Cool D&D Stuff, Part II
In case anyone enjoyed the summary of my D&D campaign I posted a few months ago...
When we last left our heroes, Jacques, secretly the sahuagin illusionist Jahuaket, had infiltrated the University of Poitionne in an elaborate scheme to assassinate the head of the school, also named Poitionne. The attempt failed, owing largely in part to the fact that Poitionne had already ascended to become the patron God of wizards, and Jacques vanished in the aftermath.
In order to beat Jacques, the player characters all decide that they need to become stronger, which prompts one of the characters, an arctic berserker named Pukulria from the cold Outer Reaches, to reveal that she is on a quest to recover an ancient weapon once wielded by her tribe's ancestral hero, the Great Wolf-chief Amak. As it turns out, Poitionne was once adventuring buddies with Amak, and he sets them on a path towards the Far East continent where the Elves and the Dwarves live in order to retrieve the spear.
A bunch of cool stuff happens in between, but the key takeaway happens when the party Cleric, Deider, has to resurrect one of the other party members and discovers the concept of first claim. In most D&D games death is a revolving door that you can come back from as often as you like just by giving up some experience points and having a cleric cast the proper spell, but in this world in order to be brought back rather than pay experience points you have to find a God willing to sponsor you. Sponsorship is strenuous and gets successively harder each time it happens, and most Gods can only pull it off a maximum of three times per character. Whichever God has the closest relationship to a character is said to have "first claim" on them, meaning that when the time comes to revive them this God is the one who decides whether or not to allow them to come back, provides sponsorship if the character is deemed worthy enough, and demands favors in return for it.
This past week, the party was approached by the head Cardinal of the church of Miatezh, God of Opportunity and Treachery, and the God who created the powerful dagger that Jacques tried to use to kill Poitionne. The dagger has two significant meanings in the church of Miatezh: first, in order to activate the dagger, one has to use it to kill someone that trusts the wielder with their life, thus demonstrating the wielder's ultimate ability to manipulate people; and second, church doctrine dictates that should someone manage to kill the previous Cardinal using an activated dagger, they in turn become the next Cardinal themself.
As a show of good faith, the Cardinal reveals just what makes an activated dagger of Miatezh so powerful: when most people die, they get to turn to whichever God has first claim on them in order to be brought back, but when someone is killed by the dagger, first claim passes to Miatezh, who in all likeliness isn't going to allow it. (Miatezh isn't stupid, though; he knows that his followers are among some of the most ambitious in the world, so he put in a loophole that prevents the dagger from ever being used to slay a God, which is how Poitionne lived through Jacques' attack).
The fact that Jacques is running around with an activated dagger and that nobody knows where he is scares the hell out of the Cardinal, to the point where he's willing to offer the player characters a deal. He knows that Whelani Intelligence found out about the plot between Kashinya and Shijai to invade when war breaks out and Whelan is too busy fighting the Sahuagins, and that in order to prevent the invasion the party was sent on a mission to acquire naval support from Ombité. He then reveals that the Kashinyan government, ruled by a council of 12 Cardinals from the churches of the various constellation Gods, isn't as gung-ho for war as Whelani Intelligence was lead to believe. The vote for war is deadlocked at 6-6, with Miatezh currently in favor of war, but in exchange for defeating Jacques and retrieving his dagger, the Cardinal is willing to swing his vote whichever way the party decides.
No sooner has an arrangement been reached and the Cardinal steps off the boat, when he is suddenly ambushed by none other than Jacques. Jacques kills the Cardinal, assuming control of the church. The player characters, still not strong enough to stand up to him yet, decide to fight anyway. Jacques casts a wicked powerful Illusion spell called "Wierd" on them, causing them to see hideous monsters that literally frightens 3/4 of the ship's crew, including 2 party members, to death.
So now the party needs to figure out how to revive their fallen comrades (even with sponsorship, the materials to cast the spell are still really expensive!), decide whether it's more worth it to keep looking for Amak's spear or to change course to go after Jacques, and figure out how to stop this war from becoming a complete and total disaster.
When we last left our heroes, Jacques, secretly the sahuagin illusionist Jahuaket, had infiltrated the University of Poitionne in an elaborate scheme to assassinate the head of the school, also named Poitionne. The attempt failed, owing largely in part to the fact that Poitionne had already ascended to become the patron God of wizards, and Jacques vanished in the aftermath.
In order to beat Jacques, the player characters all decide that they need to become stronger, which prompts one of the characters, an arctic berserker named Pukulria from the cold Outer Reaches, to reveal that she is on a quest to recover an ancient weapon once wielded by her tribe's ancestral hero, the Great Wolf-chief Amak. As it turns out, Poitionne was once adventuring buddies with Amak, and he sets them on a path towards the Far East continent where the Elves and the Dwarves live in order to retrieve the spear.
A bunch of cool stuff happens in between, but the key takeaway happens when the party Cleric, Deider, has to resurrect one of the other party members and discovers the concept of first claim. In most D&D games death is a revolving door that you can come back from as often as you like just by giving up some experience points and having a cleric cast the proper spell, but in this world in order to be brought back rather than pay experience points you have to find a God willing to sponsor you. Sponsorship is strenuous and gets successively harder each time it happens, and most Gods can only pull it off a maximum of three times per character. Whichever God has the closest relationship to a character is said to have "first claim" on them, meaning that when the time comes to revive them this God is the one who decides whether or not to allow them to come back, provides sponsorship if the character is deemed worthy enough, and demands favors in return for it.
This past week, the party was approached by the head Cardinal of the church of Miatezh, God of Opportunity and Treachery, and the God who created the powerful dagger that Jacques tried to use to kill Poitionne. The dagger has two significant meanings in the church of Miatezh: first, in order to activate the dagger, one has to use it to kill someone that trusts the wielder with their life, thus demonstrating the wielder's ultimate ability to manipulate people; and second, church doctrine dictates that should someone manage to kill the previous Cardinal using an activated dagger, they in turn become the next Cardinal themself.
As a show of good faith, the Cardinal reveals just what makes an activated dagger of Miatezh so powerful: when most people die, they get to turn to whichever God has first claim on them in order to be brought back, but when someone is killed by the dagger, first claim passes to Miatezh, who in all likeliness isn't going to allow it. (Miatezh isn't stupid, though; he knows that his followers are among some of the most ambitious in the world, so he put in a loophole that prevents the dagger from ever being used to slay a God, which is how Poitionne lived through Jacques' attack).
The fact that Jacques is running around with an activated dagger and that nobody knows where he is scares the hell out of the Cardinal, to the point where he's willing to offer the player characters a deal. He knows that Whelani Intelligence found out about the plot between Kashinya and Shijai to invade when war breaks out and Whelan is too busy fighting the Sahuagins, and that in order to prevent the invasion the party was sent on a mission to acquire naval support from Ombité. He then reveals that the Kashinyan government, ruled by a council of 12 Cardinals from the churches of the various constellation Gods, isn't as gung-ho for war as Whelani Intelligence was lead to believe. The vote for war is deadlocked at 6-6, with Miatezh currently in favor of war, but in exchange for defeating Jacques and retrieving his dagger, the Cardinal is willing to swing his vote whichever way the party decides.
No sooner has an arrangement been reached and the Cardinal steps off the boat, when he is suddenly ambushed by none other than Jacques. Jacques kills the Cardinal, assuming control of the church. The player characters, still not strong enough to stand up to him yet, decide to fight anyway. Jacques casts a wicked powerful Illusion spell called "Wierd" on them, causing them to see hideous monsters that literally frightens 3/4 of the ship's crew, including 2 party members, to death.
So now the party needs to figure out how to revive their fallen comrades (even with sponsorship, the materials to cast the spell are still really expensive!), decide whether it's more worth it to keep looking for Amak's spear or to change course to go after Jacques, and figure out how to stop this war from becoming a complete and total disaster.