Well this is looking like the spot where my RP group's rampage through the Iron Kingdoms will probably get reported each week along with my plans as GM for the campaign and whether or not those plans failed miserably (damn meddling kids!).
With the group on a short break for the next couple of weeks I'll be posting up a two-parter; a recap of the campaign thus far and my plans for the campaign next week. If anything it'll show how the campaign has evolved and the number of times I've had to revise my plans.
Backstory
I had originally intended to adapt the D&D 3.5 Savage Tide campaign (printed in the now defunct Dungeon magazine) to the Iron Kingdoms, the first half - perhaps two-thirds - of the campaign would've been simple enough to do simply by changing the monsters to something more suitable for the IK where needed. The final chapter or so would've been more difficult to do and I was planning on having the party go to Cryx and fight an Iron Lich as suppose to going to the Abyssal Plane in the Savage Tide campaign.
As the campaign progressed it deviated from the Savage Tide one that I had originally decided to use;
*Lady Ellsworth became the name of the party's patron, the heiress of a shipping company after her parents were executed by King Vinter's agents during the Skorne occupation of Corvis during the events of the Witchfire Trilogy. She had a brother (who has only recently come to light) who was last seen in Llael round the time of the Khadoran Invasion and is missing presumed dead. The other big difference is that she only has a single NPC merc bodyguard on the payrole as suppose to a fully fledged group of NPCs in Savage Tide, this NPC has since been taken over by a player.
*The Black Pearls became Isoan artefacts which the Circle Orboros has been trying to track down and seemingly destroy (well thats what the Circle itself has said). The party has already encountered the effects of a single Pearl in a pirate lair and are now trying to track down the last two missing Pearls, namely one on a missing steamboat and the other somewhere in Llael.
*The Crimson Fleet just became some random group of pirates with a much lesser role in the campaign mainly limited to three encounters; an attack on the Ellsworth estate in Corvis, the pirate lair post-Pearl and another attack against a distant colony originally founded by Lady Ellsworth's late father. They had also been mentioned harassing vessels of the Ellsworth Shipping Co. but at present they've effectively bowed out of the campaign.
*Isle of Dread I intended to do as printed in the Savage Tide campaign but with some minor changes, something that I did do with the voyage down. However the party found a way to effectively bypass the island and forced me to revise my plans completely, a single battle against the pirates took place (using adapted Warmachine rules) along with a trip to a ruined Menite temple and a meeting with a Circle Wayfarer. It was also here thanks to the Wayfarer that they found out about what the Black Pearls actually were.
*A Rusalka ended up becoming a recurring villain who ended up plaguing the group, managed to get the group to work for her and then the group got even by finding a relic that controlled the Grymkin. She also had a bit of backstory developed for her where she was originally the lover of a Menite priest/warrior when she was still Human. After she changed the disgruntled Menite create the relic that controls her. Thus far she managed to survive the party's wrath by letting slip some juicy gossip about Lady Ellsworth, though the party forgot to order her to be truthful....
*And to come full circle Lady Ellsworth I had planned from the get-go to be an imposter, originally intended simply to be somebody posing as an estranged daughter who claimed the Ellsworth family fortune post-Witchfire. This ended up getting changed a bit to the real Lady Ellsworth being replaced whilst she was in Caspia as a student. Her use of 'black magic' (actually Shadow Magic from the D&D book Tome of Magic) was meant to raise questions, though the source of her magic has since been changed to her being a Malefactor of Thamar and reinforced by Tharmarite books being in her collection. But this forms a second plotline where the party find out who she really is, what her goals are, where her magic comes from and why the group's Paladin cannot sense any evil.
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Next Week: My goals for the campaign and an overview of characters past and present.
N.B. I'm still excepting questions for a Mailbox segment this Friday.
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