[Oct] What's up in your campaign?

[viscounteric]

Forgive me Gygax, it has been two weeks since my last GM session

As I just moved away from the Hackmaster group, we finished running Robinloft Except for the BurgerMeister's name, and the pestering spirit's in the town's graveyard, they found nothing funny about the module...

The party had been investigating rumors of "missing troops" during the Marakeikan counter-attack on the kingdom of Vlachia. ( I was running a HM version of X10 Red Arrow/Black Shield with an alternate earth Europe.)

The party has been searching Castle Vlad Ne'er for the elusive count, only encountering a handful of bad-ass traps.

The party's leader, a kick-ass 6th level Gnome Titan fighter.... fell down a 220 ft self-covering pit trap and was MIA for most of the session as the party desperately looked for a way to get him out.

Ultimately the found themselves in the castle dungeons, killing a troll and recovering a man claiming to be the REAL Burgermeister. While the party has searching through side passages, the party's battle mage decided to go check on the troll corpse (they had fireballed it, but forgot to search it)

Just then, the Count appears, and using his full arsenal of abilities/spells... silences the mage, holds him, polymorph's the mage into the vampire's likeness, polymorph's himself to look for like the mage... and calls on the party to help him.... As the party comes into the room, they see Turval (the mage) stabbing a vampire(?) with a wooden stake....

(The "lost" gnome titan was beside himself during the incident. Heck, the battle-mage player didn't know what exactly what was going one!)

Ultimately, after the proper people were briefed/smacked around, the "battlemage" got his bearings and found a library to 'research' the castle...

In relatively rapid "lucky" succession, they found the way to release the Gnome Titan and escape the fog, all while returning the real Burgermesiter to the village...

Ultimately, with the very-protected vampire leaving the fog... the thousands of missing troops emerged, and with the exception of the noble strongholds (i.e. vampire castles), most of Vlachia falls quickly....

As I poorly playtested the wargame mechanics on a new battlefield, the war between Barthey (Byzantium) and the Master (the Desert Nomads) turned into a standstill in the middle of Barthey. With more troops able to go to the front from Marakeikos, the Halfling lands, and the Gnomish lands, the Master's forces were quickly pushed back into the desert.

...for now.....

Ultimately, we're shooting for quarterly weekend games when I can come down and run 6-10 hour sessions. They still have 2 parts of the Giants series to finish... and they need to get there revenge on the Slavers, who decimated the group while certain key players were unavailable last years...


Now if I can just find players for the BD&D game I want to run up here....

 

[demiurge1138]

In Eberron, the players are the Sharn Freelance Police, a detective agency granted jurisdiction by the City Watch to handle the crimes they are incapable of or unwilling to solve. Hence, the campaign is episodic, which works well.

This week, the detectives were hired to find Malaki Trevag, an explorer and freelance adventurer, who was returning from Q'barra with a caravan full of treasure. By the time the party reached it, most of the "treasure" (being ancient documents) was burned out, leaving a few corpses and three larvae behind.

Tracking the path of the raiders, it led them into the King's Forest, a small territory in which had been carved out by Erik Hagson, a half-fiend (night hag, of course) and cannibal responsible for 47 murders over the past several months. The party hunted down Hagson, dispatched him and his redcap minions, and brought back conclusive news of Malaki's death (he was, apparently, delicious), as well as a mysterious mask that can change whoever wears it into a leopard. Of course, that's all in a day's work for the Freelance Police.

Demiurge out.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

All PbP gaming for me as well (rather mundane stuff at the moment, too, judging from my list):

• In Andrew D. Gable's Victorian d20 Modern game, Inspector Jamison O'Fingal Diggory has gone to bed, (and he's likely placed a piece of cold iron on his pillow, hoping the little people don't get him).
• In Tailspinner's Dawnforge game, Kieran Amblecrown has been playing his lute.
• In Sephiroth no Miko's Planescape game, Vladimir Kronenheim is waiting outside a shop while his companions buy a portal key.
• In cdsaint's Eberron game, Cazanjan d'Kundurak has finished dinner and is heading off to bed (and has been for a while now -- I think this one might be petering out).
• In my Eberron game, the party's eating breakfast and talking with Lady Elaydren (I'm running the Forgotten Forge).
• In my Dark Sun game, the party's involved in a horribly botched attempt to "liberate" a key from one of Hamanu's jails so they can then retrieve a journal from the wellhouse of Outpost 3 (from the Dungeon adventure Last Stand at Outpost 3). Assuming we ever get there, the wellhouse is
  Spoiler

  actually a stand-in for the Moathouse from the original ToEE, of which I'm running a DS conversion
  .

Nick

 

[Boojum]

I just started up my Shattered Skies campaign again after a hiatus for the summer. Just before the break, the group had discovered that Mourngrimm's Holdfast, the dwarven citadel built as a prison for Orcus, was being infiltrated by shapeshifting demons bent on freeing him, who were using trapped souls to mask their identities to avoid triggering all the anti-demon defenses. After going out to deal with the soul-harvesting operation, the party came back only to find out that the demons had succeeded in opening a breach that allowed steam-power-augmented unead to swarm through and overpower the defenders.

Sneaking into the Holdfast, they found a hidden niche where one of the dwarven farseers was attempting to scry the source of the attack. The scrying stone briefly showed a massive factory, with corpses on meathooks being brought in by conveyor belts, and steam-tech grafted onto them by a legion of infernal workers. Overseeing it all, they saw a skull, burning with green fire and floating over a mechanical iron body. It turned to face them, and they each felt it looking at them, then it gestured, the scrying stone went blank, and the farseer reeled back, babbling insanely.

Right about then, the undead found the hiding place, and began coming in. The party pressed them back to get out the door, and then ran downward, fighting a running battle as they went down through stairs and corridors, until they finally reached the hangar. With hundreds of undead on their tail, they barely reached a zeppelin and the gadgeteer in the group managed to get it started and headed toward the open sky. It would have been overrun as it went, but the farseer, recovered from his madness, leapt into the swarm and held them back for the few precious seconds to allow the zeppelin to get free, and come out into the sky under the island they had been on, and heading for another dwarven holdfast to try and get help before the seal on Orcus' prison was broken.

That was where we broke for the summer, and since coming back, we've only done one full session and a little bit more, in which the airship was almost crashed when two of the party members (the ones who had dropped out of the campaign during the hiatus) turned out to be shapeshifters and attacked the gadgeteer as he piloted it. After barely defeating them and righting the zeppelin, they discovered they were being pursued by a flying black disk crewed by a contingent of a daemon mercenary company (can't remember the name at the moment). The battle against them occupied basically the whole session, as they first fought four footmen of the company riding fiendish giant eagles that flew ahead of the ship. To defeat them, they turned the zeppelin broadside to use the ballista and cannons, which made short work of the daemons, but meant the enemy ship gained a lot of distance on them, and soon came within catapult range, and began launching red glass spheres that each released four whiptails (small flying demons) on impact. While the elven tank and sharpshooter were busy fighting off the whiptails, the rest of the group focused on using the cannon, eventually landing a couple of solid hits that disabled the catapults, then switched to grapeshot to thin out the daemons on the disk.

Finally, they arrived, and the daemons began swarming onto their deck, becoming enraged and growing in size. With both sides already hurting, the fighting was quick and brutal--the footmen soon fell, but so did the tank, the sharpshooter, and the gadgeteer, leaving only the medic and the wilder facing off against the lieutenant of the company. The medic fought well, repeatedly using his ranseur to disarm the lieutenant's halberd and landing a hit here and there, but was obviously overmatched, taking several vicious hits, while the wilder kept firing off mind thrusts augmented to the max, but to no effect against the iron will of the lieutenant. Finally, as the lieutenant raised his halberd for another series of attacks that seemed all but certain to leave the medic dismembered, the wilder poured the last of his mental reserve into one last mind thrust. Miraculously, it breached the creature's defenses, and its skull, bulged outward twice, then exploded in a shower of brains and ichor (I finally rolled low on the save, letting the power take effect, the wilder rolled the damage, and everyone stared in awe for a good 10 seconds at all the 8s, 9s, and 10s-- he rolled a 58 on 7d10.)

Anyway, the session ended there, with over half the party unconscious, but apparently out of danger for the moment. Wow, that ended up being a lot longer than I intended it to be

 

[barsoomcore]

Barsoom Season Four has just started!

Our heroes, having only just saved the world not once, but twice, from the evil intentions of the Tyrant's Shade (the undead ruler of the Kishak Empire), find themselves in a parade in the Saijadani city of Petrahegna, stopping an assassination attempt and thence embroiling themselves in high-level political shenanigans as the Fist of God, the unstoppable army of Caedmon, pours southward into the civilized lands of Hinsua and Saijadan.

Meanwhile, a 3,000-year-old vampire (in the body of a 10-year-old girl) is dragging a hapless sorcerer towards the buried tomb that contains her former master -- the unthinkably powerful Keyad'ar warrior Essermane Varag, once the first lieutenant of the goddess Ky'in. Evidently she plans to restore this inhuman terror to life and unleash him again on a world utterly unprepared.

Oh, and the goddess Ky'in? That is, the insane goddess Ky'in who, nearly free from the pandimensional prison that's held her for more than two millenia, is planning to incinerate the entire world so that still-not-really-well-defined evil forces can't have it? She's the "God" in the "Fist of God".

Caught between a rock and a hard place, that's our heroes on Barsoom.

 

[sir_ollibolli]

Monday group: preparation of a weekly classic FR campaign before and during the Time of Troubles (using 3e rules they are gonna play a sequence of Ruins of Adventure - Avatar trilogy - Marco Volo trilogy - For Duty And Deity, bound together by a Contest of Champions to send them off to Phlan and some other side treks...).

Thursday group after a 6 week hiatus they are going to enter Jzadirune (playing every fortnight)

A Wednesday group is also in preparation stages (also in for the Shackled City adventure Path) and will perpahps start during October.

 

[Bran Blackbyrd]

My homebrew world's storyline is getting beaten into a new shape. :\
All but two of the PCs have left for college (or in the case of one player, moved to DC to teach). Since the story was custom made for the PCs I have to try and explain why the PCs are leaving the group, and why the new ones are joining. I'm considering running a PBEM version of the campaign parallel to the regular one, then combining the two when I write up the summary; which may take some doing.

In the last session the PCs were recovering from being poisoned when they were jailed by the captain of the town guard because he was given a warrant for their arrest and execution. A family they helped out earlier witnessed the arrest and spoke up on their behalf (the party had repelled an attack on the family's livestock by a local legendary monster). A regional magistrate showed up and decided the warrant was most likely a forgery and cut a deal with the party; while they were waiting for confirmation on the warrant's veracity, he would release them on their own recognizance on the condition that they help him seek out the black dog of death (the legend they fought previously) and slay it.
Helping out was sort of a no-brainer since, even if the bogus warrant was upheld, killing the hound would probably net them a pardon.
Incidentally the magistrate was the new player's PC.
They tracked the animal to a large clearing in the woods. The hound seemed to be giving a pretty poor fight when the paladin decided to climb a large rock in the center of the clearing so he'd have the high ground. The rock was about six feet tall with a thick patch of weeds growing on top. He was about to pull himself up when the female hound hiding in the weeds just about bit his face off, then used her breath weapon on him. Needless to say, he fell, right beside the male hound. Turns out the big guy was sort of 'feigning ineptitude' until his mate could get the drop on someone because, after she revealed herself, his fighting improved.
When the male was killed the female fled. The party tracked her to a small cave where she was finished off after wounding them a few more times. A search of the cave revealed a small alcove above a foot-deep pool of water. So, the rogue was in the pool with the paladin on his shoulders and the paladin was trying to see into the alcove despite the slippery cave walls. A gout of flame shot out of the alcove which sent the paladin and rogue crashing to the ground... again.
As it turned out, there was a young hellhound up there. The magistrate (actually a Scout from warcraft) tried using his grappling hook to drag the animal out of its hole and down to where they could kill it and after a few failures it worked. But then they were stuck with a hellhound pup in the same five-foot square (surrounded by the cave walls) as the pool and the scout. After what essentially amounted to the PCs all trying to catch a greased pig, they managed to kill it.
When they got back to town they were treated like heroes. They also received the news that A: the warrant was proven to be a fake, B: the woman who delivered/forged the warrant was captured, and C: she was also the one responsible for poisoning them earlier.
She was actually the mother of a criminal they brought to justice in the last town; a criminal who was hanged by the mayor on the basis of their testimony... She had disguised herself and followed them to this town in order to get revenge.

 

[Janx]

Well, we're in my homebrew campaign, a sailing based one.

Last month was one player's birthday (we had the game on his birthday). he likes zombies. We all dressed up like zombies and surprised him. He also got lots of zombie movies. And we played Zombies. And then our D&D game had zombies.

Synopsis:
party was still rebuilding the island city of Koumos after the elven-human war. A ritual wasn't performed the previous year during the war and the dead are returning to life. It also messes with time making things jump out of order (for the players). Party figures it out, gets to the temple (twice, kinda) and performs the ritual, restoring normality (and permanent deadness).

This month? haven't written it yet. Probably involves pirates. And thri-kreen. And the monk gets a girlfriend.

 

[Dragon Mage]

Vlaakith

In my three year campaign the party is trying to stop the Githyanki invasion. The city of Greyhawk is under seige and at the verge of falling. The party (21st and 22nd level) has been trying to kill the Lich Queen. After 3 failed encounters with her (the party had to run away), they are face to face with her once again. She only has one ally with her this time however, a 2 headed Dracolich.

 

[RichCsigs]

In my brother's home brew game we are on our way to Thingvellir. It's where Timeron I buried the heart of the last dragon after he slew it 2000 years ago (he later went on to unite the whole world). The first temple to the goddess Diana (goddess of birth and renewal, head goddess) was built on that spot and our group has heard rumors of strange goings on in the lower levels beneath the temple that were sealed up 130 years ago.