#366

The Halls of Arden Vul

This week the players completed the 6th and 7th trials.

I was quite interested in how the 6th would go as, while it didn’t feel like a major challenge for the party, there’s still some interesting stuff in there with an evil priest summoning monsters. However, the players managed to bypass all that: the party assassin, made invisible by a magic cloak and silenced, managed to creep up on and assassinate the priest before they even knew anyone was there. The other players handily took out his non-magic-using assistants, and completed the trial.

The 7th was very nearly a major defeat for the party. If they hadn’t have thought to cast Haste before starting, the party’s heavy-hitter and three of their best spellcasters would have been dead, for sure. Even as prepared as they were, the final result came down a single initiative roll, which they won and managed to defeat the guardian (a powerful water elemental) on the final attack of their turn.

They’ve decided to take a little break to follow up on some rumoured treasure before attempting the 8th trial.

What comes next?

All week I’ve been thinking about the end of Arden Vul. Even with the diversion the players are on now, I still expect them to complete the trials this month, or perhaps early next. Then they’ll be on track to the endgame, the final battle against the heqeti. We’re planning to take a break for a week or two in November to play some Righteous Blood, Ruthless Blades, so I’m not sure when the campaign will actually end, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it happens this year.

Then… what comes next? We’ve been doing this campaign for two and a half years at this point. I really like Traveller, but we’ve already done two campaigns of that and, besides, I don’t have a good idea for another yet. Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green are very fun, and I do have an idea of what we could do with those, but the details are still fairly hazy. I definitely don’t want to do another megadungeon so soon, in fact I’d like to avoid typical dungeon fantasy entirely.

I’ve narrowed it down to two options.

Ars Magica, which I have run once before for another group, and it was a complete disaster, but I’m a much better GM now, I have the mistakes of that last campaign to learn from, and there’s the new revised edition of the rulebook which should be out later this year that will hopefully clear some things up. I think I could run a good campaign of this now. But it takes a lot of player buy-in and between-session effort, lacking that is partly why it failed so spectacularly last time.

Or, if the players aren’t into that (but I really hope they are), Dolmenwood. Which I’ve also run before, and one player in my group is actually running their own Dolmenwood game right now, but they’ve said they’d like to experience Dolmenwood as a player again, and it’s different enough to your typical D&D setting that it would be fun to revisit. But I would much prefer Ars Magica.

I’ve not mentioned any of this to the players, by the way. They have no idea I think the end is near, I don’t want to prejudice their actions, I want them to follow what interests them, and if that leads to the campaign ending, then so be it. Better to end on a high note with unsolved mysteries, than to spend another year tediously pixel-bitching the dungeon to avoid triggering the end before knowing everything.