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Shemeska's Planescape Storyhour (Updated 29 Jan 2014)
- Thread starter Shemeska
- Start date
Shemeska
Adventurer
The door swung open to one last corridor lined with prison cells, but unlike all of the others previously, its cells were occupied. Huddled away from the light, many of them showed the signs of torture and oddly enough, starvation, despite the astral removing their need for sustenance. Each cell held a collection of humans, demihumans, and planetouched, roughly four to a cell, all of them wearing faded, tattered, and bloodstained clothing decorated with symbols of the Athar and the Godsmen.
"Athar?" Florian asked, feeling a bit of uncharacteristic pity for the prisoners, given their ideology.
Clueless shrugged. Terrance's illusionary copy hadn't mentioned anything relevant, though it was possible they'd all been abducted in the process of the 'loths finding where Aoskar's godisle lay.
The Athar were at least relevant in some way to where they were, given what the 'loths were after, and their own faction's historical involvement. But what made no sense at all were the men and women bearing tattoos of the Believers of the Source. What were godsmen doing there?
Toras approached one of the cells and called out to a despondent looking elf slumped against the rear wall. “Who are you and what are you all doing here?”
The man didn’t answer, in fact he looked away, almost as if he feared rescue, or the risk of a rescue gone wrong, more so than simply staying there in his cage.
The fighter called out to him again, and then to another of his cage-mates, but neither of them answered.
“Toras,” Fyrehowl said. “We can come back for them once we’ve made sure the place is safe. If they’re frightened to leave, we need to kill whoever’s got them conditioned.”
Perhaps reluctantly, followed by the haunting stares of the inmates, they continued on down the corridor, expecting githyanki guards, or something worse, to confront them at any moment. But nothing did, and eventually the corridor ended at a pair of doors, one leading into what seemed to be a warded, high security cell, and directly opposite it, a finely decorated archway cut with a githyanki symbol for ‘Kith’rak’ or Captain, smelling of a quixotic mixture of fiend, candle smoke, and incense: presumably the warden's chamber.
"Run you fools!"
A pained, terrified voice called out to them from the cell.
They turned to see a man huddled at the far end of the cell. Dressed in the robes of a high-ranking member of the Athar, factor or factotum, he showed the signs of hideous and recent torture. Thin and shaking from starvation, he was missing an eye and one of his legs was bent at an awkward angle from multiple breaks that had healed without proper care. Throwing aside his torture ravaged body, he would have been forty, assuming he hadn't been on the Astral for centuries, but he looked more like a man in his early elderly years, showing the ravages of energy draining magic.
“The astral fiends!” He shouted, self-consciously touching the darkened, smoky trails that discolored his skin. “Run! Run now!”
Whoever he was, the man was a hollow, walking shell of his former self. From whatever horrors he'd been through during his incarceration, his face showed more an expression of dread and fear of what might come, than any measure of hope.
"Whoever you are, you need to run." He said, glancing around his cell nervously, seemingly expecting something to come through the walls. "Leave as fast as you can and they might not catch you."
Toras pointed to Clueless, "He's already taken down half the guards here. I don't think we need to worry about them."
"No. Not the githyanki. The astral fiends." He self-consciously looked at the bruised trails along his skin. "I don't know what they are but they watch this place, flitting through the walls and the storm, they serve Her."
Clueless and Kiro both looked at one another. They knew what the man was terrified of. They'd fought one of them before.
"Just who are you?" Tristol asked.
"You're Athar." Clueless said. "And so are a number of the other men here, I know why you're all here. But why the godsmen?"
"And who do you mean by Her" Kiro very pointedly asked.
"My name is Tethonas Marfall." The man explained. "Factor of the Athar, priest of the Great Unknown."
Florian raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
"Never heard of you..." Nisha said. "I know how many of you guys were around when Terrance went all 'I need some time alone by myself'."
Skalliska nodded, "She's right. I don't ever recall hearing your name in connection with the leadership of the Athar. And that still doesn't explain the godsmen."
Marfal's hands shook and he gave another nervous glance at the walls. "You wouldn't have heard of me. I was a secret appointment by Factol Terrance, and co-appointed by Ambar Vargrove of the Believers of the Source. Nothing was ever said publicly, or outside of the leadership of both factions about what we were all doing here on the Astral."
"Watching over Aoskar?" Kiro asked. "The Athar for their own reasons, and the Godsmen for their interests, with some slight overlap?"
The factor nodded, "Yes. And even after the factions fell I stayed here out of duty, necessity, and respect as did all of my men, even if many of them didn't know perhaps all of the original rationale behind why we'd constructed the citadel, or that it was Aoskar's corpse that it overlooked."
Kiro looked hard at the man and repeated his earlier question, "Who did you mean by Her. Who is doing all of this?"
The factor trembled and grew even paler at some half suppressed memory. He'd seen her. She'd questioned him. She'd done to him what had been done to Terrance. She'd tried to break him.
"Her... the fiend."
"The yugoloth yes." Kiro said. "Which one?"
He shuddered again, "You don't know the half of what’s going on here, nor do you want to. She... this is much larger and goes much deeper than you know. I…"
The room grew cold and something like a shudder ran through the psychic space of the astral like a ripple across the surface of a lake when something passed from one side to the other.
Marfal jerked and screamed as something burst through the ceiling and began to take physical form. "Its here! You brought it here with you! It followed you in! RUN! Great Unknown, run!"
With a horrified look upon his face, like he was staring into the depths of a portal to hell itself, the factor went rigid. Coalescing out of some space only vaguely connected to the Astral, a space between spaces, a dozen glistening, translucent tentacles lashed out and wrapped around him. His flesh turned black as they pulsed with negative energy and dug deep into his core, and his eyes went wide and then glazed over as he went limp and began to age and shrivel in the space of seconds.
Glistening with ectoplasmic mucus, looking like the bastard spawn of some hellish jellyfish and a starving and deformed nycaloth, the astraloth fully congealed and turned towards the intruders it had been called to dispose of, a rictus grin upon its blind and eyeless face.
Florian stepped back in shock, "What the f*ck is that?!"
Clueless and Kiro looked at one another, having only recently survived against the same type of creature.
But by then, a fraction of a second had passed, and the astraloth had finished feasting upon the already withered lifeforce of the Athar factor, and it lurched through the air towards fresher victims.
“Watch out for the thing’s f*cking tentacles!” Clueless shouted as he dove to the side, barely managing to avoid a pair of the things.
The astraloth was looking at the bladesinger and Kiro both. In fact, it seemed to somehow recognize them. It might have been the same one that had earlier tried to kill them in the demiplane, or the abominations might have had some sort of shared memory. In fact it was the latter, but the possibility of the first gave the pair additional motivation for revenge.
“Son of a…!” Toras cried out as he moved his sword to block a swipe of the astraloth’s claws, only to have the hand flicker immaterial just long enough to avoid the flat of the blade and dig into his flesh like his armor wasn’t there.
Skalliska hurled a series of glittering orbs at the fiend, and watched as they all struck, but apparently to no harm whatsoever. While the spell had managed to avoid the creature’s partially corporeal nature, it wasn’t powerful enough to overcome its innate resistance to magic.
“Ah sh*t.” The kobold said as the fiend spun in mid-air, completely ignoring a flurry of slashes from Fyrehowl.
Small as she was, and quicker than most, Skalliska wasn’t fast enough to dodge all of the tentacles that flicked out from where they hung down behind the astraloth’s back. Two of them missed, from another three of them lashed into and partially through her, dragging their telltale discolorations through her flesh like they’d done to the now-dead factor.
Florian’s eyes went wide as she watched the astraloth drain Skalliska. She remembered what had happened to Clueless and Kiro, and with what they’d seen happen to the dead factor. She immediately began to whisper a prayer to protect her companions and herself against the astraloth’s draining touch.
The spell took effect, and the next few tentacles strikes by the creature failed to do any damage, but neither did any attacks directed against the thing either.
"Don't worry about anything else.” Clueless shouted. “You can heal us later Florian, just get some extra enchantments on our weapons."
Kiro looked at Tristol, “Use fire if you’ve got it!”
The mage complied as Florian backed away and began to chant a spell of her own as Toras, Fyrehowl, Kiro and Clueless did their best to keep the thing’s attention, causing it whatever minor damage they could at the moment.
Fyrehowl and Clueless both winced at their wounds and worried as they could feel Florian’s protective warding slowly weaken and begin to buckle under the astraloth’s draining touch. The fiend was striking at them and the others with supernatural quickness, and most of the time it was largely ignoring any armor when it hit, which was more and more often as the seconds stretched by.
A moment of respite came however when Tristol detonated a pair of fireballs near the top of the chamber, aided as he was by the quickening effects of the Astral on magic. The flames blossomed above his companions’ heads, missing them by inches, but both burning spheres enveloped the astraloth as they erupted.
The air in the room seemed to shake from the fiend’s psionic roar of pain, and though it immediately lashed out in fury at its attackers, they were ready for it, and they met it with blades tempered by the might of Florian’s deific patron. Time and again blades bit deep and hard, and while only half of them interacted with the astraloth’s bizarrely incorporeal form, those that did inflicted heavy wounds.
“Not so easy when it’s not two people by themselves is it?!” Clueless snarled at the fiend as he hacked at its flank.
The fiend was bleeding something like syrupy mist, some of which made contact with the floor but most of which drift off like immaterial globules of liquid in a vacuum. Despite its wounds though, the creature continued to claw and bite even when it realized that its tentacles were having little effect, but then a burning column of holy flame struck it across the shoulders, directed by Florian.
Letting loose an unearthly scream, the astraloth abandoned its mission, and fled with a downwards stroke of all of its tentacles.
Dzukash's eyes went wide as the creature he knew as an astraloth, and more formally as a Spawn of the Ebon, screamed and rocketed upwards through the ceiling in full flight. It had fled! While they nominally served him in patrolling the regions around the prison, and occasionally taking their pick of prisoners he selected to feed to them, he didn't control them, and few things put fear into his own fiendish heart like they did.
Yet one of them had just been gravely injured and driven off, forced to flee! He'd seen them feed upon a captive goristro before, and he'd never seen them actually harmed at any point. So far as he was concerned, they were the handmaidens of the Oinoloth and his consort.
So now what the hell do I do?" He thought, sorting through his mental catalog of spells, already feeling the urge to flee that radiated from his familiar.
There were eight of them, and he was grossly outnumbered, but some of them were injured and they were all within an enclosed space.
"They'll kill you!" The nalg hissed as it feebly hopped up and down, togging on his lower right arm.
He didn't bother looking down at the quasi-fiend, "The Manged will do more than kill me."
It was true, and his fear of her vastly overrode his fear of the people he'd just watched take down an astraloth.
“Just how the hell did the two of you survive one of those things?!” Florian asked, incredulous as the room returned to the normal, ambient temperature of the Astral.
“We’re just good like that.” Clueless said with a grin as he shrugged off the touch of an astraloth for the second time in as many days.
Florian knelt next to the factor’s body and shook her head after only a brief inspection. His body was withered from the thing’s touch, and past experience told the cleric that his soul was probably in tatters, if anything remained of it, and it was probably a useless thing to attempt to heal the body when there’d be nothing to inhabit it.
“The factor isn’t coming back.” She said, passing a hand over his eyes and oddly for her, but out of respect for the dead man, she refrained from whispering a prayer in blessing.
“Guys,” Fyrehowl said. “We need to consider something. Just how many of these things are we going to be facing?”
It was a concern, and consideration passed through the heads of her companions, but then another look came over the cipher’s face: concern.
Before she opened her mouth to shout a warning, Fyrehowl was already diving out of the way as a cone of flame erupted into their midst from the outstretched hand of the prison’s half-fiend warden.
Bodies tumbled and the air was filled with a mixture of shouts of surprise and pain as the unholy flame burned hot and true, taking all of them but Fyrehowl off balance. She snarled and leapt to her feet and charged the half-fiend, but with two sets of hands, the sorcerer could cast multiple spells at once.
A bolt of force that took the shape of the massive, grossly overdeveloped arm and fist of a Yagnaloth took form in the air and slammed into the lupinal with enough force to hurl her backwards across the room.
Having turned his attention to the guardinal, playing towards the bias of his blood, the sorcerer hadn’t given enough credit to the others, and as he prepared to send the force construct slamming into Fyrehowl a second time, he left himself open.
Aided by the side effects of being on the astral, Tristol was the first to go, especially as how he’d been unharmed by the astraloth. He made a quick gesture and spat a series of words, hurling a fireball at the four-armed githyanki mage.
The fireball erupted, but outside of the shock and surprise on the face of the sorcerer, it had no effect. By some protective spell, or by nature of his fiendish heritage, the flames did nothing. The same could not however, be said about the lightning bolt that Tristol sent streaking after him a split second later.
The half-fiend abandoned his spell as it was about to slam into Fyrehowl, and he dove out of the way, narrowly avoiding the worst of the bolt. He was only mildly injured, but the pause in his attacks gave the others the chance they needed, even injured by the astraloth as they were.
Spinning around in a blur, Kiro let go of one of his swords and watched it spiral across the hallway towards the warden, but it wasn’t aimed at the half-‘loth, it never was. The warden assumed it was, and dove to the side accordingly, but a sudden shriek and the sound of metal impaling flesh and wood preceded his recognition of what happened a split second before the loss of his familiar rocked his senses.
Dzugash’s nalg was nailed to the door like some living proclamation spiked by a king’s messenger to a signpost. The cleric’s sword had pierced the quasi-fiend’s heart, severed its spinal column and embedded itself three inches into the door leading to the other room.
The half-fiend screamed and hurled his arms out, shouting in a garbled, expletive laced mix of yugoloth and githyanki. A spell was quick to his tongue and a bead of flame flashed across the distance… and fizzled.
“Like hell you will.” Tristol said, the last words of the very same incantation freshly dropped from his own tongue as a counterspell.
Desperate now, and in pain from the loss of his familiar, the half-‘loth pointed at the cleric who’d thrown the sword and let fly a bolt of acid that forked like a bolt of living electricity. It connected solidly on Kiro, and burst from there to strike at the others around him.
But something was wrong.
He only realized a moment later that neither the priest who’d been the primary target, nor the half-celestial fighter next to him had been harmed by the acid. But by then it was too late, and by the time he’d half completed his next spell, a protective spell even, they’d closed the distance and virtually hacked him to pieces.
Stepping over the sorcerer’s remains, and around the tiefling who was busy making faces at the dead nalg, Kiro pushed the door to the warden's chamber open with the flat of one of his swords.
"Sorry Nisha.” He said. “No mimics this time around."
"Don't worry," Nisha said. "Sutekh will find you more mimics I suppose."
Kiro grinned and opened the door.
"Anything else in there?" Toras asked, not yet walking forward and looking back down the corridor to the prison cells.
"Nothing alive and waiting to kill us." Clueless said. "Well, nothing yet that I can tell."
The fighter nodded, "Then in that case, stay alive ten minutes without me, I want to let all of the prisoners out and make sure they can at least get outside on their own."
"I'll be going with." Florian said. "And I'll even be polite to the Athar. I can't offer them a planeshift or a gate, but Toras, you and I can at least get them outside of this place. I doubt that flying jellyfish from Hades is going to be coming back, at least not immediately."
Fyrehowl nodded. "If you need any help, just come get us."
Florian and Toras nodded and walked back down the hall to handle the prisoners, leaving the others to inspect and pilfer the commandant's office.
The fortress had been rather spartan up to that point, and outside of their own weapons and armor, githyanki tended to have little use for decorations, the warden's personal quarters were distinctly different: A combination of baroque githyanki elegance and the personal, and grotesque, luxury found in the lairs of the more intelligent breeds of fiends.
Half of the room was occupied with bookcases filled with books of questionable content and even more questionable binding, a cushioned familiar's perch, and a desk covered in a pile of wine-stained papers and the broken fragments of a scrying globe. By themselves it gave the impression of a relatively powerful arcane spellcaster, though one who seemed to rely more on inborn spontaneous ability than on study and research. By itself it was impressive on a number of levels, if of a radically different style than any of the group's casters were used to, or comfortable with.
But what was most immediately noteworthy were the illusory maps and diagrams of the astral storm that floated in mid-air throughout the latter half of the chamber.
"I might hold back on my normal opinions here," Tristol said. "That's almost impressive."
Kiro gave the mage a confused expression. "Normal opinion?"
"Oh, he's just got something agains..." Nisha tried to explain, but Tristol cut her off with a terse, "Illusions suck."
The wizard's ears were flat against his head and there was a bit of fluff to his tail.
"I'll let Tristol explain about that some time." Nisha said, trying hard not to giggle slightly at her boyfriend's reaction.
That said, the group stood and watched the illusion as it slowly spun with hurricane-like rotation around a central eye. Floating within the intricately detailed model were more than a dozen objects like bubbles or hollows in the storm, more locations, more warded godisles just like the one they found themselves in at the moment.
"Holy cr*p." Skalliska said, taking note of the number of locations hidden within the turbulence. "That's a lot of places to take down."
"And take a look at this." Fyrehowl said, walking into the illusion and peering closer at some specific spots as they drifted past her in transit. "Some of these are marked with names."
Sure enough, it seemed as though the half-fiend sorcerer had taken it upon himself to write descriptors of some of the spots in his own hand, incorporating them into the illusion. Some of them were given names, and some of them had notes on what had been sent there from his prison and at what time.
"Lots of movement of 'githyanki' and 'petitioners'" Fyrehowl said. "The way he marks it, he doesn't seem to have really considered himself a githyanki."
Clueless rolled his eyes, "Yeah, that would be the 'loth in him showing itself."
Meanwhile, Tristol moved over to the warden's desk and began to sort through the papers, some of them half-penned scrolls, and a wine-soaked journal of sorts. But as he looked over that, the others continued to look at the illusory map.
"Interesting names on some of these places." Kiro said. "Kleerik, stillborn child of Io. The green hollow. Nameless humanoid god of the forge."
The cleric of Sutekh looked disturbed. "All of them names of dead gods. What are they doing with all of them?"
"Probably what we saw them do to Maanzicorian's corpse." Fyrehowl said. "And probably related to what Vast babbled about before he died."
Kiro only looked more disturbed by the implications.
Oblivious to the cleric's worries, Tristol glanced down at the most recent entries into the warden's logbook. They were written in githyanki and seemed to denote the movement of prisoners into and out of the prison.
"They've been clearing this place out in the past month." He said, running a fingertip over several lines of text. Some of them it looks like they just killed, some of them they sold into slavery, though this seems to indicate they only sold their souls."
Fyrehowl snarled and muttered something under her breath.
Tristol pointed to a few of the bubbles floating within the illusory diagram of the astral storm. "Looks like they moved a bunch of supplies, weapons, and most of the guards to several of the other godisles that they've occupied."
"They're abandoning most of the godisles and pulling back, consolidating." Kiro mused.
Clueless nodded, "That's certainly what it looks like."
"And here's the most recent entry," Tristol said, reading it out loud. "Factor Tethonas Marfall to be transported in ten days time to Pitiless. Remaining prisoners at that time to be moved to the eye of the tempest and transferred to the..."
He paused and looked at the text with a more critical eye. "That's odd, the text switches over from githyanki and uses a yugoloth word."
"Where does it say they were to be moved to?" Skalliska asked.
"The Citadel of Shattered Faith"
She drifted down from above and gently made contact with the rough, pitted surface of the dead god. Padded feet flexed and felt the cold chill of petrified, dead faith beneath them. Her feet were bare, and although cloaked in a dozen layers of illusion to hide her ravaged, manged coat, she was virtually naked, wearing an outfit composed only of a loincloth and a single long ribbon of blue elf-leather that wrapped about her body to give the barest level of modesty.
Power provided her with a vanity that transcended her actual physical capacity for such, but she was heedless of that dichotomy at the moment. The fiend smiled as she walked across the deific corpse, enjoying the profound symbolism of a yugoloth walking across such a being. Exquisite profanity.
"You've been dead long enough Aoskar." She whispered in a pidgin of yugoloth and its own older, root tongue. "You've festered in your grave undisturbed, and now we rape your corpse."
The cold stone underneath her feet gave no response, though she smiled as she thought she felt a mild tremor in the subtle, psychic ether that radiated up from the rock, a subconscious mixture of the dead god's memories and dreams leaking into reality.
The archfiend crouched upon the ground, slowly bleeding from a dozen open, weeping wounds as she spread her hands out upon the ground like she was caressing her victim. "I have every intention of wrapping my tower in your flesh, carving it with hymns to me and to my lord, I may even drape myself in a portion of your hide."
Light glittered down on the Overlord of Carceri from a dozen points overhead, and from the sickly emerald fire in her own eyes as each source touched and refracted through the many glass tubes and cylinders that composed Ghyris Vast's so-called Divinity Leach.
"Already we've skinned your flesh, mined your body in ways the githyanki barely understand after tens of thousands of years, and now... now I give the Oinoloth what he desires for himself."
The fiend gestured with a hand and telekinetically flipped a lever to fully activate the Leech.
She waited and held her breath as at first, nothing happened, and there was only the whine and static crackle of crude, arcane capacitors to show that anything had changed. The ether trembled, she smiled, the tremors increased and the rocky island began to physically shake as if the dead god were wracked by a seizure and screaming in agony. Light poured from the glass of the Leech and arcs of bizarre, uncategorized energies leapt and arced up to meet it, playing along its surface and seemingly absorbed into it and taking a physical, liquid form.
"Bleed for me broken one." She whispered, leaning forward to whisper to the rock like some defamed icon usurped and perverted by a perverse, unholy being.
The ground continued to shudder and the stone grew warm, almost sticky.
"Bleed for me Aoskar." She whispered, reverting to a spoken mixture of yugoloth and Baern.
The volume of the Leech increased and the ground into which it was anchored began to glow with a dull, reddish light and all the while, the Oinoloth's consort whispered in words that predated herself. The words made her ears sting, words that caused her wounds to open and speckle her arms and legs like a multitude of crimson raindrops, and in a warped reflection of that, the godisle itself began to bleed.
Glistening silvery liquid bubbled up and precipitated from the petrified godflesh, forming a shallow lake of mercury around the Leech, mixing with the archfiend's blood as she cackled and fiercely bit into her forearm, drawing blood and letting it dribble and cascade down on herself and onto the desecrated godisle.
"Bleed like I do." She said with the conviction of a fanatic. "Bleed because we will it to be so."
She knelt and licked the rock. "Bleed for me god. Give my master his desires. Feed us."
It was near to antipeak in the Lower Ward, and many of the ward's businesses had long since shut their doors, and only a few shop windows still burned with the waxy yellow light of oil lamps or magical flames. It might have been a flux in the wind across the ring, some shift in the operations of the Foundry, or perhaps even the opening of portals to paraelemental ice, but regardless of the reasons, the night felt colder than normal.
In one of those shops whose windows still shed light out upon cold, cobblestone streets, its proprietor felt the cold on multiple levels both physical and metaphorical. Something was wrong. The city was holding its breath. The night was cold, and he was worried at what portent the City seemed to dangle before him.
Fell the fallen dabus turned and locked the door to his studio. Something was wrong and he wished to be alone.
He'd walked halfway to the back room when he felt it, a scream that he'd only heard once before, the day that Her shadow fell upon the Portal Father. Since that time, he'd felt his god's dreams, the lingering passing memories, the hopes and wishes of the power that flowed to his last proxy. Fell had been condemned to survive, alone and shunned, an object lesson for his betrayal.
Perhaps it was Her knowledge all along of what would transpire. Perhaps She left him alive to make him suffer for his crimes. The other dabus did not know, nor did he. Fell had heard his god whispering to him for millennia, a bittersweet comfort. But now, but now with a scream that echoed his first death, that voice was gone.
Silently, with not a symbol above his head to show his grief, Fell wept, and outside in the darkness of the streets, a bladed shadow drifted past with neither explanation nor pity.
“Well damn.” Toras said. “We’ve got our choice of where to go next.”
“Hopefully they won’t know we’re coming.” Tristol added. “With that astral fiend, for lack of a better term for it, with that thing having fled, let’s just hope it doesn’t put a few hundred githyanki and whatever else they’ve got on high alert.”
Clueless shook his head. “Let them be on high alert. Let ‘em come here, let them fortify the godisles that are the closest to here.”
“Excuse me?” Florian asked. “Why in the Foehammer’s name would you be that suicidal?”
“Because we won’t be here.” The bladesinger said. “And we won’t be going to any of those other places either.”
Kiro began to grin. He knew what the half-fey had on his mind.
“Kiro?” Clueless asked. “How do you deal with a snake?”
The cleric's smile widened. “You cut off its head.”
“Correct.” Clueless replied, pointing with the tip of his sword to the eye of the storm. “We'll be going right for the center.”
"Athar?" Florian asked, feeling a bit of uncharacteristic pity for the prisoners, given their ideology.
Clueless shrugged. Terrance's illusionary copy hadn't mentioned anything relevant, though it was possible they'd all been abducted in the process of the 'loths finding where Aoskar's godisle lay.
The Athar were at least relevant in some way to where they were, given what the 'loths were after, and their own faction's historical involvement. But what made no sense at all were the men and women bearing tattoos of the Believers of the Source. What were godsmen doing there?
Toras approached one of the cells and called out to a despondent looking elf slumped against the rear wall. “Who are you and what are you all doing here?”
The man didn’t answer, in fact he looked away, almost as if he feared rescue, or the risk of a rescue gone wrong, more so than simply staying there in his cage.
The fighter called out to him again, and then to another of his cage-mates, but neither of them answered.
“Toras,” Fyrehowl said. “We can come back for them once we’ve made sure the place is safe. If they’re frightened to leave, we need to kill whoever’s got them conditioned.”
Perhaps reluctantly, followed by the haunting stares of the inmates, they continued on down the corridor, expecting githyanki guards, or something worse, to confront them at any moment. But nothing did, and eventually the corridor ended at a pair of doors, one leading into what seemed to be a warded, high security cell, and directly opposite it, a finely decorated archway cut with a githyanki symbol for ‘Kith’rak’ or Captain, smelling of a quixotic mixture of fiend, candle smoke, and incense: presumably the warden's chamber.
"Run you fools!"
A pained, terrified voice called out to them from the cell.
They turned to see a man huddled at the far end of the cell. Dressed in the robes of a high-ranking member of the Athar, factor or factotum, he showed the signs of hideous and recent torture. Thin and shaking from starvation, he was missing an eye and one of his legs was bent at an awkward angle from multiple breaks that had healed without proper care. Throwing aside his torture ravaged body, he would have been forty, assuming he hadn't been on the Astral for centuries, but he looked more like a man in his early elderly years, showing the ravages of energy draining magic.
“The astral fiends!” He shouted, self-consciously touching the darkened, smoky trails that discolored his skin. “Run! Run now!”
Whoever he was, the man was a hollow, walking shell of his former self. From whatever horrors he'd been through during his incarceration, his face showed more an expression of dread and fear of what might come, than any measure of hope.
"Whoever you are, you need to run." He said, glancing around his cell nervously, seemingly expecting something to come through the walls. "Leave as fast as you can and they might not catch you."
Toras pointed to Clueless, "He's already taken down half the guards here. I don't think we need to worry about them."
"No. Not the githyanki. The astral fiends." He self-consciously looked at the bruised trails along his skin. "I don't know what they are but they watch this place, flitting through the walls and the storm, they serve Her."
Clueless and Kiro both looked at one another. They knew what the man was terrified of. They'd fought one of them before.
"Just who are you?" Tristol asked.
"You're Athar." Clueless said. "And so are a number of the other men here, I know why you're all here. But why the godsmen?"
"And who do you mean by Her" Kiro very pointedly asked.
"My name is Tethonas Marfall." The man explained. "Factor of the Athar, priest of the Great Unknown."
Florian raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
"Never heard of you..." Nisha said. "I know how many of you guys were around when Terrance went all 'I need some time alone by myself'."
Skalliska nodded, "She's right. I don't ever recall hearing your name in connection with the leadership of the Athar. And that still doesn't explain the godsmen."
Marfal's hands shook and he gave another nervous glance at the walls. "You wouldn't have heard of me. I was a secret appointment by Factol Terrance, and co-appointed by Ambar Vargrove of the Believers of the Source. Nothing was ever said publicly, or outside of the leadership of both factions about what we were all doing here on the Astral."
"Watching over Aoskar?" Kiro asked. "The Athar for their own reasons, and the Godsmen for their interests, with some slight overlap?"
The factor nodded, "Yes. And even after the factions fell I stayed here out of duty, necessity, and respect as did all of my men, even if many of them didn't know perhaps all of the original rationale behind why we'd constructed the citadel, or that it was Aoskar's corpse that it overlooked."
Kiro looked hard at the man and repeated his earlier question, "Who did you mean by Her. Who is doing all of this?"
The factor trembled and grew even paler at some half suppressed memory. He'd seen her. She'd questioned him. She'd done to him what had been done to Terrance. She'd tried to break him.
"Her... the fiend."
"The yugoloth yes." Kiro said. "Which one?"
He shuddered again, "You don't know the half of what’s going on here, nor do you want to. She... this is much larger and goes much deeper than you know. I…"
The room grew cold and something like a shudder ran through the psychic space of the astral like a ripple across the surface of a lake when something passed from one side to the other.
Marfal jerked and screamed as something burst through the ceiling and began to take physical form. "Its here! You brought it here with you! It followed you in! RUN! Great Unknown, run!"
With a horrified look upon his face, like he was staring into the depths of a portal to hell itself, the factor went rigid. Coalescing out of some space only vaguely connected to the Astral, a space between spaces, a dozen glistening, translucent tentacles lashed out and wrapped around him. His flesh turned black as they pulsed with negative energy and dug deep into his core, and his eyes went wide and then glazed over as he went limp and began to age and shrivel in the space of seconds.
Glistening with ectoplasmic mucus, looking like the bastard spawn of some hellish jellyfish and a starving and deformed nycaloth, the astraloth fully congealed and turned towards the intruders it had been called to dispose of, a rictus grin upon its blind and eyeless face.
Florian stepped back in shock, "What the f*ck is that?!"
Clueless and Kiro looked at one another, having only recently survived against the same type of creature.
But by then, a fraction of a second had passed, and the astraloth had finished feasting upon the already withered lifeforce of the Athar factor, and it lurched through the air towards fresher victims.
“Watch out for the thing’s f*cking tentacles!” Clueless shouted as he dove to the side, barely managing to avoid a pair of the things.
The astraloth was looking at the bladesinger and Kiro both. In fact, it seemed to somehow recognize them. It might have been the same one that had earlier tried to kill them in the demiplane, or the abominations might have had some sort of shared memory. In fact it was the latter, but the possibility of the first gave the pair additional motivation for revenge.
“Son of a…!” Toras cried out as he moved his sword to block a swipe of the astraloth’s claws, only to have the hand flicker immaterial just long enough to avoid the flat of the blade and dig into his flesh like his armor wasn’t there.
Skalliska hurled a series of glittering orbs at the fiend, and watched as they all struck, but apparently to no harm whatsoever. While the spell had managed to avoid the creature’s partially corporeal nature, it wasn’t powerful enough to overcome its innate resistance to magic.
“Ah sh*t.” The kobold said as the fiend spun in mid-air, completely ignoring a flurry of slashes from Fyrehowl.
Small as she was, and quicker than most, Skalliska wasn’t fast enough to dodge all of the tentacles that flicked out from where they hung down behind the astraloth’s back. Two of them missed, from another three of them lashed into and partially through her, dragging their telltale discolorations through her flesh like they’d done to the now-dead factor.
Florian’s eyes went wide as she watched the astraloth drain Skalliska. She remembered what had happened to Clueless and Kiro, and with what they’d seen happen to the dead factor. She immediately began to whisper a prayer to protect her companions and herself against the astraloth’s draining touch.
The spell took effect, and the next few tentacles strikes by the creature failed to do any damage, but neither did any attacks directed against the thing either.
"Don't worry about anything else.” Clueless shouted. “You can heal us later Florian, just get some extra enchantments on our weapons."
Kiro looked at Tristol, “Use fire if you’ve got it!”
The mage complied as Florian backed away and began to chant a spell of her own as Toras, Fyrehowl, Kiro and Clueless did their best to keep the thing’s attention, causing it whatever minor damage they could at the moment.
Fyrehowl and Clueless both winced at their wounds and worried as they could feel Florian’s protective warding slowly weaken and begin to buckle under the astraloth’s draining touch. The fiend was striking at them and the others with supernatural quickness, and most of the time it was largely ignoring any armor when it hit, which was more and more often as the seconds stretched by.
A moment of respite came however when Tristol detonated a pair of fireballs near the top of the chamber, aided as he was by the quickening effects of the Astral on magic. The flames blossomed above his companions’ heads, missing them by inches, but both burning spheres enveloped the astraloth as they erupted.
The air in the room seemed to shake from the fiend’s psionic roar of pain, and though it immediately lashed out in fury at its attackers, they were ready for it, and they met it with blades tempered by the might of Florian’s deific patron. Time and again blades bit deep and hard, and while only half of them interacted with the astraloth’s bizarrely incorporeal form, those that did inflicted heavy wounds.
“Not so easy when it’s not two people by themselves is it?!” Clueless snarled at the fiend as he hacked at its flank.
The fiend was bleeding something like syrupy mist, some of which made contact with the floor but most of which drift off like immaterial globules of liquid in a vacuum. Despite its wounds though, the creature continued to claw and bite even when it realized that its tentacles were having little effect, but then a burning column of holy flame struck it across the shoulders, directed by Florian.
Letting loose an unearthly scream, the astraloth abandoned its mission, and fled with a downwards stroke of all of its tentacles.
***
Dzukash's eyes went wide as the creature he knew as an astraloth, and more formally as a Spawn of the Ebon, screamed and rocketed upwards through the ceiling in full flight. It had fled! While they nominally served him in patrolling the regions around the prison, and occasionally taking their pick of prisoners he selected to feed to them, he didn't control them, and few things put fear into his own fiendish heart like they did.
Yet one of them had just been gravely injured and driven off, forced to flee! He'd seen them feed upon a captive goristro before, and he'd never seen them actually harmed at any point. So far as he was concerned, they were the handmaidens of the Oinoloth and his consort.
So now what the hell do I do?" He thought, sorting through his mental catalog of spells, already feeling the urge to flee that radiated from his familiar.
There were eight of them, and he was grossly outnumbered, but some of them were injured and they were all within an enclosed space.
"They'll kill you!" The nalg hissed as it feebly hopped up and down, togging on his lower right arm.
He didn't bother looking down at the quasi-fiend, "The Manged will do more than kill me."
It was true, and his fear of her vastly overrode his fear of the people he'd just watched take down an astraloth.
***
“Just how the hell did the two of you survive one of those things?!” Florian asked, incredulous as the room returned to the normal, ambient temperature of the Astral.
“We’re just good like that.” Clueless said with a grin as he shrugged off the touch of an astraloth for the second time in as many days.
Florian knelt next to the factor’s body and shook her head after only a brief inspection. His body was withered from the thing’s touch, and past experience told the cleric that his soul was probably in tatters, if anything remained of it, and it was probably a useless thing to attempt to heal the body when there’d be nothing to inhabit it.
“The factor isn’t coming back.” She said, passing a hand over his eyes and oddly for her, but out of respect for the dead man, she refrained from whispering a prayer in blessing.
“Guys,” Fyrehowl said. “We need to consider something. Just how many of these things are we going to be facing?”
It was a concern, and consideration passed through the heads of her companions, but then another look came over the cipher’s face: concern.
Before she opened her mouth to shout a warning, Fyrehowl was already diving out of the way as a cone of flame erupted into their midst from the outstretched hand of the prison’s half-fiend warden.
Bodies tumbled and the air was filled with a mixture of shouts of surprise and pain as the unholy flame burned hot and true, taking all of them but Fyrehowl off balance. She snarled and leapt to her feet and charged the half-fiend, but with two sets of hands, the sorcerer could cast multiple spells at once.
A bolt of force that took the shape of the massive, grossly overdeveloped arm and fist of a Yagnaloth took form in the air and slammed into the lupinal with enough force to hurl her backwards across the room.
Having turned his attention to the guardinal, playing towards the bias of his blood, the sorcerer hadn’t given enough credit to the others, and as he prepared to send the force construct slamming into Fyrehowl a second time, he left himself open.
Aided by the side effects of being on the astral, Tristol was the first to go, especially as how he’d been unharmed by the astraloth. He made a quick gesture and spat a series of words, hurling a fireball at the four-armed githyanki mage.
The fireball erupted, but outside of the shock and surprise on the face of the sorcerer, it had no effect. By some protective spell, or by nature of his fiendish heritage, the flames did nothing. The same could not however, be said about the lightning bolt that Tristol sent streaking after him a split second later.
The half-fiend abandoned his spell as it was about to slam into Fyrehowl, and he dove out of the way, narrowly avoiding the worst of the bolt. He was only mildly injured, but the pause in his attacks gave the others the chance they needed, even injured by the astraloth as they were.
Spinning around in a blur, Kiro let go of one of his swords and watched it spiral across the hallway towards the warden, but it wasn’t aimed at the half-‘loth, it never was. The warden assumed it was, and dove to the side accordingly, but a sudden shriek and the sound of metal impaling flesh and wood preceded his recognition of what happened a split second before the loss of his familiar rocked his senses.
Dzugash’s nalg was nailed to the door like some living proclamation spiked by a king’s messenger to a signpost. The cleric’s sword had pierced the quasi-fiend’s heart, severed its spinal column and embedded itself three inches into the door leading to the other room.
The half-fiend screamed and hurled his arms out, shouting in a garbled, expletive laced mix of yugoloth and githyanki. A spell was quick to his tongue and a bead of flame flashed across the distance… and fizzled.
“Like hell you will.” Tristol said, the last words of the very same incantation freshly dropped from his own tongue as a counterspell.
Desperate now, and in pain from the loss of his familiar, the half-‘loth pointed at the cleric who’d thrown the sword and let fly a bolt of acid that forked like a bolt of living electricity. It connected solidly on Kiro, and burst from there to strike at the others around him.
But something was wrong.
He only realized a moment later that neither the priest who’d been the primary target, nor the half-celestial fighter next to him had been harmed by the acid. But by then it was too late, and by the time he’d half completed his next spell, a protective spell even, they’d closed the distance and virtually hacked him to pieces.
***
Stepping over the sorcerer’s remains, and around the tiefling who was busy making faces at the dead nalg, Kiro pushed the door to the warden's chamber open with the flat of one of his swords.
"Sorry Nisha.” He said. “No mimics this time around."
"Don't worry," Nisha said. "Sutekh will find you more mimics I suppose."
Kiro grinned and opened the door.
"Anything else in there?" Toras asked, not yet walking forward and looking back down the corridor to the prison cells.
"Nothing alive and waiting to kill us." Clueless said. "Well, nothing yet that I can tell."
The fighter nodded, "Then in that case, stay alive ten minutes without me, I want to let all of the prisoners out and make sure they can at least get outside on their own."
"I'll be going with." Florian said. "And I'll even be polite to the Athar. I can't offer them a planeshift or a gate, but Toras, you and I can at least get them outside of this place. I doubt that flying jellyfish from Hades is going to be coming back, at least not immediately."
Fyrehowl nodded. "If you need any help, just come get us."
Florian and Toras nodded and walked back down the hall to handle the prisoners, leaving the others to inspect and pilfer the commandant's office.
The fortress had been rather spartan up to that point, and outside of their own weapons and armor, githyanki tended to have little use for decorations, the warden's personal quarters were distinctly different: A combination of baroque githyanki elegance and the personal, and grotesque, luxury found in the lairs of the more intelligent breeds of fiends.
Half of the room was occupied with bookcases filled with books of questionable content and even more questionable binding, a cushioned familiar's perch, and a desk covered in a pile of wine-stained papers and the broken fragments of a scrying globe. By themselves it gave the impression of a relatively powerful arcane spellcaster, though one who seemed to rely more on inborn spontaneous ability than on study and research. By itself it was impressive on a number of levels, if of a radically different style than any of the group's casters were used to, or comfortable with.
But what was most immediately noteworthy were the illusory maps and diagrams of the astral storm that floated in mid-air throughout the latter half of the chamber.
"I might hold back on my normal opinions here," Tristol said. "That's almost impressive."
Kiro gave the mage a confused expression. "Normal opinion?"
"Oh, he's just got something agains..." Nisha tried to explain, but Tristol cut her off with a terse, "Illusions suck."
The wizard's ears were flat against his head and there was a bit of fluff to his tail.
"I'll let Tristol explain about that some time." Nisha said, trying hard not to giggle slightly at her boyfriend's reaction.
That said, the group stood and watched the illusion as it slowly spun with hurricane-like rotation around a central eye. Floating within the intricately detailed model were more than a dozen objects like bubbles or hollows in the storm, more locations, more warded godisles just like the one they found themselves in at the moment.
"Holy cr*p." Skalliska said, taking note of the number of locations hidden within the turbulence. "That's a lot of places to take down."
"And take a look at this." Fyrehowl said, walking into the illusion and peering closer at some specific spots as they drifted past her in transit. "Some of these are marked with names."
Sure enough, it seemed as though the half-fiend sorcerer had taken it upon himself to write descriptors of some of the spots in his own hand, incorporating them into the illusion. Some of them were given names, and some of them had notes on what had been sent there from his prison and at what time.
"Lots of movement of 'githyanki' and 'petitioners'" Fyrehowl said. "The way he marks it, he doesn't seem to have really considered himself a githyanki."
Clueless rolled his eyes, "Yeah, that would be the 'loth in him showing itself."
Meanwhile, Tristol moved over to the warden's desk and began to sort through the papers, some of them half-penned scrolls, and a wine-soaked journal of sorts. But as he looked over that, the others continued to look at the illusory map.
"Interesting names on some of these places." Kiro said. "Kleerik, stillborn child of Io. The green hollow. Nameless humanoid god of the forge."
The cleric of Sutekh looked disturbed. "All of them names of dead gods. What are they doing with all of them?"
"Probably what we saw them do to Maanzicorian's corpse." Fyrehowl said. "And probably related to what Vast babbled about before he died."
Kiro only looked more disturbed by the implications.
Oblivious to the cleric's worries, Tristol glanced down at the most recent entries into the warden's logbook. They were written in githyanki and seemed to denote the movement of prisoners into and out of the prison.
"They've been clearing this place out in the past month." He said, running a fingertip over several lines of text. Some of them it looks like they just killed, some of them they sold into slavery, though this seems to indicate they only sold their souls."
Fyrehowl snarled and muttered something under her breath.
Tristol pointed to a few of the bubbles floating within the illusory diagram of the astral storm. "Looks like they moved a bunch of supplies, weapons, and most of the guards to several of the other godisles that they've occupied."
"They're abandoning most of the godisles and pulling back, consolidating." Kiro mused.
Clueless nodded, "That's certainly what it looks like."
"And here's the most recent entry," Tristol said, reading it out loud. "Factor Tethonas Marfall to be transported in ten days time to Pitiless. Remaining prisoners at that time to be moved to the eye of the tempest and transferred to the..."
He paused and looked at the text with a more critical eye. "That's odd, the text switches over from githyanki and uses a yugoloth word."
"Where does it say they were to be moved to?" Skalliska asked.
"The Citadel of Shattered Faith"
***
She drifted down from above and gently made contact with the rough, pitted surface of the dead god. Padded feet flexed and felt the cold chill of petrified, dead faith beneath them. Her feet were bare, and although cloaked in a dozen layers of illusion to hide her ravaged, manged coat, she was virtually naked, wearing an outfit composed only of a loincloth and a single long ribbon of blue elf-leather that wrapped about her body to give the barest level of modesty.
Power provided her with a vanity that transcended her actual physical capacity for such, but she was heedless of that dichotomy at the moment. The fiend smiled as she walked across the deific corpse, enjoying the profound symbolism of a yugoloth walking across such a being. Exquisite profanity.
"You've been dead long enough Aoskar." She whispered in a pidgin of yugoloth and its own older, root tongue. "You've festered in your grave undisturbed, and now we rape your corpse."
The cold stone underneath her feet gave no response, though she smiled as she thought she felt a mild tremor in the subtle, psychic ether that radiated up from the rock, a subconscious mixture of the dead god's memories and dreams leaking into reality.
The archfiend crouched upon the ground, slowly bleeding from a dozen open, weeping wounds as she spread her hands out upon the ground like she was caressing her victim. "I have every intention of wrapping my tower in your flesh, carving it with hymns to me and to my lord, I may even drape myself in a portion of your hide."
Light glittered down on the Overlord of Carceri from a dozen points overhead, and from the sickly emerald fire in her own eyes as each source touched and refracted through the many glass tubes and cylinders that composed Ghyris Vast's so-called Divinity Leach.
"Already we've skinned your flesh, mined your body in ways the githyanki barely understand after tens of thousands of years, and now... now I give the Oinoloth what he desires for himself."
The fiend gestured with a hand and telekinetically flipped a lever to fully activate the Leech.
She waited and held her breath as at first, nothing happened, and there was only the whine and static crackle of crude, arcane capacitors to show that anything had changed. The ether trembled, she smiled, the tremors increased and the rocky island began to physically shake as if the dead god were wracked by a seizure and screaming in agony. Light poured from the glass of the Leech and arcs of bizarre, uncategorized energies leapt and arced up to meet it, playing along its surface and seemingly absorbed into it and taking a physical, liquid form.
"Bleed for me broken one." She whispered, leaning forward to whisper to the rock like some defamed icon usurped and perverted by a perverse, unholy being.
The ground continued to shudder and the stone grew warm, almost sticky.
"Bleed for me Aoskar." She whispered, reverting to a spoken mixture of yugoloth and Baern.
The volume of the Leech increased and the ground into which it was anchored began to glow with a dull, reddish light and all the while, the Oinoloth's consort whispered in words that predated herself. The words made her ears sting, words that caused her wounds to open and speckle her arms and legs like a multitude of crimson raindrops, and in a warped reflection of that, the godisle itself began to bleed.
Glistening silvery liquid bubbled up and precipitated from the petrified godflesh, forming a shallow lake of mercury around the Leech, mixing with the archfiend's blood as she cackled and fiercely bit into her forearm, drawing blood and letting it dribble and cascade down on herself and onto the desecrated godisle.
"Bleed like I do." She said with the conviction of a fanatic. "Bleed because we will it to be so."
She knelt and licked the rock. "Bleed for me god. Give my master his desires. Feed us."
***
It was near to antipeak in the Lower Ward, and many of the ward's businesses had long since shut their doors, and only a few shop windows still burned with the waxy yellow light of oil lamps or magical flames. It might have been a flux in the wind across the ring, some shift in the operations of the Foundry, or perhaps even the opening of portals to paraelemental ice, but regardless of the reasons, the night felt colder than normal.
In one of those shops whose windows still shed light out upon cold, cobblestone streets, its proprietor felt the cold on multiple levels both physical and metaphorical. Something was wrong. The city was holding its breath. The night was cold, and he was worried at what portent the City seemed to dangle before him.
Fell the fallen dabus turned and locked the door to his studio. Something was wrong and he wished to be alone.
He'd walked halfway to the back room when he felt it, a scream that he'd only heard once before, the day that Her shadow fell upon the Portal Father. Since that time, he'd felt his god's dreams, the lingering passing memories, the hopes and wishes of the power that flowed to his last proxy. Fell had been condemned to survive, alone and shunned, an object lesson for his betrayal.
Perhaps it was Her knowledge all along of what would transpire. Perhaps She left him alive to make him suffer for his crimes. The other dabus did not know, nor did he. Fell had heard his god whispering to him for millennia, a bittersweet comfort. But now, but now with a scream that echoed his first death, that voice was gone.
Silently, with not a symbol above his head to show his grief, Fell wept, and outside in the darkness of the streets, a bladed shadow drifted past with neither explanation nor pity.
***
“Well damn.” Toras said. “We’ve got our choice of where to go next.”
“Hopefully they won’t know we’re coming.” Tristol added. “With that astral fiend, for lack of a better term for it, with that thing having fled, let’s just hope it doesn’t put a few hundred githyanki and whatever else they’ve got on high alert.”
Clueless shook his head. “Let them be on high alert. Let ‘em come here, let them fortify the godisles that are the closest to here.”
“Excuse me?” Florian asked. “Why in the Foehammer’s name would you be that suicidal?”
“Because we won’t be here.” The bladesinger said. “And we won’t be going to any of those other places either.”
Kiro began to grin. He knew what the half-fey had on his mind.
“Kiro?” Clueless asked. “How do you deal with a snake?”
The cleric's smile widened. “You cut off its head.”
“Correct.” Clueless replied, pointing with the tip of his sword to the eye of the storm. “We'll be going right for the center.”
Bryon_Soulweaver
First Post
Bet Kiro and Clueless, the character and the player, had a fun time.Clueless said:
Shemeska
Adventurer
Fimmtiu said:
It was the FF version with some tweaks done to it. I didn't worry as much about balance though, because I knew the player was going to be moving across the country by a certain date, and because the player had about 5x my own experience as a player and DM and that he wouldn't abuse any power advantage he might have.
If you want to blame anyone for hooking me on Planescape, blame Kiro's player
(and Florian's player to a lesser extent, because she ran us through the modules in 'Hellbound' about a year before I started this campaign).
Shilsen said:
My exact words (after smacking my head into the table) were: "Son of a b*tch!..."
Burningspear
First Post
Woohoo
Finally i am up to scedual, and what a wicked story it is.
I love the detail of how the 'loths are portrayed, very nicely done..
nice characters, good plotting as well, it just makes me drool, hehehe
Another rabid fan u have now...
thanks for indulging us with your stories and gameplay.
Daniel
Finally i am up to scedual, and what a wicked story it is.
I love the detail of how the 'loths are portrayed, very nicely done..
nice characters, good plotting as well, it just makes me drool, hehehe
Another rabid fan u have now...
thanks for indulging us with your stories and gameplay.
Daniel
Last edited:
Inconsequenti-AL
Breaks Games
I love this storyhour
Hope you managed to find a use for your 11 pages of notes?
Partial to a bit of recycling myself...
Hope you managed to find a use for your 11 pages of notes?
Partial to a bit of recycling myself...
Shemeska
Adventurer
Inconsequenti-AL said:
Oh heck yes.
The PCs eventually went back to a few of them, but a few others that were never used in the game I think I ended up reusing and recycling into the details of demiplanes, other godisles, and even a 'loth fortress elsewhere. Good ideas never go to waste, even if you have to wait a while to use them.
