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Whew, it's taken us a long time, but last night, the blooms finally started to erupt across the kingdom.
The instigating incident was to cast a spell to grant the queen, an elf named Gloss Nim (look it up in Sindarin), the grace of ultimate beauty. Suddenly and unexpectedly, reflective surfaces nearby the queen warped and distorted, growing eyes to stare at her. A deeply jealous Nyrissa, watching from her Mirror On the Wall, unleashed her plan to consume the Stolen Lands.
The high priestess of Pharasma saw a vision of various blooms erupting through a map of the kingdom, and at the end of a month, the vines grabbed the map, tearing a hole out of the middle of it. (It allowed me to make sure the metagame rules and stakes were clear to the players as well as the characters.)
Meanwhile, the king, who had been imprisoned as a political prisoner of the Queen of Air and Darkness for the past three IG years (one OOG year), finally broke free as the Shadow Courts began to dissolve and be absorbed by the Fable. Falling through the clouds, he lands upon his wyvern and soars out to save the kingdom.
Meanwhile, the court magician (alt character of the player who also runs the aforementioned imprisoned king) notices a gigantic planar earthquake on his magical richter device while he's in the middle of teaching a class at the academy of magical arts.
I narrated back-and-forth cutting between the above vignettes while playing the opening song in Carmina Burana. A little overdone, but it got things started with a bang, and let the players know that things were about the get real.
...
We started playing this campaign on May 20th, 2010. Now, almost exactly five years later, the endgame is in sight. (Caveat: only four-and-a-half years of playing; had to take a 6mo break in 2014 for paternity leave.) It's been a long road, and now it's nearing the end. At the pace we play, I estimate wrapping up around Thanksgiving.
I decided to play up the blooms as of Biblical proportions. The whirlpool was 10 miles across, and I described the water elementals as being 5 stories tall with arms as long and thick as semitrucks. The mandoraga swarm was so rapid and self-replicating (inspired by swarms of locusts), that the only recourse was to hire out Corax's entire lumber company to secure a burnline, then use the mages to burn down two entire hexes of forest/farmland. That's 300 square miles! The Horned Hunter would go into small towns, slaughter 20% of the population, and use their corpses to make letters to spell out a mocking challenge to the king. We just finished up the Nightmare Rook (each PC jumped into a dream, and we ran them in parallel: some dreams were turning pretty deadly, but as soon as one PC scared the raven off, everyone work up). Now we're halfway through the month of blooms. The PCs believe that Nyrissa is sending the blooms in order to increase Briar's sharpness, so they are considering trying to dull the weapon or otherwise keep it away from the blooms so that doesn't happen any more. We'll see what comes next!
I made this somewhat rambling post because I don't see a whole lot of "book 6" posts on the forum, and just wanted to chip in and let people know that some groups do eventually make it this far. :-) It's a pretty fun romp!
Just because now I'm rambling ... how did my PCs recover Briar?
Well, Pitax was open about the fact that it was looking for a sword. They send in spies and thieves to plunder every bastard sword they could find in the kingdom.
After Irovetti fell, they recovered half of a bastard sword: it was split perfectly down the middle, lengthwise. It still functioned as a +2 weapon though.
Then they remembered that MANY MANY years ago, when adventuring in the Margreve forest (Tales of the Old Margreve by Kobold Press), they encountered a spider wielding many strange weapons, one of which was a the Half-Sword of the Margreve Knights. The party confronted the Spider Crone, and demanded the sword, and she offered "a broken love for a broken love." One of the PCs had in her backstory that she had an affair with Meager Varn, but broke it off before the campaign began. Well, didn't they trundle on down to Vordekai's tomb, find Varn's moldering, semi-decapitated body, and bring it back to the Spider Crone. Anyway, so now they have two halves of the sword, each functioning as a +2 weapon.
Upon investigation, the two sword-halves no longer perfectly fit together, as they have since "grown" after being sundered. So the party has take them back in time, to remember their youth, were they were once supple, so they can be reunited. Enter Armageddon Echo from the Second Darkness AP. (Which happens to be Gloss Nim's hometown.) While back in time, they meet Nyrissa, then just an nymph, and her boyfriend, Count Renalc. Well, things get testy while waiting for the meteor to fall, Renalc starts throwing around disintegrate spells, and long story short, they kill Court Renalc by stabbing him in the heart with both halves of the sword. This act heals Briar (who, being a shard of future Nyrissa, knows the betrayal Renalc will eventually do to her), and unites it into the proper +4 weapon that it needs to be. Then they work together with Nyrissa to flee the city before the apocalypse occurs, all the while trying to dodge questions about "what's that sword, and why does it feel so familiar?"
Perhaps this is why it's taken us 4.5 years to get to book 6...
Man that was simply AWESOME!!!!! especially the part about briar and killing Ranalc and all the stuff: pure unadulterated RPG awesomeness.
My praises to you as a fellow KM GM and as a pathfinder player.
That is some excellent GMing work. Hats off to you.