A Look Beyond the Veil, part 1 of 3

This is the first of a trilogy, each of which took place on a different campaign. It is an epic and personally emotional story I’d love to share with you.


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My character, Veil, is a changeling rogue with a changeling father and an air genasi mother. She has an older changeling sister called Shade that we’ll get to in a bit. Her backstory is that she was adopted by the noble Renoux family and befriended their daughter Valerie. She grew up without a mother and without knowing that she had a sister or that her father was nearby.

One day, she watched Valerie get killed by a criminal organization called the Bloodfang. Torn by her loss, she went into a rage and returned to her senses when the entire building was in flames, the presence of the Bloodfang organization completely annihilated in the city of Renoux.

Confessing to Valerie’s father, he adopted her and told her she should take on Valerie’s form and life to honor her. She did, becoming the perfect courtesan lady for a few years. One day, she just left as Valerie, hoping for adventure.

That’s where the backstory ends. Now, onto the campaign.

Her first adventure was a level 1 dungeon crawl with a couple of strangers who met in front of an abandoned temple. The BBEG was introduced, helped the party by killing a mob of undead and took the macguffin in the temple before leaving them to fight the dungeon boss and get out alive. There’s a couple of adventures before Veil sees Valerie, alive and well, and is shaken. The story eventually takes them back to Renoux where they realize that Valerie’s soul has been traded for the soul of a demon, and that she’s trapped in the abyss. Veil approaches the BBEG and pleads with him to save Valerie in exchange for anything he needs, and he agrees to take Veil under his wing. Reluctantly, she becomes the BBEG’s agent to save her best friend.

She then unlocks some latent psychic powers becoming a soulknife, and the DM decided because he liked her story to give her some OP soulknife attacks that can be used once a day and potentially kill anything less than a higher level boss. This is demonstrated by the DM releasing a kraken at the party and having Veil roll to one-shot it at the expense of being drained of her psychic powers until she gets a long rest.

They run into Bob, the lecherous wizard working for Renoux. He is from a homebrew School of Transmogrification, which he uses primarily to transform willing subjects into more interesting and naughty forms. He tells them he’s been sent to retrieve Veil because her adopted father is unwell. They head to Renoux and see that he’s been corrupted by a demon and has given orders to the archmage to mobilize an army. After a tragic and heartbreaking battle, Veil ends up releasing him from his suffering and vowing to stop this madness. The commander of the Renoux armies swears allegiance to her cause and mobilizes the Renoux army to stop the archmage and his army of demonically controlled soldiers as they approach the city of Avanheim.

When they arrive, they see the massive army approaching with Valerie at their lead. It’s much bigger than they were lead to believe. The party is hopeless, Veil is broken when Valerie almost kills her, and they prepare for the final battle of their lives when the BBEG and his two loyal companions show up to help protect the city. An epic battle starts and Veil sneaks into the tower to slay the archmage who ruined her life. She is confronted by Valerie and another assassin, each of whom outmatch her until one of the BBEG’s two companions cuts Valerie down and, with the help of the party cleric, restore her soul from the abyss and heal her.

Veil is saved from a killing blow by being plain shifted for one turn as the battle continues against the archmage and his champion. As they whittle the champion down, Veil returns at the end of the next turn, crashing through the sunroof and plunging her psychic daggers through the champion’s eyes. The archmage teleports away as the tower starts to crumble. Veil manages to escape with Valerie. 

The BBEG, having sent his comrades to help the party, is overwhelmed and had to use his legendary AOE attack to annihilate the attacking army while sparing the innocents. This takes its toll on him, and the party returns to him as he’s dying. He says the slaughter reminded him of his family, and he couldn’t let others fall into the same darkness he did. He tells Veil his final request is to find and look after his son, who ran away as a child. She promises him she will, and they have a ceremony to honor the redemption of the BBEG.

Her vengeance complete and her friend back, Veil subconsciously shifts into a new form. A pretty form never before seen. She calls herself Luna and enjoys some peace and quiet with Valerie before her next campaign’s appearance. She knows she has a duty to find the BBEG’s son Kieran, and honor his request. The former DM is playing Kieran in the second campaign, which I was DMing.

See, the archmage was working for the former king of Renoux, and after the near destruction in the battle of Avanheim, the other nations in the continent rallied against Renoux. Several months after the BBEG’s heroic death, the new party finds themselves in a city as the lockdown happens and there’s no longer a way out. Fighting starts at the walls as the party tries to figure out what to do.

They see fire in a building far away from the walls and the fighting, and decide to investigate. They see a young Bloodfang agent running for his life as a tall, angry tiefling woman chases him. This leads to a short chase scene until the tiefling reveals that she’s Veil, in her vengeance form. Kieran persuades her to spare the kid who wasn’t even a member when her tragedy happened, and she walks away.

The fighting continues and everyone rallies to the walls, including Veil. But even her efforts are no match against the coalition of armies. Everyone’s on their back foot until the party manages to take down a warforged titan, forcing a retreat when the party’s artificer extracts the self destruct mechanism and holds it for everyone to see.

Some downtime happens where everybody feasts and rests where Veil delivers the final message she’s been tasked with to Kieran. A party member notices a hidden passage in the royal palace and decides to investigate, finding a shrine that’s not supposed to be there. After some detective work they figure out it’s a shrine of the Traveler, god of changelings, shapeshifters and change in general. They are interrupted by commotion outside.

The enemy coalition has launched aerial attacks from many airships, dropping oozes and slimes of all sorts into the streets. The party splits up and an Avengers-scale battle begins with some fighting their way through the ships and the rest trying to clear the streets while knee deep in slime and ooze, including a couple of slithering trackers thrown into the mix for an epic ooze battle.

While distracted by the ooze bombardment, the enemy coalition makes its way through the walls and systematically torch the remaining ooze in their way. Everyone retreats to the royal palace before the artificer rigs the bomb, convinces a goblin to run as far as it can with it, and sends it off towards the approaching army. A big explosion rocks the city and the enemy coalition is decimated except for a few survivors.

The remaining forces are more than enough to lay siege to the royal palace however, and as a battle of champions begins, Kieran is pulled aside by the new queen who tells him to retrieve something from the catacombs beyond the city. It turns out to be the ancient vampire lord who created the Renoux bloodline, who calls for the ancient binding treaties between the houses to be honored. During his speech he’s pulled up into the highest tower as the palace is starting to be sealed off. The party runs in to save him, and they meet Veil in her original form there. They meet the queen who reveals that she’s Veil’s sister and the one behind the shrines, and after a long battle she grows wings, grabs Veil and escapes, leading to another chase scene in the sky above the city where she’s cut down and sent to the crater from the explosion. She casts one last spell to release her soul and possessed Veil before using her ultimate psychic attack against her pursuers, falling into the crater.

The party investigates and finds the broken body of the queen, then are confronted by the Traveler himself who says he is disappointed in Shade, who let him down despite becoming the queen. He explains he’s the reason Veil’s life was so messed up, among other things related to the state of the world.

The party encounters Bob, lecherous wizard working for Renoux. He is exhausted from fighting and surviving a slithering tracker through the chest. He takes them to Veil, who’s been knocked out and kept unconscious by Zalt, a friendly mindlfayer. He explains that her mind is too fragmented and that they need to be sent in to fix it from the inside, saving her from her possession. They travel across four different segments to save her personas: a hellish space where the vengeful tiefling Helena, representing anger; sandy beach with a temple door where “Valerie” started her first adventure (a throwback to session one), representing sadness; a mountaintop surrounded by clouds where the peaceful and serene angel Radiance dwelled, representing serenity and the small farm where Luna, once representing happiness, weeps with the darkness of Shade’s corruption. They fight Shade and her alter ego, a crazy seductive half elf called Jinx, and defeat them. Veil traps both personas and assimilate them, effectively imprisoning Shade and adding her personas to her own. The primary form reveals herself and admits she’s representing fear. The party tells her about the Traveler’s role with the archmage and her family’s fracturing, then leaves.

Veil leaves the city silently as the party wraps things up in Renoux. Shade is stunned that the Traveler has turned his back on her and swears to help Veil on her new quest of vengeance, giving her everything she needs to kill this meddling god.


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