Campaign Plans

Spoilers ahead! Proceed at your own risk.

Already established plot elements:

  • Villain: The Arbiter, a vaguely hell-associated entity powerful enough to grant warlock pacts
  • Place: Laravin's Hope, legendary 'shining city' far in the west.
  • Event: the fall of Laravin's hope into fire and destruction, as seen in a vision by Thalandir
  • Geronimo and all that's happened in it
  • The rest of the world, most notably Lorrokan and its politics; a chunk of senior members of the monarchy and state have just gotten murked
    • Idea: Perrin and Alice get word of an approaching elven military unit and tell the party (or specifically, Thal and Miro) to get the hell out of doge since they have connections to the monarchy. This kicks off the campaign.

Plan is to run ten sessions or so; real time I have until the end of placement in september to run this, and no house in bath for the last two weeks of august. If I start a week on wednesday at time of writing (that is, 20/05) then I'll have 10-12 sessions. I'll plan ten sessions under the assumption that stuff will run over and my plans will generally get messed up.

Structure

Act 1

Should be three sessions or so.

Objective: find and enter Laravin's Hope. The plan is that the city is hidden as a mirage, always getting further and further away, requiring some solution, and then once they can approach it, they have to find a way past all the wards, protections and physical barriers it has around it. The act finished with them arriving in the city itself.

Sessions:

  1. The PCs arrive at the city and, along with some (actually just one) new NPCs, discover that it's impossible to get near. They begin the search for a solution. Use days when my mother was there as soundrack. (at present, a magical macguffin in some ancient tomb somewhere, subject to change). Has combat in the back half.
  2. After some more combat, the PCs retrieve the macguffin and get to the edge of the city, which has a number of more normal magical and physical defences (traps and the like). They begin to get through them.
  3. The PCs finish traversing the edge of the city and arrive in Laravin's Hope. See Laravin's Hope As for why the city has a bunch of traps around it - could be a few reasons; the most obvious and simple is that some places the city goes to are much more hostile than a desert on earth. It even has a standing militia for precisely this reason. Could also be that the city's rulers just don't want more people in; that might be why they don't deacitvate the traps when on a less deadly planet.

Act 2

Should be four sessions or so.

Objective: find the source and meaning of the visions. By this time a number of other characters will have appeared with similar rings and visions. They also recur every now and then, getting worse over time. This eventually leads to a confrontation with the Arbiter, who reveals that this whole convoluted plan was to lure a bunch of powerful adventurers to Laravin's Hope and use them for some nefarious scheme. The Arbiter's plan broadly succeds and the players are put on the back foot before act three.

Sessions:

  1. The PCs dick around in Laravin's Hope, generally looking for a mystic, oracle, or diviner of some kind in order to help them understand the visions. This diviner tells them that the source of the visions is hell, and they need to go there to find out more. Furthermore, there is some permanent link to hell deep in the city's underworks.
  2. The PCs go and find the gates of hell, and there fight a big demon who tells them that the Arbiter's after the city for some reason.
  3. ???
  4. The PCs confront the Arbiter, have a fight, and are basically defeated before getting deus ex machina'd to a safe location.

Act 3

Should be three sessions or so.

Objective: stop the Arbiter, but for real. The Arbiter has retreated to some dramatic location, like the top of a tower of some kind, and hell portals are popping up all over the place, generally wreaking havok and rendering the visions true. The players have to get to the location and defeat him.

Sessions:

All three are to be one giant setpiece; the Arbiter's holed up at the highest point of the city, a giant, impossible, dracula's castle type skyscraper. It's called the spire of stars.

  1. Find a way into the skyscraper.
  2. Climb it.
  3. Defeat the Arbiter, for real this time.

Laravin's Hope, aka Tul'Narath

Details about the city itself.

It's extremely magical, much much more than normal, and has a bunch of spelljammer-ass exotic races around. A lot of stuff just floats, everything is lit with magic, and anything else I can think of. It moves around the planes and the universe every few months or so, but it's drawn to places with people.

The general aesthetic is mining/geode steampunk - the walls are made of black rock but have a bunch of vents, pipes, drains, and stuff sticking out the side, and a bunch of trapped caves running once they get into it.

The top of the city, the bit visible from the desert, is the geode half; the rest of the city is kind of a basin made of the same black rock as the walls, and the shining towers kind of come up to where the center of the basin would be if it was a sphere. Buildings are plate metal, with lots of pipes, steam, and magical fire.

Percival Laravin himself found the city around 100 years ago, the last time it was on the planet. Since he disappeared (into the city), all subsequent expeditions have failed, and most have died in the desert. His crew (an order of holy chivalric knights of Lathandar, the god of Dawn) vanished with him, except Gaheris of Twynegate, who stayed behind to guard the relic which allowed them entrance. They joined the police; the humans have died or at least retired. Longer-life members of the party are still kicking though.

Some boring details:

  • The total area of the city is pretty small, running to around the size of Bath including suburbs.
  • The city is mostly run by a council of high elders in the Spire of Stars, the highest structure in Laravin's Hope. They have a council chair, a member nominated as a representative by the rest of the council.
  • There exists a vast network of tunnels, passages, catacombs and caves underneath the city; this is where most of the unsavoury business happens.
  • The police are under the control of the council and are pervasive in the city proper. They enforce a very clean, polite and well-mannered society.
  • Buildings tend to be thin and rather unreasonably tall - a regular tavern might have drinking tables running up three or four floors on a tiny footprint and more rooms above. This is enabled by use of magical elevators which just float you up or down.
    • Any good tavern will also have a few floors down to the undercity.

Some details from session III:

  • The city is split into levels, passage between which is controlled by the city guard.
  • The first few levels require little more than a rubber stamp, but the later ones require a more intensive check, an actual rep, etc.
  • The guard runs the bounty program, fighting the encroachment of the hell demons from the undercity.
  • Getting into the undercity via the guard bounty program drops you almost to the bottom, and they'll extract you as well.

NPCs

  • Cedric Laskar: A tiefling knight of Lathandar, following in Sir Laravin's footsteps. Meets the party right at the beginning (he's on Gavin's ship), but is kinda in his own story, it just overlaps with the party's occasionally. He does help them out getting past the city defences. He's a cleric who dual-wields maces and has a holy symbol engraved on his chestplate.
  • Percival Laravin: The first person from this planet to discover the city which bears his name. A human and also a knight of Lathandar, He and his crew mounted one of the first sandships a hundred years ago to sail into the unknown.