#mostly yadira and the talk with ishran

[nemossubmarine]

Knights of the Night Sky #20

This episode was a bit shorter one, bridging the gap between Underdark and our group’s final destination, the Divine Realm. Let’s see how they fared as planewalkers, shall we?

Before there’s any planewalking to be had, there’s few more things our heroes want to do at the HQ before they go.

Kasbir writes some letters, in case he doesn’t make it. One addressed to his ship’s captain and the other to Mairin, asking her to deliver his body to the captain to be buried at sea.

Jeff and Dophina also write home, but much more pleasant letters.

Jeff also has another chat with Adam. He asks whether he’d like to go to Lloth and give away his sun parts as well, as he is no more of a fan of the sun god than Jeff is.

Adam declines, saying he wants to hold onto all the pieces of him that still remain after all these years.

Jeff is also a bit worried that Adam seems to be keeping mostly to himself so he introduces him to the bugbear family that was relocated by our heroes near the HQ.

Then it’s off we go! Reane picks our heroes up and as only Jeff has any idea on how the planar system even works, Reane explains a bit.

The idea is to travel through not only the planes of this universe, but the multiple almost infinite parallel universes and their planar systems as well.

This basically means, that Reane will drop our heroes off in a plane, they’ll have to move a bit, and then go to the next portal.

Luckily Jeff asks, if there’s a chance they’ll be separated, bc Reane would not have explained it, but yeah, that happens most likely.

But Reane takes some hair from all of our heroes to make sure they can keep track of them, and then it’s off we go!

Dophina and Jeff appear in a very simple plane, where everything just happens opposite, so they walk backward and find their portal and move on.

Kendrick and Kasbir find themselves atop a world made out of trees entirely. There’s not much chances for them to move forward, so they move downward.

They locate the portal alongside the trunk farther down, but unluckily miscalculate their jump and fall off the trees, landing in some moss far far below.

They find some moss people, which offer them tea, but communicating with them proves troublesome.

Luckily Reane comes to pick them up.

Reane and Lutharin appear in a giant beehive. They get swarmed by bees. Before the bees get to do anything, Lutharin casts sunbeam, and subsequently turns into a potted plant. Reane manages to get both of them through the portal though.

Jeff appears in a completely empty place made out of rock. The only noticeable thing really is the fact that the athmosphere is heavy and the gravity is so great he can’t move. Luckily he knows a spell which allows him to fuse himself into the rock, and thus the whole planet, and transform it as he pleases. He uses this skill to move himself, and also shape the planet into a dick, cos why not, I guess.

Dophina and a potted plant appear in a world completely underwater. Dophina tries to get forward, but gets caught up in a current and thrown into the surface. The air of this plane turns out to be not for breathing, so she goes back under and tries to reach the portal she sees.

Meanwhile the potted plant turns back into Lutharin, who also gets swept up by the currents.

He and Dophina rejoin, though they appear to have lost the portal.

They find a cave underwater where someone had built a portal of some sort. Dophina activates it and they step on through.

Jeff appears in a world which is made completely out of shadows, ready to attack him. He throws a fireball, and runs into its circle of light, before the shadows manage to grab him.

Jeff, Dophina and Kasbir appear in a world where there’s no land at all, they are simply floating in air.

Dophina manages to do some air-swimming much better than she ever did water-swimming, and Jeff uses flying spell to get him and Kasbir moving.

Kendrick and Lutharin appear into a ruins of a city in some strange world. When they move out of the ruins they notice dozens of hooded figures erasing the ruins.

When the figures notice them, they tell them to move on, since it is not yet their time to deleted.

So Kendrick and Lutharin move on, concluding that these are the same sweepers that had been killing people in their universe, just doing their job.

Kendrick, Jeff and Kasbir appear in the middle of a battlefield, a desperate struggle between a city of people and a horde of undead. Also someone’s magical woopsie-daisies (not naming names, but it was Kendrick) gives everyone in the armies a cold margarita.

Jeff drinks his drink and also takes the paper umbrella from it with him, and they move on.

Lutharin and Dophina appear in a grand library of some sorts. It appears to be overseen by Fate, despite the fact that they left him at the HQ as well.

He complains about people not knocking, and then points the portal out to them.

Kendrick and Dophina appear in Hell. Literally. Dophina discovers a hidden talent, namely that she can now speak Abyssal.

They meet with this lovely giant devil named Barbatos, who, very graciously lets them pass, but says that they’ll meet again.

Lutharin and Kasbir appear in someone’s (presumably magical) purse. Kasbir takes some time to get some loot, before they move on.

Jeff appears in some kind of a desert world. He wanders around a bit, but there’s no portal in sight.

He does notice a figure of a person disappearing behind a dune, and uses his arcane eye to follow that person.

The person disappears but there’s foot steps than Jeff follows with the eye.

Meanwhile our other friends appear and find Jeff, who tells them about what he’s doing.

The footsteps end at an old tree where a portal has opened.

Lutharin takes Jeff and rushes there, in case the portal closes up.

The others follow, slightly behind.

The portal they come to doesn’t appear to be similar to the portals Reane has been leaving.

Jeff notices that there’s a symbol of Fharlanghn on the tree, so he tells Lutharin the portal is ok and hops through.

Lutharin waits for the others to catch up, before they follow Jeff.

Jeff appears at a very empty looking plane, where he finds Reane, who is very surprised to see him.

Apparently things went a bit tits up on Reane’s end and they thought that they lost our heroes forever.

Jeff looks around the place for any sign of the person who did the footsteps, though Reane claims they didn’t see anyone.

He notices a mysterious hooded figures holding a traveller’s stick in the distance.

As he approaches the figure turns to smile at him, and disappears.

The four others join this plane. Reane says that they consider their part of the deal done, and they’ll probably fuck off to another universe completely now.

They tell our heroes to rest, and then they’ll push them through to their destination. The Divine Realm.

Two more sessions to go! :O

[nemossubmarine]

GM’s reflections on KoNS

So, my first solo-GM’d campaign, and my first DnD campaign is over. It took 9 months and ranked up to 21 sessions, which is quite a lot. It was definitely definitely far from perfect, but there were things that I liked, and things that I learned. I started putting this piece together around the time the third arc kicked off. It’s mostly comments on what I think I did wrong/did not work and what may have caused these issues, and what I can do differently. There’s a lot of comparisons to the DA game I play in / run, because that is my high standard, that is what I aspire to get to, which is of course not possible, since the system is different and players are different.

Anyway, I know my players follow me here, so a quick note to you, in case you’re planning on reading this (which I do not expect (recommend?) you to do). I just want to say that this is not me saying that any player played wrong, or was a cause of something that I didn’t like. At the end of the day I am the GM and the mistakes that led me being displeased with aspects of the game are my responsibility. These are my reflections on what I expect and want my games to be. It, of course, has to do with players, because there’s no game without players. Mostly players are mentioned in me thinking how I could encourage this and that sort of behavior etc. Anything said here is not meant to be a comment against you as a player or as an individual. I recommend not reading this, if you think you might take it personally. (not that I think there would be anything too upsetting in there, just covering all my bases)

Also if anyone who happens to read this (which I don’t expect anyone to do!), wants to discuss, I���d like to hear whether you agree/disagree/have had similar experiences. GM’ing is a lonely job, and I got more than my fair share of that with this adventure, so I might be too wrapped up in my own stuff to really know if something’s just a common GM-mishap.

The rest is under the cut, because, as usual for me it is long and rambly. As in almost 4k words. It’s more than a small essay, I could return this as a homework assignment, haha.

Maybe I should do some kind of sub-titles, to make this a bit more organized. Alright. Alright.

Session building In general, I am more used to writing story-lines in bulk, because I usually have several months in-between the adventures I run on the DA game. Compared, this was very fast-paced for the most part. I do think running KoNS made me better at improvising on the spot, because there was several sessions I had to run with the barest of outlines.

What I think would have been good to have was a bit more time to set up the world. I built it on the fly, and while I enjoyed the process immensely, I think it left the PCs detached from the world, because they didn’t know if stuff fell in line with the DnD norm or was I planning on something different entirely. I’ll talk a bit more about the fast and loose gamestyle’s effect on the plot in a future segment.

Anyway, one other thing that suffered was map making. I relied some on ready-made maps, but again, I get a mental image of a place, and no map really completely captures that. And it’s not like I made every single place I imagine into a map, because making maps on the computer by yourself is sloooow. I think that’s something I want to rectify for future games, having maps of most locations, so the players have something to look at. That will probably mean having to rely on maps other people made more, which, good, they’re better at it than I am, I should totally do that.

The very first adventure I ran had a thing that I’ve never used again, but I really think should pick back up. Those were short descriptive pieces of new locations I’d written beforehand. I have no trouble describing things off the top of my head, but if I want to go for a certain mood pre-written descriptions really help. So yeah, I definitely think some more attention could have been given to describing things.

I thought I would learn the books while I ran, because that’s how I learned to play/run DA game, but I kinda underestimated the fact that there’s a ton of books, and even when I tried to limit the books I allowed on the table, I still didn’t pick things up as fast as I hoped, which kinda lost me authority as a GM. It was difficult for me to find a comfort zone with the rules of the game in terms of what to throw out and what to keep. Running DA I’m usually very experimental, basically changing stuff every adventure. I never got there with DnD, perhaps because I didn’t have time to stop and think about the rules as the pace of the story was so quick.

There’s one more thing that fits under this section. We had some canceling trouble. Of course games have to be canceled for a lot of reasons, that happens, but by the end, every other (or even more) of the sessions planned were cancelled. It bummed me out, not gonna lie. It kinda pissed me off a lot too. I don’t ever want to be the kind of GM who people are afraid to tell that they can’t come and stuff like that, so I didn’t air it out on the players too much, but yeah. It blows. Trying to arrange six people’s schedules to match with you as the main organizer fucking sucks always, but there was other effects too. It made me feel that no one wanted to play my game, that people were losing interest. It broke the momentum of the plot. It cut off my thinking process; I don’t write everything down, because I like to toy around with ideas in my head that I’m not so sure about, but if there’s a 3 week gap between sessions? I can’t do that.

It was especially bad with the final session, where I had prepared for the final battle very extensively (going as far as to have another person test it with me) only to have the session cancelled last minute and moved 3 weeks. And in that time, school had started, I was knee-deep in exam books and my other game had started, which I was also GM’ing for, I had no time nor desire to spend a lot of time going over the things I had decided three weeks prior, so a lot slipped my mind. So yeah, the finale definitely suffered for that, and that bummed me out more than anything. I’m not blaming any of the people who had to cancel, it was just, super-unfortunate in general.

I think there’s a quick fix to it though: breaking down the story in chunks (similar to our DA adventures) with breaks in between might help, so no one has to be free 21 weeks in a row. Another one is to agree that if only one player is missing (which I think in all cases except handful happened here) and especially if it’s a last-minute cancel to play something. Not main plot (unless all players are fine with it), but a side mission. I’ve understood they’re really common among RP groups, and while I didn’t get why people did that before running KoNS, I definitely get it now; it keeps the people who can attend in their characters, helps to keep the story and feel of the game in mind and most importantly doesn’t make your GM sad.

Combat Haha, battles, oh god damn.

DnD’s battle system always felt too complicated for me, too many variables. I developed an early dislike for it, which I really didn’t actively try to work around, until it came time time to actually design Yadira. There were maybe like 8 battles in the whole of KoNS, bounties non-withstanding, so I wasn’t very prepared to make a boss battle. It doesn’t help that I’m like, do everything on your own, don’t take stuff from books ever, so it was not like I could reskin something relatively similar as her. In the end, I think Yadira worked just fine, mostly thanks to the fact that I got to test run her before actual game.

Next time, well, next time I’m probably not running DnD, but I’ll actually learn the damn craft, I did it for DA, I can do it again. I’ll also want to have a discussion with the players about how much battling the players want to do. But, yeah, I’d want to actually work on that from the beginning, and not let myself get too scared to learn. I’m more of a story GM, but there’s a lot of cool stuff to be done with battles, and I want to keep that craft up.

Plot Considering the fact that when I started the necklaces had like, map-pieces to an ancient weapon or something like that, I’m surprised how well the plot actually came together. There was some stuff that got dropped that could have used more time and probably more than a few inconsistencies, but in the end, I did ok.

Although, I have a real villain problem. I am not very interested in cults or dragons or pure evil tyrants, which leaves me with unfathomable forces that don’t care about your existence. Which, fair enough. They did need some building up. For the most part our heroes were concerned with Sweepers, the pan-dimensional clean-up crew, which I made way too gnarly-looking for their super-neutral outlook, because they didn’t know that the real “villain” was Ishran the sun god and Yadira, the former Raven Queen. I think Ishran-in-Adam  and Ishran-outside-Adam needed a lot more building up than the few sesisons they got, although, considering how short the story was, I guess I did ok. But yeah. Next time, I need to work on build-up of villains a bit more.

This might be more relevant to the NPC section, but as I’m mostly going to focus there on NPC-PC relations, I’m going to put it here. I was quite sad about the fact that by the time end game rolled around none of the female characters I had established had really big roles anymore. It had to do with the fact that I had introduced them really early (such as Mairin and Joan) and as they were working with the PCs, they couldn’t have information that could help solve the puzzle, as there was no reason why they wouldn’t have given it out. Now that I know that I hopefully have a bit easier time putting out a balanced end game crew. And maybe in general building NPCs who are relevant in the story throughout.

In general, I think the story might have been a bit too fast-paced and contained way way too many NPCs (or didn’t have a clear focus on only a few, leaving the rest as backdrop). As I said, I’m more used to writing pieces of stories that last about 4 to 7 sessions. In KoNS most plot points lasted only one. Some of my players commented that they liked the fast-pacedness, which is fair enough. I wonder if perhaps I would find it easier if there wasn’t as much changing scenery, or more returning to old scenery?

There were a moment where I think I started coddling the players a bit regarding the plot information. When they didn’t ask for information from an NPC, I just gave it to them, but that just re-enforces them not asking questions, and also, they’ll be much more interested in the answers, when they are the people who actually asked. And I was very hesitant for punishing PCs for lackluster information gathering, and I shouldn’t, because it shouldn’t be me hitting them with a stick, because they didn’t play the way I wanted to, it should be a plot point and a learning moment and natural consequences. Speaking of consequences, wow, those are way harder to set up when you’re writing on the run, and don’t have to wait a year between adventures.

There was one point where I kinda slipped with the plot. I wasn’t aware enough whether it could hold a new player added in the middle. And I don’t think it did. I felt bad for the new PC a lot of the time, because the story simply didn’t bend to give him a chance to get the same stuff the others did, and I struggled to include him naturally and let him have moments as a character. For example, the necklaces; from a quick glance it would make sense to add a fifth player, because there were five necklaces, but there was no good way for me to hand the necklace over, because I needed to get to the third act and I needed to give the necklace to Alexis for that to happen. Compare this to when for example Alf was added to our DA RP. I wrote that adventure, and it was rather easy to slip him in, give him a plot relevant (for that adventure) place and make PCs work with him, and later adopt him into the party. But the difference was that, though there are some themes that carry over from adventure to adventure and some honest to god plotline in our DA RP, a main plot only lasts for the adventure, and there’s not an end goal in mind.

And yeah, maybe that tells that I’m not good enough as a storyteller and as a GM, that I have way too much pride in the story that I don’t allow the characters really to change it (more on this later), but it wasn’t a free-roam campaign, it was a story-campaign, and that’s where the trouble ended and began. I think for future, I will not allow new players to enter once the story is on the move, unless I feel that an addition is necessary for a story reason (we can talk endlessly about how (un)balanced our party was,  but that’s not my concern, tbh). And that’s a call I want to reserve an only right to make as the GM. I don’t think it’s unreasonable, I would just need to be upfront about it to players before starting.

(slightly tangential: trying to make/making strict rules as a GM really makes me feel like an asshole. I’ve never had to make that kind of calls in DA RP, except for people using cell phones. I think it’s just a matter of, I know my DA RP group’s playstyle, because we evolved it together, so it is my playstyle as well. Setting rules shouldn’t make me feel like an asshole, because it’s simply clearing up expectations that might be different from player to player? Anyway, I’ll still feel like an ass :P)

Gameplay: PCs, NPCs, Playing and Roleplaying This is a huge topic but a lot of it sorta ties together, so I’m gonna work with this title. I’ll bring up few small points first, and then move on to bigger topics.

I felt I had a lot of problem giving people things to do, moments to shine in based on their class. For example, we had a paladin in our group. I have real trouble wrapping my mind around stuff like evil alignments (see above my discussion about the way I do villains), so spells like “Detect Good and Evil” found little use. I think this has a lot to do with the fact that in DnD class defines you much more than I ever think it did in my DA group. I don’t think Cahair as rogue of the group, and not only because he is one of three, he is defined as the Dalish elf of the group, and his storylines follow accordingly. I never did that to the players based on their class. I think that’s where I really misunderstood DnD.

Speaking of underutilized parts of PC: Animals. I admit, having animals has never really worked seamlessly in any game I’ve played in (Alf has animals in DA RP and Randy has a dog, and we kinda forget them half of the time :D). Ofc it’s player’s responsibility to remember to bring their animal, but I still think I could have given some places to use them. Namely our Paladin’s horse. A lot of stuff happened indoors, most traveling was skipped and when they did travel, it was places where horses really didn’t work. Woops. I did make the ranger’s animal a plot point, maybe 1/3rd of a plot point really. I explained his origins, but it never became really too relevant. More of a time question than anything, I think.

I suck at rewarding my peeps, no ifs no buts. I gave them money, but not really anything to use money on. I threw some magic items at them, bc idk I thought that was what you are supposed to do. I don’t know how much of this has to do with how I play Cahair. I actively work on him having as little money as I possibly can (sharing the extra amount of pay he gets from being an officer with the people he works with, for example), and we are not big on throwing magic items around. Everyone got something after the Nightmare campaign, and even then I didn’t get anything that actually helped, just something that explained in game stuff he could already mechanically do (I did get climbing gloves after the pirate campaign, but that’s about it). That said, I don’t know how much it actually bothered my players, I just know that you’re supposed to fling treasure at your players in DnD, or whatever. I did like the music box Adam gave to Jeff, but like, that was bc there was an actual connection there, so it was kinda meaningful.

Maybe it’s time to talk about connections. There were several NPCs given to me by the players relating to their character. Playing them was always super-stressful, and I think I sometimes read them wrong, started taking them to unexpected direction. Of course throwing players out of the loop about people their characters are supposed to know can be a lot of fun, but if it stops matching the picture players have in their head, well. It’s a thin line to walk on (most notably, Elpidios’ plotline was very stressful, bc I wasn’t sure if it could be resolved).

In my DA game, the PCs are incredibly close. We have a lot of discussion just among those characters, and I, when I GM, try to encourage that to the best of my ability. I never really felt that the PCs here made such a strong connection. There’s several reasons: the fast-paced story that didn’t allow them to stop and get to know each other that closely, the fact that they were sort of thrust together by the plot and they didn’t choose to go on an adventure together and the fact that they were all pretty good guys with similar opinions on things, so no conflict arose.

The lack of conflict among the PCs is a curious thing. It most definitely has to do with the unfocused world-building. In our DA group, we’ve had conflicts over Humbert wanting to put Elspet and Boshara back to the Circle for their own safety. Alf and Cahair bonded over people, both PCs and NPCs, being gross about elves. No such thing existed in my universe. I consciously avoided writing in racism/sexism/homophobia as huge issues in the world, but that left the world devoid of issues. There were the drow and the elven civil war, but it touched really only one of our heroes.

There also, of course, can be personality conflict, and that is an extremely thin line to walk on. I don’t want no asshole chaotic neutrals stealing from the group, or someone bullying the lawful good guy for being, well, good. But some conflicts might have brought people together. That’s definitely a much more touchy subject though, even in our DA group, where I feel frequently displeased that I cannot bring up Cahair’s boyfriend without having a PC who hates him comment on it, or me being worried that since we all tease Humbert, our templar, that the player might feel unwanted.

I definitely definitely do not want to insert conflict where there is none. It should be natural conflict or no conflict. That would have probably come more naturally if our heroes had time to get to know each other and chatter.

Another fact that made me think that I might not have been as encouraging with roleplaying as I want to be, is the PC’s relationships with NPCs. One note on NPCs in general, again, there was way way more of them than necessary, but yeah, relationships. There were some I really enjoyed, namely Adam’s and Jeff’s and Dophina’s and Prince Floyd’s, but again there was not much time to evolve PC-NPC relationships a lot. I did offer chances, which Jeff’s player took a lot in the third act, because the player knows me and my GM’ing style.

There was that first session of the 3rd arc, where I asked PCs to pick someone to talk to. I had done a similar session with the DA crew in Antiva, and it had worked marvelously. In KoNS it didn’t work out as well. I think the biggest problem was that the conversations were different. In the Antiva campaign, each scene we played had an end goal (Humbert wanted to ask Alf for more deciding power in the ship / Boshara wanted to know why Cahair was so upset with her), while a lot of the scenes in the KoNS version were chatting with no particular goal. This leaves a huge pressure of preparation on the player, and I should have been in those cases more attentive in asking the players what they wanted out of the conversations. I’m not saying it was all horrible, but a lot of the conversations kinda sizzled out. There were two conversations that worked out really well. One was between Lir and Lutharin, but that had been a conversation I had wanted to have, to set up Lutharin’s understanding of the differences between surface elves and the drow, I was prepared for the conversation. The other one was between Jeff and Adam, but that was where Jeff’s player had prepared well with what he wanted to discuss (again, he knows me, he was present in Antiva session as well).

I also think it might be unusual and for some a bit awkward, to have a one-on-one conversation between PC and NPC (or two PCs) in front of everyone else. I’ve certainly done those things in secret, because the things I’ve shared with the PC have been plot-relevant. But I think there’s a lot of merit to having non-plot-relevant conversations in front of others. For one, it’s interesting. Second thing, those kind of conversations are gold mines for character development, and if that development happens off-screen for the others, it might be difficult to bring to the table. But maybe that’s just me.

(And I’m not saying I wasn’t awkward playing NPCs at all, mind you. NPCs relating to PCs were always a bit awkward, as were most of the gods, and basically anyone else I hadn’t a clear picture on, which just goes to show I need to limit the number of NPCs)

Anyway, maybe I just didn’t give a clear enough permission to do this sort of thing? I remember feeling very awkward about playing Cahair in the first campaign of our DA game, bc it was a highly emotional story for him, and not for the others, so I felt a little over-the-top at times. And not even a little. But, I told the GM that it might be fun to bring back Harralan, the villain of the first adventure, and Cahair’s first love. Well, she did, on the third adventure, giving my character a chance to have a conversation with him he never got to have in the first adventure. I felt it was a sort of permission for me to roleplay to my heart’s content, and it definitely helped with the awkwardness. I guess we never had a moment like that?

It of course wouldn’t have worked for everyone, and not everyone has to enjoy this kind of stuff. But I enjoy it, and would have liked more. I think Adam’s and Jeff’s third act relationship-growth was really good. I just wished relationships like that were present for everyone throughout the story. Of course, the NPCs kept changing session to session, so that would have been difficult.

Closing thoughts There are a lot of complaining in this piece, because that’s what this piece is about. At the end of the day I still really loved running the game, loved my players and I am proud of the story we build together. I think this is a good place to start working towards better games and better stories. I will take a break from DnD, but when I eventually return to it, I’ll be smarter for having run KoNS.

And that’s it for the most part. I’m gonna go snooze now forever, since I’ve been doing more than enough GM’ing for a while. Except I’m still running an adventure in DA RP, ah well. But yeah, I’m planning on partaking in NaNo, so I don’t have plans on running another long game any time soon.

[nemossubmarine]

Knights of the Night Sky #21

Welcome one and all, to the last installment of KoNS. It took us exactly 9 months to get here, let’s see how things end for our heroes.

The session was 6 hours long, so I’ll probably not detail some stuff so intently, namely the battle with Yadira, which took a few hours.

EDIT: Read more deleted.

We pick up from the parallel plane where Reane had brought our heroes, as they are preparing to enter the Divine Realm.

Jeff wants to mention before our heroes go, the fact that Alexis was a high priest of Ishran, and perhaps they are not there as unwillingly as they might think.

Kendrick says that if this is Alexis’ choice they must respect it.

They pop into the Divine Realm, a place made mostly of clouds. All around them they see elves moving around, completely silent and glowing gold.

They spot Tassarion, the monk leader and go see what’s up with him. He seems completely unresponsive to any stimuli, until Dophina has the bright idea to tie a scarf around his glowing eyes.

After a while, this brings Tassarion to his senses. He is confused about where he is and why, but soon finds his balance from old monk techniques.

Our heroes don’t have enough scarves for every single elf in here, so it might be better to go straight to the source of the problem: Ishran.

But first, they’re going to check on Elpidios, Kendrick’s brother, who was held captive in one of the rooms, and who by all appearances seemed not to be completely blank like the elves.

Our heroes find the room he’s kept in, and Kasbir gets to show off his lockpicking skills, and how marvelously he does so.

Inside, however, Elpidios is nowhere to be found, but there’s a broken open window. It seems Elpidios has decided to make a break for it.

Luckily for our heroes, Dophina can pick up his tracks, and our heroes soon find him among the elves.

Elpidios is a bit confused as to why our heroes are here, but otherwise he is in good spirits.

He notes that Alexis, who brought him here, seemed to be in great distress, saying that it wasn’t supposed to be like this.

It was Alexis who had locked Elpidios up, and Elpidios was looking for them, to have a talk.

Oh yeah, and Elpidios learns that Alexis is one of his biological parents, which, I suppose, is as good a place and time as any.

Our heroes join Elpidios in his search for Alexis, and they do find them, but before they can reach them, Alexis comes under an attack from a mysterious woman in black, Yadira.

Before Yadira can murder-kill Alexis, Fate pops out of Lutharin’s sweater, stops time and basically says to our heroes “go get em tiger” and disappears. He does that.

A fight is on! Lutharin uses the momentarily distraction to pop a sunbeam at unsuspecting Yadira, and in turn he loses his ability to walk. So he has to crawl and walk on his hands for the rest of the fight.

Yadira uses a jar on her side to summon some folk to her aid; four souls captured by her.

Our heroes have help too! Big Daddy, Jeff’s familiar, who assists those of our heroes who can’t see well in the sunlight anymore (so everyone but Jeff) and Dophina summons some animal friends. First two lions who die pretty quick, and then a rhino who has some trouble hitting things, but is trying its best you guys.

Jeff gets few fireballs in! Finally! Even if Lutharin was in the way of one of them!

Yadira has some nasty tricks up her sleeve. Most of her hard-hitting spells seem to be about forcing people’s blood out of their orifices or boiling it, or something just as nasty.

She manages to down Lutharin, Kendrick and Kasbir (twice).

However our heroes get the best of her and her helpers. Kendrick delivers the final blow, but unfortunately he hadn’t broken the bottle with her soul piece yet, so she doesn’t die.

Big Daddy takes the bottle from Kendrick and drops it off to Kasbir, who breaks it.

Dophina manages to down her again, but something is not right.

Our heroes poke her a bit, and she gets back up again, laughing about how the Raven Queen isn’t home.

Well, since she isn’t stopping her attacks, Kendrick cuts off her heads with her own sickle. She still isn’t dying.

In a moment of desperation Jeff starts playing the music box Adam gave him, and Yadira’s head explodes.

The time starts moving again. Elpidios is a bit distraught about his brother having brain bits all over his armor.

Alexis comes to talk to our heroes, saying that they don’t know why the other elves aren’t free as Alexis is, that this wasn’t what they wanted at all.

Our heroes request a meeting with Ishran. Alexis says that they’ll go ask, and maybe those who have brain gunk all over them should clean up a bit?

While Kendrick, Kasbir and Lutharin clean up, Dophina and Jeff talk to Elpidios about his artificing business; namely using one disguise self spell on two gnomes to make one human or such.

Dophina and Jeff also notice Anil among the elves, pull his shirt over his head to free him. He is of course confused, but promises to keep the shirt where it is, even if it looks kinda dumb.

Alexis returns and tells that our heroes can go meet Ishran. Which they do.

Ishran is a being of light, completely different from all the other gods they have met. He is also bit of an ass.

Jeff wastes no time telling him what a fuckface he is, much to the horror of others.

The others try a more reasonable approach, noting that the elves have no free will, they have not chosen to be with Ishran.

Ishran seems to find it difficult to find the problem in this scenario as he believes the elves to be his.

Finally our heroes, especially Kendrick and Kasbir seem to get through to him.

He asks Kendrick whether Alexis will leave him too, to which Kendrick doesn’t know the answer.

Ishran promises to send the people home. And take the other gods back in.

As he goes out of the chamber Jeff tries to steal some stuff as compensation for Adam and Lloth, but the others catch him and stop him.

Our heroes go outside, and all the elves are gone. Only Alexis and Elpidios remain. Alexis is talking to Elpidios and then they go to talk to Kendrick, saying they’ll stay behind to try to make Ishran understand but they’ll come visit Kendrick and Elpidios.

After that our heroes are sent back to Knight’s HQ, where they party it up!! Now we’ll gently slide into epilogue stuff.

Kendrick, of course, has the acute problem that is Lir. Lir honestly had expected Kendrick to dump him back to Underdark as soon as things are over, but Kendrick is comfortable with that.

In the end, Kendrick, Skylar, Mairin and Lir talk it out and Lir is relocated into the dwarven kingdom to do community service. Which we decided is nothing but building orphanages.

Our heroes go visit Lloth and all except Lutharin, who chooses not to, get their things back.

The Knights are disbanded. Our heroes turn the headquarters into a town called Bereskie for the bugbears and also the people Jeff kinda accidentally resurrected.

Jeff stays good on his word to Adam and offers him a chance to travel with him, which Adam agrees to.

They visit Jeff’s home. Goldbottom is becoming a household name thanks to Queen Margaretha, so Jeff won’t have to worry about his family’s business, especially now that Mairin has returned home to help.

It is still quite an unorthodox choice of lifestyle for a halfling, but Jeff’s parents are understanding.

After that they head to Wintervale (visiting Chester and Mike Sagreatsoup on their way), where they start a long journey of finding out what happened to Adam’s family after he was gone.

While they travel Adam plays music and Jeff cooks and tells stories to make a living. There’s some ups and downs on the road of course, but for the most part it’s good life.

They find out that Adam’s wife remarried, which he is perfectly happy to hear. His first child, Lilith became a firedancer and married a guitarist. The child Adam never got to meet, Valerie married a shopkeep. All three seemed to have lived happy lives.

Dophina, once she remembers she has it, offers her Diviner’s stone to Adam and Jeff. They find the place where Lilith performed her first performance, where she almost burned the house down, and so there’s still marks on the roof, and so Adam gets to see his children all grown up.

A lot of crying was had.

Even after Adam has gotten closure, he and Jeff continue to travel together. One night Adam says that he has a new piece of music he would like Jeff to hear. It’s a song he made specifically to Jeff as a thank you, since he wouldn’t have been able to find his family without him.

Jeff, in turn, had been working on a new recipe he would name after Adam, named Adam’s apple.

Inspired by this, they talk a bit about their future, namely Adam is curious about whether Jeff would like to stop traveling some day.

They decide to keep on traveling, and if they ever feel like settling down, it seems that they’ll be getting a house together.

Oh and every now and then the two of them go meet Lloth and have tea and complain about Ishran.

Kasbir decides to leave the pirating lifestyle. He becomes an adventurer, with the help of Mairin who gives him bounties and such to work with.

All the money he earns he gives away to good causes, having no need for it himself.

Kasbir gathers quite a reputation for himself, seeing as his impossible luck continues. He himself isn’t very keen of his fame, but Jeff, who Kasbir meets occasionally since they’re both on the road, makes sure to tell all the tales about Kasbir’s deeds.

All in all life’s treating Kasbir just fine, he has plenty of friends all around the world, and plenty of places yet to see.

Dophina’s first mission is to get the fruit she promised to her mentor. She manages that just in time.

Dophina adopts the stray wulpertinger the knight’s apprentices found in Fall Creek and having a wulpertinger family to care for forces herself to settle down in the Eternal Woods among the elves she grew up with.

She still goes out and does some giant-killing every now and then. She even gets an elven apprentice.

She’s knee-deep in wulpertingers, so she offers them everywhere; Jeff and Adam get two, Kendrick gets one or several, Prince Floyd gets one, everyone gets one.

She continues to write to Prince Floyd and visit Anil and Gordan, even attending their small wedding few years down the line.

She visits Fate and receives knitting instructions from him. The first sweater she sends to Prince Floyd is quite awful, but he wears it anyway causing a short-lived fashion craze.

As her skills become better she kinda starts making winter wear that can affect the future. Luckily she mostly uses this power for pranks.

Barbatos, the devil, also decides to uphold a friendship with Dophina. She’s a bit suspicious, but who else does she have who could reach the cookie jar on top of the cupboard?

Lutharin returns to the monastery. A lot of things have changed, and yet so many stay the same.

Both Tassarion and Natalain return to the monastery, and it has a sudden influx of confused and frightened sun elves as well as few drows.

Lutharin especially proves vital to be bridging the gap between the drow and the other elves, as he is slowly becoming one of them.

Lutharin goes and visits the drow and especially Lloth who gives him help in his transition.

Lutharin believes that for the sun elves to be free of the sun, it is his duty to reject it completely.

He also visits Fate and has many philosophical conversations with him.

Oh and he introduces pancakes to the monastery, leading a pilgrimage to Summer’s Pass to sample those sweet sweet flapjacks.

It takes several hundreds of years for Lutharin to completely transform into a being that can’t stand the sun at all. He’ll have time to get used to it.

Kendrick goes away for a year and helps in building Bereskie.

After that he returns home, picking up his duties as a paladin. He now has his own squad to lead and he takes Jass as his apprentice as he had promised.

Few years down the line a certain event causes Kendrick to evaluate his life, and realize that he may have been a bit too stuck-up. That event is his brother Elpidios eloping with one Belinda Plumpfoot.

Kendrick relaxes a bit after that. He gets his own house, he gets a wulpertinger and some years down the line he adopts a kid as well.

He even manages to start talking to Prince Floyd as he is working much more closely with the royal family and he needs his seeing skills to know where to send letters to Kasbir and Jeff who are both on the move.

Five year have passed since that day. And the invitations come. Prince Floyd is getting married to a noble dwarven woman, also a sorcerer.

First one to know is of course Dophina, she is Prince Floyd’s good friend and confidant after all. She learns months before-hand that Floyd is getting married, so the invitation is not a surprise. What is a surprise is the fact that Floyd is asking her to be his best man.

Kendrick and his squad is appointed as honor guards to the wedding of the prince. Kendrick is sad, but he doesn’t know why.

Prince Floyd reaches out to Jeff, asking if he would provide the cooking for the wedding. This would be a chance for Jeff to gain the title of grandmaster of chefs’ guild, so he of course agrees.

Kasbir and Lutharin gets invitations too. Prince Floyd reminds Lutharin that his younger sister was quite fond of him, so perhaps a gift is in order? Lutharin makes her a wooden necklace, which delights her to no end.

Our heroes get to meet Prince Floyd’s future wife, who seems nice, though something moves underneath her skin. Dophina is sure that she and Floyd will make good friends if not lovers, so she isn’t worried.

There’s a lot of stress all around before the wedding. Dophina doesn’t know what to wear, so Floyd takes her shopping. Jeff is shouting at kitchen staff like Gordon Ramsay. Kendrick is surrounded by panicked paladins and panicked Kasbir (who also doesn’t know what to wear) like the patient duck mom that he is.

But the wedding takes place, and it’s all really nice. Dophina holds a speech, telling about how she and Floyd met, and how Floyd is the nicest (and only!) prince she ever knew.

The dinner is a success, and Jeff will be awarded the title of grandmaster.

There’s dancing after the dinner. Dophina gets a dance from Prince Floyd, as does Kendrick. (Un)surprisingly the dance between a gnome and a full-grown human man is less awkward than the one between two men.

Adam and Jeff also dance and they share a kiss at the end of it.

After the wedding, the six of them (heroes + Adam) meet at Kendrick’s place/Elpidios’ shop and share stories until the break of dawn.

THE END.