[warning, mild swearing]
The party (consisting of 5 level 3 characters) is doing a favor for a green dragon. She’s one of the guardians of the forest they’ve been exploring for the last two months, and while she’s powerful she’s in a bit of trouble at the moment - a massive enchanted fire has exploded in her part of the forest, and is spewing out fire elementals intent on spreading the blaze.
[skip the next two paragraphs if you don’t want backstory]
Normally, Mirias (the dragon) has no problem dealing with intruders into her territory, but the elementals give exactly zero shits about her venomous magic, and she has no resistance to fire and would likely be overwhelmed if she tried to get into the heart of the blaze to deal with the problem. She’s been playing a defensive guerrilla war, picking off lone elementals and ripping them to shreds with her claws before retreating to heal the resulting burns. She knows she’s going to lose a throw of the dice at some point, if things keep going the way they are.
Enter the adventurers. They’ve got their own objective: another dragon, this one rather unfriendly, has stolen an abyssal artifact out from under them and made off with it towards the nearby jungle. They have intel placing him in or nearby a golden step-pyramid, but all that the local fey know about the jungle is that it’s dark, overgrown, and full of lizardfolk and things that make an unholy racket. However, Mirias is originally from the Screaming Dark, and so the PCs sought her out to ask questions before they delve into the jungle in search of their quarry. She’s happy to help, but asks that they help her out by getting rid of the fire elementals while she stays in her lair and writes up a travel guide.
So the party sets off into the burned area. The fires are strange - bending towards the center of the burn, with bits of the flames floating off and away in little streams of flickering embers, all heading towards a single objective. The party fights their way through a group of elementals intent on reducing a chunk of singed forest into proper ash, and then (eventually) enter a scorched clearing.
A troupe of fire elementals surrounds a pool of lava in the center of the cleared space; from the lava rises a small island of semi-molten stone, with a massive egg-shaped cocoon of flames sitting atop it, which all of the little embers are flowing towards and merging with. The trees around the clearing have all been knocked down, as if the thing resting in the middle of the pool had exploded, blasting them all outwards.
The party manages to sneak their way in (yay for Silence and high Stealth rolls!), and ambush the elementals. The mystic archer blinds half of them with her enchanted arrows, the paladin binds the rest in place with chains of light, and the undead warrior/pyromancer and the brownie magus proceed to chop their way through the first ones to respond to the assault.
Then the cocoon opens, revealing a greater flame elemental. The party has an “oh shit” moment when he flings a massive fireball their direction, and then breathes a sigh of relief when their Fire Resist buffs serve to just barely negate the damage. Things start to look even grimmer when the big guy begins to swell even larger, slowly growing to his normal, gargantuan size.
The party’s turn comes up, and they decide that this shit needs to end, now, before it really gets out of hand. The paladin and the protection mage are busy fending off the minions who have shaken off their banes and moved in on the party, so the archer blinds the biggun and his nearby lieutenant with two ridiculously well-placed arrows, and the brownie magus and undead warrior move in for the kill. The undead warrior clears the path, cutting the lieutenant barring the stepping stones to the island in half, and then it’s the brownie’s turn.
[Just to paint the picture, brownies are tiny (1 to 2 feet tall) fey with creepily huge eyes, happy dispositions, and a proclivity for doing household chores and repairing broken stuff. As part of her backstory, Cherubix picked up an intelligent magical dagger named Walter (functionally equivalent to a longsword for her; the sword has its own backstory), learned how to conjure elemental magic and channel it into her blade, and decided that, while doing housework was fine and dandy, she’d rather go off exploring and adventuring, rather than settle down.]
So, Cherubix’ turn begins. She focuses on her blade, pouring frost magic into it, to such an extent that she starts radiating a chill fog at least three feet in radius. She charges, trailing a line of cold fog that even the heat of the lava can’t dissipate, and dashes between the feet of Jane (the undead). Reaching the greater elemental, she leaps fifteen feet into the air and brings her sword down as she falls, stabbing it straight into the thing’s molten heart. The elemental doesn’t even have a chance to defend itself, as the archer had blinded it just a few seconds earlier.
The thing immediately spasms, throwing Cherubix back 20 feet and well clear of the lava, and begins shrinking in on itself as a wave of cold pours out of its torso and into its limbs. The sparks of flame within its molten stone face soon gutter and go out, and the rocky bits of its form collapse onto the abruptly-solidified lava in a heap as it dies. The party managed to extract its dimmed but still-burning core, which Jane promptly swallowed (because she’s undead, and having an ever-lit coal inside doesn’t even tickle and gives a constant boost to her fire spells, that’s why), and they return to Mirias victorious.
**
Cherubix rolled a freaking 71 on her attack, even with the -1 Disadvantage for charging; two nat 20s, and one of her d10s exploded. The elemental had 17 Guard versus Frost, and 38 hit points. She one-shotted the big bad for the session. This was my face, at the time: o_O
Also, can I just note how utterly broken (Potent + Bane Focus) Blind is, when used by someone wielding a Longbow? “Oh, no, don’t worry, guys, I can make half of that on-rushing horde waste their next couple of turns and make em easier to hit. From across the map. No sweat.” 