Topic: Campaign Summary: Cliff's Notes Version

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Urk
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Topic: Campaign Summary: Cliff's Notes Version

Post by Urk » Mon Aug 11, 2008 9:21 am

Part 1: The Lost
Wealsun 1, 591

For months rumors had persisted in the slums and around the docks that people were disappearing, but the consensus among the authorities was that the overpopulated city offered few opportunities and the younger, poorer folks were emigrating to other cities. You believed this yourself. Everybody in Rel Mord knows somebody who has moved to Innspa, a city some 10 days march to the east in what was once called "the Great Kingdom" but is now, since the Great Kingdom's defeat in the Greyhawk Wars some 7 years ago, for all practical purposes an independent city state.

Things finally came to a head came to a head in the summer of CY 591 when a young man from the slums vanished. When an article of his clothing was found floating in the river and was brought to the priests of Pelor to be scryed it was determined that the boy was dead, but under unusual circumstances as they were not able to contact his spirit.

The city guard wrote his death off as an unusual accident.

The people of the slums were outraged.

In response the guard opened an investigation of the boy's death. The investigation quickly focused on the boys mother.

The investigating officer was well known by the slum dwellers as a lazy incompetent (Militia Sergeant of the Slum District is NOT exactly a coveted job, in all honesty his posting there would support that he may not be the sharpest sword on the rack) and the investigation only served to anger them further. They gathered together their best and brightest and sent them to the landlord to demand that the investigation be conducted with proper vigor and by a better officer.

The Landlord, a well known and respected philanthropist named Lord Samarch, hired them on the spot to conduct a parallel investigation. In time he even went so far as to hire some of them as formal retainers.

In a short time they had gathered enough evidence to have the investigating officer not only stripped of his position, but reassigned to a border post well outside the city.

Then the party found caverns beneath the sewers infested with orcs, and the rescued a slave woman. After she escaped the caverns news swept through the city streets that a survivor had been recovered from the sewers by these young heroes, and she was telling tales of slave traders lurking below the city, and kidnappings and murders conducted by late night raiding parties. The city militia, the Sentinels, moved immediately and en-masse into the sewers. The city was opening formal hearings on the subject. Many powerful men in Rel Mord who had publicly denounced the rumors of what Rel Mord's vagrant population was calling "The Sewer People" now stood discredited and humiliated.

The city authorities had finally accepted that there is evil lurking beneath the city.

During the inquiries the City Guard posted in the caverns was assaulted by orcs. The proceedings immediately ended in a call for volunteers, and the party once again found itself marching into the sewers, this time deputized into the militia, to confront the evil that did dwell there.

Once the last orc counter-attack had been beaten back the party pressed forward. They found opulently appointed chambers protected by a fanatical cult of death worshipers. The party rescued scores of citizens, but found hundreds dead... or undead.

Once the cult was finally smashed and it's vaults looted, the city once again began it's inquiry, and the true horror of what hed been happening below became apparent.

The cult was to Nerull, the god of Death, Darkness, Murder, and the Underworld. These were no common slave traders. These were traders in the dead. They would slay their victims and animate them for sale as slave laborers in the nearby Kingdom of Ahlissa. Ahlissa, as well as the rest of what had once been "the Great Kingdom", had been economically ravaged by it's defeat in the Greyhawk wars. The use of undead to fill out the decimated labor force was perhaps not spoken of in polite company... but it was no secret either. The dead are perfect slaves. They don't eat. They don't sleep. The don't die in transit. Still... the wars had left plenty of corpses for the Ahlissans to plunder. It never occured to anyone they they might look outside their borders to fill their fields with workers.

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