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kabof
2010-07-12, 08:50 PM
Hi good folks from the GitP boards, my (nick)name is Kabof and I'm pretty sure that a lot of people around here don't know who I am. The fact is: I'm a long time reader of the boards and a huge fan of campaign journal. Being such a fan, I have alwyas been impressed by the low number of DM's journal in comparison to player's journal, so I decided to start my own. I'm unsure about the future of this thread, because it's problably going to be hard to have the time to elaborate the campaign, update the journal and keep my life running. However I still plan to give you guys a nice read as long as I can.

The Basic of the Campaign
My players and I decided to try an horror campaign. Generally, I would say that this would be near impossible, because we all talk and laught a lot about non-game stuff during the game (and I think that could ruin the mood of an horror campaign), but this time everybody agreed to try to keep the focus and we're going to give it a shot.

The Campaign World
I'm unsure if this is the right place to talk about it, but I'm proud about what we did in the setting. Me and the players constructed it together, using an old idea of mine as a base. I'm goign to summarize what is most relevant in a not very organized time line:
- The first race in the world were the Aboleth. Using a weird kind of biomagic they "invented" the humans (for had labor work) and the elves (to work doing danger stuff with magic and etc).
- After a lot o time, both races went free using a big ritual and rebelling against their former masters. The elves, being arrogants and all, went to a big forest in the north, found one huge empire-city and said that humans were not wellcome there. The humans went to the mountains.
- The elves started to play with the ancient aboleth magic, that they mastered during the years of slave work. But some ritual went wrong and all the race went into some kind of rage curse.
- The elves tried to attack the humans, that lived as mountain barbarians The barbarians, losing the war, created a ritual to make their own berseker fighters and used this new army to destroy the elves.
- The halfings appeared in the world. It's important to note that they kind of came from the mists and even the aboleth sages don't remember them. In the setting, they're some kind of a gipsy culture.
- A lot of feuds started to emerge, since the humans could now live in the hills, because no elf army would say they were too close to the north forest.
- The Great Mother church ascends. The principal object of their faith is the Aboleth's Blood Mother, but adapted for a more humanitary view. They teach that the comonners should obey the feudal lords and mantain the status quo. In the setting, the church is also the only organ that is autorized to administrate commoner traffic between feuds and they make a large profit on it.
- The hidden agenda of the church is to hold all the ancient elven secrets, so they also have several armies that sometimes try to breach the forest in the north, the problem is that there's a lot of internal disput in the church, they're really corrupt as a organization and the forest is a very dangerous place.
- A lot of mercenaries bands starts to emmerge. They're basically commoners that revolted against their feudal lord and went rogue. These mercenarie bands are important in the setting because the church and the feudal lords use them a lot.

And that's what we made for the setting; I know it may sound a little confusing, but that's because no one was writing as we talked and I'm trying to remember stuff from the top of my head.

The House Rules
- All the magic works as Incantations, and there's a class that has a special pool of XP that he can use to fuel Incantantions, just the way an Artificer in Eberron. We call the class Archivist, because the way they work in the setting remember a lot of the class from HoH.
- We're using a different kind of HP system, that is very letal. Basically player's only gain HP at first level and they take cumulative penalties if injuried. That's because we expect that most conflicts are going to be resolved using smarts over muscles.
- We're using the Players Roll all the Dices rule.
- We're using Maximum Ranks variant rule for skills.

The Players
- L will be playing a half elf ranger like tank. In the setting, we decided that elven blood keeps it strenght over a lot of generations. His character is S's character bodyguard.
- S will be playing an archivist from the church. He's insterested in the secret that R and T found.
- R is a daelkyr half blood thief. He's a descendant of the mutated human barbarians from the elven war. He and T are friends and found some kind of ancient secret in some ruin and were arrested by the church milicia.
- T is a halfing barbarian and R's friend.
- B is T's girlfriend and I have no idea about what she's going to play.

Right now, T and R are in the prision, waiting to be interrogated by S and L.
The first session is going to be friday and I'll post it by sunday.

ps: by now, you all know that english is not my first language. Please forgive any mistake I made.

DabblerWizard
2010-07-12, 09:58 PM
Woot! Another campaign journal!

I love these things! I look forward to reading it.