[Jan05] Campaign reports
- Thread starter Krug
- Start date
Hi,
I just started running a new game for a friend of mine set i FR. So basically we have just started, but the first couple of sessions have been going really well and have contained a very nice mix of both both RP and fighting. I seems as if we have found a good mixture to suit both his style of play and my ideas as a DM. This is my first DM in a long time, so I am actually quite happy at the moment!
Cheers,
Stegger
I just started running a new game for a friend of mine set i FR. So basically we have just started, but the first couple of sessions have been going really well and have contained a very nice mix of both both RP and fighting. I seems as if we have found a good mixture to suit both his style of play and my ideas as a DM. This is my first DM in a long time, so I am actually quite happy at the moment!
Cheers,
Stegger
Piratecat
Sesquipedalian
One player just had a new son and another two players have a baby on the way. As a result we're going to take a 2-3 month campaign sabbatical between mid-February and the beginning of May. We won't stop playing, but I'm hoping to have Capellan and DougMander run games for us and I'll be running a MnM superhero game for about four sessions.
Before that, though, we have to get to a good stopping point.
[sblock]The PCs are trapped between three or four competing factions, all of them wanting one of the PCs to marry (or not marry) a particuular girl. The consequences if he does (or doesn't) are extremely far-reaching, impacting the politics of Hell and providing philosophical grist for several of the Planescape factions. As a result, he has a lot of people interested in his personal business, and if he makes the "wrong" decision many of those people wish to kill him.
You see, the girl in question is sorta kinda a princess of Hell. She just doesn't know it.
I expect that they'll be taking the fight to one of those factions, buoyed with members of the factions that they've seem to have allied with. It will prove to be an exciting encounter.
[/sblock]
Before that, though, we have to get to a good stopping point.
[sblock]The PCs are trapped between three or four competing factions, all of them wanting one of the PCs to marry (or not marry) a particuular girl. The consequences if he does (or doesn't) are extremely far-reaching, impacting the politics of Hell and providing philosophical grist for several of the Planescape factions. As a result, he has a lot of people interested in his personal business, and if he makes the "wrong" decision many of those people wish to kill him.
You see, the girl in question is sorta kinda a princess of Hell. She just doesn't know it.
I expect that they'll be taking the fight to one of those factions, buoyed with members of the factions that they've seem to have allied with. It will prove to be an exciting encounter.
[/sblock]
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Playing tonight, in fairly new campaign (3rd session). The characters are back in the evil swamp city after sacking the first level of an evil temple/command post. They'll be scoping the lay of the land, but the leader of the (weak and pathetic) forces of good will get imprisoned by the city's evil leaders in a dungeon on the shadow plane. Off they will go (I hope) to the rescue. If they're as tactically disorganized as they were in the temple, it's going to be a TPK. But these are 20+ year veterans of the game playing 8th level characters, and they're disrespecting the monsters. Time for me to don the 1E DM hat and enjoy delivering the monster-respect smackdown.
Buttercup
Princess of Florin
When we ended our last session, the PCs had just rescued a badly damaged slave girl. They found her in a smuggler's cave and were just trying to figure out how to bring her out (she can't swim and they don't have a boat) when...the orc smugglers came back. The sorceress's gull familiar alerted them to the entrance of three boats into the cavern and now they're trapped.
They're in their present fix because two of the four PCs made Freeport too hot to hold them by trying to kill a guard and failing. I think I'm going to have to abandon the module I was trying to run, because they've screwed things up so badly that there isn't any way they can complete it. Ah, well. They may be doofuses, but they're my doofuses. I was getting bored with the module anyway.
They're in their present fix because two of the four PCs made Freeport too hot to hold them by trying to kill a guard and failing. I think I'm going to have to abandon the module I was trying to run, because they've screwed things up so badly that there isn't any way they can complete it. Ah, well. They may be doofuses, but they're my doofuses. I was getting bored with the module anyway.
Tom Cashel
First Post
Wings of Icarus (D20 Modern) will have a hell of a Season 2 premiere with "Showdown at the God Trap," in which the PCs meet up with a nemesis who has...erm...ah...
Best to just hit you with the details (with many thanks and apologies to Warren Ellis for lifting a few of his keen ideas from Planetary):
[sblock]The Secret History
The storyline begins, most accurately, in 2471, in the many minds of an insane sentient computer.
But for our purposes, it must begin with the dumping of a skin feaster into the Colorado River on June 15, 1931 by Jason Marks. The corpse is swept two miles downriver to a deep pool, where fish pick at the corpse and become infected. Then Ingrid Sturm, by way of Carcosa, arrives on the scene. Using her telekinetic powers, she explodes the corpse and leaves it in the sun for vultures to consume. She takes a sample of infected blood and vanishes...
Thirty-one years later, the Daedalus rocket passes through several pockets of dark matter on its way to the moon. Erik and Ingrid Sturm, Jacob Greene, and Randolph Ray see Carcosa for the first time, and become carriers of the entropic virus called Hastur. When they return to earth, they begin their mission of causing earth to be absorbed into the nightmare city. They have come to understand a truth; they must help humanity to understand it as well.
In 1968 they become field agents of the Hoffmann Institute; as Team Icarus they use the organization’s resources while pursuing their own goals. Over the next thirty years they establish a worldwide network of cults, secret societies, and sympathizers. They are the inner circle of the A-A-, the shadowy organization lurking behind the Masons, the Illuminati, the United Nations Elite Security Force, the Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight, and others. Their major sites of activity include Zero Station in Antarctica, a secret moon base, voodoo cult actions in New Orleans, and running a clearinghouse for Mayan antiquities in Bogotá, Colombia. By 1999, their research in South America has provided the exact date that earth will be ready to become one with Carcosa: December 12, 2012. After informing the Hoffmann Institute of this fact, they vanish.
In 1999 a top secret cloning program results in Jeremy Four, Five and Six, driven and purposeful soldiers with a decidedly antisocial bent. Not quite as antisocial as Jeremy Two or Three, but certainly not destined for public service. The HI builds a team around Jeremy Six, adding martial artist Victor Suan, ex-soldier and infiltrator Jason Marks, ex-Delta Force medic Morris “Morphine” Vok, and psychic Viggo Worcosky. None of them are told Jeremy Six’s origin.
This new team, code named Odysseus, is dispatched to find the former Team Icarus. But during the four years Odysseus spends searching, Team Icarus works to undermine the Hoffmann Institute’s network of communication. In 2000 Odysseus does battle with Erik Sturm in Shanghai, and very nearly captures him. Over the next three years the Institute is nearly crippled by infighting. Team Ares is formed in 2002, to add yet more decisive military might to HI’s arsenal.
On August 9, 2003, Team Odysseus arrives at Zero Station. They hold Sean DeBerry hostage, and Jeremy Six executes three scientists before DeBerry will talk. He tells them about the Icarus clearinghouse in Bogotá, and immediately warns Erik Sturm of their imminent arrival. The events at Zero Station send cracks through the foundation of the team.
August 23, Bogotá, Colombia: the team surrounds a hotel where Erik Sturm is staying. Worcosky’s psychic skills warn him of the danger as the team moves in. Only this fact saves their lives. A bomb is detonated within the hotel, and the team is captured. From Aug. 25 to Sept. 8, Dr. Ray performs extensive psychic surgery on the team members. All memories of their association with the Hoffmann Institute are removed. They are released in various U.S. cities in late September without the vaguest notion of what has befallen them. Coach is also captured, based on information taken from the team’s minds, and incarcerated at Lodge No. 523 in Las Vegas.
By mid-2004, Team Odysseus has been reunited (minus Morris Vok), with no memory of having known each other before (this is where the campaign began). They are sent on a few missions of little consequence. On August 8, a paradoxical temporal event gives Team Icarus the means to bring about earth’s absorption by Carcosa.
A TARDIS responds to a quantum signal sent from the year 2471, where its crew is slaughtered by REAPER’s Centurion robots and infected with the skin feaster virus—only Loki survives by hiding in the engine room. The TARDIS is sent back in time with a cargo of zombies to ensure the eventual destruction of the Hoover Dam, with a custom component installed that will allow REAPER to regain the TARDIS if the attempt is averted. The combined effect of lodging the TARDIS in solid matter while non-compatible hardware is installed creates a rift in space-time, where multiple timelines overlap and degrade reality itself.
Although Team Odysseus achieves a high degree of success—destroying several skin feasters, removing the TARDIS from the Dam, and disabling the REAPER computer in the future—they also alter their own timeline in 1931 and fail to repair the damage done to local space-time. In October of 2012 the dam will fail catastrophically, and the waters of Lake Mead will spread Canyon Syndrome—geographically isolated to this point—across the southwest U.S. The ensuing epidemic creates a state of affairs under which Carcosa draws earth fully into its sphere.
Season 1, “History’s Nightmare,” begins with the Hoover Dam incident. In their retrieval of the TARDIS, the team subtly alters their own timeline and then travels to the zombie-plagued wasteland of the far future. In Paris and Boston they uncover evidence of world-spanning conspiracies, discover hints that their memories may not be completely intact, and encounter the enigmatic Erik Sturm. Finally journeying to Antarctica to rescue an Institute field agent, they uncover a mystery far older than mankind...which they may have discovered once before.
Season 2, “Crawling to Carcosa,” begins with a Showdown at the God Trap, which will likely leave Erik Sturm dead or captured. In the second episode, the original Coach is rescued from a derelict Lodge in Las Vegas and the team goes rogue. Traveling to New Orleans on Coach’s advice, the team learns more of the King in Yellow in Tell Me, Have You Seen the Yellow Sign? Soon after, Team Ares is sent by HI to steal the TARDIS. In Night Floors, the team learns much of Carcosa and even speaks to Randolph Ray (or a nightmare version of him). Finally we come to Dimensions Revised, in which the team returns to Hoover Dam to put right what happened there, and confronts Ingrid Sturm in 1931.
By the end of the season, the team will know their secret history and should have restored their timeline, the damage to space-time, or both. Either or both will put an end to Canyon Syndrome, thus negating its use as a catalyst for merging earth with Carcosa. But clearly, the remaining members of Team Icarus are still out there, still intent on bringing earth under Carcosa’s influence, and still in possession of enough time and varied means to achieve their goal.
Season 3 (as yet untitled) concerns itself with the search for and elimination of Jacob Greene and Dr. Randolph Ray. One motivation, of course, is preventing earth’s absorption by Carcosa, but another is revenge against the man who erased the team’s memories.
[/sblock]
Best to just hit you with the details (with many thanks and apologies to Warren Ellis for lifting a few of his keen ideas from Planetary):
[sblock]The Secret History
The storyline begins, most accurately, in 2471, in the many minds of an insane sentient computer.
But for our purposes, it must begin with the dumping of a skin feaster into the Colorado River on June 15, 1931 by Jason Marks. The corpse is swept two miles downriver to a deep pool, where fish pick at the corpse and become infected. Then Ingrid Sturm, by way of Carcosa, arrives on the scene. Using her telekinetic powers, she explodes the corpse and leaves it in the sun for vultures to consume. She takes a sample of infected blood and vanishes...
Thirty-one years later, the Daedalus rocket passes through several pockets of dark matter on its way to the moon. Erik and Ingrid Sturm, Jacob Greene, and Randolph Ray see Carcosa for the first time, and become carriers of the entropic virus called Hastur. When they return to earth, they begin their mission of causing earth to be absorbed into the nightmare city. They have come to understand a truth; they must help humanity to understand it as well.
In 1968 they become field agents of the Hoffmann Institute; as Team Icarus they use the organization’s resources while pursuing their own goals. Over the next thirty years they establish a worldwide network of cults, secret societies, and sympathizers. They are the inner circle of the A-A-, the shadowy organization lurking behind the Masons, the Illuminati, the United Nations Elite Security Force, the Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight, and others. Their major sites of activity include Zero Station in Antarctica, a secret moon base, voodoo cult actions in New Orleans, and running a clearinghouse for Mayan antiquities in Bogotá, Colombia. By 1999, their research in South America has provided the exact date that earth will be ready to become one with Carcosa: December 12, 2012. After informing the Hoffmann Institute of this fact, they vanish.
In 1999 a top secret cloning program results in Jeremy Four, Five and Six, driven and purposeful soldiers with a decidedly antisocial bent. Not quite as antisocial as Jeremy Two or Three, but certainly not destined for public service. The HI builds a team around Jeremy Six, adding martial artist Victor Suan, ex-soldier and infiltrator Jason Marks, ex-Delta Force medic Morris “Morphine” Vok, and psychic Viggo Worcosky. None of them are told Jeremy Six’s origin.
This new team, code named Odysseus, is dispatched to find the former Team Icarus. But during the four years Odysseus spends searching, Team Icarus works to undermine the Hoffmann Institute’s network of communication. In 2000 Odysseus does battle with Erik Sturm in Shanghai, and very nearly captures him. Over the next three years the Institute is nearly crippled by infighting. Team Ares is formed in 2002, to add yet more decisive military might to HI’s arsenal.
On August 9, 2003, Team Odysseus arrives at Zero Station. They hold Sean DeBerry hostage, and Jeremy Six executes three scientists before DeBerry will talk. He tells them about the Icarus clearinghouse in Bogotá, and immediately warns Erik Sturm of their imminent arrival. The events at Zero Station send cracks through the foundation of the team.
August 23, Bogotá, Colombia: the team surrounds a hotel where Erik Sturm is staying. Worcosky’s psychic skills warn him of the danger as the team moves in. Only this fact saves their lives. A bomb is detonated within the hotel, and the team is captured. From Aug. 25 to Sept. 8, Dr. Ray performs extensive psychic surgery on the team members. All memories of their association with the Hoffmann Institute are removed. They are released in various U.S. cities in late September without the vaguest notion of what has befallen them. Coach is also captured, based on information taken from the team’s minds, and incarcerated at Lodge No. 523 in Las Vegas.
By mid-2004, Team Odysseus has been reunited (minus Morris Vok), with no memory of having known each other before (this is where the campaign began). They are sent on a few missions of little consequence. On August 8, a paradoxical temporal event gives Team Icarus the means to bring about earth’s absorption by Carcosa.
A TARDIS responds to a quantum signal sent from the year 2471, where its crew is slaughtered by REAPER’s Centurion robots and infected with the skin feaster virus—only Loki survives by hiding in the engine room. The TARDIS is sent back in time with a cargo of zombies to ensure the eventual destruction of the Hoover Dam, with a custom component installed that will allow REAPER to regain the TARDIS if the attempt is averted. The combined effect of lodging the TARDIS in solid matter while non-compatible hardware is installed creates a rift in space-time, where multiple timelines overlap and degrade reality itself.
Although Team Odysseus achieves a high degree of success—destroying several skin feasters, removing the TARDIS from the Dam, and disabling the REAPER computer in the future—they also alter their own timeline in 1931 and fail to repair the damage done to local space-time. In October of 2012 the dam will fail catastrophically, and the waters of Lake Mead will spread Canyon Syndrome—geographically isolated to this point—across the southwest U.S. The ensuing epidemic creates a state of affairs under which Carcosa draws earth fully into its sphere.
Season 1, “History’s Nightmare,” begins with the Hoover Dam incident. In their retrieval of the TARDIS, the team subtly alters their own timeline and then travels to the zombie-plagued wasteland of the far future. In Paris and Boston they uncover evidence of world-spanning conspiracies, discover hints that their memories may not be completely intact, and encounter the enigmatic Erik Sturm. Finally journeying to Antarctica to rescue an Institute field agent, they uncover a mystery far older than mankind...which they may have discovered once before.
Season 2, “Crawling to Carcosa,” begins with a Showdown at the God Trap, which will likely leave Erik Sturm dead or captured. In the second episode, the original Coach is rescued from a derelict Lodge in Las Vegas and the team goes rogue. Traveling to New Orleans on Coach’s advice, the team learns more of the King in Yellow in Tell Me, Have You Seen the Yellow Sign? Soon after, Team Ares is sent by HI to steal the TARDIS. In Night Floors, the team learns much of Carcosa and even speaks to Randolph Ray (or a nightmare version of him). Finally we come to Dimensions Revised, in which the team returns to Hoover Dam to put right what happened there, and confronts Ingrid Sturm in 1931.
By the end of the season, the team will know their secret history and should have restored their timeline, the damage to space-time, or both. Either or both will put an end to Canyon Syndrome, thus negating its use as a catalyst for merging earth with Carcosa. But clearly, the remaining members of Team Icarus are still out there, still intent on bringing earth under Carcosa’s influence, and still in possession of enough time and varied means to achieve their goal.
Season 3 (as yet untitled) concerns itself with the search for and elimination of Jacob Greene and Dr. Randolph Ray. One motivation, of course, is preventing earth’s absorption by Carcosa, but another is revenge against the man who erased the team’s memories.
[/sblock]
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We just started an Eberron campaign and have finished 2 sessions. There are only three players (a warforged barbarian, a human battle sorcerer and a human cleric) and they have exceeded my expectations so far. They have defeated a carrion crawler, 6 gnolls, won a game of Six Stones and had to be rescued by a hobgoblin from a collapsing cavern. As a result, they have gotten to 2nd level already. Warning to all Eberron DMs: Warforged barbarians can deal some serious damage!
RichGreen
Adventurer
Hi,
I'm running two ongoing campaigns: a monthly(ish) game based in Freeport (which I've set on Oerth) with 12th-13th level PCs and another monthly(ish) game for my girlfriend set in Tethyr in the Forgotten Realms with 7th level PCs.
I'm also playing in a weekly game set in the far south of Middle Earth with mixed D&D and AU rules. My character is a 7th level magister.
Cheers
Richard
I'm running two ongoing campaigns: a monthly(ish) game based in Freeport (which I've set on Oerth) with 12th-13th level PCs and another monthly(ish) game for my girlfriend set in Tethyr in the Forgotten Realms with 7th level PCs.
I'm also playing in a weekly game set in the far south of Middle Earth with mixed D&D and AU rules. My character is a 7th level magister.
Cheers
Richard
Gez
First Post
Well, the last event IMC are summed-up in the "Paladin Behaviour! Yay! Weee!" thread.
Shortly after that, guards (who weren't as fast as the PCs to find Evil's trail) arrived and discussed a bit with the PCs, asking them what they do know and telling them what happened in the Town Hall.
Then I wrapped the session on a cliffhanger as the PCs were trying to find a secret passage in those caves. Will they find anything? Is there anything to find?
Shortly after that, guards (who weren't as fast as the PCs to find Evil's trail) arrived and discussed a bit with the PCs, asking them what they do know and telling them what happened in the Town Hall.
Then I wrapped the session on a cliffhanger as the PCs were trying to find a secret passage in those caves. Will they find anything? Is there anything to find?
I have two campaigns running:
Eberron Campaign
The party reached the dead city, a ruined, undead and aberration infested metropolis at Eberron's north pole. The frost giants who live there are mostly insane worshippers of the Cthulhu-esque beings of Xoriat. The party managed to talk to the immortal frost giant king without starting a fight, but they managed to inadvertantly offer him their service. So, he decided that they should be locked up in the (long abandoned) servant's quarters until he figures out how they can serve him. When the last session ended, they had just found a secret door in the quarters and were ready to see where it leads.
One of the PCs is possessed by the king's long dead sister, a cleric of some sort of sun god. They know that the ghost has some sort of plan to depose the king and purge the dead city of the awful, sanity-blasting creatures of Xoriat, but they aren't sure what it is (she seizes control of the shifter barbarian/ranger for only short periods of time, and then only to complete specific actions). They're in the city to find a lost artifact, and the information that describes where it is came from a hag who is either out to kill them or is simply giving them clues that lead them to where they are needed most. So, they aren't sure if they can trust it.
If the characters do handle the frost giants and find the artifact, they still need to hike all the way back to the Monastery of Bitter Contemplation (they liberated it from shapeshifting undead on their way to the city), then back to Outland (an arctic settlement that you flee to if you want to disappear from Khorvaire - think Mos Eisley but with ice), and there they need to bargain with a white dragon for their airship, which the dragon shot down and stole as tribute for their violation of her territory.
Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil
We just finished the moat house, so the party is off the next segment of the adventure. I've run a few of the mini-modules from the WotC site. This has been a fun game - it's what we play when the Eberron game can't happen for whatever reason. We've managed to introduce a new player to D&D (he's running a dwarf druid) and the game has a sort of 1e feel to it. The players aren't as attached to their characters, so PC death isn't as big a deal as it is in Eberron.
Eberron Campaign
The party reached the dead city, a ruined, undead and aberration infested metropolis at Eberron's north pole. The frost giants who live there are mostly insane worshippers of the Cthulhu-esque beings of Xoriat. The party managed to talk to the immortal frost giant king without starting a fight, but they managed to inadvertantly offer him their service. So, he decided that they should be locked up in the (long abandoned) servant's quarters until he figures out how they can serve him. When the last session ended, they had just found a secret door in the quarters and were ready to see where it leads.
One of the PCs is possessed by the king's long dead sister, a cleric of some sort of sun god. They know that the ghost has some sort of plan to depose the king and purge the dead city of the awful, sanity-blasting creatures of Xoriat, but they aren't sure what it is (she seizes control of the shifter barbarian/ranger for only short periods of time, and then only to complete specific actions). They're in the city to find a lost artifact, and the information that describes where it is came from a hag who is either out to kill them or is simply giving them clues that lead them to where they are needed most. So, they aren't sure if they can trust it.
If the characters do handle the frost giants and find the artifact, they still need to hike all the way back to the Monastery of Bitter Contemplation (they liberated it from shapeshifting undead on their way to the city), then back to Outland (an arctic settlement that you flee to if you want to disappear from Khorvaire - think Mos Eisley but with ice), and there they need to bargain with a white dragon for their airship, which the dragon shot down and stole as tribute for their violation of her territory.
Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil
We just finished the moat house, so the party is off the next segment of the adventure. I've run a few of the mini-modules from the WotC site. This has been a fun game - it's what we play when the Eberron game can't happen for whatever reason. We've managed to introduce a new player to D&D (he's running a dwarf druid) and the game has a sort of 1e feel to it. The players aren't as attached to their characters, so PC death isn't as big a deal as it is in Eberron.
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