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Dawn of Magic
And so my GURPS campaign continues. Tonight's attendees were Bonnie ("Leif"), Marc ("Mushamee"), Martin ("Kaeso"), Mike ("Rufus"), and Stéphane ("Vinz"). We picked up where we left off, in the cave beneath the hidden headquarters of the "assassins' society," in the ruins of Kapital.
Time: Evening, Odin 15, 1002 Imperial Reckoning.Place: Cave beneath the subterranean headquarters of the "assassins' society," somewhere under the ruins of Kapital.
Last Event: The team just crossed swords with 24 Starfish-Man wights, destroying two immediately with archery and opening blows.
Leif, Rufus, Vinz, and Mushamee take up a box formation -- with Kaeso hovering above -- as the undead swarm all around. No shambling zombies, the creatures soon ring the party and begin a relentless assault with sword and shield. The battle is fierce but the heroes prevail! Mushamee slaughters 11 of the monsters, Vinz takes out six, Leif accounts for three, and Kaeso and Rufus each destroy one. Kaeso's tactics are particularly amusing, as he levitates to the cave ceiling and drops stalactites on his foes . . .
In the aftermath, only Leif and Vinz are at all injured. Leif calls upon his ancestors to heal Vinz. His own wounds aren't worth the effort . . . although they might incapacitate a lesser man (well, quarter-ogre).
The adventurers retrieve their dropped packs and missile weapons, and then head toward the portal the wights were guarding. Rufus senses the supernatural beyond, while Mushamee smells gold. As for the door itself, Rufus perceives only a supernatural null. Trying to scan past this and read psychic impressions, he succeeds only in shutting down his extrasensory powers.
Kaeso and Vinz, meanwhile, attempt a more mundane examination. They find no traps, only a number of complex locks. These defeat both Kaeso's talent with mechanisms and Vinz's lock-opening incantation. The door appears to be well and truly beyond ars technica and magica.
The next course of action is to have Leif apply brute force to the challenge. Using a great stalagmite as a makeshift ram, he gathers his inner strength and delivers a blow that could fell an oak. The door isn't even dented, although the stalagmite is powdered.
Vinz starts to suspect that the door is a decoy, and looks for alternative routes. However, neither his keen eyes nor his magic can detect any other passages out of the cave. Passing through the frustratingly immovable portal -- somehow -- appears to be the only available course of action.
Kaeso decides to run some alchemical tests on the door, and concludes that it's made of the fabled Adamant, stone of the gods. Now realizing what must be done, he breaks out his reagents and sets up the Forge of Su. In a feat that would take a lesser alchemist weeks, he brews the two halves of the Alkahest in mere minutes. He then mixes them within the portal's locking mechanism.
At first . . . nothing. Then there's a great deal of smoke as the Alkahest dissolves enough of the Adamant to expose the clockworks within. With the gears thus accessible, Kaeso is able to take the tools of Su directly to the mechanism. He soon has the machinery grinding and the door slowly opening.
The group responds by drawing weapons and quaffing healing potions. Leif smells dust boiling up from beyond the door, while Mushamee smells gold. Mushamee advances, using the Sun Sword of Ré to illuminate the opening. He sees stairs leading down into the darkness.
The unanimous decision is to descend. But first, Kaeso sabotages the door's locking mechanism -- just in case -- while Leif rolls the remains of the stalagmite into the doorway to keep the portal from closing. Then everyone heads down, with Vinz in the lead and Rufus bringing up the rear. Leif cannot help but notice the thick dust, undisturbed by footsteps until now.
Perhaps surprisingly, there are no traps or gimmicks. The staircase ends in a square room. Its central feature is a statue of a man -- a statue that Mushamee assures the group is solid gold, not merely gilt stone -- wearing a night-black cloak. Arranged against each of the four walls of the room are four chairs. Rufus remarks that the total count, 16, is the same as the number of shadows the group fought in the maze above.
Vinz realizes that the golden figure is not just a statue but in fact an icon of a forgotten god. This is the patron of assassins, a deity whose name is unknown and unknowable. It dates to the previous Age -- the Age that Vinz often recalls from past lives. More than that, he cannot say; this is a god that does not want to be remembered or worshipped, and that has no use for priests and temples.
When Vinz reaches for the statue, he senses profound danger! He decides to prepare first, meditating to gather his inner strength and working magic to invigorate his body. Thus fortified, he attempts to remove the black cloak.
Instantly, Vinz sees the statue turn its head to him and peer into his eyes with its own, which are now jet-black. He hears a voice in his mind: "Vinz Clortho, are you willing to take on the hate and pain of a millennium? For that's the price of my cloak!" Vinz replies with "Yes," and an instant later, the god reaches into Vinz's chest and pulls forth the Blood Wand that replaced Vinz's heart many moons ago. To the others, Vinz merely shakes, exudes blood from his pores, and ultimately "swallows" a vortex of inky smoke that passes from the icon's mouth.
When the ordeal ends, Vinz is alive but dazed, and holding the cloak -- a weightless wisp of total blackness, softer than the finest silk. Vinz draws the cloak around him . . . and instantly vanishes from sight. Upon releasing his grip, he reappears. Truly, this is an artifact of power! But when Vinz tries to meditate further on its function, he enters a trance and the others hear a horrible voice: "I am you!"
The team discusses the next move, and decides to leave with the gold and the cloak, before the god changes its mind. However, when Kaeso moves to lever the statue off its base so that the group can remove it, he is stricken with a bizarre madness! He lurches across the room, smashes his head into the wall, and falls foaming into a coma as he tries desperately to wound himself with a blade.
Leif heals Kaeso's physical wounds, but Kaeso does not rise. It is clear that Kaeso is not merely injured, but afflicted in some horrible way. This does not do wonders for morale.
Vinz again tries to contact the god via meditation, asking its permission to remove the statue, and gets another booming response: "All must pass my test!" The implications seem disturbingly clear . . .
Mushamee steps up first and, remembering Kaeso's suicidal urge to disembowel himself, surrenders his blades to his allies. He then grasps the statue as if to remove it. This sends him into a mad panic, less self-destructive than Kaeso's, that sees the great warrior reduced to cowering in a corner, wetting himself. Upon coming to his senses, he's embarrassed but apparently intact.
Leif decides to go next. Realizing the danger posed by Leif's superhuman might -- even unarmed, he could rip his allies in half bodily -- Vinz decides it would be best to give Leif every assistance. He uses his strongest magic to fortify the barbarian both physically and mentally against what he understands through experience to be the god's challenge. This proves successful: When Leif touches the statue, he is merely dazed for a moment, and shows no ill effects.
Before Rufus faces the god's test, the group decides to rest, if only to have the strength to aid Rufus and then carry off the booty. Vinz uses the break to attempt to revive Kaeso magically, and succeeds. Everyone then sits down and has a nervous meal, dining on the small pantry in Leif's man-sized pack. Thus refreshed, they return to the problem at hand.
Vinz uses his magic to strengthen Rufus' mind and body, as he did Leif's. Rufus then approaches the icon and lays his hands upon it. Rufus, like Leif, is merely dazed and a little drained -- he suffers no fits or foaming or panic. When he shakes off the mental fog, he finds that his superhuman perceptions have returned.
Rufus uses his restored abilities to assess the situation. To his eyes, the statue is now wholly mundane -- a large and valuable hunk of gold -- and the only strangeness in the room is the cloak on Vinz's back. Like the portal, the dark shroud is a null, devoid of readable impressions. However, Rufus is acutely aware that Vinz no longer has the Blood Wand within him, which should reassure but somehow merely unnerves: What, now, occupies the cavity of Vinz's former heart?
A brief comparison of ordeals reveals that everyone had visions of death and killing. Vinz experienced every death that he inflicted in all of his many past lives. Kaeso had fevered dreams of a dark being pressing him to kill. Mushamee felt first-hand the vast harm that he has committed throughout his lifetime as a man of the sword. Leif recalled mindless, berserk rage. And Rufus witnessed in a flash every killing ever committed by any of his ancestors.
With residual and only slightly less disturbing hallucinations still dancing in their heads, the adventurers decide to grab the statue as their rightful prize. Kaeso weaves a sling of ropes in which to carry it. Leif takes out an elixir of fetching and carrying, which Kaeso says will magnify his already-amazing lifting capacity fourfold, and proceeds to haul the golden man up over his shoulders, secured by Kaeso's netting. Thus begins the trek back to the surface . . .
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The Forge of Su is one of many potent "artifacts of Su" in my setting. Su was a mythological figure, a demon-slaying demigod. The Forge is a workshop that folds up into a small pack yet unpacks to a complete set of tools, a hot furnace, and so on, all of the highest quality. Su used it to repair his powerful demon-slaying weapons in the field, but Kaeso uses it to do mad science.
And yes, Kaeso is an alchemist and a Quick Gadgeteer. He's more than that, too -- artificer, engineer, master of weird science, etc.
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I guess he's just *clearly* insane.
While the others do weird stuff, it fits into a context ... like Leif being a quasi-Shaman who talks to spirits and stuff.
Keaso is alone in his world ... event Kromm doesn't understand him ... he's all alone =p
Woe is him =)