(sorry, spilled coffee on keyboad, missingout some lettes)
My little bother is going to college this weekend and were going to play the final session tommorrow, ive been hemoaging playes for a few weeks now, and this session is gonna end the campain. now were nowhere nere any kind of ending yet so I say level up from 8 to 11, ill tell you what happens in the middle of the story and you can play you epic final battle.
Problem is my adventue is an homemade bottom-up creation. with no planning beyond scatteing mcguffins and posibilities at my playes feet and coming up with the freakiest stuff I can imagine. So I was hoping that the foum could help me with some ideas.
The story so far:
The playes wake up in torture chairs with illithids drilling holes in thei heads and attempting to insert baby illithid tadpoles into them. the playes fight their way out to find themselves in an dungeon-lab where EVEYthing is oganic and cure themselves of their illithid infections all the while the tadpole talks to them and offers them powers for the price of thei humanity
The players fight a gigantic mutant neogi thing in a room where the walls are full of crystal tanks with people inside. they smash their way out and the players find themselves fighting variations on themselves. they find out that they are arcane-clones of an original group of adventures 10,000 years ago and that the illithids are infact themselves too! and that there souls are kept seperate to allow the bad guys to create more of themselves.
So they manage to escape from the dungeon only to find that they are standing on the body of a dead god the size of a continent after the world aparently ended. the gods last act was to create a magic circle to try and keep out the apocalypse but let in OR OUT the souls of his followers (he still died however). nobody knows what kind of god it was and so the souless (that is the illithid / adventures) seek to find the ight combination of beliefs and eperiances to required to get out, once found out their plan was to create 5 of themselves with the right outlook and recombine thei soul and walk out the circle to whatever is on the otherside.
The players make it to a city rulled ove by a dracolich and his ruling class of dagons and the players become endeted to the dacolich and were about to find one of the souls that the dacolich had as pat of his horde that had been the prize for a competition.
Thats as far as we got. (
Skip the middle.
My hypothetical ending:
The magic cicle is slowly shinking. The unknown god is a god of creation and his rebith would end the world and birth a new one, which is good beacuse The legions of hell are marching on wherever the players are, detemined to piece the magic cicle and destoy the last bit of not hell in eistance. The souless are trying to stop the players and have legion of illithids. the players have each got a soul in a jar and are racing to get to the artifact that will recombine their souls. BUT they have a SYNTHETIC soul created by the big bad (a deva who reanimates as soon as he is killed as he has no where to go) to combine with his own and resurect the dead god and theiby killing the old god becoming the new god and remaking eistance in his own likning.
Now I need to convet that into a series of set piece encounters. HELP!!!!!!!!!
Skip the middle.
My hypothetical ending:
The magic cicle is slowly shinking. The unknown god is a god of creation and his rebith would end the world and birth a new one, which is good beacuse The legions of hell are marching on wherever the players are, detemined to piece the magic cicle and destoy the last bit of not hell in eistance. The souless are trying to stop the players and have legion of illithids. the players have each got a soul in a jar and are racing to get to the artifact that will recombine their souls. BUT they have a SYNTHETIC soul created by the big bad (a deva who reanimates as soon as he is killed as he has no where to go) to combine with his own and resurect the dead god and theiby killing the old god becoming the new god and remaking eistance in his own likning.
Now I need to convet that into a series of set piece encounters. HELP!!!!!!!!!
Sounds like two encounters. Party vs the army of illithid, and party vs the Deva. You could break the army into two or three encounters (imagine how the army would break its people up into strike forces and what not). Once the players defeat/get past the army they have to face the Deva.
Since the deva auto-resurects the resolution is going to be trapping him - obvously. My only question is whether the players know that they will have to soul jar the deva - because if they don't then you are going to need to convieniently plant a device to do that somewhere easily accesible. If they understand the nature of the Deva then they should be able to properly prepare themselves without a DM plant.
Again thats,
1 - 3 illithid strike forces - intending to deplete dailys and expend resources.
The Deva - a challange that has to be defeated in a specific way instead of brute force.
Not that complicated really. One of the things you can do to save time is use NPC groups that are already created for something similar and change the race type to Illithid. Not that Illithid have that much phenomenal about them strictly by race ... maybe if you found some Psionic NPC warriors to base them off of?
Sounds neat ... very "out of the norm" with the dead god and the "Final Fantasy" elements. Tell us how it goes! Please! Love me a good "so the dead god was about to wake up" story 
Ah! briliant ideas.
It had not occured to me to require the players to trap the deva, I hadnt even thought how that would wok in combat. Okay. first revision.
Make the machine big. Really big. Its the machine the first used by the souless 10,000 years ago to cut out their souls and put them in jars. the players know they have to use the machine to reverse the process and that the Big Bad [still needs a name] is there already waming up the machine, preparing to combine his soul with the synthetic god soul [change of plan, he has the syntethic soul in a jar] and end the wold.
Encounter 1
On the foot steps of the machine, Cogs will turn [players on them can ride back and foth on flat onesOR be cushed in vetical ones] pistons will move back and forth [hitting players fo damage and push attacks] steam will blind and scald [on altenate turns, encourging tactical movement] (ill draw and cut out the cogs and pistons and cut them out and laminate them, so I can move them on the map ill draw)
Encounter 2
halfway up. the map will be deeply stepped, with each step being conter-rotating, taking opponents away o moving them closer. at the edgeds are pitfalls and cog grinding death. think gladiators a pyramid. Ill replace the pistons with glowing floating enegy crystals that turn enegy attacks of the same colour [blue - lightning, red - fire, puple - psionic] into crits on say attacl roll 15-20? but move around down the pyramd
Encounter 3
Top of the machine. Fight with the big bad. whenever the players kill him (he will be low hp, high damage output, to keep him 'scary' he will apear instantly within say 3 squaes of his body (which should disintergate?) OH! maybe each time they kill him he will come back more and more of a monster (like Dib in invader ZIM in the episode big bad piggy!) and the players are just making him stronger.
Im sure the players will be sick of cogs so no more cogs, pistons or energy crystals at the top. .... Battery acid pools, with control crystals in the middle the player will have to jump in to to emove willingly buning themselves. time itself is erratic within this machine that has the power to resurect a god.... some areas will inflict slow, others will grant etra actions.. (maybe 1 attack action, each turn?) the left edge of the boad wraps aound to the right and the top of the map is also the bottom.
So the synthetic soul will be poudly in one place, the chamber you enter to combine with the soul also poudly placed. the trick will be to disconect the god soul, put in one of the convieniently placed empty containers and push the deva into the chamber.
The players go Yay!!!!
But they see an unending swam of minon devils maching on the tower, billions of them. I stat to place them on the boad (substittute modles unfotunatly), the players realise that they need to reawaken the god, do they a) resuect the old god and prey on his mercy to save them o b) have one of the players become the god. and if they want to fight it out i will let them.
If they succesfully reanimate the god the world fades to white. and the players find themselves dressed in a classical d&d way, with traditional medival weapons, walking into a cave, having cast magic circle on the entranceway, about to fight an illithid, a deva and a devil. the end. OR dose it just fade to white. OR if they choose to reanimate the god, it asks them what it should be a god of, and each of the players may choose an aspect, and get elivated into epic level agents of god?
I like the idea of them re-animating the dead god (or one of the players joining their soul with the dead god) and then all the players being elevated to the state of god-hood and choosing their portfolio. Its a nice "win!" kind of ending to a story of such proportions.
they did it. just I had level 20 odd devils by the dozen chasing them from map to map. I gave them 3 rounds to work out the encounter before I added the devils (each one way to hard to even hurt) and mindflayers in from of them and hundreads of minon fel taints all the while the jumped and balanced over moving cogs and infinite pits.
They worked out how to remove the devas soul by swithing the godsoul container for an empty one. one player got really pissed off when at the last moment the other players prevented him from becoming a god, and forced him into a three-way soul combining. each player choose a domain.
Rich: Creation. I want to remake the world.
Will: I worship kord right? so.... strength
Mark: Screw you guys. destrution! I hate you all (semi-serious)
They each took a sylabol of their names and called themselves Har-Al-Var. Haralvar.
I said that that would be one of the gods in my next campain. and that marks anger and pissyness was why their was evil in the world
ive been hemoaging playes for a few weeks now
Lol, I'll use that!
Coworker, also a DM, over coffee: "I've treated my players well last session, too well in fact. None complained /sights. You?"
Me: "I've been hemorrhaging them for weeks!"
Hemmoraging players :snickers: lol. I am glad to hear it worked out - poetically even! With one player's frustration adding depth to the roleplay 
Love it when a plan comes together!