Summary of a campaign, Part 1
I’ve mentioned Angela’s D&D campaign here before. On Sunday, it reached a major turning-point… so I thought it might be a nice time for a campaign update/log/thing.
I’ve mentioned the game a few times, but I haven’t gone into much detail about it. I’m playing a Dwarf chef-turned-adventurer.
Here’s a synopsis of the campaign-so-far:
It begins, as many D&D campaigns that don’t start off in taverns do, in a prison. The PCs were all imprisoned for murders – murders they committed without forethought or reason. None of us understood why we’d killed someone. Our best guess was that we’d been enchanted. We escaped from the prison with a plan to find out what had happened. We later found out that the authorities covered up our escape and claimed to have executed us.
The PCs consisted of my dwarf, a half-orc scout (on the run from them orcish military which was engaged in skirmishes with the drow), an insane half-drow spirit shaman who grew up in the swamp and worships a (non-evil) death god, a leucistic kobold druid who has a strong belief in survival of the fittest, and a halfling rogue (imagine Belkar as a kender).
Through investigation, we found out that everyone killed had come into contact with some drow artifacts… and that the Wayfarer’s Guild (teleporters) was somehow connected to the whole thing. One of their members, Malik, who was connected to one of these artifacts (a statue of Golgo – a forgotten elvish, not drow, god) was moving out of the area. We impersonated movers and searched his place, picking up some clues.
Information on Golgo was limited. Part of this is that the elvish homeland was on another continent and Golgo hadn’t been actively worshipped anywhere for thousands of years. We did find out that Golgo was a god of plenty (wealth and fertility) who was – unlike most gods – native to the plane we were on. He was also tied somehow to Trazak, a god of famine. There was a legend in which Golgo went to various gods of death and disease seeking for them to cause mass destruction in order to prevent some catastrophe. Beyond that, we didn’t know much.
We also found out that the world we were on had a periodic flood every 2000 years or so… but the last one was skipped. As a result, poisons were slowly building up in freshwater ponds and lakes. Was this connected? (The answer? Yes.)
Adventurers were had. We dealt with goblins. We beat up a baby black dragon and took its lunch money. We found a strange hole in the air past which we could see an odd-looking landscape and some odder-looking people. We identified it, eventually, as a tiny hole into the Outlands… and it appeared to be stationary in our world and moving steadily in the Outlands. We found some hidden treasure.
One of the hidden treasures we found was, essentially, a will… that included, essentially, a claim check for a folding boat. We went to redeem it from the Mabon, an ancient (and occasionally senile) bronze dragon. The stupid halfling tried to rob him and got polymorphed into a canary. We decided that it was more pleasant and useful in that form.
Outside the dragon’s lair, we were confronted by Franklin, Malik’s best friend and fellow teleporter. He knew who we were and that we were supposed to have been executed… and he made it clear that Malik told him to take care of us. He trapped us in a forcecage (which put him at about 10 levels higher than us) and threatened us with burning hands. It was clear he didn’t actually want to hurt us… but that we were getting in the way of some important plans.
So… he teleported us away… very far away.
We ended up on a tropical island inhabited by peaceful squirrel people and normally-peaceful giant bee people. Unfortunately, there was another planar rift on this island… this one to Mechanus. Formians had come through and taken over the bee-people’s hive mind. (Side note: apparently when Angela began the campaign, Nick put in a request for Ant People and Bee People. I have not forgiven him.) The Formians were unintentionally killing off the bee people and destroying the island’s ecosystem (they insisted, for instance, in having the bee-people sort all of the island’s rocks). So – with the cooperation of a rebel-bee who was intentionally drugging itself with hallucinogens in order to maintain autonomy, we liberated a bee-queen larvae, fed it some royal jelly,used it to hack the hive-mind. Then we set some formians on fire.
We escaped on the folding boat, bribed a kraken with some salt pork, and met up with a really stupid paladin named Rogenvald. Rogenvald had, like us, been teleported south. He’d been teleported by a lich named Dobriel who had once been part of the Wayfarer’s Guild. Rogenvald thought he was responsible for a ghoul plague (which we’d heard about in goblin lands). We reluctantly decided to team up with Rogenvald to talk to this lich… who lived on the edge of an enormous wild magic zone.
Somewhere around this time, the player of the halfling (who wasn’t a canary any longer) moved to California.
