Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kerrick" data-source="post: 2567731" data-attributes="member: 4722">While I was writing this last update, it occurred to me that there are a few things that need explaining for this story to make sense. So, in the interest of fairness, I'll provide a brief recap of the campaign to date.The characters started out in a remote mountain valley north of the ruined city of Anteniele-Traxx, members of several clans formed of people fleeing the First Lich King War - deserters, survivors, refugees, etc., who had settled there 500 years ago. Now, things in the valley had been going pretty well until a couple years ago, when crops started failing, livestock developed strange mutations and some died mysteriously, and children were stillborn. The elders claimed the magic sustaining the valley was dying. Enter the PCs. They were among a group of teens reaching adulthood, who had to undergo their adult rites. They were sent forth with the command to find the source of the valley's magic and fix it. So they left the valley (the first people to do so in a very long time), got past the valley's guardian (an old living war machine left over from the war), and made their way to the city. Once there, they encountered a tribe of goblins worshipping a gigantic ape (their "ape god") and killed it with a ballista. Along the way, they also met an archaeological expedition; an old man stuck his head out of a window, and the party accidentally killed him. Whereupon his daughter, a pregnant blackguard of some power, attempted to kill the PCs. This is the woman who tried to kill Gareth in Preven (more on her later). After driving the goblins away, the group found some caves and attempted to investigate. The first encounted a tribe of ratmen, which they drove out, and, further in, yuan-ti (who nearly slaughtered them). In the course of their exploration, Zargo found a few pages from a lost epic by the legendary bard Electulu. this set them on their course to finding the rest of the epic (more on this later, too).Eventually, they restored the city's magic by clearing the fountains and cleaning four massive cat statues (Anteniele-Traxx is also called "The City of Lions"), also restoring magic to the valley. They returned heroes, and were given another quest: find civilization. The valley had been cut off for almost 500 years; for all they knew, civilization had been wiped out in the last war.So the heroes left the valley again, travelled for awhlie, and found a city. There they bought an abandoned, supposedly haunted manor house dirt cheap and set about clearing it. Turns out the manor was being used by the Followers of Silence as a base of operations. In a series of battles, they wiped out the Followers and claimed the place as their own (whereupon the global chapter declared vendetta on them and has been dogging their steps ever since). From there, they gathered more information on pieces of the lost epic, and travelled all over the world putting it together. Which brings us up to date, more or less.Except for a few details. Sometime during or after the big battle in the Red City (which was mentioned a few posts up) Cornelius revealed that the blackguard whose father the PCs had killed was really his half-sister (they shared the same mother). And the child she was pregnant with wasn't a normal child - it was a demon-driven. What's a demon-driven, you ask? Think of Jason Voorhees. Now multiply it by five. A demon-driven is created by undergoing an unspeakably vile ritual (part of which requires the mother to copulate with multiple demons); the child gestates faster than normal, and though (s)he appears normal in all respects, matures much faster than normal. The child is bred for one purpose: to kill a particular being, or group of beings. In the first stage, the child is only slightly enhanced; if he is killed, however, he comes back as an unstoppable killing machine. Nothing, not even the will of the gods, can stop one for very long once it has reached this state, unless or until it has killed its target(s), in which case it goes dormant. In this case, fortunately, its target is not the PCs, but a demon-driven can be given a secondary target. The PCs have found out that as long as they don't kill (or cause to be killed) either the mother or the child, they're all right - if the child dies by other means, or if the PCs manage to off the kid without the mother thinking they did it, it will revert to its original target, and they'll be home free. Or, they can find out who the original target is and get him to do it. The trick is finding this unlucky soul and manipulating him into doing the deed...</blockquote>

Verification