Beginner campaign in Darkon (possibly one-shot)

[HuManBing]

Turns out, this player is working this evening and cannot attend the game anyway.

Hopefully we'll finish up the adventure tonight with just the regular three players, and then decide how (and indeed whether) to include Oglaf the Omniabsent later.

[brilliantlight]

One idea I have which may or may not work depending on your campaign and how ignorant your players are of Ravenloft. Make Azalin look like a good and noble lord. It is a lie, of course, but that shouldn't be known to everyone. Azalin is crafty enough to make sure his more ruthless and wicked deeds are unknown and his knowledge and respect for the law well known. The Kargat would then be presented as an unfortantely needed orginizations to fend of the machinations of Strahd and Drakov. Their villiany should be played up in this case. Many in Darkon should see the the Kargat not only as a feared orginization but also a necessary evil. Most people would have the idea that things would be even worse without the Kargat. He would be both a villian with good publicity and a Magnificent Bastard.

[HuManBing]

Yeah, what you described is very much my default campaign assumption.

Azalin is barely even known by name - he's so aloof and far removed. Most people only know him as Darkon Rex (King of Darkon), although the Thaumatorium mage guild has heard of his "actual" name Azalin (he's a big patron of the Thaumatorium).

[brilliantlight]

Yeah, what you described is very much my default campaign assumption.

Azalin is barely even known by name - he's so aloof and far removed. Most people only know him as Darkon Rex (King of Darkon), although the Thaumatorium mage guild has heard of his "actual" name Azalin (he's a big patron of the Thaumatorium).

Great minds think alike! I admit in most of my campaigns almost all the Dark Lords are Magnificent Bastards. Only a handful like Drakov and the Dukkar (who was granted his own domain in one of the games I am running) are obvious monsters. The rest of the lords all look like decent, reasonable people. They tend to be polite, cultured and well educated but evil clear through. Most of them DON'T consider themselves evil but misunderstood or abused or merely pragmatic. They are evil but they refuse to look honestly at themselves and see it. Strahd sees his pact as being the result of an unfair world. It is unfair that he spent his youth fighting while Sergei gets to live a happy life with a lovely woman without going through the hardship he did. Azalin seems lichdom as what he needed to do to avoid death and that only the ruthless application of the law prevents the cosmos from falling into chaos. Gabrielle sees herself as a poor woman who suffered all her life and is entitled to get back at the world. Ivana Bortsi sees all men as pigs who think of nothing but sex and who then leave the woman behind heartbroken as such it is fair to use their weakness against them and kill them. They are insufferable pigs who deserve. Almost all of the rest think similarly. They don't see themselves as the root of their own problems because that would be too painful for them.

[HuManBing]

I'm seeing this adventure as the possible start of a campaign that compares Azalin to Drakov.

Drakov is currently portrayed as an ogre - understandably, since the PCs are in Darkon. But I'm thinking of showing "the other side of the fence" by allowing them to learn about Azalin's true nature, and to show Drakov as one of the few other darklords who is willing to genuinely try to unseat Azalin (no matter how doomed the effort).

In the end, life is still miserable and Drakov is doomed to tilt at windmills for the rest of his regime, but the PCs may get a more favorable view of his goals and his intentions as they learn about Azalin's equal and opposite sinister agenda.

[HuManBing]

Lukas Nardev

The Eternal Order priest showed his true ruthless nature by announcing that a perpetrator had been caught defiling the graves on churchyard property, and that the townsfolk would witness a flensing to cow and punish the agents of the Grey Realm. The accused was one of the Twisted Ones, a mentally deficient and physically deformed wretch who could barely speak. The flensing - a horrifically violent and cruel death - was scheduled for the following sundown.

Azedarek went to speak with the wretch, but being elvish, he could not understand the twisted words the creature spoke. Remke, with her greater focus on the poor and her frequent dealings with Twisted Ones, spoke to him instead and found out that he had indeed dug up the graves, but he did so in order to "make the robey man proud".

Remke asked about the robey man and got a description of Lukas Nardev, the priest of the Eternal Order. She was so outraged she had to be physically restrained from marching to the church and confronting the priest. Instead, Azedarek went to speak with the priest, rousing him from his sleep. A conversation ensued, where Lukas Nardev essentially admitted that he had put up the Twisted One as a scapegoat, and that it was a necessary step to buy the party more time to solve the undead invasion mystery.

When Azedarek tried to prolong the conversation, Lukas grabbed him and forced his leg between a doorframe and a door, saying he would be all too happy to add a second body to the flensing rack.

The two priests had a thinly disguised war of words before the congregation the following morning during the announcement of the flensing, with Azedarek succeeding only in forestalling the flensing for one week. The party now had one week to find and solve the undead incursion before the innocent Twisted One gets shredded by the church.

Selby

The three PCs found Selby's corpse under the Turnipseed farm well. They sent Remke, the druid, down the well on the end of a long rope, after she had cast "Sense Dead".

She got down about 30 feet and then hit water. Her senses told her that there was a body floating in the water, trapped under the rocky ceiling, about ten feet up the channel, underwater. She took a deep breath and went after it, keeping her eyes shut and relying on her Sense Dead.

Up ahead, she made out the outline of a man's body, turned away as if in solitude or contemplation. Drawing closer, with her breath rising in her lungs and her head pounding, she saw the body turn slowly towards her, perhaps agitated by her swimming strokes. She reached out for the corpse, and in her mind she heard a distinct voice murmur "...so you have come for me..."

The next thing she knew, the body was turning gently in the water towards her, with a hand trailing towards her. Her initial contact was of freezing cold shock, and then she felt a momentary seizure, as if the hand had gripped her wrist... but the moment passed in a flash and she gathered the body to her and tugged the rope.

When they got up to the top, they buried Selby's body (over the protestations of Azedarek, who wanted to loot the body). Later that night, Remke got dreams from Selby's point of view, where he hid something in the rotting rafters of the well roof and then jumped into the well after casting a spell of water breathing on himself to evade Shay Stearns and his bandits. Remke returned to the well and found Selby's journal, along with maps of the Falkovnian barrow, and the campsite where Jean-Pierre killed Tervinost.

Jean-Pierre

They made their way to the campsite with several of Shay's boys, and found a lone solitary figure huddled over a nonexistent fire, humming Cosablaise melodies to itself. (At this point, I hummed and murmured several lullabies and tunes in broken nonsensical French for my players' benefit.) They tried to surround it, as they had heard it was carrying no blades or weapons, but then it stood up and turned its head to look at them, much in the manner of The Exorcist's little girl. Its throat had something wrong with it, and as it began charging towards them down the hill, its backwards legs asunder, its murmurs and singing began a horrid duet with itself, singing out of its mouth and also out of the torn wound in its throat.

Azedarek began his turning spells, hoisting up his skull-under-fist holy symbol of the Eternal Order, and they staggered Jean-Pierre, causing it to shriek and dash into the scrub for cover. As Azedarek began hunting for the skeletal foreigner, Jean-Pierre took careful aim with his revolver and shot Azedarek's holy symbol, shattering it.

The rest of the combat could have gone very poorly. Jean-Pierre shot Azedarek once as they fled, the bullet drilling through Azedarek's shoulderblade and glancing out through his shoulder, and blasted away at San and Remke, fortunately with no effect. But it was Remke who broke a charm of invisibility and circled back to the campsite, where she found a discarded bullet casing.

She broke a charm of cat's-sprint to catch up with the undead gunman, and then casted a druid's spell of entanglement, crushing the bullet casing as she did so. With its greater potency ensured through the bullet's ties to Jean-Pierre, the spell tripped him up and brought him to the ground, cursing and waving his pistols wildly. The party escaped otherwise unharmed, although Azedarek's wound required immediate attention at the church. Lukas Nardev, the Eternal Order priest there, cast a healing spell to knit the flesh together, leaving only a scar.

[vipera aspis]

Could you drop it down to a first level pc? Or perhaps the first 13 levels are in Darkon? Maybe retard his pc in some horrible way via curse or amputation?

Or hey guys, guys check this out: you could call him on being an obvious chump?

[HuManBing]

Tervinost

The PCs went back up the hill the following day, with Azedarek newly-provisioned with a replacement holy symbol, to find the location of Tervinost. In their previous run-in with Jean-Pierre, they had seen an ominous trail of large bloody footprints leading away from the campsite, down towards broken rocky terrain and eventually to scrub and forest.

They followed, and found the trail petered out in the rocky terrain. Mopping their brows and drinking from poteens, the PCs and the Shay gang got ready for lunch.

Then they heard the sound of somebody approaching stealthily, with the clink and jingle of armor plates.

The entire group gathered together, and each took up position at an opening in the rock face. The creeping footfalls broke into a dead run, gaining momentum, and San heard it most clearly - it was heading straight towards her. Bracing herself with a spell, she waited and watched in growing trepidation as the sound jogged closer, and then charged straight through her, and continued jouncing away behind her.

Nothing visible had revealed itself this whole time.

They followed it down towards the lower lying scrub, where its footfalls were clearly taking it, and then they quickly got lost among the rocky outcroppings and tangling bushes. The footfalls faded out, lost among the shouts and scrum of the pursuers.

They milled about for a short while, and then the noontime sun passed. One of the Shay gang took shelter in the shade to mop his brow, and then it happened. A wrenching, wracking scream split the air as the Shay bandit rose up from the earth. The party ran to him, finding him levitating off the ground and an inky blackness spearing him through the chest from the shadows of the rock behind him.

Before they could react, a silhouette of a tall man in shimmering dark armor formed behind him, both hands on the greatspear that skewered the hapless bandit. Then, with a pluck and a twirl of the spear, the Falkovnian shade wrenched his spear free, cast the dying man to the ground, and then in one fluid motion struck his head off his shoulders with the spearblade.

The rest of the party either fled screaming or fumbled for weapons to fight the shade, but the inky shadow was already retreating back into the darkness. San had the presence of mind to cast a light spell, which brought the Falkovnian into stark relief - a bloodstained, armored foe, with the dents and hacks of a dozen melees etched into his muscle and plate, with a greatspear in his hands and a sword by his side. The nosepiece of his helmet was bent askew and a bloody pit lay where one of his eyes should have been, blown out by the Cosablean gunman's bullet. Dazzled by the light, the Falkovnian raised his spear and lunged at San, clipping one of her braids but causing her no fleshly wound.

At that point, Azederak stepped forth with his holy symbol and compelled the undead to the earth. The Falkovnian screamed in pain and began staggering towards the dark elf cleric, swiping deadly arcs in the air with his spearblade. Between San's light and Azederak's repeated turnings, they were able to force the Falkovnian shade to retreat.

The rest of the Shay gang had fled by this point, and the PCs returned to the village, unsure of what to do next.

[HuManBing]

The most recent session ran from 7 p.m. to 5 a.m. so I'm typing this up in notes.

Damin: This was originally a PC generated for Oglaf the Omniabsent, but Oglaf refused to play as him. So I introduced Damin as a GM-controlled party member instead. He's the party's sole man-at-arms, and he serves the Nartok Keep scouts division of the Darkonian Royal Army. He's been sent to the village of Velnarest to sort out the rumors of undead attacks and also highway robbery (the Shay bandits).

Lord Vorjek: Vorjek had uncovered more papers from his forebears' times. One sheet had a list of magical items that Callim Vorjek had possessed, as a Thaumatorium mage. Another sheet had a list of Falkovnian officer names taken from the dead at the barrow, along with the lord's signature on each page that none of the corpses had been robbed or defiled, so as not to risk any undead hauntings.

Jean-Pierre: could be killed simply by doing enough damage to him. However, his bullets are a serious threat (and he can magically create more in his revolvers by just spinning the chambers after unloading the empties). I prepared a method of allowing the PCs to construct a one-use, specially tailored shield for use against him, by collecting and then melting down the spent brass casings from his previous shots, and mounting it onto a shield with a reflection spell cast. The shield would then reflect as many shots back at Jean-Pierre as the PCs used casings. The secret to this would be at the Borji Weigh smithy, where the Twisted Ones knew how to sneak over to Jean-Pierre's campfire close enough to steal the pretty brass casings and use them as trinkets. By befriending Borji Weigh and his Twisted One wards, the PCs would then be able to collect enough casings to tie their magic by contagion to Jean-Pierre.

In the end, however, Remke surprised us all by creeping up on Jean-Pierre using her silent step and invisibility spells, and then quickly cast Tiger's Claws on herself and decapitated him with one stroke. The rest of the PCs leapt onto his thrashing body (shooting blindly, unable to aim) and Azedarac was able to cast Final Rest on him, pushing him underground and laying him to rest forever.

The PCs got two spells: an Air Burst spell, which pushes enemies back (and does actual damage to swarms of insects), and a Distant Blow spell, which telegraphs a melee attack across empty space to strike an enemy. Jean-Pierre's diary showed many signs of fading memories, and of his inability to remember his wife's name in Cosabel or the name of the street he lived on. It also showed that he had learned a lot about Tervinost, the Falkovian deserter, and that the two mutually despised each other.

Tervinost: cannot be killed at all - he's a shade. The PCs tried to locate his body, where he'd crawled to die far underground, and they realized that he could just emerge next to them in the subterranean darkness and throttle them to death if they tried. In the end, Remke found the grave of her old friend, Pardel, and his shade told her of the conversations he'd had with the nearby Darkonian and Falkovnian fallen. The whispered secrets of the long-dead army shades held that Tervinost could be recalled as a traitor by the Falkovnian spirits, if he could be brought there. Moreover, Pardel said he had accompanied Kheltris and tried to help him break free of the necromantic tome's influence, and Kheltris had shown signs of improvement. Then, one night, Kheltris came upon Pardel as the druid slept and stove in his head with a club in his madness. In the following morning, Kheltris came to his senses and, filled with regret and despair, gave Pardel as best a burial as he could. Pardel assured Remke that Kheltris was not an evil man, but rather a man who overestimated his own skills and fell under the sway of an evil artifact.

The PCs made a harrowing survey of Tervinost's final resting place, and found scraps of his rusted armor, his spear blade, his sword, tatters of a cape, and his Falkovnian officer's badge, with his rank, serial number, company, and name. They gave this badge to Damin, which prompted a furious response from the enraged Falkovnian. The party was able to hold him at bay with light spells, though not before Tervinost injured them.

Back at the temple, the Father Lukas Nardev showed the PCs a list of the Falkovnian officer names, and asked Damin (who was able to speak and read haltingly in Trecht, the Falkovnian script) to transcribe them to Darkonian. Lukas Nardev also informed the PCs that it appeared the Twisted One scheduled to be flensed had staged a surprisingly capable escape. He then suggested they go see the Twisted One in the cell.

The PCs did so, and accordingly set the Twisted One free, where he ran gratefully back to Borji Weigh's smithy. They followed, to make sure he got there all right, and Damin bought some oil for his lantern. (A running joke being that the shop was always out of oil because the PCs keep coming back to buy their oil for their dubious tactical plans.) In the cellar, near the long-extinguished smithy, Borji Weigh played hide-and-seek with one of the Twisted Ones, who snuffed out his candle with a trinket made from Jean-Pierre's bullet casing. The PCs did not pick up on this clue, but it worked out all right in the end (see above).

The endgame came when Lukas Nardev accompanied the PCs out to the barrow, and Damin once again used the deserter's badge to taunt the Falkovnian into manifesting himself. Remke slowed him with the lantern, and San held his gaze with her Fascination spell, long enough for Lukas and Azedarac to cast their ceremonial spell. This spell named each of the Falkovnian officers in the nearby barrow by name and rank, and called upon them to rise from their slumber to reclaim their wayward deserter and visit fitting punishment martial upon him. At the culmination of the spell, dozens of dark shades rose from the Falkovnian barrow and stood at attention, singing the daunting refrain of the Falkovnian reveille. Tervinost tried to break free from San's gaze, but could not, and at the completion of the reveille call, his armor shattered and swept away in the wind, followed by his spear, shield, and sword, and then followed by the rags of his clothing, and finally his skin, sinew, and the crumbling of his bones. His last words to San were a plea - "Don't let them take me" before his tongue and lips were scoured clean by the wind of recall, and his jawbone parted from his whitening skull.

Kheltris: With the barrow satiated, Kheltris launched his final desperate attack on the village tavern, seeking food to sustain his ragged frame. He had only a few dozen undead under his shaky control, and Father Lukas Nardev effortlessly rebuked them to the earth. He touched Kheltris on the forehead, and the emaciated mad necromancer sank to the dust, motionless. The Temple's warriors (Sentinels) came to claim the miscreant, and the villagers in the tavern began to cheer the Father warmly.

Lukas: The Father organized a flensing of Kheltris, now confident that he had the right perpetrator for the crimes. The PCs San and Azedarac fought over the necromantic tome, until Lukas himself took the tome away from them. Damin became a mere observer as Remke prepared a series of strange talismans for the evening. Remke visited Kheltris in the prison, and found him to be a shattered husk of a man whose sole concern was that he be allowed a quick death.

Remke promised him that he would not be flensed, and she left. At the twilight flensing, Remke once again used her silence and invisibility spells to gain access to the flensing platform, and slit Kheltris' throat quickly. As the Father and his Sentinels looked around in confusion, she came up behind the Father and opened his throat too, then kicked his body off the platform.

Azedarac caught the Father, and cradled his head as he still lived and struggled to speak. Azedarac opened one of the poison powder rings on his hand and held it close to the Father's face, and he soon stopped struggling.

The PCs ended up in the midst of a near-riot in the village, as the onlookers variously blamed assassins, Shay's bandits, and even restless unseen spirits from the barrow, for the death of their hero-lauded priest.

Loose ends: The adventure ends with Remke holding a secret (she killed the Father) which could lead to her acquiring the Eternal Order Church as a powerful enemy; Azedarac as prime suspect in the Father's death (though with no solid evidence of his complicity); and San recovering from burn wounds she suffered trying to save the necromantic tome from the flames. Damin remains present with the party, unclear in his allegiance and whether he will help the party evade the law, or consider turning them in for sentencing as befits his military duty. The Church needs a replacement father for the village of Velnarest. The Vorjek family still struggles to get by with their exhausted mines and vastly reduced properties, while the ambitious Redralen family continues to scheme against them. The party also has faint connections with the L'Agence d'Affaires, through the contracts made with the Fellowship of the Broken Horn. The Thaumatorium will want Callim Verjek's magical goodies.



Plenty of fodder for a future campaign.

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

Exciting! Well, did the players enjoy it enough to continue?

[HuManBing]

Azedarac's player decided he wanted to try a different character, as did San's player. (Azedarac's player spent a fair bit of game time trying to woo Remke, with a completely unnecessary player-on-player subplot which Remke's player clearly did not enjoy. I'm probably going to have to have a quiet GM-to-player word with Azedarac's player in case it escalates to bordering on harassment. Azedarac is the only male player in the group, in case that gives some idea of the gender dynamics. San's player and Remke's player are dating each other in real life as a same-sex couple.)

Remke's player enjoyed playing as Remke, although if she does continue as that character, I'm going to have to put stricter limitations on her Invisibility spell and I may even put her at a stage 1 dark powers track or similar. (Maybe her claws cannot actually retract, or maybe they appear whenever she's under stress. Plus, she can't feel fully sated with food unless she eats something which she kills using her claws? Something to show that in her use of her killing powers, she must exercise caution lest the animal side overtake her.)

San's player wants to try playing as a combat build.

It's not clear whether the next adventure will take place in Ravenloft. I've put a significant amount of effort into developing a home-grown campaign setting (post-collapse Western Africa, with American and Chinese remnant armies vying for power) which I've already playtested with one gaming group and which this current gaming group is eager to try out. But at least they're all onboard with using GURPS as a system, which I think is an excellent step.

[Zilfer]

You lucky dog. (the girls that is anyways…)

Yeah, I’m not sure If I really like that other player of yours… is it an out of character thing that he likes whoever’s playing Remke…? Or is he just trying to mess with player? *shrugs* Just be sure to maintain your grip on the game good ol’ Bing who makes me laugh .

Sounds like you may have the beginnings of something going on here.

[HuManBing]

The other player (Azedarac's player) is a good guy, but he is socially oblivious to a lot of normal social cues. He raises his voice a lot when excited and has no idea that he's shouting out loud at 3 in the morning while neighbors are trying to sleep. He also has a naturally jovial and goofy manner, which can derail Ravenloft adventures (or Call of Cthulhu, for which he GMs).

This group is the second of two gaming groups I GM for, and both of them actually have more female players than male players. The first GURPS group I ran had three females and two males (not counting myself as GM), and the current group has two females and one male (again, not counting myself as GM).

A good rule of thumb that I use is to try to plot it so that every non-avoidable confrontation has at least two and preferably three ways of solving it, with at least one not requiring heavy combat. I find that female players tend to think more in terms of motives and diplomacy and are less interested in swordplay.

Sometimes the gender combination can lead to results that surprise me. In one campaign, the group encountered a matriarchy that performed a specific surgical procedure on its adolescent girls, because one high-ranking noble daughter turned out to manifest masculine phenotypes in her teenage years (she was actually an undetected intersex individual, born with an XY genotype). The ranking noblewomen all took this as a sign of "curses of the spirits" and decided the only way to prevent girls from becoming boys was to cut away all the ambiguous structures. The PCs eventually solved the mystery and brought back the exiled intersex individual, and I had planned for that mission to end there. However, the three females in my gaming group were adamant that they wanted to put an end to the ritual mutilations forever. It's taken me a few months, and the group is going along with some other unrelated adventure paths in this campaign, but I've finally put together a non-combat adventure arc to allow the PCs to convince the matriarchy that the mutilations solve nothing and should be abolished.

It's always gratifying to see players put forth adventure ideas.

[Zilfer]

Indeed I actually read that post for you. I believe it's in the topic I keep reading everytime you post there. The Real life Madness, Horror, and Fear check topic?

I must say I'd probably try to do the same thing, and I'm not even female. Defiantly horrendous. xD

[HuManBing]

A final update:

The players of Azederac, Remke, and San have all been clamoring for another Ravenloft adventure. I think I'm going to run them through another "L'Agence d'Affaires" campaign (which I last ran maybe four years ago, but stopped after my UK player scored a critical success on a Diplomacy check and got a long-term girlfriend). I'll post updates in a new thread later on.

We're also introducing a fourth player. The player himself has played in DnD games run by me, as well as a GURPS setting in post-apocalyptic West Africa, but this will be the first Ravenloft game he'll be a part of.

All four of the players are generating significantly darker, morally ambiguous characters than before, so this will be a good testing ground for Ravenloft as an "amoral horror campaign" setting.

Also, I had a very weird dream wherein San's player's "feminine charms" separately stood for election into the U.S. House of Representative races in Montana and New Hampshire. However, they each ran on different party tickets, which resulted in a terrible media circus.

This is not strictly relevant to the game campaign though.