[Nov] What's up in your campaign?

[clockworkcrab]

I'm currently running a homebrew world that, in retrospect, ended up looking a lot like Eberron. It's a mixed magic-technology world where all the PCs are human subraces.

The party consists of:
- LN Fighter who is a knight of an empire in decline
- CN Bard/Clank (my version of the Artificer) who's pretty much a rogue-lite
- N Druid with viper animal companion
- LG Cleric who is continually trying to get the rest of the party to fight the good fight, with mixed results.

In any case, the party recently busted up a slave ring, and got a bit too cocky what with their shiny new levels. This led to a foolish solo charge into battle by the fighter, followed up by minimal help from the others, and ended up with an ugly hostage situation that got the players run out of the city on a rail.
For this reason my November is going to be spent writing out an entirely new city and introducing the players to it. I think I'm going to be making liberal use of the WotC "Steal this hook" lines for the first week until I get the campaign back on track again.

 

[Tom Cashel]

Last session began...

A very strange thing happens in an icy, windswept ravine on October 30. No one is there to see it.

High on the barren Antarctic plateau, where black, ice-crusted ridges reach toward a blue sky ribboned with clouds, an eight-foot-tall outcropping of rock and ice materializes out of (very) thin air. It is abruptly as solid and real as those nearby. The wind howls past the rocks. Glories twinkle in the sky, and the sun is graced with halos.

Then an even stranger thing happens. A door snaps open in the side of the outcropping, and four men step out in full arctic gear. They start immediately toward the ridgeline, leaning into the wind.

Halfway there, two of them are exhausted and must turn back. The remaining pair scales an icy slope to a cluster of rocks at the top. They gaze down the other side onto a scene so impossible that it could not be real, so inconceivable as to be fiction…and yet it lies before their eyes—stark, ancient, terrifying.

In Antarctica the rarefied air and unique meteorological conditions can cause errors in perception; far-off objects seem small and close enough to touch, while those close at hand may seem massive and far away. In this case, the distortion serves only the magnify the sublime terror felt by the two observers.

A titanic range of black, needle-like spires marches from horizon to horizon, vanishing into the snowy haze. It is so huge as to dwarf the mighty Himalayas. And at its feet, tumbled against the foothills like the flotsam and jetsam of a long-vanished ocean, are the black stone ruins of an elder city. Towers, pyramids, massive statues so worn by wind that their features are gone, avenues, plazas, all of it is frozen in a massive glacier.

The observers on the ridge estimate that the city extends thirty miles from the base of the mountains, and stretches off into the distance in either direction. No doubt it fills the 9000 square mile area altered in U.S. Geologic Survey maps of the region, which makes it nearly 300 miles in length.

In the foreground lies a large research station, twenty buildings crowded between an airstrip and a bluff overlooking the city beyond. But something is wrong; through field goggles, they spy a thread of smoke rising from the icy, blackened husk of the large aircraft hangar. A burned-out Blackhawk rests forlornly on the helipad, slowly icing over in the wind. Debris is scattered about the camp; some buildings have large holes punched through their sides. They see no evidence of any human inhabitants.

Soon they erect a shelter and crawl inside. By the dim light of a camp stove, they warm themselves for the thirty-minute hike back. Neither talks very much, which is only natural since neither really knows anything about the other except his name and specialty.

More here.

 

[Silver Moon]

In my western PBP campaign (D&D/Boot Hill hybrid) the players just survived a ride down a mountain in a runaway stagecoach with a large group of masked outlaws firing at them after incapacitating Deputy Marshall Morgan Earp.

Here's the story hour link for the campaign:
http://www.enworld.org/forums/showthread.php?t=99053


In my weekly gaming group we just wrapped up another module in our western campaign. In this one the cowboys and indians of the party travelled back from Europe on board a former Confederate blockade runner ship, that was smuggling contraband into the United States, and fought off three steam ships full of pirates in the Gulf of Mexico.

We've now switched back to our long-running D&D campaign where I have run the first night of "Into the Fire", the classic module from Dungeon Magazine #1. I have set the story to take place near the City of Istivin, from the current issue of Dungeon, and plan to launch into a module from the Istivin trilogy immediately thereafter.