Terwox
First Post
Well, it’s time I tried my hand at a story hour. I’m just going to hop right into the story, if you’d like an explanation of the world and the rules, I’ll explain as I go along with footnotes. This takes places a few sessions into the campaigns, and I’ll go forward or back in time as I feel like it. I had a lot of fun w/ these sessions earlier this week, so here goes.
EDIT: There's not too much here yet! But I just wanted to get started.
--
Greater woke up, and choked. Black bile tasted heavy on his tongue, and he was pretty sure that the pile of gore now on his lap was his son’s black heart. A few moments later, he realized was no longer an ascended black dragon that had recently fallen.(1) He pondered for a moment, tried again to touch the gods, and failed once again.(2) He concluded that he finally was done thinking about good and evil.(3) He also happily discovered that the heart he was holding was rather powerful, and he could fuel some magic with it.(4)
He sat up, and stuffed the heart in the one backpack they owned. Namegiver was sitting up and tending to the camp, but Clubbie was still asleep. Clubbie didn’t like being called Clubbie, but Greater didn’t really care.
Greater had gotten used to the sight of his companions, and relatively used to the sight of the world. The sun was still gone, the sky was still missing, and they were still sitting on a near-featureless grass plain. The void of the sky didn’t really welcome him back to the home of this world, but it didn’t disturb him either. Namegiver’s short brown hair still had drops of fresh blood in it, his fingers were still somewhat clawed, his teeth were still sharpened, and his skin was still chalky white. He still had his leather armor on, and his bow… her bow? Well, the dragon-claw bow from the woman who disappeared at the tree of meat was slung over his shoulder, like normal. He didn’t really wonder what had happened to that elf woman anymore. The wolf Namegiver decided to keep from the Mountain still followed him, and it looked like he was teaching it more tricks.(5) The wolf still looked normal enough. He paused for a moment, as praying for spells was still unintuitive without a deity, and without an appointed time of day in a world with no sun, it was still a little odd.
--
Namegiver went about cleaning up camp, and getting ready to head out. He trained the wolf idly; it was still having trouble with heeling. Greater was up, but the half-orc was still in bed. He still hadn’t a name for the half-orc or the wolf; the half-orc had rejected all the names Namegiver had given to him. Greater’s bird-that-was-a-bat-and-not-a-bird-but-blah-blah-something was flapping around, but Greater didn’t notice him. He walked over and gently kicked the half-orc out of bed, dislodging the rusty pygmy dragon that he had named Xantathazar the Destroyer from the half-orc’s body. The half-orc still went to sleep clutching his femur-flute, and Namegiver unconsciously shivered a little at the thought of the jelly the half-orc’s left upper leg felt like. The half-orc could still run around just fine, except when others started playing a tune.
--
The half-orc woke up grumbling. His dragon was whining at him again about being a proper minion. His dragon cried out “gnome pony!” and was met with snickers from Namegiver and Greater, and a swat from the half-orc. He liked the gnome from his dream, but she had been really aggressive. It was fun carrying her around as a dragon, though, although even now, outside the dream, he still felt ashamed about it.(6) He put on the breastplate he had won from the orc chief he had slain, tucked the dagger he slew him with into it, and was ready to go. Although he would only wield the dagger against an orc, and favored his dwarven axe, he felt comforted by its presence.
--
The three walked on for awhile, toward Hukgi. They still had no idea what awaited them at this node, but that feeling was growing normal. The walk was eventless and rather silent for a few hours, until a low moan was heard some 200 feet off the path. The half-orc had tried to leave the path between nodes once before, but simply thinking about it had caused nausea and a fainting spell. This time, though, they all wandered over without event, found absolutely nothing, and simply got back on the path with no trouble.(7)
A few hours later, the plains turned into an empty desert over the span of two miles. They plodded on for a moment, but the half-orc decided to try something.
--
The half-orc concentrated and focused his will, and decided that the bird-that-was-a-long-list-of-something’s should be modified. The bird-thing-whatever kept asking for it, anyway. He decided to make him into a rat, but he then knew he could only make a skeletal rat, and decided that was certainly good enough. The half-orc furrowed his brow, crossed his arms, burned his brain, and flubbed the creature into a skeletal bat with a rat’s leg coming out of the middle of his torso. The bird-bat-rat shrieked and flapped about. The half-orc’s ears leaked some blood, but Greater decided to fix things, and willed the skeleton-bird-bat-rat into… well, it had the feathered body of a bird, the wings of a bat, the head of a rat, and a single dangling skeletal foot of a rat. Namegiver committed the most heinous travesty of all, however, and named the poor creature Bert. Greater sighed, because he knew that his familiar that he had just acquired was most certainly now undead.
--
Bert wasn’t really all that angry. At least he wasn’t a stupid bird anymore. And he still felt his connection to Greater, even though Greater wasn’t a mage yet. And he could move about, and Namegiver would even hold him too, so he didn’t feel unloved. He did yell at the half-orc for doing this to him, and he yelled at Namegiver for giving him his idiotic name, but he was happy enough for now. Except when they called him Bert the bird. He wasn’t a bird. He sadly realized he wasn’t sure if he really counted as a he anymore, though. But being an it isn’t so bad.
--
Xantathazar the Destroyer plotted. He knew he was a prismatic dragon, he knew he was the most powerful member of this band of misfits, and he knew that these people should rightfully be his minions that he would treat justly, or at least semi-justly. He knew the connections between their dreams that they couldn’t see. He knew a great many things. He knew he was a he, though he was far too young to have chosen that yet.(8)
He asked them all to be his rightful minions, and they taunted him. Greater said that if they should be his minions, he need merely demonstrate that he was more powerful than them. He nodded, flew twenty feet up the ground, roared more fearsomely than any of them had heard before, and promptly blasted the sand with a prismatic cone. His brain burned until it was cold.
--
Namegiver picked Xantathazar up. The little bugger was still breathing, and a large section of desert was in wild disarray. He shrugged, and stuffed him in the backpack. He’d seen stranger things. It looked like three figures were up ahead in the desert, and he hailed them.
--
All I got for now, one of my players has urged me to start at the beginning because the beginning is a better spot because everyone dies in the beginning, but I just wanted to start and get something out here.
Aim conversation:
Me: what on EARTH should i title it?
Me: i'm thinking Dream Not-Dream
Me: but
Player: 101 ways to piss off your players?
Player: Spited Powergamers?
I guess I’ll just go with what I titled it.
Oh, while I’m at it… The half-orc is a dragon totem barbarian 1/half-orc paragon 2, Greater is a human priest of plant and war 3, and Namegiver is a human ranger 3.
Also...
Me: hehe i bet i'd get more reads if i logged in as Sepulchrave III
Player: do it!
Me: haha no
---
Footnotes:
1: During the course of their adventures, the… adventurers sounds somehow wrong. I suppose it’s accurate, but they’re just beings-thrown-there. Let’s call them the dreamers. But, the dreamers dreams communally, and usually as a collective. Except when they don’t. But, at this juncture, the party had a dream of being two bronze dragons, and an ascended (celestial) black dragon. Being a dream, the black dragon merely knew it was ascended, and did not dwell on its history. As they were all water dragons, they were after the black dragon’s son. They slew him, but the black dragon slurped his heart down, which popped him from young adult to adult, but lost him his celestial status. The dreamers, at this juncture, regard their dreams as apart from wrongs done ill to one another, and as a separate world.
2: Deities exist in their dreams, but none are present where-they-are. Since Greater is a priest, and a priest of plant and war, this was originally a bit distressing, but he’s over it.
3: Everybody wakes up true neutral, with no recollection of their past. Oh, this is the PCs, but covers the NPCs as well. In their dreams, most of them have ranged the gamut from lawful good to chaotic evil, or at least more permutations of such than one could really feel comfortable with.
4: There is no such thing as gold. And as the PCs woke up largely naked, most of their gear has been either crafted or stolen. I’m using the craft point system, which is going over well. There is downtime, and I ignore the stupid needing a feat to make masterwork items rule (they just make the check,) and the gp needed for resources comes from simply finding the resources. They still don’t have any usable metal, besides a few weapons.
5: I’m letting the ranger (Namegiver) use craft points as time spent on training the wolf he took a liking to. I really like the craft points, they remind everybody that they can craft things, and items are just more entertaining to myself, and hopefully the players, if they’re made by the characters. Same with the tricks and stuff, I’m running it rather loosely.
6: Dreams aren’t quite as separate from “reality” for the half-orc. Low wisdom in my world has some fun effects.
7: The routes between points of interest are non-Euclidean. Routes are found by finding the node at a point of interest, which will display routes to other nodes from that node. I suppose you could think of it as a system of wormholes, although I don’t really understand the concept of wormholes. Some node routes are one-way, some are two-way, some take longer to get there than to come back, and they’re just starting to get a little more daunting than that, although we’re not there yet.
8: Directly stolen from Patricia Wrede, but I love this concept. Dragons choose what gender they are when they are old enough to make an informed decision as to what gender they would like to be. This played an important role in the dream of dragons, but I’ll possibly get there. Also, in the dragon dream, Xantathazar was a hatchling prismatic dragon that they interacted with. In the dream, he tried to make the dragons his minions as well.
EDIT: There's not too much here yet! But I just wanted to get started.
--
Greater woke up, and choked. Black bile tasted heavy on his tongue, and he was pretty sure that the pile of gore now on his lap was his son’s black heart. A few moments later, he realized was no longer an ascended black dragon that had recently fallen.(1) He pondered for a moment, tried again to touch the gods, and failed once again.(2) He concluded that he finally was done thinking about good and evil.(3) He also happily discovered that the heart he was holding was rather powerful, and he could fuel some magic with it.(4)
He sat up, and stuffed the heart in the one backpack they owned. Namegiver was sitting up and tending to the camp, but Clubbie was still asleep. Clubbie didn’t like being called Clubbie, but Greater didn’t really care.
Greater had gotten used to the sight of his companions, and relatively used to the sight of the world. The sun was still gone, the sky was still missing, and they were still sitting on a near-featureless grass plain. The void of the sky didn’t really welcome him back to the home of this world, but it didn’t disturb him either. Namegiver’s short brown hair still had drops of fresh blood in it, his fingers were still somewhat clawed, his teeth were still sharpened, and his skin was still chalky white. He still had his leather armor on, and his bow… her bow? Well, the dragon-claw bow from the woman who disappeared at the tree of meat was slung over his shoulder, like normal. He didn’t really wonder what had happened to that elf woman anymore. The wolf Namegiver decided to keep from the Mountain still followed him, and it looked like he was teaching it more tricks.(5) The wolf still looked normal enough. He paused for a moment, as praying for spells was still unintuitive without a deity, and without an appointed time of day in a world with no sun, it was still a little odd.
--
Namegiver went about cleaning up camp, and getting ready to head out. He trained the wolf idly; it was still having trouble with heeling. Greater was up, but the half-orc was still in bed. He still hadn’t a name for the half-orc or the wolf; the half-orc had rejected all the names Namegiver had given to him. Greater’s bird-that-was-a-bat-and-not-a-bird-but-blah-blah-something was flapping around, but Greater didn’t notice him. He walked over and gently kicked the half-orc out of bed, dislodging the rusty pygmy dragon that he had named Xantathazar the Destroyer from the half-orc’s body. The half-orc still went to sleep clutching his femur-flute, and Namegiver unconsciously shivered a little at the thought of the jelly the half-orc’s left upper leg felt like. The half-orc could still run around just fine, except when others started playing a tune.
--
The half-orc woke up grumbling. His dragon was whining at him again about being a proper minion. His dragon cried out “gnome pony!” and was met with snickers from Namegiver and Greater, and a swat from the half-orc. He liked the gnome from his dream, but she had been really aggressive. It was fun carrying her around as a dragon, though, although even now, outside the dream, he still felt ashamed about it.(6) He put on the breastplate he had won from the orc chief he had slain, tucked the dagger he slew him with into it, and was ready to go. Although he would only wield the dagger against an orc, and favored his dwarven axe, he felt comforted by its presence.
--
The three walked on for awhile, toward Hukgi. They still had no idea what awaited them at this node, but that feeling was growing normal. The walk was eventless and rather silent for a few hours, until a low moan was heard some 200 feet off the path. The half-orc had tried to leave the path between nodes once before, but simply thinking about it had caused nausea and a fainting spell. This time, though, they all wandered over without event, found absolutely nothing, and simply got back on the path with no trouble.(7)
A few hours later, the plains turned into an empty desert over the span of two miles. They plodded on for a moment, but the half-orc decided to try something.
--
The half-orc concentrated and focused his will, and decided that the bird-that-was-a-long-list-of-something’s should be modified. The bird-thing-whatever kept asking for it, anyway. He decided to make him into a rat, but he then knew he could only make a skeletal rat, and decided that was certainly good enough. The half-orc furrowed his brow, crossed his arms, burned his brain, and flubbed the creature into a skeletal bat with a rat’s leg coming out of the middle of his torso. The bird-bat-rat shrieked and flapped about. The half-orc’s ears leaked some blood, but Greater decided to fix things, and willed the skeleton-bird-bat-rat into… well, it had the feathered body of a bird, the wings of a bat, the head of a rat, and a single dangling skeletal foot of a rat. Namegiver committed the most heinous travesty of all, however, and named the poor creature Bert. Greater sighed, because he knew that his familiar that he had just acquired was most certainly now undead.
--
Bert wasn’t really all that angry. At least he wasn’t a stupid bird anymore. And he still felt his connection to Greater, even though Greater wasn’t a mage yet. And he could move about, and Namegiver would even hold him too, so he didn’t feel unloved. He did yell at the half-orc for doing this to him, and he yelled at Namegiver for giving him his idiotic name, but he was happy enough for now. Except when they called him Bert the bird. He wasn’t a bird. He sadly realized he wasn’t sure if he really counted as a he anymore, though. But being an it isn’t so bad.
--
Xantathazar the Destroyer plotted. He knew he was a prismatic dragon, he knew he was the most powerful member of this band of misfits, and he knew that these people should rightfully be his minions that he would treat justly, or at least semi-justly. He knew the connections between their dreams that they couldn’t see. He knew a great many things. He knew he was a he, though he was far too young to have chosen that yet.(8)
He asked them all to be his rightful minions, and they taunted him. Greater said that if they should be his minions, he need merely demonstrate that he was more powerful than them. He nodded, flew twenty feet up the ground, roared more fearsomely than any of them had heard before, and promptly blasted the sand with a prismatic cone. His brain burned until it was cold.
--
Namegiver picked Xantathazar up. The little bugger was still breathing, and a large section of desert was in wild disarray. He shrugged, and stuffed him in the backpack. He’d seen stranger things. It looked like three figures were up ahead in the desert, and he hailed them.
--
All I got for now, one of my players has urged me to start at the beginning because the beginning is a better spot because everyone dies in the beginning, but I just wanted to start and get something out here.
Aim conversation:
Me: what on EARTH should i title it?
Me: i'm thinking Dream Not-Dream
Me: but
Player: 101 ways to piss off your players?
Player: Spited Powergamers?
I guess I’ll just go with what I titled it.
Oh, while I’m at it… The half-orc is a dragon totem barbarian 1/half-orc paragon 2, Greater is a human priest of plant and war 3, and Namegiver is a human ranger 3.
Also...
Me: hehe i bet i'd get more reads if i logged in as Sepulchrave III
Player: do it!
Me: haha no
---
Footnotes:
1: During the course of their adventures, the… adventurers sounds somehow wrong. I suppose it’s accurate, but they’re just beings-thrown-there. Let’s call them the dreamers. But, the dreamers dreams communally, and usually as a collective. Except when they don’t. But, at this juncture, the party had a dream of being two bronze dragons, and an ascended (celestial) black dragon. Being a dream, the black dragon merely knew it was ascended, and did not dwell on its history. As they were all water dragons, they were after the black dragon’s son. They slew him, but the black dragon slurped his heart down, which popped him from young adult to adult, but lost him his celestial status. The dreamers, at this juncture, regard their dreams as apart from wrongs done ill to one another, and as a separate world.
2: Deities exist in their dreams, but none are present where-they-are. Since Greater is a priest, and a priest of plant and war, this was originally a bit distressing, but he’s over it.
3: Everybody wakes up true neutral, with no recollection of their past. Oh, this is the PCs, but covers the NPCs as well. In their dreams, most of them have ranged the gamut from lawful good to chaotic evil, or at least more permutations of such than one could really feel comfortable with.
4: There is no such thing as gold. And as the PCs woke up largely naked, most of their gear has been either crafted or stolen. I’m using the craft point system, which is going over well. There is downtime, and I ignore the stupid needing a feat to make masterwork items rule (they just make the check,) and the gp needed for resources comes from simply finding the resources. They still don’t have any usable metal, besides a few weapons.
5: I’m letting the ranger (Namegiver) use craft points as time spent on training the wolf he took a liking to. I really like the craft points, they remind everybody that they can craft things, and items are just more entertaining to myself, and hopefully the players, if they’re made by the characters. Same with the tricks and stuff, I’m running it rather loosely.
6: Dreams aren’t quite as separate from “reality” for the half-orc. Low wisdom in my world has some fun effects.
7: The routes between points of interest are non-Euclidean. Routes are found by finding the node at a point of interest, which will display routes to other nodes from that node. I suppose you could think of it as a system of wormholes, although I don’t really understand the concept of wormholes. Some node routes are one-way, some are two-way, some take longer to get there than to come back, and they’re just starting to get a little more daunting than that, although we’re not there yet.
8: Directly stolen from Patricia Wrede, but I love this concept. Dragons choose what gender they are when they are old enough to make an informed decision as to what gender they would like to be. This played an important role in the dream of dragons, but I’ll possibly get there. Also, in the dragon dream, Xantathazar was a hatchling prismatic dragon that they interacted with. In the dream, he tried to make the dragons his minions as well.
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