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  1. - Top - End - #31
    Firbolg in the Playground
     
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    Default Re: Talakeal's Campaign Diary Part II (Now 90% horror story free!)

    Spoiler: Finale: The Lady of the West
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    Fall 1115
    Kim’s puzzlement at Giselle’s words soon turns to concern, and then panic. She is reminded of the stories of Morgana Le Fey, the sorceress who came to Camelot nine hundred years ago, engineered Arthur’s downfall, and then presented his bastard child, resulting in a civil war from which the Old Empire never fully recovered. She also recalls the stories of the morlocks and the fauth, about how prosperous societies were visited by a strange sorceress who pledged friendship but brought about only curses and ruin.

    Ignoring Lady Abasinia’s request, Kim pleads with her companions to accompany her to the Cliffs of Morrian, which she has learned are a geological anomaly on the coast of Masaria thousands of leagues to the south. They eventually agree, but it takes some urging and promises of future favors to be repaid.

    The Wasteland prevents a direct route. They consider going by sea, likely departing from Feur’s homeland of Zaikhan or Anani’s homeland on the Thalassian Sea, but instead decide to travel overland, moving with a caravan through the veldt and the southern kingdom of Kassandra. This way Valentine can make a profit trading along the way, and forge connections that will be more valuable still.

    Quincy does not join them, he has been called away to receive a commendation from the Warlord Balthazar in Dungenus.

    It is a long journey, one that takes approximately five months round trip. It is mostly spent guarding the merchants or bundled up in Zara’s juggernaut, and there are many perils along the way.

    As they draw close to Marhanna, they learn about the cliffs, which most people consider to be haunted, but are still often visited exactly because of their reputation.

    Upon reaching the Morrian, Kim can immediately tell that the cliffs are not wholly natural, arising abruptly out of the sea and having been broken apart by some catastrophe that was not geological in nature. Sonya can sense an ancient resonance of magic her; primarily illusion and wyrd. In many places, the stone appears to have been melted by dragon fire, and in others, it forms into strange sharp waves.

    After a few days of searching, they find an ancient cistern that appears to have been the epicenter of the ancient anomaly. It is filled with petrified growths which resemble invertebrate tissue, long since turned to stone, but no sign that anyone has been here in centuries.

    Kim states that they must be early and decides to go about fortifying the area against attack. She asks Feur to use his supernatural affinity with time to sense when Morgana is to arrive, and he tells them that she arrived some fourteen million years ago.

    Kim doesn’t understand at first, but then the realization dawns on her, it is already over, Lady Abasinia was long dead before they ever met.

    Refusing to lose someone else, she orders Aurora to resurrect her. Aurora has never brought back anyone long dead before, especially without a proper corpse, but tries her best. She extends her wand and unleashes her power, and strange oily tendrils exude from the walls and reach toward her like outstretched fingers.

    Once the strange slime makes contact, it lunges at Aurora, engulfing her in a wave of acid and teeth. Feur immediately undoes her magic, turning it back into stone and breaking it away before it can suffocate the half-elf.

    Kim then decides that if the resurrection is impossible, they will go back and intervene directly to prevent the murder, and she asks Feur to prepare a ritual to send them back in time before the battle so that they might change its course.

    Feur has never performed such a drastic feat of time travel before; having never transporting anyone else, let alone a whole group. He has also never reversed time by more than a few hours, certainly a far cry short of fourteen million years.

    Valentine tells him no. She tells Kim that this isn’t viable. Even if Feur can pull it off without a magical mishap, it will utterly drain him and he will be of no use. Then they are to fight a dragon, and gods know what else down two members of their team. They don’t know if the Lady Abasinia of that time (or really any time) would even be on their side. If something happens to Feur they will be stuck in prehistory with no way to return. And they don’t even know if it is possible to change history that dramatically, and if it is, they don’t know what sort of world they will be returning to.

    “Then what are we supposed to do?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Then why did we come all this way?”
    “We didn’t know.”

    Kim hides her emotions and goes to be alone. She finds the core of the cave, an ancient petrified mummy that she thinks was once Abasinia’s body. It is larger than a human, though not gigantic, and something resembling the octopus-faced merrow, but far stranger and more twisted, yet with a somehow reassuring motherly shape.

    She bids an Earth Elemental help her remove it from its stony womb and gently transport it back to her caravan.

    During the long trip back to Concordance, Kim communes with mummy. It is not quite like talking to a stone, and she thinks it might be more akin to a telepath scanning someone’s mind, but she has no frame of reference.


    What memories she can sense are fragmented and strange.

    She sees visions of Abasinia’s youth in the city of Carcosa, a wondrous place built across a dozen different realities. Each is incomprehensible and beautiful in its own way. She brushes upon concepts, sensations, and emotions that are no longer found in our world.

    She remembers waves pulsing with a rhythm like music.

    She remembers slaves of various races, many that remind Kim of herself, and cultivating them to the height of their beauty and then devouring them before they have a chance to wither.

    She remembers her father’s gaze, a strange being that is simultaneously a rain of living oil, a giant mouth composed of infinite fractal flowers, a shapeless something beneath a mustard yellow robe, a fey king with a golden crown and an expressionless white face, a many tentacles horror wreathed in clouds of methane, and a great floating symbol of impossible geometry composed of disconnected runic shells.

    She remembers the pain of being implanted with alien protoplasm and surviving when all her sisters perished, of being uplifted and changed into something more than merely mortal.

    She remembers the war with the Deva and the Dragons that shattered Carcosa. Most of the city was left unreachable. The one shard that landed in this reality being a sunken-tomb city inhabited by merrow who had no memory of the worlds they once called home.

    She remembers years of isolation in Pangaea, always on the run, mentally searching the vast gulfs of time and space for someone whom she could connect to, but always finding them incapable of comprehending what she wanted to express.

    She remembers the final battle, when the great black and gold dragon, fallen daughter of Hyperion, finally cornered her in a mountain cave, her body breaking down beneath the enchanted fire and mutating wildly in a vain effort to defend itself until all that was left was a gigantic predatory tumor without any memory of the person whom she once was.

    And, she remembers hope, of a time in the future, beyond the Age of Wonders, when all the infinite possibilities that lie beyond the horizon of time may once again be hers.


    When they again meet up with Quincy, he has been highly decorated for his part in destroying the Omukade. Blair De’Arnise, the voice of the Warlord Balthazar, personally commended him and presented him with the highest commendation, a runic sigil that would light his path with glowing witch-light in the colors of Balthazar’s livery and also protect him with a shield of pure magical force.

    He has been named the royal hunt-master, given leave to pursue the hengeyokai on his own terms and the authority to commandeer resources from garrisons across Balthazar’s domain. Though he will still come to Valentine’s aid and is always available for contract work, he may have other obligations that will keep him from being a full-time employee.

    Indeed, this may be the breaking of the company.

    Concordance is a buzz with news. The Imperium has come to learn that The Black King has indeed returned to Pangaea after all of these centuries, and has forged an unholy alliance between the Scourge, the undead Silent Legion, and the fomorian Under Kingdom. Thus, the Paladins met at the round table and decided that no longer can the Old Empire be on the defensive, that they crowned the eldest among them, Sir Cervantes of the Silver Coast, King.

    There are many newspapers that tell the story, with photos of his coronation as well as speeches given by Prince Amaranth. Amaranth is Cervantes' son, a cruel and beautiful young man who hopes he will one day inherit all of Pangaea. And in the background, he is followed by a strange woman with a black cloak and expressionless steel mask, whom Valentine recognizes as Talakeal, the matriarch of the legendary Night Blades, the most feared assassin in all of Pangaea.

    Valentine hears all sorts of dark mutterings about this development, for it will shake the balance of power across the entire world. Rumor is that Amaranth was thought dead after being shot by his own sister in a dual over a girl two years earlier, that Cervantes has lost his mind and that he was only chosen because he would be easy to control and to manipulate. As to why such a blackguard as Talakeal would be part of the new court at Camelot, everyone seems to have their own theory and none of them are good.

    Of course, everyone is scared of the Black King. For that legendary entity is said to be more fearsome than the Warlords, and his return could prove more devastating than even the Cataclysm, and he may well spell the true end of the world, an apocalypse in which all the calamities of the past century were merely the heralds.

    But, before anyone can come to terms with the situation, a telegraph arrives at every city in the East.

    It is from Xian, the mythical capitol of the western provinces. Lady Umbriel, Feur’s old enemy, has announced that she is saddened to see the people of the East so small and scared, and that she will graciously destroy the Black King that has so troubled them, for it will barely be a trifle for her glorious golden horde, and then perhaps the people of Pangaea will come to realize who should truly bear the crown of all world, as those in the West have already learned long ago.

    When Sonya learns of this, her shadow practically screams in her mind with excitement. This is the moment her dark god has been waiting for. If Umbriel faces the Black King, he will triumph, but doing so will force him to expend a good deal of the Night’s power, power which can be reclaimed if reality is subtly rethreaded so that she never makes it to him in the first place.

    Sonya goes to Feur and subtly manipulates him into thinking that attacking Umbriel is his idea. He presents it to Valentine, and Valentine is able to coordinate a plan with their allies in The Scourge.

    They know that Umbriel’s army is amongst the largest in Pangaea, their numbers not pruned by the constant skirmishes of the East. She herself is the avatar of Geryon, the three-faced fallen angel who judges the souls of the damned. She is known to be an inspiring and charismatic leader, a master of mysticism, and a supremely deadly swordswoman.

    Two weeks later, Umbriel is crossing the Canyon Lands. The forces of Union will not dare impede her way and risk open war without the backing of their Warlord.

    Valentine settles upon a point of ambush and time it so that their attack will correspond with a total solar eclipse.

    Though Russel Faraday is away, fighting with Livonia’s forces over something called Project Scalpel, they are still able to commandeer a sizeable force of Scourge Zealots and Immortals, and even a few of their undead priests.

    As Umbriel leads her honor guard through a narrow mountain pass, the sun is swallowed in the sky, and gloom settles over the Canyon Lands. Kim summons up all of her powers to cause a mighty earthquake, directing the avalanche to cut Umbriel’s honor guard off from the rest of her forces. While The Scourge moves in behind them, Valentine’s group strikes at the head.

    Umbriel casually digs herself out of the rubble. She is tall and striking, with long blood-red hair and glimmering armor made from solid orichalcum gold. She wields a curved sword, unnaturally sharp, as well as a disk-shaped obsidian shield that bears the six-pointed star of Solomon upon it.

    Aurora can see a devil-dragon, a fallen agent of the Tribunal, coiled around her in the spirit world, balefire flitting from its nostrils. Sonya can sense her shrouded in potent mysticism spells, and Krystal curses, surmising that it is the same spell that Akatosh had which returned every wound he suffered back on his attackers.

    Umbriel looks puzzled for a moment, and then states “Oh. You’re the meddlers my allies warned me about. I have a gift I was bidden to give you by a mutual acquaintance.”

    She then pulls out a small object from a bag and rolls into the middle of the group. They look down and see an apple, perfect and fresh, with skin like living golden foil. It glitters in the eerie twilight, and each of them thinks it is the most beautiful thing they have ever seen.

    Feur, who can sense things before they happen, is the first to react, picking it up deftly and brushing it off. Before he can do more than stare at it, Valentine demands he hand it over, and Feur’s simple naivety is stronger than the enchantments that bind his brain, and he does so unquestioningly.

    Krystal, whose powers have grown so great that she can become fully invisible, darts forward to strike at Umbriel, but her senses are so keen and her armor so thick that Krystal can do little more than delay her for a moment before falling back to hide.

    Aurora demands Valentine share the apple with her, and when the half-angel refuses, the normally gentle healer stabs her in the back. Valentine immediately takes to the air.

    Sonya, who was in the middle of a ritual to summon up a Shaitan from the Abyss and bind it into her immortal armor, gets distracted and uses the bloodstone pendant to leech Valentine’s life force from her. She collapses in a heap.

    Kim rushes forward, able to push the enchanted gold from her mind, and engages Umbriel. Though she is one of the deadliest beings in Pangaea, Kim manages to hold her own against the Warlord. Though her enchanted blade can tear through Kim’s mana shield and even her adamant armor, each of her strikes is just slightly off, always failing to make the killing blow. At the same time, Kim gets several lucky hits in, leaving Umbriel’s artifact shield deeply dented. The Lady of the West seems puzzled by the strange streak of improbable luck.

    Meanwhile, Krystal darts over to Valentine, her nimble fingers grabbing the golden apple, and then she is off into the Hellscape with it. Aurora, Quincy, and Sonya all scramble looking for it. Suddenly there is an insistent whisper in Sonya’s mind that drives everything else out.

    “I have rearranged the cosmos to give you this victory. Do not lose sight of the goal.”

    She focuses her mind, and feels the power swell within her as the eclipse bathes the land around her in darkness.

    Feur moves to assist Kim, but is unable to get close, for her ball and chain is bouncing about the area in wild arcs, and instead, the monk chooses to bless his ally with unnatural speed.

    At the same time, Quincy opens fire upon the Warlord. Though several of his bullets strike true and a few even pierce her golden armor, he suffers equal wounds in turn, as Krystal predicted, but he lacks Umbriel’s fortitude.

    Sonya unleashes tendrils of void energy that likewise injure Umbriel, and she dashes forward past Kim and toward Sonya. She then speaks an ancient magic word, and her shield repairs itself, but as it does so it unleashes all of the energy it has stored in a blinding beam of light.

    She does not aim this at Sonya, but rather at Sonya’s shadow, temporarily negating the source of her powers.

    Umbriel then tosses her shield like a discus, knocking the bleeding Quincy from his saddle, leaving Esper to guard his unconscious master.

    Kim moves to engage again, and though she gets in a few good hits, she is already tired and bleeding, and the impact of every blow is rebounded onto her. She will not last long.

    Feur centers his mind and slows time around Umbriel, halting her movements and delaying her strikes.

    Though all of her companions assumed that Krystal had taken the golden apple and abandoned them, she chooses this moment to reappear. Leaping down from the rocky ledge above Umbriel, she pours her heart and soul into her blade, and strikes with all her might upon the tiny gap at the neck where Umbriel’s armor meets her crown. It is a one-in-a-million shot, and Krystal does not relent, even as the golden corona of energy protecting Umbriel reduces her body to a charred husk.

    No mortal man could have survived such a blow. But the Warlords are not mortal. Though she is injured, Umbriel survives, and conjures a Veridian shield that blocks all chrono-magic manipulation. She again resumes moving at her normal lightning speed as she picks up her shield.

    Aurora, seeing her companions fall one by one, summons up all of her magic to heal them, perhaps to save their lives, and unleashes a powerful mass healing spell.

    But Umbriel is the mistress of mysticism, and she knows how to manipulate the aether, and she redirects all magic to herself. Her wounds are fully healed.

    The companions realize that there is no hope. Half of them are dead or dying, and the rest are so hurt that even if Umbriel merely stood idle they would expire before she did due to her magical wards.

    Anani chooses this moment to strike. What is left of her soul drags itself from the Abyss, her shadow leaving Sonya and instead attaching itself to Feur. For one instant they combine their powers, creating a shockwave of anti-magic that travels backward through time, centered not on Umbriel, who is shielded from such things, but upon Aurora, stealing her magic before she ever had a chance to cast it.

    A moment earlier, Aurora’s spell fails, and Umbriel sees victory snatched from her grasp.

    Krystal’s body appears, her cloak sundered by Anani’s spell, and Umbriel drops to her knees. As she does so, she whispers something to the dying hellspawn.

    The Lady of the West bows her head before Feur in supplication. As he draws close she says “There are countless paths to victory. But all of them are dark. The path to defeat is well-lit before me, but I refuse to walk it. Do you not sense it, agent of the Tribunal? Something is manipulating this conflict, something greater and more powerful than either Geryon OR Hyperion. I think your titan god’s oldest foe is making its move, and only together can we defeat it, but not now. Send me ahead, far down the path beyond the radius of its sight.”
    “I will never work with you.”
    “Of course not. Then I give you my oath, if you go to banish me, I will not resist.”

    She then moves with unmatched speed, swinging her sword in a deadly arc that would cleave Feur in twain. In a panic, he casts a spell of vanishing upon her, and she is gone.
    Kim asks “What happened?”
    “I sent her away.”
    “For how long?”
    “Forever.”

    Aurora resuscitates her fallen companions, the dead and the dying alike.

    Lost and leaderless, the golden army of the west is slain to a man. In the end, their bodies and weapons find their way into the Black King’s undead legion, where they will not be seen again until his final march on Camelot.

    As for the Warlord Umbriel, Lady of the West, she is never seen again. Neither Valentine nor The Scourge take credit for what happened, and in the end, she becomes just another one of the ghost tales that permeate the frontier.

    Spoiler: Epilogue
    Show

    Some months later, Quincy learns that has mentor Brad Weston has been killed in a showdown with the Warlord Lucia. He always blamed her for Christine’s death, and apparently it came to a head. The following year, Balthazar would be slain in battle by the same Warlord, and Blair De’Arnise, the de facto leader of Balthazar’s forces, would be wed to Lucia and their kingdoms unified.

    Quincy drifts away from the conflict, burning through his remaining wealth and entering a state of semi-retirement, drinking and gambling his days away. Then, one day about six years later, he is approached by a former envoy of Balthazar stating that Lucia has had a falling out with her sniper compatriot and is looking for a new marksman to help on a quest to slay some dragons and raid some Titanic ruins. Quincy decides to play along and hear Lucia out, at least for now.

    Krystal heeds Umbriel’s last words well. Over the coming years, she uses Valentine’s resources to find information about her sisters and the location of the Black Armory. She has a job to do. In the end, she parts ways with Valentine to find her own destiny, but their goodbyes are not forever.

    Kim tries to find her own past with Feur’s help, to return to a world she knows or perhaps even one where she can use her newfound power and knowledge of the future to prevent the Cataclysm. Unfortunately, all such pasts are lost to darkness, and she remains a stranger to this time. Eventually, she seeks out others who have lost their entire worlds, joining the true Scourge as their chronicler.

    Feur continues to honor his contract to Valentine in the months to come. Several years after Umbriel’s defeat, he hears tale of how his homeland of Zaikhan was destroyed by the undead Silent Legion, and the ancient compact between the royal family and the tribunal has been severed by a rogue sorceress. Soon after, his companions find that Feur has disappeared without so much as a clue as to where, or perhaps when, he was going.

    Anani finds that Sonya’s soul is waning under her power, and she abandon’s the body rather than consume the girl utterly. Sonya remains in Valentine’s employ for the rest of her days, an important asset for the Deacon and a strong figure in the reborn Immaterium. As for Anani, she works with the Silent Legion for a time, using her pull with the dwarves of Tahrr to help with their construction of Babel, but when it comes time for the final battle of Camelot, she abandons the Black King and allows him to fall. So then fades into obscurity, lurking in the shadows until the time of her true master’s dark ascension.

    In the years to come, a great war will break out between the Imperium of men and the fey alliance of the Sidhe. Aurora wisely chooses to stay out of the power struggle, and watches as Queen Titania is struck down and replaced by the Snow Queen of Mount Eluria. Eventually, Aurora is approached by agents of the enigmatic Erlking, and becomes a minor noble in his Unseelie court, and in time she becomes one of the founding members of the House of Miracles.

    Valentine takes over Valin’s operation in Sentry Gate, using it as a foundation to rebuild the Immaterium, bringing the organization to undreamt of new heights under the guidance of her enchanted mantle. One day, she is approached by an emissary from far away Gwandolain, who proposes an alliance between the Immaterium and his master, Blue Xariel.

    And thus, the fray draws tighter, leading into The Silver Hour, and the known history that follows. But this was not the end for our heroes, and one day their stories will again be told.


    And there it is, the end.

    This session went pretty good. I feel like it went a lot better on a narrative level than a mechanical level.

    Quincy's player missed the first part of the session, so we took it a bit slower and without much dice rolling. And, it was another slow stalled bit which now that I think about it is probably the biggest recurring problem I have.

    The players tend to see everything as a puzzle, despite me assuring them that I never use puzzles, and thus if they can't immediately find some sort of "I win" button they either sit idly or acting randomly, hoping someone will stumble upon the solution. This actually came up a lot this session because Kim's player was really excited to play an archeologist and learn about the world and its cultures, so I made sure to put a lot of lore into the game. Unfortunately, the player's, especially Kim's, view everything as a puzzle to be solved, and every time I just left them to explore through investigation or conversation, they refused to engage in character instead focusing on finding a problem to overcome, and then when no such problem (let alone a solution) presented itself, the session stalled out until I broke character and told them what to do, which I hate doing as it disrupts the game and feels like railroading, and they hate being told what to do.


    Still, I think it came together ok in the end, as it really showed Kim's desperation and alienation with the world.

    Now, when I started this campaign I had no idea how it would end. I knew it would likely end in some sort of "boss fight" but as the players are free to choose their own factions and then decide who they wanted to side with when the game started, I really didn't have a BBEG in mind. Lady Abasinia was the most likely candidate, but depending on how things shook out if could have been Giselle, Velin, The Triumverate, some agent of The Scourge or the Silent Legion, or almost anything else.

    In the end, Umbriel was really the only person whom they consistently regarded as a villain and didn't already have an opportunity to take care of, so she was the obvious choice.

    I was really hoping for a longer and more nail-biting final combat, but that didn't really happen. I did not see Krystal sacrificing herself for the group, let alone rolling an amazing critical hit while doing so, and that really swung things in the party's favor.

    They followed that up with a very unorthodox plan that, while I am pretty sure it wasn't technically legal and Umbriel could have potentially countered, but in the end it was such a clever plan and so cool on a fiction layer that I let it work even if I didn't feel it was a "proper mechanical challenge" to end the game on, because in the end that is going to be a lot more memorable than a long tactical combat.



    So, this is my Eight full campaign of Heart of Darkness. It was on the shorter side, as my goal was to create a sort of prequel campaign to get the new players acclimated to the world and tie up some old loose threads, as well as to foreshadow my next game, which is going to be a lot longer and more epic.

    Overall it went very well, with a lot less drama and horror stories than usual. The challenge was typical of my games, with a ~95% success rate. Feur's player is a godsend, enthusiastic and easy going. Still waiting to see how it will shake out with Anani and Aurora's players.


    Big thing I need to work on is being less afraid to intervene to keep the game on track and I still need to figure out how to encourage teamwork from the players.

    Taking a break for the rest of the year and then Brian is going to try his hand at GMing again. I will probably post a simplified diary for that game and then after a year or so I will get back to running my next big game.

    See you then, and thank you all so much for reading!
    Looking for feedback on Heart of Darkness, a character driven RPG of Gothic fantasy.

  2. - Top - End - #32
    Bugbear in the Playground
    Join Date
    Jul 2021
    Gender
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    Default Re: Talakeal's Campaign Diary Part II (Now 90% horror story free!)

    Nice to see how things end on a good note.
    Just a note i got adhd and autism.

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