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Old 06-12-2017, 06:59 AM   #126
Lord_Bigot
 
Join Date: Jun 2017
Default Re: GURPS Community Campaign & Adventure Repository

GURPS Fury of the Gods:

I ran a campaign online for a while.
It was good while it lasted, but I may need better methods of screening people online in the future to ensure they can actually commit to a scheduled game.



This was the arc I got through.

The players begin, ordinary folk living in a dwarven town. However, the town is unguarded. The guardsmen have gone missing under mysterious circumstances, and the town is unprotected. The players slowly uncover what happened:

A farmer in the area spotted a pair of orcs in the area, and ran to the town for help. Knowing the threat these creatures pose, the town guard brought most of their trained forces in to find and neutralize the threat, leaving only a skeleton crew behind. The small army was led into a trap, in which at least 3 cultists activated a ritual circle, destroying town guard and orcs alike in a continuous blast of destructive energy. This circle was just left going, and the cultists just ditched the place. However, there are clues left behind that they are planning an act of regicide, and that their squad leader is far from human.

Encouraged by the only surviving member of the guard, a mage who was just barely outside the range of the blast (he lost half his left hand), the players race to the capitol to inform the city protectors, only to find them disbelieving, rude, and racist to all non-dwarves (especially elves). In town however, they take part in some local affairs that should give them the influence to be heard.


I never got to the next part. The adventure before this is fairly on rails, leaving little room to maneuver. However, it was close to reaching the point the real adventure was meant to begin. The leader of the protectors, bound to the king, is forced to cordially invite them to a private meeting with him. The king, knowing what they are like, refuses to have any of the guard in the nearby rooms and chambers, trusting the security of a palace deep underground with theoretically only one entrance. The king gives a brief exposition to remind the players that dwarven lines of rulership work in the title always being passed down to someone the former king declared to be the most moral and worthy of the line of succession. He explains that his current person he has nominated in the event of his untimely death would be the current leader of the town guard. However, he does not trust them with such power. He wants to ask the PCs if they have a single leader among them who they unanimously agree would be a good choice.
This meeting is called in to be a banquet. Servants have been coming to place trays of food on the table, and yet despite the table being only half-full, they have stopped coming. And some light-grey smoke is trailing from the doors to the kitchen. This is not natural smoke. And then, darting from the doorway, a cloaked figure in a silver mask shaped like a giant eye with a hand pressed to either side will run from the kitchens, and assassinate the king right in front of the party. They get a brief moment to try and fight him, but metal weapons pass harmlessly through him, and all spells cast at him arc and are absorbed by his gauntlet.

This scene defines the entire rest of the adventure. The commander of the protectors becomes queen, declaring war on the elves, and sending out search parties of hundreds of righteous soldiers who genuinely believe in her across the countryside searching for her. The players may soon discover that the group responsible for the assault on the town and similar attacks across the surface is just a splinter group of a far larger organisation, which has organised a war as a smokescreen for their plotted razing of half the surface. The leader of this cult, and indeed the source of all the power they wield, including resurrection, is in the strangest of forms. And the reason that the gods have allowed this to happen completely redefines the way sentience, and psi, should be viewed in this setting.


Even a perfect god could only shape one aspect of the world. But a perfect man, could shape every aspect of a god.
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