[PF] GM Campaign Journal: Edrigar Mafia

[Sillycomic]

This is somewhat of a journal for my Evil Mafia campaign. I’m also writing this down to store my own thoughts in one place as well as asking for specific advice on what to throw at my players. They have asked for something pretty complex and I want to make sure that I give it to them in spades.

So if there’s anything you see here that you like or want to expand on let me know. Challenges or situations that would be cool for the players to go through or criticism about the game and concept are welcome.

I guess I should start at the beginning.

If anyone happens to be playing in a Mafia style evil Pathfinder game in Oregon, please stop reading right now!

The concept:
My group had just gotten together after Christmas break and things began getting hectic for our GM. So I offered to run an interim game for a few sessions, mostly just fun stuff until we can get back to our serious adventure. Everyone was happy and on board with this idea.

So, I busted out a few fun and simple adventures that wouldn’t take me too long to whip up. Mostly it came down to an evil campaign centered on a mafia style theme or a horror campaign centered on an apocalypse theme. While both sounded intriguing, they ultimately went for the evil campaign.

This was good, but I had some ground rules.

1. Kid and wife appropriate. While the game itself is played with a bunch of 20 and 30 something males, we play it in a player’s house with his wife and kids in ear shot. So they can usually hear what’s going on in our game (and on occasion the kids will join in when we’re destroying a dragon or something like that) So it is important that no one make an evil character with the concept of rape or child murder or something like that in mind. We agreed on a PG-13 type of evil campaign.

2. No Chaotic Stupid. I went over this. Don’t think because this is an
evil campaign that it’s OK to just go out and randomly start killing commoners for no reason. This will result in many people; good guys, bad guys and monsters tracking you down and destroying you in a most triumphant way. This is a mafia type of game, so imagine being someone in the Mafia. You can be a cold hearted killer in the mafia but they are usually smart and out for money as well as a desire for death.

3. PVP. We all talked about this and agreed that at some point characters might have to fight and kill each other. People agreed to this so long as their characters had a good reason in the game to do so. No killing the barbarian because he got a shiny sword.

So with those simple rules in mind I sat down with my group and started asking them what they wanted to see in a Mafia style evil campaign. Their answers were pretty shocking.

They wanted lots of role playing potential. Being hired to kill people and strong arming businesses for money is all fine and dandy, but they wanted to have situations in the game where there was no straight answer. They were interested in playing with moral dilemmas in the game, and having complex situations set up where there might be pain and loss no matter what the players decided to do.

One person even said he would love to have a no-win scenario in the game at some point. Others agreed. I was beside myself as I wrote all of this down. My players were specifically asking me to run a Xanatos gambit? Wow. How wonderful!

Also inter party conflicts. Not everyone needs to have the same goals in the game. Getting money and power within the mob would be a main goal for all characters, but they could each have side goals which were not always parallel and even sometimes conflicting with other party members.

I agreed with that.

I told them to roll up level 3 Pathfinder characters with standard WBL. As they did this I started coming up with the Background for an ancient Chicago style city for them to play in.


Background of Edrigar:
Edrigar is a large city located off the coast of the Heral Sea. It is a bustling port town that deals with lots of trade. The city itself is laid out into three sections. The first section is the Slums. This is mostly docks, warehouses and wholesale stores and has the ghetto areas of town. The second section is the Suburb; restaurants, nightclubs, general stores as well as decent housing and the like. The last section is the Hills. This has the temple district, all local government, and a good majority of the city’s rich people. Their mansions overlook the rest of the city.

There is no mayor, but the town is run by a council of three. Humans are a majority of the population but that is not by much. The city itself is a melting pot of races. Every race has pretty decent numbers in this town; there is even a gnoll community down in the docks.

About ten years ago trade started booming in this town, as well as organized crime. The council didn’t take this lightly. They destroyed the thieves’ guild in the city and made alcohol, gambling and other such sins illegal.

With the thieves guild gone, small mafia families began rising up and filling the niche for people’s personal vices. They say prohibition was the best thing that ever happened to alcohol and they were right. If you can set up a decent front and keep bribing the cops you can make a lot of money here.

(so, think 1920’s Chicago)

At the moment there are a scattering of small “families” throughout the city. Only 3 major mobs are known. The other ones are either very secretive or just not big enough to be known yet.

The first is called the Ravens. They consist mostly of rogues, pickpockets and cat burglars. They work in the better parts of town. Their numbers are unknown.

The second is called The Brothers. It’s named because the leaders of this family are three half orc brothers. They work mostly down on the docks. These are big brute thugs. Dwarves, minotaurs and half orcs are most common in their ranks. They haven’t been doing too much lately, but it’s said they got about 100 members.

The last one is called the Felons, because so many of them have been to jail. They are trying to take over the merchant part of town by any means necessary. Rumor has it they’ve got about 60 members.

I told them they would start out with the Felons group. They are all being recruited by a Made Man to run a part of town on their own.

So after sending all of my players this information I got back some very specific character concepts and goals, which made me realize almost accidentally that each member should have some secret alliance that would be devastating if the other players or the mob ever found out.

We emailed back and forth about backstory and secrets and this is the end result.

Dramatis Personae:

1. The Chemist: Deceased

He is playing a human male rogue who wants to specialize in poisons and drugs. He wants to play an assassin expert that deals with poisons, as well as being a drug manufacturer inside of the city.

His secret: He wants to eventually take over the drug trade in town.

This is bad because the drug trade is already run by someone called the Candyman. People have tried to set up their own business, but every time they do Candyman shuts them down. He has a couple of deals set up with the local mobs around town, whether or not they can distribute his wares. (Basically, he’s the owner and if you wanna sell drugs in town you work as a franchise and he takes a cut of profits)

So anyone dealing drugs in town either works under Candyman or is freelancing and trying to build up their own drug empire. At the moment The Chemist is working for Candyman, but he plans on eventually taking over.

At the moment this results in The Chemist’s profits being extremely limited. Candyman takes a big cut of his profits because he can (30 percent). The mob takes another cut (15 percent). So this means the more money he’s making the more he’s giving away to others.

If anyone ever finds out the Chemist’s ultimate goal they will kill him.

Ideas:

Rival competitors cutting into profits.

A huge shipment of drugs is stolen from Candyman and the Chemist is in charge of finding them and punishing those that did it.

Taking over Candyman’s business

New Character: The Snitch

This is a female drow Magus with a fierce loyalty to The Felons, most importantly Allore. His character concept is very similar to the Mole's, in that he is working undercover for Allore.

His job is to spy on everyone and make sure they are up and up with Allore, not lying, skimming from the top or making sure that any side businesses happen without Allore's cut in the money. So long as everyone remains loyal and profitable, there's nothing to worry about.

If anyone ever finds out that he is a snitch, they will kill him.

2. The Faust: Deceased
He is playing a human male Anti-Paladin who wants to sell his soul to the devil in order to get awesome powers in the game. When he said this everyone thought it was a joke, but as a GM I only smiled and said, “Ok.”

Now he works for a secret cult in the city called the Order of Vella. They are a group that worships an old devil god known as Vella and regularly use devils to obtain power. He is an initiate at the moment within this cult.

In order to prove himself the clerics of this cult gave him a sword with the power to steal souls. He basically plunges his sword into a dying person (coup de grace) and the sword takes the soul. The sword itself grows in power with the more souls it has.

I thought this would be a fun way for him to gain power and play with a new toy.

Once he's proven himself in the ranks of this cult they will let him speak with a powerful devil that can give him ultimate power at the expense of his soul.

If anyone finds out about him being in this cult, they will kill him.

Ideas: The sword is actually an artifact that will wake up as more souls are fueled into him. I want to make him a chaotic sword that only wishes for more souls, tempting the anti-paladin at inopportune times.

Faust is in charge of keeping track of an imp as part of his initiation. There’s lots of fun in that.

New Character: The Harvester
He is now playing a human druid with a lion shaman focus. His primary goal in the game is to destroy all of Edrigar and purge the the place of people because as he puts it, people are bad.

He grew up in Edrigar and saw his parents killed. Since then he ran away and grew up with druids far away from the city. He has since come back and spent a few months in the sewers building a lair and forming his plan.

While he is a lion shaman druid he finds an affinity for plants and wishes to use large carnivorous plants in his ultimate destruction of Edrigar.

If anyone finds out about his anarchy type plans, they will kill him.


3. The Witch: Deceased
He is playing a human female witch who wants to start her own coven within the city.

She was taken from her family by a Night Hag at a very young age. As she grew up she learned the ways of magic and brutality from this hideous mentor.

I looked up Night Hag in the Monster manual, only knowing them in passing and read this: Terrifying murderesses and greedy soul brokers, night hags prey upon mortals while they're most vulnerable. Preferring to kill their prey slowly, haunting their dreams night after night, these hags trap the tormented souls of their victims within dark gems so they might be sold in the infernal markets of the outer planes.

So, I gave the witch a gem that allows him to go into the dreams of people and steal their souls. His job is to give his Night Hag mentor a few souls a month so she can sell them on the infernal markets.

This was just a happy coincidence that the Witch’s back story matches so well with the Faust’s. I didn’t plan on it, but they both came to me with these kinds of concepts. I was happy to oblige them both.

If anyone finds out the Witch’s true loyalties are to the Night Hag or that he randomly steals souls for trade (and isn’t giving the mob its fair cut) they will kill him.


Ideas: The Night Hag wants a Nightmare mount and asks the Witch to capture one for him.

Night Hag needs random spell components?

New Character: Rascal
He is now playing a Svirfneblin rogue with a poison focus. His back story is simple. He grew up with his family until a group of dwarves decided to kill them all. He was out during the raid and when he got back decided that every single dwarf who killed his family needed to die.

Currently he is looking for the last two of these dwarves in Edrigar. He also is pretty good at brewing, or so I am told.

This is a bit of a problem because this is the first character concept that 1. isn't really evil and 2. doesn't really have a big secret.

He wants to jump into the brewing game in Edrigar, so there's something I can work on. But other than that he's just a chaotic neutral character hell bent on revenge and picking pockets.

4. The Rat
This is by far my favorite concept. This is the Rat. He is playing an elf male wizard. He is the undercover policeman trying to work his way up the mob ranks so that he can topple the entire organization down from the inside.

He worked up a brilliant back story where his entire family was devastated by the mob, father is dead, mother and sister are missing somewhere and he is trying to seek justice (revenge) by destroying everything the mob stands for.

I basically set this up like the Departed. He only answers to 2 people in the police department, no one else in the police know he’s working for them. His job is to find out who the top bosses are and help organize busts so that it doesn’t look like there is someone on the inside.

If anyone finds out the Rat is a rat, they will kill him. (and resurrect him and kill him again)

Ideas: Some close friend of his in the mafia finding out his secret.

The group at some point will be hired to track down and kill his superior knowing that he is working to actively bust up the mafia.

5. The Mole: Deceased
This concept was one I thought of last, but it’s one of my favorite within the group. The mole is a dwarven male monk who has strong ties to the mafia family. Since the whole point of this concept is that the Mafia is bringing on more people, they want to make sure these people are loyal and they have no ulterior motives or loyalties.

The Mole’s job is to make sure everyone is working towards the ultimate goal of making sure everything runs smoothly. He’s supposed to keep an eye on everything, and gather as much information about people as possible. If people are skimming off the top or have side businesses and aren’t giving the bosses a fair cut they want to know about it.

The mafia also wants personal information. Bank accounts, families whereabouts, addresses, strange friendships, anything he can find. This is valuable information. You think twice about stealing from the mafia if they know where your sister lives.

If he finds anyone who turns out to be disloyal and brings their head to the family, he gets a bounty of 10,000 gold.

If anyone finds out he’s a mole, they will probably kill him, especially if they find this out because he knows one of their secrets.

Ideas: Let him find out that there’s a police department who put someone undercover in the mob. He can know the people in the department and possibly get them to talk?

New character: Dexter also Deceased.
He is playing a male dhampir inquisitor. He is an assassin and enforcer for the mob who enjoys killing moreso than anyone else. He is a serial killer with a desire to one day become a true vampire.

Currently he is in search of a vampire clan here in the city that he can become a part of. He is killing and leaving a trademark on his victims for different people to find, in the hopes of drawing out these unique undead.

If anyone ever found out his true loyalties, they would kill him.

New New Character concept: Nephew
Now he is playing a human oracle who wishes to kill Allore.

Hell bent on revenge, he has decided to go to a small village with distance relatives of the Felon leader, killed one of them and took his place. Now he comes to the city claiming to be this long lost relative of Allore's, hoping to get close enough to the mafia leader so that he can murder him.

I do like this character concept a lot. Nothing thrills me more than senseless revenge on a character that so many other characters like and depend on.

Of course if anyone finds out about this they will kill him

Now everyone has an excuse to work together and everyone has side goals which don’t always mesh and sometimes outright contradict each other.

I told them while the mafia may have jobs and errands for them to do, most of the game will be them coming up with different crimes or schemes in order to make money. I think this is fun for them because they get to plan half of the adventures in the game themselves while I only have to sit back and have the world react to whatever it is they're doing.

So, with all of this in mind we had our first session last Tuesday, and let me tell you it was an amazing game. One of the best I’ve ever run in my entire life. I will write up the summary as soon as I can.

[balistafreak]

If anyone finds out... they will kill him.

I like your style, mate. :smallamused:

[Sillycomic]

First Session:

Allore is a made man in the Felons. He has invited all of the characters to a restaurant he owns to talk about an interesting business offer he has for them. So the campaign begins with them all at a restaurant looking at each other.

I asked each character to come up with random rumors that the other character would know of them and their exploits. I said the rumors don’t have to be true, the characters could be making up false rumors on the streets if they so wish.

So here’s what they come up with.

The Chemist: His name is Kane. He is an assassin. His specialty is poisons. He also moonlights as a male prostitute.

The Faust: His name is Patty. He is a hitman. And he’s been known to disguise himself as paladins or clerics from various religions.

The Witch: Her name is Mikaela. She is an Intimidator. She wears lots of jewelry and has several deformed religious symbols around her neck.

The Rat: His name is Valencio. He is an assassin. He is looking to increase power and standing, but extremely loyal.

The Mole: His name is Itso. He is an Enforcer. He is known as a monk, but wears very fancy and elegant clothing. Has been known to be extravagant, which is not typical for a monk.

The offer:

So after everyone gets together and shares some backstory, one of the underbosses for Allore comes over to the table. His name is Peter. He owns this restaurant. He tells them what’s going on.

Allore wants to franchise them out to take over more territory in the Suburb areas. They will be given a few blocks of their own as territory to see if they can make money off of it. While Allore gets a cut in profits from whatever they do there, the group is basically able to do whatever they want in terms of schemes and crimes.

So the party is given 2 days to go and see if this place can make money for the mob. The party agrees and starts asking questions about the area: police presence, rival gangs, the kind of shops that are there.

While this area used to have some Brothers presence (rival gang) the last few months the Brothers haven’t shown any activity whatsoever.

Since it’s a new area there’s not much to tell them, but I do let them know there’s some businesses there including a bank, general store, winery, and a very successful and well known bed and breakfast known as “Bed & Biscuits” that is basically a whorehouse.

Bed & Biscuits
After some discussion the group decides they want to start off by setting up protection for most of these shops around the area. They’re going to go to Bed & Biscuits and try to get a piece of that action.

They head into the area around 9 at night. The place is mostly shops and some homes, so the nightlife is kinda dead. They notice only one dwarf in a yellow shirt walking around. The only places open this late are the winery and of course the whorehouse.

By the time they get to the B&B the Faust pipes up why didn’t they go and shake down the dwarf in the yellow shirt for some protection money? The party agrees, but by then he’s already out of sight down the street.

At the B&B they get a nice booth and share in some moonshine. They ask to see the Madam and Hazel, an enticing half elf with a black eye, sits down with them. They explain they’re here to inquire about running protection. Hazel says they were robbed just the other day and would love some protection to help with the other girls and their safety.

They start asking about who robbed the B&B, and I only have to give them one detail; the leader was a dwarf wearing a yellow shirt!

They also ask the Madam what to do with the dwarf once they catch him. She replies simply, “Bring me his tongue.”

That’s fine with them. So, it’s back outside and on the trail of a lonely dwarf that likes springtime colors!

Dwarf in a Yellow Shirt

They go back to where they saw the dwarf last. This street has a few closed shops, but one of the shops is partially burned down and looks abandoned, except for a light coming from a second story window. The Faust quickly scales the side of the building and looks inside. Sure enough there’s the dwarf playing some cards with a few friends.

Downstairs everything is boarded up except for the main doors.

The group decides to split up. Half will go into this place downstairs and the other half will take the guys upstairs. Ok. Initiative time.

Downstairs there’s 4 guys who are doing various minion things such as counting money and drinking or just sitting in a corner brooding in the darkness. They’re all surprised when the doors fling open and people start running in.

Upstairs the Faust and Mole make short work of the bad guys. Downstairs there’s enough spells being cast to make the fourth of July look boring. Monsters being Summoned, Obscuring Mist, the witch is giving evil hexes and cackling everywhere she goes.

When there was only 2 bad guys left the Chemist tells one of them to give up and drop his weapon.

Looking at the carnage around him, he thinks the smart thing to do is to drop his weapon and sit down. His friend does the same thing.

Upstairs the Faust sees 3 dying bodies and decides this is a perfect time to start collecting souls. So I take the Faust and the Mole aside from the other players and describe what happened.

The Faust drops his weapon down into the chest of each person. The sword glows a bright blue and takes whatever essence they had. The Mole watched all of this in silence. I told Faust that his weapon is now a +1.

Downstairs the Witch decides the same thing. She goes to one of the still living bad guys, slits his throat and uses her gem to take the guy’s soul. She does this with a sleight of hand, palming the gem so the other character’s don’t see. There’s no light show with the gem, the person just dies and his soul is captured. No one in the room notices anything odd except that the Witch killed someone for no reason.

The Rat is angry and moves over to protect the last survivor, but the Witch doesn’t make any threatening move to the only survivor.

They bring down Yellow Shirt and cut his tongue out. Then they ask the last person left alive where the money is. He points to one of the tables and there’s a sack of money. Over 200 gold.

Then they start the questioning.

He tells them his name is Umi. He was just following orders from Yellow Shirt. They weren’t part of any gang, just some guys who thought they were tough and decided to steal some money. He knows about the brother’s, but aren’t sure why they don’t cover this ground anymore.

So the party decides to use Umi as a personal messenger. Umi now works for them. His job is to go around and tell everyone this area now belongs to them, and they’re taking over. Umi agrees heartily (he is literally being told what to do as his friends are dead all around him) and runs outside.

The Witch has her familiar follow Umi around to make sure he does what he’s supposed to. And he does.

First Party Conflict!

Now we come to the first moral dilemma between the group: what to do with the money.

This is over 200 gold we’re talking about. They’re only 3rd level characters, so even split 5 ways this is still a nice chunk of change. Right away the Rat and the Chemist both want to give the money back to Hazel. They want this to be a sign of good faith. The Witch thinks this is a stupid idea since they never made any agreement with the Madam about returning the money.

The Witch thinks keeping the money and giving the Madam the tongue, which she asked for, is more than enough for them. The Faust readily agrees they should give some money back, but keep some for themselves. The Mole is either way. He doesn’t really care.

Eventually the Chemist convinces everyone except for the Witch that giving the money back and laying a foundation of good faith in this community will give them bigger profits in the long run. The Witch mumbles disagreement, but decides it’s for the best.

So they head back to the B&B…

One more thing I should mention. As they are leaving, the Witch decides to see if she can gather any more souls for her gem. I take her aside and tell her that while everyone else is dead downstairs… all of the people upstairs have already had their souls taken from their bodies. The Witch thinks of this as odd, and tries to make a knowledge check to see if he knows anything that could help him figure out what happened, but he rolled horribly. Oh well. The seed of doubt and intrigue is laid, so I feel happy enough with that.

Back to the whorehouse!

Back to the Whorehouse!

The group returns the money (I’m very impressed as the GM, and didn’t think they would. Goes to show you what happens when a GM assumes something). The Madam quickly gives them 50 gold for their trouble and says she would be happy to do business with them.

So, they’re now running protection money for the B&B. 50 gold a month to make sure no more riff raff hassle the fine ladies at the whorehouse.

Everyone was happy, and someone even mentioned: Achievement Unlocked! It was pretty funny.

Ronald the Tailor
Next day they start going to a few of the other businesses. They go to the Tailor, who is more than happy to get protection from them. He gives the monk a fine new silken robe for his troubles… seeing as how he has no money at the moment to pay them.

He just spent all his money on a magical needle that does on the spot tailoring. It’s amazing, but costly. Now he can make alterations on the same day for suits!

With this magical new needle he alters everyone’s clothing so they all have secret pockets able to carry a dagger or scroll that would be hard even for a guard patting them down to notice. Everyone was happy with this exchange.

The party started asking about his business and if he needed help with anything. The tailor said that he hasn’t made much profit lately since the price of wool has risen sharply in the last few months. The only wool in town comes from a warehouse in the docks and their prices have gone through the roof lately.

A few knowledge checks reveals that the sole warehouse supplying wool for the town is run by the Brothers. They thought this was interesting.
They asked if there other shops in town with the same problem, and the tailor said yes. They asked if there were other shops that he could buy wool from, but the only other place is in the Hills and is too expensive for him.
So the group saves that information for later, thinking they can do something to try to get into the wool business.

Cliffside Apartments
Onto the next shop, that is actually an apartment complex. There is a Dwarf apartment Manager who meets them. Because of Umi running around town talking to everyone, she knows what’s up. She’ll gladly pay for protection if they can help her get rid of a tenant. He hasn’t paid rent in over 2 months and refuses to leave.

The group is all excited about this. They tell the Manager to go get some coffee or something, they’ll take care of this.

Outside the apartment there’s this half elf that looks shady. He asks what they want. They said they’re looking for Ollam, the tenant in question. He laughs in their face. They don’t talk to Ollam, they talk to him if they want anything. He’s got whatever they need, and pulls out various drugs from different pockets.

The Chemist says that this is obviously inferior product as he tries some of the coke. (I gave him a +2 Initiative modifier for the rest of the day because of that) Inferior. His is much better! They want to speak with Ollam now, but the shady half elf refuses.

Finally the Faust punches this guy in the nose. He quickly runs away.

So, now with access to the door they knock and ask for Ollam. He talks to them through the other side, asking what they want. They simply say open the door. He asks again.

And then the Chemist says, “Candyman sent us.”

This angers Ollam. Mostly because he doesn’t work under Candyman and he is pretty sure these guys are out to take his business down. No one else knows who Candyman is or what’s going on, but Ollam opens the door.

And promptly throws a bomb outside at all of them. Boom! Everyone except the wise Rat who backed up just in time takes damage. Ollam is an Alchemist.

The apartment looks like a meth lab. Alchemical equipment everywhere, various bottles, beakers and whatnot lining several tables and there is some sort of clear kerosene type liquid on the floor. Ollam is not fooling around when it comes to his business.

The party takes one turn and just goes to town on this guy. Power attack, sneak attack, and a crossbow bolt to the face. By the end of the round he falls down into the pool of liquid in his own apartment without much else to say in the matter.

And that’s when his two assistants come out and start throwing alchemical stuff at the party, which is now mostly inside the apartment. Boom! Boom! BOOM!. The Faust and The Mole are both inside, taking fire and explosion damage when this all happens. The Mole wisely jumps out of the window. The Faust decides to keep fighting despite being on fire and walking on fire and watching two Halflings who are overdosing on PCP not even caring that they’re on fire.

And on the roof, someone with a crossbow bolt starts taking the party down. The Witch decides to blind him, and he’s unable to do much else.

The Faust charges and takes down of the crazy Halflings, and this is about time when his poor little hit points run out. He falls down in the fire, on fire, screaming and crying out for help. No one wants to get inside to help him though.

So, everyone thinks that the Faust is dead… oh except for me!

This is a perfect time to awaken the sword and its powers.

I take Faust aside and tell him as reality slips from his mind there is a dark and soothing voice coming from the sword that tells him they are not done yet. There’s still much more fun to be had. The sword uses the power of the souls to heal up Faust back to full.

So now Faust knows this isn’t just a magical sword, but a living artifact with lots of mysterious properties. I was very happy to bring this out early on. Everyone saw the sword glow magically and bring Faust back to life. (since the sword no longer has any souls fueling it, I told Faust it’s +1 enhancement is gone)

Faust got back up and took down the other Halfling.

Now there was an apartment complex on fire. Everyone in the group as well as the rest of the apartments got buckets and made a brigade going from the local well and was able to stop the fire from spreading too much.

Verna came back and was surprised and angered about what happened, but couldn’t complain much. They paid her the back rent they owed her, and she agreed to the protection money if she had more problems.

All of the alchemical stuff was burned down in the fire, but the Chemist found
some of the remaining drugs to add to his horde and the Mole found Ollam’s coffer of money he was saving for a rainy day.

So, now they are off to another business to see what they can find there. That is where we stopped for the evening.

Notes:

The Mole handed me a note saying that he is going to be telling his bosses everything that he saw the Faust do and what happened with the sword. Interesting.

The Rat handed me a note saying that he sent a token bird with a message to his supervisors tell him that he’s inside and currently working to get closer to the mob bosses. He didn’t give any details, but he’ll send more when he can. Interesting.

The Mole also sent me an email saying he wants to get into the smuggling business and he wants to start by buying all the wool he can from local farmers and sell them cheaper than the warehouse in the Dock district. He wants to disguise himself and do this without anyone else knowing. This is very interesting.

Ideas
The reason that the Brothers aren't doing much lately is that they are trying to fight a Vigilante that has been taking down mafia members in the dock area. I'm thinking a minotaur cleric level 6 or so, disguising himself kinda like the Batman and taking the mob down.

Perhaps the Brothers offer a reward to the group for taking this guy out?

Interesting to see what will happen if the Vigilante and the Rat ever meet face to face.

[Wagadodo]

A good game story so far. A lot of interesting ways you can go with this type of adventure. I like seeing that the players are playing together with out automatically going for each other throats with the back stabbing.

And the first thing I thought about with the Viligante is the Cape. I was wondering why the Chemist wasn't playing a Alchemist themselves seeing their back story.

[Dragon Elite]

This sounds like a very fun game, and an interesting campaign journal.

[Sillycomic]

Wagadodo, I had the same thought myself. I wasn't sure why he was playing a rogue and not an alchemist. He decided a rogue with the Poisoner archetype fit his character better. So, he went with it.




Yeah, I'm really liking how this game is turning out as well. Everyone is working surprisingly well together despite the situations they're all in. I hope everyone will enjoy trying to keep their secrets from each other for a little while at least.

I have to admit this is like no other game I've played when it comes to Pathfinder, or D&D in general. I've had city campaigns before, but never one so involved in the city such as this. I hope it continues to go this well.

I do enjoy all the intrigue. And that the story is slightly different for everyone involved. I'll probably let them all read this journal once the game is done, so they can see what everyone else was doing. That will be so much fun, to look back at your own campaign and see what was going on behind the scenes!


I have never seen The Cape. I will have to take a look at it. I need some inspiration for the Vigilante.

[Sillycomic]

Session 2

The only bad news I have to report for today is that the Mole wasn’t able to make it to the game. He got a new job so he was absent. Actually this worked out very well considering. My excuse was that Allore had asked for him to do some private stuff away from the rest of the group.

In reality, Allore wanted to find out more about this sword that the Faust had used and the Mole had reported. So Allore brought in a cleric named Ventor who knew something about ancient lore and weaponry. Ventor spent all day with the Mole picking him with details as he researched one of the major libraries in the city.

So, that’s a good excuse to keep the Mole busy. And it also leads the Faust one step closer to being caught. Plus this gives me a way for Ogar (evil cleric) to tell Faust that there is someone researching the sword. Lots of fun possibilities there.

Onto the session:

Granny’s Restaurant
We start with the group heading over to Granny’s restaurant. Granny is an old Halfling that owns her own restaurant. It is more like a large cottage with a dining area. The restaurant is empty.

Our group starts asking the old lady about the place. She tells them this is her restaurant. Granny is a wonderful cook. The restaurant used to be pretty popular, but lately she has run it by herself and she’s a pretty old Halfling so she can’t do much by herself.

She had a son but he passed away. Apparently when the Brothers had this territory they strong armed the entire area and asked for lots of protection money from the restaurant. Granny’s son finally stood up to the Brothers and he was brutally murdered because of it. Granny said he was killed by a brother named Blades.

So, they know her business doesn’t make a lot of money and she’s very much against the entire concept of protection money. The group decides to talk about this for a minute. Faust wants to kill Granny and use the place for his own purposes. The Witch is just interested in getting some more people in here and taking over Granny’s business, letting her just cook while they took care of everything else.

Eventually they decide not to do anything with it, but just leave it alone for now. The group moves on.

Alchemy

Next is the alchemist’s shop. This is run by a half-elf named Taevor. He is an absent minded alchemist. I thought of Doc Brown as I came up with him. He’s got a bunch of alchemical mixtures, base ingredients and even some potions in his shop area.

They buy a few potions and then talk about protection. Taevor tells them that his business is being strong-armed by the police, specifically the Captain of the Watch for this area, a female human named Andis. Andis is taking a huge chunk of his profits and whenever he doesn’t pay they come in and mess up his business.

So the group offers him protection from the police. They will take a smaller cut and make sure the police won’t bother him anymore. Taevor agrees to that and now the group wants to go talk with the local police.

General Store

Next business is the general store. This store is run by a man named Robbie. He isn’t very bright. Robbie doesn’t really understand their questions. And I must admit my playerss when they’re talking about protection they do it very carefully and with subtlety. So Robbie not getting it is just his problem. They were trying their best to make him understand.

So, Faust comes up with a brilliant compromise. He wants to sell Robbie “Volcano Insurance.” You never know when volcanoes pop up and without this insurance any businesses in the area will be out of luck. The group has way too much fun describing how volcanoes pop up from nowhere and Robbie’s business could be wiped out in a matter of moments.

Robbie pays for this insurance as well as a bunch of other fees that Faust threw on top just for fun. There was a processing fee, handler’s fee, introductory fee. Robbie didn’t understand so he paid what he was told to pay. That was a pretty funny part of the session.

Winery

Now we come to the Winery. It was here that a player pointed out that the town had a law of prohibition. He asked how the winery was operating. Honestly I completely forgot about the prohibition when I made up the Winery in this section. I made sure to get rid of alcohol in all taverns and restaurants (except for those owned by the mafia) but I completely forgot about this. Blerg on me!

But, I came up with a quick excuse in game. They wine made is pretty weak, mostly grape juice. And it’s heavily fined and regulated by the government. No mead, beer, or harder alcohols, but light wine is ok. So… there are wineries.

It makes sense too. High class people would have wanted to keep their wine and get rid of the more vulgar lower class drink during the prohibition. So there is some logic to this simple mistake. Meh. Anyway, the Winery!

The Winery is having a tasting party at the moment. This place is packed. The group goes in and starts asking questions about the winery. Apparently things are going well and the winery has security. Two guards at the doors make sure only decent people are allowed inside and there’s no weapons coming in. There’s an alcove to check your weapons.

They finally get to talk with the owner. They explain who they are and what they’re doing. And this is where my group does something particularly clever. They are spreading around a rumor that the Brothers might be coming back into the territory. They’re doing this so that people get in line with them taking over the territory. Basically they will protect the area from the Brothers coming back in.

Eola, the Winery owner says that the brothers used to tax her almost all the profits. So she will definitely pay to make sure the Brothers never come back into the area. Eola also tells them of a very interesting business venture.
Apparently there is a batch of boysenberry wine that is about to come onto the market. There are a few wineries around town that will have it. This is going to be the best wine in town. A bottle will quite easily sell for 40 or 50 gold. However, Eola points out that if something were to happen to all of those other wineries and their stock of the boysenberry supply, she would have the only stock in the entire city.

Then she could name her price on a bottle of wine. 200 gold, 500 gold, and the price would go up from there.

They seemed really interested in this. So, they put this on the backburner for later.

So that’s it for the territories. The group doesn’t want to handle the bounty hunter’s office, and they don’t think they can do anything with the bank, so they’re happy with the deals they’ve made in the area so far. That’s all they want to do.

Tying up Loose Ends

So, they go back to Bed N Biscuits where Umi is waiting for them. He has 2 big pieces of information for them.

1. Andis and her watch are looking for the group. They have found out that the adventurers are trying to take over and they want a cut into the whole thing.

2. Umi told the Brothers about them and what’s going on. Apparently he heard that the brothers are dealing with something serious in their own territory and can’t really bring any sort of fight to this area.

The group is interested in both. A representative of the watch is there and wanting to set up a meeting. They tell him to meet at the burned down saloon at 8 o clock tonight.

The second, they want to find out more about what’s going on in brother territory but Umi doesn’t know all that much. He just knows there’s some sort of vigilante making trouble for the Brothers.

So the group decides to go back to Allore with all the money they’ve taken from the territory. Peter meets them at the bottom of Mama Mia’s and is very pleased with what they’ve brought in. He says Allore needs them for a job and then the territory is theirs if they want it.

They agree.

Talking with the Watch

The group isn’t sure what to do about Andis. They think they want to kill her and all of the other guards. But not everyone is sure that’s the best plan. So they argue about what to do for a while until they realize it’s about time to go to the meeting.

So now they head over to the burned down saloon and spot the guards already there. Now they are freaking out. They think it’s some sort of an ambush. They decide not to go at all and build an ambush of their own at Hazel’s, thinking that whenever Andis gets tired of waiting she will come to the whorehouse.

They’ve pretty much established that the whorehouse is their center command area. Everyone they’ve talked to knows they can be reached over at the Bed and Biscuits. So, without consulting Hazel, this is just where they do everything now.

I’m not sure how to take that. They are protecting her place, I’m sure she’s grateful. But at the same time I doubt they want all of this kind of business happening at her place. I mean, within two days of getting “protection,” they already have the place almost turned into a warzone against the guards.

Anyway, the guards do show up and Andis is irritated but still willing to talk. She offers them a pretty simple deal. For 30 gp a month they will look the other way in this whole area. 60 will give them exclusive access, including the cops helping them and making sure no one else finds out about them.
The group thinks about it and decides on the premium package. More money is well worth having the cops in their pocket. This is on the condition that Andis and her pals no longer mess with anyone in their territory. Andis agrees.

Although, personally I don’t think she will do that. Andis likes being in charge and will take whatever she wants. I expect her to be a huge thorn in the sides of the group. And they realize how hard it will be to get rid of her. I want Andis to use the fact that she knows how powerful she is to ruin the group’s day until they try to find a way to eliminate her.

Killing a captain of the watch should bring out its own set of complications. How fun for me!

Final Job

So now that they have that taken care of, they go back to Allore and get their final initiation job. They talk with Peter and then get to finally meet Allore. He is an old balding guy, as are all of the made men mafia types. He tells them this is their loyalty mission.

Johnny Legs (who hangs out at the bar and the group has talked with him before) is apparently working with the Ravens. He’s a dirty rat. They are to capture him, question him for all the information about the Ravens they can, and then make him disappear.

Allore is actually pretty happy about this simply because up until now they’ve had no real information on the Ravens. This is the first direct knowledge they will have.

The group asks to have Johnny Legs come to the burned down saloon, they have a package for him to deliver. Then they have some poison to knock him out and the Rat will charm him. It’s a pretty good plan.

So Johnny comes in and they ask him to sit down and have a drink. He politely refuses, so the Rat charms him to take the drink. He does so. He starts choking and drops a bird token to the ground. The bird pops up and flies off before the group can do anything. Johnny falls unconscious.
Witch and Rat try to get their familiars to follow after the bird, but it’s long gone.

Questioning

Johnny Legs wakes up in the basement tied up. They start asking him questions. At first he refuses, but then they cut off a finger and then plunge a knife into his hand. It’s pretty brutal! So he finally talks.

He tells them the bird token was a warning to the Ravens that he’s been discovered.

Johnny Legs works for the Ravens and he was sent in here to infiltrate the Felons and submit back information as best he can.

He gives them the tavern he goes to once a week, called the Cherry Pit. There he meets someone named Avor. Avor is a Halfling made man in the Ravens. They have a name and a place. This seems very interesting for the Felons!

Apparenlty the Ravens are trying to take over the entire town of organized crime. They are sending in people to infiltrate the felons as well as making trouble for the Brothers.

The Vigilante in the Brother’s territory is the Raven’s idea. He is a minotaur that’s very strong and using deadly tactics to upset the entire organization of Brothers. Apparently it’s working. So basically the Ravens are behind everything.

I didn’t mean for them to become the super group of bad guys, but I guess it will work out very well. The Ravens can be just a stronger and smarter group that is trying to play the same Mafia type game that my adventurers are playing. How cool is that?

They ask more questions but Johnny doesn’t have any more information. Once they feel satisfied they’ve gotten everything from him the Witch sets him on fire. He dies. And no one steals his soul. I was surprised at that, but at the same time I think both of my soul stealers (Witch and Faust) are being far more careful with their stuff at the moment.

Since they paid the watch so much money, they ask Andis to take care of the dead body. She does so with no problem.

The session ended there. I am allowing some down time of about a week for people to set up more businesses and do some side adventures.

How cool, an entire session without combat! There was a tense moment when Johnny Legs finally figured out what was going on, but it was just a round of initiative, nothing more. I was worried at the end of the session since there was no fighting if people were bored, but everyone seemed to really enjoy it. So, all right, works for me. If everyone’s having fun then I’m doing something right.

Notes

Notes: Both The Chemist and the Witch tracked down the blind drug dealer from the first session, independently of each other. The Chemist wants to offer him a job and the Witch wants to kill him and take his soul. This is going to be very interesting. I hope that the killing looks like someone is trying to send a message to The Chemist.

Ogar is the cleric who is mentoring the Faust. He explains that a cleric named Ventor came by asking questions about the cult and the sword. Apparently someone saw him use it. Ventor must be killed before he knows too much. It’s up to the Faust to do just that.

Not sure what the Rat or Mole are doing yet. I imagine the Mole wants to set up his side smuggling business, which he can do with relative ease. The Rat hasn’t told me what’s going on, but it makes sense if he starts talking with his superiors to give information on the Ravens, Felons and Brothers. At the moment he has a lot of information!

The Chemist wants to set up his drug empire. He wants to grab Hazel’s help for distribution, and sell at the winery with its taste testing parties. The blind man will be a part of it as well, but not for long.

The Witch wants to track down unhappy married couples and steal their souls, and then set it up to look like murder suicides. I admit it’s very clever.
I’ll post more when people give me more information.

[Sillycomic]

So we didn't officially have a mafia game tonight, but my group did get together and have some conversations about what is going to happen next week.

Temptation
Most notably is the Mole and Faust got together. Faust was told last gaming session that someone found out about his sword (cleric named Ventor) and is asking all the wrong kind of questions.

The Faust deduced (very logically) that the Mole must have said something. So he and the Mole had a private conversation. Apparently Faust wants to bring the Mole into the whole Devil Worship cult. The Mole seemed intrigued.

Faust wants to set up a meeting with his cult to set something like this up.

The Mole is going along with it for now. He does like the idea of ultimate power. So, we will see at which point The Mole decides to betray Faust. I like it a lot.

Their first Scheme!
The group as a whole has decided they want to get into the wine business. Most importantly they want to go around town and destroy all of the boysenberry wine supplies around town so that their own supply at Eola is the only one around.

Once they corner the wine market they'll be able to sell it for ten times what it's worth. They like this idea a lot. So, I need to stat up some guards and wineries and vineyards for them to go through.

Notes

Chemist wants to set up his drug cartel. He wants underlings helping him make the stuff, and people for distribution. Hazel has agreed to sell some stuff at her place of business and the Blind man (I really need to give him a name) will help with street sales.

Witch wants to start collecting some souls by killing couples that have some known rocky marriages around town. He also wants to kill the Blind Man (argh! nameless blind man. I'm sure I wrote some simply name down somewhere in my notebook. Owen or Will or something... oh well, guess he's dying anyway. Died without a name, how sad)

Faust needs to kill Ventor. I think I will make it so that Ventor is in a church doing research most of his time, so he might want to look into getting his whole group to do a raid on the church itself. How cool will that be. I gotta stat out a whole church. He is also doing Mole initiation stuff.

Mole is doing his side business to get the corner of the wool industry. That won't be a problem, mostly because I know so many people will come after him when he tries to do this. It should be fun. He is also doing Faust initiation stuff.

The Rat. I haven't gotten word back from him yet. I'm not sure what he's doing. I'm sure he'll plan something. I'll have his contact try to make a meeting to figure out what's going on. If nothing else he is just sitting back and gathering evidence. How cool for him.


I will post again when people send me more information. At the moment I told them they have a week of down time, so there's lots of side things for all of them to do.

[FuryOfMetal]

Just wanted to say that this is an amazing campaign you've managed to set up. The way you have multiple things happening at once is helping teach me to do the same, it's excellent.

[Sillycomic]

Thank you very much.

Honestly in the campaign I have to take down just as much notes as my players. Whenever they do something I have to keep track of it, to see if it might potentially go somewhere else in the story.

But I think the genius is giving each character some secret goal in the game. This makes for something I've never seen in a game before... background stuff that I'm not creating myself.

Such as the killing of the blind man. I am going to tell the rest of the group that the blind man was murdered and it was due to a fire. The rest of the pc's will think that I made this happen and some NPC is responsible, but I didn't have anything to do with it. This was one player's choice and the rest of the player's will react to it as if it was supposed to happen in my game.


What an incredible concept. If I game another campaign I will certainly do something like this again. It sets up soo many different opportunities in the game.

[FuryOfMetal]

Yeah I assumed there was extensive note taking being done by everybody. Personally I would try to make a family tree of sorts of each gang, adding people as you introduce them. It would show who reports to who, Made Men and the people under their command etc. You could also have people outside of gangs but who still hold affiliations linked in such as that big drug baron the Chemist wants to overthrow.

[Sillycomic]

Oh, you are so right.

I have been thinking I needed to do this. Especially for the Felons. It would help to have them at least placed out in case the group ever decides they want to start taking over other territories.

I will have to start drawing that out this weekend sometime. Felons and brothers, and then other people who aren't affiliated in town.

I know the Candyman is the drug guy in town.

I'm thinking I need someone to own the weapon trade, like a crazy gnome that likes combining weapons.

Definitely someone who is owns the alcohol business, an Al Capone kind of guy in the game.

This will give them Made Men to deal with as well as a host of outsiders as well. Oh, very good idea! Thank you so much

[Savannah]

Very awesome. I love how the characters are affecting each other without realizing it :smallamused:

[Sillycomic]

Last’s night session was amazing. I just want to say this is the most enjoyable game I have ever had the chance to GM. Things happened tonight where I, as the Gm, wasn’t sure what was going to happen. I just rolled with it, and we came up with a really fun improvised session.

This session wasn’t planned at all. My plan was for people to deal with the Boysenberry wineries all over town. I had it all statted out and everything. Unfortunately, we never even got to that. I’m very glad that I know how to make up session when it’s needed, otherwise it would have been very frustrating.

Ok, so a bit of backstory.

The mole returns to the game, but unfortunately we lost the Rat this week due to Spring Break issues. Oh well. He’s off doing undercover stuff.
2 weeks of Downtime:

The Mole took out a legitimate 500 gold loan in order to purchase a bunch of wool around town. He also purchased a warehouse in the dock area to keep all of it. He is going to sell it for a lower price than the current market… which everyone knows is currently being cornered by the brothers. The brothers have made the price of wool skyrocket, so The Mole thinks he can make a lot of money by selling it for a cheaper price.

So far he has sold about a quarter of his supplies around town. He’s still far away from making a profit though.

The Faust set up a meeting with the Mole to talk about the cult he’s in, and what it’s all about. The mole is very interested in this cult and wants to join.
Faust was also supposed to check out Ventor the cleric, but I think he forgot. Oh well.

The Chemist set up his deals around town. Hazel from the B&B and Tavor who owns the Alchemist shop both agree to sell drugs for him.

He spoke with Inan, the blind man (yes I finally named him) to have him come work the drug trade business once more. Inan says he has old contacts and can easily put things back together working under the Chemist, so long as he helps with his blindness.

Inan also says there’s a rival drug dealer in the Docks area not too far from here, a gnome by the name of Gorrack. The Chemist is interested in that.

So, with all of this the Chemist decides to pay for a remove curse from the church. He goes with Inan and they get a voucher, since none of the clerics have that particular spell prepared that day. Inan will come the next day to get his curse removed.

Chemist is happy with new allies and Inan is happy to be able to see once more.

The Witch goes to check on the couples that he asked around who are in unhappy marriages. I told him of three couples. One lives in a garbage dump, he didn’t seem interested in them. One couple is a captain and his wife who argue whenever he comes ashore. At the moment he’s off sailing but he should be back within a few weeks.

The third couple is retired and basically live in a compound. There’s lots of guards and magical locks and whatnot. He’s very curious about what could be inside. He’s wanting to tell the rest of the group about this place so they can perhaps raid it or something.

Then his next plan involves killing Inan (the blind man) and setting his place on fire. I tell him ok… with a smile to my face.

This is backstory of what everyone does in their downtime for two weeks. So, now that we’re up to speed, let’s start the game.

Fire!

So the group wakes up with the sound of a fire alam. They rush out from their prospective sleeping areas and see what the trouble is. The Cliffside apartments are engulfed in flames. There’s a bunch of people already setting up a bucket brigade, and the group decides to help out.

By the time the local Fire brigade arrives, the watch and some more spectators, they get the fire out. The good news is that only 4 apartments were damages through the whole thing. The bad news is that a couple of people lost their lives in the fire.

One of these people was Inan, the blind man. Last session the Witch said he wanted to kill the blind man, rob him, steal his soul and set up arson. So the Blind man is now dead. The Chemist doesn’t like this one bit. He’s very angry.
A couple of other people were killed in the fire as well, but no one seems interested in that.

The watch says this is now a police investigation and they try to get the crowd to dissipate. Upon hearing this the Mole decides to start investigating the crowd to see if anyone looks suspicious. He immediately spots a cloaked figure on the other side of the street just watching everything.
He goes up to try and have a conversation, but the man isn’t really interesting in speaking much.

Police along with clerics discover that the fire itself was some sort of arson. There was a spell cast in the room that caused everything. The Chemist is very angry at that. He wants to get to the bottom of this, so he asks to look at the crime scene.

Since his group is paying the watch for favors, they allow him to do so.
He goes and investigates. Indeed he sees that the fire was unnatural because it started in the middle of the room. He also sees that there is nothing left of value in the room, including coins or anything.

The clerics say that he fire was not the cause of death for Inan. They are taking the body back to their temple for examination.

The Chemist is angry at that as well. Without the voucher he can’t even get his money back.

Granny's Meeting

The crowd outside goes to Granny’s who is rushing around handing out slices of pies. The mysterious cloaked man is here as well. They watch him carefully and eventually a gnome sits beside him and they begin to speak to each other in hushed tones.

Then the gnome leaves.

Faust decides to follow the gnome. Since it’s like 2 in the morning there’s no one else around. Faust stops him and confronts him, asking what he was doing.

The gnome is first defensive and is about to run away but then asks if Faust is his contact. Faust, deciding to play along with this, agrees that he is. The gnome is happy with this and starts explaining that he’s glad to be back in the drug trade again, he was scared when Inan died, but he’s hoping they can still work out a deal.

So, it’s obvious to the Chemist that this gnome and cloaked human are part of Inan’s drug game. But Faust has no clue what’s going on. So he just kills the gnome, and then robs him blind.

The Chemist is very angry about this. (in game, out of game he’s really enjoying what’s happening)

They all meet up once again and follow the cloaked figure as he leaves Granny’s place. They ask him to stop, but he runs right up until the witch blinds him. They grab him and start asking questions. He explains that he’s part of Inan’s drug group and he has no idea who started the fire.


The Chemist makes this guy, Effron, join his drug trade. He has the Witch remove the blindness curse and then send him away to try and find out who caused the fire. Thankful to be alive, Effron runs away and starts his little investigation.

Investigating

Everyone goes back to sleep except for the Chemist, who goes to the temple to see what’s going on with the body. The temple agrees to let him in. He was here the day before and helped Inan with the remove curse payment, so they think he’s a friend or family or something.

There’s a cleric with the body downstairs who is trying to speak with dead to figure out what happened. The spell is not working though. The cleric tries a few more things, but they are all unsuccessful. He goes out of the room and comes back reading an old tome.

He explains the reason the spell isn’t working is because the man’s soul has been taken and is trapped somewhere. He’s not allowed to answer the call of the spell.

The chemist asked how this could be. The cleric says there are several reasons. There’s a creature known as the barghest that can swallow souls, there are spells or artifacts that captures souls. The cleric here doesn’t know much about these things… however there is another cleric in town that knows a lot about stealing souls, a cleric named Ventor.

They are going to talk with Ventor and he will try to figure out what’s going on.

Yes! That Ventor, the same Ventor that spoke with the Mole about the sword that steals souls. The cleric said he would let the Chemist know if they find anything. So... there's that.

Frame Job

The rest of the group decides to blame the fire and the murder on the gnome that Faust killed. This way the watch and the temple have a suspect and the case can close without them actually finding out who the murderer is. The Witch thinks this is an amazing idea.

I just want to point this out, in and out of game, no one knows the Witch is behind this murder/arson. The only two people who know are me and the Witch. He has been very good at pretending he doesn’t know what’s going on… even at one point asking who it was that was killed and having the other players in the game explain it was the blind man they followed around last session.

I wrote him a note saying that was a Natural 20 on his bluff check. Very well done, Sir.

So now the only person who is out searching for the real killer/arsonist is the chemist.

Gorrack's Ploy

And here we go.

Effron comes back and says that Gorrack is claiming responsibility for the arson. He says that this is his message to all of the other drug players out there, either get in line with him or other unfortunate accidents will happen to them. This makes the Chemist mad again, because he was speculating earlier if he could bring the Chemist into his group for whatever reason.
Well, that’s thrown out the window because now he wants to go talk with Gorrack.

They can’t though, because Gorrack technically works in the Docks area. He is not affiliated with the Brothers, but his warehouse is in their territory. The group is smart enough to think this might be considered an act of war against the Brothers if they go charging into their territory.

So, they send Umi to talk with his contacts in the bother, to explain they’re not declaring war but settling a personal vendetta against Gorrack.

Umi comes back with Blades. You may remember Blades from the session before, he’s the one that killed Granny’s son because they refused to pay protection moneys. For a moment they thought of going over to Granny’s to talk with him, but I just hit my head against the table until they realized their mistake.

Meeting of the Families

They explain their situation to Blades and even show him the arson damage. Blades agrees to let them come into his territory as a common courtesy, asking that they grant him a similar common courtesy should any problems come up. They agree.

So, now they owe a favor to the Brothers! Hooray! I have to find a way to use this to my advantage.

Blades also tells them what’s been going on in the Dock area. The vigilante has been busting their business slowly but surely. He’s taken down 10 or 15 of their guys so far, and destroyed a bunch of their fronts and businesses. They don’t know what to do, he’s so sneaky. If they could get him in one place, surely they could take him down, but they never know where he’s going to be.

Blades also says there’s a 10,000 gold bounty on the Vigilante’s head. The group seems interested, but they feel like they’re not powerful enough to take him on yet. A shame, well, it’s out there.


Attack on Gorrack!

So, with an ok from the Brothers, they head off to the Docks area. They find the warehouse and there’s a couple of guards outside. They try to bluff their way inside, but the guards push them away.

The Mole attacks! Surprise round.

In one round they take the guards down, but inside the warehouse they hear noises of people running around and barking orders. Something heavy is pushed up against the front doors. Two people rush out to the second story of the warehouse and start shooting down with crossbows at everyone outside.

The Mole decides to go around to the back to find another entrance.

Faust drags the bodies away, and starts stealing their swords once he’s away from everyone.

The Witch is throwing around some hexes but it’s not working too well. The Chemist is just kinda sitting and waiting for others, but he does put some poison on his sword.

The back of the warehouse there is a door, but it’s locked. The Mole decides to climb up to the top of the warehouse instead. On the roof he breaks through one of the skylights and starts making a rope and pulley system with his longspear to try and repel down. I have no clue what he’s doing, but he seems to be enjoying himself so I let him. I tell him his plan will take a couple of rounds.

Meanwhile Faust comes back, with his new souls in his sword and rushes towards the door. The Witch enlarges him and he begins hacking away. Inside there’s a half-orc and minotaur with weapons ready to take him out.

So they exchange blows. Faust moves inside so others can get in and help, when Gorrack the gnome appears and begins casting spells. Everything he casts is ineffective though. A color spray, a charm person and a hideous laughter all wasted, oh sadness. Stupid anti-paladin and his awesome saves.
The minotaur falls prey to drow poison. The half orc is slain as he tries to run away, and Gorrack is blinded by the Witch. One crossbow archer runs away while the other gives up and asks for forgiveness.

They start questioning Gorrack. He first doesn’t talk, but they start using Mafia questioning techniques and he finally tells them everything.

Gorrack heard about the fire and thought it would be a good idea to tell everyone that he was responsible for it. He said people should get in line with him and his drug trade or he would take them down the way he took Inan down. He thought that by spreading false rumors he could boost his business.

After several sense motive rolls, they believe him. The Chemist is now nowhere closer to find out who killed Inan. The good news is he gets Gorrack to work for him, (by that I mean he orders Gorrack to work for him, or die… Gorrack chose wisely) All of Gorrack’s business is now part of The Chemist, and they grab a bunch of loot including 400 gold worth of drugs from the warehouse.

So, all in all it was a pretty good score. They go back home with their loot and newly captured prisoners to work in their drug trade. Well, for the Chemist having lost his in with the drug trade around here, he did capture a bunch of new people willing to help him. All in all it was a win for him.

Granny's Surprise!

Once they come home, Granny is waiting for them. She needs to talk to them about something important. Someone said they saw Blades here in the territory and she knows these guys are Mafia guys, so she says quite clearly she wants their help.

She wants them to murder Blades for her. She says she’ll pay 5,000 gold for his death, so long as they bring him the blade he used to kill her son with.

The price made them all jump for joy, but the prospect of killing someone they just met who seems nice and is part of a rival gang is tough.

They said they would think about it. She said she has the money waiting for whenever they decide to do it.

And that was the end of the session. I was impressed by everyone’s role playing skill and such, so they all got to level up to 4th. Apparently there is some disagreement about what people want to do. Faust and Witch seem happy to get that 5,000 gold and take down Blades as soon as possible. Chemist really wants to take down these Boysenberry wineries so they can have the only supply of boysenberry wine in town.

In the end they agree on the Boysenberry thing, only because time is a factor. In a few weeks they will start bottling the wine and selling it… so if they want to corner the market they need to do it very soon.

Notes:

So the Witch has a bunch of souls she needs to sell.

Faust finally realized he should start looking for Ventor and taking him out.

The chemist is now working on his little drug empire, slowly bringing more and more people in.

And the Mole seems interested in everything. He wants more smuggling to happen, he wants to start recruiting little kids for a pick pocketing ring. He is very interested in joining Faust’s cult once he realizes all the rewards he might get. He seems all over the place. Well, that’s ok. For the moment he doesn’t have many problems. His little operations will start stepping on people’s toes though, and if he doesn’t give the Mafia their take, there could be other problems.

Since they’re only taking two days of down time, there’s not much else to do. They mostly want to rest up before they go wine busting around town.

I thought this last session was going to be wine busting, so unfortunately I have all of that prepped and ready to go for next time. This was a happy side track that all of the players got to take of their own accord. I simply followed them for the ride. It was very enjoyable for everyone involved.

Ventor is going to be very interested in a body showing up that has had its soul taken away. He’ll come to examine it. I imagine that both the Chemist and the Faust will be very interested in him coming to this part of town. The witch will be more than curious about it as well.

I think I want people to start emulating what the Vigilante is doing (much like in the beginning of Dark Knight) People are starting to see the Vigilante as a source of good, so they’ll want to do the same. I expect a bunch of copycat do gooders will put a bunch of kinks in the group’s operations.

If the Mole doesn’t start actively trying to sell his wool I’m going to make something happen to it. Maybe some raiders come to steal it? It wouldn’t take much for the Brothers to catch wind where all this wool is and steal it.

[Sillycomic]

Lots of new things to talk about this week.

A little bit of bad news. Unfortunately the person who plays the Rat has a very busy schedule and decided to take a hiatus from gaming. He put too much on his plate and even one game a week has been troublesome for him. He hopes that during the summer he’ll be able to come back, but at the moment he needs to concentrate on school and work.

At least working for the Mafia there are easy excuses to make people disappear. I didn’t kill him. I’m not that mean, but I did just say to the group that his character went away on “business.” That can mean a lot of things, and he can always conveniently come back whenever he does decide to join the group again.

Ok, onto some carnage!

Where is the Wine?
The group decided last session that they wanted to corner the wine market. They thought the best way to do this was to take out all barrels of this Boysenberry Wine around town so that when it finally came to bottling, they would be the only distributors in town. This wine is very good, normally selling for 50 dollars a bottle, but if the group is the only people around who have this wine they could sell it for double or even triple that price.

How awesome is that.

Eola, the winery owner tells the group that there are three major places which have a supply of this wine. There is a private collector named Evaleen who has a mansion in the Hills. There is a vineyard outside of town and there is a storage warehouse in the docks area.

The group thinks about this for a minute. Tensions are still a little high from going into the dock area last time, so they don’t want to do anything with that for now. They also want to harbor good relations with the Brothers in the docks area, and they think this is the Brother’s wine.

All right then.

Split up and Look for Clues
They decide the best thing to do is take out the private collector’s stash first.

They start by doing a little information gathering. The Witch lets her familiar fly over and take a look at the compound. The Chemist talks to the guards who are on the take for some more information. Faust and Mole both head over to the compound to see what they can see.

Witch finds out: It’s a mansion with some land around it. There’s a small storage house behind the mansion that holds the barrels. There’s a couple of guards that patrol the area and the mansion itself is in a gated community.

Chemist: The guards in the hills mean business. They are better trained and there are a lot of them. Most of them are being paid by the city with extra benefits coming from the rich people themselves. The chemist asks very nicely if there’s perhaps a dirty guard working in the Hills. Andis says he will ask around.

Faust and Mole are harassed the moment they walk into the Hills. It is apparent the guards are paid well. Every time a guard sees them, they walk up and ask what they’re doing there. They walk all the way up to the gated community and are “helped” by the guards at least a dozen times. This was during the day with lots of people out and about.

Chemist eventually does find a crooked guard, a dwarf by the name of Ulk. He explains that he works part of the town and he can get them in and out safely through his territory. That means they aren’t travelling through the Hills area alone for very long.


The Plan!
So coming back together and exchanging information they then get into “planning” mode. They will use the Ulk guard to get into the Hills area, will sneak their way to the mansion, kill everyone, destroy the barrels of wine and then go into the mansion and make it look like a robbery by trying to steal some stuff.

That’s an easy enough paragraph to read, but it took them an hour and a half to come up with that plan. This was because they were trying their hardest to think of a way to get a cart into the area and steal the barrels instead of just destroying them. Once they dropped the “stealing” part things became much smoother.


The Gate
So they were finally ready to go. At night Ulk guided them through the Hills area until he was at the edge of his territory. They told him to meet here once they were done.

They only met one set of guards before they got to the gated community. They hid fairly well.

Then they came to the iron gate and a single guard behind the gate, just idly standing around and looking bored. They weren’t quite sure how to get passed this obstacle, which I thought was weird because I told them there was a gate and a guard, but oh well.

Luckily a carriage happened to go passed. They hid, but this time not so well. The gate opened for the carriage and the driver said there seems to be some suspicious people outside. The guard thanked him for this information and came out to investigate.

The group hid pretty well, except for the Witch who cast invisibility on herself. With the gate open and the guard looking for suspicious people, the Witch just calmly walks into the gate. Very easy.

The guard, not seeing anything goes back inside and closes the gate.

The witch puts him to sleep and then uses her shiny soul stealing gem to gather up another soul for his collection. Since she’s behind a wall no one notices this. He opens the gate and everyone else comes inside.


Front Entrance
They get to the mansion and there is a guard standing just outside the main wall. He sees them coming right away and asks what they’re doing. They make up some random excuse of being drunk or lost, but the guard isn’t buying it. He pulls out a whistle and begins to blow, but they easily take him down between the 4 of them. Faust attacks with his awesome sword, Mole does some cool flurry punching action and the poor guard is down for the count.

Mole and Faust decide to stay outside by the mansion gates and keep a lookout while the Witch and Chemist rush inside to complete the job.

So, the small whistling bring 2 guards. They come up to Mole and Faust, unsure what’s going on. They have crossbows out and ask them to lay down on the ground. Faust complies but the Mole comes up with this brilliant idea to crawl and lay down and… I’m not quite sure what the plan was, but he thought he was doing something clever.

Anyway, the guards went over to subdue the Mole, but he waited until one was close and started his flurry of blows. The other guard sees this and brings out his whistle. Now there’s lot of whistling.

The plan from here on out just fails more and more.


Things get worse from here
Inside the compound the Chemist run for the back storage building while the Witch levitates up to a window on the second story of the mansion. There the witch sees a maid and tried to get her to go to sleep. A lucky natural twenty means this particular maid is made of sterner stuff, and she flees to get help.

So the witch goes through the window and starts to burning hands the entire room.

Yep, that’ll do it. The maid’s dead and the room is on fire. Awesome.

The chemist rushes towards the door of the back storage area and asks me if it’s locked. I say yes. He unlocks it and flings the door open. I say ok, roll disable device. He gives me a decent roll and I say the door opens.

Then I ask him, “Did you check for traps?”

Oops.

An alarm now starts wailing from the Storage area.

So, to conclude this brilliant plan that took an hour and a half to prepare went up in smoke in a matter of 30 seconds. The mansion is on fire, all of the guards have heard whistling and now there’s a very very loud alarm.

So, 4 guards pour out of the house to go investigate things. The chemist is smart enough to see what’s going on and starts drinking potions that will help him.


the band keeps playing as the Titanic sinks
Upstairs our Witch is trying to stick with the plan by looking for random things to steal in the guest bedroom that is now on fire. Unfortunately the only thing of value would have been the very nice sheets that have been set ablaze. The witch asks if she can search the the maid for anything and I just laugh. Nope. Charred maid doesn’t have anything on her.

Faust and Mole take care of the whistling guards outside of the mansion. Faust takes this moment, considering that there’s only the Mole here with him who already knows his secret, to steal another soul. Good! The sword is now more powerful.

Then they rush inside knowing that their plan was already FUBARed at this point. They meet up with the guards who poured out of the mansion and begin to take them down.

Chemist is turtling up and trying his best not to take any damage. He’s got three different guards on him, but they don’t seem to be doing much since he drank all of his awesome potions. (He took a level in alchemist, so he can make potions of shield and drink mutagens for lots of bonuses, I think his AC was 27, so no low level mook was going to touch him without some critical hit)


In walks the big boss!

Upstairs the Witch hears footsteps coming from outside the room. She turns invisible and leaves out the balconey, trying to make to climb to the other side of the mansion so she can still try to steal stuff. I have to hand it to her, seeing a plan blow up all around you and still sticking with the plan is pretty noble. Unless she just wanted to find stuff to steal while her friends were slowly dying outside. That makes her actions less than noble.

Then again it’s an evil campaign.

The witch is being followed by Evaleen, the half elf who owns the mansion. Evaleen sees through the invisibility and flies after the witch. Yes. She flew. Evaleen is a wizard. She is pretty darned angry about what’s happening to her compound.

So with all of this happening, guards are dropping down below in the epic battle. Faust decides to take one more soul and that seems to be enough. Faust plunges the sword into the dying man only to pull it out once more, and now it is on fire. The sword is now a +1 flaming sword! Hooray!

Everyone except for the Witch sees this happen.

The witch and Evaleen fly into the other room and have a battle of spells going on. None of the spells seem to land. Lots of will saves were made that day. Lucky Witch.

Here they come to save the day!

The guards below are more or less dead so the Chemist decides to chuck a bomb into the storage area. It works in that the barrels of wine in there explode open. But, it also helps the guards pinpoint where they are.

Cue the cavalry! I just grab a handful of mini’s from the box that we keep them in and start setting them up on the front lawn. It comes out to about 13 or so, which is a decent number. Everyone runs. Faust and Mole climb over the back wall and disappear into the night.

Witch finally leaves the room and is able to lose Evaleen for a while, but the poor Chemist fails to run out the front. Evaleen spots him and casts a hold person, which works. The Chemist is caught.

The rest of the group slinks away from the scene of the crime, licking their wounds as they do.

Chemist is arrested.


Lockup

Yeah, so that was interesting.

The guards lock up the chemist. They try to ask him some questions, but he gives a story about the Ravens hiring him to do a job and he doesn’t know anything. So the guards stop questioning. They just come around every hour and offer him something to eat or drink.

He refuses everything. Smart guy.

And then… they just release him.

I know, that’s weird right? They shouldn’t have done that. I should have done something more with this plan. Maybe even a jail break. Yes, that seems like it would have been fun for the next session, but I had different plans for this.

Evaleen is actually part of the Ravens. She knows he’s lying and knows he’s part of the Felons. So she decides to take one of his items in order to do some scrying on him from time to time, as well as plant a “bug” in his items cleverly hidden. They let him go because they wanted to use him as a spy for the Ravens.

Ulk, who just got offered a LOT of money by the ravens, pretended that he busted the Chemist out of jail and now wants some money for pulling strings. Considering the Chemist thought he was going to die, he was more than happy with this deal. And he bought it too. How cool is that.

That’s where the session ended for the night.

I have lots of notes, unfortunately I can't do any of them. There's lots of stuff going on in the real world, but the adventurers are still tryin to complete the wine game. So, at the moment I need to put notes on hold until the group gets to a place where we can do more stuff.

I realize that if I do let the group know that things are happening in the world, they'll want to do investigate or do something about it. That's a good thing, don't get me wrong. But I don't want the group to get sidetracked anymore. We've got a schedule, so let's stick to it.

[Dragon Elite]

*claps* Keep up the journal, it's great fun. I hope that the bugs come back to bite the chemist.

[zimmerwald1915]

Yes, it's back!

[Sillycomic]

Tuesday’s session.

Ahh, party conflict. I must admit when we first started there was a bit of conflict between people about who was in charge and what people were going to do. Since then it seems to have eased into a decent routine with the Chemist more or less leading the group while the Witch comes up with clever plans, the Faust tanking and killing things and the Mole… well… kinda just hanging around with them.

This week we got back into party conflict. And this is partly my fault.

Pre-Game

When the Chemist got back with the rest of the group he explained what happened. They held him, asked him some questions, tried to feed him and then let him go. They asked how and he just said he took care of it. It’s a mafia game and there should be a “mind your business when it don’t concern you” mentality. So, I liked that.

But, I did mention to everyone else that… multiple guards were killed during this raid on the mansion. This means that at the very least they’ve got murder on the Chemist, but he was released the next day? This should be very odd. If this isn’t ringing bells in their heads, then they’re not playing the game correctly.


Roadtrip
So, with that out of the way the group decides they need a few days of rest before moving onto the vineyard where the second group of Boysenberry wine is supposed to be.

The group gets a cart and donkey and head out to the farmland for some sight-seeing, as they put it. Along the way they meet up with my first random encounter in the entire game.

A paladin of Iomedea. He is very nice to them. I don’t even have him detect evil on them, why would he? He’s just travelling down a road and they’re saying hello. He tells them he was out killing goblins and was bringing a few heads back. In town there is a price of 30 gold a head for goblinoids, so the paladin is bringing back some back. He tells them, quite proudly that he’s collected 12 heads.

So the Faust tells me he gets out of the cart.

I have no reason to think this is suspicious so the paladin just keeps chatting away about the road and goblins and all sorts of random things.

Death and Souls
First time in the game that Faust gets to use his Smite Good ability. I’m proud of him. He destroyed the paladin, nearly killed him in one hit. The pool paladin rolled low on initiative so the rest of the group was able to finish him off pretty easily.

The horse tries to run away, but is killed as well.

As the paladin lay dying Faust decides he wants this soul for his sword and tells the rest of the group that he’s dragging this body away to the treeline. Well of course everyone follows him and asks him what he’s doing. He says he wants some alone time with the corpse.

Creepy as that may be, the rest of the adventurers won’t leave so Faust is unable to take the soul.

However, the good news is that with everyone following Faust they leave the Witch alone with a dying horse. He steals the horse’s soul. I think that’s odd, but ok. Horses have souls, right? I don’t know. I’m just the Gm.

Evidence
They steal everything from the paladin and leave him naked and dead alongside the treeline. The Mole decides to cut up some horse steaks from the horse, but then leaves him dead along the roadside.

As they were leaving, I asked them… in my very professiona are-you-sure-you-wanna-do-that-l Gm voice, “So you are leaving a dead horse by the side of the road and a dead naked man about 40 feet away. I just want to get this straight.”

They agreed, that’s what they were leaving by the side of the road.

Ahh. So, note for next session. Lots of guards along the road.

Plus, paladins of Iomedea are now out for revenge on their fallen comrade.

Gotcha!

Vineyard

The group continues on until they make it to the vineyard. There are numerous fields of grapes that surround the complex, which is mostly just a series of buildings for wine making. There’s a large 2 story Victorian house as well as a nice picnic area outside set up with cheese, meat and bread vendors.

The group gets some wine and enjoys themselves for a bit. They decide to take a wine tour and Elron the French wine connoisseur shows them the warehouse facility. I did a bit of research on wine making so I made 4 separate areas within the compound. The first is the juicing room, then the fermentation room, then the barrel storage room and finally the bottling room.

The barrel storage room is what fascinates them the most. They try to do a search but the barrel room is very large and they don’t have much time. They didn’t see any Boysenberry barrels.

The Caves?
So outside the Witch decides that they should go look for random goblins or something to help with the wine raid. Goblins are good for distractions, right? So, it’s off to the hills in search of caves.

The Witch finds 2 caves that seem promising in his search for goblins.

So he joins with the rest of the group and explains his plan. They follow him up to the hills and make camp for the night, next to one of the caves. They are lying in wait to see if anything comes out.

And just after sunset from the first cave, out pops a horse!

Well, that isn’t very exciting. Certainly not as exciting as goblins.

The Faust goes up to the horse, and gets a better look at him. It is a dark horse with piercing red eyes, flames coming from his hooves and a menacing acidic smell of ozone wafting off of him.

Ahh, so it’s a nightmare. A little more exciting now.

Faust comes a little closer and the nightmare just stares at him.

“Hey, I’m just here to talk,” Faust says in infernal.

The Nightmare doesn’t move, “You should leave. Now.”

And the faust goes running back to camp.

Ahh, a successful intimidate check without even rolling anything. I feel like I accomplished something right here.

Mommy Daddy and Uncle Ben
So they decide to check out the next cave, hoping it will yield more promising results. The bad news is there are no goblins in the second cave. The good news is that the group spots gnoll tracks outside of the cave. Gnolls, that will work right?

Chemist calls out in gnoll that he wants to talk. Inside there are gnoll voices who ask him what he wants. Chemist says he wants to negotiate a deal. Faust pipes up that they have food. He speaks this in common though, but the Chemist repeats it.

3 little gnoll pups pop out of the cave entrance, eagerly holding out their hands for food. Chemist asks where their parents are. They reply hunting for food. They’re hungry.

Faust gives them some rations and the pups are happy.

Chemist asks how many are in their tribe. The gnolls say there’s mom and dad and uncle Ben.

So the group decides to wait until Mom and Dad and Uncle Ben arrive home. They set up camp just outside of the cave and sit and wait.

I make them wait for nearly a day.

I honestly thought they would leave and go on to do something else, but the group was determined to meet Mom and Dad and Uncle Ben.

Finally they all hear something crashing through the woods. It is an owlbear, fierce and ferocious. The owlbear has a deer carcass over his shoulder, but he takes one look at the adventurers (one of whom only rolled a 6 stealth) and charges forward!

The group makes short work of the owlbear. He only got a chance to attack once and I rolled a four. How sad. Well, the owlbear drops to the ground very very dead.

And that’s when the young gnoll pups come out of the cave once more. They cry out at the owlbear and go… “OH NO! UNCLE BEN!”

Yeah, that's right Uncle Ben was an owlbear. What? An owlbear can't hang out with two gnolls in the forest? It makes sense.

The group realizes what happened just as the gnolls begin to attack from the hillside. They were a little more stealthy in their approach and got the drop on the poor adventurers. A couple of crossbows bolts fly through the air.

Faust is rushing out to meet them head on. The Mole flings some throwing stars at the gnolls and does some impressive damage, considering they’re just throwing stars. The Chemist realizes his plans for “negotiations” are going up in smoke and so he tells people to stop fighting, in gnoll and common.

And then the Witch throws up an obscuring mist that blocks both the Chemist and the Mole from seeing outside.

And then the gnolls attack. They come right for the Faust with battleaxes. No critical, but I did do some really good damage, enough to anger the Faust something awful. His next turn he chops a gnoll in half.

Now there’s only one gnoll left. The pups are crying, Chemist is still trying to get everyone to stop killing each other and the Mole isn’t really sure what to do. The only gnoll left standing realizes there’s not much left to do, so she takes a step back and total defenses, saying she only wants to leave with her children.


Party Conflict!

A reasonable request right?

This is where the game gets really interesting.

Faust backs down. He says he isn’t going to attack. I realize he’s saying this as he’s holding the flaming sword of soul stealing in his hands. Yup, he has to make a will save. He fails miserably. There’s a tingling in the back of his mind that says to finish the kill.

And he does so! Hooray for the demon sword of soul stealing!

Chemist flips out!

The young gnoll pups run back into the cave, crying and screaming.

So Chemist has it out with Faust, telling him that he gave Faust a direct order not to attack. Faust says they were attacking him first. That argument goes back and forth until the Mole pops in.

Ahhh yes.

The mole says, “Hey wait. Now who said that you’re in charge? You keep acting like you’re in charge and telling people what to do.”

And the Chemist replies that, yes, he is in fact in charge. He’s smart and he’s making all the decisions so of course he’s in charge.

Well, that was unexpected. I didn’t realize random gnoll encounter would lead to this interparty conflict. But I’m rather surprised at the results. Good for me. I need to send random gnolls at the group more often.

So there’s a huge argument back and forth with Faust, Mole and Chemist over who’s the leader and who comes up with the planning for things and who’s involved more than others. This goes back and forth until the Faust drops a really big bomb.

He asks, “So… yeah, what happened with you and getting arrested anyway?”

In the most accusing tone I have ever heard in my entire life. I was in awe. That was like just adding fuel to the fire. Now there’s a whole other line of questioning about what happened. Faust says he took care of it, and eventually he admitted that he had a guy on the inside help him. I guess this was a half truth.

Still, no one was really happy with the explanation. (ahh, I love it when I do my job correctly)


Fight!
So then the fight comes. Mole challenges for leadership of the clan and begins to fight the Chemist. Chemist starts drinking potions to get all of his defenses up. And poor Mole finally realizes why Monks aren’t a very awesome class to play.

I want to say this is somewhat my fault. I encouraged him to play a monk, mostly cause he kept telling me how awesome the Monk class was, with all its special abilities. I kept trying logical arguments like: none of the abilities really stack and the class isn’t designed to do what it’s supposed to do, but he wouldn’t hear it.

Had he been a fighter or ranger, it might have been a more interesting fight.

The only reason I was comfortable with him playing a monk is because he rolled some awesome stats. He rolled, 18, 18, 17, 16, 14, 13. It was amazing. I realized with those stats one could even make a monk be good. Up until now the group has only really fought low level mooks and guards, so he has been holding his own with the rest of the group.

So, when the fight ended up with two characters that kept missing each other, I realized it was partly my fault. The chemist couldn’t throw a bomb because the Mole was too close, and the Mole kept up with his flurry of misses against an amazing AC score (With a shield potion, a mutagen, good dex, medium armor and a ring of protection he was looking at a 27 AC at level 4. Pretty decent)

I kept thinking that the Witch or Faust would join in, but they just watched. That was a little disappointing. Eventually the Mole gave up, conceding that (for now) the Chemist was the leader of this group.

No one else really seemed to argue, so that was the end of that combat. I got a feeling this would be one of those, “forgive but don’t forget” kind of moments for all characters involved. This stuff would boil to the surface some other time, possibly when I throw more random gnolls their way.

I do want to say while all of the characters were in a heated discussion, the players themselves were loving the role playing. I even stopped the game at one point to ask everyone if this was ok. We’re just playing a game and everyone is still having fun with the party conflict. People said they were and so we continued.


Moar Planning
After cave diving and wine tasting and party fighting the group finally decides to do what they came out here to do, raid the vineyard!

So, we spend another hour in deep planning. And this is beginning to annoy me a bit. This campaign is only 5 sessions in at this point, but each session we spend a little more time planning. I didn’t really notice it until last session and this session it has become a huge problem.

Everyone enjoys the planning and has fun with it, but me as the GM I really don’t have anything to do. I am mostly just sitting there, looking up random stats or making sure I have the monsters ready for the next encounter.

I don’t have much to do. Answer the occasional question. I don’t want to like kick them forward with the game, its their game and they’re having fun with the planning, but I should perhaps find something to do in this down time.

Maybe just throw random encounters at them.

I don’t know.

I hope this won’t continue on.

Willy the Will-O-Wisp
Anyway, after major planning they decide to raid the place during the night. (I don’t know why that took an hour, but ok) They go up to the edge of the vineyard and notice that there is a black powder running along the perimeter. It doesn’t cast any magic.

They walk over it and begin going towards the complex.

And then they hear a voice that says, “Hello, you’re not supposed to be here.”

So they have a conversation with this random voice. Someone is invisible in front of them, and doesn’t want them to be here. He asks them kindly to leave. He is kind but stern. They ask how they knew he was here and he says they stepped over the seal.

So they leave.

They come around to the front of the vineyard by the road, remembering that there was no black powder along the front entrance. But during the night apparently someone put some black powder along the front road, so it’s there now.

The cross it again and once more the voice shows up telling them to leave. They say, pretty honestly that they were lost and didn’t know where to go.

So he lights up the road and says, “over there.”

And now its revealed that the thing telling them to leave is a will-o-wisp. Apparently he guards this place at night and wanders around invisible making sure no one goes over the black powder stuff. The group, scared of the will-o-wisp decides that a night raid isn’t a very good idea.

All right then.

Day Raid
So now the group decides to do a daytime raid, take the “wine” tour and then start havoc inside. They don’t really have an exit strategy, I think at this point they were going for an Indy ploy, just show up and see what happens.

That’s fine with me. At least we’re doing something.

So they go to the place at 7 in the morning. The shopkeepers and such are still sleepy and the place is barely open. They ask for a tour and Elron the French win connoisseur wipes his eyes as he shows them around once more.

And once they make it to the barrel storage area they only have Elron and two random workers who are moving some barrels. They pounce, killing everyone in a surprise round. These are low level people with no armor and weapons. I had no stats for them and any amount of damage was death.

The group locates 4 of the barrels of Boysenberry wine, one of them being the one that the two workers were moving. They also see a large number of empty space where barrels should have been. Apparently they were moving the barrels.

Faust takes this opportunity to take another soul for his sword. Witch steals a soul as well.

Ahh, but now Faust has apparently taken enough souls so that his sword levels up yet again. It turns from a flaming sword into a “lightsaber.” It glows a bright blue florescent light and is humming very loudly, as if it were being powered by something. Faust tries to put it away, but the sound isn’t really deterred.

And now the Chemist decides to throw a bomb and blow up the barrels of Boysenberry wine. (lot of b’s in that sentence) He succeeds, but he also creates a small tidalwave of wine as barrels explode in the small room. Wine is rushing everywhere. Mole is knocked into a far wall.

So workers are coming to figure out what’s going on.

Everyone hears the sound of wine running like a waterfall below them. And they all hear a large mechanical sound as a small 10 by 10 part of the floor slowly descends into apparently a room below it.

The Witch is the only one on the platform, everyone else is wandering around the barrel room or trying to close doors.


The Secret Wine Room
Downstairs there are two duergar, dark dwarves who look like they are ready to kill. There is also another 4 barrels of boysenberry wine.

So the witch turns invisible and starts fighting the duergar. She does this by using the spell vomit swarm and commanding the swarm to go after the poor dark dwarves. Being invisible and this being a summoning spell, she’s as effective as she can be down here all by herself.

Faust and Chemist are trying to explain to the workers what’s going on, lying and asking for help and whatnot.

The Mole steps down the hole and starts to fight against the duergar. One dwarf steps up to him and hits him for a lot of damage, while the other one is trying to chase after the witch and take her down.

The witch sees a door out of this room so she opens it and escapes.

Meanwhile the duergar are now whalloping on the poor Mole.

The Faust makes it down there and Chemist thinks hucking bombs at the Boysenberry barrels will be helpful. So, eventually they do decide this is an important fight to do.

The duergar fighting with the mole becomes enlarged and does another massive blow. The mole is finally down. Faust is right behind trying to fight off the two Duergar in the room. With Faust and Chemist both helping each other, they finally defeat the Duergar in the room.

Unfortunately this is about the same time that the Witch decides to open a random door in the hallway that she has been wandering, and out pop another three duergar who rush passed her to see what the commotion is all about.

Chemist goes to the lever on the side of the wall and presses it so that the elevator will go up. He then gets on the elevator. Faust chucks the Mole’s unconscious body onto the elevator and goes back to one of the Duergar because he has detected some magical items on the dead dwarves person.

Ahh, but the elevator rises up so that the Faust can’t get on it.

Faust’s solution?

Go back to the lever and pull it down.

So, while Chemist and the mole were almost out of harm’s way, the elevator starts going down once more. This happens about the same time that the three fresh and ready to fight duergar enter the room.


My First PC Kill... kinda.
And… that’s where the session ended. It was very late at that point. I had thought we would have a stopping point much sooner, but someone (witch) had to keep opening doors and looking for stuff.

It was at this point that the Chemist told me that he was on the elevator right next to the Mole. Unconscious but stable.

Chemist told me he was going to slit the Mole’s throat while they had some alone time.

I asked the player if this was ok… because I didn’t want any bad blood between them. He said it was fine, and there was a good role playing purpose for doing so.

If you remember I said that PVP and kills were only allowed if there was a good reason for it and everyone was ok with it. The players were ok and there was legitimate reason for this death, so the Mole was unfortunately assassinated in his sleep.

He said he had another character concept in mind, so I suppose we’ll find out what he’s going to play here in a little bit. I already have an idea I want to run by him, but it’s ultimately up to him what he wants to play.


Notes
Sheesh, lots of little plot hooks are now abandoned because of what happened. Oh well. That’s the nature of this kind of game. And everyone had fun. It was a dramatic and thrilling night with lots of twists and turns. If it were a movie it would have been very dramatic, although I would have skipped over the tedious planning parts.

Meh, can’t have it all.

We ended the night on a cliffhanger! How cool. The real fun comes with the group realizing that they’re in the middle of duergar territory, they haven’t fought any of the outside vineyard guards, they’re now down a player and they have no clue where the will-o-wisp is.

I feel like my players may have bitten off a little more than they can chew. Unfortunately they can’t even run away because of all this, they’re trapped down in a cave!

Guess how they get out is going to be half of the fun.

[Savannah]

I shouldn't be laughing so hard about the adventures of a group of evil characters.....I blame the DM commentary :smalltongue:

By the way, in the first paragraph of "Fight!" you say that the Mole is fighting Faust, but I think you mean the Chemist :smallwink:

[Sillycomic]

Ahh thank you, for the compliment and the catch.

It has been a fun game to Gm honestly. There are moments where I am just as surprised as my players are when things happen.

Everyone in the group has said this is a fantastic game so far. That seems good enough for me.

[FuryOfMetal]

I'm so happy that this is back :smallbiggrin: I didn't consider that the Chemist would assassinate the Mole, but that's the nature of the game. I think all the players I know IRL would say no and get really angry, seeing it as a personal attack. It's a shame I couldn't do alot of this with my friends :smallfrown:

[Sillycomic]

I'm surprised there has not been as much bad blood between them. This would be the 5th session and it's the first time some real party conflict has taken place.

I guess I need to deal with the mob's reaction. They're going to want to know why their mole was killed. Obviously he learned something valuable about one of them. I wonder what they'll tell him, and how honest they'll be.

Ahh, backlash. That seems to be a recurring theme in this adventure.

In other news, our game got cancelled tonight due to real world sickness. Along with a birthday party and some other random engagement we won't be playing again until May 17th. That's like almost a month. I feel sad. I was rearing to keep going and leave this thing on a really cool cliffhanger.

I suppose killing a player while the room they are in fills with Duergar is a pretty cool cliffhanger in and of itself. Oh well.

Mole's player contacted me with a new character concept.

He's looking to be a serial killer. I talked with him about it, and he's going for something like Dexter, a plotting and meticulous character with a need to kill and trying his best to not get caught.

I said that was ok. It's brutal but smart. He's not playing someone who just randomly kills people, he'll be stalking his prey. I can work with that.

So I am asking him to read up on a bunch of real serial killers to get some ideas. (your homework for this evening... go read up on serial killers and be inspired!)

He has to have a list for me.

1. Kind of victims. Serial killers usually only pick one kind of victim.
2. Ritual, something they do every time. Kill with the same weapon, pick a similar place, whatnot.
3. Getting rid of the body... again usually a pattern in how it's done.

He's going for a dhampir inquisitor.

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/humanoids/dhampir

He asked if he could play any monster race, and I gave him a list of all of them with no racial hit dice. He chose this one for some reason.

I guess it's ok. It's got darkvision which is cool, but its negative energy affinity means he can only be cured with inflict spells. I am not sure why he would want to do that, other than fun flavor stuff.

I guess it works for something trying to be a serial killer.

[Conkea]

Man i REALLY wish i could be part of a campaign like this, sounds absolutely brilliant, weel done sir. Can't wait to read more.

[Sillycomic]

Today is May 17th... the day we go back to Edrigar and find out what the crazy mafia is up to. I will be leaving in a few hours for the game. I wanted to leave you guys with a bit of a teaser though.

I talked a bit more with the player bringing in a new character. I guess I should give him a nickname. How about Dexter? Seems fitting.

He's playing an inquisitor with the death domain, should be fun. We'll see how effective he can integrate himself into the game. Inquisitor is interesting, kind of like a mix between a paladin and a cleric. It has a bunch of cool class features and spells. All in all a cool class.

He's told me that he wants to find a vampire in the city, in the hopes of being turned into a vampire himself. How cool is that? I need to start working on a vampire clan in town, and see how vampires work. I don't know how vampires really work in D&D.

I've GMed for 3 years off and on and I can count on one hand the amount of undead/ghost/zombie/vampire type of encounters I have ever run. Looks like I need to do some research.


The other thing I want to mention is that I got an email last night from the Witch in the party.

I'll copy and paste the bulk of the email because it's awesome.


I just wanted to throw you the heads up. The PVP violence is not over yet. Makaylah (Witch) won't be putting up with the cain's (Chemist's) betrayal. I won't be trying to take him in a head-on fight unless Patty (Faust) sides with me, and I'll work the buffs while Patty slashes. If Patty's not agreed that cain has to die, then I'll just take him out in his sleep.

Or at least she'll try. if it comes to blows, cain won't be a pushover, this could quite possibly kill Makaylah. Or this may even devolve into a battle royale or TPK. So just incase Makaylah bites it, I'm prepping a backup character, a Half-orc Inquisitor, lawful evil with knowledge domain.

The witch thinks that the Chemist has gone too far, and will try to form a secret alliance with Faust in order to kill him... and I assume then take over the group.

It's cold, conniving and downright dirty.

Perfect for an evil campaign.

I can't wait for tonight. This is going to be beyond fun. We'll see how things go. I doubt it will devolve into a TPK, but certainly it could. Faust has been weary to take sides when it comes to in group fighting, but he seems more interested in his side quest then party politics...

Which, I might use. I might have the sword whisper in his ear how helpful the Chemist's soul will be. That might push things one way or another.

How wrong is that? I feel like a bad GM that I'm pushing for this. Meh, it's fun role playing though, and I don't care. Worse comes to worse they bring in new characters and we start over.

In any event, I think it's funny his back-up character is the almost exact same concept as the new one that the Mole is bringing in. Inquisitor with the Death domain.

I mentioned it to him, but he seems fine with it. So, we may have 2 inquisitors here in a bit. Who knows. (I could call them Thing 1 and Thing 2)

All right, that's enough for a teaser. I'll write tomorrow about what happens. Unless we do end up in a TPK and the game ends early, in which case I guess I'll be writing this sooner than I think.

I'll keep you posted.

[Savannah]

Yay! I was just thinking the other day that I wished you guys would play again :smalltongue:

My feeling on D&D vampires is that they're a horrible mash-up of every single vampire myth ever (plus they don't turn people with their blood drain :smallconfused:). Personally, I'd take the base and house-rule that they turn people with the blood drain instead of the energy drain and modify which of their weaknesses and powers apply, so that they're less all over the place on abilities.

[Sillycomic]

One of the best night’s of gaming ever! I feel really jealous at this point. This is an amazing game. Absolutely amazing. I can say by far it’s one of the best games I’ve ever been a part of, and I feel very jealous that I’m not allowed to play in it. This is one of those games where so much fun things are happening that I want to be a player and have fun with everyone. Unfortunately I have to GM… bleck on that.

All right, let’s get on with things.


Meet Dexter

The night starts with the Witch, wandering into a random room that the Duergar just left. He goes in to this room and sees a small alter to a random god that he doesn’t recognize and a prisoner hanging up on the wall. This prisoner is a tall pale human who just happens to have a small pile of equipment right next to him. Ladies and gentleman, please welcome Dexter.

The Witch is still invisible, but begins asking Dexter questions about what’s going on. Dexter explains he was wandering around and got kidnapped, they’ve been torturing him here because the duergar have a bunch of stills down here and make quite a bit of illegal alcohol underneath the winery. There’s a bunch of stills and such further into the caves that the duergar want to protect. They thought Dexter was some sort of spy, kidnapped him and were torturing him for information. He had none, so they were just about to kill him when the Witch conveniently arrived.

The witch cuts him down and tells him to go and help his friends. Dexter does so.

Moar Duergar!

Meanwhile back in the main room… the elevator is currently moving down with the now dead Mole and the murderous Chemist. Faust is in the room waiting for the elevator when the three duergar arrive. One tells the other two to take care of this while he goes and warns the others. Two duergar stay and one runs further into the caves. The fight commences!

Blows are traded. One duergar falls down while the other becomes large! Dexter arrives just in the nick of time to start killing the duergar. He realizes there are a lot of enemies, so he gives up. There’s not much else he can do.

They question him, and get the same answers that Dexter provided. Apparently they are running a still down here and are trying to protect it from intruders. That makes sense. Maybe it’s just cause we’ve been away for so long, but they never really bothered to ask any other type of questions, like why they were moving all of the boysenberry wine or anything.

Oh well. Not a big deal. He tells them the wine is in a storage area further along in the cave and the stillery is even further than that. The group is done getting information from him and kill him. Faust uses this opportunity to power up his sword anymore. It’s a +1 sword again. Hooray!

Foul Play?

Meanwhile the Witch looks over at the Mole, who had been breathing just a few rounds ago. Apparently not so much now. The witch does a simple examination and see that while the dwarves have been using warhammers, it was actually a dagger wound which killed the Mole. So now the witch is asking what happened. Faust doesn’t really know, Mole was alive when he went up in the elevator and dead when it came down.

Chemist says he isn’t sure what happened either. It’s at this point I would like to point out I stopped having people roll bluff and sense motive when it comes to talking with each other. I think it’s more a matter of, if you have a feeling someone’s lying or something’s up, then you do that. No die roll should tell you one way or the other. There’s still these rolls when it comes to NPC’s, but I feel like it’s far more fun if you have to figure out for yourself if an ally is lying versus some die roll in the game telling you.

So, suspicions are flying in the air, but no one says anything. Just like before this is one of those fights where it’s just under the surface, biding its time before things explode. Well, I’m all for that. So, let’s just move on and wait to see what happens.

Further into the Cave!

They decide to break the elevator so no one can come down after them. They also decide to use the huge alter to cover up the tunnel leading down into the grand unknown. They are essentially blocking themselves in, but at the same time no one can really take them from behind… so it seems to be a good plan so far.

They move further into the caves and… surprise! come across the rest of the boysenberry barrels. 45 in all. And they’ve destroyed 5 already, so this is what they’re looking for. They set 5 aside to try and take back to their hideout, and destroy the rest. The cave fills with the sticky wine and everyone except Faust becomes drunk. How fun is that.

They move further down and they come to a very large iron door. Chemist disables the trap and tried to unlock it, but then hears Duergar voices on the other side. Apparently they’re readying themselves for the coming fight.

So, the group holds, and they ready themselves as well. It seems as if we’ve got ourselves a standstill. The group is waiting for the Duergar to come out, and the Duergar are waiting for them to come in. So, after some deliberating there comes a knock at the door from the inside.

The group isn’t sure how to respond to this, until they hear a voice say, “Yep, there still out here, just waiting.”

Apparently the Duegar woke up Willy the Will-O-Wisp who is relaying information right now. So, the group decides to start some negotiations. The duergar are only interested in their stills, which they’re protecting. My group says they’re only interested in finding a way out of here, because they’ve already done what they’re supposed to do.

The Duergar says to go up the elevator, but the elevator is broken. No good. Then the Duergar say to go down the tunnel, it leads out eventually. The group has no way to navigate through the tunnels though. And then Will-o-wisp pipes up and says he can do it!

Follow Willy!

So, Willy takes them all out through the tunnels. No more fights or random encounters. They leave through a series of tunnels and end up outside! The will-o-wisp bids them goodbye and disappears once more.

So, they’re out! They destroyed all but 5 barrels (which are still inside the cave) and apparently never bothered to check anyone or loot anyone because aside from the Witch grabbing some uncut jewels they have nothing really to show for what happened.

Except all the money coming in from the Boysenberry market.

So outside they go back to their cart and take in the situation. They send Dexter away and talk about him joining their group. They’re down 1 man, and he seemed to be able to handle himself and take direction. They decide to bring him in as a tentative person, provided he give information about future endeavors for them.


Challenge for Leadership of the Clan!

Dexter mentioned he worked for felons and brothers alike, and one of the people he mentioned working for was Blades. If you may remember, Blades has a 5,000 gold bounty on his head thanks to a petite Halfling grandmother who wants revenge on him for killing her grandson. So, if they get some information that’ll help in collecting this bounty, he’ll be in with them.

And here we come to the fun part.

Once this has been squared away, the Witch brings up, once more, what happened with the Mole. The witch stabilized him and then left the room, when she came back he had a knife wound and was dead. The Chemist finally revealed that he killed him, and he said, “For obvious reasons.”

Which makes sense; if you recall last time Mole and Chemist fought for leadership when they came to heads about who ran this group. Since the Chemist said he made most of the ideas, he was the leader. The Mole disagreed. They fought for a bit, couldn’t really hit each other and in the end decided to call a truce which wasn’t really a truce it was more like a “I’ll wait until he falls asleep,” truce.

So, the Witch finally goes through with her plan. She blasts on the Chemist with burning hands. The chemist is burning, but luckily he used all of his bombs for the day and isn’t blown up on the spot (unlucky in that those bombs would have been quite helpful here). They go back and forth, all the while Faust is looking between them and isn’t sure what to do, he wants to ask his sword what he should do.

How wonderful. I take him aside and tell him the sword thinks these are both powerful souls and would make him even more powerful, “Pick a side and fight!” I didn’t know which side Faust would pick, but he seemed to like that answer.

So, he comes back out and charges the Chemist.

Dexter, new to the party and still unsure what’s going on does something very smart. He turns invisible and waits until things calm down. Very smart. I gave him points for his intelligence.

Faust provides the killing blow and Chemist goes down. Then Witch comes in and steals his soul. Faust isn’t happy about this at all, and it looks like there might be another fight between Faust and the Witch. Faust seems to think it’s better to bide his time at the moment though, so he doesn’t finish the Witch off.

(Again, I get the feeling this fight isn’t over… just that people are waiting for the right opportunity, but what do I know, I’m just the GM)

Paladin guards!

So now the three of them head back to town on their cart. The trip is uneventful until they reach the city gates. There is a huge line of people trying to get into the city. Some people have been here for hours. The group investigates and they find out that the local church of Iomedae found one of their paladins killed in some sort of cult ritualistic murder just outside of town and now the church is inspecting anyone trying to come into town for information about the murder.

There is a group of paladins, clerics and a unicorn who are questioning people trying to get inside. Apparently it’s a pretty thorough search. Faust seemed really worried that they had a unicorn who was with them, and he was also really worried that they were going to find out he killed the paladin, so he didn’t want to go through the gate.

Witch thought she could lie her way through the gate, and Dexter is mostly innocent so he has no problem. But Faust was getting worried. He asked his sword for help, but the only thing I told him is that a unicorn soul would be really powerful. Apparently Faust didn't want to take advice from the sword anymore.

Camping!

So, instead of going home the group heads out into the woods to camp out for the night and figure things out. Witch and Dexter go to sleep while Faust keeps watch of everything. There is a night-time skirmish of hobgoblins but it wasn’t a very good group of hobgoblins and Faust takes care of them mostly by himself.

He also takes all of their souls, and along with some of the duergar from the tunnels he sees that his sword is now completely black and looks like it absorbs light instead of reflecting it. He is really interested to see what it does now. I have fun making his sword do random things…

In the morning they finally decide for Dexter to take the cart into the city alone, since he’s innocent, and the Witch and Faust will climb over the wall after Faust gets some rest. Dexter goes through the gate after only answering a few questions, relatively simple.

Soul Talk

Faust goes to sleep… and then we have the Witch, with two souls inside of her gem that she very much wants to talk with. So she has a little meditation session and she’s able to talk with her trapped souls.

First she speaks with the Chemist. He is pissed, but she explains why she did it. She also explains what’s going to happen to him if he doesn’t answer all of her questions. She will sell his soul to the black market and he’ll be some demon’s play thing forever and ever. She promises to let him go and be in whatever afterlife he has coming to him if he tells her all of his secrets and dealings that he’s been up to.

After some haggle back and forth, he agrees. He explains everything (apparently the Chemist will email everything to both Witch and myself, so I’ll update that when I get it) So now the Chemist knows all of that. She promised to let him go once she could validate all of his information.

Then she speaks with the Mole. She explains she avenged his death and wants to know if he has any unfinished business. He explains the pickpocket children he was training and the big warehouse of wool he has, as well as the debt he need to repay the bank. He didn’t mention that he was a Mole for Allure or that he knows all about the Faust’s secret devil cult. I was surprised he didn’t mention either of those, but that’s all right. Those are his secrets to tell or not. Then she thanks him and leaves.

The witch told me she’s not letting The Mole go, he’s getting sold into the soul black market. Well, all right then… that’s going to be fun.

Over the Wall

Once the soul talk is over with, Faust and the Witch use a couple of invisibility spells to climb up the wall with very little problems.

So, now we are back in town. And that’s where I left things off for the night. It was late and I realized anything else I was going to do would be involving just throwing random plot hooks at them, none of which they could really do… so it’ll be better to just do it next session.


Chemist's new character

Poor Chemist fell out of the game early on, but he spent most of the downtime working on his new character concept. He rolled some decent stats and is going to play a drow ranger/wizard. He wants to be loyal to the felons, which got me thinking of a pretty similar character concept. I asked him if he was interested in being a mole and going in under cover with the felons to try and find out what’s going on with them? He liked that idea a lot!

So, I told him the backstory that Allure knows a lot about what’s going on, thanks to Isto’s previous mole work, and now Allure is very angry that his Mole was killed. He wants to know what happened and if the group of people now really are loyal to him or not. I gave him the speel I gave the Mole. When he realized that the Mole was undercover, he didn’t really think the Mole did a very good job. I agreed. He said he would do much better, pretending to be people’s friends and asking all sorts of personal type questions.

Oh good. From now on, I will call this new character, The Snitch.

Ghostbusters!

I also asked him about his old character… since the Chemist will have his soul released, is there anything he wants to do with that soul? Pathfinder is pretty cool when it comes to souls, lots of things can happen. I offered him a few suggestions, like coming back as a ghost or allip, or just tormenting the Witch from time to time if he wanted. He would be mostly an antagonist at that point, but it’s an idea. I would enjoy bringing him back to seek out revenge on those who betrayed and killed him. Up to him though, I won’t do it if he’s not interested in it.

All right, now we’re onto fun plot hooks for next week.

Since the boysenberry thing is done, the game is pretty open. At this point they can do whatever they want. They mentioned the old adventuring couple who has a house full of random artifacts, as well as the 5,000 gold bounty on Blades head.

Ventor the cleric will try to examine Inan’s body to find out what happened. Since Chemist was the only one who cared about this and he’s now dead, I doubt it will be important anymore… except Faust still has orders to kill Ventor. So he’ll be interested to find out that Ventor will show up (with bodyguards) next session.

Robbie, the not so smart shop merchant will tell them that he has spotted rats in his basement… so obviously a volcano is coming! Not sure what to do with this, maybe throw some were-rats at them for fun? Or just have them chase down random normal rats? Either way, something to lighten the mood.

Dexter wants to kill some more people, leave his calling card and see if any vampires show up for him. I think I’ll let him find a cult somewhere. Maybe they’ll make him do a few things and if he’s good he can talk with a vampire. I seriously need to think about this and find some good answers, right now it’s all vague. Bleck on vampires!!!

So, this seems to be a good start for next session. There’s upkeep, a new character to introduce, a few people to go talk to (including Allure and bringing him up to speed on the whole situation) and lots of little loose ends to put together thanks to several PC deaths.

If I get any more emails I’ll update things, but for right now I think we’ll just wait to see what happens next week.

[Sillycomic]

Hey guys, welcome back again to Edrigar!

Let me start by saying that my new Snitch has decided to get the Ultimate Magic from Pathfinder, and is really excited to play the Magus class. I was fine with that, I looked over the SRD Magus and it didn’t look so bad.

I am not sure if I like that Magus class, now that I’ve seen it in play. It’s powerful. Very powerful. By third level you can cast a spell and attack twice thanks to all of the class abilities. Isn’t that a bit too much? I don’t know. To me it seems too powerful when the witch is just casting one spell and Faust is charging and hitting. I don’t really know about that.

Ok.

Clean-up
Our new character Dexter couldn’t make it tonight. That is all right, he went off due to random errands and said that he would be back in a day or two. Good enough excuse to let him go. I guess I’m just that kind of GM, I don’t mind characters randomly popping in or out for no real reason. I’m sure some people would want something that is more in character and makes logical sense, or even have them tag along as an NPC for the power of it all, but I personally don’t care that much. Characters can disappear for no reason or show up and join the campaign as absences occur.

We’ve only got two characters to start with then, the Witch and Faust. There is nothing specific on the agenda, so the witch decides to go check up on some of Kane’s old investments.

Faust wants to do something a little more practical, start his lottery. I completely forgot about the whole lottery idea, but in my defense it was over 2 months ago since he brought it up, and he never emailed me that is what he wanted to do. So unfortunately I couldn’t help him much.

Taevor explained that he needed about 2,000 gold start up collateral to make the lottery thing happen. And there will need to be some council members “persuaded” to make a lottery in the town official. So, I have got to work on that.

The Witch explains to Gorrack and the drug distributors that she is now in charge of everything. They take this in stride. Considering they knew Kane for all of a week, it doesn’t seem like a big dip in things.


Volcano!

Then we get to our first big notice of the day.

Umi brings in a letter that he doesn’t understand. It is from Robbie. It says.

Saw a Rat.
Volano is coming.
Help!
Robbie

It was pretty funny, everyone liked it. So, with a table filled with groans they head over to Robbie’s place. Robbie has the shop closed up with a large sign that says VOLANCO COMING outside. He unlocks the door once they come in, and explains what’s going on.

Basically, he saw a couple of rats in the basement.

If you may recall, Robbie doesn’t pay protection money for the Mafia. Instead, the group convinced Robbie that he pays for Volcano insurance. Robbie wasn’t convinced until they explained to him that rats were a sure sign of volcanoes coming, and they mentioned various cities destroyed by large volcanoes and rats being a part of it. So, Robbie thinks rats are followed by volcanoes. He sees a couple of rats in his basement… so… you get the picture.

Down in the basement the group doesn’t see any rats, but the basement is pretty big and filled with random supplies from the store, so the rats could be hiding anywhere. The Witch decides to summon a swarm and let it clear the room. The rats are eaten by spiders.

Then the witch goes to the stairs and casts burning hands up to the main store. Robbie freaks out and hides in the corner, positive that a volcano is coming.

Instead, the group comes out of the basement and says they took care of the problem. They then ask for 50 gold, which Robbie pays since he doesn’t really understand how insurance works.

There’s an offhand comment about how Robbie can stay in business if he’s not that bright, but they just leave it at that. In truth, I do need to come up with a good reason why that is. It’s fun playing Robbie, but he needs a reason why he’s dumb but rich.

Maybe a rich uncle in the senate is keeping his shop from caving under? That’s a good idea. I can work with that.

Rituals
Faust decides he needs to go sell his soul. So, off we go to the temple cult where Ogar is in a small room meditating. Faust says the sword is full and he wants to sell his soul. Ogar laughs at that, and then asks to see the sword. While it is black and absorbs light rather than reflecting it, Ogar tells him the sword is not ready.

Faust says there’s seven souls in the sword, it must be ready. Ogar only shakes his head. If the souls are weak the sword will not grow in power very much. Ogar tells him that he will now when the sword wakes up, it will reveal itself in a very obvious way.

Ogar then tells him, when his happens, to go find a virgin woman. He needs to perform a ritual involving her sacrifice in order for the devil to be born. He is happy to oblige and wants to see the sword grow in power.

So, there’s that.

My plan for Faust is coming together. Once he fills the sword he will need to perform the ritual, in which an imp will be born. The imp’s job is to make sure he is worthy, and will tag around with him generally causing trouble.
I’m not sure after the imp, maybe getting specific souls, a cleric of good or something? I don’t know. Still working on that.

Back at the hideout, Faust is greeted by a secretary of Ventor, who says that she is looking for the Chemist. If you recall the Chemist wanted to know when Ventor was coming to examine the body, so she is here telling them.

Ventor will be at the church tomorrow at noon if the Chemist wishes to join them.Faust, being really interested in killing Ventor, thanks her for this information. He decides to go and buy some disguise equipment so that he can pretend to be Kane and kill Ventor. He wants to do this inside a church? All right then.

I’m just the GM.

Welcome Snitch!

The witch gets an invite from Allore. They both go to the Mama Mia’s restaurant, and Allore is pissed off. He heard about the whole vineyard incident, being that two of his friends showed up dead around the area, and is livid why no one is telling him what’s going on and why things were so messy.

Witch tries to explain that it got messy, but they were doing it for money. Allore asks where the money is, and they say it’s coming. Now Allore is really angry. He doesn’t like a messy job with no money for it.

Then the witch goes off about how it was all Kane’s fault. Kane challenged for leadership and that’s why things got messy. The group basically blamed everything on Kane, which was easy to do since he’s dead. They said the Mole tried to fight valiantly, but Kane is a dirty trickster who didn’t fight fair.
Allore is convinced of this (it’s half truth, and he rolled poorly on sense motive) and agrees he wasn’t 100% on Kane. He did trust Nimble to bring Kane in, but with this going on now he’s not so sure.

In any event, Allore asks them if they need any more muscle, being as they’re low on numbers. He says he has a friend who is loyal to him, and he used on occasion. Being as how it is only Faust and Witch, they agree to take on some more muscle for new mission.

They head off to the marketplace, and in a dreary pub in a private backroom, they meet the Snitch, a female drow magus by the name of Al’trilmeal. We mostly call her Ultrameal, but here she is known as the Snitch. She is loyal to Allore and has done a bunch of random jobs, and looks pretty competent when it comes to fighting and such. (grumble grumble, Paizo, grumble)

Winery wrap-up
So, with new muscle the Witch and the Snitch (witch’n’snitch, that’s funny) head over to Eola’s Winery to discuss getting the money they owe. Eola is happy to see them, apparently it’s big news that the vineyard was taken down, and everyone now knows she has the biggest supply in town, so orders have been pouring in for the wine. She’s already sitting on a nice investment.

Witch wants to know when profits will come in. Eola explains they’ll get about a thousand a month from everything, but they won’t see a full return of investment for a year or so. But… she’s willing to make a deal with them.
She’ll give them 6,500 gold now to buy them out of the contract.

The Witch likes 8,000 gold more. They agree on 7,500 gold with 10 bottles of the wine thrown in for good measure. The witch agrees to this, as soon as he speaks with Faust on the subject.

The Chemist returns!

Faust has gone to his meeting with Ventor outside of the church. He rolls a pretty decent disguise and looks somewhat like the now dead Chemist. I find it funny that no one at this meeting knows what the chemist looks like, but there’s a clever disguise anyway.

Ventor is an old man with a beard. He’s being escorted by a couple of paladins and… surprise! a unicorn named Daisy. Daisy shoots Faust a dirty look, but luckily Faust remembered to cast undetectable alignment.
It would have been a much shorter meeting had that not taken place.

Ventor leads them into the morgue where the body of Inan, murdered in session 3, lies resting. He has been preserved thanks to magic and looks in the same condition as before.

Only Ventor, Daisy and “Chemist” are in the room. Ventor examines the body but is not happy with what he finds.

Apparently Ventor has been looking for bodies with souls missing, there has been some recent activity in the area and Ventor thinks it is part of a devil worshipping cult, more specifically a powerful sword that must be behind all of this.

This body though, while its soul has been stolen, does not have a sword wound in his chest. Ventor is a little discouraged by this. He was hoping to get one step closer to this devil sword and whoever might be wielding it (little does he know how close he is)

He does spot a gem patch though, a small circle where the soul was extracted, probably through some sort of a soul stealing gem. “Chemist” asked who could be responsible for this and Ventor responded it must be the Hag.

Deep in the southern swamps there is supposedly some hag out there that deals in the black market of souls. Ventor would love to go and ask her questions, but it is a very big swamp so he doesn’t know where to look.

The "Chemist" then says, he knows exactly where the Hag in the swamp is, and will gladly show Ventor. Ventor is excited and says they should prepare a quest for this right away. He needs two days to get his affairs in order and he will be ready. “Chemist” says to meet him outside of this church in two days.

Excited, Ventor and the unicorn left, leaving only Faust and whatever wild plan he has for them.

Info dump
Everyone gets back together to share information. Faust likes the idea of getting money now from the winery, and agrees to it. Then he asks his friends for help in taking down a cleric. He explains some of what happened, and that there is a hag in the southern forest that they could use this information to bring out Ventor and kill him.

You might remember, or you might not, but the Witch is an apprentice of the hag in the swamp. Her job is to steal souls for the hag. When the witch is told this information, it is not new to her, except in the fact that now her friends know about it. All in all I thought he had a good poker face. I kept my own face behind a book, looking up some random cleric spell.

I’m just the GM, after all. When some characters actually talked about taking this hag down and the witch calmly mentioning that maybe they shouldn't... I couldn't help but smile. My poker face isn't so good.

There was a little confusion in Faust’s story, because one of the plans they came up with was to have Ventor and the hag fight each other, and then they as a group could just swoop in and take the victor. I, as the Gm, had to point out that while this is true Faust does not know where the Hag is. He lied about this little spot, so unless the group wants to spend months searching through a filthy smelly swamp for one hag, that idea isn’t going to work.

So, the new plan is to take Ventor out just beyond the city limits, kill him, get rid of the body and then return back home. I applauded my group, finally deciding to get rid of the bodies. You may recall that a few session ago they left a murdered paladin on the side of the road thinking nothing of him… yeah the paladin’s didn’t take that very lightly.

Think smarter, not harder!

This is the group’s ultimate plan. It’s a good plan, with only one flaw.

We'll get to that in a bit.


Moneys!

The group decides to go and get their money from Eola. She is delighted and hands them a bank receipt for the amount. Thinking this is a nice way to check out the bank as well as get the money, they go to the bank.

Inside it looks like a regular old bank with a large vault behind a counter in the back of the room. The group goes to cash out the check, but in this large of an amount, they need to talk with the owner of the bank. The owner is a nerdy human with spectacles named Avin. Avin is impressed with the size of the check, and tries to ask a few questions about where they got such an amount, but the group really wasn’t interested in answering.

He then goes to the bank vault and pulls a key from around his neck to unlock the vault. He goes in for a few minutes and comes back out with a large coffer of the money.

They count it, it’s all there, and everyone is happy. Avin is sorry to lose their business, but if they ever need any help to come back again.

They say ok.

Outside there is an ambush waiting.

On the roof a gnoll sharp shooter begins with a critical hit to Faust, which I was rather impressed with. Two dwarves and a human come out from behind a back alley and run towards the group.

This is where the Snitch gets to shine, as she throws out spells and sword damage like nobody’s business. It is scary watching her. The Witch is trying to get everyone to fall asleep, and Faust opens the bank doors to get some help out here.

Unfortunately the people in the bank see the fighting going on outside and close and lock the doors.

So much for that.

The gnoll continues to pluck people from above until the witch uses Cause Fear on him, and it works… the gnoll runs away. Two more humans come out of a back alley, and the Snitch pulls a darkness spell to help her and her efforts.

Between Faust and the Witch they make short work of the rest of the group on the ground. Two humans ran away when they saw the fight wasn’t going so well, and they never did find the gnoll, but everyone else was dead and lootable.

That they did. Nothing spectacular as far as loot goes, just a mithral shirt from the dwarf. Witch and Faust both got another soul to add to their collection, so that’s nice.

Snitch notices that one of the dead dwarves looks familiar. He’s a hired muscle person for the Brothers. He mostly does freelance work, but he definitely has Brother ties.

Opportunity!

They go back to their hideout, divide up the loot and give Allore his fair share. Allore is happy with them and tells them that if they ever need anything, he’s here for them. He is glad to see that the Snitch is working out so well.

The group doesn’t tell him about the ambush or ties to the Brother clan just yet.

The group then decides what to do. They think they can use this fight to their advantage, trying to use it to persuade the bank to get some protection money from them.

They head back over to the bank, talking with Avin once more. They try to convince Avin that the fight outside was an attack on the bank, and they saved Avin. Avin only laughs at that, saying his bank is very safe and there have been no incidents of theft.

They then try to convince Avin that since there’s protection inside of the bank, that doesn’t mean there’s protection outside. People need to feel safe in order to use the bank. At this point Avin counters with, “If people are less safe out there, they feel a greater need to put their money in the bank, ha ha.”

The group took a real interest in this little sentence. They ask more about it, but at that point Avin decides it’s time to close up the bank for the day. He evades their questions and shoos them out of his bank.

The group, outside in the streets, concludes that Avin might have had something to do with this ambush. It happened just as they went outside and no one else knew about the money.

They were going to follow Avin once he leaves the bank. An hour later bank tellers start leaving the bank, but no Avin. He must still be inside the bank. They don’t like this predicament at all.

One fatal flaw

Two days pass, and the time of the great Hag hunt is upon us. Faust once more dresses up like the Chemist and waits for Ventor. Snitch is right beside him, and the Witch is outside of the city waiting for the impending ambush.

Then the one single fatal flaw in the group’s plan is revealed.

Ventor, who knows how powerful a night hag can be, brought an army with him.

He has the unicorn, Daisy, as well as paladins, clerics and random muscle fighters as well. Almost a dozen characters in all are parading down to see “Chemist” and head out on their journey. Snitch sees this and makes herself scarce.

“Chemist” eyes everyone and explains that he needs to go get some merchandise from the general store, asking for people to wait here until he returns. Ventor agrees, shaking the man’s hand. The "Chemist" runs away, dropping his disguise and heading back to their saloon.

Apparently they aren’t going to kill the cleric.

This is the best part of my plan though. Ventor now knows the Chemist has knowledge of the hag, and will try to find him. The Chemist is dead, but his name keeps coming up with a lot of things around this part of town. He’s tied to Allore and everyone. If Ventor really thinks the Chemist has knowledge that will get him closer to the Hag or the soul stealing sword, he will do whatever he can to find Chemist.

This is big for me. Up until now Ventor’s only been a minor thorn in the group’s side. He just became their ultimate nemesis. I need to put a group together that will find the Chemist. Maybe a paladin, the unicorn and some sort of ranger tracker.

Cool.

New plan!
So, with their plans of cleric killing halted, the group then decides to go sell some goblin heads. The group got some goblin heads a few sessions ago thanks to a murdered paladin, along with some hobgoblin heads from last session. They want to go and collect the money.

They head to city hall where there’s a small place behind the main guard building that deals with bounties and prices on random things. They begin to ask what else has a price for heads. The guard there names off a bunch of random things, everything from were-rats running around in the sewers to dragons, if you can kill them.

The group is also interested in bounties of actual people, but I admit I didn’t have any prepared. I didn’t think of that. So, I told them to check back some other time. Now I need random wanted posters of people for them to go and get.

I need to plan so much stuff!

The group decides to go down into the sewers and kill some were-rats for money. They travel through some sewers and eventually run into a couple of were-rats. They try to do some diplomacy on them, one runs off but the other comes forward and seems willing to talk.

They ask him a bunch of questions about the were-rats down here and the sewers but the poor were-rat doesn’t know much. They want to know where the main lair is and he simply says to follow the smell of cheese. Without the sensitive sense of smell as sewer were-rats, the group isn’t really able to use that information, so they kill him.

They move further into the tunnel and find a larger group of were-rats. They don’t even try negotiations at this point, it is just a simple slaughter. The Snitch finally gets into a real fight, and proves why I feel frustrated with the Magus class. It’s a powerful class, and he did more damage than anyone else in the group… so good for him.

Awake!

With all of the were-rats dead, Faust decides to go pick up numerous souls for his sword once more. He digs his sword into the last of the were-rats and a large explosion happens. The sewers shake and shift underneath them. The Snitch is thrown down to the ground and the dark sword in Faust's hands now pulses a deep dark energy that everyone feels.

And the sword speaks, “Hello.”

Everyone hears it.

The sword is awake.

Among the lewts left from the were-rats the group found 5 dragon coins, gold coins with a dragon imprint on one side. They look very old and valuable, appraised at around 200 gold or so per coin.

The sword, awake and apparently knowledgeable in such things, tells them that the coins are part of a dragon’s horde. Thousands of years ago before the city of Edrigar was formed, there was a dragon who lived deep underground. The dragon has a vast pile of treasure that is only surpassed by his vast knowledge. The story goes that if you travel deep within the sewers and caves under the city you will eventually find this dragon’s laire, and if you give him payment to increase his hoarde he will answer one question for you.

The group liked this idea, although they kept trying to tell me it should be one question per gold coin and not one per person. I told them if they wanted to negotiate with an ancient dragon about his policies, they can do so. This pretty much shut them up.

They are interested in the idea of going and talking with the dragon though. Just one of the many things the group is interested in at the moment. I keep throwing them plot hooks, waiting to see what will happen. I think that is one of the downfalls of sandbox gaming, as a GM you throw out juicy little plot hooks that never ever seem to be picked up at all.

I guess I can sympathize a little with railroading GM’s. They put a lot of hard work and effort into their plot hook, by ignoring it the players are basically saying the plot that the GM worked on is crap and they can surely find another plot that is just as interesting in random bar # 4.

The price I pay for making an open ended game. Woe is me… ha ha.

Anyway, that was our session for the night.

Since this was last week and we just finished up the session for this week I will leave this here. No need to speculate on stuff I already know has happened.

I’ll put up another update sometime later this week.

[Savannah]

Wait... Where was Kane introduced? :smallconfused: I don't recognize the name.

Otherwise, cool session, like always!

[NamelessNPC]

Really, really cool campaign, man! Keep'em coming

[Sillycomic]

Oh, I apologize.

Kane was the name of the Chemist who died 2 sessions ago. He's the one who has had his hand in a lot of cookie jars until he was betrayed by his so-called friends (ahh, evil campaign, how fun you are)


I should probably go change that, seeing as how the session we had last night had a bunch more to deal with the fake chemist running around.

Actually, it took up most of the night, and killed another PC.

(oh! Cliffhanger! Love to leave them wanting more, ha ha)

Edit:

Ok. It's edited with spelling and grammar fixes now. Sheesh. Last time I just write it and throw it up on the interwebs.

[Savannah]

Ah, I was wondering if Kane was one of the now-dead PCs, but wasn't sure which one. Thanks for clearing that up!

Also, YOU CAN'T JUST LEAVE US WITH THAT CLIFFHANGER!!! :smallfurious: How will I survive until the next post? :smalltongue:

[Sillycomic]

So, once more we return to our friendly little evil mafia group trying desperately to make it in the dark and sinister city. Or so I tell them every week. We had some ups and downs this week, not a lot of fighting, but a lot of cool story and character development. In the end, isn’t that what we’re all here for?

More Intel
When last we left our adventurers, they had climbed out of the sewers and were running around trying to sell more of their lewts. This led to people splitting up and going off to do their own thing, buying supplies and asking around for information.

Faust and Snitch were the two important people for this little bit of downtime. Faust really wants to kill Ventor now, and get rid of the whole mess he created last episode (pretending to be the Chemist and set up an ambush) His plan involves more disguises, invisibility potions and a fake map with a maximized explosive runes spell cast upon it. I thought that was funny enough, so I told him he found everything except a high level caster to actually cast the spell, it would take some time and money to find that.

Snitch went the opposite direction with his downtime. First, he wanted more information on Blades. If you may recall the group has had a standing offer from Grandma for the death of Blades since about session 2 or 3. For the group it’s always been on the back burner, but they’ve never really done anything active towards it. I will admit for a while they were busy with other projects, but even so… 5,000 gold for level 4 party isn’t really something you leave on the backburner for very long.

Secondly Snitch wanted to know more about the renegade Minotaur who has been causing so much trouble for the Brothers. Thirdly he wanted to get someone to track down random magical items for him, either to legitimately buy or steal. How interesting. I gave him some info and said I would work on the rest later.

Ventor returns (or... he actually never left)
The group then meets up back at the saloon, including Dexter who finally decided to join us once again, where they are met by an army of paladins, clerics, a unicorn named Dexter and of course Ventor! I love being a thorn in my bad group’s side.

Ventor, asking around about the Chemist, had been led here. Ventor had a lot of questions and poor Umi, who had been trying to stop Ventor from coming into the saloon for a while now, looks about ready to break. Luckily the group steps in and asks what’s going on.

Ventor explains he is looking for the Chemist. The group says the Chemist is dead, which is not a lie. He was killed a few days ago. Ventor is confused about this because he saw the Chemist this morning. Also, there is some strange rumor of the Chemist not dead but out of town on some family emergency (a rumor spread by Faust last session)

In the few hours the group went were-rat killing, Ventor was investigating. The two rumors running around are Ventor is dead, or away at some nearby town dealing with a family emergency. Ventor isn’t sure what’s going on, but he wants to get to the bottom of this.

Ventor asks how they know he is dead, and they say it is because they saw him die. He asks where the body is, and they say it’s near the vineyard out of town. This sparks up much interest from Ventor and his little army. The group just came from the vineyard after causing quite a bit of death and destruction in order to corner the wine market. Ventor nods, knowing the massacre at the vineyard as well as the paladin murder that happened not too far from there.

The group doesn’t know this, but most of the paladins, clerics and law enforcement are pretty sure both incidents are related.

So, Ventor, knowing where to go next to find the Chemist’s body and more answers, thanks the group and leaves.

However, two paladins stay in the area, carefully looking over the saloon and the people inside.

The group starts to panic.

They realized… like before, they left the Chemist’s body in the middle of a field near the vineyard and didn’t even bother to cover it with a sheet. I seriously enjoy having the messes they just leave behind come back to bite them. If they just leave bodies lying around, then they deserve the wrath of the GM! How awesome for me.

Seeing as how the Chemist’s body can lead Ventor back to them as well as Allore, Faust decides they need to go and find the body first. Dexter and Snitch go with him. Witch feels her time is best spent scrying on their next venture for money, a compound of retired adventurers supposedly filled with rare jewels and artifacts. She’s only level five so she’s using several clairvoyance/clairaudience spells to find out more about the house and some of the cool things in there. So, she’s being productive.

The Vineyard Part 2
Off to the vineyard once more!

Oh. Wait. The group did just come back from the sewers and they are beat up pretty bad. So, they get some rest and then head off that night to take care of things. How cool is that, huh? They gave Ventor a 10 hour head start.

They have only one small pitstop when apparently the group stumbles upon a murder. The guards are helping to quarantine a crime scene. This is one of Dexter’s victims with the familiar calling card of a blood orchid on the forehead. The group sees this, but doesn’t go investigate much. They have bigger fish to fry.

Since it is night the gates out of the city are closed. Faust uses his old method of rope climbing up the side of the wall. It works as usual, but the Snitch’s stealth isn’t so good and the guards hear what’s going on. The group is on the other side of the wall by the time they arrive though.

Uneventful trip to the vineyard, but since they’re on foot they don’t make it here until morning. The group searches and eventually finds the spot where the Chemist fell in battle. Big surprise he’s not there. Dexter looks at the tracks and realizes that there are both boot prints and hoof prints. He sees that most of the prints lead towards the road, but one set goes up the hill towards the cave area.

The group thinks this must be the Nightmare’s prints, and he has something to do with the body’s disappearance.

The group follows the prints to the road and come across Ventor’s large pavilion by the vineyard. There’s a dozen or so paladins, clerics and fighters who have set up a temporary camp. Ventor, the unicorn and the Chemist’s body are nowhere to be seen.

So, Faust isn’t sure what to do now. Either he waits to find Ventor and perhaps steal the body from a small army, or he goes and talks with the Nightmare for help.

Faust’s brilliant idea is to wait until he sees Ventor. So the group waits all day, almost into the evening.

The Snitch, realizing this is a waste of time at best and might get them killed at worst decides it’s time to leave. He does so.

Faust’s next brilliant idea is to go talk to the nightmare. He and Dexter actually both have had previous conversations with the Nightmare (something I didn’t realize until they talked to him, and I thought it was pretty funny) One got scared away and the other was kidnapped and eventually tortured because of it. Despite these bad memories, they head off to the laire of the mare.

They go inside, see several dead bodies in the cave’s entrance (none of them are the Chemist) and realize maybe they shouldn’t go talk with the nightmare. This is when he shows up, asking them in a very gruff voice what they want.
They ask if he took the Chemist’s body. He says no and tells them to leave.

They leave.

So, Faust is running out of brilliant ideas. Dexter finally realizes this is futile and leaves Faust to his own end. Faust is fairly convinced at this point he will do some sort of a suicide mission into this camp to kill Ventor, so he sits and waits for Ventor to appear, but after I tell him he waits for a day and nothing happens, he finally returns back home empty handed.

The others
Meanwhile, the Snitch actually did something competent during this downtime, he spoke with Allore about the random things going on with Faust; pretending to be the Chemist, messing up the body, getting Ventor onto a trail that could be led back to Allore and the other felons, as well as doing random things which make no sense and just waste everyone’s time. Allore is pissed at this, and tells the Snitch to find out what Faust is up to, make it a top priority.

So, the Snitch goes out to hire someone to follow Faust around.

Dexter makes it back home. He has most of a night to play and he decides to go kill another random person and leave his calling card. There are lots of murdered bodies just lying around at this point.

The Witch goes to Andis to try and find out some more information on the house, but doesn’t get much. There’s three guards who frequent the area and three private security people, but that’s all he knows. The witch asks if perhaps Andis could do anything about getting rid of the guards. Andis says for a price he can make sure the three guards of his are conveniently gone, but he can’t do anything about the private security.

Andis also explains that there may be some sort of cult performing ritual murders in the area. Victims are found lying face up with marks on their necks and a blood orchid on their forehead. At this point there are over a dozen and while there doesn’t seem to be in any pattern, it’s mostly around the Felon area. Andis is just giving the guys a heads up. The witch thanks her for that and says if they have any more info to let her know.

Faust's brilliant plan number 3
So, back to Faust, his new plan is to get that darned explosive rune map and kill Ventor! He runs around town trying very hard to find a wizard who will cast this spell for him. I make him roll a few perception checks to realize that someone is following him. He doesn’t like that, but doesn’t do anything differently because of it.

He eventually finds a drunken dwarf wizard willing to do it for 1,000 gold. (I calculated it out to be 720 gold for a 12th level caster, so 1,000 isn’t a huge mark up, fair for someone wanting it to be done quick and fast in a back alley) Faust unfortunately doesn’t have that much money, so he has to go borrow some.

The person following Faust tells the Snitch what is going on, who in turn tells Allore what is going on, who in turn asks to speak with Faust himself. (that one sentence took more or less an half hour to role play out. It’s a very different game when during certain times you take players to the side for
their own little adventures)

Meanwhile, Faust is able to scrape some money together and buys the wizard’s maximized explosive rune spell and put it on his fake map. Hooray! Congratulations for him! He’s now broke, but at least he has what he wanted to get.

Faust goes to Allore once he knows he’s been sent for. Allore wants to know what’s going on…. He’s been hearing rumors that are not good, and the last he checked Faust is just running around and not making any more. Plus, did Faust disguise himself as the Chemist a few days ago? This was fun because I as the GM was finally able to look at Faust honestly and say, “Seriously, dude, what are you doing?”

Faust tries to explain that he’s cleaning up a mess that he started and he is hoping to make money from it. Allore doesn’t care about messes, so long as he gets his money. But, making a mess and not getting money is a big problem. Allore makes light mafia type threats , basically saying take care of this or else…

So, now Faust dresses himself up as a letter carrier and goes to Ventor’s temple. He says he has an important letter and it must be delivered to Ventor personally. The temple says that Ventor is off at a local vineyard taking care of some murder or something that happened out there.

The Vineyard part 3
Once more to the Vineyard.

Faust and Dexter go this time. Faust is pretty sure it’s a death march, but Dexter has a much more cheerful outlook.

They get to the paladin, cleric and fighter camp and Ventor asks to personally deliver his letter to Ventor. The group asks him to wait in a big tent and they go get Ventor. A few minutes later Ventor arrives. Faust, dressed as a mail carrier, explains this is a letter and he needs to read it. Ventor, confused at the whole thing, opens the letter and reads, “I prepared explosive runes this morning.”

BOOM!

36 points of damage.

Part of me, the sick demented GM part who delights in tripping up my players, thought perhaps that the drunken dwarf who offered to cast Explosive Runes for an outrageous price had only cast something silly like arcane mark or something on the fake map… ahh! Wouldn’t that have been hilarious to just have Ventor open up the map only to see some random symbol and then look confused at the letter carrier.

But ala, I can’t be that mean. He spent 1000 gold and took up half of a session trying to do this one thing. I need to give his character closure.

And boy did I.

So, where was I… oh yes. BOOM!

Ventor falls down to the ground as an entire encampment of paladins, clerics and fighters are roused up. Two men immediately come into the tent as Ventor… who took a big deal of damage but didn’t die, slowly gets up. They ask what’s going on and Ventor points to Faust.

“He tried to kill me.”

Initiative. Faust smites good and goes to kill Ventor. One huge hit with lots of damage takes Ventor down to the negatives. One dead cleric! He was supposed to kill this guy 4 or 5 sessions ago. It is good to see he finally did it.

Dexter attacks a nearby paladin for a decent amount of damage.

And then it’s my turn. The tent is swarmed with people, outside there is screaming and alarms going off, and somewhere in the distance a unicorn is racing towards the encampment. Yep, ladies and gentleman I am very proud to say that this is overkill.

Realizing the predicament, Dexter rips the tent and runs off into the forest, casting invisibility on himself so that he can’t be followed. Smart man. Dexter lives to kill another day. Faust has other ideas with himself. He feels like he should keep fighting, more smites and using his amazing sword to take down everyone coming into the tent.

I have to give him credit, he took two paladins and a cleric with him, but finally one smite evil for 30 points takes him down to well beyond negatives. He falls, but he’s not quite dead yet. The sword speaks to him in this random limbo, asking how he can help to get out of this situation. Faust keeps asking to get healed up so he can kill the rest of them. The sword, realizing that Faust doesn’t understand when to run away from an obviously overpowering fight, decides not to help Faust this time, and instead leaves him.

Another Death
Faust is dead.

The good news is, while two other members of the group have died already, this is the first death by GM! I am very proud of it, mostly because it didn’t come out of the blue and the character more or less knew what he was doing… also Dexter running away and surviving meant there were others options out of this mess that Faust chose not to undertake, and so he chose his own fate.

The player wasn’t sad about the death, and actually started looking in the book for what he wanted to play next.

Dexter made it back the city safe and sound, mostly because he never stopped running. He was able to make it back to his friends and explain what happened. Considering Faust’s odd behavior as of late, it was probably for the best.

Meanwhile, the Witch was finally able to do her scouting of the house as much and has some good intel to take this place down. She also has grabbed a couple of laborers willing to work for drug money to dig some sort of a underground smuggling tunnel from the basement of the saloon to outside the city gates.

I don’t know how long it takes laborers to dig a tunnel like that. I suppose I need to figure that out. Oh goodie, more math.

After the whole Ventor incident the paladins are no longer watching the saloon. So, there’s a small victory there. The group as a whole decides they need a more secretive base of operations though, preferably in the sewers. So, they want to spend a week cleaning out the sewers and killing more were-rats to find a decent lair. Sure, we can work on that.

So, that is the session for this week. I called it early simply because Faust had just been killed and their next plan of robbing the retired adventurers might take a session or two to complete.

PVP Brawl
Instead, I let the group fight each other in an arena style event. I gave Faust all of the cool things he wanted in trade for his soul, the premise being in an alternate world Faust actually did sell his soul and now the rest of the group has to fight him.

The group loved that, especially Faust. I thought it was a nice send off to him. He had a lot of cool abilities, was able to smite anything, had some kick butt DR and like a +8 GM bonus to Strength. That’s all he wanted in exchange for his soul… even though I told him one of the things he could get was gestalting with a spellcasting class on top of his paladin class. Oh well, that’s what he wanted, it was still pretty kick butt.

Faust took down Dexter in two rounds and almost got the Snitch were it not for invisibility and mirror image. Poor Faust kept hitting the copies instead of the real one. Eventually The Snitch killed Faust (he died two times in one session! I’m a mad man, ha ha)

Faust and Witch had a showdown and for a while they were holding their own, but eventually the witch ran out of stuff to throw at Faust and crumbled to the ground. It was cool. Everyone got to stretch out their abilities and practice tactics in the game, and Faust got a very nice send off… having actually sold his soul and become pure awesome if only for a half hour.
So, that is the end of our session this week.


There have been some recent developments
First Faust wants to come in as a druid. His backstory is simple, but awesome in my opinion… he grew up an orphan and Edrigar was never a nice place for him. He left the city and was raised by nice druids, now he wants to come back to the city and find a way to destroy it. Kill everyone!

What a cool concept huh? I like it. I am intrigued at where he wants to go with it. Currently he says he wants to look for the dragon and ask about carnivorous plants. Yeah! How fun.

Secondly, The Snitch has gotten the intel he needs to take down Blades and wants to do it by himself. He feels like given the right circumstances he can get in, kill Blades and get out without anyone noticing him. He says he has a plan, and bought a lot of invisibility and Alter Self scrolls, so I think he might be able to pull it off. Who knows, we’ll see. Him and I are meeting up this
weekend for a private session to resolve this little matter.

If it works he’ll be rich, and actually take initiative on something in the game that everyone dropped or forgot about.

Finally, this game has proven to be very lethal. I have had 3 PC deaths in the last 4 sessions. Everyone felt they were justified deaths, so I have no complaints. So far as I know my group has no complaints either. I didn’t expect it to be a lethal kind of game, more like a “the more stupid you act, the more lethal it becomes” kind of game. The group had found out to play smarter, and I think these new characters reflect that.

Ok. I still need to work on that vampire cult for Dexter. I am thinking they will finally contact him and ask him for something. I don’t know what though. What would a vampire possibly want from a mortal? Something specific? What if there’s an item on hallowed ground in a temple that the vampire wants for himself? Oh, that could work. I will start there.

The witch is happy with her little plans. We’ll take down the adventure compound next session, and her tunnel digging is working fine. I would like to point out that the witch is also the last of the original group members here so far. She’s been smart, cunning, and known when to lie back and wait versus strike. She’s made her mistake as well, but for the moment they’ve been few and far between. I don’t plan on killing her anytime soon. (the gm says as he chuckles)

And I’ll let you guys know more about the destructive druid when he gives me more info. I need to come up with a cool nickname for him. The Gardener?

[Savannah]

I need to come up with a cool nickname for him. The Gardener?

The Reaper or the Harvester, more likely :smallwink:

[Sillycomic]

The Harvester. I like that.

I was thinking of making him go on a journey to grab rare plants and sacred water and whatnot from various areas in the world. I guess that's harvesting.

I like it.

[jguy]

The Mulcher!

[Sillycomic]

Our last session ended with the group finishing a week of downtime, everyone splitting up to do their own financial goals within the game. Dexter concentrated on his body count, trying to get vampires to notice him. The Witch worked on finding out more about the house they were going to rob. The Harvester (our new druid) was down in the sewers creating his lair, and the Snitch was trying to find out information on Blades for a sneak attack.

Private Game
So, this last Sunday I had a private game with just the Snitch to find out what happened with Blades. So, the Snitch first bought a bunch of scrolls and potions: invisibility, alter self and dimension door. His idea was to sneak in, pretend to be the minotaur Vigilante and murder Blades, then dimension door away and sneak back so that he could collect the reward from Granny.

That seemed simple enough. It was a clear cut and precise plan moving forward. I couldn’t see any obvious problems with it, at least not any that my clever GM brain could nitpick. That is weird. Maybe individually my players are very smart, but when they get together and plan a heist, things just go undeniably wrong. Perhaps they need to have one person planning next time.

All right then.

So, on this solo mission things go mostly according to plan. Snitch sneaks into the brothel that Blades normally frequents. He goes in mostly un-noticed, hides in the closet and waits. Soon Blades comes in with his lady friend. Snitch gets all excited and uses the alter self scroll to make himself look like the Vigilante, but Blades easily hears him. Knowing something is up Snitch jumped out of the closet and begins the assault.

Snitch first kills the prostitute in the room and then goes after Blades. Blades does pretty well, I have to admit. He’s only one level higher, but he’s got some pretty good moves. I just wish Blades had a chance to sneak attack… if he would have the game would have been over much sooner. Since Blades was limited in that, he wasn’t able to do that much damage. Still, all in all it was pretty good. Blades took the Snitch down to half his hit points.

One of the Brother’s members runs up the stairs and inside to help once the fight breaks out, but Snitch does massive amounts of damage to him and he falls before he even makes it into the room. (mumble, mumble, Magus class, mumble)

One lucky hit and Blades goes down. Snitch grabs up Blades’ blades and a dimension door scroll later he is out and running back for home. There were plenty of witnesses to see that Blades was murdered (and looted) by the Vigilante. So, that part of the plan worked.

Snitch gets the reward money from Granny and that’s about it. As far as I know he’s too scared to spend much money on anything, simply because he wants to wait for the heat to die down. So, I guess we’ll see what happens.

Now onto last night’s session.

The Druid's Lair
We start in the sewers, with the group killing random were-rats and looking for an underground lair. Apparently after their little meet and greet with Ventor, they wanted a place that couldn’t be easily found by clerics and paladins.

In their dungeon diving they find a nice lair already built by The Harvester. This lair had some pretty impressive defenses (he spent the week coming up with his own cool little dungeon complete with monster encounters!) So the group got to fight off assassin vines and summoned monsters to a standstill.

The harvester asks what they’re doing here, the Witch asks what he’s doing here, and then they start sharing life stories. A few well chosen sentiments about money, power and strength and the group strangely feels like this new druid should be part of their ranks. Funny how that goes.

Since I didn’t make the dungeon or play the monsters I was just sitting looking up random treasure and monster encounters for later that evening. Fun for me, homework!

The lair is now the group’s new lair. They are renovating it out for more space and will eventually put the drug dealership in there as well as other such things.

So with the Harvester in tow the group plans out how to take down the retired adventurer’s compound.

Recon
I give the group a week’s worth of clairvoyance recon on the house. It’s clearly a druid’s house simply because there’s a garden and a tiger where the living room should be. Alarms are on all of the windows, there’s a pretty extensive library and there’s 3 local guards watching the house as well as 3 private guards paid to be inside of the house.

So, now the planning happens, which means another hour of me looking up random treasure and monster encounters. It’s these days where I feel like making a DMPC just so I can join in on the planning fun. Ahhh, good times.

They go to Andis to get rid of some of the outside guards patrolling the area. Andis says she will do it for a favor. The group thinks that’s a little too high, so they instead decide to ask for an actual price. Andis gives an outrageous price of 100 gold per person, and the group reluctantly agrees. I didn’t think they would, but ok then.

I think Andis is going on a big gambling spree. She didn’t pay off the guards and could care less what happens to the group. She just wants money to keep up with her gambling habits. I think I’m going to have her lose a lot of money and then need more in order to pay off her debts. Her favorite customer to shake down will be Taevor.

If you might remember from the second session, Taevor is paying protection money specifically so that Andis doesn’t bother him anymore. I think if Andis clears Taevor out to re-pay her debts then we can have some fun come next session. I love being the GM sometimes.

So, that leaves only 3 inside guards who the group can’t buy off, a tiger and two retired adventurers inside of their own house.

Cue the burglary!

Late at night the group goes to a backalley. The witch casts levitate on a rock and they use it to levitate to the second story. Dexter uses a knock spell to open the window. The night before the Witch cast a dispel magic on the alarm spell permanencied on the window, so no alarms went off. Lucky for them.

Everyone uses the magic stone to get to the second story and through the window, except for the Witch. One of the guards (that was supposed to be paid off) came looking when he heard a noise. The Witch runs around a corner, casts invisibility on herself and while the guard goes chasing shadows down the alleyway, the witch makes her way up to the second story.
Everyone is inside, no alarms have been raised, no one knows they’re there and everyone in the group is invisible. Wow. So far this plan is going great.

I’m impressed.

The group then realizes they’re all invisible and inside. They never planned for this, so they don’t know what to do. All of their planning was to get inside. Now they just split up and start wandering around.

So much for being impressed.

Split up and look for clues
They all wander to different parts of the house. The Harvester begins checking in random guest bedrooms (because that’s where people hide all their expensive stuff, in guest bedrooms) the Snitch goes for the main bedroom where she knows there’s a locked chest with valuables, while Dexter and the Witch go downstairs to try and take down the library.

The witch makes it easy enough.

Dexter makes some noise, most importantly when he and the Harvester bump into each other on the stairs. The tiger, who up until this point was lounging on a rock in the garden, looks up at the stairs hungrily and heads over.

The witch completely ignores the tiger situation and heads into the library.
There Ijo (retired paladin) is reading a book. He closes it and sees a door open on its own, plus the tiger fighting outside and quickly goes into a trap door in the library’s floor.

The witch starts raiding the library.

Upstairs the Snitch breaks into the master bedroom and starts looting stuff. There are lots of cool magical items in there. The Snitch and the Witch are both grabbing random lewts and making sure to keep the really nice stuff for themselves.

Meanwhile, downstairs Dexter and Harvester are fighting the tiger. Just as they drop him three guards rush out to join the fight. Dexter and Harvester now have to fight the guards. The Witch and Snitch are more interested in finding lewts to pocket for themselves so they in no way help with what’s going on. If I were Dexter or the Harvester I would have a problem with that, but they didn’t seem to mind.

Well, ok then.

The witch finally is able to detect thoughts and finds out there’s a couple of people underneath the house. They are scared and hoping to escape this without harm. The house has an escape route underneath the floorboards. Ijo wasn’t using the floorboards to escape though, he was using them to prepare.

So, after a few rounds Ijo bursts up from the floor with his longsword and shield, rushing out to join the battle. The witch, still invisible, lets Ijo run out and join the fight with Dexter and Harvester.

Snitch's downfall
Meanwhile, Snitch finds a hidden door in the back of the closet and decides to open it up. It is a staircase leading up to the third floor. She easily spots a trap at the bottom of the stairs, jumps over it and runs up the stairs. She does not easily spot the trap at the top of the stairs though.

The top trap triggers the stairs turning into a slide, which triggers the bottom trap of a pit to open up, which triggers the pit in the bottom of the first floor to open up as well, revealing the vat of acid underneath the floorboards. How cool is that? A three phase trap, each one deadly but combined is even deadlier. So, she takes a bunch of damage falling down into the vat of acid.

Fortunately since she is deciding that Dexter and the Harvester are the only ones who need to fight this encounter, she is fine. She drops a potion of fly and heads back up in search of more lewts!

Poor Dexter and Harvester, they are trying their butts off. They finally take down the small guards thanks to a plethora of leopards summoned by the Harvester, leaving only the paladin. Dexter casts a doom spell on him, in which the paladin replies by casting a smite evil back. More blows are traded and the paladin does get to bring Dexter into the negatives before leopards claw at his insides.

Snitch flies into the third floor to find Sylvia waiting next to a black mirror along with a rhinoceros and a fiendish ape who both look ready to fight. Luckily the Snitch was still invisible so she was able to leave the third floor without incident. She came back down to the others. She tells them about it, but the group is more interested in leaving while they still can then fighting for more. The Harvester did seem interested in that mirror, oh well. I suppose we can have that wait for another time.

Another death
So, all in all it was a good fight. I took Dexter down, hurt everyone except for the Witch (it’s hard to hurt someone who stays invisible and just sits in the corner refusing to fight… I’ll try next time) So, everyone is licking their wounds and the Witch sees that Dexter is down but stable, so she goes over and does the most logical thing.

She heals him for 13 points. That’s simple right?

Except, if you recall Dexter wanted to play a Dhampir, a race of pale humans that were cross bred with vampires or whatever. They have a negative energy affinity, which means they heal with negative energy and are hurt by positive energy. So the cure light wounds spell the Witch casts on Dexter actually kills him.

The rest of the group just looks in shock at what happened. He never told anyone he was a vampire-spawn and needed negative energy to heal. It came as a random surprise at the end of the session to have Dexter die by a friend’s hand.

I called it, didn’t I? When he first proposed using that silly race I knew something would happen with that negative energy thingy. I just said ok… because he wanted to play it and I’m just the GM, what do I know? He played it, kept it a secret, didn’t tell anyone and then died because of it.

Oh Dexter, how sad it is to see you go.

Just in case you are keeping count, I have had 4 PC kills in the last 5 sessions of my campaign… although only one kill was by my hands. The group has killed each other 3 times (although, I’m inclined to say this was an accidental death)

Lewts!
The group grabbed a bunch of nice library books, the rest of the lewts, Dexter’s body and ran back into the sewers.

All in all it was a pretty good night. They got around 20,000 gold in lewts when everything was said and done. Snitch only pocketed a few magic items for himself and I think the Witch did the same. The books themselves were pretty decent, the group was willing to sell them until I told them what the titles were. There was a journal account of several elemental temples in the area, a map of the overlying areas around Edrigar, animal and plant tomes from the druid Sylvia and a necromancer anatomy guide to the undead occultism stuff.

I think Dexter would have liked the necro book, but he was already dead so the group sold that. They kept the rest of the books though, simply because they were some decent books. I thought so.

As a player I have been to a good half dozen libraries in my time, and whenever I go I always ask the GM if I can search the library, thinking there might be some fun books to read. Every GM just says there are random books, nothing at all of interest. Every Gm. Every time! I always thought what a great way to set up a plot hook for a group, just having a journal or a random book that explains where adventure might be next in the area. So, I made some books that were actual plot hooks. The books could be sold for a pretty penny, or they could be used to go adventuring. The group so far has decided to keep and read the books, so that’s a plus.

Blades
The only other piece of information is to tell the group what happened with Blades. The Vigilante killed him a few days ago. The brothers are taking this seriously, pulling back their forces and being very defensive about what they do next. In that same light the bounty on the Vigilante has risen to 20,000 gold. The group liked that amount, but still no real interest in tracking him down.

That’s a shame.

The good news is no one thought that Blades was killed by the Snitch. The bad news is the group just wants to collect the bounty from Granny. That is interesting; it will be nice to see how that works out next time. I told them that Blades family got all of his possessions, so they might go and follow up on that.

Maybe that’ll put them on the trail of the missing blades of Blades.

Downtime
The group has decided that they will take a month of downtime. Firstly because it will take them nearly a month to sell everything, secondly because they want to lie low while the heat of everything goes down. I really like that. That’s something that real mafia people would do, plan a big heist and then lay low in some hideout or in the sewers until the heat died down.
I didn’t even think of the heat after this. I suppose Sylvia would want revenge for her husband’s death. Maybe she is interested in burying her husband, so she will travel to find out what happened to him. I’ll have to do something about that.

The bad news is I finally had some information for Dexter about his vampire cult, they were going to talk to him to see if he would steal some clerical stuff for him. But he had to up and die for some silly reason. So much for the vampires in town. Oh well, probably for the best, I don’t like D&D vampires anyway.

So Dexter’s new character concept (I make sure all of my players have a back-up concept simply because of the nature of this very deadly game) is to be a werewolf whose clan was killed by Allore, so he is going to infiltrate the Felons and assassinate Allore when the time is right.

I thought that was pretty sweet. I love that concept soo much. I wish him the best of luck and want to do everything I can to help him.

So, a month of downtime.

End Notes
Now what do I do? I want to make the people fall in love with the Vigilante, by stopping organized crime. He took down Blades and that will make the Brothers stop all of their rackets down on the docks. With businesses able to work without the mob’s take things will be better. It will start a ground swell that the Vigilante has been looking for.

This will also cause the guards to be more legitimate in the Dock area. Without the extra payments from the mobs, and in fear of the Vigilante killing them at night, they will straighten up and do the right thing. Crime will be down and the people will love the Vigilante… all thanks to the Snitch’s one dirty murder.

I love this idea. It’s my favorite.

I also will have Andis deep in gambling debt and rob Taevor (alchemist with a shop in the group’s territory) blind. Taevor won’t pay up during the next protection ring, so the group needs to do something about that.

Maybe I’ll have Verna not pay either, saying she’s with the vigilante on this. Organized crime needs to stop. Maybe another business will join her. I can’t think of another one that would though. Hazel’s Bed’n’Biscuits is an illegal operation anyway, so they have no need to join the Vigilante’s cause. Robbie won’t understand organized crime, not since he has volcano insurance. I guess that leaves Ronald the Tailor?

I don’t know.

At the moment that’s our group’s session. I will put down more when people tell me what they’re doing during the downtime. At the moment things are very much up in the air, so I have no clue what’s going to happen next Tuesday.

We’ll see.

[Eldest]

Death from healing...
Man, that must have sucked for him. But the werewolf idea seems solid. This seems like a great game, wish I could have something like this with my friends but they are all too silly for it.

[Sillycomic]

I know right, what a way to go. It shocked everything. I thought it was funny, in a stupid kind of way. I guess it's one of those random things. Maybe I should put it in one of those Darwin Awards threads.

He died because his party healed him.

[NamelessNPC]

Every time I read a campaign update I feel the urge to congratulate you on this. You are a wonderful GM, and your ability to develop a world and make it respond realistically to the players actions is great. Cool game, man!

[Sillycomic]

I do enjoy the compliments. Thank you so much for reading and sharing this adventure with me. I feel like it's half experiment, half game and I get to try new concepts and fun ideas out on my group.

Some things have worked and some haven't.

I wanted to post this because I had a bunch of downtime emails from my group and I wrote a lot in them that includes background and plot hooks. So, when the group decides to go kill the hag in the swamp it won't come as some big surprise to all of you.

So, I'll start with the witch.
She's doing something very low key and yet brilliant in her downtime. She's going to fix up the burnt down saloon the group has been using since the first session as a make-shift hideout. She's kicked out the drug lab in the basement, brought in people to make the place nice and is going to open up a "Tobacco" shop for people to come in and relax.

It'll basically be a front for the group's more nefarious activities, but I like it. She set it up that it actually might be profitable too. You can go in and have runners do your errands for you, get outfits, shopping, even food all while you sit and smoke and enjoy your day. Nice concept.

She's spending a few thousand gold to get the place up to snuff. I think that is brilliant, wisely spending gold on in game resources for later. Sheesh, who does that? Even I don't do that. Anytime I get gold in a role playing game I can't wait to find the next wondrous item I'm going to purchase, belt of strength or boots of speed. Here she is investing in a tobacco shop as a front to her mob affiliations. Ahh, moments where I love this game.

She's got her workers continuing to dig the smuggling tunnel underneath the saloon. That's going to take another 2 months to complete. She offers them free drugs and a place to stay, so I don't think there'll be any problems with that.

She did sell all of her souls. Last session you may remember she took the paladin's soul, Ijo from the house they robbed. I think this is going to bite them in the butt big time.

They killed Ijo the husband but left Sylvia, the wife alive upstairs. Sylvia is a high level druid (I told them she was) You don't think she would want to talk to her dead husband's soul after all of this? She is very angry that the robbers in her house stole her husband's soul. She will do whatever she can to get it back.

So, this will come back to haunt them. And since the Witch already sold it to her hag master, she has no way of getting it back... unless she wants to talk to the particular underworld person that actually bought this soul. Well, if it comes to that I'll need to come up with buyers of souls from the black market. More fun for me.

Next is the Harvester
He wants to research how to make killer plants. I gave him a bunch of animal and plant tomes and said that if you want to do this in the game you need some sort of a biologist profession. So, this is what he is working on.

He's also very interested in the books about the temples. I said there are four temples, Air, Fire, Water and Earth scattered around the world. There's a journal of Ijo's documenting them as best he could. He actually went to the Air temple, so that one is very specific. The rest are vague and general.

I told him each temple has treasure, mystery, monsters and secrets. So... obviously adventurers will want to go to them. Correct?

Also, the plant journal mentions a hag in the swamp, and shows you how to find her and that she is very knowledgeable on plants and animals in that area.

Yes, this is the same hag that the Witch is apprentice to. How fun.

Harvester is also making his lair more suitable for the rest of the group.

Last thing he wanted to do was to check and see if he could find Blades family to get those blades and collect the reward. I told him he could hire someone to look up that information if he so chooses. He never got back to me on that, so I guess he's still mulling it over.


The Snitch.
She wanted to have the Witch followed to see if the witch ever did anyone with Blades, but I said the witch seemed more interested in saloon upgrades. She never mentioned following up on blades to me. Harvester did, but Snitch didn't have Harvester followed. Oh well.

The Snitch also read the maps that were stolen from the robbed house. I gave her the same basic information I gave the harvester about the four temples, but the maps have general locations of each one around Edrigar. (except for the air temple which is clearly marked)

I also gave the Snitch two other important pieces of information (plot hooks) on the map.

1. The map shows a detailed version of the swamp and clearly indicates where the hag lives in there. (yes, the witch's hag)

2. There is a castle marked on the map far north of Edrigar called, Girron's Castle. Girron was one of the first human's who conquered this land and made it habitable for modern societies to live here, but since the tales are all from a thousand years ago it's unsure of Girron was an actual person or just stories that parents tell their children.

Either way, there's a spot on the map that shows where his castle is. So, that's something.

I just made all of that up on the spot, but it sounded fun. Kind of like Alexander the Great meets King Arthur. It's a good story. If they ever decide to go up to the Tundra North, they might get to see it some day. I'll have fun creating some more lore for this plot hook.

I'm finding as this goes on I get to create more and more on the history of Edrigar and the founding countries itself. I'm able to put more thought into the world and the random artifacts lying in wait. I enjoy the world expanding as the characters expand. It makes me feel like Edrigar is just another character in this game that I get to play with.

Since Snitch now has a map of where the Hag is, she wanted to check out Ventor and see if Ventor would come up with a bounty for bringing the hag in. I said Ventor would, 15,000 dead, 30,000 alive. Hopefully that's some nice incentive to go Hag hunting in the swamp.

Snitch also wanted to know about bounties in the area... I came up with these.

A drug dealer known as Candyman has about a 6,000 bounty on him. Little is known about his aliases or whereabouts.

Human sorcerer called Endell has a 2500 bounty on him... alive. Looks like he ran away from home and his mother wants him returned.

12,000 bounty on a half orc that is only known as Sledge. He's affiliated with the Brothers. Dock area is his whereabouts.

There is a group of highwaymen robbing from passing merchants and traveller's on the North Road out of town. There's a 4,000 gold bounty for the group.

2,000 gold bounty for any information leading to the arrest/death of anyone responsible for the Vineyard massacre that happened a few weeks ago. They also believe a paladin murdered on the side of the road might be connected to that. (in case you didn't read anything prior... this was done by the adventurers themselves, at least before most of them died anyway)


And, I'm always open for more of these. If you have an interesting idea for a bounty in town let me know. It's always fun to see what other kind of ideas people have. The funnier the better!

And our new character.

He is playing an Oracle werewolf whose clan was killed by Allore. So, his plan for revenge is to kill Allore's distant nephew from a far away village, go to Edrigar, pretend to be the nephew long enough to get close to Allore and eventually kill him.

Brilliant plan, isn't it? I love it soo soo much. I can't wait for it to come true. I always told myself the second chapter in this game will be when the group finally decides to kill off the rest of the family and go at it on their own. So, this will be a giant push forward in that direction.

In my mind there's three chapters to this campaign. The first chapter was being in the mafia and getting money. The second chapter would be killing the competition and turning themselves into the big players in Edrigar, and the final chapter would be trying to take over the entire town and surviving the mass of good guys that I throw at them. If they do that, Edrigar is theirs and the campaign is over.

So, even though it doesn't feel like it, there is an endgame here.

Ok, back to our new character... we'll just go with Nephew as the nickname. It seems simple enough.

Since Nephew is related to Allore and is new to the mob business, I asked Snitch if she would want to play bodyguard for Nephew's new character. Snitch agreed.

I did this for two reasons. It would be a fun dynamic to see Snitch and Nephew having to work together with their characters and also Nephew has gone through 3 characters in the short time we've been playing this game. 3 characters in 9 (or so) sessions isn't very good at all. I'm hoping with another character required to help out, Nephew might last a big longer than usual.

We'll see.

Anyway, the only information I have for Nephew will be the letter from Sylvia. He will come in with a letter to give to the group. Sylvia's letter will demand that the group of robbers who stole from her house give back her husband's soul, or else she will spend the rest of her time, money and energy tracking down and killing the robbers.

How did Sylvia's letter make it to the Nephew... you ask? Simple. Sylvia knew the robbers were going to sell all of her very nice stuff to various merchants through town. So, she wrote a bunch of letters and gave them to the merchants, asking them to pass it to anyone selling a list of the stuff she knows was stolen from her.

Obviously the merchants knew what happened and one gave a letter to Allore, not wanting to get involved in the matter. Allore wants this dealt with, so he gives it to his Nephew as his first "initiation" test.

How fun is that?

I will give the adventurers 2 weeks in game time to address Sylvia, the druid widow, before she starts tracking them down. Since she has access to scrying and numerous tracking animals; I don't think it will take very long.

I will do what I can within RAW of the game, but I don't think a high leveled druid will have trouble finding them. We'll see if it comes to that.

So, that is all the downtime from my various players. They are spread out with lots of different things to do. I hope they go in a few different places.

I'll have another update for you after our game on Tuesday.

[Savannah]

She's spending a few thousand gold to get the place up to snuff. I think that is brilliant, wisely spending gold on in game resources for later. Sheesh, who does that? Even I don't do that. Anytime I get gold in a role playing game I can't wait to find the next wondrous item I'm going to purchase, belt of strength or boots of speed. Here she is investing in a tobacco shop as a front to her mob affiliations. Ahh, moments where I love this game.

Perhaps it's because this game is based around a stable location. I mean, one of the points of the game was that it would be in this city, so there's reason to do stuff to prepare it for later. With most games, you could get a plot hook sending you off somewhere random at any time, so what's the point in investing in something that you can't take with you?

[Sillycomic]

I suppose that could be true, but I've played in stable games before where no one invested in anything other than better weapons/armor and magical lewts before as well. In fact a most recent game I'm playing in right now has that same option.



I was happily surprised with how the Witch spent her money.

[Ayra]

first gonna say I love the champaign, keep it up :D

as for a bounty. Ayra a drow magus (my character for another champain :tongue:) supposedly a assassin for hire wanted dead or alive... you can deside the price of course. ^^

not tested magus yet, tough I cant wait.. it just fits my character concept so much :P (and from what i read here a bit over powered and should make for a nice challenge for your players if she plays smart)

[Sillycomic]

Ayra, thank you for your suggestion.

Drow Magus? I could do that. The Snitch is actually a female drow magus at the moment, so I hope it doesn't make it sound like her character. Maybe I will make it a male drow magus to make it different?

Magus assassin? I imagine the group would rather try to recruit him to help with assassinations than collect him for the reward.

I plan on getting the ultimate Magic pathfinder book sometime this weekend, so I will look into statting one up. Thank you for that, more suggestions are always welcome.

Onto the game...

***

We had an amazing night of gaming last night. There was a lot of subtle and nuanced role playing that happened. Personally this is always what I wanted and up until now I have gotten mixed results. Tonight, I am proud to say everyone overshot my expectations.

The good news? No one died.

Even better news? I got an email from the player who played the Rat today. He is finally done with random school stuff and he’s able to come back next week. The Rat, if you don’t remember, started out as an undercover police officer who is trying to find his lost family and avenge his father’s death. You know, that old story… So, he’s coming back! He has my absolute favorite back story, so to be able to play more with undercover stuff has got me excited.

Onto the game
First I took witch and snitch aside for some private information. I started with the Snitch. Allore wanted to talk to him and ask how much the Snitch has found out about the others so far. The snitch didn’t have much to report. The Harvester is pretty much a loner and the Snitch did pay someone to follow the Witch, but that didn’t turn up anything useful.

Allore didn’t like this one bit. He’s paying the Snitch a lot of money to keep tabs on these people, and the Snitch isn’t doing his job. Snitch said he would step up his game on that.

Allore had one more piece of information to offer. Apparently Sylvia has been handing out notes to all of the local merchants in town, in hopes of these notes getting to the bandits who broke into her house. Sylvia is the druid married to a paladin named Ijo. Last session the group decided to break into their house and steal everything.

One of the last things the witch did, as usual, was to steal Ijo’s soul from his body for her mistress the hag. She didn’t think anything of it, and when she told me she was cashing in her souls during the downtime I told her that particular soul got her a bunch of money (a thousand gold… it’s the pure soul of a paladin being sold on the black market, of course it’s going to be expensive!)

Sylvia explains in her note that she knows the bandits stole her husband’s soul and she wants it returned as soon as possible. They have one month to give it back, otherwise she will hunt down and kill every last one of them.

Allore gave this information only to the Snitch, thinking one of the people in the group is responsible. Allore thought the whole soul stealing thing was done when Faust died a few sessions ago, but apparently not.

So, now the Snitch has a few things on her plate. She is the bodyguard to Nephew, in charge of finding out about this soul stealing note and he is also looking to become Edrigar’s new bounty hunter. It’s always fun to multi-task.

The Snitch does 2 things. 1. She gets one of her contacts (a halfling) to start tracking the Witch. 2. She gets one of his other contacts (gnoll) to find out more about the Vigilante. This costs her some money, but ahe’s more than willing to pay for this sort of information.

For the Witch, it was simple. Gorrack tells her that people aren’t buying drugs anymore. The docks area has gone clean since the Blades murder from the Vigilante, regular people are afraid of getting murdered to try and get high anymore. People aren’t buying.

The witch doesn’t think that’s a big deal. She never really had her heart in the drug trade anyway.

She does find out that the Vigilante is being thought of as some sort of a hero down in the docks. Apparently his murder of Blades caused most of the dock people to think of him as an amazing hero who has swept crime from the streets.

I do mention to her that there are some strange things surrounding the whole Blades murder though. First, the vigilante never murdered anyone. Usually the Vigilante only attacked the Brother’s businesses or stopped them whenever they were going around getting protection money. Sometimes brother’s died, but it wasn’t the main purpose, more like a sad side effect. The murder of Blades was cold and calculated.

Oh, and the blades themselves were stolen from the dead body.

The witch thought that was interesting. She went over to Granny’s and started asking around. Granny lied through her teeth, and the Witch rolled very well on her sense motive. So the witch thinks something is up about this whole Vigilante thing. Good. I love planting seeds of doubt in players. It makes my heart tingle.


Coming back
So with this we actually start the game. Everyone gets together after laying low for about a month after the burglary in which they all got lots of gold and lewts. The Snitch brings in a new recruit, Allore’s Nephew. He’s more or less a made man and the Snitch vouches for him so everyone thinks that is ok.

People start sharing information from the random downtime stuff they have been doing. The first thing to come up is the elemental temples in the area. Both Snitch and Harvester had some information to share about where they are and what they might contain. Certain treasure, guardians of great secrets… you know, that kind of adventuring stuff. Everyone seems intrigued.

The Snitch also pulls out a map that he found from the burglary that shows where the hag lives. He explains that the cleric Ventor will pay a pretty penny for the bounty of this hag. The Witch (who is the hag’s apprentice) doesn’t think that it’s a good idea at all.

This is a thought that the Witch will eventually have to deal with. Ventor promises 15,000 gold for the hag dead, 30,000 gold alive. That is the most gold I have ever offered for a bounty for this group. And I gave them a map telling them where the hag is. I’m pretty sure at some point it will come out just how much the Witch doesn’t want to go and confront this hag. Then we’ll see how interesting things get.

Protection money
So, lots of good ideas for future events and heists running around, but at the moment the Witch is more concerned with collecting the protection money from the businesses in their territory. Off we go. We start with Hazel at the Bed’n’Biscuits. She pays them without any problem.

Then they go to Ronald the Tailor. He pays them as well and shares in all sorts of gossip. He is able to explain to them what’s been happening in the dock area lately. The brothers, afraid of their own lives, have more or less gone underground, being very defensive to make sure no one else is murdered by the vigilante. Because of this the businesses around the dock area haven’t been paying any protection and they’re able to sell their products at a more reasonable price. The people around the docks think this is a wonderful thing that has happened. They call the Vigilante a superhero come to save them.

All right then.

So the group goes to the General Store with Robbie. The witch says Robbie is a special case and she should go in alone, which everything thinks is funny. Robbie’s whole thing with this group has been sort of comic relief in an otherwise serious mafia game, so it’s pretty funny. However, the Snitch says she’s going in with the Witch. I didn’t realize until now this was a subtle ploy on the Snitch’s part to find out more about the witch and what is going on with her. The Snitch doesn’t want to leave the witch alone at all, even for this, so she’s going inside with her.

See what I mean by it being a really good night of role playing?

They all go inside and Robbie is there with a dumb look on his face. They ask for the money and Robbie pays up as usual. They leave. No big problems there.

Then the group goes to Eola’s winery. Once more things go without incident. Eola has the payment as well as the 10 bottles of Boysenberry wine he promised them with his little deal, and they move on. More money to be had.

The Neighborhood Watch
Then the group comes up to their first problem, Verna and the apartment complex.

Outside of the apartments is a group of guys who look like they’re looking for trouble. They spot each other at the same time and there is a lot of manly standing off to be had. Words are exchanged and my group finds out these guys are actually an organized watch that is trying to rid the town of scum that pray on innocent people by collecting protection money.

The Snitch asks what brought this about and the guy says, “The Silent Sentinel!”

Apparently Vigilante isn’t a very good nickname for someone who is cleaning up the streets of organized crime, so they renamed him the Silent Sentinel and now groups of people are getting together to help him. I know, how clever is that.

The watch shows the group small lapel pins with the shape of a minotaur’s head on it, saying this is their cause.

They both ask each other to leave several times, neither one does until the fight breaks out.

The group makes short work of these guys. They had some armor and some weapons, but nothing like the newly decked out adventurers. The fight ends pretty quickly. One guy starts to run away but the Snitch chases after him and kills him. There is only one survivor.

The group grabs the bodies and carries them down into the sewers. There they question the one survivor about this “Silent Sentinel” organized watch. He says it was started by a blacksmith in the docks area and there are about ten members. There’s a meeting in a few days and if you have a lapel pin and say the password you are allowed in. They ask for the password but the guy doesn’t talk. Unfortunately the Witch has a detect thoughts spell and one failed will save later she knows the password to be “Catch the Bull by the horns.”

They ask why the group was standing outside of the apartment complex and he explains that Verna is part of the group and she explained what was going on in her area. The group doesn’t like that one bit. There was some talk about what to do with Verna, but not much.

Once they’re done questioning the guy, the Nephew kills him pretty brutally. He calls it his initiation test to prove his loyalty.

So, the group realizes there is a big problem. They can’t have the people rise up and rebel against them; they have a good thing going on here. The consensus is to go to the meeting disguised as members and take everyone out. But since the meeting isn’t for a few days this will have to wait.

They strip the dead bodies of all their loot, grab all of those small bull lapel pins and go back up to the surface.

And onto Andis
They head over to Taevor’s place, which is closed. Taevor is inside cleaning up. His place is a huge mess. The group asks what happened and he explained Andis was here about an hour ago. She stole all his money and then broke up the place. She left with about 400 gold.

Now the group is very angry. They had a deal with Andis, they were paying her decent money to stop this very thing from happening. They aren’t sure what’s going on.

So the group decides to take out Andis. They need to talk to Allore to get his blessing in order to do this. Since they have most of Allore’s money anyway, they’ll just head over and do it all in one trip. All right then.

Mama Mia’s.
The group arrives for lunch and Allore meets them. He’s happy to see his nephew and hopes things are going well. The group explains the situation pretty thoroughly and Allore understands. He tells them they need to do what they need to do, if Andis is a liability than he has outlasted his worth and needs to be taken care of.

In fact, Allore has a brilliant idea. He decides that Nephew should be put in charge of this whole Allore debacle, this being his first real mission. Nephew is in charge and everyone listen to him, follow his instructions. The Harvester has a problem with this, but Allore stops him mid-sentence, asking who this guy is. They explain he’s hired muscle. Allore responds since when does hired muscle speak?

Allore was being a bit of a jerk, but I think it was called for. This was a mafia meeting with made men talking. The Harvester isn’t a member of the family yet, so he should have no say in this meeting. Even being here is a privilege. He didn’t speak after that, but he wasn’t happy. (just to be clear, the character wasn’t happy, the player was fine with it, understand the subtlety of how mobs worked)

So, with Nephew in charge the group decides what to do next. He says they need to go find Andis. But the question is where to find Andis?

The Night of Plans
The group decides to go to the watch tower where Andis works and look for her. They head over and it is nearing evening time as they do. There are two guards in the watch tower, but no Andis. Nephew then comes up with a plan; go in, make up a story about money and ask where Andis is.

OK

Nephew and Harvester go inside the tower and talk to the guards. Nephew says he has money for Andis. The guard says that’s ok, just leave it. Nephew says no, he needs to give it to her personally. The guard doesn’t understand what is the money for? Nephew starts talking about some random grandmother.

The guard pulls a list out of a locked drawer and asks who is it for? Nephew sneakily reads one of the names off the list. The guard says ok, 16 gold, just leave it here with him. Nephew is pretty adamant about finding out where Andis is to give the gold to her personally, but it’s fairly clear that isn’t happening.

So Harvester and Nephew leave to make a new plan.

New plan: Snitch goes invisible and grabs the list while Nephew distracts the guard by “counting” out grandma’s money. All right then.

So Nephew goes in and is a pretty good distraction but the list is in a locked drawer. The Snitch tries her best but can’t unlock the drawer without making lots of noise. So the Nephew tries a new strategy. He makes noise by throwing some gold onto the floor. The guard asks him politely to leave. He then casts mage hand to throw some more gold around, as if pretending that it wasn’t him who did it. (I’m not sure what he was going for here. Maybe a ghost? I don’t know)

The guard sees Nephew cast a spell and calls out for help. He runs outside to get more guards. This gives the Snitch time to break the locked drawer and grab all of the papers, as well as a couple of magic wands, and run away.

Nephew isn’t so lucky. There are numerous guards that come running and they arrest Nephew.

So now he’s in jail.

They ask him a bunch of questions about what he’s doing and what’s going on. He plays dumb and says he thought it would be a funny joke. I ask how much gold they find in his stuff, he has 200.

200 gold? Really? Wow.

Ok then. Yeah, they let him go after a while. All of the guards made a nice chunk of change and he didn’t really break the law. They’re fine with letting him off with a 200 gold piece warning.

Nephew gets out of jail and now has to come up with a new plan.

New new plan: kidnap a guard and force the information out of him.

This plan, despite its stupidity actually goes very well. They wait around until there’s only 2 guards in the watch tower once more and then they strike. The witch casts a stinking cloud and the Harvester pulls out a flaming sphere to roll around inside the tower. Snitch waits outside for them to come running out. They’re blind, nauseated and on fire so they run out as quick as they can. Snitch makes short work of them. Nephew stabilizes one of them.

Some people come out to see what the problem is, but Witch and Harvester’s spells both end, so actually nothing looks out of place. They say the guards got hurt and it must have been gnomes playing some trick. They are taking the guards to a cleric for healing. The people say that’s ok, they’ll wait here to explain to more guards what happened.

Pretty simple. I liked it, executed very well. Good job Nephew, one of the plans actually worked!

The halfling problem
Back in the sewers the group ties up the stabilized guard and feed the dead one to their pet assassin vine. They all get a good night sleep. I take Harvester aside and tell him in the morning that his animal companion lion explains he heard someone sneaking around outside the lair, a small creature like a halfling. He checks outside and sure enough there are halfling tracks.

Harvester goes inside and reveals this to everyone else. They aren’t sure what to make of it. Who would be following them? (The Snitch realized it right away and sent a note off to his halfling friend not to come down into the sewers anymore)

But the Snitch also uses this as an opportunity to find out more about the witch. They both go away from the rest of the group and the Snitch starts asking the Witch very simple and yet double edged questions. He asks what the witch is into and why someone might be following them. The witch explains some of her duties, but not all of them. She plays the game very well, giving half truths that seem pretty logical. I enjoy this so much. I spent the entire time smiling and keeping to myself, letting them role play.

Isn’t that the best role playing? They both had secrets and ulterior motives for having what sounds like a normal conversation between the two… all the while the GM just sits there and enjoys the madness he creates? If there isn’t a more perfect example of real roleplaying, I haven’t seen it.

After a while nothing is revealed, so they got back to the rest of the group.

The guard spills his guts
Back inside they wake up the guard and start questioning him.

He explains that he doesn’t know where Andis is. She took a leave of absence from work and he doesn’t know where she lives. The group goes through the files they stole and see that there are a bunch of bank statements for loans, IOU’s, receipts for cash and whatnot. They ask what this is all about.

The guard explains Andis is a pretty big gambler. She came into some money about a month ago and she spent it all gambling. Apparently the bug bit her and she couldn’t stop, she took out a bunch of loans around town trying to win back all the money she lost. Well if you know anything about gamblers you know that logic never works. So at the moment she owes money everywhere. Lots of it. Thousands in debt.

Poor Andis.

The group asks about the list and the grandma payment. The guard explains they were just random people that Andis was running protection for around town. Not businesses, but people. There were ten people on the list for various amounts of money. It wasn’t much, just 10 or 15 gold mostly.

The group likes the list, they want to keep it and use it as their own. They don’t like Andis running her own protection racket under their nose. Now they really want to get her.

The guard eventually tells them that Andis has a boyfriend by the name of Chare (I am bad at making up names, so sue me) He’s a bard that works at the Cherry Pit up in the Hills area. The Witch remembers that the Cherry Pit is one of the rumored Ravens hangouts in the Hills area. That is a very good memory, I’m glad she caught that. The guard also tells them the Cherry Pit has a casino in the basement.

With no more information the group kills the guard. Actually they are a little more cruel. They pretend that they are going to let him go, blindfold him, push him down into a pit with an assassin vine and then laugh as he dies.

What can I do? It's an evil campaign.

Cherry Pit
So, they are going to go to the Cherry Pit. Nephew thinks they should go down to the casino, spread some money around and see if they can find Andis there. If not, Chare will be there and they can ask him where she is. That’s pretty solid so the group heads off to the Hills.

Harvester and Nephew go inside to catch Chare’s matinee show while Snitch’n’Witch wait outside to see if anything happens.

Harvester asks around about the casino and after spending a few gold he finds out it’s downstairs and with a simple password of “blackbird,” he can get in.

Chare does his show. He’s a good bard and everyone enjoys it. He does singing and plays some instruments, even some stand up. One of those classy shows, the audience loves it and they shower Chare with praise.

Chare heads off backstage before Nephew or Harvester are able to say anything to him. He goes outside where Witch’n’Snitch see him entering a carriage. The Witch tries to cast a spell but it has a will save and Chare happens to have a pretty good will, so he shakes it off. The carriage speeds off, but not without the Witch’s little familiar following it.

You know, when he used this trick in the first few sessions I thought it was going to become a nuisance, but honestly it hasn’t. In fact, if anything it’s been helpful. The group is able to find out good information and more often than not the “bad” guys know they’re coming anyway so they can have some down time to prepare and whatnot. I’m glad it’s helping out me, the GM just as much as it’s helping out the players.

So the group meets up outside, the Witch’s familiar returns and says that Chare is in an apartment a few blocks away and Andis is there as well. He saw them both through a window.

End session
Unfortunately that is where our session ends for the night. The group is about to surround the apartment and go in Commando style, killing everyone. How fun is that.

Actually it is a blessing in disguise because I don’t have Andis or Chare statted out yet. I don’t know why, I didn’t think they would actually fight Andis. My thoughts were once they found her she would be drunk on the side of the road begging for them to kill her. She owes money all over town, she’s in debt up to her eyeballs, the mob is soon going to come after her thumbs, she’s all but fired over her job, what else does she have?

I get to stat out Andis and Chare and make it a pretty memorable fight. Much better than my original plan. I think the group is itching for a fight.
Other than the small “Silent Sentinel” guys outside of Verna’s house, this session was mostly about gathering information and doing cool mafia stuff. No real fighting though.

That’s good though. This game isn’t really about fighting, at least not initially. The game itself is more about being able to play a really cool mafia guy (or girl) and enjoying being evil.

I did have a bit of a Q&A session after the game was done. I asked everyone how things were going so far. I wanted feedback to myself as a GM and the way the game was running and how much fun people were having. Everyone’s feedback was really positive. They said they love the game, the open ended feel to everything, how they can go down a random alley and there is something there for them to interact with.

They love the intrigue of the game so far, and how I am able to cater to their specific side goals in the game while still keeping everything fun for everyone else. I didn’t hear any bad comments at all actually. I felt like, if I were being paid they would have given me a raise.

So hooray for that.


Notes:
The Rat is coming back next Tuesday. I have a perfect reason for him coming into the game too. He was hired to follow and find out about Andis and her doings, because she is a crooked cop. He is put in charge of finding Andis and taking care of her before she does anything else to hurt people or disgrace the department.

So, it’s the perfect excuse to have him walk into the session and help them with this final attack! How cool is that? I love it when random things just fit together so well.

With Andis gone there will need to be a new Captain of the watch in the Suburb area. I’m thinking I should hold an election. Mafias always are notorious for messing with elections. I will have a few candidates for watch who are shady, but a few more who are actually up and up about stopping organized crime in the area. We’ll see how that turns out.

I need to stat out people for the blacksmith “Silent Sentinel” meeting. I think there’s going to be a lot of people there. 20 or 30? This idea of getting organized crime out of the town is going to catch like wildfire.

Anyone else besides me enjoy the fact that this whole thing was started by the Snitch’s character pretending to be a good guy in order to kill a bad guy and collect a bounty? The worst part is the Vigilante can’t tell people what really happened because he will lose all of this momentum and good will the city is finally giving him.

I feel like I’m following the Dark Knight script as I play out this whole part of the game, but I don’t care. It’s way too cool not to follow to its logical conclusion.

That’s about it for me. There’s no downtime so I have no updates to give anyone. So, we’ll wait for next week and see how things turn out.

[Dragon Elite]

I agree, it's great in almost any game where the characters realized they should have realized something. Also, when they make hilariously stupid mistakes.

Needless to say, I love this journal. Keep it up!

[Ayra]

just as i'm done with my session, I see you have updated the journal. joy!
one of my better sessions actually.. To bad i suck at writing journals...(tough you are tempting me to try xD )

glad you liked my suggestion (I forgot that the snitch also was a drow Female magus sue me ;P )

[Sillycomic]

Hi everybody! Welcome back to Edrigar.

Uninvited Guests
When last we left our bumbling evil adventurers, they had tracked down Andis to her hideout and were about to storm the place. Outside there was a driver in a carriage apparently waiting for something. The group went up to him, made some small talk and surprise rounded the crap out of him. They stuck his body in the carriage and moved onto the condo itself.

The Harvester climbed up to the roof and thought to go break through one of the balcony windows to get the surprise on everyone inside. The Witch runs around the back of the house and looks to see if there’s no one coming. Nephew and Snitch run up to the front door and try to break it down, but it’s an amazingly strong door for some reason. (not really, but they couldn’t roll above a 4 with their strength checks)

As Harvester breaks through the balcony window Andis is waiting for him. They begin to fight upstairs, trading blows and damage pretty well. I’m impressed.

Chare, our bard boyfriend runs downstairs. By this time Nephew has decided the window is a better option and crashes through it. He takes some glass shattering damage but it works. Chare sees him and casts charm person, so now Nephew thinks Chare is the most amazing person evar!

Snitch doesn’t feel this way, so she just follows through the broken window and begins to wail on poor little Chare. Chare doesn’t do anything, except try to cast spells to defend himself. That doesn’t work very well.

I smell a dirty rat
At this time, the Rat decides to make a dashing entrance by appearing in the middle of the room and casting a devastating spell on Chare. I worked this entrance out with Chare ahead of time, he has been invisible inside the house for a while, trying to get a better bead on Andis. Andis is a corrupt cop, and apart from taking lots of money from the mob and random innocent bystanders, she is always abusing her captain powers. The Rat was following her to try and stop her… so cue dashing entrance from a long time friend. It’s just like something that would happen in a tv show.

How cool is that?

Upstairs Andis takes down the Harvester’s animal companion, and then tries to make a run for it. Harvester summons some kitties to stop her, and outside the Witch is ready with some sleeping spells so Andis doesn’t get very far. Chare and Andis die pretty easily, leaving only a couple of bodies to deal with. The group grabs them, puts them in the carriage and leave as quickly as possible.

Harvester is able to use a wand to bring his companion back to life. Aww. Drat. I thought I almost had one.

They didn’t question anyone or search for anything. The Harvester did a quick search of the bedroom upstairs, but since he didn’t find any lewts he didn’t really care. So, that’s interesting. Chare did have some good information on the Ravens, if they were going to question and torture him, but they thought murder was more appropriate. All right then.

Back Home
The group leaves the Hills area, going back into their own territory. They dump the bodies in the sewers, get rid of the carriage and go back to their underground lair. Now they are able to question the Rat more closely, why he just showed up suddenly and what he’s been doing all this time.

The Rat played it cool as a cucumber saying he was doing private family business, and he was tracking down Andis for similar debt problems. That’s all good, isn’t it? They don’t seem to question it all that much, so it must be ok, right?

The group decides that since the Harvester killed Andis more or less by himself, that is enough to bring him on as a full time family member. Now he’s expected to pay Allore a cut of whatever he does. So yeah, welcome to the family!

They send word to Allore that Harvester is a made man and that the whole Andis thing is taken care of. Nephew is very happy about that. This was his initiation of sorts, Allore put him in charge of the mission, so him accomplishing it is great news. He has just become that much more loyal to the family.

Hell hath no fury like a Druid scorned
Now the group gets to sit down and decide what to do next. They still have a meeting of the Neighborhood Watch they want to crash, or at least go check out. There are the bounties still out there; bandits to the North and the Hag to the south in the swamp are the most prevalent. (30,000 gold for a hag in the swamp, why are these guys not jumping on this? Blerg, so frustrating)

They also have the Vigilante to deal with. The group thinks they can begin to take over the docks if they just get rid of the Vigilante. Harvester and Nephew want to go take over the docks territory now and use it as a bait to bring out the Vigilante, which I think is clever and actually would work, but Witch’N’Snitch don’t think that is such a good idea. They would rather wait to take out the Vigilante first.

And then Harvester points out maybe they should follow up on the druid they robbed from a month ago. They might want to track her down and take care of her. At this point Snitch pulls out a piece of paper from the druid herself, addressed to “The bandits who robbed my house.”

She wrote a letter about three weeks ago and gave it to all of the merchants in town. Allore caught wind of it and gave it to Snitch to take care of the problem. The Snitch finally decided to share it with everyone.

The letter says that the bandits who robbed the house stole her husband’s soul, among other magical items. She only wants the soul back. She is giving them a month to “free” her husband’s soul otherwise she will track them down and kill them all. The letter says she is giving them a month; actually the deadline is only a week since it took so long for the letter to find them.

This is a bombshell, especially since all of the players (not the characters, just the players) know at this point that the Witch probably stole the soul. She played it very well though, and looked as dumbfounded as the rest about the whole situation. Snitch asked several times if anyone did actually steal the soul, but no one confessed to it.

The letter specifies that there is a man waiting at the Druid’s house that they broke into. They decide to write him a letter explaining that while they didn’t steal the soul, they may have information that can help and they want to talk. They decide to have a nameless messenger go deliver the letter.

Split up and look for clues
Meanwhile they go visit Taevor to explain everything is fine now and the Captain of the Watch is dead. Taevor finds that good news, but he is worried about who might be the next Captain. He tells them that captain of the Watch is decided by an open election. The group really likes this knowledge. They think they need to put someone down as the Captain so they can have the same deal as before. Just one more fun plothook to throw their way.

Since they dumped the body of Andis though, it will be a few weeks before a new Captain is found. So, we’ll see how that develops.

The group then decides to split up and go look for random clues around town. Snitch, Rat and Nephew go to the blacksmith’s shop where the meeting for the Neighborhood Watch is supposed to be held in a few days. There is a nice gnome who tries to make them buy all sorts of random weapons and armor, but they don’t really have the money for any of it.

They start asking about the minotaur pins, and then the gnome says, “So, I hear a bull craps in the fields.” And he sits and waits for the password. Unfortunately the Witch is the only one who knew the password and decided not to tell anyone. So, they stare at him dumbfounded and then he says quickly he doesn’t know anything about that and they should leave.

The Rat then decides to charm him and sure enough he agrees there is a meeting here and they should come and show support. So far about twenty people are supposed to arrive. They ask if the Vigilante will be there and the gnome says maybe… he has got an open invitation to show up. They try to ask more about the vigilante but he doesn’t know much.

Harvester does two things. First he asks around about the bandits to the north. Apparently the bandits go and steal from random trade merchants and rich people travelling along the North Road. There are about a dozen of them, including some gnolls and they are pretty good at what they do.

Harvester then scopes out the bank. He opens an account with a hundred gold, and asks some very seemingly innocent questions about how the bank works and when the vault is opened up. It only opens at the end of the day or when a really big transfer of money takes place. He looks at the walls to make sure they are made of stone and then leaves.

He grabs Nephew and Rat and decides to plan a bank heist.

Meanwhile Snitch’N’Witch try to find the Vigilante. Witch goes to the dock area and uses a new spell, Seek Thoughts, to try and see if anyone knows the location of the Vigilante. After 10 minutes though there is really no luck. No one knows where the Vigilante is, at least not in the docks area.

Then they go and visit Verna at the apartment complex. Once again she’s not there and once again there’s a couple of the Neighborhood watch standing around. They exchange some words and get into a fight. This one ends pretty easily with more dead bodies for the Snitch’N’Witch to clean up. Snitch decides to leave a message, Dark Horse at the scene of the crime. I don’t know what it means, she doesn’t know what it means, but she put it there.

So, that happened.

Dark Horse and Vigilante, now arch rivals? I guess we’ll see. I’ll have to do something about this.

Halfling conspiracy
Everyone joins up and makes their way back to the sewer lair once more. Unfortunately the Harvester and his lion friend notice that they are being watched by a Halfling. He quickly makes a break for the halfling, while everyone else is kind of surprised about what’s going on. The Halfling luckily ducks into a back alley and drinks a potion of invisibility, but not before Snitch takes a good luck at him. Snitch realizes this is the same Halfling she’s been paying to follow the Witch around.

So, she doesn’t tell anyone what’s going on, just plays dumb and lets the rest of the group fumble around in a back alley trying to find a Halfling. Harvester hears something on the roof of a house and climbs up to see an open skylight. He jumps down only to startle a young family that call for the guards to come and help.

At this point no one has seen the Halfling except for the Harvester, so when guards are called everyone splits. They meet up back in the lair and have a talk with Harvester. He is convinced that Halflings are out to get him. He saw Halflings hanging around the outside of the lair a few nights ago, there was a halfling following them today. Everyone thinks he’s paranoid, and since it helps Snitch’s case to make it seem like Harvester is paranoid, she plays along.

So the Snitch finally meets up with her halfling friend and says kindly to stop following the Witch around. That darned druid has too high of a perception to do a decent casing job. The Snitch instead asks the Halfling to try and look into the Witch’s other dealings around town: the warehouse of wool and the Saloon. Halfling says that’ll be all right. He goes off to work.

Come into my parlor
So once more we’re at the crossroads and the group doesn’t really know what to do. There’s bandits to the north, a bank heist, more Vigilante problems and of course the Neighborhood watch meeting coming up.

Oh, and the messenger they sent to the Druid’s house returns with a note that says, “We should get together and talk. Noon tomorrow, come to the house.”

So, the group is freaking out about this little note. They are pretty sure it’s a trap and don’t know what to do at all. I thought it was clever myself. I imagine the person that wrote it has a big smile on his face. It’s the kind of “Come into my parlor” said the spider to the fly mentality that I absolutely love.

Back to Verna's
Instead the group decides to go back to Verna’s for a third time. Here there is only a lone Halfling standing outside of the place. He spots them, starts to run away but they run him down and begin to ask him questions. The halfling says he’s part of the neighborhood watch but he won’t answer anything. They threaten to cut out his tongue so he sticks it out at them.

In the end they decide to tie him up and bring him back down to their lair. Harvester asks if this is the same Halfling that’s been following him, and I ask him to roll a perception. He rolls very low, so I tell him yes… of course, this is the exact same Halfling. So, Harvester is excited to question this guy.

So, that is where we left it at the moment. There wasn’t really a lot of fighting. This was mostly gathering information and moving things forward day of plotting. There are certainly a lot of loose ends now. I am wondering how it will all turn out.

As a GM, personally, I love having to juggle a lot of balls in the air at once. It’s more fun than only juggling two or three. I don’t know why but I always get scared as a GM when the group has nothing to do. It seems much better, and much more realistic that one of the constraints of the game is for the players to have a bunch of stuff thrown at them and to look at priorities of each one.

To me it’s a lot of fun. The players seem to be enjoying it as well.

Notes
There is no down time this week, so no randomness to look up on. Next week seems to be Neighborhood Watch stuff and then possibly some bank heisting.
Plus the Druid’s deadline will very quickly run out, if they don’t do anything about that then we’ll see how it goes. I’m kind of happy to look at the druid and see just how she will track them down. Perhaps some Scrying or Locate Object might work. I’m still thinking about it, any ideas?

I’m excited to get an email from the Rat. At the moment he said he was still busying tying up school stuff, so he said this week he will finally set some time off to start up on his undercover police duties. I’m excited about that. When I get it I might just copy it here word for word so you guys can see what’s going on.

Since he’s in on the bottom floor of the Watch Captain Vote as well as the bank heist, it will be interesting to see how that pans out.

The halfling was supposed to be caught. The Neighborhood Watch is going to be following him and seeing where they take him. I imagine they’re going to set up a bit of an ambush for the group. That will be fun. It’s about time I get to do something pro-active to the group. They can’t just go around killing my neighborhood watch. The nerve of them!

Ok, that’s all I got this week. Until next time.

[Unseenmal]

I just sat and read all of this from the beginning. Words cannot acurately describe the awesomeness that I see before me. Truly great work. I only hope to get to this level of GM goodness. I am on my first game as GM right now.

[Sillycomic]

Thank you very much. I love all the comments you guys leave. Please feel free to critique when you can. There are days when I feel like this is the best role playing experience I've ever been a part of, and then there are days when I feel like I never have any right calling myself a GM. So, any feedback for better or worse will only help.

And once more we are off to the windy city of Edrigar to find out what our Mafia men (and women) in training are up to.

Nephew's absence
We do not have the Nephew with us this night, due to working late. It makes sense that Allore wants to congratulate him with a night out on the town anyway.

He emailed me and said he wanted to go do some scouting for a good kidnapping anyway, so he's off on his own working on that.

Morning Questions
We start off with the group getting a good night's rest. They wake in the morning, have some delicious waffles, read the paper, let the dog out...

oh yeah, and they also interrogate the kidnapped halfling.

He tells them all he knows, which isn't a heck of a lot. He basically just tells them what they already know. There is a meeting at Arrock's on Wednesday, the neighborhood watch is growing, they don't like mafia people, and they don't know who or where the Vigilante is.

The group tries to poke for more information, but he just didn't have any. I'm sorry, if you pick up a random person off the street how much relevant information is he going to have?

One detect thoughts spell (cast by the Rat this time) revealed some more, but again it was all information they already knew. The password to get into the meeting and whatnot.

The best information they get is that... if its possible for anyone to get in contact with the Vigilante, it might be Arrock, the dwarf at the blacksmith's shop.

So, now the group starts contemplating if they should hit the blacksmith's shop before the Neighborhood Watch meeting. They think if they kidnap Arrock and force him to tell them where the vigilante is, they can then take out the Vigilante and begin taking over the docks.

And then we get into an argument over how to take over the docks. The Harvester is still convinced they should just start taking over businesses to draw out the Vigilante. The Witch simply wants to just take out the Brothers so they can claim the territory and the Snitch really wants to take out the Vigilante and let everything else fall into place.

Druid woes
The rat, having just come into this long discussion of "how to take over the docks" doesn't really have an opinion either way. Instead, he just reminds them all that they have a meeting with the homicidal druid later on today.

So, for the moment everything is put aside while the group comes up with a plan for the druid. They don't like the idea of having a meeting at the druid's place, even though they pretty much asked for one.

The Rat has a perfect solution. He advises to go himself to scope it out. Since he wasn't part of the theft on the druid's home, he really has no stake in this. He'll go over, see what's going on and then try to find a way to defuse the whole thing.

The group doesn't like that, but they like the idea of them going to the house even worse, so they decide it's OK.

The Rat gets the cheese
The Rat heads out, and him and I have a little bit of 1 on 1 session time.

First thing he does is tell his informants what's going on. He explains that the group is planning a night raid on the Neighborhood Watch and also that he is going on what might be called a suicide run.

He heads over to the druid's house and inside there is a female half elf who greets him warmly and asks him to come in. She explains she is a friend of the druid and is simply here to find out what is going on. She points to a silver chair and asks him to sit down in it. It's a simple chair that will determine if he is telling the truth or not, it works similarly to a Zone of Truth spell.

The rat doesn't like it at first, saying he "has secrets." Boy if that isn't an understatement in this campaign. A PC who has secrets?

She explains that if she asks any question he doesn't feel comfortable with he is always free to leave. There's no obligation, and if he is going to tell the truth he might as well sit in the chair anyway. So, he does... I ask him if we wants to roll a will save or not, he says he does. He makes the will save. Good for him.

Except the chair begins to heat up under him, and he takes a small amount of fire damage. (ahh, a chair that actually does light your pants on fire if you lie, how cool is that?)

He then decides to fail the will save and be honest.

He goes off on his explanation... that his friends robbed the place a month ago but to the best of his knowledge no one stole the druid's husband's soul. He feels like there is some random misunderstanding and his friends are getting scared by the whole thing.

She assures them if they are all innocent they can simply come here and sit on the chair, prove to her they are all telling the truth, that none of them have any information about the soul and no harm will come to them.

There is some back and forth here about the friends and whatnot until the Rat does reveal that he is going undercover to take down the entire Mafia clan, feeling it is in his best interest to make allies. She agrees them being allies would be most beneficial.

Then she does the most brilliant thing I have done in this campaign... at least in the last few sessions anyway. She tells the Rat to lie to the rest of his friends. Tell them that the druid has been scrying on them for weeks now, she knows exactly what is going on and is ready for the deadline to come before she gets a bunch of her other retired adventurer friends to kill them all.

This is all total BS, mind you, but the rest of the group will flip out if they hear this. They have already speculated that the druid might know about them, and might be scrying on them, so just adding a layer of truth to those rumors will make for some interesting developments.

The Rat agrees to go back with this information.

The group faces the chair!
He returns to the rest of the group and says that he has good news and bad news. The good news is there is a truth telling chair at the druid's house... they all need to just go and sit down on it, tell the truth and no harm will come to them.

The bad news is the druid has been following them for weeks, knows who they are, is using scrying techniques and a bunch of other lies that I didn't even mention. Ah, the rat is a natural born liar, no wonder he does so well undercover. Ha ha.

The rest of the group utterly believes him. Everyone feels like they can't just wait around for the deadline, they want to go and clear their names. So, everyone decides to go.

Yes, you read it correctly. Everyone decides to go.

Yes.

Yes, even the witch.

Why is the witch going along with this?

Don't ask me, I'm just the GM. I don't know why she agreed to go. Perhaps she thought she could beat the chair. The Rat didn't mention that the chair actually did damage to you if you lied on it. I didn't feel a need to correct him on that piece of information...

Ok.

So, off we go.

Even the witch...

The group goes back to the house they robbed. Once more the sweet half elf is standing beside the chair and asks them to sit down one by one. Snitch goes first, she is asked a bunch of questions about the soul, and since she doesn't know anything she answers them all truthfully. The half elf is satisfied so she gets up.

Next is the Harvester. He is asked a bunch of questions, again he answers them all truthfully, so he is cleared and is allowed to go.

And then the moment you have all been waiting for. The moment the rest of my group was waiting for as well, because everyone at this point knows that the Witch stole the soul (out of character they know, in character they are still clueless... I love people who don't metagame. My group is awesome like that)

She sits down, she tries to make her save but rolls a 2... so no go. She is asked if she stole the soul, tries her best to weasel out of the question but it doesn't work. The chair prevents her lying so instead she just sits there.

Everyone is kind of shocked. The half elf begins asking her more questions, but most of them she can weasel her way out of. She technically doesn't know where the soul is, or what happened to it, so it's ok her her to "tell" the truth about those questions.

And then the half elf asks her how she did it. the witch takes out her soul stealing gem and says, "here, let me show you." The witch leaps for the half elf, touching her with the gem.

Girl Fight
They go into another realm. Here they fight. The half elf reveals she is a sorceress and starts by using a cool breath weapon spells to deal some damage. The witch responds in kind with some general hexes. They fight to a standstill basically. The fight takes a good 20 minutes, and it's pretty riveting. The half elf finally wins when she summons a water elemental to help with damage as she runs away from several burning gaze attacks.

Outside both the witch and half elf are frozen, with the gem between them for a second. Then the half elf comes out of it all right. The witch is about to do something when Snitch comes around and coup de graces her.

And say goodbye to the witch.

Wow.

I was a little speechless, to be honest. I did not see that coming. Yet another example of why I feel I would make a horrible Railroading type of Gm... I never see things like this happening.

Quoth the raven, Nevermore
So, anyway as awe-struck as I might be, the fight is not over. I have everyone roll initiatives. People are confused, not sure what to do until it gets to the witch's turn.

The raven familiar that always flies around with her and generally acts as some sort of random spy for the group flies down to pick up the soul stealing gem and flies off with it.

There is a huge battle in the house. Everyone is trying to kill this Raven familiar, while the raven is trying to escape. Unfortunately all the doors and windows are closed. There's no reason they would be open. I mentioned there was a broken window through the library downstairs, but this was after the raven was upstairs looking for a way out.

Finally I think the Harvester cast a flame spell of some sort and dropped the bird. They got the soul stealing gem and gave it to the half elf, saying that they hope this will stop the druid from going medieval on their butts.

The half elf agrees. The person was killed and she has the item that did it. They have no need to worry the druid's wrath now.

The Harvester tries to ask if the silver chair of truth telling is for sale, but the half elf responds very nicely that it isn't. The group, not wanting to press their luck, decides against robbing from the druid a second time and instead just leaves.

Ahh, silver chair of truth telling, we say goodbye but I'm sure we'll meet each other again some day.

Saying goodbye to the Witch
They grab the witch's body and drag her down to the sewers where they, as usual, strip her body of anything useful or expensive. While the witch does have a bunch of cool stuff on her, a majority of the stuff was tucked away in random hidey holes, so they don't find all that much.

Apparently the witch was saving for some really cool magical item and she was pretty close to getting it. That is sad to hear.

Snitch decapitates the head and brings it to Allore, explaining that she was obviously a traitor and was dealt with. She receives her fee for killing the traitor.

The Rat had his familiar follow the Snitch, cause he wanted to know where the Snitch was going with the Witch's head. But the familiar wasn't able to see what happened inside, so nothing was really revealed there.

So, yeah.

Killing the Neighborhood watch
The group then decides to take down Arrock at his Blacksmith's shop. They go at night, scouting the perimeter.

Fortunately the Rat earlier had told his informants of the impending raid and the watch was able to get some word down to Arrok's people, so they were waiting with an ambush. Three archers pop up from different roofs and start raining down arrows and bolts.

The Harvester starts to summon random cheetahs and lions to help with the archers. Then a group of dwarves emerge from the blacksmith's shop, looking for revenge. The fight, while looking impressive actually was over quite quickly. My big bad barbarian never even got to do any damage. How sad.

The gnome joined the fight, but when it went bad he turned invisible and ran back inside. The Snitch casts invisibility on herself and followed inside.

Guards began to show up. A good dozen or so (I just grabbed a handful of mini's and put them on the board) Everyone turned tail and ran except for the Snitch. She felt determined to grab some magical items from this blacksmith's shop.

The Snitch's last stand
She cast detect magic and found, among other things, the invisible gnome in one of the corner's of the shop. She runs to attack the gnome. Her invisibility pops off and since the gnome starts crying out for help, and the guards don't find anyone else around, they all go inside to attack.

And this is where I tell you I hate the Magus class. It sucks. It deals too much damage and it can too easily be turned into a tank. Her AC was in the high 20's at level 5. She was dealing on average 30 to 50 points a round, able to cast darkness and mirror image on herself mulitple times. It was like trying to nail jello to the wall. I have 8 different attackers on her at one point, plus the gnome trying to cast spells on her and for the better part of an hour she just shakes things off.

Ok, end rant.

The fight took nearly an hour, and in the end the Magus just decided to cast more invisibility on herself and sneak off.


So, that was it for the night. The group didn't have much else to do, especially with one person not there and another one who didn't have a new character sheet ready yet.

The night was still early, so I let the group do another free for all. One last goodbye fight to the Witch. She put up a good fight, but the Magus owned her butt. The good news is the Rat actually won, thanks to him being left alone for the most part and casting all sorts of buffing and damaging spells.

That was nice.

Notes
The group has decided on two weeks of downtime, and they want to head an expedition to go find the Hag in the swamp. The bounty is 30,000 if they can bring her in alive. That's a lot of money for adventurers, and with no Witch telling them to go do other things, they feel this is their best bet.

Of course, they still want to take over the docks, but I told them for the moment the Neighborhood watch thing was over. They killed Arrock, (not captured him, but killed him) so the neighborhood watch can't really stand together any longer. They were devastating to my little start up group trying to take them down. Oh well, I'll try again with something else.

So, the new character concept replacing the witch is actually a svirfneblin rogue who is out for revenge against a bunch of dwarves that killed his family.

I didn't know what a svirfneblin was, so I had to look it up. It's basically a drow gnome. Sheesh, why do my players insist on playing these strange creatures? I don't know, although I'm pretty sure the Spell Resistance might have something to do with it.

Anyway, I don't know, it seems a little bland of a character. He came up with a cool backstory, but all it is is a long detailed story about how he's been seeking revenge against the dwarves who killed his family.

The email he sent me had this quote in it: With no goals or purpose except revenge, Tarbin is willing to do almost anything for the felons if it leads to his goals.

The witch was all about side goals and quests with her soul stealing franchise going on, but this? I don't know. Thoughts or ideas are welcome.

Oh, but I did tell him since the group is going after the hag, if he wants he can GM the final battle between the group and the hag. It's his character, he put more work into it than I ever did, so I thought it would be cool to let him have the reins on it. I hope he says yes, that will be fun.

I'm already looking at random cool things to throw at them as they go through the swamps. Hangman's Tree and Shambling mounds will be fun.

Oh, one more thing... Snitch has up wanted posters. She killed Arrock plus a city guard before she left the blacksmith's shop. And before she cast darkness everyone got a good look at her face, plus the gnome can describe her in detail as well as her friends and their whereabouts. So yeah, she's in big trouble.

I already sent him an email wondering just how often he is going out in the streets now that this is happening.

So, unfortunately I need to hold off putting up a Wanted poster for a Drow Magus since it appears we already have one in place. I'm very happy with this development. She had been so smart up until this night's game. Oh well, perhaps some bribe money might help.

We'll see how it develops. It will be interesting to see how the rest of the group reacts knowing their friend has a price of 6,000 gold on her head. Ah, loyalties in an evil campaign, I love it.

We play again this next Tuesday. I am very curious to find out what happens.

[Sillycomic]

Double post.

[Savannah]

Aw, I liked the witch :smallfrown:

[Sillycomic]

I did too. That's why I was so surprised he went along with the whole thing.

I asked him several times during the night, even after the session, "Dude, what were you thinking?"

The best reply he gave was, "I thought I could lie my way out of it."

He was betting his entire character on a single will save. Not sure I would have done the same, but there it is.

Oh well.

[Savannah]

You should get this (http://www.zazzle.com/famous_last_words_in_roleplaying_save_button-145686095517202763) for the witch's player :smallbiggrin:

[Magic Myrmidon]

Not all caught up yet, but I just wanted to say I'm enjoying this journal. Don't want this to go unappreciated.

I have to say, I WAS a bit disappointed that Dexter was killed so quickly. Still, I love the way he died, of course.

[Sillycomic]

Welcome back everyone. We had a fun, but very improvised game last night. I found myself scrounging through the the bestiary half the time. The group, as usual, didn't do anything that I thought they would do.

Once more the prodigal nephew has gone missing. He had to work late again. I think he works construction and they always have more hours during the summer months. He needs the money, so more power to him for getting that work. It is sad to see him not there though.

Downtime
In any case, we had 2 weeks of downtime.

Harvester is trying to set up a better business bureau in town. He wants charismatic salesman to try and get businesses to be set up here. He also wants to hire a lawyer for legal processes. It looks impressive, but I don’t see a blossoming medieval city embracing the concept of paying for a plaque in their office.

Harvester is convinced it will work though, so I guess.

He also went to do some recon on some more banks in the area. I gave him a bunch of useful information on that.

He says he wants to go research more into that dragon beneath the city, but he never made any attempts to do so. Once more the dragon with all the information in the world lays waiting underneath their feet. Oh well. I’m just the GM. I can’t force them to go on fun and rewarding adventures.

Snitch decided to lay low while wanted posters of her were up all over town. There is a 3,000 gold reward for her capture because of her escapades. Last session she killed a city guard as well as several members of a blooming neighborhood watch group. She tried to find out some more information on the Ravens and the Vigilante.

The Cherry Pit up in the Hills is the best known hangout for Ravens. She tried to get her contact to go in there and ask questions, but the contact only laughed at her. That’s like going into Al Capone’s bar and starting to ask random questions. Now imagine Al Capone with wizarding levels. Yeah, no one is that stupid,

The best she gets is that the Cherry Pit has a casino, is known to be a Raven den and is owned by a halfling named Morgan. No other information is really known about the place, at least not from anyone that the Snitch is aware of.
Which is sad, because the other week the Snitch broke into a house and killed the bard, Chare who performed nightly at the Cherry Pit without a second’s thought. She also killed Andis, a watch captain who was known for spending lots of time in that casino. Those were two perfectly good people to ask questions and get legitimate answers about Ravens or Cherry Pit or anything else. I even had a list of information written down for Chare to say, in the hopes that information would allow him to escape.

No such luck. Oh well. I can’t really tell my players how to play the game. I just set things up and watch them get knocked down.

Actually, I am glad I’m writing a journal like this, because this gives me a perfectly good venue to vent certain frustrations about the whole process. Also when the whole process is over I can send all of my players a link to this site and they can see how silly they have been, and how many easy answers were just around the next corner.

One of her contacts said that he needed money for bribes. He thinks the Vigilante might have something to do with law enforcement. If he bribes a few watches there might be some significant lead in the whole Vigilante thing. I asked for 1200 gold, thinking it was a ludicrous price, but the Snitch to my surprise said it was all right and she paid the money. Wow. Ok then. So, I guess we’ll see if that pans out.

The Rat went to find Syd, who lives in Edrigar. Syd was the half elf friend of the druid who, last session, was hell bent on revenge against the party for stealing her husband’s soul. The Rat wanted to make sure everything was taken care of. Syd assured him that the druid is happy with what happened, and with the new leads and the soul stealing gem that was recovered she should be able to find her husband’s soul.

He also wanted to solidify that relationship. Syd is more than happy to become partners for the time being. If they ever need any help they will call for each other. Syd is a ranger in town who cares for birds and other animals at her vet center. She’s pretty, nice and loyal so I’m glad the Rat got to make good friends with her. We’ll see how this turns out.

Then he went and had his first official meeting with his police contacts downtown. They had a secret meeting on top of a random building with a wizard casting some magical spells to prohibit scrying and whatnot. Here the Rat explained what he had so far, which isn’t a lot.

The guys had some information for him. First they explained that they had a wanted poster out for the Snitch, so perhaps the Rat could use that to his advantage in some way, hopefully to get closer to the real power players in the Felons gang.

Also, they knew who the Vigilante was, and asked if the Rat wanted to set up a meeting with him. The Rat said definitely yes. So, we’ll see what happens with that.

Ok. So that was two weeks of downtime. Interesting. Now onto the game.

Home Brew
Harvester also wanted to start brewing some hard liquor. He was looking to find someone that could help him start brewing some hard liquor so that harvester could have some supply coming into town. So, I introduced him to our new player, Rascal, an emo gnome rogue with delusions of killing dwarves and a penchant for brewing. They had typical discussions about the kind of investment they wanted to do, both thought each other seemed pretty trustworthy (for some reason) and decided to go off into the Harvester’s lair to meet the others.

So, the group comes back together and decides the need to go into the swamp to capture this hag. You might remember that was the plan from last week. The hag has a 15,000 gold bounty on her head, 30,000 if they can bring her in alive and the group is in desperate need of funds. I don’t know why, they just robbed an adventurer’s house and got like 10,000 gold in items and lewts, but somehow they are all broke. I guess.

That’s the life of a gangster, rich one moment and broke hobo with a shiny sword the next.

What my group is really good at, moar planning!
Anyway the Rat finally decides to do some investigating on hags in general, and discovers they are immune to lots of different kinds of damage and also are pretty hefty spellcasters and masters of illusions. The group is a little frightened after that, thinking that maybe they should save the hag hunting for another day.

Well crap.

I spent this entire week looking up swamp random encounters and statting everything out for them, one knowledge check and they decide it’s a no go. Sometimes I really hate these sandbox games. How happy would it be to put three walls down in the city and there is a single trail leading to a swamp, telling the adventurers to “GO! Oh, and roll initiative cause all of these alligators are about to attack you.”

Bleck. So, anyway, my group then decides to spend an hour deciding what they do want to do. They think they can take the hag if only they get a bunch of money so they can supply up and better prepare themselves. They need a way to grab some decent money.

This is when the Rat isn’t sure what is going on in the city as far as plot hooks and the other adventurers fill him in. I suppose they’re also filling in Rascal, since he just showed up to brew some beer and they are throwing him in to go adventuring with them. The player knows everything that’s going on, but the PC doesn’t.

So, once more we’re going over random plot hooks which are readily available but no one has done anything with. The current tally is:

1.Vigilante minotaur who is using Batman style justice against gang members in town, currently has only attacked the Brothers in the dock area.

2. The hag living on a small island in the middle of a swamp.

3. There is a dragon with a vast hoarde of treasure living somewhere underneath the city. Legend says if you track him down and give him treasure he will answer you one question, any question you desire since he’s an ancient dragon and he knows almost everything.

4. Four ancient elemental temples that have vast amounts of knowledge and magic tied to them. The temples are filled with dangers and perils but promise vast knowledge and rewards for anyone who defeats the champion of said Elemental. They know where one elemental is, and have general areas of where the other ones are.

5. There is an ancient castle somewhere to the far far north that is told to have vast treasures. It is supposed to be the castle of an ancient king that some claim didn’t even exist. If it is true, this castle will have lots of riches and ancient information and all of that good lewts stuff. Oh, also the dangers and perils too, but that goes without saying.

6. Plus the Brothers themselves. They have too scared to deal with their territory thanks to the actions of the “Vigilante,” so their territory is technically up for grabs if the adventurers want to grab it.

7. Various bounties around town.

Getting ready for campin
Anyway, things like that. The group looks at the pros and cons of each. They decide that they want to try and collect the bounty on the bandits to the North of town, and then go further north and see if they can find out where this earth elemental temple is. The map they have shows a general area within a valley that is considered “no man’s land” simply because it has lots of dangerous monsters in there. Rumors of dinosaurs and large gorillons and such things.

They explain to Allore what is going on, and leave Nephew in charge since he’s not there for the session. They grab up some supplies and rations and head off into the forest.

Just to make things clear: They have no clue where this temple is, all they know is that it’s in a valley filled with lots of deadly monsters. Their plan is to find it somehow? I don’t know, they never really gave a good explanation on how they would find a temple that hasn’t been found in thousands of years.
Good luck to them on that.

So, they get some horses thanks to Allore, fill the carriage they have with supplies and head out of the city. Just outside the city gates they are met by some people who ask to be escorts. These are rangers and the like, looking for money for “protection” basically. The group first says no, but the rates are cheap enough so eventually they grab 8 people to come along.
Very nice, this is a caravan!

Adventure ho
So our adventurers with they’re newly acquired hirelings head off for the North Road. They travel during the day, expected to be bombarded by the bandits along the north road, but that never happens.

So, instead they make camp for the night.

And during the night there is an attack! It’s war hardened bug bears and ogres that attack from each side of their camp. The group wakes up and goes to work. The newly squired adventurer the Rascal keeps rolling 3’s and 4’s on his sneak attack, which is sad. The Harvester summons more lions to help. The hirelings all surround an ogre to bring him down, and the poor Rat got pummeled so bad that his only defence is to turn invisible and fly up into the air.

A bugbear does get into their carriage and grab some supplies, running away, but he is gunned down before he gets too far. All in all it was a pretty decent combat. The hirelings didn’t lose anyone and the adventurers were able to heal up. I was close to dropping the Rat, if they hadn’t hired the random adventurers that fight would have been a lot tougher. Lucky them.

An Ordinary tree?
The next day the Harvester rolls a perception to see a Hangman Tree set off to the side of the road. This is a tall carnivorous tree that hangs random people who happen to get close to it. The Harvester decides to cast produce flame and throw them at it from 50 feet away.

Unfortunately he rolls low against the Spell Resistance and the small fireballs fizzle out before they hit the bark. The harvester is frustrated and feels like they need to get closer to destroy this thing. They do so, and then the Hangman Tree does his Hallucinatory Spores and everyone except the Snitch fails their will save.

So, everyone except for the Snitch thinks it’s not a dangerous tree, but a normal tree and there’s nothing wrong with it. The Snitch, who never saw it as anything more than an ordinary tree anyway, decides to leave it be and move on.

So, the group moves on.

Afterwards the druid snaps out of it and realizes that the tree beat him in a battle of wits (which I found funny) He wanted to go back, but couldn’t convince anyone else that the tree they passed was anything other than an ordinary tree.

I am enjoying this far too much. I think I need to play this up some more, that the Harvester keeps having these random fits of paranoia and delusion that no one else can see. You may recall a few sessions ago the Harvester kept seeing a halfling that followed them, which no one else could really confirm (except for the Snitch, who purposely denied it cause it helped his own story)

Maybe I will throw something their way which only the druid can see. Is there something in the game with selective perception? I might need to look into that.

The mining town
In any event, the group continues on their way. It is uneventful, except once during the travel they did come across gnoll tracks going down the road, but since there is no active bounty on gnoll heads the group decided against it and moved on.

They made it to a huge mining town in the mountains known as Reavin. It is filled with dwarves mostly. The group settles themselves in and decides to look up a man named Hokkist, a dwarf that Allore said would be a contact up in this town.

Hokkist is a friendly dwarf that owns a general store. They get into some talk about the town and what things import and export. There are a bunch of mines in the mountains here and Reavin has lots of ore and jewelry they export, and in its wake they import necessary supplies. At the moment the trade between Edrigar and Reavin is nonexistent due to the bandits and other such monsters that occupy that road between the two cities.

So, the group decides they want to do a little trading. They will make sure supplies go back and forth safely, making huge profit since they can sell things in this town for nearly double the price and people will pay for it. It’s very beneficial for everyone. So the group talks about this venture for a while.

Split up and Look for Clues
Rascal decides to go out drinking. He pops into a tavern called the Mitheral Hammer and asks for the best drink they got. The dwarf laughs heartily at the Rascal and pours him a glass of what looks like cement, cold and gray and it actually pours like thick syrup. Rascal sniffs it, drinks it, fails a fortitude save and lands headfirst on the counter. He wakes up a half hour later with a hangover, 50 gold less in his pockets and 2 bottles of the cement mix on the counter next to him. Rascal is, for lack of a better word, happy.

Harvester goes and looks for bounties in the area. Snitch doesn’t like that cause he’s supposed to go and look for bounties. He feels a need to tag along, and he does this by saying, “We both go looking for bounties.” I thought that was funny.

The only two bounties at the moment are for a dwarf gang that stole a bunch of mithral ore from the mine about a month ago. The second bounty is for any help in solving a murder in the town. There was a wizard by the name of Graettin who was killed a couple of weeks ago. The only thing known about the murder was that it was necromantic magic which killed him.

A cloaked stranger in the corner of a bar
The group thinks those are interesting bounties. They decide to turn in for the evening, grabbing up rooms at the Mitheral hammer. There’s a bunch of dwarves drinking and partying for the evening, but in the corner there is a man in dark robes by himself smoking a pipe. The group casts some detect magic and realize he has lots of magical items so they need to talk to him.

Yes, this was their reasoning.

Harvester: I cast detect magic on him.

Snitch: Me too.

Me: He lights up like a Christmas tree.

Harvester: I go over to him, “Hello.”

All right then.

He says that he is a good friend of Graettin and is here for the funeral taking place in a few days. He is shocked to hear about what happened and wants to pay his respects. The group asks some more questions about the murder and he answers what he can.

The only thing he really knows is that Graettin came here to retire, built a wizard’s tower and was studying random things that wizards study when they decide to stop adventuring. He had a few people who didn't like him, but no enemies. No one who actively wanted him dead.

The group asks about the elemental temple and the old man says he knows of them. Graettin and him heard of it when they were young wizards at the academy and decided to try and find it. They went to the savage valley and searched it as thoroughly as they could, but never found a trace of it. The old man admits that since it is an earth temple it is probably buried underneath the ground somewhere, so they could have searched for years and never found it.

The group asks to join them on their daring search through the savage valley to find the temple. He smiles and politely declines. Perhaps 10 years ago he would have joined them, but his adventuring days are behind him now.

Rascal leaves the bar, thinking that he would want to jump this old man as soon as he left for the evening, but the old man actually had a room at the Mitheral Hammer, so he never left. Sadness. And that is where we leave for the evening.

Notes
I never thought the group would actually go for the murder mystery plot. I don’t think they care exactly about it, they seem interested in getting into Graettin’s wizard tower. Since he searched for the Elemental Temple they feel like in his notes there must be some sort of clue to find the location of this elemental temple. They even tried to convince me that, as a clue, it would certainly be nice if existed.

I thought that was funny. I’m not sure what are in Graettin’s notes in the wizard’s tower myself, I suppose I should think about that. I certainly know there is no easy answer. They aren’t gonna go find out where the entrance is by doing just 5 minutes of actual research.

I have a lot of work to do now in Reavin. I need to stat up bad guys and good guys and clues and… it’s going to be a busy week for me.

I pulled most of this session out of my butt. I had some general notes on this mining town and the North Road out of Edrigar, but nothing concrete. To be honest I had an entire adventure set out for the swamps, you know, when they said they were going into the swamps to capture the hag. Instead they turned and went a random direction.

It was fine, and people enjoyed the session, but I felt like I was scrambling half the time. Hopefully this next week will be much better, and I can stat and think out a bunch of things in the story.

There’s no real downtime, as the group is still looking to solve the murder mystery… which I still find interesting. That seems like something a good group would do, try and solve the murder in a new town they visit. My group is doing it mostly for profit, but in this case it makes little difference.
Perhaps we’ll see just how similar to a good group they are.

If I get any emails or updates I’ll let you guys know.

[Sillycomic]

Back to Edrigar once more. Although, at the moment my group of players are in a small mining town known as Reavin. So, I suppose it’s more apt to say we are back in Reavin. Welcome back.

Once more with planning
And again... Nephew can’t make it tonight. He apparently has a really bad ear infection and decided to stay home today. I feel bad for him, and the game too. It’s more fun when he’s in it, even if he does do off the wall and crazy things sometimes. They are fun crazy things. Oh well. He will be missed; hopefully we can see him next week.

As for the rest of our adventurers, they are in a tavern known as the Mithral Hammer. It is morning and a bright beautiful day in town. My group sits down for a while coming up with a plan. Harvester wants to go after those mithral bandits from a month ago. One of the bounties I told him about was a trio of dwarves who stole a few hundred pounds of mithral and other gems from the mines. The group has no way to track something that happened a month ago, but the Harvester did come up with a smart plan. He wanted to do to the trio what I did to them with the druid. He wants to put up flyers all around the area to try and draw out the bad guys.

I thought it was pretty clever, but didn’t say anything at the time. I’m just the Gm after all. The rest of the group didn’t feel all that interested in wasting time on the trio. Instead they wanted to go to the Graettin’s Wizard tower in order to try and find some plot clue to help them find the entrance to the Earth Elemental Temple.

Again, I want to point out… at no point did I even hint that this wizard has any clue where the elemental temple is. I just said he searched for it when he was far younger. The group is going on pure speculation at this point. Which is fun. Speculation always gets adventurers into trouble. And as the GM, I’m just sitting back and watching them with a smile on my face. Some days it’s good to be the king.

Wizard's Tower
After some more discussions the group finally decides to go to the Wizard’s tower. They go east of town passed a bridge over a deep but narrow river and down a winding road. Ten minutes from town they find the Wizard’s tower looming in the distance.

The group sees that there are two dwarf guards in front of the door of the wizard’s tower. There is also a large lock on the door. Rascal gets away from the rest of the group and decides to do some recon of his own. He sneaks to the back of the tower and lies in wait for the rest of the group to do something. The group is kind of waiting for Rascal to come back, thinking he did some recon. So, everyone waits around for an hour.

All right then. One hour gone. Good to know.

Finally the Rat decides to go and charm the guards into helping them. He does so. One of the guards the save and the other makes it (he cast the spell twice). The Rat explains the mayor asked him to come and investigate the watch tower, so they should let him him. The guards aren’t really convinced, even if one of them is charmed. They ask for some written letter of recommendation which he doesn’t have. They then say, “well the mayor gave you the key right?”

And the rat says, “Oh no. I’ll use your key.”

“We don’t have no key.”

So… despite having one of the guards being charmed as his best friend, this guy comes from the middle of nowhere and asks to go inside with no proof of anything he’s saying. So yeah, even the charmed dwarf is now suspicious.

They ask him nicely to go back to the mayor’s office and get the key, plus something saying he is authorized to come into the tower.

And that’s when the rest of the team strikes. There isn’t much my poor dwarf guards can do. They were slowed and sneak attacked and had summoned cats sent after them. It was sad. They died in a few rounds. Their stuff was taken and they were thrown into shallow graves.

Soo many traps
So, now there is a door to a wizard’s tower. Rascal sees the very nice lock and decides to take twenty on it. So, we spend a good hour waiting for Rascal to pick the lock. He does so. There are also two other locks on the door, and he picks those as well, they are much easier. They open the door and see the wizard’s tower inside.

Two hours gone into this plan. It's a good plan so far, right?

Rascal notices the floor is strange. He tells everyone to stay outside. Snitch takes out a rock and throws it to the floor, but the rock goes through the floor. They poke their head through the illusionary floor to see a very large pit 40 feet deep, with swarms of spiders down there at the bottom.

Snitch then uses a rope to see what part of the floor are solid and what part is illusion, but it looks as if the entire floor is illusion. There are stairs at the other end of the tower, 30 feet away, which are real. The group feels they somehow need to get around this floor and get to the stairs they should be ok.

Except, the group now isn’t liking this very well. This is a wizard’s tower, and there have already been several traps and tricks. Rat keeps explaining to people that he really doesn’t want to keep going. He has said all along he wishes to go speak with the mayor, why not get actually approval and help to take care of this tower, but the group decided to bull rush their way through. Well, this is what they get when they bull rush.

So, after a few minutes and thinking of plans Harvester decides to use stone shape to make some steps so they can walk across to the stairs. I look at the spell, it looks ok and there’s enough stone to make the steps needed, so they are across to the stairway.

The group goes up the stairway that ends in a door, with no lock or handles whatsoever. The group searches and Rascal finds out that the door isn’t really a door, it’s just a stone wall cut out to look like a door. Snitch finds a loose stone near the doorway.

Now the group is really freaking out.

They take some time to search this stairway thoroughly. More time wasting? That's just what a good GM wants to hear! Ha ha. Because the middle of the day dwarf guard shift is coming to replace the other dwarves who had just gotten killed.

Luckily Harvester left his animal companion as guard outside, warning to howl and then run away if he saw anyone coming.

Sure enough, as they’re looking through the stairway the lion howls and wanders off. Harvester and Rascal both skip out of the tower, thinking they are all leaving. The Rat and Snitch stay behind to try and figure this place out.

So, outside there are three dwarves coming to the tower. They look and see that the guards they were supposed to replace are gone. Also… the lock isn’t locked anymore on the door. This is pretty suspicious, they head back to town.

Rascal and Harvester take them on the road. Harvester entangles them and Rascal starts sneak attacking. Two get loose and start running back into town, while one poor dwarf is stuck helplessly. By the time he gets out harvester has sent one of his cat summons after him and it’s a short fight. Poor little dwarf.

The other two are running as fast as their stubby little dwarven legs will carry them. Rascal is shooting them and running after as best as he can. He gets them a few more times before they head into the town. He can’t follow them in town and so he decides it’s best to tell everyone else it’s time to leave.

Meanwhile, inside the wizard’s tower Rat finally decides to pull at the cobblestone and it comes out. There is a small piece of paper lying inside, folded up. Neither Rat nor Snitch like this at all. They look at each other. Snitch casts detect magic and sure enough it glows with a evocation school signature. So, he’s pretty sure it’s a piece of paper with explosive runes on it.
But… curiousity gets the better of him and he reads it anyway. Sure enough, explosive runes. He gets blasted for lots of damage. I find it hilarious.

So the group meets up. Rascal says there are probably lots of guards coming, and from the sounds of trumpets and alarms coming from the city the group is pretty sure that’s the case. They go back on the road and head east.

I'd like to think as they head away from the Wizard's tower, running for their lives they lower their heads in shame. Utterly defeated by a clever wizard who died 2 weeks ago.

I have to admit I feel pretty clever with myself. I thoroughly confused them and they had no clue what was going on. They just decided to go to the wizard’s Tower without talking to anyone or scouting anything else and that was the consequences.


Back into town
So, instead of going back to town the group instead heads east away from town and then spends the rest of the day double backing to the city to use the west gate to come in. While they head back Harvester notices some more gnoll tracks, but no one really cares about gnolls so they move on. The group comes in around sunset that day and go back to their inn, licking their wounds.

Back at the bar they see a bunch of other people who are here, nicely dressed. Apparently the wake for Graettin was today and the people are drinking and lamenting the passing of their friend. The group talks with one of them for a bit, but doesn’t get much information.

Finally the Rat convinces everyone to go talk to the mayor. The bar tender says the mayor is just a few houses down. The group goes and are welcomed by a fidgety gnome who ushers them in quickly.

The mayor is sleepy and in his pajamas, but happy to see them. They explain they are adventurers in search of finding the killer to this Graettin and the mayor is very happy to hear that. The sooner it's dealt with the better. He tells them everything he knows.

First his people have been to the wizard’s tower and searched it thoroughly, but it was already cleaned out for the most part. It looked horrible in there, there wasn’t much to search through.

The group asks how to get into the Wizard’s tower and the mayor gives them two potions of fly. He says the door is at the top of the tower. The bottom door is a trap. They learned that the hard way. They mayor goes on to say some idiots tried to break into the wizard’s tower earlier today, and they must have fallen into the spider’s trap or something. They sure were stupid.

After some funny OOC mutterings about mayor killing, they then ask about the Wizard’s apprentice, Tio. The Mayor says that he was spending his time at a seedy bar in the bad part of town, but he apparently left a few days ago. They were trying to get in touch with him, but they haven’t been able to find him. Some rumors are going around that he was kidnapped, but his guards haven’t found anything yet.

Mineral Port
So, the group wants to go investigate that. They go to the Mineral Port, a very bad bar in a very bad part of town. There, they see some very surly dwarves who seem to be enjoying their evening drinks. The group comes up to the bar tender and ask to see Tio’s room. Bar tender, a mean dwarf with only one eye says 20 gold.

Harvester tries his best to haggle his way down, but is very bad at it.

Then Rascal pulls out one of his bottles of Dwarven cement ale. The bar tender looks at it with interest, grabs it and says that Tio’s room is in the back. Room 3. Gnolls came in here 3 nights ago and grabbed him. They paid some money so he didn’t care what happened.

They go into Tio’s room and find a small pouch there.

Or… I should say Rascal found a small pouch. He tries to pick pocket it and only Harvester notices. They get into a bit of a discussion about stealing and whatnot, but nothing big. The pouch contains some gold and a potion of mage armor. So, hooray for that. Lewts.

At this point they know the gnolls took Tio. So, they decide to split the party. Snitch and Rat will go to the Wizard’s tower and look for some clues while Harvester and Rascal will scour the countryside for any sign of Gnoll or Tio.

Don't you know...
you NEVER SPLIT THE PARTY!

This group sure knows how to make all the wrong mistakes.

Ok. So we start with Rat and Snitch. They head over to the Wizard’s tower, which now has a dozen or so dwarves on guard. They are pretty spooked at first and demand to know who is there, but the Rat reveals a letter of writ and the dwarves are fine after that. They killed a boar earlier in the night and are roasting it at the moment; Rat and Snitch are welcome to join them once their investigation is done. They are thankful for the offer.

So they each drink their potions of fly and head on up to the top of the tower. There is a trap door here on the roof which was purposely held open by a small rock. They make their way down and it is like the mayor described, a chaotic mess. There was a living quarters, some small library area and a make shift alchemist’s lab that was utterly destroyed. The only find a couple of scrolls and a single potion of usefulness in the whole thing. Other than that it is trashed.

It looks like there was a huge fight as well as people looting through everything. The only thing of note that Snitch and Rat can find are scraps of a journal that says things such as “angel sacrifice” and “Cult of Vella.”

They also find some tufts of fur, but the Snitch can’t really identify them. So he saves them for later.

A couple of knowledge religion checks let them know that Vella is a devil worshipping cult that has a sect somewhere in Edrigar. You loyal readers may remember someone from this very cult a while ago, by the name of Faust. So, at least now the characters know what this old paranoid wizard was doing with his secluded time.

Snitch and Rat search around some more, find nothing and then decide to go to sleep for the night inside of the wizard’s tower. All right then.

We move onto Harvester and Rascal. Harvester turns into a large cat and they start searching for a scent of Tio or gnoll. It takes them three hours of wandering through the forest before they finally come to what looks to be a gnoll clan. They have some tents set up around a large bonfire and there’s about 20 or so gnolls running around doing various activities. They don’t see Tio there, but they think he is. His scent is lingering in the area.

They also see what appears to be the leader of this gnoll group, a Leucrotta. This is a scary magical beast with a badger for a head and antlers and hooves and all sort of meanness. Not to be trifled with lightly.

So, they head on back to town.

Gnoll huntin
By morning they all meet at the Wizard’s tower. They share information they found throughout the night and the Snitch shows the Harvester the pieces of fur. Harvester identifies them as gnoll fur. It looks like all directions point towards gnoll, so the group heads off.

They find the gnoll camp, the gnolls are still there but there are not as many of them and the Leucrotta is nowhere to be seen.

They ambush. The wizard flies up and casts a fireball on the lot of the group. They scatter about and the enemies come at them from all around. Harvester turns into a big cat and starts wailing on gnolls, along with his animal companion. Rascal hides in the bushes and hits them for devastating sneak attack damage.

The Leucrotta appears and releashes her deadly scream… which is a will save, and every single one of my players made the save. Crap on that. Oh well.

Anyway the Leucrotta throws into the mix with the Harvester. Lots more fighting and gnolls are dropping like flies, one by one. Finally the Harvester lets out his usual devastating attacks and brings the Leucrotta down, the remaining gnolls try to run away but they are taken down… all except for one! One of my gnolls gets away. Hooray for you brave little gnoll.

They manage to stabilize 2 gnolls and then search the camp They find a chest filled with rare obsidian gems and around 400 gold. They also find a letter written by the cult of Vella itself! But, I didn’t have time to write the letter, so I didn’t have one to show them. Good news is, that is the time we wrapped up the gaming session, so I can return next week with a letter of Vella explaining just what it is that’s going on around here.

Has anyone figured it out yet? It seems pretty simple, I think I’ve laid enough clues out there. You wouldn’t know it by the way my group bumbles around though.


So anyway that is the session this week. No downtime. Hopefully Nephew will return next week. I honestly don’t know how to put him into the storyline (other than through GM magic) but I would rather have him there.

Notes
Oh, every NPC I know of is making fun of the adventurers for the way they went into the Wizard’s tower. The dwarves outside of the tower were talking about how stupid it was that someone tried to break in. Imagine trying to break into a wizard’s tower by going through the front door… madness!

I also told them that they could have easily gone to the mayor’s office and just asked. The Rat was right, there was no reason to walk in without any forethought, kill your way to the trapped room and then fumble around until you don’t know what’s going on anymore. I can’t believe they fell for almost every trap I laid out for them.

GM note, make more traps. They fall into them every time.

The only thing they missed was falling down into the pit. I had 2 ogre spiders down there ready to start chomping down as soon as they fell. That would have been lots of fun.

Oh well, I can save the ogre spiders for another time.

I did have lots of contingencies. If they had flown around the tower they could have seen the top door hanging open… if they had talked to the guards about it they could have found out you don't go through the front door, even searching the area around the tower they could have seen the wizard’s hidey hole where he keeps a few extra potions of fly so he can get up into his tower, plus the mayor was more than happy to explain all plot related events going on in his town. That's what mayors do, they explain plot!!! There were so many options to keep the group from going inside the front door I didn’t even thinking of statting out all of the traps and such until the last minute.

Luckily I did.

Oh… by the way, the whole point of the group even coming out here was to find the entrance to the Earth Temple… they haven’t found anyone or anything that has led them a single step closer to that. But, they seemed to be entertained by my murder mystery plot so we keep chugging along.

[Savannah]

Has anyone figured it out yet? It seems pretty simple, I think I’ve laid enough clues out there. You wouldn’t know it by the way my group bumbles around though.

Um...nope. Not a clue. Although, to be fair, I haven't been thinking about it. I'm sure it will be good when it comes to light, as your plots always are.

[Conkea]

I think I´m gonna join Savannah in being clueless :smallconfused:

[Sillycomic]

It's OK. You would have to read very carefully and probably make a few assumptions to figure it out yourself. I suppose I have the luxury of creating the plot, so to me it's always super obvious. That never really translates well to others though.

Well, in a nutshell the Cult of Vella is a devil worshipping cult which, like I said before, the Faust used to belong to.

Before Faust died he went to his cleric sponsor and asked him if he could finally sell his soul in order to gain the ultimate power he wished to seek.

Ogar, the cleric of the cult told him to go find a virgin woman and sacrifice her in order to summon the devil.

So... the scrap of paper that Snitch and Rat found in the wizard's tower spoke of angelic sacrifice and the cult of Vella.

The plot is basically a wrap up of all of the old Faust's character threads running around. Ventor the cleric who got the sword after Faust was killed, has slowly grown to love it and now wishes to sell his own soul for its immortal power.

The cult of Vella left to perform the ritual, which involves several sacrifices (including a virgin, and some sort of angel) for the great devil Apostate to appear.

From there Ventor the cleric can sell his soul and gain the ultimate power.

My group just happened to stumble upon this as they are running around setting everything up (killing the wizard that was getting in the way, kidnapping the apprentice and so forth).

So, when the bad guys show up they will be busting in on the ritual that will bring forth a greater devil into the material plane.

Yeah, so I'm curious to see how my group reacts to that. We'll find out next Tuesday.

[Sillycomic]

Welcome back everyone. We had another amazing night of role playing here in Oregon. I must admit after tonight I’m very proud of my group. We always seem to have fun when we get together and start role playing. It was one of those nights where everything just seemed to come together. In a sandbox game that doesn’t happen every night. As a GM, there are some night when the game simply grinds to a halt, or the players go off in a random direction and the GM is “buffering” as he tries to find out just what is going on over there.

Tonight wasn’t one of those nights. No buffering for me.

Nephew Returns
We’ll start with the good news. Nephew returned! Or… well, I should say the player playing Nephew has returned. Nephew didn’t return however. As you may recall the group left Nephew back in Edrigar to keep an eye on things while the group itself went out in search of Elemental Temples. And… as clever as I am when it comes to plots and whatnot, I just had no real reason to put Nephew back into the plot.

So, I came up with a really cool plan. I had Nephew play a Doppelganger of himself. This doppelganger works for (at the moment) an unknown entity of evil who is looking to expand his business and wants to bring in new people.

He has been aware of the group’s antics for a while now and saw this opportunity as a perfect chance to get one of his people in close to find out if the group is strong enough and worthy enough of initiation.

So, Nephew is playing an exact copy of himself. It’s a lot of fun actually. He is using his same stats and same character sheet, and he knows basic information about the group, just using the guise of getting to know people better.

So, with that problem solved we go back once more to Reavin and the murder mystery plot…

To the Letter
We start off with the group going over a letter they found in a chest of gemstones. This letter is addressed to Lucia and explains that the gnolls have been helpful in kidnapping the apprentice and thanking them for their service. There is an offer of more money if they wish to do more work. They have a summoning circle set up North of Reavin near a Waterfall, and want to have more guards in case a cavalier named Benjer and his band of good aligned heroes comes to stop the ritual. Apparently the ritual needs to happen during the full moon, which will be in two days, and they can’t let anyone screw it up.

So, now the group knows what’s going on as far as that. They can at least learn what else is going on with this whole thing. There was enough mention of people and rituals for the Rat and Snitch to figure out that this is from the Cult of Vella and they’re probably going to be sacrificing someone or something in order to bring a devil from the lower levels of hell up to the material plane.

Being as my group is mafia oriented they are all for that, thinking they can somehow expand their business down to the lower planes. I mentioned casually to them they can’t even take over the docks yet, what makes them think they can run “protection” on a plane.

So now we come to what my grou is best known for...



Moar Planning
I’ll give Rascal credit, he started asking the questions that I as a GM have been asking inside of my head (and in this journal) for a while now. Questions like: why are we doing this, what does this have to do with the elemental temple, and so on. Snitch tried to explain that if they help find Graettin’s killer perhaps his wizard friend might help them out with a map or something of the jungle area. So, the best answer is… if we finish this quest maybe the Gm will throw us a bone.

I’d like to think I’m a pretty nice GM, but even I don’t just throw out ready-made maps for no reason. But, I’m just the GM. They can think the wrong things all they want, doesn’t hurt my feelings any.

So the letter does make an offer of more money, but also makes note of a group of heroes led by a cavalier named Benjer. So, now the group wants to try a double cross… or is it a triple cross? They want to go find out what’s going on with the whole ritual and summoning thing, trying to get the money that was promised to the gnolls.

Then they want to try and get a hold of Benjer’s people to double cross the evil ritual summoning people to get money from Benjer for stopping this horrible plot from ever happening.

Then, they want to kill Benjer’s group and go back into town for the reward money on Graettin’s murderer, plus any other rewards for stopping the end of times in Reavin. Plus the friends of Graettin will be so grateful apparently a map consisting of temple locations will fall out of someone’s pocket.

All right, everyone got that? Me neither, but it doesn’t matter… we’re moving on.

In Town
So the group goes back to town. Harvester skins the Leucrotta in order to make treasure maps for himself. Pathfinder has a Create Treasure Map spell and a material component for that is the hide of a dead person, it will reveal to you the location of what they think is a pretty vast treasure. So, there’s that.

Everyone else tries to find out directions for the waterfall north of town. They go talk to the bartender in the Mithral Hammer, who tells them (quite obviously) the waterfall north of town is probably north of town, follow the river running through town and you should find it. He does say there is some animal trail just on the other side of the river which should lead them to where they want to go.

And Nephew shows up! He bursts in through the doors and says hi to everyone. They are surprised and a little shocked to see him, but no one seems all that suspicious. I thought that was pretty good. If they had been super suspicious this ploy might have been very short lived. Nephew explained Allore had some unfinished business here in Reavin and he had come to complete it, plus he thought it would be nice to join in with everyone.

The group is whole once more… ha ha ha! I love being a GM.

Meadow Fight
So, with a direction in mind the group decides to follow the river and go down to this waterfall and see what is up. They travel for about an hour until they come upon a meadow and a very large bear is just on the other side of this meadow. The bear is looking at them from behind some bushes, watching them intently.

Rascal takes out a poisoned arrow and hits the bear. The bear cries out and it’s initiative time.

So the group goes further into the meadow to try and meet up with the bear. The bear growls out a very loud growl and he gets two responses from either side of the mountain foresty areas as he comes charging out into the group. He is a big nasty dire bear, large and angry and formidable.

Yes, that's a good word. Formidable.

Harvester and his animal companion go in to attack the bear and for some reason only roll 4’s and 5’s. So the cats are a whirwind of claws, but apparently don’t do much of anything. All right then. Snitch also fails at his attack. So the huge bear which just sprang out from the bushes has really only been attacked by Rascal so far.

This is when his two bear friends come to join him. The battleground is now filled with bears! These are regular bears though. So Nephew throws out a spiritual weapon and starts attacking one bear. The Rat is in the middle staying away from bears and casting magic missiles and flaming spheres. Harvester is still doing more missing than hitting, and for some reason Snitch can’t hit anything to save his life… which if he did hit it might actually do so.

My bears, which should have been a fairly easily fight have now become foes for this optimized group. Cool! Time to kill some PC’s.

Dire bear starts whacking on Harvester this time and chomps down on him good. I took like 20 HP from him in one round of attacks. One bear starts attacking Rascal and the other is in a death fight with Nephew. Some hits, some misses, some damage.

Finally Harvester and Snitch actually land some hits. They take the dire bear down in a matter of rounds, and then the group goes around and cleans up the other two bears. The fight is finally over, but everyone is hurt pretty bad, except for the Rat… but he is almost out of spells. The group doesn’t have a lot of resources left. How interesting.

A little R and R
So the group decides to rest. It’s only early afternoon but they have been through two big fights so they need it. The group pulls back from the meadow of dead bears, get off the trail and find a nice place to settle down for the evening. Except for Rascal… Rascal decides to go off and gather some information on the situation down at the waterfall.

He sneaks to the top of the waterfall and looks down. There is a cliff about 40feet down where the waterfall ends in a nice pool of water. The cliff is pretty rocky, but there is an animal trail that is more or less passable if someone wished to go down.

He sees a blue stone platform down near the pool at the bottom of the waterfall with some arcane marks on it. He also sees 6 men standing guard around the platform who don’t have any armor or weapons of any kind. So, he incorrectly assumes they are spellcasters of some kind. There is also a bunch of foot traffic going down behind the waterfall. Rascal tries to find another way behind the waterfall, but he really can’t. So instead he takes this information back to his group.

The group doesn’t really do anything with this information, instead hunkering down to sleep for the night.

Meadow Fight 2: The Meadowing
Rascal decided to go back and keep watch on everything.

Around midnight the “spellcasters” head up the animal trail. Freaked out Rascal runs back to the group and tells them the bad guys are on their way. Not having enough rest the group panicks and starts casting spells from scrolls and tapping out their CLW wands. When no fight comes Rascal slowly creeps down the animal trail to find the “spellcasters” guarding the meadow area where they had fought the bears earlier this day.

Rascal once more goes to check out the waterfall area only to find a man in robes now standing beside the blue stone summoning ritual platform, along with 4 skeletons. Rascal feels confident enough to climb down and take a peek through the waterfall inside. There he sees 6 more skeletons guarding what appears to be a young man tied up.

Rascal once more goes back and shares this information with the group. The group then decides to take down the “spellcaster” guards in the middle of the night, thinking it would be an easy fight and they have a good chance of dwindling down forces.

Ahh, how naïve the group is.

They set up a pretty good ambush, except Rascal for the first time in forever rolls very low on his stealth. And I get two 19’s for my perception… so two of them at once say they are being ambushed and under attack. Before anyone gets a chance to do anything the fight breaks out.

The group finally realizes the “spellcasters” aren’t actually spellcasters, but are in fact monks. They come out fighting and fighting hard. The group takes them from all sides casting some spells and summoning some nature’s allies. One of the monks does get a chance to run back down to the Waterfall area, while the rest deal with the monks.

Summon Monster V
Of course, after about three rounds skeletons come up and enter the fight as well as the man in robes, who flies up overhead. The group looks at this real spellcaster and see fear for the first time. Skeletons are swarming, only 3 monks have been killed and the flying spellcaster is casting a spell. What spell you might ask? Oh… one simple spellcraft check reveals that he is actually casting a Summon Monster 5 spell.

Oh yes, high powered necromancer knows what he’s doing.

It’s a full round action though.

So the group tries desperately to stop him. Rat flies up away from the skeletons, but isn’t able to do anything. Rascal is just 10 feet too far from making a decent sneak attack. Harvester can’t really do anything, so his cats just keep scratching away at monks. Then we get to Snitch, who has a Command spell. He casts the spell, and I get to make a will save.

I laugh, but it’s entirely possible to miss this save. I roll the dice out in the open and it’s high enough. The group groans in unison as my necromancer shrugs off the spell. Serves them right. Their characters shrug off a fair number of my spells, so it’s about time for some payback.

And payback indeed.

The summoned monster is a dinosaur. A huge dinosaur with a nice fiendish skeleton template attached to it. It is large, devastating and is plopped down on the middle of the field with access to almost everyone. It starts ripping all of the summoned cat creatures to shreds. Something that scares everyone when they see what happens.

I call him Skelly… and he’s my favorite.

So, skeletons are attacking Snitch. Nephew is still trying to fight off a monk. Harvester is trying to make a dent in Skelly, or any dent at all really. The necromancer is still flying high and pops a Spectral Hand out just so that he can make all of those nasty touch spells… and I say very nicely, “would you guys like to surrender?”

The Rat and Nephew quickly surrender. Rascal hides in the bushes and stops sniping people, effectively surrendering. Snitch still thinks he has a winning shot at this, and Harvester feels like he can take things down. So, we’ve still got a fight.

Skelly starts taking on Harvester’s animal companion and almost kills him in one round. The skeletons are following Snitch around, who casts mirrored image on himself so he can have a bit more defense. Luckily one skeleton hits him anyway.

Surrender
Harvester finally realizes things are a bit more difficult than he realizes and withdraws, along with his animal companion. Snitch sees that he is surrounded by undead, his allies surrendered, a high level caster who hasn’t even been touched yet (except for one magic missile attack from Rat before he surrendered) and decides that perhaps it is time to give up the ghost.

Necromancer flies down and has his skeletons surround the three who have surrendered. He then asks if Rascal who is hiding in the bushes wants to surrender as well. Snitch says he doesn’t speak for Rascal. And Rascal responds to this by attacking. His arrow hits, but the poison on it doesn’t catch, so instead Necromancer turns around and casts fear on him. Rascal fails the save and runs off into the forest for about a minute or so, completely panicked.

Then the rest of them decide to have a rational conversation. Snitch says that he and his group killed a bunch of gnolls and found this letter, asking for help in the upcoming ritual. Rat, Nephew and Snitch reveal they know something of what’s going on, but not everything. They are only interested in money though and will serve loyally for the right price. Considering as how the Necromancer is low on help at the moment, he agrees. He invites them down to his Waterfall lair in order to parlay.

The Necromancer's Deal
The Necromancer fills them in on the rest of what’s going on. As they’ve guessed this is a summoning of a great Devil. An Apostate for Vella, being brought up from the layers of hell. They ask why and he says that is none of their business. They need help though, because in order for this to work they need the ritual to go without a hitch.

They find out there are 2 other summoning platforms in this valley. The cult is going to sacrifice 3 different angelic beings when the moon is full in order to complete the summoning. They have an angel kidnapped for the main sacrifice, a hound archon for another sacrifice and here the necromancer will be sacrifice the wizard’s apprentice, who after a simple perception is actually found out to be an Aasimar.

You may not know this, but Assimar’s are humans with just a bit of angelic blood in them. That seems good enough for the Necromancer's purposes.

Now they just need to agree upon price. The Necromancer is asking them 4 thousand to stay here and guard the area in case Benjer or anyone else try to mess with the ritual. They want 3 thousand a piece for their services. Necromancer feels like a trade might be made out for the rest of the money. Since they are summoning such a large devil, they can ask one favor from the Cult of Vella in order to complete their payment.

The group thinks this favor might be very nice, considering they are looking for a key to find the elemental temple. A devil’s favor would be right up their ally. The group agrees, they wish to help bring forth the coming Apostate.

Well, the necromancer needs to confer with his boss, so in teleports Ventor the Cleric. Yes, that Ventor from times past. I swear, he’s been in so many of my sessions he’s almost like an DMPC right now. Ventor is a nice and friendly cleric, except the group sees right away that there is a sword at his side dripping in black fire magic. It is awake and throbbing with power.

So, the players figure out what’s going on. The ritual to bring the great devil forward to this plane is the completion of Faust’s Awakening Sword plotline that was unfortunately dropped a while ago when Faust sadly was murdered thanks to Ventor and his army.

Ventor got the sword and has slowly descended into evil and madness thanks to its power. He now wants to complete the ritual and gain ultimate knowledge and power. You know… that old story.

Unfortunately the three characters receiving this information don’t know all that much about Faust or the cult or the ritual. Snitch knows a little bit, since he followed around Faust for a while, but the other two are clueless.
Still, It’s nice to see loose ends being tied up, right?

So, the three are determined to make sure the ritual goes according to plan. They decide to rest… finally, so they can recoup spells and get prepared for this Benjer.

This was all done away from the table. No one else knows the plans or secret dealings that happened between Rat, Snitch and Nephew. Just the way I like it.


Rascal's "Waitin the bushes" Gambit
So… I now go to Rascal. After the Fear spell wears off he decides to sneak back to the waterfall area. He sees his three allies outside talking things over. Once the offer was put on the table they went off to discuss things, and Rascal is seeing this, but he isn’t close enough to actually hear anything. After a bit the group goes back inside.

Rascal wants to get closer, but unfortunately there are 4 skeletons still guarding the summoning platform. So, Rascal decides the best thing for him to do is just stay hidden and see what happens.

Ok then.

Benjer's Deal
Then we get to Harvester.

This is the fun part.

Harvester runs back to town. He first tries to go to the mayor’s office, but it is like 2 in the morning, so a groggy gnome answers the door. Harvester tries to explain summoning rituals and skeletons and Benjer and… the groggy gnome doesn’t understand any of this. He explains there is a tavern a few doors down and perhaps the man needs to go and sleep it off.

So Harvester goes into the Mithral Hammer and starts asking around for Benjer. Eventually he finds a group of drunken humans who say they are part of Benjer’s party. Harvester spills everything. He found out where the summoning table is, he has information on the necromancer who is guarding it, and the kidnapped apprentice who will be sacrificed.

The group is blown away. They quickly sober up and start rallying friends. They are getting a party ready with Benjer leading… in order to go and take down the Necromancer.

They offer Harvester 6,000 gold in order to take them to where the summoning platform is. Harvester is very happy to oblige for that price.

Again, I would like to point out that all of these separate things are happening without anyone else’s knowledge. I took everyone off on their own to make their own plans. So, no one knows what is about to happen.

Gentleman, We Fight at Dawn
I tell Snitch, Rat and Nephew that the necromancer comes in just at 5 in the morning to wake them up. He tells them the group is coming right now, the fight is about to begin.

They felt so sad. They asked me very nicely if it could be at 6 in the morning, so they can get some rest. I look at Harvester and ask nicely, “Will you give them an hour to rest.”

Harvester laughs and says, “No.”

And then the group realizes what is going on.

That’s right. Harvester is bringing the good guys with him to fight against the bad guys, who have Snitch, Rat and Nephew in their ranks… oh and Rascal is out in the weeds, waiting to see who wins I suppose.

This is so epic. I ended the game at this exact spot, with both groups about to clash.

Notes
I am thinking this next fight will be big. Very big, as in take almost the entire session. I’m very pleased with this. The group is loving and dreading this fight at the same time. It’s a very climactic end fight to the whole thing, but at the same time I’ve got party against party as well as rested NPC’s fighting against the PC’s who have actually yet to rest since yesterday when they took on the gnolls.

Snitch and Rat are almost out of spells and don’t have much HP left. Harvester doesn’t have many spells and his animal companion is near death. Rascal isn’t doing too bad, but he also hasn’t done much either. And he hasn’t taken a side in this epic fight. So, we’ll see.

Yep, I suppose we’ll see.

I asked Harvester to make 2 5th level characters, anything he wants in order to add to Benjer’s army. I also gave Rat, Nephew and Snitch 2 skeletons each to control as they wish. The Necromancer has some spells left, as well as some scrolls and wands he can give to Rat and Snitch. So, there are strengths and weaknesses on both sides.

I am hoping for a battle to end all battles. I’ll tell you all about it in a week.
Ok, that’s all I got. Any thoughts, suggestions please let me know. Thanks for reading.

[Unseenmal]

By the Gods, I wish I could be in this game...Truly an epic setup.

[Sillycomic]

I know, right!

As a GM, I feel the exact same way. It's fun setting up and designing this game, but there are times when I feel like I just want to grab a character sheet and jump into the fun.

But, if you ever happen to be near the Portland area, let me know... maybe we could bring you in as a special guest character for the session, ha ha.

[Unseenmal]

I know, right!

As a GM, I feel the exact same way. It's fun setting up and designing this game, but there are times when I feel like I just want to grab a character sheet and jump into the fun.

But, if you ever happen to be near the Portland area, let me know... maybe we could bring you in as a special guest character for the session, ha ha.

That would be great but I am stuck on the other side of the country...in NJ....and I hate this damned place.

[Ayra]

oter side of the country is still bether then other side of the world.. Norway seams to be such a long way away from everything I would like to be a part off xD
awesome story hoping the fight will be as epic it sounds like!

[NamelessNPC]

damn, this campaign only makes me unenjoy my current campaing. I've said it before, and I say it again, you are an amazing storyteller and your players should thank their deities every morning

[Sillycomic]

And we are back. Hi. Welcome once more to the show. We are hot on the trail of an evil cult trying desperately to sacrifice innocent angels and aasimars in order to summon a greater devil that will ensure them all of the gold, lewts, knowledge and power in the world.

Yeah, fun.

Pre-Pre-Planning
When last we left our band of adventurers they had split up into different parties and were about to attack each other. Harvester had gone to seek out a group of good adventurers led by a man named Benjer to come and stop the ritual. Rat, Snitch and Nephew (who is actually a doppelganger) have been recruited by a necromancer named Reylon to protect himself as well as an Aasimar set up for sacrifice. Rascal is waiting in the weeds around the summoning circle patiently for an opportunity to present itself. I’m not sure what that means, but he has an amazing stealth check so he’s allowed to hide in the bushes all day long.

Right, so everyone’s up to speed.

Once more I would like to point out, the adventurers had left the Mafia-ladened plot filled city of Edrigar to go Elemental temple hunting, how that turned into helping (or stopping) a greater Devil summoning in the middle of the forest is a little beyond me, but there are times in this game where you have to just gloss over the parts that make no sense in order to have some fun.

So, glossing over we get to the emails.

I asked Harvester to come up with 2 5th level characters who would be part of Benjer’s team. He sends me an email of two characters, a magus and a cleric. They are both pretty decent 5th level characters. I like it. Benjer is a 6th level cavalier, plus these two new builds as well as Harvester and his animal companion (Harvester is pretty much out of spells, so he’s not an awesome druid, but still his worst day is better than a monk’s best, so he’s still a pretty good foe) and I also have 6 other low level fodder characters that will be part of the Benjer's group as well. I feel like this is a pretty formidable army to go stop some devil worshipping cult.


My next email makes me so happy. It is from the Rat. He expresses a question of conscience for being on the team which is about to sacrifice two innocent creatures for selfish means. Well, one innocent creature and one that could go either way. Aasimar’s have some celestial blood in them, but they could be just as evil as anyone else walking around… so you can take that or leave it as you wish. Rat decided he didn’t want that to happen at all. He needed to stop these creatures from being sacrificed any way possible, which meant a betrayal sometime during the fight.

I thought this was both good and bad news. The good news is that it’s fun and interesting and creates chaos in the game. This to me is always makes things go better. You rarely get to see this kind of betrayal in role playing. Mostly it’s stabbing people in the back for their loot…. But this is actually a genuine catharsis in a character, looking at your own choices and realizing the path you are walking down is one of evil and something you can not do. That is the sign of a real character right there. I couldn’t be happier honestly.

The bad news is, this ruins the battle. That battle was set up for an ultimate good versus evil showdown, but unfortunately the evil people are slowly jumping ship. The only true person on board with this evil train is the Snitch at the moment.

Oh well.

Pre-Planning
Ok. Onto our epic fight of epicness.

I start by pulling the Rat aside and asking him what he wants to do specifically. He explains he wants to get the word about this summoning. He sends a bird token to the Mayor of Reavin explaining what’s going on, as well as to his Ranger friend, Nivian in Edrigar. I like this idea a lot, because it brings Sylvia the Druid back into the picture.

I was actually going to throw her in this fight anyway. So, this gives me an excuse to bring her in. Not this exact fight, but the bigger one about to happen at the other summoning circle. Ventor and the cult followers are at the main Summoning circle and are holding an actual angel prisoner hoping to sacrifice her… so there has to be some pretty strong good guys going to fight against them. My thoughts were high level good and bad guys would be fighting it out over at the Angel’s summoning circle while this fight between adventurers is happening over at the side circle.

The outcome will be the same either way. If the good guys win here, the good guys win at the other circle, if the bad guys win here than the bad guys win and our ritual still gets to take place.

Rat explains at some point he’ll be turning on the necromancer, but he doesn’t know when. So it’s as much a surprise to me as you. I guess we’ll see.

I then take Harvester aside and explain to him some of the pre-war stuff his group is planning. Benjer has about 25 guys with him, all meeting outside of town. Harvester is with them when he sees Nivian and Sylvia show up. He recognizes Nivian as the person who at one point asked him to sit in a silver chair of truth and says that he didn’t steal anyone’s soul. Since Sylvia shows up looking like a high leveled druid he makes the assumption that this is the druid he stole from a while back. He would be correct in that assumption.

So Sylvia offers Harvester whatever he wants if he helps in taking this Necromancer down. Since this offer is coming from a high level druid, Harvester feels like he can get anything he wants from this, so he is compelled to help. He’s on the good guy’s side.

I ask him what his end game is in all of this, if he might choose to betray the good guys at some point, or if he’s really going to fight his own friends. He explains that he’ll ask them to surrender and if they do that’s great, but if not… looks like they’re going down. Ok then. At least he’s honest.

So Nivian and Sylvia take a bunch of the good guys to start fighting evil cultists, which just leaves the small band of Benjer's fighters with Harvester to start marching towards the warzone!

So then we move on to Nephew. This doppelganger realizes that he might be getting into something a little bigger than what he’s capable of, so he asks his Master for some help. He’s given a potion of invisibility and told to get out of there if things get too hairy. Although, this would be the perfect opportunity to see how the group handles themselves in sticky situations. Nephew agrees and awaits the battle.

Then I ask Nephew, Rat and Snitch to create the battlemap. Since they know the good guys are coming, they get to choose where to fight. They are in a pretty isolated area surrounded by cliffs to one side and jungle brush to the other. There is only one real downslope off the cliff which the impending army can use to march down, so the group feels the best solution is to use the downslope as a choke point, bring everyone in and take them out 300 style. This is Sparta!!!!

It’s a good plan. I set up the map that way. I give each of the three guys 2 skeletons a piece in which to control and they set them up appropriately. Everyone is at the choke point waiting, except for Nephew and a few skeletons who are waiting off to the side of the cliff, hoping to get around the group and start taking them out from the back.

It Beings
We’ve got Harvester’s Cleric and Magus coming in at the front, along with two lines of army fodder. One group is heading right for the choke point and one heading towards the edge of the cliff. The group heading for the cliff just wants to look over the side so they can get longbow range on everything down in the valley, although they just happen to run into Nephew’s ambush spot. Nephew is hidden pretty well, but the skeletons aren’t so much. So they come out swinging.

All of the bad guys are holding back, except for Rat… who is REALLY holding back. Like, he is actually retreating from the choke point, and taking his two skeletons with him. No one thinks anything about that, just yet.

And then Benjer soars over the battlefield on his war ready gryffon. He looks beautiful and majestic, you know how cavaliers should look when they fly over their battlefield. He is searching for the Necromancer, who has luckily hid himself inside of the cave away from danger at the moment. Benjer is also calling out and telling people to surrender.

Harvester's cleric is smart enough to start channeling positive energy to burst against the skeletons. They take a bunch of good healing damage and they don’t like it at all.

Harvester is true to his word, he looks at all of his fellow allies who are opposed to him and says, “you guys should surrender.”

No go, apparently.


Sigh... it was a good plan
Snitch holds the line with his skeletons, he casts some ranged touch spells, scorching ray and whatnot. He’s doing some damage but not a lot. Nephew and his little group are trading blows with the small army that got in his way, with only three people I can hardly call it an army. A battalion? Something like that. Anyway. Trading blows, not a lot is happening.

The cleric’s energy bursts and finally making some skeletons disappear, and the choke point is giving away. I finally get some of my soldiers through the slope, but then Snitch casts some grease. One guy fails his save and falls down.
With skeletons dead (or… deader, I guess) Nephew decides to make a run for it. He can’t really take three different guys at once and he has no real investment in this fight, so he’s happy saying goodbye to people.

I guess that’s one down.

Snitch has a pretty good plan and casts darkness all around him. He’s in a 20 foot radius of darkness with cliffs on either side of this small downslope. He has got the advantage, there’s nothing my guys can do, so they all hold their actions until they can see. But Harvester’s cleric sees this and dispels the affect, he rolls well and the darkness goes away.

Rat takes a flying potion and starts flying around the battlemat. He is purposely avoiding the fight and ordering his skeletons to stand waiting in the reeds far away from any combat. This is the first WTF moment in the game.

Snitch is wondering what’s going on, as well as Nephew. Rat gives some excuse like, “well, I’m saving them for the end.” It’s an excuse, I’ll give him that. It’s not a very good one. Skeletons are supposed to be fodder in the fight, poor Snitch will get beat down here in just a bit without some help.
Instead Rat runs up to Harvester and whispers in his ear, “I wish to help you stop this summoning.”

Nephew overhears this, but he is out of the game basically so nothing comes of that.

So, apparently two down.

Rat has decided to mutiny secretly by just pulling from the fight, his skeletons are making sure nothing happens to the grasshoppers in the fields down below and Rascal... oh yeah, remember him? He's still here, waiting patiently.

Then Rascal finally takes a long sniping, but nothing devastating happens. He's got some poisoned arrows but my guys keep rolling really well for some reason. Heck, if I were one of those GM's who rolled behind a screen I would even purposely miss one or two just to make him feel more useful, but I roll out in the open.

Then in the middle of the fight Rascal decides that he wants to go to the summoning circle and try to destroy it. Well, all right then. He makes a nice big scratch in it, but that also causes a very large spark of light, letting everyone know exactly where he is. He didn’t like that at all, so instead he slinks back into the reeds to wait for more opportunities.

But, those are running out.

You Shall Not Pass!
Snitch, the only brave soul still sticking with the plan to try and help the necromancer calls out for help as he begins attack the coming group. He takes one down and looks like he’s doing a pretty good job until Harvester’s Magus shows up in the fight. The Magus has been sitting and and casting buff spells this whole time, blur and Mirror image and shield and… by the time he gets right up next to Snitch, he’s battle ready. And, wouldn’t you know it he actually rolls a critical hit? 60 points of damage, enough to make poor Snitch drop to the ground.

He is dying but he stabilizes.

So, my group trying to help the necromancer is now gone. Mutiny, running away and now one falling in battle. There’s nothing left to do but bring forth the necromancer and have Endgame.

Necromancer summons Skelly in all of his fiendish skeleton template goodness. This huge creature drops right on top of the summoning circle protecting it. Necro flies out of the cave and just over his creature, waiting and hoping for a chance to do some devastation.

Skelly makes a full attack at Rat flying overhead and does enough damage to bring him down. He had a flying spell on so he slowly falls to the ground, stabilizing as he does so.

With the choke point gone the rest of the army comes running down the slope to meet this monster. And Benjer! Benjer the cavalier who has finally found the enemy boss begins to attack as well. Unfortunately this means everyone is crowded in more or less the same area, fighting the Skelly monster.

The Final Spell
As the GM I look at this and I look at the spells that my necromancer has left. He has Cloudkill, a very powerful very devastating spell. I told myself I wouldn’t use this unless the Necro was in danger and didn’t have any other way to survive, his Hail Mary spell, more or less. But, this was it. If there was ever a time for a last resort Hail Mary, it would be now. Outnumbered, outmanned, looking at the entire army opposing him, most of which were in a 20 foot radius spread?

I suppose a different Gm would have made a different call. But, I had decided a long time ago that I wouldn’t pull any punches during this fight. The Necromancer casts the spell. DC 22 Fortitude save.

Harvester fails.

Snitch fails.

Rat fails.

Cloudkill is an instant death spell for anyone under 6 HD who fails the fortitude save. All of my PC’s are under 6 HD, so they all die. They simply die. One spell wipes out 3 members of the party.

Like I said, a different GM might have made a different call. I’m still not sure if it was the right call. I’ve made questionable calls as a GM, but I have always justified it in one sense or another. This is the first time I look at something and think… maybe I did the wrong thing?

I don’t know. But I did it. So there it is.

Victory
After that there was only Rascal left. Since the Necromancer had come out Rascal decided to start sniping with arrows. Necromancer began flying around trying to track him, but Harvester’s Magus was right on his tail, kicking his butt for that massive Magus damage. One last sneak attack arrow from Rascal and the Necromancer dies.

Benjer’s team, the ones still alive finally do take down Skelly the unimaginable monster, and I’m left with only one player on the field.

Benjer’s group takes down the rest of the skeletons and rescues the Aasimar, who is shaken and sullen but alive. So, hooray, the good guys win!

Rascal loots the necromancer’s body, of which there’s not really a lot on him. Then Rascal finally reveals himself to the rest of Benjer’s good guys and explains that he was helping them all along. They give him a thousand gold and say thank you, as they loot the rest of the bodies for lots of valuables and whatnot and then head off into the distant sunset, which in this case would actually be a sunrise because this fight took place super early in the morning.


So…

Yeah.

The End
After all of this I asked the group what they wanted to do now. It wasn't a complete TPK as there is one character who survived and another who was still technically a hundred miles away oblivious to everything that's going on, but it more or less was a TPK.

An NPK? Near Party Kill? I'm not sure if that works, but I'm using it.

I asked them how they would want to continue the campaign. And, most of the group said they were fine with leaving it. They had had their fill of mob shenanigans and the lulz fun of being evil characters and kind of wanted something new.

Everyone agreed. So, it was a little sad but I said that was OK. We ended the campaign then and there. Edrigar Mafia was officially over.

It didn’t end like I thought it would at all. I suppose it didn’t peter out like most of my campaigns do though. It had a huge climactic fight which involved everyone pushing themselves to the limit and figuring out who they were and why they were fighting, using every available resource and advantage they possibly could right up until their last breaths. That’s a good ending to a story, right?

My group lamented on all of the plothooks that went unanswered, laughed at all of the behind the scenes shenanigans, like Snitch actually killing Blades or that Nephew was a doppelganger spying on the group. There were questions like, “Would we ever get to the entrance of that elemental temple?” that they wanted me to answer.

And I did. Yes, there were ways to find the entrance. Two big ways actually, they could have helped summon the devil and he would have pointed them in the right direction. Or, they could have helped save the angel and she would have thanked them by helping them. And, I also mentioned there was a dragon who answered any freaking question it was asked back in Edrigar that they never ever even remotely went looking for!!!!

I swear... anyone, put this plot hook in your campaign. Put a all knowing dragon in some cave somewhere and let the adventurers know about it, and see if they don't spend all of their time searching for it until they finally find it.

Who just leaves that huge plot hook lying on the floor? Honestly... pfft!

In any event, we had fun and got to explore a truly dynamic sandbox together. That was the most fun, having plots twist around the character's, bringing out backstories and personal side quests that you actually see grow and change over time is something I've always thought was brilliant role playing, but never actually got to see in a game myself.

Well, you know what they say, if you want something done right you gotta do it yourself. That was always been my goal here, and I'm pretty sure I reached it.

My group wants to move on though. They want to be adventurers and go looking for treasure and raiding dungeons and explore islands now. You know, more typical D&D adventuring stuff.

So, that’s ok. I suppose I will put Edrigar away for a while, maybe dust it off and bring it back out sometime to laugh or cry or simply lament on fond memories of my first real adventure. I think it was a successful evil campaign. I accomplished everything I set out to do.

As promised once I finished with this campaign journal entry I am going to send a link to all of my players. They’ll finally get to read everything that’s been happening behind the scenes, as well as your comments on everything.

I think that will be the most fun. The best part of this campaign has always been finding out later what was really going on in the story.

I’m not sure what else to say actually. It’s been a wild and crazy ride to say the least. Thank you all for reading this, and as always comments and concerns are welcome.

[Eldest]

It's over? Already?
BOOOOOOOOO!
It did seem like a great campaign, I would have loved to be in it or one like it.

[Conkea]

why is it over? WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY :smallfurious:

But yeah, seems like a nice time to end it. You were obviously never going to finish up more than half of your plothooks anyway :smallbiggrin:

[Sillycomic]

Probably.

Numerous plothooks I can think of off the top of my head:

Defeating the Hag.
Exploring Elemental Temples
Searching for the Dragon underneath the City who has vast knowledge
The city Elections for New Watch Captain
Defeating the Brothers to take over the Docks
Killing the Vigilante
Defeating the Ravens in Town
Numerous Bounties around town
Girron's ancient Castle in the Deep North

Plus personal plothooks that were part of the story, like Rascal's search for revenge.

Lots of things left up in the air. Oh well. I'm disappointed, but I'm not going to force my group to play in an evil mafia campaign if they don't want to.

The good news is the group is looking to do a cool mercenary sea-faring type of campaign next. It is a bit like the A-Team meets Pirates of the Carribean.

So, while this adventure is over I will be writing up that journal as soon as we start.... I'll provide a link here for the next campaign.

[Savannah]

Aww...:smallfrown: Well, better to end it with a big battle than have the game just sorta die out, I suppose. I'll be eagerly awaiting the next campaign journal, though :smallbiggrin:

[JadeSpider]

Witch/Rascal here. Just wanted to give Silly props for the great campaign. And thanks for putting up with all the Moar Planning sessions.

Now that I've had the chance to peak behind the curtain, I thought I'd throw in some more perspective.

I have to give mad props to the Rat. We've been gaming for...golly...3-4 years? And I never saw thru that poker face. I tell ya, I will never be able to trust his characters again. While Witch may have been coup'd by Snitch, I have to give credit for the kill to Rat. When he brought back the "news" that we were so screwed, I bought it so hard. I went straight up to that chair and cooked my own goose because Rat basicly said there was no other way. It was a true roleplaying kill. I applaud you, you dirty rat.

[Magic Myrmidon]

Well, it was a cool ending. Way better than most of my campaigns. Been fun reading, although, yeah, the loose ends are a real bummer.

And Witch, I loved how well your character was played. Lasted the longest from the originals, and had a really climactic death, I think.

Great characters, even though they were shifted through relatively quickly.

[ConanThePaladin]

Faust/Harvester here, I totally knew the campaign was over when the cloudkill was spoken and the DM's finger pointed towards the Rat, Snitch, and I. The Nephew killed Allore which meant his character concept was achieved. And finally the Rascal, He seriously would be the only character wanting to continue on meaning 4 of us would have to make new guys. It was slightly depressing seeing the best campaign that I've ever been in end so abruptly.

And if Benjer was a real cavalier he would have atleast buried my body for saving the stupid world, I started out used and abused and was hang out soaking wet to dry. Its no wonder why I was bent on destroying the city. mankind is evil.

now the Snitch, I had a few ideas of what you were up to but wow.
Mr. Rat, you were just to soft I was planning on doing a little investigation work on you when we got back into town.

I really wanted to rob the bank in Edrigar for good ol' mafia times, the campaign felt like it was just starting too. If we would have hit 7th lvl we would have destroyed the Brothers at the docks, killed the vigilante, and started actually establishing big time schemes

[sdream]

I loved how the "evil" party when actually playing smart to protect themselves most of the time were indistinguishable from any old adventurers.

I guess stupid/clever is a more essential alignment axis than good/evil.

[Ganorenas]

This is a very good campaign in my opinion, and I hope to do one similar to it (with the separate agendas' bits atleast, I won't steal your mob idea) =]

I am very curious, and would love to ask questions: but I know I shouldn't and would ruin the story for myself and others should you answer the ones I am thinking of at this time :smallbiggrin:

So, I would just like to congratulate you and your group on being so entertaining :smallsmile:

Please keep posting, I would pay my Dm to do an adventure storyline like this if he had enough time to do so :smallsmile:

I feel like I wantto offer any help I can for you, but I doubt you need it lol

Edit: I sent the above almost exactly halfway through - I finished the story... And just wow :smallsmile:

You should definitely do this for more campaigns! The story following everything bit lol (I feel sad for posting before I finished reading lol)

Don't worry, as a player I jump at the chance to meet dragons, be they all powerful or newly hatched, so it was just your players lol

To bad I live a fee hours north of you guys, you have a great group and I am envious :smallbiggrin:

Happy gaming =]

Again, I'm loving this story and would enjoy seeing it turn into a book the way it's been going :smalltongue:

[Sillycomic]

So finally got the new campaign up and running if anyone is interested.

You can read about it here:
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=213969

[thereaper]

I find it hilarious that the only two who survived were two of the ones who weren't really evil (if only poor Rat hadn't kicked the bucket...).