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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 them so he wouldn't be embarrassed if/when Szass Tam found out. And while he did manage to kill one NPC former slave, the female cleric who also happened to be pregnant with another NPCs child, every one else has managed to stay relatively safe (or at least not dead for long).

They learned from Oshar's rival that he hadn't left his quarters in the Ziggurat of Thay in days, so they knew where they could find him, get the slave bracers' control rod, and finish him off for good.

The party sailed off to Aglarond, where they had connections. Once there they used their contacts to meet with a Simbarch (a member of Aglarond's mageocratic ruling council) to request aid in getting into Aglarond.

The Simbarch was busy on the front lines of the war, however. Thay was sending seemingly endless waves of undead at the realm and to make things worse, the undead were infectious. For every Aglarondan defender they killed their numbers grew.This was part of my plan as the DM from the get go when I was thinking a major element of the game would be a zombie horde apocalypse story, accomplished by Tam's larger plot. This one involves two crystals. One at the top of the Ziggurat of Thay that controls the undead with the help of Bane. The other, in the Astral Sea sitting on the body of Azuth (former got of spells, who play's into Tam's goal of collecting enough various sorts of energies to allow him to become an overgod) that makes the undead infectious, done with the aid of Orcus (without Bane's knowledge).

To buy a little time to get help from the Simbarch the party rushed off to take out a horde of zombies that were trying to flank the defenders. The party went up against a horde of zombies of a half-dozen different stripes. I mean there were a LOT of them.

The party won, got the Simbarch's help keying them into a teleportation circle that used to be in the basement of a tavern in a small town not too far from the center of Thay. They'd used it for some espionage (a call back to my original plans for the campaign being all about conducting small strike team missions into Thay from Aglarond for the entire heroic tier).

Upon arrival they found the tavern...and the rest of the town in ruins and the only signs of life came from the various undead wandering the area. The party teleported themselves right into a fight. This was the encounter where I found one of my favorite monsters that I ran. I want to say it was called some sort of devourer. It's the tall undead thing that sucks you up inside it and slowly digests your soul.

They then traveled to the Ziggurat in the capital city (which is attached to the arena where they fought their first encounter of 4e). They found the entire country, including the capital, in ruins. The vast majority of Thay had been converted into undead for Szass Tam's army. The city had cages full of zombies packed up for transportation. It was a frightening and gruesome sight.

There was an urban encounter where the cages of undead served an environmental effect and the used the terrain to great effect, climbing boxes up to the rooftops and the like it was great.

They got to the arena, which was also in shambles, but it was the only way they knew the path into the ziggurat and to Oshar's quarters. When they opened up the doors inside the arena, the monsters inside (used for battles) came bursting out, one or two at a time. Each round a new monster or two joined the fight. And it was full of suck for the PCs. There was a Bulette, a Beholder, and a Dragon at least. And those are just the three I remember off the top of my head. And they started coming from multiple locations. This was the same arena they fought their first ever encounter. It was a great call back, and epic battle, and a great time. And the wizard got turned to stone (I fudged a bit that with some skill checks they found a living cleric of Bane who fixed it for cash..not my most creative moment, but I was eager to wrap up heroic).

They got inside, they found Oshar being guarded, but it seemed they were trying to keep him in. They even overheard them talking about Oshar becoming a leader in the army once he'd been broken.

They fought their way in, kicked in the door, and found that I had stolen their prize from them. Oshar was already dead. Tam had discovered his failure and decided that he (like most of the rest of Thay) would be more useful to him if he was dead. So he killed him, turn his body into a wight and raised his spirit as a spectre. So when the party rushes in they have the spirit to fight, the big brute body, and the various lesser wights he'd created with every random person he ran into since being turned.

The party won the fight, destroyed Oshar for good and found a fake control rod in his quarters. I had been listening to some podcasts giving advice about how heroes need obstacles and problems thrown at them. They sometime s need to be kicked when their down. I don't know that I would have made the same choice if I was running it today because the bracers do not become important again one single time in the entirety of paragon tier, but who knows, I still have three PCs wearing them, maybe they and the control rod will come up again.

And so the party quickly teleported their way out of Thay and back to Aglarond and the heroic tier ended. The triumph of success while the real victory snatched from their grasp.

What do you think? Was I overly cruel? Should I have let them have the victory? Did I do the right thing, giving them a new obstacle right when they thought things might finally go their way?

It's one of the choices I've questioned the most since I made it, and I'm curious what people think.

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 when she was reading their fortunes.

The mechanics involved in all this are non-existant...unless the PC later became Weave-Scarred, in which case the scar would manifest in a way related to the card they had drawn.

That means it's time to explain Weave-Scars. The 4th edition Realms are steeped in this concept of the Spellplague which has created in people something called Spellscars. My interpretation of this is that it's a manifestation of wild magic imprinted onto people.

A Weave-scar is much more rare (to the point that so far as anyone has ever known it's only happened to the PCs...and only two of them). An essential part of my campaign storyline is that there are still elements, strands of the Weave that have survived the Spellplague (in fact it was later established that active pockets of Spellplague in the world are the result of remaining Weave magic conflicting with wild magic).

A Weave-scar works a lot like a spellscar. A being is infused with Weave magic...ordered magic, and it manifests on their person as an image or symbol of some sort.

Mechanically I designed something that I felt was inspired by some of the elements of 2e D&D that I loved and missed. Randomness combined with effects that are both positive and negative. In the case of my PCs the Weave-scars manifested in ways associated with the dead god they pulled from the Deck of the Dead.

The first PC to earn such a Weave-scar was Dok who drew the card of a god of undead who's symbol was a skull with gems in the eyes. The power associated with this was that whenever a creature died in Dok's presence the small bit of magic that exists in all things was absorbed into the PC, through his eyes which would then appear to be blue gems.

Mechanically this resulted in Dok gaining a certain number of temporary hit points. However, each combat where this happened there was a small percent chance, something like 10%, that he would progress towards eventually becoming a lich. His features became more sunken and the like. Each step towards the inevitable lich-dom made the number of temporary hit points gained greater. But after three steps, he'd become a full lich.

Powergamers out there would see lichdom as awesomeness, I suppose. But Dok didn't want to be a lich and it scared the hell out of him. Plus he had this odd pull towards others areas of Weave. And ultimately, there was no way to reverse the process, eventually he would just be a lich, but in all other ways, he would be Dok.

I worked out something similar for each card in the Deck of the Dead so I would be covered regardless of what card PCs pulled. When they progressed through each step was randomized and they had benefits along the way, but the end result generally comes with a negative and a serious paradigm shift.

The one PC who didn't want to pull a card was a problem for me. Do I pull a card for him and he just doesn't know what his card is. You're fate is your fate even if you don't know about it and all that. That was my orignal plan...then I was taken back to the fact that the eventual conclusion of the campaign was going to be bringing back a god of magic. The PCs think it will be Mystra. My plan was that it would actually be Azuth...but what if it turned out to be the PC who wouldn't take a card.

When he became Weave-Scared (and he would be the next one, actually) his scar would show a symbol no one recognized...the symbol that, when it was all over, would be HIS holy symbol all along.

Anyway, that's the Deck of the Dead and Weave-Scars. The Weave-scars will be the way that the party will gather bits of the Weave from around the world to eventually use to bring back a god of magic. A story arc I had planned for Paragon tier...but mostly is waiting for Epic, as it turned out. But that's a tale that is a long ways from telling.

Next up, the return to Aglarond and back into Thay!

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 at this point and wanted to see where the players would go...but I had a pretty good idea of where they wanted to go.

The plot seeds are this: fixing the Raptor back to flight (they were informed through some research that the flying city of the Five Companies, the only people who currently own the only flying ships in the world, were near the East Rift, where one of the PCs is from), they could follow the new Weave-Scar that a party member picked up (ooo, there's a whole concept of Weave-scars and the Deck of the Dead that I skipped over earlier, back to that in the next post), or they could return to Aglarond and seek help in removing the slave bracers.

I had it in my head that going back to Thay, defeating Master Oshar, the guy who first put the bracers on them, removing the bracers would be a fitting end to the heroic tier. I envisioned the paragon tier (at this point) as being filled with gathering supplies and repairing the Raptor to flight and running around to gather up other bits of Weave that remained in the world. The conclusion of paragon would be the party sailing around the world on their airship. Then epic would be gathering up the needed components to cast the spell to gather up the Weave again, taking the fight to Thay, and defeating Tam and returning a god of magic to the world all in one fell swoop.

Some of that has changed, but much of it remains in place. The thing that didn't happen in Paragon was gathering up a bunch more Weave. Partially because I inserted the Tomb of Horrors to the game.

The party already wanted to restore the Raptor to flight. It was a side-quest sort of idea that I came up with when I inserted the ship from the start and they latched on to it. That's an easy story to create. The Weave-Scar that Dok (one of the PCs) got in the last adventure wants to be around other Weave magic...so it's pulled towards other areas of Weave, so Dok is constantly feeling pulls towards nearby areas of Weave magic. There's an easy thread there too. Both of these equate to, run around the world and collect stuff.

But I knew that if I laid the groundwork for the party to get their slave bracers off then that would go that way, and that would give me the opportunity to end the tier the way I wanted.

So the party decided to go by boat to Airspur, and travel from there south to the East Rift to find the Five Companies. Along the way, however, I had Oshar's rival Red Wizard (the one who favors summoning as a military solution) come to the party for help. It was a side quest with a smaller party (many players couldn't make it that night) that involved a cool puzzle I stole from listening to the Return to Northmoor podcast.

The mini-delve for the night was fun, but the story groundwork was ultimately more important to the larger plot. Oshar's rival came to the party to inform them that Oshar hadn't left his offices in some time and that they could easily find him there. He would give them aid in making sure they could get to him if they were gutsy enough to get to Thay to take him out. Oshar has the control rod so if they party did this they could use it to remove the bracers.

They were hooked and I knew where they'd go. They dropped their cargo in Airspur and headed immediately for Aglarond where they would begin their trek into Thay to end the tier. My plans were laid, my goals sinister, and my vision clear. Then I got some ideas to really throw a wrench in the whole thing.

But I'll save that for another time. Next time I think I'll take some time to talk about the Deck of the Dead and the Weave-Scars as a story and mechanical concept.

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 case, what Westgate really did for me, was give me an opportunity to try my first hand at writing an adventure that I was hoping might be publishable somewhere. It was going to start in Westgate and then go to the ruins of Starmantle for the majority of the adventure. I wrote it up, I stated out the monsters, I even did some formatting (in fact, this may have been the first time I really typed up my game notes).

I knew there would be an issue with the idea of taking my Forgotten Realms adventure and trying to get it published somewhere. Namely, that there were very few publishers asking for freelance submissions and that all of the FR names, locations, etc. would have to be changed. But I feel like I did a decent job of setting it up so that with some name changes and a few re-skins it could easly be anywhere.

I don't recall if I ever actually pitched it anywhere, now that I think of it. But hey, WotC, if you're interested, you know where to find me. :-) Or maybe I'll file off the serial numbers and release it as a free PDF on The Tome Show's feed. Who knows.

In any case, the adventure went something like this:

The party arrives at Westgate and are contacted by a compatriot of their patrons at the Two Shores. While there a thief arrives and steals a map from the new contact. The party chases him down (skill challenge to catch or he gets away and they get clues elsewhere to follow him to his camp). The party finds the map to be a map of the ruins of Starmantle, which has largely been avoided but this map leads to a specific wizard's home which could be full of magical goodies. As they investigate they learn that there is also some risk .The story goes that this merchant-wizard was conducting trade in the planes with some unsavory creatures. In the process he accidentally created a permentant demon-gate at the same moment that the spellplague hit and boom...becuase of this confluence of events Starmantle are made into, well, ruins.Well that gate is still open and while sealed, runs the risk of destroying the region or unleashing demonic hordes.

The party heads to the ruins. Runs into the party (I think this was my first introduction to the Order of Blue Fire, actually, they thought there was something important to recover and study there...they were right) associated with the guy who tried to steal the map. My party, as it happens, actually completely avoided this encounter by showing me that I, as a DM, had to start thinking about rituals in 4e in my designing. A set of phantom steeds swooping over the water past the baddies negated the need to run into them at this time.This also made me re-think the idea of a magical amulet that the party was to aquire that has stages of being unlocked, which opens up the intellegence of the item inside, which also wants to push them to the wizard's tower.

The party gets to the ruins. Braves the pockets of spellplague warped land and creatures (another skill challenge here) and gets to the wizard's vault. The amulet transforms to become the key to the vault and they head in. There are some demonic challenges, they're first encounter with active spellplague (another skill challenge) and eventually they get themselves to the real vault of the wizard. Inside, they find an angel (big bad solo creature) and the statue of a dragon. The angel insists, blindly that they leave and the amulet insists that he can shut down the gate if he's placed in an imprint on the dragon. The party does their thing, the amulet turns out to be the mind of the wizard that started this whole thing all along and there is a mindless body of a dragon in that statue which the evil wizard now controls.

The big fight is interesting in that the angel and the dragon are fighting each other and the party at the same time (and otherwise would individually outclass the party). The gate needs to be shut down as well, and the magic that is still fueling it is a magical mote at the top of it that still contains Weave magic, something that's not supposed to exist (although this is, of course, an integral part of where my story is going for the next two teirs).

The way my actual running of this went the dragon eventually kills the angel and fights the party until bloodied at which point it tried to run away. I had it do some skill checkes to digg through the roof to get out and it accidentally caved the whole thing in on itself and the party (which had to escape in a hurry).

On the outside they found the spot where the dragon was digging, it eventually dug it's way out but was hurt and the party finished it off (it almost got away if not for Peren, the archer ranger).

Then they leave the city and find that (since they skipped them before) now they have to deal with the party from the Order of Blue Fire which wants the Weave magic that they found (although the OBF doesn't know what it is at this point). What they don't realize is that when a PC shut down the gate by crawling on top of it and stabbing the blue energy ball with his short sword the energy went into the PC creative my first "Weave Scar".

There is no way for the OBF to get the Weave magic from them. There is a fight, the PCs win, and they go home to lick their wounds and count their phat loot.

I realize at this point that I did skip an element of my game that is/was supposed to be important and still might be that deals with the Weave Scar that I mentioned.

I think I'll dedicate my next post here to discussing this Weave Scar before I go on to tell you about the next phase of the campaign.

Hope you enjoyed this. If you'd be intersted in seeing/running the adventure I'd be interested in cleaning it up, re-working some numbers, and giving it away. Leave a comment and let me know!

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 (furthering the story because it is their recent weave-magic interaction in the Isle of the Sea Drake that is making them attractive to the Spellplague).

There was also an encounter or two where Thay tried to get them back. The most interesting of which was done by one of Master Oshar's rivals in the Red Wizards, who wants to show him up by capturing and revealing his failures. His solution for Thay's future is summoned demons and devils. He tried to get them once with some legion devils when they were in the Underdark and this time he snuck a succubus into the crew of their ship.

They figured her out and that's when he attacked with the rest of his infernal troops.

Of course they won the day and made it to Westgate.

I still wish there was a good sailing system in 4e that was interesting and engaging. Someone should creat that just for me. But we got by, and soon (in my current sessions) the ship will fly and it won't matter much anyway (you're a long ways to seeing how they get the ship flying again, but I'll get there, promise).

This is a good time to mention the one house rule I was using at this point of the game. The Background Skill. One of my players said that 4e gave up all the skills that relayed information about a PCs background. Perform, craft, etc. So we said every player gets one "background skill" for free (and they can take others). This came into play becuase one of them is trained in "sailor" and one is trained in "merchant". The sailor is the captain of the ship while the merchant runs the affairs of cargo, trade, etc. for the company while they go from place to place on their quests.

I largely say that they don't get any extra money from the ship, by the way, which they felt cheated about. I suppose I should have found a more interesting solution. I would give them some treasure parcels in the form of cash from the ship and otherwise said that the ship uses a lot of it's money paying for itself and sending profits back to their patrons. This chafed them a bit as well and they started to wonder why they allowed these patrons to take so much from them...maybe they should go their own way. After all, they rescued the boat, so it's theirs, not the trading houses.

This has yet (two years later) to really come to a head...we'll see how it all plays out. *crosses fingers that I'll figure out a good solution before the time comes*

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 faith. And one is the father of the other's child...and in the secret employ of Oshar, destined to betray the party later (especially after the mother of his soon to be child is killed). These could also fill in as possible back up PCs in a pinch. Which has only panned out once...about 10 levels later.

Ultimately, the party never made s real connection with these NPCs. They're there in the background, but no one ever talks to them, asks their opinion on anything. They're not characters that the PCs care about despite the things I've done to reveal their story and desire to be more active.

So, anyway, all of these guys show up in Veltalar, capital of Aglarond to find the help of a PCs family the Chiascaros of the Two Shores trading company. But his parents are missing. So they take up a mission to take the company's remaining ship and go find them.

They've headed off to a small island not too far away and now the party is going there too. Until a sea drake sinks the ship. Enter the Isle of the Sea Drake adventure from Goodman Games. With some tweaks (making the evil wizard a Red Wizard, making the previous sunk ship owned by the PCs parents, and making the Raptor, the ship that they find later, an ancient but broken airship) this published adventure could be run almost exactly as written and not only fit my campaign, but advance my story.

The general story is that an evil wizard is using a magical item to control a sea drake and thus a couple of islands here. I also added a spot where there was some blue-fire weave magic that is going to play into my "restore the weave" story line.

Ultimately, the party explores the islands, defeats the wizard and his undead, takes their ship, the Raptor, and return to Aglarond with the PCs parents and a brand new ship. The NPCs become the crew, and the Two Shores take on the PCs as partners in their trading company.

They have a patron, a hint at another major story arch (weave magic is still out there), a mobile base of operations, and a new quest...did I mention the Raptor was a former airship...well guess what they're looking to do for about 9 levels, find help fixing it (the parent's contacts in the Five Companies will be helpful with that), gather materials, and then...fix it. A task they'll finish just at the end of Paragon tier. Epic, perfect time to get your own airship.

Oh, and the party got a name, finally. The Crew of the Raptor (real creative bunch I have there).

Well, that was the quick version of how I ran Isle of the Sea Drake. Next up for my party was a first sailing trip off to Westgate...which leads to adventure is Spellplague ruined destroyed cities, and a much larger push for a the new campaign arch.

So when last I wrote I avoided a TPK by having most of the party captured. Then they did a whole thing where they were freed by other PCs and an NPC (which on a side note allowed me and another player toy with some of the new Forgotten Realms races/classes...well, it was new at the time...I've mentioned I'm about 2 years behind on this thing, right).

So now they have to get out of Thay. Given that one of the characters is from a family in Aglarond (next door to Thay) that he decided would be called the Chiascaro family. They're a trading family, former members of the Five Companies (mercenaries with the only 5 remaining flying ships in the world), and the parents of this PC, plus the employers of two of the characters used to free the party...well, they decided that Aglarond looked like a safe haven.

This fit well into my original scheme for the campaign. I wanted the party to adventure through Thay in the heroic teir and escape into Aglarond. I would then launch the world into a war between Thay and Aglarond where Thay would send endless hordes of zombies at them, and to make matters worse, these zombies would be the infectious sort. So if they kill an Aglarondan soldier the ranks swell.

I don't recall if I wrote on this before, but the general story for this was going to lead to the final arch of the campaign...that's a bit ahead of myself. The orignal campaign idea (before I added a whole new thing with missing Mystra, etc that I know I mentioend before). They would escape Thay, go to Aglarond, help with the war effort, run special missions into Thay, and eventually build up to an ultimate conclusion with Szass Tam.

Szass, it turns out, is expanding his borders to make new Dread Rings so he can re-attempt his ritual to become a super-god. And without Mystra to contain him (it turns out when I added that story) there's no divine entity that can stop him. Well he's a massive tyrant, so he's totally getting Bane to help him a bit. He needs some divine power to channel after all, the whole ritual (in my world) is based on containing various sorts of energies. Arcane, divine, infernal, etc. etc. etc. Secretly, becuase these two would normally never help each other out, but Szass is just tricky enough to fool a god and a demon prince, he was also getting the aid of Orcus. Orcus helped him create a massive black crystal that fuels the contagious nature of his zombies. This crystal his hidden on the Astral Sea (on the body of Azuth...but the party was going to think it was Mystra herself until they got there...surprise). There is another crystal, in the capital of Thay, that Tam uses to control the zombies.

So the final arch was going to be the party getting in, destroying the first crystal thinking it will stop the lich and...surprise, you just made the throning endless horde of undead uncontrolled and without Tam's guidance they may just go ahead and consume the world. Final push, they head into the Astral and destroy the final crystal, which is tied to Szass Tam's phylactery, and the party wins the day. The end.

Most of this is still the final arch of my campaign, by the way, but there are some tweaks I've made along the way. There's also potential for the PCs to call up help from the likes of Eltab (demon prince), reveal the secret alliance with Orcus, leading to him and Bane abandoning Tam, and more.

Well, that was all a waaaay to long way to get to the rest of this story...how does the party get out of Thay (no, that really didn't get me to this at all did, it, it was just a complete tangent...but perhaps a useful one, we'll see).

The party starts their trek out of Thay, but they're still being hunted by their slave Master...Oshar. With the bracers on most of them he can find them and exert some influence on them and that sucks.

First, he sends his other team of Monster Hunters. The orignal heroic tier involved a rival group of monster hunters who would also provide some sympathetic NPCs (and a possible stable of replacement PCs if needed). They're going to end up filling that role and more as things actually proceed.

They defeat this rival group of NPCs but don't kill them. They then launch into a fight with Oshar himself as well as his two Red Wizard lackeys. The two lackeys are killed but Oshar escapes...which honesetly, I sort of cheesed. If I had played it straight they probably would have had him killed as well (even though he was higher level than them) but I pulled a bit of a deus ex machina and he got away. He's my big end of heroic boss fight, after all. And I've made them hate him for so long now, I couldn't just abandon that chance.

But, lo and behold, the party won and escaped into Thay. They still have their slave bracers on and so can be magically tracked pretty much anywhere...so they're not safe. But now they can go get help from the Chiascaro family...except, upon arrival, it is discovered that they took one of the two ships from their trading house, the Two Shores trading company, and went on a short task...which they haven't returned from and are late...bum bum bum...enter the side quest that was supposed to give me a break and accidentally introduced the side quest that would later dominate most of the paragon tier.

But I'll save that for next time when I talk about how I ran and modified the Goodman Games adventure, Isle of the Sea Drake, to fit my campaign.

Okay so in my last installment I explained how my players finally got out of the Underdark...and then I TPK'd them.

Okay, not really. One or two of them ran away successfully. The rest were captured rather than killed. This was actually part of the plan and fits the story well anyway. It's Thay, their all about taking slaves and captured slaves are more valuable than dead ones. What's more, if anyone actually knew who the PCs were then there is all the more reason to capture them and return them to their former Master Oshar to earn his gratitude (and perhaps future favors).

So the Shadar-Kai went off bring the captured PCs off to the Thayan capital.

Now I could have gone a couple of ways with this. I could have captured the PC who got away, taken them all back to Oshar, and continued the adventure the way I had originally planned it. They'll work for Thay for a while and the big climax of the Heroic teir would be ecaping. That was always my plan from the start and when they escaped into the Underdark it ruined those plans...now I can get that story back.

Option 2, however, meant giving the players what they wanted. They worked really hard and did some monumentally stupid things to get away from slavery. Plus, the FRCG had come out since I developed that original storyline and suddenly the mechanations of Thay had grown from being THE story to being a part of a much larger story that no longer needed them to be in Thay all the time.

So I went with the second choice, or at least give the PCs a chance to save themselves. One of the players (who had already had two PCs taken out now) brought in a new PC. His captured character was a member of a relatively well to do merchant family in Aglarond and it was decided that his family sent some of their employees after him to make sure he didn't get himself killed. They teamed up with the Wizard who wasn't captured to free the other PCs and get back on track.

This also allowed me to bring in the background of a character and make the Chiascaro family a more important player in the story. They ended up being owners of the Two Shores Trading Company (from Isle of the Sea Drake, published by Goodman Games, used for reasons that will become clear later). It allowed us to bring some Genasi into the game, which was a new race at the time that we wanted to play with.

Besides, if I really wanted the PCs back I could do it. Most of them at this point are still wearing the slave bracers that allows the Oshar to track them and theoretically exert some control over them...but that will play out more later.

This rescue encounter also allowed me to try my hand at monster creation for the first time. This was in the pre-Monster Builder days so it was a bit more of a task...but that said, it turned out that it wasn't too hard. Making monsters in 4e, it turned out, was quite do-able and effective. I wasn't going to do it all the time (not like I do now that I do have the Monster Builder...I seldom run a monster as written any more) but I realized that it could be done at times when I wanted a specific creature that only existed in my head, and this was a realization that would serve me well. Especially once the Monster Builder was released.

So the short of it is, they fought off my Shadow Hound and the Shadar Kai and escaped once again...but they were still in Thay. Off the went...but they weren't out of Thay yet. First, they're going to have to earn that freedom and perhaps the freedom of some others who show the players what would have happened if they hadn't escaped. But that will be for next time.

So last time I talked about how I used the unexpected trip into the Underdark to lay some future story seeds becuase the story I wanted to tell with my campaign changed from a zombie apocalypse story into a bring-Mystra-back-from-the-dead story...sort of (I quickly decided that it wouldn't actually be the return of Mystra, but the return of a god of magic, my first plan was Azuth, but I've since started thinking that one of the PCs is a better fit, probably our dwarven wizard). And all of this accidental questing throguh the underdark got us to level 3, just as planned. Now it's time to get out and for that, I also planned a pretty serious story hook.

You see, the exit to the Underdark that the PCs found just so happened to be directly under the Citadel that was Sass Tam's capital and (I decided) the home of one of his most important Dread Rings (although they've never been called that in the campaign itself).

My interpretation of the FR Campaign Guide talking about Tamm trying to become some super-more-than-a-god through a ritual using Dread Rings became a ritual where the Dread Rings were locations charged with various sorts of magic that Tamm was harnessing to power his ascension by exploiting the lack of controls due to a lack of Magic god. While exiting through this Dread Ring the PCs saw ways that this Ring was connected to other rings (although I don't think the players have pieced that together quite yet) indicating things like the Elements (this was before I knew/embraced the idea of the Elemental Chaos), the Astral Sea, the Abyss, etc.

It turned out that the Ring that the party was exiting through, was Tamm's Abyssal or Demonic power source. And what was at the center? Eltab. The Demon Lord who is an major part of Thay's history. He's been trapped again in a throne/prison and he's not too pleased about it. He did save a PC, however, from the demons that were going to destroy the party but laying some groundwork for that PC to return some day to release the Demon Lord. It was me laying some groundwork to have the PC's have to struggle with a choice later about if they should use the aid of a demon to help foil Tamm. This is a story beat that I hope to return to in the Epic tier. I'm playing a truly long-game here.

And I'll be honest, the player of the PC was a guy brand new to D&D and I really didn't want to kill his character at that time. He looked a little upset about it when it happened, although he could easily handle it now without issue, I'm sure. It's led to some great role-playing, though. The other PCs totally don't buy his story and for the last 12 levels have been waiting for him to do the bidding of his "demon master".

After they got out of the Dread Ring they still had to escape the complex and make it into the surface world. To do so, however, they had to sneak past one of the entrances to Sass Tam's Citadel, which was guarded by a team of Shadar-Kai who were also watching over a massive horde of undead. Undead which would become part of Tam's army when he assaulted Aglarond and other nearby areas. Something he needs to do in order to have new, life-filled land to drain the life from with new Dread Rings (his old ones having already failed, making them now useless due to a lack of remaining life/energy in that land).

The Shadar-Kai (followers of Orcus) and some symbols back in Eltab's prison were me lacing in some clues about some of the alliances that Tam has made to work towards his goals. He's working with Orcus, who thinks he's using Tam to raise a massive undead army and he can later betray Tam and use that army to conquer in his name. And he's also teamed up with Bane, as a follower out of convention. Orucs knows about Bane. Bane does not know about Orucs. And Tam is certain he's playing them both. Ultimately, I side with Tam. He's prepped and planned for this situation from the start and is ready for it when it all goes down.

But in the meantime, he needs Orcus' help raising and controlling the undead army (something done through a pair of artifacts Orcus supplied. A giant crystal in Thay controls the undead, and a twin crystal on the Astral Sea, located on (and powered by) the dead body of Azuth, god of wizards. But that's all story for the epic tier. He also sees the value in Bane's aid, as a divine intermediary, something he'll need to channel divine energy through one of his Dread Rings as part of his super-ritual.

In any case, that aside aside, the PCs make it to the exit of the complex, and lose the battle horribly. I had a choice to make, TPK, or story opportunity that could involve introducing some new PCs into the game, something one of my players was interested in doing anyway. So that's where we'll go for the next installment.

So in my last entry here I talked about how I handled the party throwing me for a loop by going into the Underdark instead of returning to the safety of being a elite unit of fighting slaves.

I also started to use this trek through the Underdark to lay the groundwork for some future stories for the campaign, or at least put some things out there that could become part of the story in the future.

First, there was the band of dwarves and dragonborn. They had teamed up to find an ancient anvil and/or forge. They believed it was in Thay and were sneaking into the evil realm through the Underdark with a small band in hopes of finding it. What the party didn't know was that I was laying clues that this forge was the very forge that craeted their slave bracers. Bracers they desperately wanted off. Bracers that could only be removed safely if you had the control rod (being held then by Red Wizard Oshar, their slave master) or destroyed by using the forge that made them. I was laying the groundwork for two possible story beats here, both of which could still come up, except my players seem to have completely forgotten this story element almost as soon as it happened. One, they could help the band find the forge and use it to remove the bracers, and two they have allies hiding under Thay that could be useful in a future assault into the place. The party was even nice enough to lead them to the obelisk in the Bug Cave (see a previous post) where they would be safe from scrying (a fact that was established in order to make that a possible future headquarters for the party working in Thay even though they were otherwise easy to scry because of the bracers). It was my thought at the time that they would have many covert hit and run missions in Thay and the Bug Cave would act as a base of operations, these dwaves and dragonborn would be the support staff during those missions. Almost none of that panned out, but there is still some potential there.

Second, they met and saved a drow noble/paladin (still not a nice guy) who has a deep seeded hatred for Thay. He gave them a message stone telling them that when they were going to strike against Thay they should contact him and he will bring his resources to bear to see Sazz Tam fall.

This was all when the story was that Tam was creating a zombie apocalypse that would threaten to overwhelm the world. The party would be working out of nearby Aglarond and within Thay to slow the scourge and eventually destroy both a control crystal back in the ziggurat that was the main location back when they were slaves in Thay. Then they'd have to travel to the Astral Sea to destroy the other crystal that was being used to raise all the undead since controlling just the one would only make Tam lose control, but wouldn't stop the infectious spread of the walking dead.

All of that changed, however, or got modified, when the Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide came out and suddenly a new story appeared to me as of mana from the heavens. But I'll save that for the next installment. Needless to say, though, at this point the party got out of the Underdark after killing off a duo of slave-cathers sent by Oshar. A couple of badass warriors based on an image I clipped out of my collection of Paizo published Dragon magazines.

But when the party escaped the Underdark, finally, I had a whole new campaign arc to introduce and I would start to lay the groundwork for that almost immediately.