| eyelessgame |
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I've been playing this campaign, with long breaks, for a couple years now, and tonight my PCs have finally acquired Briar and heard the story of Nyrissa from Evindra.
I've posted before, but to review: I have three players - twin half-elves and their gnome druid friend. Royce and Serafina share rulership: Serafina, a sorceress of Sarenrae, is the Queen, and her brother is the Spymaster and father of the Heir.
The Consort is Melianse the Nixie. This has led to a satisfyingly deeper relationship of my players to the Stolen Lands...
Melianse, Evindra, and Nyrissa, a nixie, a nereid, and a nymph, are all water fey. I have decided that fey families need not be all of the same species... and thus decided early in the campaign that Melianse is the daughter of Evindra, and Evindra's grandmother was the sister of Nyrissa.
This means that by marrying Melianse, the player characters are <i>family</i> to Nyrissa - and not only that, the Heir to the Throne of Narland (and thus all the Stolen Lands) has fey blood and is of Nyrissa's bloodline.
This has opened the door for me to play up the fey connections of the Stolen Lands - and to have legend lores suggest that the Lands themselves, even without the machinations of Nyrissa, would have eventually destroyed their kingdom - were it not for the fact that the legitimate royal family is now tied into the fey nature of the Lands.
I decided tonight also to pull back the curtain a bit. My players are quite impressed by the way this has fit together and foreshadowed all along - it has been great fun to leave little hints of Nyrissa starting all the way back with the Stag Lord, and with little stray comments by their old friends Tyg-Titter-Tut and Perlivash, that now finally make sense and have context.
Because Darby, the gnome druid, has been slightly less of a central character, she has been brought into the center of the adventure now by the revelation that Briar is an undersized scythe, and thus clearly intended to be wielded by the gnome druid.
The players were kind of astonished that it was not part of the module as published for the ruler to marry a fey, specifically to marry into this family, because it seems so obvious to them in retrospect, and to add so much to the story to make the Heir so crucial.
I reminded them that the original reason they had for Royce to pursue Melianse was actually nothing but powergaming: the Consort would add half their Charisma bonus to the nation's Loyalty, and Melianse's Charisma made her an obvious choice. The story parts came later.
As my son (who's watching the campaign) put it: "Let me get this straight. Marrying Melianse makes sense from the roleplaying standpoint, because a fey heir can save the kingdom. It makes sense from a powergaming standpoint, because she gives the most plusses to running the country. And it makes sense from the horny teenager standpoint, because she's the hottest girl in the story. Those are like the three demographics of roleplaying games. How is it that the designers didn't expect her to become the consort?"
| Tinalles |
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Oh, that's rich. I like it.
Due to a peculiar set of circumstances, I've sorta played Kingmaker twice. We never did anything in particular with Melianse.
In the first, there was no queen, no consort, and no heir. The ruler, a dwarf ranger, filled out a will specifying an elaborate system for selecting a new ruler. It involved a nine-day conclave, nominations put forth by representatives of different factions, ended up in a vaguely Grecian instant run-off election, specifically forbade any one family to serve as rulers in two consecutive reigns, and capped the length of any one reign at 50 years.
In the other, the king (an aasimar bastard of the Brevic royal line with a trait that give him some draconic blood from way back in the family tree) married a fey-blooded half-elf sorceress (also of Brevic descent) and rolled a percentile on a random chart to see what this particular concoction of bizarre heritages would yield. The result was a natural 100 on the percentile dice, and so he wound up with fraternal fey-blooded half-elf twins with the half-dragon template. Of course we didn't know it was twins, because Nyrissa contrived to steal one of the two from in utero, bore and raised him herself, and contrived through the time-distorting properties of the First World to age him faster than his sister Berry so that he could quasi-legitimately claim to be the elder and thus inherit the throne.
I honestly don't know which of those two was weirder.
| Lee Hanna |
Eyelessgame, that's REALLY cool, the way that worked out for you all.
My ruler was a human woman who had given me the background of a mother with suspected elven heritage and had disappeared into the Stolen Lands when the PC was a little girl. I was sorely tempted to rework Evindra into her missing mother, but it seemed too pat and I was afraid of rewriting the timeline and missing another connection.
| eyelessgame |
I also spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to do with Candlemere.
A while ago - just before the events of War of the River Kings - I finally decided. It's the result of an earlier experiment of Nyrissa's. She's tried more than once to steal the Stolen Lands - in this earlier attempt (destroying the civilization that had started at that time), she accidentally opened a hairline crack into an adnormal Lovecraftian place, letting in will-o-wisps and other things.
Nyrissa's sister Reinheld - another powerful nymph, and in some ways her equal - dwells far beneath Candlemere and grasps the threads of reality, holding shut the break. The PCs met her at one point, in a scene in which I tried to evoke as much similarity as possible to the Dresden Files, specifically his time underwater with Mab in Cold Days, because Reinheld had sent agents to kidnap the Heir (the infant Vivian) for safekeeping. (Reinheld has a low opinion of mortals, and the roleplaying that attempted to get Vivian free was a lot of fun).
Reinheld may or may not play any role in the denouement of volume 6.
| Lee Hanna |
Tinalles: Missing Mom was one of the Lovelies in the Misbegotten Troll's cages, I statted her as a half-elven sorceror, and she provided some guidance in Nyrissa's castle. Again, I really should have worked her into Evindra's place.
Mom's diaries and maps of most of the Stolen Lands were given to the Baroness about Book 3, and an updated journal was found during the war in Book 5. I also printed off "Zuddiger's Picnic", and presented that with the first book. I shamelessly stole from someone else on this board: "your mother used to read this to you at night".
Mom & Dad had explored the Stolen Lands before their marriage. Dad was a Brevic warrior, secretly looking for Ovnirbane on behalf of the Tsar, Mom was looking for Briar for some elves who were never named, but let him believe she was looking for Ovnirbane, too. Sometime after the birth of the PC (Dad's 2nd marriage, by the way), Mom went exploring again and never came home.
FWIW, two more of my players gave me backstory, so I was able to give them in-game links to NPCs and/or information that was useful during play.
| eyelessgame |
Bit of an update.
Kingmaker has been the most memorable D&D-derived campaign I have ever run. And I started DMing in 1978. (I've done memorable stuff in other rulesets - Runequest, Mage: the Ascension, Ars Magica, Champions). But Kingmaker has become my new standard for D&D excellence.
It's gone on for almost five years now, because we only have had a few hours per week to play, and part of the year we can't play at all. But we're near the end.
Rather than start wielding it (seeing it first as just a +4 scythe, for a druid who *never* gets into hand-to-hand), the PCs had kept Briar concealed within Evindra's shawl, which continued to keep its location and discovery secret from Nyrissa for a while.
It took a number of sessions to stabilize Pitax after the death of Irovetti: they arranged for a marriage between Jhofre Vascari and Atalia Gitaren, creating a political alliance supported by every bard in the city, including some working-under-radar Pathfinders. But while that was going on, Irovetti's ghost started haunting Evindra, whose long abusive association with another ghost had warped her and rendered her vulnerable to his manipulations: she absconded with her shawl to try to be with him.
They found Irovetti's bones (which had been relocated to under the castle at Shrikewall by Engelidis, who wanted both to annoy the PCs and also continue to torment Irovetti for her own revenge) and banished his ghost, but the damage was done and Nyrissa now knew everything about them, putting her plans in motion.
But now Briar has become useful. It manifests its power through every creature our druid summons; they found this out when giants she summoned started arriving wielding scythes instead of clubs or axes, and summoned dire tigers had cold-iron claws and teeth. With only three PCs, none of them remotely a front-line fighter, this is not at all overpowered, but it gave a satisfyingly epic feel to Briar immediately, and makes it clear this is not just a powerful magic weapon but an Artifact.
We've been playing through the Month of Ruin. The picture book has become very important to them, of course. They figured out the correlations and have fairly accurate ideas of what to expect as they proceed - and also see that have to take the fight to her, to go into Thousandbreaths and "pull it down", to beat the nymph.
Given the existence of Vivian, the Heir, I've decided she's critical to opening Thousandbreaths (without her, it would be impossible to open the conduit and let anyone through). She has to hold it open while they're inside... it is the most awesome imagery, of this five-year-old creepy-as-heck half-fey girl holding open the Door, standing herself in Thousand Voices all day as her father and aunt explore Thousandbreaths.
(Not entirely alone, though. A young-adult bronze dragon I'd introduced on a whim way back at the midpoint of the campaign - who shows up or leaves as they story suggests, and who flirts shamelessly with the Queen - waits with her at the gate, to protect her.)
That the story made it so easy to introduce new aspects like Vivian and fold her into the story's fabric is just *amazing* structure. I can't say enough about how good Kingmaker is.
Our latest adventure: the treants in the Lake turned out to be something between an epic fight and a slog - their few bits of magic were exactly what would counter most of the PCs' tricks. My PCs accused me of fine-tuning them - faerie fire for the rogue's invisibility, damage reduction for most of the summoned druid creatures, elemental resistances and invulnerabilities for most of the sorcerer's spells...