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So it's time to talk about how I ended the heroic tier. I really need to get caught up to live with this thing. Just for some context, I'm about to run the last session of the Paragon tier (tomorrow) and I'm doing some things that I think will be really fun. But I want this story to go in order, so I guess save that for another day.

When last we left our story the PCs had learned that their Heroic tier enemy, Red Wizard of Thay, Master Oshar. The man who made them slaves, made them fight in the gladiator arena to prove themselves. Attached magical slave bracers to them that can only be removed with his control rod (or destroyed on the forge that made them).

Sure, they escaped, but he continued to hound them, send slave catchers after them, send wave after wave in an attempt to recover

Issue 2 is up:

Assault of the AfriApes!

The LA Stars are back in action!

Okay, so last time I said I'd go back a step and explain the Weave-Scars and the Deck of the Dead. An important element that, in the midst of explaining story and publishing concerns, I neglected this element that was laying groundwork for the future.

First, when the party arrived at the docks of Westgate they were approached by a woman who was clearly blind. She offered to read their fortunes and when all (but one) of them drew from the deck (a special customized deck that I created myself) they drew a symbol and then she recited the name of the card and a phrase to go along with it. This is the deck of the dead. Each of these cards was affiliated with a god who was or has been dead (and got over it) and the phrases and names alluded to who they were. The woman's eyes also glowed blue

So in the previous post I had a party heading into an adventure that I considered pitching here and there...which never quite happened. But it was a fun adventure, it ran well, and with some re-working I may revisit it later. It was also the adventure where I realized that my players have discovered the power of rituals in 4e and I need to re-think my adventure-building style as a result. Phantom Steed killed my encounter. :-)

The party took a vacation from the main story, centered on Thay and the manipulations of Szass Tam. They found a flying ship that doesn't fly. They made freinds with a trading company. They discovered what would be a seed to future major plot points. And now they are only a few levels away from completing the heroic tier.

I laid out handful of potential story seeds

Running a short Pathfinder campaign, what we have done so far:

Wyvern Hunt I - The Road to Asku-Korla

Wyvern Hunt II - Ill-met in Asku-Korla

and the cast of characters.

So my party made it o Westgate. They ran around town and had some fun figuring out the politics of the place as well as fighting with their new status as merchants.They largely complained about this concept becuase they didn't feel they were getting paid enough where I as I was trying to convince them of the benefits of working with the Chiascaro familiy and at the same time, I think I may have half-way wanted to show them that dealing with the merchanting bits of having a ship wasn't fun, heroic adventure. I think my back deal hope was that they'd be happy to use the Raptor as a floating, mobile base of operations and let the economic issues sort themselves out. Anyway, I think it half worked, but mostly I ended up going a bit meta and the desenters of the party sort of gave up.

In any

So I've decided to do another quick campaign design report here.

When I finished in my last post the PCs had recovered a ship, The Raptor, which used to be able to fly, and which they would like to make fly again.

Given no other purpose at the moment and wanting to get far away from Thay they accepted the task of the Two Shores trading house to re-establish their trade routes after being indisposed for a while and with one of their ships recently destroyed it was off to Westgate, their "other shore".

But first, they had to get there and I had to figure out how to do sea travel fun in 4e. I had a skill challenge or two dealing with sailing through a storm and one trying to outrun an earth mote that is covered in spellplague and little blue wraiths that came off of it to try to catch them

Two blog posts in two days? I'm rocking this thing.

So when we last looked at the party of escaped slaves they had finally escaped slavery. Yay!

Although they had magical slave bracers attached to their arms that allowed Master Oshar, Thayan Red Wizard who was trying to impress Szass Tam with his new units of monster hunters and now has him trying to save face by capturing them all, can track them all.

Did I mention before that when they fought the other NPC monster hunters on the way out of Thay they didn't kill them...but brought them along? This was my brilliant idea of creating NPCs that would give a voice to add touches of humanity to the game. They also were supposed to have their own stories. One was pregnant with another's child. One was the charismatic leader who has lost his