Piratecat's Updated Story Hour! (update 4/03 and 4/06)

[Plane Sailing]

Check out the excellent artwork done by a chap here for ghouleax, necropede and others...

http://enworld.cyberstreet.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=17191

Cheers

 

[KidCthulhu]

BTW, to bring all this back on topic, we finally have a copy of the Spira pantheon for your entertainment and amusement.

http://www.folded.com/defenders/pantheon.html

 

[loxmyth]

Am I reading the pantheon wrong, or is Imbindarla the daughter of Aeos???

 

[Henry]

note the phrase "failed creation" under Imbindarla. No wonder she tries to **** up daddy's stuff so much...

 

[Piratecat]

Yeah - I'm on my way out the door in a minute, but as a compensation for being patient with me I'll post the story behind Imbindarla (and some fascinating beginning-of-the-world legends) on Sunday.

In the mean time, go check out that art thread that Planesailing linked, featuring art by David Hendee (littlejohn). He paints like my imagination works, and he has works up of the necropede, Saint Aleax, and Velendo (as well as Morningstar from Sagiro's story hour.) Truly wonderful.

By the way, on our printed copy of the pantheon, someone has written in a little note next to each god. "Likes us." "Hates us." "Hates us a whole lot." "Hates paladins." And so forth.

 

[Hammerhead]

Aeos seems to be a rather poor parent.

 

[aithdim]

And to think, one question we asked ourselves, and the King (of Gaunt), when he origionally sent us to Eversink was: Why us, what should we do? We're not diplomats. To which he replied: just be yourselves.

So have the defenders done well for Gaunt? The chamberlin would likely say no you cast too much.

FYI: I played Valdek/ Glimmer before moving to VT. Leaving the two campaigns I was involved in was the hardest part of the move for me.

 

[Piratecat]

FLASHBACK: Three years ago, heading west.

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It's dark, and the shadows have weight. They rise up around the heroes sitting crosslegged on the forest floor. High above the towering silhouettes of the trees, the eternal stars burn in the heavens, and the air is redolent with the smell of moss, leaves, and streams.

Light flares. A candle has been lit by one of the many elves surrounding the Defenders. Flickering wanly in the open air, the pale yellow light shines upon the unnaturally smooth skin of an ancient elf that has been lowered from the tree above them.

Nolin tries to meet the old elf's eyes. With a horrified thrill, he realizes that the elf is blind, eyes bandaged by a red-soaked strip of cloth. Tears of blood slowly slide down the elf's cheeks from underneath the bandage.

"It is the price I pay for my Sight." No one has spoken, but the seer answers their question nonetheless. "You wish to know the truth of the Ages Before. What you were taught is not the truth. The Gods did not create this planet. They did not build it solely from breath, or heat it in a forge, or dream it from the ether. Those are myths.

"Many humans think that elves are the elder race. That too is a lie. Before us were the giants and the lizard folk, and the dragons, and those from other worlds who found a home here. But neither were they first. There was a world before our own, and it was eaten by the worms." His voice trembles with age, and the horrible sight of the blood dripping from his hidden eye sockets is mesmerizing.

"The First God came here when he heard a scream. It was not a loud scream, as such things go, but it caught his attention. It was the scream of the last living thing on the planet... dying. It was the scream of a person who had no Gods, and it begged for one as it died. When the God arrived, however, the person was long dead, and the world was worms. Huge squirming coils of darkness, the worms were the world and the world was dark, and the shambling husks of the once-living served them as slaves. The worms were as Gods themselves, and naught could be done at first.

"But the First God Abbath called to him his love Aedrae and her clever friend Trea, and showed them the world, and showed them the worms and the mumbling dead. It was Trea the clever, Trea the Deceiver, who thought of the plan. It was she who tricked the worms, and convinced them to trust her, and soon all but two were locked in a red prison where they would never escape. The Gods set the lock in stone and breathed life into the key. And they looked upon the worm-riddled world, and Abbath breathed upon it. He fathered a child with his wife, and called him Aeos, and lifted the incandescent child into the heavens. There, the Godling ignited the endless night and brought the sun to a world that knew only darkness, and he forged chains of light to bind the last two worms within the earth. The dead were burned from the pitted world, and the globe was made anew.

"The world now lived and breathed, and Aedrae named it Spira, and it was good. The children of the Gods have been good to us. But the worms still exist, in this world and the next, and they hunger most terribly. The children of Imbindarla call to them and worship them. They...." The elven seer straightens his back in the candlelight, and it seems that real tears are mixed with the blood.

"They are fools."

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END FLASHBACK

 

[Piratecat]

The name Spira actually comes from the words of the first lizard kin as it came out of the mud "Suspira. Serva." (I live/breathe. I serve.) KidCthulhu ccreated that, and beautifully done, too.

The whole comet-cycle that keeps getting alluded to was all about the Imbindarlans doing their level best to destroy the "lock" keeping the worms out (a big stone circle). They almost succeeded, too. The "key" was a piece of stone called the damming stone that could show and affect force lines - gravity, speed, energy, wind, that sort of thing. But the heroes prevented the destruction of the lock and the freeing of the worms, and almost noone knows how close they came to dying messily.

It was a dual plan that couldn't fail.

1. Use life energy to wrench a star out of a constellation and sending it shooting through another constellation, thus making the stars correct. Use that alignment to perform the rituals that will release the worms from their imprisonment under the stone circle.

2. On the off chance that the ritual fails, use the falling star to break the stone circle itself. With the lock broken, the worms could emerge - and probably nothing else could have done it. It was put up by the Gods, for one thing.

It's always good to plan for contingencies!

I posted this because it's worth noting exactly why Imbindarla has it in for Our Heroes (and why the other Gods are irked at her), and what with the Pantheon chart posted, I thought you deserved a little creation myth. The story of Imbindarla and her Dad can wait for another time. Next update coming tonight!

 

[Bandeeto]

A few points to be made. Before we met the ancient elven Seer we had only the vaguest ideas as to what to do next. We had figured out that the Brotherhood of Night was, again, planning to use a conjunction of the stars to power a major ritual and bring darkness upon the land.

It was… to say the least… typical.

The scope of the catastrophe was entirely unknown. We had recovered several texts from the BoN, and knew that the denouement was to occur at a place called Tovag Baragu, far to the west, and that a multi-ringed group of standing stones would be involved. That was about the limit of our knowledge.

The other hints were all derived from a madman’s prophecy, thousands of years old.

This was it:

Fragment from the Tale of Ycriss (transcribed and translated from Kanach’Hurian to the Common Tongue of Northern Trade by the humble interpreter Aldef’aliah, in the Year of the Lizard’s Tomb)

…or the well could fill before they fill it. There in the foundation, built the earthdeep hatredhatred! The skin of the fallen blows upon the thirsty and their screams, oh their screams! echo off the polished air. The eye stares, but some are oh so shy. And in the month when the eye is shut, the Martyr tests his fate against his shadow in the place where dry tears blow and spheres focus and the moments rebound between white doors. Twice, twice and once ringed the plinth shall be, and the worm’s brethren shall be waiting in their cage of vermillion, bars of cinnabar, and the fey shall betray, and the eye’s own shall blaze and call between the teeth, calling are there none here to stop her? For when the river of damned is dammed by dammedosel, who is caught in the flood? My duck! His beak is as wide as a riverway….

How we howled at P’Cat over this one.
“Somebody’s beak’s gonna be as wide as riverway when all this is done!”
“My duck?! My DUCK??!!”
“So who wants to be the Martyr? I volunteer Arcade!”

You get the idea.

Although the story told by the Seer was not quite as detailed as the one posted here, it finally gave us an idea of what we were up against.

Oh, yeah. And about that Damming Stone….

We had learned that the Damming Stone was connected to the prophecy, but had no idea what it was for. We argued about it for weeks. We were fairly sure that the BoN did not even know that it existed. Was it needed to initiate the conjunction? Should we try to use it to stop the prophecy?

We did know that it was buried beneath an ancient dwarven king’s throne under thousands of feet of water at the bottom of a lake in the country of Solthrag; this pleasant land being ruled over by a demon-goddess who actively encouraged her people to sacrifice strangers in her name.

Many of us thought that it should be left where it was, and that to bring it would delay us, and ensure our doom. (“Oh. That’s the piece that we neeeded to complete the prophecy. Thank you so much for dragging it across hundreds of miles of desert for us! Ho ho ho ho!” Don’t think that P’Cat is not capable of this kind of subterfuge.) Others were certain that it had to come along, or we would find ourselves needing it at a very bad time. Heated debate shook the Werehouse gameroom walls. Finally, after some broad GM hints via the Seer, we decided to fetch it along.

But who should carry it?

We had some idea from a previous prophecy that Alix was the Martyr, so it seemed that perhaps he ought to carry it. But the stone bound itself to the mind of the wielder, and would repeatedly attempt to take over. This effect was inversely proportional to the wisdom of the character (Alix’s being the lowest in the group) and may also have had something to do with alignment. Alix actually managed to touch it twice, making ludicrously unlikely percentile dice saves, before Velendo stepped in.

Now, another point. The stone was a large boulder, the size of a hefty cauldron. Under normal circumstances, Velendo could not have even picked it up. However, the enchantment of the stone permitted the user to realign lines of gravitational force. At Velendo’s command the stone weighed less than a feather. We strapped it to his back with a large sash.

But… the stone was also a malign artifact. It would whisper to Velendo, hinting that if he were to tug ‘here’ and push ‘there’, he could remake the world one piece at a time. The Damming Stone had the power to rip apart continents, and it wanted badly to be used.

He carried it all the way to Tovag Baragu.