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Dawn of Magic
This report is two weeks late coming owing to my trip to Austin. Sorry! In any event, we had a full house: Bonnie ("Leif"), Marc ("Mushamee"), Martin ("Kaeso"), Mike ("Rufus"), and Stéphane ("Vinz").
Time: Afternoon, Odin 21, 1002 Imperial Reckoning.
Place: Shaft beneath Spirit Anaconda's temple, Teclá.
Last Event: Awakening an "undead slime" congealed from decayed corpse matter.
The slime doesn't take any definite form – it simply swells up into a putrid tower. The heroes waste no time trying to analyze or negotiate with it. It's a monstrosity and they respond with steel. The thing proves resistant to cutting, though, and slicing into it splatters acidic goo all over the attacker. Worse, cuts cause it to spasm violently and momentarily expand, crushing the adventurers against the stone walls of the shaft. Fortunately, bashing with shields, blunt instruments, and sword flats proves effective, and the ooze soon collapses into a festering puddle. Kaeso collects a few samples.
The warriors pause to wipe off slime and quaff a few healing elixirs. They then exit the shaft by stepping off the narrow ledge and down the only side passage that anybody can spot. This slopes downward, and is wide enough to let the explorers advance two abreast. Mushamee and Vinz lead the way. Rufus gets the psychic impression that this tunnel was built by an alien intelligence – more specifically, by entities that resemble living skeletons!
Suddenly, Vinz holds up a hand to halt the group. Spotting a seam in the floor and sensing danger, he suspects a trap. Mushamee holds his sword up to cast Ré's light into the gloom ahead. This reveals a similar seam about 40 feet down the passage. Rufus tries to peer through the floor using his enhanced sight – to see what traps lurk beneath – but his powers are insufficient to penetrate the thick stone.
Vinz summons his chi to lighten his body, and then carefully tiptoes out onto the suspicious floor. As he moves, he can sense it trembling – clearly, it's pivoted, and designed to dump its victims into some sort of pit. Vinz glides to the far side of the teetering slab and works powerful earth magic to weld it to the surrounding stone. He then beckons for his allies, who cross without incident.
As the delvers venture further down the passage, the slope steepens and plunges deeply into the earth. There are no doors or side passages, and no further pitfalls. Eventually, the corridor ends – but not in an ordinary stone wall. Facing the adventurers is a massive skull carved out of the surrounding rock. Within its teeth is a door of some sort. Above this, the eyes glow a dull red.
Rufus examines the skull with all of his special senses. The first impression he receives is that of malign, demonic energy. Trying to peer beyond the stone, he sees only darkness. An attempt to read the psychic impressions left on the skull by its creators causes him to hear a strange voice in his mind:
"This is the last thing you will see before you die!"
Meanwhile, the other four examine the physical aspects of the skull-shaped barricade. The "door" in the mouth seems to be merely a stylized carving, not an actual portal. In its center is an indentation in the form of a six-fingered hand. After a brief discussion, the adventurers conclude that the most likely mode of operation involves placing a hand in the hollow – which, given Rufus' gleanings, doesn't strike them as being a safe course of action!
Vinz volunteers for the task. He rallies his chi to strengthen his will and vitality, and then casts a number of magical charms for good measure. Thus fortified, he places his hand in the six-fingered handprint. He immediately senses that he has a choice:
"Give in and pass, or resist and be thrown back!"
Vinz opts to resist. Instantly, he's physically hurled away from the skull by a visible force that resembles a titanic skeletal hand. He picks himself up, returns to the portal, and attempts to open it with magic. The same thing happens.
As Vinz is regaining his feet the second time, Rufus steps forth. He places his hand in the indentation, is given the same choice, and opts not to resist. Before his allies' eyes, he vanishes from sight! The skull's eyes flare brightly and emit a devastating shockwave of pure supernatural force that washes over and injures those still standing before it.
A few seconds later, though, Leif can hear Rufus shouting, as if from somewhere distant. Whatever just happened, it seems that Rufus is still alive . . . just elsewhere. Vinz resolves to follow Rufus' lead, and he, too, vanishes – causing a second blast that harms Kaeso, Leif, and Mushamee further. Kaeso goes next, causing Leif and Mushamee yet more pain. Then Mushamee activates the skull, vanishing and giving Leif his fourth dose of hurt.
When Leif stands alone before the skull, bathed in the dim red light of its eyes, he hears the thing speak to him. It promises him divine status if he leaves his allies to die. All he need do is sacrifice them willingly and he'll return to the world a demigod. Leif refuses, and despite his wounds, presses his hand into the six-fingered slot.
The heroes find themselves teleported to the same location: some dark place beyond the skull. All five are badly wounded – both by the shock of their transit and by the crushing energies unleashed by their allies' journeys. Mushamee lights the darkness with the Sun Sword of Ré, which reveals that he and his companions are sprawled among the skeletons of dozens of less-fortunate travelers, in what appears to be another downward-sloping corridor.
Leif and Vinz immediately see to everyone's wounds. Leif's shamanic healing and Vinz's spells soon have the party in good shape. Kaeso's curative elixirs then revitalize the healers, whereupon the entire group is ready to explore further. Clearly, there's no easy way back . . .
This new passage levels out as it twists and turns through smooth-cut rock. After a short hike, Leif hears a distant crackling, and everyone smells something acrid and eye-stinging. Kaeso identifies this scent as that of lightning. The sound and fumes grow more pronounced as the team advances, and a flickering light becomes visible up ahead. The source of all this soon comes into sight: a straight piece of hallway, perhaps 100 feet long, crisscrossed by random thunderbolts spewed from hundreds of grinning death's heads carved in the walls, ceiling, and floor.
For the heroes, however, this isn't the obstacle that it might be for lesser men. Vinz works air magic to render himself immune to thunderbolts, while Kaeso digs among his vials and prepares an elixir that will grant the others resistance to lightning. Then the entire party moves slowly through the arcing bolts, taking care not to stumble into other traps hidden in the flickering haze. Sure enough, there's a second pivoting slab in the floor – and with Vinz's magic taxed to its limits, he cannot defeat this using a spell. Fortunately, Kaeso packs flight potions for just such contingencies, and he and his allies simply fly over the danger.
Beyond the lightning, the tunnel leads even further down into the earth. It eventually brings the party to a second barrier carved in the shape of a gigantic head – this one is shaped like the face of a serpent. In its toothy, gaping maw is what appears to be a door.
Rufus moves up to examine the latest discovery. He senses that he gazes upon the face of the god of the beings who excavated this bizarre passage. His allies look cautiously into the serpent's mouth and see a genuine doorway, sealed by a huge stone slab. The seal is so solid that mere blows won't crack it, while there are no locks or hinges for a thief or a wizard to tamper with. Only great strength applied to a solid lever stands any chance of dislodging this obstacle.
As luck would have it, Mushamee saw picks and other heavy digging tools on the skeletons back before the lightning-blasted passage. As he is the fastest runner, and as his elixir of resistance is still working, he volunteers to go fetch these items. He moves quickly without his pack and other hefty gear, and soon returns with an armload of picks, shovels, and pry bars. Leif, by far the strongest, takes these and gets to work . . .
. . . and immediately, Rufus senses a strange aura building up around the serpent's head. He yells for Leif to stop. Squinting at the strange carving, he concludes that the ultimate purpose of the force he sensed is to move something very heavy with great force. His guess is that it slams shut the jaws of the serpent – an outcome that would almost certainly kill anybody who has the misfortune of being between them.
After a short scrum, Leif agrees to take the risk anyway if the others can come up with a way of dealing with the trap. The plan is to tie a rope harness around Leif and have the other four adventurers stand by on the ropes, ready to heave him out if there's trouble. Rufus will be in front, so that he can monitor the energies building in the serpent's aura and hopefully give the signal to extract Leif in time. After tying the necessary knots, Leif resumes work.
With great effort, Leif manages to loosen the slab. As it is teetering and about to fall, Rufus senses that the trap is about to spring, and yells for everyone to pull. Even as they do, the jaws slam shut! When the dust clears, though, Leif is standing there unscathed. The head behind him is no longer stone, however, but that of a huge, glittering serpent. While it isn't striking, it also isn't opening its mouth to let the group pass.
Leif has some experience with animal spirits, so he decides to take his chances with the serpent. He steps up and asks it what it wants in return for safe passage. Leif receives an empathic message – no words, just intent. He knows intuitively that the entity will settle for nothing less than a sacrifice that destroys somebody's body and soul, and that it is uninterested in bargaining.
Leif moves to volunteer for this task. He figures that he might be able to escape somehow to the spirit realm, which would be inconvenient but not fatal. As Leif strips off his armor, Rufus digs in his pack and pulls out one of the strange "spirit jars" from Ramasi's laboratory in Kali. He asks Kaeso to take a look, and Kaeso confirms that it indeed imprisons a spirit – if an incomplete one.
Kaeso pushes past Leif and thrusts the strange artifact in the serpent's face. It accepts the sacrifice! The spirit-object is consumed in a fiery flash. Whatever soul was imprisoned within – consensus being that it belonged to Vlad, the heroes' former traveling companion – is unmade and deleted from the rolls of Creation. A great voice rings out:
"The passage leads to the final test!"
Then the serpent's jaws open, revealing a swirling portal where a beast's throat might be.
To be continued . . .
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In this particular instance, Rufus divined that the forces involved – while thoroughly evil – weren't allied with the Starfish-Men. Thus, sacrificing that soul, however nasty it might have seemed, did nothing for the true enemy while moving the party closer to completing their quest for Spirit Anaconda. Said quest will secure considerable aid in driving off the Starfish-Men. Therefore, the action spelled a net gain for the heroes' universe.
The campaign cosmology isn't standard fantasy Good vs. Evil. Instead, there are several parallel worlds (planes, realities, realms, universes, whatever). Within each, there are often moral conflicts – Good vs. Evil, Chaos vs. Order, etc. Normally, heroes adopt these causes and battle rival causes. However, when an alien plane of existence is finally brought under the banner of a single force, becomes a monolithic power bloc, and tries to conquer other planes of existence, the heroes of the target realm tend to drop their moral quarrels and do what it takes to repel the invaders. It often takes all sides of a moral conflict to succeed, and so such conflicts are considered secondary to the survival of the right to have them.
Implicit in all this is the premise that any two planes of existence are so radically different that morality understood in one is incomprehensibly alien to the denizens of the other. There are individuals who think they can serve their moral cause – be that Good, Evil, or something else – by aiding off-plane invaders, but they inevitably meet a bad end, because the shared values are entirely in their minds. It's nearly always better for the Righteous Healing Paladins of Good to ally with the Baby-Killing Necromancers of Evil on their own reality than to try to forge a pact with a Good-seeming force in the invaders' realm.
Thus, plane vs. plane conflict is the highest calling. It's proxy war between different Creations and their gods, fought by mortals. Moral conflicts are a lesser calling: When the local gods have peace, they split into factions – like Good vs. Evil – that get mortals riled up against one another. But when they go to war with alien gods, that gets called off.
Conflicts between planes are exceedingly rare, though, and in fact lost to mortal memory because Creation gets shattered and/or remade to hide such violence afterward. Thus, mere mortals regard moral callings as the highest ones until invaders from elsewhere show up. The whole thrust of my campaign is that the PCs are the "early adopters" of the higher calling (saving their universe). This is no surprise, given that they have clear evidence that their fates were engineered to put them in that position.
Which boils down to "Yeah, he's a soul-eating lich, but he's our soul-eating lich. At least we understand his soul-eating lichdom. The freaks from that other realm blow your mind when you try to understand them. And since they don't understand us, they'll disintegrate you, me, and the soul-eating lich, and replace us with their idea of reality."
Thus, sacrificing Vlad's soul, while evil, was the right thing to do. This also explains why the PCs can make pacts with things like the Harb (a profoundly evil soul-eating lich whose spiritual essence is tied to this reality and stands to be destroyed if the invaders succeed), and can include among their number such figures as a maltheistic priest (Recnam, currently inactive, who worships a nasty god from this reality) and an assassin (Vinz). Which isn't to say that Dawn of Magic is a "play the evil guys" campaign. Mushamee, despite his greed, is a champion against evil – one could even say a paladin – in the service of Ré. Leif is a healer, shaman, and defender of what's good and natural. Rufus is good, almost innocently so, and a worshipper of Truth. And Kaeso is entirely neutral, in love only with Science!
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Kaeso: Pathologically incapable of diplomacy. Has trouble regarding those less-intelligent than him as sapient. Previous tendencies exacerbated after he willingly exposed himself to mind-warping cosmic energies in order to expand his comprehension of the universe. Said exposure had the additional effect of turning him into an outwardly scary freak.
Leif: Not wholly human, but in fact a shapeshifter who is somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 troll. Possibly part demon. Descended from a long line of shamans, and exhibits signs of a mystical worldview that precludes fully grasping polite social norms. Walks around speaking to his deceased grandfather, who on occasion manifests as a frightening specter.*
Mushamee: One of the more socially and physically normal group members. Still, immortality and being married to an Amazon queen have distanced him from humanity. Chief gift is killing, with all that implies.*
Recnam (currently inactive): Messiah of Necros, God of Death. No natural human parentage. Raised by priests to be an instrument of the Temple. Currently on his third life, and spent subjective millennia being spiritually tortured between incarnations. Occupying his second body, which emanates divine charisma and an aura of death, and onto which he has sewn a horrid vampiric hand.*
Rufus: Possesses second sight that means he does not see creation normally. Rather, he sees auras, past events, thoughts, and the spirit world. Consequently, he is going mad. Significant parts of his soul have been altered by repeated, involuntary exposure to demonic forces. Currently sprouting horns as a result of this.*
Vinz: Reincarnate being from an earlier age. Unsure which incarnation he is currently on, but all of them were assassins and many of them were wizards. Previously had heart replaced by a sinister cosmic artifact, the Blood Wand. Currently has no heart at all, with all this implies for his humanity.*
Vlad (formerly inactive, now deceased): Scion of a wealthy slave-trading family. Thief, torturer, and ne'er-do-well. Possibly fleeing a death sentence.*
* In addition, these six might have been created by black magic to serve as instruments of destruction against the Starfish-Men. If so, their pasts remain accurate but were retroactively inserted into creation by unholy forces. Either way, they appear to have a destiny that further distances them from flesh-born mortals who lack ties to black magic and unholy forces.
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1. Most important, my recaps cover strictly what every player in the campaign has a right to know because all of the PCs saw it or heard about it. There are many things that go on behind closed doors that simply do not get written up here!
2. Inasmuch as "domestic" means "social," realize that the black magicians who empowered the PCs are people like the Emperor and the Patriarch of the Sun Temple, so despite the PCs' oddities, people in high places have extended them courtesies that oridinary citizens generally do not dare challenge. In Recnam's case, he is the Patriarch of Necros, so his weirdness is tolerated and even expected.
3. Inasmuch as "domestic" means "family," note also that a lot of the PCs' mates are equally bizarre. Kaeso can only conduct sexual relations with Amazons; he is cursed against human women. Mushamee's wife is an Amazon queen who is herself both a bloodthirsty warrior and essentially immortal – and who is another of the powerful NPCs whose social protection the PCs enjoy. Vinz's wife is a Teclan witch who steals souls. Leif and Rufus have relatively normal personal lives, but note that Diandra and Helena took up arms and went on the road because they were unwilling to accept their expected sex roles, which rather limited their marriage options.
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