The Arsonists Good Guys
| Name | Class | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Sartorin | Rogue/Ranger | It me. A rogue with a hidden past. Unexpectedly good with woodwork. |
| Mitro the Magnificent | Sorcerer | ”My boy!” Impossible to tell if he’s genuinely just a jolly natured magic flinger or if he’s disguising a motivation I wouldn’t abide |
| Doros the Minor | Bard/Cleric | Shady AF, but powerful and good in a pinch. Respects me? Intimidated by me? |
| Caillite (aka Cail) | Fighter | Pure chaos surrounding a good heart. Some kind of dark past, but we’re working to prevent a resurgence. |
| Dracarys Urrhash-Drenikas | Monk | (this section empty because Dracarys has been absent from the campaign for a bit and I’ve forgotten his character traits) |
| The Springfly | Airship | Our* trusty airship. Ever since we stole it from Sabrina (*yeah, it’s technically hers), it has been our home as well as our vehicle. |
Former Members
| Name | Class | Cause of Departure |
|---|---|---|
| Sylcaryn | Cleric | Sacrificed himself in the effort to restore the Sundered Heartwood Tree of Palecrest. |
| Rylok | A brief addition to the party, he was interested in hunting Sabrina of The Orion Transport Company and linked up with us for the short period when we had our sights on her. When the party moved on, he decided to depart. | |
| Yorin | Ranger | Yorin was killed in our first fight with Arthund Waney, during the assault on Bayford Manor. With the help of clerics at the Temple of the Wildmother in Westruun, we were able to return him to life, but the experience made him re-evaluate things and he left the party shortly afterward. |
World Rules
Table rulings made by the GM which may come in handy later
- Only one body per keg
- A pile of corpses is full cover from fireballs
Campaign Narrative
This campaign uses the map of Tal’dorei for its world, but the setting is heavily homebrewed and isn’t strongly tied to the worldbuilding and lore of Critical Role or the official campaign setting book. Both official and fan-made maps can be used as a visual to track our journey.
Previous Chapters
Information
This is where older campaign notes will go as I achieve the motivation to bring them over from my physical journal. Once the prior chapters are caught up to the current state, this will be reorganized into a traditional table of contents.
- An Adventuring Party
- The Orion Transport Company
- The Journey South
- The Rifenmist Jungle
- Palecrest and the Past
- The Caverns of Visa Isle
- Minions of a False God
- After the Fall of Serethis
Back to the Mainland
Coratosh bade us farewell, then departed with tree magic. Our next stop was Westruun, but given the recent events, I asked to make a detour to Oar’s Rest first. It’s time to say goodbye, and to adorn their resting places properly. I set about gathering wood from our supplies to use as grave markers. We didn’t have proper woodworking tools, but the kit we use ships repair is enough if you know what you’re doing. It felt good to carve again. To find the heart of the wood, and let beauty flow from it.
For Caryarus, I fashioned imagery of sailing ships to honor his love of the sea. For Jorieth, I wrought a scene of her hunting in the forests outside Walden, drawing her arrow with that steadfast precision she’d learned far younger than her peers. For Inarie, I formed a bed of the lovely flowers she’d used in her medicines. Once the detailing was done, I weathered them with heat and oils (convenient to have a ship’s tooling at hand for that).
While I worked, I amused myself keeping track of an agility course Dracarys had set up, navigating the rigging. Aside from himself, only Cail and Glib took up the challenge… and all roundly embarrassed themselves early. That may have just indicated the course was too hard, except Lamora proceeded to breeze through it on her first attempt without breaking a sweat.
Along the way, we received a package from Sabrina through sorcery. It contained a couple of pennants, and a letter. Mitro drafted the response, which may have been a mistake. He produced a rambling and chaotic retelling of the events since we left Westruun. Fully honest about several things we might not want Sabrina to know in detail, and evasive about things that it absolutely didn’t need to hide.
As we reached the south end of Slumber Reef, a storm rolled in from the west. We moved to the east side of the reef to avoid it. As we drew past the midpoint island, Lamora (and Dracarys) spotted a shipwreck that had clearly been run straight up onto the reef on purpose, from the ocean side. And on the shoreline they saw driftwood spelling out SOS. The ship was flying the Trading Guild flag, and on the side they could spot its name: The Amber Tide.
Beached
Most of the party descended to the beach, while I remained aloft with weapons ready for action. After some mingling, Mitro, Dracarys, and Cail headed off with a couple of the stranded folks to rowboats, and then on to the shipwreck. Doros remained behind and all seemed well, so Lamora and I agreed to bring the ship down to hover in rope descending distance and I joined Doros. He caught me up on the survivors’ story, and definitely covered it thoroughly but most of the details escape me because BAHA. Their captain. Is Baha. How can it be that he survived? I spent hours on that shoreline, with nobody in sight. I was at the edge of death when I left it. He must have had some other means. We must find him.
The trio returned with several casks of gin and some herbs labeled in elvish (good shit, incidentally). After some decision time about which one Mitro would smoke, we gathered up and headed off after Baha. An hour or so into tracking, we came across an opening with a rough camp. As we split to approach quietly, Mitro stepped directly on a twig. Within moments, a wild naked man riding a massive boar charged out of the underbrush and set upon us.
Luckily for Mitro, it wasn’t much of a fight. The boar charged past the party missing everyone. Well, Mitro took a glancing blow. Dracarys chased it down and instantly knocked out the rider, and then Cail followed up knocking out the boar in a flurry of saber hilt strikes. We tied him up, then I moved out of sight so the others could question him. Once revived, he let out crazed madness again. Doros, on a suspicion, used Greater Restoration to try to help him, and it worked. It turned out Baha had been drinking from stagnant water around his camp.
Once healed, Baha didn’t appear to pose a threat any longer so the group untied him and began walking back to camp (Doros tossed some healing at the boar on the way out, thankfully it darted away into the brush). On the way back, I lagged behind to listen from a distance. As we walked, Baha said nothing of note or consequence… but when we reached the camp he paused and encouraged the party to rejoin the camp without him. At this point, my suspicion grew unbearable and I closed the gap. Treading softly to enhance the effect, I drew up a few feet behind him and asked “why don’t you want to see your crew?”
Baha spun around in shock and confusion, and in very short order recognized me. Gasping, he expressed amazement that I was alive. I confronted him. He shouldn’t be alive. I’d been brought to death’s door escaping that shipwreck all those years ago, and nobody else had made landfall on those barren beaches. How could he be standing here, just up the beach from yet another shipwreck? I could not believe there was an innocent explanation. For his part, Baha stumbled out an explanation that he had made it to shore, and he didn’t know anyone else had. That the reason he’d run the Amber Tide aground was to evade the same monster as before. I couldn’t find the lie. He truly seemed existentially terrified of the beast, so much I could feel it. But it still didn’t make sense how.
I turned from him and returned to the crew. I could feel him shrink behind me as I left, but I didn’t care. I asked Pibb (Amber Tide’s First Mate) about the monster, and he said only Old Red really believed the captain that it existed. So I went over to speak to him. He affirmed the story, certainly, but not in a way that inspired much confidence… never saw the monster, just saw dark waters and whitecaps that he insisted meant it was near. Still, he seemed convinced.
I returned to the campfire and discussed with the others. Mitro and Doros reasonably put together that it was almost certainly Xalthamos who had attacked my ship all those years ago, and scared Baha ashore in the past few days. We’d faced Xalthamos and knew he was beyond us for now… but we resolved that if we ever gained the strength to face him, we’d return to his sunken pit off Visa Isle and put an end to his greed.
That night, we had a nice beach party with both the Amber Tide and Springfly crews. Cail and I returned to the jungle and hunted the boar, which provided a hearty meal for everyone. With the revelations about Baha’s history, the Amber Tide’s crew resolved to demote him and promote Pibb as their new de-facto captain. Baha didn’t raise a word of defense.
The next morning, we loaded up. The Amber Tide’s crew had never seen an airship before, much less one with as advanced workings as the Springfly, and with no posts in need of filling, they mostly milled around gawping at things. I ended up helping Lolen reinforce his door’s latch and locks to keep the engine room free of tourists. Once situated, we moved over to the Amber Tide and recovered the last goods from its hold, as well as its complement of ten cannons (we tossed the old rusted ones we’d found at the fort). We then set out for Oar’s Rest.
A few short hours later, we settled into the water and docked at the port. Oar’s Rest wasn’t big enough for an airship docking tower. We unloaded the Amber Tide crew to their own devices, and paid our hireling crew for their time so far (somehow six long weeks had passed since we hired them in Kymal) and gave them shore leave. We retired to a nearby tavern and negotiated with Lamora to see how her crew would align with our party moving forward. She presented the idea that when we aren’t actively using the airship, she would take it to go… earn money in unspecified ways befitting her experience, of which we’d get a cut. Haggling ensued, but not too much all considered, and we struck a deal. After the conclusion of business, I took a couple stiff shots to help strengthen my will, then headed out to the south with the party as company.
Memories, Resolved
A couple miles out, we broke off the path and cut across the scrub grass to the beach. It had been so many years, I knew the best way to find the site would be to retrace my steps off the shoreline from all those years ago. To calm my anxiety, as we walked I haltingly described to the party the events from a decade ago. The fire that drove me from Walden, the news of work in Emon, the passage on Baha’s ship. The attack in the night. Caryarus never getting the chance to wake. The chaos in the waters, amongst the splintered remains of the vessel. The long hours adrift, urging myself never to stop making for the shore as night turned to dawn, and dawn passed into afternoon.
We reached the beach and I stumbled to my hands and knees. My mind flicked back to the past. I remembered… no, re-lived finding not my senses, but the edge of them. Seeing Inarie and Jorieth, lifeless on the shore beside me. Acting out of instinct, rather than any real presence of mind, as I rose and sought the highest point in those low grasslands to bury them. Placing them on the driftwood that had carried us ashore, and slowly working one foot after another to bring them to that rise.
The graves I had dug scarcely warranted the word, but it was all that was left in me. As the work finished, I fell to the side and drifted in and out of awareness until the necessity of survival forced my body to move on. As I returned to my feet, so did my mind return to the present. Instead of the unmarked space on a hilltop I’d left them, here was a low sandstone wall guarding the upwind side of the site.
I reached out in confused wonder to touch it, and as I made contact a wind began to blow, clearing a thin layer of sand from within the center. Here, where I’d laid my wife and daughter to rest in the coarse sand of the beach, were now two smooth sandstone mounds. As these were revealed, flowing green script faded into existence along the wall. In the unmistakable hand of Sylcaryn read:
QUOTE
They lie in stone which I have blessed,
Below the sands that time may shift,
I pray, undisturbed, they may rest,
To them I grant this final gift.
I thought back to when I’d first seen him again in Kymal. He’d mentioned that he scried on me after leaving Walden, and that he didn’t know exactly what, but that something terrible had happened. He must have seen this place. He must have come here and placed his blessings on the site, performing the rites my family deserved. I closed my eyes and thanked him. All those weeks he’d stood alongside us, fighting for causes not his own, and he’d left me to heal at my own pace.
I stayed in that spot for a long couple minutes, reflecting on the decade that had passed since that night. Then, accepting what had happened and letting the pain and loss drain from me, I drew the grave markers from the Bag of Colding and drove them carefully and firmly into the sandstone just within the wall.
For Caryarus, the marker was adorned with a catamaran, its sails taught and one of its hulls clear of the waves as it slices through the ocean spray - one of the fishing vessels he’d spent so much of his young years watching, dreaming of his infinite future crossing uncharted waters, the wind in his sails. For Jorieth, an etching of herself, bow drawn and aimed with graceful precision at a magnificent elk - one carefully selected to ensure naught would go to waste in its sacrifice. And for my dear wife Inarie, a constellation of flowers from the herbs she used in her medicines - her own special magic through which she’d brought so much life to the world.
When the work was done, I knew the sandstone would hold these markers in place. With the protection of the wall, they should last into the twilight of my lifetime, if not longer. As one final gift, after I placed them I noticed a sapling sprouting beyond the hill. I was sure it was not there when we approached. This must have been one final touch of Sylcaryn’s magic. As it grew, I resolved to return here. This place would no longer be a ghost of my past, but rather a connection to it. As I finished my rites, Doros performed a gentle piece. As the notes faded, we turned and departed back to Oar’s Rest.
Unprovoked Antagonism
Bar shenanigans at The Whiskey Dick Mitro tries slam poetry, poorly Doros does a ditty, well Cail tries to start a music competition (by immediately insulting everyone in the bar), pins a thrown hat to the ceiling with a crossbow, and is summarily kicked out (Doros too, after trying to defend him) Cail and Doros both try to sneak back in unsuccessfully, and are thrown out bodily Cail tries to befriend a cat and gets scratched. Doros successfully befriends it and names it Little Alley Sally Cat based on a drunken misunderstanding. Dracarys tries to get a game going throwing rocks into people’s drinks and also gets thrown out. Sartorin sits in the corner like Aragorn and doesn’t get thrown out.
We sail from Oar’s Rest to Three Streams Sartorin points out to Cail the place where he started on his rogue path (the bandit camp is long gone, but he still remembers where it was on the riverbank outside Plathe)
As dusk falls, we encounter a flying haphazard collection of balloons and platforms and propellers that starts ascending above us in a way that seems suspicious. We ascend also, but they’re able to stay at higher altitude, just barely We’re pretty sure this means combat, so Doros suggests the classic “Doros and an invisible Sartorin teleport aboard the uppermost part of the airship and then Doros tries sweet talking whoever while Sartorin does sneaky shit” plan We do that. As we arrive, dozens of goblins leap off the back with homemade parachutes and hooks, and descend to start attacking.