Beginner campaign in Darkon (possibly one-shot)

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Re: Beginner campaign in Darkon (possibly one-shot)

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The Preacher's Pestle apothecary shop 2013.07.14
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The PCs went back to the Preacher's Pestle (where Giancarlo Gallietti worked) and they watched him. The Preacher's Pestle was located on the Bridge District - a gigantic three-tiered bridge that spanned the mighty Vuchar River, connecting Solatus and Cimelus suburbs of Il Aluk. Shops made their establishment on the three decks, with balconies in the back to host and lower cargo from river traffic.

Alcibiades hung around, passing for a lowly laborer, and he picked up work from GG unloading a cargo from a small boat - a crate. After the shop closed, GG spent some time working with the crate and then locked up. Alen picked the lock and went to check it out. As expected, the crate was missing a significant amount of contents. A search on the third floor showed that there was a hidden attic, and it contained about fifty pounds of abfalduz.

The next delivery, according to the PCs' snooping of GG's journal, would be a drop off of forty pounds of the drug for one "ZaPh" (although whether he has two heads and three arms was unclear), some two days hence. They lay in wait for this.

ZaPh indeed came in a small rowboat near dusk, and GG dropped a waterproof packet. The rowboat crew retrieved it and continued upstream towards the residential eastern side. The PCs followed along the the bank as unobtrusively as they could in the pub crowds, and eventually lost the boat at a canal of rickety pubs and flophouses. Several water-level alcoves hinted at where they were: old town.

The PCs secured a barge from a nearby pub with a decent amount of coin, and went alcove to alcove, searching. They finally found one that had a ruined passageway leading into a villa of the Ancients, and to our campaign's first true dungeon crawl...
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Re: Beginner campaign in Darkon (possibly one-shot)

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The Waveshaper shrine 2013.07.21

Entering the villa - boathouse tunnel
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The alcove, now waterlogged, had been a boathouse for the ancient villa in times before the kingdom, and there were vines covering much of the entrance. Lyra also noticed that the high tide mark seemed to cover the entrance, meaning that the villa would be inaccessible in a few hours.

They went in, and found that a faded inscription near the doorway said "Villa of Sesterius - canal entrance". Up ahead, there was an upwards sloping corridor, leading presumably to quarters kept safely above water level, and a curtain blowing gently in the breeze. Nadia could see the outline of the corridor thanks to her demonic Shadowborn vision, and she activated her lifesense once she got close enough. Two figures were behind the curtain, apparently standing guard. Peeking through the curtain, she got a glimpse of crates, barrels, and other storeroom paraphernalia.

She stepped back from the curtain and, when far away enough to do so without being overheard, she told the group mates what was up.

Alen stepped forth and darted the two guards, and the party entered the room. To the left, right, and front there were curtained doorways and sounds of an argument off right. The two guards were young men wearing blue robes with clubs at their waists - Alen padded softly to the curtain on the right to listen, as Alcibiades and Lyra and Nadia carefully carried the unconscious acolytes out the entrance way.

The argument seemed to be about a well, and etchings and discs on the side. Alen watched as three acolytes tried to fit a disc with a "camel" symbol into a depression. A short burst of energy later, and one acolyte lay unmoving on the done floor. The others clustered around the well, thought about trying to place more discs, and then decided against it. Instead, they brought their fallen comrade to the side of the room under some weathered stone shelves, and left through a curtain to the east.

Lyra cast a darkness spell on one corner of the room and the group huddled there to observe. The acolytes came back in greater numbers with an official looking tough type wearing a breastplate and carrying a morning star. By his side a thin faced sallow guy in street clothes looked around nervously.
The well and carvings
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The leader, to whom the others referred as Breshgard, quizzed the acolytes about the disc placement, and reacted angrily when they said they had few insights, even despite the drugs. He said something about the priestess having a lot to answer for, as the body count increased.

Alen decided he had heard enough and threw out for darts, hoping to get as many people as possible. He got two acolytes and the tough guy, but then the ready of them fled to the other end of the room and called for reinforcements. The adventurers decided it was time to run.

They retreated back to the storage room and prepared to fight. However, when the enemy came, the heroes found the experience unsettling. The curtain parted, and rank after rank of blue-robed expressionless cultists came marching out. Alen dropped the first few easily with darts, but then the ones behind effortlessly caught their falling brethren and held them up between two each - like a body shield. All without breaking stride or breaking emotionless eye contact - their only response was to draw their clubs and engage with the intruders.

Nadia let loose with her throwing knives, Lyra threw out spells of confusion and fire against the enemies, and Alcibiades drew his saber and prepared for lethal force. At this point, both Alen and Alcibiades realized a crippling problem from their horrific experience with Bukcsa the Ogre Mage. From his bloody skinning and evisceration of Beredostich, both PCs had acquired a marked aversion to the sight of blood.

As the combat progressed, and as the PCs struck deep, bloody wounds into the comparatively docile cultists, Alen and Alcibiades both found themselves trembling and retching at the spectacle. Both fought down their revulsion, with difficulty, although Alcibiades dropped his saber when he cleaved a cultist and a spray of claret stained his entire arm to the elbow.

And still the cultists advanced, with inhuman coordination and mindless resolve, snatching up their fallen comrades and holding them up as shields against darts and throwing knives.

The melee seemed precarious for a while, but in the end, the party prevailed, leaving vacant-eyed drugged or dying opponents scattered around the room.

The party recovered and Lyra looked at the well side. There was a set if there indentations in the side, and several dozen discs bearing animal likenesses. The cultist who fell from the shock trap had evidently been trying out the wrong discs. Working with her snake familiar, Lyra puzzled out the "trine" of eastern animal zodiac creatures associated with Water, the element of death and decay in Eastern philosophy. Her initial guess was Rat, Dragon, and Snake, but her familiar assured her that snakes were a creature symbolizing wealth, beauty, honesty, generosity, and especially burdened strained patience with mortals of lesser ability.

Eventually, the two of them pieced together enough details from their memory of the Book and its secrets of magic, to select the proper animals: the Rat, the Dragon, and the Monkey. This immediately agitated the water, such that a large volume rose up out of the well and assumed a vaguely humanoid figure.
"Walter" and Breshgard's story
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The water elemental told them that it had come down river along the Vuchar to accompany the water stone, but then it had been imprisoned here when the transporter came under attack and it was forgotten about. The black stone of water is still at the bottom of the well, and if the party could remove it, the water elemental could return back to its home near the spring in Nevuchar, up river.

The party brought the stone up, with some creative spellcasting, and the water elemental followed them along gamely, earning the nickname "Walter" from Lyra. They got to other rooms where a few cultists attempted to hold them back, but the water elemental brushed aside most of the opposition.

In the next rooms, they found large pipes and variations all boiling weird chemicals. The fumes and odors were overpowering. A single pipe overhead funneled condensate through the rooms, onwards to some unknown receptacle further on ahead, and the vapors had the strong scent of concentrated abfalduz drug.

The party eventually tracked down Breshgard and his few armed enforcers and got them to surrender. While tying him and his men up to a pillar, they divulged the following:
  • Breshgard was the joint leader of the cult, known as the Waveshapers.
  • the sole leader now is an ellyll-y-gwerin (half elf) priestess named Thesseldarmenias.
  • the cult worships a power known as Quoshregga, said to have dominion over water.
  • the initial plan was to distill the abfalduz drug with other compounds to create a mind control drug, in sufficient quantities to affect an entire city or district. Once enough was produced, the water elemental in the well would be infused with the concoction and then sent throughout the city's canals and water sources to enslave the whole city.
  • the water elemental in the well has been there long before the cult, and their attempts to control it have all been to no avail.
  • Thesseldarmenias wrested control of the organization away from Breshgard after Zaskin Pheldas won her favor. The thin-faced man proved adept at securing a ready supply of the drug, and even offered to provide much-needed converts and material if Thesseldarmenias would delay the planned uprising in return for focusing her adherent brain power on theological mysteries. Thesseldarmenias has taken Zaskin Pheldas up on his offer and the cult now spends most of its time drugged out, mind linked, and pondering on ineffable mysteries of a highly esoteric nature.
  • the PCs were lucky that they had taken Breshgard out of the fight early on. Had he been coordinating the cultist defense instead of Thesseldarmenias, the cultists would have put up a much stiffer fight, with actual fighting tactics.
  • the priestess was upstairs, in the old bedroom of the pre-City villa.
Closing in on the priestess, Nadia's powers awaken
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The PCs went to the villa's central stairwell and found that the paranoid defenders had collapsed the central staircase, leaving only a railed second-floor balcony with ellyll archers trying to take out the intruders. They brought the water elemental to the room and made it into a broad vertical column of water, and then they swam up it inside to get to the second level. The arrows struck the water and slowed, harmless against the folks safely ensconced within.

Four archers loosed off arrows at the balcony, but the water elemental (whom Lyra began calling "Walter" largely as an act of whimsy) grabbed one off and threw him down the stairwell, depositing the PCs safely on the balcony. The other three continued loosing arrows, with one hitting Lyra in the abdomen and forcing her to the ground in pain. Alen and Alcibiades stormed up the sides, cutting down the elves, while Nadia took out her counterpart with her throwing blades. In the end, Alen secured one elf to the railing with wrist bindings, and then the party gathered to see about healing Lyra.

The arrow was both deep and well-aimed. Nadia tried to cast a Vistani wound closing spell, but she'd been in Il Aluk for too long and the static burn stymied her. Finally, she called to Vigo, asking him for help.

His black left hand materialized over her own, and he reached into her chest to draw her shadow blade from her soulkeep. He held it out In her hand and told her to go to the remaining bound elf. Despite a foreboding sense of what was to come, and the panicked disbelief of her group mates, she did as he told her and advanced on the helpless elf. The captive saw what was coming to him and began struggling to get away, calling for help and pleading for mercy. Ultimately, to no avail - Nadia meekly let Vigo guide her arm, sword in hand, back behind her ear for a good swung, and then straight through the elf to cleave his torso in half sideways. His disembodied legs swung down through the balcony post and plummeted down to the floor below, and his ruined upper body sagged lifeless as it hung by a fraying wristbone from the railing.

Alen and Alcibiades wisely averted their eyes at the fateful stroke, and Lyra was lying down. So nobody could say definitely what happened. But it was clear that Nadia was now the carrier of some horrendous latent power.

There was one final corridor between the party and the lair of the priestess, and it was filled eight men deep with similarly vacant looking cultists. Vigo gave out a war cry that only Nadia could hear, and the two began a manic slaughter of the sluggish cultists, striking heads from shoulders and lopping arms from torsos. The rest if the party cowered in the hallway as Nadia reduced it to something resembling a butcher shop.

Lyra walked in and cringed. Even the ceiling had blood all over it. Knowing that Alen and Alcibiades would likely have a fit if they had to traverse that mess, she called Walter up to the balcony and asked it to clean the corpses and wash the blood off the surfaces. A sickly crimson river flowed out, carrying severed fingers and hands from when the cultists tried vainly to shield themselves from Nadia's shadow blade, pittering on the flagstones of the lower floor.
Confronting Thesseldarmenias, the Waveshapers' plan
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Inside the sanctum, they found the priestess and her three closest priests, rocking back and forth and concentrating. The party brought them out of their reveries and arrested them, quizzing them and going through their papers.

It appeared that the cult had received several mysteries that were of a highly mathematical bent, and the priestess had discovered that the abfalduz-based mind control drug could be used to link minds to solve problems quickly. The Zaskin Pheldas connection had provided numerous vagrants and drugs, with the understanding that the Waveshaper cult would focus on pondering and solving various mysteries with their collective brainpower.

The cult had a number of mysteries to solve - they were about a third of the way through the text of mysteries.

One report caught their eye: Breshgard had sent an acolyte to tail Zaskin one time, and he found a resupply point that the man used. Searching there later, they found a foot locker marked K2. Alen had heard once of a rumor in Nartok that king's secret police there used the prefix K6; perhaps this was a different division of the Kargat?

They brought Walter to the flooded exit passageway, and carried the black stone of water out. The elemental carried them safely through the canals to land at the piers near the pubs, then left to return to its homeland. They handed the cultists over to the Agency, explaining the progress of their investigation to Cotter. They returned to the Green Lady Inn to rest for the night, although they gave Nadia a wide berth, uneasy with her powers of slaughter and violence.

Lyra woke up to see her snake scratching itself against her bed. A large mass had formed, bulging out from its middle. Barbara wondered if it might be tumorous. By morning, Lyra saw that the mass had developed into a single, forlorn limb - apparently a lizard-like forelimb, complete with toes.

Lyra and her snake were both nonplussed.
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Re: Beginner campaign in Darkon (possibly one-shot)

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Returning from Il Aluk and Entry to Nartok 2013.10.20

Finishing up in Il Aluk
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Leaving the Waveshaper shrine, the party decided to dig deeper into the Kargat connection. Zaskin Pheldras was not a member of the cult, but he had been supplying them with materiel, drugs, new personnel, and apparently even the ineffable mysteries to be solved by group meditation. Alen especially was eager to find out what he could about their mysterious dealer.

A quick follow brought him to a disreputable pub called The Coppice Gate, in Il Aluk's northeastern district (Solatus). Pheldras evidently had a couple of friends with him, because the thin-faced man was directing several heavyset men in carrying trunks of papers and other goods down from the top floor. They shifted the chests down several flights of stairs, then carried them out back to a waiting cart.

Alen shifted upstairs quickly and checked out the door, but found it locked. On the door was a note, pinned there by a dagger, saying "Your precious Agency Head's meeting with the Baron is at risk. ~L"

Never one to regard notes pinned to doors with daggers, Alen decided to follow the cart anyway, and found the cart trundled through the bustling city streets, out the eastern outskirts of town, and into the countryside. The cart picked up speed as it left the busy streets and eventually outpaced him in the villages.

He waited a while and then went back to the Coppice Gate.

Outside in the streets, Lyra wandered away with typical childlike curiosity, and found a familiar looking face at a nearby cafe. Leila sat there, enjoying a cup of coffee in the afternoon bustle. Seeing the foreign mage, Leila waved her over and the two of them had a brief conversation - mostly with Leila asking Lyra thoughtful questions.

"If you receive an order that may lead to your death, is it ever justifiable to refuse?"

"If you had to choose between your own survival and that of your friends, which would be more important to you?

"Which is nobler: to allow only the talented best people to contribute towards the nation, or to allow all people to contribute to the nation?"

After a few such exchanges, Leila finished her coffee and smiled pleasantly to Lyra, thanking her for her enjoyable company, and heading off into the crowd. Lyra sat bemused, and then returned to the party.

That evening, an urgent summons came from higher up in the Agency. The party had to report before a committee and make a full disclosure of their activities of that day. Apparently, whoever had left the threatening note also had a way of backing it up, and the Agency Head, Shayla Nin, was extremely annoyed at losing her chance to speak with Baron Karl Ranherdt of Il Aluk.

The bulk of the following day was spent in depositions, interviews, and various other forms of corporate grilling. Accounting for all costs, accounting for all operations. At one point, Kellsin Cotter (the Agency's requisitions expert) dropped by to offer them some procedural relief, by blocking some of the more onerous lines of inquiry. The party theorized that he had profited handsomely by their discoveries regarding the abfalduz trade, and felt some semblance of conscience to help them out.

After a gruelling day of questioning by the Agency, they were released. They found an unexpected note awaiting them: an invitation from Shayla Nin herself, inviting them to meet her at her homestead.
An Audience with Shayla Nin
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Alen and the rest of the party travelled, in somewhat chastened spirits, to the Fotherings Mansion homestead of Shayla Nin, outside the outskirts of Rivalis.

They passed through the bodyguards and found Nin seated in a bower with several other company friends, a blanket across her lap and a scarf to guard her against a slight cough.

After a few sweet pleasantries, during which Nin waved away their apologies for her recent troubles with the Baron, she launched into their latest concerns: the Falkovnian occupation of the city of Nartok. Apparently, the Falkovnians have taken down the standard of Darkonius Rex (the golden eye surrounded by flames) and have raised up the Darkonian military standard instead (a blue and black sign), with Baron Eduard Curwen as its remaining titular administrator. There are garbled reports that Ardellia Borlest and her circle of bard friends are slowly coming to side with the Falkovnians, and the Beurteilung has begun its proceedings, aiming to publicly discredit the rule of Darkonius Rex. Nin's one-time colleague, Dr. Rudolph Van Richten, has received an invitation to the city to deliver his witness testimony, and he's considering taking his entire group of adventuring partners with him.

Clearly, this was something to generate concern.

Nin confessed that Ardellia Borlest has never seemed to have much love for her, as her father, Sonny Borlest, was once an Agency operative and he died in the line of duty. She suggested the PCs go to Nartok and attempt to reconnect with Ardellia and see if she's gaining any insights as to the Falkovnian operations.

Also, she took Alen aside and conferred with him urgently. The Kargat had an operative in Nartok, Calbie, who is likely to be in grave danger. Alen reached into his memory and brought her into focus - a large, lumbering, thick-set woman who worked at the Keep's Armory. Apparently, it has come to Nin's attention that the Kargat at Nartok are suffering significant setbacks as the Falkovnians comb the citizenry for the secret police. Nin hopes that she can curry favor with the Kargat by saving their operative in Nartok. The unspoken understanding is that the PCs have caused problems for Nin by riling up the Il Aluk Kargat, and so they owe it to her to try to win back some good graces. Also, it was worth getting into the city and seeing whether the old source, Dedrick Lacon's message service, was still reliably passing information to the Falkovnians. Nin suggested that Alen find some way to test the Lacon messenger service, perhaps by sacrificing some minor piece of Darkonian information to the Falkovnians and seeing if they acted on it.

The PCs gratefully accepted, and soon they were off to Nartok. At the gates of Fotherings, they received Agency passports, to show to the Falkovnian military police when they got there. It was suggested that they play up their credentials with Ardellia Borlest, if it seemed that she was still in favor among the Falkovnian interim leadership.
Nartok Bound
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The PCs passed south along the Arterial Highway, and noted several Darkonian army camps and tents along the way, setting up crude basic fortifications. They got to Nartok Keep late in the afternoon, and gasped at the changes.

Naked, twisted earthen trenches and ramparts had been gouged into the hillside surrounding the walled city. A separate flag flew over the city now, and the walls and towers bristled with armed men. The PCs drew near and the extent of the Falkovnian administration became clear - deep, roofed entry tunnels led in zig-zags up the hillside, clearly set up to deter any invaders hoping to recapture the citadel town.

At the gates, the Falkovnians stated that the PCs would have to specify a visa type. If they were here to speak on the Beurteilung (public truth-and-reconciliations committee), they would be taken aside and interviewed over the course of several hours to ascertain the truth or relevance of their testimony. If they were here on mercantile or diplomatic business, there would be a deposit payable at the gates of 3,000 Darkonian Eyes (or 30 Darkonian Sceptres) to ensure compliance with martial law. The PCs did not have that amount of money, and they weren't particularly keen on joining the Beurteilung to speak out against the "depredatory rule of Darkonius Rex".

They took to the ramparts outside the city, where a vast number of mercenaries, sellswords, and ne'er-do-wells made their living.

Asking around, they found that the Falkovnians paid handsomely for mercenary aid to defend the city at nights. 100 Darkonian Eyes per night - if you could survive an entire year, you'd come away wealthy with the equivalent of 3 Darkonian Crowns - enough to live in a comfortable style for a number of years. The PCs spoke to several adventuring groups, and found them in decent enough spirits. They refused to tell the PCs what the Creeping Death was, though - they said like any other rookies, they'd have to find out first hand.

Shortly before sundown, the mercenaries took up a haunting refrain of defiance, ringing across the hillsides. "There's only one will to fight - and that's your own, your own, your own! There's only one will to fight, and that's your own, your own, your own..."

A Prominente guard came out of the Keep, with a person of some clear importance leading. The PCs got closer and saw a good-looking man speaking fluent Darkonian and fluent Trecht, weaving among the mercenaries and asking after the health of their comrades, and asking what they needed. He made notes of equipment requests, trying for blankets and pillows and bandages. The PCs noticed that the Falkovnian guards on the city walls behind them only had shields and clubs - the sort of less-lethal armaments you'd see with police and constabulary, while the big weapons like glaives and halberds were outside the walls for the mercenaries to use against the Creeping Death.

The man came by the PCs' group, but they did not speak with him and he passed by amiably enough. The mercenaries nearby said they were indebted to this man, Colonel Leopold Neiß, for he was the policymaker who recommended a high mercenary wage for hired help. After ten days of service, they could afford to enter the city. With a few days more, they could afford to do recreational things inside. This cycle repeated itself until the mercenary gathered enough wealth to leave indefinitely, or until some battlefield misfortune claimed them.

A short while later, the PCs met up with a braying oaf of a man, towken jas loik vis, whom they had unwittingly aided a few months previously to regain his lost libido by the unusual aphrodisiac restorative of skinning a Falkovnian Hauptmann alive. Large as life and twice as unkempt, it was Dale "Cut-Me-Own-Throat-Or-At-Least-Somebody-Else's" Reeve, terror of the Darkonian highways, travelling salesman of bandit insurance, and requisitions expert nonpareill.

I shall spare the reader the exercise of deciphering his accent and merely relate that Dale Reeve had clearly overcome his previous hydraulic dysfunction and was busy trying to bed every wench in service around Nartok. Between mugs of ale and cherrystone spitting competitions, Reeve confided to the PCs that he had heard of the first shipment of grain coming up the Arterial Highway from Falkovnia to Nartok. This tallied with what they'd heard as well - the Falkovnians were using the Beurteilung as a truth-and-reconciliations forum, to try to reconcile the Darkonian public with the past. There would be vast reparations in grain to individual Darkonians who could prove lineage to fallen Darkonian soldiers. And Dale Reeve was going to lead his mercenary company of the Bec de Corbin to raid the shipment.

The PCs declined his generous offer to join him in sticking a thumb in the eye of the Falkovnian occupiers.

The first night, the PCs saw the Creeping Death approach in the firelight as a roiling mass of shadows. And then they saw the reflections of the firelight in paired pinpoints of vacant, staring eyes. Jaws lay slack with rigor mortis, or bare of flesh and sinew in the cold. The mercenaries shouted and manned the ramparts, striking down into the mass of shambling corpses with mace, halberd, and poleaxe as the undead hordes stumbled relentlessly onwards, claws and fists and mailed gloves reaching for their prey.

The PCs felt a chill in their blood, and Alen (born and raised in Darkon) had a moment or two of abject panic. This was the revenge of the Grey Realm that the Eternal Order had spoken of! But they fought down the revulsion and horror long enough to help the seasoned mercs fight back the first wave, pressing them back from the packed earth ramparts and mashing them to the ground. Blades sang out and maces crunched as the impudent dead fell back and surged, fell back and surged, in a neverending unthinking tide of rapine and destruction.

At some point during the night, the PCs came up with the idea of laying down a path of fire. This blocked some of the ramps, and also gave them some effectiveness against the walking dead. They also availed themselves of various weapons provided by the Falkovnians and Nartok watch. They found the following results:
  • The undead do not appear to infect their victims with tooth or claw.
  • The undead do not appear to be vulnerable to head-strikes. They will keep on advancing even without a head.
  • The undead are slow and sluggish and do not have any coordinating or strategic ability.
  • The undead suffer the most when hit in the center of mass and disrupted physically there.
After an utterly sleepless night, the mercenaries and PCs enjoyed (if that is the right term) a morale boost in the morning. Apparently, the Falkovnians had captured a member of the Kargat - Agent Simundip - and after a night of interrogations, the "public" had called for his immediate execution as a blight upon humanity. This went beyond the hatred typical of an oppressed people for their oppressor - this had the feel of a pogrom or witch-hunt.

Being outside the city, the PCs couldn't follow the executioner procession inside, but they were aware of a gathering near the Hanging Wall (where only a few months earlier they had witnessed the execution of some Falkovnian collaborators... strange how the times change). Then, with a great cheer, a figure appeared at the top and plummetted earthwards until it stopped with a jerk of the noose, and began an agonized, dancing sway from side to side. The struggles continued, abating, for quite some time. As the sun came up, the true nature of the thing became clear - much larger than a man, though man-sized, and with patches of golden, black-striped fur between the clothing. Amidst the ruined, blood-matted confusion of the face, the unfortunate convict featured a gaping maw with sharp, curved teeth and incarnadine whiskers, like some great cat. His eyes sagged vacant - one staved in by a stone from the mob, and the other catching the glimmer of the weak dawn sunlight.
Pulling a Few Strings to Enter Nartok
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By this point, the PCs were ready to leave in a hurry. Leopold Neiß came back out to do another morale tour, and at that point the PCs spoke with him. He was a cultured, urbane gentleman who further proved his generosity when they mentioned they were friends of Ardellia Borlest, the singer and violinist.

With his sudden interest, they breezed through customs and got a Beurteilung visa. And Neiß showed them to a shared quarter house with several priests from the Church of Ezra.

They had made it into Nartok in one piece.
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Re: Beginner campaign in Darkon (possibly one-shot)

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Nartok Keep - the Occupied City 2013.10.27
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The PCs arrived in Nartok with the following goals: get in touch with Ardellia Borlest and see if she was all right. Shayla Nin had also given them a goal of getting to Calbie, the Kargat operative who was in charge of the Keep's armory.

The Falkovnian military police led the party to a rowhouse converted to housing Beurteilung folks. The top level were bedrooms, fairly cramped but well-appointed, with a privacy curtain to divide the women from the men. The bottom level had a sitting room and chairs for the Wahrzeugen witnesses to sit and talk in.

All in all, it was almost civilized.

They went downstairs and met with the other occupants of the house. As it turned out, they were quartered with several mid- and low-level priests from the Church of Ezra, who were chatting and laughing with undisguised glee at the prospects of testifying against their rival faith, the Temple of the Eternal Order. Many of them traded anecdotes about curious unexplained dodgy "miracles", especially with healing spells that went far beyond the usual: regrown limbs, regenerated tissue and organs, and the like. None of which really interested the PCs, of course.

Then a guard came to the house and asked if Alen Vaughn and three companions were there. ("Hmpf, suppose I don't count!" said Barbara the snake.) When Alen raised his hand, the guard produced a night pass and announced that they had been invited to dine with Colonel Leopold Neiß at the Fiddler's Finger Pub, with Ardellia Borlest.

They agreed immediately.
Mr. Neiß and Delly Bee
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The party got the most part of the bloodstains out of their clothing, from the fight against the Creeping Death of the night before, and they went with the Falkovnian guard to the Fiddler's Finger pub.

There, they saw several noble-looking guests and Falkovnian and Darkonian soldiers - only now the soldiers were wearing a new red/blue armband of the keep's shadow, showing Nartok Keep as a free city no longer under Darkonius Rex's rule. A well-dressed dapper man with a ready smile and a confident voice was there too - Colonel Leopold Neiß. And by his side, in a fancy dress and with her hair tied above diamond earrings, was Ardellia Borlest.

The dinner was superb fare, and quite different from the usual pub grub at the 'Finger. Over truffles and mushrooms and sunflower roasts, Neiß spoke gently with each party member, informing them of the Falkovnian Administration's role in Nartok and the ultimate goal: to reunite Darkonian and Falkovnian citizens against the fraudulent rule of King Azalin, the deceitful lies of the Kargat, and the cynical social manipulation of the Eternal Order. The previous attempts by Drakov to unseat Darkonius Rex failed because they didn't give the Darkonian citizen enough credit for their sense of right and wrong - he said. This time, they prevailed upon Drakov and the Falkovnian leadership to use persuasion, truth, and public information to see what sort of monstrous regime truly ran Darkon... and once educated, the Darkonian public would rise up alongside the Falkovnians to overthrow their unmasked oppressor.

Fanciful stuff, perhaps, but there were experts coming from all across Darkon, Nortenmark, and even further afield to speak out as Wahrzeugen (witnesses) at the Beurteilung (truth and reconciliations hearings). And among them were ranking Church of Ezra members, Thaumatorium members, and other adventurers and experienced travelers like the PCs. Once the truth was out, the Darkonians could make their own decisions about whom to support. At one point, Neiß put down his forkful of Schwartzwaldekirschtorte to sing a few lines from an aria:

"Let us heal the scars of bygone indiscretions,
May the wiser hearts forgive the wrongs of youth.
Now we lift our arms ’gainst tyrants and oppression
We shall only bow our heads before the truth,
For today our lives return to me and you.
"

Ardellia Borlest, who had been listening rapt to his speech at this point, smiled broadly and slid her arm in his elbow. "Neiß helped me pen it," she said softly, in tones of unabashed adoration.

The PCs knew this song rather well. It had gotten as far north as the Regina Mirabilis Music Hall, as performed by the singer and lutist Byron May - himself a one-time husband of Ardellia Borlest a few years ago. They'd heard it in performance, alongside "Stehen Wir Zusammen" ("Let Us Stand Together") and other such collaborationist songs. What they weren't prepared for was Ardellia's apparently wholesale devotion to the Falkovnian cause.

Back at their cramped quarters, the two women, Nadia and Lyra, kept up a constant flow of concerned guessing. "Do you think she's drugged or something?" "Maybe she's in love with him." "Is magic involved?" But it was Alen who seemed to figure it out. "The way she was looking at him and squeezing his arm - it wasn't like a woman with her lover," he said carefully. "It was like a girl with her father."

This was a new one on them. Ardellia had been married to Byron May, a man a few years older than she. After her divorce, she had become romantically involved with Vasily Szekler, who was not only significantly older than her, but (rumor had it) originally was assigned as her legal guardian after her father died. Now, this fortysomething Leopold Neiß was in town and Delly Bee was at his side, the dutiful worshipping scholar in the lap of a professor.

Lyra and Nadia felt awkward. "That's... a bit of an age gap, isn't it?"*
*No it's not. Be quiet, you.

They all went back to the quarters to sleep and some of them dreamed. Nadia had an odd dream about Vigo Drakov straining honey at the sink and also fermenting out a rich mead with butter and cream treats - strangely domestic, for a man so driven to inflict pain and suffering as he.
Gauging the Occupation
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Alen decided to drop by at his humble rowhouse and check in with his housekeeper, Marta. Things were still largely the same there, although apparently the Falkovnians had attempted to get inside once and take an inventory. Alen found a discreet fireplace and burned one of Vesildur Ermoroud's cards.

Much to his surprise, a pink-haired female elf was the one to take the call. Apparently, Vesildur had finally found what he was looking for.

Speaking to Vesildur, Alen informed him of the Creeping Death around Nartok and the Falkovnians' use of mercenaries. Also, there appeared to be a very efficient intake case processing mechanism for sorting out the Beurteilung people, which hinted that the Falkovnians were more interested in controlling the public narrative and turning the people against their leaders, than in merely despoiling and conquering.

Vesildur nodded and told him to prioritize Calbie. Extracting her from Nartok would be primary importance. She was at the Armory and apparently has still been feeding the Darkonian intelligence with a good amount of information. Also, with testing the Dedrick Lacon connection, Alen suggested that they leak news of Dale Reeve's imminent attack on the Falkovnian grain shipments to see whether the Falkovnians respond efficiently to that. If they did, then it would prove that Dedrick was still feeding them information, knowingly or not. If they didn't and if Dale Reeve did get through, it wouldn't result in anything that would hurt Darkonian interests. The perfect sting operation. Vesildur smiled and said it was a good one, and that he would provide Alen with the appropriate counterfeit papers to slip into Dedrick's study later.
Listening to Leopold
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Calbie seemed in fairly low spirits when the PCs visited her. She remembered Lyra by scent, if not by sight. ("You're the one who snuck in here with your little pal, when I had that Book to watch over!") She was surprised to finally see Barbara, as she had difficulty placing the smell of reptiles and she wasn't entirely sure what she had scented.

Alen got her take on the entire Falkovnian thing, and it tallied pretty well with his own. Apparently, the Falkovnians are using grain deliveries as a kind of reconciliation device with the Darkonians here, and then they're carrying out public denunciations of the king, the Kargat, and the Eternal Order. Rudolph van Richten and his group of people are coming, as are the Church of Ezra's high clerics under Bastion Raines. To round it out, the Fraternity of Shadows and key Thaumatorium sources are said to be responsive to the Beurteilung call as well.

All in all, this is the face of a weirdly calculating, effective, and demagogically canny Falkovnian operation. None of which meets the usual traditional description of them as callous, violent brutes.

That's what scares Calbie most of all. They're up to something, they've got somebody smart at the top calling the shots, and there's a good chance they may do some lasting damage.

Ultimately, Calbie was unwilling to leave her post with the Armory unless she can do some damage to the Falkovnian administration in return. She produced a fine lacquer case with a stretched parchment in a frame, and said that parchment had to be introduced to the Falkovnians in the Keep. That way, the Darkonian side could listen in on what they were saying. She gave it to the PCs and asked them to see if they could get access to the Keep, perhaps through meeting with Ardellia Borlest, who now lived in the Keep (and rumor had it, stayed in an adjoining room to Leopold Neiß).
Testing the Lacon Connection
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Alen also decided to see whether Dedrick Lacon's messages were still being read by the Falkovnians. He met Lacon at the Fiddler's Finger Pub, where he was still transcribing music with intentional notational errors to correspond to predetermined messages.

He then went with Nadia to Lacon's apartments, which had since become a billeting post for some of the Falkovnian soldiers. Evidently aware that locals might not tolerate seizure of their apartments, the soldiers had set up a row of tents in the courtyard outside. They gathered and sang and danced to folk music ("...Выходила на берег Катюша, На высокий берег на крутой!").

Alen decided to monkey his way up the chimneys at the back of the building, while Nadia kept the Falkovnian soldiers distracted a at the front. He made his way into Dedrick's room, finding it unoccupied, and then easily replaced the papers on his desk with Vesildur's own.

By morning, Dedrick had fake papers to send onwards to the Falkovnians, and he was none the wiser.
Meeting Ardellia's "Friends"
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At some point they congregated in the Fiddler's Finger Pub and got to know Ardellia Borlest's friends. An ellyll-y-gwerin (half-elf) named Rue, a doleful guitarist named Maryam Kevat, and a childlike singer named Vesper Trill. There was also a golden-haired man in his middle age, Percival Sedgewick, who turned out to be the inspiration for "I'll Plow My Own Furrow" (written by Ardellia Borlest under some degree of duress having lost a bet). Sedgewick started off by asking after Delly Bee's health, but then very quickly turned towards whether the PCs could see her and convince her to sign over the pub to his name instead.

Turning away from him in disgust, the PCs then heard from Kevat and Trill that they were deeply concerned with Delly's well being and hoped to go see her in the Keep.

Eventually, the PCs decided they would petition Neiß to see if they could get access to the Keep with two guests.
Meeting at the Keep, Various Resolutions
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The Keep was heavily guarded, and the Falkovnians there apparently were exempt from the "peacekeepers-only" directive for the rest of the city. Alen's trained eyes saw full platemail for every guard, plus a sword and polearm, and even reinforcing chainmail underneath the necks, armpits, and groins. No place to stick a poison dart this time.

They spent a few hours in processing, and then their passports were stamped with a pass until sundown. Neiß wasn't in, but a guard took them to the Keep and then to Ardellia's apartment on the third floor. It was, indeed, next to Leopold Neiß's apartments, and the PCs caught a glimpse of a connecting door to his rooms.

(Lyra and Nadia: Dat gap.
GM: Be quiet, you.)

The meeting between Ardellia and her friends did not go well. Her friends wept and begged and pleaded with her to forsake the Falkovnians and to return to her pub and speak out against the occupation, as she had done countless times before. Ardellia just smiled serenely and said that there were other reasons she couldn't do that. Sedgewick's request for her bar deed was relayed to her, and she broke her strangely narcotic spell for a bit and spat out several earthy platitudes about his character. After about an hour of speech, Ardellia's friends finally withdrew tearfully, realizing there was nothing they could do against her sudden and odd affinity for the Falkovnians. In that sense, the PCs had failed.

However, in a more longterm sense, they had hopes for cautious success. While Ardellia was otherwise engaged, Lyra was able to send Barbara on an infiltration mission to Neiß's room, with the parchment tied around his body, and to leave the parchment in Neiß's cloak for a listening device. Barbara came back to Lyra and gave her a thumbs-up indicating success. Barbara was an unusual and gifted snake.

They went back to their rooms dejectedly, and spoke a bit with the Church of Ezra. The following day, they woke up to the strange singing of a satirical song by Percival Sedgewick.
The Glorious Hymn to Oppression (can be sung to the tune of the Communist Internationale)

Declare your oath of cringing fealty
Abase yourself before the lord.
Exchange your blood for crown and duty,
Devote your sons for pointless wars.
Dedicate your life to grinding labor
To earn your gravestones in the field.
Support your lord against your neighbors
He is the sword, you are the shield.
Year by year through your struggles
And daily as you wilt
The world is deaf to your troubles
And blind to alls your ills.
Serve your king with persistence
And reap your grand acclaim
Of scorn, contempt, indifference
The peasant's life be praised!
Later that day, the Falkovnian grain shipment came in. The Falkovnian outriders had been on double duty that day, and they had thwarted a massive attack from the Bec de Corbin gang, killing or capturing over fifty of their bandits, including their leader, Dale Reeve.

Evidently, the Dedrick Lacon connection was still reliably feeding information to the Falkovnian overlords back in Lekar.
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Re: Beginner campaign in Darkon (possibly one-shot)

Post by Zilfer »

Sorry this is unrelated to the posts but I wondered, is it still possibly just a one shot? xD
There's always something to lose.

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Re: Beginner campaign in Darkon (possibly one-shot)

Post by HuManBing »

I like the increasingly inaccurate title. It reminds me of the Douglas Adams "Trilogy in Five Parts" that the Hitchhiker's Guide books became. (Mostly Harmless was subtitled "The fifth book in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhikers Trilogy".)

I guess the thread's title also shows its success. What started off as me and three buddies around a table in late 2012 playing a one-shot later morphed into the biggest, longest, most-intricately-planned Ravenloft campaign I've ever done. :)

Traitor in the Camps (Meta discussion of group dynamics)
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Part of the campaign has hit unusual territory though. One of the players was given a chance to betray the others, and quite to my surprise they've been using it repeatedly. This initially led to them essentially spoiling the plot progress of the other characters arbitrarily, and eventually caused their character to become enemies of the others.

The damage was pretty profound, and at one point I had to take the player to one side and ask what they thought they were doing. Apparently it struck them as surprising - they genuinely had no idea that their actions were being so disruptive. But when the other players found out what was happening, they were extremely angry.

I don't like to impose ethical or moral codes on my players, because I like to let them explore the ethical space of the campaign. But I do draw the line at intentionally screwing over the fellow players at a table-side session. If everybody else has taken the time to find weekend availability, it's not okay for one thoughtless player to essentially veto everybody else's progress. I'm okay with the treachery, which I thought was good fun. I was not okay with the "wasting everybody's time at the table-side and essentially relying on the GM to run interference".

In the end, because the group had essentially become three-against-one (or more accurately, one-opposing-three secretly), I decided to clue in the other players (two of whom had suspicions as to what was going on), and we made a group decision to continue separately in solo missions. That way, if one player wanted to oppose the others, they could all make their moves without the tableside assumption of collaboration. And they wouldn't have cleared a weekend session just to get clobbered by a betrayal.

The campaign was fragmenting anyway, in terms of timetables, as one player has weekend work and we can't meet anymore. I'm now pursuing a solo-online method, where each PC has their own solo sidequest and I conduct that by IM and chat every so often. The players are agreed that they would like the betrayer's PC to return to the party, but they can't imagine how their loyalist PCs would ever accept the betrayer back in-character.

Part of the fault is probably mine for giving the player the option to betray, without discussing my expectations with the player beforehand. But I think it's reasonable to at least assume they wouldn't use it every time they could. After all, GMs give their players swords and spells in-game without having to tell them "now, now, don't go sticking your sword in the party cleric's neck because even though you can do it, you shouldn't necessarily".

I think I have a good, compelling redemption plotline. So we'll see. I expect a few months of solo work, and then all the players will reunite with multiple storylines resolved and a much greater idea of the general plot. As well as some important side quests finished.

I do still have a number of game session journals to post up through November 2013 and January 2013, before the betrayals began in earnest.
Also, in related news, LomboDot (my girlfriend) has finally joined the group in the solo sessions, with Alen's character. It's her first RPG experience so we're keeping it light.
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