Dorlorial is in its 7241st year of the Era of Freedom — and something is changing. Karst and his Red Sun Legion have taken Sunbright, the holy capital of Kodral. Strange things stir at the edges of the world. The wild places are restless in ways that those who pay attention have begun to notice.
Five adventurers have found themselves on the same road, drawn by separate reasons toward the same places. A fighter looking for a cure. A druid carrying old grief and a new purpose. A warrior hunting his missing brother. An alchemist chasing stolen things and strange trees. A changeling following a thread she cannot explain.
None of them fully understand yet why their paths have crossed — or what the road ahead is building toward.
The party came together on the road toward Sunbright, each following their own reasons. Along the way they encountered Edrin Vale — a courier carrying something important — and his apprentice Braum. They also crossed paths with a knight of Sunbright whose fate would become one of their first glimpses of what Karst truly was.
The session ended with Karst completing his takeover of Sunbright. The party spoke to him directly — calm, controlled, and already completely in command of a city that was not his two days before.
The party moved through the occupied Sunbright, eventually meeting Madame Elira Vance — the information broker who agreed to look after Braum while the party was forced onward. They then met Cassian Dreadmoor, Karst's elite knight, who informed them of their new arrangement: find three crystals Karst needs. One is in Aetherwyn. One Zar'oak gave to Karga. The third — nobody knows yet.
They boarded an airship to begin the first leg of the task. The ship was carrying something it shouldn't have been — a dragon. The players discovered it. The dragon disagreed with captivity. The airship crashed near Dusk Harbor.
Stranded and low on coin, the party picked up work in a tavern to recover. By the end of the session, Vash was gone — taken in the night.
The party went after Vash. They did not get him back cleanly — whatever took him had already done its work. Vash was returned to them changed. The memory of his sister — the entire reason he left home, the thing that started all of this — was gone. He knows something is missing. He cannot name what it was.
In its place: Magnus Vex. Vash's old rival now lives somewhere in his head — a voice no one else can hear, sarcastic and sharp and occasionally more honest than Vash wants him to be. Whether Magnus is a memory, a construct, or something else is a question that doesn't have an answer yet.
The party is now heading toward Aetherwyn — first crystal, first real task, and the road ahead is longer than any of them have fully reckoned with.
Departing Dusk Harbor with Willie, Cassian, and the full party, the group passed the Fungi Wall when a violent storm struck. Panicking, they drove the carriage forward into a thick red fog — only to be pelted by tiny wooden mushroom toothpicks, a warning from something within. The carriage flipped and the horses fled, scattering the party across the fog.
What followed was a trial of illusions. The fog preyed on each of them individually: Vash heard a little girl's familiar voice and chased her into a pit containing a trapped spider mother and her brood — while Magnus Vex taunted him the entire way down. Azeylie encountered the friend she cannot name — the one from the tomb — and was shown a flashback of herself driving a blade into that friend. The face Azeylie wears as a changeling is hers. Moriko saw her family walking ahead and followed, until Thistle do Nicely revealed it as a trap. Creed heard nature screaming as Zar'oak stepped on the vines and tendrils, and when he touched one he was dragged into a vast underground cavern, where a great tree with red eyes and faces pressed into its bark waited in the dark. Zar'oak heard his brother calling and chose silence, then saw yellow vines pulling him somewhere — and chose silence again.
A false Willie grabbed Azeylie and threw her into the pit with Vash. The real Willie and Moriko ate a mushroom and prayed to Gondwan Petri, who showed them the carriage through a haze of fungi-induced clarity. Cassian pulled Creed and Zar'oak back from the tendrils — then walked into the fog himself, saying quietly: "You should have stayed dead."
The tree creature hurled what appeared to be the severed heads of Vash, Azeylie, and Cassian at the feet of the carriage group. They rode hard. The creature reached — and missed.
In the pit, Vash and Azeylie struck a bargain with the spider mother: carry her children to safety, and she would help them escape before the tendrils filled the pit. They agreed, took the spiderlings, and climbed the Fungi Wall. At the top, Fungaria stretched out on one side, the fog on the other — and Gondwan Petri visible in the distance. The spider mother, transformed and maddened, cracked the wall trying to reach them, tearing an opening for the fog and tendrils to spill into Fungaria. Azeylie put her down with one arrow. The spider had been begging to die.
The party reunited at a pond — the Starfall Pond — where they spoke of things they had not said before. Willie told Creed his memory has been slipping lately and he doesn't know why. Moriko and Vash saw the burnt side of Cassian's face for the first time. Backstories surfaced. Azeylie ate a mushroom and saw Gondwan Petri dead, overtaken by tendrils.
Beneath the waterfall at Starfall Pond, someone found a locked box. Inside: the Starfall Coin.
The party slept. In the night, the baby spiders spoke to Azeylie. You killed our mother. We will grow. We will destroy everything you love.
Two days of travel later, the party reached the border of Oakford. In the distance: the great tree where Crystolas's vault is said to rest, and the roots that hold Aetherwyn beneath the earth.
The first crystal is close. The fog is spreading. And something in Fungaria just woke up.
The party entered Oakford — a continent-spanning forest of ancient magical trees so vast and dense that no light from the sky reaches the ground. They rode in on the carriage with Cassian and Willie, a day's travel into the dark before they encountered something unexpected: the Lantern Troupe, a travelling carnival embedded deep in the forest.
The Troupe brought welcome respite. A fortune teller named Madam Seraphelle gave readings to everyone except Moriko, who refused. Creed stayed behind to speak with her further while the rest resupplied from the Troupe's merchants. More importantly, they met Lyric Vale — celebrated bard, Lantern Troupe performer, and brother to Edrin Vale, the captured courier the party has been carrying information about since Sunbright. They found Lyric in quiet conversation with Seren Voss, hand to the old king of Sunbright — the throne Karst took. The party followed Lyric briefly into a private pocket realm he keeps as his own before moving on.
Zar'oak received word at the Troupe that his brother had been seen travelling south-east with a group investigating the strange purple trees appearing throughout Oakford. He filed the information away and kept moving.
Deeper in the forest, the party passed one of those purple trees. Azeylie had a flashback. The tree was investigated, and it sparked a tense argument between Moriko and Cassian that left things unsettled between them. Shortly after, the party was held up — a roadside robbery. They handled it without much trouble, but the resolution was immediately overshadowed: the earth split open. A violent earthquake tore the road apart, roots the size of bridges punching through the ground, collapsing the main road to Aetherwyn into a network of chasms and caverns. The path forward no longer existed.
They healed one of the robbers and shared food with him in exchange for what he knew about the area, then left the carriage behind and descended into the caverns below.
The underground was not empty. Shadows, gnolls, goblins, cursed frogs, bullywugs, and animated knights all occupied different corners of the dark. Zar'oak fed the goblins until they were too drunk and content to be a problem. The gnolls were less cooperative and were killed for it. Vash picked up a cursed frog that immediately poisoned and intoxicated him; in his haze he threw it against the wall, where it died as a goblin. Mabel the mouse carved through several enemies with quiet, unsettling efficiency. The party gave a wide berth to a section of the cavern radiating a freezing wall — looking directly at it meant freezing.
Then a shadow demon found them. It went for Cassian. He held it off long enough to protect the others — and the two drunk goblins and the robber they had shown mercy to earlier came back at the worst moment and fought alongside them. An elf attacked during the chaos. Zar'oak landed the killing blow on the demon. In the aftermath, Mabel got her first clear look at Cassian's face. So did the rest of the party. Some things became harder to ignore.
They passed the animated armor knights without incident. Every one of them saluted.
At the end of the caverns, the party emerged at the gates of Aetherwyn — the city they have been travelling toward for weeks. Crystolas's vault is here. The first crystal is here. Cassian, who had been bleeding since the demon fight and saying nothing about it, collapsed the moment they arrived.
They made it. Whether Cassian did too is a question the next session will have to answer.
The campaign began with a threat unlike any the party had faced before — not a monster or a dark god, but a king. Leo Lionhardt had declared the Great Purge: a systematic campaign to remove every unnatural being from Dorlorial — magic users, non-standard races, anything that deviated from what Leo considered pure and natural.
The party spent Arc One dismantling Leo's empire from the inside and the outside, tearing down the infrastructure of his ideology one piece at a time. Leo was a formidable opponent — not through supernatural power, but through conviction, resources, and the terrifying ability to inspire ordinary people to do terrible things.
The Fall of Sunbright & The Chase to Calladona
When Leo overtook Sunbright, the party fought their way in. Leo fought hard — and then ran. He fled to Calladona, and the party followed. In the final confrontation, the truth came out: Leo had been drawing on a fragment of Chaos's power, which at the time was barely more than myth. The artifact that had been fuelling him overloaded and exploded, destroying Calladona entirely.
Years later, the survivors and descendants of Calladona reclaimed Leo's former kingdom — once called Obscurite — and renamed it Calladona in memory of what they lost. The crater left behind became Old Calladona: a sprawling shanty city of bandits, thieves, and deep underground guilds that operates entirely outside any law.
"He was just a man. That was the part that made him so hard to stop." — party recollection
Arc Two introduced something the party was completely unprepared for. Thaw arrived — a figure reminiscent of a negan archetype, wielding a scythe forged from the essence of Chaos. He could see attacks before they happened. The party was powerless. He laughed at all of them.
He killed Pik. He killed Aurious. And he killed Alistair — an orc who had been with the group since early Arc One alongside his daughter, Serah. Their deaths were not clean or heroic. They were a demonstration of how outmatched the party was.
The Artifact Hunt & The Turning of Thaw
With two party members dead and grief running deep, the survivors pushed forward. They hunted three artifacts across Kodral — the only way to stand any chance against Thaw's impossible foresight. The quest took everything they had.
When they finally faced him again, they had enough to win. But the battle's true turning point came through Candis, the bard, who chose not to destroy Thaw but to save him. She teleported him away from the others and, through the confrontation that followed, brought him back from the edge of what the scythe had made him. Thaw, changed and freed, joined the party.
Roland's Wedding
Arc Two ended with a rare moment of joy: Roland and the Princess of Calladona — whom he had met during Arc One and fallen deeply in love with — were married. The celebration was genuine and hard-earned. The princess, however, had been afflicted with a disease of Chaos. The shadow of Arc Three had already begun.
"She didn't beat him. She reminded him that he was still in there." — of Candis and Thaw
Arc Three began with the world literally falling apart. The Ascended Rage Tavern — their home base — collapsed inward as storms, hurricanes, earthquakes, lightning, and meteor showers descended simultaneously. The Children of Chaos had finally released Chaos back into the world, and the apocalypse had begun. Zombies, hordes, and skeletons filled the streets. The sky broke open.
Celestine and the Airship
Survival meant reaching an airship — and the airship belonged to Celestine: a very short, very angry, very small mushroom man who nonstop insulted and cursed at the players for the entire encounter. They fought their way to him through the chaos. The Princess, drawing on her Chaos-afflicted power in a final act of sacrifice, sent the players and the group away on the airship — and did not come with them.
Roland lost his wife in the escape. And then he lost himself. Chaos, sensing the grief and the opening it created, reached into Roland's mind and began pulling him toward thrall. Roland resisted for a time. Then he accepted. He became a different man entirely — one who thrived on killing all. His first act was to travel to Settnak and kill every dwarf he could find.
The Death of Thaw
While the party headed toward Yokogawa — discovering for the first time that the world was larger than Kodral — Serah, Alistair's daughter, confronted Thaw. She blamed him for her father's death, regardless of the circumstances. She tried to kill him. He killed her in self-defence and shot her from the airship. The party, in their grief and rage, killed Thaw. The man who had been brought back from the edge was gone.
The Race for the Sacred Trees
Chaos was collecting the divine artifacts from the sacred trees — the anchors of reality itself. The party raced across the newly discovered world to reach each tree before him. They failed at Marglow — Chaos attacked first. They barely made it to the Ruins of Veilspire, but still lost. Last was Ionsgate — the massive continent-sized city where the Dragons Maw had once defeated Chaos centuries ago.
They fought their way in. And in the streets of the greatest city in Dorlorial, they prepared for a final confrontation.
Pik Returns — The Legendary Battle
Roland, consumed by Chaos, stood against his former companions. Then Pik appeared — returned from the afterlife by the wish he had been granted. What followed was a battle that stretched across the landscape of Dorlorial itself — two former friends hurling each other across continents, neither willing to stop. Until Pik found the opening, and brought Roland back to the light.
The Final Battle — All of Dorlorial
The entire party, reunited, faced Chaos in Ionsgate. They were losing. Then, one by one, every friend they had made along the entire two-year journey came to their aid. Chaos was defeated — not destroyed this time, but sealed into Raijin's Strike in Kadaka, where his essence remains, dormant and contained, within the cursed lightning tree.
The survivors returned to the ruins of the Ascended Rage Tavern. Scarred. Broken. Alive. They sat together in the wreckage and that was the end.
"We didn't save the world clean. We saved it the way everything worth saving gets saved — with everything we had left." — end of campaign
When Pik and Aurious were killed by Thaw, their story did not end. They were brought into the afterlife — but the afterlife itself was broken. Thaw's scythe, forged from the essence of Chaos, had been tearing apart the realm of the dead, ripping holes in the fabric of what lay beyond life.
Pik and Aurious — joined by the spirit of Alistair himself — had to travel through the damaged afterlife and repair everything the scythe had destroyed. It was a campaign of grief and wonder in equal measure: seeing a place that should be peaceful in pieces, and having to put it back together with the hands of the recently dead.
The Wishes
When the repairs were complete, each participant was granted a wish. Pik and Aurious chose to return to life — to go back and finish what they had started. A third player chose something remarkable: to become the deity of the clouds, ascending rather than returning. Alistair used his wish for his daughter Serah — a final act of fatherly love from beyond death, the details of which only Serah ever knew.