WizarDru
Adventurer
Hey, guys. The old noodle is dusty from weeks off from the game and I've got one scheduled for tomorrow night. It's potentially the climax of a long-running adventure, but with a lot of personal shenanigans, I haven't had time to flesh out the finale idea as much as I might. That's where I turn to the collective imagination of my fellow gamers for some inspiration (as I am wont to do from time to time). What I'm looking for are cool idea for the location (and random ideas on the encounters).
Without going into mind-numbing detail, the situation is this: the players have been dispatched on a mission to one of the five 'Modron Stations' in the middle of a wasteland of wild magic (think Eberron's Mournland and you get the general idea, except replace warforged with beastmen). Their task is to stop an evil organization known as the Legion of the Coming Storm (or Storm Legionnaries, for short) from reaching the station. The station itself is situated on a MOSTLY-inactive volcano in the center of a crater that is both oasis and ash-field (again, wild magic). The endpoint of the adventure is them arriving at the station and fulfilling their mission. Unbeknownst to the players, they group they were chasing and hoping to catch are actually now BEHIND them, thanks to some good dice-rolling and clever thinking on their part. What IS a 'Modron Station', you may well be asking. I'll come back to that.
My intention was that their arrival would signal a BIG Skill Challenge, of which combat would end up being a component, but not the totality of the challenge. The nature of the challenge is what I hadn't fully decided, yet. There is a wrinkle: both groups were racing to the station to stop a third party from whatever he might be doing there. This being, known as Secundus, has arrived is actively working to subvert the station. The players will need to stop him (though defeating him might not be attainable, as he's a potential Big Bad for the campaign....but clever players can be clever, so his survival is not assured). Secundus leads us to what the station, specifically Irth Development Substation #1, actually IS.
In my Berenshar campaign, there are 28 divine beings. Together they created the Elemental Chaos as the raw materials for their grand creation, the Irth (aka the Prime Material Plane). To shape the Irth, they agreed into splitting into two groups (the beginning of a schism that would break them into two separate groups, the Divine and the Greater Sidhe). However, creating the Irth (and later, other planes) would require lots of workers, time and precision. Thus, they created the Modrons, who in my universe are caretakers of the stuff of reality. Like the planetary engineers of Hitchiker's Guide, they built the world. The divine placed the spark of living things, but everything else was crafted by the Modrons. Once their task was completed, they constructed a central station off-Plane called Mechanus, which is their interdimensional hub to maintain the upper planar dimensions. (The Modron March is actually a Planar Inspection Tour). What with one thing and another, they left behind their primary construction and maintenance facilities on the prime, albeit highly protected. However, thousands of years later, mortals keep poking the sites with bad results.
Site #3 was broken into by a group called the Cruel Wizards (who use the Legion as their enforcers). They experimented with the some of the defenses and the head wizard managed to infect himself with something called the 'Cog Virus', turning him into a partial modron. Since he is part of a unique system, he promoted himself to the primary modron...but since he also is aware of an existing Primus, he has made himself Secundus. He is also now stark staring MAD. Like you do. He intends to subvert all modrons on the Prime to his will and then eventually stage an assualt on Primus and Mechanus to replace the former and infect the latter.
So what do you think the inside of such a facility would look like? And what do you think a guy like Secundus would do there? What challenges would you expect to face there?
Without going into mind-numbing detail, the situation is this: the players have been dispatched on a mission to one of the five 'Modron Stations' in the middle of a wasteland of wild magic (think Eberron's Mournland and you get the general idea, except replace warforged with beastmen). Their task is to stop an evil organization known as the Legion of the Coming Storm (or Storm Legionnaries, for short) from reaching the station. The station itself is situated on a MOSTLY-inactive volcano in the center of a crater that is both oasis and ash-field (again, wild magic). The endpoint of the adventure is them arriving at the station and fulfilling their mission. Unbeknownst to the players, they group they were chasing and hoping to catch are actually now BEHIND them, thanks to some good dice-rolling and clever thinking on their part. What IS a 'Modron Station', you may well be asking. I'll come back to that.
My intention was that their arrival would signal a BIG Skill Challenge, of which combat would end up being a component, but not the totality of the challenge. The nature of the challenge is what I hadn't fully decided, yet. There is a wrinkle: both groups were racing to the station to stop a third party from whatever he might be doing there. This being, known as Secundus, has arrived is actively working to subvert the station. The players will need to stop him (though defeating him might not be attainable, as he's a potential Big Bad for the campaign....but clever players can be clever, so his survival is not assured). Secundus leads us to what the station, specifically Irth Development Substation #1, actually IS.
In my Berenshar campaign, there are 28 divine beings. Together they created the Elemental Chaos as the raw materials for their grand creation, the Irth (aka the Prime Material Plane). To shape the Irth, they agreed into splitting into two groups (the beginning of a schism that would break them into two separate groups, the Divine and the Greater Sidhe). However, creating the Irth (and later, other planes) would require lots of workers, time and precision. Thus, they created the Modrons, who in my universe are caretakers of the stuff of reality. Like the planetary engineers of Hitchiker's Guide, they built the world. The divine placed the spark of living things, but everything else was crafted by the Modrons. Once their task was completed, they constructed a central station off-Plane called Mechanus, which is their interdimensional hub to maintain the upper planar dimensions. (The Modron March is actually a Planar Inspection Tour). What with one thing and another, they left behind their primary construction and maintenance facilities on the prime, albeit highly protected. However, thousands of years later, mortals keep poking the sites with bad results.
Site #3 was broken into by a group called the Cruel Wizards (who use the Legion as their enforcers). They experimented with the some of the defenses and the head wizard managed to infect himself with something called the 'Cog Virus', turning him into a partial modron. Since he is part of a unique system, he promoted himself to the primary modron...but since he also is aware of an existing Primus, he has made himself Secundus. He is also now stark staring MAD. Like you do. He intends to subvert all modrons on the Prime to his will and then eventually stage an assualt on Primus and Mechanus to replace the former and infect the latter.
So what do you think the inside of such a facility would look like? And what do you think a guy like Secundus would do there? What challenges would you expect to face there?
