THE SETTING:The town of Garamile, near the Bahr al'Raml desert. [A second-edition campaign.]
THE CAMPAIGN:Several people all discover they have inherited a share in a bar in Garamile by a person named Harad. Each has heard of or met Harad in the past, and have different descriptions of him. None of them know why he gave them the bar.
It swiftly becomes clear that the bar is more than it seems. For one thing, there's a demon named Cruelthorn locked into a corner room, apparently trapped there by Harad. There are numerous secret passages and rooms and the group even discovers an alcoholic genie trapped in their central bar mirror! (They freed him, but he was never much use to them).
Eventually the group found a spelljamming ship locked away in a hidden chamber in the cellar. They figured out how to trap Cruelthorn into a gem to "drive" the ship and how to roll back the secret doors in the courtyard to allow the ship to launch (trying to get it up the stairwell would have been difficult.)
This began a spelljamming adventure, sending the group into space to deal with sleazy lizardmen merchants, arrogant elven warriors, and the local intersphere military force, the Iron Autocracy. Along the way they discovered that Harad had been something of a scoundrel, a male djinni noble who'd been trying to learn the secrets of Truemagic. Their hunt after him finally led them back to Samru, where they found him locked in stasis, in battle with another lamia noble (a female). They freed Harad to complete the spell he'd been trying to cast when he'd been interrupted. The resulting truemagic tremor opened up a great earthquake fault that ran from the temple in Bahr al'Raml where they'd found him up northeast to a place in the Icewind Mountains where there was, apparently, another interplanar rift. (As it happens, that place was Tocair's laboratory, discovered in the Heroes of Tharsis campaign—the Heroes had left the planar gate open when they ran away.) The adventurers promptly dubbed the rift "Harad's Fault", and the name lingers, although few really know why.
DM's MUSINGS: This campaign was run nights at a local gaming store, and then moved to one of the player's houses once the gaming store tried to charge us for using its space (bad business choice!). I ran it as a lark because I'd liked the Spelljamming stuff and wanted to run a Barsoom-like set of adventures. It was fun, light, and lasted only a year before I moved to another part of LA to start my PhD studies.
I particularly like my initial hook of having everybody inherit part of a bar. Bars are classic D&D settings and the mystery around the bar kept the players interested, providing an overall framework for the campaign story.
What did I learn in this game? That sometimes it's okay to be silly if it's cinematic enough, and that goat's milk and Kahlua don't mix well. Harad's Fault remains on my world maps today.
