Jeremy said:
I seem to remember there being a tangent thread in which Piratecat explained some back story and history it was called something like Secondary Story hour and it had to do with the Defenders. I don't know how many boards ago that was though. 
It was a while back, and the thread did exist. Here's a copy of what I saved from it... don't recall if there was ever any more:
Appendix A: Piratecat's Secondary Story Hour
Okay, here's what I have coming:
1. The descent into a lost academy of magic, and meeting the surprising instructor
2. (possibly my favorite game) The discovery of the time-locked Cirit Tordu, the Tower of Black Snow - and of Congenio Ioun, an archmage whose name may just be familiar
3. A summary of the grand honking epic quest that took 3 years, real time, to play out! (Yes, thank God, just a summary.)
4. A trek into flooded dwarven caverns to recover a lost artifact
5. The creation - and subsequent defeat - of a dracolich
6. The madness of King Josric
7. the use of ebon magerot to destabilize a country - and the effectiveness of improved doppelgangers therein
8. Encountering the orcish horseman of the Mang (or: mongol tactics, anyone?)
Should have the first one done today, barring complications!
Note:
It was three years ago in real time, four years ago in game time, and it's one of my favorite games I've ever run. I had just read an ancient Dragon module by Ed Greenwood, back before the Forgotten Realms had bee picked up by TSR. It was called "Into the Forgotten Realms," or something like that, and it was a relatively lame exploration of a lich's academy. But it was full of potential, and it started me thinking.
Here's the result.
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The group (roughly 8th or 9th level) came to the port city of Oursk, the largest port city in this part of the world. They had come here hot on the trail of worshippers from the banned Church of Imbindarla. Imbindarla is the Goddess of the bad things that crawl in the night, and of Undeath. The Defenders had been fighting her cults for years, and they had just learned that the church was looking for a number of obscure prophecies. Why? They didn't know, but in a fit of prescience, they realized that this couldn't lead to anything good.
After a series of adventures and misadventures (including bumping up against a portly mind flayer, his pet intellect devourer Rex, and getting buried up to their necks in sand with the tide coming in,) the group learned the Imbindarlites' next step. The mind flayer had learned where another prophecy was, just north of Oursk. A day behind the mind flayer and his cronies, the PCs followed them to the ruins of the Celestar, an ancient elven wizard's academy now buried under tons of rubbish and trash from the city.
The Defenders made their way through the Rat Heaps, slogging through heaped refuse and past squeaking rat nests. The insects and garbage smells were horrible, and they thought they spotted something large moving through the garbage nearby. Skirting the monster, but not the biting flies or odor, they managed to trail their enemies to a makeshift tunnel burying down into the refuse. Holding their breath, in they went.
They entered what looked like the remains of an ancient school, now buried beneath the rotting trash above. It was clearly elvish design. Worryingly, right near the entrance they found two bodies of ruffians, both dead with horrified grimaces on their faces. What could have killed them? They panicked briefly when a third body, rotting and floating, slid towards them; after some hasty retreating and panicked spellcasting, they realized it was nothing more than a gelatinous cube. Phwew! Inside the cube was a third dead Imbindarlite. Worrisome..
They slowly explored the academy, crossing magically unstable corridors and finding nothing alive. Nevertheless, there was very little dust. In one classroom, they found several dozen skeletal hands, pinned in place, demonstrating the correct somatic position for various types of spellcasting. Likewise, they found several elven skulls being used in displays, or as decorations.
Someone noticed that the skulls, and the hands, were all identical.. as if someone had made many copies of the same bone structure. Odd. Many of the rooms had spell formulae scrawled in a consistent hand on all the chalk-boards.
By this time Dylrath (on point) had gotten a little blase'. For several doors in a row he had very specifically said, "I listen at the door. I peek into the room." At a third door, he didn't say this, and just opened the door and walked in..
.. to a room filled with undead. Several ju-ju zombies sat at small desks, as did the animated corpses of the remaining Imbindarlite thugs. A petrified mind-flayer (the party's enemy) stood in the corner of the room, wearing a Dunce cap. And at the head of the classroom, wearing tattered academic robes, was Hagiok, Librarian.
A lich.
[Note: ever seen the British cartoon "Dangermouse"? Hagiok talks a little like Baron Greenback.. rough and raspy, with little inflection, because his throat is slowly rotting.]
Hagiok called Dylrath "Otto," and commanded him to come sit down, asking him why he was late. Did he have an excuse? A hall pass?
"Err.. no, sir. I don't. It's outside. I'll just.. run and get it." And Dylrath turned and fled. Outside, the horrified party wizard Arcade used his wand of conjuration to start putting up prismatic walls, layer, by layer, in front of the door. From inside, they heard, "Ahh, an excellent example! Prismatic wall is a standard, if slightly disappointing and unimaginative, example of mixing conjuration and abjuration magic. To dispel it you are required to cast a series of spells in the proper order, as so..."
And from the other side, the walls began coming down. The party fled.
Unfortunately, in fleeing, they strayed into a room with an insane elf secured to a blood-soaked table. On the elf's hand was a ring, sovereign glued there. A ring of regeneration. In a flash, the group realized why all the skeletal hands and skulls looked identical. The group kept running.
And when they reached the entrance, it was blocked off by magical force.. and Hagiok stood there.
"Enough of this tomfoolery!" he rasped. "Tasha, you had better have completed that assignment I gave you. Now, you and Ioun and the others should march right back to class. We have a quiz coming up."
... to be continued
So it occurs to me that I should give a little bit of background on my campaign, so that these stories make sense. The PCs started off on one of their first adventures tackling a group called the Brotherhood of Night. This is a cult dedicated to the worship of a God of the Night. I made that god be Imbindarla, a Goddess of undead mentioned in a different Dungeon module, and the PCs proceeded to plague this cult and their nefarious plans for years to come.
Eventually, the church's leaders formulated a plan to do something really, really nasty.. and to achieve it, they allied with the church of the God of Murder, and started a war against most of the countries on the continent's eastern seaboard. They then used life energy from that war to power a ritual. The ritual ended up yanking a star from the heavens, and using the new comet to create an astrological conjunction that would otherwise be impossible. This conjunction was key to the church of Imbindarla's plan.
Into this mess stumbled the PCs, intercepting the church's quest for old prophecies and sussing out from Hagiok what some of these may mean. They learned of a set of stone circles more than a thousand miles away called "Tovag Baragu" where the conjunction would focus on, and learned that the church was trying to find an artifact which was somehopw related to these stone circles. The PCs determined that they better find the artifact first - either to stop whatever it was the church was doing, or to prevent the church from using the artifact themselves.
Eventually the PCs learned the awful truth - what was under Tovag Baragu, what the ritual was for, and their lethal back-up plan - and they damn near failed in stopping it. I was this close to destroying my whole campaign world. I'm glad the PCs prevailed!
And into this framework will fall a lot of the stories I'll tell. I'll try to match them up chronologically as we go.
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-War Golem
