Tracking your journey

You're walking through the woods when you come across a half-elven corpse lying under a tree. Searching the corpse (which tends to be the first thing every PC does when coming across a corpse) you find a leather-bound journal. You open it and read:

Greetings, gentle readers, and welcome to my diary. I am Sam, orphaned child, and son of Gentlemen.

 One of my favorite things about online gaming is the ease with which I can chronicle what happens in the game. My old campaigns were notes scribbled on maps and in the margins of other written material. But they were always incomplete. I'm still keeping a set of notes, and they happen to be scribbled on the paper map of the dungeon I made as my first concept. But, since Embrel is being run as a text chat, I also have complete logs of the sessions saved on my hard drive. And, thanks to an old program called DM Genie, they have hyperlinks to the parts of the campaign that are relevant.

But this is more about player journals. We're playing Draikonheim, where I'm a player, with voice over Skype. So the log is only us rolling dice. I've taken it upon myself to post an in character story line via diary entries. After all, I'm sitting at home, right in front of my computer, right? Might as well. Plus, since I post it on the internet, I'm sharing it with some people. It's just the internet version of bothering the clerk at the game store about your character and the session you just played.

Plus, it's amazing how much easier it is to play and plan out stuff to do when you have a chronicle of the events that had happened. Of course, my character is a very unreliable narrator, what with being a rogue and more than willing to inflate his own self importance, especially in his personal journal. But that's ok, because all the really important stuff is correct. Plus, during the period where we just couldn't get a game together for a month, at least I had those to read again and keep excited for the next game.

You continue to read the journal:

Now, I might not be any sort of hero, but I have been known to snatch any opportunity for coin that might come my way. Such an opportunity might have found me the other day as I was being hustled out of the establishment I was patronizing. I stood in the alley with a few other sad individuals wondering where we might just find another beverage for our rapidly drying up throats.

That was when the local blacksmith, rather distraught, came up to us and asked us to find his son, Kraig or some such, and he'd be eternally grateful. Now, there being few things in life quite so nice as a blacksmith owing you, I immediately leapt to clean as much of his gold do my civicly-type duty and help this distraught citizen. 

My fellow do-gooders would be the human monk, Ethelon, and the elven mage Dylansomethingorother. They're about as worthless as tits on a boar, but it's nice to have some people around to soak up some hits. I quickly took lead and got us to the bar Kraig fancied, The Saucy Mermaid.

The bartender pointed us at the wench. I fired up my ole silver tongue, laid down some loving, wrapped her around my finger, and extracted all sorts of information of use. Chief of which being the fact that the nefarious obstacle to my wealth villain has facial tattoos. The charming lass being out of information, and my fellow investigators weighing me down as I'm sure they'll do the rest of the time I'm saddled with them, I move the investigation outside along the route he would have walked home. 

Success! The monk, whose senses are as gifted as his intellect is not, spotted a blood trail. We followed it to find a shithouse. That's when the cliches rats appeared. They were as crazy as shithouse rats, and truly a force to behold. Drawing my rapier, I bravely ventured forth and slayed two of the rats in valiant combat. The other two people killed another one or something. But it was mainly all me. Because I'm just that awesome. 

Knowing that the search must be held down underground from here, and the fact that the manhole was cemented with the rust of ages, I immediately turned to the humble monk, and laid out the information as I saw it. In reality, I just wanted to see someone crawl down the poohole. Sadly, the monk informed me that it wasn't happening, as we are not poo. 

So, we venture forth from the shithouse and found another one. One with a much better manhole. I applied my unique talents, and secure entrance to the sewers, liberating the admittance cashbox on the way through. 

Following the sewers, we locate the original shithouse, from a much worse view. No blood, but there was a body. The mage snagged some potions, I secured some poisons encounter equalizers, and we tossed the pittance of gold to the monk. He was extremely happy with that outcome, as he is rather easily distracted by shiny objects, a fact I took advantage of to slip the hereto unnoticed signet ring into a pouch. Hopefully the information I can get about this person will lead to a nice cash reward for its discoverer.
That's when we saw some torchlight down one of the passageways, and bravely strode forth to investigate. The mage noticed something odd about the water and told us to back up. That's when we started hearing the tapping from where we came from, then where we just where, then all around us.