Taff Campaign Diaries: Tom and Sinvik

Art Credit: 
Character art by Deltastic and Saph-y.

Of course the campaign is still going! It’ll hopefully be going for a long while and continue to teach me all those exciting things around DnD, such as making maps, writing campaigns, reading rule books until my eyes bleed, and improvising when the players come up with amazing things. Those sorts of things.

In my next blog post I am probably going to be talking about where our lost souls are right now in their development, alongside of a module/adventure review that I’ve got coming up, but before I get to any of this I really, really, really want to talk about Tomakos and Sinvik a little more. Mostly because I just love talking about them and I love them. Individually and together.

Tomakos Drake belongs to Maegan, and he is the main protagonist in her original novel series, while Sinvik Shielding is mine. Together, we’ve been exploring them (and in my case discovering) over the past two years by playing them in various games, such as Star Wars: The Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights, and Dungeons and Dragons Online. It was only a natural progression that they’d find their way into a DnD campaign.

So, what’s their deal in Homebound?

Tom arrives in Ved by ship, packing light. He’s got little more than his armour, his weapons, and his winning attitude on him. Oh, and a cat. Sinvik. His guiding light. His anchor.

She’s not always been a cat. It’s a recent thing. Very recent. And she’s certainly not a cat by choice. Though between an agonising death, her soul being pulled apart strand by strand by a curse, and walking the world on four soft paws? What choice did she really have? Better a cat than dead, even if she’s left with an urge to chase butterflies and to purr on occasion.

The curse is a curious thing. It would have tore her soul apart, if not for Tom’s crafty druid friend, who hid her soul by binding her together with a cat. As long as she stays like that, the curse can’t finish what it started.

But no one has got a clue on how to break it.

Thankfully, Tom will stop at nothing to find the warlock who’d cursed her. Heading to the ass end of everything? Psht. Easy. Not worth the mention. That’s what Ved is and no one argues against it. It’s a little known blob on any map and home to no one of import. Used to be it was at least a somewhat decently peaceful place, though that’s changed. What Tom finds as he disembarks, is a land ill at ease. Pirates nip at its heels. Monsters roam its wilds. People vanish into thin air. And those with means to, they pack up and leave for elsewhere.

Not a big deal though. It’s not like he’s here to settle.

Except he also doesn’t have much of a clue on what to do next, save for a vague signature on a half burnt piece of paper. That’s not a lot of a trail, even for someone as good as tracking as him, and so he seeks help from the local adventurer’s guild. Which is doing about as well as the rest of Ved: terribly. It’s fallen out of fashion years ago, its guild hall good as abandoned and empty, and the only member that it’s got left is an old half elf. Rorrik is his name. And even though he’s half blind, broke, and alone, he hasn’t given up tending the guild hall as best as one man possibly can.

The prospect of Tom coming to the guild, to give it some purpose, is enough to excite the old caretaker, and he quickly promises to help. In return, Tom offers his swords and is promptly sent to check on a long abandoned mine a few hours from the hall. One that, Rorrik says, is filled with kobolds that have been sending small parties to harass him most evenings.

But what Tom finds there aren’t kobolds at all. He’s attacked as he approaches, not by a kobold, but by a man. And once he cleared the only still passable mine shaft, he finds a man-made hideout, not a kobold borrow, buried deep into the hollowed out mountain. It’s far from empty, too, and he’s forced to fight a few more people dressed all in thick black robes.

Venturing deeper, and following a rhythmic, metallic GONG reverberating through the air, he eventually finds a large chamber. In that chamber stands a lit brazier, white smoke billowing out from it. Another man, also dressed in black, stands a little in front of it, striking a metal gong while he mutters words under his breath.

Around the brazier, stand a handful of dazed or unconscious figures. They are all dressed in perfectly white gowns. Spotless. Not a smudge on them. And as the man strikes the gong over and over again, whispered words falling from his lips, white tendrils begin to shape from the smoke and drift towards the people in white.

Tom, thinking he’s stepped into some unsavoury ritual, does what any other good adventuring hero does: he interrupts it all.

And something goes awfully wrong. After a blinding flash of light knocks him on his ass, the tendrils fall away from where they hooked themselves into the figures surrounding the brazier, and they all collapse into heaps on the floor. Which at first isn’t all too bad, since they’re all still breathing. A good thing, overall.

Except then a few of them wake up and hoo boy are they confused.

Tom, on some god’s whim, ended up interfering in a ritual (it’s purpose unknown) that caused a few lost souls to be yanked from their perfectly mundane world into a perfectly chaotic one. And just like that, he’s got more than just Sinvik’s curse to worry about, since what sort of hero would he be if he’d left those poor souls to fend for themselves.

And this, my dear readers, is how Tom and Vik got mixed up with the Homebound campaign.