The first little bit of the campaign was pretty standard faire. Each of the party members have been brought together for different reasons. The Knight is seeking glory and fame, the Rogue fortune, the pyromancer power, the loremaster information and protection on his journeys. The loremaster and cleric are the de-facto leaders of the party. Everyone trusts the Loremaster, and the Cleric has such a strong personality there's just no point in arguing with him. The rogue has been silently undermining the Cleric out of a pathological hatred of Clerics, but thanks to my policy of Mobile-phones on silent at the table at all times as well as a SMS-based dice-rolling app, the Cleric is thus far none the wiser.

So far, we managed to do player introductions and two short story arcs at this point. The players have been working for the Order of the Sun's Spear, who are a LG organization dedicated to rooting out followers of the Advent, a LE cult organization that wants to extinguish the flames keeping alive the Dawn Concordat, which divides the world between light and darkness. The first story arc concerned the party being inducted as honorary mercenaries of the Order after being found worthy due to their prior heroisms performed during character creation, the thing that granted them level 1 of a hero class. The magister that inducted them into the order actually was a sleeper agent of the Advent, and so their first several missions were actually being done to divert the Order's attention and eventually further the goals of the Advent.

After discovering that their leader was the enemy, the players foolishly chose to confront his direct superior with this information. Unfortunately, his direct superior is an incompetent bureaucrat, and the players' physical evidence wasn't enough to tie the magister to the Advent, and unfortunately the way this information was obtained actually resulted in the expulsion of the party from the Order. The Cleric foolishly attempted to cast a spell of command on the magister, and ordered him to tell the truth about his loyalties. Unfortunately, he passed the saving throw and his bluff check also succeeded for the bureaucrat, and he swore that his loyalty would always reside with his benevolent superior, the Viceroy Eddard of Yggsval (the bureaucrat). The Viceroy, in response to the outrageous affront to his subject ordered that the Cleric be seized and hanged for assault and insubordination. Meanwhile, Patches has slipped away and is robbing the Viceroy's private chamber of everything that isn't bolted down. The Knight sides with the Cleric and fucking STABS the Viceroy's manservant when he tries to seize the Cleric. The Pyromancer doesn't miss a beat and forms a fire wall between the party and the Viceroy. The loremaster throws a handful of flash powder into the fire, and the entire party sans Patches drags the cleric the fuck out of there.

The party now expelled from the Order for discovering the loyalties of the Magister beat feet into the town underworks, where later they are met by an agent who calls himself Seeker of the Righteous Fury, and introduces them to the Vigil of the Broken Oath, a pack of outlaws who claim to be seeking to complete the Dawn Concordat by completing the mission that kept Thoth, lord of fury from joining Allisara and Ygrenne in immolating himself to shelter the world from darkness. That is, to slay the last of the Wyrms so that Thoth's may return to ignite the moon into a second sun, forever beating back the darkness. This order simultaneously reveres and reviles Thoth for breaking his vow. This order often hunts down oathbreakers so that they can be brought to justice, but they also respect those who violate their oaths when confronted with a higher principle or mission. They have been spying on the Magister for some time and had agents present when the party confronted the Viceroy.

This is where shit kind of starts to go wonky, because... Well, because Patches is CN. A few sessions go on pretty good with the Order. The party goes a few sessions working on manuevering the Magister with the help of the order. They blow a few chances to catch him and the party almost gets caught a few times, but for the most part, I keep them hiding out in the lawless part of the city doing side missions while I'm struggling to write plot and move the story forward... That and Patches being Patches. Patches gets caught stealing from the Vigil of the Broken Oath and gets his hand cut off as punishment. The Cleric calls out: "I've got a spell for that!" and mends his hand. Because of the rules I wrote for mend, it was able to repair the wound because it had not scarred over and the severed body part was retrieved. (I actually wrote those rules intending to use them later for Paelomancy, the grafting of many body parts together to create divine abominations.) So now the Cleric's in trouble with the Order again for showing mercy rather than justice. The Loremaster sides with the Cleric so the rest of the party forsake their vows and leave the Vigil.

Now, at this point my storyline is completely fucked. I can't move forward with what I had planned, because all my major political players in this region are straight up trying to catch and murder the party. The party flees the city and almost dies on the road due to the players not understanding my rules for traveling... Because, you know, you need food and water, or a character that has knowledge of edible plants, or a foraging/hunting skill that doesn't involve converting empty hands into stolen coinpurses. Out of delusion due to hunger and thirst, the Loremaster starts to overestimate his knowledge on the subject of flora and fauna, and stumbles upon some mushrooms that happen to be mildly toxic and highly mind-altering. What followed was a very fragmented and confusing account, for which only Patches could give an accurate account of. The party, in a confused stupor threw all of their gold into the bog along with some of their gear and equipment. Of course, what Patches didn't tell the party is that after they passed out, Patches robbed them blind and threw some of their gear into the bog to throw them off of his trail. Meanwhile, Patches didn't mention the cheese, cram, and dried meat that was in his bag, and had himself a hearty meal before spotting a campfire in the distance with two old gypsy women sitting at it. He bartered some gold to them in exchange for traveling rations and an antidote to the poisonous mushrooms. After night fell, Patches came back to steal his gold back, but after succeeding was cursed by the Gypsies. Occasionally, when Patches wants to do something dishonest, he will now randomly blurt out his intentions prior to fulfilling them. I haven't told Patches how to break the curse or even of the source of the curse, but he simply has to go a single game session without being dishonest or acting out of pure self-interest. Trust me, he's gonna have this curse for a long, long time.