RPGaDay2024 Day 21 - Classic Campaigns

Before I started writing this, I'd have said it was an easy question. The obvious answer is my 7-year campaign, called the Guardians of Ridlen. However, my two "honorable mention" callouts ended up being almost full writeups of their own, so I'm going to just go with it and include all three.

The Guardians of Ridlen 

The concept of this campaign was that in the prosperous country of Thorin, there were seven duchies and the characters were special problem solvers assigned to and reporting directly to a duke. I'd run one campaign earlier, when I lived in New York, called "Guardians of Greenlen." I liked the concept and decided to change the location for the next game, when D&D 3e came out.

The campaign started with just two players, but quickly expanded to include numerous players over several years, but ultimately ending up with six core players. The growth was friends, friends-of-friends, and one person I met at a game store who seemed nice, so got invited to join. (Spoiler: He was very nice, and we've been friends ever since.)

The campaign was epic, going from 2nd to 17th level characters, over seven years of play. Stories went from local problems such as strange behaviors in a nearby city and troll attacks, to events that affected the whole country. And as with the "dream realm" adventure I mentioned in yesterday's blog post, some of those adventures were surreal.

While I can't hope to capture the campaign in writing, especially the feel, the funny stories, the amazing and pathetic dice rolls that changed story arcs, I will provide a few of the most interesting elements to give you a taste of what we accomplished.

Highlights included:

A collection of special missions that took the party around the duchy, around the country, and to surrounding countries. Two missions even took the players to the far north, and the far south, in other regions of the continent. I specifically remember the different environments allowing me to keep the players from being too comfortable in their knowledge of "how things work."

While the party was away on a personal mission, the king was assassinated and their duke's two sons were kidnapped. The duke, who had always planned to have his elder son become the king, sentenced the party to death for their blunder of not being there. He gave them a one-year suspension of the sentence, to rectify their error. This was the start of an especially epic "end game" that went on for almost a year in real time.

Extensive efforts to find the sons, only to learn that for some reason, they'd been kidnapped by illithid (mind flayers) and taken to an illithid city that could not be reached without the right "path."

Having to bargain with a rakshasa (which I interpreted as a manifested nightmare.) He had a key to the city,  but would only give it up in exchange for a cloak that would let him change his nature.

The issue with this deal was that the cloak didn't exist, except in stories. The party had to venture into a literal morality tale / children's story to find it, and they had to get the cloak out without destroying the story, which, in turn, would destroy the cloak, the influence of the story, and cause all kinds of problems.

The adventure into the city was a multi-step adventure that lasted almost three months.

The epic conclusion had multiple (real) people who had been in the campaign over the years showing up to support the party as their characters. The big assault on the city was over a month itself. It involved normal illithid, who are scary, but not bad for 16th-level characters. Leveled illithid, especially with rogue or fighter levels, or invisibility spells, are truly terrifying. And the whole assault had to be done both quickly and quietly and without making a wrong turn, as there were sleeping epic-level illithid in the city.

In the end, the adventure was successful, but the party was down one party member, and only had small healing potions and just one cone of cold and magic missiles for spell damage. They were at a point where evcn "normal" illithid presented a serious threat. But they found the young nobles and were able to plane-shift out of there with their "hold in reserve" item.

Their reward for their amazing accomplishment? Not even a thank you from the duke. They'd just done their jobs and were no longer sentenced to death, what more could they ask.

The Three Kingdoms

This was the first campaign I played in with my current game group. This was after a friend offered to start swapping out stories and GM duties every year or so, to help me avoid getting burned out after nearly 10 years of continuously running.

The world was well-constructed, with interesting political dynamics between different groups and countries. Normally, such things do not interest me, but he presented them in a way where those dynamics related to us personally. Over five years of real-time (interspersed with the remains of my second 5-year campaign, so around ten total years to tell the story) we got asked to do errands; other groups would ask one or all of us to sabotage those errands; still other groups would have us pursue goals inside a successful or unsuccessful mission. And since there was a major favor economy going on, it was critical that we look successful, support our patrons, and not annoy the wrong people--goals that were often at odds with each other.

Some key memories:

A conflicting set of orders where we were to help build or not build a temple, which various factions had opinions about. We had to do finish the mission without letting on that we were involved. Ultimately, we ended up causing havoc by trying to rescue the priest in charge of building the temple after he'd been sentenced to death. It sort of worked, but ended up causing fireballs and guards to be sent all over the place. The temple burned, the priest was killed, and we hid in the tunnels where we accidentally killed a gelatinous cube which was the basis of the city's sewer system. In the aftermath of the chaos, everybody said we'd done a great job, including opposing factions.

A cross-continent search for relics: a suit of magical armor, an intelligent dagger, and several others which at some point were just obviously a "rebuild the ancient power" assembly project. One object, a dagger, was acquired early, and we weren't even aware of it. It was in the bottom of my luggage, wrapped in oilcloth. We got the dagger from a random assailant, and because the dagger was intelligent, I took it, and stuffed it in my bag, because I was best suited to ignore its promises of power or attempts to control.

After the suit was reassembled, we ended up using it to summon the Power back. There was disagreement on whether we should do it, but the group was ultimately convinced to do it. The ritual was enacted, and in short, there was a big battle between two godlike creatures. Also, the Power that was in the suit was decimated by his former lover who had always been the real power, and we stood by stupidly while the battles raged around us. Bonus points to one player who figured out a great way to hurt a god is to carry a big rock to a high place, and drop it on them. 20d6 damage is hard to ignore, regardless of how powerful you are.

And in all of this, I got to be Tal, the beguiler. Who was just too amused with his own abilities and how they could be used to solve problems in new ways. I was the defacto leader of the group: I was a polyglot with over-the-top charisma, diplomacy, bluff, and other key skills. I had many wins, but a favorite was convincing a bunch of guards who were kicking our groups collective butts that they needed to lay down arms because I was an unrecognized child of the king. My bluff check was over 40, so they were obliged to stop attacking. We lived, though by the time higher ups showed up and got it sorted out, we were banished and I was short one tongue. But such things happen, and it all got better soon in our next stop.

The Godlike Campaign

In college, my roommate, who is also the co-creator of my "Trinity" game world, had an amazing world-building idea: he created a list of interesting people who would be characters or NPCs in a short but intense campaign to create the pantheon of gods.

The premise was simple: Play your character; interact with other characters; people will die, and the order in which they die will define their place in the new pantheon. Things will happen, people's personalities will come out, there will be heroic wins and horridly stupid deaths, and all of it will build up a deep and relatable pantheon for the next campaign.

Some key memories:

One NPC character was the emperor. He had incredible power and influence and was virtually untouchable. Yet, he wasn't as much of a factor in the game as other characters, because he couldn't easily leave his seat of power to act directly on his own behalf. He had to trust others.

One PC was a ranger who was a generally nice guy. The player and the GM mutually agreed it was time for him to "go" so the GM told him that he died on an island fighting giants. "How many giants?" asked the player? "At least one more than it takes to kill you" responded the GM. So it goes.

My character was "Jethro, Lord of the Insane and Master of Creative Genius." He was an absolute delight to play, because he was genuinely nice, but also a seriously annoying person. He had an artifact "Jethro's Amulet of Helping", which would teleport him anywhere in the multiverse where he was most needed. His help was often "challenging" and led to a near-universal response of (in very defeated voice) "Hi Jethro." whenever he'd show up. My theory was that while he was annoying and often unhelpful, he couldn't be killed because he was likely to annoy the opponents equally much at some point in the future.

His crowning achievement was effectively giving one of the most powerful items in the universe to the person most able to use it, in exchange for a truly obscene amount of gold and magic, which in the next campaign was referred to as "Jethro's Folly" and/or "Jethro's Lost Treasure" because it's not clear that he kept track of it once he had it.

In all, our friend group had a blast with that campaign, and while it didn't really evolve into a next camapign that used those gods, it was by far one of the most memorable gaming events in college.