For those (very few) people who actually had an interest in this thread, we have been continuing our campaign; we simply have not updated the logs. After clearing out book #12 and defeating the Voice of Rot, we have had a number of side sessions, plus eight more sessions.
Those side sessions aside, we spent two "full" sessions handling a year-long timeskip set in a fully-liberated and fully-explored Gyre. We happened to bring a copious amount of Lanjyrian NPCs along with us to the Gyre, everyone from Wolfgang von Recklinghausen to Athrylla Valanar, from Reed Macbannin's ghost to Amielle Latimer's ghost; and we had unearthed many new magics, technologies, and arcanotechnologies within this cosmic recycling center at the end of worlds. Arkwright did an amazing job of setting up quirky scenes for our characters to engage in during this year-long timeskip, and it was all custom content.
It is a little hard to explain the precise specifics and mechanisms, but we concluded the timeskip by depositing the minds and souls of our Gyre-copy PCs and NPCs into a pile of specially-prepared witchoil, and then having someone hurl that witchoil into the grinding gears of heaven. This action created a "Gyre goddess" of sorts, a rational and benevolent guiding intelligence to allow the Gyre to make more reasoned judgment calls on how to mark worlds for doom. This custom material is very silly out of context, but it makes sense under the kind of transhumanist magics of minds, souls, hiveminds, godminds, and witchoil that Arkwright had been allowing us to conduct research on.
We spent one session being reintroduced to a frozen Lanjyr, after the one-year-long time skip. Arkwright happened to edit together
a frozen version of the map of Lanjyr. Our conversation with Nicodemus went somewhat off-script from how it was supposed to go in the book. This is because Arkwright allowed our party, during research in the Gyre, to discern that Jiquus had a loophole that allowed sophont undead to bypass Regulus's prescribed history. Thus, we explained the problem towards Nicodemus, who was somewhat dismayed.
Fortunately, Nicodemus had a (custom material)
backup plan, which involved rewinding all time in the local planar system to just a few decades after the Great Malice. Unfortunately, this would render the Axis Seal inoperable, and leave the world with a rather janky and unfavorable planar configuration, including no Jiese. This plan would be very bad for the local planar system, so our PCs objected to it. Naturally, this led to the battle over in the ziggurat of Jiese.
The hivemind/gestalt domination hotspots likewise went considerably off-script. Given the way Arkwright had portrayed the entirety of Lanjyr up until this point, and the various NPCs we had grown attachments to, the "baseline" adventures to tackle hivemind/gestalt domination hotspots, as presented in book #13, would prove unsuitable. Thus, Arkwright presented more tailor-made, custom material to get us invested in liberating the world.
We had eight hivemind/gestalt domination hotspots to tackle: Alais Primos, Cherage, Flint, Nalaam, Sentosa and the Elfaivaran colonies, Seobriga, Trekhom, and the refugees of the Unseen Court. Each of these domination hotspots was ruled by a "doppelganger," not so much an actual shapeshifter, but a previously-established NPC dominated by the hivemind/gestalt and transmuted to appear as our PCs and some of our most beloved NPCs which we took to the Gyre. So, for example, my character's doppelganger was in charge of Sentosa and the Elfaivaran colonies, and was a transmogrified Betronga Sidhon.
Rather than take the book's prescribed approach of stopping the scorched earth plan by blocking communications from Flint, we took the book's alternate suggestion of picking up Andrei von Recklinghausen from Sentosa and having him pose as Nicodemus to call off the scorched earth plan. We also staged some elaborate ruse wherein our PCs were supposedly defeated and converted by the Obscurati. We strengthened the bamboozlement by subverting several key members of the ghost council. Arkwright added in the plot thread wherein Borne was the master intelligence in charge of the hiveminds/gestalts all over the world, and we used our rapport with Borne to convince him to perpetuate the ruse. We also sent many of our other allies to directly attack Axis Island, keeping Nicodemus too distracted to counteract the deception upon the Obscurati elsewhere. Thus, we gained some significant breathing room with which to liberate each city under a hivemind/gestalt domination hotspot.
Throughout these last five sessions, we have liberated Sentosa and the Elfaivaran colonies, Trekhom, Alais Primos, Seobriga, and Flint thus far. We have been tackling these as a group, rather than splitting up our PCs. All of these hotspots have been expanded considerably with custom material from Arkwright, tailoring these sequences to better fit the interactions and influence our characters have had on these great nations of Lanjyr. The sessions have been a... bumpy ride, of highly inconsistent quality, with many ups and downs, but I appreciate the effort that Arkwright has been placing into expanding the baseline content. Our GM places an extraordinary amount of effort into using MapTool maps and tokens to visually depict the state of each city and its domination, and it has been marvelous.
We are visiting Nalaam next, which has grown unusually important due to circumstances in our game. Then it is off to wherever the Unseen Court's refugees are, and then Cherage.
Of course, since our party has never had too strong a set of compunctions against mass-domination, we have not actually been freeing people from the hiveminds/gestalts. We have simply been wresting control of them from the Obscurati. We will free the people later, maybe; but for now, we are focusing on uniting the world under a hivemind/gestalt of our
own and using that empowerment to take the fight to Nicodemus over in Axis Island. It is, to us, a more palatable alternative than using the Sacrament of Apotheosis; and besdies, we have already been training and grooming up a friendly hivemind-goddess of our own to take the reins of this global gestalt and serve as the new world order all on her own.
All of the above probably makes very little sense to anyone who is not already intimately familiar with our game, but it cannot be helped. We really did take a more unusual route in our campaign.