I had a kind of emotional speech about the love and praise that’s come out since I started running games for money on Start Playing Games. I’m not ready to share it just yet. So let’s talk games!
The adventure that I want to recruit most for right now is listed on the page as Arcanix: Summon Mightiest Heroes. This adventure began as a Curse of Strahd sequel. After the book the group wanted to stay together and keep gaming. And I really wanted to run Eberron. So as we started in on the last act of the adventure. The idea came to me at some point in The Amber Temple. I love Strahd’s Amber Temple. There is something about it, this big open map, the mystery, I just find it inspirational.
That dungeon and a desire to run Eberron drew me into one of those keith-baker.com rabbit holes looking at lore about the Draconic Prophecy, other planes, and the Five Nations. A campaign began to form. I started with Arcanix and the Arcane Congress as the most magical of Eberron’s nations.
Eberron is a high fantasy setting, the technology level is somewhere between the Victorian Era and World War I. It is just coming out of a century long, very WWI inspired war. Aundair is the France inspired nation of this world. None of these comparisons are one to one. Dragon Age’s Orlais is MUCH more explicitly French than Aundair is.
The point here, the PCs are in Curse of Strahd. They finish. The Mad Mage of Mount Bartok teleports them on to their next adventure. But they land in Aundair in Eberron. The storyhook is that Aundair has the best wizards of the five nations that went to war in Eberron. But despite the 4th edition handwringing that post war, all the nations are at the same level of strength, in my opinion and for the sake of this campaign Aundair came in 4th place out of 4 surviving nations. The 5th one got magical nuked, long story, not relevant here.
Aundair’s leading wizards are called the Arcane Congress and live in a place called Arcanix in case you don’t know that they’re super awesome wizards. My thinking is that with a lot of group effort and maybe a little bit of infernal help they have managed to cast a very specific sort of Wish spell. They tried to conjure the warriors Aundair needs to survive. I call it the Summon Mightiest Heroes spell. Maybe Aundair expected to get angels, devils, golems but they get your player characters. Maybe they weren’t expecting you to have free will.
I think the biggest challenge here is, your PCs need to work together, stay together as a group, accept the premise of the adventure. Curse of Strahd begins with, “you’re thrown into a prison called Barovia. Escape. Good luck.” This is a similar premise in a much larger prison with potentially more benevolent guards. And think this is a problem that gets hammered out in session zero. Players need to make characters that want to go on the adventure is like Rule #1 of an ongoing campaign. This place sucks, are you willing to try and make it better without just sitting down and trying to get back to wherever you came from.
I think this is a good campaign hook and I have the bones all sketched out in case people want to continue it. Since I want to make it an ongoing campaign for people who haven’t played together before it would benefit from being hacked up into more discrete chunks. That way it can come to a more satisfactory ending every story arc.
If you’d like to join up, here is a link to do so. I have 2 interested people, I’d like at least 2 more before it gets going in earnest. Let me know if you’d like to join. Thank you!
https://startplaying.games/adventure/cld7p6dg3000708l5dqzpar8u