Are you viewing the post on a mobile browser? I found that the images do not show up when I view it on my phone, but they appear on my computer.
WotBS Tormyr's War of the Burning Sky campaign [spoilers abound]
Are you viewing the post on a mobile browser? I found that the images do not show up when I view it on my phone, but they appear on my computer.
RangerWickett
Legend
Nope. Desktop. I went to quote your post, and when I copy-paste the links, it looks like the attachments are private.
Okay, thanks for pointing it out. It had looked fine to me! You should be able to see them now.
As the heroes turned a corner, the river came into view. A large bridge spanned the river, and a tower sat at the midpoint of the bridge. Relieved to see some water, the heroes started to hurry to the river.
However, as they started forward, Crystin called out, "Zed, look out! Move!" A sword of fire formed above Zed's head and crashed down on him before splitting into several fire elementals shaped as deer. The forest fire on both sides of the road swelled in size and started to press in, and a wall of fire sprang up behind them and started to advance on their position. D'buld cried out, "Get to the river!" As they renewed their run, a couple large, burning trees crashed down across the road to form a barricade several hundred feet ahead. Byron called out, "Keep going! I can get us across it." The heroes continued their run as the fiery deer pursued.
Torrent had been demoralized by the difficulties of the travel through the forest, especially the defeat at the hands of Kazyk. She decided to buy the rest of the group, especially the out of shape Haddin, time. She turned and faced the creatures alone as everyone yelled at her to keep running. The deer attacked, scorching Torrent as she held the line. Frustrated with her heroics, Dro'Marri rushed back to join her. He struck one of the deer and screamed in pain as his hand and clothes caught on fire, but he continued to fight at Torrent's side.
Torrent could not hold up to the onslaught. She fell next to Dro'Marri. He interposed himself between the deer and Torrent and called out, "I fight with my fists and fire. This forest hates me. I need help here!"
Byron replied, "I thought we agreed to run!?!?!" Crystin and Haddin continued forward while the heroes joined the fight. As they got back to Torrent and Dro'Marri, Dro'Marri was knocked unconscious. Byron healed Torrent, and she sent a spiritual weapon at the deer while dragging Dro'Marri away. Trinja summoned her glaive and struck hard, beating back the deer, and Byron's magical words turned aside the brunt of the deer's attacks. All the while, the fire kept advancing. As Crystin and Haddin approached the barricade, the flames leapt up, and two ephemeral eyes peered out at them. Neither dared to cross the flames, and Byron's attention was with the rest of the heroes.
The renewed attacks turned the tide, and as Trinja's black glaive slashed through the remaining fiery deer, a moment of stillness reigned. The flames still crackled, they always crackled as the forest burned, but the wall of fire stopped advancing. The moment of peace passed as the flames above the barricade continued to coalesce into the image of a draconic head with antlers. It spoke directly to their minds:
As the heroes tentatively asked who or what this creature was, it introduced itself as Indomitability. It said that it was held prisoner at the bottom of a lake to the south by a village of fey and their horrid singing. Indomitability explained that he controlled the forest and the flames. The heroes would aid him, or they would never be able to leave the forest. Not seeing much choice in the matter, they agreed. Indomitability told them to visit the deserted village across the river before infusing them with the ability to withstand the heat of the forest. There they would be able to find rest. With that, the image of Indomitability vanished, and the flames on the barricade died out.
Sore and beaten up, the heroes pondered their next move. At least they would not have to worry about running out of stand the heat potions while they were on Indomitability's good side.
However, as they started forward, Crystin called out, "Zed, look out! Move!" A sword of fire formed above Zed's head and crashed down on him before splitting into several fire elementals shaped as deer. The forest fire on both sides of the road swelled in size and started to press in, and a wall of fire sprang up behind them and started to advance on their position. D'buld cried out, "Get to the river!" As they renewed their run, a couple large, burning trees crashed down across the road to form a barricade several hundred feet ahead. Byron called out, "Keep going! I can get us across it." The heroes continued their run as the fiery deer pursued.
Torrent had been demoralized by the difficulties of the travel through the forest, especially the defeat at the hands of Kazyk. She decided to buy the rest of the group, especially the out of shape Haddin, time. She turned and faced the creatures alone as everyone yelled at her to keep running. The deer attacked, scorching Torrent as she held the line. Frustrated with her heroics, Dro'Marri rushed back to join her. He struck one of the deer and screamed in pain as his hand and clothes caught on fire, but he continued to fight at Torrent's side.
Torrent could not hold up to the onslaught. She fell next to Dro'Marri. He interposed himself between the deer and Torrent and called out, "I fight with my fists and fire. This forest hates me. I need help here!"
Byron replied, "I thought we agreed to run!?!?!" Crystin and Haddin continued forward while the heroes joined the fight. As they got back to Torrent and Dro'Marri, Dro'Marri was knocked unconscious. Byron healed Torrent, and she sent a spiritual weapon at the deer while dragging Dro'Marri away. Trinja summoned her glaive and struck hard, beating back the deer, and Byron's magical words turned aside the brunt of the deer's attacks. All the while, the fire kept advancing. As Crystin and Haddin approached the barricade, the flames leapt up, and two ephemeral eyes peered out at them. Neither dared to cross the flames, and Byron's attention was with the rest of the heroes.
The renewed attacks turned the tide, and as Trinja's black glaive slashed through the remaining fiery deer, a moment of stillness reigned. The flames still crackled, they always crackled as the forest burned, but the wall of fire stopped advancing. The moment of peace passed as the flames above the barricade continued to coalesce into the image of a draconic head with antlers. It spoke directly to their minds:
As the heroes tentatively asked who or what this creature was, it introduced itself as Indomitability. It said that it was held prisoner at the bottom of a lake to the south by a village of fey and their horrid singing. Indomitability explained that he controlled the forest and the flames. The heroes would aid him, or they would never be able to leave the forest. Not seeing much choice in the matter, they agreed. Indomitability told them to visit the deserted village across the river before infusing them with the ability to withstand the heat of the forest. There they would be able to find rest. With that, the image of Indomitability vanished, and the flames on the barricade died out.
Sore and beaten up, the heroes pondered their next move. At least they would not have to worry about running out of stand the heat potions while they were on Indomitability's good side.
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I added in some more character information to the first post of the thread. It now contains some of the information I worked with the players to develop the backstory of their character as well as secret information the players are not aware of but would be interesting to those familiar with the campaign saga.
The heroes decided that despite their misgivings about being given orders by a fiery talking head, they needed some rest. They decided to skip the tower for the time being and found shelter in the abandoned village. They spend an uneventful night there and searched the village the next morning. Many personal possessions had been left, as if the whole village fled suddenly. Most of what had value had been taken, but they found a strange necklace. Upon putting it on, Byron found that he could only speak and understand Sylvan, a language that no one in the party understood, including him.
Continuing to the eastern edge of the village, the heroes found a strange stone tree with a path that came up to it and various decorative stones set in a circle around it. As they approached, a pair of ghasts dropped from the branches and attacked them. Torrent ran forward and attempted to turn the undead. She failed in that, but the magical energy radiating out from her opened a secret door in the base of the stone tree. After the heroes dispatched the ghasts, they found a journal on one of the creatures. The ghasts turned out to be a husband and wife pair of druids. When the forest started to burn, a number of children became separated from their families by the flames. The druids took the children to a cave for shelter. When the food ran out, the druids turned to eating the children. The final pages show a descent into madness as the curse of undeath took them over.
Shaken by the revelation, the heroes decided to investigate the opening in the tree. Inside they found a deva standing guard over a shrine as well as two bodies. The deva welcomed the heroes and explained that it had been sent in response to the dying wishes of the dead elf. The shrine was constructed in honor of the elvish woman Anyariel, a hero of the elves of Innenotdar. When the angel arrived. Bhurisrave, the first elf, was already dead, and the second, a Shahalesti soldier, was alive and burning with the indomitable fire but unresponsive in a state of suspended animation. A broken display case was on one side of the shrine. A magical mace lay next to the dead elf, and the heroes decided Dro'Marri could make the best use of it. The deva told the heroes that its duty was to stay here to guard the evidence of crimes that had been committed and found the shrine in this state when it arrived. It did not know what information the soldier held and did not have the ability to release the soldier from the magical coma. Also lacking the means to revive the soldier, the heroes left the shrine.
As the heroes exited the shrine they were again visited by Kashyk who started by placing his glaive down and backing away, saying he just wanted to talk. Untrusting of the bearded devil, the heroes told him to speak quickly. He told the heroes that he had been visited by Indomitability as well and had received the same request. While the he or the heroes could simply kill the fey in the village to the south or find some other more boring way of getting them to stop singing, he proposed a simpler plan.
Kashyk had signed a contract to hunt down the heroes, get the Ragesian intelligence from them (what they had) and ensure they did not leave the burning forest. Indomitability had described itself as being trapped on the bottom of the lake next to the village to the south. The heroes could simply swim down and kill it while it was trapped. Without Indomitability, The fires should then extinguish. If the heroes also parted with the information they had, Kashyk figured that his contract would be fulfilled as the forest would no longer be burning.
Suspicious of this arrangement, the heroes agreed to get Kashyk to leave. He said he would but cautioned the heroes to honor their agreement for he would be watching from the forest.
The heroes had a choice: south to the fey village to release Indomitability or north to the victims headed at the mouth of the white river. Before deciding on a direction, they wanted to investigate the tower next to the bridge. After dealing with the magical protections on the entrance, they walked into a time capsule from before the days when Innenotdar was on fire.
Inside they found the desiccated bodies of two elvish guards. The bodies had no marks of injury. The storage for the ground floor of the tower had various weapons and armor for the two guards. Continuing on to the second floor, they found a holy symbol to Pelor on a table next to a war map set up to analyze ways to defend the village. A journal lay next to the map and holy symbol. The journal, written in Elvish, was written by a cleric of Pelor named Bhurisrava. Much of the journal was unremarkable, but the end of it cataloged a crisis of faith for the cleric.
In the journal, Bhurisrava wrote that after the Ragesian army took over Gate Pass 40 years ago, a group of goblins who lived under Innenotdar started fires throughout the forest. Some were captured and explained that they had been hired by a Ragesian orc. They were found with a pouch of something Bhurisrava labelled "dream seeds". The goblins said that taking a seed would allow them to talk to the firemaker but that they were poison. After trying one and experiencing no effect, he filed them away for later study.
The fires could not be extinguished even through magical means. A woman asked the cleric to help her find her boyfriend. They found him and several other elves in the shrine of Anyariel on the East end of the village. The man had gone to the underground shrine to curse Anyariel, but the fires seeped in through the roots of plants and reached him and the others underground. They now existed in a perpetual state of combustion and agony, but their bodes were not consumed, and death did not come. The woman ran in horror into the burning woods, and the cleric never saw her again.
Bhurisrava, faith crippled by the suffering he was witnessing, decided to take the victims north to the start of the White River. He hoped that someone would someday discover what he had hidden and figure out how to heal his homeland.
While the heroes read the journal and headed upstairs to investigate the third floor, Byron made another copy of the five pages of Ragesian intelligence he possessed, subtly changing minor pieces of text.
Upstairs, they found living quarters and a storage closet. Within the closet was a small pouch with goblin markings on it. Inside were the dream seeds, but nobody took one as they did not really want to have another conversation with Indomitability.
Their search was interrupted by the screams of a woman outside the tower. Running to a window, they saw a human-sized woman with six wings running from a group of similar creatures.
Continuing to the eastern edge of the village, the heroes found a strange stone tree with a path that came up to it and various decorative stones set in a circle around it. As they approached, a pair of ghasts dropped from the branches and attacked them. Torrent ran forward and attempted to turn the undead. She failed in that, but the magical energy radiating out from her opened a secret door in the base of the stone tree. After the heroes dispatched the ghasts, they found a journal on one of the creatures. The ghasts turned out to be a husband and wife pair of druids. When the forest started to burn, a number of children became separated from their families by the flames. The druids took the children to a cave for shelter. When the food ran out, the druids turned to eating the children. The final pages show a descent into madness as the curse of undeath took them over.
Shaken by the revelation, the heroes decided to investigate the opening in the tree. Inside they found a deva standing guard over a shrine as well as two bodies. The deva welcomed the heroes and explained that it had been sent in response to the dying wishes of the dead elf. The shrine was constructed in honor of the elvish woman Anyariel, a hero of the elves of Innenotdar. When the angel arrived. Bhurisrave, the first elf, was already dead, and the second, a Shahalesti soldier, was alive and burning with the indomitable fire but unresponsive in a state of suspended animation. A broken display case was on one side of the shrine. A magical mace lay next to the dead elf, and the heroes decided Dro'Marri could make the best use of it. The deva told the heroes that its duty was to stay here to guard the evidence of crimes that had been committed and found the shrine in this state when it arrived. It did not know what information the soldier held and did not have the ability to release the soldier from the magical coma. Also lacking the means to revive the soldier, the heroes left the shrine.
As the heroes exited the shrine they were again visited by Kashyk who started by placing his glaive down and backing away, saying he just wanted to talk. Untrusting of the bearded devil, the heroes told him to speak quickly. He told the heroes that he had been visited by Indomitability as well and had received the same request. While the he or the heroes could simply kill the fey in the village to the south or find some other more boring way of getting them to stop singing, he proposed a simpler plan.
Kashyk had signed a contract to hunt down the heroes, get the Ragesian intelligence from them (what they had) and ensure they did not leave the burning forest. Indomitability had described itself as being trapped on the bottom of the lake next to the village to the south. The heroes could simply swim down and kill it while it was trapped. Without Indomitability, The fires should then extinguish. If the heroes also parted with the information they had, Kashyk figured that his contract would be fulfilled as the forest would no longer be burning.
Suspicious of this arrangement, the heroes agreed to get Kashyk to leave. He said he would but cautioned the heroes to honor their agreement for he would be watching from the forest.
The heroes had a choice: south to the fey village to release Indomitability or north to the victims headed at the mouth of the white river. Before deciding on a direction, they wanted to investigate the tower next to the bridge. After dealing with the magical protections on the entrance, they walked into a time capsule from before the days when Innenotdar was on fire.
Inside they found the desiccated bodies of two elvish guards. The bodies had no marks of injury. The storage for the ground floor of the tower had various weapons and armor for the two guards. Continuing on to the second floor, they found a holy symbol to Pelor on a table next to a war map set up to analyze ways to defend the village. A journal lay next to the map and holy symbol. The journal, written in Elvish, was written by a cleric of Pelor named Bhurisrava. Much of the journal was unremarkable, but the end of it cataloged a crisis of faith for the cleric.
In the journal, Bhurisrava wrote that after the Ragesian army took over Gate Pass 40 years ago, a group of goblins who lived under Innenotdar started fires throughout the forest. Some were captured and explained that they had been hired by a Ragesian orc. They were found with a pouch of something Bhurisrava labelled "dream seeds". The goblins said that taking a seed would allow them to talk to the firemaker but that they were poison. After trying one and experiencing no effect, he filed them away for later study.
The fires could not be extinguished even through magical means. A woman asked the cleric to help her find her boyfriend. They found him and several other elves in the shrine of Anyariel on the East end of the village. The man had gone to the underground shrine to curse Anyariel, but the fires seeped in through the roots of plants and reached him and the others underground. They now existed in a perpetual state of combustion and agony, but their bodes were not consumed, and death did not come. The woman ran in horror into the burning woods, and the cleric never saw her again.
Bhurisrava, faith crippled by the suffering he was witnessing, decided to take the victims north to the start of the White River. He hoped that someone would someday discover what he had hidden and figure out how to heal his homeland.
While the heroes read the journal and headed upstairs to investigate the third floor, Byron made another copy of the five pages of Ragesian intelligence he possessed, subtly changing minor pieces of text.
Upstairs, they found living quarters and a storage closet. Within the closet was a small pouch with goblin markings on it. Inside were the dream seeds, but nobody took one as they did not really want to have another conversation with Indomitability.
Their search was interrupted by the screams of a woman outside the tower. Running to a window, they saw a human-sized woman with six wings running from a group of similar creatures.
There was not much time to act. Byron had just finished his second copy of the Ragesian intelligence as the rest of the heroes rushed past him.
The attackers had already inflicted several blows on the woman, who was trying to hold them back with her magic. The heroes hit like a moving wall, with Byron catching up by using misty step out the window of the tower. Blows were exchanged as the attackers dealt with the new threat posed by the heroes. Torrent helped the woman away and healed her. Zed chucked one of the attackers the bridge into the water below. As the other attackers were wounded, they decided to escape and jumped off the bridge, gliding with their six wings to shore.
They had heard the woman yelling in Sylvan, so Byron put on his new necklace to talk to her. He learned that the woman's name was Tiljann, that her people were the Seela, and she came from a village to the south. Forgetting that he could now only speak in Sylvan, he relayed this information to the others in a language that nobody else understood. After Byron took off the necklace to relay the information, Zed asked him to ask the woman why the others had attacked her. As Byron got ready to put the necklace on again, Tiljann said, "It's okay, I understand Common," in broken Common.
After some nervous laughter and introductions, Tiljann explained that a schism had developed in her village to the south. 45 years ago, the Elven warrior Anyariel, hero of Innenotdar, faced off against a powerful stag of indomitable will and incorporeal nature. So strong was its will that it refused to die when hunted, and it lashed out and killed some of the elves who had hunted it. Anyariel fought it in an epic battle near the Seela village, and the Seela used one of their gifts to aid Anyariel: the Song of Forms. The song gives body and form to that which does not have it, and with the stag now having a physical body, Anyariel was able to wound it. Still, it would not fall. The best Anyariel was able to do was pin it to the bottom of the lake with her living greatsword, a gift from her dryad lover Timbre.
Anyariel pulled herself up out of the lake, but her wounds were too great, and she died in her lover's arms. The Seela realized that they would have to continue singing the Song of Forms indefinitely. If they stopped, the creature would become incorporeal again, and resume its rampage. So the Seela sang, and they sang. For 5 years they sang until the forest exploded with fire. As the elves and other creatures of the forest tried to flee the flames, Papuvin, the leader of the Seela, made the decision to keep the indomitable stag trapped at the bottom of the lake, so they sang. For 40 years they have sung the Song of Forms, their village an island among a sea of flames, and strangely, none of the Seela died of old age, sickness, or injuries during this time. They had achieved a sort of immortality like the burning creatures of the forest.
But now a faction of the Seela has decided they have had enough. Led by a Seela named Vuhl, they see this strange life here as an abomination and their village a prison. They say that their departure from the natural order of things began when the stag became trapped and the forest burned. They want to stop the song and let oblivion claim them. Papuvin, for the time being, has managed to keep a majority of the Seela singing the Song of Forms in rotation, day and night, day in and day out.
Tiljann, on the other hand, wanted to live, but beyond that, she wanted to leave the forest and travel the world like Etinifi, a Seela who left the forest in search of help shortly after the forest started burning. She had decided to leave the village and see if other parts of the forest held any answers to help resolve the conflict in her village. That was when she was attacked by some of the Seela who wanted silence to fall on the village.
After hearing Tiljann's story, the heroes decided to escort her to the mouth of the White River to see if it held any of the answers she sought.
The attackers had already inflicted several blows on the woman, who was trying to hold them back with her magic. The heroes hit like a moving wall, with Byron catching up by using misty step out the window of the tower. Blows were exchanged as the attackers dealt with the new threat posed by the heroes. Torrent helped the woman away and healed her. Zed chucked one of the attackers the bridge into the water below. As the other attackers were wounded, they decided to escape and jumped off the bridge, gliding with their six wings to shore.
They had heard the woman yelling in Sylvan, so Byron put on his new necklace to talk to her. He learned that the woman's name was Tiljann, that her people were the Seela, and she came from a village to the south. Forgetting that he could now only speak in Sylvan, he relayed this information to the others in a language that nobody else understood. After Byron took off the necklace to relay the information, Zed asked him to ask the woman why the others had attacked her. As Byron got ready to put the necklace on again, Tiljann said, "It's okay, I understand Common," in broken Common.
After some nervous laughter and introductions, Tiljann explained that a schism had developed in her village to the south. 45 years ago, the Elven warrior Anyariel, hero of Innenotdar, faced off against a powerful stag of indomitable will and incorporeal nature. So strong was its will that it refused to die when hunted, and it lashed out and killed some of the elves who had hunted it. Anyariel fought it in an epic battle near the Seela village, and the Seela used one of their gifts to aid Anyariel: the Song of Forms. The song gives body and form to that which does not have it, and with the stag now having a physical body, Anyariel was able to wound it. Still, it would not fall. The best Anyariel was able to do was pin it to the bottom of the lake with her living greatsword, a gift from her dryad lover Timbre.
Anyariel pulled herself up out of the lake, but her wounds were too great, and she died in her lover's arms. The Seela realized that they would have to continue singing the Song of Forms indefinitely. If they stopped, the creature would become incorporeal again, and resume its rampage. So the Seela sang, and they sang. For 5 years they sang until the forest exploded with fire. As the elves and other creatures of the forest tried to flee the flames, Papuvin, the leader of the Seela, made the decision to keep the indomitable stag trapped at the bottom of the lake, so they sang. For 40 years they have sung the Song of Forms, their village an island among a sea of flames, and strangely, none of the Seela died of old age, sickness, or injuries during this time. They had achieved a sort of immortality like the burning creatures of the forest.
But now a faction of the Seela has decided they have had enough. Led by a Seela named Vuhl, they see this strange life here as an abomination and their village a prison. They say that their departure from the natural order of things began when the stag became trapped and the forest burned. They want to stop the song and let oblivion claim them. Papuvin, for the time being, has managed to keep a majority of the Seela singing the Song of Forms in rotation, day and night, day in and day out.
Tiljann, on the other hand, wanted to live, but beyond that, she wanted to leave the forest and travel the world like Etinifi, a Seela who left the forest in search of help shortly after the forest started burning. She had decided to leave the village and see if other parts of the forest held any answers to help resolve the conflict in her village. That was when she was attacked by some of the Seela who wanted silence to fall on the village.
After hearing Tiljann's story, the heroes decided to escort her to the mouth of the White River to see if it held any of the answers she sought.
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