Justin Achilli

Heeding again the clarion call of the “Tomb of the Seeker,” the party once more traveled south from the port village of Bier. The only surviving member of the original party of two, Mardun, recruited the help of three additional adventurers in an effort to discover just what it was that had the limping madman raving as he collapsed just outside of town some two weeks ago. Joined by the human rogue Stiev (ostensibly charged with watching the madman for the thieves’ guild of Bier), the elven cleric Kython who hails from the Dearthwood, and the half-elven barbarian Zirul who has no home among the elves of the wood nor the men of the City-State, Mardun the fiendish alchemist led the group southward.

The group made good time, keeping to the Old South Road and straying from it only to make camp for the night. A chorus of unknown pilgrims passed the camp in the night, but Mardun had no interest in them and let them pass, as they came past the camp during his watch.

In the Wilderlands, there’s no guarantee that what you find is occupied by its original inhabitants.

The next day, travel continued amid light rain, and the group discovered a strange manor on a scarp where the hills thinned eastward and the woods haunted by the Mystic Eye tribe of giants and orcs thinned to the west. Stiev’s initial reconnaissance indicated that this was unlikely to be the “Tomb of” anything, unless whatever it was died in comfort and was buried in its home. The manse was ostentatious, constructed in a style unfamiliar to the midden-age sensibilities of the communities outlying the City-State, with open galleries and pillars of quarried and sculpted marble. Caryatids held up the vaulted ceilings in the central hall, in which hundreds of wild birds made their home and stained the marble with their droppings.

The party explored the mansion (which was actually a slightly retooled take on Widdecombe’s laboratory) fairly thoroughly. The idea of open doors bothers Mardun somewhat, so the party first scouted the lay of the mansion before venturing past any portals. Thus they met the fish-golem Adapa (though they never learned his name nor his penchant for powerful magic), whose lapses in memory made them unsure about the place and its purpose.

In reverse sequence, they discovered the various laboratories and living quarters into which the mansion had been converted. In particular, Mardun felt a strong connection to the place, in its function if not the exact experiments. Kython, by contrast, recoiled at the amorality of the place, and chalked it up to the ephemeral lives of Men, who learn so very quickly during their fleeting lives that it sometimes erodes their ethic and their sanity.

Part of Widdecombe’s work in progress. (Relax; it’s not real.)

When they eventually discovered the old scientist’s offices, after meeting the genocidal brass constructs, the fractured aristocrat, the idiot fowl-woman, the vats of caustic acid, the flesh incubator, and the nacreous gut of the mollusk that had overtaken the vestibule, the party declared the eugenicist’s journals a trove. Mardun pledged to study them, which Kython decided to be the lesser of possible evils, arguably better than selling them to a buyer whose own aims might be more dubious than Mardun’s personal quest for redemption.

Such lofty ambitions faced immediate peril, however, when a tribe of dog-men, warned by a scouting party of their fellows that had been dispatched by the adventurers, came calling. The explorers had barricaded themselves inside Widdecombe’s sanctum, and when a warlike humanoid came hammering on the door with more dog-men in his retinue. The monstrous fellow was a dumb brute but deadly, and the dog-men wielded strange javelins that allowed them to generate and direct lightning, no doubt artifacts of Widdecombe’s menagerie, which used a great deal of electricity to provide the divine spark that animated some of its denizens. The dog-men had stricken Zirul with Levin-bolts at their first encounter, and Kython’s divine magic had brought him back from death’s hearth. As Stiev tumbled past the hulking horror during the midnight ambush, however, he greeted the second gang of dog-men, who electrocuted him beyond any hope of return.

Rogues are 0-for-2 so far in the Exodus campaign.

Zirul, in a barbarous rage, cleft the brute almost in twain, like an ox at a sacrifice, and the wretched thing barely held on to its own destructive capacities, lashing out in response. More swordplay and the elixirs crafted by Mardun brought the thing low, and the dog-men routed.

Recovered from the room that housed the insensate, nonsessile slab of living tissue, and used to “dress” the eugenicist’s constructs in flesh.

The next day, the remainder of the party chose not to press its luck, and returned to Bier with a sledge crafted from one of the lightweight but durable metallic doors Stiev had removed during the laboratory’s plunder. Laden with anachronistic treasures, the party cashed in and formed a rough article of incorporation. Hereafter on explorations and adventures, those in attendance will set aside an additional share, which will be held in a company trust, to be used for supplies and other sundries.

This session went much better than the first, which I attribute to both having ample party members to handle the expedition and to more comfort with sandbox exploration. I was happier with my presentation — the group was genuinely weirded out by some of the situations they discovered, and that’s the sort of homage to the hobby’s roots in strange fiction that I like to create. The players have well-formed (or well-forming) personal agendas in mind that serve as their motives for exploring the world, which makes me happy. Some of the group even wanted to clear Widdecombe’s manse and use it as their own stronghold, reasoning that free buildings are hard to come by, and that they might save some hard-earned gold by reworking the existing structure rather than building a new one from the ground up, which I was enthused by. Others reasoned that the place was too hard to defend, however, and that they had plenty of exploring of the world left to do before settling and establishing a stronghold. I’m sure Mardun will find an excuse to return, whatever comes of the group’s will.

I’m also pretty proud of the reasonable sense of adventure we’ve eked out of three meager hexes worth of map space. The Wilderlands of High Fantasy are rife with ruins, forgotten people and cultures, and bits of life and history that have simply been… lost. It’s an amazing thing to discover, hex by hex.

The session started in a small, riverside town of Bier, where rumors abounded and various character concepts yielded even more opportunity. Unfortunately, we had a few out-of-towners, so session one of Exodus began with only two players, but it was certainly enough to cause trouble and yielded two almost-TPKs.

Ah, the infinite potential of a blank sheet of hex mapping paper. A wondrous world awaits!

Exodus is a Pathfinder campaign set in the Wilderlands of High Fantasy, which has a decidedly old-school feel to it (largely because it was the first non-TSR D&D setting ever published, way back in the 16th century). It’s a sandbox hexcrawler, and that’s exactly what I gave to my players on session one. “You’re here. You’ve heard this, this, and this. Now what?”

The two characters, being of roguish persuasion, sought out the local dubious elements and proceeded to get themselves into hock with the thieves’ guild, a localized branch of the greater guild doing business in the City-State of the Invincible Overlord, that just happened to be running a smuggling operation out of Bier. The abbreviated party had heard:

• The savages of the Purple Claw tribe haunt the Dearthwood to the north, across the Estuary of Roglaroon.
• A madman recently came into town from the foothills to the south, raving about the horrors in the Tomb of the Seeker.
• A pair of hideous giants prowls the wood to the west, under the control of a witches’ coven.
• In a ruin to the northeast lies a treasure sought by the marauder Lokaug Vishnakh and his warband.

At this point, the party consisted of Mordun, a half-orc, half-tiefling alchemist trying to suborn his monstrous origin, and Quinthalas, an elven rogue displaced from the Dearthwood by the orcs of the Purple Claw. They decided that the wise thing to do would be to venture south and find exactly what this “Tomb of the Seeker” was, and then use that information to pay off their debts to the thieves’ guild, from whom they borrowed a pack animal to carry their supplies. Without a known destination, though, they later opted to seek out the giants of the nearby forest, to give them a better grasp of the immediate geography.

And giants they found. At least one, and apparently leading a rival tribe of orcs. The drew the giant and his entourage out of the forest with a great campfire, over which they roasted a deer, and the hungry humanoids followed the scent.

That’s when it fell apart. The party had staged itself in a ruin that stood on the crest of a hill, where the two hoped to be able to use the geography to their advantage. Tactical errors were the rule of the day, though, and while the duo managed to overwhelm the trio of orcish scouts who closed with them first, they were soon themselves overcome by eight more of the Mystic Eye tribe. TPK one.

Nothing good could come of it. And nothing good did.

When they came to, they found they had been dumped into a small catacomb beneath the ruin (which they presumably would have found had they not been swarmed by the orc raiders). Looking up into the moonlit sky, they saw a grate and the silhouette of an orcish head, and were told, “Find the idol and we’ll let you go.” Whatever was down there, the orcs didn’t want any part of it.

More haplessness occurred, with the rogue mostly finding a series of long-ago-sprung traps, but falling face-first into a recessed gallery that had collected a pool of viscous acid. Icons from an unknown age decorated the gallery, with the most notable being a large, human-shaped statue missing its arms and head.

Thereafter, with a bit more exploration, the pair discovered another shrine, this one protected by a bizarre pair of spiders. The spiders had constructed no webs, and instead seemed to be automatons or otherwise behaving unspiderishly. Flanking the alcove of the shrine were a pair of chests, and the alcove itself housed another headless, armless statue, around the neck-stump of which hung a pendant marked with the Mystic Eye on one side and a similar symbol on the other that they had encountered on a stone column when they still owned their freedom.

The spiders — the initially nonaggressive spiders that had been provoked into combat — proved more than the meager and wounded party could handle, and Mordun fled into the company of the orcs after procuring the relic. Quinthalas’ greed made an end of him, and he expired, food for the spiders — the vampire spawn spiders — in the abandoned shrine.

I don’t think those orcs came up with this on their own.

Mordun turned the pendant idol over to his orcish captors, who repaid him by branding their tribe’s sigil on his face.

In retrospect, on a gameplay level, I think the players had different expectations of the exploration game and sandbox experience. I think Quinthalas’ player, Nate, had a conception of “old school” gaming as “if it exists in the dungeon, it’s there to be conquered,” and that’s a perilous undertaking for first level characters. Sam, Mordun’s player, was much more cautious, but felt a player’s responsibility to help the other character, even though the Mordun probably should have fled when Quin pushed his luck too far. This is okay — the players are new to one another and the campaign is new, so everyone is still feeling out how he wants the campaign to proceed and how the players and characters relate to one another.

On my end, I didn’t feel like I evoked as much detail as I prefer to, nor do I think I conveyed the sense of the campaign scope as much as I might have liked. It’s something that will acquire a greater sense of understanding as the campaign progresses, so I’ll keep my eye on it. Also, the encounters felt a bit “stock,” and I’ll need to take my own advice to weird things up a bit once the campaign hits its stride.

For their part, the players were definitely proactive instead of waiting for the Malleus Argumentum, which was fantastic. The downside, of course, is inherent to sandbox games : The gamemaster has to know enough of the world to at least wing it when the players decide they want to do any given thing, so focused preparation suffers. I think this is somewhat to blame for my lack of evocative vision communication, but I’m happy to accept that as the cost for a world the players truly own in which they can undertake whatever they wish.