Embers of the Last War: Warming Up (Session Zero)

Before this plague shuttered us all in our respective homes, I used to play Dungeons & Dragons with a group of people up at a friend’s house. He was the dungeon master, and I played a humble elven druid trying to make his way in Mystara after having been kicked out of his homeland in the forests near the Rugalov river in Karameikos. To be honest, the character was an expression of myself: someone trying to forge a new path in their career after having been laid off in the middle of last decade. I met “CP”, the dungeon master, at my first job after that layoff.

I really enjoyed playing D&D. It involves creative problem solving with socializing in a group, all wrapped up with a fantastic world and exciting adventures. When the pandemic hit, I missed it – so I eventually decided I would become the dungeon master so that I could still have fun. Different fun, but I find it a great creative outlet to run the game.

So I went to the DM’s Guild, a website where you can purchase Dungeons & Dragons adventures pre-made, and bought the “Embers of the Last War” campaign. It’s designed to be used with the Adventurer’s League, but it works just fine for a home game. After firing up Roll20.net for our virtual tabletop, we started off with Session “Zero”, titled “What’s Past is Prologue.”

From here on out, I’ll describe how each of these sessions went – consider this a “spoiler alert” in case you’re planning on playing the “Embers of the Last War” mini-campaign.

Set in the world of Eberron, the first session sees the players (students at Morgrave University in Sharn) hired by a shady professor-turned-wandslinger to assault and hijack an experimental airship. The players pick out pre-generated characters and become unwitting accomplishes to piracy in the sky. My players were suspicious from the get-go when I couldn’t figure out a good lie about where the “artifacts” they were supposedly retrieving were located.

Nevertheless, they fought bravely against some enemy sailors, and then realized when the dust cleared that they and the shady professor were the only ones left alive. The prof-turned-thief goes into the cabin, when suddenly the airship they arrived on lists to the side and begins to fall. The players hop on the new, captured ship as they watch the professor begin to fall with the ship.

The next segment entails the party exploring the ship to discover what it’s about and how to operate it. This was my favorite part of the adventure, as the players discover the enclosed “cockpit” and figure out a way to open it. The players eventually figured that the thing had an “autopilot” feature that would return it to Sharn. The players are on rails and they clearly realize it at this point, but they gamely play along.

The (real-life) hour grew late at this point, so I had them wrap things up. Upon returning to Sharn, the professor meets them in the shipyard as they try to find someone willing to repair their ship so that they can skip town. The professor is slated to die at the hands of thugs in the Boromar clan (a halfling gangster outfit), but my players decided to kill him off anyways. They do so handily, and make off into the sunset in their new experimental airship. Thus ends the “session zero” story.

We were mostly getting used to how Roll20.net worked at this point, warming up to the process of gaming online. I liked it a lot – the system has a lot of tools for dungeon masters to easily run the show. With a good Excel spreadsheet where I tracked everyone’s HP and basic stats, combat went quickly and efficiently. We’ve since gotten better at using the system and, so far, it’s been a great way to continue doing D&D during the pandemic. Next time I’ll describe how the “session one” went, where the players solve a murder.