But in setting this up, I made an unintentional improvisational error.

I wanted to see what sort of hilarity the party would conjure up when faced with a Spectacularly Dangerous Object. This was reinforced by a sickening sensation the party could all feel as they approached the portal, as if even at a distance, it was tugging and twisting at some unseen part of them. I had made very certain to describe the eerie silence for miles around the keep the seeming absence of any living creature. This unstable portal was a very intentional Big Red Button, placed there deliberately for my party to play with.

The party follows the cultists back to their camp, and after we went off the rails, I had the cultists flee again to a nearby forest, where - due to a series of poor rolls by the party - they arrived at an old, crumbling keep just in time to see the last cultist crush some sort of magic idol in his hand before jumping through an unstable magical portal. We were playing an increasingly homebrew version of Hoard of the Dragon Queen, and this was shortly after I had decided to discard the rest of the campaign entirely, in service of indulging my table's propensity for shenanigans.įor those unfamiliar with the material, the inciting incident has the party - already travelling together - stumbling upon the sacking of a frontier town by a cult of Tiamat, complete with a dragon flying menacingly overhead. I put a Big Red Button in my campaign once.

Big red button game do not press