Blackwood is a land I have only been to a few times, and I had never been to any of their tournaments. It was a good weekend full of fun tourneys, good food, and a quest with a strong story.
The tournaments started out with armored on the first day, which was a nice twist that I enjoyed seeing. After some very good and entertaining matches throughout the day we eventually took a break from the single tourneys and moved to the grand melee to decide the generals for the war maneuvers. Since the generals were decided by the winners of the grand melee the typical winners of grand melees were the generals (Shandar, Wrath, and Guilliam). However there was a random winner that came out of nowhere. Nico independent civilian of Gau Dring won his first grand melee with a sneaky magic missile while dueling the last opponent Dygen of Grimloch.
From there the tournament turned into war maneuvers, the Sun team with generals Wrath and Guilliam vs the Moon team with Shandar and Nico as their generals. The first war maneuver was a castle siege but with a twist with weapons. Blackwood wanted to play test a new weapon design, which was a 7 foot slash weapon. Both teams were able to successfully defend the castle from the invaders in the end. The next maneuver was one where each team lined up in a queue and then every 10 seconds another team member would join the fight from each side. It became much more interesting when each team had two spawn points instead of one. Annoyingly yet fun nonetheless the tourney turned into a guard the spawn point when one team got ahead, However a few rounds it was a giant battle where you had to constantly watch your back.
After the war maneuvers it went back to single combatant tourneys. Around lunch time we were treated with pb&j sandwiches to defeat that slight grumble in our stomachs, it was a delight which held us over until dinner time. As usual Blackwood is very good at feeding the masses, we all were treated with a delicious and well-seasoned BBQ. When the night quest rolled around we all were well fed and ready to roll out.
The Night quest had a strong story and was good at staying consistent, however a flaw that some people didn’t like that it was a light on combat. The majority of the night quest was solved with charisma and wits. Our goal was to revive someone named Holiday, this was someone who would balance the elements. We started the night making a deal with a necromancer and a god named Change to retrieve one of the pieces needed to revive Holiday. We then went through a door to enter a pyro/rock world which had another piece we needed. Neden used their puzzle solving skills to get this part done. Kyara then allowed a pyro spirit enter her body to be able to carry the piece we needed. The quest moved onto the water element where we had to worry about flash floods when the spirit got moody. Bohis used his charisma to charm to sway the elemental to reason with us. Once we retrieved the last piece from her we met with an oracle to perform the ritual to revive Holiday.
This is the part where I realized there was a lot of sacrifice for this quest. Quite a few people sacrificed a tick for all this ritual to go off, and some other people risked quite a bit more. The last sacrifice was made by Searix which he sacrificed his magic and possibly his life to bring back Holiday. Once Holiday was back we all were cursed (any more details than that are unknown). After we were all done and Holiday was raised the pyro spirit inside of Kyara started to take over and caused a raging monster to go throughout the camp and kill quite a few people. Luckily she was able to be restored to her normal self.