Game starts out and I bring out the big drama.
Grevien and Myrkhul finish walking up the gang way and the first thing everyone does is try to interupt a DM cinematic.
Ain't happening.
The soul stone falls into the pit and a moment later releases another piece, a big piece, of Myrkhuls trapped soul.
Myrkhul empowers Grevien to the nth degree and Grevien makes like the big boss avatar I've been waiting to unleash. Hands rubbed with glee and cackles ensue.
The players feel the sting of super powered Grevien and I'm loving every second of it, until suddenly, Oberron, Paul, rolls a crit.
Oh shit, everyone says, oh shit did he use the time gun? We establish that that level of fuckery is only available on a double crit.
So Paul goes ahead and rolls another 20. So of course everyone loses their minds and he's laughing hard; my eyes flutter into the back of my head as I'm realizing I've got an issue when Paul rolls another, a third, 20.
Fuck it. TIme for me to have some fun. I had a bunch of ideas written up that I was thinking of throwing at the players in a bend of time as the Karrassel attacks (if necessary to save the players bacon) but it seems all those ideas were going to come to fruition in a more direct manner.
At the end of the session, Joe voiced that he would have simply swapped a character in to address the time removal, but given how I treated the last time gun event (and my penchant for playing with the fates of my players) I had plans and I wasn't about to pass up the opportunity to be legit in their use. There's a reason I'm the DM.
Now I did something as a follow up to this that I think everyone took advantage of, and that was reestablishing of history based on what's happened and a guess of what would happen had things been different plus 6 months.
This means the players get to have some say in how things go. How so? Similar to a wish, I suppose you could say? I allowed each player (who showed interest) to describe their future self and how they wish to end up. Of course, this was after a nice dramatic introduction to the 'new timeline'.
My description of why things are the way they are is based on the description of time I read in 'Chronomancer' a second edition source book that was released by TSR for Dungeons & Dragons. I have two source books for D&D Chronomancy, the second one being for the d20 system. They're both great flavour, and I use a mishmash of whatever I remember as the core of my time hopping antics.
The Karrassel, Chronomancers and many of the characters I reference are from the last two campaigns; some 2500 years of 'history.'
So what happens moving forward? I have a very simple plan that will tie a few loose bits together. Whether it's what we want or not, I don't know but it's a simple plan which gets the players fighting yet another big bad ass boss form.