EricNoah
Adventurer
The current arc of my nearly-three-years-old Arcana Unearthed campaign is drawing to a close. I will be transitioning to a new campaign model set in the same location but with a few twists:
1) Timeline advances by about two years to accommodate the return of the dragons as in Arcana Evolved, but with a different origin and purpose. The origin will involve the PCs over the next couple of sessions; the purpose you'll see below...
2) The heroes will all be members of or work for a magic guild. Within this guildhall will be a sort of "hall of many portals" type deal, which can take the heroes all around the world and to different planes as needed.
3) Each player can develop a small stable of PCs to use throughout this next part of the campaign. This will allow for folks to try out different races and classes and not feel trapped with one PC. I might ask them to stick with one character for an entire adventure, but they can then return to home base and swap in a different character if they want. One of my players has cleverly dubbed this the "Justice League" model and that's a great way of explaining it in a nutshell.
4) The thrust of the next campaign arc, as you can see by the title of the thread, merges key concepts from AU/AE and Lords of Madness. The "core story" is thus: To prepare the good folk of Terrakal (the lands of the Diamond Throne, AE's setting) for a future battle with invading aberrations from beyond space & time, the heroes must unearth lost arcana and other lore related to battling and defeating aberrations. They will undertake several related missions to uncover this lost knowledge. The foes in each mission will be aberrations and their thralls/servants; the MacGuffin in each will be a specific piece of lost lore. In one case, it might be uncovering knowledge of the lost spell, Invoke the Cerulean Sign (and a related Runethane rune that's slightly more powerful), from a powerful grell mind witch who has locked its secrets away deep in the earth. In another, the PCs might seek out the lore of special mental training that allows greater resistance to aberration mind-control (a feat like Partitioned Mind or Quick Recovery from LoM) from a captive of jungle cultists in a revised version of Rana Mor (Dungeon Mag).
5) To keep the players on their toes and present them with a twist, I will be avoiding two of the standard aberration "mastermind" races (beholders and mind flayers). Instead, I will focus mostly on aboleths (psionic variety), grell (with an AU/AE mind witch twist), koprus, nagas, and a few others.
6) In addition, to provide more variety I have slightly extened the definition of what an "aberration" is. In essence, the new definition includes all "aberration type" creatures, plus selected others -- basically, if it's got tentacles, or if it's bug-like, or if it's an unnatural/mutant mix of two creatures, or something like an intelligent ooze, it's probably an aberration by my campaign's definition). I've developed a "master list" from a few of my monster sources and will be adding more, as well as putting new twists on old monsters. Similarly, the thralls will be chaning a bit too (the thralls of the grell will be a bipedal version of the Grick; and the thralls of thea= aboleth will be various enslaved humanoids but especially Skulks).
7) In an effort to cut down on my prep time, I'm going to be running almost all published adventures, most of them from the pages of Dungeon magazine. I'm lumping a few adventures together in some kind of semi-logical format. I've got three main "groups" of adventures: Jungle adventures (the Isle of Dread update, Rana Mor, the grell lair from LoM which I'll jazz up a bit, and an updated version of the Temple of Demogorgon); the Frigid North and Underground (starts with an ancient frozen "far realms" type city near the north pole ala Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness -- I'll have to develop this a bit; then the heroes find their way underground to an aberration-dominated Underdark -- plenty of those types of adventures around to modify); and then finally to a temperate costal region where I will jazz up a few adventures such as the aboleth lair from LoM; and the recent aboleth/Tharizdun adventure published in Dragon Mag.
8) The ultimate purpose of the return of the dragons to Terrakal is related to the campaign's greatest secret.
1) Timeline advances by about two years to accommodate the return of the dragons as in Arcana Evolved, but with a different origin and purpose. The origin will involve the PCs over the next couple of sessions; the purpose you'll see below...
2) The heroes will all be members of or work for a magic guild. Within this guildhall will be a sort of "hall of many portals" type deal, which can take the heroes all around the world and to different planes as needed.
3) Each player can develop a small stable of PCs to use throughout this next part of the campaign. This will allow for folks to try out different races and classes and not feel trapped with one PC. I might ask them to stick with one character for an entire adventure, but they can then return to home base and swap in a different character if they want. One of my players has cleverly dubbed this the "Justice League" model and that's a great way of explaining it in a nutshell.
4) The thrust of the next campaign arc, as you can see by the title of the thread, merges key concepts from AU/AE and Lords of Madness. The "core story" is thus: To prepare the good folk of Terrakal (the lands of the Diamond Throne, AE's setting) for a future battle with invading aberrations from beyond space & time, the heroes must unearth lost arcana and other lore related to battling and defeating aberrations. They will undertake several related missions to uncover this lost knowledge. The foes in each mission will be aberrations and their thralls/servants; the MacGuffin in each will be a specific piece of lost lore. In one case, it might be uncovering knowledge of the lost spell, Invoke the Cerulean Sign (and a related Runethane rune that's slightly more powerful), from a powerful grell mind witch who has locked its secrets away deep in the earth. In another, the PCs might seek out the lore of special mental training that allows greater resistance to aberration mind-control (a feat like Partitioned Mind or Quick Recovery from LoM) from a captive of jungle cultists in a revised version of Rana Mor (Dungeon Mag).
5) To keep the players on their toes and present them with a twist, I will be avoiding two of the standard aberration "mastermind" races (beholders and mind flayers). Instead, I will focus mostly on aboleths (psionic variety), grell (with an AU/AE mind witch twist), koprus, nagas, and a few others.
6) In addition, to provide more variety I have slightly extened the definition of what an "aberration" is. In essence, the new definition includes all "aberration type" creatures, plus selected others -- basically, if it's got tentacles, or if it's bug-like, or if it's an unnatural/mutant mix of two creatures, or something like an intelligent ooze, it's probably an aberration by my campaign's definition). I've developed a "master list" from a few of my monster sources and will be adding more, as well as putting new twists on old monsters. Similarly, the thralls will be chaning a bit too (the thralls of the grell will be a bipedal version of the Grick; and the thralls of thea= aboleth will be various enslaved humanoids but especially Skulks).
7) In an effort to cut down on my prep time, I'm going to be running almost all published adventures, most of them from the pages of Dungeon magazine. I'm lumping a few adventures together in some kind of semi-logical format. I've got three main "groups" of adventures: Jungle adventures (the Isle of Dread update, Rana Mor, the grell lair from LoM which I'll jazz up a bit, and an updated version of the Temple of Demogorgon); the Frigid North and Underground (starts with an ancient frozen "far realms" type city near the north pole ala Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness -- I'll have to develop this a bit; then the heroes find their way underground to an aberration-dominated Underdark -- plenty of those types of adventures around to modify); and then finally to a temperate costal region where I will jazz up a few adventures such as the aboleth lair from LoM; and the recent aboleth/Tharizdun adventure published in Dragon Mag.
8) The ultimate purpose of the return of the dragons to Terrakal is related to the campaign's greatest secret.
The earth itself is a living being; it is the source of the akashic memory, and the source of the "pool" of spells from which all spellcasters can draw in AU/AE. It is sentient and aware, and using the heroes to uncover lost aberration-bane lore. It is, in fact, controling the "hall of many portals" -- opening some but not others to steer the heroes in the right direction. Only if dragons, giants, and the other races of Terrakal can put aside their differences can the good peoples of the land stand a chance of surviving the future war with the aberrations from beyond space & time.
