GotWK Campaign Part 9: An Eye For An Eye

This is an account of part 9 of my ongoing campaign set in my homebrewed wild west setting, Guns of the Western Kings.  Get caught up with the previous parts here.

When last we left our heroes, they had chased a drow raiding party down into the Sunbeam Silver Mine.  The drow had attacked the mining camp at the surface, surprising both the miners and the elven rangers who had been waging a guerrilla campaign against the mining company.  As the party descends into the mountain in pursuit of the drow, they discover the wounded leader of the elven guerillas.  Bemoaning his failure, he says that if the drow have not seized control of the evil now, they surely would soon, and he implored the adventurers to destroy the evil before the drow can use it.  He is maddeningly unclear what he means by "the evil".  Nevertheless, the party fights its way through a hostage situation, kills a giant spider, and ends up hanging in its web above a seemingly bottomless hole deep into the depths of the mountain.

And now:

The Sniper in the Dark
One single passageway breaks into the side of the bottomless pit - a square entrance large enough that two men might march abreast through it - just above the level of the giant spiderweb.  Heather, Theodore, and Rusty pull themselves free of the sticky webbing and tightrope-walk to the passage.  Gudguníis, the blinded sharpshooter, has considerably more trouble extricating himself, and by the time he makes it to the entrance he is wearing the equivalent of a new suit of clothes in tangled spider silk.  The passageway is freshly carved and climbs steeply down, spiraling roughly around the outside of the bottomless pit.  They follow it for untold hours - possibly days - in the sunless dark before it opens up into a natural cavern.  It is a long cave full of stalagmites and stalactites, obviously carved by water at some time though now it is drier than a coal miner's cough.  Brandishing the lantern, Theodore takes the lead, only to be shot right through the breastplate.

GotWK Campaign Part 8: Shut Your Drow Hole

This is an account of part 8 of my ongoing campaign set in my homebrewed wild west setting, Guns of the Western Kings.  Get caught up with the previous parts here.

When last we left our heroes, they had rescued Heather (the party healer)'s young daughter Annabelle from the fey realm.  There were some complications, of course.  For one thing, due to the fey realm's interesting relationship with time, Annabelle was now 17 years old instead of 8, which came as a surprise to Heather.  As did the revelation that Heather was a half-fey changeling (a homebrewed race currently in the playtesting stage), which went a long way toward explaining her ability to cast suggestion once per day as a spell-like ability.  During the process of rescuing Annabelle, the party managed to blow up an ancient tower by igniting a room full of a magical ammunition called firecorn, thereby thwarting the goblin king Hizendis' plot to conquer the fey realms, or whatever that little dude was trying to do.  But all of that has little bearing on this chapter of our adventure.  What you do need to know is that Theodore procured a snazzy new mithril great falchion from Annabelle's ogre guard, Heather's dryad mom gave everyone a magical oak leaf that will transform into a tree when they speak her name, and the party rogue Gudguníis is blind now, which makes him fairly unreliable as a sniper.  Also, when the party left the fey realm, they discovered they were an undisclosed amount of time in the future.

And now:

As the party emerges from the mighty oak tree, heads still spinning from the interplanar journey, they notice that, though they had left the woods at the height of summer, the trees are now bare and the ground marked by drifts of snow.  They have little time to absorb the change in surroundings before a hideous yowl smites the cold air.  A hungry mountain lion lopes out from the trees, picking up speed as it charges at the startled party.  Gudguníis takes a blind potshot at the big cat but manages only to scrape some bark off a nearby tree.  Heather opens fire with her own rifle and, thanks to her working eyes, fares much better than the blind rogue. Rusty hurls one of his alchemical bombs and scorches the cougar, and Theodore leaps into the fray with his mighty trident and finishes it off.  Our heroes are back in their home plane and ready to kick some ass.  And Fate, as usual, will soon present them with some ass to kick!

GotWK Campaign Part 7: Cold Iron and Hot Lead

This is an account of part 7 of my ongoing campaign set in my homebrewed wild west setting, Guns of the Western Kings.  Get caught up with the previous parts here.

Previously, in Guns of the Western Kings, our heroes were trying to make their way back to Fort Crawdon and the Sunbeam Silver Mine after an unusual subterranean steamboat ride took them far off course.  They fought off a bandit gang of coyote-folk who were trying to rob their train, only to arrive in Fort Crawdon and find they were wanted by the Deuclair Mining Company for failing to carry out their end of a bargain they had made earlier.  They fled into the woods and encountered a group of elves that they had also tried and failed to help, but were interrupted by a patrol of Deuclair Co. soldiers.  They fled deeper into the woods and were surprised to meet Heather's mom, a dryad, who told them that Heather's daughter was in grave danger.

And now:

Before Heather can absorb the fact that her mother is a dryad and her daughter is in the fey realm, the dryad has everyone link arms and pulls Heather, Theodore, Gudguníis, Face, and Rusty (and their horses) through her oak tree into the land of the fey.  They emerge, slightly dizzy from the experience, in a majestic wood.  The dryad introduces herself as Dervenn and explains that Heather's child, Annabelle (whose disappearance was Heather's reason for adventuring) has been living with her in the fey realm.  Because time passes differently in the land of the fey than it does in the mortal realm, Annabelle is no longer a child of eight, but a girl of seventeen, and quite the favorite at the Seelie court.  Unfortunately, her popularity has also made her a target; the goblin king Hizendis kidnapped her and took her to his lair - an ancient tower in the Forest of Twilight.  The tower, built by the ancient Dark Elves long ago, is reputed to have a corrupting influence on the fey, so none from the Seelie court have dared try to rescue her.  Hence why Dervenn had to reach out to the mortal realm.

Still reeling from the news that she is a changeling and her daughter has aged nine years since she last saw her, Heather heads off with the others across the fey realm.  After trekking for some time, they come to a patch of woods where the sky is dim and a foul yellow mist hangs in the air.  Above the treetops they can make out two towers.  They advance, but are distracted by a commotion to the right - two unicorns have wandered into a nearby swamp and become trapped in the sucking mire.  Suspicious of the trapped beasts, Face the pigtailed paladin detects their evil intent and the party simply walks away.  The evil unicorns, loathe to let their prey slip from them so easily, teleport out of the swamp and gore Face and Rusty.  They manage to fend them off, Face smiting them with her twin sawed-off shotguns and Rusty blasting them with fiery bombs, until the nefarious beasts are nothing but crispy, perforated corpses.  Rusty seems to recall that shadhavar horns can be very valuable evil spell components, and Theodore is all for taking them, but Face and Heather overrule Theodore's business plans and have the black unicorns burnt, horns and all.  Face makes camp there, unable to go further before she fully recovers from the shadhavars' poison.

GotWK Campaign Part 6: Chugga Chugga Choo Choo!

This is an account of part 6 of my ongoing campaign set in my homebrewed wild west setting, Guns of the Western Kings.  Get caught up with the previous parts here.

Previously, on Guns of the Western Kings: The party was caught in a conflict between a mining company seeking to re-open the Sunbeam Silver Mine and a tribe of elves who  guarded the mountain and claimed that mining there would unleash a great evil on the world.  In the midst of this, they took a side-quest to investigate a mysterious ore coming out of a Dwarven settlement.  There they met a new party member, Theodore the adventurous businessman, but they also discovered what it was like to careen down a subterranean river on a broken-down paddle-boat.  They ended up in the desert far to the south, and worked their way northwards via an exciting and dangerous cattle drive.  As they approached the city of Templeton, where they intended to catch a train, they noticed they were being followed by a group of canine-headed humanoids who always stayed just outside of rifle range.

And now:

Wikimedia

After selling a load of accumulated goods in Templeton, including gnomish grave goods and a giant rattlesnake skin, the brave band of adventurers buys train tickets up to Fort Crawdon, hoping to finally get their plans back on track.  Heather especially was looking forward to it, since their adventures had taken her far away from the area where she was hoping to find her missing daughter.  It is a short train - two boxcars, two passenger cars, and a caboose.  Theodore's horse, Bucephalus, rides in one of the boxcars. Bjorn and Falco ride with the incapacitated Dawne and Ash in the frontmost boxcar, as the railroad wouldn't allow the tomb-cursed duo to sit in the passenger cars.  Heather, Theodore, Gudguníis, and Rusty take their seats in the passenger cars and the train chugs northward through the prairie.

Rusty was the first to notice a rider out the window - a lithe humanoid with the head of a coyote, armed to the teeth and riding with purpose.  He recognizes it as a wayaha, a race of roguish tricksters native to these lands.  Although the wayaha are a tribal people, they are quick to take up new ways of life, and many have been drawn to the way of the gun and become bandits and rustlers.  Gudguníis grabs his rifle and rushes to the back of the train, hoping to pick them off from the caboose, but as he passes into the second passenger car he sees the door to the caboose slide open and a coyote snout poke around it.  The wayaha bandit steps into the train car, brandishing a pistol, and calls out, "Your money or your life!" before Gudguníis blasts him with his rifle.  The coyote-man slumps back against a train bench, clutching his chest wound, fires off a shot at the half-elf rogue that misses by a foot, and collapses to the floor.  The door to the car slams back open and a burly, tough wayaha warrior, bristling with orangish fur, muscles his way in and blasts at Gudguníis with his shotgun.  Heather rushes into the car behind the half-elf and dives for cover behind a bench, calling out to the cowering civilians in the car to stay behind cover or flee to the next car.

GotWK Campaign Part 5: Desert Dungeon and Cattle Drive

This is an account of part 5 of my ongoing campaign set in my homebrewed wild west setting, Guns of the Western Kings.  Get caught up with the previous parts here.

When last we left our heroes, they had just crashed their bedraggled steamboat in a desert canyon, far to the south of anywhere they wanted to be.  Narrowly escaping a swarm of flesh-eating giant freshwater crabs, they found themselves facing the steep wall of the canyon they were trapped in.  Following a crumbling staircase carved into the rock, they came upon a cave, littered with shards of pottery, but large enough to rest in.  Before them looms a circular stone door ringed with strange glyphs.  In its center, a carved skeletal figure hanging upside down over a river, its dark maw open wide, as if waiting to swallow something.

We now return you to the adventure already in progress...

Photo: Tigerhawkvok via Wikimedia

Intrepid Theodore leads Big Bjorn, Falco the Flexible, Rusty the prospector, and the half-elf rogue Gudguniis in scaling the face of the cliff.  Ash the sharpshooter, Heather the hedge witch, Face the pigtailed paladin, and the newly-adult sorceress Dawne, meanwhile, attempt to figure out how to open the circular door.  They figure something needs to go in its gaping maw, but what?  Dawne shines a light in its mouth, revealing only a fist-sized smooth stone concavity.  Ash tries sticking his hand in, and when that doesn't work, he cuts his finger and rubs the blood inside.  Finally, he pours some whisky in there, and the door slowly rolls open.

GotWK Campaign Part 4: The Underground Steamboat of Death

This is an account of part 4 of my ongoing campaign set in my homebrewed wild west setting, Guns of the Western Kings.  Get caught up with the previous parts here.  

When last we left our heroes, they were hired by the dwarven trading concern House Dent to investigate the source of a mysterious glowing dye being traded by their rivals, House Fleckstone.  Their investigations had led them to an underground warehouse housing a secret lab, which in turn hid a secret passage deep below the mountain to a subterranean river and - of all things - a steamboat.  Back up at the warehouse, the party got into a firefight with two dwarven guards, quickly dispatching one of them.  The other, finally figuring out what was up, called out that he too was working for House Dent.  We now return you to the blogpost already in progress:

via Wikimedia

The dwarf said his name was Quentin Plumbum, and explained that he had been hired to infiltrate Fleckstone, but hadn't yet been able to get inside the secret lab.  Ash told them of the underground steamboat he and Gudguníis had discovered, and Quentin suggested hiding the party inside the food shipment bound for this mysterious outpost that both he and the party had heard mention of.  He would cover for them by explaining that subterranean raiders had attacked the warehouse, wounding him and killing his partner before retreating in the face of Quentin's fire.  The party agreed.  But before he would put them in the crates, he insisted on bringing in his employer - a businessman who had been hired by House Dent, and had in turn hired Quentin to do his dirty work.

Quentin burst into his hotel room, still bleeding, and explained the situation.  Theodore was up immediately.  Adventure - just what he had been waiting for!  He grabbed his "go bag", his twin .577 revolvers, and his trusty melee weapons: a whip and a trident.  In a flash, he and Quentin were back at the warehouse.  They hardly had time for introductions before being shoved unceremoniously into the shipping containers.  Heather pocketed a few potatoes for a later stew.  Rusty, meanwhile was really enjoying his time in a pickle barrel.  They waited a few uncomfortable hours before being picked up and loaded onto the boat.

GotWK Campaign Part 3: Bored at the Board Meeting

This is an account of part 3 of my ongoing campaign set in my homebrewed wild west setting, Guns of the Western Kings.  Get caught up with the previous parts here.  

Top row: Face the paladin, Heather the witch, Bjorn the barbarian, Falco the acrobat
Front Row: Rusty the alchemist, Skip the warpriest, Dawne the sorceress, Ash the ranger

The party was understandably pretty horrified that the wizard Ixander Cleve and the railroad were massacring orcs, but there was little they could do against a man who could control what one party member described as 'machine gun golems' - larger versions of the gun sentry they had fought earlier, but armed with gatling guns.  In the end, all they could do was accept Cleve's offer to take the other rescued captives back to Fort Crawdon while the party set off with Deuclair Mining Company representative Hanc Growlon to investigate the Sunbeam Silver Mine.

GotWK Campaign Part 2: Blood on the Rails

This is an account of part 2 of my ongoing campaign set in my homebrewed wild west setting, Guns of the Western Kings.  Get caught up with part 1 here.  

Vulture-Tribe Orc Berserker - Kent Hamilton

When we last saw our heroes - Face, Blair, and Heather - they had vanquished a bandit gang of hobgoblins and kobolds in the Sunbeam Silver Mine and discovered that the old mine, long thought to be played out, was still producing silver.  That night, Blair struck off on his own, still convinced that he was evil inside and hoping to save his companions from himself (translation: Blair's player wanted to play a different character).

The next morning, Face and Heather sat in the sheriff’s office.  Sheriff Flant sat across from them, his dirty old boots propped up on his messy desk.  Two of the hunks of silver ore that they had liberated from the Sunbeam Silver Mine rested atop a stack of coffee-stained papers.  Flant took another puff from his pipe, then wheezed, his grey moustache bouncing along with his rattling cough.

“I have to say, everyone in town is mighty pleased that you found silver in that mine, seeing as we was all told it was played out.  Silver was the lifeblood of Sunbeam; without it we been withering up, fixing to expire.  Problem is, that mine is still property of the Deuclair Mining Company.  Mr. Deuclair bought up the whole damn mountain less’n a year after the first silver strike.  Course, weren’t two years after that the mine up an closed, citing a lack of ore, which we can clearly see is no longer the case!”  He laughed and tapped the ore with his foot.  “We cain’t draw none o’ that silver out without oversight from Deuclair.  Our town’s got hope again, but hope’s gotta go through a whole mess o' clerks and lawyers afore it can reach the people.”  He paused and took another puff from his pipe.  “Course, being as the silver ore you liberated was already mined, that’ll fall under spoils of war.  No need to notify Mr. Deuclair on that account,” he winked.

Guns of the Western Kings - What is it?

A few weeks ago I posted an account of the first play session in my new campaign setting, Guns of the Western Kings, promising that I would explain more about the setting later.  Well, later is now.  Last time, I explained that GotWK (pronounced gotwik) is not Eberron, not steampunk, and not Deadlands.  I want to expand on that a bit, just for clarity's sake:

GotWK is not Eberron.  Eberron is a campaign setting that made its debut during the age of 3rd edition D&D.  It was groundbreaking in tone, inviting players into a high-magic, high-fantasy setting heavily inspired by post-WWI pulp adventure.  Eberron took magic to great extremes, filling the world with magical robots (that you can play as), airships, and trains powered by bound elementals.  GotWK, while similarly bringing a fantasy world into a more modern setting, is not a high-magic world of airships and sentient robots.  Magic, in the world of GotWK, did not advance exponentially as technology did.  It has the same basic presence in and effect on the world as it does in an average game of D&D or Pathfinder - magic items are expensive, wizards are holed up in their towers, and magical beasts are terrifying and dangerous.  The trains in GotWK run on coal.  Speaking of coal...

GotWK is not steampunk.  The level of technology is the same as the real world American West in the 1870s-80s.  Although I wouldn't rule out coal powered automatons and airships, they certainly won't be commonplace.  Steampunk can be pretty cool when it's done right, but it is rarely done right.  Besides, if GotWK were steampunk, it wouldn't be western anymore.  There are no giant mechanical spiders in GotWK, as far as I know.

Warner Bros via Unmuseum

GotWK is not Deadlands.  Deadlands is a Western RPG set in an America where suddenly, after the Battle of Gettysburg, the dead started rising from their graves and magic was unleashed upon the world.  It has its own system of magic, its own classes, and its own rule system (although it was later adapted into d20, GURPS, and Savage Worlds).  Where Deadlands is about the real world suddenly becoming magic, GotWK is about a fantasy world that advances to the point that it has a Wild West.  It is not its own RPG, it is a campaign setting for the Pathfinder roleplaying game.

So now that we are clear on what Guns of the Western Kings is not, let's talk more about what it is.

Guns of the Western Kings - First Play Session in a Brand New Campaign Setting

I've been working on a secret project for a while now: a Wild West campaign setting for the PFRPG.  I'm calling it "Guns of the Western Kings" (formerly: "Gunslinger", but that is a little too close to some other trademarked names.  Plus Pathfinder has since come out with an ill-conceived class of the same name).  Here's a picture I drew when I first came up with the idea about 4-5 years ago, which still gives a pretty good idea of what this whole thing is about:

(No longer called Gunslinger and no longer being developed for D&D 3.5)

I thought maybe the best way to introduce you to the campaign setting was to tell you how my first playtest of it went.  But first, I feel I should clear up a few things.  This is a campaign setting for the PFRPG, not a new roleplaying game system.  It uses the same rules and has many of the same races, classes, and monsters.  It is not steampunk, it is not Eberron, and it is not Deadlands.  It is an original fantasy world, not a magicked-up version of the late 19th century American West.  The world of GotWK is one of kings and presidents, dragons and locomotives, wizards and six-shooters.

But I'll tell you more about it later.  For now, let's hear how the first play session went!