
Behold our world,
hanging in the void. A bright blue gem sitting motionless as myriad suns, stars
and moons spin around it. Move closer, towards
the single continent in the midst of that blue, see the World Mountain. A
singularly huge eruption of stone, the anchor of the world, the focal point of
everything, with millions born and dying in its shadow. Move closer still,
looking down on the slopes of the mountain, see a slash of vibrant green in the
expanses of white snow and dark stone. Look at the tropical jungles, the
volcanoes, the ruins left by civilisations ancient and modern, the glimmer of
gold and shine of gems lost to the past ready to be snatched up by the quick
and the daring. Welcome to the
Wyrmtalon Valleys. After two years, we've just finished our first campaign and along the way a few seats at the table are now empty. I'm looking to fill those seats again so this Sunday 31st March at 1PM GMT I'll be running session zero for the Ostoko Tales campaign and need three new adventurers to join us. When? Sundays at 1PM GMT Who? It's a mature group, so 25+ and and we're English speaking only. Three places available. How? We don't do video, but voice is a must - we use Discord for convenience. It's a richly detailed campaign world, with nice big blank bits for the players to fill in and an ever expanding history as I invent new material. There's a fairly specific style I'm aiming for and a restrictive list of classes and races so it's best to read the stuff in the LFG forums before deciding on a character concept. If there's something that will flat-out not work with the established canon, we can figure out together a way to make it fit in most cases. The last campaign got quite epic and earth-shattering towards the end so this campaign I'm aiming for a more down-to-earth approach. More of a personal tone, with the direction being more open. I certainly didn't railroad the party, but given I'd presented a world breaking threat it was natural they'd throw everything else to one side to deal with that. This meant that whilst the campaign was highly enjoyable, there was too much impetus to defeat the bad guys and many details weren't explored as much as I would have liked. This time I intend to have less grand threats and more room to explore those details as they arise and the party's focus shifts. That's the stuff I'm going to change, the stuff that will remain the same is the good stuff - a decent balance of roleplay and crunchy tactical combat. The kind of game where certain names on the map will always fill my players' hearts with terror and other names will remind them of great deeds and hard-won victories. We were joking around in the Discord as I was writing a summary of the last campaign. I stopped when I'd written eight sessions into the campaign, realising that'd I'd written a thousand words or so and still missed several significant events. One of the players offered his own synopsis which tells about a tenth of the story: "The last survivors of a mercenary band complete their desperate mission saving a village from undead, then reestablish the company in Ostoko. Local crime syndicates are disrupted. Before they can deal with an emerging blood magic cult, they are kidnapped and spend 2 years in the Feywild. Upon their return, they finally defeat the blood cult, though only after it has already desecrated the nearby city of Pilin. The end." This of course misses out the king's ransom in dwarven steel they found and transported out of the wilderness, the disappearance of the warlock Edrikhanan, the gladiatorial career of Coldheart the barbarian, the encroachment of Imperial culture on local religion, the founding of a nearby goblin village, the ever present giant centipedes. It doesn't mention that along the way they met tree gods, fought demon monkeys and the night hag Granny Scrimshaw at the order of the fey noble, the Midnight Prince. He misses out the party's recurring ability to have a member almost drown nearly every time a body of water is encountered - including the River Styx. If this sounds like something you'd be interested in, please drop me a line.