ADVENTURE LOG: July 14, 2018
"Accept our love. Be our holy assassins."
The adventure opened in a deep forest gorge with the Lilitu Moon hanging low in the evening sky, a luminous death’s head drifting behind scudding clouds over the feywild jungle. A gunslinger was sitting before his campfire at the foot of a derelict shrine on the Pilgrim Road when a beautiful young traveler woman stepped out from the jungle, unarmed and alone.
“An outlaw who builds an open fire on the Straight Road must truly want the Watchers to find him," she said. "You are either extremely brave, Korric Gunslinger, or extremely stupid. Come, the others have been waiting.”
The young woman withdrew into the jungle, and Korric reluctantly followed. She led him to the encampment of the Seven Caravans People, where, in a painted tent high atop a rocky escarpment known as the Bastion, the Marchioness and two of her counselors received him. Three strangers sat before her in the gloom—a cleric, a tiefling witch, and a druid shapeshifter. Like the gunslinger, they were summoned by a dream.
"You may leave us, Chani," the Marchioness said, and the girl obediently withdrew.
The witch and her two attendants wore elaborate decorative vestments that contained them almost completely. The ceremonial garments were meant for the protection of the profane. The women were seers. They burned with the light of seven stars in the constellation that their duchesses and marquises claimed as the mythical birthplace of their bloodline—a light that bestows holy illumination, but which also immolates.
As the Marchioness addressed the four strangers, her two counselors whispered sibilant prayers, stirring the smoke from the copper censers that simmered at their feet. The interior of the tent seemed to crawl with shadows, charged with an uncanny atmosphere that was disorienting to the four strangers.
“Mighty forces are at play in the world,” the Marchioness began. “There is fighting among the city-states. The Faithful Cities have sunk into fanaticism, barbarism, and self-abasement, believing themselves to be the guardians of religion even as they commit atrocities against the planetouched and any terrestrial who would dare to embrace the truth of the multiverse. The Inquisition casts its shadow over the continent, a brazen attempt by the Synarch to enforce the ancient order through the judicious application of terror. The people are powerless in the face of such oppression."
The Marchioness smiled wickedly. "But is not the Forbidden Lore full of tales of the solitary champion who dares to stand up for the weak?" she asked. "One wonders what four champions might accomplish in a troubled age such as ours.”
As the old crone spoke, she counted her prayer beads by the flickering light of the hanging mosque lantern.
“We are approaching a critical stage in the Greening," she continued, her fingers spiderlike in the gloom. "You must understand, this world is not what it appears to be. It is a trap, an abomination, the spell-working of a malign sorcerer who has enthroned himself as a god. He has become Demiurge, Yaldabaoth, Yahweh, Adonai—the great artificer and deceiver, who has claimed for himself the names Holy of Holies, Righteous Judge, and God of Love, but whose true name is known only among the princely bloodlines of the Shadowfell. The Synarch works to preserve his maker’s creation against the Greening and the hidden ones who have set the Divine Invasion into motion."
Her vestments were deepest black, and embroidered with arcane patterns that seemed almost to change shape in the guttering lantern light. Sometimes the patterns coalesced into the shapes of birds taking rancorous flight, black birds on blacker vestments, as black as the abyss, darkness absolute, like in their dream.
"Go to the Darkmanse and slay the Synarch by whatever means necessary," she said. "Safeguard the Greening. Defend the multiverse against this abomination. Do this for us. Accept our love. Be our holy assassins."
Tomb of the Innocents
The four adventurers returned to the camp below, where a young mother came running toward them screaming that her baby girl had been stolen. A crowd gathered around the hysterical woman and fearful whispers passed among the people. "It is Eva," someone said. "Eva has stolen the child and taken her to the mausoleum."
From atop her rocky escarpment, the Marchioness gazed down at her four unlikely assassins, her eyes gleaming with dark intent. Eva's mausoleum was the one from their dream.
Realizing that they were being tested, the four strangers returned to the derelict shrine where the gunslinger first encountered Chani. Its intricately carved facade was dripping with moss. Its monumental dome was half-collapsed and overgrown with vines. The crumbling temple steps faced south, the direction the souls of the dead traditionally face to keep watch for the certain coming of the maker and his Day of Judgment. On the steps, the dying embers from the gunslinger's campfire still glowed.
In the subcrypt of the abandoned shrine, the party encountered and killed Eva, a ghast whose bite infects her victims with a dreadful form of ghoul fever. Sant'oka, the druid, was nearly killed in the melee after his scimitar failed to find its mark, but Ven, a Dawnbringer cleric of Faerûn, rescued him from the arms of death. Nik snatched the baby from the ghast's undead clutches when the battle began, and Korric finished the monster off with his pistols.
In a lair hidden in the wall of the subcrypt, the group found a palantír among the bones and skulls, a gift by the Ghoul King to his favored disciple.
The party returned to the traveler camp and delivered the baby unharmed into her mother's arms, earning the respect and gratitude of the Seven Caravans People. In the coming days, the the story of how the adventurers risked their lives for the clan would be be told and retold on trade routes across the continent, and the adventurers' prestige would spread among the traveler guilds.
That night, Korric went to the Marchioness and successfully secured fresh horses and safe passage on the trade routes.
The following morning, at first light, the four adventurers set out for the Darkmanse.
"Like ripples on the miller's pond."
At noon that first day, they came upon an agricultural commune that was mysteriously deserted. The atmosphere in the square was like that of a ghost ship. The front doors of houses stood ajar. Inside were kitchens with bread still baking in ovens, and tables set for the midday meal. It was as though all the people had abruptly vanished into thin air.
The commune was called Jericho’s Purchase. It supplied grain, primarily corn and wheat, to the city-state of Gilead. It was also locally renowned for its brewery, and for its observatory, known as the Overlook, which was said to have been built by a reclusive and eccentric nobleman from Gilead called the Clockmaker.
The tower was topped with a curious dome constructed of glass and lattice. Gazing up at it, Ven knew that its construction was the handiwork of a being or beings from elsewhere in the multiverse, possibly the Sword Coast of Faerûn. It wasn't of this earth. The craftsmanship was too exquisite, unusually intricate and beautifully carved. The party entered the tower to investigate.
The walls inside were hung with scores of clocks of different shapes and sizes, all of them ticking away. In a second-floor library, they found shelves of technical treatises on clockmaking as well as numerous folio-sized ledgers filled with handwritten notes, charts, and conceptual drawings concerning the stars and planets.
The library steps led up to a marvelous observatory that offered a breathtaking view of the firmament. There was an enormous telescope, its huge lens pointing out one of the dome's elaborate mechanical apertures, and worktables strewn with charts and navigational instruments. Hiding behind the telescope was a ten-year-old boy named Ben.
He leapt out swinging a butcher’s knife, but it was obvious to the adventurers that he posed no threat. He was just a frightened little kid. Calming him, they asked Ben what had happened in Jericho's Purchase.
Ben explained that the Clockmaker was a horologist, and that a stone giant named Fjolvar was the one who had built the observatory for him.
"Fjolvar's taught the Clockmaker all sorts of things about how time and space are like a realm of dreams, where nothing is entirely true or real," the boy said. "And Fjolvar has taught him about the planets and the stars, and about the 'many-verse,' which is like ripples on the miller’s pond. He calls it saṃsāra, 'the wandering,' and bar do, 'the between two.'"
He told the adventurers that a pogrom was being carried out in Jericho's Purchase by the Black Watch with the help of the reeve, an appointed agent of Gilead, and his small force of hired soldiers. Ben said the drow Watchers were making an example of the commune after it was discovered that it had knowingly harbored a planetouched, and that this offworlder had been schooling one of its citizens in the cosmology of the multiverse—acts that were deemed heretical by the theologians of Darkmanse.
Ben said the killers took the Clockmaker and Fjolvar to the woods along with everybody else in the commune. As he said this, shrieks were suddenly heard coming from the forest. The adventurers raced to the people's aid with Ben fast on their heels, but the horrific scene that confronted them in the woods was a no-win situation.
A mass grave had been dug in a clearing and the Watchers were killing the villagers one at a time and tossing the bodies into the grave while the Clockmaker and the giant were forced to watch. Presiding over the proceedings was the Fisher, a fearsome drow warrior who wore Luger P-08s—a gunslinger, just like Korric.
From their hiding places on the edges of the clearing, the adventurers were faced with an impossible choice—rush headlong into battle and surely be killed by overwhelming numbers, or leave the villagers to their fate. The party was divided. Korric and Ven withdrew while Nik and Sant'oka engaged the enemy.
Communicating telepathically with Fjolvar, Nik persuaded the docile giant to rise up and fight, while the shapeshifter Sant'oka assumed the form of a wolf. Then the unexpected happened: in the chaos that ensued, the people rose up against their executioners. Korric and Ven rejoined the fight. Sant'oka tore out the throat of a drow mage. Ven dispatched the enemy with his divine magic and his charmed quarterstaff while the sound of Korric's pistols split the air. The Fisher was injured and fled with his surviving drow. Ben and the Clockmaker, however, were killed in the melee.
The surviving townspeople—a few hundred at most—buried their dead while Ven moved among the bodies in the mass grave restoring to life those he could.
With the adventurers' help, the villagers had routed the Watch, defied the Synarchy, and bloodied the noses of their overlords in Gilead. Retribution would undoubtedly be swift. What should the villagers do? Flee? Petition for help from the dissenter city-state of Cumorah? Would there be war with Gilead?
A council was called that night in the great hall of the ancient brewery. The four adventurers were in attendance.
DM's Note. The PCs begin the Darkmanse campaign as third-level characters.
The adventure opened in a deep forest gorge with the Lilitu Moon hanging low in the evening sky, a luminous death’s head drifting behind scudding clouds over the feywild jungle. A gunslinger was sitting before his campfire at the foot of a derelict shrine on the Pilgrim Road when a beautiful young traveler woman stepped out from the jungle, unarmed and alone.
“An outlaw who builds an open fire on the Straight Road must truly want the Watchers to find him," she said. "You are either extremely brave, Korric Gunslinger, or extremely stupid. Come, the others have been waiting.”
The young woman withdrew into the jungle, and Korric reluctantly followed. She led him to the encampment of the Seven Caravans People, where, in a painted tent high atop a rocky escarpment known as the Bastion, the Marchioness and two of her counselors received him. Three strangers sat before her in the gloom—a cleric, a tiefling witch, and a druid shapeshifter. Like the gunslinger, they were summoned by a dream.
"You may leave us, Chani," the Marchioness said, and the girl obediently withdrew.
The witch and her two attendants wore elaborate decorative vestments that contained them almost completely. The ceremonial garments were meant for the protection of the profane. The women were seers. They burned with the light of seven stars in the constellation that their duchesses and marquises claimed as the mythical birthplace of their bloodline—a light that bestows holy illumination, but which also immolates.
As the Marchioness addressed the four strangers, her two counselors whispered sibilant prayers, stirring the smoke from the copper censers that simmered at their feet. The interior of the tent seemed to crawl with shadows, charged with an uncanny atmosphere that was disorienting to the four strangers.
“Mighty forces are at play in the world,” the Marchioness began. “There is fighting among the city-states. The Faithful Cities have sunk into fanaticism, barbarism, and self-abasement, believing themselves to be the guardians of religion even as they commit atrocities against the planetouched and any terrestrial who would dare to embrace the truth of the multiverse. The Inquisition casts its shadow over the continent, a brazen attempt by the Synarch to enforce the ancient order through the judicious application of terror. The people are powerless in the face of such oppression."
The Marchioness smiled wickedly. "But is not the Forbidden Lore full of tales of the solitary champion who dares to stand up for the weak?" she asked. "One wonders what four champions might accomplish in a troubled age such as ours.”
As the old crone spoke, she counted her prayer beads by the flickering light of the hanging mosque lantern.
“We are approaching a critical stage in the Greening," she continued, her fingers spiderlike in the gloom. "You must understand, this world is not what it appears to be. It is a trap, an abomination, the spell-working of a malign sorcerer who has enthroned himself as a god. He has become Demiurge, Yaldabaoth, Yahweh, Adonai—the great artificer and deceiver, who has claimed for himself the names Holy of Holies, Righteous Judge, and God of Love, but whose true name is known only among the princely bloodlines of the Shadowfell. The Synarch works to preserve his maker’s creation against the Greening and the hidden ones who have set the Divine Invasion into motion."
Her vestments were deepest black, and embroidered with arcane patterns that seemed almost to change shape in the guttering lantern light. Sometimes the patterns coalesced into the shapes of birds taking rancorous flight, black birds on blacker vestments, as black as the abyss, darkness absolute, like in their dream.
"Go to the Darkmanse and slay the Synarch by whatever means necessary," she said. "Safeguard the Greening. Defend the multiverse against this abomination. Do this for us. Accept our love. Be our holy assassins."
Tomb of the Innocents
The four adventurers returned to the camp below, where a young mother came running toward them screaming that her baby girl had been stolen. A crowd gathered around the hysterical woman and fearful whispers passed among the people. "It is Eva," someone said. "Eva has stolen the child and taken her to the mausoleum."
From atop her rocky escarpment, the Marchioness gazed down at her four unlikely assassins, her eyes gleaming with dark intent. Eva's mausoleum was the one from their dream.
Realizing that they were being tested, the four strangers returned to the derelict shrine where the gunslinger first encountered Chani. Its intricately carved facade was dripping with moss. Its monumental dome was half-collapsed and overgrown with vines. The crumbling temple steps faced south, the direction the souls of the dead traditionally face to keep watch for the certain coming of the maker and his Day of Judgment. On the steps, the dying embers from the gunslinger's campfire still glowed.
In the subcrypt of the abandoned shrine, the party encountered and killed Eva, a ghast whose bite infects her victims with a dreadful form of ghoul fever. Sant'oka, the druid, was nearly killed in the melee after his scimitar failed to find its mark, but Ven, a Dawnbringer cleric of Faerûn, rescued him from the arms of death. Nik snatched the baby from the ghast's undead clutches when the battle began, and Korric finished the monster off with his pistols.
In a lair hidden in the wall of the subcrypt, the group found a palantír among the bones and skulls, a gift by the Ghoul King to his favored disciple.
The party returned to the traveler camp and delivered the baby unharmed into her mother's arms, earning the respect and gratitude of the Seven Caravans People. In the coming days, the the story of how the adventurers risked their lives for the clan would be be told and retold on trade routes across the continent, and the adventurers' prestige would spread among the traveler guilds.
That night, Korric went to the Marchioness and successfully secured fresh horses and safe passage on the trade routes.
The following morning, at first light, the four adventurers set out for the Darkmanse.
"Like ripples on the miller's pond."
At noon that first day, they came upon an agricultural commune that was mysteriously deserted. The atmosphere in the square was like that of a ghost ship. The front doors of houses stood ajar. Inside were kitchens with bread still baking in ovens, and tables set for the midday meal. It was as though all the people had abruptly vanished into thin air.
The commune was called Jericho’s Purchase. It supplied grain, primarily corn and wheat, to the city-state of Gilead. It was also locally renowned for its brewery, and for its observatory, known as the Overlook, which was said to have been built by a reclusive and eccentric nobleman from Gilead called the Clockmaker.
The tower was topped with a curious dome constructed of glass and lattice. Gazing up at it, Ven knew that its construction was the handiwork of a being or beings from elsewhere in the multiverse, possibly the Sword Coast of Faerûn. It wasn't of this earth. The craftsmanship was too exquisite, unusually intricate and beautifully carved. The party entered the tower to investigate.
The walls inside were hung with scores of clocks of different shapes and sizes, all of them ticking away. In a second-floor library, they found shelves of technical treatises on clockmaking as well as numerous folio-sized ledgers filled with handwritten notes, charts, and conceptual drawings concerning the stars and planets.
The library steps led up to a marvelous observatory that offered a breathtaking view of the firmament. There was an enormous telescope, its huge lens pointing out one of the dome's elaborate mechanical apertures, and worktables strewn with charts and navigational instruments. Hiding behind the telescope was a ten-year-old boy named Ben.
He leapt out swinging a butcher’s knife, but it was obvious to the adventurers that he posed no threat. He was just a frightened little kid. Calming him, they asked Ben what had happened in Jericho's Purchase.
Ben explained that the Clockmaker was a horologist, and that a stone giant named Fjolvar was the one who had built the observatory for him.
"Fjolvar's taught the Clockmaker all sorts of things about how time and space are like a realm of dreams, where nothing is entirely true or real," the boy said. "And Fjolvar has taught him about the planets and the stars, and about the 'many-verse,' which is like ripples on the miller’s pond. He calls it saṃsāra, 'the wandering,' and bar do, 'the between two.'"
He told the adventurers that a pogrom was being carried out in Jericho's Purchase by the Black Watch with the help of the reeve, an appointed agent of Gilead, and his small force of hired soldiers. Ben said the drow Watchers were making an example of the commune after it was discovered that it had knowingly harbored a planetouched, and that this offworlder had been schooling one of its citizens in the cosmology of the multiverse—acts that were deemed heretical by the theologians of Darkmanse.
Ben said the killers took the Clockmaker and Fjolvar to the woods along with everybody else in the commune. As he said this, shrieks were suddenly heard coming from the forest. The adventurers raced to the people's aid with Ben fast on their heels, but the horrific scene that confronted them in the woods was a no-win situation.
A mass grave had been dug in a clearing and the Watchers were killing the villagers one at a time and tossing the bodies into the grave while the Clockmaker and the giant were forced to watch. Presiding over the proceedings was the Fisher, a fearsome drow warrior who wore Luger P-08s—a gunslinger, just like Korric.
From their hiding places on the edges of the clearing, the adventurers were faced with an impossible choice—rush headlong into battle and surely be killed by overwhelming numbers, or leave the villagers to their fate. The party was divided. Korric and Ven withdrew while Nik and Sant'oka engaged the enemy.
Communicating telepathically with Fjolvar, Nik persuaded the docile giant to rise up and fight, while the shapeshifter Sant'oka assumed the form of a wolf. Then the unexpected happened: in the chaos that ensued, the people rose up against their executioners. Korric and Ven rejoined the fight. Sant'oka tore out the throat of a drow mage. Ven dispatched the enemy with his divine magic and his charmed quarterstaff while the sound of Korric's pistols split the air. The Fisher was injured and fled with his surviving drow. Ben and the Clockmaker, however, were killed in the melee.
The surviving townspeople—a few hundred at most—buried their dead while Ven moved among the bodies in the mass grave restoring to life those he could.
With the adventurers' help, the villagers had routed the Watch, defied the Synarchy, and bloodied the noses of their overlords in Gilead. Retribution would undoubtedly be swift. What should the villagers do? Flee? Petition for help from the dissenter city-state of Cumorah? Would there be war with Gilead?
A council was called that night in the great hall of the ancient brewery. The four adventurers were in attendance.
DM's Note. The PCs begin the Darkmanse campaign as third-level characters.
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