It’s been a month since the last narrative. My game has continued every Tuesday during that time, but since it was a connected adventure, I felt it could wait until it was complete. Also, I swing back and forth in my excitement for blogging, there are times when I blog three times a week, and there are times – such as the last three weeks – when I think “does anyone care?” and “do I fell like blogging?” August has had the RPGaDay, and near the end of July I was getting excited to perhaps take part in it, and then I asked myself “do I really want to blog Every. Single. Day?” No, I didn’t as it turned out. I’ve been doing other things recently during the time I normally blog, such as: get back to reading philosophy, trying out new cooking, and doing more outdoor cycling. I am getting mentally and physically more fit, I am eating better, and I am losing some weight as well.

But, back to the story of my Aufstrag group. Let me just give you my GM perspective of the group over the first 8 months of this campaign. I have taken Troll Lord Game’s epic 3 box set Aufstrag campaign and have put it in my developing campaign world. For the first 5 months of 2023 the group followed the adventures in the first box set In the Shadow of Aufstrag. That group of 8 characters worked their way north along the Drunderry river from Malforten to just being a day away from Botkinburg as they followed the Aratok Mountains and Blacktooth Ridge to the east. However, my players had 8 more characters they made (we all love LARGE adventuring companies which allow players to build up an incredible variety of skills and capabilities, especially since we make use of C&C’s Expanded Class options that allows amazing multi-classing). This second group followed the roads from Malforten west to Hrueset and then north along the Hruesen River past numerous towns that I created myself, making use of Philip Reed’s marvellous Fantasy City Sites and Scenes I, II, and III to fill them with intrigue and adventures.

As my players moved through those home-made adventures, I was worried whether my players would like the shift from our previous theatre of mind and VTT maps shown on a large monitor, to a new gaming table I set up next to the normal one where I set up Loke Battle Mats for more tactical encounters. It so happens they enjoyed the change up!

With my new playable undead Remnant and Changeling ancestries, my players get to try out new ways to develop characters and this campaign has so far been very heavy on character development as well as profession development, for I am also making great use of The Ultimate Guide to Alchemy, Crafting & Enchanting (Nord Games), the Vault of Magic and Deep Magic (Kobold Press), and the Tome of Alchemy (Frog God Games). All the PCs in my campaigns choose professions, and those that chose Alchemy are having quite the time collecting journals and notebooks with unique recipes drawn from these books! This campaign has (thus far) made less use of conventional magic items and stronger use of what the PCs themselves create through research.

In the next game session, this group should arrive at Botkinburg, and we will continue where we left off with the first group at the end of May. They then get to choose which members of group 1 and 2 they want to use to visit a dungeon known as the Vargolg, and the other members will most likely end up in one of the other adventures from the In the Shadows of Aufstrag box set (that is, one group may do A2 and the other A3, and then they’ll gather together afterward to see how they’ll divide themselves up for the next couple of adventures). I think it is very interesting to have multiple groups that mix and match over time, each going off based on rumours they hear and doing one of the adventures, and then coming back to together in a town and tavern and regroup to head off in different directions for the next series of adventures. With so many PCs (we’ve got 16 so far and my players still want to make more as they come to understand the themes and possibilities of the campaign!), levelling up is slower, but since most of the PCs use the C&C Expanded Class (so many have 2-3 classes), and each of my players role-play two characters, it means each adventuring party of 8 characters has about 12 character classes among them, so they are versatile enough to handle what the Aufstrag adventures present to them.

Let me end this entry with a brief summary of the last three adventures. The adventurers passed through the towns of Claethorpes, Woodhurst, Woodpine, Hempholme, Ormkirk, and Alryne. Passing through each town, they picked up work guiding and guarding wagon supplies from one town to another for some extra cash and had some encounters on the dangerous roads that took them further from the civilized city of Hrueset. Upon entering Alryne – a town filled with many Remnant undead (my new playable ancestry), they visited the remains of an old sewage system that belonged to a city that once existed there before the 1,000-year Winter Dark left it in ruins. In the sewers, they were looking for Godfrey, a Remnant black marketeer specializing in alchemy and cadaver caterpillars (i.e. carrion crawlers) that have been bred to hunt and paralyze other undead! My player who has a Remnant Vampire Hunter/Assassin named Lucas wants to acquire one as a pet so that he can better hunt down the Darakhul ghoul(s) that killed him and his family.

To free Godfrey, they had to confront Darakhul, Shadowmancers, and Necrophage Ghouls (I’ve brought these great creatures in from the Kobold Press Creature Codex). The group ended up getting teleported into a Darakhul tower in Ghoul Crest and fought a Darakhul alchemist name Archibald. They defeated him, but as you can see from the condition rings, most of the group was paralyzed, charmed, or blinded due to his clever use of hypnotic patterns on walls, and his ghoul powers and magic. Some players thought a TPK was immanent, but I told them there are far worse things than death, since Archibald had other things in mind for them…such as transformation into undead!

Upon defeating him, they headed off to Harmstead and next week Lucas will get his cadaver caterpillar pet, and they will then head to Botkinburg.