Myriad: City of Tiers Campaign Report - Session #8

What: Myriad: City of Tiers, an adventure for 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons

Premise: Originally created for magical research, Myriad disappeared and has been lost to civilization for centuries. Its recent reappearance has spurred interest in creating trade relations and exchanging information to learn more about its absence and possible hidden powers, dangers, and struggles.

Notes: I’m writing this in the 1st person, from my character’s perspective. This will not be a bird’s eye view of all information in the campaign.

Characters

• Talullah Rynn Bahk (Rynn) (Me) – Orc Monk/Barbarian
• Palamandrix (Pal) – Gnomish Fighter/Ranger
• Louise – Tiefling Druid
• Lady Jackie Sintara – Halfling Bard
• Greer – Goliath Rogue

Read Session #7

Character Description & Backstory:

See session #1 for backstory and character details.

Previously: 

My name is Talullah Rynn Bahk, of Clan Bahk. I have been assigned as an emissary of Baldur’s Gate to the city of Myriad, a magical city lost to time that has recently reappeared. We are to create trade relations with them, and my role is also to protect the group from threats that it may encounter in the city.

Previously, we infiltrated a lair of Baneite cultists and rescued hundreds of freed captives. Following this, we investigated the crystal palace, where we discovered a newly sentient crystal that had been powering the city for centuries but had recently turned on the city’s inhabitants.

Session #8 – Playing Politics

Bloodied and exhausted, we take stock of the scene for additional context but then head out. On Dolan’s (the head wizard) corpse, we find a note that alludes to a plot by two of the city’s factions, the Sorcerers and a group called the Shroud, whom we have heard of but not interacted with, in an apparent coup attempt. It is possible that Dolan was assassinated via these groups.

We are met by Fendra, of the Bard faction, and we tell her what has happened.

The following days are a blur. With the head wizard killed by the crystal or the coup attempt, unrest is high in the city. As outsiders who were somehow involved in much of it, we are shunned or feared by many. The merchants suggest we leave the city, refusing to do business with us or those we represent.

Deciding to take matters into our own hands, we use our Bard connections to hide out and spend some time hunting down Veneece Caltreen, the slaver who had been running the Bane cult. We do not give him a merciful end. We then pin the crystal destruction on him by planting crystal shards around him and his hideout, since its destruction was not universally regarded as positive for the city, despite its recent homicidal tendencies and unruly nature.

With a clear villain to blame for the unrest – rather than the general state of the city and its factions, which seem the truer problem – we determine our long-term plans. Lady Jackie decides to stay in the city to help Fendra navigate the city’s unrest, with the goal of positioning Fendra in a position of authority. We have not found many others in the city worthy of our trust, so this seems sound.

Greer enjoys being Jackie’s assistant, and stays with her. Seeing opportunity in the city, Pal stays to pursue his fortune. Louise stays to promote animal life in the city. She takes to the sewers and we hear little of her afterward.

I feel differently. My purpose here seems done. In some ways, it was a success, since we rooted out a slavery ring and evil cult, and helped to regulate the political situation in the city, volatile as it was. I do not regret my actions.

But to stay seems limiting. I have more to explore in my quest for enlightenment, and there are likely others I can help on their path outside of Myriad.

After concluding the business with Caltreen, I take my leave of the group. It was an honor traveling with them, and I shall remember them fondly.

We are still feared and hated. As I depart the city, there is an attempt on my life, though it is unsuccessful. I pity those who allow their fears to dominate their actions. I trust that my friends – friends? Yes, I think they are such – will help the city’s inhabitants navigate the coming years in a better manner.

I take to the road without a specific end. To return to Baldur’s Gate in failure seems purposeless, so I set off in the opposite direction. I have much to reflect on.

Post-Session (and Post-Campaign!) Player Notes

Most of this session was handled narratively, since it happens outside the confines of the published adventure. Which is fine, and allowed us to work through our character’s long-term plans a bit for a small campaign epilogue of sorts.

I enjoyed my character enormously. Rynn was a lot of fun to roleplay, and her personality lent itself well to both the group and D&D campaigns as a whole. I felt like shenanigans and mayhem would occur as a result of her personality, but without having to “force” such things and also while still ultimately being a force for good.

Mechanically, probably my least favorite character I’ve ever played was a Monk multi-class build from a previous campaign. So I was nervous about Rynn in a mechanical sense. I need not have been. She was fun to play, and I felt useful and powerful in combat. I think the new (2024) D&D edition has done a nice job sprucing up the Monk class. Many of my former gripes about Monks in 5e were not an issue in this campaign.

I also had pronounced gaps in my usefulness, which is also good. The Bard and Rogue were lots better at skill checks, our Fighter likely had higher total damage output potential, and Druids never lack for versatile options that a more martial class will lack. And despite the damage tanking I alluded to on several occasions, magical damage was sort of my kryptonite.

And so I was situationally powerful while still having meaningful drawbacks. This feels like the sweet spot for class design.

I cannot comment on the module as a whole from a Game Mastering (GMing) perspective, which is a DM’s Guild purchase. The feedback from our GM is that it was not terribly intuitive to run as-is, requiring a lot of work to flesh out absent information and encounters. I’ve seen some glowing reviews for it online, but frankly, seeing a lot of praise for something that I personally find to be clunky as a GM is nothing new.

Some amount of work to adapt a campaign to your table is necessary in most adventures from any publishing source, so it’s not necessarily a huge knock on a module if there are other interesting elements in it. But the fact that our GM specifically called out this aspect is a bit telling to me; she has run a lot of D&D and knows there’s no such thing as a perfect campaign module, so she wouldn’t have mentioned it if there were only “normal” levels of missing info.

We were informed that this would be a more diplomatic campaign, and that the encounters wouldn’t be uniformly difficult. Amusingly, we ended up taking a fight-first approach to some of the campaign’s challenges despite this. We were warned, however, and now so is anyone reading this. I assume there are plenty of other ways it could have played out, particularly since we angered or ignored several of the city’s other factions.

The rest…underground evil cult, warring factions where we have to choose a side, and so on. Nothing revolutionary, but also solidly executed. The fact that the creator(s) of the adventure created Myriad as sort of a demi-plane is another smart move, since it allows for easier absorption into a variety of campaign settings.

The best thing I can say is that I wish I got to hang out with this group a bit more and explore Rynn’s character further. I’m a little sad the adventure is ending, and would love to revisit Rynn down the road in a different campaign or one-shot.