No Eleventh Hour Reprieve: A Pathfinder Campaign

[Luckymoose]

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Next Session: SOON

No Eleventh Hour Reprieve is a campaign using the Pathfinder RPG rules that is currently being run for the #nes IRC channel. I am the DM, and this thread, while bare now, will serve as the home for session recaps, player information, stories, and whatever else is required. At this time it will be relatively empty, as the campaign has just begun.

Setting Info:

This campaign takes place on a large, flat land mass with thousands of continents and smaller islands hovering at various altitudes throughout the sky. Imagine if the planet Earth was flat, but had additional chunks of land floating miles in the sky. The reasons behind the stationary floating landmasses are unknown, but recent research by leading halfling arcanologists has found strange fluctuations of magical energies around them. All known water in the mortal plane comes from the feywild, the highest continent hundreds of miles into the sky and home of fantastical beasts of myth, where an infinite source rains down on the rest of the world day and night.

Our party’s adventure begins in the second year of the reign of Queen Gloria I of the Great and Bountiful Halfling Empire. This empire, as its name suggests, is dominated, organized, and run by halflings. Over the past two centuries their industrious minds in combinations with a natural affinity for magic has sparked a magitech revolution, quickly sweeping over the rest of the world with terrifying new technologies. The invention of the arcane howitzer and airships have been attributed to the downfall of ancient human and elven civilizations across the base world and countless smaller civilizations populating the sky continents.

This rapid technological explosion has changed the landscape of the world forever. Some regions isolated in the high skies away from the reach of current airship limitations remain at varying states of technological progress. There is everything from the stone tools to the high medieval fantasy standard, and countless stages between. But the world of the Halfling Empire is one of amazing feats of engineering. Airships, railways, cannons, skyscrapers, arcane projection screens, and living constructs are but the tip of the iceberg of halfling capabilities. All running on masterfully repurposed arcane energies.

At the heart of the Halfling Empire is the largest metropolis in the world: Victory City. This city was constructed and named after the victorious wars against humans, elves, dwarves, and all number of other defeated races. Victory City is the home of over two million citizens, far surpassing anything previously achieved in the world by any known civilization. Half of the citizens in Victory City live in ghettos and slums, purposefully oppressed by the government and forced to work in factories and other low paying and degrading positions. The slums are populated by dwarves, humans, elves, and mixed breeds, many of whom were brought to the city after their own kingdoms were crushed beneath the halfling military’s boot. Living conditions are hard. Racism is worse.

These conditions have expanded old resistance movements and secret organizations to new, unheard of membership levels as they fight the powers that be. And thus, our campaign begins in one of the most revolutionary ages the world has ever seen, ruled by the most oppressive civilization in living memory.

Gods save the queen and her fascist regime!

Main Cast:

Breakspear, Warforged Bard / North King
Arog “Boozebelly” Neckbeard, Dwarf Druid / Terrance888
Mjorvald Barzun, the Skull-Taker, Dwarf Fighter / Thlayli
Mogan the Fierce, Trox Barbarian / Lord Iggy
Wilic Montgomery, Human Gunslinger Buccaneer / bestshot9

Supporting Cast:

Urist Nirn, a dwarf preteen healed and rescued by the party

 

[Luckymoose]

reserved #1

 

[Luckymoose]

Campaign – No Eleventh Hour Reprieve as told by Thlayli

Session 1 – Welcome to Victory City

The campaign opens as a standard-class passenger airship makes the approaches to Victory City, the sprawling capital of the Halfling Empire. The skyscrapers of the city and grand domes of the Palace sit atop a sprawling underclass of non-halflings who toil in squalid ghettos for the benefit of their minute masters, and Her Majesty Queen Gloria I, ruler of the known world.

In the third class cabin of the airship sits Wilic, a roguish human with a mysterious magical gun, and chained below in the cargo hold is Breakspear, a terrifying warforged construct with an accidental heart of gold, both destined for some unknown fate in the capital. Far below, Arog and Mjor, two dwarves trying to forget their past failures in life, have begun their morning routines in the non-halfling ghetto far below.

But everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked a force of mysterious women in red cloth masks massacres the crew and hijacks the airship, which then begins to dip and swerve erratically, throwing bodies about the ship. As it descends towards the ground, it finally attracts the attention of those below, including Mjor and Arog.

Back on the ship, Wilic is threatened by one of the masked women, who after a brief confrontation, allows him to jump off the ship before it “lands”. He makes his way down into the cargo hold, where he first encounters and then ignores Breakspear, and finds the rope trailing out the escape hatch where the red woman had left it, potentially as an alternate escape route. Gritting his teeth, he jumps out of the ship clutching the rope, hanging on as it wildly swings back and forth. As it stabilizes and the ship descends, he lets go, landing on a roof – Mjor’s roof.

The airship lands shortly thereafter, crashing into the prison at the center of the Victory City ghetto, the red women having parachuted out of the airship just before. The magical energies within the airship dissipate and cause a massive, sparkling explosion that stretches over the city. Arog, a brewer-cum-deliveryman-cum-drunk, immediately rushes towards the explosion, thinking only of the people of the community he loves and how they might be in danger. Mjor, by comparison, suspiciously assumes that the man who has just landed on his roof is a burglar who created the entire explosion as a diversion to loot the area. He rushes up to his room and buckles on his old warrior’s armor to confront the villain.

Wilic watches the explosion from Mjor’s roof, transfixed with ecstasy that he managed to escape it. When Mjor emerges on the roof to confront him, he tries to bluff his way out of the situation, which fails when the armored dwarf knocks the wind out of him and disarms him of his gun. Faced with the choice of being turned into the police or killed, Wilic desperately jumps off the roof, landing hard but surviving.

Meanwhile at the prison, Breakspear emerges from the catastrophic explosion unharmed, and wreathed in flame, perhaps because of his innate enchantments making him resistant to magic. Despite being a construct intended only to kill, an error in his enchantments left him with the overwhelming desire to love; Breakspear therefore stalks the halls of the flaming prison with friendly words and offers of assistance, nonetheless terrifying the red women (who staged the crash in order to carry out the prison break) into fleeing because of his race’s terrifying reputation. Undeterred by their flight, he breaks the prisoners out of their cells and marches them out into the sunlight in a relatively orderly fashion, the prisoners themselves being too terrified of the warforged to disobey.

Just outside, the explosion has killed or maimed dozens of locals, who Arog desperately tries to heal with his limited means, (mostly strips of cloth and alcohol,) to little effect. He calls about for assistance, finding none. Finally, the sight of a horribly scarred, dwarven child with half of his face burnt off, Urist, causes something of a mental break in Arog’s mind, causing him to waken his latent druidic abilities to commune with nature and channel its healing powers. Urist is healed in a flash of light just as Wilic and Mjor arrive at the prison.

Some minutes prior, after Wilic had jumped off the roof, Mjor descended to deliver a killing blow to Wilic, but instead hears and confronts a trio of looters, escapees from the prison breaking into his room on the first floor. Wilic shouts encouragement to Mjor as he decapitates one prisoner and eviscerates one of the two survivors who try to flee. Wilic asks Mjor for his “stick” back so he can kill the third, and Mjor decides to trust him on a whim, which Wilic repays by shooting the fleeing prisoner through the heart. This forms a minor bond between the two, who then instinctively run towards the prison to investigate, Mjor doing it against his better judgment.

There they see Arog and his healing, and the terrible form of Breakspear emerging from the wreckage, leading an orderly contingent of prisoners, who soon leave to “turn themselves in” as soon as they are free. Mjor first threatens Breakspear with his axe, Wilic following his lead, but the dwarf is too paralyzed to act, and Breakspear does not respond (as he expected of a warforged) by trying to kill them all, which sends him into a lapse of confusion. Arog, though drunk, recognizes Mjor as a neighbor, and solicits Breakspear to help him with his healing.

The sounds of approaching sirens cause a panicked Mjor and Wilic to usher Breakspear (who does not know what he has done wrong) and Arog (who is totally incoherent) into a nearby alleyway, little Urist in tow. A brief discussion of what to do is interrupted by an astral projection message from the Halfling police force, promising justice to all lawbreakers, who the party members are now assumed to be, the warforged having escaped his custody and led hundreds of prisoners out of the prison, and the others (Wilic, Arog, and Mjor) having aided and comforted an Imperial weapon gone rogue.

The group flees down an alleyway as the camera pans upward, revealing the scouting airships of the Empire already beginning their search for the criminals.


~~~

reserved #2

players can now post whatever they need to

 

[Thlayli]

Mjor

Full Name: Mjorvald Barzun
Level 1 Fighter

Current Feats:

Power Attack
Mounted Combat

Character Biography: Mjor has worked for the past several years as a smith in Victory City, producing "ethnic" dwarven metalworking for an upper middle class halfling clientele. He is quiet, stoic, and suspicious. He has a significant past history with the Empire that he tries not to talk about. He possesses a set of dwarven heavy armor and a double-bladed war axe, that he apparently knows how to use to devastating effect.

~More to be revealed at a later date~

 

[SamSniped]

Spoiler If you ever need me :

Just sticking this here.

 

[Terrance888]

Arog

Full Name: Arog “Boozebelly” Neckbeard
Level 1 Druid