Rise of the Runelords
A Town, a Dead Empire, and Ancient Magics
This is a live tabletop campaign. We meet on Foundry VTT about every other week and run Tales of the Valiant. The adventure is Paizo's Rise of the Runelords.
The setting is Sandpoint, a town of twelve hundred people on the Lost Coast of Varisia. Fishing boats, a glassworks, four families who do not much like each other, and a ruined lighthouse nobody can read. The town has been there a few generations. The stonework underneath it has been there ten thousand years, and belongs to an empire that built its magic out of the seven deadly sins.
Nobody in Sandpoint thinks about that much. That is the problem.
Where the campaign is
The party rowed out to the goblin fort at Thistletop, went in underneath it through a sea cave, killed the goblins' champion — and then, out of spells and with the wizard on one hit point, they withdrew.
Nualia Tobyn brought several goblin tribes down the coast road at once, and the campaign became a four-session siege of Sandpoint: a militia raised by ringing a cathedral bell, a bridge taken apart on purpose, a treeline set on fire, a siege engine built in two days by the blacksmith off an antiquarian's drawings, and a mercenary who changed sides for a gold piece a day and then fought all three nights.
The town held. Nualia died in the market square. The relief column the battle had been fought to buy time for arrived after it was over.
Then the party went back to Thistletop and searched it properly.
Party level 4. About a month of downtime, being played out between sessions.
Start here
The Campaign Diary — the story so far, written up session by session from the recordings. What was said, what was rolled, and what it cost.
The Player's Wiki — the reference. The party, the town, the enemy, the ruins, and an honest list of what we still do not know. Nothing in it that the characters have not seen, been told, or worked out.
The party
| Who | Lineage | Class | What they do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brother Lucian Veyra | Human | Cleric of Sarenrae — Light | Rang the bell that raised the militia. Fights with a moonbeam parked in a doorway |
| Stone Mistrail | Human | Paladin — Justice | Holds doors. Hired the enemy's mercenary, and killed Nualia |
| Thalanadil | Elf | Wizard — Cantrip Adept | A hundred years old and a very long way from home. Read the word greed off a wall under Thistletop |
| Grace | Human | Fighter — Weapon Master | Commanded the defence of Sandpoint. Also, as it turns out, the sheriff's daughter |
| Flightless | Kenku | Rogue — Thief | Named for what she cannot do. Watches the back door, and grew up in this town |
| Roland | — | Ranger, scout | Rode south to fetch the soldiers, found the column on the march, and brought it home |
Roland's player had a shift change and is welcome back; the character is standing in Sandpoint as an NPC in the meantime.
How it plays
The town gets as much table time as the dungeon. Half of one session was spent arguing shopkeepers out of their own shops.
Big fights get their own rules. The siege ran on a purpose-built mass-battle system — stages resolved by opposed rolls between the two commanders, with the party's decisions buying bonus dice, and time passing in half-hours until something became a crisis worth dropping into ordinary initiative for. Burning the treeline bought advantage on a roll. Sending the raven up bought command and control. Nobody had to push a hundred tokens around a map.
The transcripts are the record. Sessions are recorded and transcribed per speaker, so when the wiki and somebody's memory disagree, there is a tiebreaker. It has been needed more than once.
Downtime happens between sessions. Scenes that only involve one character get played out asynchronously in text, which is why a month of in-world time does not cost a month of table time.
What the party is holding
A door with two keyholes and no keys. A ritual book with pages nobody has read. A well ringed with carved gold coins. A circlet of Thassilonian metal that hums. And a month of quiet in a town that has just been through a war.
The runes under the town spell wrath. The ones four miles up the coast spell greed.