The Campaign Diary

This is the campaign told as a story rather than as a set of notes. Every scene in it happened at the table. The dialogue in quotation marks was said out loud by somebody, and the dice fell the way the diary says they fell.

The record starts partway in. Sessions were not recorded at first, and the first transcript opens with the party already underground at Thistletop, already hurt, and already arguing about which corridor to take. So the first entry is an honest accounting of what can be established about the campaign before anyone thought to press record — and no more than that.

One thing worth holding onto while reading: the dates are the nights we played, not the passage of time. Four months of Thursdays cover a handful of days in Varisia. There was no fortnight between the fight at the bridge and the fight at the north gate. There was a night.

The entries

Before the Record Goblins in the market square, a letter that lured a woman to her family's glassworks, and a staircase down into something ten thousand years older than the town.

Inside Thistletop · 19 March Greed carved on every wall, a shrine to something with a jackal's head, hellhounds in a doorway, and a man who threw down his swords and asked for a lift home.

The Prisoner and the Town · 2 April The most useful half-hour in the campaign, followed by the fastest day's work: a militia raised, a bridge dismantled, a siege engine commissioned, and a rider sent south.

Fire on the Water · 16 April The first night of the battle. Burning treeline, goblins on reed rafts, hands under the river, and a fight over a bridge nobody was allowed to destroy.

The North Gate · 30 April The worst night. Thunder off a goblin's staff, a woman with a red arm, seven to nothing, and a commander telling her cleric she could not do this.

The Market Square · 23 July Street fighting up High Street, a light cast on the ground as a trap, and a hammer coming down on somebody already failing.

What Thistletop Gave Up The aftermath. A book bound in a leather nobody could identify, a door with two keyholes, a well ringed with carved gold, and the sentence that reframed the whole campaign.