Eberron Recap, Episode 1: Pilot

I don’t remember if I actually said this before or not, but I’ve gone from not playing any D&D to being a player (non-DM, even) in two different games! <- exclamation point indicates excitement… On Saturdays, my old group has been ably taken over by another player, who has set us down in the Eberron campaign setting; as far as I can tell, one other person has minimal knowledge of the setting and the rest of us are n00bs. In order for our real-life ignorance to flow smoothly within the game, he has integrated a combination of memory loss and stanger-in-a-strange-land displacement right into the story. To wit:

We have a cold opening (no warm-up or background) of our characters waking up to find themselves drenched in goo, standing in the midst of giant, broken glass(ish) tubes. Each of us is dazed and disoriented, but we can spend little time asking questions because there’s a more immediate problem. In the center of the room, several goblins are dead or dying at the hands of a pack of shadow-y undead. Not just shadow-Y, shadow-shadows! Right into initiative we go, where we discover that whatever we may not remember, our inherent skills and abilities are still right at our fingertips. Wallace Worthington V, a sneaky little halfling, plays dead and riffles through the pockets of the goblins, but the shadows don’t buy it and he gets whapped for ability damage. Meanwhile, Mekashtari (a human-ish woman who later tells us she is from Kalashtar) channels divine energy to force the shadows to flee, Corn (my human swordsage/warblade who is sure that that isn’t his actual name) tries to stab them without much luck, and Lucius Deveraux Minster (”you can call me Buck¹“) draws his pistols and shoots one dead. Wait, what?
In the aftermath, the entire group (also including Naideria, a sorceress with a be-bubbled sea anemone floating next to her and Alaran, a man with a penchant for stabbing people at great distances using arrows) comes together to compare notes. Sure enough, nobody remembers much beyond their name - not where they’re from, no personal history, no friends/lovers/acquaintances, nada. so, like a fresh game of Civ with nothing but shadow-of-war on all sides, we start wandering about to gather any information at all. The room we’re in contains other tubes besides ours, some with people in them and some with… corpses. Oops. The goblins seemed to have tunneled into this chamber we’re in, rather than using the one door, but we’re feeling unstable enough without leaving “civilization.” That’s about when the door opens, an a man made of metal enters.

The metal man, who is referred to immediately and forevermore as “Guard”, turns out to be sentient and free-willed, but a metal man nonetheless. He answers some basic questions that leave us almost as confused as before. We’re in “Cyrran Shelter #3,” we’ve been here a whole lot longer than he thought we would be, and it’s been very boring up until now. “Five” (as Wallace Worthington V gets nicknamed; perhaps h’s a Cylon!) produces a map that he snagged from a dead goblin and asks Guard to mark it up for him/us - paranoid looks naturally ensue. In any case, with map marked out we set out to investigate three distinct locations.

1. The Armory. Here a few of us find a vast array of finely-crafted weapons of all varieties, secured behind clear barriers that each bear a numeric keypad. We think about trying to break the barriers, but Buck is familiar with explosives (Wait, what?) and points to some things behind the barriers that might not take kindly to jostling. ooooookay.
2. The “secret room.” Wow, you’d think they’d name it something different…. anyway, Five gets us in, where we discover a wand. Our magically-inclined folks aren’t able to make much sense of it, so we stow it for later.
3. A library containing all sorts of information. Too much to take in all at once, but some history is gleaned. Most pertinent, we discover that we were apparently stowed away for future use by a nation called Cyre, but an “extraction team” would have been sent to release us under normal circumstances. We still don’t have an exact timeframe, but from bits of pieces from Guard and the library it looks like the time can be described in terms of millenia.

We also get put into communication, thanks to Guard, with somebody on a lower level of the Shelter that he refers to as the Red Queen. The Red Queen is not exactly more helpful, but she’s differently helpful and gives us our bearing within the Shelter; she also tells us the location of a couple of other living souls here. We resolve to work our way down to where she is, along with something called The Living Document which may be able to provide us with more answers.

Next time: Red Queen’s Race!