Circle of the Living Flame: A New Threat

Circle of the Living Flame is what should have been the first campaign for the overall series since it introduces the main threat of the larger story plot, which is the Circle.

Basic plot for this campaign:

The area around Neverwinter has lately been encountering a new threat from the already hostile areas of Neverwinter Wood and Mt Hotenow. Short on men and resources, the Neverwinter Guard is asking for volunteers to aid with finding the source of this threat and helping to eliminate it.

Spoiler Version:

The Circle of the Lingering Flame is a group of Wizards who are wedging a war on Faerun starting with the areas around Mt Hotenow. They worship a (supposed) fire deity by the name of Netho'relok who is believed to have been born from the fires of Mt Hotenow's eruption.

So there you have the premise, pretty simple.

A New Threat

As for this particular part of the story, the player will be tasked to deal with the rising threat. The frst quest will take the player into a cave complex to nip this new thread in the bud. They are asked to team up with a Neverwinter Guard Veteran, Sergeant Graegos (Graegos was my first pen and paper character back in the 80s and has been a character in every RPG I have played since, I will do a bio on him later) as he deals with the threat head on.

I started working on this map some time ago but side tracked onto "Sewers of Insanity" which was to be the second quest in DoD but it got scrapped for Labyrinth of Lunacy. I have now decided to get this quest published to give more back story to the main plot of the series since it has a more direct connection early on than DoD.

Here are some screenshots of the new map:

The cultist of the Circle will cover a wide array of "intelligent" monster types including "civilized" races. To join the circle they must agree by contract to worship this new deity and serve him and the Circle until death as they plot to take over Faerun.

The player can expect some nice surprised in this quest as well as a deeper insight to some of the subtle hints dropped in CoC but will not make any major connections yet. It's not so dungeon crawly as DoD are but it still has that hacky slashy feel, because it is a quest to kill off a fledgling cultist group.

That's all for now on this campaign and quest, peace.

-chili

3/21/13

Made some more updates to this quest over the past few days but currently unable to access the foundry and take some screenshots, will do it later.

I have map one complete and functional it just needs some clutter love and to perhaps add an encounter or two. The dialog for the while quest is still very basic as well, I will be adding much more to it as I get the maps laid out as I get good ideas while laying out the maps most of the time.

Map two is almost completely built, I tried some really cool things in this one as far as design goes, it will be much less inhabited by living cultist and more undead and fire elementals and will be low light most of the time. I probably will not add much clutter to this level of the map as it's supposed to represent a newly formed cultist group who has yet to get a foothold in this cave.

As soon as I can get some screenshots of some of the content I will.

-chili

As promised, screenshots.