#from the mists

alright look i know i try to only post art here but my party is great, I love DMing for them, and this kind of stupid shit is why

he’s alive! but “having spent the past 9 years softening as a person because a bunch of super nice people spared you and made you a part of their found family and now having to go back and see exactly what ruin you helped cause now that you can see the victims as people and not monsters” has been going uh. well.

@interstellardragon​

okay I’ll get some updates for the campaign! thank you guys for taking interest in my dumb weird post curse of strahd adventures lol. Now that I have free time there’s a lot more sketches I want to make because the party has been through a lot so far.

anyway looooong post below cut. there are some pictures though, at least.

The party’s enjoying it! One member had to take a break due to IRL concerns, but so far everyone’s been enjoying it, and they’ve definitely enjoyed being able to play their characters from a relatively young age to maturing, starting families, having kids, etc. :D It’s been fun to play through because not many campaigns go that long, you know? Currently they’re on another adventure, so they haven’t had as much domestic time!

The adventure: after the five year skip, the party got asked by an old friend (Orezana – one of the first NPCs of the outside world to interact with them) if they could… kill the queen to end the war. The party refused, instead deciding that they were going to investigate Twilight Woods: the homeland of the dusk elves, now abandoned. The queen supposedly changed personalities when she came from there. So stands to reason something happened in there, right?

Well, they ventured inwards – Ellerian, Kelogul, Miharu, Arialoth, and Rahadin. Ireena couldn’t join them, as she’s actually pregnant currently, and the party didn’t think they’d be gone… that long. They got ambushed by a group of dullahan that nearly killed them and sent them further into the woods. All contact with the outside is lost. They don’t know how to get out (DM Note: it’s being treated like a domain of delight/domain of dread in terms of those rules, so basically Barovia. They can’t use sending. They can’t teleport. They’re trapped).

They came across Rahadin’s birthplace, a place called Hllona, where its inhabitants were mysteriously turned to stone. There, they found a clue on how to escape from an old nursery book Rahadin’s mom used to read to him:

In the Forest, overgrown
Sit the Kings upon their throne
Answer them their riddles three
And you may pass between the trees

From there, they traveled south, finding a set of mass graves from when Barov’s men marched through. They encountered a haunted tree that attacked them, decorated with breaking wheels (note: during the fight, the tree dragged Rahadin up into its branches and began re-enacting the same brutality enacted on him many years ago. It was fun!). Here was the tree’s token:

After the battle they decided to head back to Hllona and take a rest (note: we actually use gritty realism rules, so this was their ‘long rest’ – i.e. 7 day vacation). Afterwards, they discovered an abandoned tower with the skeletons of two kids surrounded by cherished toys. They met a vulture-like man inside, who called himself Myslik – and asked the group if they would take him to the city of Temir, home to the finest magical academy of the dusk elves that now sits abandoned. He mentioned how it was guarded by a sphinx, who sits in the abandoned city and refuses entry to anyone.

Note: the vulture-like man is a nagpa. Nagpa are a race of 13 cursed wizards that were fucked up by the Raven Queen. certainly this will have no ties at all into the area the party is in. :)

Anyway, they traveled to Temir. Rahadin told them some of the history of the city, and how it was the first major city to surrender to Barov as his men marched through. They found the home of the old town master, and they cracked opened his safe, only to find what was essentially a time capsule and a letter begging whoever found it to find the joy that his family would never get. They then confronted the Sphinx of Temir.

The sphinx fucked with time, sending two people forward to the future briefly, and even at one point turned Ellerian into a baby. But they killed it. Ellerian wants to take the hourglass around its neck and see if they can’t rebuild it (it was played off more like a construct than a living creature aesthetically) and possibly free it somehow. It was a sphinx enslaved to guard a dead university in an abandoned town, which he sympathized with a lot.

In any case, NEXT SESSION the party is going to enter the university. It’s an enormous dungeon lol, with over 25+ rooms that they’re going to get to explore. I’m really excited to finish it and run it for them. also the sphinx turned 3/5 party members into teens again, and nobody has access to greater restoration to fix it.

As bonus, here’s some of the maps. The first map is actually… so the way I have this set up is that the party is basically in a hex crawl. I told the party that I wouldn’t provide or draw the map for them – they’d have to do so themselves. So far they’ve been doing a great job, lol. The drawings oontop of it are what they’ve done; everything faded beneath is the actual locations.

Here’s the map for Hllona:

And here’s the map for Temir.

It’s definitely been a lot of fun, for both players and I. My players have told me they’re really enjoying the exploration aspect, as well as the kind of survival aspect (they didn’t bring a lot of rations going in, so they’ve had to scavenge for food and manage their resources). And on my end, I’ve enjoyed running it, because… well, if it ain’t obvious: I always thought the dusk elves were extremely interesting and it’s been neat to expand on their lore. Plus the party is actually interested in little shit I put out just to solve the mystery of it. They spent about an hour theorizing over the corpses of two dead kids to think about what happened to them, and the best way to respect their bodies. I’ve had to write a lot of lore about why the place is like what it is, how the dusk elves fit into the world. And it’s been interesting playing Rahadin, a character that has spent 9 years essentially being declawed by the party to have to encounter his past self and what he did.

tl;dr: shit’s fun and im excited.

tl;dr rahadin and ireena update: they got married, they’re gonna have a kid, but Rahadin’s currently trapped in another plane of existence and ireena’s losin’ her fuckin’ mind. but nobody knows that.