Ending: Rise of Drekis Chapter III (Patreon)

It is with a heavy heart that I announce the end of Rise of Drekis: Chapter 3. </3

There are 3 big questions to answer about this

• Why is it ending?
• What does this mean for the story?
• What is coming next?

Why is it ending?

The factors that lead into ending the campaign are as follows. 

This campaign, from its inception, had a very tight time table. It was known that somewhere at the start of the new year one of our players was going to be unavailable for long enough that the game would have to end by then or continue without them. Here we are in the new year and our player is, as predicted, unavailable. The goal of the campaign was to finish it off before the new year ended, which considering the troublesome scheduling around the December holidays, meant that we'd have to hit all of our game dates and make really good progress in each session. If you know anything about D&D, you'll know that scheduling is always a problem and no party on the face of the earth has ever made really good progress in each session. In other words, from the onset of the campaign it was known that we were going to be trying to do the improbable. But we tried anyway.

So why run a game under such circumstances? Because these were the players I wanted for this game. This mix of personalities would create fun, move the story, have good cohesion right out the door, and had enough playstyle differences to cause a fun amount of friction.

With only one player / character missing, couldn't the game continue without them? Each character, and each player, brings something to this table that is needed for this campaign in particular. I'm not going to take over playing one of the characters, that's a general rule of mien. In theory the party could have continued with just 3, but they would have died / failed pretty quickly. I could handwave some of the difficulties associated with losing one party member, but that would defeat the whole point of the game: that this is a dangerous and hostile environment that needs a diplomat, a ranger, a warrior, and a scholar. Each role is integral to the core story (and the stories to come), and so to hand wave any part of it would undermine the foundation we are attempting to create for the future. If this were a more normal sandbox style game, we could do without 1 player for weeks or months or forever, and while it would be disruptive to the game, it wouldn't inherently be a problem.

If we let the party continue with 3 people and no hand waving of difficulty, they'd die in a session or two, and the quality of those sessions wouldn't have been great. Better to go out on a high note than to go through the motions.

What does this mean for the story?

Where last we left the party, they were escaping Ember's Keep. We actually ended mid escape, with half the party free and clear and the other half of the party about to get into a fight. By stopping the campaign here, we get to leave the characters in a state of unknown. Maybe they escaped and survived, but missed their appointment to go back to Arcadia. Maybe some of them died in the fight and the others fled into the jungle, only to get eaten. Maybe they take up the offer to settle in one of the cities. Maybe they get taken prisoner and reveal everything they know to the Ranger of Yaka. Maybe they join with the rangers willingly in return for power, prestige, position, and profit. Maybe a combination of things.

The one thing we do know is that they do not make it back to Imrik, and they are never seen or heard from again. Which is actually a pretty perfect ending! Bravo is a strange and dangerous place. Ships fail to make it. Seers fail to scry upon it. Monsters are everywhere. Magic is as abundant as in the Age of Might, and the locals are mythically strong and competent, even with little to no training. Having the party never return helps reinforce that this is a place best avoided, or at least carefully considered before approached. 

What is coming next?

There's this side project I've been working on that isn't ready to announce. It's a little delayed, but its success or failure will determine how many campaigns I can run at once. The plan was to launch at the start of the new year and that by the start of February we'd know if it was going to work or not, but other things got in the way and delays, delays, delays, mean that we're looking for some news / a launch by the end of February and a known success/failure by the end of March. 

I share this with you because Rise of Drekis: Chapter 4 hasn't been sorted yet. I've got a lot of ideas (see this post about Rise of Drekis: Chapter 2), but I haven't settled on any one just yet. There are some big questions left in Arcadia proper (Akuba, Gadia, Wake County, Voraci's Born Again, etc.) as well as some big external options like the growing conflict with the Voraci Empire, and further eastward expansion into places like The Dardense. 

That's all to say, we won't know what Chapter 4 will look like until we finish with Chapter 2. 

In the meantime, we'll have Chapter 2, Outcasts, Hardly Heroes, and City Dwarves, along with map making and Baldur's Gate 3 to keep us very busy. Perhaps too busy. ,

That's it for today's post! Thank you for your unending support, and I'll catch you in Discord, on stream, or on YouTube. 

gl hf
Neal