It’s that time. Every year now I start the year with a list of games to theoretically finish with more higher priority games added as the year goes on while keeping track of what I actually finish. Then we see how it went at the end of the year.
This year’s list:
Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment (3DS) (started)
Shovel Knight: King of Cards (3DS)
Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past (3DS) (need to restart)
Dragon Quest VIII 3DS (3DS) (need to restart)
Ys: Memories of Celceta (PC, Steam) (started)
Octopath Traveler (Switch) (started)
Ys: The Oath in Felghana (PC, Steam) (started)
Ys Seven (PC, Steam)
Zwei: The Arges Adventure (PC, Steam)
Valkyria Chronicles 4 (Switch)
Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete (PS, emulated)
Lufia II (SNES, emulated)
Tokyo Xanadu eX+ (PC, Steam) (started)
Final Fantasy XII The Zodiac Age (Switch) (started)
Hollow Knight (PC, GOG) (started)
Pokemon Sword (Switch)
Okami HD (PC, Steam) (started)
Ni no Kuni Wrath of the White Witch (Switch)
Hades (PC, Steam)(started)
Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling (PC, Steam)
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (SNES, Switch) (started)
Mutazione (PC, Epic)
Chrono Cross (PS, emulated) (started)
Kentucky Route Zero (Switch)
Bastion (Switch) (replay)
Last Word (PC, Steam)
Final Fantasy XIII (PC, Steam) (started)
Super Mario RPG (SNES (classic mini))
Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga (GBA,emulated)
Röki (PC, Steam)
Spiritfarer (Switch)
Dragon Quest I (Switch)
Dragon Quest II (Switch)
Dragon Quest III (Switch)
The list originally stopped at Hades. You can see I did just swimmingly with the original list.
And now the games I finished this year:
Pokemon Sword (Switch)
Trails of Cold Steel II (3rd time) (PC, Steam)
Chrono Trigger (unknown number of times. lots) (SNES)
Ghost Trick (4th time) (DS)
Bastion (2nd time) (Switch)
Kentucky Route Zero (Switch)
Mutazione (PC, Epic)
The Legend of Heroes Zero no Kiseki (2nd time) (PC)
Shrug Island (PC, itch.io)
Jam and the Mystery of the Mysteriously Spooky Mansion (PC, itch.io)
Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling (PC, Steam)
Last Word (PC, Steam)
Mega Man X (finally!) (Switch, Legacy Collection)
Un pas Fragile (PC, itch.io)
Yi and the Thousand Moons (PC, itch.io)
ISLANDS: Non-places (PC, itch.io)
Ace Attorney Remastered (Switch)
Super Mario RPG (SNES)
Milkmaid of the Milkyway (PC, itch.io)
The Legend of Heroes Ao no Kiseki (2nd time) (PC)
Röki (PC, Steam)
Oxenfree (PC, itch.io)
Gris (3rd time) (PC, Steam)
Dragon Quest XI S (Switch)
Untitled Goose Game (Switch) (Co-op x2)
Spiritfarer (Switch)
Dragon Quest I (Switch)
Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga (GBA)
Dragon Quest II (Switch)
I am Dead (Switch)
Super Mario Odyssey (Switch)
Nelly Cootalot: Spoonbeaks Ahoy! (PC, itch.io)
The Curse of Monkey Island (PC) (umpteenth time)
The Haunted Island, a Frog Detective Game (PC, Steam)
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III (2nd time) (PC, Steam)
Dragon Quest III (Switch)
Got some great indies in and some games I’ve been meaning to play for some years but hadn’t gotten around to: Mega Man X, Mario RPG, Superstar Saga, to a lesser degree Mario Odyssey.
I also replayed Dragon Quest XI to play the Definitive Edition and due to that decided to go back and start playing the series from the start because while I had played parts of some of the previous games before I had only finished VIII, IX and XI. I managed to get the Switch ports of the first three games finished and now the DS ports await me for IV-VI.
Ok, if I’m going to keep proper DM records for D&D on this tumblr, I need to actually write them.
Being An Account of Game #1: In Which Several Youth Attend A Party, And Some Experimental Magic Has Less Than Optimal Results
[all game logs thus far]
The Setting: It is a Thursday night in the city of Karna Vi, called by many the last surviving bastion of the Trava Empire in Highnorth. In the mostly student-inhabited districts around the University Karnassa, scholars are working, resting, eating, hanging out--and having parties.
More excitingly, there’s a classics major party tonight. And it’s not just any classics majors. It’s the self-styled Young Pre-Glorians. In a society mostly built on a relatively even mix of human, gnome, and dwarf citizens, where humans are the unnecessarily tall people who don’t live nearly long enough to ever get really good at rulership or scholarship (though gods know you won’t find a more versatile, intense group of people in any species you can name), this little cluster of classics majors includes two humans, two tieflings, and a half-orc, all living in one slightly shabby student apartment. Every single one of them is going to be dead before they’re a hundred. Every single one of them is obsessed with figuring out how things worked at least 2000-4000 years ago. And they party like it.
Our NPC hosts for the evening include Peary (a bubblegum-pink tiefling who makes historically accurate bathtub gin, and reconstructs ancient crafting methods from diary fragments and scraps, and den-mothers all the rest of her roommates with constantly chipper affection); Athenasi (or Athen, a human cleric of the Church of Lost Things made entirely out of sticks and paleness, who buries himself in ancient records trying to reconstruct the specific rituals used to properly worship long-mislaid gods); Riva (an enormous half-orc sportsball player and also wizard who mostly only bothers using spells to light his bonfires and translate dead languages, intent on uncovering the distant origins of magic as written ritual); Lisha (a human who got briefly campus-notorious last year when she reconstructed an ancient power-binding ritual well enough to actually summon an archdemon who hasn’t been seen in three millennia and somewhat incidentally get herself warlock powers); and Wren (a dark-skinned, gray-haired tiefling who knows very nearly everything there is to know about the politics and power struggles spanning half a continent and seven centuries, 5,000 years ago, and does not particularly care to know anything else).
These five like hands-on experimentation and practical research. They’ve thrown historically-accurate parties in celebration of a dozen ancient forgotten holidays, with Peary’s bathtub gin to really make it work. There’s rumors about an invitational-only orgy last year. In short, their parties are the place to be if you’re the kind of nerd who likes to study hard and party harder. Which...does not quite describe our PCs, but it’s a fun party to be at anyway.
Marion the human paladin has spent enough afternoons pouring through ancient records with fellow church acolyte Athen that they can’t really turn down the invite, even if Athen’s insistence on “you need to talk to other live people more than once a week!” is ridiculous and hyperbolic anyway. Kevin the elf barbarian has been a cornerstone of the University sportsball team for ten years straight, and would never turn down a party invite from a teammate, let alone a party that looks as promising as this one. Kou the halfling bard, who spends so much time with the music-majors half the university forgets she isn’t one, got invited along with her bard friends to be the entertainment.
Gnome rogue Reigenleif, of course, is the beer supply. Reigenleif is always the beer supply.
It’s a Thursday night, and a four-bedroom apartment with attached rooftop deck is crowded full of graduate students eating cheese, drinking a dozen different kinds of alcohol, and arguing about history. Life is, for the moment, good.
The Hooks:
One by one, each of our PCs--vaguely familiar to one another, in a nodding-acquaintance sort of way, though nothing like the friends they’ll be by the end of the week, let alone the eventual end of this campaign--finds themselves tugged into conversation with an acquaintance.
First (in-game time, though we played these way out of order thanks to a handy d4), before the party even begins, Reigenleif heads down into Old Town to pick up some beer. It’s one neighborhood over from the district of ancient, pre-Imperial ruins and thousand-year-old buildings where the University and its denizens live, so most students don’t know to come this far for good, cheap beer in the first place. (Of course, even if they did they wouldn’t know to go where Reigenleif’s going.)
Her destination is a small bakery owned by two dwarven brothers and a sister. Out the front, they sell excellent bread, with a very nice additional line in cakes and cupcakes. Out the back, the middle dwarven brother Milosh acts as middle management for a smuggling ring that’s known in the right, quiet corners for its ability to get just about anything for anyone, given the right place. Reigenleif runs errands on his say-so on weekends, in between avoiding her own research and helping out with everybody else’s. Buying a few kegs of decent ale that hasn’t been marked up for tax, and then reselling it to thirsty college students, has basically been paying her rent for the past two years.
“How’s the family?” Milosh asks, and, “how’s that school thing going?”
“Eh,” says Reigenleif, and, “school’s school,” and, “parents still want me to go straight,” which isn’t even a pun because every player at the table is so generally disinterested in heteronormativity that it’s too easy to even bother with.
“You know,” Milosh says, “you really want to do more of this and less of that, could be Anna’s got a job for you.”
Anna’s not a real person--she’s been the code name for the leader of the smuggling ring for over a century, and given that her so-called last name literally means ‘human’, probably if there ever was a real Anna Cheloveko, she’s long dead now. An Anna job might be hard, but it’ll pay, and then some.
The job, Milosh explains, isn’t too complicated. There’s a certain package that needs to get to the city of Ormiras, and then past Ormiras a week or so’s travel up into the local mountains. The contents of the package don’t matter, but with the strictures on the large industrial teleportation circles downtown, it’s unlikely to pass through without comment. A University student, on the other hand, looking to do some research in the library of another University, could use one of their teleportation circles without anybody raising an eyebrow at their research materials, now, couldn’t they? Grab a few friends to head with you up into the mountains, and when you come back down, there’d definitely be a job waiting--back here in Karna Vi, or with some of Anna’s friends in Ormiras.
(Reigenleif and her player go on a digression about bags of holding, immovable rods, and other magical items attempting to pass through teleportation circles, and then the potential of measuring continental drift with immovable rods over a long enough period of time. Milosh raises his eyebrows and wonders if maybe Reigenleif should stick with those University-types after all. This is about to prove extremely indicative of Reigenleif’s entire character.)
With that offer in mind, Reigenleif heads off, six kegs of ale for thirsty college students in hand. This would be tricky for the average human, let alone a three-foot gnome, but Milosh lets her borrow the Bag of Holding for the job. It’s no real risk. He knows where Reigenleif lives. He knows where her parents live. She’s good for it.
Second, an hour or two into the swing of the party, Kevin and Riva are out on the roof deck supervising a cluster of increasingly tipsy party guests as they climb onto each others’ shoulders and attempt to joust with a couple of sportsball sticks. The pair of them are taller than any two gnomes stacked together. They are taller than nearly any gnome on top of any dwarf here. They are taller than most double-stacked dwarves. They make good referees.
They’re cleaning up some good-natured bruises and spilled beer when Kevin’s friend Poppy finds him. She’s a half-elf, and barely as tall as his bicep. She has dark curly hair, and smudged-up makeup, and she is already drunk.
“Kevin,” she says. “Kevin, Kevin, look. Can I ask you a favor? Can I beg you a favor? Please?”
Poppy is in Kevin’s cohort in the art history department--they started with the same incoming class, ten years ago. You don’t really graduate out of university, in the Nine Cities. You study until you get hired into a professorship or government position, or you run out of money, take a lesser job, and quit. Poppy’s dad is an elf, with plenty of resources to throw in her general direction. She hasn’t run out of money yet. Ten years is a lot longer for a half-elf like Poppy than it is for Kevin.
Poppy says, “if I don’t do something big, I will never get hired, ever. I will never amount to anything.” She says, “I know there are Glorian-era ruins on the Iris Peninsula that haven’t been found. I know there’s something there.” She says, “I know there are elven aesthetic motifs in Glorian-era Irissan fragments. Seven hundred years before elves ever made it to this continent. If I go, I can prove it. It will matter. It will mean something.”
“You grew up on Iris,” she says. “And you’re good at hitting things. Right?”
It’s been 512 years since the Elven Ascendancy broke their isolation and sailed forth into the world for the first time in six millennia. Five centuries since the very first elves set foot on the continent of Nokomoris. The Glorian Empire conquered half the Iris Peninsula, and was driven out, and collapsed, a thousand years ago. Not a single soul under Glorian rule had ever even heard of elves. And sure, elves live on the Iris Peninsula now--in the cities, like proper elves, in shining tall buildings with a lovely background view of the tangled wilderness where they never, ever go. Elvish art in Glorian-era ruins? It would upend everything anybody knew about history. It would be huge.
“It would probably make my parents really happy if I tried to do a big art history thing instead of focusing on sportsball so much,” Kevin muses. “Sure, I know people. We can probably put an expedition together. I bet my parents would be happy with that.”
(Kevin and his player do sound enthusiastic about the idea of getting some good research and publishable papers, which tells this DM a lot I didn’t already know about his priorities. Sure, he likes sportsball, but getting an actual job in art history would make his parents happy. Kevin says ‘that would probably make my parents happy’ like it’s the only long-term life goal he’s ever bothered assuming he probably needs.)
Third, Kou and her band take a set break.
Lio’s been switching between singing and rocking out on the zither, because even in a cluster of bards, Lio makes a good frontwoman. She’s a tall dwarf, dark hair, dark clothes, dark eyeliner, dark everything. She’s a star in the music department, a cornerstone of student activities committees, a manic pixie overachiever, a goth anarchist who knows exactly what’s wrong with the world today, the artificial urban-wilderness divide that’s been imposed on society in the new century, the problems of traditional religion and modern capitalism. She’s a level 3 bard. She’s got a townie boyfriend in one of the local guilds who doesn’t mind when she makes out with boys, girls, and everything else on offer at parties. She is, without question, the coolest person Kou knows.
Lio is drinking water and also taking a couple of shots of Peary’s bathtub liquor, and Kou is hanging out and watching the party, and Lio sighs.
“You want to get out of here?” she asks. “Not tonight, I mean--the whole University conspiracy. Just go.”
“Yes,” Kou says, instantly on board without a single detail. Her girlfriend has been gone for three weeks. Her body is ready. Her entire everything is ready. “When? Where’re we going?”
“We could totally make it as bandits out by Zakri,” Lio says. “You know they’ve been doing all kinds of weird construction stuff along the main road between the two seas, trying to restart the canal project, and the main road’s been in shambles for months. I have a total plan. We could camp out along one of the smaller roads and take out caravans, be bandits, live like queens. It’d be great.”
“Yes,” Kou says again. “Absolutely. I’m in. I know some healing stuff, and I have a pocketknife. Let’s do it.”
(Kou asks precisely zero questions about where, or how, or why, or even who, for the entire conversation. I knew this would be the case by halfway through session 0, and I am delighted to be proven right. Kou is ready for absolutely everything and absolutely nothing. It’s going to be great.)
“Hmm, but we’d probably need more people,” Lio muses, in that way people do when they remember all the practical reasons they’re mostly joking about quitting their job and running away to live in the woods. “Unless you know how to use a sword.”
“I know some people!” Kou says. “Let me see who I can talk to. We can totally do this.”
Fourth, Athen takes a break from circling around the party with an eye out for any serious injuries or alcohol poisoning risk to find Marion in the kitchen, eating cheese and arguing about historical probability and textual interpretation with Wren. They’re having just about as much fun as an antisocial math nerd with a special interest in history can have at a party full of academics who also have a special interest in history--which is kind of a lot, come to think of it.
The party is loud and boisterous, so they head to Athen’s tiny closet of a bedroom to chat. There’s something he needs to talk about, and Marion’s a good enough friend to listen.
“So you’ve been talking about doing some fieldwork,” Athen says. “Have you thought about going west?”
Athen’s family lives west of Karna Vi, in the wide highland plains of the Highnorth, where there’s nothing for miles but cattle, a few sheep, a lot of rye and oats, and the occasional potato field. In his grandfather’s day, they were part of the Trava Empire, and that was fine. Theoretically their village doesn’t belong to anyone but themselves, now, and they farm as best they can, and sell what surplus they can at the closest big trade-town to someone who carts it into Karna Vi and sells it to city bakers and and housewives and leatherworkers, and it’s fine too, mostly, except for when it’s not.
Lately it’s not, so much. The Uvencatra Empire in the western mountains has been making some motions towards marching eastward across the plains, and they’re eyeing the region Athen’s family is from next. He’s concerned. He’s really concerned. He’s maybe about to drop out of school concerned.
“You know how to fight things,” Athen says. “And maybe you’d find things over there, in the Western Orthodox church records. I can go home and help heal people, but I don’t know how to protect them.”
“Oh, I am not the right member of my family for this,” Marion frets, and Athen frowns.
“Would any of the rest of them care?” he asks.
“Point,” Marion agrees.
(They’ve got a quiet monotone the whole time, slow to assemble sentences except when they start contemplating the actual possibilities of research within the Uvencatra Orthodox churches, spilling out hypotheses and jargon like water. Marion’s player has degrees in anthropology. Marion cares about Athen’s problems, but has no real thoughts about them. Marion has thoughts about historical research.)
“Let me think about it,” Marion says, and the party goes on.
The Fight
By dawn, most of the party has cleared out, though not quite all of it. A couple of failed Con saves mean that Kou is dozing in a chair in the living room, not quite with it enough to notice the rest of the band leaving, and Marion is passed out cold in Athen’s bed alone. Reigenleif has spent most of the party hanging off to the side, watching people and occasionally scooping up anything that appears to maybe be a weapon that’s been carelessly left sitting around, tucking it into the Bag of Holding just to make sure this party doesn’t go sideways in a nasty way; she can’t leave until the kegs are given back over into her keeping, so she might as well help clean up.
Kevin, out on the deck, has not actually realized the party has ended yet. He’s only just beginning to notice the lack of people as the first rays of sunlight creep over the city, and a very loud bang sounds from the top of the roof.
It jolts Kou dozily awake and Marion tumbles onto the floor in an instant. Kevin and Reigenleif, already outside along with Riva, look up just in time to see the outlines of Wren and Lisha on the roof in the pale morning sun, alongside some billowing smoke and two cat-sized things skittering along the roof tiles in acid green.
Then Wren falls off the roof to the deck and takes so much damage in a ten-foot fall that her scrawny little NPC self ends up unconscious. Then combat begins.
There’s a flutter and a flurry as the quasits on the roof hiss at everyone and skitter away. Initiative is nobody’s friend, and fighting something ten feet above everyone’s head isn’t easy, but Reigenleif upends her entire bag of holding and sends a pile of belt knives, a couple of blunt-ended reproduction historical weapons, and a fancy letter opener skittering out over the desk, and hides behind a convenient barrel. Riva grabs a sportsball stick. Kou has enough movement to rush out onto the deck just in time to see Lisha fall; “Oh, fuck!” is now the official incantation for her Healing Word, and Wren is safe, although not very happy.
Kevin tries to intimidate the quasits, all six-foot-seven of burly elf growling directly at them, and it actually works on one. The intimidated quasit instantly turns into a bat and swoops off through an open window into the living room to Get Away. The other quasit, annoyed at the attempt, casts Fear on Kevin in retaliation. It is super effective.
Marion makes it out to the living room, wearing no armor but carrying the heaviest candlestick she could grab, just in time to see an acid-green bat swoop through the window and start destroying things. It’s very early and she is probably slightly hungover but also she’s a good researcher and knows what a quasit looks like, so she whacks it. It bites her, poison and all--make that definitely pretty hungover.
Athen made it outside around the same time as Kou, and has been trying to heal people who need it as Riva tries to whack at a tiny demon on his roof, Kevin attempts to cower behind a gnome, and Reigenleif and Kou both throw things. Kevin succeeds in a wisdom save after another round or two, and manages to do some good thwacking damage. The quasit turns into a foot-long centipede in an attempt to escape, and skitters along the wall through the door into the house, before Kou Cutting Words’s it to death.
Lisha tries to jump off the roof to get down and help, and sprains her ankle. Athen is already inside giving Marion a hand, and none of the PCs seem inclined to help.
Between Marion and Athen, the second quasit goes down relatively quickly. The first one has already disappeared into nothingness, and the second one follows soon behind. Marion lay-on-hands’es themself, and drinks some water, because they have utterly forgotten that quasits have venom at all and damn, this hangover. The nauseous feeling passes after a minute or so, anyway. Athen goes outside to heal Lisha, Peary appears from her own room wanting to know what the hell is going on out here, Kou is jumping between ‘I insulted it and it died and I’m real cool!’ and, ‘did my entire band just ditch me here because I fell asleep?’, and everything is equally as chaotic as it was in the middle of the fight, when the knock sounds on the door.
The Head of Campus Housing brought security with him, and he’s not happy.
The Aftermath
Marion pulls rank and some excellent persuasion checks to keep the entire set of Young Pre-Glorians from getting evicted right now, and everybody else in the room from being put on housing probation. Marion lives with their parents on the other side of the city, or, more accurately, in the library--housing probation doesn’t mean much to them, but it does matter to everyone else.
Lisha, apparently, was attempting to use the limnal nature of sunrise, sitting over a party that both was and was not a party any longer, with people below who were drunk, and dreaming, and no longer drunk, on a day of particular celestial configuration, to do some magic experimentation, because obviously. Wren wanted a familiar. Lisha could totally use a ritualistic setup to cast a spell she isn’t high enough level for and doesn’t actually know, and also alter it to bind to somebody that isn’t even her, and make it work. Maybe not today, but probably next time, right?
The PC’s are somewhat annoyed with Lisha, but also agree that the university just does not have enough ritual magic experimentation labs, and that really needs to be corrected. They also figure that, housing probation or no, it’s maybe not a bad time to get out of town for a bit. They’re good at fighting things together! They’ve got some options!
They toss some ideas around--Kou’s option involves banditry, and Marion’s pretty sure they’re not allowed to do that, but Reigenleif’s has, like, three weeks in the mountains, and that sounds pretty awful too. Athen and Poppy both need help, and they’re both friends--Kou doesn’t care where they go, and Reigenleif is up for whatever sounds interesting. Poppy’s research trip sounds like a good way to make the university like them, which after this display might be particularly useful.
In the end, the decision comes down to Marion, who’s happy to help people but is mostly only considering either of these treks as a road to more god-research, to help define the variables to determine the maximum number of gods the Church of Lost Things still has to discover. There’s a western orthodox church in the Uvencatra Empire, out past where Athen’s family lives, and they could have all sorts of records and knowledge that Marion doesn’t...but nobody knows what the hell is going on in the Iris Peninsula. The entire place is apparently a forest, and that means people don’t travel it much for some reason? It’s all sort of unclear and difficult to understand from this side of the continent. So what the heck, Poppy’s thing it is.
Poppy is somewhat taken aback to be woken up slightly hungover at 10 AM by Kevin and also a random human knocking on her dorm room door to tell her that yes, they and two other people she’s never met are in for her expedition, and also can they leave tomorrow please? But also sure. Why not. These things happen when you ask Kevin for help. She’ll talk to her advisor to push those expedition grant funds through, and they’ll leave on Monday. Maybe let’s have lunch or dinner this afternoon? After Kevin and Marion sleep?
Reigenleif, meanwhile, takes Kou along to return the bag of holding and empty kegs to Milosh, in the hopes that having a highly charismatic good-persuasion bard along might just increase their chances of persuading Milosh to let them keep the Bag of Holding for this journey. Little does she know that, while Kou is fun and delightful and good at persuasion, she’s also an awkward flailer who doesn’t entirely understand what they’re supposed to be convincing Milosh of in the first place, and has no proficiency in deception whatsoever.
The conversation stumbles and bobbles a bit, before Reigenleaf gets to the meat of the situation: they’re not going to Ormiras, but does Anna maybe need something delivered or picked up from another of the Nine Cities? Perhaps something on Iris? Like, say...
“Cloud Bay,” Reigenleif says, naming the only city on the Iris Peninsula she can remember at 7 AM on zero sleep, which is unfortunately not the same one Poppy mentioned to Kevin earlier.
“Cloud Bay?” Milosh says. “Shitty weather and elves? What’re you going there for?”
In an attempt to leverage her higher Deception score over Persuasion, Reigenleif starts to spin a relatively believable lie about engineering research and her own degree work. Unfortunately, she doesn’t roll particularly well. More fortunately, or perhaps more unfortunately still, Milosh doesn’t actually care ‘why Cloud Bay’, aside from as a rhetorical question, so it’s not particularly useful in any case.
“Look,” Milosh says. “Let me talk to Anna about Cloud Bay. Check back in tomorrow or Sunday, maybe we have a job for you there, maybe not. A’right?”
They snag a couple of muffins on the way out. Kou feels a little useless, but so be it. Marion crashes in Kevin’s room, since he just needs a corner to meditate in anyway, and everyone naps until the meet-with-Poppy time in the evening.
The Campaign Plan
Poppy is just a little taken aback at the new crew she seems to’ve acquired, but she’s ready to go and they’re game, so, sure. Let’s do this.
She elaborates a little on what she told Kevin, in some angles, and says less in others. The Glorian Empire, as some of the party know better than others, stretched out from here in Karna Vi across most of the Attiks Sea and around the continent. They sped the civilization in the Midlands, they spread the Eight Churches throughout the continent, they founded cities, they built roads. They founded Port Charé on the coast of the heavily-forested Iris Peninsula and began to build in, cutting trees and building roads and forts and towns as they went. Kera the Conqueror, famed emperor, oversaw the expansion across easily half of Iris, naming literally everything after himself as he went.
Iris was hard to conquer, and the Empire began to pull out not long after Kera died. They left ruins and roads, and the people of Port Charé, who’d lived in this city for two centuries at this point and were not about to move back to the other side of the sea, even if this was going to be the only bastion of civilization for a thousand miles. There was a working road to Ormiras. They’d manage.
As for those ruins, deep into Iris--who knows what’s there?
Sober and in front of three strangers, Poppy doesn’t say anything about pre-Elven Incursion elven aesthetics. It doesn’t really matter, because Kevin told everybody everything, but some things are just too historically improbable to admit you believe.
“So,” says Poppy. “Are you in? I can get grant funds and our travel paperwork Monday morning. We circle into Port Charé and follow the roads as far as they go. I have an old map, Imperial-era. We can find things nobody’s seen in hundreds of years.”
The party doesn’t need to ask each other. They’re in. They all know they’re in.
Six months on an archaeological expedition in a forest for four city kids, three of whom have never seen anything more than a single ten-acre orchard in their lives?
The IC campaign log of our wonderful Chronicles of Darkness mortals game, run by a good friend of mine for @darrelodin, @onadacora and myself.
Story 1: The Fortune Thief
Story 2: Deus Ex Machina
Interlude 1: The Camping Trip
Story 3: A Dream Play
Story 4: Ex Vulnere
Interlude 2: Grand Ballo
Story 5: Escape from New York
Interlude 3: A Wonderful Life
Story 6: A Cult Phenomenon
Interlude 4: The Chicago Fire
Interlude 5: The Crown of Arcane Knowledge
Pathfinder 2E [Tues] Quest For The Frozen Flame Log
Last nights session for my Pathfinder campaign had went on a lil sideplot dealing with Alva (Changeling Witch, level 1), who had been experiencing The Call in an attempt to Lure her to her Hag mother.*
* In Pathfinder, “the call” is supposed to happen once, and if you resist you are good, but the player wanted to make it a reoccurring element.
She had been lured off the path, something missed by the rest of the party, as they made their way through the forest. Eventually they had to backtrack and try to track her down. When they eventually found her, she was trudging slowly and methodically across an iced-over lake towards the waiting arms of a Frost Troll and some Ice Mephits sent by her Hag mother.
I had warned the player’s that this encounter would be EXTREMELY difficult, it was a 280 XP encounter all together, the plan was to have the mephits engage them, and hopefully enter a chase conflict with the very powerful Frost Troll, or if dealing combat to approach CAUTIOUSLY and understand it is way more powerful than they are.
Enter: Ice. Pathfinder Ice rules are BRUTAL. Or at least how I ran them, assuming RAW, that being said I will not be running them that way in the future, whether that is a house rule or playing them correctly now :P
ice slowed them down and caused enough issues, that by the time they’d managed to free Alva from her call (with a fire cantrip to the back (fire damage frees her, as her mother is a Winter Hag)), the Mephits had engaged, many of the party was stuck mostly immobilized on the ice and the troll had grabbed Alva and started moving away with her.
Things did not look good for my party or the encounter I mis-prepared for them 😂
ENTER PLAYER INGINUITY
Alva, knowing that the Troll has been instructed to return her alive, drew her dagger and put it to her own throat, telling him that her and her friends would be allowed to depart unimpeded or he would bring back nothing but a corpse to her mother.
This fantastic flare of ingenuity earned Alva’s player both a Hero Point and concluded the encounter as the Troll called the Mephits off and left with a warning that they’d be seeing him again.
