ADVENTURE LOG: September 14, 2019: The Bane of the Time Lord

A Friendly Boxing Match

Ven, Nik, and Korric are living on borrowed time. The Synarchy has put a bounty on their heads. While recuperating from the hardships of the road in the bustling river town of Pike’s Crossing, the adventurers barely escape with their lives after the inquisition blockades the town and papers the public square with wanted posters. The posters show the likenesses of the “dangerous heretics” who brazenly defied the Black Watch in the forests of Jericho’s Purchase and sparked an insurrection. The city-states of Cumorah and Gilead are now openly at war and the fire of revolution is rapidly spreading, further weakening the Synarchy’s iron grip on the continent. In the great halls of the free cities, troubadours have begun to sing verses about the heroes of the Battle of the North Woods. Down in the crypts of Darkmanse, the council of eleven grows worried. The council, which has its spies among the Seven Caravans, has recently learned that the cunning old witch, the Marchioness, has dispatched assassins to Darkmanse to slay the Synarch. The council believes these hired assassins could be the same renegades who defied the Fisher at Jericho's Purchase.

The three adventurers kill several of the inquisitor’s sentries and escape from Pike’s Crossing under the cover of night and make their way along the bank of the river, hoping to make contact with a band of smugglers. They carry with them a writ of introduction from John Pike and the second letter from the mysterious time traveler, Doctor Jessup. In the letter, Jessup makes reference to an expeditionary team sent from another branch of the time track, and alludes to the possibility of reversing “Incident I." He has provided coordinates to a rendezvous point somewhere on the far side of the river.

As the adventurers make their way in the darkness along the riverbank, a light rain begins to fall and the night grows misty with fog. Up ahead, they see a flickering light. As they draw nearer, the adventurers see that it is a lantern hanging from a post at the end of a dilapidated old dock. The adventurers hear the dip of paddles in the water as a keelboat glides stealthily toward the lonely dock from out of the fog.

A short, stout figure emerges from the fog and strides out onto the dock and extinguishes the lantern. Crew on the boat toss mooring lines to him and he secures the boat as it comes up alongside the dock. Now several other figures—short and stocky like the ones on the boat and dock—emerge from the rushes at the water’s edge. They climb into the keelboat and help to unfasten canvas tarps from the cargo, which consists of numerous heavy wooden boxes. The stout figures proceed to unload the boxes onto a trio of wagons, which stand waiting, back from the river’s edge, on a rutted lane that wends off into the woods.

The smugglers are members of a clan of exiled shield dwarves, refugees from Faerûn who have a small settlement in the Misty Isles, an archipelago to the north of the Darkmanse island. These islands are considered by the inhabitants of the continent to be remote, inaccessible, and wild. The dwarves are running arms to the free cities in the east. [1]

Their leader is Dain Ironfist. The Ironfists pride themselves on their prowess in bare-knuckle contests. When the adventurers present Dain with John Pike's letter of introduction, he invites them back to the dwarves' hideout, where his sister, Vistra Ironfist, challenges them to a "friendly" boxing match with the clan's champion. Ven reluctantly takes up the challenge, and, with a combination of grit and magical guile, succeeds in felling the champion with a single blow. The clan is stunned into silence, and then they begin to cheer. Ven earns for himself the respect and admiration of Clan Ironfist, and wins for the party a potential new ally on the road to Darkmanse.

That night, the adventurers share camaraderie and kegs of the ale with Clan Ironfist. Early the next morning, they set out for Doctor Jessup's rendezvous point with their dwarven guides.

The Airplane 

On the journey to the rendezvous point, the dwarves advise caution, informing the adventurers that they are traveling through the territory of the Mighty Lord Emperor Chan. The adventurers press their guides to tell them more about this "mighty lord," but their guides will say nothing further about it. A high, craggy tor can be seen rising out of the jungle several miles to the east. The dwarves refuse even to look at it, genuflecting in dwarf fashion. As they near the rendezvous point, Chan is finally sighted flying low over the feywild jungle, surveying his domain or perhaps hunting. He is an adult red dragon. The dwarves urge the adventurers to find cover until the monster passes.

When the traveling party finally reaches the location indicated by Jessup’s coordinates, there is nothing there but jungle. The time traveler’s letter, it appears, has led them to a clearing in the middle of nowhere. The atmosphere in this place feels funny somehow. There is an oppressive flatness to the air. The party members cast no shadows. The dwarves are spooked by the place and, informing the party that they have fulfilled their obligation to John Pike, hastily take their leave of the “cursed place,” retreating into the jungle. The party is now alone.

Clearing away some underbrush, the party makes a startling discovery. Hidden in the jungle overgrowth is a crashed B-29 Superfortress. Korric identifies the four-engine propeller-driven heavy bomber as a relic of the World War II era. Entering the aircraft through a hatch in the tail, the party discovers the crew inside, all of them dead. Some of the dead appear to have been scientists. Reading the name tags on the scientists’ flight suits, the party discovers that one of the dead scientists is Doctor Brody, the RAND contact described in Jessup’s second letter. Like the mysterious Doctor Jessup, the dead expedition members were time travelers.

In the cockpit, the adventurers find the ship’s log. The final entry in the ledger is dated May 10, 1947, around the time Jessup’s letter was written. The clock on the control panel is still working, ticking off the days, hours, minutes, and seconds. The dial shows a date of March 25, 2030. Noting the discrepancy between the handwritten log entry and the clock, the party concludes that while the time-traveling airplane managed to reach the geographical coordinates in Jessup’s letter, it missed its drop zone in time by nearly a century.

The oppressiveness to the atmosphere is considerably stronger inside the plane. There is a faint crackle to the air, like the heaviness that precedes an electrical storm in summer. Everything is strangely flat and colorless, and like outside, objects cast no shadows. Even the sound of the adventurers’ voices is muted and stifled. What is causing it? And why does the clock on the control panel still work when the plane crashed almost a century ago?

As the party is contemplating these mysteries, the dragon, having sighted the cleared fuselage glinting in the afternoon sunlight, attacks the airplane. Korric is killed. Ven is mortally wounded—and then the whole scene abruptly resets. The party, alive and well once again, finds themselves back in the clearing with the dwarves, who again abandon the party, which again discovers the downed bomber, and is again attacked by the dragon, which again kills Korric. And then sequence resets again . . . and again . . . and again. The adventurers relive the same events over and over, and as they do, they slowly begin to awaken to what is happening to them: they are trapped in a time loop, and soon discover the cause.

There is a crude time machine in the nose of the airplane that was damaged in the crash but is still functioning. Whatever is powering the machine is also powering the clock on the control panel. The device is also the cause of the peculiar atmospheric effects in and around the aircraft. When the adventurers destroy the time machine, they are overwhelmed by visions of the sacred necropolis. They see a door set into the earth, and a great wheel turning in the starry sky. Entering the earth, they find themselves lost in the catacombs. They see funerary chambers, gold-inlaid family shrines, mausoleums, crypts, and reliquaries. They see grim processions of priests, their faces ghostly white, chanting arcane prayers in hazes of incense to their all-powerful maker. And they see the friendly red-haired priest, who is desperately waving them away, trying to warn them as the moving images of the time track disassemble into frames like a broken 35 mm film on a movie projector. The film spools outward, ever outward, unraveling . . .

The Exhibit Hall

A disorienting wave of vertigo passes over the party members and they find themselves in a darkened exhibit hall standing before a museum display behind glass. On the other side of the glass, like a historical reenactor posing in a living diorama, is the tiefling, Nikadeamus Malyre, seated upon the mighty throne of the maker. At her feet are her three dead companions, Ven, Korric, and Sant’oka. Framing this eerie tableau is a painted backdrop like a set piece to a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera. But this isn’t The Pirates of Penzance. Depicted on the painted oilcloth are mountains of skulls, for as far as the eye can see.

Standing beside the adventurers in the exhibit hall now is an affable chap dressed in natty tweeds. He shakes his head, tut-tutting to himself. “Convincing, isn’t it?” he remarks. “I designed the display myself, you know. I dare say, the skulls are a nice touch.” Thereupon, he hands Nik his business card, and then unnecessarily distributes duplicates to Ven and Korric. The cards read:

Chronos
Head Archivist

The time lord gets straight to business. He says to Nik, “I really must urge you to kill yourself, or, if you are not so inclined, perhaps your friends could help you do the job. I realize this is all in rather bad taste. I bear you no ill will, but there is this tricky business having to do with the apportionment of time that is entrusted to a person, which is fate. Or call it destiny. But no matter what you call it, and no matter how it slices and dices out there on the time track, yours, Nikadeamus, is very bad indeed, and not just for you and your friends but for my whole apparatus. So you see the conundrum. You have to go. Now as for me, I am merely an archivist, a humble records keeper. I can’t intervene to resolve the problem myself, which is why I hired those five bunglers to handle the job for me, and we all saw how smashingly that went.”

The party angrily defies the Archivist are instantly returned to the physical realm, where they are greeted outside the downed B-29 by the Fisher with the Mighty Lord Emperor Chang at his side.

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[1] Rumors have begun to circulate about a powerful warlord and mystic who has arisen in the Misty Isles, a mysterious figure known as the Sun King. The smuggler dwarves appear to be in awe of him, and their smuggling activities seem to be aligned with his vision for the Darkmanse continent.