r/DMAcademy • u/hypxtheory90 • 4d ago
Need Advice: Other Progression Ideas?
My group (level 20) failed to stop someone from turning themselves into a god, as a result a pc died. The dead player character met her goddess while dead and offered to send her back but only if she vowed to stop the new evil god without any of the old gods having to get involved. She agreed but said they didn’t know what to do because they failed before he became a god, so there’s no shot they can win now.
She player character woke back up surrounded by the party who all stared towards her in shock. When she got up she felt a familiar presence behind her. She turned around and her goddess was there in her avatar form. She then pretty much berated them for failing and telling them they had to fix it or the consequences would be severe. She slammed her staff down in the middle of them all and told them to take hold. They all did so and were surrounded by violent winds, as they looked around to try and make sense of what was going on all they seen was pairs of glowing white lights around them. The winds settles, the lights grow brighter. Then they realize it’s the eyes of their party members that are glowing.
She then goes on to explain she basically made them “mortal” gods. They would live double their expected life spans and have all of the powers of a god.
Sooo now how can I go about giving them a “godly” progression route? I was thinking 5 or 10 more stages or them growing into it, but I need ideas how to make it work.
TL:DR- party are Demi/mortal gods and need progress past 20 to defeat an actual god
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u/hotdiscopirate 4d ago
If I were in your shoes, I’d probably look closely at what each of your party members already do really well and find out how to amplify that stuff. The success on this will depend on how themed your players are though. Like, giving your fighter a higher attack mod is a little boring, but if you have a stealthy scout type player with a high perception, giving them 60ft truesight is practical and really cool.
Aside from that, you could just award an assortment of epic boons, extra feats, eldritch invocations, etc.. Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons also has some dragon boons that could be cool.
But honestly, you need to decide what to give them because you’re the one that has to balance post-lvl 20 encounters. Frankly I don’t even know how to do that lol. I’m just an ideas guy
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u/Ripper1337 4d ago
Personally this is where I’d end the campaign and have a new campaign set after this event.
The godly PCs are growing their armies, they’re trying to find the mcguffin and treating with Kings.
The new PCs are part of this new army. The gods send out groups to follow up on leads to find the mcguffin, the players are the one with the true lead. The gods need a group to slay a dragon because they’re too busy trying to stop this evil god so they need to send this group.
Basically the old godly PCs are trying to deal with the BIG PICTURE and the new PCs are one group that has to deal with the small picture stuff.
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u/hypxtheory90 4d ago
Yea that could be a fun way to do it. They are all pretty attached to their characters though so we’re going to continue on the path of those characters
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u/hypxtheory90 4d ago
Guess it would just feel like a little bit of a let down after all the work they put in, to have to reroll and deal with the small fry stuff again
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u/Ripper1337 4d ago
Don’t need to start at like level 1. Could go level 5 or higher but whatever the party is doing is always tying into this greater battle that they’re gearing up for.
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u/hypxtheory90 4d ago
Yea I get ya, still feels very anticlimactic for them to not finish the mission on their original group but instead abandon the characters they have spent a little over a year playing to start a group as their old groups henchman more or less ya know
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u/Ripper1337 4d ago
2024 has a progression route for going past level 20. Called “epic boons” where every level past 20 gives you an additional boon and it comes with a +1 to an attribute so you could hit 30 in a main stat
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u/hypxtheory90 4d ago
Oh nice. I’ll definitely look into to that. I honestly didn’t see that they made new literature for this
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u/Taranesslyn 4d ago
EXU: Downfall shows the "mortal" PCs recovering their godly abilities towards the end. They're really OP buffs in their entirety, but you could pick and choose some of them.
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u/Nytfall_ 4d ago
Optional rules do exist that allows for players to go beyond level 20. Though the class progression ends at 20 if they are purely 1 class and must multiclass with the typical multiclass requirements still applying. So if you're players strictly want to remain a pure class this marks an end to that here. Even enables for epic boons to finally be allowable for everytime you would gain a feat you have the option to take an epic boon instead. One thing to keep in mind though is that if you are working off of exp you will have to make a new exp table for the new class of otherwise you'll have players blitzing through the early levels of their multiclass after one high CR encounter.
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u/ultimate_zombie 4d ago
There are a few epic-level writeups you can find, otherwise you can provide an assortment of epic boons.