The Lathanderites
The Lathanderites were a very small sect at first in the city of Helsport. The Padre, the keeper of the Sacred Tryptich, was the young acolyte who fled his monestery with orders from the Cardinal to safegaurd the churches mostsacred object the Tryptich of Lathanders Light. The Tryptich was an artifact of tremendous power. It could convert anyone when the priest holding it opened it in front of the viewer and commanded the viewer to convert. If they failed their save the person would see Lathanders light and become a devout follower of the faith (Greg always seemed to play it that once the person was converted they lost all sight of how to do something, I personally think that that is a reaction to how powerful the priest had really become with a fanatic group.) Those viewers with alignments that were not Neutral Good would shift one spot closer to it, for instance Chaotic Evil would become Chaotic Neutral. In his journey the Padre fled to the only city within sight from the portal that the Cardinal opened, who was just then killed beforejoining the padre.
Once at Ellis Island the Padre recieved his citizenship papers and his new mortage on a rundown house at 1313 Ghouls Way Lane.Then all hell broke out. Somehow the rest of the party emerged into the group from a variety of different places and from different means. At some time in the future i will include some of the funnier moments. Needless to say all our troubles started when we discovered in the basement of our house a stairway leading to an extra-dimensional space which was in reality the lost greek fire plant stolen by a lich from Atlan Miskovar.
O ne thing that the party had to do was duty outside the city chopping down the ironwood trees for sell. During an attack the Padre was assualted by 13 orcs, swinging his mighty two-handed warhammer he took out three orcs and then swung straight into the mud. Thinking quickly he opened up the holy tryptich and shouted the Command spell, convert! And thus the wanton conversion of anyone to Lathanderism begin. Over the course of several months the Padre converted quite a few important officials ofthe city to Lathanderism. However, being a young priest his sermons were often meandering and not always specific. Eventually what started as pure Lathanderism over time became fragmented within the city, and from without. On one journey out of the city the party ran into an invading Issligi army, escaping from it upon a juggernaut used to maintain the roads. While rolling through the gathered army the Padre, always on the look out for a new converts opened the Typtich and converted masses as they steamed rolled through the troops. Thus another faction converted to the faith but left without instruction, many of these troops later fled after the war and some eventually made their way to Helsport. To the converted orcs shiny pewter plates became their holy symbols, as a poor copy of the priests rosestone disk of the morning sun. One aspect of the faith was however carried over to all, the idea of new beginnings. This was taken to an extreme in the fall of the city.
The Padre and the rest of the party were not in the religious district when the other faiths were taken intothe Arena. Gathering our people we meet in the slum district and dispacthed all our followers through the tunnels to the temple of Lathander. For months we had been building under the small temple a much larger, and hidden Cathedral underground. The cathedral building had finished when we began to buildunderground living areas and storage facilities to house our faithful. On the day of the citys invasion we were ready to sit out the worst. All 6,000+ followers made it into the Cathedral when the Padre and the rest of the party began to resist the Ranken Horde.
Being loyal citizens, paranoid to the extreme, fearing that the city would fall we reacted. Being a group of players we made several decisions that ultimately changed the face of the conflict and the nature of the warfare. Upon hearing that a large number of troops were gathered in the Arena we assumed that the entire Ranken Hoard was there due to the natural defensability of the arena. Calling upon his faith the Padre called upon Lathanderin his grandeur to complete a Quest level spell to help the true followers of Lathander to survive the war, in effect the Padre was able to summon ahuge hoard of magma elementals to the city in the area of the Arena. The Gnome illusionists using her spells of illusions "created her own vast army of magma elementals" and sent them in with the real elementals. The elementalsfell upon the Arena and slaughtered everyone there, Ranken and their POWs held on the Arenas floor. The party was devasted that they had killed so many, burnt parts of the slums district, buried the holy district under a slab of magma, and turned the area into the largest source of pure obsidian known in the known continents. However, it was a rebirth of the old into the new. Being a player we later learned that the POW's had betrayed the city by letting in the Ranken hoard thus as traitors that got what they deserved.
Reeling at what had occured the Party fled to the sewers and into the hidden Cathedral to protect their followers. The Padre and his followers remained with in their Cathedral and faced new problems as plaque ravaged those that had survived the battle on the surface. The Gnome however, disappeared at one point in the flight to the Cathedral, stealing all of the partys treasure, and hiding in the government district and later became very busy. But her story is yet another tale that involves the other new third generation of Helsport.