Sessions
Shadow of the Demon Lord: A Bag of Dyx

The Campaign

We're playing the Tales of the Demon Lord adventure path and playing it pretty straight

The players decided to go with an extended family as their character creation rubric, so you have a mixed clan of goblins, dwarves and a giant clockwork. The names in the Dyx clan are...pretty much what you would expect.

Yes, these are my players. Experienced, skilled roleplayers all, forcing me to 100% straight face the fact that this whole site is built upon the foundation of dyx jokes.

The Characters

Session 1: Harvester of Sorrow

Father Gregory, a well liked and well respected figure in the neighborhood, has gone missing, and is one of a number of disappearances that have occoured over the course of the past week. Worried about Greg, the Dyx Clan starts poking around and askign questions, bringing the issue to Private Dyx, a clockwork member of the browncoasts who leads them to investigate the good father's chapel. This task is complicated by the fact that Private won't fit inside, so he investigates by proxy.

The investigation bears little fruit (Though Grabba ends up with a potion and a scroll, just ot help), but it makes it clear that Greg was abducted elsewhere. Thankfully, the crew is pointed to Browncloak sergeant who had been investigating the disappearances (and who has been put on traffic detail to get her to stop. Private approaches her and persuades her to share her notes, which Grabba (The only literate one among them) translates. This gives them enough information about the disappearances to investigate The Fallen Soldier, a rathole of a tavern and the kind of place the Dyx clan is quite cofmortable.

It turns out that everyone's a little worried about Greg - he's well liked, even if he's a bit of a stick in the mud - and they gather enough information to point them at the old Moore House, so the Dyx set out.

They find themselves interrupted by a pair of gang members, encouraging them to keep moving. Words are exchanged, and during the face off, Grabba and Notti sneak ahead to look in the house, and see a cloaked figure. Further investigation is interrupted as the confrontation turns to blows. The gangers are driven off, but in the chaos, the cloaked figure slips out of the house, and it's faster than the Dyx. however, the know the neighborhood better, and they arrange to catch it in a dead end alley.

Session 1.5: Harvester of Sorrow concluded

Realizing that the creature has left the house unguarded, the Dyx clan abandons their pursuit in order to explore (loot?) the house. They have a run in with a swarm of diseased rats, which leads to a bit of a melee, but Dyx emerge triumphant.

Exploring the house reveals a secret door to the basement, and they proceed to explore. In its depths, they find an old iron crypt, the badly injured form of Father Gregory, clinging to his holy symbol. There is also, most critically, a ghoul who is snacking on the not-trival pile of local bodies who looks very interested indeed in this source of fresh meat.

Combat follows. Grabba makes every effort to rescue the insensate priest, but between hsi wounds and his trauma, he's of no use. He also attempts to use the scroll taken from Greg's quarters, but his lack of faith seems to keep anything from happening.

Sadly, despite heroic efforts, the ghoul absolutely tears through the family, quite gruesomely at points. The heroic efforts of Private, Grabba and Bagga Dyx buy time for the others to retreat. Unfortunately, as the fleeing goblins come up from the basement and head towards the exit, the grey cloaked figure returns through the front door.

Notti & Grabba immediately change directions to dive out the rear window, but the creature is faster than they are. Notti is cut down while Grabba dives out the window and flees into the city, where the grey cloaked figure eventually hunts him down.

Session 2: Born to Die

Trying again with new characters.

We framed this one as happening not long after "The Dyx Massacre", and had a fresh boat of characters who had gotten pulled in to help on of the city councilmen deal with his lost daughter. The crew consisted of:

The job was staightforward - watch the payoff get deposited, follow it back to the source, rescue the daughter and kill the hell out of the kidnappers. Naturally, it's not that simple, as it turns out there are cultists and demons in the mix too. To get right to the spoilers, the girl in question has been posessed by a demon, and her cult wants her back (to kill her and free the demon), and she also wants that, and the criminals who kidnapped herhave no idea.

The ramp up ended up kind of fun character stuff, as Steelbeard ended up bonding with the clockwork who was acting as courier for the payoff. He's kind of a throwaway drug-addicted clockwork in the text, but since Steelbeard was a new Clockwork and trying to get his bearings in the world, it ended up driving some fun conversations. At least until the other paty memembers scared hm so badly his key stopped turning.

The PCs jumped the crooks at the docks, pretty much kicked their asses, got information on the island where ther girl was being held, and stole their boat to head out. This is where it started to get a little wierd. See, as noted, we have a few different groups in play (the crooks, the cultists and the demon itself) and one more simple reality: The PCs are going to lose almost any stand up fight they get into. They might be able to take on the cultists (the weakest group), but the criminals are stronger and more numerous than they are, and the Demon is just a big old pile of trouble.

However, unlike the Dyx, the party has a few more tricks available to them, and luck in on their side (literally - i had them roll a d20 as a luck check for how this played, and they rolled a 19) so as they are positioning themselves for an ambush, the cultists launch their own ambush, creating chaos for the players to take advantage of.

They genuinely did a pretty good job of it. Their Turret spell was tremendously effective, and they picked their moment well, but they had not accounted for the screw-job of the hostage wanting to be killed. If she had been a genuine prisoner, they probably could have grabbed her and ran. Instead, they got to watch her turn into a 9 foot tall magic tossing monstrosity.

To their credit, that was when they ran. It was also when the crooks ran. Sadly, the crooks ran in Steelbeard's direction as he was working to sabotage their boats, and a 3 on 1 fight ended quickly and decisively against him. Still, 1 death was an improvement!

At the end, the players took the boat further away from the city. The next adventure takes place out in the boonies, with no connective tissue to anything that's happened so far, so "laying low in the countryside" seemed like the right next step.

Session 3: The Curious Case of the Errant Swine

In the time the characters have been bombing around the woods, Quinn engaged in more clockwork experiments, resulting in the creation of Stabbicus, best described as a homicidal clockwork murder parrot.

So, the hook for this one is that a reprehensible pig farmer is willing to pay a princely sum (1 gold) to recover his lost pigs, or barring that, to deal with whowevr has been stealing them. The additional complication is that the creatures responsible came out of a dungeon in the nearby woods. The dungeon had been recently disturbed by some adventurers, for whom things went pretty badly.

The first leg went well enough - the party found the trail left by the monsters, and managed to ambush them when they went to hunt again. The fight very clearly could have gone badly if the ambush had not gone well - there were some injuries (and no small amount of grossness). They got some information about the dungeon off the corpses but, frankly, the thread to get there was tenuous at best. I had to do something, or there was a good chance this was going to be the beginning and end of the adventure.

So, I cheated a bit. When the next possible random encounter rolled around, I explicitly had them run across the one surviing adventurer being pursued by beastmen. The party rolled over the beastmen to an almost startling degree, rescued Delia, claimed their prize and got back to the nearby town. Delia gave them the rundown on the dungeon and what she knew about the beastmen (who had a camp within striking distance of town).

While interested in the dungeon, the immediate threat of the Beastmen caught their attention first, so they set their eyes on the camp. Taking lessons from past fights, they again struck from Ambush, and again it served them well, though the one group they hadn't counted on took out Quinn, though they were stopped from finishing him off. They gathere heads for bounties, got their reward, and now intend to explore the dungeon. (Session break)