Gloating About My Players

Okay, I've ran this campaign 20 times including this time and everyone has enjoyed it except for one player who was a total munchkin. Munchkins are like the worst. Anyway, I decided to break the campaign into two parts this time with four sessions taking up the boat ride from Faerun to the colony of New Fork somewhere in northeastern Maztica or Eyulkos. The party thinks they are headed to southeastern Maztica maybe only a month from New Waterdeep by Fort Flame but they are about as close to that as New York is to Cancun.

See the thirteen colonies were set up as slave plantations by the Ratkin or basically the DnD Skaven with some major modifications of lore. I am redoing the Homebrew species now because there was a bug that deleted just the parent species and left the subspecies alone that Beyond couldn't fix plus I needed to update it anyway but essentially they have resistance to poison and immunity to disease and they can carry diseases that they can plague people with unless they or someone else spent a short rest washing them clean with soap ie making Pink Dragons their only potential natural predator. So, these Rats trick people into signing up thinking they are going to colonize Maztica and then they get there and it isn't them who is colonizing anything. They're memories are removed or replaced and the Rats use them as slaves to operate their drug plantations. They run experiments on them boosting productivity by dosing them with potions and all of this they won't even know about because they'll have their memories modified afterwards. Imagine a colony of people with repressed trauma just boiling in there subconscious. It is debatable which type of slavery is worse Drow or Ratkin. They Ratkin aren't as abusive as the Drow because they find it inefficient but they do work people for longer hours using potions to keep them going.

The Ratkin actually serve the Drow who stole the Alchemist Journal of a human one of the Drow married turning him into a city commodity. This is part of a campaign I played and basically the Drow couldn't stop me because I was just too much of a badass so instead they trapped me emotionally in this marriage and then stole my recipes. They now want me back so they can get even better potions out of me but I fled. This is another story though. Whereas these Rats they created people would think are wererats if they saw them because no one is aware of these race one Drow noble created in secret to run a bunch of secret drug plantations to provide components for the Alchemical Company she stole from my Alchemist when he fled. She also has been secretly making some potions addictive so junkies sell everything and end up having to sign up for Maztica because they got nothing left. Then she also distributes their actual narcotics through dealers like the Zhentarim using some other intermediary than the Rats. It is all compartmentalized and done through shell companies to obfuscate the whole operation.

Now to the current party. The Alchemical company, "Big Phial" grew too big to fail gaining purchase in the upper ranks of all the factions and cities except the Emerald Enclave who were the only faction to refuse to join the Alchemist before he married the drow because he was testing potions on monsters allowing him to develop new revolutionary products that were cheaper and more effective than what those "holistic hippies" as he calls them could ever make and it is true Big Phial does make the best potions and provide the best components but they are mostly known for their genetics that are mass produced and dirt cheap. On this ship headed to Maztica I finally for the first time got an Enclave member! The Ratkin know and because they aren't the type to get into direct combat they have been manipulating the party to try and turn them against the Enclave member.

The gave people Rabies and made it appear that the Enclave member's goat is the culprit or patient zero. They've been using Message from within the ship's hull to convince one of them that their deity thinks the Enclave member is an evil threat. They've been slowly depriving one of them of sleep so he's been exhausted which they mostly successfully pinned on the Enclave memebr. Well, the Enclave member knowing that the ship is headed to the slave plantations because they never got into bed with Big Phial is catching on to the fact that someone is trying to turn the party against her and she is loving it.

Next session is set up perfectly for them to uncover the Ratkin hidden on board who've already been experimenting on them. Those fights with people who had rabies all were under different conditions so the Rats now know how they will fight as a party against one opponent, multiple opponents, if there is an innocent hostage etc. They're going to have one epic mini-boss fight then the session after the next they'll suffer the great defeat that makes the BBEG's evils truly personal. From there they'll recover and so on into the second half of the campaign.

The party is super involved. They communicate and roleplay. They're all having a lot of fun and even the newbie is keeping up with the vets who told me this is one of the best if not the best games they played. Sometimes being a DM is really nice you know. Especially if your good at it. Stay off drugs kids or the Rats will get'cha.

Probably should be in the "Story and Lore" subforum.

Quote from ArmorStorm >>

Probably should be in the "Story and Lore" subforum.

 My mistake. I don't know if I can move it myself.