Campaign Recap — Cards From Beneath
One heavily condensed summary per session, max 5 lines each.
Numbering follows the DM's count: the one-shot is session 1. Most entries are placeholders — details pending.
Session 1
- Played as a one-shot, not as a campaign opener. It took place in a mansion.
- The party learned of cards that hold magic.
Session 2
- Into Briar Hollow: a village at the edge of an old forest where outsiders are noticed, with a long-abandoned noble estate as the hook — lights in the upper windows, sealed doors standing open, livestock missing, voices where no one should be.
- The party meets Mark and enters a house with a marking on the door.
- Percival tests the card called the Maiden, asks to be shot for it, and the wound kills him.
- Dying, he makes a deal with Valis the Feeding.
Session 3
- The party meets Liora.
- They enter a dead woman's house and contemplate killing her.
- They find a new house.
Session 4
- The old woman dies.
- The party goes to the mansion.
Session 5
- Percival is away from the table, in Lantern's Row on his own business, running the trade corridor from the city end. He left the party a note saying so.
- An accomplice hands him an envelope; the letter inside says, in substance, meet us at the abandoned chapel.
- He does not act on it this session. What the rest of the party did is not recorded.
Session 6
- The start, with the full party, is not yet recalled — to be filled in. A book is found this session.
- The session ends with an evening drink by the water: Liora, Nessa, Percival.
- Liora swims out to catch a whale and fails.
- Valis then tries to drown her; she almost drowns. Percival plays disinterested to take the fun out of it and make him stop.
Session 7
- From the Beachhouse, a card draws the party — Nessa, Liora, Percival — into the forest.
- They find a man who cannot remember what he was doing there and escort him home to another village; he is its Sheriff.
- In the village they meet Astor the Controlling, and 3 marks are given.
- A whole scene follows that the players themselves do not remember: Astor took it.
- In a tavern, he tells them about the deities and about a greater evil, a sickness they already knew of.
Session 8
- Mostly in the woods. The party finds a ritual site with three magical threads running out of it in different directions; nobody knows where any of them lead.
- They do something to the ritual, and a large tree warden crawls up out of the ground.
- It slams Percival against a tree — he had said out loud that he set a small fire in the forest before. How the encounter ended is not recorded.
Session 9
- Percival is away from the table again, and leaves the party a second note.
- He goes to the abandoned chapel in the Low Lanterns and is met by a lady speaking for the Congregation of the Hollow Star.
- She offers to help him be freed and will not say from what — his deity, this life, and the responsibility for his city all stand in the space where the answer would be.
- She hands him a vial that collects card dust. Nothing about it is explained.
Session 10
- A night's rest at the Beachhouse. Percival opens a door with the Veil, the card he carries; everything in the room behind it lies, and the window onto the beach carries no sound. He tries to jump through it, hits it, and takes 3 damage.
- They wake Gia, and Percival destroys her sandcastle for not being focused enough on solving anything. The party sets out to find a lighthouse.
- On the way they are caught in a loop that only lets them out for secrets, spoken into a stone. Percival whispers that he actually likes Gia in a friendly sense. Liora spoils hers before Gia's turn and Percival helps keep it secret, seemingly already knowing it.
- His unseen servant, left behind to watch the others, catches one thing: Onyx's hand covered in blue light that spreads over his body, and Onyx saying he shouldn't be able to do this.
- At the lighthouse Astor the Controlling hands over a note in an unidentified script, which Percival reads with Comprehend Languages: the light was built so the Beneath would not be forgotten, and only those who surrender the gift may enter the place where the First Ones fell.