Hello, normal malice.site readers. The following are a collection of notes summarizing a Shadow of the Demon Lord campaign I’m in with some friends. I had intended for these notes to stay “hidden” from the main feed to not get mixed up into my own blogposts and creative writing. The idea was only the members of my party (or particularly nosey people outside of the group) would be able to see and read these notes, but as it turns out, the website really doesn’t like that! Instead of hiding it from the main “Recent” feed, it hides it in general. Now, I’m sure there’s some fix Cass or I (mostly Cass) could figure out, but frankly I can’t be bothered. So, again, unless you’re really nosey, feel free to ignore these. Apologies to Zack who is subscribed via RSS and will unfortunately be getting emails every time I post one of these. And apologies to Joe, who probably knows how to fix this but my own laziness will not allow me to listen to him.

The following notes are a summarization of Kalyn’s notes of the campaign thus far. Exact session numbers or dates are missing as it would be way too annoying to try figuring that out at this point. I’ve added as much details as I can recall to hopefully keep all the names of people, places, and things coherent. In the future, I’ll be taking my own notes and posting them here a day or two after sessions. I’ve separated the following into parts, though events are mostly separated solely based off vibes.

Part 1

Sorren (as played by Evan) the dwarf, Sigrid (as played by Yen) the Jotun, Rasmus (as played by Dallas)- Sigrid’s son but is obviously human, Dust (as played by Kalyn) the human (?) and Noid (as played by Michaela) the fae riding on Dust’s shoulder, arrive on a ship to the coast of an expansive desert continent. They’re here on a mission given to them by a Basilian noble and general named Boril. The goal is to scout around the major city Monta to find possible locations for army encampments, searching for things like renewable sources of food and water. Sorren, Sigrid, Rasmus, Dust, and Noid all team up together to accomplish this, and after just a few days travelling are very successful. With Sorren’s cartography skills, Dust’s familiarity with the area, and Rasmus’s knowledge in geography, they are able to construct a very well made and accurate map showing waterholes, catoblepas herd locations, and their relation to Monta.

While on the way back to the coast to drop off the map, the group scavenges and analyzes the local wildlife, specifically to great interest to Dust. They also see a large flensing storm in the distance, a large red swarm with arcs of lightning born from static. Eventually it comes closer, and the group has to hunker down in a small hole they dug to avoid the worst of the storm. Sigrid lays on top of the group, protecting them from the bulk of the damage, and though her cloak is tattered by the end, they are able to weather the storm unscathed. The same could not be true for the other travelers of the desert, as the group hears distant screams. After the worst of the storm is over, the group looks up and sees a large black spot in place of the sun. Noid recalls legends about The Desolation, at the heart of each flensing storm is the residual power of a sealed ancient evil. The manifestation of this power appears as a black “eye” just after the storm that seems to attract wind. It doesn’t do much and still behaves as the sun normally would, but it still gives off a very bad feeling. On a distant hill, three humanoid figures with tendrils sliding out from their bottom jaws stand ominously - Desiccated ones, undead people who died of thirst.

While walking, they spot a woman face down in the sand, having just barely survived the storm. They heal her and she asks if they can escort her to Monta, where she will be staying. They agree, as its on the way and they will need to reup on supplies. Once there, they find out her name is Umira Inox, a scholar from The Grand Tower. The group aren’t able to get a clear answer on if there is a literal, physical tower, or if its simply the name of a group. They do find out she’s a Zauberin magician who’s out on a mission by the Tower to research and catalogue magical artifacts. She gets a room at The Wrong Inn and tells us to meet her there if we’re looking for work, she’ll want some bodyguards to her next excursion.

After arriving to the city, the group also connects some dots and realizes that the group paying them to survey the land are actually looking for opportune places to attack Monta from! Dust and Noid, being Monta natives, are staunchly opposed to this, and attempt to steal the map from Sorren, failing miserably. They are forced to come clean to the group. Sorren is against the city being taken over, however Sigrid and Rasmus believe that nature is survival of the fittest, and if Monta isn’t fit enough to survive an attack, it didn’t deserve to prosper in the first place. They are able to come to an agreement, however. They hatch a plan to make all five party members happy. They’re going to turn in the map, reap the reward after receiving their payment, and then they’re going to light the map ablaze through teleportation and rune magic!!! The plan goes off without a hitch, in fact it succeeds way more than they thought it would, as the fire expanded too quickly to be tamed by the soldiers and the majority of their camp is burned down.

Part 2

The group continues to stay in or around Monta, Sorren choosing to get a room at an inn, meanwhile Rasmus, Sigrid, Dust, and Noid camp outside the city walls. They enter into the city to do some shopping, but also to do some worship of the Zarite god Forcio, god of chance and luck. Worship of him looks a lot like gambling, as casinos are fully legal here as long as there’s some religious affiliation. They meet with Umira who has a ruin picked out to investigate. She has organized their transport, a hollowed out dead beetle being piloted by pseudo-necromancers. These beasts are slow, but they can travel 24/7 and offer decent amounts of protection. After several days of travel, the group arrives to the ruins, which Dust is familiar with. The origins of them are unknown, but there’s hundreds across the desert. They take some charcoal rubbings of the various etchings and writings on the wall to analyze later.

As they make their way deeper into the ruins, they find odd imagery of a faceless bull and random human skulls strewn about. Sorren also encounters several traps head first, causing him to be quite injured. Eventually, they find a room filled with undead zombies and a large mechanical bull, who one shots Sorren very sadly by impaling him with its horn. The rest of the party are able to defeat the creatures, but they do it very sadly. Dust acquires a magical amulet of unknown origin or effects - something to investigate later. The party also grabs some of Sorren’s more useful items. Its what he would have wanted.

They leave the ruins and take a rest. Dust finishes their first grimoire, a sash of coded knots of rope they wear around their waist. Rasmus is able to summon a fucked up moldy looking dog. His name his Charlie, he is clearly unable to breath, and he smells like mildew. They begin making their journey back home, when on the way the beetle suddenly stops moving. Dust and a guard get out to investigate, and are greeted by Richard “Dick” Pummeler, a halfling assassin sent to kill them by General Boril!! Dick attempts to punch Dust in the dick, but of course misses because Dust does not have one. He does one shot the guard, but Dust is able to intimidate him by dealing a large amount of sheer magical damage. Dick is ready to surrender, when suddenly 6 Anubin attack out of nowhere, and the two parties agree to team up against the common enemy. Unfortunately, an Anubin lights off a fire bomb, killing most of the beetle’s crew and severely injuring the main party. They decide the best course of action is to get away from them as soon as possible and as a last ditch effort attempt to pilot the beetle for themselves. The only successful part of this is they are able to get away from the Anubin, by piloting it off a sheer cliff into a white water rapid. Through a series of lucky breaks and a lot of thrown rope, everyone is able to make their way out of the river unscathed. Rasmus summons several horses and they are able to make their way back to Monta.

They have time to talk to Dick, and once they tell him of Boril’s plan to take over the city, he is immediately in favor of fucking him over as he’s also a Monta native. They begin hitching a plan to assassinate him, though many of these plans are castles in the sky. They’re able to make it back safely and analyze some of the rubbings they took from the ruin. They tell a tale of someone called Arkhaos, an old god the Emorans worshipped. A mortal general who was able to rise to the ranks of godhood. Parts of it reference a “god-eater”, though many of the details are unclear.

Part 3

The group gets together at the Pummeler residence, a house on top of a very successful general store run by Dick’s brother with another phallic pun. Dick presents the group his plan to get more information on General Boril. They all tell him its a bad idea, but Evan is too drunk to see reason and goes through with it anyway. Dick schedules a meeting with his middle man with General Boril, a man named John Kerularios, who stays at the Solar Mass temple in Monta. The Basilian Empire is running this specific Solar Mass temple, a group of reformists attempting to make the religion more palatable to outside cultures. His plan is to schedule a meeting under the guise of asking for more resources capturing his targets, and then kidnap him and interrogate him for more information on the army and their current whereabouts. The plan is for Dick to meet with John in the church, with Noid invisible ready to give him backup inside. Rasmus and Dust are outside and waiting for the signal. Sigrid hasn’t been spotted in weeks, the group is questioning if she ever really existed to begin with.

Dick’s negotiations are going poorly, so poorly he decides to knock him out with one punch to the neck. The priests very clearly see this. This is probably the worst place he could do this, given this is the only church where the priests are also seasoned and armed warriors. He makes up a lie that John just had too much to drink and he drags him out. Noid helps by teleporting them to the entrance. The guards immediately begin giving chase. Dust and Rasmus decide they don’t want any smoke and run to the Pummeler estate where the group reconvenes after Dick somehow loses the guards. Evan is too drunk at this point to properly question this guy, so Rasmus takes the reigns and asks John if they promise to not attack Boril again if he’ll look the other way. Dick begins to protest to this compromise, but Dust reminds him that Boril now effectively knows where he lives and knows he’s associating with insurrectionists, so its best to just take the L on this failed plan. John agrees, he says he’ll write a letter to Boril saying that Dick accomplished his mission, that we all died in the beetle crash. We let him go, but send Dust and Noid to follow him and make sure he does well on his word.

They follow him back to the church where he writes in a language neither of them understand. He gives the letter to a carrier pigeon, which Noid follows to a large expanse of ships just outside of eye sight from the coast. We now know where the army is camping, but there’s nothing we can do about it for quite some time.

At this point, the group is feeling very discouraged. Dust believes that John kept his word, but Rasmus can’t shake the feeling that he double timed them and another, more powerful group of assassins will be on their tail next. He’s spending most of his time with Dust in the desert. He’s really not sure where his mom is, she has been coming and going in ways that defy space and time. How did she stay in Monta when they went to the ruins, but then suddenly reappear when they made their way back? Did she teleport? She didn’t seem to have an explanation. And frankly, when Rasmus does see her around, she doesn’t interact much with the rest of the party. He comes to the conclusion he’s been hallucinating her this whole time.

Dick is still determined that they’ll be able to put a plan together that will kill Boril, but all his ideas are bad. Dick has a contact with a group of nomadic ferren that are rolling through. Through his intel, Dick learns that several merchants, one of the city guard captains, and a bartender at The Wrong Inn all have connections to John, and by extension, Boril. He believes these people are acting as moles. Coincidentally, Dust makes friends with this contact’s older sister, Vex. Dust introduces Vex to Rasmus while she’s in cat form, but she keeps attempting to sit on his lap which freaks him out because she’s a fully grown woman who is trying to sit on a 15 year old’s lap. He summons horses and runs away from the camp. Dick and Dust both attempt cheering him up, but after staring off into the middle distance for awhile, Rasmus says he’s “going to college” and begins walking into the wilderness.

Part 4

Cyrus joins the group! He’s a city guard from Monta who caught onto the grand conspiracy and acted as a whistleblower to his higher ups. As a reward, he gained a promotion and was put in charge of protecting the city from the Basilian threats. He heard of the ragtag group’s odd, but vaguely anti-Basilian escapades and wanted to meet with them to give them further direction and channel their mass destructive capabilities to a more focused source. He wanted to get a feel for their raw combat capabilities, so they all went to investigate some nearby ruins. Its a large, manmade structure mostly buried in mud and sand. After descending, they find a small manmade creek flowing through, as well as various flora and fauna surviving in the damp cave. They find a huge, aggressive mud worm with the colloquial name “Slaughter-Jaw”. It isn’t capable of crossing the small flowing water, so the group is safe from it as long as they don’t cross, but it is quite a heavy hitter.

While investigating, they find iconography on the walls showing illustrations of vague humanoids feeding a worm something, and then the worm spewing from its mouth gold. After searching around they area, they find a vial of acidic smelling liquid. They cover one of the insectoid creatures from the river in this substance and throw it into the Slaughter-Jaw’s enclosure, which it easts eagerly. After a few moments, it vomits up several silver items. The group leaves it alive, collects the treasure, and leave the ruins. Dick realizes that one of the coins are different, while holding it he realizes he is capable of speaking ancient Emoran.

The group makes their way back to town. After a brief period of downtime, Cyrus realizes his brother, Emilio, had suddenly disappeared. With some investigating, he finds that he was likely taken by a nomadic tribe of bug people, humans who dress in bug chitin and pilot the undead beetles. Sometimes people join the bug groups willingly, but they are also known to deal in slave trading, so its likely he was kidnapped to be sold. Umira tells the group she wants to investigate some new ruins crawling with undead, and Cyrus tags along hoping to run into some nomadic bug people on the way to talk to them. The bug pilots Umira hired fly the flag for trade and conversing and Cyrus goes to meet the bug captain for the tribe they’re meeting. He asks him if he’d seen Emilio. He says no, but tells him that if he was taken by bug nomads, he was probably sold into slavery to a man called Barakat for 2 gold. Cyrus thanks him for the information, and joins up with the rest of the party at the ruin.

There, they fight a bunch of zombies and Umira collects some esoteric ancient information on Emorans. There’s a lot of black sun imagery and the group learns the black sphere during the flensing storm is actually the forbidden knowledge Arkhaos gained on how to become a god sealed away within winds of blood. Dust believes he’s probably a Lich.

Part 5

Once they make it back to town, Umira says her Grand Tower wants to meet with the group. The individual should be arriving within a week and will stay for quite some time. To kill time, the group decides they want to do some oddball jobs around the city. Cyrus is busy doing his actual job and raising money to help his brother.

There are two job postings:

  • Investigate a series of disappearances from minor farms and caravans.
    • Find the source of the disappearances for 10gc
    • Deal with the source for 20gc
  • An owlbear is nesting nearby and killing livestock. Kill it or drive it off for 25gc.

The group decides to take both. In Cyrus’s absence, Dick talks to some of the locals to find where the owlbear’s nest is located, on a hill near an aquifer. After crawling through some burrows, they are able to find and Dick one punch man’s the owlbear, killing it instantaneously. The group receives 25gc.

Afterwards, the group finds a wagon dragged off the side of the road. Dust cracks open a locked box with destruction magic to find a leather bound journal and a ledger. The journal details the group being in a “weird” area and the horses getting freaked out. They were on their way to Monta when they were attacked by something. There are no bodies and limited signs of a struggle, though some hides and salted meats are missing. Animals are also gone, but it is unclear if that’s due to them being killed or wandering off. There are tracks leading to a nearby farmhouse from the site of the crashed wagon.

No animals are nearby and the fields are overgrown. The group approaches quietly, not knowing what to expect. The house is dark with large holes in the roof, busted windows, and a broken down door. Though it appears that someone had hastily been making barricades, as if they saw the attackers coming. The cuts in the door appear to have been made with a sharp object, like an axe. Planks of wood have been removed from the walls. The house appears to have been abandoned for at least a month. There is an Anubin rune carved into a support beam. The group takes a rubbing of the rune to analyze it later.

The group travels to the farmstead that has most recently had people disappear. Very similar in appearance, the door was hacked down with a similar bladed tool, but the windows remained in tact. The bed was overturned, but it didn’t appear much else had been changed. No visible signs of struggle and nothing valuable was stolen, except for all the meat. There is once again another Anubin rune, although this one is slightly different. After analyzing the runes together, the group finds that they represent the new moon and the full moon respectively. The most recent disappearance happened on the full moon, with it currently being a waxing half-moon.

Part 6

Cyrus reunites with the group and requests to have a meeting to discuss what they’ve been up to, and refocus on the current goal of undermining General Boril. However, after being confronted with this beastman organized kidnappings, his opinion changes and he agrees to help them complete this task. They collectively put their heads together and with Cyrus’s abilities to deduce logically and Dust’s occult knowledge, they believe that the Anubin are preparing for some kind of religious ritual. They understand the broad strokes, that Death Masks appear seemingly out of nowhere and for magical, unknown reasons. But they’re unclear on what this ritual is meant to accomplish. They know that Death Masks appear to command Anubin, without a Death Mask Anubin usually only travel in groups of 4-6, but when following a Death Mask the numbers could reach the hundreds. The Death Masks command Anubin to build large, stone towers covered in sigils.

The group decides that the evidence they have at the moment is circumstantial, they need more proof that it was specifically Anubin to satisfy the contract. After all, if these chucklefucks could quickly identify Anubin runes, who’s to say some group of bandits didn’t copy their runes to throw investigators off their tracks? They believe the best place to check is The Crags, a mess of difficult to traverse rocks and cliff faces. They want to go there, do some reconnaissance, gather more evidence, and bring it back to the guards to hopefully encourage them to launch a more organized and well funded attack on the Anubin. They go to Umira to ask for initial funding to take a beetle there, as they’re safer and can travel 24/7. They promise her some artifacts, or at least some more information on Anubin, and she is just interested enough to give them the funds to travel.

After making it to The Crags, the beetle is unable to travel through the thickest part of it as the pathways get too narrow for it to fit through. The staff piloting it say they’ll make camp and will give the group 3 days to make it back. They set out, with Cyrus and Dust walking on the ground and Dick and Noid scouting above. Dick spots what seems to be the Beast Tower currently being constructed, a huge stone plateau far away. Cyrus and Dust recognize that they’re about to walk into an ambush. They stop, take defensive positions, and Cyrus motions where they are hearing the potential attackers to Dick, to see if he can get a peek at what they’re dealing with. Unfortunately, Dick loses his footing trying to get a good angle to see what’s ahead and almost falls, but is able to catch himself on the next crag. When he turns behind him, he sees Anubin with weapons ready to attack. He gives the signal and combat begins. Dust rushes ahead and through a series of lucky rogue breaks, completely shatters the Anubin in front of them to mince meat. Cyrus rushes quickly behind, but slips at the last moment and is unable to attack. The second Anubin on the ground panics and blows a horn signaling for backup.

Up on the cliff faces, Dick pushes an Anubin down, where it lands in an unfortunate position where its spine is fully broken. It is paralyzed from the waist down. The group sees the distant campfires and realizes that their recon mission is getting out of hand, so they snatch up the near death Anubin to interrogate it with Dust’s new comprehend spell. Noid uses its clamor ability to trick the Anubin backup into hopefully going a different direction than they actually are going. The staff on the beetle don’t allow them to bring the Anubin on board, but luckily they can make this quick. Cyrus holds down the captive so it can’t crawl away, Dick is writing Dust’s questions and the response of the Anubin through Dust translating, and Noid is playing Darude Sandstorm.

The group learns of The Great Savagery, a religious idea from beastmen. They see civilization as a sin and seek to destroy it through their savagery. They believe the people they took captive have sinned, and to atone for it, they must be killed on the Beast Tower. It says that the significance of the moon is tied to “She who Defies”, “she” in this instance literally referring to the moon. The Anubin time the construction of the Beast Towers to be finished during the new moon so that the people can be sacrificed then. The timing isn’t immediately clear, as the Anubin doesn’t seem interested in giving too many details. It eyes the moon in the sky with disdain and disgust. Once the Anubin has had enough, it leans forward, and quickly, in one swift motion, leans back with enough force to break its own skull open on the rocks.

Using Noid’s shrink ability, the group shrinks the body down to keep in a bundle by itself. They hope Umira will have some interest in it. They board the beetle as the sounds of barking and howling can be heard approaching.