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Message: <blockquote data-quote="sniffles" data-source="post: 3628092" data-attributes="member: 30035">I'm sure I've told this story previously on these boards, but it bears retelling.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Several years ago I was involved in a Fantasy Hero campaign that ran for about 3 years. Our party started out loosely inspired by the Black Company books. They were members of a small mercenary army that specialized in both combat skills and magic. The founder/general of the mercenary group had recently disappeared, presumed dead along with most of his senior officers, while on a secret mission that didn't include any of the PCs. In the wake of that tragedy the PCs took over as the senior officers of the company and accepted a commission from a master swordsmith to gather the ingredients for the mighty runesword he wished to forge. Due to some poor negotiation skills (read: bad rolls) on the part of the company's new commanding officer, we ended up becoming virtually indentured to our employer.In the course of our searches for the various items he wanted us to recover, we stumbled upon information about the Reavers, who we looked on as powerful evil beings, but not gods. At the same time, these Reavers started reappearing in the world after a thousand-year absence. According to what we knew about them (which wasn't much), they had been at war with the gods.People started turning to the Reavers as deities. We found a sleeping god in the ruins of an ancient lost city. We found a castle that seemed to exist outside the flow of normal time. We started running into all kinds of nasty portents about what was going to happen to our world. We learned that the Reavers and the gods we worshipped weren't really all that different, just opposing sides in a war that had been waging since the beginning of time - and all the mortal races were just their pawns or playthings. My character, a devotee of the Sun God, learned that her god was for all practical purposes dead, though as long as he still had worshippers he still wielded a little power in the mortal world. She found herself chosen as his avatar, and another character was chosen to be the Messenger of the Reavers. Eventually, as a result of learning some of this information, our little merc company decided to fight against the Reavers and support the "gods". We began recruiting supporters to form an alliance against the Reavers. But in the meantime we had to keep working for our employer, partly because he had the right to sell us as slaves if we broke our contract, and partly because we'd become convinced that his runesword might be a powerful weapon in the war against the Reavers. In the course of his creation process he'd hired a master swordsman to advise him, and my character become somewhat romantically attracted to this character, although it never went very far with her religious obligations and the missions the company became involved in. We also discovered that our swordsmith's ancestor had attempted to create a similar runesword, and in the process became so obsessed with success that he became a sort of lich. He'd been killing swordsmen to incorporate their blood into his unfinished blade. We wanted to prevent our employer from doing something similar, and also to direct his efforts more toward what we considered the "good" side of the titanic struggle that was brewing.Finally the swordsmith was ready to begin the actual forging of the sword. We made our way to the ancient dwarven forge we'd cleared out for him to use and positioned ourselves to watch the final steps of the forging. As my character stood by in horror, we saw him plunge the freshly-forged blade through the heart of my swordmaster friend. There was nothing we could do to stop it. Then the sword began to levitate, threatening anyone who approached it - it sent on of the other mercs flying across the forge chamber. Gradually we all began to realize with mounting horror that the only person who could touch the sword was my character. She took it reluctantly. It vanished immediately, but she knew she could call it if she needed it. Now it was time for the final showdown with the Reavers and the gods. We brought all our allies to bear against them, even the isolated and dying Elves and the xenophobic Dwarves. My character was levitating through the battlefield with her new sword in hand, glowing with the brilliance of the sun, and yet somehow the Reavers couldn't see her. At least, not until she sliced one of the practically immortal Reavers in two with the runesword. Then the Reavers all took notice of her. Her companions joined her, and together they brokered a deal with the Reavers to force them to leave our plane of existence for good and let mortal creatures live without fear of their depredations. Our actions shook the magical and spiritual foundations of the world; some of the gods left too, as part of the bargain. That's the most epic story I've ever been involved in, and I still marvel out how my GM brought it all together.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> This same GM is running us through a D&D campaign now that is loosely connected to that campaign, though we don't yet know what all the connections are beyond the reuse of some names.</blockquote>

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