WotBS Torch of the Burning Sky question

[pneumatik]

My campaign is in Trial of Echoed Souls. The players just got the torch back and are about to figure out they need to enter the Temple of Echoed Souls. I want to make sure I understand the soul in the Torch before going any further. I want to make sure I describe the soul in the Torch accurately now so that when the party meets Trilla later I don't have a retcon anything. Let me know if any of this is wrong:

The Torch was created when Coaltongue(?) used the thigh bone of a devil in a fight with angels and Syana the gold dragon while a captured Trilla looked on. When this happened a portion of Trilla's soul was trapped in the Torch and became the source of its mighty powers. Trilla is still alive but only has a partial soul. The events and maybe lack of some of her soul is upsetting her to the point where she spends most or all of her time in a deep sleep. Her dreams are so powerful, maybe because she doesn't have all her soul or maybe because the rest of her soul is in the Torch, that they are leaking out of her psyche and becoming the Trillith.

 

[Tormyr]

A fragment of Trilla's soul was extracted when Coaltongue clocked her in the head with the thigh bone zapped with celestial energy, creating the torch. I don't remember if she could create trillith before this event.

Whether Trilla misses the portion of her soul is up to you, but it isn't why she mostly sleeps.

Spoiler

Trilla is trapped and kept asleep by her children, and they are shaping her dreams to create the trillith they want.

 

[pneumatik]

Okay thanks. What exactly is going on with the Torch when the PCs get to it has been tricky to decipher. It seems like the details will matter in later adventures so I want to get it right now.

 

[Tormyr]

Yes, it is a little tricky to get everything on the same page, but it comes down to:

1. The torch had a fragment of her soul.
2. Rhuarc pulled it out the soul and destroyed it.
3. The PCs need to use the temple to create a copy.

I don't remember if Trilla had her abilities before the creation of the torch or not, but it doesn't really have an ongoing influence on the rest of the campaign. Once the PCs have repaired the torch, it behaves as it should, and I don't remember it really affect trilla (outside of how it is used to end the campaign depending on which route your choose).

 

[RangerWickett]

I don't know if I wrote it in the adventures, but in my home campaign that inspired WotBS (and the earlier campaign in which Rhuarc was a PC, and Coaltongue was just an upstart half-orc revolutionary), Trilla always had psychic powers.

I think I had recently read some Dragonriders of Pern and wanted a psychic dragon in my game, and the PCs came across a few manifestations of her nightmares that acted like breadcrumbs to help them track down where Coaltongue had taken her. If I recall correctly, he was threatening to kill Trilla unless Syana helped his army attack the Serens, who were the main power of the region (vaguely Roman - which some 20 years later my headcanon says were actually colonists from Crisillyir who sailed over from the continent where ZEITGEIST happens, around the time of the Great Malice).

Syana was going to give in and help, but the PCs (who also disliked the Serens, but didn't want Coaltongue to start a war that would lay waste to the countryside) thought they could maybe protect peace and get Syana as an ally to promote diplomacy instead of war. So they launched a rescue mission.

The battle took place on a river bank in a canyon where it would be hard for a dragon to attack without landing, but the PCs were stealthy (see: Rhuarc), and they managed to kill Trilla's guards and start to withdraw when they were spotted and a big fight kicked off. Coaltongue charged in, I think some of the orcs had summoned a devil, and the party had summoned an angel. The devil got blasted, Coaltongue got disarmed, and I had him use a bone from the devil to power attack to try to kill Syana. He knocked her out, but didn't kill her, and then another rogue PC hit Coaltongue with a big sneak attack. He fell into the river and was carried away (defeated, but not killed), and the PCs fled in the chaos.