RPGaDay2024 Day 20 - Amazing Adventure

In the 20+ years my gaming group has been together, I've run about 14 years of games spread across three campaigns. In those 14 years, we've had some incredible multi-session adventures and story arcs. Today, I'll describe one of the most memorable of those.

The Moon Realm of Drendir

In my first campaign, the characters (mid-to-high level) had to acquire artifacts and information that didn't exist anymore, so they entered the dream realm of an ancient elf by the name of Drendir who was also the Old God of Artem, one of the two lunar objects. 

At the time of the campaign, Drendir was long dead and had been replaced by one of the new gods, but the old gods of my world are strong dreamers; the death of an elf-god didn't necessarily mean the death of his memories of his life. In Sherlock terms, the realm was literally his "mind palace", and was somewhere that could be found if you knew where to look.

The realm was multi-phased and each phase was defined as a phase of Artem as it corresponded to aspects of his life: youth (Waxing Gibbous), adult and growing in power(First Quarter), and Old God(Full), The Downfall (Three Quarter) and his death (New). The party interacted with each phase in order, before finding a portal that took them on to the next phase.

In traveling this way, they got to see the same places and people that Drendir saw, altered in each phase by circumstances as he perceived or experienced them, over time. This meant that saw situations set up in one phase of his life and resolved in the next. And because dream magic is weird, it was not just a vision, but actually experiencing the events as they occurred, but where they were there for it.

It was probably a 2-month adventure:

Finding the road into the realm was a whole session of its own, which led to them being lost on an endless dream road from which they could find no escape. Like many of my puzzles, I don't have preset conditions for solving them. I let them try things, and if they seem reasonable, they work and I describe the implications of their solution. In this case, the dwarven cleric (dwarves are immune to dream magic in my world, being creatures of iron) asserted reality against the dream road. He rolled a natural 20 on his efforts and destroyed the dream road forever, dumping them into the Dream Realm.

I planned it out, such that each "phase" was a day's adventure. Each week, they started the session at a portal entrance, found Drendir in his current state, got to know him, and played through the phase--ending up at the exit portal. As they journeyed, Drendir recognized them from the previous phase and while they knew they didn't exactly belong because they weren't there the first time, he didn't take it personally. He helped them, such as he could, without changing the nature of the phase they were in. Often he'd assign his friend Dein, another ancient elf, to help them. This worked because Dein was part of Drendir's dreams and memories, but wasn't a controller of the realm.

Through this sequence of events, the party got to experience history first-hand. They not only learned what they were after but a lot about the real history of the ancient elves. (In my 3.x game, I award skill points for situations where the party experiences so much that they must have learned something. In this case, I awarded 2 points of Knowledge: History, specialty in Ancient Elves to everybody. Those who didn't have that skill gained the points as if it were a trained skill. Those who had already trained in Knowledge: History got the points incrementally to whatever they already had.)

It was a fun and memorable adventure for both me and the players. Without trying to do a heavy exposition dump, the players got to learn, experience and explore events, meet people, and literally change history in fixed ways.

It was great world-building for me, as I got to dive into one of the old gods. My co-creator and I understand the old gods, but haven't exhaustively defined them; I bring them in and define them as needed for whatever story is being told. Since most of them are dead, there isn't a lot of opportunity to use the old Gods. This let me do so, and at the same time, I was able to bring some other Old Gods and historical figures into the story.

I also got to experiment with what I could do with time and dreams, to help me build out historic events and let the party feel they were really a part of things without following a prescriptive path. It gave me a chance to explore the world-building concepts of dream vs reality, which I'm passionate about, especially in my game world of Trinity.

A fun side effect of all this was that when they left the realm, none of it had happened, sort of. It was "only" a dream, so it didn't happen, but at the same time, they came back with the object they were after and the knowledge they were pursuing. In addition, because the dwarf is immune to dream magics, Dein recognized him when they ran into him later and was able to help them use what they had gained, in the name of his old friend.

Another fun thing: one of their complaints about the session was that they didn't get much treasure. I pointed out the rooms full of ancient tapestries I'd described as part of the New phase of the realm, just before they left. Rather than feeling cheated, they slapped their head and realized they'd missed the obvious. I made it up to them later, but it was a running joke for the rest of the campaign.

While this adventure took place in 2006 or 2007, it still sticks out in my mind as memorable, and when I mention it to the players, they think of it fondly because of the interesting, fun and memorable things that happened. And as a game creator and world builder, I definitely grew from the experience of creating this setting and story.