Talakeal's Campaign Diary Part II (Now 90% horror story free!)

[Talakeal]

Now that health and family issues have been resolved, my gaming group is back to meeting up regularly, so I can continue my campaign journal from last year.

The game uses my own Heart of Darkness system, a gothic fantasy game with elements of weird western and Arthurian romance; but anyone familiar with D&D or similar games should be able to follow along.

The Fray
It is the distant past, less than a century after The Cataclysm shattered the Old Empire and the Warlords took the frontier.
The casino town of Golgotha stands on the edge of the desert, about to slip free of the last vestiges of Imperial rule, and into the chaotic battle that will determine its new master going forward.
In the back room of a Golgotha pub, an unlikely group of mercenaries with dreams of grandeur come together to undertake a lucrative contract.
Unbeknownst to any of them, they have caught the attention of mysterious powers, and they will soon stand at the nexus of history, determining the fate of all Pangea in the millennia to come.

Characters:

Spoiler: Bob is playing Krystal, a female tiefling rogue / warlock

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Krystal grew up on the streets of Concordance, stealing to survive.
People looked down upon the young orphan for her demonic appearance, and always assumed the worst. Eventually, she learned that if she was going to be blamed for every crime, she might as well be guilty.
Her only friend was the Nephilim Valentine, and soon the two urchins began running scams together.
As they grew into adolescence, they joined a gang and eventually began working as agents of the fallen trade-prince Valen’s criminal empire. But they didn’t appreciate Krystal, and she decided to betray them, making off with the prince’s magic sword that had been entrusted to her care before selling him out to his enemies in a deliciously complex double-cross.
But, it was no longer safe for her in Concordance, and Krystal needed to flee to the frontier, to Golgotha.
Valentine came with her, and though she was at first mad that Krystal ruined a good thing, she has thrown herself into establishing her own criminal empire out here on the frontier.
One fateful day Valentine forced Krystal to wake up at an ungodly hour for her latest get rich quick scheme, claiming that she has found a lucrative contract but needed to put a crew together really quick. And so Krystal found herself in the cramped back room of a seedy tavern looking for someone who was competent enough to be seen as a deadly huntsman but also gullible enough to not realize what is really going on.
Krystal has little love of the arts, but she is known to sometimes practice scrimshaw upon the teeth of her kills.

Spoiler: Brian is playing Kim, an intersex human eldritch knight with an earth magic focus

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Only bits and pieces remain of Kim’s life before the Cataclysm.
She grew up in the Southern Empire, near the great temple city of Necropolis. Even as a child, she spoke to rocks, but nobody believed her until she taught them to talk back. As she grew older, she became fascinated by the stories stones could tell and made it her life’s work to record the history that had been lost to Earth.
She attended the Imperial Archeological Society. She accompanied the Templar crusaders as an anthropologist. She alchemically augmented her gender. She learned abjuration from the Buddha Noboru. She learned biocontrol from the woman who would become her wife. She meant to settle down and start a family, but then she became obsessed with finding a legendary lost city on the shores of the Misty Sea, one unknown to Imperial maps.
Eventually, she would find the answer, in the oral histories of the Goren Nation, an avenue which most Imperial scholars would have been too ethnocentric to consider, let alone pursue.
She traveled to the wondrous city covered in mangrove swamps and fog, and found that the once-massive city was quickly and quietly abandoned, its population seeming to disappear overnight.
Then Mount Krackenrock erupted.
The ruins began to crumble around her, and Kim called out to her friends for protection, and she was engulfed in a diamond shell.
And while she slept within her crystalline tomb, the world forgot about her and moved on.

Spoiler: Dave is playing Valentine, a female aasimar valor bard

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Valentine grew up in a small shack in the slums of Concordance. She lived with an old man named Gabriel who may or may not have been her father, and who may or may not have been an archangel in disguise. He watched out for her, but provided little.
As she grew older, she began to make money working as a con artist, finding that her charm and beauty would let her get away with almost anything.
She made fast friends with a cambion pickpocket named Krystal. They concocted numerous schemes, their contrasting appearances and natures playing well off one another, as did her skill with words and Krystal’s skill with violence.
As an adult, Valentine got a job working with a local crime syndicate under the leadership of the rogue trade-prince Valen, but it wasn't to last, she soon betrayed them and fled to Golgotha.
Since coming to Golgotha, Valentine has decided it is time to live for herself and make her dreams come true. She has thrown herself into starting her own syndicate, so that she might one day lead a war band and work her way up to Warlord proper.
To further her goals in Golgotha, she has started working to make a network of contracts, already befriending an informant named Tatters, a fence named Pops, a tinker named Zara; and of course her muscle, Krystal.
Recently, she managed to talk herself up and get a very lucrative short-term contract from a cannery owner in Vladispol to the south, but she also promised him that she had an expert tracker in her employ. This was a lie, but it can't be too hard to find a huntsman on short notice, can it?

Spoiler: Johnny is playing Quincy, a male human ranger

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Quincy grew up on a ranch in the hinterlands near Dungenus, city of the East. As a young man, he learned to love the land; hunting, camping, riding, and exploring the wilderness for leagues around.
Like so many young men of the frontier, Quincy was drafted into Balthazar’s army as a teen, more grist for the Warlord’s endless conquests. Due to his superior riding and shooting skills, he was soon promoted to the dragoon corps.
Quincy made a name for himself in the countless battles against the hengeyokai in the forests of the East, the Imperial Templar of the Great Plains, and the Warlord Apollyon on the moors, but after a decade of constant warfare, he grew tired of military life.
He thought transferring to Golgotha would be a good way to disappear, but like so many, Quincy quickly lost his savings to gambling and drugs.
He has become addicted to drugs and gets the shakes if he goes too long without. He claims it is too steady his aim as he grows older, but it is more likely that he is self-medicating to deal with years of untreated battle fatigue.
Quincy has been hunting the hengeyokai beast folk and claiming Balthazar's lucrative bounties; so far he has nineteen confirmed kills. He has taken to using their hides for taxidermy as a hobby.
Looking to make some money on the side, Quincy has answered a newspaper advertisement seeking a huntsman for a discreet and very lucrative mission.

Spoiler: Sara is playing Anani, female human darkness domain cleric.

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Anani was born to a peasant family upon the Aitos plateau, far to the north. When unexplained phenomena began to follow her about as a preteen, her parents eagerly sent her to apprentice under the Archmage Thanatos, Warlord of the North West.
Her time at the tower of Morpheus was unpleasant, the other apprentices were cruel and depraved, and left to their own devices by their uncaring and distant master.
When the time came to curry his favor, she alone volunteered to let Thanatos experiment upon her, tearing her soul to pieces and then sewing it back together.
She died and spent an eternity in the empty void. But she was not alone. She heard the whispers of oblivion, and the call of Magnum Tenobrosum, the nameless dark.
When she was revived, her powers were amplified, especially when it came to controlling darkness, and she was all but immune to enemy sorcery, but all the color had drained from her world and a whispering voice guided her every move.
Thanatos was disconcerted by her newfound grace and wisdom, and sent Anani far away, to be the ambassador to the city of Golgotha on the distant frontier.
She has done well in the city, living a luxurious life, studying as a nurse, and preaching her own nihilistic gospel to any who would listen.
As she was coming home one morning after a long night, a voice whispered in her ear with remarkable urgency, guiding her down a side street and into the back room of a small tavern, and insisting that she go along with the people inside.
She didn’t know what it meant, but the voices have never steered her wrong before.

Spoiler: The New Kid is playing Feur, a male human elemental monk with a time focus

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Feur is from a land far to the west, the city-state of Zaikhan where spirits and mortals work together to create perfect order. He is from a long family of bureaucrats, vassals to the royal family, but when his talent for seeing and manipulating the strands of time was discovered, he was sent to a monastery where he would learn to serve The Tribunal.
The Tribunal enforces the laws of the spirit world, particularly oaths and divine mandates. Though they are normally trained in the art of Mysticism, having someone who can see alternate timelines is extremely useful in tracking down people who would try and use time travel to escape from their obligations. Once his arduous training was complete, he was welcomed into the order and given a golden medallion of station as well as a mysterious elixir which he was told to use when the time was right.
Years later, when an anarchist cult was uncovered, the light of justice revealed they had been sent by the Warlord Umbriel to destabilize the ancient dynasty and leave the city of Zaikhan open to her conquest.
Further interrogation found that similar agents had been sent to the city of Golgotha on the chaotic frontier, and when volunteers were asked to make the long journey and rout them out, Feur was first to step forward.
Though at first he enjoyed his travels, Feur is now finding that his time in this city of sin and vice is making him soft; not to mention his money is running out. And so, Feur has decided to hire himself out as a bodyguard to hone your skills and fill his coffers while you wait for Umbriel's agents to show their hand.
And besides, it will be good to feel like part of a group again.
Feur is known for his love of bad jokes as well as his tendency to oversleep. He is also extremely loyal, and will happily kill or die for his companions, even those he has just met.

Here is a link to the previous thread.


And here is a .pdf copy of the entire campaign for anyone who wants to read it all in one place