First Dawn started well enough, with the characters interacting with the various residents of the kaer. Everyone had the opportunity to show off a bit of their character's background and motivations (except the ork's player who couldn't make it) which I think they all enjoyed. After that the party was gathered together for a ceremony that ended with the kaer doors being opened and the party heading out through the traps to the surface with tokens which were supposed to disable the traps for them.

At the far end of the trapped area, the party was introduced to the obsidiman that was supposed to act as their guide. Centuries ago he had volunteered to enter the kaer and enter the Dreaming through the Scourge to be able to guide its people back to the surface when the time came. The party, being told he was how they would open the kaer doors but thinking he was just a statue/key, had drag him up to the surface with the aid of a disk of True Air which levitated him and allowed him to be floated to the front antechamber. Due to the proximity to the surface awoke while the party was resting, leading to some interesting interaction.

After some discussion with the obsidimen about who he was and then ultimately what to expect outside, the adepts finally opened the front doors to the kaer and saw the destruction the Scourge had caused to the countryside. With that visual the first session ended. In hindsight it was a successful session and had hit all of the goals and themes I had set (with the exception of the missing player).

Everything went downhill from there.

Before session two began I received an email from Thok's player telling me he wouldn't be able to play in the campaign. While that was disappointing, the player had a whole lot going on and I didn't blame him for recognizing he didn't have the time and admitting it instead of trying to fit too much in to his schedule. So we continued the campaign down one player and up one NPC.

The second session began with the party exiting the kaer. After descriptions of the changed landscape and interactions with the obsidiman regarding what the land looked like before the Scourge, I wanted to finally give the players the chance to try out their characters skills in combat. Seeing as the characters were advanced, I decided to use something that wasn't quite a push over and could hint that the horrors were still present in the world but not quite as strong. My solution was a small group of tainted ogres (led by a tainted ogre twin) that had been kept alive from before the Scourge by a crystal entity which was severely weakened by the lower magic level.

It was a fairly simple concept but one which caused a couple of problems. The characters had a rough time in the initial encounter with a couple of the ogres, and even though I adjusted the creatures' stats on the fly they still faired poorly. Part of the result was due to die roll disparity and part was due to the fact that the non-melee characters (which meant everyone but the swordmaster) had fairly low Toughness scores and correspondingly low damage ratings.

Still, the characters defeated the cadaver-ogres and pulled back to rest. The characters correctly deduced the source of the creatures must be in the nearby cave and decided to investigate. As the party leader and a stealthy adept to boot, Holthan said he'd check the cave out and see what he could find. Despite Holthan's order to stay behind, Eltherin, the elf archer, decided to accompany him. I called for stealth rolls right away just to emphasis their skill levels and Holthan nearly tripled Eltherin's result as expected. Holthan's player picked up on what I was trying to subtly imply about their comparative chances of remaining quiet and in character pointed out how loud the elf was being and reiterated instructions to remain behind, but the elf refused.

As expected Eltherin was detected further inside the cave. When a single ogre came out to investigate Holthan melted into the shadows. After trying unsuccessfully to hide Eltherin decided to stand and shoot the ogre instead of running and wound up getting killed. Holthan was able to make his way back out and share the news and the party fell back to regroup. Since we had an extra NPC, Eltherin's player took over Thok. As they were recovering I had an animated Eltherin come and have the horror use him to offer the adepts safe passage if they left immediately.

Although the adepts toyed with the idea of leaving, they eventually decided they had to try to destroy the horror that lived so close to their kaer and launched a successful attack that killed the crystal entity. Afterwards the party made a crucial decision - they decided that since they had witnessed horrors still active in the world their mission was complete and they should return to the kaer, inform the council, and reseal themselves in.

And thus, the campaign was quickly sidetracked by the combination of a number of issues.

• Poor choice of enemies. Although I wanted to show the party horrors were still around, I should have done so further into the campaign with weaker enemies. Doing so would have allowed the party to see non-horror opposition then meet horror-backed opposition that was in some ways weaker, meaning manageable by adepts.
• Untimely party death. The world of Earthdawn is dangerous, and I'm always afraid pulling punches will cheapen the experience. Still I won't kill characters over crappy die rolls, but the elf's player realized how powerful the enemies were and ignored the opportunity (and urgings from his fellow players) to flee so I let the dice fall where they may.
• Misuse of Earthdawn themes. If you fight a horror, loose a party member, and flee to seek refuge nearby, it's entirely in genre for a horror to animate the corpse of your former friend and use it to torment and dishearten you. However I did so when the party's courage was already fading and it just served to help push them to the decision to conclude their mission over and return home, claiming it was far to dangerous out. Bad move on my part.

When the party decided to return the kaer, I couldn't say I blamed them. Although perhaps not the most heroic of options, it was certainly in-character to judge the world too dangerous after losing a party member just a day out of the kaer. Still as they made this decision I saw my campaign starting to go down the drain. All of the areas I had created for them to explore and the descriptions I wanted to provider weren't going to see use. Sure it would have been possible for the kaer council to turn the party around and say "go back out, you're not done" but the ogre encounters wound up lasting through the third session of what was planned to be a six-session campaign. Sending them back out meant either rushing the campaign or greatly expanding it past the idea length so I decided to push the timeline and have the final scenario with the kaer's denizens being sacrificed as the party returned.

Hindsight being what it is I made a bad choice. Even besides the way the campaign got sidetracked I had become frustrated with how the game was going - I was far from satisfied with the quality of my gamemastering and was angry at myself for not doing better with it. My frustration soon became apathy towards campaign, and some of the final encounters that should have been exciting and filled with entertaining descriptions turned into rather dull die rolls and narrations.

I'm ashamed to say that eventually I looked at the party and expressed my inability to conclude the game on a high note - they were chasing the final big bad through the kaer but I just couldn't give them the final encounter they deserve. Then for some reason Saultydog asked if I wanted him to take over. Figuring I had nothing to loose I agreed. He handed me his character sheet and I passed him the core book. After taking a few minutes to gather his thoughts and jot down some numbers, S-dog launched into us cornering the elf and having the horror emerge to be dealt with.

There was a difference between Saultydog's version and mine, though - he was immediately excited and his excitement was contagious. Because S-dog didn't have any expectations of what should have been, he was able to take a fresh perspective on the current encounter and make it cool on its own. Even I was sucked in and quickly began plotting a way to defeat the horror dramatically without just knocking of hit point after hit point. A running fight, battle-alchemy, and a chase through the kaer finally culminated in dropping the horror in a bottomless pit that was part of one of the traps the party had passed on their initial trip out of the kaer - all scenes we collaboratively built entirely from my initial description of the overgrown kaer when the expedition had returned and Saultydog's enthusiasm.

After the last encounter we had a post-game discussion. I confessed my frustration and then when asked went through the plot as it was intended to be. The reactions I got from the players assured me that had we gone through the intended story line, it would have been a fantastic game - they loved the encounters, plots, and how they tied into their character backgrounds. But hearing that was bittersweet - while it meant my creation was appreciated, it also meant the difference between teh awesum and teh suk was that great.

As disappointed as I was with the whole First Dawn experience, I did learn a valuable lesson. The Gamemaster's enthusiasm towards his game is paramount in allowing him to entertain the players successfully. I absolutely should have done one of two things - either realize that while my initial concept was cool a new plot could be just as entertaining and run with it, or break down and meta-game with the players, explaining how their decision to return would derail the campaign and ask what in-game events could help dissuade their characters and get them to change their minds. Instead my stubbornness and reluctance to meta-game combined with my frustration at what should have been killed my enthusiasm and led to substandard gamemastering. It's a mistake I intend not to repeat... assuming I can convince the group to let me behind the screen again.

Unfortunately during the second session I let the campaign take a sharp left turn away from my intent and things only went downhill from there. I primarily blame myself for this, but afterwards I just couldn't get the story back on track. I'm going to try and identify the problems I had and what I could have done to correct them below. However in order to convey the magnitude of diversion from the intended story and feel I first need to start with a description of the campaign as it was intended to be.

As detailed in my first blarg on the campaign we did character generation as a group, and as part of character generation we started building the setting that was Kaer Southhome. What I mentioned in that blarg but didn't expound on was how well the collaborative story fit with my intended plot.

The only background I started with when setting up this campaign was to have two sister kaers at either ends of a valley (geographically isolating the area and containing the campaign). The characters would leave one to check on the other only to discover the northern kaer had been broken out of and all the inhabitants had been killed in a complex ritual. They would find clues alluding to something similar about to happen in their own kaer and rush back in time to stop the ritual and save the kaer and its inhabitants. It was a simple plot to say the least, but once the players got in to character generation, it began growing in complexity:

Before the Scourge, the valley (which was never really named in-game) was governed by a family of elves who protected its denizens (many of their elders had mastered magician Disciplines) and had negotiated with the Therans for the Rituals of Protection. However wards against the horrors had come too late, and the primarch of the elven family had already been tainted. Using knowledge granted to him by his horror master, the elf devised a plan to use the life force of the inhabitants of the valley to open the way for his master to enter the physical realm.

With the Scourge approaching quickly there wasn't enough time to corrupt the entire valley and perform the ritual before the denizens retreated below ground, so the elf expanded a plan. The horror was patient and saw no need to manifest during the Scourge proper. Instead he would be summoned closer to the end of the Scourge when he would not need to compete for survival with the other Horrors.

Through the elf the Horror carved an intricate ritual on twin orichalcum slabs. Together servant and master then corrupted another of the eldest of elves and as the Scourge approached, each elf - now a Harbinger of the horror - took one slab into the two kaers that the people of the valley had constructed. In addition the elves used their influence as headmen of their kaers to alter the Naming Rituals the inhabitants used on each newborn. Every child ingested a seed from a tainted Cherin plant which was supposedly meant to symbolize the seed of hope within each Namegiver for the time they could return to the surface, but instead had a darker purpose. Every generation the harbingers selected a successor from his family and passed on the horror's corruption until the day it was time to summon their master into the physical realm.

As the time approached in Kaer Southhome Laelaron Lightfeather, that kaer's current Harbinger (and the PC Eltherin's father), need a reason to gather the kaer's inhabitants in one location and trick them in remaining passive long enough to complete the ritual. The plan was as follows:

1. Organize an expedition to the surface to determine the status of the Scourge. This would occupy a number of the kaer's adepts, insuring they wouldn't be able to interfere with his plans. Laelaron wasn't able to convince the council to send the most powerful adepts out, but he'd settle for what he could get (the PCs).
2. Conspire with one of the kaer's nethermancers (the PC Thok) to help frame Torvis Sternhand (the one human on the kaer council of elders) to accuse him of horror taint.
3. Once the adept expedition had left the kaer, accuse Torvis of taint publicly with the support of the elves, who would be under the impression it was just a maneuver to gain the Torvis' pivotal seat for themselves.
4. At Torvis' execution and the elevation of the newest councilmen to replace him, enact a ritual that would awaken the corrupted Cherin seeds each kaer member had ingested during their Naming.
5. The seeds would spout forth and mass together, creating a tainted conglomeration that would channel the combined lifeforce of the kaer's inhabitants into a specially prepared orichalcum cage, which would then be combined with the lifeforce of the opposite kaer (who's similar sacrifices was being coordinated by that kaer's harbinger) to summon the horror.

As the adepts explored the valley, their primary clues would come from messages Jaspree was attempting to send them in response to the corruption of his domain (plantlife) being used to summon the horror. A shared vision of the past would have a friendly elderly gardener of a village give the characters information that would lead them to seeing the orichalcum tablets and a perverse grimoire in the possession of one of the Lightfeather ancestors. They would also witness a Naming Ritual from the time that didn't include the ingesting of a Cherin seed (that part of the plan hadn't been formulated yet). Considering denizens of the kaer would have been told that the current naming ritual is the same that has been used since before the valley was settled, this should raise some questions.

Later after the vision they would find the remains of an enchanted grove choked over with tainted brambles. Clearing away the brambles and purifying the fountain in the small temple to Jaspree at the center of the grove would reveal a carving of the Passion that looked just like the gardener from the vision. In addition anyone drinking from the blessed fountain would begin retching within minutes, eventually coughing up the tangle of black vines that was the Cherin seed from their Naming Ritual. The PCs wouldn't know what that meant right away and might even scare them, but if they were astute they may start to piece things together.

Eventually the characters would arrive at Kaer Northhome and find it overgrown with similar tainted plantlife as the grove of Jaspree, including odd-shaped cocoons containing the kaer's denizens. Exploration would turn up that kaer's harbinger's orichalcum slab, which would reveal the purpose of the plants, where the denizens were (if they didn't already carve open a cocoon to look), that it was all part of a ritual to harvest life force to summon a horror, and that the ritual was to be duplicated in their own kaer for the summoning to be complete. At that point the PCs would have to race back to their kaer to save its inhabitants. I had a number of ways to handle the finale, but it all was going to depend on how the players had reacted to different aspects of the story along the way.

So that was the plan for First Dawn in an (admittedly large) nutshell. I had high hopes for this game and had plenty of visuals and descriptions I wanted to give the players of the post-Scourge landscape but unfortunately fate decided it was not to be and the campaign got derailed early on, as my next blarg will detail.

After giving the group the rundown of life in the Kaer and the different races and disciplines that they might have to choose from, everyone came up with their general character concepts. From there we began fleshing out backgrounds and motivations, tying the characters together while at the same time developing the Kaer where the game would start. Before the character generation session I had known what sort of overarching plot I wanted for the campaign, but I hadn't imagined that the players would hand me the perfect vehicle to make it personal for them during character generation.

As it turns out, the racial tension is thick within Kaer Southhome. Of the five seats in the council of elders, two are occupied by dwarves, two by elves, and one by a human. The elves of Southhome live luxuriously with their small private community. Although pompous and condescending to much of the kaer's population, they controlled enough of the Kaer's resources to force the residents to deal with them for survival.

Meanwhile the dwarves were attempting to run an efficient, well-organized settlement. Unfortunately that meant allowing the general populous a more direct access to certain resources than the elves were willing to allow, leading to a conflict of interests.

Balance was maintained in the kaer by the single seat on the Council of Elders occupied by neither elf nor dwarf. While the dwarves accepted this arrangement and begrudgingly worked with it, the elves resented the situation and conspired to change it. The elves planned to frame Torvis, the human councilman, of Horror taint in such a way to imply that the dwarves were aware of the matter. They'd then use the support of the residents of the kaer to immediately replace the human and as many dwarves as they could.

The plot elements are pretty basic - a bid for power by one demographic in a culturally segregated setting - but the way the plot was created piece by piece based solely on information provided by each player when they answered questions about their characters' backgrounds and personalities really drew it all together and made it personal to each character even more than I had initially expected. For example the elven elitism came from the the elf character's player deciding he was going to play up his arrogance, then the rest of the group working together to determine why the elves of the kaer were so arrogant to begin with. Each question led into more exposition on the kaer until suddenly we had a plot. In addition by generating the character stats myself I was able to give each character strengths and flaws that I would be able to emphasize during the adventure.

These are the characters that we wound up with for this campaign:

Eltherin, elven archer. Eltherin is the son of one of the elven members of the Council of Elders and has lived with all the comforts his linage would imply. He's only recently met the other members of the group, but his arrogance has already been noted by his traveling companions. Eltherin was assigned to the group by his father as a way to insure his interests were represented in the group.

Glenna, dwarven swordmaster. Glenna is more devoted toward the blade mastery side of the discipline than the social gallantry. Her master, Garas, found her at a young age and offered to teach her the discipline as a way to get her out of trouble and off the streets. Both Holthan and Thok were part of the trouble-causing element she was lured away from, which angered them as children. Now a competent swordmaster, Glenna volunteered for the expedition to the surface as a means to prove herself.

Thok, ork nethermancer. Thok is one of two nethermancers in Kaer Southhome, which is two more than any other residents would like for there to be. The ork's lack of social graces does nothing to overcome this resentment, a fact he is aware of but doesn't care to address. Only days before the expedition, Thok "accidentally" killed an Illusionist and joined the expedition to get out of the kaer before it's discovered he was the murderer. Only Holthan, his childhood friend, is aware of his motivation for joining the group.

Holthan, human journeyman. Holthan is the group leader by default - the dwarves on the Council of Elders refused to allow an elf to lead the expedition, the elves on the council refused to allow a dwarf to lead the expedition, and no one wanted a nethermancer in charge. Holthan has assumed leadership reluctantly, although his protective nature lends itself to the role.

I'd love to comment on just how everything the players created fit into the campaign's plot, but I don't want to spoil any of the surprises for the players yet. Suffice it to say that I was very happy with how character generation worked out for the group.

Our first actual play session was this past Sunday, but unfortunately Ravious came down with bronchitis at the last minute. By the time I found out one of our players was already half way into his hour drive so the decision was made to go on without him. I don't want to recount the entire session here - that's what the campaign wiki is for - but I can offer up my comments on how the game ran.

I wasn't 100% thrilled with my gamemastering this time around. I really wanted to improve my descriptions and in a couple particular instances evoke specific emotions, but I don't think I was as successful at either as I wanted. I still concentrated too hard on what I wanted to be happening and less on the overall look and feel of each particular scene. The players seemed to express that they had a good time once the game got rolling but I'm just not satisfied with how I ran the game.

It never seems to fail - I plan out what I want to do and have some descriptions in mind, but once I sit down at the table I choke. It's like I rush through the descriptions so that we can get to the next part of the game, whatever that may be. And that's really a flaw in my opinion. The GM's descriptions can really go a long way towards setting the stage and mood of a scene that if I wind up not fully expressing something, the players miss out on whatever I skimp on.

I hope that next session will be better. The characters are out of the kaer now, and I'm going to try and use collaborative scene building some more to try to help flesh each scene out more than I seem to be capable of doing on my own. We'll see come Sunday.