Forgotten Realms Remembered

Campaign Overview

Themes & Setting

Noblebright

Despite challenges and dangers, there is an underlying theme of optimism. Good outweighs evil in the world, but evil exists and can pose meaningful threats. Heroes are heroic not just because of their abilities, but also because of their virtues. Villains, while formidable, can often be redeemed or might even serve a greater purpose. Expect high heroism, moral and ethical dilemmas, acts of self-sacrifice, and moments of triumph over darkness.

Arcanopunk

The world is developing a blend of magic and technology. Magic powers trains, illuminates cities, enables communication, and more. The world has a fusion of Victorian, steampunk, and cyberpunk elements suffused with a magical essence. Devices and constructs powered by crystal energy or inscribed with magical runes are commonplace. "Hackers" exist — individuals skilled at manipulating or breaking the magical codes that drive society.

Crystalcore

Crystals play a fundamental role in technology and magical practices. Specially cut crystals can focus the magic of the weave in more precise and controlled ways than a magic user can alone. Crystal-based technology ranges from basic tools and weapons to transportation, communication, healthcare, and energy production.

The Forgotten Realms

The world of Toril is on the cusp of entering a new age of arcano-technology and democratic governance. While this is great for the common folk, entrenched institutions and powerful people are not happy with the democratization of the world and the empowering of the people through technology.

Inspiration: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power

The Netflix animated series influences the campaign's tone. Princess Adora / She-Ra and her fellow princesses represent noblebright forces of good. The blend of magic and technology on Etheria reflects the arcanopunk vibe. Crystals — especially runestones and the Heart of Etheria — echo the crystalcore theme.

Session Log

Arc 1: Candlekeep, First Steps

Sessions 1–2

• Litany made their name in Baldur's Gate by driving out Nine Fingers Keen's protection and gambling racket. They protected the Elfsong Tavern; the owner, Alan Alyth, sold it to them and retired. This gave the group renown across the southern Sword Coast.
• Received a summons from Keates Latimer, 1st of 8 Great Readers of Candlekeep, to journey there and get details from Capt. Kale Linton of the Avowed (leader of the elite Emerald Gate Brigade).
• Investigated the disappearance of Professor Fistandia. Found a magical book in her office containing a permanent Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion (entry word: "Serendipity"). Explored the mansion in a pocket of astral space. Discovered high-level devils had broken in, fought Fistandia, and kidnapped her. Met homunculi (Cumen and Corriander), fae dragons (Kenzie and Chloe), and a book elemental. Found and killed an imp named Archie, who warned he'd return to life in Baator.

Sessions 3–4

• Learned Fistandia was "arrested" on orders from Primus (god of Law), who directed Asmodeus to hold her for crimes relating to time travel and interdimensional actions. Discovered this through the Erudite Outfitter shopkeeper (an acolyte of Asmodeus) and a broker who arranged a meeting with the archdevil Lascivious.
• Met Lascivious in The Eighth City Services building (a skyscraper in Baator). The Deal: Orianna agreed to kill Little One within a week (Lascivious claimed he'd done bad things) in exchange for Fistandia's bail. Fistandia was released, abjured from using magic, and retreated into her mansion-book. Litany carries the book.
• Told Keates they found out what happened to Fistandia, but withheld details about the bail. The party is suspicious of Keates after finding Fistandia's notes implicating him. Keates publicly praised Litany at the Festival of Remembrance and declared them "open for adventuring" — the party believes this was to keep them busy.
• Discovered Little One was actually good (manipulated by Lascivious). Contracted Shauvra, a cleric of Oghma, to Revivify him after the kill. The loophole worked — Lascivious was outsmarted and vowed revenge. Litany owes Shauvra two favors.
• Rescued Marcus Wendell from cultist kidnappers. Found a note: "Find the Wendell boy, capture him, wait for instructions." Cultists bore a tattoo of a moving mouth surrounded by crawling tentacles beneath a crescent moon. Identity unknown.
• Met with Vera Washington about Keates's possible involvement in the kidnapping. She was skeptical but wants the party to keep investigating.
• Connected with Amelia (Avowed member) whose brother Jontu lives in the Cloakwood with Lily the witch.

Session 5

• Delivered Jontu's note to Amelia — he disapproves of Candlekeep's direction and doesn't like that she's an Avowed. Amelia hopes to reconcile.
• Discovered Coast2Coast, a social media platform (like Twitter) on the Arcane Internet spanning the Sword Coast. Based on industrialization of the Message spell. Accessed through crystal-based comms devices (arcanotech smartphones with Minor Illusion screens). Keates is a savvy user; Vera is not. The party created accounts: Ben made an "alt Keates" troll account, Saturn made an earnest account under his real name, Orianna created a non-real-persona account, and they made a group Litany account.
• Sought reinforcements from Capt. Kale for the trip to Lily's hut. He provided 2LT Jim Basil — green but capable, very formal, eager to please.
• Visited Lily in the Cloakwood. She revealed an empowered fey form (elongated arms, claws, eerily attractive). The party tried to signal they wanted a placebo for Marcus's charisma potion — unclear if she complied. Marcus drank it and started acting differently. Lily warned about cultists nearby (two weeks) and corrupted animals/plants near their lair. Left Marcus with Lily and Jontu (Marcus shows romantic interest in Jontu; Lily mentioned she's polyamorous).
• Found the cultist lair (cave). Jim scouted — found two guards and a tripwire. Ben used Minor Illusion (aberrant cricket sound) and Mage Hand (snapped branch) to lure guards into a tree; they fell and Jim slit their throats. Jim seemed to enjoy it more than expected.

Session 6

• Entered the cultist cave. Combat-heavy session. The cultists were CKU washouts — seemingly good kids who had been corrupted. Their leader was powerful but unidentified.
• Found Matreus, Fistandia's assistant (a flumph), being sacrificed. Negotiated his release. The cultists let the party leave with Matreus.
• Killed one cultist kid who was equivocating — could have been turned.
• Recovered an encrypted journal from the cult leader containing documentation connecting Keates to the cult.
• Jim Basil went into a violent frenzy during the fight, seemed to genuinely enjoy it, then snapped back to normal.
• The cave was not fully explored. The cult remains intact and operational.
• A clutch natural 20 involving Saturn saved the party from a dire outcome.
• Loot: Carpet of Flying, Dagger of Venom.
• Matreus is now safe inside Fistandia's book.
• Party reached a milestone — now Level 4.

Session 7

• Camped at the edge of Lily's alarm ward (~600 yards from her hut). During rest, Ben was ambushed on watch by a cultist who had followed them. Formidable fight; party was victorious. Loot: +1 cursed dagger. A scrying orb watched the combat.
• Jim slipped away in the morning, magnetically drawn to other lycanthropes. Lily scryed on him — safe, with unidentified people in a hex adjacent to the cultist hex.
• Visited Lily. She told the party the cult is good kids being manipulated by an elder being or human or both. The polycule between Lily, Jontu, and Marcus Wendell is official.
• Found Jim at Moonbrook, a lycanthrope outcast settlement (~20 people) led by Cullive Ironhouse (old hippie stoner, cool). Met Poine Leafwing (half-elf, recently turned, on a diplomatic mission from Kale to the goblins) and Daud Gravewalker (quiet lookout). The lycanthropes told the party Keates is scapegoating them for political purposes.
• Visited Hammered and Inked in Candlekeep. Turstin Mudteeth (biker-goth tortle, redneck accent, goth assistants) revealed CKU washouts are arriving with 1,000 GP in hand to buy cult tattoos: Message cantrip + once-per-day advantage on an attack, normally 1,000 GP. Someone is bankrolling them. Turstin offered Litany magic tattoos at 500 GP — he follows them on Coast2Coast.
• Nine Fingers Keen has come to Candlekeep from Baldur's Gate and is running a protection racket targeting Hammered and Inked. Crime is rising in CK.
• Encountered a speciesist guard entering Candlekeep — Keates's anti-lycanthrope / anti-goblin rhetoric is filtering into the ranks.
• Delivered letters: Marcus Wendell came out as bi to his father Barnard, who responded warmly (had butler James take dictation). Jontu's sister Amelia received a cordial letter and made peace with their political differences.
• Gave Jim a glowing review to Capt. Kale. Briefed Kale on the cult, CKU pipeline, and the Idiot Devourer. Election in one week. Joint audience with Vera and Keates scheduled.
• Next: Litany plans to enter Fistandia's mansion (the book) to explore and check in with Fistandia.

Session 8

• Entered Fistandia's mansion. Fistandia briefed the party from her study — magically exhausted, wrapped in a blanket, cold tea at her elbow. She built a scrying portal in the basement to watch Avelin Halisera. The portal also transports through time (chaotically) — this is why the gods punished her. The portal overextended her magical reserves.
• An aberrant creature attacked Fistandia in the night. She cracked her Primus-imposed abjuration under duress to fight it with magic (like a parent lifting a car off a child). She wounded it and drove it into the lower level, sealing the door behind it. The abjuration snapped back harder — she now has no magic at all, possibly for days.
• Fistandia is science/research-driven and dispassionate about her sentient creations (Cumen, Corriander). She said she is studying Sehanine only because she cares about Avelin — the research is personal, not theological.
• Fistandia lent the party a sapphire pendant necklace with a 3D etching of Avelin's face — casts Revivify 1/day (requires the 300 GP diamond). She expects it returned.
• She gave the party 2 Scrolls of Phasing (pass through any door/barrier not guarded by 8th-level magic) and asked them to clear the creature from the basement.
• During the briefing, monster sounds were heard from the 1st level — a second, smaller creature had gotten upstairs. It made the lights flicker as it moved. Party tracked it to the library on the west side.
• Fight: An aberrant creature (body horror, described as The Thing from the movie). Party defeated it. Post-fight: slime trail from the creature, pieces of Fistandia's clothing inside its body (it was hunting her specifically), and a cultist insignia found inside it (purpose TBD — links the cult to the aberrant attack).
• Followed the slime trail to the stone stove in the kitchen, where they discovered a secret path to the basement. Path was too small for the full party, so they burned one Scroll of Phasing to bypass. 1 scroll remaining.
• Basement discoveries: a laboratory with experiments, a portal schematic (can't decipher yet), a power room with 10 crystal batteries from Lantan (6 depleted), a separate terrarium/aquarium schematic showing a planar window (different project from the portal), and a specimen room.
• In the specimen room, the party saw a lunar elven woman (appearing to be Avelin) being attacked by mimics. They engaged immediately. The real threat was a shapeshifting Mind Flayer-type creature — the "Avelin" was its disguise/lure. It took control of Orianna during the fight and forced her to Guiding Bolt Ben. Fight was close but party prevailed.
• Ben cast Shatter during the fight, breaking open specimen cages. 6 quasits escaped and are now loose in the mansion.
• Session ended mid-dungeon — party is in the basement specimen room. 6 quasits running around upstairs. Fistandia and the homunculi are on the 1st level.

Session 9

• The Mind Flayer puppet. The Mind Flayer corpse twitched and spoke — another voice using its dead lips. The speaker mocked Keates as a puppet who has no idea who he serves, confirmed he had been watching the party since the Cloakwood (the scrying orb during Ben's ambush in Session 7 was him), and named Ben specifically when describing the cultist kid Litany killed in Session 6. Then the body slumped and oily black smoke poured out.
• The quasits, multiplying. Twelve quasits had escaped specimen cages (more than initially thought), loose throughout the mansion. Mostly chaos and demon ichor everywhere. Low threat. Matreus volunteered to handle the upstairs while the party explored further.
• The Sehanine sphere. Through a translucent opalescent barrier, the party entered an extraplanar space Fistandia had built in her basement — an embassy of Sehanine, the Moonweaver. Demons would not approach the aura. Inside, peace; Orianna (cleric of Sehanine) was granted her spell slots back. A telepathic message: "Please show respect and remove your shoes, this is a holy place."
• Pathiel, Herald of Sehanine. A planetar approached — feminine androgynous, bald, teal skin radiating with a platinum glow, sheer Roman silk toga. Pathiel explained the sphere is a window into Bytopia, Sehanine's domain, superimposed on the room. Why Fistandia built it, Pathiel did not say. (When Ben suggested killing the demons and Kain pushed back, the party heard a feminine giggle. Sehanine has opinions.)
• The rainbow puzzle. Outside the sphere, a disk on the floor with seven stones that lit up when struck with magic. The party solved a sequencing puzzle and were teleported deeper into the mansion's astral architecture.
• The Hound of Tindalos. Teleport landed on a platform floating in an astral void, with a portal at its center. A Hound of Tindalos — drawn by the portal's time-travel aspect — was waiting. The fight nearly killed the party. Ben got the killing blow, and as the hound evaporated into lower dimensions, he pulled a tesseract-style gem out of its body. Properties unknown.
• Kain's vision through the portal. Kain looked into the portal and saw the future: a stone room marked with Candlekeep iconography, cultists ringing a hole in the floor that opened into a galaxy, hundreds of bound captives having their throats cut in parallel. The galaxy opened. A Lovecraftian horror burst out, tentacles and teeth. The scene shifted to Candlekeep's Court of Air, where the ground tore open and even larger horrors emerged, with hundreds of "Thing"-like aberrations attacking citizens and wearing them as skin suits. The portal went black. The party intuited what they had just seen.
• Returning upstairs. Matreus had been overcome — took out a few quasits, was incapacitated by the rest. Quasits had reached the upper floor. Ben ripped one in half cleanly. Kain failed his DEX save against a popped-balloon ichor splash and grew a second head: another Kain brain, controllable, lasting two days. (Effects: advantage and +4 on INT checks, advantage on Perception, disadvantage on social.)
• Fistandia, fallen. Fistandia was unconscious, tended to by Arthur (the book elemental, who chose this name — Marge was a name Fistandia had only written about him, never told him), Matreus, and the homunculi. Beside her, a bag of gems worth 10,000 GP and a note: she knew she was about to pass out from the sickness of overcoming Primus's magic and wanted Litany to have these resources to "save the world." Party laid her in her bed where she's safe.
• Out of the book. Spurred by Kain's vision, the party left the mansion to check on Candlekeep. They emerged into their inn room at the Hearth and House of Rest. The city is still standing. The vision was the future, not now.

Session 9 — Downtime

• Saturn took public-speaking lessons from Capt. Kale. Long-running thread: Kale has been asking Saturn to give an inspiring address to the cadets. Saturn finally asked for help. Kale gave the standard advice (no filler words, project from the chest, smile, "I'll get back to you" beats inventing answers). Saturn rolled to internalize it — natural 20. Saturn now has advantage on Persuasion checks for the rest of the campaign. The address itself is still pending.
• Kain decrypted the encrypted journal using his temporary INT bump from the second-head mutation. The cipher was a Vigenère; frequency analysis revealed the codeword "DEMOCRACY IS FOR CHUMPS". Decrypting a few pages a day across the book, Kain confirmed the cult's true patron is Nyarlathotep — named explicitly in Keates's own writing — and that Keates believes himself the deity's patron, reveling in his ability to control an Eldritch power. Litany now knows who their real adversary is. Nyarlathotep, in turn, has taken interest in Litany.
• Orianna and Ben investigated the Candlekeep sewers. Working theory: Nine Fingers Keen has a lair down there, and "the work beneath" might be too. Orianna asked Trun Dreamdew (who skims Little One's till) for a criminal contact. Persuasion failed — the ask landed Steve Buscemi-style — but Trun read between the lines and walked them down anyway.
• The bandit lair. Met Zeke (Ezekiel) and Doberman (insists Doberman is his "callsign"), and the gang's bookkeeper / criminal jeweler Avi (introduced anime-style by light glinting off his glasses). Avi offered Litany a job: 5,000 GP in actual gems — or 10,000 GP in Non-Fungible Digital Gems, a freshly invented scam product the gang is rolling out — to investigate something taking the gang's new sewer recruits. Orianna accepted the actual-gems version.
• Identifying the tesseract gem went badly. Ben asked Avi to ID the gem from the Hound of Tindalos. Avi's enchanted Identify-loupe forced an INT save against the gem; he failed and dropped unconscious. Orianna healed him. He came around babbling about "worlds within worlds, melting geometries, feelings of terror and ecstasy" — recovered fast ("What a rush, man!") and acknowledged Litany are operating well above his pay grade. The gem is dangerous to identify directly. Properties still unknown.

Deep Lore

The Defense of Candlekeep (10 Years Ago)

Ten years before the start of the campaign, the Red Wizards of Thay launched an assault on Candlekeep. Three archmages — Fistandia, Lily, and a third mage specializing in holy magic (identity unknown to the party; a cleric and High Priestess of the Moonweaver) — worked together to raise a magical shield around the city. The shield held long enough for Candlekeep's forces to organize and repel the Red Wizards. This event cemented Fistandia's reputation at the university and is part of Lily's history, though she has since withdrawn to the Cloakwood. The defense was funded by merchant Barnard Wendell. The third archmage is missing by choice.

Key Deities

Oghma — God of knowledge. Shauvra is his cleric.

Sehenine, the Moonweaver — Moon deity. The third archmage is her High Priestess. Has a significant role in the broader campaign cosmology.

The Idiot Devourer — The party's name for a powerful entity apparently stronger than the gods. The cult appears to serve it. Bad decision to mess with. Doesn't care about you if you don't mess with it. Litany has briefed Capt. Kale on its existence.

Party Loot (Session 9)

Outstanding Commitments

• Stop the future Kain saw — the cult's gate-ritual under Candlekeep, the galaxy-hole sacrifice, the horror erupting from the Court of Air
• Bring Keates's decrypted journal evidence to Vera Washington — the election is one week away
• Joint audience with Vera and Keates — debriefing scheduled
• Decrypt the rest of the encrypted journal — a few pages a day from where Kain left off
• Identify what the tesseract gem actually is (safely)
• Investigate the disappearing recruits in the Candlekeep sewers — Avi's job, 5,000 GP in gems
• Saturn's address to Capt. Kale's Avowed cadets — lessons taken, address still pending
• Cult tattoo money trail — who is bankrolling the CKU washouts with 1,000 GP each?
• Cultist cave — partially explored, cult intact and operational
• Nine Fingers Keen — protection racket in Candlekeep, crime rising
• Two uncalled favors owed to Shauvra (cleric of Oghma)
• Little One's soul — uncertain whether the resurrection loophole truly satisfied the infernal contract
• Lascivious has vowed revenge
• Archie Gimblebarb — reforming on the River Styx as an upgraded devil, will return
• Frozen devils in Fistandia's mansion will eventually thaw
• Fistandia is unconscious; she will need care when she wakes (and her trial before Primus is still pending)
• Return Avelin's sapphire pendant to Fistandia eventually
• Keates's anti-lycanthrope / anti-goblin political campaign — speciesism filtering into the guard ranks
• Rescue Matreus (complete — safe in Fistandia's book)
• Tell Amelia that Jontu is okay (complete — letters exchanged, peace made)
• Help Marcus visit Lily in the Cloakwood (complete — living with Lily and Jontu)
• Marcus comes out to Barnard (complete — warmly accepted)
• Report on Jim Basil to Capt. Kale (complete — glowing review)
• Brief Kale on the cult and the Idiot Devourer (complete)