What Do I Know?

The party managed to find the portal room that connects the remote outpost to the old Eastern Empire of the elves.  Improperly playing with said portal opened a gate to the para-elemental plane of acid, which flooded the room with acid and brought with it an acid para-elemental.

Once the elemental was dealt with, and the portal was closed, the party decided to check out the huge crystal cage at the north end of the level.  The huge crystal cage that contained a large riding wyvern, in suspended animation and waiting for the elves to jump on it and ride.

The professor that hired the group let them know that the old elven empire, at it’s peak, bred the broken and defeated dragons of the previous age until they had produced stupid, docile riding wyverns.  Despite the fact that it was a dragon, and huge, the party decides that one of the things adventurers do is wake up dangerous things, and they do so.

There is some bargaining, which allows the wizard to finally use his draconic language skill on the wyvern.  The riding wyvern speaks very bad dragon, and seems more annoyed than intrigued by the offers.  The party keeps offering.  The dragon keeps lunging at the bars.  Eventually I decide that the riding wyvern remembers it’s napalm breath, and he sprays the team.

The party’s employer, the professor, the one who knows where the scepter from the crown jewels that he stole to pay them is burried, goes up in flames.  Oswarld, the party halfling, finds a secret passage, and closes it behind him in order to hide from the dragon.

Zardock, the Wizard, and Chad, the Paladin of Gozer, run to the portal room and open a portal (successfully) to near the party’s home town.  Chad waits on the other side, hoping to get a shot at the wyvern if it comes through.

Groot and the most recent human intern fall to the wyvern, and the wyvern demolishes the stone room that houses the portal, leaving it able to actually reach into the portal and chase after Zardock and Chad.  Groot survives the dragons attack, and wakes up again thanks to his nine lives ring, and surprises the riding wyvern as it is peering through the portal.  

Groot makes his mighty deeds roll and manages to cut the stinger off the riding wyvern’s tail.  It swings around to attack the persistent tree-raised human ranger, and it’s bloodied tail  falls through the portal, right to where Chad can hack it off at the root, and the riding wyvern dies.

On the other side of the portal, Zardock finds a halfing farmer and recruits him as the newest adventuring intern for the party, bringing him back into the dungeon via the portal.

Osborn finds an altar to some strange mystic patron in the secret passage, and mist shrouded monsters pounce on him and knock him out from his wounds without anyone hearing him.  The next morning, the rest of the group finds the secret passage, and the mist monsters.  Groot, Zardock, and Chad make short work of them, the halfing intern survives, and the party recovers Osborn’s body to find him still alive.

Upon finding the altar, Chad destroys it before it can be identified.  Becuase it’s an altar, and it’s not to Gozer.

The group finds the quarters of the former master of the outpost, finds some coins and his stash of magical scrolls, and gets ready to leave.  Groot has plans on refurbishing the elven outpost as their new headquarters, using the portal as a “funnel” to test new interns for their own adventuring guild.

Before they can draw up any more plans, a supernatural minion of Gozer leaps through the portal and tasks Chad with an important mission.  It seems that while the party has been off adventuring, the elves have marshaled their mercenaries and slave armies in the east to march across the continent and take the largest of the human held free cities.  

Gozer wishes Chad to venture into the orc held northeastern wastes and raise a horde of orcs to fall upon the supply lines of the elven army, thus dooming it before it can pose a threat, and also causing massive bloodshed and destruction, rousing the sleeping giant of the orc tribes to action across the continent.

On a metagame note, I had always planned on putting this campaign back on the shelf at the end of August, since I knew I would be starting my new Star Wars Edge of the Empire campaign at that point in time.  Because I really wanted to have an ending to the campaign, I threw open the idea of what to do for the end to my players, and one of them pointed out that the running theme of this setting has been that elves are jerks that hate humans.

Since that’s the case, I thought, how better to end a campaign than to have the players recruit and lead a horde of orcs to crush an elven army, thus saving humanity?  So we’ll see if we can pull off that kind of an ending to this campaign next time around.  Wish me luck!