Elianora, of The Black Rose Company
THE SETTING:The setting was the city of Cislunar, which, like the rest of the Cognoterre, had recently been invaded and subdued by the dragon-emperors of the Iron Autocracy. These invaders had, in the previous generation, placed the city under military rule, especially regulating magic, and completely banning all religion. The adventurers in this game had grown up under this regime and knew little else. During the course of the campaign, the invaders created a magical portal linking Cislunar to the "matrix", some sort of magical chain of teleport points. Shortly thereafter, the city began to feel earthquakes ... very minor at first, but growing during the course of the campaign. [A second-edition campaign that shifted to Skills & Powers.]
THE CAMPAIGN: A group of nobles and affiliated individuals join together in the Blackbriar Inn of Cislunar to help an NPC, the illusionist Thacarias Pelindar ("Thax"), ambassador for the gargoyles, help the Free Gargoyles of Cislunar find their wings to stem a diplomatic incident. Thax is a human, but somewhere along the line (the group never did get the full story), he ended up friends with the Free Gargoyles. The group helped him out and found and replaced the wings, but in doing so came to the attention of the city guards.
After a few similar investigations, the group finally got involved with a group of aristocratic child molesters calling themselves the Knaves of Hearts. During the inquiry aftermath, they were brought before court. A group of aristocrats barging into another noble's house? Lady Elianora—already involved in a scandal with her father-in-law and soon to end up in court, suing for custody of her children—waving around a sword? A member of the highly regulated mage's guild casting spells without a license? Shocking! There was only one thing that could be done—bring these loose ballistae into order by making them enroll as a licensed mercenary group and make them members of the Ministry of Justice, under chief investigator Lord Llewellyn Finster Jhansczil!
This began the Black Rose Company, as they named themselves. The group became involved in a variety of adventures, but when they began to investigate a vampiric ward mayor, their luck took a turn for the worse. The group decided to attack the mayor's house at night and ended up burning it down—but there were witnesses that the BRC had done the deed and the group was collectively accused of murdering a noted city official! In continuing to investigate the vampire problem they had uncovered, the group stumbled across a magical portal in the sewers that took them down to an underground city of rogues and smugglers. There they realized they couldn't get back up through the portal, and so reluctantly walked down a long flight of stairs only to find a barred door—and a group of drow in uniform—at the end.
Eventually the group gave up trying to escape and allowed themselves to be escorded to "Queen Teskil Sleet"'s palace for dinner. The drow queen welcomed the famous Black Rose Company and they ate dinner (she only picked at her food). Alas, the dinner was drugged, and that night the Black Rose Company became the vampiric queen's main course.
This began the second incarnation of the Black Rose Company—as vampires! Struggling to maintain their humanity against the overwhelming urge to give in to their monstrous natures, the company, in thrall to the vampire who created them (the nosferatu grey elf Spider, himself apparently in thrall to the drow-vampire Queen Sleet), were ordered deeper into the "Unders" below the city. As they explored the vast labyrinth of caverns there, they slowly uncovered a part of Cislunar's history they had never known—the vampire-hunting project of the city's original founder, Persifal, and her entrapment at the bottom of the underground complex in a temporal stasis, set there to lock the rest of the Unders, and its invading Nine Punishments, in time to protect the city. At the same time, the BRC realized that the Sunrose seals that had locked the temporal stasis in place had been removed or destroyed over the centuries, and now the stasis around the Unders was gone. The Nine Punishments—evil spirits locked into vampiric bodies in this incarnation—were free, but Persifal was still enstasised below. The group destroyed one Punishment and drove another off, stealing his artifact-power sword. They discovered the School of Redeemers, a group Persifal had been setting up as vampire-hunters before the Punishments destroyed it, and from there found magical portals that led back outside the Unders into Cislunar.
Reading Persifal's notes and doing their own research, the BRC also discovered that the very fabric of spacetime itself was in peril. Cislunar was riddled with magical portals. Many of them had been set up by Persifal, many had been added since, and, in the last few months, Cislunar's invading rulers, a military force from theIron Autocracy, had set up a huge magical portal linking the city to their empire across the oceans. These portals, the BRC discovered, had so frayed the planar substance around Cislunar that the entire area was in danger of being sucked to another plane!
In the meantime, in the city, the group was accused of killing the mayor and hiding from its crimes. Two of the Nine Punishments escaped into Cislunar and terrorized the city, killing the "lesser" vampires and anyone who got in their way. In reaction, the city set a curfew and sent out teams of vampire hunters who were systematically slaughtered by the incredibly powerful Punishments. Many normal vampires were destroyed, especially by Lord Finster (it later developed that he was taught vampire-hunting techniques by a close friend, Rudolph Van Richten), but the Punishments finally discovered what they were looking for. They raided Philip Ilzimmer's relations, killing his uncle, crippling his brother, and driving his aunt insane. The BRC raced back to the surface and Philip gave the Punishment his sword back to save his family.
Now it was war between the Punishments and the Black Rose Company, and the BRC undertook research and forged deeper into the Unders, searching for Persifal. At the same time, Cislunar's invading rulers, from the Iron Autocracy, discovered that the two Punishments had come from the Unders and set up a military force to begin invading and cleaning out that apparent hive of monstrous villainy. Queen Teskil Sleet called together her drow clan and abandoned her castle to travel deeper into the Unders, following her own quest—the lost members of her clan who'd been trapped in the stasis when the Unders were closed by Persifal's spell.
It all cumulated in Wyllowwood, where the BRC and the drow both found Persifal locked in the holy flames of Bel. The drow, and Spider, left through the tunnel that went deeper into the caverns below the earth. Spider gave his vampiric thralls, the BRC, permission to choose their own path.
Knowing full well that they now faced the "Light or the Fire" as the clerics of Bel used to shout when they fought undead, the BRC forged into the circle of holy fire that surrounded Persifal to pull her out. The flames scorched their vampiric bodies but they survived, and discovered that centuries locked in Bel's fire had worked its changes on the devout mage—Persifal had become a fiery deva! She was quickly updated, both about the Punishments and the danger that Cislunar would be swept into another plane by portal rifts. She teleported the BRC up into the city (fortunately, it was night), and offered them their final choice of the Light or the Fire. The group chose to take their chances and linked hands with each other and the deva. Bel's fire coursed through them and up into the magical matrix of the world itself. The BRC was judged and found adequate—the negative material energy of their vampirism was burned away, turning them mortal again but leaving a gold streak in their hair as a reminder of the ordeal. At the same time, the magical surge closed down every magical portal in the world and temporarily "burnt out" all magic on Samru. The deities, their worship banned from the Cognoterre by the dragon-emperors, manifested in the form of miracles, tearing down the facades that had been built over their old temples and holy symbols. And, finally, the magically supported tunnels and rooms below Cislunar collapsed, destroying the army of the dragon emperors that had been sent below to hunt for the Punishments, shaking the city, destroying many buildings, tearing holes in the streets, and sending a tidal wave out from the coast.
Persifal disappeared and left the Black Rose Company—now the Sun Rose Company—to pick up the pieces.
DM's MUSINGS: This campaign was set in Cislunar, a city based on the Waterdeep maps (I say "based" because I changed all the street names and discarded most of the NPCs, replacing them with the wonderful CITYBOOK series as well as odds and ends from many TSR and other companies' publications, as well as with people and places from books and my own imagination). My goal in running it was to concentrate on city politics rather than dungeoneering, and the players were all warned. They each came up with very detailed characters with long histories and lists of old friends and enemies.
This may have been a mistake, because some of the histories they came up with were filled with problems and angst. I didn't mind running with the darker thread, but it turned out that each character seemed to have so many problems that it was hard to keep the group cohesive. I did end up weaving many of their backgrounds together into a cohesive overarching plot in which it turned out that Elianora's husband was killed by members of a rebel group of mages in order to get access to her children. Her children were kidnapped during the course of the campaign by Halkem's brother and father, who Halkem's player had told me were secret, evil mages. They were taken to a necromancer who was related to another character's family. There were even more convolutions designed to involve two other characters, but those never came to light, so I'm saving them for the next campaign.
At the same time that I was having problems working with the characters' troubled histories, this group of players, almost all of whom had known each other and gamed together for many, many years, became curiously divisive. In character, they argued and tore at each other so much that it even started leaking out into our "real-life" feelings to the point that, after one argument, the player turned to the person she'd been arguing with and said, "that was in character, wasn't it?" Of course it was, but I felt things moving out of my control.
I'd expected them to report the vampiric mayor to the government or, at least, attack the mayor during the day. Attacking at night was a bad mistake, and the group was sorely injured. Things went from bad to worse for them as they stumbled into Queen Sleet's palace. I'd hoped they would at least be on their guard, and expected to run an escape attempt, but the group surprised me by calmly accepting the invitation to dinner...!
When the BRC ate the drugged dinner at Teskil's—and they'd had plenty of warning to be careful, including learning about vampiric drow being called "poisoners", and including one character actually realizing during the dinner that he was dining with a vampire ... and not warning anybody!—I was faced with three choices. (1) Kill them all, (2) vampirize them all, or (3) deus-ex-machina them out of the situation. I'd ended the game on them falling into a drugged stupor and realizing their fates, and during the next week or two I called each player up, asking them what they wanted to do about the situation and suggesting I could run them as vampires. The group decided to continue the game as vampires, forcing me to come up with a number of writeups on vampires in Skills & Powers, that I based off of Vampire: The Masquerade. You can find the "class" writeup, the cultural notes, and the weaknesses written up on this site.
Running for vampires changed the nature of the game, suddenly forcing me to pit them against much tougher foes. Thus I brought in the Nine Punishments, whom I'd introduced in a previous campaign (The Shattering). They were reincarnating spirits, so the intercampaign link worked out OK, and also gave the two players who'd been in that previous campaign a chance to grin knowingly at the rest—and learn more about the foes they'd faced so long ago. Being vampires also exacerbated the tensions within theparty, until one character actually ended up leaving the party—and falling into the hands of drider, who quickly subdued and captured him. When the rest of the BRC chose not to try to rescue their companion, that was that—the player had to take over an NPC for the rest of the campaign.
So what did I learn, as a DM, in this campaign? First, that players are insatiable for information. Never have I played a game that's generated so much paper—what you see in the Site Index for this campaign is only a tiny part of the whole. Second, that a DM shouldn't allow players to write too much angst into their histories, because it becomes difficult to manage. One problem I had was when I asked Elianora's player what would happen if Elianora got her children back. The answer was, "retire to raise them", and of course that's not exactly useful in a campaign—it virtually forces me to keep tormenting the character more! Third, that sometimes character dynamics are completely independent of player dynamics. We're all still friends, and we've all played in different campaigns together in which our characters have gotten along—but in Cislunar, for some reason, things just didn't mesh and the characters often hated each other.
I ended Cislunar with the miracle of the Theophany and took a year's hiatus running Al Qadim, a much cheerier and different sort of campaign setting. A year later, I took up Cislunar again, in that hope that the year's hiatus allowed tensions to defuse and let everyone to learn how to get along again.
