The Final Promise (Or, Isaac Chalk Versus Twitter)

[Isaac Chalk]

ENworld! It is I, Isaac Chalk. Hi.

This will be an unusual story hour, in that we are picking it up at some distance from the campaign's beginning, and the telling of the story hour will be mostly via Twitter. I am also not the game master of the chronicle, but a humble player character.

If you haven't used Twitter, imagine an instant messenger, an Email client, and a blog. As Email is to the blog, the IM client is to Twitter. I have a Twitter account. It is cunningly hidden in this post. Can you find it?http://twitter.com/isaacchalk

Questions about the campaign can be asked here, or sent to my Twitter account. Short answers will be posted to Twitter, with a weekly summary here. Long answers will be posted here, with a link on Twitter leading back here.

Here is a summary of what I have talked about thus far, reposted for your convenience.

Twitter! It is me, Isaac Chalk. Hi.

For those of you who do not know me, I am an inquisitive. That means I'm like a detective, except I use a different word because why not.

I am also an artificer, and in my world that means I build magical devices that uplift our standard of living and almost never explode.

I am also the best-dressed man in Sharn three years running, voted as such because why fight what's true.

I am also a Dungeons and Dragons character, and I travel around the world of Eberron, and beyond in a magical ship that flies.

Since I am a Dungeons and Dragons character I cannot possibly be gay. But I am. Don't spread it around. Twitter isn't searchable, is it?

Anyways! This is my Twitter account. I will be posting recollections of my many clients, adventures and mysteries unfurled.

(Or at least as much as I can fit into what appears to be an entirely arbitrary character limit. How am I supposed to properly ruminate wit

Damnation. Anyways! Follow me if you want to know about life in Eberron, life as an inquisitive, life as an artificer, or just because.

Ta for now!

People are asking where my swank Eberron background comes from. Is it a painting by Wayne Reynolds? Yes. But! It is not fictional.

In your world, getting mobbed on your flying ship by hyena people on crystal surfboards is an unusual event. In Eberron, it's my afternoon.

Quite an interesting case I'm on. Let me tell you all about it! All... three of you.

Some background. Through circumstances too long to go into here, I have wound up the engineer on Eberron's first bona-fide spelljammer.

I am also working on a case for the captain's... let's call her the captain's "friend." Yes. No connotations there at all.

Tracking down her mother who has gotten abducted by a suitably dangerous villain: the fae.

We've broken through the Astral Sea and journeyed to Thelanis, making planefall successfully and travelling to the court of the Winter King.

(On a scale of 1 to 10: About an eight. Wouldn't mind seeing him sans shirt. But focusing...)

He has been abducting elven woman and eladrin women, a crime which I cannot abide, because he is looking for the soul of his lost love.

We have found a backstabbing vizier - I'll wait for you to get off the fainting couch because what Vizier ever does that -

Who is willing to force the Winter King to break an oath he swore, thus wounding him in ways mortals can't imagine. The kicker, well...

The kicker is that he swore never to kill the foes of an enemy of ours. Long story. I myself lack details, having joined this crew late.

So to break the oath, we need to goad him into killing one of us. Well, you can imagine how that went over.

Two of us immediately volunteered, myself included because I am noble, self-sacrificing and handsome as all hell.

The woman who is the captain's "friend" however, doesn't want this, and that touched off a shouting match.

And shout we did. And then, plans were laid out. She has plans. Many complex, probably unworkable plans.

A famous man once said that plans will fail but planning will succeed. Personally, I prefer building a device that will raise the dead.

That's what I call planning. You'd be amazed how popular it makes you.

So that was the case thus far, Twitter. Where will it end? I'm not sure. I'm not eager to die... but I *am* eager to get this case done.

Also I'm told that it is amusing to talk in hashtags, so #I #Will #Do #That #Now. #You #Are #Welcome.

If you have questions about this, our past adventures, or about myself, ask in this thread or on Twitter - againt, that's Isaac Chalk (IsaacChalk) on Twitter - and if you prefer to use RSS for keeping track of my updates there is one here. I have also cleverly linked my Twitter page to my ENWorld profile, because I am "networked" and also "with it."

I know this is a rather unusual format for Story Hour, but I'm hoping it will prove to be a useful and entertaining one.

 

[Isaac Chalk]

Hello again, ENWorld. This is the weekly update.

Hello again, Twitter, and welcome to Isaac Chalk's logbook.


When last I left off, we had been told that to trick the Winter Lord, one of us needed to die.


The daughter of the woman we are here to rescue, didn't like that plan, and devised her own. She will attempt to fool this immortal fae...


... into thinking that she is his reincarnated lost love. Then all the captives will be freed and we... do... something, to get her out.


Not fond of this plan, I must say. But you can't argue with this woman. Her name's Paya. She's stubborn as a mule.

Anyways, we go and get some information out of the Winter Lord. What to look for when we "look for" this woman. Personality traits, etc.

We get this information and then two things happen in relatively short order. First, we come across some gnomes. I like gnomes.

Gnomes keep good libraries and they accept all forms of currency. Quite handy in the inquisitive line of work. Anyways.

They talk about how they lost someone on the path to the castle, to winter wolves. And here, we get a sinking feeling.

Because we heard screams on the road. But we were admonished to not leave the path to this castle under any circumstances.

I smelt a rat. Well, not a rat, and I didn't smell it, I deduced from body language and voice cadence that there was something off.

To get into this castle, the captain - the changeling wizard, Mask - had to shed an honest tear. She shed it after having a thumb broken.

No injuries, amongst these gnomes. Problem one. Problem two being the leading questions they asked. A bit too focused for those in grief.

(And I know what a person in mourning sounds like. Too well.)

So our resident kalashtar mentalist did what kalashtar mentalists are known for: hauling out a big damn sword and calling them on lying.

They scattered like mice. So when I said I liked gnomes, I was excluding these ones.

Then we tracked down another player in this castle of intrigues, the Witch of Fates. Linked strongly to Paya, she is. We got information.

On her powers, which are from an involuntary warlock pact, linking her to the ship we own and allowing it to travel the planes.

And on our final goal - not the freedom of these captives, but the true treasure we seek. The perfect world. The fabled 'Promised Land.'

This myth has done nothing but grow amongst the downtrodden of the world. I had heard tell of it many times before I joined this ship.

It is so pervasive that they have named their ship after the legend. Fittingly enough, since we discovered the legend was real.

The cost of the legend, of getting to this perfect world, of shaping it, however... is that whoever shapes it must die.

"Isaac," you say. "Seems like everything is asking you to die. Are you sure you're not playing Dragon Age?" Yes, quite sure.

This death, unlike the Vizier's offer, is more final. Beyond Dollurh, beyond resurrection. It gives even an agnostic like myself pause.

We've yet to make a decision, but we've found ourselves transported by the Witch of Fates to beyond the castle walls. That is it for now.

And that's it for this week. Follow me here on Twitter, or ask on ENWorld, if you have questions. 'Til next time.

 

[Isaac Chalk]

I have returned! Hello.

Hello again, Twitter. [MENTION=72389]isaacc[/MENTION]halk here. (I wonder if putting my own "call sign" in this tweet will cause an infinite Mention loop?)

Twitter has yet to explode! #Hooray #ITalkedInAHashtag #SexyMan

So we left the palace of the Lord of Winter and went back to our ship, the Final Promise. I stewed in my endjinn room. Paya came to talk.

We talked about options for finding the woman she wanted to impersonate. I suggested the library, and the Korranberg Chronicle.

(I have a friendly reporter on staff at the Chronicle. She keeps trying to drive me back to heterosexuality. Good luck with that, Iris.)

But since this woman is unlikely to be on the same plane as Eberron, my traditional sources are useless. Which frustrates me.

We had a nice, clean, solution, with its only attendant risk being one I was willing to bear. But, can't do it the easy way.

Had a row about it with the captain, the changeling wizard Mask. I pointed out that there are no other spellajmmers we know of on Eberron.

If ours is destroyed, getting back to Thelanis becomes far, far harder. And we lead risky lives. None it made a dent, so bah.

Bah.

I wonder if I get paid extra if the captain mandates that I take a longer, less efficient path towards resolving a missing persons case.

Anyways, back to it. We went to lunch in the galley. We talked with our planar navigator, Kanya, as he spoke of the Promised Land.

Kanya is a gith. The Promised Land is part of his ancestral homeland, Zerthimon. Accessible via a game made of byshek...

A gate made of byshek, rather. Damned typewriter. Anyways. The gith no longer live there, because the place is devastated.

Something called Ragnorra found the place, or was summoned there. She began twisting the plane like spaghetti around a fork.

The gith fought back, but were on the losing side, as too many people are. So they came up with a weapon of mass destruction.

The pedant in me wanted to point out that mass cannot be destroyed, but there is a time and a place for being smartarsed.

This weapon of... lots of destruction... depended on Zerthimon's spiral stream, also known as the lifestream. Put plain, it recycles life.

On Eberron, when you die, your soul goes to Dolurrh. Your experiences feed the stream.

There is a small segment of Zerthimon sealed off from the cancer eating the rest of it. This segment houses the uncorrupted spiral stream.

Enough gith souls have died, and accumulated in that stream, that the weapon is ready. It will spend souls as arrows.

And it will kill the infestation.

It was how calmly he said it, really. Ready to use up the souls of his people to clean up a planet with no one on it. Gave chills.

But he said that it's this or they wind up of no use.

"Are you still sure you're not in Dragon Age, Isaac? This seems unnecessarily grim." No one in Ferelden dresses as fly as I do, so yes.

So whoever gets into this sealed off fortress and triggers the weapon will have "earned" the Promised Land. Problem being:

Nothing alive can get through it. You have to die and your soul travels past. I'd wager, as a result of the spiral stream.

An additional wrinkle. The Nation of the Warforged, led by the Lord of Blades, may be after the souls here for their own reasons.

Specifically, to create new warforged, which can't be done without soul energies to draw upon. And their last source, erm, dried up.

(For more details as to why it dried up, visit the GM's previous campaign which I wasn't there for.)

So we have to die to get in there, and also, contend with the Lord of Blades who is an artificer without equal, and his army of warforged.

All this to claim a new world. Which I'm no longer sure is truly worth the cost if it means firing a cannon made of gith souls.

Ah, for the olden days, when all I had to contend with were halfling mob bosses, handsome dragonmarked thieves and warforged serial killers.

That's it for now, Twitter. Good day.

 

[Isaac Chalk]

Here is the week's update! First, something from earlier this week.

#ItGetsBetter Honestly. #TweetYour16YearOldSelf

Also, try not to set the carriage on fire when you attempt to create the artificial horse. #TweetYour16YearOldSelf

An explanation - the hashtag is an easily searchable string that you append to a tweet, and Twitter users use it to group all tweets with the tag. So you can have your tweet belong to a specific group with the appropriate hashtag. "It Gets Better" is a gay rights movement you may have heard of, aimed at young people. Tweet Your 16 Year Old Self should be self-explanatory.

Now, on to the journal itself.

Hello again, Twitter. Here's the update for this week's sessions of Large Lizards and Broad Basements.

We were pondering our next move on board the Promise, sailing through the Astral Sea, the membrane between planes. Then: disaster struck.

Something bored through the side of the ship, leaving a hole ten feet by ten feet. (I measured it.) It opened, and it was hollow.

Inside were fire beetles. Thousands thereof. Here to sow confusion and chaos on board the ship. Making matters worse, though?

The capsule itself was chained to a ship that had come alongside, and had attached itself via this device so we couldn't run.

Then raiders boarded. Demonic ones. Devils and demons, it turns out, have their own Spelljammers. We were exotic prey.

Kashna, the kalashtar empath, and I stayed in the galley to try and detach the clamp, while the rest of the crew went abovedecks.

It took some time but we detached it. Kashna and I then dashed up above to witness the fight in progress.

Paya, the half-elf warlock linked to our ship, called upon this extraplanar fog to summon horrific creatures that flayed the devils alive.

Mask, the changeling wizard, flooded the deck with force bolts and mystical fire, and summoned a succubus - yes, she has one -

- to bewitch the raiders. Raven, elven veteran of two wars, took down her foes with the pinpoint accuracy that made her name.

I myself deployed a shield drone to protect Mask when an enemy got close, and one of my automated flying injectors full of healing vitae.

It was over, frankly, in seconds. They retreated. Kashna said that she could tell, by the way the ship flew, that it had cargo.

Living cargo. Bound to Hell. So of course, we are obligated to give chase.

And that's where this tale ends. I've already been to Hell, if by Hell you mean Sharn's lower wards. So I'm not afraid. That much.

 

[Isaac Chalk]

Where was the Story Hour last week? I'm glad someone asked! Even if only hypothetically.

No updates this week, Twitter. The Game Master came down with a bad case of the homework. Earnestly, who goes to college to learn?

Then, mid-week, I had a vexing encounter with a new computer-program.

Oh, a new character builder. I'll just have my player import me and MY FACE MY HANDSOME FACE #dnd #ddi

Well, I suppose I can close my eyes and pretend my portrait is accurate. #NoICant #ddi #dnd

I weep for the loss of the bouffant. None of the stock models posing for CBuilder portraits have one. #WhereIsMyBouffant #ddi #dnd

"Isaac, aren't you over-fixated on there being no custom portraits?" But - my bouffant! #BouffantIsAFunnyWord #dnd #ddi

And now, on to the week's events.

Hello again, Twitter. This is the weekly update.

Our ship has side-skiffs for ship-to-ship transport. We all boarded one, and sped off to the ship that attacked us. Problems? One.

The enemy ship was equipped with an anti-ship cannon called a beam lance. If it hit the skiff, we'd be torn to shreds.

So we have a ballista bolter on board. I decided to tie my singing, super-tough flaming robot to a bolt.

I may have forgot to mention this, by the way. I have a super-tough flaming robot. It sings too.

So the robot intercepts the beam lance, blocking their attack long enough for us to get onto the devil-ship.

Gods-speed, Flaming Mister Punchy. I only have half a dozen of you left. I'll remember you when I make more.

We land. Out come the tricks and traps. Kashna, the kalashtar psychic warlord, is out first, using euphoric triggers...

... to motivate us to get into position. We do so. Raven takes arrows in hand and a rain of sharpened wood results.

Mask detonates a shockwave of raw force, knocking several on their feet and tearing up the deck. Karka, our gith sword-mage, leaps in...

... and uses his isolating ward to minimize the damage one of the chain devils can do to anyone.

Paya sneaks into position, releasing the frost of Thelanis and the Winter Court upon the demons on the ship, freezing one solid...

... and before long, the initial guardsmen are dispatched. That's where this tale leaves off.

Next week, we descend deeper, confront the ship's captain, and hopefully live to free the slaves on board.