Introduction

I previously posted some warts-and-all email summaries of the ‘Curse of Strahd’ DnD 5e campaign I ran in 2017-18, the ‘Tomb of Annihilation’ campaign I ran in 2018-19, the ‘Out of the Abyss’, a campaign I ran in 2020, the ‘Phandelver’s Pact’ campaign I ran from 2020-21, the ‘Shadows over Saltmarsh’ campaign from 2021-22, and my current Pathfinder 2e campaign, ‘Vaults of Otari‘. CoS was the first campaign I sent summaries to players by email after each game (I was a bit lazy prior to that), which is why I can use them for this column. Now, I post summaries to Roll20 after each session.

Here are the session summaries from my first Dragonbane campaign which I started running in 2024 after buying the Dragonbane Starter Set. It includes adventures from that set, plus homebrewed content. We recently finished the campaign, after 38 sessions!

I apologize in advance for the writing in these summaries – they’re a bit raw, and not fancy at all (I didn’t have time for fancy writing when typing them up late at night after each game lol). Some will be more detailed than others.

Steve 🙂

Session 25 – Bard’s Requiem

The battle raged as Bastonn the wolfkin hunter fought with Niklion the dragon knight. Zog the mentalist ogre was struck from behind by a guard and knocked to the ground. Archmaster Aodhan the wizard peppered the guards and knight with fire blasts. Isadelia the dragon knight and Kalgrim the artisan dwarf came to blows. Piscapo the wolfkin bard sang to inspire the party. One of the guards used his crossbow to target Aodhan, who took cover behind the castle wall. The wizard’s next fire blasts immolated two guards and Niklion.

Isadelia, seeing her knightly partner burned to a crisp, was enraged. With one blow from her sword, she took out Kalgrim. Zog and Bastonn surrounded the knight, wearing her down and breaking her sword before she yielded. Isadelia and her two remaining guards huddled solemnly while the party searched the area.

Piscapo tasted one of the amazing golden apples from the withered tree. She felt full after the delightful meal.

Zog investigated the keep, finding a hole dug in the floor, surrounded by pickaxes and a pile of debris. Feeling downwards, he realized it would take a fair bit more time to dig deeper to whatever was further below. Archmaster Aodhan investigated the rear courtyard, but found nothing. Bastonn wandered the castle grounds, feeling ashamed of the party’s deeds today.

Zog headed down some stairs. At the bottom, he found a vault door inscribed in a strange language over an image of a tree with a leafy crown, with five horizontal indentations and a bright crystal lens placed in the leftmost indentation. Kalgrim, Aodhan, Zog and Bastonn struggled to interpret its meaning.

Meanwhile, Isadelia and her guards had been left unsupervised and were not disarmed by the party. As Piscapo returned to the tree, Isadelia approached and stabbed her in the stomach with a knife. The wolfkin collapsed, coughing up blood. She slowly bled out and died.

Isadelia grabbed one of her dead guard’s swords and rushed to the keep. “That inscription is none of your business,” she cried. Her crossbowman fired at Zog, knocking him unconscious. Bastonn, Kalgrim and Aodhan, unaware of what had happed with Piscapo, rushed the knight and her allies.

Aodhan cast a spell, but it misfired, leaving him with amnesia. He wandered around in a daze, asking who everyone was and assuming the rough looking adventurers were bandits. At one point, Isadelia managed to persuade the old wizard that she was his friend, and that Bastonn and the others were his enemies. Aodhan struck rather ineffectually with his staff at Bastonn, but the wolfkin growled and the old wizard backed off.

Zog rallied and joined the fray. Kalgrim was knocked unconscious a further two times, before finally recovering. Zog’s blows were weak to start, having pulled himself back from the brink of death, but finally he managed to bludgeon one of the guards to death. Isadelia parried every one of Bastonn’s attacks. Finally, Zog demolished her.

Bastonn rushed out of the keep into the yard, looking for Piscapo. He found the bard’s still warm corpse near the great tree. The others joined him. It was a sad scene, with Kalgrim carving a headstone for the wolfkin and Bastonn picking up Picapo’s lyre and attempting to play a song to celebrate the bard’s life. Unfortunately, he realized he could neither play nor sing, so he buried the lyre with Piscapo in a grave under the roots of the old tree.

Searching the dead knights and guards (something the party had neglected to do when the knights surrendered), the party found some silver and gold, and four colored crystals that allowed them to solve the door puzzle. They decided to wait until they rested for the night before proceeding through the vault door at the bottom of the keep stairs.

Bastonn found a prisoner locked in a cell building – it was Iliel, the elf who had been kidnapped and whom the party had learned about from two elves they met in the forest earlier that day. They released her to return to the forest.  

As the party settled down in the keep for the night, Aodhan pondered a strange emergent memory – something about dysentery? He found a book of bile and bodily functions in his knapsack and settled down for an interesting read. It was the first time he had read a book, after all…

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