General Campaign Information

Setting Information
This campaign is set in the world of Eberron, as described in the Eberron Campaign Setting. However, there are some important differences from the sourcebook.


 * Deities are not restricted to the pantheons described in the ECS, however, those described therein are considered the most openly worshiped and accepted. In other words, if someone is this campaign were to worship Wee Jas, they would be considered a cultist, and would have to be secretive about it in most civilized areas.


 * For the most part, the Eberron Cosmology is not used; instead the standard "great wheel" is used. The moons and the manifest zones they influence are simply strongly aligned with a plane of existence, and are not themselves unique planes. However, planar travel to them is still restricted, and is so for all the planes in the great wheel.


 * The campaign began previous to The Last War and is just now entering the beginning of it. Thus, there are no warforged, Cyre is still Cyre, and various other countries remain part of the Five Kingdoms.

Premise
This campaign is about saving the world. Pretty cliché, but it's my first campaign so...whatever. I started out trying to run it as a horror game, using rules from Heroes of Horror. Some of what I took from that remains, such as the rules about taint, but most of it has been abandoned due to an apparent lack of desire for that kind of thing from the players.

Centuries of peace in Khorvaire have been shattered by the untimely death of the Emperor Jarot. Rumor has it he was assassinated by a being from another world--an event he had seen in his dreams and had been attempting to protect himself from. Unfortunately, this was just a harbinger of things to come. A massive army has poured through the waygates scrattered throughout Eberron, and the party has 'sort of' been trying to close them and/or stop that army. Thismaliscious force has been trampsing its way from its point of origination (somewhere in the Towering Wood) to its first victim, Fairhaven, and now marches ever onward towards Breland (supposedly).

Meanwhile, the current party of adventurers has been busying themselves with a plan to unify the survivors of Aundair and Karrnath before heading after their true enemy...

In the Beginning...
...there was a boy in need of rescuing. Several adventurers had recently arrived in the town of Whistlebrook, and the task fell upon them to find him. A horde of rats gnawing their way through town was the only indication of foul play, so they followed the vermin to their lair, a cave near the waterway that gave the town its name. They carefully snuck their way past the engorged, sleeping rats, only to find their stealthiness outmatched by a queer looking goblin with a set of panpipes.

This goblin tried his best to summon his noxious servants, but unfortunately, his nervousness caused him to play poorly, and the angered rats to swarm over him. He was luckily still very much alive when the vermin dispersed, and happily told the party where the boy was after some gentle motivation. They allowed Gjallar, as they came to know him as, leave the cave. The changeling Nolu discovered that she was lacking in the social graces once the boy was located, causing the child to flee deeper into the cave in fright.

A few hobgoblins and the discovery of a beleagured Adonteon later, they made their way out of the cave and discovered the boy hiding in a tree. They tried to talk him down, but found that knocking him out of said tree was a quicker and more satisfying method. The boy explained that he was Corey, and that he had been kidnapped by the goblin as ordered by his father, the mayor. Apparently, the man had sold his child's soul to a demon in exchange for the power to rule a small town(hah). The party was of course a bit skeptical, but the boy was pretty convincing, so they made their way back to town to confront the mayor.

By confronting, I mean that they attempted to exhort more money out of him whilst still turning over the boy. They succeeded, and had themselves a satisfied rest at the inn in town. In the night, they awoke to a familiar sound. Rats. Their numbers had more than tripled, and there were many larger specimens amongst them. Barricading themselves in as best they could, they killed rats as they poured in through cracks and windows, townspeople lamenting their fate all around them. By morning, the ground was litered with corpses of both rodents and humans. The boy was once again missing, but strangely, this time the father did not care to see him returned.

The survivors began to drop like flies in the next few days, having caught some kind of sickness from the tiny invaders. The party's cleric, Arctus, quickly finding himself overextended, suggested that they visit the relatively close fort of Orcbone to request the aid of its medical officers. The party set off with all haste.

(To be continued)