Graveyard of Empires: The End
After 221 sessions, 884+ hours, one year exactly in-game, and over four and a half real-life years, the party has defeated the evil AI named XenoTel and prevented the imminent invasion of their homeworld by the space dwarves’ armada. They also destroyed magic, both spells and enchanted items, except for a handful of ancient artifacts based on a system of transpatial manipulation that pre-dates the dragons and dwarves. Finally, there is now a huge gate to Hell — the shadowy world between worlds that DVLs and Daemons call home — and an intermittent rain of devils falling to the planet from outer space to spread chaos and ruin. Congratulations?
As mentioned last night, the big winners were the Devil Fish (who achieved their every goal with help from previous iterations of the party) and the Arch-Devil Asmodeus. The latter, after spending thousands of years bound to the probability sword of the first Lord Marshal of the Ancient Dwarves, fell into the possession of a group of inexperienced adventurers who carried him all the way to the one place (on a low-orbit space station) where he could enact his plan to free his people and wreak vengeance on the dwarves. Of course, the party’s role in that plan makes them the single greatest force for the liberation of enslaved entities ever — a fitting conclusion for adventurers whose first great victory was breaking up a much more localized slavery ring on Curmidden. At the same time, that accomplishment also makes them largely responsible for the imminent destruction of the greatest empire to ever conquer the Curabel Islands, which ended up being the graveyard of an empire spanning galaxies.
Obviously, the story of Curabel could go on from here — we left off last night with the party setting off to find the Mothers and regain their mastery over transpatial energies while also contemplating a future trip to Asmodeus’s realm — but the PC’s current victory seems like an opportune moment to take a break from those adventures. With the destruction of the dwarves, the campaign has lived up to its name and any further tales that might happen someday in the setting would be fundamentally different. Thank you, everyone, for making this the best campaign I’ve participated in throughout all my years of Dungeons & Dragons!
John, it was an awesome campaign! I really enjoyed it. While I’d have preferred Thorfus to make it all the way, no other PC or hireling made it through all 221 sessions in play. Things didn’t go my way in many other things, but that is true of life. It is a game after all.
It was too late to work on the session summary when we left off last night after nearly 2 hours of talk after the end. I’ll do that either tonight or Friday night.
I’m also going to do my Thursday Thoughts on the end of the campaign this evening.
If we resume play, I can’t do 4 hour sessions in the middle of the week anymore. I can do 8 pm to 11 pm Eastern.
As I said last night, I am looking forward to future releases of adventures based on Graveyard of Empires!
Indeed – probably one of the most engaging campaigns I’ve ever had the pleasure of being a part of.
I’m sorry I missed the last session though. I did not get home until very late and went straight to bed (11pm) – was hosting suppliers at a restaurant and went WAY over time.
Like Larry, I should be good to go back to 8 pm starts in a few weeks should something start up again.
Alessandro Bertolucci, it was great having you in the campaign! As always, no need to apologize for real life impeding gaming time; I completely understand. By the way, Kauri was instrumental in the victory over XenoTel by means of a haste spell that allowed the party to go first despite losing initiative in the last round of combat.
Whew! I got the summary for both Sunday’s game and Wednesday’s game done.
Ha! I knew the Haste spell would come in handy. Glad to have been helpful even if I wasn’t there. 😉
Alessandro Bertolucci Yes, if not for that, we’d have had a lot more dead….
I wish I had remembered to record the session…. Oh well.