Fires of Iskh
by The Arcane Library
Kelsey Dionne is the creative mastermind behind The Arcane Library, a one-woman RPG publishing company. What makes Dionne’s stories especially unique is how her modules highlight character motivations and “dramatic questions” to give players context and purpose.
Fires of Iskh is a treacherous Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition adventure designed for level 20 characters. Players can expect original monsters and a deadly, cataclysmic volcano. Learn more about Dionne and her original adventure below.
About Kelsey Dionne
Kelsey Dionne has been a newspaper journalist, teacher, and technology specialist for some of the world’s largest companies. Most importantly, she’s been a Dungeon Master since age 12 when her loyal gaming friends gave her the encouragement needed to pick up the Dungeon Master’s Guide and lead adventurers into worlds unknown.
Eighteen years later, Kelsey now writes bestselling D&D content and dedicates herself to bringing friends together around the world’s greatest roleplaying game. You can find her wherever the swords fly, the spells cut, and the bards sing legends of great heroes
What inspired this story?
Fires of Iskh is an adventure for 20th-level characters. The adventure begins with the players in a city or stronghold (the more important the location to them, the better!). Suddenly, a violent earthquake blasts the ground and a volcano phases into existence over the site, raining destruction and fire. The players learn the earthquake and volcano are the product of a planar incursion, where one plane of existence bleeds into another. They must travel across the planes to reach to the source of the issue — the volcano Iskh on the Elemental Plane of Fire. Inside the volcano, the players discover that an invading force of efreet have overrun what was once a peaceful azer stronghold.
The efreet, lead by Pasha Baltazar, are trying to awaken and control an ancient red dragon who slumbers in the volcano’s caldera and whose titanic stirrings are causing the planar incursion. The players must overcome Pasha Baltazar and defeat the dragon, Talus-Mir, in order to end the incursion and save the Material Plane from certain destruction.
I thought writing a 20th-level adventure would be a real challenge, and I wanted to test the limits of the adventure design and layout ideas I had used in my previous lower-level adventures. I’d been looking for an excuse to use an ancient red dragon in something (what DM hasn’t?), and this was the perfect opportunity to finally bring that dream to life.
I knew a showdown with such a legendary creature would have to happen in the boiling caldera of a mega volcano on the Elemental Plane of Fire — the crucible of flame itself! — and so the adventure built itself up around that confrontation. While it seems obvious to put a red dragon in a volcano, I hadn’t actually seen it done before in the epic tier. So, I considered why a dragon of such plane-shattering power would be brooding in a volcano, why she went unnoticed for so long, and why she was now causing trouble. At its core, this adventure was inspired most by the desire to put an ancient red dragon in her element and watch the most powerful players in the game meet their match.
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