The Chronicles

A celebration becomes a riot, and five strangers leave Eldenhold as fugitives.

The campaign began during Eldenhold’s Festival of Flame, held twenty years after the Champions sealed Asmodeus away. Kelsynk, Valen, Reese, Grenak, and Mruno arrived as Lady Arabelle Thorne’s guests. Their assignment was essentially to attend politely. Grenak bullied a beer vendor into a discount, Pip Thistledown unveiled his Transmutative Ale, Old Man Griggs muttered that the rings were breaking, and dignity began its swift retreat from the square.

The festival shattered when a frightened boy tried to throw a burning infernal egg into a noble tent. The party intervened, but the crowd saw armed strangers striking a child. Dockworkers surged forward, the Iron Guard moved in, and the square dissolved into smoke, shouting, and broken stalls. Somewhere inside the chaos, time stopped for Valen and a vision showed him cracked silver rings above an impossible well. When reality returned, the party’s first shared decision was not to explain anything. They ran.

The fugitives escape the city and find one little girl waiting in an empty town.

Lady Arabelle begged the group to surrender so she could clear their names. General Thornvale arrived with the Iron Guard and a far less comforting interpretation of due process. Reese scattered the angry crowd with magical fear, Mruno covered the escape with darkness, and the party slipped beyond Eldenhold’s walls while everyone else argued about where they had gone.

They headed north toward Port Town, filling the road with a singing contest that grew loud enough to threaten the entire concept of stealth. By evening they reached Ashenvale, a lakeside town with barred doors and empty streets. Inside an abandoned-looking inn they found Susie, an eight-year-old girl who said ghosts and zombies came out at night. Exhausted, suspicious, and apparently immune to obvious horror-movie warnings, the party barricaded the tavern and stayed.

Susie loses her disguise, Ashenvale wakes up, and Mruno loses considerably more.

Mruno decided Susie’s story did not survive close inspection and cast Dispel Magic. The child’s shape peeled away into a small horned demon, and the tavern became a battlefield. A necrotic shockwave blinded and terrified much of the party, dropped Mruno, and sent everyone scrambling. Grenak raged because he had wasted good life advice on a demon. Valen finally drove the creature’s head into the bar and ended the fight.

With Susie dead, Ashenvale’s people stumbled back into the streets as though waking from a shared nightmare. The innkeepers learned their adopted daughter had been the thing imprisoning the town. The party accepted free food and drinks for life instead of twenty gold, while Mruno negotiated permanent performance rights and quietly changed the pants he had soiled during the battle. Then came fresh indignity: his old band, the Silken Sonics, had replaced him with Dark Bronson.

Roland joins the hunt while the others prepare the least subtle undercover performance imaginable.

The next morning introduced Roland Blackstone and his Billy Bumbler companion. Roland was hunting Towerheart, a demon tied to the destruction of his old company, and the group agreed to help once they finished the far more urgent matter of humiliating Dark Bronson. Mruno completed his disguise as Bruno Bars, although Grenak failed to recognize him until the addition of an absurd moustache apparently made everything clear.

To promote the show, the group created a temporary band, rejected several catastrophic names, and settled on the Punch Drunk Loves. Their sign-making and street performance drew nostalgic fans back to the inn. Carly Beltweek attached herself to Mruno with alarming intensity while her sister Marina tried to behave like a normal person. Above it all, a gleaming gold pirate-style airship crossed the sky—a hint that their next problems would have altitude.

Mruno faces his replacement, wins the crowd, and helps start the campaign’s second civic disturbance.

The Drunken Wyvern filled beyond capacity for the promised showdown. The Silken Sonics arrived dressed like a corporate fever dream, followed by Dark Bronson, whose confidence had no measurable relationship to his talent. His performance was a glittering, tone-deaf catastrophe. He nevertheless left the stage convinced that everyone had witnessed greatness.

The Punch Drunk Loves answered with an actual performance. Spells, coordination, and raw enthusiasm turned the tavern into a roaring crowd, and Mruno won decisively. Dark Bronson’s tantrum ended when Marina kicked him in the balls. His entourage advanced, magical darkness swallowed the room, and another celebration became another riot. Carly led the party through a hidden escape route before the crowd could reorganize around murder.

A roadside alarm brings the Black Talons, a spy warning, and absolutely no increase in trust.

The group left Ashenvale with food, although Reese left enough gold behind to keep the departure technically outside the category of theft. They camped after an extended argument over whether the middle of the road was a sensible place to sleep. Mruno’s Bruno Bars disguise shed itself piece by piece until only smeared makeup remained.

Before dawn, Roland’s alarm spell woke them as a unit of Black Talons rode toward Port Town without noticing the camp. Roland then revealed that General Thornvale had warned him there was a spy inside the party. Insight checks produced incompatible conclusions, Grenak remained suspicious, Valen remained confused, and the discussion deteriorated into goat metaphors and bad spelling. They reached Port Town with no spy identified, but at least everyone distrusted everyone more efficiently.

The party hires an airship and unknowingly shares a tavern with the person sent to capture them.

At the Bent Coin, the party met Captain Rhogar Skyscale and Kaela Voss. Rhogar offered passage aboard his airship, the Storm Wraith. Kaela was a bounty hunter working under a contract connected to the Eldenhold riot, although she kept that detail to herself while studying the group. Roland’s Billy Bumbler did some quiet eavesdropping and learned more than the adults realized.

The party secured passage and boarded the Storm Wraith, heading toward Big Titty Demon Island in search of the red crystals that powered the vessel. Grenak discovered new and overlapping fears involving heights, open water, moving ships, and whatever lived beneath them. The island emerged ahead—an infernal place with a ridiculous name and no obligation to balance the two.

A talking skull provides directions shortly before the cargo opens a portal to Hell.

Recovering near the coast, the group met Azrul and discovered a sentient skull infused with red-crystal energy. The skull called itself Sam and balanced being irritating with being useful. He pointed the party toward Mireholm and Krivahn the Verdant Fang, one of the Champions who fought Asmodeus twenty years earlier.

The red crystals were packed into the Bag of Holding and loaded aboard the Storm Wraith. Mid-flight, their energies destabilized and tore open an infernal rift inside the ship. Gremlins poured through, turning the deck into another short, ugly battle before the breach collapsed. The party reached Mireholm at dawn with a destination, a dangerous cargo, and no improved understanding of storage safety.

Krivahn points toward the corruption; the party points itself toward a tavern and a hydra.

In Gravenhollow, the party met Krivahn the Verdant Fang at Jollow Fang. She sensed corruption inside the red crystals and warned that Mireholm’s spirits and land were reacting to them. Roland’s resemblance to someone from her past earned a moment of attention, but the spreading taint was more urgent. Krivahn gave them a map to an old swamp shrine where the guardians might reveal what the crystals were becoming.

Naturally, the group stopped at the Last Gourd for powerful swamp liquor before conducting sacred wilderness research. They eventually followed the map into the marsh and were ambushed by a three-headed mirehydra whose death released a swarm of venomous serpent-spawn. After surviving the fight, they returned to the tavern with trophies and a rapidly deteriorating relationship with sobriety.

The shrine takes Reese, the mimics lose patience, and Rhogar arrives at exactly the dramatic moment he wanted.

After shopping at Dartfang Forge, the party followed Krivahn’s map to a ruined shrine. Three corpses and a riddle explained how to feed three stone chests: by spell, by distant sting, and by fang. The party struck all three correctly. The chests unfolded into mimics but remained calm, creating the rare possibility that the puzzle had actually been solved without disaster.

Then the altar erupted with red light and dragged Reese through a portal mid-sentence. In the confusion Roland fired at a mimic, broke the truce, and began the disaster everyone had apparently missed. The guardians merged into a massive corrupted creature and nearly killed Valen. At the critical moment, the Storm Wraith crossed overhead and Rhogar rappelled into the clearing, joining the fight and the party with all the restraint of a man who had rehearsed his entrance.

The party enters a world where truth is power and still attempts to defeat a bargain with wordplay.

Valen survived the shrine but his spirit did not return with his body. Krivahn sent the party to the Shell of Many Dreams, an ancient shaman able to guide them into the Spirit Realm. They awakened beneath a bruised sky where lies weakened them and honest admissions produced silver crystals capable of cutting the crimson roots binding Valen.

Each companion offered a truth, and together they reached Towerheart. The entity offered Roland one absolute answer in exchange for breaking his horn, marking a friend, or surrendering his future. The party immediately tried to exploit the wording by insisting they were not friends. Towerheart accepted the argument and marked Billy Bumbler—the one companion Roland could not honestly deny. They freed Valen and returned to Mireholm with Billy’s eye burning red and their legal victory looking suspiciously like defeat.

The Golden Minotaur Guild attacks from two ships and discovers the Storm Wraith is crewed by lunatics.

While flying toward Sylvara, the Storm Wraith was trapped between two hostile airships bearing the Golden Minotaur Guild’s colors. Cannon fire damaged a crystal engine and set the deck ablaze. Mruno created illusionary engines to confuse the attackers while Rhogar drove the ship through a sun-blind turn and down toward the treetops.

When boarders crossed on ropes, the crew dropped anchor and stopped hard enough to ruin several carefully planned landings. A mage fireballed the deck, Rhogar answered with lightning breath, and Grenak introduced the enemy captain to the practical limits of feathered hats. A surviving attacker admitted that a hidden patron called the Golden Voice had ordered the party captured alive. When he had nothing else to offer, Valen threw him overboard.

The main campaign pauses in Vaelthalas with a referral, a taboo mystery, and one more tavern acquaintance.

The damaged Storm Wraith reached Vaelthalas, the elven capital built around Whisperroot Sanctuary. The party began at the Gilded Pot, where Velsar Thornweave, Saelva, and Tessa introduced them to Sylvaran mead and the city’s careful social rules. They learned that Whisperroot was both the nation’s spiritual center and the place most likely to hold answers about the crystals—but openly discussing the corruption was taboo.

At Whisperroot’s reception desk they met Raelynn Mossveil, whose interest in Valen quickly moved her from receptionist to drinking companion. Their questions attracted Sareth Vosser, a connected aide who confirmed that Champion Elyndor Faelithil was the right person to seek. He provided a referral that could get them past the sanctuary’s outer bureaucracy. That is where the main campaign paused: in Vaelthalas, preparing to seek Elyndor while The Rise of Maltraxis became the active campaign.