Raiek Elden is Dead: a Hymns of a Vagabond Campaign Update

For months now, Adam and I have talked of starting our epic 1st edition AD&D Campaign: Hymns of a Vagabond. In it I would take a single level 1 character from a meagre beginning and try as hard as I could to grow them into a great hero of legends; using all of the expanded 1st edition rules.

After many hours of preparation on our parts (from miniatures painting to story writing), we finally played our first game. It started very strong: I was interacting with NPCs, my roleplay was on point, the story was interesting and compelling. Everything you want out of a D&D game. I even managed to survive two seperate fights taking a goblin and three bandits our in the process. But my great usccess was not without its high price. As I delivered to the killing blow to one of the final bandits, he had mortally wounded me as well... and I fell in the field as my three other comrades slew the final bandit.

And so it turned out that after all of our preparation, Hymns of a Vagabond ended on the first game.

Adam and I were a little devastated. We had put a lot of work into things, and so we desperately searched the rules for some way of resurrecting Raiek. But sadly aside from some incredibly rare artifacts or a level 16 cleric (none of these we had) it seemed impossible. Raiek was dead. He died saving his village Carthen from Bandits.

With the only player character in the game dead, we were a little at a loss for how to proceed. We figured I might die early on in this adventure, but neither of us thought it would be this early in the game. But being RPG gamers, we new there was only one thing to do: roll up a new character. And that is what we did for the rest of the evening as we discussed his back story, and relation to Carthen. Adam figured he needed a week or two to write the next stages of the game and work my character into Carthen as the story unfolds around Raiek's death.

So meet my new character:

That's right... Using the same mini.

His full name is Aeklius Flint, but he just goes by Flint. He is the the son of a gravedigger in Carthen, and much more of an outcast than Raiek was. The unusual nature of his profession He was in a rather unsavoury profession (Gravedigger) and belongs to a different religion than most of the town. And though having grown up there the people of Carthen never fully trusted him or his father.

The next game will pick up with myself, digging Raiek Elden's grave... and I am sure will spiral out of control from there.

Written by: Andrew Gregory