I can't really proceed with the fall semester campaign until I get the results of the summer transcribed for posterity. So here's a short summary of the final session, and of the full campaign. June 27, Caudex Annales, 70 AUP
The party broke into a series of smaller groups, and slowly worked their way back to Balewood Keep. Elven nightblade Terra Daystar and Dunflow the Barbarian had already arrived the previous evening with a report of the shrine battle. The less respectable duo of Meros and Wulfhere arrived together the next morning, Wulfhere sporting a new winged helmet he had looted from his extensive pillaging of the shrine's back rooms. Regrettably, the helm had born an enchantment with the effect of permanently altering his alignment to "Chaotic", and by this point he had decided that the most chaotic course of action was to isolate and murder the castellan. The jewel-snatching nightblade Meros had always been something of a bad seed, and was hardly one to stand in his way.
The two of them lured the castellan and his scribe down to the dungeons, on pretext of having some secret news to report. Wulfhere's mystic aura proved persuasive enough to set up the ambush, and upon arrival, the nefarious pair bolted the dungeon doors behind them and sprang to the attack. Terra, who had never quite trusted the other elf, followed the two of them from the shadows, and observed them through a grated window.
The initial round of combat went poorly, as Meros successfully opened with a choking grasp against the scribe, lifting him helplessly in the air before he could cast a prepared clerical spell from his scroll case. But the castellan was cast from a sterner mold, and his enchanted armor proved impervious to the initial assault. The battled turned hopeless against the conspirators when Terra slipped a magic missile past the bars of the window into Meros' back, disrupting his spell and releasing the scribe. The completion of the scribe's hold person spell ended the assassination attempt abruptly.
Fortunately the castellan did not immediately check the belongings of the traitors, or he would have discovered a freshly cut medusa-head with still potent petrification capabilities. (It was also a small blessing that neither of them thought to use it on the castellan during the fight.) When the rest of the party arrived in the upper bailey, they discovered a warrant had been issued for their arrest, and they were unceremoniously locked into the dungeon.
The following morning, the clearly insane Wulfhere attempted to overpower his guards, and was quickly slain. The rest of the party was hauled up to the great hall for an improvised trial, with the keep's bailiff functioning as prosecutor. They stood accused of having awoken the dead against the express recommendation of the castellan, of having stolen cursed insanity-inflicting relics from the tombs, of harboring assassins, of fraternizing with hobgoblins and cannibalistic lizardmen, and of generally disrupting public order.
The previously arrested (and stripped and mutiliated) visiting cleric, Father Isembart, served as a key witness for the prosecution, forced to testify by written statements due to the splitting of his tongue. His sorry condition earned him great pity from the assembled throng of civilians assembled for the trial, and the official rule of the castellan (under some pressure of rising political unrest and insurrection) was that the party should be immediately exiled into the wilderness. Privately, he communicated his hope that they could find some way to resolve the regional crisis, and he also lent them a fragment of a stone tablet artifact, a fragment recovered by another adventurer decades ago -- one who had emerged as the sole survivor of a doomed expedition.
The party attempted to return back up through the mountains into Green Pass and take refuge at Centerpost, but found the gates at Footman's Notch occupied by hostile forces flying a sinister black banner in place of Durnovar's White Ship. Meros slipped away under pretense of scouting the walls, and instead opted to simply defect to the side of the captors within. When the party was assaulted by a pack of hellhounds during the night -- easily enough dispatched, with the use of the medusa's post-mortem gaze -- it had become obvious that the occupation force was of an entirely fiendish nature. Earning passage across the mountains would only be possible through subterfuge, or by another route.
The last couple RPG sessions have seen some discussion of simply running away from the Green Pass region entirely, and leaving the area to its grim fate of eventual conquest and pillage. Here's a short summary of all the different directions that the party could go, based on a zoom-in view of the world map.
The world of Proxima, at the northern end of the occidental basin
Notes:
The party is currently at the very easternmost edge of the hex with the fortress icon, labeled "Green Pass".
The scale is roughly 200 miles per hex. Traveling along roads means that it's possible to cover this distance in a week or so. Traveling through rough terrain can more than double this time. Moving through a thousand miles of hill or forest hexes would take several months.
That's all desert to the southeast. Desert requires you bring along water as part of daily rations, consuming a stone of food and water per day. For a party of ten, that works out to 3000 stone of water per month, which would require a fleet of camels to carry. Although there are alternatives to bringing water along...
There are other passes through the Great Barrier Mountain Range, in addition to Green Pass, but none of them are civilized.
Most of the realms on this side of the mountains are chaos-states run by high-level necromancers, witches, or evil warlords who rule populations of orcs and such, and who use humans only as slaves.
Directions the party could try to go:
Directly back through Footman's Notch, into the Green Pass region: This follows a presumably safe road. However, it's under the control of a Durnovaric garrison that might not be entirely willing to allow the passage of normal traffic from the east, especially for a party under a cloud of suspicion as being the kind of grave-robbers who probably triggered the crisis in the first place. There's already been serious political pressure to close the gate, to prevent the migration of suspected cultist infiltrators.
North along the edge of the mountains: This leads to a vast wilderness of cold high-elevation pine forests, and eventually to the northern sea. At this time of year the weather is mild enough to be above freezing, but still chilly overnight. In the winter, this area is choked by snows. There are plenty of fierce beasts and magical creatures here, but the only sentient inhabitants are small and isolated settlements of hostile kobolds and other such mountain-dwelling beastmen.
South along the edge of the mountains: This is the rumored direction in which lies a great passage through the underdark beneath the mountains. Pirates far away on the Larcenous Shores send their prisoners to the east in desert caravans, using the tunnel to deliver their captives to the chaotic lands in the east to live unhappily as slaves for the various immortal Undying Lords who live in the Hyperborean Basin, hundreds of mile to the south of Green Pass. The exact tunnel location is unknown to Durnovar, but probably well known to the slavers in the area.
East into the Hyperborean Desert: This is the location of the vast ruined cities of Thule and Nerigos, the true imperial centers of power, citadels of which the nearby city of Umeskelion was merely a satellite. Both cities are nearly a thousand miles away, accessible only through the trackless wasteland of shifting sands that have slowly buried them.
I'm moderately disappointed that no one in the party decided to charge a valley full of 100+ gnolls, orcs, and hobgoblins. That would have been the evening, right there. Maybe next time. June 25-26, Caudex Annales, 70 AUP
Getting out of the keep ended up being trickier than anticipated. A furious mob of local merchants and their mercenaries had gathered in the lower bailey to demand the right of egress, and to insist that if they were denied it, then no one else should be granted permission to leave either. The bailiff was attempting to maintain order with small force of guards. Worse yet, the locals were not apt to be especially well-disposed to the news that the "adventuring team" who had been robbing graves and (most likely) awakening the dead were attempting to leave after having dragged away the well-liked visiting priest, Father Isembart, to the dungeons for who knows what kind of mistreatment.
After a good deal of debate over the virtues of simply lowering a rope over the walls and slipping away, the party elected to buy a large keg at the tavern and invite the mercenaries back for a free round of drinks on the house. The bailiff seemed a little relieved at the resolution of the situation, but also warned that leaving the keep during a crisis would be regarded as evidence of guilt without counter-evidence that the real conspirators had been located and eliminated. The party elected to march to the secret back-entrance into the catacombs seen by Malcom's ESP investigations. Meanwhile, Zigzinu took a horse down to the swamps to parley with the lizardmen, and slowly brought them around to the conclusion that helping the party against the cult would be a better source of tasty mammal flesh than raiding the dwindling traffic of zombie-averse caravans.
The trees, they're full of elves!
The rest of the party (along with the chapel's curate Father Hubert, replacing the injured Brother Bartimaeus) advanced to the valley entrance, where they discovered a small battle already on the verge of erupting. The local factions had drawn up into two camps, with the gnolls and orcs allied against the hobgoblins and a few goblins. Terra Daystar went on overwatch by stealthing up a tree on the ravine slope, and Dunflow and Wulfhere constructed a few simple traps. At this point the elf decided that her elevated position was ideal for launching a few sling bullets. Given the range it wasn't too surprising that they both missed, but they did attract a bit of attention from the orcs, who deployed a squad to investigate the trees in search of "hobgoblin snipers". The hobgoblins knew perfectly well that something suspicious was afoot, and sent some reluctant goblins to keep an eye on the orcs.
At this point the orcs blundered into the traps, and all hell broke loose. The hobgoblins made some effort to warn the orcs, but the orcish response only further infuriated them, and by the time the gnolls closed into melee the battle was inevitable. With the orcs support infantry partially disabled by traps, the gnolls were easily taken apart by the well-organized hobgoblins. Unfortunately, the paranoid hobgoblins had little interest in rewarding their unseen benefactors, and Terra remained helplessly treed like a squirrel by hounds.
At this point, Finkle ensorcelled Wulhere's steed into an illusory dragon, with Reed casting some fire out of its snout for good effect (and incinerating some goblins in the process). This got the attention of the hobgoblins long enough for a parley, with Wulhere presenting himself as the champion of a "hobgoblin spirit" living up the tree. Elves speak the hobgoblin tongue with sufficient fluency that Wulfhere and Terra were able to conduct a sort of strange three-way conversation, with the talking tree issuing orders to the hobgoblin chieftain to attack the cult of the horned god in the shrine. When the chieftain seemed unpersuaded by this somewhat implausible tree-given request, Wulfhere went double-or-nothing and challenged the chief to a single combat. Fortunately hobgoblins are always itching for a fight, and the chief took the bait despite his wounds. The brawl nearly cost Wulfhere his life and left the party facing three-dozen angry hobgoblins... but at the last minute the chieftain went down, and left the in control of the remaining forces of 12 spear guards, 2 crossbows, 9 hobgoblin wenches, and 3 of the chieftain's harem's most beautiful consorts (well, beautiful by hobgoblin standards, at least).
The lizards, slow as ever, arrived late in the evening, and gorged themselves on the corpses of the dead, leaving a gruesome arrangement of half-gnawed bones and viscera all over the valley. The chambers of the defeated orcs and gnolls were plundered for treasures, and the party set a hobgoblin watch over the entrance to the cult's tunnels.
The next morning, Finkle decided to down a potion of gaseous form and go exploring in the tunnels. (Note: This leaves behind all equipment and clothing, but the cursed gem's enchantment forced it to constantly follow him down the hall, dropping to the floor with an echoing clunk and then teleporting to his new position to repeat the cycle.) This being a poor substitute for invisibility, the acolytes of the shrine spotted the billowing cloudy outlines of a buck-naked gnome within the first hundred yards of the shrine's entry hall, as he tried to slip into their private chambers through a keyhole. The resulting chase had a temporary lull when he found a blocked-off tunnel full of boulders and slipped between them, discovering a long passage leading up to the barrow catacombs. Unfortunately, by this time the entire shrine was alerted and a company of four acolytes, four adepts, and an evil priest had arrayed themselves on the far side of the boulders to intercept his escape. Finkle released an phantasmal courier to race past them to the exit, announcing his discoveries to the guards outside, and then created a brief covering illusion to slip past them.
Unfortunately, the entrance had already been corked shut by the arrival of a nearly-transparent gelatinous cube, closing off any crevice of escape. Finkle raced back into a maze of tunnels in the other direction, finding a small prison cell with a rather attractive female prisoner inside (even by non-hobgoblin standards). Alas, when she turned to look it him it was obvious that she was having a bad hair day everything, being coiffed with a collection of writhing snakes, and Finkle turned from gas to stone without stopping at flesh in between. Kinda figures that the hot chick in the cult dungeon turned out to be a bakku-shan.
The cursed gem finally managed to materialize in Finkle's stone hand, triumphantly crowning his new career as an X-rated lawn ornament.
To close, here's an illuminating dramatization of the elite gnomish espionage protocols on display:
Casualties
Finkle Bagnozzle: Turned to stone by a gorgon medusa (because in D&D gorgons are actually giant metal cows with bad breath, for some odd reason)
(Note: Lizardmen don't count as "defeated" for xp purposes, since they weren't initially hostile, but hobgoblins do.)
Total experience from treasure: 1458 xp
Total experience from kills/captures/deceptions: 1855 xp
Total experience from exploration: 0 xp
Total experience: 3313 xp Total experience per member: 301 xp
(Note: Mort the Wardog is taking an experience half-share but not a treasure share. Father Hubert, the curate, is taking both.)
