Wondering how to get started? Here are a few tips: h4. 1. Invite your players Invite them with either their email address or their Obsidian Portal username. h4. 2. Edit your home page Make a few changes to the home page and give people an idea of what your campaign is about. That will let people know you're serious and not just playing with the system. h4. 3. Choose a theme If you want to set a specific mood for your campaign, we have several backgrounds to choose from. Accentuate it by creating a top banner image. h4. 4. Create some NPCs Characters form the core of every campaign, so take a few minutes to list out the major NPCs in your campaign. A quick tip: The "+" icon in the top right of every section is how to add a new item, whether it's a new character or adventure log post, or anything else. h4. 5. Write your first Adventure Log post The adventure log is where you list the sessions and adventures your party has been on, but for now, we suggest doing a very light "story so far" post. Just give a brief overview of what the party has done up to this point. After each future session, create a new post detailing that night's adventures. One final tip: Don't stress about making your Obsidian Portal campaign look perfect. Instead, just make it work for you and your group. If everyone is having fun, then you're using Obsidian Portal exactly as it was designed, even if your adventure log isn't always up to date or your characters don't all have portrait pictures. That's it! The rest is up to your and your players.

You are all starting in the Imperial Dockside Prison in Ruywick, capital of the Ruy Empire. It's up to you how you got there.

Ruywick is Fantasy Constantinople. It's the capital of an empire that once covered 1/4 of the known world. The empire has shrunk in recent generations – the loss of the eastern half to the Orcish Hordes being the most recent tragedy, but it is still powerful, vibrant and increasingly sea-oriented. Thousands of ships from across the known lands dock here, and the docks are a massive stew of cultures, races and goods.

The Imperial Prison is a massive stone keep on the waterfront. Prisoners are housed on the towers and lower levels. You are responsible for your own care and feeding, and for protection the residents of each hall or chamber tend to stick together. All of your characters have been put in the Underhall, which is an old storage chamber that runs underneath one of the walls. It's a long stone rectangle, with narrow barred windows high on each wall. One set of windows looks up onto the docks, the other into the Yard.

You have your money and any small items that you could reasonably carry and protect with you. The rest was put into a chest when you arrived, and will be returned to you upon release (or sold to pay for your upkeep, if you can't manage it yourself).

1 silver piece per day pays for ample food and water, and the guards who run the prison are friendly enough, provided you aren't a troublemaker. The dockside urchins come by the lower windows regularly, and are happy to provide errand services, provided they are paid for their time. They have an understanding with the prison guards, and won't supply weapons, files or fire-starting materials, but otherwise, they're keen to help and relatively reliable.

Currently, the Underhall is a fairly safe place. Most of the inmates there don't seem to have much interest in fighting or causing trouble. It is well-know that most inmates who are put into the Dockside are eventually Transported to the Southland Colony.

Transportation is a relatively new (in the last 20 years) sentence. From the gossip and general knowledge, you've pulled together the following information:

• The Southland Colony is on a different continent, about 2 months sail to the South or South-East.
• The Colony is about 50 years old, but it's only in the past 20 years that prisoners have been sent there.
• Transported are generally used as cheap labor in the Colony, and it's apparently quite dangerous.
• The Southland Colony is run by Colonial Administration, and they are mostly concerned with squeezing every last drop of profit from the Colony as possible.
• The Southland has huge alien beasts, strange races, dangerous wastes and is mostly unexplored. It is dotted with ruined ancient cities, too.
• Port Greyscale is the capital of the Colony. Most Transported end up there, at least at first.
• You are tattooed before they Transport you. Anyone who shows up back in the Empire with a Transported tattoo is summarily put to death.
• There are some other cities in the Southlands. The Free Ports are off to the east of the Colony.

You finished your commission to escort the wagons to Blawtro, delivering them to the massive Colonial Administration fortification at the center of town.

You got a lot of dirty looks from other Transported on the way through, and discovered that Blawtro is an unlovely town crowded with taverns, gambling dens and whorehouses.

Each of you earned 6 sp from the trip, and spent 1 sp on a night's accommodation at The Hanged Man, a fine inn run by the loquacious and sly Oleg.

Desiring to learn more about the town, you went to the Twisted Tree, a massive complex of entertainment centered around a stone tower with a tree growing inside it.  After sampling the local tobacco and beer (one quite good, the other very mediocre), you were invited to meet Hanrik, the owner of the building, and clearly a local crime-lord.

Hanrik offered a Salvagers License, and a reward of 500 sp (for good intel) or 1000 sp (for great intel leading to the defeat of a rival) if you are willing to infiltrate the organization of a fellow called Traven, who is apparently some sort of leader for the local Transported.

After being thrown out of the Twisted Tree, you returned to the Hanged Man.

The following day, after a quick visit to the Temple of Mael, Shade and Wrenaldo headed up the mountain to the graveyard and everyone else went looking for a local market.

At the graveyard, Shade and Wrenaldo discovered a half-eaten, several-day old human corpse in a ravine nearby.  The body appeared to have once been clad in fine clothes and didn't appear to have a Transported tattoo.

After retrieving the rest of the group, a lively discussion resulted in a decision to bury the body with the appropriate rites and to say no more on the subject.

Later that day, the party decided to check out the other major drinking establishment in Blawtro, The Warrens.  A significantly lower-rent location than the Twisted Tree, the Warrens seems to be mostly a drinking hole for Transported.  After nearly being scammed on coppers for beer, a teenager named Oric showed up and invited everyone to meet another local person of influence.

Shown to a hard-to-find basement room, the party met Traven, an old Transported in workman clothes who presented himself as a benefactor and organizer for the Transported.

When the party expressed interest in maps, Traven identified a map-maker Transported who was working at a nearby logging camp.  He offered the party 300 sp if they rescued several other Transported from the same camp, and killed to camp overseer at the same time.

The party agreed to the deal and came up with a plan to poison the supplies in the weekly supply wagon, then go in to rescue the transported.  Oric is tagged to go along as a guide/identifier for the people that Traven wants.

After successfully dosing the alcohol in the supply wagon, the party traveled to the logging camp, which is where we broke for the evening.

The session started with Morwen scouting the logging camp in cat form.  She found four of the five rescue-targets, but also found evidence of a strange almost-snake creature that had been circling the camp, doing its own scouting.  The scent of it freaked cat-morwen right out.

The party had several alignment-testing discussion, concerning whether blocking doors and burning down a building full of incapacitated guards would be an acceptable method of killing one truly awful Overseer.  Eventually the group decided that while the guards were probably all bad people, and likely wouldn't be missed, the nearly fifty transported would likely be executed as a result.  There was surprisingly little moral outrage from the paladin contingent on this potential course of action… perhaps his god prefers people dead and in her realm? ;)

The other option discussed was blocking the doors and starting to burn the building down, with an offer to let the guards out if they tossed the Overseer's head out first.  It was discarded as too loud, and too likely to let the guards identify someone later.

A decision on the Overseer deferred until later, Merrin "snuck" close to the wagon under which our lame cartographer slept and brought him out to our hiding place.  Morwen and Arnik then also loudly snuck over to the tents where the other to-be-rescued transported were sleeping. The occupants of the tent awoke at the slightest of sticks cracking in the woods near their tent… perhaps there are nasty things living in the trees they're cutting down?  All but one of the desired transported were rescued.  The one who wasn't had died the week before of a snakebite.

Everyone demonstrated their basic goodness in their decision to quickly and mercilessly kill the Overseer in a targeted strike.  They blocked one door of the longhouse that the camp management were decorating with vomit, and flung the other open.  Morwen entagled almost all of them, tying them to the ground.  Merin then said a quick hello by hitting critically with a Guiding Bolt: the Overseer was ripped from his vegetable bonds and slammed against the wall in a flash of light.  Arnik followed with a swarm of shining magical arrows arrows and the overseer, briefly pinned to the wall by the afterimage of arrows, slumped to the ground.

Mission accomplished, Wrenaldo slammed the door shut and dropped a gigantic round of wood in front of the door, and the party took off back to their hiding place feeling very merciful.

Morwen healed the worst-off of the rescuees, and the party stopped to regroup and discuss how to get back to Blawtro

With a collection of angry-but-sick guards soon to be on their tails, the crew decided that making immediate tracks towards the welcoming arms of Blawtro would be a good idea.

Not very long after setting out, still feeling confident after their plan at the logging camp succeeded so nicely, they were walking near to the road as quickly as their party of exhausted slaves could manage.  The regularly observant party let their guard down and were surprised when, without warning and immediately in front of them, a collection of leaves and twigs swirled down from a tree to become a woman-shaped being.

"Who are they, traveling at night in my forest?  Are they prey or friends?" Glowing yellow eyes, and far too many teeth were nervously observed during her musing questions.

"Friends," she was quickly assured by the party, who didn't much like the response she gave: a slow toothy smile. Morwen stepped forward and spoke in Druidic, again saying "Friend."

"Ah, you speak the language of the trees.  Good.  I speak that much better than gabble-gabble monkey-talk."

Upon the party's insistence that they were not food, she suggested that there would be a price to pay for being in her forest, and for stealing some of her children's meat.  It turns out that she and her children had been scouting the camp, and were planning to eat its occupants.  Interestingly, she stepped back from Morwen, when she mentioned being able to smell her children.

After some dickering, where the suggested prices were either "Magic, or blood," Wrenaldo suggested that she might be interested in a bottle of perfume that he was carrying.  A price of information about the camp and its inhabitant's health, plus the bottle of perfume was agreed upon.

The party were given four hours of safety for the price paid, and ran for the edge of the forest.  The newly-rescued transported needed some support keeping the pace, but they made it to a patch of forest where a certain feeling of menace dropped away.  Camp was made for the night.

More care was taken while traveling the next morning, with time taken for scouting and harvesting nature's resources.  Care was taken to enter the city from various directions and at various times, so as not to form an association with a collection of recently returned Transported.

Everyone ended up at the Hanged Man, and chatting with Oleg.  He happened to have a line on an old friend, a trapper, who wanted some company to check out some ruins he'd found.  As part of the conversation, the mystery in the graveyard of about a week past came up.  Oleg was concerned, and intrigued: something may come of it.

The next day, a meeting with Traven was arranged. He heard of the success of the mission, and the fate of the overseer.  He also heard about the encounter with the being in the forest.

Traven was very concerned with the fate of the 70 or so transported who remained in the camp, and managed to convince the party to attempt a rescue.  He broke out his stash of magical things, and offered 300sp to make the trip.

After delivering the Transported to Port Tanner (and to the small village outside Port Tanner), the party took a ship back to Southfort, intending to return to Blawtro and collect their reward from Traven for rescuing the Transported from the logging camp.

Upon reaching Southfort, the party spread out to take care of their own affairs.  Arnik was able to gain access to the Colonial Governor's library and found a number of old Exploration and Survey books that detailed several interesting locations in the Southlands.

Merrick headed to the Temple of Mael, to inquire about any work he might do for the temple.  Luckily (perhaps) the Temple did have a job that needed to be done.  The Temple had accepted a contract to transfer a group of Transported to one of the trading companies in Blawtro.

Merrick, being of a suspicious and mercantile mind, decided to do more investigation as to the circumstances of this contract.  It turned out that the transported were a group of half-orcs, imprisoned in extremely dubious circumstances and likely very dangerous.  Being a stout soul, Merrick negotiated a very favorable rate to perform the task, and headed off to inspect the prisoners.

He found them in a fairly bad state.  Sick with fevers, filthy and with inadequate clothing and food.  They were also suspicious and hostile.  Luckily for Merrick, he had Wrenaldo with him, too.  Wrenaldo, a half-orc himself, is both charismatic and empathetic, and his brave conduct and healing magic quickly disarmed the simmering violence of the prisoners.

After purchasing blankets, clothes and supplies, and healing the sick prisoners, some discussion on the logistics of moving them was discussed.  The party decided on two courses of action.  First, hire a few more guards to assist in the event that the half-orcs turned hostile.  Second, try to get the active assistance of the half-orcs.

The first course of action was only partially successful.  Loria, an elven ranger, was hired, but other guards weren't available.  The second course was much more successful.  Tal and Odkirk, the de-facto leaders of the half-orcs, were convinced that the party meant them no harm after Wrenaldo volunteered to stay with the prisoners by posing as a prisoner himself.  That, combined with the food, medical care and clothing, turned the half-orcs fear and anger into respect and hope.

After equipping and supplying the half-orcs, the party sets out to escort them to Blawtro and deliver them to the Talltrees Trading Company, but with assurances that rescue will come shortly afterwards.  Loria, the parties new recruit, heads off scouting while the rest of the party travels more slowly with the main body of transported.

Camping on the first night, the group encounter a strange group of man-high lizards with extensive natural camouflage.  They sneak up on the campsite, but don't attack, although they startle Loria badly.  Morwen is able to communicate with them using Speak with Animals, and they prove to be somewhat intelligent, bargaining for food in exchange for guarding the camp at night.

The lizards also mentioned that they were on guard against the "dead tree spirits" in the vast clearcut nearby.  Luckily, no dead tree spirits appear during the night, and in the morning the group moves on.

They aren't so lucky on the second night.  Upon waking in the morning they discover that one of the half-orcs is missing.  The others don't believe that he would have left on his own, so a search begins.

After some tracking, the trail of the lost prisoner is found, heading up into the hills to the south.  Morwen, in wolf form, also encounters an odd, rancid rotting-vegetation smell in the area.  Several miles into the hills, they discover the shredded remains of the missing half-orc.  He is half-eaten and bound to a tree with tangled roots and vines.   The rotting stench is thick around the corpse.  More tracking identifies that the stench trail goes further south into the hills, but the party decides not to follow.

Everyone returns to the road after burying the remains and the group continues on to Blawtro.