Shemeska's Planescape Storyhour (Updated 29 Jan 2014)

[Suldulin]

mine is a: "whateveryouneedittobeprod" at 10D6 Lightning...

some things are immune to lightning though. . . would not a "prodwhateverfiendyouneedto" prod that does 10d6 holy damage be better?

 

[Burningspear]

some things are immune to lightning though. . . would not a "prodwhateverfiendyouneedto" prod that does 10d6 holy damage be better?

thats why it's a "whateveruneedittobetypeofprod", so instead of lightning as a basis, when immune to that, it automatically becomes holy , so yes you were assuming correctly

(and yes, i was being a "smartass" )

 

[Dialexis]

Shemmy, what is the planned article for Planewalker (title-wise so I and others can keep a head's up). Of course, an update on SH1 would be nice too...

 

[Shemeska]

Shemmy, what is the planned article for Planewalker (title-wise so I and others can keep a head's up). Of course, an update on SH1 would be nice too...

The story for Planewalker just got released by the submission system there this morning. It's called Evil Still Seeps Through. It's a followup story to a very short piece I wrote some time ago about 3e FR's retroactive cosmology changes.

The SH1 update is currently sketched out and in-progress. Would have been finished last night, but I was on call, got called into work and didn't get home till 4am'ish this morning. I'm going to try to finish it today, because I'm working the entire weekend.

 

[joshhg]

The SH1 update is currently sketched out and in-progress. Would have been finished last night, but I was on call, got called into work and didn't get home till 4am'ish this morning. I'm going to try to finish it today, because I'm working the entire weekend.

Thanks for the hard work on the story! And good story on Planewalker too .

 

[Clueless]

Check in tomorrow we should have a conversion for 3.5 of one of the older modules up. (There were lots of *nice* entries this week.)

 

[Reality Key]

Finally I caught up!
Great story Shemmy ,It was nice to see that Belarian left the Gray Waste. So what are the high -ups in Elysium going to do about bringing it back to Elysium and what they paln to do about Ebon?




Of course now i'm gonna have wait like everyone else for the answers *whips out holy cat o'nine tails * ^_^

 

[Burningspear]

Finally I caught up!
Of course now i'm gonna have wait like everyone else for the answers *whips out holy cat o'nine tails * ^_^

Shall we take turns in Prodding him with my Demon prod and your cat o'nine tails?

 

[Shemeska]

***​

Two stories above the Guildhall Ward at #210 Greenglass Avenue, Marlene Brittlestone shuffled the papers on her desk and diligently checked to make sure that everything was in order with the files that her employer had requested. The professor wasn’t nearly as crusty as some other Guvners could be, but everything still needed to be neatly ordered or else he’d mark corrections in red and give her a polite little chat later - and Sunnis forbid, you never wanted to get one of them going on trivial minutia, they’d nag you for hours on end, or maybe haunt you from a cinnamon bun or something.

The earth genasi glanced over the names on the summary page and smiled. A motley lot of people, all of them talented, some of having past work with the Whitefire Institute of History, but most of them fresh faces full of potential and question marks at once. Of course, the Institute was going through a money crunch, and funds were low, so hiring for the security detail was dragging the bottom of the barrel while still attempting to get qualified bashers for a pauper’s price. Dodgy didn’t begin to describe one or two of those people.

She knocked on the door into Professor Leobtav’s office and waited. From inside there was a vague, noncommittal grunt –ostensibly the graybeard himself- and a moment later there was a much more animated chirp of “I think there’s someone at the door. Can they come in? … Ok! You can come in!”

Marlene smiled at the pseudodragon’s voice and opened the door.

The faintly sweet smell of lingering pipe-smoke greeted her nostrils as she walked into the office, and also the smell of a recent rain. She looked past the professor’s desk where he sat in the same clothes she’d seen him in the day before, hunched over a stack of papers, and noticed that the window was open and had apparently been left open since the other day, the night’s pouring rain having apparently gone unnoticed.

“You left the window open last night sir.”

Another mumble and the professor toyed with his thin beard, adjusted his spectacles and turned the page of the volume he was reading.

“It was great!” Leobtav’s familiar Ficklebarb chirped from atop his master’s head. “I got to eat the bugs that flew in!”

The genasi suppressed a chuckle. They were an odd pair to be certain. The little red pseudodragon was bubbly and innocently cute, prone to randomness, and his master was a dusty old ex-Guvner scholar nearing fifty, prone to being absentminded and oftentimes oblivious once he found something of academic curiosity.

“I have the reports on the people that we’ll be sending letters to.” Marlene said, at least catching Ficklbarb’s attention if not his master’s. “I had Doran sign off on everything yesterday. You seemed busy and neither of us wanted to disturb you.”

Besides, the elf was capable of taking his nose out of a book in linguistics for more than ten minutes to handle the logistics of the whole expedition.

Several minutes passed with his secretary standing there before finally his familiar dangled its tail in front of his face and waved its stinger around. That got his attention, and with a blush, Leobtav looked up and accepted the stack of papers from the genasi.

“Thank you Marlene.” He said, sounding a bit tired and sleep deprived.

“Not a problem sir, but you’ll want to look over their names and see if anyone looks too out of the ordinary, or if you see any red flags pop up. We’ve got the lilland again, that’s good, but a lot of new people on the magical and mundane security side of things.”

Leobtav scratched his chin. “I’m glad that we’ve got Larill along with us again, but why? We’ll be going to Pandemonium, and she’s a bard by profession.”

His secretary shrugged, “Doran added her name to the list. Said he wanted someone familiar who wasn’t a scholar or a porter. You can ask him yourself when he’s back in Sigil in five days. He wanted to meet with you before the expedition left, but after we got back acceptances or rejections from everyone we were sending out employment offers to.”

The professor masked a yawn. He’d been reading for… he didn’t actually remember how long actually. It must have been some time though, and he’d just gotten wrapped up in it and lost track of the hours and all.

“You should get some sleep sir. You look dreadfully tired.”

“I’ll get some sleep soon.” He replied, trying to dismiss her concern. “Just leave those papers on my desk and I’ll get to them afterwards. And let Doran know that I’m looking forward to seeing him at the end of the week.”

She nodded, left the stack of papers on his desk and left after reaching out and giving the tiny pseudodragon a rub under his chin. He gave his best draconic equivalent of a purr, but as soon as the genasi had left and the door closed shut behind her, he tapped his master’s head gently.

“Not just sleep.” Ficklebarb said, laying his tail over Leobtav’s left ear. “You need to go eat. When you’re hungry, I’m hungry too, even if I’ve eaten.”

“Can it wait till I’ve finished this section of the book?” There were still another three hundred pages of text and diagrams to finish before that point.

“Go eat something or I’ll eat another moth.” Ficklebarb said. “I know you grimace when I do that because you can taste it too. Let’s go home and fix you some breakfast, I don’t want anything bad happening to you.”

“Alright.” He finally said, bring a smile to the dragon’s face. “We can go home and get some food, and then I’ll take a nap. But after that I need to read over these files and check into some of these people. I don’t want to have something unplanned for happen down there in the dark.”

Ficklebark beamed, but it was the last time for some time that he would find himself genuinely smiling. Pandemonium’s screaming darkness would not bring happiness to either master or familiar.

***​

The noonday sun reached through the windows and pierced the curtains, falling upon a pair of figures sprawled upon a bed, partially entangled in the sheets and in one another’s arms. One of them was breathing, but the other had given up the ghost hours before.

Frollis Terpense groaned as the light irritated his eyes. He preferred darkness, but the copious amount of alcohol that he’d drunk the previous night only worsened the harsh glare of that hatefully burning orb in the sky whose fingers reached through the crystalline panes like the ethereal fingers of a vengeful revenant. Such a metaphor was ironic all things considered.

The man groaned a second time and winced as he tried to sit up. Blood pounded in his ears and his senses swam with nausea, the lingering aftereffects of drink, and everything else that he’d pumped into his system during the course of the evening.

“Good morning my dear.” He said, leaning over to plant a kiss on the whore’s right breast. She was still warm, but a chill had already spread to her fingertips and toes.

An empty bottle of wine lay broken on the floor, drugged through and through, but as he looked into the dead woman’s glazed eyes with blurry ones of his own, he wasn’t honestly able to say if it had been an overdose on the drugs that had killed her, or –judging by the bruises- his hands around her neck. Then again, judging by the scratches down his back, she’d been entirely willing at first, and she’d embraced the last evening of her life –and him- with considerable gusto.

“Your life ended well I should say.” Frollis said as his mind recalled bits and pieces of their activities the previous night as the fog of sleep and drugs slowly lifted. “But you were marked. You had done something to make yourself thusly chosen. And if it makes your soul rise, or plummet, any easier, I never knew what your crime was. I only knew that you would be dead before the morning. I do not question the why of my actions, I merely obey what the wind on the horizon calls for me to do.”

The corpse gave no reply, and by that point the blush upon her cheeks was the only color left on her face. The blood had already begun to pool with gravity, the moments of their ecstasy were over, and his task was complete.

“It is better that I do not know.”

He sighed, remembering her smile, remembering her laughter, remembering how she’d clung to him as they coupled time and time again before she’d slipped into a poisoned torpor and he’d ended it before passing out as well. Whatever she had done, it was avenged and with the morning came his time to move on.

Frollis climbed out of the bed and stretched, naked in the sunlight, lean and taught from the dual abuses of pushing his body to its limit, and from whatever he could find to numb himself into oblivion when possible. It was better that he did not know, did not remember the things that he himself did.

Silently he dressed, strapping on pants, shirt, cloak, boots and blades before finally turning and looking at her face one last time. She was still beautiful, and he longed to kiss her one last time, but the moment had passed and it would not be right to do so, it would only haunt him later.

“Praise be unto you.” He whispered, touching the holy symbol around his neck and rubbing his index finger across the raised symbol of his deific patron. “And unto you as well.”

Hidden from the light, his thumb likewise caressed the second sigil on the back of his holy symbol, that second one hidden behind the first like the dual faces of Selune, one visible and bright, the other perpetually dark. Both of them whispered, both of them called, and to both of them he pledged his soul.

He never looked back at the woman that he’d killed from that point on. Quietly, silently, and efficiently he collected the coins, jewels, and other valuables that she’d carried and stripped the bedchamber of anything associated with himself. Before the noon sun began its descent he was gone, slipped away into the Shadow border, one more soul to his tally and a few thousand jink in pilfered riches lining his pockets. Hopefully the latter would make the task less likely to haunt him in the coming weeks before the wind whispered to him yet another name.

***​

Settys al Khylian gazed down at the water lapping at the shoreline of the River Maat. Entranced and hallucinated by the river’s vapor he stumbled on his feet as he walked along the water’s edge before finally falling to his knees. Illusions and memories and fleeting visions tumbled through his mind and he found himself unable to sort truth from lie from illuminated inspiration.

Footsteps in the wet sand surrounded him in bizarre spirals and madcap designs, half of them extending off into dry land beyond the riverbank and into the marshes beyond, but they all eventually returned to the River of Mysteries once again. He was hungry and his stomach ached. Truth be told, he couldn’t say when he’d first arrived there and where he’d wandered in the interim before coming back, following the visions and seeking to find himself finally.

A face that had seen thirty some seasons gazed back up at him from the waters. The face was healthy, unmarked by injury or disease, radiating a supernatural aura of health though it was only his own strength reflected in the water, not any granted power of Thoth’s empowering his health. His head was shaved bald except for a single lock of long, black hair that hung to his shoulders. The hair was damp with the Maat’s water and beads of sweat and river vapor caused his skin to shimmer a rich, tanned brown in the light of the Outlands. Lines of kohl decorated his eyes, and golden pigment painted a wadjet upon one of them, marking his profession and also marking him as someone women had always coveted.

He sighed. Of course he’d allowed his youth to pass by without giving them much attention. On the times that he’d given himself to a woman’s touch, he’d never allowed himself to fall in love. To give his heart to another would be a sign of weakness, a sign of impropriety, and a failure to devote himself wholly to his deific patron. It wasn’t too late of course, but so much time had been devoted… devoted to what and why?

He touched the silver Ibis symbol at his neck and frowned. His faith, any true faith that he’s once possessed, had died years ago, but he still made the motions of a faithful scribe of souls and paladin of the book. Thoth had abandoned him and he had done likewise, but what had he become in that absence? What were his motivations? What did he believe? What was real and what was only the whisper of the Maat?

He didn’t know, and that was why he was there drinking the vapors of the river, staring at his reflection, gazing into the depths and hoping to find something beyond his own face staring back. Would he die before finding an answer? Would he end his days as one of those madmen who chained themselves to the shore and exposed themselves to the waters while seeking enlightenment?

Time passed and he wandered and returned a dozen times. He babbled and he prayed, he beseeched the multiverse for some reason beyond devotion to Thoth purely because it was expected of him, and because he had already wasted his youth and a dozen years of his adult life in the Scrivener’s service, and to abandon that now would be to admit something he could admit to, not just that he’d wasted the years but that he himself was worthless.

Perhaps eventually the Athar would find him. Perhaps eventually Set would come slithering into his heart. Perhaps the latter already had and perhaps the Father of Jackals was responsible for his loss of faith in Thoth. Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps. Only possibilities and no firm answers.

Settys paused. There was something in his hand. A parchment envelope, still sealed with blue wax, addressed to him: Settys al Khylian, Paladin of Thoth. He had no idea when it had appeared there, or where he had gotten it. His grip on time was tenuous, but his surprise and curiosity was rapidly shaking him free of the river’s enchanted grasp.

“What mockery is this?” He wondered aloud as he opened the letter and read over its offer.

“Was this your doing? Are you drawing me back, or letting me go?” Settys wasn’t sure, but his eyes glanced north, towards the fringes of Thoth’s deific domain. He didn’t know, but when he turned from the Maat and took his first steps towards Automata, and from there to Sigil, he knew that where he was going, he had either been directed or he had been called.

He never heard the call of an ibis echo out across the marshy sea of river reeds when he passed out of sight of the river.

***​

The raven cawed impatiently and ruffled the leading edges of its wings.

Doran Highsilver looked up and paused with an overlarge pine-nut pinched between two fingers only an inch away from his mouth.

“You know Melisyyn.” He said. “You could always just ask and I’d be more than happy to share.”

He tossed the raven one of the nuts and watched it snatch it out of the air and gobble it up without preamble.

“By all means, I won’t turn down more.” His familiar said with another ruffle of its wings.

Highsilver rolled his eyes and lay the dish down on the tabletop for the raven to share with him. She was something alright, and at the moment he wasn’t going to tell her no to anything. Where they were going, he wasn’t going to be giving her much freedom, if any at all, and in all likelihood she might spend the entire trip inside an extradimensional pocket.

“You wouldn’t dare.” Melisyyn replied. “I know that you’re worried but…”

“That’s an understatement.” The elf said, inhaling and slowly exhaling as he looked out over the edge of the balcony onto the surrounding forest and dotted buildings there at the outskirts of Arborea’s gatetown of Sylvania. The institute didn’t afford him a salary enough to afford the villa, but inheritance had seen to that.

“We’ll be going to Pandemonium.” Doran explained, though his familiar was privy to his thoughts and already knew the scope of what they were doing and were they were going.

“I’m well aware of that.”

“We’ll be going to X, with no firsthand guides, fifty unprepared sages and scholars, half of whom have never ventured to any of the lower planes. That’s my first concern.”

The raven swallowed another nut.

“Howlers, tanar’ri, madmen, insane petitioners, and the environment itself. You can’t cherish flying blind in total darkness in gale-force winds can you?”

Melisynn wasn’t going to admit to anything. She was far too strong willed for that, even if the abjurer she was bound to was right and justified in his concern.

“And then we’ve got a relatively unknown group of hired muscle and magic to keep them all corralled, keep them all from wandering off into the dark to fall and kill themselves, or be eaten by some fiend or fiends. You’ve seen the people on the list, the lilland is the only one I know and trust completely. The others?”

He shrugged and wished he had a bottle of wine to drink from for dramatic effect.

“Let’s see. A tiefling Xaositect… that always goes well. An evoker from the prime, he has some promise, but I suspect we can’t pay him enough to come. An amnesiac bladesinger, all better now I’m led to understand. A half-celestial fighter whose past I know nothing about. A cleric of a war god. A paladin of Thoth. A rather jaded guardinal. A kobold who split her time between portal finding and running a high-end magic shop. And saving the best for last, a shadowdancer apparently wanted for questioning by the Harmonium.”

Melissyn looked away and cawed. “You get to meet these people first, yes? You’re not going to go hiring ex-Blood War mercenaries because they came cheap or came recommended by the neighborhood yugoloths or anything right?”

“I’d like to meet them all.” Doran said. “Hopefully I can arrange something with the wizard and the clerics. I’m tempted to pay them out of my own pocket if they’re talented enough. I want multiple people beside myself to move people around in a hurry. I can’t teleport or planeshift nearly threescore people by myself, but with help it’ll be possible. And I’m not a combat mage by any means. I’m an abjurer, and that’s what I’ll be using my spells for, protecting people from the environment so we don’t all go mad, or deaf, or mad and deaf.”

The raven twitched her tail feathers. “That extradimensional pocket is sounding more attractive now that you put it that way.”

Tired of just wishing for that alcohol, Doran cast a spell, conjured some into his hand, and took a deep drink. It was going to be hell getting to where they were going, but hopefully it would all proceed with as little incident as possible. It would be better than his last trip to the lower planes. He knew it would be. Secrets were not worth that much blood. And the secrets of Howler’s Crag were no exception.

***​

The soft, diffuse light of the Infinite Staircase fell upon scales and skin and feathers. Wings beat the air and the long, serpentine coil of Larill Moonshadow’s lower body set down upon the last landing of the Stair that she would see for some time. Spiralling around her within the void, the insane weavings and twistings of the Stair made for a schizophrenic’s exercise in perspective, or as far as she was concerned, a rapture of creativity unbound by rules and restrictions; the Stair touched where it was called, and each landing reflected a portion of that summoning aesthetic.

The local cluster of landings glittered like winking stars as bits of metal, glass, crystal, or stone reflected errant bits of light from further off in the void, or from time to time one or another doorway would open and flood the Stair with the light of some far off place. Larill’s scales glittered emerald and gold regardless of the source of the light, and the whimsical currents of illumination reflected off of her to spread what seemed a carpet of jeweled dust across the deceptively mundane landing that she’d paused upon.

The stone was white but otherwise unremarkable, the railing was polished oak, and the doorframe was carved from bone. Nothing seemed special, but if one looked closely enough, the rock was curiously identical to that of the Spire -in form but not in function- and the frame was dotted with a mixture of rilmani and guardinal iconography. Those along might have been explanation enough of where the doorway led, but it was the more immaterial quality that they possessed which currently had the lillend smiling.

To be sure, it wasn’t simply nostalgia for the Stair, or wanting to take it in fully before departing that held her still and momentarily silent in the song that she’d been singing for the past dozen hours as she’d passed from landing to landing. No, it was the flood of well-being that emanated from the doorway itself that had her smiling.

A turn of the doorknob and a few feet forward and a weary traveler would find themselves in the gatetown of Ecstasy, only a short walk from the Court of the Philosopher King, and a mile or so from the city’s gate to Sigil which was Larill’s ultimate destination. She was going there to accompany an old friend of hers, the elven mage Doran Highsilver, though at the moment she wasn’t absolutely certain of the particulars of his group’s currently planned expedition. She’d find out, and the revelation would be just as much a pleasure as the trip itself would likely be.

The words of a song came to her lips and the Lilland closed her eyes and imagined what Ecstasy would look like in the current season since she’d last passed through the gatetown. The song rose in pitch as her mind continued looking forward, imagining Sigil and its wonders that still managed to thrill her mind though so many of its residents themselves seemed ever so jaded to her perception. All of it moments away, just beyond the door and…

She paused at the threshold with her hand wrapped around the handle.

Cold. Fear. Watched.

The notes of her song fell flat and she turned to look behind herself.

The pale, ambient light of the Stair washed over her face the same as it ever had, and there was nothing obviously out of the ordinary. None of the doorways in the local cluster had opened, nor were there any other climbers traversing the landings that might have given rise to the peculiar feeling that had just then washed over her.

For a moment there she’d felt bitterly cold, something unnatural and malign had been staring down at her, piercing into her soul. That’s what it had felt like. But then it was gone, and with a shrug the song returned to her lips once more as she opened the doorway and stepped through.

She was gone and safe within Ecstasy, yet high above, burning emerald eyes continue to bore down upon where she had been. Fate twisted and wove her tapestry around many disparate threads, but if you knew where to begin you could follow those threads and see the picture that they would make. Of course, having already seen the future made the process of pulling and following those threads all the much easier. The Stair to Ecstasy to Sigil to Pandemonium and then… Darkness.

High above on a landing of the Stair from where he’d followed her progress, Severeth Na’Halastrian hissed. She was linked, but she was not Touched. It would be one of the others whom she would follow into the screaming depths. It would be one of them. But which one?

“This is not what we had planned. This was not supposed to happen.”

The Wanderer snarled and opened the adjacent doorway. The Eladrins’ sires could wait. What he now hunted was more important, and much more of a danger. The light through the door washed over his flesh as he stepped through, and once it closed the clock of Larill Moonshadow’s life began its first steps towards its midnight oblivion toll.

***​

“We need a vacation.” Nisha said.

The tiefling’s feet were propped up on a table and her tail was gently twitching from side to side in time with the same motion from Tristol’s tail. He was reading a book, the same one that he’d gotten from Lothar, or Lolthar, or Lolth or… no definitely not Lolth. Not enough legs or webs for that.

Nisha blinked as her train of thought plunged over the side of the ring. “What was I thinking about?”

“About needing a vacation.” Tristol said, smiling behind his book as he batted at her tail with his own. “Clueless was saying the same thing the other day actually.”

She leaned her head on the aasimar’s shoulder. “So what sort of vacation might you have in mind if we took one?”

Of course, unbeknownst to them both, as they were discussing vacation ideas, Toras was thumbing through the mail when he found a set of seven letters, each of them addressed by individual name to the owners of the Portal Jammer.

***​

 

[joshhg]

Oooh, nice begining for a new arc. Interesting new NPC's, exotic locations, and a hint of something greater. Ah, can't wait for the next one.

A few questions though. Will the merc. that the Ebon touched be in this arc? What is important enough for the Wanderer to pause in his hunt for whatever he was looking for? What happened to the fairy dragon? And did the player's really express an interest in vacation, or was that just narrative licence? *Deep Breath*

I could go on, but I'll stop for now. Thanks again!
Josh