Date: Planting 16–18, 576 CY
Region: The Drachensgrab Hills, Wild Coast — South Road to Highport
Weather: Chilly and overcast. Upper 20s at dawn, climbing to the mid-50s by afternoon. A thin wind from the south. The kind of cold that does not bite so much as persist.
Players Present
Dog the Ranger
TerryOr the Cleric of St. Cuthbert
Silversun Ubermage the Magic-User
Slash the Bard
Tiger Wong, Monk of the Eastern Lands
Kern Blackshield of Safeton
Talon, Paladin of St. Cuthbert
Lady Morwen Ellisar (NPC)
One hundred sessions.
That deserves a moment.
One hundred Wednesday evenings. One hundred rolls of the dice across a table that has seen level ones become legends. One hundred arguments about armor class and oil flask range and whether the bard should be allowed to do that. A campaign that started with a caravan on a forest road, with bandits and mud and the smell of ordinary danger, and found its way — through caverns and temples and slave pits and undead horrors and a drow sorceress wearing someone else's face — to this: twenty-six freed souls walking north through the Drachensgrab Hills toward salt air and the promise of a ship.
Ten thousand experience points to every player at the table.
In honor of Eric Koh — player, companion, and keeper of character sheets from level one to level eight — whose records were recently recovered and whose contributions to this campaign the table chose to remember properly on the occasion of its hundredth chapter.
The dice rolled. The numbers climbed.
The hills waited.
Planting 16 — The Curse Has a Name
The march was three days from Highport now.
TerryOr walked beside Kern and did the thing that clerics do when they are not fighting or healing: he looked at things carefully. The sword on Kern's hip had been bothering him since the stockade. Not the weight of it. The feel of it. The way it sat at the edge of his awareness the way dark things sometimes do.
He asked to examine it.
Slash, who could read runes when the occasion demanded, leaned in.
The characters were old. The blade itself was clean. But the inscription along the fuller was unmistakable once you knew what to look for.
Death Master.
A cursed weapon. The kind that does not simply make its bearer unlucky — the kind that begins, in its patient way, to own them.
TerryOr removed it.
The prayer took time. The removal took intention. But the cleric's faith is a practical thing, and by midday Kern's sword arm was lighter than it had been in longer than he could precisely remember.
He noticed the difference the way a man notices the removal of a stone from his boot — with the quiet relief of someone who had stopped expecting comfort.
Slash removed the rod from his backpack - touched it to the blade and the blade exploded in a damaging flash. Everyone looked at the Bard - thanking him as they bound their wounds.
The march continued.
TerryOr used his remaining cure serious wounds on Kern and Dog. Both men stood a measure straighter when it was done. The freed captives received cure light wounds in rotation — not everyone, not enough, but what was available.
Dog hunted that evening.
The deer did not cooperate.
He returned to camp empty-handed, said nothing, and ate a hard ration with the expression of a man keeping his own counsel. The group supplemented their supplies with witch root gathered from the hillside, which Slash prepared into a healing paste during the night with the focused competence of someone who had learned not to waste what the land offered.
It was not a comfortable meal. But everyone ate.
Planting 17 — The Vision That Didn't Come
Morning brought prayers that went unanswered.
TerryOr had his beads. He used them. He asked his god for clarity, for guidance, for some indication that St. Cuthbert was watching the road ahead the way he watched the road behind.
Nothing.
Not silence exactly. More like the particular absence that makes a man wonder whether he has been asking the wrong questions.
Mark, the new paladin — Talon — meditated separately, seeking his own vision.
Also nothing.
Two servants of divine law, sitting in the Drachensgrab Hills at dawn, receiving the theological equivalent of a closed door.
They exchanged a look.
"Tomorrow," TerryOr said.
Talon nodded.
It was the sort of faith that did not require confirmation to function. That was, perhaps, its own answer.
Dog did not wait for divine instruction.
He ranged three hours toward Highport in the early afternoon, moving through the hills with the particular silence of a man who has been doing this since before he could name it. No patrols. No tracks. No sign of organized pursuit from the stockade.
He returned before nightfall and reported the same.
The camp exhaled.
That night, he found the deer.
One clean arrow. A reasonable amount of blood trail. Enough meat for twenty-six freed captives and a party of adventurers, with some left to dry for the road.
The fire was built higher than usual.
No one complained about the smoke.
Planting 18 — The Slave Cart
The column crested a hill and Dog's hand went up.
Below, on the road heading toward them from the north: a cart. Ox-drawn. Twenty armored humanoids walking alongside. A standard he did not recognize at this distance. The cart itself was enclosed.
He did not need to see inside it to understand what it likely contained.
The party dissolved into the hillside with the practiced efficiency of people who had been doing this through a hundred sessions of dangerous country. Slaves and captives hidden in the rocks above. Silversun positioned. Tiger conspicuously in the open road below, which was the plan, and which Tiger accepted with the equanimity of a monk who understood that being bait and being dangerous were not mutually exclusive.
Dog moved ahead under Silversun's invisibility spell.
Up close: humanoids in splint mail. Dog was spotted - only escape was into the tomb.
The ambush was precise.
Silversun's fireball hit the front of the formation — twenty-eight points of fire spread across forty yards of road. The calculation was correct. The armor class was four, and TerryOr's critical strike delivered five times normal damage plus three before the smoke cleared.
Slash cast Entangle. Ball Lightning followed in two directions behind the surviving formation.
It was, by any measure, efficient work.
When the last man dropped, Talon walked to the cart and broke the lock with his bare hands, which was the kind of thing that happened when a paladin had a strength score of eighteen and a righteous cause.
Inside: a man in splint mail. Bound. Wearing the symbol of Hardby.
He thanked them. He asked for a sword.
The man's name was not offered and not pressed. He had a copper ring on his right hand that caught the light in a way that no one commented on yet.
He called himself Therny of Hardby
The Despotrix's city. Women-run, bold, well-armored, and — this far from home on a road through humanoid territory — almost certainly not slavers in the ordinary sense. The symbol was known. The men wearing it were a long way from where they should be.
The ruins appeared like a bad memory.
South of the road, in a fold of hillside that should have been empty, stood the remnants of towers and broken walls — stone that had been shaped, once, by hands working toward some purpose that the centuries had declined to explain. The walls had the look of things built for permanence by people who had understood what permanence required. Ash lay three feet deep on what might have been a roof. A trapdoor, rectangular and wooden, was preserved beneath it with the unnatural care of something that had been kept rather than simply abandoned.
The party stared at it.
Dog did not come back.
Not in an hour. Not in two.
He had gone ahead to scout. Alone. Three miles from the rest of the group, moving through the kind of terrain that swallowed sounds, toward something that was moving faster than him.
The group arrived at the ruins as the light was failing.
Dog was not there.
Outcome Notes
XP Awarded:
- 10,000 XP to all players — special gift from Angelo to mark Episode 100, honoring the recovery of Eric Koh's character sheets, levels 1 through 8
- XP for slave cart ambush, combat, and prisoner rescue: pending final calculation
- XP for captive escort and safe travel: credited toward next session
The Sword: Death Master — cursed blade removed from Kern by TerryOr. Destroyed.
New Prisoner: Therny— man in splint mail, rescued from slave cart, bearing a copper ring of unknown significance. Behavior noted.
Dog the Ranger: Last seen entering the ruins alone, pursued by a warg. Location: unknown. Alive: presumed.
Next Session — Planting 18:
- Tiger Wong and Talon hold the surface with the freed captives
- TerryOr, Silversun, Kern, and Slash descend into the ruins
- The ruins do not appear on any map the party carries
One hundred sessions. Raise a glass — then roll for initiative.
Watch the campaign live at @thedmandfriends on YouTube.
Well done sir
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