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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Dallman" data-source="post: 9264493" data-attributes="member: 6999616">Avalon is a setting with a lot of history. Dave Waring has been running it for about 45 years, and keeping his notes up to date. In recent history, a civil war has started between the sub-kingdoms of the country of Greensward. This appears to have been plotted and guided by the Temple of Set. Here, I have to explain the religious metaphysics of the setting a bit. The amount of religious power a church can use is controlled by the number of worshippers it has. The relationship is very direct: the number of worshippers determines the number of priests that can turn undead and cast spells, and the effective levels at which they can use these powers. They also have to have achieved the levels through personally earned experience. There are a great many churches with some worshippers, but there is one that is by far the most popular, Mammon, god of wealth, money and economic success. It has so much religious power that it can afford to rent some of it out to other churches. Naturally, this brings in more money, so it's consistent with the principles of the religion. There is a requirement that churches renting power not preach against the Church of Mammon, or attack it in other ways. The PCs in the campaign recently discovered that the Temple of Set has smuggled in large numbers of Set-worshipping adventurers from other worlds to affect the civil war. Since this is likely to result in the deaths of large numbers of Mammon-worshipping citizens of Greensward, the Patriarch of Set was asked about it by the Patriarch of Mammon, and knew nothing. The supply of religious power was cut off (to about 400 priests, average level 8). The PCs continued investigating, in the Temple of Mammon's records. The payment for all that power was made in the form of semi-refined magical metals, valuable in enchantments. The PCs have been in the mining business, and were interested by that. Asking the School of Ancient Knowledge (a college of sages and bards) about the material gave a clue: it looked like Avalon's version of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manganese_nodule" target="_blank">seabed nodules</a>. Borrowing a priest of Moradin who could talk to metals and stones made it clear that the nodules were being collected by creatures that nobody recognises, smelted, then transported by sahuagin. That's extremely interesting, because the PCs have encountered sahuagin in saltwater in a set of caves more than a hundred miles inland and hundreds of feet above sea level. They were aggressive and violent by the standards of very evil creatures, and seemed to have connections with the "One True Church of Evil" who are a bunch of nutters who spread plagues and otherwise try to cause mass death. That gets us to the end of the first quote. For the second, we asked Mammon's accountants about other payments that had been made in that kind of semi-refined metal. There were several, and the timing looked very bad.<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">It was used to buy ten scrolls of Gate, a few months before an attempt to destroy the world by worshippers of the Goddess of Pale Bone, who comes from Tekumel and is very nasty. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Ten more scrolls of Gate were bought a few months before Skyfall, an orbital bombardment that destroyed many cities. That was definitely connected with an extremely evil being from outworld that seems to have been a Saberhagen Berserker, which fled at about the same time as Skyfall. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">An associated account was used to buy two year's worth of power for a first level cleric: the first ever cleric of our Paladin's religion. That chap is now the High Priest of the church, and knows nothing about this, although it happened a month or so before he first found that he could cast spells, and he'd have had to sign the contract himself.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">That account was also involved in setting up the second monastery of the religion, in paying some remarkably generous expenses. One of the people who received the money died recently; we're about to dash off to try to prevent the other being assassinated.    </li> </ul>Writing this account has given me some more ideas to investigate. Being intelligence agents is much more interesting than fighting on the front lines in the civil war.</blockquote>

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