Demonlands Mini Campaign¶
"I don't need to rule. I need to endure. Bring me the work of Nurizak, and I will bind us together in a covenant of friendship and accordance." — Daennelgin to the party (S341)
A short campaign set in the Fourth Age, played from late 2025 into January 2026, in which the player characters were not mortals but demons: newly risen spirits in the Demonlands, sworn as the least of the minions of the Gut-Queen Gharmatha, who serves the demonlord Vulgurak. Treated as expendable by their masters, the party went from the city of the Gorgery to a rift-side ruin where the buried machine-demon Drazannak lay, and down into the dwarven roads, where they found the lost laboratory of the engineer Nurizak and ended bound by covenant to the hidden demonlord Daennelgin, who promised them passage out of the Demonlands. Their leader, Kosh'tuul, reappears in the Marshford Campaign as a plague-god of rats.
The party¶
| Character | Form | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Kosh'tuul | a demon in human form | Leader of the band and master of the others; party to the Covenant with Daennelgin. Also written Kosh'Tuul and Kosh-tuul. |
| Noxidia | a hellcat (S340), then a large spider (S339, S341) | Took a spider host on the dwarven roads; Kosh'tuul's chief lieutenant thereafter (S359). |
| Zagamar | a lion | Joined after the deaths in the Temple of Gharmatha. |
| Gorefiend | a giant snake | Joined after the deaths in the Temple of Gharmatha. |
| Rylor-Ka | a hellboar | Also written Kylor'Ra. Killed before the session of 20 December 2025. |
| Ar'gurath | a demon in human form | Killed before the session of 20 December 2025. |
Xanatak, a spider-demon, travelled with the band as Kosh'tuul's minion rather than as a player character (S339, S340, S341); he is one of the minor figures of the Demonlands. The chain of command above the party ran from Vulgurak, "the Maw", through Gharmatha and her lieutenant Serru'gorn, the "Maw-Fire Tyrant", to the Maw-Priest Yssathra (S336, S339).
Premise¶
The players' primer describes a demon as "a spirit from another world", whose origin "even the oldest demons do not know", driven back by the mortal races and their gods in the Demon Wars and imprisoned in the Abyss, slipping back "either through rifts or are summoned by reckless spellcasters" (S334). A demon is an essence that must possess a living host to act in the world and must feed to keep its hold; the lore of essence, bond and mortiqueries is on the Demons page, and the rules the campaign used are kept as legacy material. Gharmatha's demonkin live by three rules: no violence between them on her ground, every vessel larger than a human presented to her within ten days, and strict obedience, on pain of "your deposit into the Great Gore Vats" (S329).
Arc¶
The surviving documents are session prep with short recaps, written between November 2025 and January 2026. Three sessions are dated; at least one earlier session is known only from a recap.
Before the dated sessions¶
The party's first hosts came from a secret expedition of the White Fire. Two memory handouts, written for the demons who took the bodies of the ranger Jaren and the warrior Orrhen, tell of a small party put ashore from a ship and hidden by the wizard Algonn's magic, who dug at warded marble ruins for "a reddish crystal in a steel box covered with runes", were overrun by a magma infernal that "jumped over the edge of the ruin" despite the wards, and fled to a camp whose illusion failed as "a demonic boar bore down on the camp" (S335, S338). Algonn's and his warrior Gyrden's heads were kept afterwards as the party's flesh anchors (S336, S339).
Gharmatha then judged the band for leaving the task half done, "you had failed to slaughter the remaining vessels", and sentenced Rylor-Ka to the Culling, a loss of a fifth of his essence, before sending them back to finish the work: "There will be no reward, no gifts … but do not mistake me: This is generosity" (S329). In the session recapped at the start of S340 the party spent half the evening in the Gorgery, Vulgurak's city, where Gharmatha keeps the Churning Pits and the Great Gore Vats serve as "Punishment area and Vulgurak's Central Bank" (S337), and the other half "killing each other at the Temple of Ghormatha": two of the band died there, the first by misadventure and the second at Kosh'tuul's hands. Rylor-Ka and Ar'gurath, on the roster of the month before (S336), are absent from every later one, and Zagamar and Gorefiend took their places (S340).
Session played 20 December 2025¶
The new band set out for the rift to finish their task, the destruction of a rival's harvesting operation. Three winged demons of Daennelgin's harried them and they took cover in a ruin (S340). The ruin hid Drazannak, "a specialized demonic harvesting MACHINE", a living structure of flesh buried there long ago by Daennelgin and stranded since its master died. It speaks to intruders as a projection: "They fear me. They know my ancient feud with Daennelgin. I will destroy them should they approach. … I can help you … but you MUST help me in return." What it wanted was a mortal host of magical origin (S340, S341).
Session played 27 December 2025¶
Beneath the ruins the party entered the dwarven roads and an abandoned dwarven garrison that was in truth Nurizak's secret laboratory, where the Order of Valyr engineer had built his machines and been killed by the first of them to rebel (S341). A Valyr containment squad, sent because wards had sensed demons on a supply route, swept the garrison while the party hid; its notes read the party as "3 to 5 Riftspawn" and left the "active essence containment matrix" for the Inquisitors (S341). In the spider host Noxidia had just taken she found the memory of a mark, "its new god has a strange name: Daennelgin", and Daennelgin spoke to the party through it, offering alliance against the Valyr in exchange for Nurizak's notes, and enmity if refused (S341).
Session played 3 January 2026¶
By the time of the last prep the party had "escaped the dwarven roads with the help of Daennelgin", "destroyed/consumed the emissary of the Valyr", and agreed to an accord (S339). Its terms, the Covenant below, were bound in blood-essence. Daennelgin then fed the party captured Valyr documents: orders moving three battle companies and an inquisitor company from the Dark Falls Outpost to a newly found dwarven forge, a manifest of twelve captured demons to be loosed on Grozzurash's town of the Vile Pit, and battle plans for a pre-emptive strike on the Temple of Gharmatha (S339). The prep notes add, for the gamemaster only, that Daennelgin wanted the forge for himself and meant the party to do his fighting unattributed. What was played from this prep is not recorded.
What changed¶
- The Covenant of Daennelgin and Kosh'tuul (Fourth Age; no year given). Neither party may dominate or destroy the other or the other's minions; Kosh'tuul and his minions take Daennelgin's mark, swear never to possess a body bearing a Valyr tattoo, and must give Daennelgin everything they recover of Nurizak's work on Drazannak and on Daennelgin himself, keeping no copies; Daennelgin promises transit from the Demonlands to a landing on Astia for Kosh'tuul and up to twenty of his demons, "no sooner than when Daennelgin is also able to make this transit". The accord ends thirteen days after both land, and "a break of the covenant results in the immediate banishment of the covenant breaker" (S339). See Daennelgin.
- A Valyr emissary destroyed on the dwarven roads (S339), the party's first open act against the Order of Valyr.
- Kosh'tuul's band left the Demonlands. The chronicles do not record the crossing. In the Marshford Campaign Kosh-Tuul has gone to ground in the sewers of Narlhaven in Arnyr as "God of Rats, Plaguebringer", with Noxidia as his chief lieutenant and a brood of demonic rats, after being "betrayed by Tserrerak (which he expected) and nearly destroyed" (S359). See the Marshford Campaign.
Daennelgin's own reach also crosses into the later campaign: the ruined imperial mint of Vaal'Dunak is "a Daennelgin Outpost … building a host machine for him" (S360).
Planned and unplayed¶
The prep for the last two sessions lists four paths the party might take: serve Daennelgin and keep Drazannak imprisoned; win standing with Gharmatha by betraying Daennelgin or by handing her Drazannak "for Essence"; free Drazannak to supplant Daennelgin; or take the Valyr Wardens' quiet messages, carried by a "Spellbound Penitent", which aim only to set the demonlords against one another (S341, S339). The campaign notes also hold, as gamemaster secrets, that the Valyr were "silently watching via Kosh'Tuul" through a disguised enchantment (S329), and that a band of outcast demons was trying to summon Xyrlazath, a demon prince of Bhaal (S340). None of these is recorded as played.
Gap
No play log survives; each session is known from the "Last time" recap of the next. The documents never name a year in any calendar, and the session after 3 January 2026 is not recorded. Which demon took which of the White Fire hosts is not stated. Four character sheets of 2026 filed in this campaign's folder for a separate campaign (S354 to S357, discarded) have no campaign documents.