The Gang (2019–2021)

A long-running, free-wheeling homebrew campaign DM’d by Pat, running from October 2019 through at least November 2021 (the latest recorded session). The table calls it simply “the campaign” — “The Gang” is this wiki’s label for it. Tonally it swings from dungeon-crawl pulp (pyramids, sphinxes, golems) to cosmic/planar horror (the Abyss, the Nexus, Lovecraftian artifacts) to outright slapstick (urination as a puzzle solution, a hat that renames people “Steve”). Pat has stated at the table that the party has previously fought in an Orc War, run a casino heist, killed a lich, and been trapped in a Titan’s pocket “fish tank” universe — all backstory from before this wiki’s transcript coverage begins.

Across its recorded span the party acquires, loses, or gets stuck with a long chain of reality-bending artifacts (a planeshifting ship, the Apocalypse Box, a Ring of the Hive Mind, a newborn god), gets yanked into the Abyss and back out, and survives several player-character deaths — almost always, per Pat’s own observation, “from a cursed item turning players against each other,” not from monsters 2020-03-24 @ 03:23:59.

Shape of the campaign: two arcs + an interlude

Character names, classes, and even species change substantially over the recorded timespan, with real gaps of months between sessions. This wiki splits the record into two loose arcs plus one outlier one-shot, rather than assume continuity the transcripts don’t support:

• Arc I — The Ship (Oct 2019 – Apr 2020). The party raids a pyramid, steals a mage’s planeshifting/blood-fueled ship, gets dragged through the Abyss, Hell, and the Feywild, and ends up raising a newborn god. Core cast: Tick-Tick (Jake), Mori Yoshinari (Donnie, the ship’s captain), Dread Pirate Bobbert (Rich), Ozan’s bard/fey character (see Kurt Furbane), and Nutty’s healer (unexpectedly possessed by a demon for several sessions).
• Interlude — The Kidnap Job (Sep 2020), DM’d by Ozan. A single one-shot heist session with an entirely different cast of goblins and a dwarf monk, run by Ozan instead of Pat while Pat played a PC. See 2020-09-28. Not clearly connected to either main arc; treated here as a stand-alone interlude.
• Arc II — The Nexus (Oct–Nov 2021). After an ~18-month real-world gap, the party (now playing Alexander, Fish, Miss Cleo, Nutty’s fire sorcerer, and Jess’s magus) is deep in an unrelated-looking cult/portal-hopping plot that ends with them trapped in a planar prison called the Nexus. Whether/how this connects to Arc I is never stated in the transcripts.

The party (by arc)

Arc I

• Jake — Tick-Tick, later Paladin of Pelor; earlier an unnamed earth-gliding shapeshifter in the pyramid session
• Donnie — Mori Yoshinari / Donovan, the ship’s captain, bonded to an enslaved air elemental
• Rich — Dread Pirate Bobbert, wizard
• Ozan — bard/fey performer, see Kurt Furbane; killed and True-Resurrected mid-arc
• Nutty — healer/alchemist, unknowingly possessed by a demon for several sessions
• Ryan (Rawntrail) — Obadiah Jones, Loxodon cleric, joins partway through

Arc II

• Jake — Alexander, android
• Donnie — Fish (Donovan), alchemist; piloted by Rich when Donnie was absent
• Rich — his own unnamed tank/healer character, and stand-in pilot for Fish
• Ozan — Miss Cleo
• Nutty — fire sorcerer, “the character formerly known as Ari”
• Jess — unnamed elf magus/dhampir with a bat familiar

Timeline

1. 2019-10-15 — The party fights through the pyramid’s “Tests of the Pharaoh,” destroys clay golems, and is ambushed by shadow-doubles of themselves before a half-finished boss fight against an awakened, staff-wielding figure.
2. 2020-01-20 — Looting the dead mage’s ship, the party accidentally triggers its plane-shift crystal, strands itself on a new continent, and has an air elemental permanently bound to the ship so it can fly.
3. 2020-01-28 — Shopping, scrying a hunter-paladin, and a doomed feast in an isolated mountain village end with the ship accidentally yanked into the Abyss.
4. 2020-03-16 — A Whimsy Wall roll conjures the Apocalypse Box, which curses Jake to carry and (daily) risk opening it.
5. 2020-03-24 — A demon secretly possessing Nutty kills Ozan and then Jake; Jake dies and is reborn a Paladin of Pelor, lifting the box’s curse.
6. 2020-03-25 — The party finally escapes Hell/the Abyss via the ship, after a side-dungeon demon fight, and lands (not quite safely) in the Feywild instead of home.
7. 2020-04-06 — Trapped in an escalating monster trial, the party frees a frozen Loxodon cleric (Obadiah Jones) while a demon drags Jake into the Ethereal Plane.
8. 2020-04-13 — The party adopts a newborn god, then kills a glabrezu demon disguised as a paladin mid-knighting-ceremony, leveling to 12.
9. 2020-09-28 — One-shot interlude, Ozan DMing: the party (as goblins and a dwarf monk) infiltrates a mansion banquet to kidnap a goblin, Littlepen.
10. 2021-10-19 — A talking Sphinx painting’s riddles open the way into a Nexus-portal complex; the party scouts and steps through into a frozen plane.
11. 2021-11-02 — The party fights free of a frost giant and golems on the frozen plane, loots a haul of magic items, and learns they’re trapped in a planar prison called the Nexus, with no way back.

Major threads

Resolved

• Escaping Hell/the Abyss with the ship — 2020-03-25
• The Apocalypse Box’s compulsion curse on Jake (lifted when he died and was reborn a Paladin) — 2020-03-24
• The demon possessing Nutty — banished the same session
• Ozan’s death and True Resurrection — died 2020-03-24, confirmed alive again by 2020-04-06
• The kidnapping of Littlepen — 2020-09-28

Dangling / open

• The Apocalypse Box itself was never destroyed, only stopped being Jake’s problem
• The green death-bubble sealing the Isle of Death, and the lich it may be tied to
• The freed djinn the party keeps failing to locate/scry
• The Church of St. Cuthbert’s manhunt for Mori Yoshinari
• The newborn god-baby’s upbringing and future religion
• Jake’s interrupted duel to the death at Clydewell
• The miasma death-cloud and the never-found “Miasmic Cloud Monitoring Agency”
• The Grimson Knights cult and “Brother Felhorn”
• Escaping the Nexus — the campaign’s last recorded session ends on this cliffhanger

Unresolved

The exact relationship between Arc I and Arc II — whether Arc II’s cast are new characters in a new campaign thread, or a direct continuation nobody explained on-mic — is never stated in the transcripts.

A reader submission to Rugby’s Roaming Gazette by “Dr. Boom,” a rat and war veteran, published 2019-04-22 (before any recorded session — the first is 2019-10-15), describes joining a small merchant boat crewed by a cat captain and a druid searching for a lost dinosaur, capturing a pirate ship and freeing two prisoners (one “the true embodiment of chaos,” the other rapidly “plunged into evil acts”), and selling a stolen drug shipment for gold at a pirate town 2019-04-22. This reads like it could be an in-world account of the party’s own early, unrecorded adventures from the era this page describes as “backstory from before this wiki’s transcript coverage begins” — but no PC or NPC on this wiki matches the rat, the cat captain, or the druid, and no session confirms or denies it. Recorded as a possible but unconfirmed parallel, not an identification.