After recent detours through a few others systems I am getting ready to start my second Anima campaign. The first one was very, very popular (and more than a littel over the top) and the new one will pick up after the old one left off. This is going to more or less be a brief journal of the goings on in the game. I'll be interested to hear what people think. I don't have the books handy so if I mix up a few names please be kind.

I'd better start off with what came before, or nothing will make sense. When we started only the original book had been publish, so that's all I had to work with. After reading the setting information provided I decided to set it about 150 years after the events detailed in the book. Despite the looming threat of was in the original setting I decided that after some very brief hostilities everything settle back without a major blow-up.

The party start in Americh as a group of people who gotten on the bad side of those in charge, but would be given an opportunity to earn something other than an intimate accuantance with a sharp piece of metal. The first job was to go to an ancient collapsed tower and find out why the local bandits hadn't been sending in their dues. The tower had once been about 500 feet tall (now it was more like 50) and was suspected to be just as deep. Local legend has it that it was a library, but who has that many books?

A couple of badly fumbled perception checks later and one spellcaster's spy of light went much, MUCH deeper than it should have. The The party ran in terror from a giant eyeboll with dozens of tentacles each a different color. Fast forward a bit as they did end up finishing the mission and got paid. Most of the characters were having nightmares about the rainbow tentacle monster trying to talk with them. One bright fellow decided to use the spell "enter nightmare" to go confront it in the dream world.

Believe it or not his characters are not the ones with the hightest death rate. Second highest though.

So confronting a much much bigger version of it in the dream realm he was forced to choose between one of the different colored tentacles. After making his choice he woke up to find himself a Dukzarist. Not a nephilim mind you, but a full on non-human. Most of the rest of the group quickly ended up becoming non-human in a similar fashion. The nephilim didn't get to pick a color, they just became whatever they had been a nephilim of. Of course it wasn't done with them, after this they got dreams directing them to go get a key.

Fast forward many, many session chock full of awesome stories they eventually get both the key and some answers as to what is going on. The rainbow tentacle monster is the manifestation of a spell that is the reason Nephilim exist. Basically when the world got divided up and the non-human races were seperated from the human not everyone agreed with it. The spell was supposed to allow the races to bear children of any race. After all it's hard to be racist if you don't know what species your kid will pop out of. Unfortunately the barrier between the realms was too powerful to allow it to work correctly, so you ended up with nephilim. Of course this means that the species were hacing kids that were human nephilim.

Well the party decided that in light of their current racial status they would set things right. Their treck took an unplanned detour through the world inhabited by the Sylvan and eventually ended at the giant clock tower described in the book. It is one of the anchor points for the world barrier. Their treck through the tower itself took a slight detour as the parties resident evil Ebudan put the party in a position where they released one of the five seals holding in the Beryl know as The Void. This full filled the Ebudan's destiny AND gave him more Elan with The Void.

After this they did manage to reach the room in the tower they needed, defeated the guardians and shut down the barrier keeping the worlds apart. Did I mention the campaing was a little over the top?

Eventually they made their way back to the section of the world near where they had started. Unsurprisingly everything was in chaos. For a day it had seemed like the sky had shattered into millions of glistening fragments, world spanning rainbows appeared and disappeared and every nephilim everywhere turned into the species they had hinted at before.

People did not take it well.

Eventually they hooked up with Weizencraft, who they had been chummy with before. Weizencraft was in the process of declraing independence from the church and starting an industrial revolution. Still there was one more desperate plan that needed to be enacted. The barriers were down, but the Technocracy was still manipulating human hystory.

Well the party agreed to to a crazy plan to smuggle a bomb into the headquarters of Tol Rauko and use their gate to reach the floating island headquarters of the Technocracy and there detonate a bomb to damage or even destroy the island. The bomb was more accurately a device that turned the soul of the person it was attached to into an enormous explosion of energy.

The party actually managed to get to the floating island and the psychic almost burned his own brain out taking over a Jurgend agent for the few second necessary to slap the bomb on him and send him to get as close as he could to the islands power source. The campaign ended with them just barely getting off the island before most of it exploded and the whole thing sank into the ocean. Some of them didn't actually survive getting off the island but enough of their remains did for them to scrape them up and resurrect the fallen.

I think it was a pretty satisfactory end to the campaign.

What Level did the characters start the campaign at? If they ended up fighting Jurgand (and I suppose you mean Imperium, when you write Technocracy), I guess they were no less than Level 13...and even then pretty bold ones...

At the end they were around level 9-10 I believe. They had assistance from a number of sources. They had been given significant power upgrades at one point by Wissenschaft, in addition to finding other ways to enhance their own abilities. I do sometimes wonder if I should have made the Jurgand agents much more dangerous (and probably will in the future). Still they enjoyed the campaign enough that they still talk about it and want to go back to it.

For the new campaign we are starting over with new characters at level 1. It will be set 6 months after the Day the Sky Broke, which is what the dropping of the viel is now called. The church has declared all non-humans to be demons and is about to begin a holy war. They will be starting in a relatively large city in Kushistan near the border with Argos that is about to be wiped off the map by church forces. It will be up to them to figure out how to escape the fighting and decide what direction to go from there.

The two most likely courses of action are to try and reach Lucrecio or try to find the army in Kushistan and either join or run past them. Still knowing these players they might try something completely off the wall. Lucrecio has of course expected the fighting and is prepared for it. Almost all of the party is non-human so joining the church is completely out of the question.