The living record of our Pathfinder campaign — rebuilt from the table’s own words after every session.
🌍 The state of the world
The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the smoke upon the northern wind. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember the North before the war.
It began with the mustering of a host — ten thousand men of the Velorian Compact, marching beneath a prince’s banner to break the tribes of the Northmen and end the war in a season. But they were all of them deceived, for another power was at work in the North. Upon the crossing of The River Crossing the witch revealed her art, and the river rose up in walls of frozen glass, and the mist came down, and the great host of the south was unmade in a single day.
Now the last strength of Velorian Compact stands at bay before the walls of Nordor-Viddi, and the battle that shall decide the fate of the North has begun. Yet the army fights beneath a borrowed face. For Lord Marshall Barron lies stricken — felled upon the eve of battle by a sickness no honest plague could hasten — and it is Captain Kessel who wears the great general’s likeness, that ten thousand hearts should not despair. And Prince Roderick those ten thousand died to save is himself dead: slain not by Northman steel, but by Zaria’s arrow, when his madness turned at last to murder in the night. His body was given to the fire. History will not record it. Five now living know the truth, and they keep it.
And in the deep places of the blood, something older than the war has stirred. The broken children of Brigid step out of the firelight to counsel Ollie Ray, last keeper of their line, and their warning is ever the same: the magic is waking, and the waking has a price.
Upon the forest flank of the great battle the party holds the line with three hundred sworn spears of the North. And out of the treeline comes a creature studded with iron, that knows not pain, nor fear, nor mercy — and the age of quiet things draws to its end.
🩸 Where we left off
As the giants died, the Savrotherum broke and ran along the whole line — then stopped, and turned. A second wave was coming, and at its head walked The metal-studded champion: the one who has stuck all those metal things into himself, who seems to feel no pain. The party chose to run, three rounds ahead of him, as the session ended.
Next session picks up here.
📖 The full story of Session 04
In the quiet after the battle at the ravine hamlet, the party stripped Frostgrip’s fallen rearguard. Ollie Ray pulled Skullfang, the Bonebiter Axe, from the raid boss’s corpse — a +1 battle axe of dark iron with monster bone carved in Nordic runes and a once-a-day gift called Blood of the North. Nimble claimed the chief’s coin-studded Wolf Skull war belt and a purse of glowing amber beads, and his hobgoblin histories put a name to the bronze medallion: the Wolf Skull Clan of Ulfgar One-Eye, the founder who put out his own eye with a hot poker and burned one of the hobgoblins’ greatest cities three hundred years ago. Zaria took five masterwork throwing axes and two raven shields reading ‘The Wolf Remembers the Hand that Feeds,’ and Ismenee identified a fist-sized witch-woven rune stone that wards against fear — one of a larger collection that might unlock something if gathered.
Then a woman screamed from camp. Prince Roderick, raving that he had been sold out and that his loyalists would find him, had set the tent ablaze as a signal fire — and when the drow smith woman fought him, he ran her through the heart. ‘You aren’t even mine. You’re a spy. They’re all spies.’ The rescued soldier already lay dead by his blade. Ollie Ray tangled him in vines, Manville wrestled for the sword, and Ismenee reached into his mind — ‘You witch! There’s secrets at hand!’ — before his longsword laid her open across the collarbone. As he turned on the healers, Zaria put an arrow through his eye. Captain Kessel arrived to find his prince dead, took the signet ring as proof, and had the body burned in its own fire so the Northmen would never parade it.
War horns answered the smoke. From the ridge they watched a vanguard of well over a hundred organized warriors sweep toward the fire, and the party sprinted north past The ravine hamlet into the forest. That night, at one of Zaria’s invisible fires, Ollie Ray’s watch turned strange: the embers flared blue and three ancestors sat with him — Cunobel the Painted, seven feet of scarred barbarian; Brigid, Brigid with a face of old leather; and Custennin the Shepherd, youngest of the dead, a broken arrow still in his ribs. Something is waking the magic of the world, they said, and Ollie Ray is meant to carry their power and protect what little of the bloodline remains. Three of them coming at once was a warning.
Two days on, the party crested a hill above Nordor-Viddi, where Lord Marshall Barron’s 22,000-strong Valorian host besieged the walled town. In the command tent they broke the news: Prince Roderick dead in a ’tragic accident,’ his ten thousand annihilated by a storm of ice that was no weather at all, and Yorun Halbir uniting the north and gathering magic users. Barron scoffed at sorcery but took the numbers seriously, gave Captain Kessel command of 300 mostly-northern allies to hold the forest flank, and adopted Ismenee’s idea of staked oil torches to burn off the freezing mist. Ollie Ray fought a longer war with the paymasters — no badge, no papers, wrong army — until Commissioner Amara finally counted out twenty-five gold. Manville, meanwhile, siphoned Skullfang’s rune magic into his conjured blacksmith hammer, and the camp smiths set a striking rune on Nimble’s rapier and a reinforcing rune on Manville’s shield.
On the eve of battle Barron doubled over and coughed up black blood — gloom vein cough, Ollie Ray’s farm-trained eye said, a disease that should spread from a wound, manifesting impossibly fast with none. Captain Kessel buried the secret and donned Lord Marshall Barronl’s mantle: if the army faltered, the North would fall.
On the flank, waves of savrotherum berserkers crashed against the 300 — and two juvenile Juvenile frost giants came through the trees. The party nova’d the maul-wielder down, though his corpse crushed Nimble half to death, and Manville played living wall against the torchbearer until she smashed him into the dirt and burned Ollie Ray’s barn-door shield to splinters. Pickett’s acid and Zaria’s arrows finally brought her down. Then the retreating Savrotherum turned: a second wave was coming, led by the metal-studded champion who feels no pain. The party ran, three rounds ahead of it, as the session ended.
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