D&D Campaign: First Session, Part 1

The real reason I started this blog was a way to record and share my Dungeons and Dragon 4e campaign this semester and broadcast all my blatant thievery of ideas and, in several cases, intellectual property (I’m hellbent on prison, clearly). The first session was tonight, so I actually get the chance to make a post about it.

Most of the group has been playing for about two years now, and although they’re proficiency with the system is a bit varied, the majority of the players know what they’re doing. Not everyone is as good at role playing as others, but everyone manages to get along and enjoy the game. There are a few exceptions and I’ll mention that in a later post, but I want to at least start with background and our progress, before I get to bitching about other things. The basic back story to the campaign (which I gave a lot of unoriginal thought into, but won’t waste time describing here) is a wintery town that serves a hub for various trade routes between the areas surrounding it. I wrote a small packet describing the area, its personalities and various points of interests, but none of my players seemed to have read it. This was probably my first real frustration that night, because I put effort into it so I wouldn’t have to waste time in game covering it.

I began the game by having the group enjoying breakfast and deciding how to spend their day in town. While eating, another player who wanted to play a town local approaches them. They exchanged words and discover that this player is a jiang-shi, a unique kind of undead found in this area. I used the revenant player race to mechanically represent this and it worked out really well. Ishmael, the cleric of the group, and Cain, the warlord, both took slight offense to the notion of tolerating an undead, and demanded that they be taken to the man responsible for “creating” this player, who is a monk by the name of Tediore. The rest of the group follows along, making things fairly easy on me.

Tediore takes him to a small shrine in the southern region of town and introduces the party to a large, amiable priest named Harkevich. They immediately ask him to explain his foul necromancy, while Harkevich tries to explain that there is nothing foul about it. He humbly explains that he is a priest in service of Nerull, god of the dead, and that the jiang-shi are the way that he passes on Nerull’s blessing. The jiang-shi are all devotees of the god and that their “undeath” is more akin to a second life, rather than zombification. Ishmael and Cain continue to bicker for a while, while Harkevich continues to explain, with just a bit of distress in his voice, that he is merely doing his god’s work. I remind Ishmael and Cain that the Raven Queen is the most commonly accepted god of the dead and that she does not have any lesser gods working beneath her. Although they recognize this anomaly, they don’t really think much of it and just let it pass.

The group moves on after warning Harkevich about raising anyone who isn’t a worshipper of Nerull. The group decides to go to the business district. There is little of significant interest, but they found some entertainment in riding hares available for sale (none of them were halflings or gnomes, so they couldn’t use them). Deciding to further pursue righteousness, Ishmael and Cain decided to try and find a drug dealer, in order to bring him to justice. Although they fail to do so, mostly due to their lack of intelligence and tact, Choronzon, the shade sorcerer, decides to help them out and finds one. They threaten/manhandle him to lead them to his organization’s hideout (most of the people who peddle narcotics here work for a mafia-style organization called the Circle Laris). The man pretends to guide them away, before leading them in front of the mayor’s office. Here, Ishmael and Cain unwisely threaten him in front of some guards, who approach. They have a brief discussion with the guards who assure them that the elf and his companions will be taken care of. Cain, however, decides that this isn’t enough and mouths off to the guard. The guard backhands him, causing Cain to intimidate him by summoning an illusionary dragon. Although this terrifies all of the guards, the town mayor appears and reminds Cain, along with the rest of the group, to behave with an electric display of power.

The group, feeling some mid-day hungry, heads back towards the business district and strike up a conversation with a bizarre looking minotaur. With green and gold eyes, along with white hair, braided with bones and crystal, he seems more like a shaman than someone who would be selling a variety of roasted, skewered meat. The minotaur introduces himself as Wrongeye. He’s friendly enough, offering plenty of information about the town. He tells the party, after some casual and largely insignificant banter, about a string of kidnappings over the past two months. At first the disappearances were every few days, but now several happen each night. More recently, some people have been reappearing, dismembered horrifically, a few days after their disappearance. With some further investigation, the group learns that it is unlikely that neither the Circle Laris nor any other local crime organizations would be responsible for this because those groups tend to deal in direct murder, although some victims did have ties with the Circle Laris.

Wrongeye also passes on the rumor that the kidnappings are the result of the Ragman, a spooky superstition involving a spectre or a ghoul who scares people out of their skin, then wears it to scare the next person. Deciding to follow this thread, the group heads to the local library. The library was a donation from a local mage-scientist, Lord Calaban, who was essential in the original founding of the town. It largely contains his personal collection of books, both academic and personal. It is managed by an elf family, the youngest and only surviving member of whom, Dahlia, is the currently librarian. When the group arrives, Dahlia is reluctant to look up from her book, let alone help them. She points out where the various books are, but offers little more. As the group begins to look into Calaban’s medical books and journals, Dahlia becomes more outgoing and helpful. She seems excited that people are investigating real books.

While the group struggles to understand most of Calaban’s personal logs and notes, which are written in an older version of Elven (none of the more intelligent characters spoke elven), they do notice a pattern in a lot of his works. He focused a lot on the field of chimericism, the combining over multiple creatures or, in some descriptions, conceptual ideas, as well as bio-alchemy, such as magical skin grafts or organ replacement.  Although the group could not discover much from Calaban’s personal writings, they did notice a significant accomplishment. The first is the creation of an artificial substance, wraithbone, which is made by compressing nearly any natural material, such as dirt or stone, and infusing it with magical energy. He describes wraithbone as being incredible hard and durable, while also very malleable and easily grafted when manipulated magically.

The group spends several hours at the library, going over the various medical and magical texts that Calaban has there. They ask Dahlia if Calaban has a laboratory, to which she replies, “Yes, but he kept it hidden in the woods surrounding the area to avoid unnecessary intrusions. He wasn’t a paranoid man, but didn’t want strangers breaking in. When he passed away, the location was lost.” The group decides to look for the lab the next day.

After waking up at the crack of dawn and exploring the woods for several hours, the group eventually comes upon a large mound. Realizing that such a natural looking hill is out of place in this area, they investigate and find an entrance way hidden behind an illusion. They enter and explore the first room, which is a living space that has not been disturbed for quite some time. They decide to bring all of the books and notes left here with them, rather than waste time reading them now. They also explore two bedrooms here; one that seems designed for a young child and one for a grown man. In the man’s room, an aged picture shows a tall, dark-skin half elf and a very short, pale girl. As the group leaves this first room to head down stairs, Duke, the genasi swordmage, senses a peculiar presence near him. There was a slight tug on his sleeve, as if someone unexpected was standing near him. The group stops for a minute before shrugging it off and continuing on.

The first floor down (essentially B1) reveals a large laboratory. The walls and floor are made of a white, porcelain-like metal. Around the edge of room are multitudes of glass tubes, filled with a green-ish liquid, that extend into the floor. A red, faintly glowing line runs from the tubes to a large center console made of black stone. In some of the tubes are a variety of humanoid creatures. They are non-responsive and it appears as if their flesh is slowly flaking away. The priest, Ishmael, investigates the center console, revealing a magical log of various entries. The most recent are methodical and indifferent, giving a feel of an uncaring scientist. They simply list numbers and races, suggesting the quantity and kind of specimen added to the tubs. Older entries are friendly, expressing someone’s excitement over finding the lab, before finally resorting to the ancient, incomprehensible elven.

Ishmael, being a priest of Avandra, decides to liberate the people in tubes. He breaks the glass around them, although the liquid inside keeps its form, and pulls them out. He heals them, regenerating their flesh (although they feel a great amount of pain outside of the gel), before asking them what they know. The freed people recoil in terror, babbling insanely and are generally unhelpful. The people seem particularly afraid of Tediore, the jiang-shi, but seem to express a greater fear that someone, or something else, might return. The group decides to have Erdan, the ranger, guide them back to town, simply because his player had to leave. While liberating these three people, the other corpses that were entirely fleshless began to sink down into an unseen room.

The group continues down the stairs again and finds on the next floor a room similar to the first. Its layout is identical to the one above it, except for a different assortment of bodies in the various tubes. Walking from tube to tube are several horrific creatures. Their skeleton is made of the white porcelain metal with muscle fiber stretch tightly across it. In place of a face, there is a large crest of porcelain along with a variety of metal plates across the body, especially around the hands, forming finger-like claws. These creatures are tall and spindly, walking with a slight bending gait. At each tube, they’ll motion with their hands and manipulate a white pudding inside them, forming a variety of plates and grafting them onto the skinless subject. These creatures are deacons.

In addition to the deacons, there are two smaller creatures of similar features. They have a larger number of noticeable plates around their bodies and wear robes, giving them a priestly image. They are stockier than the deacons, but seem more intelligent. One interacts with the center console of this room, while the other “talks” to a tube subject in a bizarre tongue that fluctuates between guttural growls and shrill clicks. These are vat priests.

Cain decides to enter the room first, trying to act normal and nonchalant,but is immediately noticed by the vat priest and attacked. Deciding that it is unlikely that they will be able to communicate with such clearly inhuman creatures, the party attacks and eventually defeats the creatures.

We stopped after the fight, due to a lack of energy and a quiet frustration between me and the players. Given the length of this post, I’m going to cut it short here on other thoughts. But that covers what we managed to progress through on our first session.