Story HourPost your ongoing tales from your campaigns, and read those from others for inspiration. Lots of other RPG boards post "Story Hours", but this is where it started!
My current campaign, using a mish-mash of the 1983 and 1991 OD&D rules, has been going strong for about a year and a half now. Usually, any campaign I try to run will fizzle out after about a year, with the PCs topping out at level 15, getting bored, and drifting away. But this game... it reached its first major climax at level 15, but now it's level 25, with no signs of slowing. And I blame the rules.
In the past, I've always used AD&D or some iteration thereof, like the d20 system. And it always starts to become craptacularly unbalanced at just about level 15, the end of the fabled sweet-spot that 4th edition was supposed to correct. But now I'm using the later versions of OD&D, and the divine blessings which are the Companion Set and the Rules Cyclopedia have kept me inspired (and the players challenged) for an extra ten levels, with the distinct feeling that this could go on forever.
The game has had two regular player characters throughout: Sprocket Astroturf, tinker gnome extraordinaire; and Mira, a knightly bird-maiden along the lines of a 3rd edition raptorian (Deo gratia for the Creature Crucible supplements to OD&D!). Sprocket's Chaotic; Mira's Lawful. Sprocket solves his problems with brains and bullpuckey, Mira with swords and muscle. They make a heck of a team.
Now for the first 14 levels of gameplay, with those famous red and blue booklets close at hand, I had these two player characters traipsing across the surface of Arcadia (the Europe-like continent which serves as the campaign’s major setting area), delving into multi-level mega-dungeons and trying to outwit an evil party led by a mad wizard, Zoltar, as they raced to find the Nexus of Leylines, a mythical position somewhere deep beneath Arcadia which would give its possessor unlimited arcane power. As it happened, the player characters were 13th level when they actually confronted Zoltar at the Nexus, and they defeated him utterly. This kicked them up to level 14, which meant that it was just about time to put aside the Expert Set and pull out the glorious green of the Companion Set.
I dusted off my CM series of modules: CM1, Test of the Warlords; CM2, Death’s Ride; and CM3, Sabre River. CM1 is an interesting piece of work, because it’s really a campaign skeleton, not a single adventure. It presents an area called Norwold, largely unsettled, meant for the player characters to carve dominions out of. I had this happen in my campaign, and the PCs became Baron Sprocket of Astroturf and Baroness Mira of Insulaves.
Now in OD&D’s Known World, Norwold is just north of the lands that the player characters come from, equidistant between the empires of Alphatia and Thyatis. But my own campaign setting is a fantasy version of early 1800s Europe, with Arcadia standing in for Europe, and another continent called Lemuria which is vaguely like North America. I put Norwold in Lemuria, right about where northeastern Canada would be. (The various Old-World nations also have their respective analogues: Avalon, Utopia, Asgard, Midjard, Hesperia, Elysium, Sylvania, Olympia, and Amarna, to name a few places, stand in for England, France, Sweden, Germany, Spain, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Greece, and the Ottoman Empire.) The campaign began in Utopia (imagine post-revolutionary France, but run by tinker gnomes). And now it had moved to the new world.
OD&D has rules for running characters’ dominions in a SimCity kind of way, but also for mass battles, and rising through the ranks of nobility with conquests and alliances. They started as barons; but the player characters were pushing 24th level when all of the nearby lords finally capitulated to the military and diplomatic might of Sprocket and Mira, who were elevated from counts to marquises by the circumstances… and then, just to make it more insulting than injurious, Mira swore fealty to Sprocket, leaving her a marquise in the vassalage of the newly created Duke Sprocket of Greater Astroturf (at which point, the gnome’s surname actually managed to become even more grating than it already was, what with an entire duchy named after it).
Well, the PCs are now 25th level, meaning that in one or two short sessions, I’ll be dusting off the black box with the Masters Set in it. And rather than running out of steam, the campaign has just cranked up a notch. As it happened, while the PCs were carving out their personal dominions and becoming lords and ladies in the New World, a Napoleon-esque gnome (a Gnapoleon?) by the name of General François Biendit marched Utopian troops on Midjard and Elysium and took both nations in one fell swoop, creating a new land empire that dominated Arcadia.
Deciding that he had to do something about this, Sprocket convinced Mira to accompany him back to his homeland, where they proceeded to assassinate General Biendit so that Sprocket could assume his identity. They marched the Utopian gnomes back home, and it might have seemed that the war was over, except that now Elysium, which had been an autocracy, was in chaos, with no government. And the surrounding nations, Hesperia, Sylvania, and Olympia, were all licking their lips at the thought of conquest. Further, the rulers of Hesperia and Olympia even had legal claims to the Elysian throne. Our heroes had to do something. So, they split up.
Mira went to her own homeland, Sylvania, to convince the ruler there not to attack. Said ruler is Duke Konstantinos IV, an enigmatic ruler believed by his terrified and oppressed subjects to be a vampire. Mira went in fully expecting an epic showdown between herself and Count Dracula… only to discover that Konstantios was very much alive, and a high-level monk at that. His mysteriousness was due to his monasticism, and his martial arts training. He was also dead set on attacking Elysium as a matter of personal vengeance, but Mira talked him down and diplomacy’d the man into a more defensive military posture. One down, two to go.
Sprocket, meanwhile, went to Olympia, to speak with the rulers there, King Olibios and Queen Jolanda. Sensing that the queen was extremely soft-hearted and the king unusually willing to listen to reason, Sprocket used this to his advantage, and presented a plan that would convince the Elysians to accept Olibios as their ruler, if he would guarantee them a modicum of independence and self-rule. The king agreed, and soon, Sprocket and Mira met up in Elysium, where they managed to convince the princes and senators to meet in a great congress with the purpose of federating all the various little republics and principalities which had sprung up in the wake of recent strife. Another diplomatic success, and it looked as if Elysium and Olympia would have their differences resolved.
Enter Hesperia, a none-too-friendly autocracy run by a governor named Maximo Lucilli. A major imperial power with a huge navy, Hesperia was ready to take on Olympia directly, ignoring the anarchic Elysium for the time being, but poised to pick up the spoils when war was over. To top it off, nearby Amarna was once again (as it had done repeatedly throughout history) ready to attack Olympia and make it a subjected province. An alliance between the two powers was natural, and forthwith happened, something Sprocket and Mira are still clueless about.
Instead, as soon as they heard that Hesperia was fully marshaled and mobilized, they sought an alliance with their own liege, the Empress Maeve of Avalon, the major imperial and naval rival of Hesperia. And Avalon has a tight alliance with Asgard, which pretty much ensures that if Avalon enters the war, so do Asgard’s dwarves. Using his characteristic approach of rhetoric and argument, Sprocket handily convinced Queen Maeve that it would be in her best interest to defend Olympia. And the queen’s last words, as one of the craziest game sessions ever (and the only talky and diplomacy-heavy game I’ve ever run that had me sweating bullets from the adrenaline) finally came to a close, were: “Imagine… the whole world is going to war!”
At that point, Sprocket’s and Mira’s players just smacked themselves on the forehead, finally realizing what all their politicking had just done. They’d just started World War I, a hundred years too soon. “Well,” said Sprocket’s player, “thank goodness they haven’t invented machine guns yet.”
I just stared at him and deadpanned, “You did that when you were 2nd level.”
The player went pale. And now I need a Risk board and whole lot of tiny minis, because next game session, it’s war!
Cool. I somehow feel that 25th level characters could make trench warfare less than ideal.
__________________ Ryan "RangerWickett" Nock
Author of the War of the Burning Sky serialized novel, free at EN World. Part Two, The Irons Have Tolled, now available.
Well, it finally happened. My Lv-35 PCs befriended Bahamut and slew Orcus.
Wow, it's been a while since I've thought to blog about my campaign. But it's got to happen now, because we're all done with the Masters Set. Session before last, the player characters hit that 4.35 million XP mark -- the most XP that a character can possibly earn in OD&D -- and made 36th level, the maximum attainable level. It's like reaching 99th level in a computer RPG. That's how epic this campaign is. It's a first for me, and I have to say, a heck of a lot of fun.
Jeez, the Great War was so many game sessions ago that I'll have to see if I can remember all the details. Suffice it to say, the Hesperian navy threw everything it had at Olympia. Sprocket and Mira stayed there to rally the troops and direct the war. Elysium was too discombobulated to bring anything more than a token force to the table. The Amarna corsairs might have been troublesome, except that Avalon's Royal Air Force flew southeast, past Olympia, to keep them at bay. Mira was able to muster everything that Sylvania had, and just in time to repel Hesperia's main ground invasion, saving Olympia. The Amarnans, meanwhile, hurled back Avalon's Air Force and sent them limping back home, retaking quite a bit of lost territory in the process. The main theatre of the war was Olympia and Elysium, and in a long and entrenched battle that went back and fourth for nine whole days, the Hesperian invasion force was finally defeated, forcing a surrender and a treaty.
Now, here's where things get funky: the treaty was to be signed at Marvilles, a city in Utopia. In attendance were Duke Sprocket, Empress Maeve of Avalon, Governor Lucilli of Hesperia, King Olibios of Olympia, a senator representing the Elysian Federation... and then, into the room walked General François Biendit, presumed dead (because Mira had killed him and burned up the body to prevent any unwanted resurrections). In the treaty negotiations, Hesperia essentially lost its sovereignty to Utopia, which in turn gave Elysium over to Olympia, as Sprocket had already proposed.
Now, where was Mira through all this? During the war, Duke Konstantinos had tried to sneak-attack Elysium, to take it for Sylvania. Mira didn't like this very much, and so she surprised the Duke and all his generals while they were making war-plans, killed everybody in the room, and declared herself the new Duchess of Konstantinos's realm. Then, when she marched the Sylvanian armies into Olympia to help throw back the Hesperians, and this won them the war, she was able to return to her homeland as a war-hero... and the people made her the Empress of Sylvania!
Not to be outdone, Sprocket sensed that something was very strange about General Biendit's reappearance, so he returned to his own homeland, Utopia, to get the down-low in this. After many games' worth of spying and intrigue, he finally discovered that the General had a whole compound under Reville, Utopia's capital. It was your typical Bond-villain lair, with henchmen, a doomsday machine (just in case), and (let's not forget that Biendit was a gnome, just like Sprocket, and therefore a mad scientist extraordinaire) an automaton factory and cloning vats. As it turned out, this General Biendit was not the original Biendit, but an automaton (a clockwork robot) with an exterior of cloned flesh... and there were seven or eight others wandering around the complex, just in case the the current one got bumped off.
Well, Sprocket did the impulsive thing and decided to just flat-out attack Utopia. So, he gathered his own troops from back in Norwold (including his gnome techs, and about a hundred automated, steam-powered war-mechs) and got them ready for a war. Then he made a pact with the Empress of Avalon and the President of the Lemurian Republics to attack Utopia in concern when the time was right. Sprocket then spent the next month working one of his technologies---a teleportation device---into a practical means of secretly transporting his armies to Reville (actually, to a factory in that city that he owned). Marching his armies from the heart of the city itself to the palace, while foreign armies assaulted the shores of the country, Sprocket confronted Biendit for a battle gnomo-a-gnomo.
Sprocket won, but he discovered a nasty surprise: the Biendit-bots were all equipped with a deadman switch and a subatomic phlogiston bomb. So, Reville was nearly nuked in the ensuing blast, and in order to undo the destruction, Sprocket had to develop his greatest invention. (Now, keep in mind, the player characters are pushing the early 30s in terms of experience levels---with Biendit out of the picture, Sprocket is the greatest scientist in the world.) So, he finally develops an improbability engine, a technological item that essentially duplicates a mage's wish spell. Now, like any good level-thirty-plus-odd bookworm type D&D character, Sprocket can alter reality. So, he un-nukes Reville. And now, Utopia has a capital city again, but no government. Ergo, Sprocket runs for president... and wins. And, since Hesperia is still subject to Utopia, that makes Utopia technically an empire... which makes Sprocket an emperor as well.
*whew*
Now, as I catch my breath, I have to take a little detour and explain two things about Sprocket, so that this next part of the story has the proper impact.
(1) When the campaign first began, the "hook" used to draw Sprocket and Mira into the adventure was a letter from Sprocket's uncle, a rich but dotty old gnome named Thaddeus Q. Thimblequimby. Uncle Thaddeus was a collector of artifacts, and a descendant of the nobles of l'ancien regime displaced by General Biendit's government.
(2) Since day one, Sprocket has been using aliases and pseudonyms like most adventurers use arrows and healing potions. He's got an alternate identity for every situation. And he takes pains to make other people, even close friends and allies, think that his multiple personalities are real people. He'll use a holographic projector and a phonograph to make it look like he's in his lab, working on machines... when, in reality, he's out adventuring, dressed in ashigaru armor and carrying the daisho, calling himself "Lo-no-Mai, the wandering gnome ronin," and acting like a Lawful Good samurai warrior. Or he'll use makeup to make himself look like a hobbit, and a polymorphic mutagen to transform Mira into a golden dragon, and then go adventuring as "Tellwiggly the halfling dragon-rider, atop his loyal steed, Theracuzia the dragon."
As far as Mira's player ever knew, she was in on all the secret identities.
When Sprocket Astroturf was officially crowned l'Empereur d'Utopie, he announced to the world that he would now go by his real name---his real, real name---and rule as Darius Thimblequimby VI.
Mira's player? Her jaw dropped. She positively freaked out when she realized that "Sprocket Astroturf" had been a pseudonym all along.
The coronation of Darius/Sprocket was a huge affair of state, and all of Sprockets' and Miras' important friends and allies attended, including most of the local royalty. Queen Maeve, King Olibios, the President of Lemuria, princes and senators of Elysium, the high kings of Midjard and Pohjola, and so on---people that our heroes have been dealing with for quite a long time now, so they're practically old friends. Since Maeve, Sprocket, Mira, and Olibios are now the major players in Arcadia, and their countries form an adjoining band all across the continent, and they have such a tight alliance that while they reign wars are very unlikely, it seems that a "Pax Arcadia" of sorts has emerged.
When the curtain fell on this scene, Sprocket and Mira were 34th level.
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Backing up again, Sprocket once recovered a very powerful and useful artifact. Once, (around 18th level or so), while adventuring in the land of Asgard, our heroes found themselves deep beneath the dwarven capital, the great hall of Niðavellir. The high king of Asgard, Jarnhammar, was sorely pressed by orcs and trolls swelling up from the underdark. The tunnels under his hall were a festering hole of evil. Sprocket and Mira, along with a small band of dwarves and an aged old priestess from Sylvania named Bloduedd, delved into this hellhole to meet the foe head-on. At the Battle of Gaðrhal, some tricky tactics and powerful technology helped to collapse a cavern and decimate the main force of orcs, holcs, and trolls. Our heroes themselves still had to fight off a quartet of nightshades, no easy task even for high-level characters, but they survived.
In the mess, Sprocket, Mira, and Bloduedd got separated from the dwarves and went deeper underground than they intended. They wound up in the Kingdom of the Kobolds, and they came into the maze-like palace of Kurtulmak, the Kobold King. (This campaign world does not have gods per se, nor does it really have "immortals" in the traditional OD&D sense. Immortals in this game world cannot be killed, but neither do they have any godly powers beyond what a wizard could accomplish. Wish is as powerful as it gets; no epic spells, true dweomers, or salient divine abilities.) As an immortal, Kurtulmak could not be killed, but he could be outwitted. And much of his power rested in an artifact, a bejeweled golden girdle which granted its wearer some protections from magic and the ability to teleport and polymorph other. Sprocket had no training in thievery, no capacity whatsoever to pick pockets, but there's always that one-in-a-million chance... long story short, when they finally confronted Kurtulmak, Sprocket roleld that unbelievable "1" on his long-shot pick pockets roll and just nicked Kurtulmak's golden belt, just like that. They had been sneaking about in the Kobold Kingdom for some time, so they knew the kinds of powers that Kurtulmak was feared for, and they had seen him operate the belt. Sprocket at once polymorphed the Immortal Kobold into a bunny rabbit, and that was it. "Kurtulmak the Unkillable Bunny" was thereafter a running gag throughout the campaign.
Needless to say, Sprocket abused this belt at every turn. And I kept careful track, counting the number of times it was used. What Sprocket didn't learn until much later, and much to his chagrin, was that this artifact was a little piece of Chaotic Evil. Its proper name was the Girdle of Orcus, and it had a foul purpose. Orcus once gave it to Kurtulmak, thinking that he could use the artifact's taint to bring the Immortal Kobold under his power. It didn't work, and Kurtulmak kept the belt, using it for his own gain.
When Sprocket stole the girdle, it woke up, and it started whispering Chaos to the gnome. Every time Sprocket used the belt, it also weakened the fabric of reality. There was always a possibility, for example, that using the polymorph or teleport power would just conjure up a hostile demon instead. Also, (in order to avoid alerting Mira's player), I had to be subtle about the belt's effects on Sprocket's mind---prompting him that chaotic or evil acts were worth considering, or weren't so bad and wouldn't change his alignment. It took quite a while (and a visit from one seriously ticked off archangel) for Sprocket to catch on, but eventually he realized the nature of belt and started using the item more sparingly. Nevertheless, the damage was done. He overused the item (use number one-hundred happened during the melee with Biendit), weakening the boundaries of the Prime Material Plane, and Orcus stepped through. Not right then and there, of course. He made a nest in the Underdark and started gathering an army, everything from goblins to balrogs.
These beasts started swelling up from underneath all over the world, first beneath dwarven mountains, much like the evil underneath Niðavellir once had. In Mira's dominion, back in Norwold, one her barons was a dwarf---Lord Dexter Rockbuster---with a dwarven hall of his own. He called for help to Mira, an ocean away in Sylvania at the time, to push the orcs and demons back into their hole. Sprocket and Mira came, and they led a massive army into the mines. They crushed orcs, zombies, and trolls, but when it came to balrogs and mandraks (fear-inducing demons), they were defeated and repelled.
Now 35th level and really pissed off, they went back to Arcadia and summoned the newly formed "Council of Nations," bringing their allied rulers together to discuss the problem. Most of the rulers were too sorely pressed in their own countries to offer much help, but then the council was crashed by a famous archmage by the name of Griswick---a wizard that Sprocket and Mira had met before, and one whose advice everybody respected. He told Sprocket and Mira that the Girdle of Orcus, an item in Sprocket's possession, was the key to stopping this madness. Griswick then proceeded to tell a story, revealing an important secret of the campaign world to all the royals present (and this, let me tell you, is just the tip of the iceberg):
The planet Gaia is home to two very powerful immortals, the Lawful dragon Bahamut and the Chaotic dragon Tiamat. Bahamut is the Guardian of Gaia---the closest thing the world has to a god or deity. Tiamat is the source of all evil, the creator of orcs and undead, and the mother of Orcus---and she is imprisoned in the core of the world. As long as Bahamut stands guard over Gaia from atop the Blessed Isle, Tiamat cannot be freed. But her son, the demon-lord Orcus, can still wreak some havoc. And he wants to wreak some major havoc, by releasing the Weapon of the Enemy. The Weapon of the Enemy is nothing less than Tiamat's avatar, an agent of pure distruction. (You guessed it, kids: it's the Tarrasque. Sprocket and Mira still don't know this little tidbit.) But in order to free the Weapon, Orcus needs his belt back. So, it’s on our heroes to destroy the evil artifact. And only one entity has both the knowledge and the desire to see the belt destroyed: Bahamut.
But to get to the Blessed Isle, which floats above the world far higher than any airship can sail, a group of heroes would have to travel over the impossibly high Drachendorn Mountains, cross the blighted wastelands of orc-infested Tuonella, and then pass through Cursed Land Draconia, a place that nobody has ever returned from.
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Our heroes decided to simply fly over Tuonella, little interested in wrangling with an entire kingdom of orcs. Once they arrived in Draconia, though, they were grounded. (On a globe, it’s in the same place as Siberia. And the weather is just as lovely.) The Cursed Land is a twisted place, where practically everything is evil and mutated, and some places are just plain weird. Stretches of country are magically invisible, made of rubber, moving up and down, spinning, low-gravity, you name it. Between these regions are haunted forests, haunted swamps, haunted farms with evil and carnivorous crops… you get the idea. But in the middle of it all is a high cliffside with a monastery at the top, and some very serene monks who *really* enjoy their solitude. And beyond this, a rocky valley with four stone pillars in the center. And in the middle of those pillars, a crystal tower that stretches into the clouds.
After taking some rest among the monks (who were, in fact, half-dragon humanoids), they passed to the pillars, which formed an impenetrable barrier around the base of the tower. This was defeated by teleporting, and they passed onward, to the gates of the tower. Inside, a spiral staircase carved into the crystal, that wound up, and up, and up. They had to climb for three days straight before they arrived at the half-way point, temple in the clouds, where they were confronted by… none other than Griswick the archmage, who revealed his true identity to be the archangel that had once visited Sprocket to warn him about the evil of the girdle. To test their worth to appear before Bahamut, they would have to defeat the world’s most powerful wizard. This they did, though not without some difficulty.
From here, they were permitted to proceed up the crystal tower again, another three days of climbing. As they rose, they noticed that they needed rest less and less frequently, and that they stopped noticing the passage of time. Outside the tower, only stars were visible—-Gaia could be seen far below, the curvature of the planet’s surface apparent. Finally, they reached the top, a crystal palace guarded by ancient gold dragons. Taken into the awesome presence of Bahamut, they presented the Girdle of Orcus, upon which the Lord of Dragons summarily performed a divine disjunction, breaking the belt, and with it, Orcus’s immortality.
Sprocket and Mira spent an untold span of time in the crystal palace (time didn’t actually pass in this place, convenient for Sprocket, who needed to build some more robots and weaponry), before asking Bahamut to teleport them into Orcus’s lair to carry out an assassination. This they did, although the battle was about as difficult as the one with Griswick. Orcus fell, and so his armies were dispersed. The world was saved… and our heroes reached 36th level for their efforts.
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Sprocket has a very nice airship. It’s called the Expedition, and it’s outfitted with all the latest technology: shields, lightning cannons, a dimension door drive for short-range FTL jumps, a teleport engine for the long-range travel… or so Sprocket hopes, if he can ever figure out how to make the thing airtight and launch in into space.
After defeating Orcus, our heroes teleported back to the crystal palace to confer with Bahamut. The Dragon God informed them, for their reward, that they were now worthy to drink the elixir of immortality, the substance that once gave Bahamut his own immortality some twenty-thousand years ago (along with that of all the other immortals on Gaia). The elixir is fatal to anybody that tries to drink it before reaching 36th level, but Sprocket and Mira were now strong enough to survive the elixir and join the ranks of immortals. The only problem? The elixir is deep beneath the surface of Gaia, in the feywild. Sprocket wants to quaff the elixir before venturing into space. So, this is their new quest.
This evening, our heroes traveled back to the dwarven kingdom of Asgard, for deep under Niðavellir is the great cavern of Gaðrhal, and in the tunnels from that cavern is the way to the Kobold Kingdom. And beneath the Kobold Kingdom is a Stone Door that our heroes were unable to open the first time they visited the place. This door, Bahamut informed them, is the passage to the feywild.
They came to the door and found that now, it would open for them. And they passed through… and they fell. And they fell, and they fell, down the rabbit hole…
The rulebook says that with an ordinary party of six players, playing once a week, it should take about five years. This campaign has had two PCs, playing two to three times a week, so it's only taken us about two years or so to get this far.
As to what's going to happen next, well, I'll post the next section of the story once the players have completed another adventure. Meanwhile, here's how I'm going to handle the game rules (for those readers who are somewhat familiar with OD&D and might be interested):
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Warning! Crunchy rules ahead!
There are two sets of rules for carrying an OD&D game above the 36th experience level. The first is the Immortals Set (1985); the second is a revised set of rules, the Wrath of the Immortals (1992). Both versions of the rules involve a transition from mortal, adventuring PCs to godlike, immortal PCs who concern themselves with creating their own demiplanes, drawing power from worshipers, increasing their divine power levels, and ascending through the hierarchy of immortal beings. Above all, immortals cannot interfere in the mortal realm unless they descend and take mortal form.
This is a very different sort of game from traditional, adventure-based D&D, and not exactly appropriate in either scope or tone to a gaslight/steampunk world. The characters can become immortal, and they can ascend into the heavens, but they will not be gods. Instead, the game will shift in tone and setting from gaslight fantasy to science fantasy, and it will take place in the galaxy at large, with the characters travelling from system to system via steamtech spacecraft.
In OD&D, once characters pass name level (9th level), they stop rolling hit dice, and they instead gain only +1 or +2 hit points per level. Fighters, thieves, and monks get +2 hit points per level; clerics and magic-users (and, in my world, technologists) get +1 hit point per level. The amount of experience to gain a level is fixed from 8th level onward: either 100,000 XP (cleric or tech), 120,000 XP (fighter or thief), or 150,000 XP (mage or monk). Under the ordinary rules, demihumans are usually limited to 8th-12th level, but as a house rule, I allow demihumans to advance all the way to 36th level, albeit at a -20% XP penalty to keep them balanced with humans.
For my system, I have had to create a set of rules for "epic level advancement." The rules are very similar to the makeshift epic rules outlined in the old 3.0 FRCS, before the 3e Epic Level Handbook came out: characters gain special "epic levels" (or, in a terminology more befitting OD&D, "epic ranks") that come with minor, fixed benefits. Above 36th level, characters no longer improve attacks, saves, class abilities, or spells. Other qualities can improve at certain intervals.
Upon reaching 36th level, characters no longer earn any experience points. Instead, advancement shifts to achievement points (APs). Characters earn APs for winning battles (1 AP is earned for every 10 monster hit dice defeated), overcoming challenges, and achieving important story goals. An epic rank is earned at every 100 APs (this scale makes it very easy for the DM to ad-hoc AP awards, since APs always represent a percentage of the next level-up). At this level, demihuman abilities are fairly minor, and demihumans are going to be six or more experience levels behind humans already, so there is no demihuman penalty or limit to APs earned.
Each epic rank comes with an increase in hit points (+1 hp per epic rank), and a particular benefit that cycles ad infinitum until that particular quality or set of qualities is maxed out. The benefits are as follows:
Code:
AP Total Epic Rank
0 O (36th experience level)
100 I (+1 hit point, +1 skill slot)
200 II (+1 hit point, +1 to weapon damage rolls)
300 III (+1 hit point, +1 skill slot)
400 IV (+1 hit point, +1 to any ability score)
500 V (+1 hit point, +1 skill slot)
600 VI (+1 hit point, +1 to weapon damage rolls)
700 VII (+1 hit point, +1 skill slot)
800 VIII (+1 hit point, +1 to an ability score)
etc. Lather, rinse, repeat
Basically, a new skill is earned at every odd-numbered epic rank, until a character can't possibly learn any new skills. At every even-numbered epic rank, a character either adds a +1 bonus to weapon damage, until a maximum bonus of +15 is reached; or the character increases one ability score, until all scores reach the maximum of 25 (the adjustment for a score above 18 is the score itself minus 15, so an ability of 25 is a +10 bonus). At every single level, a hit point is gained, until the character reaches the absolute maximum of 999 hp. If and when all of these qualities are ever completely maxed out, the character can earn no more AP, and then ascension to godhood and character retirement are the only options for further advancement.
One particular magical item in the game, elixir of immortality, can render a character unkillable. This does not make the character godly or invulnerable. Instead, it merely means that a character reduced to 0 hp does not die for any reason. A character with 0 hp, even an immortal one, is unconscious and incapacitated, and cannot fight until he heals again, but he cannot be killed. He could be sealed, bound, trapped, or even cut up into little bits and scattered to the winds for millennia… but never killed. Eventually, the character can recover from any wound, no matter how severe, through natural healing.
Sprocket and Mira have completed their first epic quest. They are now officially immortal, and both have gained enough APs to become experience level 36th/epic rank I. (Incidentally, this little dry-run test for the AP system has proven to be a resounding success. The ability to ad-hoc awards on a percentage basis is perfect for regulating high-level advancement. It seems that I can make it so that a new epic rank comes as quickly as every three sessions or as slowly as every six, which is just about ideal for the way we play.)
Before I get on with the story, let me first say a few words about my theory when it comes to DMing high-level games. The AD&D 2nd edition Dungeon Master’s Guide had a section that offered advice for this sort of thing. It said, basically, that after 20th level, the PCs are going to be so powerful that the only way you can challenge them is to strip them of their magic and their equipment, or to place them in moral dilemmas and catch-22 situations which are impossible to resolve. In other words, cheap and dirty tricks. But that sort of thing gets old fast, said the DMG, so sooner or later, you’re going to have to retire those characters.
Hogwash!
I don’t believe in resorting to dirty tricks, but the DM has another tool up his sleeve when it comes to challenging the players. He does control the game world, after all. The DM is at once the over-deity, every NPC in the multi-verse, and most importantly of all, the physics engine. No matter what their level, no matter how much magic or technology or resources, the PCs still live in the DMs world. They have to play by those rules. So, what happens when the rules change?
I’m talking about a good old-fashioned mind-frell. (If you don’t know what that means, it’s kind of like a mind-frak, but lighter on the Battlestar Galactica and heavier on the Farscape.)
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The player characters opened the door in Kurtulmak’s realm, the deepest part of the Underdark that they had ever visited. This was the passage to the Underworld. Very quickly, they learned that the Underworld was a feywild realm, or to be more specific, a series of self-contained realms and demi-planes, each one leading to the next deeper world. The laws of physics weren’t too very much altered here; but each place was filled to the brim with anachronisms, pop-culture references, and incessant homages to the writings of Lewis Carol, L. Frank Baum, and Ruth Plumley Thompson. (If you don’t know who Baum and Thompson are, tsk tsk, for shame! Get your ignorant butt to a library and start reading, this instant, before you DM another session of any fantasy RPG!)
The first demi-plane? Wonderrealm.
Sprocket and Mira landed in a pleasant country, when they were accosted by a white rabbit, crying and fleeing for his life. Soon they learned that this dapper bunny was called the Hat Rabbit, and he was fleeing from the ruler of this realm, a wicked witch called the Red Queen. They also learned that the Red Queen possessed the First Key, the way into the next realm below. So they convinced the Hat Rabbit to lead them to the Queen’s palace, promising to protect him. What they did not know yet was this: the Hat Rabbit was one half of the Red Queen’s most powerful magical item, the other half being the Magic Hat. By placing the Rabbit within the Hat, the Queen can grant herself one wish—meaning that the Rabbit was the source of the greater part of her power.
Sprocket and Mira arrived in the Red Castle and invited themselves in. Literally. (“Who are you?” “We’re here to see the Queen.” “Oh. And were you invited?” “Yes. We each invited each other.” “Ah. Very well, then. Right this way.”) The Queen was taking tea in her garden with a bunch of insufferably fashionable nobles. The nobles all scoffed at the sight of Sprocket and Mira, but the Queen said that she would give them the key if they would help her find her dear pet Rabbit. Sprocket and Mira accepted the challenge and left the palace, and Sprocket built a rabbit-shaped automaton and covered it with fur and padding, to make a reasonable facsimile of a live rabbit that looked, behaved, acted, and spoke just like the Hat Rabbit.
They returned to the castle and presented the fake Rabbit to the Queen. To test it, she placed the automaton in her Magic Hat and tried to wish. After three unsuccessful attempts, she began to grow angry, and suspected deception. Sprocket convinced her to try again, but this time, as the Queen made a wish, Sprocket granted it himself with a discreet use of an improbability engine. Satisfied, the Queen gave them the First Key, and Sprocket and Mira got away safely with the real Hat Rabbit. To keep the Rabbit safe from the Queen, Sprocket then teleported him up to the surface of the world.
On the way out of the Red Castle, a “jabberwock, with eyes of flame, came whiffling through the tulgey wood.” Sprocket and Mira used a charm monster and convinced the jabberwock to run past them and attack the Red Castle head-on! That accomplished, they found another stone door in a hillside and put in the key, opening the way to the next realm.
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The second realm: Chessrealm.
Taking a cue from “Through the Looking Glass,” the second plane was a giant chess board, divided into black and white squares. Sprocket and Mira found that their clothes had turned white, because they were now “white pawns” in the great game that governed this realm. A black-and-white striped referee appeared, blew a whistle, and explained that as pawns, Sprocket and Mira could only advance one square at a time, and only by going on foot. They had to hike across alternating terrains of frozen white squares of snow-and-ice, and muddy black bogs filled with enemy soldiers, knights, clerics, and charioteers. Only by defeating the King and Queen on the eighth square were they able to recover the Second Key and pass through the doorway into the third realm.
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The third realm: Dreamrealm
This is where things start to get trippy. Passing through the doorway, Sprocket and Mira found themselves in a hallway lined with doors, honking and shouting coming from somewhere outside. They were inside an apartment building in Brooklyn, and an old lady in room B2 was hollering for someone to come fix her drainpipe! Having little better to do, Sprocket offered to deal with the plumbing, and he and Mira were promptly ushered into the bathroom, where the bathtub attacked and swallowed them whole! Now sliding down a green copper pipe, they were spat out the other end in a strange country full of funny plant and rock formations, stacks and pyramids that seemed to be made of blocks of red brick or solid gold. Wandering everywhere were turtle-shelled lizard-men wielding spears and war-hammers. (That was when Mira’s player recognized the eerie resemblance to a Super Mario game.)
As it turned out, this was Dreamrealm, home to a race of fey folk called the Dreamers, and an evil Turtle Tribe had taken over the castle and enchanted all of the Dreamers with endless sleep. At once, our heroes went to the castle to confront the King of the Turtles. Sprocket scared the living daylights out of him and convinced him to lift the curse and cough up the Third Key.
On the way out of Dreamrealm, Mira’s player joked that they defeated the evil turtles, but they hadn’t seen any mushroom people. I laughed, because I knew what was coming next.
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The fourth realm: Rainbowrealm
The doorway to the fourth realm was a ring of concentric circular stones, each one a different color of the rainbow. On the other side of the door, the sky was made of shifting colors, like light on a puddle of motor-oil. Everything was psychedelic, shifting like a kaleidoscope. And the only structure on the landscape was a city of high-rise buildings.
Sprocket and Mira wandered through the deserted streets until they came to a skyscraper with music coming from it. The penthouse, it seemed, was home to an important personage called “the Main Cat.” Inside, they met a toasted elevator operator in hippie hemp-and-tie-dye who conducted them to the top floor. There, they found a swinging, shagadelic pad filled wall to wall with go-go dancing party-goers, all led by an anthropomorphic cat with a curly red wig, blue crushed-velvet suit, frilly lace cravat, etc. who spoke in slang that would make Austin Powers proud.
The Cat informed our heroes that the city was dead because a real square, Dr. Mad Hatter, and his foul henchmen, March Hare and Doormouse, were perpetrating crimes all over the city. Citizens were too afraid to leave their homes! At that very moment, in fact, Doormouse was robbing a bank downtown.
Sprocket and Mira leapt into action, Batman and Robin style! Borrowing the Main Cat’s “Shagmobile” (yes, Sprocket knew how to drive), they raced across town and confronted Doormouse, just in time to keep her from pulling off the heist. Then, one quick “enhanced interrogation” later, they were made aware that Dr. Hatter’s Evil Lair was in the sewers beneath the city. They broke into the lair, defeated the mad doc, nicked the Fourth Key, and got the heck out of dodge ASAP.
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The fifth realm: Desertrealm.
Here, our heroes had to cross a vast desert, aided only by a local caravan of Bedouins. They had to fend off attacks by Ifrit bandits and depose an evil Sultana before they learned that the Fifth Key was in a mysterious cave in the middle of nowhere. Trekking to the cave, they found it filled with treasure, but all treasure that glowed when hit by detect magic, detect evil, detect snares & pits, etc. After all, these players had both seen “Aladdin,” and they knew what they were doing. They went into the depth of the cave, took the key, and left. The door was in a row of mountains on the far eastern part of the realm that separated the desert from the seashore.
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The sixth realm: Oceanrealm
Now standing on a beach at sunset, with an ocean stretching as far as the eye could see, Sprocket had to devise a means of transport that would get them across the sea. He built a small motor while Mira put together a boat, and they went buzzing over the open waters. Along the way, schools of singing fish jumped out of the water over their heads, singing pirate shanties and warning of dire fates ahead.
The first island they found was a little volcanic island with a pirate port flying a Jolly Roger. From here, they booked passage on a schooner with a dashing, Errol Flynn sort of privateer who had a mermaid for a wife and a mute dervish for a first mate.
They sailed south and found first a jungle island with a crystal tower on it. The tower was a prison, and it was being used to seal up a good mage, the White Wizard of Waltz Island, to keep his power at bay. Mira managed to break through the crystal and free the wizard, and he joined the privateer crew.
Next, the came to the deserted Wedge Island. Here, all of the natives had been conquered and carried off as slaves by the barbarian king of the next island over. Only a young boy, the prince of the island, had escaped, and this by hiding. The privateer crew sailed over to the barbarian island, where they found the prince’s family and all the salves, but also the barbarian king, and his witch wife. (As it turned out, the king was a pansy and a coward. His wife wore the pants in the family.) A few neat tricks on Sprocket’s part, and the witch-queen was defeated. The king and the queen each had one half of the Sixth Key, and Sprocket claimed these and put the key together. The people of Wedge Island were freed, and went home; and the White Wizard went with them, to become the young prince’s tutor.
Onward they sailed, until a kelp forest could be seen rising up from the seabed, meaning that the water was getting shallower. Then they came to a span of ocean where stationary waves stretched as far as the eye could see, but remained fixed in place like walls of water. The privateer captain guided the ship over these “hills,” and now they came to the shoreline at the end of the world. And here, they found a keyhole in the solid crystal dome of “sky” that touched the ground here.
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The seventh realm: Underrealm
Sprocket and Mira went on by themselves from here. When they placed the key into the keyhole, it simply caused an earthquake and swallowed our heroes whole. They fell, but it was a feather-fall. Wherever they were, the gravity was getting weaker. They fell past a set of six colorful orbs, like tiny suns, each a different color, and landed in a realm where all the buildings and roads were made of glass. A crowd of emotionless, unsurprised “mole-people” appeared and led our heroes to the Palace of the Sorcerer, where Sprocket and Mira were charged with trespassing, and Sprocket had to duel with the Sorcerer, tech vs. magic, to win their freedom. Sprocket won, and they were led to the tunnel out of the Glass City, a tube that seemed to pass straight down, deeper into the earth, but the gravity was still low, so they just jumped in and floated.
They crossed a valley filled with invisible monsters, and then they passed into a cave filled with mist which turned up. They realized that they were now climbing again, up and up, inside a mountain. They passed through a country where everything was made of wood (the soil and grass were sawdust and wood-shavings, the houses were ramshackle and plywood), inhabited by vicious wooden gargoyles… who caught fire very easily.
At the top of this chain of caves, they found another chamber, a workshop inhabited by an “artiste” name Charles de Jacques, who gave the Seventh Key to Mira and said the following: “The next realm is a race. The first of you to place that key in the keyhole and open the way to the next realm will receive a special prize. Mira, my dear, while you hold that key, you are under a charm of haste… and Sprocket, my friend, here is a crate of supplies, fresh from the ACME factory. I suggest you teleport ahead and set some traps along the way.”
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The eight realm: Toonrealm
The players decided to play along. Mira and Sprocket walked through the door and into a room where everything was bright and cartoony. They looked down, and beneath their persons were subtitles. “Sprocket (gnomicus crazius).” “Mira (birdus quickus).” Mira gave an enthusiastic “meep-meep!” and took off road-running.
Sprocket dimension-doored as far ahead as he could see, into a narrow canyon, and he filled it with all the explosives, bombs, rockets, and TNT in the crate. Then, just to make it interesting, he rigged up a giant electro-magnet designed to draw the key from out of Mira’s grasp.
Mira saw the trap ahead, and decided to use one of her favorite tricks: polymorph into a gold dragon, and try to fly past. Unfortunately, cartoon physics ruled the day here, and so the electromagnet latched onto Mira’s gold scales and started pulling. She resumed her normal shape just in time to break free, but the magnet had moved to follow her flight, and now it was pointing at the bombs. Sprocket teleported away, just in time to avoid the mushroom cloud.
On the other end of the realm, Sprocket found the doorway and the keyhole. He had exhausted all of his traps, except for the ACME All-Color Paint. And so, he tried the fake door trick, painting over the real doorway and making a pretend one with the paint. Needless to say, Mira arrived, put the key into the painted keyhole, and it worked. Because that’s just how these sorts of things go. Charles de Jacques appeared and awarded Mira a cartoon mallet of flattening +5.
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The final realm: the Sidhe Kingdom
In the last demi-plane of the underworld, Sprocket and Mira had to defeat a hungry swamp-witch and judge and friendly dance competition between some very large (and none-too-hasty) ents. Eventually, though, they found the Sidhe Kingdom, and the king of the feys directed them to the wellspring of the elixir, in the Caves of Life and Death.
Here, they heard a booming voice recite a riddle: “Life is change, matter in motion, yet atoms persist without alteration. Even should you take this drink, in spite of all that you might think, something else is ever true for all things living, even you: your road is done, but your souls to ascend, here your bodies meet their end.” Ahead, in the middle of the cave, a wellspring bubbled up with pink liquid, and empty flasks were scattered on the floor.
A commune spell was used to make contact with Bahamut, who clued them in on how the elixir worked: it was agonizingly and permanently fatal to any living body that consumed it, but a vessel stripped of mortal life would become immortal. Sprocket then figured it out: he would have to be dead before he could drink the elixir! This made Mira nervous, but Sprocket figured that he had the right answer, so he set about building a machine that would instantly fry his own brain by scrambling his neurons! He zapped himself with this device and fell down dead. Mira gave him the elixir, and he awoke, good as new, and no IMMORTAL. Just to be sure, he zonked himself with the brain-scrambler again and fell down to 0 hp, but he survived, albeit comatose. Mira now had to hit him with a heal spell to wake him up again. Then Sprocket whipped out a sixgun and tried to shoot Mira in the head! “Hold still!” “I don’t wanna! Hit me with the brain-fryer!” Of course, Sprocket did exactly that, fed the elixir to Mira, and she too was rendered immortal.
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Their task accomplished, they teleported home and discovered that precisely one year to the day had passed in their empires since they had entered the Underworld. The regents and stewards in charge of Sprocket’s empire were doing well enough keeping the peace, and Mira is married to another of the birdfolk, a fellow named Aramis, who had been ruling the empire of Sylvania alone the whole time.
Never one to sit on his laurels, Sprocket had to spend about 2.3 million GP making the Expedition space-worthy, but he succeeded! And at the end of the last game session, the players gained their first epic level, and Sprocket had launched his boat out of planetary orbit and towards the moon!
We’ve played a few more sessions, and some interesting developments have taken place. As of this moment, Sprocket and Mira are still experience level 36/epic rank I, with 49/100 AP.
After the Expedition was launched into space, Sprocket put the ship into lunar orbit and took a small crew down to the moon’s surface in a shuttle. Mira became the first person from Gaia to set foot on lunar soil. They didn’t find anything more interesting there than moonrocks, though, so they left after a short while.
Next, they decided to shake down the FTL drive by plotting a lightspeed jump to Chronos, the sixth planet in the Gaian system, just to see what was there. Taking the ship to “starspeed factor 1” (exactly lightspeed), they were in subspace for about half an hour before they transitioned back into realspace, not too far from Chronos. The planet was a gas-giant, ringed and with a whole bunch of moons, but nothing that looked too worthwhile right away.
Incidentally, the engines on the Expedition’s stardrive have a cruising velocity of starspeed factor 5 (meaning 5^4·C, or 625 times the speed of light) and a maximum velocity of starspeed 6 (6^4·C, or 1,294 times lightspeed). The engine is basically a warp drive: artificial gravity emitters positioned outside the ship can be activated to curve or warp spacetime in a bubble around the ship, transitioning the vehicle into a four-dimensional subspace, where the curvature or “warp bubble” can propagate through realspace at FTL velocities. Within the bubble, the ship is stationary compared to its own reference frame, so it experiences no inertia, spatial compression, or time dilation. The ship isn’t technically moving through space; the warp-bubble moves space past the ship.
In order to decide where to explore first, Captain Sprocket (yeah, he just went and made himself captain) ordered his science crew (there are about 500 people in total aboard the vessel) to take spectra of all the nearest stars, and pick out any that showed promising signs: yellow suns with signatures indicating water might be present somewhere in the system. The closest of these proved to be a yellow star about 30 light-years due galactic west. They plotted a jump, and this time, Sprocket ordered the pilot (a human from Utopia named Celes DuBois, who has been his pilot ever since he commissioned the airship Expedition) to take the ship all the way to starspeed 5. The ship accelerated through each starspeed factor in turn, until they reached cruising speed. (Sprocket wisely decided to not to push things and test the engines’ maximum speed yet. As the DM, I can say that it would have been hilarious if he had, but you don’t get to the point where you have thirty-seven levels under your belt without being a little cautious at all the right times.)
En route, they picked up a distress signal from another ship not too far off of their course. They dropped out of starspeed and found a derelict, long and rectangular, with most of its aft starboard side blown away. There were life-signs aboard, though, so Sprocket and Mira assembled a boarding team and went exploring.
They found a ship that seemed deserted. The hallways led them first to a cargo hold, where there were three dead bodies: two gray-skinned aliens that appeared to have circuitry running through their skin, and one vaguely humanoid blob of green slimy stuff. The gray aliens had apparently died of burn-wounds to the chest; the green alien, of multiple bullet wounds. (The gray aliens had submachine guns, while the green thing had a plasma blaster. Sprocket took both kinds of guns, in order to learn how to replicate them.)
They explored further and found the med-bay. Here, in a heavily armored quarantine chamber, three of the gray-skinned and becircuited aliens were locked in transparent cells. They appeared to have been infected by something, because their skin was green and oozing, and they were all violent and incoherent. Sprocket tried to use a “cure disease” on one of them, and it was fatal to the victim. After that, they left and went to the bridge.
Here, the only thing they found was the ship’s computer, NIKA. They learned that the starship was called the Eskai, and that it came from a planet called Aleer. The Aleerin people were new to space exploration: the Eskai was their first FTL capable starship, and they had been heading to Gaia to meet its people! Unfortunately, they were hit en route by something called the “Viral Pirates.” The crew was fatally infected, and the computer, NIKA, sent out the distress call after the pirates left. NIKA requested only that her computer core be retrieved from the chamber near the engine room. (Eventually, Sprocket realized that NIKA sent the distress call on her own, to save herself, thinking the crew beyond help. The realization that NIKA is an artificial intelligence with a self-preservation instinct has been disturbing, but it didn’t stop him from taking the computer core.)
They also discovered that while “cure disease” was always fatal, “heal” was only fifty percent fatal, so they set about saving which crew members they could. Unfortunately, some were traumatized and insane, but one, an Aleerin called Officer Däz, joined Sprocket’s and Mira’s crew. On the lower levels, the infected crew were shambling about like zombies, attacking anything that moved. Sprocket and Mira ran past, pulled NIKA’s core, and got the hell out of Dodge.
Then Sprocket ordered the ship’s chaplain and the ship’s doctor (both high-level clerics) to go through the ship with an armed escort, “healing” all the infected crew. The ones that died were simply “raised,” much to the astonishment of the Aleerins. The Aleerins, as it turned out, were highly skilled with computer technology, but utterly confounded by magic. After that, Sprocket towed the Eskai all the way back to Aleer, and as thanks, the Aleerins let him keep NIKA, and an officer exchange allowed Däz to stay aboard as Sprocket’s science officer. Since the Expedition had been using an analytical engine (based on mechanical relays and vacuum tubes, and taking up an entire cargo bay) for its computations, installing NIKA multiplied the ship’s computing capabilities by several billion times! Nevertheless, a few conversations with the AI have so far proven that it has no moral compunctions whatsoever. About anything. Except, perhaps, its own continued existence.
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Next, they plotted a 40-light-year jump to an interesting nebula, coreward and galactic west. Here, they found glowing hot clouds of vaporous heavy metals, and about ten AUs into the nebula, a dodecahedral shape about five miles wide, made of some anomalous stone or metal. Sprocket personally “teleported” into the object, where he found nothing but a rectangular stone box. It turned out to be a casket with a millennia-dead alien inside, which Sprocket retrieved and tried to “raise.” It didn’t work; the alien died again of old age. But the ship’s chaplain used “resurrection,” but even this would only keep the alien alive for a few minutes. Nevertheless, they learned that the alien was called a Fraal by the name of Grand Admiral Z’bin, and that this burial site was to commemorate his great victory over evil enemies in a space battle long ago. The Fraal informed them that he had fought on behalf of a great civilization, the Free Empyrean Federation, against a terrible evil called the Cocytian Galactic Empire. But with thousands of years of galactic drift at work, there was no way of telling where to find either the Federation or the Empire. And then he expired again.
Now they turned the ship toward galactic east, but still coreward. Another 40 light year jump took them to a jungle planet, where they met the primitive batlike aliens called Sesheyans. Mira, who has that favorite “polymorph self” trick of hers, led the away team. She took of the form of a Sesheyan in order to meet the people, where a tribal elder told her that their particular village was besieged by an invisible monster that stalks the night. Mira played the part of a warrior from a distant village, and she took up the quest to slay the monster. Traveling north of the village for half a day, she came to a cave, wherein lay an invisible beast of considerable size. Mira used “truesight” and then “polymorph self” again. She saw that the monster looked like a gargantuan four-jawed dinosaur thing, and she took a dragon form for herself. The resulting battle dropped the beast in two breath weapons.
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After this adventure, they plotted yet another course, this time galactic east and a little rimward. It was 60 light years or so to the next planet, quite a journey all things considered. Along the way, Sprocket continued working on his latest obsession, combining holograms with force fields in order to make “hard light” holography. Anyway, en route their power systems became infected with some kind of microorganism that feeds on high-energy plasma, draining all power from their engines. The microbes were actually inside the main fusion reactor, and when they shut it down, the things somehow migrated through the power conduits and into the backup reactor. Sprocket simply disconnected the backup reactor, to isolate it, and then they found that they were able to start up the main reactor and go to starspeed again. At the nearest sun (a 7 light-year detour), they jettisoned all the plasma in the backup reactor, sending the bugs out with it.
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The next system they found was a trinary star system, with three stars all gravitationally bound, but far enough apart that each planet had its own “Goldilocks belt” and its own habitable planet. The nearest world was a desert planet surrounded by a debris field, and populated by an advanced but very defensive race of orange-skinned humanoids. They were called the Zidans, and they proved very eager to make any alliances they could with Sprocket and Mira. As it turned out, their planet was a desert because it had been so frequently ganged up on and bombarded by the Orkans and the Kordans, the other two civilizations in the trinary system.
Sprocket managed to trade his knowledge of holograms and invisibility cloaks to the Zidans, in favor of particle shields and a superior stardrive design with a maximum velocity of starspeed 7 (2,401 times lightspeed). While among the Zidans, Mira and Sprocket both noticed that these people were extremely religious, and they constantly offered prayers to a deity called Zida. Once they left and got back aboard their ship, Sprocket searched the planet for any sign of a crystal tower, similar to the one Bahamut had back on Gaia. They found a crystal structure in the debris field circling the planet! As it turned out, this immortal had put her palace on the planet’s only moon, but the moon had been destroyed by the Orkans and Kordans. Zida was still alive, but she was weakened and unable to do anything about the Chaotic and evil immortals who ruled the other two planets in the system.
Our heroes realized that Bahamut had had some experience dealing with evil immortals in the past (he had defeated Tiamat back in the day and sealed her up in Gaia’s core, after all), so they decided to travel home to resupply, upgrade their technology, and learn what they could from Gaia’s chief immortal. The course from the trinary system to Gaia was only another forty light-years or so, jumping rimward and galactic west: the maiden voyage of the starship Expedition, three months of game-time in execution, was one big circle… and, by and large, a successful mission!
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