Chapter 1

This is a brief review of the first fifteen sessions of this campaign.

It started with a usual night at the Roaring Bull Inn with the usual crowd of people from all walks of life enjoying themselves with the entertainment and relaxation the place offered.

Among the crowd were a few people of note:
Zelast & Ysilia – Elves fleeing persecution by the corrupted nobility of their homeland.
Ian – A man so ugly that his heritage could be mistaken for orc. He escaped capture from a guaranteed death sentence for a crime he did not commit and came to Endrin to start over.
Artemis – A well-liked half-elven warmage on an impossible mission to aid his homeland by arranging a trade agreement with a company that has no interest helping non-humans.
Arianna – A princess, fleeing the overprotection of her father, but her time of freedom is coming to an end as the magical trinket she used to hide her whereabouts is now hiding from her.
Caspar – A knight seeking to prove his virtue so he can return home to Lataan.

That night the entire world erupted into violence. Normal objects animated and attacked their users. Mythical creatures appeared and wreaked havoc. The dead rose to feed and spawn more of their own.

A few individuals in the crowd, who would eventually call themselves Caspar’s Brightblades, joined together to face these challenges.

During the chaos a terrified woman in the crowd seemed to know everything that was going to happen. While the fear in her heart was killing her, with her dying breath she claimed to have seen everything that happened this night in a dream and exclaimed “Darkness is coming! The six flames must find the lost candle or all shall burn!”

By the next morning all but the strongest or luckiest of cities were now a memory, leaving only rubble to note they even existed. The great cities that still stood were given a wake up call that the world had changed.

Over the next several weeks the remaining people of the land fled to these still-standing cities, looking for nothing more than safety.

The group that would become known as Caspar’s Brightblades took this as an opportunity to both save lives, make money, go on great adventures, and possibly solve the Prophecy of the Six Flames (which they found out was spoken by more than one person). First they escorted as many refugees as possible to still-standing city of Endrin while bringing back the heads of the mythical creatures for study. Then they searched for the daughter and ex-wife of their mutual friend Bull McAllister.

On that particular trek they found that even the less “civilized” creatures of the land faced the same problems, causing gold to be worth a little less and usable equipment to be worth more.

Eventually, after plenty of fights with creatures they had never heard of before, they found Bull’s family, and returned them to him.

By this time the city of Endrin had adapted to its new situation, was dealing with the large changes in the world, and had done much to regain and control of a fraction of their original land, though their control of the sea was not even close to returning and the prices of some goods were at an all time high.

The party found this to be true with pearls. Pearls, a crucial component required for the creation of healing wands, had stopped being plentiful when the Bay of Endrin’s water became a deathtrap. So the party went on a trek along the coast to search for treasure and find pearls.

A halfling joined the Brightblades at this time.
Trebor – A simple halfling looking to earn some good coin and enjoy life.

The Brightblades first encounter was with a group of bounty hunters who intended upon taking Ari back to her father, willing or otherwise. After the bounty hunters were taken care (and pearls found on their bodies), Ari’s identity as a princess was exposed. And this attack would not be the last of its kind.

The Brightblades chose to look for more pearls, this time crossing a bridge that they had heard more than one story about how dangerous the lands beyond it were.

This danger proved itself to be true after a few days when the party was decimated by some oversized insectoids known as ankhegs. The party lost this combat, and it cost them two comrades – Ian and Caspar.

After fleeing back to Endrin, the Brightblades have not come near that bridge since.

Shortly thereafter Caspar’s Brightblades officially took on that name and became recognized by, and were now working for, the king of Endrin.

This arrangement paired them up with two new members of their group:
Lindo – A monk from Lataan, who had been sent to find Caspar by Caspar’s mother and friends.
Moore – A cleric who had been spending much of his time healing and helping refugees coming to the city and was now looking to do something more.

The task the party had been given would be to reconnect with the overland trading city Krendalar. It was the nearest of the large cities and did much to aid in the strained relations between the kingdoms of Endrin and Ponalim. The city was strong enough to defend against an attack, but had remained silent in the three months since the Apocalypse happened.

After some troubled travels, the Brightblades made it to Krendalar. The city was in utter ruins and showed signs of monstrous life.

During a particularly nasty combat with a group of shadows, Moore was drained of life. The Brightblades were too far from any city to take him to be raised, so they buried him at a temple.

Shortly thereafter the party met up with a lady knight that entered the town for her own reasons.
Sorra – A Knight from Ponalim who left that kingdom as it become needlessly warlike since the Apocalypse. Now she was guided by her dream of a woman begging for help. Those dreams led her to Ponalim.

They eventually found a disturbing network of living, fleshy, and pulsing tubes that spread throughout the western side of the city. After investigating the party found that the tubes were being attended to by alien-looking, man-sized creatures that they found out later were kythons.

But the kythons were as smart and clever as they were evil; they brought the fight to the Brightblades by ambushing them at their temporary house of rest. The party won the day, barely, and found the central lair of the kythons.

If you’ve seen the movie Aliens, you’ve seen the kythons lair. The evil creatures had been using captured humans and elves to create a feeding machine that nourished gestating kythons (the network of tubes); with nearly 40 elves being held in a poisoned stasis (strength 0) to be used later as food for the machine.

The Brightblades put saved those they could, ended the misery for those that they could not, and destroyed every kython in the machine.

While the elves were recovering, Trebor, Lindo, Sorra, Artemis, and Ysilia were sent out to some nearby gem mines to find some young elven noble who had escaped the kythons’ capture. They did find the boy, strangled to death in chains of a devil. But they returned the boy’s body to his care taker, who would have the boy returned back to life later.

What the Brightblades did not know is that this child was the last of his family, and would one day be the heir to the throne of the elven kingdom of Maratheelia.

With forty elves in tow, Caspar’s Brightblades returned to Maratheelia, and on the journey they were told why the elves fled from Maratheelia; the royal family of Maratheelia was destroyed and the corrupted and power hungry noble houses banded together to dominate the remaining kingdom.

Over one hundred elves fled their forest in search of a new home. Ponalim only offered them slavery, forcing them continue their journey on to Krendalar or Endrin.

When the party was only a short distance away, they were once again attacked by a force of bounty hunters looking to get a large reward for Ari’s return to her father. The party easily won, but the Brightblades realized that these attacks would continue unless something was done to get Ari’s father to stop them.

With the elves now in a new home, the party had a decision to make; do they help Maratheelia and allow Zelast, Artemis, and Ysilia get some revenge, or do they return to the kingdom of Siglund to reason with Ari’s father? They chose the former.

Nearly a year had passed since the coming of the Apocalypse, and now Caspar’s Brightblades were on the road north to save lives and be heroes.

When the party came to Krendalar they found it to no longer be in ruins, but to be in perfect shape, as if nothing had ever happened to it. After much interaction they found out that the entire city was an amazing illusion and was really a necropolis of sorts.

They found the source of the illusion to be a very talented but naïve young man named Mornal, who had been led astray by someone he thought to be his friend, Ventraine. Ventraine used Mornal’s talents to aid in the destruction of Krendalar during the night of the Apocalypse, and then led him down the path of lichdom.

The party exposed the Ventraine’s lies to Mornal which led to a fight between the two groups, with Caspar’s Brightblades being the victors and the bodies of both liches being destroyed.

As per Mornal’s wishes, the party searched for the phylacteries of the two liches, but could not find the cave that held the phylacteries in time. Neither phylactery was found, meaning either lich could be anywhere. Given Mornal’s tenuous grasp of his own sanity by the time his body was destroyed means that two liches could be out there plotting against them.

With that side adventure done with, the party continued on to their quest to save Maratheelia.

On the road they met with a patrol from Ponalim. It was an uneventful affair, but they did determine that Ponalim had allied itself with some rather bestial orcs. This was a concern, but they more pressing issues to deal with and moved on.

After several more weeks of traveling along the road, the Brightblades encountered a group of unofficial guards of Maratheelia who eventually led the group to their leader in exile, an unnamed druid who simply claimed to be a caretaker.

This caretaker told the Brightblades that if they truly wanted to help the elves of Maratheelia, they would enter a particular glade and find out what happened to Maratheelia’s Tree of Life. This tree had a kind of symbiotic link with the elves of the land, and now the hearts of the elves had become apathetic at best and almost cruel at worst and access to the tree had been cut off.

The party entered the glade, found the tree to be infested with evil, and defeated a fiend that had been corrupting it. But the defeat of the fiend did not remove the corruption of the tree; it only removed the source of continuing corruption of the elves.

The current leaders of Maratheelia found the party and put them on trial, only to have the Brightblades determine the cure for the Tree of Life leading to the defeat of the heart of darkness in Maratheelia.

In time the remaining elves returned to their usual selves and the unredeemable elves fled the city. The rightful heir to the kingdom returned and the party were treated as heroes.

For the next three months the party worked with both the elves of Maratheelia to help them regain the strength they had lost during their corrupted times.

It has been eighteen months since the Apocalypse shattered the lives of everyone on the planet, and once again it is time for Caspar’s Brightblades to begin a new journey…