Shemeska's Planescape Storyhour (Updated 29 Jan 2014)
Burningspear
First Post
Tal Rasha said:
At least its grammatically correct
Shemeska said:We'll eventually be revisiting the events at Rubicon for a bit of a closer, more personal look. Next plot arc is going to have some of my favorite moments of creepy and claustrophobic, and next update we'll be getting a prelude of that, though we'll have seen hints of it before (after next update, some of the banter between the Dire Shepherd and the Architect may hold more meaning). And don't worry, Shylara gets more messed up in the head as time goes on (which is saying something...). Plus, we've still got a renegade arch-'loth named Taba running around.
The Clockmaker is some of the darkest though, yes. Not sure I've topped that. Not sure I want to top that.
Indeed, it does tend towards the dark. (Though a good deal of the humor doesn't make it to the story hour, for reasons of tone, context, or slightly ooc nature. That does tend to add a bit of light to the darkness)
A Crazy Fool
First Post
SPZ, the d20m campaign is more hopeless than this campaign, definately not darker
Mike Powell
First Post
okay yeah. so says the DM
edit: read your diary tristol. Damn. Or rather WTF? whats with the all the discrepencies between the SH and the diary? I am suprised nobody commented on this before considering the humongous amount of discrepencies.
edit: read your diary tristol. Damn. Or rather WTF? whats with the all the discrepencies between the SH and the diary? I am suprised nobody commented on this before considering the humongous amount of discrepencies.
Last edited:
Shemeska
Adventurer
Mungoth, the third furnace of Gehenna was ancient, formed along with the other layers of the plane in time immemorial by the proto-yugoloths as a reaction to the exile of Apomps and the creation of Carceri. That was one version of the orthodox history of the plane at least, but the history of the event was shrouded in mystery, with a number of apocryphal variants existing within the libraries of Khin-Oin and the archives of the Tower Arcane. The second great ‘loth tower was eons younger than Gehenna itself of course, though many historians, even among the fiends, simply assumed that when Larsdana Ap Neut had sunk the first foundation stones of her tower onto the burning slopes of Chamada, the plane to which she had linked the essence of her entire caste of yugoloths had only recently been formed from the metaphysical nothingness between the primordial, unmixed planes of the pure alignments.
Apocrypha spoke differently, and it spoke in a void of tangible historical facts. Larsdana had conveniently enough failed to include swathes of history into her tower’s memory pool, and though assumed dead, her own memories were not within the tower’s communal memories either. The records failed to address the earliest moments of Gehenna’s history, and only a discrete few beings, those who had personally lives during that period of proto-history still remembered the truth of the matter. For anyone not among their select number, apocrypha would have to suffice.
Apocrypha spoke legends at odds with the speculations of the rank and file scribes and scholars of the yugoloth race. Even among a race of fiends who collectively knew a version of history more factual than their younger cousins in the Abyss and Baator respectively, their knowledge of Gehenna’s origins was occluded by a lack of material and perhaps deliberate muddying of history.
Gehenna was formed by the migration of yugoloths from the Waste seeking to react against the formation of Carceri by Apomp’s thrice-damned brood. That was one version. The fourfold furnace was formed when the General of Gehenna ripped up whole sections of the Waste and hurled them into the unformed void of what would become his namesake plane. Another version that happily flattered the yugoloth orthodoxy. These were not the only legends though.
Gehenna was formed by the exile of those yugoloths who defied the General of Gehenna and refused to submit to his authority and the purge of Law and Chaos from their essence at the order of the Baernaloths whom later generations would call The Demented. Was this version of history fact, or simply another subjective truth?
The furnaces formed around the footsteps of Hazarik Ap Neut, ‘The Shackler’ as he carried the larvae that would become the Baatezu, or perhaps the Ancient Baatorians, as he wandered his way towards the nascent Plane of Law with a poisoned brood and a smile on his lips, whispering to serpents all the while.
The furnaces crystallized around the entombed bodies of Yrsinius the Elder, Joleb Ap Corpus, Phleboerus zef Thiragoth, and Trypanos vath Chagarn. The Diseased Trinity and the Rotting Prince were killed or dismembered, their bodies hurled into the void between the proto-Waste and the plane of proto-Law, spreading their spiritual filth like an infection, forming the islands of pain and flame which their wayward children would come to populate in time as a second homeland.
Lazarius, Chorazin, Tellura, and Ghoresh Ibn Shartalan had each formed and sculpted one of the furnaces from the living bodies of four titanic beings that had inhabited the empty void. The First House had come upon then, whispered them to slumber and then like egg-laden wasps they had planted their seed in fallow flesh like living incubators for a metaphysical form that would spawn from them to replace the nothingness and populate the void for the yugoloths who would come.
But for all the apocryphal tales, the exact version was of little meaning, irrelevant really, within the confines of a patch of frozen ground obscured upon the flank of the third furnace of Mungoth. Seven square miles of land, a thin strip of forsaken ground, dusted with ice and ashes, where history didn’t matter and where the laws of reality didn’t entirely apply.
The Vale of Frozen Ashes was a place that wasn’t supposed to exist.
Sarkithel fek Parthis knew this of course, and that, among a host of other reasons, was why his primary manifestation had lived in contemplative solitude in the ruined city within the Vale for eons, keeping vigil over something he and his kindred only vaguely understood. The Chronicler knew the true origin of Gehenna’s furnaces, but such things were far from the forefront of his godlike mind as he sat at the edge of a weathered ritual bath.
The Baernaloth closed his eyes and listened to the wind, listened to the voices carried by the swirling currents of ash and ice that whispered and warned of what had happened and what would come. The open book in his lap danced with myriad lines of ink and tears and blood, painting an image quite literally with the flow of their pictograms and syllabic words, recording the proto-fiend’s observations there in the present while a dozen other avatars of his danced about the multiverse following the scent of misery wherever it might lead them to a greater understanding of the concept.
In time he would recall his diffuse presence into a single physical form, the one which sat there listening to the sifting ashes of the dead, but there was still time before his concentration would be needed to that degree. For the moment all he had to do was monitor and record the progress of something which was already known and acknowledged.
But perhaps he and his kindred were wrong.
Half a city away, something else moved, a dozen somethings. Mortals. Sages and priests and mercenaries, mortal and immortal alike: a motley group of the soon-to-be-damned. They shuddered against the cold as their gate from the Outlands flickered and finally closed behind them.
The Chronicler failed to notice their arrival. That should have been impossible.
But even if Sarkithel had noticed them, he wouldn’t have harmed them, oddly enough. But then again he wouldn’t have helped them either, and he would have watched as the drifting flocks of Phiuls came to rend them limb from limb, or when their curiosity about the statues of frozen ashes led them to join that forsaken group’s eternal agony. The dead whispered and warned, but their touch was deadly, and the Vale was one of the most innately hostile locations in Gehenna, and one that had existed, precipitated out of nothing mere moments after the third furnace had solidified.
The Vale should not have existed, and the mortals’ intrusion was both unexpected and undesired by the Baernaloth. But still as he stirred his fingers through the dry and perverse font at his back, feeling the ashes and children and elders against his claws, the mortals were hidden from his perceptions. In a place where the laws of reality did not entirely apply, the laws themselves suddenly pitched and twisted on their own accord, by the hand of another.
The mortals went about their explorations on their own, ignorant of the Baernaloth and the Baernaloth ignorant of them in turn. Chance had drawn the mortals to the Vale, but it wasn’t chance that veiled them from the city’s immortal guardian and watcher. No, that was something else entirely, another something which should not have existed.
Twelve miles away, the group of mortals gazed in horror at the city’s occupants, the thousands, tens of thousands of statues, all of them looking towards a single spot in the city, a look of ecstatic terror frozen upon their faces. The ashes grew deep, pooling around their ankles as they made their way through the avenue that led to the open gates of the cathedral with no name and no deity.
The group, twenty strong, had already seen the phiuls, and they had seen the dozen carbonized and flash frozen ultroloths standing only feet away from the similarly petrified forms of a sobbing leonal and weeping solar. The group began to question their own safety, and the wisdom of having come to the Vale. Their footsteps through the ashes slowed and stopped, and arguments were made over whether to stay or to go back to the safety of the gatetown of Sylvania where they had started their journey from hours before.
But as they argued and wondered and worried, the wind whispered in their ears and the ashes crawled, a twisted current running towards the center of the city, to the center of the great and nameless cathedral. Preoccupied with worry and debate, their senses dulled by the wind and bitter, deathly chill, the group failed to notice that their number had fallen to nineteen.
Halfway across the city, Sarkithel fek Parthis likewise failed to notice the lone mortal who strayed from his fellows and entered the cathedral, following the currents, following the whispers, following the voice that spoke into his heart. Something called to him. Something promised greatness. Something promised meaning. Something had chosen him for a purpose.
“Who are you?” The mortal whispered, kneeling before the broken remains of an altar, hip-deep in a swirling pool of ashes.
The whispers that had filled the cathedral stopped and the ashes fell silent. He trembled at the change, but then the mortal’s eyes went wide as something reached out and answered his question, touching his mind and filling his consciousness with a truth of its own.
Half a city away, Sarkithel fek Parthis looked up abruptly, nearly dropping his book into the dust. Something wasn’t right. Something was…
The Baernaloth tilted his head to the side and listened to the wind, and for a very brief moment it seemed as if the fearful whispers of the unlamented dead were holding back sneering laughter… but no, it was nothing.
Sarkithel inhaled and clenched his eyes shut for a few brief moments. He felt uneasy. He felt a certain distant… something… He’d felt it before, or rather, he’d feel it again, but the time was not yet right. The precise sequence was still being formulated though the exact moment was open to change. It was not yet time. The Oblivion Compass, the Architect’s Oinian Clock had yet to strike, that was a certainty. It –had- to be a certainty. Anything else… anything else meant that their original plans for this creation, this multiverse, were flawed.
No. No, they’d planned it, they’d set the variables. They’d set the conditions and all the outcomes were predetermined. The Clockmaker and the Architect had witnessed the paths that history would take, might take, could take, and collectively the Demented had warped the path of history to a perverted end of their own design. All was known. All was set. All was predestined. It had to be.
Surely it had to be…
Meanwhile, hidden from the Gloom Father’s sight, in the nameless cathedral the mortal shuddered and seized with the influx of corrupting knowledge as he was marked, chosen, and wholly damned in the ashen baptismal font. The mortal wept and clawed at his own flesh, knowing in an instant what had happened there in the Vale, viewing it as a flashback from another’s memories, knowing what would happen again, and understanding his intimate role in the horror that would come.
“Yes my lord, I understand.”
His flesh tingled as blood vessels burst beneath the skin and his teeth chattered from muscles involuntarily firing, his senses overwhelmed by the presence surrounding him, permeating the cathedral, soaked into the city like blood in the soil of an ancient battlefield. The presence was also inside of him, and he would carry a fragment of it out of the Vale and into the world.
“I understand it now.” The mortal whispered. “It is not enough to wait for the signs to manifest themselves.”
And in the darkness beyond the darkness, something smiled.
Apocrypha spoke differently, and it spoke in a void of tangible historical facts. Larsdana had conveniently enough failed to include swathes of history into her tower’s memory pool, and though assumed dead, her own memories were not within the tower’s communal memories either. The records failed to address the earliest moments of Gehenna’s history, and only a discrete few beings, those who had personally lives during that period of proto-history still remembered the truth of the matter. For anyone not among their select number, apocrypha would have to suffice.
Apocrypha spoke legends at odds with the speculations of the rank and file scribes and scholars of the yugoloth race. Even among a race of fiends who collectively knew a version of history more factual than their younger cousins in the Abyss and Baator respectively, their knowledge of Gehenna’s origins was occluded by a lack of material and perhaps deliberate muddying of history.
Gehenna was formed by the migration of yugoloths from the Waste seeking to react against the formation of Carceri by Apomp’s thrice-damned brood. That was one version. The fourfold furnace was formed when the General of Gehenna ripped up whole sections of the Waste and hurled them into the unformed void of what would become his namesake plane. Another version that happily flattered the yugoloth orthodoxy. These were not the only legends though.
Gehenna was formed by the exile of those yugoloths who defied the General of Gehenna and refused to submit to his authority and the purge of Law and Chaos from their essence at the order of the Baernaloths whom later generations would call The Demented. Was this version of history fact, or simply another subjective truth?
The furnaces formed around the footsteps of Hazarik Ap Neut, ‘The Shackler’ as he carried the larvae that would become the Baatezu, or perhaps the Ancient Baatorians, as he wandered his way towards the nascent Plane of Law with a poisoned brood and a smile on his lips, whispering to serpents all the while.
The furnaces crystallized around the entombed bodies of Yrsinius the Elder, Joleb Ap Corpus, Phleboerus zef Thiragoth, and Trypanos vath Chagarn. The Diseased Trinity and the Rotting Prince were killed or dismembered, their bodies hurled into the void between the proto-Waste and the plane of proto-Law, spreading their spiritual filth like an infection, forming the islands of pain and flame which their wayward children would come to populate in time as a second homeland.
Lazarius, Chorazin, Tellura, and Ghoresh Ibn Shartalan had each formed and sculpted one of the furnaces from the living bodies of four titanic beings that had inhabited the empty void. The First House had come upon then, whispered them to slumber and then like egg-laden wasps they had planted their seed in fallow flesh like living incubators for a metaphysical form that would spawn from them to replace the nothingness and populate the void for the yugoloths who would come.
But for all the apocryphal tales, the exact version was of little meaning, irrelevant really, within the confines of a patch of frozen ground obscured upon the flank of the third furnace of Mungoth. Seven square miles of land, a thin strip of forsaken ground, dusted with ice and ashes, where history didn’t matter and where the laws of reality didn’t entirely apply.
The Vale of Frozen Ashes was a place that wasn’t supposed to exist.
Sarkithel fek Parthis knew this of course, and that, among a host of other reasons, was why his primary manifestation had lived in contemplative solitude in the ruined city within the Vale for eons, keeping vigil over something he and his kindred only vaguely understood. The Chronicler knew the true origin of Gehenna’s furnaces, but such things were far from the forefront of his godlike mind as he sat at the edge of a weathered ritual bath.
The Baernaloth closed his eyes and listened to the wind, listened to the voices carried by the swirling currents of ash and ice that whispered and warned of what had happened and what would come. The open book in his lap danced with myriad lines of ink and tears and blood, painting an image quite literally with the flow of their pictograms and syllabic words, recording the proto-fiend’s observations there in the present while a dozen other avatars of his danced about the multiverse following the scent of misery wherever it might lead them to a greater understanding of the concept.
In time he would recall his diffuse presence into a single physical form, the one which sat there listening to the sifting ashes of the dead, but there was still time before his concentration would be needed to that degree. For the moment all he had to do was monitor and record the progress of something which was already known and acknowledged.
But perhaps he and his kindred were wrong.
Half a city away, something else moved, a dozen somethings. Mortals. Sages and priests and mercenaries, mortal and immortal alike: a motley group of the soon-to-be-damned. They shuddered against the cold as their gate from the Outlands flickered and finally closed behind them.
The Chronicler failed to notice their arrival. That should have been impossible.
But even if Sarkithel had noticed them, he wouldn’t have harmed them, oddly enough. But then again he wouldn’t have helped them either, and he would have watched as the drifting flocks of Phiuls came to rend them limb from limb, or when their curiosity about the statues of frozen ashes led them to join that forsaken group’s eternal agony. The dead whispered and warned, but their touch was deadly, and the Vale was one of the most innately hostile locations in Gehenna, and one that had existed, precipitated out of nothing mere moments after the third furnace had solidified.
The Vale should not have existed, and the mortals’ intrusion was both unexpected and undesired by the Baernaloth. But still as he stirred his fingers through the dry and perverse font at his back, feeling the ashes and children and elders against his claws, the mortals were hidden from his perceptions. In a place where the laws of reality did not entirely apply, the laws themselves suddenly pitched and twisted on their own accord, by the hand of another.
The mortals went about their explorations on their own, ignorant of the Baernaloth and the Baernaloth ignorant of them in turn. Chance had drawn the mortals to the Vale, but it wasn’t chance that veiled them from the city’s immortal guardian and watcher. No, that was something else entirely, another something which should not have existed.
Twelve miles away, the group of mortals gazed in horror at the city’s occupants, the thousands, tens of thousands of statues, all of them looking towards a single spot in the city, a look of ecstatic terror frozen upon their faces. The ashes grew deep, pooling around their ankles as they made their way through the avenue that led to the open gates of the cathedral with no name and no deity.
The group, twenty strong, had already seen the phiuls, and they had seen the dozen carbonized and flash frozen ultroloths standing only feet away from the similarly petrified forms of a sobbing leonal and weeping solar. The group began to question their own safety, and the wisdom of having come to the Vale. Their footsteps through the ashes slowed and stopped, and arguments were made over whether to stay or to go back to the safety of the gatetown of Sylvania where they had started their journey from hours before.
But as they argued and wondered and worried, the wind whispered in their ears and the ashes crawled, a twisted current running towards the center of the city, to the center of the great and nameless cathedral. Preoccupied with worry and debate, their senses dulled by the wind and bitter, deathly chill, the group failed to notice that their number had fallen to nineteen.
Halfway across the city, Sarkithel fek Parthis likewise failed to notice the lone mortal who strayed from his fellows and entered the cathedral, following the currents, following the whispers, following the voice that spoke into his heart. Something called to him. Something promised greatness. Something promised meaning. Something had chosen him for a purpose.
“Who are you?” The mortal whispered, kneeling before the broken remains of an altar, hip-deep in a swirling pool of ashes.
The whispers that had filled the cathedral stopped and the ashes fell silent. He trembled at the change, but then the mortal’s eyes went wide as something reached out and answered his question, touching his mind and filling his consciousness with a truth of its own.
Half a city away, Sarkithel fek Parthis looked up abruptly, nearly dropping his book into the dust. Something wasn’t right. Something was…
The Baernaloth tilted his head to the side and listened to the wind, and for a very brief moment it seemed as if the fearful whispers of the unlamented dead were holding back sneering laughter… but no, it was nothing.
Sarkithel inhaled and clenched his eyes shut for a few brief moments. He felt uneasy. He felt a certain distant… something… He’d felt it before, or rather, he’d feel it again, but the time was not yet right. The precise sequence was still being formulated though the exact moment was open to change. It was not yet time. The Oblivion Compass, the Architect’s Oinian Clock had yet to strike, that was a certainty. It –had- to be a certainty. Anything else… anything else meant that their original plans for this creation, this multiverse, were flawed.
No. No, they’d planned it, they’d set the variables. They’d set the conditions and all the outcomes were predetermined. The Clockmaker and the Architect had witnessed the paths that history would take, might take, could take, and collectively the Demented had warped the path of history to a perverted end of their own design. All was known. All was set. All was predestined. It had to be.
Surely it had to be…
Meanwhile, hidden from the Gloom Father’s sight, in the nameless cathedral the mortal shuddered and seized with the influx of corrupting knowledge as he was marked, chosen, and wholly damned in the ashen baptismal font. The mortal wept and clawed at his own flesh, knowing in an instant what had happened there in the Vale, viewing it as a flashback from another’s memories, knowing what would happen again, and understanding his intimate role in the horror that would come.
“Yes my lord, I understand.”
His flesh tingled as blood vessels burst beneath the skin and his teeth chattered from muscles involuntarily firing, his senses overwhelmed by the presence surrounding him, permeating the cathedral, soaked into the city like blood in the soil of an ancient battlefield. The presence was also inside of him, and he would carry a fragment of it out of the Vale and into the world.
“I understand it now.” The mortal whispered. “It is not enough to wait for the signs to manifest themselves.”
And in the darkness beyond the darkness, something smiled.
***
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Burningspear
First Post
I was almost falling asleep on this side of the pond
nice update, we want more....
nice update, we want more....
