Tony Vargas said:
How did the book of a notorious necromancer also come to be the key to the chains holding a dark god? (Or was it the other way round? And was that the only way to destroy it?)
I was also wondering how Martin had any idea where he was going in the Negative Plane, or, for that matter, how he knew to use the gizmo to evert his lungs to breathe there.
You know, until I read this post I never realized how poor a job I did in explaining a lot of this stuff in the campaign. I mean, we went over it some at the end of the last actual session - but not in that kind of detail.
I think I get really possesive of campaign and setting "secrets" and it is hard for me to give out conclusive info. Part of me wants my players to speculate and theorize and figure stuff out (or come up with better ideas than mine, so I can steal them and make them feel smart
) - but the truth is, it is in reality very difficult "to figure things out".
So anyway, here is some info, though I will be avoiding anything that might be a spoiler for events in the story hour itself.
Marchosias the Corruptor is essentially Keraptis or Vecna, or any of the mad wizards of D&D campaigns who seek out the secrets of godhood and immortality while threatening the safety and sanity of the free peoples of the world. You know, one of those figures that would claim to be above other petty beings, but still revels in nothing better than messing with the recognixed authorities in the world.
The Book of Black Circles was one of Marchosias’ ways of insuring his continued immortality, which he made from the piece of negative energy removed from its plane to hold the god in its place by the other gods to punish the upstart god for his continued meddling in mortal affairs beyond what is normally allowed. How did Marchosias do this? Who knows? What’s important is that he did it. He had a tiny piece of the essential energy of a dark god and was using it to try to get himself back in the world.
The lock and the chains and the book fitting into it are just a visualization that makes sense to Martin’s mortal mind. How did Martin know where to go? Well, in that plane, thought is the means of locomotion. He knew where he had to go, even if he did not know
where he had to go.
The lung thing was easy to figure out. His Knowledge (planes) skill told him this plain was a near-vacuum and here at an entry point to the plane were some pink lungs hanging within each reach.
Tony Vargas said:
I remember two Story Hour's where the DM came up with a really cool, dramatic way to handle a resurection - this one, obviously, with the Urn of Osiris, and Piratecat's when they brought back Mrs Horn. Oddly, in both cases, the character in question either died again later, anyway, or the player left the game.
Did that detract from the drama, or add to it (in a dark way)? Martin, for instance, is stuck with an evil artifact, and, ultimately, must sacrifice his life, to 'pay' for the resurection of a friend, just so that friend could be later torn apart by an Umber Hulk (if I'm remembering it right). And, since Jana bought it, she could never fulfill her part of the bargain, so the Urn is no longer useable, at all.
Pretty rough - but then Aquerra seems like a brutal, no-punches-pulled kind of setting.
I think Jeremy’s second untimely death did add to the drama, even if there was an initial disappointment there. Undoing the rules surrounding life and death can have serious consequences (as Beorth used to try to tell the rest of the party) and the players and their characters understood that.
I wrote in a thread today that the setting for Warhammer Fantasy was a big influence on me when that first came out, and it was not that long after that that I began developing Aquerra, and if you are familiar with that setting at all, you know how grim it can be. More recently, reading George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice & Fire, I have found another dark world where the ripples of actions have some terrible consequences, and where being a hero is not an easy thing, if even possible. At least in Aquerra, it is possible – it is just that I am emulating the trope that I have always like most from fantasy, which is the heroic struggle against despair.
I think the random factor of an RPG helps keep that dark element firmly there, because a stray crit can kill Jeremy, or an unforeseen death can lead to a powerful magical item becoming useless, or a rickety staircase meant to be a simply challenge for the party to overcome can lead to the death of another PC.
