. Witch would then get stalled by Burly at the entrance to the staff area while Red pickpockets the watch. This plan went off without a hitch, and they managed to convince Mr. Witch to explain where they could find their lost things in more detail in exchange for the watch.
Mr. Witch and Mr. Light brought the party to the Hall of Illusions, and tried their best to teach the party a rhyme to activate a portal to the fey realm of Prismeer. They explained that all things lost at the carnival eventually end up in Prismeer, and if they wanted to get their things back, the party would need to take a one-way trim to that shadowy realm. We had a fun scene where the party needed to recite the rhyme they were taught, but it ended up being kind of difficult, so there were a lot of laughs around the table trying to recite the activation phrase, failing, and then having Mr. Light implore them to "repeat after me". Eventually, they all got through the portal, and found themselves in the fey realm of Prismeer, in the swampy domain known as Hither. At this point, I awarded the party a level up! They found themselves upon a large broken bridge/highway with a great view of the swamps below.They decided to climb down off of the bridge, and saw a strange patchwork balloon in the distance on a crash-course with a slanted tower in the distance before they made it to the bottom.
At the bottom of the bridge, a giant crane noticed the party, and made a big racket while flying off. This alerted a nearby band of harengon (rabbitfolk) brigands that began marching towards the party's location, singing about how they were going to beat the party up and steal their stuff. Some of the party tried to hide, but with various degrees of success. The leader of the harengons declared that the party was now being robbed, and that they should not resist. Red had snuck off behind one of the harengons and ambushed them with a knife at their throat. Seeing this as resistance, the harengons (who I gave awful cockney accents to) defended themselves, and we rolled initiative. The combat was relatively quick, with the harengons not posing much of a threat due to their low individual HP and some poor initiative rolls. They made a couple good hits on a couple party members, but were quickly dealt with by the party's blades and spells. After the combat, the party befriended the harengons' pack-snail and Red chopped up the bodies to make harengon-steaks. Snuffy, the party Harengon was surprisingly ok with this, but "they started it" was good enough for them. Next, they decided to head over to the slanted tower to investigate that balloon crash.
After avoiding some scary-seeming stiltwalkers in the swamp along the way, the party made it to the Slanty Tower. There, they were called to by a hushed voice in an air balloon's basket hanging from the tip of the tower above them. Apparently, there was a knight by the name of Sir Tavalar trapped in a magic cage in the basket, and the balloon had crashed due to a "fell wind", and the pilot "Wigglewog" died in the crash. He said that giant snakes were sleeping in the brambles below, so they needed to keep their voices down, and that a key-collecting goblin named Jingle Jangle might have the key to his cage. Jingle Jangle was said to reside atop a nearby hill, so the party made haste to the hill to track her down. After dodging some nasty swamp gas, they made it to the hill. The hill was covered in treefolk that were happy to show them the way to the top of the hill to meet Jingle Jangle. It turned out that Jingle Jangle had recently been robbed by the Harengon brigands, and upon hearing of the party's exploits against them, she produced the key they sought as a reward for their pre-emptive revenge. This really raised Jingle-Jangle's spirits, so she also gave them some info on the nearby lands and points of interest. The party then headed back to the tower to free the knight, and were given another mysterious key by the treefolk on the way back down the hill.
The party made it back to the Slanty Tower without incident, and quickly got to work deciding how to scale the tower to free Sir Tavalar without alerting the sleeping snakes below. Bramblewine had earlier been crowned the Witchlight Monarch, and so had a boon by which he could gain flight for an hour. The only problem is that this boon is limited to 3 activations total. Once used up, no more flight. So, to conserve resources, they decided to tie a rock to a rope to rig up a makeshift grappling hook and hurl it over the tower so that someone could shimmy up the rope to the hanging basket. Snuffy, the party barbarian have the rope a good toss, but missed the tower pretty horribly and the rock-rope fell into the bramble-thicket below and alerted the sleeping giant constrictor snakes. Time to roll initiative again!
Combat got off to a quick start, with Red running up to one of the snakes, marking it for death with a Hunter's Mark, and chopping into it. Unfortunately, the snakes were quick, and one of the quickly coiled around Red, putting him in mortal peril. Hemlock lit up the other snake with some magic missiles, and Snuffy swung away at the other snake with their battle-axe. Bramblewine offered up some psychic support with some vicious mockery as well. The other snake coiled up around Hemlock and quickly downed her with some pretty nasty damage rolls. In revenge, Snuffy was able to land a devastating crit against the snake that downed Hemlock, and felled it before it could finish Hemlock off. Combat was fierce for a few turns, with the remaining snake coiling up around Red while he tried his best to escape. Eventually, he did get away, and while it was chasing after him, it got a powerful bite off against Snuffy, downing her as well. Things were starting to look pretty dire, so Bramblewine activated his boon and flew up to the basket to free Sir Tavalar for some backup. As it turned out, he was a small faerie dragon! He charged into battle to assist, and caught the attention of the remaining snake, who coiled up around him instead of chasing after Red. Eventually, with most of the party down or grievously wounded, they were able to fell the beast with a few well placed strikes from Sir Tavalar and Red. They revived the downed party members, and Sir Tavalar thanked them greatly for their valorous deeds. As a reward, they were awarded a +1 dagger (Sir Tavalar's magic sword), and were told that the Summer Queen would hear of their good deeds before he flew off into the swamp. The party took one last long rest before we then called it for the night.
This was a really fun session to run! I was pleased that their heist went well, and that they were able to get to Prismeer pretty quickly. We got to our first combats of the campaign, and it was nice to get back into the flow of battle after a couple very RP-heavy sessions. I'm liking the fey realm so far, and I had a lot of fun doing all the voices for the various weirdos within. The party are looking for a Hag in this realm, and I think it'll be cool to see how that plays out. Really looking forward to the next session, which looks like it'll likely be some time next year, since everyone's getting pretty busy for the holidays. We might get a new year's eve board game session in though! Great fun, and a very good way to wrap up the weekend.