Black Hart

To Kill A King

DM's Notes: Chapter 8 - The Battle for Fax

Finally I got Jean-Paul back to the fold. While Stuart was my only player he had split from Eloi to go west and do some goody-two shoes rescuing of peasants, which was played out. However, in that time I went from Compuserve to AOL and lost all the previous e-mails, as I wasn't maintaining the story at that time. Needless to say there were quite a few 'death-or-glory' style cavalry charges with JP and Thanoin in charge of a bunch of cavalrymen.

Fax was the base for my PC's for a long time, and I still have all my notes relating to it. Some parts of it I detaield using the 'City League' sections of Imagine magazine, which were excellent, but on the whole it is my creation. I still have a street map for the port which is about 8 sheets of A4 paper in size.

Zarn Varnt, as you may know, was a PC in my campaign. He was also the previous Count of Axewood's guardian for Fmuth, to look after him whilst the wild Fimuth went off to follow his whim.

I was astonished at JP's decision not to help with the defence of Fax, but as always I let my players chose which way they go without boundaries. In the end, however, they realised their folly after merely a few orcs stopped them in their tracks.

Fra-Lan and the occupants of the 'Old Sentinel' are from the 'Old Bastion' in Imagine Magazine. Tumbry OTOH is a long-term NPC who has adventured with Aranon on a few occasions. He was the companion of one-time PC Sheyr Bn'Griz who is mentioned in passing in Chapter 1 and 2.

As we can see, Garthanyel Giltholian reappears in this chapter. Bear in mind that this happens the day after he is bombed down (and nearly killed!!!) by Aranon at Oakhart. He had to use several scrolls to get back to Fax and get healed without drawing attention to himself. He has now had to temporarily suspend his studies in order to prevent his home from being over-run by orcs of the Pomarj hordes.

I liked the image of the massive ogre-head battering ram bursting through the gates of Fax.

Garthanyel's strange behaviour here can easily be explained. He is one of only a handful of mages on Oerth who know anything about Chronomancy. he is working to develop an item, which for want of a better name I call the 'Chronobomb'. what this device does is cause a temporal loop, so that anyone caught in its blast relives the same events over and over again ad infinitum. Groundhog Day anyone? ;-)

What happens here is that Garthanyel's father, Alepp, accidentally sets off a prototype version, this has a very large sphere of effect, covering the whole city, but is weak and only lasts for a few minutes. This is why the players relive their deaths and get a second chance. It all worked very well, and I am looking forward to letting the players have another go at this all at a later date. Eight or nine times around they will be banging their heads off the wall :-)

Akhan's use of the Dust of Disappearance let him off the hook and prevented their deats, I was quite impressed with his plan.