Infinite Ideas: Building the Infinity Tower

TLDR; last session thoughts are first, long version DM notes are second. After the previous session, we had a lot of morality and alignment discussion. I love my players and the fact that they and the PCs worry about the consequences of their actions. I want them to feel like their choices matter, so I started to come up with material to support their decision to learn more about a creature before killing it. There's a lot below about how this whole thing got so serious and came to mean so much, but in summary, the players wanted to know 'why' the Big Bad was evil. What happened. What they could do about it. So I started writing a profile of Veyla, my Big Bad, as a trapped, forsaken creature who traded bad for worse. I thought about what her power would mean and how it would manifest. I looked for options other than a big battle that would give closure to the story. Did I reveal everything about the villain? No. Did I make her sympathetic/understandable for the player...

This was a rough session. We had a schedule issue the previous week that led to an excellent fun session with a guest DM. There was XP awarded, so it became canon. But not everyone made it! Because of unavoidable circumstances, one player couldn't be there. The result was that I decided one player was facing the dragon alone, waiting for the others to return whenever. So we have one gnome level 5 fighter against a CR 6 white dragon. The dragon was already mid-air, mouth open, last session. The player decided to Dodge as their action, unaware of the fact that a Dodge affects direct attack actions, not a breath weapon. Dragon breathes cold. PC immediately goes down. But the player is a tinker. A recent invention is an 'auto-cleric' that restores HP when reduced to 0. He's back up. He survives another 2 rounds. The entire time, I'm rolling to see if the magical portal opens. I decide 4 or higher on a d6, the portal opens and the rest of the party comes back. Round ...

The cold, icy realm at the heart of Dreysil has proved to be the site of our most terrifying and difficult encounters! The party was clearly on edge and worried about their survival when they landed in the icy realm. It was cold; they were worried about the elements and resting outdoors. They expected another boss fight to happen any minute. The constant snow and ice made navigation nearly impossible. The party jumped in, as usual, but found themselves unable to navigate in the storm. They blundered around until attacked and had a very tough fight against a pack of Winter Wolves. The Wolves focused on using their cold breath when the party grouped, then attacking anyone who broke formation. I felt like I focused on pack tactics and got into the Winter Wolf mindset really well here; it was a tough fight! Yetis, however, were not as awesome. Through a wonderful random encounter roll, the party was stalked by yetis. The yetis were terrible at stealth. They also were easily distracted b...