Wow, four and a half years have come and gone. When I was last updating this site, I was hoping to update weekly and provide information about how to run a game in various ways. But life got in the way. Dez's player and I were dating and broke up, which left me without a place to live days after I got fired from my job at the time (the grocery store where I worked didn't believe me when I said someone broke into my house and that I was late because I was speaking with the police). I stopped updating because I needed to get my life on track and work on some personal stuff--lots of therapy and other growth. It was a wild time, and I'm happy to report I'm in a much better place, and of course there were loads of other events in between (going to grad school, falling in love, having my heart broken, moving across the country to be with family, and much more). Suffice it to say that I'm in a different, better place now, and I'd like to think I'm inclined to update again. Of course, life is unpredictable, so we'll see, but I do have some new stuff to talk about: three new campaigns, one-shots in a variety of systems, and general tools for running games.
But of course, you're not here for the personal stuff. Thanks for indulging me this far. So let's talk about the Eastweald campaign, which has been finished for a while now. I'm going to give some overall updates on it and prepare for notes on more recent stuff. So what ended up happening in the Eastweald?
After dealing with a series of encounters in Feirmor and losing Dez, the party headed for a small town called Splitaxe, where they made a few friends and quickly moved on to Fort McCarthy, where they bested a clan of barbarians and bandits. They created an outpost in the fort's place to monitor dangerous folks in the area and moved onto the large city Woodhearth. Many things happened in Woodhearth: Gerald found his childhood home, Ell learned new skills, and the party were deemed heroes for their conduct at Fort McCarthy. The party then headed to Blackleaf Falls, the home of Carric's order of paladins. There, the campaign began to solidify.
In Blackleaf Falls, the party met a strange ranger named Vincent, who pledged his help to deal with the increasingly odd happenings in the area. Carric was told of a mounting evil in the area, which they eventually learned was a surge in Underdark creatures. The Underdark is home to Drow classically, but I added a small collection of other Underdark races. Dark dwarves are called Duergar, also a classic race in the D&D canon. But I also added deeplings, halfling-like creatures with exoskeletons and telepathic powers, and the gant, a race of orc-like creatures with long necks, high intelligence, and a xenophobic worldview. These four Underdark groups vied for control of a section of the Underdark near a passage to the surface world. Carric learned that most of the Underdark denizens would try to break through and take over the surface.
Meanwhile, Gerald learned from a seer that goliaths like him were sailing for the coast of Evanoch, not far from the Eastweald. Dozens of longboats loaded with the goliaths were set to arrive at imperialist human city New Dalton, one day's ride away. With their limited time, the party set to investigating both potential threats with journeys across the Eastweald to scholars, religious orders, and adventurers. They learned that both the incursion from the Underdark and the arrival of the goliaths would happen within a day or two of each other.
At the same time, Ell was trying to solve the mystery of various strange magics that were appearing more and more around the party. She was seemingly both interested in learning to defend against these magics and learning them herself. The signs pointed toward a fabled dragon whose location was unknown. A dwarf named Fiskar appeared in the campaign before too long, befriending Ell and the party at large and helping with tasks across the Eastweald. Fiskar always seemed a bit dodgy, but the players wrote that off as him being a dodgy guy, as rogues often are.
As the clock ticked on, the party was forced to make the trip to New Dalton and receive the goliaths. It turned out that the goliaths wanted a new home in Evanoch, somewhere they could call their own and not encroach on the good people of the continent. The party led them to the entrance to the Underdark. Before they could enter, Fiskar turned into a dragon and trapped them inside the entrance with a cave-in. Betrayed and with no other options, the party and the goliaths headed deeper into the Underdark and began to slay legions of threatening Underdark foes with the intention of making the Underdark the new home of the goliaths. I created a combat minigame to speed up the process of dozens of encounters. I no longer have the numbers I used for the minigame, but it involved rolling dice to see how many enemies the players could damage at once and how much damage they received as a result of the attack. It functioned reasonably well and resulted in the party clearing a large swath of the area in a relatively short amount of time. The goliaths' help in combat also sped the process along.
With the Underdark no longer a threat to the surface and a new home for the goliaths, all that remained was facing off against the Big Bad. It was essentially Vecna in a human avatar. This detail makes more sense when you include the fact that Vecna had been luring Carric over the darker side of life over the second half of the campaign. And as they fought Vecna, Carric made a heel turn: he joined Vecna and fought the rest of the party. It's hard to overstate how surprising this was to the whole group, myself included. I think even Carric's player was a bit surprised. Ell and Gerald managed to beat Vecna and Carric with help from a few goliaths and some careful strategy on the good guys' part. The campaign ended with each of the three player's personalized arcs complete, though I still think things kinda got away from me toward the end of the campaign. I put down a few too many possible storylines, and while I loved having a personalized storyline for each player, it got a bit unwieldy when combined with my penchant for throwing out loads of possibilities to see which the party was interested in. I was also more in improv mode than storytelling mode for most of the campaign, so lots of smaller stories never had a payoff. The group enjoyed the campaign overall, but I know I would change a few things if I could.
Obviously, this hyper-compressed version of the story is not highly satisfying. I had hoped to chronicle the finer details (and have them fresh in my memory at the time of writing). But for a campaign that spanned nearly two years, this is the best I can do to not overwhelm you with the small stuff. I'm including this summary more out of completionist neurosis than because it will be satisfying--sorry about that. But in the end, the most important thing was that the whole group, myself included, had a good time creating stories together. We laughed a lot--once, Gerald's impressive strength and lack of experience with doors caused him to not know how hard to knock on doors, and I had Gerald roll a d20 to see how hard he would knock. Both natural 20s and natural 1s are obviously hilarious, but so was seeing his player celebrate an 11. Little moments like this are what D&D is about for me: playing off your friends and having a good time while also sharing a creation. And there certainly was plenty of that, so I'll call the campaign a success overall.
Next time(s) on Over the DM's Shoulder: a custom one-shot designed based on the movie musical Cats (2019), notes on how to run a mystery campaign, and resources so that you don't have to come up with names for NPCs on the spot.
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