The End of an Age

In the summer of 2019 my daughter and two of her friends were attending a summer theater camp, and then coming over here on Thursday afternoon to "play D&D" (actually 13th Age). They told me what they wanted to play in broad strokes and I made up a default Half Elf Bard, Human Cleric, and Wood Elf Ranger in advance and them them know that they were the newest acolytes of a druidic circle in Brinham Wood, left behind to keep an eye on things while the others dealt with a catastrophe elsewhere. They fleshed out these PCs during the first session, becoming 

• Lyria: Having played in, and been chased out of, every port city in the human lands, this former member of the elf queen's court is versed in elvish sagas and has a voice so pure it makes plants grow.
• Maria: Possessed by a demon as a child, the monstrosity was exorcised by bathing Maria in, and feeding her, silver dragon blood. Blind and prophetic, she has an innate connection to Birinham Wood and its Sidabras River, as that is the sleeping body of a great silver dragon.
• Hosiery: Having lived several human lifespans, she is currently a member of the Elf Queen's order of Hamster Knights, who fight against cruelty (and constrain Drow rapaciousness), riding their giant hamsters to battle. She invented socks. 

I found a very simple adventure in an old issue of Dungeon Magazine (The Fountain of Health by Ann Dupuis: A straightforward ruined building turns into a labyrinth in the jungle setting, which might be re-skinned a little for a collapsed chaos estate), updated it for 13th Age and they spent 2 weeks completing it. There were then another 2 weeks following up on the various plot threads in it. And then camp ended and we were done. Everyone had fun.

The Covid hit, and to keep the kids from never seeing each other outside of school I restarted it: every Friday afternoon from when I finished work until dinner we played on Roll 20, eventually adding two more players and three more characters:

• Amy Packsister: daughter of the local bakers, she frolicked in the woods with wolves as a child before being captured by slavers, sold to demon worshipping pirates, and eventually escaping to home with a reservoir of rage but boundless optimism. Human Barbarian. 
• Azeroth: A human wizard, trained at the Archmage's academy, and solider for the Crusader in the defense of Harrowdale, this stalwart eventually died and trapped his soul in hell to defend the people of the sinking tower-city of Quag. 
• Axar: a Star Elf, wanderer of the Overland, duelist, vitalist, and master of the magic of the concordant spheres, the Priestess foresaw that his path lay with the Guardians of Brinham Wood.
• (This is not counting the time the party split up during the Quagmire adventure and we ran a chunk with Amy and Lyria and Hosiery with two other temporary PCs, and then Maria and Azeroth with 3 other temporary PCs, one of whom is also in Hell, or the Demonweb to be more specific.)

Last weekend we ran our final session of this game before the kids, now adults, go off to college. It's been 5 years of mostly regular play: vacations, drama programs, and other things kept us from playing every week but I figure we got 25 sessions per year on average, in fits and starts. I may have had games before that clocked more hours total (these games were almost all 2-2.5 hours, aside from the half dozen times we got everyone in person for an afternoon, difficult since Amy's player joined during Covid and was 90 minutes away), but none lasting this long, and it has been amazing. The session ended with their spelljammer, bereft of power, tumbling end over end into the Tannhauser Gate, a Star Elf artifact to bridge dimensions, on their way into the Demonweb to affect a rescue of their lost allies. 

We will not play again until holiday break. It is my hope that we can meet 3 times a year (once in December/January, twice in the summer) until everyone graduates. 

James Maliszewski has several pieces up at Grognardia about the need for lengthy campaigns, citing the aggregation of events that make a campaign unique, give it its motive force, and make it feel real and alive. 13th Age is very much not an old school game of the sort that James is discussing, and it is designed for a "change the world at the end of level 10" campaign.  But since I had no idea this would last that long, nor did I have any real plans for what SHOULD happen, I was just grabbing content that had been lying around for a while - sometimes as a personal challenge to make something out of modules I owned but hated - and strung them together. (Matt Coleville has a nice discussion on the values of that here.) I went from The Fountain of Health to something I just made up on the spot to trying to salvage one of the all time stinkers The Terrible Trouble at Tragidore to the Siege of Harrowdale adventure that Pelgrane put on Roll20 for 13th Age to more stuff I made up surrounding the coven of Hags who were their nemesis before putting in The Wayward Wood by Leonard Wilson from Dragon Magazine, which I had hoped to use because it's built off the Brinham Wood joke, and finally more stuff of my own creation. This took them from levels 1-4, and they made significant changes to the politics of their central woods and it surroundings.

They finished this in August, 2021, completing the Adventurer Tier in 13th Age.

Once that was done, I had years pass, asked the players what the characters were doing, and picked what was next from that. Quagmire, another of the highly uneven TSR adventures was next, modified to build on the players choices till now to make it feel organic, took them off their home island and radically changed the campaign, upping the stakes and seeing a PC death. They returned having to deal with the politics of where they started, and a simple task of apportioning healing from the Fountain of Heath took them into a war in the Underdark, and from there to the desert-landscape of the Hollow Earth from which dwarves originated, using the Dungeon Adventures module The Kingdom of Ghouls by Wolfgang Baur as a foundation. Returning with their political problems solved, having upended the religious practices of the Dwarf King's court, and and carrying eggs holding the blessings of Blibdoolploop, they became the agents to avert the resurgence of the hag coven as I finally made use of Rahasia, one of the first modules of the Hickman revolution. 

These trials completed, they realized they has wasted enough time... their friends in the Demonweb needed rescuing. Their research turned up three possible paths into the Demonweb and the settled on Tannhauser Gate, the artifact that was the core of the Star Elves phyrric victory over the Grievance of Eden (this is all from Axar's players provided backstory, though I gave it the name Tannhauser Gate because none of them have seen Blade Runner yet....), giving them a reason to enter the Overworld, which in this game was Wildspace and I used Steve Kurtz' module The Sea of Sorrow, again from Dragon Magazine back in the day, as the baseline. 

They finished this last weekend, completing the Champion Tier in 13th Age, they are now Epic 8th Level heroes. 

Am I gonna use Queen of the Demonweb Pits next? It's another famously uneven module, so I might - I recall some parts as being quite good. I doubt that it was prepared for the PCs to enter with a flying ship and a small mercenary company of Giff eager to claim land in Hell. 

The linking thread from session 1 to now is... their choices. The aggregation of individual decisions to pursue this or that thread, deal with this or that enemy, until they found themselves here... Diving into hell with a mercenary company of Hippo-Men warriors at their back on a mission of mercy. And what thy do once they are in the Demonweb, directly facing Lolth's minions and her manipulations of their world? I have no idea. We play to find out. 

Last session the after doing a deity impersonation to convince a colony of former Drow on the dark side of a distant world to follow them to a recently revitalized colony on the light side and ignore the 'divine commands' of the broken communication array of the destroyed castle on the moon overhead, they remembered that the colony was settled to contain a deep evil inside the planet. 

Maria: "Whelp, running away from our problems has always worked before!" 

Hosiery: "Like when I decided to not check out what that cambion assassin was doing and it killed the princess? that worked out great!"

Lyria: "Hey her ghost on her ex-fiancee's ship eventually forgave you!"

This, these exchanges, with someone in 2024 recalling something that happened in 2021, and everyone remembering what happened, and what it lead to, is why they play. To see what happens next. Their not remembering that they maneuvered the cambion assassin to drag the hag responsible for the princess' death to the Demonweb where she will be waiting for them is why I play....

Because according to them I am a bad person who does bad things.