The Dread Pagoda of the Inscruitable Ones

This w/e is (hopefully) the concluding installment of the a/m adventure. Dragon subscribers (from when it was a real magazine and not just an interweb thing) might recognise it.

The Perran Empire campaign is a home brew RM adventure. It has its roots in AD&D (that's "1st edition") when our PCs carved an empire out of the central Flanaess. As you do when you are 14. Then GW launched MERP. So the PC moved to Middle Earth. Then the rules system morphed into ICE's RM. Then there was a bit of a hiatus. I launched a new campaign, back in the Penguin Empire that has been running for about four years.

Due to us all being grown ups with jobs and families we havn't played for six months (and of course, me being in Kent all week hasn't helped). So this little side adventure was never intended to be on the 'critical path' of the camapign arc. And it's never good to end a gaming session in the middle of a combat.

So I'm faced now with a consitricted timescale where I, as DM, have to sort out the combat and get the campaign back on track. There are about four or five adventures left in this campaign arc. The last one is an epic that will probably take three or more sessions.

The campaign is supposed to end in a grand finale. Whether the PCs dissapear in to the darkness and their moment of greatness takes place in the bowels of the earth or there is a giant showdown with a cast of fousundz is up to them of course. But hopefully it will be memorable enough. Even if I do have to actually stop leaving clues and just the PCs what is going on and what their motivation is in this scene (shesh !).

So, if you're one of the PE adventurers reading this, there'll be a new campaign, possibly in 2011. This time I get to be a player. The pathfinder or shackled city adventures can be downloaded from Pazio, so its possibly time for 3.5. I know that's me weakening and that if I had any integrity as a gamer then I wouldn't be suggesting moving away from RM. But if it makes it easier and quicker to play then I don't have a problem with it.

So to cut back to the dread pagoda. It was never meant to be important.