The party was assembled following the taking of Zaen by a coalition between the Kuluku, the Malaqani, the Vorloi and Voriig Kye. They were entrusted with the quest bestowed to the previous party by the Orhan gods: find and rescue Andraax.
Said previous party had no idea what that meant, but they where otherwise occupied with the aftermath of the campaign, mostly trying to keep Voriig Kye from having all of Zaen for himself.
So this new party, a group of good-hearted people gathered from those helping in Zaen, was tasked with finding just what it meant that Andraax was captured, where he was, and how to rescue him. Of course the first weird thing was that Andraax was supposed to be dead!
They were given powerful artifacts from the loot in Zaen (each player had the chance to express what kind of item they wanted, and I used the RMU alchemy rules to craft one item for each with equivalent power measured in TUs). The Adept was the exception since she could bring an item given by her mentors in Namar-Tol, although the power was the same as for the others.
Also, they were given a helper NPC in the form of Yolim, a sentient doctor's pack that could cast healing spells and communicate by touch telepathy to help with Medicine rolls. The campaign ended without them knowing that she was previously a Lotana cleric of Yaalc Muul specialized in healing, who on the brink of dead decided to continue her life helping others by being transfered to a magic item.
On to the adventures now...
1) The first of its name
The party starts out from Zaen, with a request to meet the members of the Ordakurdoth (E. Club of the end of the world) in Lethys. These people were scholars who had met the previous party and were intent on learning what had caused the earthquakes and chaos at the beginning of 6053. They had sent word to Zaen saying they had information they needed to share in person.
Using a combination of walking, Jinteni portals, boats and air ships, they set out to reach Lethys.
2) The safest trip
The party reaches Orv Cibur as a stopping point towards Lethys. They exchange tokens that represent the commercial agreement between Namar-Tol and Zaen, and request horses, a wagon, and lots of adventuring gear. They are loaded onto a Cloud Caravel, driven by a merchant that is taking is sister to Lethys for a special treatment requiring the herb Huith.
3) Nothing wrong
Before reaching the city, the air ship is attacked mid flight by weird looking clay worms, mostly on the underside of the vessel. The captain requests help from the party, and provides a flying harness to help the fight (which was on board to be used when making repairs). By combining flying, ranged attacks and wall-walking spells, the win the battle. The captain is unsure about the origin of the worms, and attributes it to some generic sabotage between warring guilds.
Once on Lethys, they reach their appointment. They enter the library that hosts the meeting of the Ordakurdoth in its basement. The owner of the place shows them the way down, and the party finds an empty room. They are faced by Foxwixolpi, a shadow demon that explains he was summoned to keep no one from leaving the room, after a summoner took the members of the club prisoner some days ago. The demon is friendly to the party since he knows they work for Zaen, whose leaders have benefited powerful demon lords when they killed Sigirus (in the previous campaign).
The only way the demon can oppose the summoner's command would be for the party to find the payment the summoner offered and give it first. Using the seer's spells the party finds the item (the demon knew it must be in the same room) and he goes without having much to offer.
4) Track your demons
Thanks to the seer's past visions, they now have a clue as to how the summoner looks, and scrying spells allow them to find her in the city.
When they go looking for her however, it seems the woman is a simple tailor who uses her lunch breaks to go with other girls to spy on some soldiers they fancy.
Unsure about how to proceed, the Gark takes matters into his own hands and sets fire to the woman's workshop, escaping with some money and a portrait of one of the soldiers. This latter turns into the most discussed event in the campaign, since they can't seem to match the visions with this woman. Eventually they decide to return the money and the portrait, along with some extra cash for compensation of the arson. All of this was done with subterfuge and long distance spells, so the poor woman never knew why her workshop burned, or why her savings box was spared the fire, and had extra money inside.
After this, they never let the Gark wander on its own again in a city, fearful of his fire-starting ideas.
Eventually the campaign took them elsewhere as you will see, and they never found out that the summoner was a prominent figure in the city, mother of a key politician, and she always goes to do her dirty work with a glamour of the tailor, whom she envies because of her flirting with the solder.
While stalking the city, before the arson event, the monk encountered a homeless drunk preaching about the end of the world, who eventually invites the party to join a group of like minded people outside the city, in a clearing that can be reached by watching the pulsing light of a special stone. As it turns out, the group was on the lookout for those preventing the end of the world, and had helped with the kidnapping of the Ordakurdoth. Some spectral ghots appear at the meeting and attack the party. The preachers tell their part in the story, and mention that the stones for the gathering were provided by a man who encourages their view. They also have a book left by this man, who was considering it before taking the kidnapped scholars. The book is magically encrypted with a poem-password: spider. The content tells of a resurgence of the cult of Hrassk in the vicinity of Rhakhaan, and their sacrificial holidays, one of which requires several people and is only days away from occurring.
5) Spider Prophecies
The party wastes no time, gets on their wagon and runs to the location of the Hrassk temple mentioned in the book.
They scout the area, and as they attack the temple, are assisted by a mysterious figure. After they battle summoned spiders and teleporting priests, the stranger reveals himself as Ikton, priest of the night spider, a cult of Reann (who was a player character in a previous campaign:
http://www.ironcrown.com/ICEforums/index.php?topic=13097.msg170345#msg170345).
Luckily for the captives, the ritual had not yet begun. Most of the rescued members of the Ordakurdoth refuse to go back to the city, and instead ask to be left at the villa of one of them, where the party is well received and offered a feast in their honor.
6) Late Checkout
The only returning member of the club is Cufune, a Loar scholar who teaches arcane magic in Lethys, although she has no spellcasting abilities herself. She explains that they were kidnapped suspiciously close to the moment she tried to check out a seemingly innocent book at the library of Lethys. "Jaiman Weather: island revision and tendencies" is a book by the Loar climatologist Poltrish, who research theories by Andraax on Essaence patterns, the time of the year, and the weather currents.
The party subtly makes contact with a friend of Cufune inside the library and manages to get the book without raising suspicions. The book explains how Andraax presented a thesis on Essaence and weather fluctuations by studying the Watching Isle, near Ormian, and that is believed to be the reason why is tomb is located there. It is even suggested that the tomb of Andraax might include more studies never published.
7) Tour of the Tomb
The party reaches Ormian and from there finds passage to the Watching Isle, leaving Cufune to research in Nomikos while she waits for them to return.
While exploring the island they avoid dying at the hands of a Will of the Wisp in the swamp, and the Gark finds out about some old ruins underwater which trigger some memory from the inner Mind Leech.
More explorations yields an encounter with the Segri Dorane, a former Nomikos book keeper who lives as a hermit, and tells the party about the Witch and the Tomb. The witch explains that in order to decide whether she can let them enter the tomb she needs to think it over sleep, and offers them to stay the night, in which they have weird dreams about the origins of Andraax and the layout of the tomb, and are granted the ring on the next day.
Inside they find Tya'ar, explore, open the secret vault (I replaced the mega killer item with less powerful things and some potions they never used). Then came the moment when the seer tried to read the awareness in the orb, which resulted in some visions, a coma, and the party rushing her to the operating table in the medical room, where she came within seconds of having her skull open by the automated systems. I can't recall how they stopped it, but she recovered and received the Andraax mind copy (come to think of it, I never used that fact in the whole campaign).
With the help of Tya'ar, they enter a records room, and start asking questions and getting some answers, mostly in the form of projected videos.
Here the Mind Leech got a map from places in the world where more like him could be found, an old cooking recipe that might be of interest to Andraax, and... learned that Andraax was nowhere that the Tomb sensors could detect, and he hadn't entered the complex in some time. They also learned about the Daenku Ahrenreth, got some videos showing the initiation ritual, and footage from the death of some of them.
The presence in the orb and Tya'ar help the party understand what the Ahrenreth meant, and how Andraax was the last one. They also learn of a special "location protocol using geostationary satellites", which requires a member of the Ahrenreth to activate a machine in the Tomb using their membership ring.
They had learned that the members of the Circle dedicated their lives, natural or extended through a sleeping process, to be there whenever servants of Kadaena or the Unlife threatened the planet. Since they didn't know how to proceed, the adept decided to pledge herself to the ideals of the Ahrenreth and recited the speech she saw the members of the Circle gave in the video. I can't recall now what I had originally planned for them to do at this point, but this was not exactly it for sure. This was one of the changes in a campaign that a GM can't foresee. Since there was no real power to the words that she recited, the presence in the orb decided the intention was enough to show them a list of Andraax associates, a last know location and trust status for each of them:
- Elor, in NW Jaiman, a confirmed ally, registered under at least 70 different forms
- Nameless One, no location known, trusted ally, suspected of being able to foresee events
- Jenkyna, in NE Emer, listed as unknown ally status, potentially dangerous
- Andejaan in the Isle of Jade, listed as proceed with caution. The party informed the orb about her demise (in the previous campaign) so she was removed from the list
- Voriig Kye in NE Emer, trusted ally
- Thule in central Emer, listed as proceed with caution
- Varyan in the Tomb of Andraax, confirmed ally, added when she recited the oath of the Ahrenreth
Call to action
The party goes back to Nomikos, where they discuss their findings with Cufune and Elemmir (a PC from the previous campaign), and learn that the Nameless One was seen in Lethys some days ago. They could also contact Voriig Kye since the party in the previous campaign worked with him, but they don't trust him (he promised them help to conquer Zaen and after the battle all but took half of the city for himself).
They try to track the Nameless One, fail, but are then contacted by him outside Lethys. He is intrigued by what they share, but offers no specific aid and doesn't seem to trust them (the previous party also had a bizarre encounter with him, and because of it they had lost the chance to recruit Changramai monks when they assaulted Zaen).
Voriig Kye contacts the party through an agent in Lethys, with a promise that he has what they are looking for. They are asked to board a ship, from which they are instructed to jump into a raft driven by a mute girl, who takes them to an island with a portal, that teleports them to a cave. Inside it they find the agent again, who explains that Voriig acquired the Ahrenreth ring from Schrek during the attack on Zaen. This further enrages the party, since they are the same players who played the last campaign, and they know Voriig did not participate on the final battle against Schrek, and yet somehow looted him!
Voriig offers the ring to the party, since he explains it is cursed and he was only keeping it as a souvenir. This triggers some discussion as to what the Ahrenreth is and what it stands for, since the party was not completely aware of the Jerak version. They conclude that more than one Circle must have existed.
The agent explains that the cave is a specially selected location, in case the cursed ring causes any trouble, no one other than the party will be harmed. To study it they cast mostly seer spells, but the curse causes the spells to take some time to complete, during which they are showered with physical and magical attacks of increasing lethality. The most powerful effect of the curse defenses implies the summoning of 3 Janak and 1 Guguth.
After defeating the demons they learn from the ring that the members in an Ahrenreth have a role, a symbol and a name. They also learn that there is an Althan machine that manufactures the rings, when provided with raw materials and specifically crafting instructions for the designated wearer. They wouldn't be able to use Schrek's ring, but they could craft a ring for the adept who is technically the only member of a new Ahrenreth (they decided to call themselves the Zaen Ahrenreth).
9) Cold in the Wall
With the information gained from the seer spells, they got a visual of the machine, called a Manifester of Wills, and Voriig helped them locate it somewhere in SE Mulira, near Lindiis Lakes.
He provided the adept with enough materials to prepare the elements the machine would ask for. He also sent them to Mulira (I think via Navigator, can't recall now) but they didn't ask about how to get back.
There they made contact with a tribe who worshiped the local god Iylarus who opposes the Ice Undead that live in the north. The lake also hosted a protector for the tribe and the region, who ended up being another Mind Leech. This allowed the player to understand more about his own kind. I decided the creatures where not native to Kulthea, and had been brought by the Earthwardens to help them protect the ecosystem of big lakes in different continents. The player understood he was supposed to be the protector of Quon-ul in Emer.
In trying to locate the machine, they learned that the Undead had taken control of a part of the mountains to the west that hosted inside an ancient ruin. The tribe didn't volunteer people but offered them advice and some protection potions.
The party got to the mountains and found a possible entrance with runes similar to those they expected to find in the machine. While trying to open it a swarm of Ice Undead descended from the higher altitudes and started attacking. This combat used the largest number of miniatures we had ever needed, and part of the idea was to make the party trapped between increasing number of difficult enemies and the rock wall. They had to work the trick to opening the ruins while fighting, and once open risked entering and confirmed that the undead could not pass.
10) Element of surprise
Inside they found themselves confronted by a vision of their happiest and their saddest memory, and walked the ancient Althan complex. The seer tried to scan the past of the place, and was rewarded with a vision of a shadowy Ondoval who had protected the place from spells like that, and the seer almost got killed.
They also found a family of raccoons from the plane of light, who had been falling from years from a portal deep in the complex, resulting from a failed experiment.
I also prepared some very weird machinery for them to explore, but which required risks they didn't take.
They also found a set of cronogenic capsules, some with people still inside. The party discovered a black goo along the capsules, and correctly interpreted/spell-deduced that if they were to open the capsules the people inside would be affected by it (a tormenting joke placed by Ondoval to anger Andraax if he ever went to the complex again to make more rings).
They finally find the Manifester of Wills, where the adept is granted the title of Reth Lavan (Maker of Rings), represented by a square with a semicircle below (like an inverted closed lock).
Once she dons her ring, the complex offers her information on some of the features, like a machine that heals but is damaged and could cause damage (they use this to help the seer recover from the Ondoval vision attack), and also the service of a recording orb that could monitor her adventures (since they would require going back to the complex to review the recordings, they decide against taking them).
11) Kingdom for a flame
They decided to go back with the ring, and on they way out were attacked by the leader of the Undeads in the region, an Undead Ice Dragon (I promise the god Iylarus of Mulira, who wields the power of Ice-Water against his enemies the Ice Undead, was a concept I created in 2004 and GoT was not a thing back then).
They started running away from the dragon's attacks, who was confronted and pushed back by Irkuugor the Blue Dragon. When he appeared they could hear him bellowing: "The king is trapped, the weapon he searches could be the key you need to rescue Andraax".
When they got back to the tribe, they find their wagon storage open, nothing missing, but someone left there an Earthwarden flute key. Seer spells show it was placed there by a mysterious Lotana. More spells and attunement rolls, plus some required music skill, allows them to deduce the flute will guide them either to a way back to Emer or at least to the king mentioned by Irkuugor.
Playing the flute allows them to find the sound goes north no matter the direction the one playing it is facing. They pack things up and start in that direction.
During the trip, they are ambushed by night by explosives arrows and a band of Lugroki and Trogli that teleport right in the middle of their camp. The battle is hard but eventually won. With some tracking and spell casting, they find the arrows came from a ranger that was seemingly hiding and following them, who escaped the battle undetected. Upon following her trail, they find her dead with no apparent injury. More seer spells show her receiving payment in gemstones by an elf with violet eyes, seemingly to follow them and ensure they are killed. They find the gemstones hidden nearby, and past vision them to see they were cut and used in some factory filled with Trogli and Lugroki.
They continue north until they find an outcropping where they use the flute to open a path underground, which leads them into the Coral Roads. The flute does not indicate with way to go once there, but there seems to be only one path, going east towards Jaiman.
12) Underground rescue
The adventure starts with the party inside a cave, without their wagon, and no memory of how they got there. The last thing they know is that they were walking the Coral Road.
Before they can start figuring out what happened, a patrol of Snow Garks approaches and after a failed attempt at diplomacy they party is forced to kill them.
Here they learn that the cave is part of an underground complex where some Garks live, under the guidance of a demon lord, in preparation for an invasion against their enemies the Lotana.
With some past visions applied to themselves, they learn that the Coral Road trip ended in a meeting with a mentalist working for Ackbar, king of the Aanaku (also a PC from a previous campaign). The mentalist had explained that the king, along with his elite fighting force, had come to the domain of Raathmaauriig to recover the ancient tower of the kingdom, and bolster the morale of his resistance against Ulor. They didn't even know if the demon was still alive, but once they teleported there with a gateway opened by another flute, the mentalist lost contact and doesn't what what befell the assaulting force. The party had agreed to travel the gateway and find the king, since they understood "the weapon he searches could be the key" to freeing Andraax. On arriving to the island, they had been affected by a blanket of mist coming from some flowers, and escaped to a nearby cave, only to have a lot of that erased from their memories.
They scouted the closest Gark village, and made contact with a Gark who ended up being king Ackbar himself, separated from most of his men when they arrived and where attacked by demons patrolling the surface of the island.
He had a plan on how to reach the tower of Raathmaauriig, but no plan on how to recover it nor whether his men had been captured or killed.
After some stealth maneuvers they skipped the village, traveled through tunnels and reached a part of the tower that had an entrance underground. Although there seemed to be a remote sentry (a Gark operating the Earthwarden scouting powers of the tower from the inside), the Mind Leech realized the door had a representation of a natural lake ecosystem, with a creature in the bottom of the water part, and other party members saw that all the animals in the door had protrusions like buttons. The Mind Leech pressed the ones for his race and the door opened, after which the sentry activated the alarm.
They quickly scanned the tower and saw that the bottom levels opened to a cave with captured Lotana encased in ice crystals, while the upper levels where frozen and mostly uninhabited. An image appeared before them in the spiraling stairs, of Raathmaauriig, a demonic woman with white skin and hair, who asked them who they were and what they searched for.
Upon understanding their intent, Raathmaauriig called forth the powers of the tower to send them down into the cave below, but the Mind Leech, understanding his connection to the Earthwarden powers, was able to counter the energy and change from a capture-all mode into the opposite expel-all power that the tower possessed.
This teleported everyone in the tower, including the party, the king, Raathmaauriig, her hydra, her local soldiers, and the trapped soldiers, to the surface of the island.
Here we started the second big battle of the campaign (the first one being against the undeads in Mulira).
Raathmaauriig drew the Unheat sword and called forth an ice storm, while her Hydra, Demons and Garks attacked the party, and the party tried holding off the enemies while at the same time started melting the ice crystals to free the soldiers with the help of the king.
This battle took a session and a half, with changing tactics required as Raathmaauriig turned the storm into a defensive set of ice walls around her, and alternated with powerful blasts of ice.
Eventually enough soldiers were freed to contain the attacking Demons and Garks, the Hydra was beheaded, and only Raathmaauriig remained. The king asked the party to distract her while he used the powers of his sword Kuugorkhiin to appear before the demon and slay her.
13) Prized Possessions
With the battle won, the party was invited to the Aanaku kingdom, where the king shared with them the power of the Books of the Elements. Instead of giving them spell lists, I decided each character felt a specific attunement to one of the elements and this knowledge allowed them to use more powers from their initial main artifacts (more fire powers for the adept fire staff, more light powers for the merchant war mattock, etc).
They also understood using attunement and seer spells the power of the Unheat sword, and how it was half of a set, and how using both they could open any barrier, which meant wherever Andraax was, they could need both swords to get to him.
I presented an out of game narrative about how they joined the king and got the Uncold sword, since the Lotana now held the place where it was hidden. They didn't have it simply because the party for that campaigned had missed the hiding place, and I ruled that they hadn't found it since then.
I explained that the power of the swords required a high level character, which none of them were, and the wielders should also be versed in arcane arts, like a Dragonlord, Loremaster or Navigator.
Also, since now they owned an Ahrenreth ring, they could go back to the Tomb of Andraax and activate the searching protocol. This gave them a location: the north pole. I think the Loremaster Legacy states that Andraax is ambushed in the south pole, but the whole idea for the campaign occurred to me when I read it and it seems I remembered that fact wrong when I wrote the adventures.
Before going north they still needed to recruit high level arcane users to wield the swords. They decided to try their luck with Elor, the Nameless one, and Voriig Kye, in that order, and see if they could get two of them to agree to join them in a trip to face the unknown.
I really wanted them to bring Voriig Kye along, and had no intention of using Elor in this campaign, so when they got to his home he was nowhere to be found. He left some traps for any would be visitors and that helped get the players out of the house and move on with the list.
The Nameless One contacted them and once he saw the swords agreed to the mission. I think the party didn't question the fact that he knew more about the items than they did. Also, he agreed to participate because they told him Andraax had him listed under a lower ally status than Elor, and the same that Voriig Kye, and that hurt.
14) The road north
The party finally contacted Voriig Kye, who wanted to better understand the swords and how to use them, while also asking for time to research the potential danger of the mission. He guessed Ondoval was behind this, and the party shared information learned from the Tomb to understand who he was and what was at stake.
To devise a plan to use the swords and combine their energies, he took the party to a camp where they were joined by Oran Jatar (I think he didn't even speak to the characters, he just met with the silver one).
They learned that Ondoval would be planning an attack on the south pole, and the Dragonlords agreed that the only valid moment to proceed was once they could confirm he was on the other side of the planet.
Once they were ready, Voriig asked the party to meet near the destination, while he traveled on his own. The Nameless One also wanted to be there only at the last moment to keep the element of surprise.
So the Dragonlords arranged for them to travel on the Silverfish, which would better increase their chances of traveling undetected by Ondoval. The trip was quite disgusting, as it should be, since Ulya was only doing Voriig a favor. Just to get you an idea, they had to sleep on a room that was used as a torture chamber.
15) Open Prison
At the meeting point, the party were joined by Voriig, they traveled some miles on foot and finally the Nameless One appeared as well.
They could see an unexpected domed structure in the distance, around which the scene showed frozen and abandoned pieces of demon and also of robots (defensive patrols of the Eyes who had attempted to help Andraax from the ambush).
In the middle of the battleground was a two dimensional energy shape, with the body of Andraax trapped within.
My original idea was that Ondoval had trapped him at this point of Kulthea, fixing him to a number of other dimensions through powerful magics. The combined stream of the swords should break the prison but also alert Ondoval and his forces, who would be distracted on the southern Eye.
But, the seer tried to use her vision spells in the battlefield, which again triggered the past vision wards that Ondoval had used in the complex in Mulira, and the past shadow attack the seer. They easily protected her, but now Ondoval had been alerted of their presence before they could start freeing Andraax.
Tens of Lugroki started being teleported to their location on the next minute, and every minute after that. Their only advantage was that teleporting so near the Eye was not possible so the attackers had to run a short distance to engage them. In the meantime Voriig Kye and the Nameless One got to their positions and started the combined beam to free Andraax, while the party defended against the army. Another threat they had to face was X'jemiis, who was not on the southern Eye offensive but was specifically assigned to keep an eye on the party (he was the one who had paid the gemstones and prepared their ambush in Mulira).
The adept asked if her Ahrenreth membership could help in some way there, and I had decided that she could connect with the citadel defense system to activate some combat drones. I didn't prepare stats for them, just reduced the number of enemies that got in fighting shape to the party.
This battle was long but not so much as the one against Raathmaauriig. As the number of enemies kept increasing, they got the assistance from the party of the previous campaign as NPCs, and also the troops that had helped them take Zaen back then (Kuluku, Malaqani, Vorloi). After some rounds and with X'jemiis down, Andraax was freed, he turned on his power sword and cut down a large number of enemies as well. Then he insisted that they go down to the citadel of the Eye.
Andraax called on Tethior to follow him, which got the party a little confused, specially when the Nameless One cursed under his breath and started running after him.
I would have loved to have the inside of the citadel take at least a complete session, but of the 3 couples that make up the gaming group, 2 of us were expecting our firstborns in the coming months and I had already decided to cut the campaign short some sessions ago.
in a cinematic description I told them how Andraax and the Nameless One descended into the citadel, with the party following. He instructed them on how to operate controls to try to prevent Ondoval from completing his plan on the south pole. They could see his advance in real time in the opposite citadel, and at the last moment, Once they reached the chamber of the Eye, Andraax activated an energy reversal protocol on both citadels, teleporting the Eye of the south to the northern citadel. The drawback of this plan was that all sentient life on both places got disintegrated into the ambient Essaence.
I ruled that after some years their spirits would coalesce back into the world, formed in a place they would have called home. So the aftermath of the campaign found all of the characters back in their home, with Andraax and Ondoval free to continue plotting, and the southern Eye absent, because it was now the northern one.
I tried not to go into every detail, and at the same time didn't want to leave any important event out of the tale. I always like it when other groups share their view on Shadow World and how they play their adventures, so I wanted to share our experience.
