WotBS Trilla's Journey

[emeraldbeacon]

I'm trying to put together a coherent timeline of what happened to Trilla (and her mother Syana) in the decades leading up to the campaign. There are some gaps that I'm not really clear on, and I feel like I need to have those details secure... mainly because my parties are starting to learn names of characters and locations thanks to some very good investigation checks (and I don't want to keep saying things like, "sorry, a 28 doesn't give you any new info").

What I have so far...

MORE THAN 60 YEARS AGO: Syana was the protector of Phorros Irrendra, and had a cordial (if distant) relationship to the Taranesti who lived there. She had a daughter, Trilla, who bore startling psionic abilities.
~60 YEARS AGO: Coaltongue and Shaaladel united to conquer most of the known world. In Phorros Irrendra, they captured Trilla, using her as bait to draw out Syana (who had enlisted the aid of a number of celestials). The ensuing battle created the Torch of the Burning Sky (and ended with Syana's demise?) The Taranesti and Droalesti of the land helped hide Trilla in an underground lair beneath Gate Pass.
~40 YEARS AGO: Shaaladel, seeking a way to re-create The Torch, demanded the aid of Taranesti in Innenotdar and Phorros Irrendra, slaughtering them when they refused to reveal the whereabouts of Trilla.
MORE RECENTLY: The ideas & concepts that Trilla manifested via her dreams began to become both tangible and sentient, developing into the beings known as Trillith. Seeking independence and security, they bound their "mother" in a state of perpetual sleep, so that she would create more of them. This slumber has transformed a significant section of the underdark into a demiplane of its own, a realm of dreams. Meanwhile, once Leska learned of the Trillith, she bargained with them to form an alliance... one where both sides believe they are playing the other for fools.

My intention is for the heroes - one of which fled Phorros Irrendra as a child - to learn that Syana was known as a great protector of the elves there, but somehow she fell in battle, and her daughter went missing. That seems like enough to tide them over until chapter 7-ish, right?

 

[RangerWickett]

By main canon, the only thing I'd clarify is that back when the Torch was created, Coaltongue and Shaaladel had much more local ambitions.

I've got some later retcons I'd enact if I were rewriting the series. But I'm on mobile, so in brief, I've got an idea of how the first trillith started escaping and why some ended up working with Leska.

 

[Salicus]

I mean trillith came out of the dreamplane since years did they not? Indomitability already came out between 40 and 60 years ago since he was in the forest by the time it was burned. Thing is, most trillith that came out did not have a real sentience, I would assume and were solely acting on their trait. If you have a Sorcerer with the newer Subclass, then it is clear that it is not only in the recent years where they came out. And as far as I understood it, leska did not learn of the trillith but the trillith came to her with an offer of an alliance. Since they thought, that she would be able to help them achieve their goal of destroying the heart.

 

[RangerWickett]

When I was looking to adapt WotBS in novel format, a few tweaks here and there cascaded and demanded revisions to other elements, and one of the things I wanted to change was the amount of internal logic of magic in the world. Make there be a bit more rules, y'know?

One part was that generally summoning fiends bodily was nearly impossible (because I was intending for the setting to just be on the other side of the world from ZEITGEIST), so inquisitors instead would offer up a person's soul in exchange for dragging the soul of a fiend and planting it in the body of a person or animal. Usually the inquisitor would have to maintain control over the fiend or else it might rebel or attack him, but it was easier to give the fiend commands that aligned with the desires that the body it inhabited had while alive.

For instance, if you had a loyal warrior who let you sacrifice him for the cause, you could turn his body into a loyal, infernally-charged murder machine. If you capture someone who was trying to find shelter in Seaquen, put a demon in them, and send them to Seaquen to hunt someone, you'll have an easier time keeping that fiend under control (even if you're not there) than if you sent it to some random place.

All of this was meant to give some texture to mini-chapters from Guthwulf's perspective, so that he wasn't just doggedly pursuing Rantle and company, but was facing hurdles of his own. Even though he's clearly evil, I wanted people to feel a glimmer of sympathy for him because he'd be happy pursuing his job and dealing with the challenges it presented, even if that job was, y'know, finding the right people to murder and turn into unholy slaves.

It was also intended as set-up so that, when you later on got some of Leska's POV during her origin story, she would at one point be in Gate Pass several decades ago, and would have a Ragesian spy/infiltrator that was helping her that got mortally injured, so she tried to give his soul to a fiend to upgrade the human spy into a devilish bodyguard. But in Gate Pass, instead of bringing over a fiend, she released a trillith: Deception. And since the person whom she sacrificed was an ally, Deception had to be one too.

And that would be the secret of it: trying to summon a fiend in Gate Pass would tap into Trilla's dreamscape instead of getting a devil from hell or whatever. Most of the trillith would have been wild and off doing their own things, of course. But there'd be some, like, rules for where they came from.

 

[Lylandra]

My intention is for the heroes - one of which fled Phorros Irrendra as a child - to learn that Syana was known as a great protector of the elves there, but somehow she fell in battle, and her daughter went missing. That seems like enough to tide them over until chapter 7-ish, right?

This is part of one of my players' backstory. He knew about both Syana and Trilla as his mother was a student of Syana. He also knew that the Taranesti helped Trilla to go into hiding even if he doesn't know where she would be located. I expanded the rest of her and Syana's story a lot, but this part never got weird or changed too much of adventure 7. Go for it, my player loved it