[Games] Iron Kingdoms Update
Jan. 16th, 2018 09:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jordangreywolfIron Kingdoms Draws to a Close
I've given up posting session summaries to the Privateer Press forums some time ago. When I was attempting to run and adapt several pre-written adventures, I felt there was some value, in that I could share what worked and didn't work for me, and how I attempted to string several scattered adventures together into a single "narrative." However, the players came up with some pretty oddball characters, and requested that the campaign focus upon high seas adventure to go explore the lands of the wicked Orgoth -- the ancient bogeymen of the history of the fantasy land of "Immoren," who were sort of Vikings and Aztecs rolled up into one, with a dash of every flavor of dark magic, who invaded the continent hundreds of years ago, then mysteriously vanished when the locals finally started to rebel.
The trouble is, there's no source material for that land, or the "secrets of the Orgoth." It's all uncharted territory. The game is poorly supported, in that there are all sorts of hints that there are underground Orgoth ruins full of dangerous magical artifacts all over Immoren, but there's not even a single proper "dungeon module" to give an illustration of just what such a complex might be composed of. (There's a free handout with a sort of "Orgoth mini-dungeon," but it lacks even a MAP. The PCs just sort of "explore" vaguely by narrative and theater-of-the-mind, and then an encounter happens, and then another. No mapping, no choices, just a sequence, and they don't even bother to specify what sort of rewards the PCs get for their trouble. "It's up to the GM." Such a cop-out.)
Ahem. Much ranting, eh? There's a LOT I've been frustrated with in this campaign. And on the one hand it's with some relief that we're getting to the end, but there's also a dash of anxiety (what if the ending is a complete DUD?!?), and also regret (I feel there are so many things we COULD have done with this game, and I've invested so much into the minis and books and so forth that it seems like a waste to just box it all up and store it in the garage for who-knows-how-long).
My attempts at any sort of over-arching plot have been thwarted by spotty attendance. JHZ is frequently absent (including for the past few sessions), and when he IS present, he seems to have forgotten a lot of what has gone before. As such, I basically gave up on trying to come up with a nice tied bow on the story with "Stinky" Pete, the Boatman's Curse, and the Rusalka; when the PCs reached the lands of the Orgoth, anything Grymkin-related mysteriously vanished. If we were to run another campaign featuring going back to the mainland triumphantly, THEN we might get back to it, but that's in some possible future.
Digital_Rampage is my most frequent player (the player of the rogue Satyxis librarian, Ximena), but he's also very chaotic, and I cannot pin down any logic to his character's motivation. Too often it seems to be just whatever strikes him as the most amusing thing he might do at any given moment. That, and by stupid bad luck, he seems to have been strategically absent during sessions in which I planned for there to be a tie-in with his character's past. By Deux Ex Exposita (I'm making that term up), some demi-god-like adversary in the chaotic "Orgoth Paradise" may conjure up information that fills in the gaps in my invented backstory-explanation for Ximena's weird situation, but that's probably just about it.
SV has the character who provides me with no hooks at all. His pain-loving mortitheurge character is a combat-spellcaster who wears no armor, yet has the highest Armor rating of the group, is the hardest to hit, gets even HARDER to hurt once he's been injured at all, can recover damage by hurting other characters, can make 5 attacks per round (most characters only manage ONE), dishes out enough damage to topple a warjack single-handedly, is immune to all sorts of things (corrosion, fire, continuous effects) or at least highly resistant, is highly mobile, and on and on. His presence turns a fight from "challenging to the party" to "let's sit back and watch him clobber it on his own." And he's from a mysterious land far to the east (we went WEST) with absolutely no connections to this realm, he serves no deity (his people don't believe in an afterlife), he has no discernible ambitions, and on and on. The way to engage him is just to give him more stuff to kill extra-dead, it seems.
NinjaTheWolf's "Reclaimer" character has some interesting possibilities, but the player is frequently absent (he works on weekends and has to request time off to play), and the character class is rather hobbled (IC, he's not able to speak -- a vow of silence). I can drop some "hooks" for him, but he might not even be present for the pay-off. The new guy (invited by NinjaTheWolf -- I don't really have a "handle" for him yet) is basically playing a character NinjaTheWolf wrote for him, and hasn't been that enthusiastic about it, but we're so near the end of the campaign anyway, why bother writing up something new?
Goober_Chris's elf character, Thale, therefore seems to be my best hope for being tied into some overarching purpose to this whole quest, with his aim to try to learn more about the fate of the Iosan (elven) race by investigating the fate of the old Iosan gods. I just really, really hope this doesn't turn out to be a dud. His character is at times the "good guy," and at others he's quite ready to make Faustian bargains. His is the character where I honestly have NO IDEA, if Darth Vader makes the offer to "Join me, and together we shall rule the Empire!" to his Luke Skywalker, whether he's go "No! NEVER!" or whether he'd go, "Mmmm. OKAY!" So I've got to be really careful about that. ;)
...
So, the last part of the campaign, once the PCs actually reached the land of the Orgoth, was going to be divided up by "zones." I'd established that, due to the Orgoth business of sacrificing not only the souls of subjugated peoples, but of LANDS to their infernal "benefactors," they ended up destroying their own homeland. (I.e., they didn't realize the interconnectedness of the land. You start messing with the ecology and the ley lines, and everything's going to start falling apart.) Plus, they meddled with some draconic shards.
So, the main "realms" that they'd be running into would be the Wild (the remaining natural areas near the coast), the Blight (the area where a draconic shard was lost and it managed to regenerate a body and become a minor dragon, spreading its dragonblight through the area), the Dead Land (the remains of the conquered domains the Orgoth "sacrificed" to the infernals), and finally Paradise (the original Orgoth homeland, now a place of shattered reality because of all the insane "wishes" the Orgoth overlords made in exchange for thousands upon thousands of souls to the infernals).
In the "Wild," the PCs encountered prototypes for the pig-like Farrow and the pain-obsessed Dreggs (or my versions thereof). I basically drew upon some inferences that the Farrow were magical creations of the Orgoth -- essentially edible slaves who could be used for labor and livestock during the long sea voyage to reach Immoren. And the Dreggs -- well, their "ecology" is so nonsensical that I figured they needed some sort of MAGICAL origin. Hence, I "revealed" that they were once human, but had been warped by Orgoth experiments at bending reality in an attempt to ape the reality-warping magic of the infernals on their own terms. (And in this case, a desire to make warriors inured to pain went a BIT out of control.)
The PCs eventually found a port city where the Orgoth had built their dreaded Black Fleet. Ximena found the imprisoned undead spirit of a former War Witch of the Orgoth, and learned that the "big secret" about Ximena (why she was a slave, when Satyxis ARE NOT slaves, etc.) is that Ximena has deep within her heart a sliver of dragon shard. A dragon shard, if exposed, will eventually spontaneously reform a new dragon body, and this will in turn draw the attention of any other dragons in the area (as they have an innate desire to devour other dragons and absorb their shards into their own -- as Toruk the "dragonfather" and original dragon created all dragons by splitting shards off of his own crystal, and then ended up regretting it when they rebelled against him). Supposedly the reason why Ximena is not affected by the dragonblight of the crystal is because she's a Satyxis: the Satyxis are unusual in that they are descended from humans blighted by a dragon that was subsequently absorbed back into Toruk; at that point, the blight progressed no further, and they were each immune to any further effects of dragonblight. Hence, a satyxis could potentially withstand the corrupting influence of such a tiny dragon shard -- at least until her death, anyway. That still didn't explain everything, but it at least laid the groundwork for more. (It also heavily implied that Ximena had BETTER NOT DIE, or else the rest of the party might have a dragon to contend with.)
They also learned that the Orgoth had discovered dragon shards as well, and their potential value. A dragon shard, so long as it lacks dragon flesh of its own, can provide protection against dragonblight. However, once it gains flesh and becomes its own dragon, each dragon develops its own unique flavor of "dragonblight," warping life around it in different ways. (This usually involves some "element" the dragon is associated with -- e.g., fire, cold, lightning, acid, gas, poison/toxin -- and some variant of pseudo-reptilian features, and a distinct color scheme.)
They spent some time exploring, but eventually were urged onward when the Cryx made an appearance out to sea -- apparently in pursuit of SOMEONE in the party. (The Cryx, incidentally, serve Toruk the Dragonfather.) They then figured out the workings of the channel locks on the river spilling into the bay, and helped the /Rusalka/ to head further inland (switching from sails to relying entirely on the paddlewheels for river travel).
Because the PCs took the route of aiding the /Rusalka/ in heading inland rather than abandoning it and going on foot, they PCs largely got to avoid dealing with the "Blighted" region. I had a bunch of Everblight models (each dragon's "dragonspawn" are supposed to be different, but, eh, why not use what I have?) at the ready, but I guess those weren't really needed.
So, the PCs were eventually to reach the Dead Land. This is basically a huge expanse of grey: grey sludge that extends to the horizon, and then a featureless grey sky, dotted only by the occasional remnants of Orgoth ruins fashioned of the supernatural "blackstone" they used. ("Blackstone" is nigh-impervious -- even ghosts/spirits cannot pass through it and thus might be imprisoned -- created through dark rituals that involve a lot of blood sacrifice. So, even when the land itself was given over to the infernals, the structures of Blackstone remained.) Lore has hinted that Menoth, the creator-god of mankind, had visited ALL lands in which humans dwell, so that would have to include the land of the Orgoth, but evidently the Orgoth chose to rebel against him. I decided to have an "island" exist within this realm of sludge, where had once been a site holy to Menoth, where he had given his Four Gifts to the local human population (the gifts of Fire, Law, Agriculture, and Architecture), but eventually his worship was spurned, and the shrine sealed up and buried.
And this is primarily the objective for the Reclaimer and the Paladin: to reignite the "eternal flame" at the heart of this shrine, to dispel the blasphemous creatures that inhabit the garden, and so forth, for the glory of Menoth. It's also a place to wrap up "what happened to Ivan?" Ivan's kelpie (sea-horse) vanished along with the other Grymkin creatures/artifacts upon reaching the land of the Orgoth. (The infernals don't want any competition for souls from the Grymkin, hence have erected barriers against them.) So, Ivan, with his demonstrated uncanny sense for locating "horseys" and "doggies," made a beeline for the ONLY HORSE left in the entire region: a lone Aethon (flame-horse) that was a gift from Menoth to the keepers of his shrine. The Aethon has been corrupted by the apostate elder who turned against Menoth in favor of his new Infernal masters, and when this elder slew the other elders, Menoth returned in anger, reminding the last elder of the promise they had sworn to keep watch over the flame for all eternity ... so the last remaining elder would be the only one who could be counted upon to keep that promise. (Hence, the elder has been imprisoned in the desecrated shrine ever since, along with the corrupted horse.)
There are four "champions" of the shrine who represent counterpoints to each of the Four Gifts of Menoth. The corrupted steed has become the first, as the Champion of Fallow (vs. the Gift of Agriculture), representing things feral and untameable. The apostate cursed the eternal flame, creating the Champion of Void (vs. the Gift of Fire) -- a being constituted of a dark "flame" that grants no heat and gives off no light, but rather absorbs heat and light from its surroundings.
The Champion of Ruin (vs. the Gift of Architecture) was a golem created by the Apostate in an attempt to tear down the original shrine, though its pillars are unassailable. As such, it serves to guard the shrine, and anything crafted that it touches will turn to ruin (including armor and weapons!).
The Champion of Misrule or Chaos (vs. the Gift of Law) is actually a conscriptus spirit conjured by the Apostate from the Infernals. As a conscriptus, the creature is a shapeshifter. Although the Umbrals are bound by law, the lesser conscriptus are free to deceive as they see fit. The ostensible job of the Champion of Chaos is to obscure the indestructible Tablets of Menoth, hiding them or warping their meaning, simply to spite Menoth. But as a servant of the Orgosis (the infernal patrons of the Orgoth), the Champion of Chaos will particularly have reason to try to thwart the intentions of Thale -- since he is potentially a champion to bring about the downfall of the Orgosis regime, if he can somehow wrest Ayisla away from them.
Sidenote: Ayisla is the goddess of death and reincarnation of the elves/Iosans; she was betrayed by Thamar, an ascended human demigoddess, in a pact with the Nonokrion Order -- the infernals having dominion over the Iron Kingdoms of Immoren -- in order to help defeat the invading Orgoth. In turn, the Nonokrion Order made an exchange with the Orgosis to reconcile their differences, as the Orgosis were encroaching upon the domain of the Nonokrion Order through their servants the Orgoth: the Orgosis would receive Ayisla -- an elven goddess -- as payment: a soul worth thousands upon thousands of souls.
What the Nonokrion Order didn't realize (since they weren't experts on elven theology) was that Ayisla was worth so much more than that, given her role in the elven pantheon, and the Orgosis got a steady influx of souls of dying elves. Hence, the Nonokrion Order has had second thoughts about this, and set things in motion to goad Thale into heading westward to throw a monkey-wrench into the arrangement, now that the Orgoth are largely wiped out. They can't be held accountable for the actions of a rogue MORTAL, after all.
And the Orgosis are basically relying on this "free" flow of elven spirits to justify their continuing operations on the world of Caen, since they've greedily gobbled up the lands, and the populations are decimated and hardly producing any new souls at all, compared to how they used to be. If Ayisla is taken from them, they're likely to fall into infighting over what few souls are left in their domain -- and the Orgoth "paradise" will fall apart as the infernals are no longer able to hold up their part of the bargain.
Anyway, my big plan was for the Champion of Chaos to take on the guise of Ayisla, and proclaim to be a prisoner of the shrine, and that Thale's role is preordained -- and that of Anya, the soulless little girl he has brought with him. Ayisla's claim is that the Orgoth assumed there would be no elves within this land, as far away as it was, and therefore failed to cover all possible avenues of her escape. Thale must offer up Anya as a sacrifice on the ritual altar -- for only when Anya's body as at the edge of death can Ayisla work her miracle, restore Anya to life, and grant her a soul -- and escape her own bondage in the process. If Thale has any doubts, he should know Anya has power over death, and that Anya is, despite her child-like appearance, a soulless husk, used as a tool by the Retribution.
I hope to make it sound compelling enough for there to at least me a moment's consideration, but I hope it will seem horrific enough that Thale's going to question it. Plus, there's the whole pattern of the Champion of Fallow, Champion of Ruin, Champion of Void, and Champion of Chaos/Misrule, and at some point someone might say, "Hey, where's the fourth champion, anyway?" (That is, if the Reclaimer and the Paladin actually remember/read the handouts I gave a while back with some dream-visions about the history of Menoth's presence in this land, and the Four Champions and whatnot.) If Thale refuses, then I've got a mini kit-bashed to represent the hideous creature's true form. AND, the shrine has a few relics that are immune to the reality-warping effects of the Orgoth "Paradise."
If Thale goes AHEAD with it (I don't think so, but what if I am too persuasive?) ... hmm. I suppose Pseudo-Ayisla will possess the soulless's body in a quasi-undead state (but with her appearance-shifting she can make the body appear healthy), and then she'll basically be looking for an opportunity to corrupt Thale, backstab him, mislead him, etc., as he goes into Paradise.
...
The last session will be when the PCs reach the Orgoth Paradise, where reality REALLY breaks down. If I have time, I may try getting out the hotwire foam cutter and chopping up some foam bits to make "floating islands" for the table area (and institute some "low gravity" rules as the PCs basically bound from one precipice to another), and getting out some weird bits to represent the incomplete nature of the realm. Basically, there are a few select Orgoth overlords who got the best deals with the infernals, and live in a sort of paradise of their own making, wherein they get to constantly oppress the defeated, and be catered to by their underlings. The underlings are at the mercy of the attention of their masters -- for anything that the overlords are not immediately focused upon begins to crumble away into nothingness. (Hence the broken-up incomplete nature of reality here.)
So desperate are the underlings to be NOTICED that even being tormented and trampled underfoot is preferable to being utterly ignored.
For adversaries, I'm painting up Digital_Rampage's "Noh Empire" army for Relic Knights. They're essentially a bunch of "space oni."
Or, at least, that's the case with the MALES.
The females are more purple succubus-types, I guess. (Okay, no wings, no tails, but they've got HORNS, and just seem rather different.)
The big thing going on here is that the Orgoth are distinctive for having a motif of putting scowling/screaming faces on EVERYTHING: doors, walls, floors, shoulder pads, axes, helmets, chestplates, codpieces, you name it. If I want a mini of an Orgoth warrior, there'd better be some nasty faces on his armor.
Well, with the Noh Empire, we have at least some of that.
I should have painted these up a long time ago (as my premise for borrowing them from Digital_Rampage was that I'd paint them up to use in the campaign), but the box of minis was actually lost out in my garage for some time. A few days ago, while a bit delirious and sick, I suddenly had a frenzy of activity and went tearing through the garage, tossing a bunch of junk (or at least putting it aside for later tossing), and lo and behold, I FOUND THE BOX. Since then, I've been basing, assembling, and beginning basic painting of the minis. It's a bit slow and time-consuming, particularly because some of the minis were missing bases (not my fault) and even when they did have bases, they were just plain-jane plastic bases, and for a proper job I needed these oni to be standing on some sort of ruined-looking piles of debris and broken stonework. So, I used some Instant Mold and some epoxy putty and started churning out customized base decoration (by aping some terrain/base designs of a resin piece, then breaking up the putty "cast" and rearranging it in various ways).
So, it's my sincere hope that I can paint these up before the end of the campaign, and use them for at least an encounter. Even if I don't use them all, at least Digital_Rampage will get a painted Noh Empire army back. (I need to dig through my cardboard boxes and foam collection to see if there's some way I can safely STORE them. They're a bit too thick/big for APC boxes, as they're large models, based on 50mm rounds but even large enough that they're overreaching from there.)
(INTERLUDE: While still typing this, a delivery just arrived -- a big box full of a gift from a client on a project I worked on. I can't say what, but it's the prototype product that came about from one of our brainstorming sessions. Whoo! And a logo shirt, though I'm too fat to wear it. :( Eh, it might fit Gwendel. But the BOX. The box is the perfect size, and it's the same sort of design as the APC box with a lid that easily opens/closes with a slide-in "latch" construction. Problem solved! :) Serendipity!)
...
Anyway, I really need to hammer out the final showdown, and to "modularize" it based on the fact that I don't know who will or won't be there for the last game. Goober_Chris and Digital_Rampage are my most likely players, so I'm hinging most of it on them and their characters (Thale, Ximena). (Okay, so SV is also highly likely to be there, but as stated earlier, to engage him I just need something for him to clobber.)
I plan on using the Noh Empire "oni" to represent Orgoth overlords and their exalted servants (with various wretched underlings as expendable minions), whereas the Noh females can represent the ascended "War Witches" of the Orgoth.
Ayisla will be there, but not quite as Thale expects her. She's been warped by her time in captivity, the loss of her brother-and-sister-gods, disillusionment by the great disasters she's been a part of (the elven gods are kind of incompetent as far as deities go ;) and I get the impression they're really sort of new to the game, possibly "ascended mortals" from an earlier age, much as Thamar and Morrow are), and the insane environment of the Orgoth Paradise. I envision her taking on the appearance of a "War Witch," horns and all, challenging Thale's faith, and more-or-less goading Thale into KILLING her. If he DOES kill her, then it's just a sort of "bittersweet" end, as, after all, he did free her from her captivity in a way, and broke the hold that the Orgosis had over the flow of spirits from the deceased of Ios. But then, since this whole Paradise is kind of supported by that arrangement, she'd also be the "load-bearing boss" in this case. ;)
I'm not sure how to drop clues as to her true identity in such a way that can still be seen as subtle, so if he figures it out, it feels like a revelation, and not something OBVIOUS. Even then, how to resolve it? The easiest solution might be to slay her anyway, and thus save his people (after a fashion).
The other issue is Anya, if she's still around. Anya is a "soulless," but the very nature of "soulless" is more than a little controversial. They seem emotionless, but the thing is, if anything, they're overly mechanical/rational rather than being like a wild beast. Some supposition I've heard concerns the surviving god of the Nyss (the elves who broke off from the rest of the Iosans ages ago and went north, basically becoming an offshoot race), as THEY do not seem to be plagued with "soulless" the same way as the Iosans are. The theory is that Nyssor, God of Winter, has taken the place of Ayisla for his own people, the Nyss, by shepherding them on to the Veld (the Iosan afterlife), and that as parts of his modifications of the Nyss, they no longer participate in the circle of reincarnation. (They're either expected to make it to the Veld on their first try, or wander the wilds of Urcaen like any other lost soul, rather than getting an endless number of "retries.") He is also the god of the forge and of craftsmanship, and a theory was that he has "crafted" replacement souls for the Soulless -- so that they aren't just dead husks -- but that they are by nature cold and emotionless like Nyssor himself, and their peculiar nature regarding magic is a byproduct of the unnatural usurpation of the process Nyssor has had to do to take Ayisla's place.
Eh, it's a bit hand-wavy, but I can work with it.
Anyway, the idea here is that Anya isn't really "soulless" at all. It's just that she has a soul rather clumsily crafted by Nyssor rather than Ayisla.
If Anya is still alive (i.e., Thale didn't sacrifice her), then Ayisla (even in her guise as a War Witch) is likely to explain Anya's situation to her. (Now, why would a War Witch know all this? Perhaps this could be part of a clue to Thale, though I fear that it might just be written off as "sloppy GM exposition.") Ayisla, though she might be trying to goad Thale into killing her, still has enough care for a child of her people to try to set Anya straight about her situation.
Ximena and Dragons
Now ... how to work Ximena into all of this? Hmm.
Well, I suppose I could have an encounter with a dragon. I mean, that shouldn't go well at all. But I've long been building up the very real danger of encountering "Khanjira the World-breaker," who is supposedly a "dragonspawn," but perhaps, hey, he's actually the dragon (just not a very large one, by dragon standards in this world -- merely, oh, a few stories tall). I suppose the dragon could somehow "sense" from Ximena's crystal her true past and all that, but then I'd have to figure out:
a) Why the dragon doesn't just devour Ximena and absorb her crystal to become stronger.
-or-
b) HOW the PCs might be able to defeat a real dragon. It's just a thing that isn't usually done.
Why is the dragon in the realm of Paradise and not the Blighted Land? Well, I already established that Khanjira was in the Dead Land, rather than the Blighted Land. The Blighted Land is already corrupted, so it's going to stay that way; that doesn't require his continued presence.
I figure that the dragon hangs around Paradise in order to hide its presence from Toruk (as dragons tend to hide around magical anomalies and pocket dimensions and so forth that mess with scrying and other means of magical detection at range).
Now, as for WHY the dragon wouldn't devour Ximena? Perhaps it thinks she could serve a greater purpose, as a "dragon" that can actually travel without instantly attracting Toruk's attention. In the lore, dragons have sometimes banded together to try to fight/resist Toruk, and one particular dragon with an almost heroic nature actually sacrificed itself while trying to open the way for its "brethren" to overthrow Toruk. Each dragon has a different personality -- not just mindless greed as a uniform thing.
And so it might reveal to Ximena that the shard in her heart is not some ticking time bomb that needs to be magically removed. No, she IS the dragon. Through blood ritual, the Satyxis conveyed her shard to a new body. She essentially gave birth to her new body many times over -- and at such time, her life transferred from one to the other. (Ewww. Yeah, creepy. But very in keeping with Satyxis blood magic.) Unfortunately for her, this scrambled her memories: it was like when a shard is split off from a larger crystal for the first time and forms a new personality -- failing to inherit memories from the "parent" crystal. So she had to keep relearning things, and her Satyxis masters simply found it more convenient to keep her ignorant.
The purpose in leading her to the remote tower (in the Unleashed campaign) where the Satyxis attacked the Nyss settlement there, was that in the tower's basement was essentially a "pocket dimension" (i.e., a dungeon we dealt with), and that would be the perfect place to take Ximena, sacrifice her, and allow the shard to more "naturally" grow a draconic body. Upon assuming a draconic form, normally that would send a signal to Toruk of its whereabouts, but since this would be in a pocket dimension, as long as the gateway was sealed off magically, no such "signal" should get through. The Satyxis would then see fit to try to "raise" this dragon as a rebirth of Shazkz, the dragon that gave rise to their race.
Technically, no, this would not really be Shazkz, and there's no guarantee that it would have any inclination at all to obey their commands, but ... eh, who says a cult that old actually has to be RIGHT about anything? ;)
Anyway, I suppose Khanjira could offer to try to help "unlock" some of Ximena's "locked" memories, but warn that this runs the risk of changing her personality drastically. It would be like "remembering" several past lives, and who knows which life would then be the "real" Ximena? (In game terms, it'd be an excuse for Ximena to get a few last-minute cheat skill bonuses, which I wouldn't consider too game-breaking this close to the end of a campaign.)
I guess one little side-effect of this would be that if Ximena really wanted to drop an atom bomb into the middle of Orgoth Central, she could easily do so ... by committing seppuku in Paradise, and subsequently unleashing a dragon on a rampage. However, that's rather a posthumous sort of "victory," I guess. That'd be a rather desperate last resort.
On the upside, one of the side-effects of having a dragon shard at your heart is that you're pretty much immune to not only dragonblight, but other reality-warping, shape-shifting effects. Ximena could not be forcefully turned into a warpwolf by the Circle Orboros, nor into a dregg by an Orgoth rift, nor into who-knows-what by the bizarre pseudo-reality of Paradise.
...
The Reclaimer and Paladin also have tickets for causing much mayhem in Orgoth Paradise. Both are immune to its physically-warping effects. The Paladin essentially has a one-way ticket to the City of Man (e.g., Menoth Heaven) combined with an atom-bomb-like "apotheosis" effect to consume his dead body (and everything within a stone's-throw) in holy flame. That ought to rip a hole in Paradise, for sure. The Reclaimer also has certain spells that amount to toasting every enemy within X inches, and when everything in Paradise is crafted from spirits, that can result in a lot of table-sweeping.
SV's character, Brah-Lurh, is an aescetic, so he's basically immune to temptation, doesn't mind pain at all, his punches and kicks are magical attacks, and he has a rune tattoo on his body that forces all incorporeal entities/creatures to become solid right that moment. (Again, everything's made from spirits. MAYHEM.)
Pete? He's got bombs. I'm sure he can find something interesting to do. I'd like to figure out more, but honestly the odds are so low that he'll even show, I don't know if it's worth putting that much work into it. :/
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Date: 2018-01-17 12:40 am (UTC)Floaty islands sounds like a fun battleground to set up, anyway. It'll be almost like a Star Trek 3D chess board!
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Date: 2018-01-17 02:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-17 09:43 pm (UTC)Hope you feel better now/soon!
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Date: 2018-01-17 10:59 pm (UTC)Therefore, I usually represent the interior of a "dungeon" with abstractions such as individual floor tiles that represent the floors of the rooms and hallways, and wherever there is no floor, that's assumed to be the solid stone wall separating those rooms (unless or until someone turns a corner and discovers another room he didn't see before, or someone opens a secret passage). More 3D details are restricted to the minis themselves and a few select details such as doorways and furniture items.
So realistically I can probably just use a few foam "hill" pieces I already have on hand, and put a few spacers underneath them -- either *smaller* tiles or hill segments with some thickness to them, but fairly flat and sturdy -- or else things like rolls of masking tape or packing tape at different support points. We don't really need to have the hills spaced several stories above and below each other -- each "step" of difference might represent a far more extreme vertical distance. (I just need to spell that out up front.)
I had to do something similar with a "multi-tier system" layout I did where the differences between floors were supposed to be so great that the steampunk robots with the PCs couldn't simply peek up onto the next level (that and they could walk through the obviously too-short archways), but the visual difference in height was still illustrative. (For maximum visibility, it *just so happened* that the higher-elevation areas were all further back toward the GM's side of the table. I'm standing, after all, so I don't mind looking over obstacles.)
Technically, I could do the same thing with just a wipe-off mat and magic markers, but I like to put a BIT of flash and color into things.
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Date: 2018-01-24 06:51 pm (UTC)It does seem like it'll be hard to find a satisfying conclusion with unreliable players. I am impressed by your ability to figure out some things that give you a decent shot at a climactic resolution!
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Date: 2018-01-24 10:42 pm (UTC)If he WERE to sacrifice Anya, I only think he'd do it because the infernal phrased it in such a way that it sounded like the Right But Hard Thing To Do. That is, Ayisla is the goddess of death, so surely it'd make a sort of "sense" that the only way Ayisla can intervene with Anya is if Anya is brought to the brink of death ... or something. If only someone in the party actually had at least 1 rank in "Lore: Iosan Religion" (or equivalent), maybe we'd have a reasonable chance for someone to shoot holes in the theology of that, but even then that'd just be boiling it down to the whim of a die roll (and a potential "tell" by the fact that I'm asking a player to immediately make a die roll just after I had an NPC make a questionable claim).
I'm placing my bets on the idea that Thale is going to be *hesitant*. The infernal is not a mortal, and does not experience emotions the way humans (or elves!) do; the closest things to emotional displays portrayed by infernals would be that "true" infernals are capable of experiencing something resembling fear if they are in true peril (since they do not have "souls" and hence if they are somehow slain, they cease to exist) ... and that they display a sense of *satisfaction* (perhaps smugness) at maneuvering a mortal into a hopeless situation, and winning out in a bargain -- but those are tied to their primary motivators.
The umbrals (or "conscriptus" or "decaconscriptus") don't have any fear of death, because they're even less alive than the true infernals are. They're fashioned together of "soul-stuff," and if they're "slain," their masters can potentially put them back together again. It's a matter of question of whether the thing that gets put back together again is really the SAME CREATURE, but umbrals don't have a strong sense of self: they SIMULATE a sense of self, for the purpose of interacting with mortals, and may SIMULATE more mortal emotions of surprise, happiness, etc., in an attempt to be more relatable, but they are generally very BAD at it compared to true infernals.
The only reason why this umbral should have *any hope at all* of fooling Thale is simply because, despite his misadventures, he really doesn't have much *experience* with dealing with infernals/umbrals. Nor does he have experience with gods. That "Ayisla" might seem a bit alien to him might seem perfectly reasonable, since she's an immortal. Okay, so she's pale-skinned, with raven-black hair and eyes as black as night -- not exactly out of character for being the Nis-Asyr (Goddess) of Night. The umbral does not have the power to assume ANY form it pleases; it's generally part of the umbral package that it can adopt *A* form resembling any given species (albeit with some telltale "unearthly" details for those wary enough to pick up on them), but it cannot attempt to impersonate a particular individual's appearance. Here, it simply does not need to, because the subject is not personally familiar with the appearance of Ayisla, the specific individual elven goddess.
Goober_Chris seems to be better than most players at picking up on my subtle cues, even though he hasn't been gaming with me as often as several of the other players. It's another reason why I'm more willing to have a "deeper" plot with his character, because I think he handles nuance better.
So ... eh, we'll see.