Sep 16, 2013

Second Dawnlands Campaign Finished

Finished the second Dawnlands campaign last night after nine (maybe ten, I lost track) sessions.

The set up: The PCs are Kadiz nomads, members of the Barreeve clan. Killer Rohan, a mercenary related to them, returns home for the winter assembly and kills one of the members of the rival clan while drunk (the dude hit Rohan's kid). The PCs are recruited by their clan to assemble the goods necessary to win the potlatch that will decide Rohan's fate.

What they did: They decided to slay the Killer of Wives and Children, an undead sorcerer who used to belong to their clan who killed a bunch of people 70 years ago before fleeing into the wastes. Along the way to finding him, they explored a ghost city inhabited by necromantic terrors and a friendly cyclops; interfered with an archaeological expedition looking for demons to dig up; slew a golden god-shard golem; got killed by the golem and then brought back to unlife by the cyclops; attempted to become kings of the ghost city; met a raiding party from the Orthocracy led by a guy with no face who rode horses made of shadow; met a cool gobliness tattoo artist one of the dead PCs married surreptitiously; had a wagon chase with some hobgoblins; picked up a cantakerous and slightly nutty priest of the God of Gates; hung around with some Dwer merchants and helped them against the guy with no face; met a cannibalistic ogre hermit whose dryad wife made him eat vegetables (because she was also a cannibal); slew the cannibalistic ogre hermit's former wife, a harpy with a leech head who shat blue flames, and her twisted spawn, including giant spiders with human hands growing out of their backs, a thing that's kind of like Jabba the Hutt except it sprayed poison gas, and a thing that was basically a starfish made of legs.

The conclusion: They got to the citadel of obsidian glass the Killer of Wives and Children had raised, got inside to meet him under the pretext of negotiations, and then one of the PCs thought negotiations had broken down and tried to trick the KoWaC into believing they had come to welcome him back to the clan. The KoWaC proceeded to make them his Nazgul, complete with flying black horses, summon his zombie legions to crawl into the belly of his Dracolich for easy transport, and fly with them back to the ghost city to summon the rest of his army before heading back to conquer the Barreeves, their rival clans, and anyone else nearby. About half the PCs were pro-Nazgul, and half were uncertain. The KoWaC summoned the ghosts and met up with the faceless Orthocrat's band, who the PCs had sent to this city several weeks beforehand thinking it was a good way to get rid of them. Finally, realising they weren't going to get a better chance, one of the PCs threw a javelin into the Killer of Wives and Children, and an epic battle ensued, with PC vs. PC combat, a dracolich tearing someone in half after biting their head off, the KoWaC doing the Vader death grip and a PC's magic shield repelling it, ghosts possessing zombies that the dracolich was shitting and puking out of itself all over the battlefield, somebody shooting a giant lightning bolt, and shadow horses tearing off people's shadows as they escaped their control. It ended with one of the PCs using magic berserker axes to behead the dracolich while the priest of the God of Gates castrated the KoWaC's decapitated body (to neutralise his sorcerous power). They released the ghosts from their imprisonment, waved goodbye to the Orthocrats who'd helped them out, and went home where they won the gift contest handily, released Rohan, and retired as mighty heroes of their clan.

Pretty good for nine or ten sessions.

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