| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| Jamallo Kreen |
Posted - 17 Apr 2008 : 08:37:55
Where our campaign's timeline has led us so far:
The PCs have joined a mercenary company, the Company of the Red Spear, which joined the Army of the Western Alliance, under the titular command of King Azoun IV of Cormyr, to drive back the hundred thousand Tuigan, Shou, and Thayan invaders descending upon Faerun. The two Battles of the Golden Way were fought, and King Azoun died. The army fell apart, with only a few small, cohesive groups remaining organized for a tactical withdrawal to Telflamm and surrounding parts of Thesk. Yamun Khahan, Illustrious Emperor of All Peoples, besieeged Telflamm. Knowing that Telflamm is almost defenseless from the sea, a Thayan fleet sailed boldly into her harbor and began blasting the city apart. As foretold by a prophecy, "help came from the West," and a small fleet arrived, armed with magic and Gondian holy weapons before which the Thayans could not stand. (The fact that a few sneaky PCs swam out to their ships and lobbed fireballs right at them didn't help the Thayans much, either.) The "help from the West" was a delegation of Gnomes from Lantan, led by an envoy who had come to negotiate with Yamun Khahan. Although the envoy threatened Yamun with the wrath of Gond if he didn't return to his own lands, the Tuigan continued the siege. Finally, the heroes sallied out of Telflamm's main gate and rode towards the center of the Tuigan, and Yamun and his elite troops rode forward to meet them. Unfortunately for Yamun, the heroes split off to the right and to the left and the Illustrious Emperor of All Peoples, immune to lightning, tough enough to withstand fireballs, tough enough to even survive a disintegration spell, discovered that he was no match for a "Gondian Death Bell" hurling a twenty pound ball of stone at several hundred feet a second. As the top of Yamun Khahan turned into a fine, pink mist, the Tuigan went berserk, losing all cohesion, and becoming easy prey for the survivors of the Alliance. Finally, the Tuigan agreed to withdraw from Thesk and return to their homeland if they were given Yamun's body (or what little was left of it). A treaty was worked out, and the seemingly invincible Tuigan Horde returned to the east, leaving Thesk.
Thanks in part to the machinations of a couple of PCs, a group of Tuigan violated the terms of the treaty, and now a small part of the Army of the Alliance is headed slowly east to wait for the burial of Yamun Khahan, at which time they intend to fall upon the Tuigan who remain, slaughter them, and loot the tombs of hundreds of years of khans and khahans. (The Company of the Red Spear is working for the Overmaster of Sembia -- he wants his money back.)
After a strange series of encounters at the tower of a recently deceased Summoner (who was theeesclose to Epic level when he died of old age), including a general melee with a glabrezu, two vrocks, and ten lemures (don't laugh -- they killed a 4th-level fighter by surrounding and outflanking him), as well as a surprise attack by a very irritable Red Wizard, with a dozen spell-bearing darkenbeasts under his control, a horde of sword-wielding flying monkeys in little red coats ("I'm not making this up, you know!"), a ring of spell turning and a staff of lightning, the PCs and their allies -- the Company of the Red Spear, General Vrakk's orc regiment from Zhentil Keep, a company of Swords of Evereska, and the Lantanese Gnomes began their slow pursuit of the Tuigan through Thesk, following in their wake up the Golden Way.
Many refugees had spoken of the atrocities committed by the Tuigan at the Theskan town of Tammar, but nothing prepared the Alliance forces for what they found: more than three thousand decapitated people, almost all civilians, many of them refugees, and all of them still bearing their jewelry and money pouches as a sign that the Tuigan had killed them for defying the will of the Khahan, and not just to loot their town. The sternest soldiers broke down in horror at the sight of a tower of skulls, not the first they had seen, but the first that was hundreds of feet high and contained the skulls of all three thousand victims of Tammar. After night fell, the heroes learned the real reason that the refugees who had passed through Tammar to Telflamm were stricken speechless with horror, as a titanic undead thing began to form, drawing to itself the bones of the three thousand dead of Tammar. With four gigantic claws the monster scooped up living soldiers and incorporated them into its own body, destroying them both body and soul! Then began a susurrus of madness, as if the souls of all the three thousand dead of Tammar and those whose souls had just been merged with theirs were calling out to their living brethren to join them -- to join them in undeath -- to overwhelm the world of the living beings who had done this to them, to gain revenge by absorbing their bodies and souls, as well! 
The most powerful spellcasters were helpless against the monster -- an "atrocity wight." according to the Chief Medical Officer -- messages and sendings summoned powerful allies to the fight, but not even the most powerful clerics could turn it, nor the most powerful wizards control it or damage it. In desperation one wizard dropped a fireball on the Gnome's supply of smokepowder, and the Gondian Death Bells (which were being called "Canon" by then, because it was now a Canon of the Faith that Gond's weapons were invincible) exploded in a cataclysmic shower of fire, force, shredded iron and bronze and chunks of stone. The atrocity wight stumbled, but rather than collapsing, it grabbed up more living men, and orcs, and elves, and pressed them into its badly-damaged leg, fusing their bodies to its own in a living damnation! The famous order was given: "Run away!" and the remnants of the Alliance scattered, their camp followers abandoning their meagre belongings and running into the night, in any direction, as long as it was away! Filled with panic and terror, hundreds of the survivors began to lose their very minds at the mere thought that the thing might capture them and merge them into its being ... forever ... with no hope of an afterlife, only an eternity of despair as a vengeful creature of undeath.
Only a single cleric remained to face the monster, having already begun to invoke his god's powers against the thing. Slowly a black fog arose around the titanic, undead monstrosity and tendrils of it wound around the creature of Hell and Madness, gradually slowing it, allowing the living to flee. Still the atrocity wight advanced, but, slowed as it now was, it could no longer reach the living beings whom it intended to grab and affix into its own self. The darkness rose higher and higher, seeming to pull the atrocity wight into the ground itself, and it was then that the most experienced heroes realized what was happening: the monstrosity which whispered of madness and despair even as it scooped up screaming, doomed living folk, was being sucked bodily into a place of no hope -- the Plane of Shadow!
In time the atrocity wight was no longer to be seen. The tendrils of black fog -- living Shadowstuff! -- sank into the ground, having carried off a mighty prize. Gradually officers began to gather clumps of troops around themselves. Small groups of terrified soldiers, some, in their madness and fear, willing to kill their own comrades, were slowly melded back into their units in what many of them saw as a horrid parody of what had just befallen their fellows, melded body and soul into an undead horror.
Through the night the Army was gathered back together. In the morning the healers and the clerics began what seemed, in many cases, a fruitless effort to restore the shattered minds of the troops. Some seemed to recover, but others....
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Campaign timeline ©2008 by Jamallo Kreen, Friend of Religion, all rights reserved, except that license is granted to post this on Candlekeep.com.
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| 5 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First) |
| Dezmodu |
Posted - 21 Apr 2008 : 08:09:05
I do not think my finacial advisor will think thats a good idea.
She'll probably kick my behind if I do one of those  |
| Jamallo Kreen |
Posted - 19 Apr 2008 : 19:02:09
quote:
Originally posted by Dezmodu
man this is some great stuff.
If only there were more DM's like you around holland.
got any more? thats good reading.
DeZ
I'm sorry, but you'll either have to come to Southern California or else pay my way to the Netherlands! 
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| Dezmodu |
Posted - 18 Apr 2008 : 14:34:20
man this is some great stuff.
If only there were more DM's like you around holland.
got any more? thats good reading.
DeZ |
| Jamallo Kreen |
Posted - 18 Apr 2008 : 02:28:59
Thank you. That was three years of real time play summed up in a few paragraphs.
I always tell my players that if their characters can survive, I will gladly take them to Epic level -- and maybe beyond. After years of never having a PC death, of assuming that they could always overwhelm anything they faced, and cultivating many, many NPCs so that they were as familiar as the player characters themselves, real war and powerful enemies shocked the players very much. After the First Battle of the Golden Way (in which each and every Red Spear was named and positioned), one of the players asked about a certain NPC. As Beshaba's dice would have it, that NPC was the one and only soldier killed outright by a Tuigan arrow! I hadn't rigged the die roll; that was what "really" happened. Other NPCs lost limbs or eyes, but that one was the only one killed instantly, and the powers which were had no intention of wasting powerful and expensive magic to raise some Corporal-level nobody from the ranks. King Azoun was dying! The player never got over the shock of that unfortunate NPC death.
Accompanying the Red Spears were "the Red Halberds," a squad of cadets from the Red War College who had volunteered as a group to fight the Tuigan and who were assigned to the Red Spears because the Red Spear Captain-General is a devout worshipper of the Red Knight. The very first time a real dragon attacked the party, the luck of Beshaba's dice dictated that one of the Red Halberds and one of the apprentice mages were killed, but the Red Halberd's body was carried off for food. Mind you, in my game, if a character has a name, they also have a personality or quirk or something which individualizes them, so this Red Halberd wasn't just some anonymous cadet who was working for no pay -- they knew him.
When the demons attacked, the only comfort they have from the demon battle, besides x.p., was the certain knowledge that whichever nameless idiot opened the iron bottle and released the glabrezu, was certainly one of the first killed -- trampled, fireballed, dead, dead d-e-d, dead. It was another Red Halberd who was separated from the rest of the party, surrounded by the lemures and slowly killed (it took a few rounds, during which the PCs realized that they could do nothing to save her -- powerful stuff, not "beer & pretzels!").
The irritated Red Wizard, who had a bunch of contingency divination spells tied to the re-appearance of the not-to-be-found Summoner, had waited patiently to discover the Summoner's location. When a PC accidentally knocked a greenstone amulet from the Summoner's corpse, his location was revealed and the Red Wizard readied for war against what he expected to be a 20th-level Summoner, not a bunch of mid-level PCs and a swarm of NPCs. The Red Wizard sent darkenbeasts to soften up the defense, and most of them were loaded with area-of-effect killing spells, including several cloudkill spells: whoever was powerful enough to kill one of the darkenbeasts immediately unleashed death on weaker characters, if not himself.
The PCs barely escaped death by cloudkill and watched in horror as their orcish allies charged the flying monkey attackers, and immediately entered the death zone. The best and bravest of General Vrakk's troops collided, fell, and died within yards of the PCs. The PCs used a fly spell to reach the top level of the tower and blew away the surviving darkenbeasts, but they had to tread through the grisly carnage of the unit with which they themselves had trained at 1st level, they reached the impregnable throne room of the tower, which the darkenbeasts had been trying to enter. Knowing that powerful NPCs and that one PC was in the throne room, one of the PCs used the secret command word to open the doors, and moments later learned what happens when an enemy has a crystal ball with clairaudience. The Red Wizard appeared next to the PC who had spoken the command word, thanked him politely, and then blasted him with a lightning bolt which hurled him to his death from the top floor of the tower. (I use "Fate Points." The player used one, and -- ta dah! -- the NPC cleric upon whom the fly spell had actually been cast flew down and just happened to have prayed for a raise dead spell the night before.)
In the throne room, cloudkill gas had seeped in and had incapcitated one of the toughest of the Red Halberds, who, lying unconscious on the floor of what was to become a battlefield, was soon killed. A PC cleric who had slipped in when the throne room doors were first opened used greater darkness and similar spells to slow down the Red Wizard, whose ring of spell turning had already killed a highly-ranked NPC who had used gloves of lightning against him.
Outraged that the throne room bookshelves were empty of all books (just one of which he had apparently launched the attack to obtain), the Red Wizard summoned a huge fire elemental who nearly did in the rest of the PCs. Having learned through intimidation that there was a secret room under the throne room, the Red Wizard summoned a xorn to just eat through the wall, not wanting to waste time trying to find the secret to opening up the wall. The mage apprentices attacked as a group and were simply fireballed as the PC cleric, having used a ring of feather fall to reach the ground and the other PCs, was suddenly trapped within a wall of fire small enough to kill her within a few rounds. Then the luck of the party changed, becaused the newly raised PC wizard, even having just lost a level, could still use his rod of fire control to banish the wall of fire and the fire elemental, too.
When the PCs and the NPC cleric reached the second floor, they found the slaughtered apprentices (and some more dead Red Halberds) and the climax of the battle occurred as the xorn broke through the wall into the hidden library. Enraged to discover that there was actually an inter-dimensional space between the hidden library and the throne room, the Red Wizard resorted to brute force, blasting at the ceiling with his staff, slowly chipping it away. So far the Red Wizard had kept himself in the battle by drinking healing potions, but when the NPC cleric entered the hidden library, the Red Wizard made his great mistake, He blasted the NPC cleric with his staff of lighting, and moments after the boom of the lightning bolt, the PCs heard the NPC shout, "I've got one too, mother <cough>!" and the cleric's ring of spell turning sent the powerful lightning bolt against the Red Wizard. As he paused to drink one of the last of his healing potions, he found himself cornered. The raised wizard and the PC cleric worked in smooth coordination with the party's rogue-sorcerer, who kept flanking and stabbing, flanking and stabbing the Red Wizard, while the looming NPC cleric and his ring prevented the Red Wizard from unleashing a lightning bolt which might rebound upon him in full, almost certainly killing the person in between the cleric and the Red Wizard, but possibly killing the Red Wizard himself. Outflanked and outnumbered, the Red Wizard teleported away.
As the PCs helped to conduct triage on the wounded lying outside (flying monkeys don't have a lot of hit points and aren't particularly effective against crack human and elven troops, but they can wound a lot of people before being killed), the PCs saw a nightmarish sight: two more darkenbeasts headed in a straight line for the secret library. Having already killed a darkenbeast who had earlier flown directly at the throne room doors, but been killed, exploding with a disintegrate spell, the PCs guessed that these last two beasts were "kamikaze" darkenbeasts, intended to destroy the hidden library and expose the hidden interdimensional space between the floors. Exhausted of all spells, the PCs turned to the NPC priest, who had cast few spells so far. He agreed to pray for an effective spell if the PCs agreed to give up the golden chains of honor which had been bestowed upon them (but not him). Helpless, they agreed, and as the darkenbeasts reached the battered tower, the NPC cleric cast daylight upon them, killing them instantly and releasing their disintegrate spells against the tower's outer wall, not within the secret library. That seemed to be the final attack which the Red Wizard had, for nothing else happened to interfere with the tending of the wounded.
The following morning the most powerful wizard of the bunch, who had been hiding in the inter-dimensional space with the most puissant magic items which the Summoner had owned, with his most powerful grimoires, and with his corpse, too, came out and surveyed the damage. It had been a costly night. The only mage apprentice who had survived had been outside the tower, tending his horse; the only Red Halberd to survive had been outside doing bodyguard duty while her comrade's screams reached her ears as they were clawed, and burned and blasted to death. General Vrakk had lost his best troops, but they were orcs and the PCs didn't know any of them. Two elves died, as well (from a combination of flying monkey sword cuts and cloudkill gas which overtook them as they lay wounded), but they were elves and not known to the PCs.
And that was the battle which they had won, against a roughly equal opponent. Is it any wonder that the horrors of Tammar shattered the minds of so many of them? . . .
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| Dezmodu |
Posted - 17 Apr 2008 : 09:47:59
COOL!!!
and beautifly told my friend.
I like the grand scale of the whole thing.
DeZ. |
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