#catsfallcampaignspoilers

[catcas22]

Gushing about my new campaign!

I'm four sessions into my first campaign (as GM) and it's going great! I volunteered to run a campaign to give three of our forever-gms a chance to play, which ended up being a great way for me to get my feet wet as a gm -- three of my four players are highly knowledgeable about the rules, good at improv, and love being in character.

I've got so many plans for upcoming sessions, but unfortunately I can't rant to my usual dnd friends because they're in the campaign and I don't want to spoil the plot (@thatboreddrake this is your warning to block #catsfallcampaignspoilers).

Said spoilers below, if anyone wants to hear me ramble.

The campaign takes place in a standard fantasy setting, but about fifteen years out from a zombie apocalypse. The king got tired of paying wages to his living soldiers and figured paying a couple of necromancers to raise him an undead army would be cheaper. Things went wrong in predictable fashion.

The players are as follows:

Alvar: A bloodhunter afflicted with dragon-flavored lycanthropy after he inadvertently picked up a cursed coin from the horde of a lichdragon. He can't get rid of the coin now, and is violently paranoid that someone will try to steal it from him. Since he killed quite a few people before he learned to somewhat control his curse, he now travels the land protecting innocents and slaying less scrupulous monsters as a way to pay back that debt.

Xenitor: An owlin abjuration wizard. A field researcher for a network of scholars working to gather and preserve as many spells and texts as possible, before they are lost forever in a zombie-induced Dark Age. The type to try to steal Alvar's coin out of pure scientific curiosity.

Hiro: Tom Sawyer-flavored bard. An optimistic young drifter just looking to make friends and go on adventures (who is a reborn and doesn't know it). Due to constantly flubbing his history/insight checks, he still sees Sebastian as a perfectly trustworthy, somewhat eccentric, but definitely-not-a-vampire gentleman. He has seen Sebastian walk on walls and bite people.

Sebastian Pietro Vasquez de Cornelio IV: Dhampir conquest paladin. A nobleman from a family that intermarried with vampires generations ago, recently cast out for mouthing off to the family patriarch. Talks like he's in the Spanish Inquisition, dresses like he's in the Swiss Guard. Having been disinherited by his family, his goal is now to start his own noble house, presumably with blackjack and hookers.

It took him five minutes to surprise-adopt Hiro to act as his herald.

After saving the small town of Alderford from an undead horde, the party did a bit of investigating and found that the town's palisade had been sabotaged. Asking around town revealed that the local liege lord, Barnabas Dunwich, had raised taxes to the point where the people of Alderford said he could take his troops and leave, they'd raise a militia to defend themselves rather than continue to pay his protection money.

A bit more poking around, and the party correctly concludes that Dunwich had left some men behind to deliberately lure the undead towards Alderford. Party sets out for the abandoned watchtower, where they believe Dunwich's men to be hiding.

This is about where the derailment started, but I'll write up the rest later. Suffice to say, I'm having a great time!