North Watch
A Frontier, a Vampire, and Something Underneath
This is a live tabletop campaign. We run Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition on Foundry VTT, roughly every other week, in a homebrew setting.
The setting is the North Watch — the northern frontier. Mountains down the whole western edge, forest across the whole northern one, and in between a chain of lakes and rivers with every town in the region strung along it. Fallcrest sits at the eastern end of that water, Harken in the middle of it, Nenlast at the top. The roads between them are the only thing holding the place together.
Click for full size. One hex is two miles.
Above ground it is orcs, bandits, a mercenary company that traffics people, and a vampire who has taken the town at the head of the water and started walling it.
Below ground there is an Underdark, and an orc chief called Dorakor told the party what the two have to do with each other: the people taken off the roads are being sold downward.
Where the campaign is
The party hold a keep, a truce with the vampire, and a warhammer that a masked elf told them was made to break psychic domination.
They are deep in the Underdark, marching south with a Derro rebellion that introduced itself last session. Ahead of them is the City of the Glass Pool, and beneath that, in what the same elf called the sunless ocean, the Old Ones and the towers he says they are building.
Behind them, on the surface, Gulthias keeps Fastormel. He offered the truce himself, on the grounds that whatever is below was disrupting his plans as much as anyone's.
Kvothe and Agatha are level 8. Ubo and Dravona are level 7.
Start here
The Campaign Diary — the whole story in order, from the first job in Fallcrest to the march south. Twelve arcs and ten session records.
The Player's Wiki — the reference. The company, the keep, the region, the enemy, the deep, and an honest list of what nobody has worked out yet. Nothing in it the characters have not seen, been told, or reasoned their way to.
The Chronicles — the same campaign in the characters' own words. Letters home, journals, and reports filed with the Riders of the Watch by two people who could not agree on how the fight had gone.
The company
| Who | Heritage | Class | What they do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kvothe | Gnome | Bard — Mountebank | Invisible scouting, Faerie Fire across an entire enemy formation, and the man who opened the sarcophagus |
| Agatha Ironheart | Dwarf | Cleric of Torag — Warpriest | Front line, healer, conscience. Carries the Chain Breaker and is honest about being frightened of mind flayers |
| Ubo | Orc | Druid — Guardian | Survival infrastructure. Forages, scouts as anything with legs or fins, and charmed a bulette rather than kill it |
| Dravona | Human, Elk Heart | Sorcerer — Draconist | Blaster and controller. Negotiated a truce with a vampire lord alone, on her first day |
Jocelin — Marshal, Rider of the Watch, Silver Raven — was killed by a wraith on the road to Nenlast. She is the campaign's only player character death.
Zarah, Rindle, Vaelin and Ruin left because their players did. No in-fiction departure was ever written for any of them, so all four are still out there.
Two more people travel with the party and are not party members. Caldris is a wight, loaned to them by the vampire they are at truce with, as a term of that truce. Sylvara is an elf scout they cut free of a slaver's rope in the dark.
How it plays
What the party does sticks. Kvothe burned a tree and opened the coffin under it. Gulthias has since taken a town, besieged a village, and dug tribal ancestors out of their barrows. The rest of the table has not let him forget where that started.
The party negotiate as often as they fight. They have bought off a spider queen, allied with the goblins who used to feed her, taken terms from a vampire, and opened diplomatic relations with an enemy they had been fighting since before Midsummer — that last one after a character who had been in the party a day walked out to talk to a monster instead of running.
The Underdark is a logistics problem. Rations rot on a failed roll. Encumbrance gets things cached on islands. A fortified position got stormed because the party needed the larder. Everyone has a job on the march — cooking, scouting, foraging, chronicling — and the chronicler dropped the chronicle down a crevice.
We record the sessions. The later entries in the diary are close to a transcript. The earlier ones are reconstructed from a running summary and a player's own notes, and where the record is thin, the diary says so rather than inventing something.
What the party is holding
A dwarven warhammer of deep iron, inlaid with silver runes in an archaic dialect and hafted in sharkskin that never grows slick. The masked elf who sent them after it called it a weapon made specifically to oppose the Old Ones, and said it can shatter the mental shackles of those held in psychic thrall.
It came out of a behir's nest. Agatha, a dwarf cleric of the god of the forge, is carrying it south.