Set in the year 576 CY, this campaign unfolds in the World of Greyhawk and follows a determined band of adventurers drawn into a dark and unraveling mystery. What began as a mission to protect caravans and root out brigands has led the party deep into the heart of an ancient evil—the Temple of Elemental Evil. The cults are stirring. The blasphemous Rod of Six Parts is being reassembled. And now the only thing that stands between the mortal world and the return of a forgotten horror… is them.
Tuesday, June 23, 2026
Thursday, June 18, 2026
Chapter 3 / Episode #102b — "The Long Way Home"
Chapter 3 / Episode #102b — "The Long Way Home"
Date: Planting 19–23, 576 CY Region: The Drachensgrab Hills to Highport — Woolly Bay — Safeton, Wild Coast Weather: Cold overnight at the ruins. Four days of open water. The bay is grey and cooperative.
Players Present Slash the Bard Tiger Wong, Monk of the Eastern Lands Dog the Ranger — recovering
TerryOr, Kern Blackshield, Silversun Ubermage, Talon — left below
Planting 19 — "The Night They Wait"
They stay.
It is not a decision so much as an unwillingness to make the other one. Slash and Tiger make camp above the entrance to the ruins and watch the rope and listen to the dark below and wait for someone to come up.
No one comes up.
Dog breathes through the night in the shallow way of a man whose body is doing all the work. The burns are bad. Whatever those pale creatures had planned for him was already well underway when the bard found him. He is alive because Slash went down into the cave with two dwarves and a lantern and did not talk himself out of it.
The rope hangs still.
By morning it is clear. TerryOr is not coming up. Kern is not coming up. Silversun and Talon are not coming up. Whatever is on the other side of that membrane in the northern hall is keeping what it has taken, and no one left above ground has the means to go back in after them.
The decision is made in the grey early light without much ceremony.
They leave.
Planting 19 — "What Cannot Be Carried"
The freed captives cannot go to Highport. Everyone understands this without it needing to be said at length. Highport is an orc-held city on the Wild Coast, and a group of recently freed slaves walking through its gate is not a group that walks back out. The captives are given what supplies can be spared, pointed toward safer roads, and released to make their own way.
It is the hard decision and the right one. Both of those things are true at the same time.
Those who can pass are another matter. Lady Morwen. The noble brother of Dame Gold. Kern's wife. The two dwarves. Tharney of Hardby, copper ring and all. Their hands are bound — not cruelly, but convincingly. They will enter Highport as slaves, because that is the fiction that gets them through the gate, and fiction is something the bard has always been good at.
Planting 19 — "The South Gate"
Highport's south gate has thirty orc guards and a sergeant who has been doing this long enough to know what a bribe looks like when it walks up to him.
Slash plays an old orcish lullaby as they approach. It is a small thing, a gesture of respect in a language the gate understands. The sergeant listens. Then he looks at what is being offered — two hundred and fifty gold pieces, sapphires to make up the remainder, handed over with the easy confidence of a man who has done this before.
The gate opens.
The group wastes no time inside the city. No taverns, no questions, no lingering. They move directly from the gate to the docks, keeping to the wider streets where a group this size draws less attention.
Planting 19 — "Captain Red"
Three captains are approached at the wharf.
The first two find reasons to say no. The third is Captain Red of the Woolly Bay — a man whose willingness to ask ten thousand gold pieces for a four-night passage to Safeton tells you everything you need to know about his relationship with risk and reward. The negotiation does not take long. The gems do the talking.
They board before the tide turns.
Planting 19–23 — "Four Nights on the Bay"
The Woolly Bay offers nothing to complain about.
No other ships on the horizon — which is strange, and everyone notices it, and no one mentions it aloud because some observations are better left to settle on their own. The water is grey and calm. Captain Red is a man of his word, which out here counts for more than most credentials. The accommodations are generous for the price, and the price was enormous.
Dog sleeps most of the crossing. His body is making use of every hour.
Slash works the crew. Four nights is enough time to learn a great deal about a ship, its routes, its captain's habits, the particular texture of how information moves between sailors when they think no one important is listening. The bard files all of it away in the place where bards keep things.
Tiger watches Tharney.
Tharney turns his copper ring.
The bay passes beneath the hull and Safeton grows on the horizon one morning like a promise that has decided to keep itself.
Planting 23 — "Dame Gold's Door"
They go directly from the docks.
No detours, no delays. The noble brother of Dame Gold has been in their custody since the slave cart, and custody has a weight to it that does not lift until the delivery is made. Dame Gold's establishment is not difficult to find for people who know the city, and they know it well enough.
The brother is returned.
Whatever passes between them in that room stays in that room.
What comes out of it is a reward of twenty-five thousand gold pieces and the particular exhaustion of people who have been holding something tightly for a very long time and have finally been allowed to put it down.
Then: soft beds. Hot water. Food that did not come out of a dungeon or a saddlebag. Sleep without a watch rotation, without one ear open for something moving in the dark. The first real rest any of them have had since before the Drachensgrab Hills, before the stockade, before all of it.
Dog eats. Dog sleeps. Dog does not yet know everything he missed.
There is time for that.
Somewhere in the hills behind them, in a pocket the world has forgotten, TerryOr the Cleric of St. Cuthbert stands before a throne and waits for something to change.
The king is patient.
So is Terry.
XP Award — Episode 102b
| Encounter | XP |
|---|---|
| Highport gate (bribed, entered) | 150 |
| Passage negotiated, Woolly Bay crossing | 100 |
| Noble brother delivered to Dame Gold | 500 |
| Session Total | 750 XP |
The survivors reach Safeton. Dame Gold's brother is home. The reward is paid. And somewhere beneath the Drachensgrab Hills, four companions wait in the dark for someone to come back for them.
Watch the campaign unfold at @thedmandfriends
Chapter 3 / Episode #102a — "The Rescue of Dog"
Chapter 3 / Episode #102a — "The Rescue of Dog"
Date: Planting 18, 576 CY — same day, hours later Region: The Ruins Beneath the Drachensgrab Hills — The Cave System, Wild Coast Weather: Underground. Dark. The torchlight is everything.
Players Present Slash the Bard Tiger Wong, Monk of the Eastern Lands Two Dwarves (freed captives — names unknown)
Dog the Ranger — recovered. TerryOr, Kern, Silversun, Talon — beyond the portal, fate unknown
Planting 18 — "What the Bard Carries Up"
Slash comes through the crypt alone.
He left four of them on the other side of that portal. He stood at the threshold and watched them go through one by one and did not follow, because the bard has always understood that some doors are not meant to be walked through on instinct. Now he is back in the 70-foot chamber with the dark water and the magical sconces and the weight of what just happened sitting on his chest like a stone.
He goes up.
Tiger is where Tiger always is — exactly where he said he would be, watching Tharney, watching the road, watching everything at once with the monk's particular quality of attention that makes other people feel like they are being measured.
Slash tells him what happened.
Tiger absorbs it the way he absorbs most things. Then: Dog is still out there. The tracks went south. Into the cave. Someone has to go.
Two dwarves step forward. They were in the slave cart a day ago. They have had time to remember who they are. One takes a spear. The other takes a spear, a dagger, a mace — whatever can be gathered quickly from what the freed captives are carrying. They do not ask for thanks or explanation.
The three of them go back down.
Planting 18 — "The Cave South"
The cave entrance off the main chamber opens into something larger.
Slash brings his lantern out front and the dwarves fall in on either side — natural formation, no discussion required. The cave is large enough that the lantern light does not reach the far walls. A pool fills the center, black and still, the surface unbroken. Two passages open to the right and left, leading deeper into worked stone and older dark.
Slash looks at the floor.
The tracks go right. Dog's boots — he recognizes the tread now, the slight drag on the left heel that Dog has always had and never bothered to fix. They are not old tracks. He moves quickly.
There is light ahead. Not lantern light — something lower, warmer. Firelight.
He slows.
Planting 18 — "Color Spray"
The tunnel opens into a chamber and Slash sees it all in a single moment.
A fire pit. Ten, perhaps fifteen creatures gathered around it — subterranean things he has no name for, pale-skinned and large-eyed, built for a world where sunlight is a rumor. They have the look of creatures that have never needed to worry about what might come down their tunnel.
On a spit above the fire is Dog.
Or what remains of Dog. Unconscious, bound, turning slowly. Alive — barely, by the look of it, but alive.
Slash does not deliberate.
Color spray erupts from his hands in a cascade of light that has no business being this far underground. Half the creatures drop where they stand — blinded, stunned, knocked senseless by the sudden violent brightness in a world that has never known brightness. The others take one look at what just happened to their companions and run. They disappear into the far tunnels without looking back.
The dwarves are already moving before the light fades.
They cut Dog loose. They pull him off the spit with the careful haste of people who know that careful and fast are not opposites when someone's life is the margin. He is not conscious. He does not respond to his name. He is breathing in the shallow way of someone whose body is handling everything it can handle and has nothing left over for awareness.
The paralyzed creatures on the floor do not get the chance to recover thanks to the anger of Slash.
Dog would have done the same.
Planting 18 — "Out"
They run.
The bard carries Dog. The dwarves carry the light and the rear. Through the chamber, back into the tunnel, back toward the pool and the main cave. The water is still and black and exactly as unwelcoming as it was on the way in.
The crayfish comes out of it without warning.
One claw snaps at the nearest dwarf. He gets his spear across in time — not a strike, just a deflection, the claw scraping off the shaft — and they keep moving. There is no time for a fight with something that lives in underground pools. The entrance to the main chamber is right there.
They go through it.
They go up.
Planting 18 — "Surface"
Tiger is at the rope before they call for him.
He hauls Dog up hand over hand with the monk's quiet strength, the ranger's body limp and smoke-darkened, the burns and the binding marks already visible in the daylight. Slash comes up next. The dwarves last.
Tiger kneels beside Dog and looks at him for a long moment.
He is alive.
Burned. Starved. Whatever those creatures had planned for him was already well underway. But alive. The monk checks the breathing, checks the pulse, checks the things a man checks when he needs to know exactly how much time there is and how much there is not.
There is time.
Not much. But some.
Dog the Ranger, who has carried the Rod of Six Parts since Episode 65, who has walked into every dark place this campaign has walked into, is alive on the grass above the ruins with the Drachensgrab Hills around him and no idea where he is or what happened to the rest of his companions.
Somewhere below, in a pocket the world has forgotten, TerryOr stands alone before a throne.
The king is still waiting.
XP Award — Episode 102a
| Encounter | XP |
|---|---|
| Subterranean humanoids (color spray, dispatched) | 200 |
| Giant Crayfish (evaded) | 50 |
| Dog recovered (alive) | 250 |
| Session Total | 500 XP |
The bard went into the dark with two dwarves and a lantern and brought back what mattered. Dog lives. The Rod of Six Parts is back above ground. What happens next is a harder question.
Watch the campaign unfold at @thedmandfriends
Chapter 3 / Episode #101 — "The King Below"
Chapter 3 / Episode #101 — "The King Below"
Date: Planting 18, 576 CY Region: The Ruins Beneath the Drachensgrab Hills — Wild Coast Weather: Overcast. Cold wind off the Woolly Bay. Underground by midmorning.
Players Present 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
Absent: Dog the Ranger — whereabouts unknown
Planting 18 — "Tharney of Hardby"
The ruins are still there in the morning.
They always are.
The group arrives at the entrance before the sun has done much with the sky. Among the captives freed from the slave cart is a man who gives his name as Tharney — of Hardby, he says, the port city on Woolly Bay. He is calm for a man who was recently cargo. Perhaps too calm. He turns a copper ring on the third finger of his right hand, over and over, the way a man does when he is thinking about something he has decided not to say.
Tiger watches him.
The monk says little. He does not have to.
The decision is made quickly. The group will go below. Tiger will remain above — watching Tharney, watching the captives, watching the road back toward Highport. Lady Morwen among them. Kern's wife among them. The noble brother of Dame Gold among them. The monk plants himself between all of it and whatever might come down that road, and he does not move again.
The rest go down.
Planting 18 — "Seventy Feet Below"
The entrance opens into a chamber.
Seventy feet by seventy feet of worked stone, old enough that the craftsmanship has blurred into the walls. Water covers the southern half of the floor — black and still and deep enough to swallow a torch without complaint. Two exits present themselves: a cave entrance to the south, where the water begins, and a carved archway to the north, dry and dark.
They light torches. Kern raises the lantern.
The tracks are there, if you know how to read them. Dog's boots. Leading south. Into the water. Into the cave.
The group searches the chamber instead of following immediately. The east and west walls each conceal a secret door, flanked by iron sconces. As they approach, the sconces light — old magic, still holding after however many decades, responding to the warmth of living bodies the way a hound responds to a familiar smell.
They read the carved warning near the south entrance.
Robbers, it says, will be cursed.
They choose north anyway. Dog's tracks go south, but something about the archway pulls at them — a quality to the air, a faint wrongness in the stonework, the sense of a threshold that is more than architectural. They go toward it because that is what this group does.
Planting 18 — "What the Archway Holds"
The hall beyond the arch is straight and long.
At its far end is something that is not a door.
It has the shape of a door. It occupies the space a door would occupy. But what fills the frame is not wood or iron — it is a surface that moves the way still water moves when something passes beneath it. They test it methodically, the way experienced people test things that might kill them. Weapons through the surface. Objects thrown. Nothing comes back. Nothing makes a sound on the other side.
Kern goes through.
He does not return.
Slash shakes his head. He has made his position on pocket dimensions and one-way membranes clear on previous occasions, and this occasion does not change his thinking. He stays. He watches the archway. He holds the line between whatever is on the other side and the world they all came from.
The others follow Kern through.
Planting 18 — "A Pocket in the World"
The other side is wrong in a way that is difficult to name.
The stone looks the same. The air feels the same. But TerryOr reaches for St. Cuthbert the way he always does — the practiced inward gesture, the sense of a presence behind the prayers — and finds nothing.
Silence where there should be something.
He is alone in a way he has not been alone since he first took his vows.
There is no time to process this. The zombies are already moving.
They come out of the dark in numbers, shambling and purposeful, and the corridor offers no room for formation. Terry reaches for the holy symbol, raises it, speaks the words — and nothing happens. Whatever this place is, it does not carry the authority of St. Cuthbert's name. The undead do not flinch.
Silversun's magic missiles fire and connect. Talon and Terry take the melee. For a time it holds together. Then Silversun goes down. Then Kern. The two men left standing look at each other across a corridor littered with bodies.
There is no going back through the membrane. They know this without testing it.
They go forward.
Planting 18 — "The Throne Room"
The room beyond is lit by nothing visible.
The light comes from everywhere and nowhere — pale, sourceless, cold. Pillars line the walls, floor to ceiling, old carvings worn smooth by centuries. At the far end, elevated on a dais of dark stone, is a throne.
Something sits in it.
Skeletal. Armored, or what remains of armor after long enough in the dark. It holds the posture of authority the way the dead hold everything — absolutely, without effort, without any possibility of change. There should be a crown on its head. There should be a sword at its side.
Both are absent.
Talon does not hesitate. Evil is evil. The paladin moves forward, blade drawn, and strikes. The blow connects — real, solid, the skeletal figure absorbing the impact and rising from the throne in a single motion. What follows is brief and decisive. Talon falls. He does not get up.
TerryOr strikes. His weapon glances. He strikes again. Nothing penetrates.
The skeletal king speaks.
Its voice is the sound of old stone and older patience. It wants its crown. It wants its sword. These things were taken from it, and it has been waiting in this pocket of nothing, on this throne, in this cold light, for someone to bring them back.
Terry has no crown. He has no sword. He has a holy symbol that no longer connects to anything, a cleric's hammer, and the weight of every companion he has watched fall tonight.
He tells the king the truth: he does not have what was taken.
The king regards him.
It does not kill him. It does not release him.
It waits.
On the other side of the membrane, somewhere above, Slash holds a position by a portal that no longer has anyone coming back through it. Dog is still missing. Tiger holds the road with a monk's patience and a copper ring turning on a stranger's finger.
TerryOr stands alone before a throne in a dimension that St. Cuthbert cannot reach.
The king has been waiting a very long time.
It can wait a little longer.
XP Award — Episode 101
| Encounter | XP |
|---|---|
| Chamber exploration and secret doors | 100 |
| Zombie combat | 250 |
| Skeletal king (encounter, unresolved) | 0 |
| Session Total | 350 XP |
Kern Blackshield and Silversun Ubermage fell in the corridor. Talon, Paladin of St. Cuthbert, fell before the throne. TerryOr the Cleric stands alone — trapped in a pocket dimension, his god beyond reach, facing a king who only wants what was taken from him.
Watch the campaign unfold at @thedmandfriends
Saturday, June 13, 2026
Broken
“Silversun, Kern, Talon, and Terry-Or, all gone. Most of the people we just set free had to be sent to fend for themselves in this forsaken land. It was the only logical way. Can't feed everyone. Can't protect them all either. The happiness of my rescue was short lived. Slash told Tiger and I what had become of them and my spirit broke. Hard decisions were made.
Air seems colder after such loss. Not biting to the skin but radiating from my core, like the deepest bones of the highest mountain. Groups much smaller now. Closer too. Bound by shared trauma and sorrow. Like blood and tears mixing together to gather as stains on cloaks and tunics.
What trials wait for us at the end of this perilous journey? Blighted lands of decay surround the festering wound called Highport. So full of tension, death, and hate it threatens to boil over at any second. This is where we must go. Diabolical as it is, it's a necessary step to take towards our ultimate hope. The shining beacon on the horizon. The only guide for our travels on a moonless night.”
“Elhonna, Lady of the Wood.
Hear me.
Ease my soul and quiet my thoughts.
Relieve us from cold and help me keep watch.
Tree roots and rocks dont threaten this walk.
Only on the hunt let my arrow unnock.
The Gnarley will wait until my return.
Leaf, moss, and fern ill reach them in turn.”
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