Campaign Journal - Session 1 - A Beginning

All dates Northern Reckoning year 707.

Linden, Olmsby, Fulcher's Hold (1 mile hex)

April 3 - On the road again, arriving at the frontier town of Linden late in the afternoon. Linden is a town of perhaps 200 buildings, and numbering as many as 1,000 inhabitants if you count some of the outlying farms. The plan is to spend the night in Linden and finish the trip the next day. The party meets and talks to a few locals in the Rusty Nail tavern, including a nosy merchant named Narsan of Ilaresh (from the Kalembar Federation), along with his lackeys Mack and Gardel. There are tales of sheep and goats going missing in bunches over the last couple months, and there are a lot of questions from the locals as to the long term intentions of Fulcher's Band. Before turning in for the night, someone is seen snooping around the wagons. Nothing seems to be missing, although there are signs that some things have been rummaged through.

April 4 - Atherik and the dwarves have some business in town to attend to first, so it is late morning by the time the group sets out northwards on a minor road. A mile or so north of town, a wheel comes off one of the wagons, spilling its heavy cargo onto the ground. Careful inspection shows that several other wagons have also been tampered with. Fixing the damage takes a few hours, and it is near dark when the wagons pull into Olmsby, a small hamlet of maybe 50 buildings and 200 inhabitants. The party meets some locals, including Ravar, an elderly beekeeper, who warns the party of his giant honeybees (which are harmless unless provoked). Ravar claims to have been an adventurer in his younger days, and regales the characters with some good stories of ruins in the Shearingvale, including one site just a half dozen or so miles further north. There are more tales of missing livestock in this town. The party sleeps with the wagons through an uneventful night.

April 5 - The party heads the remaining 6 miles to Fulcher's Hold. They talk with Fulcher (priest of Alaron, god of Light), Alissara (female elven spellcaster of some sort) and Damron (human warrior), the 3 of Fucher's Band who are present at the moment.  Fulcher seems friendly. He claims to have no greater goals than to semi-retire here and "spread Alaron's divine radiance over the surrounding land". The characters do not get the sense that he is lying, but have the vague feeling that he is hiding something.

On a bit of high ground overlooking a stream, a couple dozen laborers and a few dwarves are working on the keep. There is a cluster of a dozen or so wooden shacks and a few nicer houses at the bottom of the hill; presumably where the workers live. The site itself consists of a rectangular wooden palisade, with a wooden tower in one corner, and a medium-sized stone keep rising at the opposite corner. The wooden parts of the complex seem complete, or nearly so, while the stone keep is complete only to about the top of a first story. Work is focusing on the stone keep, which definitely looks more like a castle than a manor house.

At the end of their conversation (and getting paid), Fulcher indicates that if the party wanted to remain in the area, he and his companions would welcome that, and would provide what assistance they could. The party is noncommittal, and decides to head to the nearby ruins described by Ravar. The party backtracks 2 miles toward Olmsby, and is able to find the overgrown trail leading north along the west bank of a stream. A mile or so up this trail, the party comes to a spot where the trail drops down into a marshy looking lowland. With daylight fading, the party decides to camp on the dry ground. The night passes quietly.

April 6 - The party rises early and is on the trail by 7:30am. By about 9:30am, they have made their way through a couple of miles of marshy lowland and across another couple of miles of open ground. Ahead they see a few low hills, the landmark that Ravar told them to look for. Leaving the trail and heading east toward the stream, they find the site and begin to investigate the area. A few vultures circle low overhead.

Ruins

There are the remnants of many low stone walls, flagstone paving that may have been streets, foundations and basements fairly well hidden in the dense scrub and underbrush. In a large sunken area that may have been a building's basement level, they discover a 2.5 foot diameter circular opening in the floor covered by a pair of thin stone slabs. The party surmises this may have been a well. Niam, the extremely dextrous wood elf rogue, is easily able to climb down the very rough stone-lined shaft and finds that water can be seen below, perhaps 30 feet below ground level. The pool of water seems to be in a chamber that opens out beyond the bottom of the well shaft, which ends 9 or 10 feet above the level of the water. Without a rope, he can go no further without free-falling into the water. He returns to the surface to tell the others what he has seen.

An old stone well?

The party begins to discuss what to do next...

The Sage's Commentary - For a first Dungeons & Dragons session in about 22 years (best guess), this went pretty well, and I had an absolute blast. We had two out of our three hoped-for players, and were able to rope in another player on a few hours notice, so we had three players and a DM. Over the course of almost 3 hours, we put the finishing touches on character creation for a couple of the players, and had the new player create the wood elf rogue. Then we very briefly covered some "world background" of the type posted here (which the players for the most part had not read). Once we got things rolling, we covered the above 2+ game days of non-combat role playing fairly smoothly. I will admit to feeling like a bumbling (and very self-conscious) fool at start, but think that we all found a pretty good groove once we got going, and you have to start somewhere. Preparation was key, and once I stopped thinking and just went with the flow, things went very well. People seemed to enjoy themselves. Now that the players know that this blog is here for the campaign, creating some of that sense of place in which to set these adventures should go more smoothly. I can't wait to play again. We have yet to roll dice in anger...