It still has not fully hit home yet, that the game is done. I'd estimate that I've spent about 1500 hours of my life creating and executing the Charagan campaign, not including time spent writing up the Story Hour. It has been one of the most rewarding and enjoyable experiences of my life, and I'm happy to have the chance to share it with a few dozen EN Worlders.
I've probably said this before, but it's been hugely valuable to have written these up, and I'm not sure I'd have had the energy to do so without the feedback from you readers. So, to anyone seeing these photons: you've personally made a positive impact on the game. Thanks!
Oh, and here's an update.
Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 334
Nexus of Last Roads
Morningstar delivers a
sending to Yale, so the Spire will know where they’ve gone:
Investigating where Cencerra went. Think we’ve found Naslund, burial place of the Gods. It’s missing caretakers now that Drosh gone. Yikes. Guess we’re going in?
Yale’s reply:
Sounds like business as usual. Good luck!
Morningstar throws up her hands. “Did she not hear me say ‘burial place of the Gods?’”
Flicker laughs. “Yeah, but put it in context. We’ve been inside a city in a bottle. We’ve travelled through time. We’ve defeated armies of the undead. Are you surprised she’s jaded?”
Morningstar also
sends to Rhiavonne, whose reply is more sensible:
Resting place of WHAT Gods? Take the usual care. Will have Chroniclers investigate Naslund, if you want..
And finally she issues a third
sending to Lucas, on Dranko’s behalf. Lucas’s answer:
Look, whatever happens, don’t let them erase your memories. I don’t want to have to explain everything to you again.
/*/
Morningstar starts the following morning with a quick
commune in the Lucent Tower. She casts her spell and feels the holy presence of Ell around her. She asks her questions:
Is Naslund through that archway?
I CANNOT SEE
Did something control the blacksmith when he went toward the Downward Spiral?
YES
Was it Farazil?
YES
Was Farazil inhabiting the blacksmith’s body when he went through the arch?
YES
Were the two peasants who arrived and went through the arch, people whom we would find important?
YES
Did Cencerra go through the arch?
YES
Was she mind-controlled?
NO
Were Farazil’s interests opposed to our own?
NO
In the past year, has anyone else been through the Arch, other than the two peasants, Cencerra and her party, and the blacksmith with Farazil?
NO
If Farazil is the same now as he was when he went through the arch, would it be safe for us to trust him?
IN THE SHORT TERM, PROBABLY.
Was Farazil working for the king or the Spire guard?
NO
Was he working for another party?
NO
Do we know the people who were disguised as peasants?
I DON’T KNOW
Has anyone come out of the Arch in the last two years?
I DON’T KNOW
Morningstar sighs. Those two peasants were almost certainly
mind blanked, which would explain the lack of divinatory clarity.
Do you know anything of Naslund?
NOT IN ANY MEANINGFUL WAY
We think that Naslund lies beyond that gate. We think that Drosh fleeing has left it without a caretaker. That’s where we’re heading…
Before Morningstar can even form a question to go with this preamble, she receives as answer:
NASLUND CANNOT BE MY CONCERN
Should I not go, then?
THAT IS YOUR CHOICE
Do you expect any more of the Gods to flee the oncoming Adversary?
YES. BUT NOT ELL.
After that, Morningstar takes Aravis with her into
Ava Dormo and they journey again to the archway at the bottom of the Downward Spiral. This is so that Aravis can judge the distance from the surface to the arch; armed with that knowledge, he then
dimension doors the whole Company down, so they don’t have to make the slow physical journey through the folded earth. As Morningstar saw, no light from the surface makes it all the way down to this place. Aravis casts
mass darkvision.
The freestanding arch and its written warning stand silent, inert.
Dranko walks through it in both directions, but nothing untoward happens to him. He narrows his eyes and thinks that he would like to go to Naslund. Immediately the gateway responds to his desire; the arch’s interior space glows red, an opaque sheet filling the opening.
“That’s more like it.”
He lights his cigar, hoping for a prophetic exhalation, but the smoke is just smoke.
“Screw it,” he says, and he steps through. The others quickly follow.
/*/
There is no feeling of translation or travel. Their feet leave the ground of Karth, and touch down upon an old cobbled road… somewhere else. The Company stands in a group, looking around at their new surroundings.
Behind them, a gartine arch twin to the one in Karth stands half-embedded in a huge foggy gray wall that marks the edge of the demiplane. They have seen this sort of thing before; the boundaries of the Slices of Het Branoi looked like this. But this is not Het Branoi.
The road beneath their feet emerges from the archway and the gray wall, and continues straight away from it for about fifty yards. Its terminus is the base of an enormous pearlescent dome, easily a mile in diameter, that fills the sky in that direction (and indeed takes up most of the space in the demiplane). All of the ground outside the dome is flat and bare dirt, save for the stone road. It appears that there is a large arched doorway in the dome, where the road meets it.
Kibi takes a sharp breath, for he has noticed something else. Some twenty feet from the road to their left, lying scattered on the featureless ground, are four sprawled bodies, human-sized. Dranko notices a fifth body on the other side of the road: a dwarf. And he sees something else
beyond the dwarf. It’s… another road, shimmering, somehow both there and not there, a shadowy dream of a cobbled path. He stares at it, and though it doesn’t come into focus, he then thinks he sees yet
another road beyond that one. Both of the new roads, like the true one under his feet, radiate from the great dome in the center of the demiplane. It’s like he’s seeing, faintly, the next two neighboring spokes of a great wheel. He turns and looks the other direction, and to his left are yet more roads, shifting, indistinct. The longer he stares, the more roads he sees; there must be hundreds, all leading to the dome, but there do not appear to be any doorways save the one to which the solid road leads.
Morningstar grasps her holy symbol and feels Ell’s presence within her, but muted, indirect.
Kibi looks up. The sky is a sunless, uniform gray, and everywhere is a sourceless light of an overcast afternoon. The temperature is perfectly neutral. He turns back to the archway through which they entered, and wills it to take him back to Karth. Nothing happens. He walks through anyway, and comes up against the unyielding boundary of the demiplane. For the moment, at least, there’s no escape from this place.
The party’s collective attention turns to the bodies. Did leaving the road somehow cause their deaths? Grey Wolf uses
telekinesis to bring over the closest of the four human-sized bodies. They all recognize it immediately: it’s Cencerra. Her corpse has been stripped of armor and items, and her clothes are torn. More disturbing is the burned out hole in her chest, where her heart should be. Instead of a heart, there is an ash residue in a charred cavity. As Grey Wolf retrieves the remaining bodies, they see that all the corpses have had their hearts incinerated. They’ve been dead for some time, though there are no insects or signs of putrefaction.
Dranko is bestowed with
death ward and
fly spells, and flies over to examine the dwarf on the other side of the road. This body is different; its heart is intact, and it still clutches a water-skin in a withered hand. It appears that the dwarf must have died of thirst or starvation. Dranko drags the body back to the road with his whip.
They are jarred from their focused attention on the corpses by a distant two-toned horn blast. It comes from somewhere outside the dome, off to the right in the shifting sea of ghostly roads. Dranko can make out movement in the distance; he is made
invisible and he flies over to get a closer look. As he flies, he sees that the many roads are shifting over and under one another, and he adjusts upward his estimate of their number. Thousands, tens of thousands, radiate outward like sunbeams from the huge pearly dome. But not too far away, marching down one of these streets, is an ethereal procession of giants. They appear to him as though through a smeared lens, blurred around the edges. There are at least a hundred of these beings, and in the center of their host a dozen of them bear a large shoulder-mounted slab. On this slab rests the body of a truly enormous giant, twice the size of the others, with a huge and ornate shield upon its chest. Every twenty feet or so, the procession stops for a second while heralds at the front sound their trumpets. When they reach the dome, their bodies seem to pass directly through it, and before five more minutes have passed, the entire company of giants has disappeared inside the dome.
/*/
Morningstar tries casting
speak with dead on Cencerra’s body, but the spell simply fails. Whether this is due to the nature of the demiplane, or the mysterious absence of the target’s heart, no one can say.
Grey Wolf wonders aloud what became of Farazil when the dwarf died.
“Doesn’t he go back to the plane of shadow if his host body dies?” asks Ernie, trying to remember what they once learned of the Carch Din.
“If he’s still here, he’ll possess us if he wants to talk,” says Morningstar, only half-joking.
Dranko grins. “Hey, Flicker…!”
“Are you volunteering me?” squawks Flicker. “Because… no. No way!”
“I’m asking if you’re still you,” says Dranko.
Flicker’s eyes go wide; the thought hadn’t occurred to him.
“Yes!” he exclaims, looking around. “And I’d like to keep it that way!”
There is more movement out among the wheel-spoke roads. Dranko flies again to investigate, and this time sees a single ghostly form, a perfectly-formed humanoid some twenty-five feet tall and radiating a divine light. Tears are streaming down his face, each a perfect diamond droplet. He holds a dead woman in his arms, a tall perfect being like himself, and slowly he walks toward the dome. Dranko tries to speak to the being, but either it cannot hear him or chooses not to respond. As Dranko watches the man passes soundlessly through the dome, bearing his burden of grief.
Upon hearing what Dranko has seen, Ernie whispers, “I think these are the dead from all the different onions! That would explain why only one path is solid for us. But for those others…”
“They’re all in different planes of existence,” says Aravis. “But they overlap here.”
/*/
It doesn’t take long for the Company to walk the fifty yards to the dome, and its large, arched doorway. But the doorway is only cosmetic – there’s no actual door, just the smooth glassy white surface of the dome. There are words carved into the dome wall above the doorway, in the same language as that back in the Downward Spiral.
“Naslund, Nexus of Last Roads.”
“I wish to enter,” says Ernie. When nothing happens, he turns to Aravis. “You’re a God…”
“But I think I’d have to be dead,” says Aravis.
Dranko tries pushing on the wall where the door should be. He is rewarded with a painful flash and a feeling like electricity in his hands. It feels as though the dome surface tried to suck out his life-force – and it probably would have had he not been protected by a
death ward.
“Guess I won’t be licking it,” he says, eyeing the dome with new respect.
Morningstar frowns. “So we can’t go forward, and we can’t leave.”
“Guess we’ll starve to death,” says Dranko.
Aravis tries casting
knock from a distance. Nothing opens, though he feels an unusual jolt of energy. Ernie tries channeling his faith into the doorway. The door remains unimpressed.
And so they stand there, flummoxed, for a few minutes more. Aravis casts a
vision naming “Naslund” as the subject, but divinations are stifled in this place. At a loss for more esoteric solutions, Aravis decides that maybe he can succeed where Dranko failed. Morningstar supplies him his own
death ward, and he steps forward to touch the doorway.
The stone in the doorway vanishes, creating an open entrance to the Necropolis. The party crowds around to peer inside.
/*/
Several weeks earlier, in the presence of the Feline Conclave, the cat Inkspot had spoken private words to Aravis: “
You are the only directly divine
human on Abernia. I don't think that came about simply to help the feline race. Perhaps there is a place you must go where only Gods are permitted, or a creature you must slay whom only a God can kill...destiny is not finished with you, Aravis.”
So it would seem.
Aravis utters a prayer to Pikon, and another one to Quarrol, and the Company steps across the threshold to Naslund, Necropolis of the Gods.
…to be continued…
