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Wayne
Underboss
1371 Posts
    
 | | 04/26/2006 1:45 AM |
| After a TPK in Sons of Gruumsh, I started an Eberron campaign. We've played three sessions so far, and I think it's going well. I'm going to chronicle the entire campaign, with journal entries either from my players (from the POV of their characters, usually) or from me.
Please note that I'm going to be running the series of adventures that starts in the Eberron Campiagn Sourcebook and continues in Shadows of the Last War. If you intend to play in these adventures, it will ruin your fun to read these entries.
Dramatic Personae:
Slate -- A "male" warforged artificer with a botched personality imprint.
Calmoothra -- A male shifter ranger from the Eldeen Reaches with absolutely zero couth.
Jennelyn -- A dual-wielding female elf scout from Valenar.
Umari -- A male spirit folk shugenja, storm tossed into the Shadow Marches.
"Blank" -- A heretofore unnamed "male" warforged fighter and erstwhile servant of Lady Elaydren d'Cannith. | |
Jeff "Wayne Laredo" Wilder | Email | Have/Want List | Trade Policies | Are You an Ethical Trader?
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Wayne
Underboss
1371 Posts
| | 04/26/2006 1:47 AM |
| Slate's Background (by LCS, Slate's player)
DIGGERS' UNION / BRELAND / SHARN -- REPORT XN457R12 -- [insert date here, 6 months before start]
Mission Report (Final), Agent Colin Dwyr
Matron Martra:
What follows are the complete events and details surrounding my most recent mission. I regret that I am unable to deliver this report to you in person, but the mission that Patron Zuzrin Tellun has insisted I undertake immediately will prevent me from returning to Sharn for some time.
The initial phase of the contract was completed without incident. With the assistance of several other agents, I retrieved the cargo from the warehouse in Sharn and used the pre-arranged transportation to bring it to the town of Zilspar near the border region between Breland and Zilargo.
The destination was a cluttered warehouse near the edge of town, with barely enough free space for the cargo to be stored. As directed, I remained with the cargo and waited for our employer while the other agents returned to Sharn.
I had several days to investigate the contents of the warehouse, although I needed to ensure that no signs of my search remained for more than a few moments, since the exact timing of our employer's arrival was unknown. The majority of the equipment seemed to be intended for use in some type of laboratory, although there many items that I was unfamiliar with. Many items bore the markings of House Cannith, and the few items that I recognized were used for the purposes of alchemy and magecraft. Our employer, the gnome Aolien Enttaer, arrived close to sundown on the third day after my arrival at the warehouse.
When he arrived, he looked me over quickly and then promptly ignored me for several hours. He seemed shorter than most of the other gnomes I've seen, but maybe it was just the fact that he frequently disappeared behind the low piles of junk everywhere as he moved about the warehouse. He spent those first hours going back and forth about the warehouse, putting together equipment and heating beakers and liquids, almost like he was deciding what to do at random in order to keep me from understanding his purpose. At the time, I suspected his age had made him even more paranoid than most gnomes, and perhaps had added a little bit of insanity to the mix.
When he was finally done with whatever preparations he had been making, he stopped to look me over again. When he noticed the Mark of Making on my forearm, he scowled and said "So, did House Cannith send you here to spy on me?" I'm not sure if I managed to convince him of the truth that my only loyalty was to the Diggers' Union and to completing the mission we had undertaken, but eventually he asked "And the others... they have all left to return to Sharn?" and seemed satisfied with my response that they had left immediately after the cargo had been delivered.
He moved toward the cargo crate, and pulled a small crystal shard out of one of the many pockets on his robe. As he waved the shard near the crate, magical runes and lines came into view and then gradually faded. He stepped back, pointed towards a crowbar leaning against a pile of junk near the wall, and ordered me to open it. Being curious about what he had paid so much to have delivered to him, I didn't object to the command.
As the front panel of the crate finally fell away, it revealed the contents: one of the warforged, looking as if it was brand new, rather than having endured years of battle in the war. It didn't seem to be active, until the gnome gave an order for it to stand, and it did. The gnome ordered me to guide it over to another empty space near a wall, where there was some sort of frame with restraints and various tubes and connections. This warforged didn't seem to have any of the personality or the intellegence of most of its kind... it followed simple one word orders and walked in the direction it was prodded.
As the | |
Jeff "Wayne Laredo" Wilder | Email | Have/Want List | Trade Policies | Are You an Ethical Trader?
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Wayne
Underboss
1371 Posts
| | 04/26/2006 1:50 AM |
| The Forgotten Forge (by LCS, SLate's player)
Finally, it looked like the constant drizzle of the last few days was going to let up for a while. I don't really mind the rain, but sometimes the dampness makes it difficult to keep the darkwood fibers from warping while I rebind them into place. If the fibers aren't bound tightly, sometimes they work themselves loose at the most inopportune moments, and the hand will drop whatever it's holding or the arm will just go limp... not good at all.
I had just finished some repairs and was about to start on my next customer when my warforged friend who works for House Cannith arrived. I have done repairs and favors for him before, and he has helped me out in return, especially the time when Gharblek and his bugbear thugs decided that they wanted to take over my workshop as their base of operations in this part of the slums.
One of the battle-worn 'forged who likes to sit outside my workshop, who fought for almost 20 years in the war, always asks my friend's name whenever he stops by. It doesn't seem to bother my friend, but it's a bit awkward since he doesn't have a name. I'm really glad that someone who helped activate me was able to tell me what my name is, since it would be really strange not to know that I'm Slate... it's hard to imagine what it must be like to not know your own name yet.
My friend was stopping by to see if I had time to go with him to help him on a job he had to do. None of the repairs that were waiting were urgent, and most of them were warforged who didn't have much money to pay me so they were willing to wait until I had spare time to work on them anyway. I told my customers that I would be back in a few hours.
My friend was supposed to go to the upper levels of Kelsa Spire, to fetch a professor that his mistress wanted to meet with. I wasn't sure that he needed my help, since it didn't seem very dangerous, but I had never been that high up in the city before and it seemed interesting.
When we reach the professor's level, I was tempted to drop a pebble from one of the sky bridges so that I could calculate the amount that it was slowed by the magical field as it dropped towards the ground, but I didn't want to get my friend in trouble with the watch. We were almost at the professor's tower when my friend motioned for me to stop. I only saw a man slumped against the railing of the bridge, but my friend said that someone had just slipped over the railing and out of sight. I looked down, but didn't see anyone who had jumped down to a bridge on a lower level.
Apparently, whoever it was had climbed along the outside of the railing and then back onto this level near the other end of the bridge. It looked like there was some kind of argument going on with three people who had approached from the other direction. We went over to check on the man slumped over, and one of the people from the other group came over as well. It was hard to tell, but it looked like the man was already dead and there wasn't anything we could do. Meanwhile, the other two people had drawn their weapons, and so had the mysterious figure, who we could now tell was a warforged like us.
My friend and I headed over towards the argument. The other people and the warforged had taken a few swings at each other, and both the warforged and one of the people looked badly injured. The warforged said that it was a follower of the Lord of Blades, and wanted us to attack the other people, but it didn't seem right since it was obviously involved with the death of the man on the bridge. I told the warforged that he needed to put his weapon away, but he didn't listen. I swung my morningstar, just to make it stop, but it only made it angry. It started attacking me, and its second blow disabled me. My friend and one of the other people managed to disable it before it could hurt anyone else, though.
My friend told me later that one of the other people had tried to use a healing spell on me, which seemed to have worked much better than I would have expected. He also described a little flying construct that had detached from the other warforged after it was disabled, which I think was probably some kind of messenger that must have gone back to whomever had sent this warforged after the professor.
It wasn't long before we could hear the shouts of the City Watch coming to investigate. We told them what had happened, but we had a hard time convincing them at first that we weren't responsible, since one of the other three people (a shifter) had run away before the Watch got there. I wasn't sure why, but I found out later that he didn't have ID papers. Eventually we convinced the leader, a Sergeant Dolom, that we had arrived after the man had been killed and had only been involved in capturing the perpetrator.
We found out that the dead man, whose name was Bonal Geldem, was the professor that my friend had been sent to escort to his mistress. I'm not sure why he left the tower before we got there, but it turned out to be a very bad decision. Apparently, the other three people who had helped to stop the other warforged had also been looking for this professor.
Sergeant Dolom sent us on our way. My friend needed to report back to his mistress, and tell her what had happened to the professor. The other three people seemed like they didn't have anywhere to go, so I offered to let them stay at my workshop and rest for the night since it looked like they needed it.
One of the people was Umari, who said he was a spirit folk, and that he had come from very very far away. He was on a ship that was forced off-course by a powerful storm, and he wasn't sure how to get back home. He was the one who used his healing to fix me.
The shifter rejoined us after the City Watch left, and his name was Calmoothra. I don't know why he was so worried about the watch, and although he would have gotten into trouble for not having any ID, it would have been worse if the Watch had caught him trying to run away. He's from somewhere called the Eldeen Reaches.
The other person was Jennalyn, who looks sort of like an elf. She didn't say much about where she was from, but she was hurt pretty badly in the fight with the other warforged, so she probably just wanted to rest.
I worked on myself for a while to fix the damage from the other warforged's attacks, and eventually my friend returned from his meeting with Lady d'Cannith. She told him that she wants to meet with all five of us in the morning, and the other people seem willing, so that is what we will do.
We were supposed to meet at a tavern called the Broken Anvil, which is run by House Ghallanda. When we arrived, we were shown to a private room. There were a lot of different liqueurs, and I dabbed a little bit of a few of them on my fingers to see how they tasted.
My friend's mistress arrived a few minutes later, and introduced herself as Lady Elaydren d'Cannith. She asked a few questions of Umari, Jennalyn, and Calmoothra, and seemed really interested in where they were from and why they were in Sharn. I found out that Umari had hoped that the professor would be able to tell him how to get home, and he might have been able to if he hadn't been killed.
Lady d'Cannith got out a journal that had been found on the professor's body, and which she had gotten back from the City Watch. It seemed to be blank, but as she moved her ring over the pages, writing started to appear. She told us that the professor had been researching an old relic that belonged to House Cannith, a piece of something called a schema, which is like a magical pattern for making things. The professor believed that it was in a foundry in the ruins beneath the city. She offered to pay us to recover the relic for her.
It seemed like it would be interesting, and everyone else agreed that we could do it. We got a little bit of gold up front to purchase supplies, and Lady d'Cannith also gave us a pair of "shadow guardians" as an advance against our pay for the mission. She said that they would activate to protect someone from a fatal blow. It seemed like a good thing to have with us, since recovering the schema would probably be dangerous. Jennalyn and Calmoothra each took one of the guardians.
Lady d'Cannith also gave us the journal, and said that we would probably need it to gain access to the schema. She also mentioned that the professor had said something about being sure to bring fire, although she didn't know exactly what he meant or why it was needed.
The first step in finding the passageway that would lead to the foundry was to find a valve cluster in the sewers of Dorasharn Tower. We knew the passageway was near cluster 213, but we didn't know how to find the valve cluster. We weren't sure if we would be able to find access at the bottom of the tower, so we entered at one of the lower levels. We wandered into a market area, looking for a way to reach the sewers.
We didn't find a way into the sewers, but we did find out that there was a goblin merchant named Skakan in the market that knew his way around the sewers pretty well. At first, it seemed like we might be able to get the information we needed fairly cheaply, but Calmoothra ended up insulting the goblin and then tried to steal something. We managed to avoid bloodshed, but the price for the information we needed went up higher than we wanted to pay. We tried to negotiate, but the only other option was to do a favor for Skakan that wouldn't have been right to do.
We went off again, looking for a way into the sewers on our own. We found an access hatch, but the lock has too complicated for me to pick. My friend was able to break the latch through brute force though, so we were able to get into the sewers. After wandering around down there for a few hours, we headed back. We needed Skakan's help.
We finally convinced the goblin to help us, although we had to pay him the 100 silver pieces the information would have originally cost up front, and then another 200 silver pieces when we returned if we were able to complete our mission.
Skakan went with us through the sewer, and he told me all about the fiendish dire crocodiles that live in the sewers of Sharn while we walked. He seems to know a lot about them. A couple of times it sounded like someone was following us, but we didn't see anyone else. Eventually, we reached a passageway deep in the sewers with a stairway down, and Skakan told us how to get the rest of the way to the valve cluster. He wished us good luck, and headed back to the market.
We headed down the stairway, which lead to a sewer channel. As we walked along the channel, a warforged moved towards my friend from the shadows, and two shifters came at us from the other end of the passageway. The warforged demanded that we hand over the professor's journal, and when we refused, they attacked.
There were pipes from the sewer coming out of the walls, and every few seconds one of them would let out a big gush of dirty water. We didn't have much trouble with the warforged, although it had another one of those messengers, which detached when he was disabled and got away. The shifters tried to run away after the warforged went down, but we managed to catch up with them before they could get away. We salvaged their weapons and armor before the bodies floated away, but other than that they didn't have much of interest.
We continued down the passageway, which branched to the left and right. One way was blocked by steel bars, but the other way lead to the valve cluster that we were looking for.
The hatch that covered the passageway had the same hammer and anvil symbol on it as the journal (an old symbol used House Cannith). It also had magical runes around the hatch cover. The hatch was locked, but we touched the journal to the hatch, and we were able to open it. There was a steep shaft on the other side of the hatch, and we tied and knotted a bunch of ropes to try to make the climb easier.
The shaft gradually leveled out into a tunnel, and when we reached the end, it opened up into a huge cavern full of ruined buildings. My friend climbed down and walked out a bit into the cavern while Umari and I climbed down. We started to hear strange clicking noises, and a weird rustling that was echoing all around us.
Suddenly, beetles seemed to be coming from everywhere, climbing out from underneath the rubble and coalescing around my friend. They must have been really hungry, since they were trying to eat a warforged! The beetles started to swarm over the three of us that had climbed down, and we put some distance between ourselves to try to get out of their midst. I remembered what Lady Eladrin had said about the professor's suggestion to make sure to bring fire, and reminded everyone. We used one of the flasks of alchemist's fire, and it killed the beetles in the area it burned. The beetles started to swarm up into the tunnel above where Jennalyn was still standing, but we had torches and eventually managed to burn enough of them that the rest of the beetles scattered. I could still hear the clicking of beetles coming from other parts of the cavern, so I kept my torch ready in case another swarm started to form.
We followed the wall of the cavern, and eventually came to a larger building that was mostly intact. Towards the back corner, there was so much rubble that I had a difficult time climbing over it. I head back around the other way, and reached the front door of the building about the same time as the others. The double doors were big, and looked like they had been covered with a thin layer of adamantine. They had the symbol of House Cannith on them and runes similar to the ones on the hatch, but when we touched the journal to them, nothing happened. It looked like the magic that was supposed to open the doors had gradually dissipated and no longer had enough power to work properly.
Jennalyn and I searched the walls, looking for another way in, while my friend began breaking through the wall near the door. WHile he was working, some rats were attracted by the noise. The rats started chasing after Umari, ignoring the rest of us. Jennalyn and I were still searching, but when I heard my friend stop pounding on the wall, I went over to see if he had broken through and saw the rats. Calmoothra and my friend had killed one the rats and injured the other, and I managed to finish off the wounded one before it could bite Umari again.
As my friend got back to work on the wall (he had almost broken through when the rats attacked), I looked at the bodies of the rats. The rats had really tough skin, with spikes jutting out all over the place, and oversized teeth and claws. Obviously the rats that lived here had to be much tougher to survive the sewers, since weaker rats would be easy prey for the fiendish dire crocodiles.
My friend managed to break a large enough hole in the wall for us to enter the building, so we went inside. A large chunk of the ceiling had caved in, which would have allowed for easy access through the roof if we had thought of it. There was some sort of metal dog crushed underneath the rubble, and a large forge covered the far wall. There were also two more metal dogs, which were still active, and not happy to see us.
The dogs were armored with metal plates, and had sharp blades for teeth. One of them attacked me, and the other went after Calmoothra. We managed to fight them off, and as each one was disabled, a rod popped out of the dog's foreheads. One rod was shaped like a triangle, and the other like a rectangle.
When we searched the room, we discovered that there were corresponding holes in the side of the forge, as well as a third pentagon shaped hole. We guessed that the crushed dog probably had a third rod, and my friend moved enough of the rubble with Calmoothra's help to get it. Jennalyn was searching the shelves, and found a variety of weapons.
I was trying to figure out which order to insert the rods into the forge, and tried the rectangular one first. It triggered a burst of electricity, which shocked me badly. I figured out that the rods needed to be inserted in the proper order, and that the order most likely was based on the number of sides of the shaped rods. The order was probably either triangle first, rectangle second, and pentagon third, or the reverse. I wasn't quite ready to test my hypothesis, since another shock would have been very dangerous to me, so my friend stepped up and inserted the triangle rod. Nothing bad happened, so he continued, and as the final rod was inserted, the metal tiles on the floor started sliding to one side, revealing a narrow stairway leading down.
The passageway didn't go more than a few feet, and led to a small compartment. We found the relic, a star shaped adamantine piece covered in strange symbols and a very old map, as well as some very old gold and silver pieces and a few gold ingots.
Now that we had recovered the relic, all we had to do was get it back to the surface. As we left the foundry, a crossbow bolt came flying out of the darkness, but it was fired just enough off to the side that it wouldn't hit us. It was another agent of the Lord of Blades, who called himself Saber and demanded that we turn over the schema to him. As the others moved towards the rubble piles that Saber was taking cover behind, he fired a flaming bolt from his crossbow that just barely bounced off of my body plating.
Jennalyn and Calmoothra circled around as my friend swung several powerful blows against Saber. When it looked like that battle was going against him, he thought about trying to get away, but we had him trapped. Finally he went down, and unlike the others, there was no messenger. Hopefully that means that he was the last one looking for us and the schema. We recovered a very well made longsword that Saber had been using, which turned out to be magical, as well as a few other items including a magic bolt that I'm guessing is another flaming bolt.
We were exhausted from the battles and our explorations, so we decided to try to find a place to rest in one of the other ruined buildings. It turned out to be a temple, dedicated to Onatar, who is supposed to be the patron of crafts, industry, and artificers. Even though the temple had been abandoned for a very long time, it felt strangely safe to stay there. We also found a font that still contained some kind of magical liquid, enough to be several doses.
After resting we headed back the way we had come, and made it safely back to the inhabited parts of the tower. We sold some of the weapons we had recovered from the foundry, and paid Skavan the rest of his fee.
Lady Elaydren was very pleased when we delivered the schema to her. She paid us the rest of the gold she had promised, and said that she might have work for us in the future. If we check with the House Sivis message station at Barmin Tower, she would leave a message for us there if she has another job for us. She also seemed very interested in the map we recovered, which she says is a map of an area called the Mournlands. She asked to keep the map, but made a copy for us. There are strange symbols on the map that I am hoping to try to decipher when I have a bit more time.
For now, I am headed back to my workshop, and the others are planning to stay there with me for the moment as well. I'm sure that I have a lot of work waiting for me, and my adventure has given me a few ideas of things that would be useful to try to make. It's really too bad that I didn't get to see a fiendish dire crocodile myself, but maybe next time... | |
Jeff "Wayne Laredo" Wilder | Email | Have/Want List | Trade Policies | Are You an Ethical Trader?
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IanB
Commander
3112 Posts
| | 04/26/2006 3:07 AM |
| I ran these and had a very good time with them. We'll be starting the newest Golden Dragon one as soon the DMship for our weeknight thing rotates back to me.
Let me know if you want to compare notes on any upcoming stuff. | |
Anson on WotC boards | |
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Korhal_IV
Sergeant
852 Posts
| | 04/27/2006 8:56 PM |
| Played through this entire series as a warforged cleric; good times. Also read most of the modules (after, and, er, sometimes before playing through them - I was in line for DMing them but another guy cut ahead of me - not that I minded very much. :) ).
Haven't done Golden Dragon yet, but as my group managed to capture an airship during Grasp of the Emerald Claw, it will be interesting to see how the GM tries to work that one in. | |
I now have a Have/Want list updated with all my rares! Stop by to take a look!
Trade References: www.maxminis.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=8560 | |
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Wayne
Underboss
1371 Posts
| | 04/28/2006 7:31 AM |
| I'm not sure my players -- with the exception of LCS, who always launches himself head-first into games -- are really "getting" Eberron. I've always been pretty stingy with magic, in an attempt to make the game more about characters' abilities rather than items, so I think it might be coming as a shock to them that there are towers that float in the sky and a train that rides on lightning.
Actually, I take that back ... the woman who plays the Charisma 7 male shifter is doing a good job, as is the guy playing the (thus far) nameless warforged fighter.
But one of my best friends, who plays the spirit folk shugenja, is just kinda blah -- no flavor to his character at all -- and his roommate pretty much plays the same character in every game ... a slightly bitchy contrarian "light" fighter or rogue. (Not coincidentally, the player herself is a slightly bitchy contrarian.) | |
Jeff "Wayne Laredo" Wilder | Email | Have/Want List | Trade Policies | Are You an Ethical Trader?
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IanB
Commander
3112 Posts
| | 04/28/2006 2:35 PM |
| Wait, you have contrarian friends? I can't believe it.
I think I have a bit of that problem as well, but I don't actually think I've done a great job of really selling the setting.
I'm guessing though that the players in your game who aren't completely into it probably haven't really read through the whole campaign setting or the player's guide. It can be hard to adjust to a new setting when you're not really grounded in it, I think. | |
Anson on WotC boards | |
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Korhal_IV
Sergeant
852 Posts
| | 04/29/2006 5:32 PM |
| We're pretty lucky with our group; Eberron was the first introduction to d20 for the two new players, both the DM and I were enthusiastic about the setting, and the last player still appreciates it even if it's not his favorite setting.
Still, if you've got 3 of 5 players into it, it's going well. Hopefully the other two will warm up (though as one of those *highly* annoying purist/canon types, a spirit folk shugenja in Eberron already raises the hair on the back of my neck. :p). | |
I now have a Have/Want list updated with all my rares! Stop by to take a look!
Trade References: www.maxminis.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=8560 | |
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IanB
Commander
3112 Posts
| | 04/30/2006 12:03 AM |
| quote:
Originally posted by Korhal_IV
We're pretty lucky with our group; Eberron was the first introduction to d20 for the two new players, both the DM and I were enthusiastic about the setting, and the last player still appreciates it even if it's not his favorite setting.
Still, if you've got 3 of 5 players into it, it's going well. Hopefully the other two will warm up (though as one of those *highly* annoying purist/canon types, a spirit folk shugenja in Eberron already raises the hair on the back of my neck. :p).
Hey, those are both in sidebars in the Player's Guide! | |
Anson on WotC boards | |
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Wayne
Underboss
1371 Posts
| | 04/30/2006 1:59 PM |
| quote:
Originally posted by IanB
Hey, those are both in sidebars in the Player's Guide!
True, although I didn't know that at the time of character creation. (The player of the shugenja is beginning to discover that there are eerily similar spellcasters in the strange continent he's marooned on, although they are very rare.) | |
Jeff "Wayne Laredo" Wilder | Email | Have/Want List | Trade Policies | Are You an Ethical Trader?
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