Labour disputes in a lumber town lead an avaricious sawmill owner into a head on conflict with a grove of dryads
A dead man dressed like the king of a past era points the party to investigate a derelict playhouse staffed by puppets and hungry spirits.
Hoping only to save people from the horrors of war, a well meaning artificer builds a clockwork army that's poised to go rogue upon it's debut
Buffeted by an unnatural fog, the denizens of a flying city throw an inventors' fair to keep everyone's spirits up.
Unlike a lot of my arc sized adventures which tend to progress in a strictly linear fashion, I decided to try my hand at creating something more nebulous for a more open world style of campaign.
You could start these adventures in any order, and whether your party is your classic bunch of wandering dogooders guarding a caravan, a gaggle of thieves in the province's capital looking to loot a creepy building, or a group of crime solving sleuths,there's a way to get them tangled in this disastrous chain of events.
Endgame: Once the machines start going rogue, it'll be all too easy for the party and their allies to throw blame at the toymaker, imagine this is all part of some plan to conquer the territory while he sits safely in his flying town. To put an end to things, they'll need to improvise a means of returning to Thopperton, possibly having tfight past the legions of clockwork soldiers in the process. Once there, they'll find Gleebringer sealed inside his laboritory by his own creations, possessed by the dryads who cursed him and his industry.
DM: You all did really well and I’m really proud of you.
Tati (playing Hanako): I’m still shaken from Therak calling out our names. How did he know so much about us? We never met him before.
DM: After you got Rarth to spy on Esme, she made him right away. She brought him in from day one, got him to spill the beans, and had been updating Therak with everything she knew about you and your movements since she met you.
Tati: Son of a bitch.
Adam: Damn it, Rarth! So he wasn’t even working for Therak from the start, he switched sides!
Hamish (playing Thaddeus): So Therak knew everything up until Esme died? Did he know we were hunting generals?
DM: Yup.
Hamish: Shiiit.
Tati: Wait, Esme knew we were luring her out to kill her?
DM: She did. That’s why she was so cocky.
Tati: Holy shit! No wonder she was so smug. Still... she’s dead now. We won.
So me and my friend were messing around in class with Photoshop and this happend. I came up with the "Just Druitt" Also the wrestler guy is The Undertaker ;0.
Settlement: Kaelvalon, Throne of the Once and Never King
Artsource 1 Artsource 2
Despite it’s dusty summers, muddy winters, and reputation for being a brutish backwater among other inhabitants of the kingdom, the rugged province of Drigveria holds a beauty and dignity all its own. This is no better exemplified by the province’s capital of Kaelvalon, which presides over the surrounding wilderness like a gemstone emerging from course rock.
Built as a safehold during an age of monsters and warlords by the hero Kaelrik, this sturdy bastion and the town that surrounds it is the best place in the badlands for a group of adventurers to find work, shelter, and a few homey comforts before setting out on their next expedition.
Who’s Hiring:
Increasing dangers on the road lead a pair of ambitious merchants to hire the party as escorts, bringing them into conflict with the corrupt soldiers who’re supposed to be in charge of keeping the roads safe.
Early in their travels the party will meet a royal surveyor looking to explore the rugged terrain of the province’s wilds. A good friend to have, if you don’t mind the espionage he’s doing on the side.
An ambitious noble wants the party to search the skeleton of a titanic dragon to find the fabled weapon that killed it. He’ll pay well, and absolutely won’t betray them.
While visiting the market the party see an acolyte of the goddess Istus telling fortunes, when she divines for them, she demands they make pilgrimage to a temple in the mountains, a temple it’s rumoured to be impossible to reach.
Rumours of arcane artifacts lead the party to an isolated orcish village built in a crumbled wizard’s tower. To win their favour, the party must investigate why one of their traders has gone missing in human lands.
The ruler of Kaelvalon, the Marquess Talmis Younge, has a problem. Or rather, three problems that are going to make eachother infinitely worse. The first is that she’s trapped in a loveless marriage to a man named Selvin who she dare not divorce for fear of angering some of her most vital bannermen. The second is that she’s having an affair with an orc named Irgyr, who happens to be one of the clan leaders of her people’s traditional enemies. The third is that after years of “diplomatic meetings” with the clan leader, she’s fallen pregnant with her lover’s child, and the due date is approaching. She doesn’t want to give up the child, but giving birth to a halforc out of wedlock will be all the fodder Selvin needs to raise support and oust her from power. Perhaps the party could be convinced to look into her husband’s dealings, if they can expose or fabricate his involvement in some kind of treason or illegality, she’ll be able to break from him before shit hits the fan.
From the statue in the town square to the toasts still raised in his name, the legacy of the hero Kaelrik’s looms large in the heart of Drigveria’s people even centuries after his death. Once merely a wandering adventuer, Kaelrik’s dauntless defence of the innocent in an age of war saw him hailed as a hero and later crowned as king of a fledgeling realm.
All legends must end though, and after defeating warlords, wizards, and the challenges of the wilderness itself, Kaelrik gave his life plunging into an ancient dragon’s maw to impale its heart upon his blade.
Or at least, this time he did.
Beyond his own bravery and skill, one of the keys to Kaelrik’s success was his relationship with a woman named Nyramie, an oracle of Istus: goddess of fate. What began with duty and fellowship blossomed into love, and each time Kaelrik went into battle he would act upon Nyramie’s divinations, however impossible they might seem, to seek the best outcome for the people they protected.
The last time he came to her, Nyramie wept. The goddess had revealed to her Kaelrik’s ultimate fate and the oracle broke, at once faithful to her patron’s plan and raging at the betrayal, the years of hardship and sacrifice and the future they had hoped to share all snatched away by divine edict. Contradiciton met miraculous power and Nyramie’s heartbreak fractured time; one outcome where she stayed silent and left Kaelrik to his fate, and another where she forged a destiny defying artifact in the form of a jagged red crystal. While holding it Kaelrik would be able to see all possibilities that led toward his victory, and would be able to survive his clash with the otherwise invincible wyrm.
What Nyramine could have never predicted was what would happen to Kaelrik once untethered from his fate and given a tool that would provide such easy answers. His victories mounted and his kingdom spread, as he became a warlord to rival and then exceed any of those he’d fought. A desperate fight for survival turned into a quest for supremacy, and when the borders of his dominion were secure, Kaelrik’s ambitions turned intward. He was as fearsome a king as he was a hero, and he ruled for centuries thanks to his elven blood and Nyramie’s gift, becoming crueler as time and necessity hardened his heart.
Eventually his subjects had enough, the outer reaches of his kingdom rising in rebelion and descending upon his capital of Kaelvalon with such force that there was no possibility for Kaelrik or his loyalists could fight his way out. No possibility, save the one the crystal showed him where he used its power to pass across the divide of time, to the fork where he had never established his kingdom. It required great and terrible sacrifice, but he managed it… and at some pivotal moment, Kaelrik the once and never king will emerge into the province of Drigveria through a crimson gate along with his legion, and will set about building his kingdom anew.
Future Adventures:
Chronal anomalies will begin popping up in the prelude to Kaelrik’s arrival. Strange red lighting storms, artifacts from the other timeline drifting through, to say nothing of the various extraplanear entities that might be attracted by such disturbances.
Kaelrik’s emergence happens shortly after Talmis has given birth to her child, posing a direct threat to her legitimacy as a ruler and giving her detractors one HELL of a symbol to rally around. The once and never king is all too happy to embrace these new supporters, overjoyed to find a populace that adores him the same way they adored his younger self. Add to this his distrust of the orcs of Felstar’s Faultering, who turned out to be one of the factions that rebelled against him first.
To defeat Kaelrik, the party will need to lay their hands on the presentworld mirror of his objects of power: his crown ( in Talmis’s possession), his sword (lost in the dragon’s skeleton), and his crystal (buried in the heart of the impossible to reach temple of Istus). When these items are assembled not only will they give the party an edge in combat against him, but they will also (at the right hour, we’re in full prophecy territory here) summon the ghost of Sydagul, the dragon that was to be Kaelrik’s doom in the first place. Queue the party fighting on top of a castle against an extratemporal tyrant while a skeletal dragon the size of a mountain bears down on them.
If you’re considering what to do for your next adventure arc, consider having all the temporal shenanigans unleashed by Kaelrik’s meddling attract the cannibalistic god of entropy, who’s cult is liable to start popping up in those continuity-orphaned soldiers who’ll flee to the hinterlands when their boss bites the dust.
DM: Rynnura tells the hundred soldiers she has with her to stand down and introduces the two nobles with her, representatives of the noble houses of Gold and Silver. She invites you to sit down and discuss.
Hanako (kitsune bard): We tell her the whole story, right from when we first heard about Therak and saw the wanted posters, to when we came to Shibanah and recognised Esme, to hunting down the generals and ending up in Darratar. I even pull the bodies of each of the generals out of the bag of holding as they come up in the story.
DM: The nobles are vaguely disgusted.
Hanako: Fair enough. I finish with killing Therak and tearing down the Court of the Rat King, but I tell them that Therak’s body was destroyed by a stray fireball and I don’t mention Damaris at all.
DM: They seem to accept this, especially with your rather gruesome pieces of evidence and the chained thri-kreen you’re handing over.
And with this final session, the latest arc of The Leeching Wastes has come to an end. I'll be taking a break for a while as one of my players takes over the GM's seat for a while, to run an arc of his own. Which I'll write about instead of this game.
After five sessions, which feels like both more and less time than I expected, we’ve wrapped up the second arc of my The Leeching Wastes campaign. The first arc involved fleeing from a home that was directly in the path of a horrible monster in hope of finding a new, safer place to call home and the second arc has been all about settling into this new home while dealing with some of the…
