With the dreaded Blackhide dead, the party began to loot the goblin den, during which time Zel and her roc Cameo rejoined the party. They took the flaming morningstar and rat-hide cloak off of Blackhide's corpse, and combed the rest of the dungeon for treasure. Behind one door, they discovered a mining operation powered by slaves, whom they freed. One of the slaves, a dwarf, turned out to by Monty's long-lost son Jonnal, whom the giant orc Grathwar had carried in a cage at his hip for years before growing bored and selling him to Blackhide. The party also looted a passel of potions from the goblin alchemists' "laboratory," picking them out of the more unsavory and mysterious devices and concoctions therein. The other rooms surrounding the large open chasm that was the goblins' stronghold were less rewarding - only a few hundred silver and a few thousand copper came from ransacking the various caves and cavelets where the goblins slept en masse amongst filthy hides and furs, and nothing of value was turned up in the various wolf dens or the accurately named "meat room."
Finally, however, they came to Blackhide's private chamber and found it brimming with gold and jewels and treasure. Rikkit was particularly interested in a stout, gilded scepter ("Just the perfect size for a goblin pimp cane") that turned out to be a Rod of Wonder.
As the party left the goblin den, they encountered a hunched old man in a rough brown cloak. "You have slain Blackhide?" he asked of them.
"Yes, we have. He will trouble this region no more."
The old man threw back his cloak, revealing shimmering garments of red and blue, a cunning face, and a long beard of black and white. "You have killed one of my pawns. For that you shall pay, in time. But for now, know this: I have my eyes on you, and where my eyes go, my servants follow." With that, he vanished in a cloud of green smoke.
When the smoke cleared, a beautiful woman with green skin, robed and hooded in olive cloth, stood in his place. As she looked up to meet the party's gaze, they could see she had golden-amber eyes with slit pupils, but they only noticed it for an instant before turning to stone.
Only Zel, Cameo, and Sigrid's horse, Flokki, withstood the medusa's gaze. They acted quickly; Zel summoned a wolverine in front of the creature as Cameo and Flokki charged her. The medusa struck back feebly at the wolverine with a wicked dagger, her petrifying gaze, and her hair of poisonous snakes, but she soon fell as Zel rammed her with a flaming sphere.
Zel then flew on Cameo's back to Castle Morbis and asked Charvin Groote, bookseller and rumored wizard, for help. He agreed to return her party to flesh and blood, offering Zel a "group rate" if she assured him that they would not spread the truth of his arcane might around. He wanted solitude for his studies, not to be hounded by adventurers day and night.
They flew back to the new statuary and Charvin, mixing a few drops of his blood with a handful of mud, invoked a spell which turned stone into flesh. The number of statues was so great that he had to teleport home and rest before finishing his work. Zel payed Charvin in part with the sack of platinum pieces she had taken from the medusa's corpse.
The party arrived in Castle Morbis and celebrated Spirits' Night in town square. The festival, usually a celebration of the end of harvest, took on a slightly somber tone given the recent burning of all the willages and crops around the castle, but news of Blackhide's demise and a newfound sense of hope helped energize the festivities. The party left the next day on their carriage, now retrofitted with a reinforced roof holding the light ballista that stood outside of Blackhide's lair, and sporting a gilded demon skull found amongst the goblin leader's possessions.
As they passed by one burnt-out village, a rider came out to meet them. A headless rider. As he approached, Rikkit tried and failed to fire the ballista at him while Kat, noticing he carried a pumpkin under his arm, used pilfering hand to steal it. Realizing it was rotten and gross, she threw it on the ground, releasing a swarm of centipedes under the carriage which swarmed up on the horses. Sigrid, Ryder, and Daphne charged the headless horseman while Rikkit and Zel picked at it with fire and lightning, gradually wearing it down despite its resistance to spells. Finally, the dullahan and its fiendish warhorse were defeated and the party found on its body a sack of platinum and a rolled up note written in a twisted, spidery script which read:
Command:
Harry the countryside around Morbis.
-X
The party rode into town, looking for authorities to inform, only to discover a huge tree had sprouted up in the middle of town and eviscerated corpses were hanging from it, their organs piled around its roots in a revolting pile of black rot. Sigrid, Ryder, and Varisana approached to bury the bodies when suddenly two of the corpses dropped down and attacked them. The tree itself released a cloud of devious spores which convinced most of the party not to see the tree as a threat, then the huge plant began grappling the adventurers with its noose-like vines. After a long fight against the tree's vines and spores, the party came around to the fact that this tree was bad news. After it had already taken a lot of damage, the tree finally managed to pull one of the interlopers - Kat - into its trunk where it could feed off of her. But Kat cut her way out with a sickle, shattering the trunk and causing the tree to collapse in a shower of flinders.
The party high-tailed it out of town and headed south along the Forest Road. It was slow going, as late autumn rains and heavy traffic fleeing Castle Morbis had turned the road into a muddy mess. But the party eventually hit its stride and was moving pretty quickly with their carriage through the Shatterwald.
One night, a strange shadow passed over the carriage and then descended. The shadow belonged to a peryton, a terrible beast with a hawk's wings, a stag's body, hooves, and antlers, a snake's tail, and a wolf's head. The peryton stole Kat's shadow, then swooped down to attack her. Just then, two barghests and four werewolves burst out of the brush to the side of the road. Sigrid, riding her horse with Varisana clinging to her back, wheeled to meet one of the barghests and a werewolf. Two of the werewolves leapt atop the carriage to attack Kat and Ryder, who were driving the vehicle, while the other ripped open the door and dove inside, where Zel, Daphne, and Rikkit sat.
After failing to stop the carriage now that the horses were spooked, Kat used jester's jaunt to teleport off the carriage and fight the second barghest. Zel and Rikkit dispatched the werewolf in the carriage with a silver scythe and a shocking grasp ("I call that spell 'Lycan-nope!'"). Zel and Daphne then clambered out of the speeding carriage onto the rooftop to help Ryder with the other two werewolves. When Rikkit tried to follow them, he fell off the carriage, tumbling back into the mud. Sigrid slew the first barghest with her cairn blade Grave-Sealer while the peryton then swooped down on Kat, flanking her with the other barghest. Kat held her own for a few rounds with her bastard sword Deathfang, but was looking close to death when Rikkit finished the Peryton off with a well-placed burning arc. The barghest knocked Kat out with a bite, then used dimension door to appear in front of Rikkit. Meanwhile, the other werewolves were finished off, worn down despite their supernatural strength and stamina. The barghest hit Rikkit with three powerful blows, leaving him staggering, before Sigrid and Cameo closed in and slew him.
The party continued on to Brackenburg, stopping in a small town a day's ride out to celebrate Kat and Daphne's birthday - they rocked the small village inn late into the night as light snow fell outside. Then they headed south to Two-Break Castle where they purchased passage on a river barge to Karcerinburg, capital city of the Empire. As they passed a large stone island jutting out of the river, they caught a brief glimpse of a man in blue and red robes on top of the rock. When they looked again, he was gone, but soon a mist rose around the rock and a long, serpentine dragon burst out of the roiling water. He charged the barge and shot a stream of boiling water at the party before Rikkit knocked him back with a gust of wind from his Rod of Wonder. Unfortunately, the wind also knocked Kat off the barge, and she clambered onto the back of the dragon. Zel slammed the wyrm with balls of lightning while Sigrid hacked at it with her sword before finally driving it deep into the dragon's throat. The dragon slumped and sunk into the river, leaving Kat soaked again.
Soon, the party arrived in Karcerinburg, an ancient city dating back to the days of the Dragon Empires, when it was called Kar'zeris before passing into elvish hands as Carserith and becoming a frontier city of the great Amnoran Empire as Carserius.
They sought out and found Chernyx, who was in the imperial city taking care of some important personal business and generally enjoying his new lease on life. Chernyx, pleased to be with his friends again, asked if they were here to see Sir Hardrig.
"Hardrig is in town?" asked Sigrid, heart in her throat.
"Yes, he's taken up with the church of Valdrimar and he's been running around with some circle of paladins clearing out dungeons or something."
Sigrid ran to find him, the rest of the party following to eavesdrop. She saw him talking with another paladin and immediately got nervous, so Kat jester's jaunt-ed her up to him. Sir Hardrig was pleased to see her; since he had joined the Circle, he had been doing much better for himself than he ever had as a knight errant, and he was looking forward to taking Sigrid up on her offer of marriage. They contacted Sigrid's family via sending and set a date for the first day of Winter.
The weeks passed swiftly. On the next full moon, Ryder learned that he had received the curse of lycanthropy and immediately sought Chernyx out to have him remove the curse. Zel cast reincarnation on Crowdance's finger bone, and the ghost-touched barbarian returned to the world in the body of halfling. As the wedding approached, Sigrid's and Hardrig's family arrived bit by bit - Hardrig's mother and her second husband, Sigrid's mother and father, Hardrig's patron Sir Arktos, Sigrid's brothers one-by-one. Even family friend and part-time adventuring partner Guy showed up.
The wedding was held in the Temple of Valdrimar - a smaller event than was typically hosted in the temple, but the priests were pleased to allow it for one of the paladins of their Circle. Numerous strangers and curious city dwellers showed up as well to participate in the festivities, especially when the wedding party retired to a pavilion in the Temple District park for the wedding feast.
The next morning, Sigrid and Hardrig were going through the stack of wedding presents they had received from the guests last night. One of them was a drinking horn made out of a large tooth, with a serpentine dragon carved around it. Within was a note written in a spidery script:
To the happy couple -~~~~~
May they find peace someday.
-X
Thus concludes the sandbox campaign, although there is definitely room for more adventure when I come back from England in a year. If this campaign does continue, I would like to see more exploration of Zel's backstory, as high-level campaigns are well-suited to having spellcasting antagonists. Plus, we'll be able to discover what's up with that mysterious red-and-blue-clad 'X' figure.
These are the main house-rules I instated during the sandbox campaign:
A full night's rest heals one quarter of a character's total hit points. The rule as-written for healing is that you regain one hp per level for every night of rest. While I like the gritty, harsh quality of this rule on principle, it does not make for excellent gameplay in practice. Sleep, by all accounts, does not make for an enthralling play session. Resting in dungeons is conceptually weird to begin with, it does not need to be further complicated with 24-hour slumber parties. This is sort of the reason I instated the next rule as well.
Once per day, plus an additional time per day for every five levels a character has achieved, he may take a one-hour rest and regain one hit dice plus his CON modifier in hp. This allows the group a little bit of natural healing (without going totally overboard like 4th Edition did) without making them sleep for a day in the middle of a dungeon. I like this house-rule better than the above-mentioned one because the healing is limited and based on your class and constitution - just like your actual hit points are. In the future, I may eliminate the "1/4 heal overnight" rule and instead combine this hit dice rule and the as-written healing rule so that the player regains 1 hp per level per night of rest, plus he can roll any hit dice he is entitled to if he has not used them up already that day.
On skill checks, a natural 20 is a +20 modifier to the roll, and a natural 1 is a -20 modifier. This doesn't really change much from the "20 is auto-success, 1 is auto-fail" rule, but I like it for some reason.
Absent player characters gain half the xp that the present characters gain. For example, if four of six players are present for this session, and the four players defeat a juvenile river dragon for 4,800 xp, gaining 1,200 xp each, the absent players also get 600 xp. It is assumed that absent players are off on their own, lesser adventures. This keeps an absent player from falling behind by a lot, while continuing to reward players who are able to make it to the session. Of course, xp earned personally, like the xp Sigrid got for resurrecting Sir Hardrig, or the xp Zel got for slaying the medusa, does not factor into this. This worked really well in practice, and I think it is my favourite house-rule so far.
~~~~
I learned a lot GMing this sandbox campaign. I let go of my plot-railroading tendencies while still ensuring there was some plot and substance to the campaign, generally shaping that plot around the characters' actions and backstories. I learned to appreciate pre-existing NPC stat blocks such as those found in the back of the Game Mastery Guide; that really helps when you are running two sessions a week. On a similar note, I learned about re-skinning existing monsters to serve my own purposes. Most importantly, I found I was preparing less and less each session, and instead doing a lot more improvisation. Instead of writing everything down, I kept it in my head to pull out when I needed it. I let NPC motivations drive their actions, even if the characters would never know those motivations. All in all, it made for a larger-seeming world.
Maybe now that that is over, I can start writing more game design articles again.
-your boxy d20 despot
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