Can YOU Heal a God?

*Warning, this post contains spoilers from the Scales of War adventure path.......you have been warned.*









So you know that moment when you think you have them by the throat and it all turns around and suddenly you find yourself scrambling to cover your butt? Yeah, that happened in my campaign.

We started a session with a knockdown, drawn-out fight against an evil Drow king who had usurped the throne of the Efreet in the City of Brass and was infusing his troops with elemental fire immediately followed by a battle against a fire infused white dragon that they had to fly through a waterfall of fire to even gain access to. The PCs were down to a handful of healing surges, tons of daily powers spent and half of them were still bloodied and after all that, I planned on ending the session by having the PCs witness the defeat of Bahamut who they had just helped raised from the dead with a gargantuan blue dragon (who happens to be the blue exarch of Tiamat) stand over the fallen unconscious form of the dragon god. The party was going to have to make some tough choices now! Face the exarch of an evil god with pretty greatly reduced resources and possibly face character death or take the time to rest and leave Bahamut at the mercy of a hideous foe. I had my evil cackle all ready too.

Immediately, the dragonborn runepriest bolts through the fire waterfall and streaks through the air to save his patron deity. The rest of the party is licking their wounds trying to gather their wits and we start to tear down for the night with the runepriest all by himself outside and he is flipping through his character sheet and says, "Can I do something real quick?"

"Sure," I respond because I figured whatever he had to say or do really quick wouldn't greatly impact the way the encounter picks up the following session having no idea what would come from this simple round of actions. What harm could it do, really?

The runepriest then proceeded to attack Namissi and used his Rune of Awakening on Bahamut. With a single attack, Bahamut regained all his hit points...

...Once I recovered from the shock of that revelation.... the runepriest used Rune of Hero's Resolve grant Bahamut (who is undoubtedly his ally) temporary hit points equal to his current hit point total. So Bahamut has his full hit point total and then once again...

Man, I didn't see that coming.

So we ended our session with my jaw dropped for the second week in a row. I honestly never expected something like this and again I was taken aback by how great it was. How powerful is a story that grows out of a divine character who finds himself housing the divine spark of a god who is murdered and given the chance to bring him back to life and now once again  uses new found strength to respond to the threat and strike back a blow against the mortal foe of his god and restore his god to strength as well.

Now, I've gone back over my decision to let the healing roll and with how I'm going to make this work and I think it is pretty cool. I've debated whether or not it makes sense that a divine character could in fact heal the god he gets his healing from and if he were a cleric or paladin, I might not have allowed it, but the runepriest is a pretty interesting dynamic. He gains his power from the ancient, runic language he works through. So the ancient words he is using to restore Bahamut would technically be older than the dragon god himself so HECK YES it will bring him back to full hit points with temporary hit points equal to his maximum.

What I have decided to do is essentially turn the narrative reins over to the runepriest's player and I'm going to have him write out the story of how he and Bahamut take down the evil exarch. I'm not going make the rest of the party sit through a slog fest of two mighty Solo beasties going at each other since there will be over 3,500 hit points on the board (more if you account for the healing the runepriest could still dish out). So as a reward for creative planning and use of powers, my player (who is also a DM in his own right) will finish out our story for this piece of the adventure (which is terrifying), but also exciting because a big cinematic ending is perfect for this series of adventure and will lead into a great "cutscene" sequence that will set me up for the hook for the last adventure of the campaign.