Once upon a time there was an earth dao with an ego so large you could brain a tarrasque with it, who'd set up a cozy demiplane tucked just off one side of the Underdark. He'd built an underground palace there, largely dedicated to murals of how great he was and how many epithets he'd given himself and animated stone guardians in the wall who could preach to everyone wandering through about how the dao's stone rod is the longest and strongest around.
Topside, our largely brave band of Lv. 6 misfits was sent to find out why a series of local farmers and villagers had suddenly been disappearing.
Turns out the dao was the answer, opening up magical sinkholes that sucked unwary passers-by into his plane, forcing them to be added to either his harem or his cadre of slaves. Unfortunately for him, his sinkholes got us.
We clomped through his domain with all the grace of a drunken stumble, eventually came upon the dao, and fought him and a handful of his closest stone friends until he was battered enough to play the running ***** card and planeshift back home. A little problem solving allowed us a mass jailbreak afterwards, and while we couldn't return aboveground (still working on that) we escaped into the Underdark below.
Fast forward a few to tonight. We hadn't heard from the dao in days, and assumed he either remained in the plane of earth or didn't have enough power in the Underdark to want to challenge us. The crew is working on securing a route out of the Underdark, which requires a set of materials. To that end two of our party members (high elf warlock/rogue and half-elf barbarian) have dipped into the Feywild, leaving us to collect the third and final piece: a star sapphire.
Contacts we've made while down here allowed us to enlist a few darkling miners, and I managed to pin down a trio of star sapphires via Locate Object. One of them is unreasonably far away, so we set the darklings mining out the second star sapphire which is 100 ft into a wall, and everyone else works on another vein 20 ft straight down.
So there we are, mining our own business, when up comes Clompy McDirtclod and a pair of stone cohorts shaking the place with each step. My cleric squares up to the dao as he approaches, furious, screaming "WHERE ARE MY SLAVES?"
"Blow me," I reply.
The dao responded by causing a quake and opening up a cavalcade of fissures in the earth beneath us. Sorcerer fell in and took a boatload of hurt. The rest of us stayed upright. Combat began.
The dao liked dual-wielding mauls that our party doesn't have the strength to use as a two-hander. Partway through the fight, I'm down (his cronies bum-rushed me following an opening fireball), the sorcerer is now flying twenty feet above the battlefield, the ranger is at range, and the arcane trickster is making successful hide checks in the pit we've dug. The half-orc is closest thing in mauling distance, so he draws the aggro.
They've traded a few blows, and the barbarian decides to tell the dao his slaves are in "*****." The predictable exchange happens - something something 14-inches of rock - and in return the next swing by the dao is a called golf-esque shot to the barbarian's danglies.
Disadvantage be damned, he makes his shot, and the result is best summed up as:
Follow-up shot and all.
Between the two, the barbarian drops to 0 for the first time in the combat, half-orcing his way back to 1 at a time when death may have been a mercy. He's left straddling a pit.
We eventually did polish off the dirtbag. Ranger got the kill shot. Dao opened his mouth to say something, an arrow pierced his throat from beneath, pinned his tongue to the roof of his mouth, and kept going. The spoils of victory fell into a crevasse we weren't able to reach (the ranger's death plot point specified that he wanted the body to tumble into a pit, because he didn't think it all the way through) but nobody died, we got our star sapphires, and all's well that ends well.
Except for the half-orc, who will probably need a Wish spell if he ever wants progeny.
It should be noted that all this happened with the half-orc's regular player absent and being played by another one of our crew.
So that's going to be fun to explain to his regular player when he gets back.
Along with the updated portraits on his sheet.