Game Description
You come to slowly, groggy and disoriented. Stiff, in both limb and spirit. In a sense, it’s less like waking from sleep than it is rising from the dead.
The last thing you remember, you were fighting giants—stone giants and hill giants, both from the Cult of Fire. Yes, that Fire Cult. The one led by your former ally, the genasi Ruinas Borgas. A sizeable force of giants flying his banner had invaded and overrun the outer reaches of the orcish Kingdom of Many Arrows, and you’d been hired by King Obould XIX’s daughter—what was her name?—to aid in the salvation of her kingdom.
Traveling into the Spine of the World had been easy enough, as had locating the enemy. You’d tracked the giantish outriders to a base camp hidden in the mountains, and you’d slain their forward patrol leader—a hill giant werewolf!—along with his allies, more hill giants, a pack of worgs, and a pair of stone giant mercenaries. In the spoils, you’d found a map that led into the depths of the mountains, to a glacial peak at the very top of the Spine of the world. It seemed a likely spot for the giants’ citadel.
But even as you’d made your attack plans, others had been making plans for you.
That night when you’d lain down to sleep, you’d fallen together into the Plane of Dream. In the distance, you could hear the sound of demonic chanting. Closer on stood a rank of dark angels and their prince, the godling Maglubiyet. They’d come for the Iron Crown of Shadows. The key to freeing Bane, the Black Lord, from the prison-plane of Banehold.
You’d fought…
You sit. Touch your face, your hands, your torso.
You’re alive. Changed somehow; indefinably but indisputably altered from what you once were. But you live, of that there is no question. The Iron Crown of Shadows, however, is gone. You don’t think that Maglubiyet got it—certainly, you remember slaying his priests and his angelic minions—but the fact is that you no longer possess the Crown, and whatever became of it is a mystery.
Still. You have life, you have will, you have your weapons. Really, that is all you need. Because if there is one thing that being a mercenary in the city of Luskan has taught you over the years, it is this:
There may not be time for much. But there is always time for Revenge.
***
Welcome back to the City of Sails!
Well, we’ll actual (re)start our tale in the Spine of the Wold, but it’s the same story, and I plan to pick it up right where we left off. However, we will no longer be using the old 4th Edition rules. Now, we’re onto
D&D Next!
What, what?!
Yup. That’s right. And here’s why:
The game broke down before because I just didn’t have time to adjudicate the rounds using the 4th Edition ruleset. All the Interrupts and Reactions and everything that you got when you reached mid-Paragon Tier changed the game’s basic action economy in such a way that, really, I just couldn’t keep track of it all. It was taking me 2 hours or more to do every game post, and frankly, I simply do not have two hours per day to work on this. However, the new ruleset is greatly stripped down, and I want to try it in the worst way. So…
We are going to pick up our game with PCs at
7th Level.
This is because you guys were roughly the same level as the Stone Giants you were fighting when last we left. Stone Giants in D&D Next are 7th Level monsters, so it makes sense that you’d be about that level as well. Also: D&D Next has only 20 levels rather than 30 in total, and you guys weren’t quite half way up the game’s total level progression scale yet, so I’m again thinking level 7 sounds about right. Finally, given the way the game’s rules are evolving, I’d rather err on the side of starting too low rather than on the side of starting too high.
So.
You guys will make characters based on the extant character classes: Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, Monk, and Wizard. This, of course, won’t capture the full flavor of what your old characters could do because the new ruleset just isn’t fleshed out enough yet, but to make up for the difference, I’ll allow substantial homebrewing. For example, I homebrewed a Swordmage build of the Wizard class on my blog recently. Things of that nature are not only allowed, they are actively encouraged. In fact, one of the major reasons I want to try this is to see what you guys will come up with to adapt our old concepts to our new ideas.
We’ll (obviously) have to work out how to balance things on the fly, but I think we can manage with a little reasoned discussion. Besides, the new ruleset relies less on balance overall, so I imagine it’ll be a little harder to break it.
Notes:
1. You must sign up for the Playtest.
2. We’re going to be using the Playtest’s rules, even as they change. This will no doubt cause chaos. But that chaos will be awesome!
3. I do not quite have time to start running the game just yet. I have to finish writing a short story first that is one of my kids’ Christmas presents. So we’re gonna have like three weeks or a month to fully familiarize ourselves with the new ruleset as well as to create/fully homebrew our characters.
4. It is my plan to take 5 Players, and ALL of the Players that were part of the original incarnation of the Sellswords of Luskan will be accepted… if they’ll have me back. That said, I disappeared without warning, and I doubt seriously that everyone is going to come back. So I am posting this publicly, and we’ll just have to see how it shakes out and who we wind up putting in the Party.
5. When your characters awaken, they will quickly realize that all of their weapons and armor have been disenchanted. You can either ignore this in-character or make a deal out of it, and I’ll think up some nefarious reason why it’s important. Either way, you can start with as much mundane gear as you want, but you will have ZERO magic items.
6. Finally, because of improvements in my personal mobile technology, it’s my plan to run maps for this game out of Google Maps, like pretty much everyone else in the world does.
Questions? Suggestions?
I’m sure there will be some. That’s a good thing.
Revenge of the Sellswords of Luskan
