By Beth Griese

The text content of the following pages containing The Jade Letters are the property of the author, Beth Griese and are used with permission by Candlekeep.

About the Campaign

Every other Saturday, six friends of mine and I gather up and play Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. We've been doing it for around five years now, although not always with this group of characters. I write The Jade Letters as a log of the events of each gaming session; it's a good way to help everyone get back in synch with what happened the last time we played.

You don't have to be a role-playing gamer to enjoy these. It's not a bunch of game mechanics; the logs concentrate on the story, since that's the important part of playing these games. Think of the game as getting the chance to control your own characters in a book: this is the novel my friends and I have created so far. Jade and the rest of the Wayfarers' adventures continue to this day, so I'll be adding more logs as we go!

I've gotten an amazing amount of positive feedback on these logs, from the other players and the multitude of friends they've shown the logs to, so I figured I might as well put them on the web! The writing is my own, but the credit for the characters and the stories are shared with:

	Jim Leitzel, our illustrious game master. The head storyteller.
	Stu Collins, who plays the gnome, Nory, so well it frightens us all.
	Jim Gaynor, the creator of the reluctant adventurer, Telaran.
	Vaughan Herron, who plays the rather mysterious, don't-say-monk monk, Lorivar.
	Kent Jenkins, he of the continually-bemused priest of magic, Verence.
	Brian Smith, who plays the amazingly studly Borreau. (Pronounce his name with the accent on the e, or bear the wrath of Brian's French expertise.)

Jade's Background

To give the background leading up to the beginning of the letters, Jade is a woman who begins the stories at about 20 years of age. She's not sure what her true age is; as she understands it, she was born to a gypsy family, and then sold at a young age as a servant to a man named Garen. Garen is a great priest of Mielikki, the forest goddess, and has brought up Jade not only as his housemaid, but also as a ranger of the forest. When the first letter is written, Garen has gone missing for some time now, and so Jade has begun to write as a way of reporting all that has happened for the time she's sure she'll see Garen again.

As mentioned previously, Jade is a member of an adventuring band known as The Wayfarers. This is their sigil:

The Jade Letters

Click on a log below to read, or start at the beginining and read of the ongoing events of the Wayfarers, as written by Jade. (Each Jade Letter links to the next and previous log).  Each log contains the writings of Jade as well as a list of characters and their players at the time of the adventure session.