GM's notes: This is the first session of a D&D 5E campaign I've been writing for the past ~8 months. My players requested that I put together an original setting that would allow for proactive player choices and political/factional intrigue in a high-magic environment. I happily obliged.
I opted to start the game using Kidnap the Archpriest by Skerples, the human behind the excellent Coins and Scrolls blog. This was an easy choice--the writing in KtA is clear, easy to use, and I knew it fairly well from several readings and a few test runs with other groups.
Success or failure by the party would ideally provide an unambiguous inciting event for the rest of the campaign's political and factional events, and the fallout from whatever they ended up attempting would give me direction to write further material.
To my surprise, I didn't end up getting to use as much material from Kidnap the Archpriest as I might have preferred!
~
Salera, Capital of Anem - Late Autumn
After several unpleasant weeks in a Saleran jail, three unusual men were unceremoniously hauled from the reeking ranks of prisoners by the firm hand of compulsory international intrigue. In a cold interrogation room, Isaac Bacterian--via a projected illusionary duplicate --ignored his steaming tea and reviewed his notes.
- David Van Stone - Former officer of the Aneman Army, now a vagabond accused of killing two city guards with sorcery during his arrest for burglary of government property. Proposed penalty: Execution.
- Van Darkholme - City planning committee lead, now accused of thievery of government documents. Proposed penalty: 60 years imprisonment and hard labor.
- Wellston Plumbago - "Drow" "Ambassador". Diplomatic nightmare. Deliberately requested incarceration; accused of nonspecific but catastrophic indecency. Proposed penalty: Deportation and sale to Chernikan slavers.
Success would be rewarded with 5,000 gold pieces each and, doubtless, the favor of His Dread Majesty. Failure--or revelation of their status as agents of the Aneman Crown--would be punished as befitting the nature and severity of their indiscretion.
With less than an hour to decide in the privacy of their own company (and that of the six silent, armed guards in full battle armor lining the walls of the frigid interrogation chamber), the three men accepted the task. Only after they had acquiesced were their brooms returned to them--the true reason for their imprisonment, each broom was a rarity enchanted to fly faster than a horse could run, and each man one of the few who could use the wonder reliably.
After a few choice items were retrieved from homes, the trio were informed that the location to which they were being taken was a state secret, and they were black-bagged and frog-marched into the depths of the Aneman capital. That two of the three men had invisible familiars keeping pace with their passage seemed to go unnoticed by Isaac.
The Saleran bureaucrat, his clanking guards, the three unwilling provocateurs, and their invisible familiars arrived at a chamber filled with the crackle of magic and the shuffling of paper and feet. While other uniformed military rushed past on unknowable errands, six Saleran military mages stood in a loose circle around a concrete arch that hissed with orange arcs of power--a transcontinental gateway from the days of the Empire. The mages swept steel wands through the air, calling to each other like nervous sailors as they manipulated the energies of the gateway between them.
David, Van, and Wellston were informed of their schedule--the gateway would leave them on the southern end of Lake Stuh, just inside the wilderness of the Imperial Diaspora and south of the Pirran border. A precise sequence of broom flight to Sasbad, a Pirran train to Aichwal, and a riverboat voyage to Breitters would carry them to the northern Pirran coast, where the captain of the Angel Wings would take them aboard his two-masted yawl for a single day's sail into the Libussan harbor.
The trio acknowledged the schedule with varying levels of attention, stepped through the magical gateway, and witnessed the plan immediately dissolve.
~
Lake Stuh, Northern Imperial Diaspora Border
The three men found themselves on the banks of a frozen lake that extended over the northern horizon. Snow smothered the dense pines lining the strand, but none of them felt the bite of the cold--none of the three felt anything, in fact. Nor could they move, save to stare straight ahead at the field of snowflakes fixed, unmoving, in midair before them.
Wellston cheerfully pointed out that his telepathy would at least let them converse amongst themselves if they were to remain frozen for all eternity. As neither of the other two had mastered the skill of telepathy, the concept of one-way missives sent at the whim of a half-Drow pervert, forever, did little to soothe.
Gradually, the snowflakes began to drift again, a millimeter a minute, as whatever stretching of space and time wrought by the gateway caught up to the present. Although the three men remained helpless observers in their own bodies, time sped up; sheets of falling snow whipped past their eyes like sand pouring from a ripped bag, and the sun's overhead arc accelerated from a glowing slash across the sky to a painful strobing glare that flashed before and behind the ever-present moon.
The celestial sequence ended as abruptly as it had begun. The trio fell to their knees in the snow, aching from the sudden release, and did their best to gather themselves. Van's fine pocket watch revealed that they had stood motionless on that icy strand for a full 30 days. After briefly debating if the mission was still even possible (and consulting with Wellston's mysterious supernatural patron), the three agents decided to continue as best they could.
The trio grimly charted a flight plan calling for sixty hours of travel in six days from Lake Stuh to the northeast, hoping to catch the train at Donau. There, they learned that the train wouldn't arrive for several days. Not wanting to waste any more time, they resupplied with several flasks of bitter, potent coffee and flew another miserable long-haul north to Achengen, a larger coastal town, where they finally--snow-blasted and wind-whipped--sat down inside the pilgrim-packed passenger carriage of a train bound for Breitters.
Their efforts paid off, however; when they stepped off the platform, they were precisely on schedule as per Isaac's original orders, and the Angel Wings was waiting to provide an inconspicuous ingress to the holy quarter of Libussa. The exhausted party slept for most of the day-long voyage up the coast.
~
Libussa, Capital of Pirra - Early Winter
The coastal approach to the Holy Quarter of Libussa was a tangle of broken aqueducts and gap-walled, goat-haunted villas. The sea docks were crowded with merchant ships pressing for a slip and dodging the lumbering mass of a Libussan naval hulk. The trio disembarked, found an inn with a slow proprietor and private rooms, and laid out their plan--gather information, scout the area around the castle of St. Logan, and figure out where the Archpriest's daily schedule might allow them a chance to capture him. After a brief ritual attempt to bribe some city rats with peanut butter in order to act as spies, the trio approached the gates of the castle through the busy streets of the Holy Quarter. A careful illusion of a fake street-side shed was erected and Dave slipped inside while Wellston approached the heavily-manned portal into the castle.
Meanwhile, Van Darkholme, magically invisible and wearing the trademark leathers of his nocturnal career as a crime-fighting vigilante city planner, approached the castle through the open air on his broom. He spotted a broad balcony containing a private garden--perhaps this would be an opportune place to find the Archpriest? Van opted to peer through the iron-barred, stained-glass windows in search of his quarry.
Through sheer dumb goddamned luck, the Archpriest happened to be praying in the private chapel just beyond the first window into which Van stared.
Abandoning caution for opportunity, Van picked the lock on the balcony garden door and found himself facing a curtain of thick white mist. He gulped, passed through it, and found his magical invisibility stripped and his way blocked by a hulking Temenite bruiser in beetle-black plate armor--a member of the Black Endoguard, the Archpriest's personal enforcers. The Endoguard tore his sword from the scabbard and bellowed, and Van hurled a glass globe of alchemical reagents at the guard's feet. The resulting flash of light that burst from the shattered flask was brighter than the mid-day sun, and the guard reeled backwards, clawing at his own eyes.
Van darted into the Archpriest's glittering personal chapel and--ignoring the threat of imminent dismemberment, the presence of more gold and jewels than he'd ever seen in his life, and the protesting screams of the Archpriest--slapped manacles on the holy man, threw him over his broom, and darted out the balcony door into the open air high over Libussa.
Far below, Dave and Wellston saw a dark form launch from the Archpriest's balcony like a loosed arrow, white robes cracking like whips in the sea breeze. Wellston immediately began asking the gate guards for directions to somewhere irrelevant in broken Imperial Common, while Dave lurked in the illusory shed and kept a wary eye trained on the group in case things turned violent. When Van's broom looked like little more than a sea bird in flight, Wellston broke off his circuitous conversation with the exasperated guards--just as the bells of the White Cathedral began to toll.
Guards and passers-by looked up in confusion--it was nowhere near the end of the hour--and confusion turned to shock and fear as the hundreds of other churches in the holy quarter rang their bells in response. Chaos! Panic! Was Libussa under attack? Were they being invaded? A frisson rippled through the streets as the gates of the castle opened and a double-column of Black Endoguard poured out, charging into the winding alleys and roads of the holy quarter, cutting down any men or livestock that barred their path.
The holy quarter erupted into a riot. Van's broom--Archpriest securely attached--landed on the deck of the Angel Wings, which immediately cast off. The dockmaster's complaints were silenced by the brandishing of the first mate's heavy pistol, and the ship raised sail and headed for open water just as the first columns of smoke began to rise from fires in the city.
Lagging behind and unwilling to draw attention by riding flying brooms over the quarter, Dave and Wellston made their way on foot toward the quay. The docks swarmed with shouting, angry voices, worried sailors, wary merchants, and a rattling, metallic storm of Black Endoguard forcing their way onto vessels in order to search their holds. Wellston called on his powers of illusion again to conjure the image of a swooping red dragon harassing the upper rigging of the Libussan navy hulk in the harbor, and then called on his powers of rampant arson to hurl a burning bundle of lit torches into the hulk's rigging and sails. Distraction established, Wellston and Dave took flight and left the chaos and noise of the spasming Pirran capital behind them.
~
They heard the powder stores of the naval hulk touch off just as their feet touched the deck of the Angel Wings. Burning debris left spectacular, arcing trails of smoke as it scattered over the Libussan docks--but the three kidnappers (after a brief but vigorous debate on the anti-scrying merits of shaving their captive) were busy binding the hands, legs, eyes, and mouth of the Archpriest of Iades, Thomasz I, before carefully locking him in the toilet below deck.
Now all they had to do was keep the Archpriest secure while they sailed around the entirety of the Aneman-Pirran continent.
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