Objects With Soul
As a preface to this post, I'll begin by noting that I'm doing this over the course of several days since each artifact is turning out to be more text than I'd originally anticipated. But it's worth noting here that
because I intend to consider how the Reality has changed, I will not necessarily be sharing complete details for any artifact listed here- since I'll now need to keep a few surprises back, I reserve the right to change anything posted here if the item should ever again appear in a future game. This list is more of an abstract, showing just how crazy-powerful items can get when you have 21,000-HD First Ones making them.
Also, it's worth noting that although the Silver Key which I've kept mentioning is in fact a Soul Object (specifically, a Soul Object of the Eternal that gave its name as SEPHIROSOPHIA), it is not included in this post, because it was important enough to the full campaign- and old enough in my personal timeline of game development- that I wanted it to have its own post. It will come two posts after this one, if I follow my present plan.
In this post, I will give descriptions and game details for eight major Soul Objects which played a part in my campaign, even if only briefly or peripherally (the Omegablade for example; it's here because the PCs
considered questing for it at one point, but they ended up not doing so in the end). These eight, in no particular order, are: The Sword of Time, the Omegablade, the Initial Enabler, the Pit, the (Diamond or Onyx) Scales, the Cosmic Egg, the Ring Portal, and the Device in the Desolation.
The Sword of Time
Ironically, since I mentioned the Silver Key as being so old, I now start with the
other oldest item in my collection of personal artifacts. This one began its life back when I came up with the story for how the "Tertiaries" populated the multiverse, and how there came to be only three left alive inside it. I had a whole tiered system of super-swords, within which I included the Githyanki Silver Swords as the lowest tier (specifically, I said that the Githyanki discovered a stash of the "true" Silver Swords and made slightly-inferior copies of them, which was why there were two types back in 1st Edition). All tiers shared two properties: one was that they're capable of cutting the Silver Cord of an Astral traveller, thus killing said target irrevocably; the 1E mechanic for this was a percentage chance rolled if the sword's wielder hits the cord with an attack, and I had the higher tiers of my swords have a greater chance of severing it. The other property was that the swords all know their owners, and refuse to work for anybody else, with a period of "mourning" of sorts when one owner dies or gives up the Sword during which the Sword just refuses to work or accept a new owner at all no matter who tries to claim it (the length of the "mourning" period increases as the tiers go higher). I won't detail all six tiers here, except to note that they were
collectively called the "Swords of Time" for reasons I've long since forgotten. The lowest tier was the Silver Swords, but the
top tier was the item that became so important to my campaign background. The top tier was exactly one item, originally called the "Sword of Perfection," but I postulated in the original notes I have on the items that it had some alternate names- one of which was "
the Sword of Time."
The original backstory to these was that the "bad" Tertiar, the one known as "the Destroyer," named Thangorodoth, originally crafted them to use in a war against the others- its plan was to make the weapons and distribute them, then rile up the other Tertiars and keep the top-tier Sword of Perfection for itself, letting them fight it out and kill each other and then step in and mop up the survivors. The trouble was, one of the first other Tertiars to acquire some of the lower-tier Swords was a "smith" (in modern terms, it'd be an artificer) who figured out by extrapolation that a top-tier Sword must exist. One of the younger Tertiars went a-questing to find the Sword of Perfection, and got to it just as the war really started in earnest. This young Tertiar, dubbed Animar, took possession of the Perfect Sword and used it to unite the then-survivors against the Destroyer- whose plan was effectively kaput at this point, thanks to the property it had put into the Swords for them to "know their owners." Its own weapon was being used against it, and after Animar used the Sword of Perfection to "kill" the Destroyer, the young Tertiar was tired of conflict and became a supreme pacifist.
Of course, Thangorodoth the Destroyer wasn't quite dead yet. It survived, in some unspecified form, and eventually returned to its place of power deep in the heart of the Negative Material Plane (today called the Negative Energy Plane), and began to rebuild. Animar was still around, but refused to ever use violence against another living being due to its beliefs, so another had to step forward to take up the Sword of Perfection again against its maker. This time it was a mere demigod, of a particular Material world of some importance in my cosmos's history; during the quest to take the Sword and
really kill Thangorodoth he acquired so much power that he became a Greater God. Eventually, of course, he succeeded in the end, facing off against the Tertiar in its own lair deep in the plane of ultimate annihilation and giving it a taste of its own destruction. Thangorodoth was really dead this time. Except, of course, as my players know, it really wasn't- it left a mortal avatar behind as its only remaining link to existence. But I won't go into that here.
What I will go into is what happened when we fast-forward to the last few years, when my campaign was at last reaching the Nexus Event which it had been building toward since I began it back in 2001. That Nexus Event was primarily based upon the existence of a mysterious Portal, opening every 5,000 years for exactly 24 hours, to a random layer of the Abyss each time. Once this Portal opened, and all the while it remained open, demons could freely cross into the Material Plane (through the Portal) without being summoned, and demons on the Material side could summon others freely without those others either losing their own summoning abilities or having a limited duration-of-stay. In other words, it would cause a demonic invasion the likes of which nightmares could barely scratch the surface. Now, it had always been my intention that the Portal had its special power because it was actually powered by a living demiplane, which originally opened the portal hundreds of thousands of years in this unfortunate world's past because it had received information from the far future that someday, natives of that world would kill it. Naturally, the idea was that this became a self-fulfilling prophecy because the existence of the Portal was what
motivated the natives of said world to kill it, and also, that the PCs would themselves
be the murderous natives who killed the plane.
Now, by the time the Portal was getting close to opening, we were already using the IH in my game, and the PCs in the main party were starting to seriously ponder divine ascension as valid character prospects. In planning the big day, the Portal Day, I realized that I needed a Sidereal to stand in for the living demiplane (I even emailed UK about it, which he may or may not recall). I also realized that, as a Sidereal, the Entity would obviously have Cosmic String and I therefore needed to give the PCs some way to get around that. This led me to consider what sort of artifacts in the game might be capable of killing Sidereals... and since I always kept as much of the old backstory as reasonably possible when updating my campaign to new editions, naturally this led me back to the Sword of Perfection.
But therein lay a problem, because I had originally planned to introduce this item into my 2nd Edition game run during my college years as a way to deal with the returning avatar of Thangorodoth- which was to have been the climax of
that campaign (but we never actually reached it due to graduations and other life circumstances). In my 3rd Edition terminology, that event was another Nexus, but the Nexus Event
following the Demon-Invasion Portal one which was coming up in my 3E game. This was a problem because the "mourning period" for the Sword of Perfection was supposed to be inordinately high, on the order of thousands of years. Also, it also occurred to me that if these Swords were made by Thangorodoth, then they would be unable to truly kill anything with greater power than that Sidereal had at its peak because Cosmic String relies partly on divine rank.
But the alternate name for the weapon gave me my solution. Why did it have to be, I reasoned, that these weapons were created by Thangorodoth? In fact, what the Hells is a Sidereal known specifically as the
Destroyer doing creating items in the first place, particularly when (as I was slowly realizing) the only logical way to fit it into my new cosmos was to make it the Sidereal of the Negative Energy Plane specifically? Answer: they weren't made by the Destroyer at all. And the reason they were called the Swords of
Time is because they literally were that- they were created by Zurvan, the old First One of Time himself. This allowed me to reasonably say that the ultimate sword, the Sword of Perfection (which I stopped calling that as soon as I made this creator switcheroo), could bypass the Cosmic String of any being less powerful than Zurvan himself- in fact, it was crafted specifically to ensure that nothing could be beyond the ravages of Time (should he get angry at them for some reason).
So, after dropping loaded hints into my game in one session involving a "dream sequence" because we didn't have enough players show up on time to run a normal game, and marking the first time I directly used IH background material in my campaign (as opposed to pure rules-based material such as specific Divine Abilities), I sat down to work out exactly what this puppy could do.
The powers I kept from the original version included its ability to cut silver cords (in the 3E version there is no percentage roll, you just have to hit the AC of the cord- which is remarkably easy due to the Sword's "plus" value), the ability to cast any spell (I postulated that it contains the Alter Reality Cosmic, though it rarely if ever tells a non-Sidereal wielder that it can do that), its ability to kill anything (in IH parlance, bypass Cosmic String for any being with a Divine bonus less than Zurvan's), and perhaps its most important characteristic: the duplication of the effects of the Spire in the Outlands. Yes, simply by holding the unsheathed Sword of Time, a wielder creates an anti-Supernatural zone extending out to 1000 miles from the Sword, with diminishing effect as the distance increases. In fact, in the original backstory, the Spire
didn't even have that property until the Sword was hidden there in a secret dungeon built right into the Spire itself. Over the long millions of years the Sword was left there, the effect gradually "bled into" the rock surrounding it, until the actual Spire had the anti-Supernatural property and not just the Sword. One difference: while the Sword has an accepted wielder, that wielder is able to use its own Supernatural abilities (including all spells, psionics, whatever) freely, without having them suppressed. Allies of the wielder, however, are not so fortunate, so the Sword of Time is ideally used by lone-wolf types.
Besides the above, I gave the new edition of the Sword two things: first, an ability to erase any being
without Cosmic String from ever having existed at all, if killed by the weapon (essentially a less powerful Rectify); and second, its "plus" had to be greatly increased to account for its new (vastly more powerful) creator. I gave it a "plus" value of over +7500 when I worked all this out, but I realized later that I probably miscalculated it and have never actually bothered to
recalculate it- so for now that estimated value stands. The players never knew this number, incidentally, even though they did find the Sword (or more precisely, an alternate-history version of one of their members brought it to them in a last-ditch attempt to save the world); all they knew was that it was best used sparingly due to its extreme suppression of Supernatural effects and abilities, and that it always seemed to hit whatever it was used on as long as the wielder didn't roll a natural 1.
And that about covers the Sword of Time. Whew! Hope your eyes didn't get tired reading all that.
The Omegablade
The good news here is, this one was an item I made up on a spur-of-the-moment spotlight when one of my players got a divination effect off which told him (among other things) which artifact could defeat Matter's Cosmic String. So, much shorter description than the above!

Of course, I needed an item that could not just defeat Cosmic String, but which could also defeat Matter's Transmaterial ability (granted by the First one template). It was almost immediately obvious to me that the only being which both could and would make an item to do both was another First One; the most logical choice was Entropy itself. Entropy, after all, would not want
anything in Reality to be beyond its ability to kill somehow; therefore, it created the "nemesis" artifact for Matter and this was that artifact.
The players wanted to know more, so I made up more. First, I will go on a slight detour and mention that we used UK's rules (set out on his page) for Neutronium items; in fact, by the end of the game, all of the weapons wielded by any party member bothering with weapons were pure Neutronium. But the table on UK's page lists two materials which are better than Neutronium: Quark Matter and Black Hole Matter. Now, for my game, where I explicitly capped Virtual Size Category multipliers based on the material of the VSC-user's body, even the dragon with the million-hit-point bite was using Neutronium caps on his teeth to get the maximum possible bonus- items made of special materials were the only allowed way around the cap. Of course, the players wanted to know how to make the next two, but I decided that since Neutronium itself was apparently assumed (by UK) to be the province of Time Lords and Eternals, the two better materials should be unavailable to my own PCs. So were born the requirements for crafting Strange Matter and Singularium (the name we used in my game for Black Hole Matter): Strange Matter requires the crafter to have Abrogate, to stop its "viral" nature (quark matter in real science is theorized to have the effect of converting any other matter that touches it into more quark matter), and Singularium requires
both Abrogate
and any one Gravity [Effect] to craft it.
The reason for the detour is, of course, that the Omegablade is made of Singularium. A second point to make before going on is that the Omegablade is
not in fact a Soul Object of Entropy's- Entropy has no Soul Objects. But the Omegablade
is a Major Artifact crafted by Entropy, and that makes it a very, very scary object indeed.
Its most important property is that it has no miss chance, ever- no matter what sorts of incorporeal/Blink/concealment tricks the target may be using, the Omegablade penetrates them all. Even the
Transcendental ability Interdimensional is not proof against this effect, because (as I explained to my players) the Omegablade exists in a sort of fractal-dimensional state itself. Of course, this does not mean it always
hits its target; you still have to roll against the AC like normal- but if the blade hits the target's AC, then no other defenses the target has (except perhaps Omnific ones like Undimensional) will help.
Second, the Omegablade also produces a nullifying aura like the Sword of Time- that 1000-mile-radius zone within which Supernatural abilities just plain fail to work sometimes, though the Omegablade's is far less powerful (only working out to 100 miles total, so 1/10 the standard radius). Third,
all damage the Omegablade deals is Permanent damage- requiring
Wishes of various sorts to heal. Fourth, it drains XP and QP from any target struck by it with every hit. Fifth, it grants its wielder Uncanny Gravity Mastery (since it is effectively a shard from a black hole, this makes far too much sense to leave out). And finally, a being killed by the Omegablade
cannot under
any circumstances be
Raised or
Resurrected except through use of the Alter Reality Cosmic Ability by a being with equal or greater Divine Bonus than Entropy itself. In other words, the Demiurge could do it, and any true Eternal could, but otherwise, the victim is deadDeadDEAD.
The players decided to not quest for this thing, since they didn't like the supernatural-damping effect- so I never bothered to calculate its "plus" value. It'd be obscenely high, though.
The Initial Enabler
This artifact, the one Raithe the Dreamer has been raving about, played an enormous role in the campaign- in no small part because RtD's character acquired it before she even ascended to godhood, and kept it later through all her transformations and quests outside her home cosmos. It its natural state, it looks like a sort of double-crown, with spines pointing both up and down from a central ring, shaped as if carved from a perfect sphere. It's made of a silvery metal that looks liquid (like mercury), and yet stays solid (in fact, harder than diamond) constantly- even when it's changing shape. A wielder uses it by wearing it; one puts the bottom "crown" on top of one's head, and the spines slowly sink down through the skull until the central ring is circling the head like it was an ordinary circlet. In the process of this, the metal flows into the wearer's eyes, such that they become perfectly reflective silvered orbs (though the wearer's vision is largely unaffected).
This thing is a Soul Object of the Demiurge itself, and the reason it played such a large role in the campaign is that one of its functions is to create and link new Sources for Urgic Magic to the rest of Reality. The Shades, who originated that form of magic, did so after discovering this artifact and learning that function; their original Master (who used the artifact) eventually fell victim to its usual method of passing on from one wielder to another. More on that later though. For a final note on this function, I'll just state that there were no specific game mechanics applied to this function; it was intended to be used as a plot device only (and such it proved to be- the PC who had it used the function only once, to extend the number of Sources from six to ten).
For most PCs, the Initial Enabler's prime powers all involve its ability to produce Metamagic effects. Any spellcaster can use the artifact, simply by touching the tips of the "lower crown" to its head as described above; non-spellcasters (those who have no levels in
any casting class) can touch it all they like but nothing will happen. Once in place on a wearer's head, the Enabler works as a Greater Metamagic Rod would, except that it's far more powerful- it grants its wearer 3 daily uses of
any Metamagic feat, and the "counter" is separate for each feat. So you get 3 Empowers, 3 Extends, 3 Silents, and so on... up to and including the powerful ones such as 3 Maximizes, 3 Quickens, and 3 Intensifies. Use of this ability is a free action, so the wearer is free to apply any or all of them to a spell as desired, at casting time.
It can also convert spells cast by the wearer into Living Spells, using that special monster template; it can do this 3 times/day as well, but the effects are permanent (at least, until the created monster is killed). One thing I never told the players, and I don't think they guessed, is that the reason it can create Living Spells is that we had a Metamagic feat that could do it- the Enabler essentially duplicated that feat. It was one of the special "Mana" feats that were used with Urgic Magic, so the fact that the object which was essentially the ultimate source of said magic could use those feats was a fairly obvious extension of its basic mechanics.
After my group created the Godspell [Effect] type, I also began thinking of ways for the Initial Enabler to allow a divine user to use that, but wasn't sure how to add this feature since it would radically change the power quotient of any such user. During the game, therefore, this was never mentioned, and even now I'm not sure how to do it (except, perhaps, it could grant 3 daily uses of any given [X] Godspell at the basic level, so Divine Godspell, Force Godspell, Wind Godspell, Withering (STR) Godspell, etc.). This suite of powers would also include the Cosmic [Effect] types, for a Sidereal user, but the Enabler wouldn't allow a non-Sidereal to access the Cosmic [Effect] Godspells (nor, for that matter, a mortal to access the Divine [Effect] ones).
My basic thought for this item was that it represented the Demiurge's secret thoughts about magic and how it should work, and therefore in some ways was the ultimate
source of magic everywhere within Reality. So, I postulated that wearers would gradually become more distant and detached from reality as they used it more, eventually becoming tired of dealing with mundanity and simply vanishing into a pocket realm where all their thoughts would become literally manifest. The intended pattern here was to duplicate the life of the character Coin, in the Discworld novel
Sourcery. When a wearer vanishes this way, the Initial Enabler does not go with; it stays behind and remains inert until another wielder finds it and claims it.
The Pit
This Soul Object of Matter is an "artifact" in approximately the same way that the Throne of the Gods (from 1st Edition) was. It
is a made thing, with specific powers one can attune to and use, but it's not a portable object one can take with oneself on one's travels. Its description is as simple as its name, a simple, slope-sided pit set into otherwise unremarkable ground. Well, unremarkable, that is, for the Elemental Plane of Matter, in both the central cosmos and the cosmos of Matter itself, where the Pit has a weird sort of resonating dual existence. In other words, there is
A Pit, which is often considered the center of the plane in both places, but both Pits perform exactly the same functions and it isn't at all clear whether they're separate artifacts, a single one somehow existing in both cosmoi, or just "shadows" cast by some greater artifact which exists outside them both.
The Pit has another strange property, and that is that it appears to be shaped differently each time it is encountered. That is, on one visit, one might find it to be a generally rectangular thing, but if one then leaves it (via whatever means of transport one cares to use) and comes back, even if it's only a few minutes later, it may suddenly be triangular- or pentagonal- or some other shape. Two things never change: first, it is always a shape formed of straight lines, never curves; and second, one slope leading into the Pit is always at a shallow angle so that it's more of a ramp than a wall.
Whatever its shape, the Pit always contains a pool of grotesque, greenish slime or mucous, which is constantly seething, churning, and burbling as if heated from below. The smell near the Pit is awful, thanks to this roiling, noisome mass, but this is usually what leads to its most common description: many adventurers will, upon seeing this mass, think immediately of an Ochre Jelly, Green Slime, or some other Ooze-type monster. This is not far from the truth: anything which falls (or is tossed) into the mass is immediately dismantled and digested by it unless it, too, is a Major Artifact or Soul Object (and even some of them, of course, are specifically vulnerable to the Pit and can be destroyed this way).
But destruction is not the Pit's primary function- or even one of its primary functions for that matter- it's just a sometimes-convenient side effect. The real purpose of the Pit is to create and design life. The Goo in the Pit, which is made up of all elements in essentially equal portions (even those which have no analogs in Material Plane terms), is in a state of half-life in its own right, and it is intelligent enough to respond to requests made directly to it. Any language may be used; the Pit understands them all, though it never under any circumstances answers questions or even speaks
to anyone or anything else. Simply by standing at the shallow-sloped edge of the Pit, and asking the Goo to create a creature of desired specifications, the Goo begins to churn and roil more fiercely, and eventually produces the specified creation. It is also possible to take an existing lifeform and make changes to it by requesting the Pit add characteristics, or subtract characteristics, or otherwise make the desired changes, and then bringing the "base creature" into contact with the Goo. For example, one could change an ordinary Material Plane monkey into a Fire Element Monkey by bringing the monkey to the Pit, making the request, and then tossing the monkey into the Goo (though the creature is likely to be terrified of the Pit so it would probably need to be sedated first). The Goo would dismantle and digest the monkey, but would then churn and roil and eventually produce the same monkey again with the Fire Element Creature template added. It would be the same monkey, in terms of memories, temperament, and so on, but would have the added capabilities of the template. Mages can do this with their familiars without breaking the familiar bond in the process, and intelligent creatures can even augment
themselves by making specific requests of the Pit and then entering the Goo. However, all of this augmentation is dangerous, for the reasons discussed below.
For the Pit is a device of Matter, and given that Matter is the ultimate source of all Evil and corruption, it should come as no surprise that the Pit often has... unpleasant side effects. In particular, any request made to the Pit will typically be acted upon as though it were a
Wish, or more specifically, a
Wish being granted by a very irate Efreeti prince who wants to punish the mortals who dared force him into such servitude. The Pit (nearly) always fulfills the stated request of a supplicant, but stated requests nearly always leave "wiggle room" that the Pit fills in with its own "additions." For example, the Fire Element Monkey discussed above may come out of the Pit with an INT score of 26 and a Neutral Evil alignment- not only fully cognizant of being tossed into the Pit against its will, but also desiring revenge on the ones who did it, and smart enough to play dumb so they don't suspect a thing until it's too late. Small requests (minor changes, or small creatures like an inoffensive kitten created as a test by one PC when my party found the Pit) are less likely to have their intent perverted this way than are large requests (such as creating a Paragon creature, for example, or making an Akishra from scratch), but the chance is always there. It is worth noting that requests to "Do X, and
make no other changes" are never fulfilled to the letter, as the Pit ignores requests to
not do something. Finally, the Pit has a tendency to form pseudopods and attempt to grab and re-digest creatures it just made, so anything coming out of the Pit will need help or must make some swift Acrobatics/DEX checks to escape.
The Pit never demands anything for all this production of life, but the price paid in unintended consequences- the old adage "be careful what you wish for"
definitely applies to use of this artifact- means that few who learn of the Pit's existence are willing to use it often, if at all.
The Scales
Originally called the Diamond Scales, then later the Onyx Scales (when they became blackened and cracked after the destruction of their creator), this Soul Object of the Sidereal named Concordance (the name I used for the Old One-level Entity who formed the soul of all layers of the Outlands) was of interest to my PCs in the "second" game, the one wherein the party spent most of their divine existence in an alternate timeline that saw the Sidereals reawaken more than 700 years before the Grand Nexus. In that timeline, there was no Neutral Outer Plane; Concordance and its subordinates had been killed about 50 years after the Sidereals in general awoke (except for one, the Entity Daoloth, who represented the Spire itself and managed to retreat into the Far Realm where it remained alive in safety). In the "standard" central cosmos, these would just be the Diamond Scales- though in truth, of course, they're not made of either diamond
or onyx, but instead a crystal far harder and more resilient (treat as a material with Hardness 100 and 50 hit points per inch of thickness).
In the game wherein PCs of mine found them, as the Onyx Scales, they were specifically quested for because the PCs intended to use them to resurrect Concordance: this event never actually occurred in game, but the basic idea was that the remaining piece of Concordance's soul (which was still within the artifact given that it was Concordance's Soul Object) would be drawn forth
from the artifact, and then used as a "seed" to essentially recreate the greater Entity. Daoloth was also to play a pivotal role in this event, for obvious reasons, but the PCs never met that Entity before the Grand Nexus made it all essentially obsolete. I stated in game that the reason the Scales turned black was the shock of witnessing two bitter and eternal enemies- a Seraph
and a Balseraph- joining together to put Concordance out of their mutual misery.
Creatures of any non-Neutral alignment are obliterated simply for
touching the Scales; they must save or be
Disintegrated (in my own game, with the existence of the Disruption energy type, this would translate to something like 10,000d8 Disruption damage). Creatures of an alignment that is Neutral in one axis but not the other can use the Scales, but must make a Will save every time they do, to avoid being changed to True Neutral alignment. True Neutral creatures, of course, are what the Scales like, and are not harmed in any way by touching or attempting to use them. Apostasy is irrelevant to this judgement, unless the creature in question has a higher Divine bonus than Concordance itself did (Concordance had a +136 bonus)- the Scales can effectively
negate Apostasy for the purposes of making this determination.
The Scales, whatever their color, are one of the rare artifacts that make their sentience known to the wielder, in that they will answer questions asked of them directly (as long as the questions are of the type that can be answered by a Yes or a No). The Scales answer such questions by lowering one side or the other (one side representing "yes" and the other "no" of course), or by lowering first one side and then reversing to lower the other, to indicate "maybe" or "I don't know." This can essentially become an infinite-question Commune, assuming the DM allows it; the Scales aren't
bound to answer questions, but usually do if the wielder is friendly. With regard to answers, the wielder can often divine the degree of "yes" or "no" by how quickly the Scales lower one side or the other, and how long the side stays lowered before pivoting back to the balanced position (for example, pausing a round before lowering "yes" would mean "...Eh, okay, sure," while an immediate lowering of "yes" that stays lowered for a full minute could be interpreted as "YES!!! HELLS YES!!!"). The Scales are knowledgeable on any topic the DM feels Concordance itself would be knowledgeable on, but questions of judgement (whether between alignments or for justice reasons) would be prime topics of concern to the artifact, and it should be assumed to have an extensive knowledge of the true history of the multiverse (though of course, what it chooses to
share might not be so extensive).
Aside from the function of answering questions, the Scales have the ability to divine the true alignment of any target creature; all the wielder need do is concentrate on the target and ask the Scales where the target falls on the Good/Evil and Law/Chaos spectra. No form of alignment obscurity can override this function, unless set in place by a being with a higher divine bonus than Concordance itself had (rather unlikely in any cosmos where the Sidereals aren't fully awake and active, given how high said bonus is). The Scales can also change a target creature's alignment
to True Neutral, as a standard action; the target does not get a save to avoid this ability unless it has a Divine bonus, and even then does not get to use any bonus to its Will save
other than its Divine bonus unless its Divine bonus exceeds Concordance's. Finally, the Scales contain the power of Abrogate, and grant that ability to the wielder for as long as they are held.
The Cosmic Egg
This was an artifact (
not a Soul Object, but a crafted artifact) of Metatron made to aid in the creation of universes. Originally gifted to Fate and her derivative Sidereals (the souls of the various Material Planes), it can be found and used by any being with the ability to cast spells with the Healing or Creation descriptors.
Its primary function, if used in Astral space, is to create new Material universes; this function pretty much requires that the wielder be a Sidereal related to Fate in order to work so I won't be giving it any game mechanics here.
If used within an existing plane, by contrast, the Cosmic Egg can create any desired celestial object that the wielder wishes to make. New moon for that planet? Check. New planet to put in orbit with your existing one? Check. New sun for your system? Check. New system to build worshippers within? Check. New star to build a system around? Check. New stellar cluster to put stars in? Check. New galaxy to put stellar clusters in? Check. I could go on, but you have the idea by now. I never gave real game specifics for these massive creation abilities, except in the most generic sense.
I told the players (who did actually find and use this item to craft a new stellar system- complete with planets designed down to the shape of the continents- to populate with worshippers) that "crafting a galaxy [the size of the Milky Way] would take about a million years, which is a highly significant speedup over the more normal evolution time of several
billion years for a typical galaxy to arrive at the same stage of development. In principle, if you didn't care about crafting in any precious or unusual materials, one could use the Egg to craft a planet about [Earth's] size within a few days. A week at the outside. A star would take longer, but only because of the amount of material needing to be generated- a year or so would do for a typical sunlike star. So for an entire system, not including any outlier objects like an Oort Cloud or an asteroid belt, would take perhaps a year and a month to make from scratch. That assumes no material to start with, building basically from vacuum. If you discount the need to make a star, and just want to add planets to an existing star, then you could do it in far less time- more like a few months. You could also design crazier things like a dyson sphere, a ringworld, or even a "necklace" of habitable planets all orbiting within the same 'goldilocks zone' with no real trouble." Turning a lifeless rock into a fully habitable planet, with atmosphere, ocean, and so on, would be "Trivial- that could be done in a day or two. Two for a particularly large world, understand," I told them.
Aside from its use as a literal creator of worlds, the Cosmic Egg can be used like the Genesis Device in
Star Trek II- The Wrath of Khan. In other words, it can reorganize matter on an existing world, down to the subatomic level, to create organic compounds and other precursors of life- and although it will not (in fact, cannot) create actual lifeforms on its own, any worlds touched by this effect will grow new lifeforms with astonishing speed- speed which would be impossible in a standard-evolution sense. However, given who and what Metatron is, the Egg (
unlike the Device in the movie) was crafted with "special programming," I told my players, such that "if it ever was used on an already-inhabited planet or other such object, to eradicate the existing inhabitants and create new ones, that the Egg would immediately stop working for the wielder and Metatron would subject the wielder to summary judgement." I also said that the artifact had been used exactly that way, despite the threat of Metatron's personal involvement, 54 times in its history when the players found it- and 15 of those times, Metatron didn't exact any penalty other than to just take the Egg back and give it to somebody else.
Three of those times, I further stated, Metatron "allowed the wielder to return home and continue using the Egg as if destroying an entire biosphere had been the right thing to do." I never specified exactly what those situations entailed, and the players never used the "Genesis Device" function anyway, but this is a potential jump-off point for other DMs who wish to use this artifact to expand upon history and include something interesting.
The Ring Portal
This, of course, played a pivotal role in the campaign, and was critical in opening the Final Gate that opened during the Grand Nexus. I based this artifact on "Bolder's Ring" from Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence stories; for those who haven't read those stories (and even for those who have, since my version was smaller), I'll copy the description I gave my players directly into this post.
"...you have a spectacular panoramic view of the black hole that
is at the center.

Or rather, the singularity. Because as it happens, this one isn't black. It's surrounded by a typical accretion disk, true, and within that there is an event horizon wherein nothing can escape- but the event horizon itself is far from spherical. In fact, it's
so far from spherical that it would be more accurate to compare it to a donut, with a space in the center containing the
naked singularity that's responsible for the existence of the black donut in the first place. The singularity is only intermittently visible, as a weird, spindle-shaped object of material unlike anything you've seen before (even Orichalcum), apparently spinning at incredible speed. What obscures it is a flickering area of twisted spacetime directly above and below it, looking from the perspective of a line perpendicular to the black donut; the twisted spacetime is over 3000 miles across. And it looks immediately familiar to you. It is a portal- a
Gate ripped open from the fabric of this universe by the incredible gravity of that spinning singularity closed between the two
Gates an the event horizon-donut. And the portal does not maintain one set destination, but is clearly flickering rapidly between many. Watching it for several minutes, you don't see it repeat even one, even though the
Gate flickers every second or two.
The sky around this weird sight is another thing you can never forget after seeing it- because while there are many stars visible surrounding you, you have never seen a sky exactly like this. All the stars are various shades of blue here. In the distance around and beyond the accretion disk, you can sense the crazy...
device?... that's creating the naked singularity and keeping it spinning so quickly, you realize after some minutes of watching. The device doing it is an assemblage of what... science calls 'cosmic string-' objects blown up to astronomical size by the Inflationary Epoch of the universe. Cosmic String is sort of like a black hole, but linear rather than a point source, and constantly moving such that it can't form an event horizon around itself. In this case the cosmic string is formed- quite deliberately, you're certain- into a ring, which has been set around this region of space and somehow spun. The gravity of the cosmic string drags the spacetime at the center of this region around, twisting it so tightly that it formed the singularity and dragged it into spinning to match the ring itself. But the ring is spinning so fast, that the singularity's spin rate is high enough to exceed lightspeed at its equator- and thus the event horizon is pinched away to nonexistence. The singularity is left naked. The
Gate (or rather
Gates, for there are two) are essentially directly above the poles of the rotating spindle that is the naked singularity.
[The dimensionas of the donut are] Toroidal, outer equatorial radius of about 60,000 miles, inner equatorial radius of about 5000 miles. It's a "squashed donut," not perfectly circular, so the cross-section would be an oval with a long diameter of 55,000 miles and a short diameter of 20,000 miles. The oval is also "thin" on the inner side, so that it's really more like a half-hourglass if that makes sense. The actual naked singularity is an object about 2000 miles wide, and maybe 500 in height, being like a spindle as I said before. The twin
Gates are each 3000 miles across, located directly above the poles of the singularity-spindle, and each
Gate actually touches the singularity in its exact center (or would, if the
Gate were a substantial disk). ...The cosmic string making up the ring itself carries the weight/mass of tens of thousands of galaxies, all compressed into a linear object with a thickness equal to the Infinitesimal, the smallest possible measurable spatial distance. The string is formed into a loop more than 10,000,000 light-years across.
No, that was not a typo.
The cosmic string has been formed into a single enormous ring 10 million light-years in diameter. And furthermore, that ring is spinning like a wheel, and is placed such that the ring is on a precise plane with the black donut in the center of the space. The ring is rotating like a wheel, as I said- and it's rotating such that its string is going at just below light-speed. The effect of this is to cause enormous dragging on the spacetime inside the ring, and outside it to some distance as well; but your concern is more with the inside here. For, the effect of the spinning is to drag that black hole- which would be a normal stellar-mass black hole without the ring- along with it.
With the drag induced by the ring, the black hole spins so fast that... its equatorial velocity exceeds lightspeed, at least on the inner side of the toroid. This is what forces the toroid essentially out of existence there, leaving space empty again down to the singularity. The spinning singularity is an object that shouldn't exist in any sane universe- it obeys physical laws that are radically different from those of your universe. And so, spacetime near the singularity does things it shouldn't normally do. The singularity, spinning as it does, is what is opening those enormous
Gates and keeping them open. Somehow, the angle of its poles is causing the
Gates to open into different universes and/or planes with every flicker of the portals. The pole's angle is changing, you see; the ring and singularity alike are not just rotating but also
flipping- though the flip is extremely slow by comparison with the spin.
The entire assemblage, ring and singularity-portals alike, constitute a single incredible device (the ring's mass can only be that Great Attractor you knew about before coming here, in fact, which is drawing all the local galactic superclusters towards this place) designed to tear open holes to other universes. And perhaps more to the point, to other realities? It's unclear what the purpose of doing all this could be, but clearly there must be a reason the
Gates don't stay locked on to any one destination very long."
Once you wrap your mind around that, know that the Ring in the Xeelee Sequence was even larger than my version, and spinning even faster, so that the portals it opened were about
3 light-years wide instead of a mere 3,000 miles. Another difference between the original and mine was that my version was specifically used by Eternity (the Sidereal of the Material Plane containing this incredible Ring) as a home base; she had actual rooms hollowed out inside the naked singularity itself and made comfortable by careful manipulation of gravity and other forces inside. The purpose of this vast device, of course, was precisely to open portals to other planes, universes, and (eventually) outside Reality itself, to provide an escape hatch in the event that the Demiurge's awakening didn't go well for the Sidereals (and more to the point, Eternity herself).
I never stated what happened to Eternity during the Grand Nexus, though the fact that the Ring unraveled and self-destructed shortly after the Final Gate closed suggests that she saw no further need for it (or wasn't around to keep it intact).
The Device in the Desolation
This artifact remained a mystery to my players until just before the end of the campaign, because its purpose was not revealed until a Nexus Event just before the Grand Nexus itself came to pass. In particular, this Device turned out (in the end) to be a Soul Object of
one of the PCs, specifically the PC who was the Incarnation of Urgic Magic and the wielder/user of the Initial Enabler. It was a Soul Object that had been created
by her in the time near that Nexus Event, and constructed such that its existence went
backward in time as well as forward- so it had existed since the beginning of the cosmos, and nobody up until that point knew who had made it or what it was for.
The Device itself was located in a location on the Negative Energy Plane called the Desolation of the Destroyer; the Desolation was a Planar Edifice constructed by Thangorodoth to be its home base, but Thangorodoth originally built the Desolation
around the Device without ever finding out its purpose or who had created it. It was, in appearance, an enormous roughly spherical object about a mile across, created apparently (though not actually) of Voidstone and which when successfully opened proved to have a cavity at its center about 2,000 feet across. That cavity contained 12 disc-shaped objects (or "nodes") of similar material linked to something like an immense computer console with a holographic display. A user would float to the center of the nodes, arranged in roughly dodecahedral/spherical formation, and would thus be linked mentally to the Device. Only beings with a Divine Aura could use the Device; mortals would be unable to do anything with the nodes except float, unless carrying a special "key" which took the form of an amulet of black stone. A mortal with the key would be able to enter the Device and use it like a divine user, except for not being able to access its primary function (see below).
What it was for, was to provide a temporary home for deities displaced by the awakening of Sidereals on the planes of existence they had previously called home; logically, I reasoned, if a plane of existence has a soul, and that soul assumes a full waking state, then any Divine Realms on the plane
inhabited by that soul will go bye-bye unless the soul is feeling particularly friendly towards the gods in question. The Device gets around all that by forming a sort of pocket plane, within which any or all divine beings linked to it are able to "anchor" themselves as if forming a new Divine Realm. In other words, this was a Plot Device, pure and simple, to allow the gods the players didn't dislike to survive that critical Nexus Event involving Sidereals waking up in every plane of existence simultaneously.
The secondary function of the Device, and the one that was known before this revelation just before the end of the campaign, was that it was an information archive of tremendous antiquity, existing in some sense outside the traditional sequence of time. The players used it on previous occasions to gain information regarding the hierarchy of the Sidereals, what to do about a certain would-be Akalich, and examining the lowdown on upcoming Nexus Events.
The
reason this PC was able to create and use the Device, I should hasten to add here, is that by the time she did, she was no longer truly the goddess she had ascended from mortality to become.
That goddess in fact committed suicide, to attract the attention of Entropy, and Entropy essentially carved off a portion of its own being and reshaped that portion to exactly fill the void left by the goddess's death. So the being which created and linked with the Device was actually a sort of divine avatar of Entropy rather than a standard goddess, which is why (in the game-mechanics sense) she was allowed to break the usual rules of artifact creation to make this thing. This was not the only such "crossover" being in my parties, twixt Deity and Sidereal, but I'll save a description of the "Favored of the First Ones" templates which we used to bring these strange beings to life in the game, for a future post.
As a final note, I'll mention that the Device is sort of a borderline case between normal Soul Objects and the strange artifact-locations that I called Planar Edifices in my game; in one of the early posts in this thread, I promised to make a post detailing Planar Edifices, and now at last the time has come to fulfill that promise. That's the next post.