#voidfinder

[stormaerie]

shoutout to my snake wife for surviving the campaign despite everything and managing to re-establish her empire, after 8000 years of going mad in isolation at the borders of the universe and 150 years of mindless rampaging

[stormaerie]

If there's one thing my witch, Iora, can be counted on to do in every setting, is apply the scientific method to magic to create unconventional weapons.

In one setting she specialized in portals, so obviously she created an empty tube without air (kinda hard, but once you know outer space is a vacuum you can open a portal to that inside the tube to eject the air) to see what would happen if an object placed inside kept being warped between two portals, achieving infinite downward motion. The answer is apparently nigh-infinite acceleration (no terminal velocity due to no air drag), which has the unfortunate implication of, if that object gets ejected into the atmosphere again, it would force the first atoms in its path to undergo nuclear fusion and create a big explosion. That experiment ended with a god (who has secret knowledge about physics much more advanced than mortals) to intervene and slap her on the wrist. The top of a mountain got blown off.

In this other setting she's an edgy, brooding veteran who lost an arm. A terrible (cool) thing about that setting is that due to a war, healers are basically impossible to find, so she went to Axis, a clockwork plane aligned to Law, and had a sick-ass FMA-style automail (but golden, because she uses those colors here) installed. And since she was at it, she did a little transhumanism (well, trans-elfism?) and implanted in there a number of tuning forks for easy planar travel, and a hole in her wrist to launch a single fireball at the speed of a cannon. Try to counterspell a missile coming at you at hundreds of kilometers per hour, fucking casual.

Anyway yeah, I love her. Also she may die next session. FUcK

[stormaerie]

voidfinder sesh in a few hours, banger plot and characters ready, and only half a headache because i was silly and stayed on my phone this morning while it was still dark

[stormaerie]

so the thing about ivan is that he was only trying to become a good person (as per the Detect Alignment spell) to avoid the very real fires of hell for his afterlife. he was a devout fantasy christian, down to the only caring about others for fear of punishment, not because it's right. he was a profoundly selfish person, only preoccupied with their own balance of good/bad actions on the scale of universal, objective morality.

arguably it's not his fault, he was brought up always being compared to a paragon of all that is good and holy with his cousin, the fucking village's aasimar blessed with celestial traits whereas he had none. but we can only blame our parents so much before we have to take responsibility for our behavior.

and this is why when he died in the shadow plane, where ghosts remain stuck instead of going to the afterlife, he was more relieved than scared. he realized he could be as evil as he wanted (which turns out, it's not a lot!) and never pay the price, infinitely postponing going to hell.

oh ivan, you were a fucked up little kid

[stormaerie]

btw Ivan died last sesh, choosing to go out in a blaze of glory against someone much higher in level than him, hoping that would finally sway his alignment to good, and avoid him the flames of hell upon death

not only it did not, but since the party is in the ethereal realm he's going to be stuck there as a ghost. as soon as he'll realize that he can use this as a cheat to postpone his judgement indefinitely, he's going to stop trying to be good and indulge his evil side i think

[stormaerie]

and in the Darkness you will go

descending further into the Land of Dreams

and there you shall meet him, the King

[stormaerie]

holy shit i got a nice idea for voidfinder campaign 2

so a pivotal event for c1 was the creation of the Sword of Gold and Silver, a magical artifact capable of harming objects of divine nature. The Sword imploded when the dark crystal that contained a lot of the power of the Snake Goddess Makal was destroyed. It was such a strong explosion that despite being made of first choice materials, and being forged by a master blacksmith, it disintegrated. And that was that.

But now for c2 i'm thinking about this "sword of darkness" and how the player characters are:

a guy who did something bad, is convinced they suck ass (they're partially right), and they need to put themselves in danger to help people to make it right

a guy who is neutral but his species is considered evil by the culture in the region, they make up a minority that is usually enslaved

and i'm wondering... could it be that the sword of darkness is a dark reflection of the SoGaS, from the ethereal plane? Oh my god... one of the original Heroes of Light is partially from there... and he had disappeared for c1... did he become a sovereign there, and will be relevant later?! D:

woah!!

[stormaerie]

right, time to start brewing for voidfinder campaign 2

it's been 5 years since the end of the evil snake god's conquest of the northern continent. their rampaging came to a stop after laying ruin to a number of countries, and wiping out the New Heroes of Light that tried to stop her. returned to her senses, she is now in a humanoid body and capable of more higher consciousness thoughts. she's back to being the leader of an empire.

but not much of this is felt in the eastern desert, that was spared from her path of destruction. instead this new location is facing its own set of challenges, namely the sheer scarcity of resources- water to name one. Towns flourish along rivers, and commerce moves via flat boats up and down it. (There are paths alongside rivers for slaves to pull boats upstream.)

Yes, slavery. This is one of the key elements of the campaign. One of the two (three in the future characters?) is a Naari, a descendant of a fire elemental born from occult ritual. Their kind are hunted to be sold as slaves in the region, because of their unusual appearance (their hair is a flame) and control over fire. The desert is also home to a number of Duergar settlements, built into the rocky mountains that emerge from it here and there. They are known as evil dwarves that take sadistic pleasure in watching people in pain, and enslave them to sell them in the rest of the Inner Sea.

The campaign is planned to go from level 3 to level 9, with a level up every 2 sessions. (About 3 months.)