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Message: <blockquote data-quote="the Jester" data-source="post: 3854779" data-attributes="member: 1210">What Has Gone BeforeOur heroes are from a small village called Whitewater in the barony of Kamenda, part of a fragmented larger kingdom that has mostly dissolved over the last couple of generations. The world is a low-magic, dangerous land. The elves are all gone- where, no one knows, but none have been seen in decades or longer. Kamenda’s southern neighbor, Tydon, is her traditional rival and enemy. The party met in Whitewater, joining forces to help their local community with a variety of dangers, including both bandits and bandit hunters, monster-inhabited ruins and a goblin incursion. While dealing with this incursion, our heroes discovered that the goblins had been displaced from their usual home, Goblin Gorge, by some sort of weird, alien cyst on the ground: a giant, pus-filled bloat on the land, riddled with passages and inhabited by strange, twisted beings with unfathomable motivations. Our heroes, using salt as a weapon against the unnatural forces they faced, managed to destroy the cyst and drive off or destroy the alien entities. Not long after, a sudden, unexpected attack on Whitewater by Tydonian soldiers led our heroes to hurry to the capital city of the barony, Kamenda City, to warn the baron. Tydon was on the move, and from an unexpected direction. Worse yet, evidence began to accumulate that one of the baron’s two top advisors was a traitor- either Sir Galadon or Sir Harth. Things got more complicated when a demonic entity allied to the mysterious traitor kidnapped one of the party members, who was- even worse- pregnant with the child of another of the pcs. Though there was a great deal of misdirection and a spider web of intrigue, our heroes finally discovered that Sir Harth was the traitor (narrowly avoiding the execution of Sir Galadon) and captured him. When their army came to attack Kamenda City, the party played a pivotal role in beating off their initial assault. However, Sir Harth- whom the party had imprisoned- managed to escape during this time. The party knew that he was involved in some sort of black magic, demon-related cult, but had no more details than that to go on.The Tydonian army had been fought off for a time, but it was building for another assault. Desperately investigating the odd direction from which they were coming, our heroes found that the Tydonian force was crossing through a portal from Tydon. They managed to defeat the portal’s guardians, close the portal and retreat to Kamenda City, from whence the remaining Tydonians, cut off from reinforcement or resupply, were easily routed. The immediate danger was past, but Sir Harth was still free. Our heroes had found documents indicating that Harth’s cult planned to perform some kind of ritual to open the “gates of fire” on New Year’s Eve at the Ghost Tower atop Battle Rise (once called Inverness). They resolved to be there first, and to ambush Sir Harth. But once Harth arrived with a beholder, things went horribly awry, and in the end even a small Kamendan army could not stop Sir Harth and his beholder ally. Our heroes were captured and forced to watch as Harth and his men sacrificed a pair of elfbloods- a human-elf hybrid, somewhere between 25% and 75% elven, usually closer to the lower end- and opened the gates of fire. They would have been killed, too, but for a figure that silently slew their guards and slit their bonds. This turned out to be- an elf! She warned them that some of her folk would be coming through the gate, but that they had changed while Outside. Before she could explain much more, several of the “elves” emerged. They were the same alien creatures that our heroes had fought at the cyst!After a quick, furious battle, the party and the elf destroyed these “elves.” Then she told them that Harth had fled into the past, and had to be stopped from bringing unimaginably powerful weapons back into the present and conquering all of Kamenda- or more. She went through the gate, and the party followed after- only to find themselves in a blasted wasteland, nearly empty of life, littered with battlefields full of corpses. It was horrifying. Worse yet, the very environment sucked the life out of our heroes. The world had been torn apart by a magical apocalypse, and it was to this period that Sir Harth had gone. The elf quickly died due to the influence of something called the “elf-slayer of Varzoth”, and our heroes were left to track Sir Harth over this blasted land through an age of madness. They eventually reached an abandoned village, but to their surprise, their investigations turned up a few survivors of the devastating war that had destroyed the world around them. After what was nearly a tragic misunderstanding, the party and the survivors joined together. Our heroes took some time to rest and train, and now they have departed on the road to the capital of the destroyed empire that they are in, for it is to that city that they suspect Sir Harth has gone- or is going...</blockquote>

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