Leviathan's Midnight campaign

[Leviathan]

I thought it might be good to share the fact that I DM'd a relatively long Midnight campaign and, all in all, it was probably the longest and most satisfying rpg campaign I've refereed to date.  It started up in April of 2004 with 5 players, gained three more, lost three, and finally concluded in May of 2009. 

I started out with the COS storyline, and eventually weaved my own quest involving a set of powerful, arcane tomes believed to contain an epic spell thought to be capable of piercing the Veil.  No one really knew if said spell could accomplish what it was designed to do, but dark times bred desperate measures, so the quest was pursued, despite the unknowns.  The Codex of Unmaking had originally been created an age earlier and had been inadvertently scattered, and partially confiscated by the Shadow's forces, an equally long time prior to the campaign's current date.  The quest for said Codex, sub-divided into 14 volumes, allowed me to set adventures all over Eredane, as the party pursued volume after volume in an attempt to re-assemble the Codex and hopefully cast the spell that might bring salvation to the world.  Interesting characters and situations were encountered along the way and many battles and raids were played out, especially as the forces of the Shadow slowly awakened to the fact that this once trivial resistance cell eventually graduated to the level of persistent thorn. 

Of course, in a way somewhat similarly to the way Sauron never really figured out what was going on with the Ring quest until it was too late, the Order of Shadow never fully put two and two together about the party's quest until the end.  As it was, though, my group only managed to collect and hold onto 9 of the tomes by the time outside pressure forced them to attempt the great spell.  Three of the tomes were in locations simply to difficult to penetrate and they actually managed to lose three tomes they had already collected during a disastrous series of adventures in Baden's Bluff.  In retrospect, that town really proved to be bad news for my players!  Multiple Shadow aligned "hit squads" attempted to take down players over the last 3 years of the campaign, with each attempt becoming deadlier and deadlier.  At the end they gambled with what they had simply out of a belief that the next battle would be their last.

Suffice to say, the spell worked, and the Veil was indeed unmade.  The spell could've failed, or been bogus from the start, but...really...that just didn't seem appropriate for a group of persistant and heroic players who'd struggled against a very harsh world for such a long time. The world of Midnight was easily the darkest and most difficult setting we'd played in up until that time, and remains so, since that campaign concluded.  We play Pathfinder now, in another setting, and, although dangerous and evocative, it isn't Eredane.  Which is fine...I'm not sure that my players' stress levels and sanity could take another sojourn back to the lands of Midnight again, LOL!

Although the idea is tempting and I really think I could run something even better a second time around...learning from my past errors, so to speak.

L

[arnon]

Sounds cool

Tell us what happened, either in-game or your idea, once the veil came down.