Fellow DM's, I'd love to hear your thoughts on a rather peculiar situation that has arisen in my Tomb of Annihilation adventure. Your familiarity with the actual adventure may not be necessary. Here's what has happened:
The mummy, while restrained, successfully strikes the snake with its rotting fist attack.
Snake fails the CON save.
How would you handle the effects of mummy rot on the snake? Would you allow the curse to dissipate the moment the snake reverts to its staff form? Or take some other approach?
The cursed target can't regain hit points, and its hit point maximum decreases by 10 (3d6) for every 24 hours that elapse.
As a DM, I would have the curse end once the snake changed to a staff again, to be honest. As a caveat, I would tell the player the staff cannot be changed into a snake now for 24 hours, as the magic deals with the curse's effect. I don't think there would be any RaW to support ANY choice you made, so it's going to be in your hands to mediate. The aforementioned example would allow the curse to still have an effect, as it should, but not be overly harsh on the player and their new toy.
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Talk to your Players.Talk to your DM. If more people used this advice, there would be 24.74% fewer threads on Tactics, Rules and DM discussions.
An unusual scenario, indeed. Spoilers below for anyone besides OP who isn't familiar with ToA.
I'd probably rule that the magic of the staff overrides the mummy rot if the player "refreshes" the summons before it hits 0hp. It's a magic item tied to one of the Nine Trickster Gods; having a CR 3 creature able to pretty much destroy it with a single failed save seems...off to me.
Now, if you really want to preserve the mummy's effects, you could have the snake lose 5hp each time it's summoned until someone removes the curse on it. So its subsequent "full health" starts slowly whittling away.
(On a personal note, my cleric was the one who attuned to that item when I played ToA. It remains the single most useful item I've ever had, and it still breaks my heart that I had to destroy the staff to survive the beholder fight. I named the snake. So maybe I'm biased against letting mummy rot take someone else's staff away, lol.)
There's two possible reads on the rules IMO, and either is valid. The interpretation is based on the question of whether the staff becomes a different snake each time.
If it's a new snake, then the curse goes away when the snake does.
If it's not a new snake, then the curse remains. By my reading the snake does not heal when it reverts to the staff, and the max HP keeps ticking down, until the snake dies, and the staff shatters.
Of course, you can also rule it some other way. You're the GM.
Thank you for taking some time to respond. Much of what you said harmonizes with my own thoughts. I'm a bit more confident in my decision to allow the staff to remain in the game, probably unharmed.
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Fellow DM's, I'd love to hear your thoughts on a rather peculiar situation that has arisen in my Tomb of Annihilation adventure. Your familiarity with the actual adventure may not be necessary. Here's what has happened:
How would you handle the effects of mummy rot on the snake? Would you allow the curse to dissipate the moment the snake reverts to its staff form? Or take some other approach?
As a DM, I would have the curse end once the snake changed to a staff again, to be honest. As a caveat, I would tell the player the staff cannot be changed into a snake now for 24 hours, as the magic deals with the curse's effect. I don't think there would be any RaW to support ANY choice you made, so it's going to be in your hands to mediate. The aforementioned example would allow the curse to still have an effect, as it should, but not be overly harsh on the player and their new toy.
Talk to your Players. Talk to your DM. If more people used this advice, there would be 24.74% fewer threads on Tactics, Rules and DM discussions.
An unusual scenario, indeed. Spoilers below for anyone besides OP who isn't familiar with ToA.
I'd probably rule that the magic of the staff overrides the mummy rot if the player "refreshes" the summons before it hits 0hp. It's a magic item tied to one of the Nine Trickster Gods; having a CR 3 creature able to pretty much destroy it with a single failed save seems...off to me.
Now, if you really want to preserve the mummy's effects, you could have the snake lose 5hp each time it's summoned until someone removes the curse on it. So its subsequent "full health" starts slowly whittling away.
(On a personal note, my cleric was the one who attuned to that item when I played ToA. It remains the single most useful item I've ever had, and it still breaks my heart that I had to destroy the staff to survive the beholder fight. I named the snake. So maybe I'm biased against letting mummy rot take someone else's staff away, lol.)
There's two possible reads on the rules IMO, and either is valid. The interpretation is based on the question of whether the staff becomes a different snake each time.
Of course, you can also rule it some other way. You're the GM.
@ Falwith, theologyofbagels, and jl8e
Thank you for taking some time to respond. Much of what you said harmonizes with my own thoughts. I'm a bit more confident in my decision to allow the staff to remain in the game, probably unharmed.