We are back again. This episode is a little shorter, as there is less introductions and what not. Hope you enjoy. Next session will be November 10th, so expect the next episode to be uploaded a little after that.
Continuing the adventure, the party bumbled through the depths of the Underdark. Sam had a magical vision of darkness and laughing, all the while she glowed faintly. Having faced off against a pack of Gnolls (in which Goyo introduced a Gnoll very personally to his fist, yelling "Welcome to Flavourtown!" Maude ended up covered in "Flavourtown.") and running low on supplies, the group reached an underground sea known as Darklake. Travelling along the lake, a school of humanoid-fish creatures ambushed them, but were dispatched of with ease. Afterwards, the group meets another fish-man who offers food and passage across the lake in turn for a job. He points us in the direction of a Drow outpost, Drow city, Deepdwarf city. With this information, Jalil can determine how to get to his hometown of Blingdenstone.
That job is to pose as prisoners to a cult that gives blood sacrifices to some "Deepfather," and kill their leader: the fish-man's daughter. We now had our berrings, and, with passage across the lake, we could make our way to the Deepgnome town of Blingdenstone.
Unfortunately, the ceremony goes sour: after the leader of the cult has been dispossed, the ground starts shaking. Out of the water rises a Kraken who begins grabbing the denizens of the town with giant tentacles and gobbling them up. Turns out the fish-cult was worshipping something a bit more present than a god. Our employer had vanished and we no longer had an opportunity to steal a boat, so it was back to the tunnels for us.
That's it for this week. We are still bumbling around in the dark. Admittedly, we haven't had a lot of opportunities to explore the story or the world to much, but there were a few instances where our DM weaved in a little bit of a few characters' stories. Hopefully we see more of that coming up: I love seeing how the characters interact and evolve when their own plots develop!
Just a reminder: November 10th is the next session. See you then!
Edit: I meant to post this a couple days ago but I forgot to hit post. Oops!
Alright, so our first meeting of our new campaign is this Saturday. Before that first summary, I’d like to give you my character background. So here it goes: Meet Goyo “Cookpot” Firehovel.
Eager to see the world, Goyo left home as early as he could and traveled to the dwarven lands. There he worked in various inns and taverns, learning the cook’s trade. Eventually, he worked his way into an upscale tavern where many dwarven nobles (where some wealth comes from questionable origins) congregated.
In an unfortunate series of events, a powerful dwarven noble was the target of a poisoning attempt. Framed for the assassination plot, Goyo was kidnapped, beaten, and left to be hunted by the bands of kobolds that lurked in the woods outside the city.
When a sect of Dragon-worshiping kobolds captured Goyo, he managed to strike a deal: offering his cooking services for his life. And so Goyo spent many months with the group, where he adopted the name “Cookpot” in order to keep a low profile in case allies of the noble are looking for him. In his time, Goyo learned their tongue, and was enthralled by tales of the silver dragon they worshiped.
After dedicating himself to their patron, the kobolds released him from his servitude. Now, Cookpot is searching the land for the den of the dragon, and for exotic recipes to fill a cookbook for a dragon-sized feast.
So our first session was tonight, and I’m excited to share the story that unfolded so far. I’m not sure how I’m going to title these, but I’ll try to have some sort of consistent tagging system so they are easy to find. I hope you enjoy it!
It started as a sharp sting, then the numbness, then the darkness.
We start the campaign, awaking in a dark cell, in an underground cavern. A band of drow slave-traders has “employed” us and will be selling us off in the coming days. Our things have been taken, leaving most of us down to our undergarments. Most of us being everyone except Goyo whose clothes are already dirt-stained rags that the guards decided he could just keep them. We are all captured at different times and so we have all spent different lengths locked up. This has provided some of us with little knickknacks: a pointed rock, a spider companion, a gold coin, ect.
By the time the final slave is brought in, there are eight of us in total: “Cookpot”/Goyo the male halfling (PC, thats me!); a female human called Maude (PC); a male tiefling (Who we will eventually call Byron, PC); a female aasimar called Sam (PC); a male aarakorca by the name of Bill (PC); a female dwarf called Eldith; a male deep gnome by the name of Jadil; and a sentient fungus, that Goyo befriends, called Stool.
Then the group is graced with the leader of the operation: some drow magic-user who introduces us to the way things will work down here: every couple of hours, a squad of guards will escort one of use outside the cell, we will be provided a job to do, and, when the job is done, we will be returned to the pen. Some of us are lucky: Goyo immediately offers his services as cook and lands the occupation (this isn’t his first time being captured, so he knew what to do... or maybe it was just the Stockholm syndrome kicking in after a week in the cave), while others were less fortunate: Bill was taken out to be tossed in the dirt for the amusement of the guards.
Bill, being used to open air, did not take to the cramped spaces very well and quickly became desperate to escape, even convincing Eldith to rush the door the next time the guards came so that we could make an attempt to break out.
Eventually, the party assembled a make-shift set of lock-picking tools out of a small piece of metal, and a spare fork that Goyo swiped from the kitchen. The tiefling confidently undid all of our shackles and even got the lock off of the door. This was just in time, as Bill and Eldith were about to start their desperate plan, and we were able to sneak up on the three guards overseeing the cells.
A fight broke out here, and we quickly dispatched the guards, but not before the last one alerted the rest of the facility of our plans. So we rushed to the storeroom and discovered all of our confiscated gear. As we were filling out of the storeroom, the guards were assembling on the other side of the ravine. Among them was the magic-using maiden in charge of the operation.
Here we had three options:
1) confront the swarm of guards, we were outnumbered two-to-one.
2) jump into the ravine, where a large net-like spiderweb would catch us 50 feet down.
3) return to our side of the ravine, cut the bridges, and try to find a way out farther down.
Ultimately, we decided on option three: it seemed the safest and we had already dispatched three guards on this side. So, after cutting the bridges to buy us time, we came across two more guards, who we made quick work of now that we had our weapons. The path led to a watchpost that overlooked a huge drop that we could not see the bottom of. Bill brought Stool to scout it out, and determined that, by tying the rope that we scavenged earlier, we could propel down the 200 feet to the bottom of the ravine, where a path led away from the prison-center. Bill left Stool at the bottom before returning to the top of the ravine.
Thanks to some convenient wild magic: Maude was able to levitate down to the bottom, carrying Jadil. Bill then ferried Cookpot, while Sam and the tiefling descended the rope while Eldith kept watch. Unfortunately, Sam lost her grip part way down, knocking the tiefling off. Bill found the two unconscious at the bottom and quickly brought them back with his cure wounds spell. After Eldith joined the rest of the group, Stool informed us that the guards were taking a lift to the base of the ravine and would be cutting us off from exploring in the other direction.
With our decision made for us, we rushed through the opening at the end of the ravine, traveled for a full day before stopping for some rest. Stool had pointed in the opposite direction, saying his village was back through the other end of the ravine, while Jadil felt he could point us in the direction of his own village once he got his bearings. Well, we couldn’t go back, so we trudged on forward through the maze of tunnels, hoping our captors would catch up.
Eventually, we came upon a large-fire-beetle nest that blocked the way. The dog-sized bugs were everywhere and very territorial. Luckily, the party dispatched most of them in order to pass through, using Maude’s sleep spell to lessen the workload. Goyo used one of their luminescent glands to leave some phallic graffiti for any pursuers who came across the nest.
Satisfied, the group continued on into the Underdark, searching for sanctuary, or a way out.
And that’s all for this week. We all enjoyed the session a lot, and it was a fun way to start a campaign instead of just meeting in a tavern or something. I really enjoyed beating things up with my cooking tools, and got some laughs out of the group for it.
Overall, though, I don’t think everyone got an opportunity to do something uniquely “their character”, but we were mostly focused on the problem at hand. Hopefully, next time, we will get a chance to see what makes each character unique, fun, and interesting. I’m hoping to do some short posts introducing (what I know) about each character as we learn about them, and updating the posts as we go along.
Our next session is scheduled for October 20th, so I’ll try to think of some things to post in the meantime.
Hope you enjoyed the start of our journey. If you have any suggestions for how I could make this more interesting, let me know! If you have any questions about the campaign, or the characters, feel free to ask and I’ll do my best to share what I know. The inbox is open for these reasons, but if you want to ask privately, so are my private messages.
