But in the meantime, we've had a couple of Starfinder sessions to write up here, closing out the second volume of the Dead Suns adventure path.
As Gencon is less than a week away, the next time you hear from me will likely be from or after the convention! (I plan on participating in RPGaDay again, but I'll be driving up to Indy on the 1st so I won't have a reply posted until after I arrive) If anyone will be there, reach out either here or on Twitter. Hopefully, I'll see some of you there, or just be back here after!
So after leaving behind the Stargazer statue, the party follows the trail and notes they have for another few days. They pass through the ruins of an elven settlement festooned with pyramids as the jungle thins out and they climb into the mountains. Halkueem Zan seems to have something to say about, as he called it, 'The Forsaken City'...
"The city in the foothills is a forest of small pyramids overgrown with vines. As with the funerary monuments of lost Osirion, it might be this was not a place of the living but a realm of the dead. Initial excavations uncovered multiple stone tiers of fine architecture—displaying skill truly more advanced than the builders' primitive contemporaries."
The ruins would take years to properly study, but the high point is the observatory further up the mountain. The group finds themselves climbing up... oh, wait, there's some notes on this, too, labeled 'The Stairs to Eternity.'
"From the Forsaken City rises a staggering, weathered staircase carved into the mountain beyond, evoking mystical contemplation in all who would climb it. Beyond stands a great temple whose haunted guardians feasted upon my comrades, forcing us to flee the savage sentinels."
They creep up the stairs in a winding path up the mountain, with Virxidor's drone ahead a good ways scouting. They reach a landing just below the observatory and the drone finds a large reptilian creature feasting on a reasonably fresh corpse. Virxidor, being a smartass, asks Malesinder if there are any green dragonkin because he thinks there's one up ahead.
Malesinder heads up, calling out to the creature. N1-C0 follows closely behind, and when he sees the creature -- which is obviously not a dragonkin -- he texts 'You racist fucker' back to Virxidor. Virxidor's laughter down the stairs gets the thing's attention[0], and Malesinder and N1-C0 gaze into the creature's compound eyes and feel their muscles starting to lock up, but they push past to engage the creature.
On Virxidor's screen, Zar identifies it as a creature called a 'mountain eel,' and upon seeing that it takes a chunk out of Malesinder with a bite, he comments that it has mind-controlling venom (it doesn't) and they'll have to watch Malesinder to make sure he doesn't go crazy (he won't). But the rest of the group moves in to fight the thing off. They take a closer look at the corpse and determine it's one of the Devourer cultists.
They move the rest of the way to the top of the steps and N1-C0 and Virxidor's drone creep around some ancient, weathered pillars to find an undead elf of some sort guarding a doorway into the observatory. Zar takes a look on the screen, but he doesn't look like any sort of undead the drow knows. Also, he notes a small mote of energy circling the guardian, and recognizes that this thing is also a solarian like himself. And then Zar and Virxidor begin speculating on which of his elf traits[1], like the venom blood and ovipositor, are likely to function differently because he's undead.
Virxidor just approaches the elf openly, greeting him in Eoxian since he's undead. He looks strangely at Virxidor, and greets him in Elven. And now they're getting somewhere. Apparently the elf (whose name they didn't get) is an ancient guardian of the temple, dedicated to defending it for as long as he and it both last. However, cultists of the 'Star-Eater' have arrived, and their leader, referred to as the Speaker, has been able to control the guardian with powerful magic. He cannot let them pass, and must put everything he can into stopping them if they wish to enter. (So no situation where he throws the fight or anything like that.) And despite the group's best attempts to logic their way past the guardian, there really isn't a loophole to exploit. And they don't want to destroy him if it can be at all avoided.
So instead they go down the mountain a bit and find a temple wall with some windows. Virxidor's drone climbs up the side of the building and grab a spot next to one of the windows. N1-C0 uses his jump jets to boost up there and carefully balance on top of the drone while he carefully opens up the window and lowers the pane he removed via a rope so they can put it back in later. He carefully creeps into the temple and finds he's in a safe spot -- there's a some sort of starfield painted into the floor on one side of him, and on the other is a kasatha woman studying carvings in the floor. He's pretty sure this is the missing Dr. Solstarni, from the university. He texts the group from his perch to check in, and they decide to go in the window one by one. Of course, they know that getting Malesinder in is going to be a pain in the neck, and it's either try to squeeze him in the window, knowing it'll be a debacle but keeping the group together, or see if he can get in through the observatory tower like they did with the Stargazer.
In the end, they all wind up going in the window one by one. Dr. Solstarni sees and hears them come in, because their stealth is a little lacking. Also, Kech steps onto the painted starfield and hits some sort of trap as stars rain down from the ceiling upon her, both burning and electrocuting her. And then there's Malesinder, cramming himself through the windowframe like Winnie the Pooh, and the commotion brings a trio of cultists around the corner -- one of them with a big-ass machine gun.
So a fight breaks out. There's shooting, there's stabbing. As far as fights go, it's barely a half-step above the usual 'party gets the drop on some nameless mooks' fights... until the woman with the machine gun falls, just as she was starting to pull a detonator out of her pocket. It skitters across the floor and Malesinder quickly moves to grapple the remaining cultist to keep him from getting it. Zar delivers a coup de grace to the one with the machine gun, while the rest of the group finishes off the others.
An energetic hum behind the group gets them to turn around, to find the undead solarian standing behind them, his weapon ready.
"Nothing personal," he announces. "But now you must face the Sun Spear of the Inscrutable."
He wreathes himself in burning plasma and the fight begins. Despite the dangerous aura circling him, Malesinder and Zar team up on him. He remains close to the dragonkin, forcing him to back up to safely use his polearm's reach, and goes to properly take out Kech first, as she's a dangerous ranged combatant. Eventually, though, Malesinder toughs out dealing with the plasma aura to finish off the undead elf, and... something happens.
Energy pours out of the wound as the elf falls back. As he falls, he locks eyes with Virxidor and says in Elven "I will not be the last." An orange, glowing, ephemeral form of the elf flies out of its body like a ghost, lunging at Virxidor, and reaches into his chest. He squeezes Virxidor's heart before dissipating, and Virxidor falls over.
Zar checks him. He's not breathing. His heart's not beating. Zar says that he's dead, and he can only squeeze one of his hearts at a time[2] so CPR wouldn't be helpful.
The rest of the group rushes to try and help, examine him, do something, when Virxidor takes a breath and sits up. He's having trouble finding his heartbeat, though, and something just feels... off. He had some sort of brief moment of cosmic one-ness with the universe, and now he's back and... something doesn't feel right. After a few moments and some focus, he does find his heartbeat, but it's worryingly slow.
Zar examines him with everything he knows about magic and science and believes that Virxidor's been infected with some sort of strain of undeath.[3] In Elven, he asks what he's supposed to tell the others. Virxidor says to tell the others he's going through 'elf puberty' and he's likely to start molting. Zar relays this to the group as Virxidor gathers himself.
Meanwhile, N1-C0 (who has no patience for the 'fun elf biology facts' gag) goes to check on Dr. Solstarni. She describes what happened -- that 'Dr. Eyrub Paqual' (whose real name, BTW, is Tahomen) was trying to lure her out there to inspect the temple, having made the connection between Halkueem Zan's expedition and the temple. She suspected something was up, so he kidnapped her (which is why she left behind that printout for the others to find, though Virxidor says they found her emails as well). She explains that eventually she was just tired of cooperating so he knocked her out and left her to die as he went off to do something (she doesn't know where) but planned to come back and blow up the temple with her inside. She suspects he probably found something in the temple's inner sanctum. She also comments that while she'd rather do as part of a proper expedition, with enough supplies she could easily spend months studying the temple and surrounding ruins.
The group pokes around the rest of the temple, finding paintings and carvings of constellations and the night sky as seen from different parts of the planet. They also find a bunch of planted explosives -- not enough to bring down the temple, at least not yet. The group must have interrupted them in the middle of planting said explosives. They also find carvings that reveal a path through the starfield, which they would have found in a more timely manner if they'd gone in through the doors rather than a window. Ah well.
They come around to the sanctum, which is at the base of the observation tower they noticed from the outside. There's a pair of stone guardians shaped like elves, animated, and they raise their weapons but hesitate before striking. He tries to talk them down in Elven with no success, but Zar steps up to address them in Elven and manages to convince them to stand up and listen to him and Virxidor (it helps that Zar wears that face-concealing helmet).
They go in and immediately see that the architecture of the sanctum and the tower is substantially different from the rest of the temple -- even to the uninitiated, it's clear that originally there was only the tower, a shrine to Desna, and then a temple to Ibra[4] was constructed around it later. The base of that original tower seems to be the repository for the Oatian (as they're called) elves' knowledge -- there are actually a lot of books and scrolls that are barely intact and full of pre-Gap knowledge.
As he was planning on destroying the temple later, Tahomen didn't really bother to properly shelve the texts he'd been going through, so it's easy enough for the group to find what they need because it's pretty much all dumped onto one shelf. So they dug through with Dr. Solstarni's help to see what they could learn.
(This next bit is something of an infodump, apologies in advance.)
So the Oatian elves, as it turns out, spurned their kin elsewhere on the world and sought a new life of cosmic contemplation on the continent of Ukulam, thousands of years before the Gap. Their astronomy techniques improved and between divination magic and telescopes they discovered a strange constellation of 12 stars that formed a perfect circle in the sky. Studying the constellation brought them strange dreams that included an odd language that they recorded[5], and those dreams led to parleying with strange and powerful alien minds. One of those minds was a being known as Ibra (and interestingly enough, the elves' records suggest that Ibra may have not been a god at that point), and through Ibra's teachings the elves learned that the constellation may have been constructed by an ancient and advanced species untold light years away.
The elves believed that the constellation (which, in case it needs to be said, turns up in several carvings and such in all of these ruins) was in fact a gateway, and they called it the Gate of Twelve Stars and the temple was renamed in its honor. Some of the scholar-priests believe that the Gate held back a powerful army. Others suspected that it magnified the thoughts and dreams of another galaxy and could be the key to untold knowledge. The most popular hypothesis is that the Gate is so powerful it can only be part of (or at least contain) some powerful superweapon. Some theorized the existence of something they called a "Stellar Degenerator," which could drain all energy from a star, turning it into a hypothetical remnant known as a black dwarf.
(There's no sign of where this Gate is, and it's possible recording its location would have been taboo.)
Interpretive disputes broke out among the elves, and the only thing they could agree on is that from their city there's no way they could test or confirm their theories. They packed up what they needed and performed a ritual referred to in the texts as "the Celestial Voyage." The implication is that the elves traveled to another system, but it's pretty much impossible to tell whether or not they succeeded, as if they did succeed they almost certainly never returned.
So with these revelations (and associated infodump) over, the group climbs up the observatory tower, mostly to find the remains of a bunch of astronomy equipment. Of course, after millennia of exposure to the elements, that's mostly rusty smears on the floor and scratched glass. They do, however, find a magical crystalline device meant to measure and record psychic emanations from across the galaxy. The storage crystal ran out of room thousands of years ago but kept recording, just cramming and compressing and reconfiguring everything as best it can. It's unreadable now, but now the crystal positively hums with the psychic hopes and dreams of a million minds from across the galaxy and can be used to empower oneself.[6]
The group heads back down to the ground floor, and they and Dr. Solstarni decide to head back to civilization as swiftly as they can.
As they come out of the temple, however, they hear "Well, well, well" from a lashunta who is obviously Tahomen, the leader of the Devourer Cult cell. He's with a couple of goons, who are putting down some equipment they brought down. He doesn't get any further into some planned banter, though, before the group just opens fire on him. His minions drop pretty quickly, and Zar and Malesinder team up to bring him down before he can successfully unleash any of his magic.
It turns out the equipment he brought down with him is a comm unit big enough it has to be broken down into pieces for transport purposes. Virxidor hacks the computer in the comm unit, finding that he's transmitted to his allies pretty much the same information they found in the temple. Tahomen was a proponent of the 'Stellar Degenerator' theory, and he suggests that the Drift Rock is in fact a piece of the superweapon that got sheared off and dragged into the Drift when it took a chunk of the Degenerator's demiplane. He also suggests that the cult apply as many resources as possible to find the Gate of Twelve Suns before anyone else does.
Fortunately, Virxidor is capable of finding out where the information was transmitted, and tries to also beam them some false information steering them towards the Sarenrae temple inside the sun in an attempt to lure some of the cultists off to get beaten up by paladins. He also gets into Tahomen's bank account and bleeds that sucker dry for a couple thousand credits.
The party treks back through the forest without further incident, though as they travel Virxidor becomes paler over time, and his veins visibly turn black through his skin with negative energy. By the time they get back, Zar is more able to properly diagnose what happened to Virxidor -- as near as he can tell, the undead elf they encountered tried to turn Virxidor into something like himself, and it didn't properly take for whatever reason. And, the result, as I mention in the footnotes, is a borai.
They get back to the university, to find everyone so appreciative and grateful for Dr. Solstarni's return. They offer the members of the group a reward -- admittance and three years' tuition to study at the university, or a 'research grant' of cash up-front. Though Zar is tempted to take the scholarship offer for a later date, just so he can say that he made the administration accept a drow, he and everyone else decide to take the money -- after all, they need to resupply and upgrade their gear. There's a Devourer Cult to deal with!
And that brings us to the end of the second volume of Dead Suns, Temple of the Twelve! In a couple of weeks, following Gencon, we'll pick back up with volume three, Splintered Worlds.
And now, way too many footnotes.
[0]-- It's worth noting that Malesinder is also basically incapable of stealth, but for flavor reasons I said it was the laughter that got the thing's attention.
[1]-- Just as reminder, Sean and Kevin (Zar's and Virxidor's players) have put a lot of effort into keeping up this running gag that elves have all sorts of bizarre, dangerous traits just to mess with the more gullible party members (meaning Malesinder).
[2]-- Again, the aforementioned running gag.
[3]-- Actually, what's happening here is that Virxidor is becoming something called a 'borai.' (Lashunta-based borai pictured) It's an undead race that appears in the Pact Worlds supplement, sort of a 'half-undead,' kinda like a dhampir. They often come about through undead-tainted bloodlines or botched resurrections. Kevin expressed interest in having his character become one, so I figured something out. (Incidentally, the description of the 'race' doesn't say anything about their heart rate, so I declared that it works like the zombies on iZombie, where their heart beats something like 10 times a minute.)
[4]-- I mentioned Desna way back in the first writeup for this game, but Ibra hasn't really come up yet. Ibra, also referred to as the Inscrutable, is a god of celestial bodies, the cosmos, and mysteries of the universe. In other words, a natural fit for an ancient, obscure culture of astronomers. It has no gender or defined physical form, and it's unclear whether Ibra is a deity who sprang into being when the universe was born, some alien paragon who ascended to godhood, or a personification of the cosmos itself.
[5]-- As a reminder, it was this strange language that happens to match that found on the Drift Rock that caused the impetus for the group to seek this temple out for more information in the first place.
[6]-- Unlike Pathfinder, Starfinder dispenses with 'generic boost to stats' magic items like belts of strength, headbands of intelligence, etc. Instead, there are augmentations that can be acquired or purchased for permanent boosts, and in mechanical terms this is one of them, referred to as an 'ability crystal.' But there are limits as to how many of these things you can have empowering yourself, but as Virxidor didn't have one yet they let him have it.
No comments:
Post a Comment