“-2 Full Hendersons: The action has somehow set in motion a chain of events that’ll fix every problem previously thought of by the GM for all future campaigns, so much so that not even That Guy can screw it up.” ~ The Henderson Scale of Plot Derailment
Obligatory not D&D. PF2e. Also sorry for not making it a greentext. I don’t know how. I’m basically copy/pasting this from Reddit, because I didn’t know Lemmy existed before now.
This is going to be quite the story. It was with a large party, and there’s a lot of events that informed the decisions that eventually led to the moment. There’s some Out of Character activities and discussion involved as well. I’ll do what I can to show when we swap between IC and OOC.
First of, the setting was Wildemount, reflavored to work for Pathfinder. We were on a small, homebrew island called Petalita, which is somewhere The Dwendalian Empire occasionally sends death row prisoners. Something important for this story is that Petalita has no contact with the outside world, other than a monthly sky ship that drops off beforementioned prisoners (and even that is a one-way contact). The island is overrun by undead, and only a single small city, Toit, remains standing. But with the situation as it is, it won’t survive the winter. And our group were meant to fight off 1 or 2 zombies, and then die.
Now for the main characters:
The GM
William/Zynqur’s player
Olaf, the Bloody (Human Barbarian) - A schizophrenic barbarian with a love for torture.
Sena (Fleshwarp Cleric) - A follower of The Raven Queen, and the only character originally in the party that went to Petalita voluntarily, rather than as a prisoner.
William (Human/Tiefling hybrid Psychic) - A 10 year old who grew up in Toit. Hated by everyone because of his tail and his pitch black eyes.
Fiery (Fire sprite Kineticist) - A fire sprite that was accidentally summoned to the Material Plane when a ritual went wrong (more about that in a moment).
Izumi Fan (Human Monk) - White bread weeb character, and also problem player (which is surprisingly relevant for the negative Hendersons).
Zynqur Whiskers (Catfolk Thaumaturge) - William’s second character, and a member of Cobalt Soul. The catalyst for the main event.
And lastly Rekiss Techat (Tengu Witch) - A disgraced cult leader of Vecna played by yours truly, and the main character of this story.
Of the non-PC characters that are important to the story is
Lune (Elite Elder Wyrmwraith and overarching BBEG).
Elriss Windshadow (Elf, and the guard captain of Toit).
Some Dhampires (Likely intended to be the BBEG’s for the first campaign. I forgot their names, sorry GM).
Grille (An undead raven who’s Rekiss’s familiar).
Now for the story. It’s gonna be a long one:
The first real thing that led to the main event, was that William had knocked down a building during our first combat encounter, in an infested town right outside of Toit. Rekiss, being an expert in undead, told everyone to flee back to Toit, due to the noise the collapse made being sure to attract a proper horde. Anyone who wasn’t out of their current predicament within a minute would be considered dead.
Back in Toit, Olaf began flirting with Rekiss. This took Rekiss by surprise (because she is, quite frankly, hideous for Tengu standards, and well aware of it. I faceclaimed Famine from RuneScape for her, if you want to know how bad it was). This led to Rekiss falling in love with Olaf pretty quickly.
A bit later on, the dhampirs kidnapped Olaf, and cut off his beard and one of his fingers, and sent it all in a box to Rekiss (who at this point was considered the party tactician), to force us into dialogue. Before they went, Rekiss asked Vecna (through Grille) how to handle the vampires. I rolled very high on my lore check, so Vecna answered through Grille with “The vampires are not the real enemy.”, and gave Rekiss a vision of Lune.
It turned out that they were looking for some freaky kid, who turned out not to be William. So they bothered us for literally no reason. And then they began provoking us, belittling us, berating us for mistakes.
Until they got to Sena. They asked her “And who do you follow?”, to which Sena replied “I am a follower of The Matron of Ravens.”
In this setting, the followers of the Raven Queen had committed actual genocide against the vampires. So now these dhampirs were vengeful, and needed us to die. The GM had to deus ex us out of that one, by having Grille off-screen provoke an ancient red dragon into following him, scaring both us and the dhampirs away.
I planned to tell the rest of the group about Lune in-character, but must have forgotten for one reason or another. Anyway, more time passed, and we eventually were sent to conquer a small homestead. We were all very excited about this, looking forward to turning this homestead into a player home. At this point, Rekiss had become the official group leader, and we were starting to give the people of Toit hope. Especially because we conquered half the homestead in, in-universe, 20 minutes. Then we retreated to the freshly conquered barn, and rested.
There was character interactions, both between the players, and between us and some allied NPCs we had gotten. Rekiss was promising William to teach him to better control his powers. And she was in a good position to actually do this.
When the party woke up the next day, Rekiss reminded everyone that undead are mainly attracted by lights, sounds, and movement, and that there’s a huge horde not so far from the next place we were gonna strike. Grille, who had been out scouting, also informed us that one of them was visibly intelligent, so we had to be extra careful.
We manage to sneak into the main buildings of the homestead, and start looking around for a way to get upstairs… …and Izumi promptly kicks in one of the doors. In moments our building is surrounded. Despite losing the tactical advantage, we managed to defend ourselves in the living room against wave after wave of undead. Finally we were exhausted but near victory, when Fiery panicked and unleashed a MASSIVE pillar of fire. Rekiss immediately ordered a retreat, as the homestead was now lost.
There was a lot of out of character conversation between the players between this, and the start of the next session. At first it was even considered a total campaign loss, since without this homestead, everyone would starve to death. But the GM managed to find a solution: We did three major fuckups (Collapsing a building, telling dhampirs that one of us follows The Raven Queen, and being very unstealthy during a stealth mission), so three of us, and most of our NPC allies would be killed.
The three that died were William, Olaf, and Izumi. Rekiss was emotionally a wreck. The closest thing she had to a family in 30 years was taken from her. And she got to look them in the eyes as they died.
Izumi’s player also got kicked from the group for refusing to learn from mistakes, and being a general OOC nuissance. But we got a new player, who unfortunately isn’t relevant to the story.
When the party returned to Toit, and we had informed Elriss of what had happened, and Rekiss finally telling the rest of the party about Lune, and how she was sure that Lune’s goal was to kill Vecna, take his position, then kill the Raven Queen, and then with all the souls in existence, move on to all the other Gods.
Rekiss also got a desperate idea at the same time: Send Grille with a written note to the airship that was dropping off prisoners. So she and Sena sat down to write together. A desperate plea for help, giving the outside world knowledge of the situation, as well as the knowledge that if Toit fell, the world would end.
First Sena rolled to write. Rolled a 6 with a +4 modifier. Then Rekiss rolled to correct it. Rolled a 19 with a +7 modifier. And Grille successfully got the note to the right person.
In character and out of character, I expected this to not lead to anything more than some supplies so we could survive the winter, and maybe a couple extra troops as well.
After a short out of character break to get some food, the new characters arrived. The only one important to the story being Zynqur. Zynqur was sent by the Cobalt Soul because of the note. And the rest of what’s important in the story happens out of character.
I was preparing for being in an awful situation. Everyone despising us and all that. Rekiss was retraining Intimidation into Warfare Lore, so to actually make us of that, I was studying medieval warfare out of character, while also considering how best to starve a kobold warren to strongarm them into aiding us.
Then me and Zynqur’s player had a call. In this call, he made me truly realise that the Cobalt Soul, a group dedicated to making information public, had information about an apocalyptic threat. I don’t remember what exactly he said, but I told that to the GM a bit later.
The GM was completely quiet for a full minute as he realised the implications. The entire world was going to declare war on Lune now. Already warring nations were gonna set up temporary truces. And Lune had no way of knowing, because she’d yet to expand outside of Petalita.
We have now been told that next campaign is the last one, and that even if we TPK, we still win. And we only get that session because the player that replaced Izumi was brand new, and we want him to actually experience combat.
Lune was supposed to have been the overarching villain of 5-6 campaigns, each lasting around a dozen levels. We are not even halfway through level 1 in the first campaign.
We apparently get to be level 2 for the final session. The GM has declared that he doesn’t want us to win it all at level 1.
Sorry for my bad English. It’s not my mother language.