ZEITGEIST On the Wayfarer's Lantern

EarthSeraphEdna · Jul 22, 2018

The wayfarer's lantern is rather confusing to me.

1. Given its name, does the lantern have any relation to the constellation of Alesia the Wayfarer, mentioned in Digging for Lies?

2. Can soulless witchoil serve as a Bleak Gate oil for the lantern? What of witchoil containing souls?

3. What exactly are these "meteorites"? Where do they come from? Is it known to astrological scholars that such planar-energy-charged meteorites regularly crash into Lanjyr and offer up magically-charged dust? How does the Obscurati possibly have enough meteorite dust to fill up lighthouse-sized lanterns? Where are they getting the meteorites from?

4. How does the wayfarer's lantern interact with the golden icons, and the golden seals? If, say, an inactive lantern was brought before the massive Apet seal, would anything special happen? Likewise, if an active, Apet-meteorite-charged lantern was brought before the massive Apet seal, would anything special happen?

hirou · Jul 22, 2018

1. No comment but great find.
2. Lantern needs a material infused with the energy of corresponding plane to function. Either kind of witchoil should function.
3. Have you read adventure 7? Ob are mining meteorites from glacier at Knutpara at north Drakr
4. Inactive lantern is just a piece of complicated machinery and lenses, as far as I imagine it. Activated lantern, I guess, could be used for opening the corresponding portal, if the party wants to do so.

RangerWickett · Jul 24, 2018

Alesia is so named because a friend of mine was good friends with Alesia Glidewell, the body model for Chell from Portal.

I had Wayfarers as an organization in War of the Burning Sky.

As for fiddling with planar travel, what do you think the party wants to accomplish? What do you want? Our general idea was, no, you don't get to go anywhere other than the Bleak Gate and the Dreaming until adventure 10.

EarthSeraphEdna · Jul 24, 2018

The players want to use inert, soulless witch's oil to transition into the Bleak Gate, possibly with looted iron amulets.

RangerWickett · Jul 24, 2018

Sure. At most they'll skip a bit of adventure 5 and get themselves in over their heads. You could also use it for other plots, but the main storyline is resilient against the party playing around with the lantern. The Ob are good at hiding.

Empirate · Aug 3, 2018

My group planned to use the lantern for a raid on the Cauldron Hill complex in Bleak Gate, as well. Also before the adventure called on them to go.

However, since I moved the Kell investigation up to take place in between Always on Time and Cauldron Born (playing it out in the form of a months-long investigation à la The Wire – with Kell just a powerful puppet, the guild being masterminded by The Lawyer instead... Quentin Augst was the secret, dangerous, highly-intelligent boss in my game), they came into possession of the guild's trinkets earlier than Cauldron Born assumed, so they didn't actually need the lantern to pursue their plan.

They still took the lantern with them as a way to quickly get back (and possibly bring prisoners) from Bleak Gate, something I hadn't even thought about, but that I found quite smart.

In the end, their first foray ended in a skirmish with some patrolling Ob guards, after which the group quickly withdrew. They started another information-gathering expedition, were discovered again and had to fight their way out of the complex this time. After this, Quital put all of his troops on the highest alert and installed additional security measures. But when the constables returned (this time, by way of the portal opened by King Aodhan after the formal dinner), they brought some of Captain Dale's crack troopers with them, and a huge James Bond-esque fight broke out on and around the construction decks. Hugely cool scene ending in Borne's awakening and clawing his way free of the hill.

The Wayfarer's Lantern, it turned out, never once got used in all of these trials and tribulations, even though my players wracked their brains for a way to make good use of its powers. I had the feeling my group was slightly underwhelmed by its role and function in the adventure all in all... :erm: