Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Gurv 12-01-07, 09:04 PM	I've got an ongoing campaign that needs a little fleshing out. The players have been following a series of clues and collecting keys to Kundarak vaults. Each one opens a vault with pieces of an eldritch machine, and more clues. Recently, they have learned that one of the keys was hidden (years ago) underneath the lightning reigns of a coach known as Ol' Fortune. Soon, they'll attempt to learn where that coach currently is, and when it will pass through the area of Passage (where they currently are). One of them has Favored in House Orien, and searching a coach would normally be no big deal. But as circumstances would have it, when they attempt to get a copy of her itinerary, they run into a problem. Although Ol' Fortune often makes the entire run from Sharn to Thaloist, the timetables are incomplete. Many of the rail stations along that route don’t show her on their timetables at all. The last one shown is a disembarking at Nowhere station, then no mention of her until Fairhaven, three days later. No amount of prying or calling in favors will get this information; no one seems to know why it's unavailable. (For those not in the know, "Nowhere" is a town located south of Hatheril Breland, where the lightning rail line splits) The truth is, the crown of Aundair has made a discovery in the Mounlands. Something they want to keep secret. They've smuggled it from Vathirond, and through Breland, paying House Orien to help keep it quiet. At Nowhere Station, it's being transferred to Ol' Fortune for the journey to Fairhaven. There will be no stops, no risks taken. Certainly not so some treasure seekers can look for a lost key. Any attempt to stop the coach or board it will be taken as a threat to Aundarian national security. Now my question. What did Aundair find? It has to be something interesting enough to make the government want it, dangerous enough that they want to keep it secret, and big enough to require the lightning rail to move it. It should also be something that the PCs don't have an immediate need for. I want them to get messed up in this, but not become completely distracted and forget what they're really after (a key). It should be something to further Aundair's goals too, perhaps something to help them retake the Eldeen Reaches or something. But I don't know what. I like to seed the campaign with things that the player's can later go back to, or things that can later grow into a problem for them to solve. But it has to be something they can put on the back burner for the time being.
naturax 12-02-07, 09:59 AM	Now my question. What did Aundair find? It has to be something interesting enough to make the government want it, dangerous enough that they want to keep it secret, and big enough to require the lightning rail to move it. It should also be something that the PCs don't have an immediate need for. I want them to get messed up in this, but not become completely distracted and forget what they're really after (a key). It should be something to further Aundair's goals too, perhaps something to help them retake the Eldeen Reaches or something. But I don't know what. I'm using a secret weapon that Aundair designed for the war in my next story arc (http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=960179) and I think it might work for your plot too. The project was called Fernia's Chosen: and it's a cheap ripoff of the typical magical experiments on teenagers to turn them into super-weapons a la River Tam. Oh and it was inspired by Ignus from Planescape: Torment. Basically they took a sorcerer, and created a direct link between him/her and Fernia (though you could easily substitute a more sinister plane, such as Xoriat), making him/her a super awesome fire sorcerer that could unleash loads of magical devastation. In my game the project was never used and instead it was hushed up, the subject(s) petrified and sent to Droaam for safekeeping, but in your game the project could have been unleashed for the first time on the day of The Mourning. Maybe there's rumours he/she survived the Mourning and has been warped by it? Or there is just evidence that Aundair was experimenting on its subjects and they want to destroy that evidence? Or the subject, in a state of stasis, was brought into Cyre and was about to be used but was never activated? I'd really love to hear what you do with this, so post here with what you end up going with please! I hope my ideas help.
Gurv 12-03-07, 07:16 PM	The project was called Fernia's Chosen: and it's a cheap ripoff of the typical magical experiments on teenagers to turn them into super-weapons a la River Tam. I was considering the "government super-soldier" archetype. But I've also had this urge to introduce a powerful Good Outsider...gone mad. My own little addition to Eberron's ethical grey areas: what to do with a powerful agent of the forces of good...who has become dangerous? Also, the PCs are from Aundair, and I want it to remain a nation they can back, not one that spent excessive amounts of energy on obviously questionable pursuits. The players have enough untrustworthy allies already. But you've sold me; I'm going to borrow heavily from your Fernia's Chosen concept and add my own little twists to it. Since the typical super soldier program is generally a horribly immoral project inflicted on unsuspected and unwilling subjects, I'm going to go the opposite way with it. This wasn't an ill-conceived plot driven by power-hungry men determined to get what they wanted. This was a good idea, which worked well for as long as it lasted, and had the support of many virtuous volunteers. In my Aundair, several powerful mages of Arcanix observed the moral decline that had happened during the war and felt it was time for a change. They wanted to help win the war, not by any means possible, but by deserving to win. These rather pious wizards felt victory could not be achieved unless right was on their side. Working with an order of paladins, the Heart of Arrah, they searched for a means by which to increase the effectiveness of warriors on the battlefield without compromising honor and justness. The solution was the Seraph's Heart program. Backed by the crown of Aundair, the mages contacted powerful beings from the plane of Shavarath. Convincing the most holy of the archon warriors that channeling their power to mortal paladins would serve their cause on Shavarath, as well as on Eberron, was only the first difficulty the mages faced. Wanting to draw on the archon's physical prowess as well as their brilliant minds and magical abilities, the mages created suits of full plate, attuning them to the outsiders so that the wearer would be transformed into mighty soldiers. Magicks woven into the armor also provided extensive protection to the wearer and shielded the archon from spells and effects that could be used to specifically harm it. Once complete, a paladin channeling an archon could don the armor and experience the full range of the outsider's true power. Although small, Seraph's Heart was used extensively by Aundair during the Last War. While history does not record it, a number of key battles were decided by members of the Seraph's Heart, won or lost solely on the merits of the archon's greater knowledge of tactics and the moral imperatives of the combined warriors. In the end, many of the Hearts were lost in battle. As the War became desperate, it became difficult for the holy warriors to function in the increasingly ambiguous battlefield. Archons had to fight the need to return to Shavarath, and eventually most of them did so. The sole exception was the hound archon Myrthresimes, bound to the paladin Shanaar. Shannar survived, leading Aundairian troops through Thrane and Cyre until the end of the War. Like so many others, they were lost on the Day of Mourning, somewhere in the vicinity of Making. Present Day House Orien, employed by the Crown of Aundair, has been hired to transport an enormous chunk of seemingly indestructable glass taken from the Mournlands. Moving it from Vathirond and through Breland without the knowledge of the Brelish authorities, the dragonmarked house has gone to many lengths to maintain the discretion of their client. Although those who have been involved in loading the enormous lump of glass onto the lightning rail have been sworn to secrecy, there are whispers that the dark glass can almost be seen to hold a human, trapped within. Others whisper that the creature within is no human: it seems twisted somehow, as though warped by the terrible forces of the Mournlands. And it has wings.
Toloran 12-03-07, 08:35 PM	Another possibility from a completely different direction: Some sort of artifact from ancient times. Age of Demons is a good choice, perhaps even the time of the progenetor dragons.
Wauthan 12-03-07, 09:11 PM	I can see a few relics of great interest to Aundair. 1. The military of Aundair relies heavily on elite cadres of fighter/mages. Perhaps the secret is a hundreds of crates containing bars of an odd metal. A metal that can be forged into armour with no arcane spellfailure, or perhaps spellresistance? 2. The train is transporting several young mistborn (or other wierd template) treants or dryads. These creatures are even stranger then usual because they form a bond with humanoids similar to that of Grey Renders. This would make them excellent scouts/infiltrators/assassins for use in a campaign in the Eldeen Reaches. 3. The train is transporting a huge bizarre monolith that projects an immense anti-magic field (somehow shielded from affecting the lightning rail). Aundair is not interested in using the artifact, but hiding its existance from Thrane. 4. The train is carrying hundreds of cascets. Inside them lies the bodies of Aundair soldiers that where on a secret mission inside Cyre on the Day of the Mourning. If word come out about what Aundair was doing in Cyre during year 994 it will be a political disaster for the nation, and might well start a rebellion against Queen Aurala. For added kicks make a few of the soldiers wake up from their Mournland induced coma. Hope that helps. :D
naturax 12-04-07, 07:37 PM	I was considering the "government super-soldier" archetype. But I've also had this urge to introduce a powerful Good Outsider...gone mad. My own little addition to Eberron's ethical grey areas: what to do with a powerful agent of the forces of good...who has become dangerous? Your idea is so awesome that I'm considering revising mine. I'm going to tell you a little bit more about the details behind my MacGuffin in the hopes that you can give me your thoughts on it. The big question is whether or not to maintain the typical "government super-soldier" archetype, as I proposed, or whether to subvert the trope as nicely as you have (though I hadn't considered the latter possibility until reading your post). In my campaign, Aundair gets desperate after the Eldeen Reaches revolts, so the mages of Arcanix start experimenting with creating direct conduits to the planes using the bodies of test subjects. They would have attempted this with all of the planes they have access to (which I guess is everything except Dal Quor) calling the project The Chosen. One subject in particular, who would become Fernia's Chosen, is the sister of the major NPC (who is the love-interest of my PC). But the NPC doesn't know at all about what happened to his sister. In any case, the leadership at Arcanix changed, and the one mage in charge of The Chosen Project decided to send the subjects somewhere relatively safe instead of letting them get killed. Since they all turned out poorly, keeping them conscious was out of the question, so keeping them/her petrified seemed like a good idea. The mage contacted the Queen of Stone and somehow (I'd love your ideas on this) arranged for the Chosen to be kept among the medusas' statues until such a time that the mage could cure them. I think that mage should be dead, records of the project found, and now Arcanix wants to recover the subjects before they are discovered/used against Aundair. Now the cool part is that I've decided that on Eberron, when you are petrified, what's actually happening is that your body is replaced with precisely equal parts of the element of stone from Llamania (I was gonna stick Earth on Mabar since it doesn't have its own plane, but Mabar is too evil). What happened over the course of my game is that the NPC got petrified while in Sharn, and in the time that it took the PC to fix him, he had visions of his sister, burning in perpetual torment in a place of blackness. That doesn't have to be exactly how it was for her, but it means that the key to locating precisely where his sister is being kept by the medusas will involve him being petrified again, and him coming out of it knowing exactly where to go. The NPC has no idea that his sister was even involved in the Chosen project in the first place because he ran away from home when she was still young and hasn't had any contact with her since. I like the idea of subverting the evil-experiment trope, especially since the NPC is such a scoundrel himself, but I need to keep some of the themes in place. Do you have any specific suggestions for how to modify what I've got? Thanks!
Gurv 12-05-07, 07:15 AM	They would have attempted this with all of the planes they have access to (which I guess is everything except Dal Quor) What about Xoriat? The mage contacted the Queen of Stone and somehow (I'd love your ideas on this) arranged for the Chosen to be kept among the medusas' statues until such a time that the mage could cure them. How he did it isn't the hard part. A mage powerful enough to head a project of this type could easily know of and contact Sheshka. The real question is: why did he think this was a good idea? He's obviously a odd guy, who has qualms about killing off failed experiments, but not against performing them on unwilling subjects in the first place. So he has a screw loose in the first place. Hmm. Tinkering with living creatures to create new forms of life + insanity + associates with medusa + knowledgeable of the planes = daelkyr influence. Just screams it. Yep. This guy delved too deeply into lore about modifying living creatures and was touched by the mind of a daelkyr. He didn't go nuts, exactly, but he started doing erratic things. Like calling up a medusa queen and saying "Hey, would you mind storing some of my unused super-weapons?" In fact, it might be that the experiments worked fine, but in his new mindset, he just could bear to see them put in danger. As for the Queen of Stone...who says she kept her side of the bargain and isn't using the Chosen for her own ends? The blurb on her in the ECS does say that she "plot her own bid for power". Maybe the Chosen are part of the Daughters arsenal by now. An interesting thing that I've done with petrified beings who need restoring is to break them and separate the pieces. Then, restoring them requires repairing the statue (magically, of course) before undoing the petrification. Sounds like it would work just fine with your version of petrification. I like the idea of subverting the evil-experiment trope, especially since the NPC is such a scoundrel himself, but I need to keep some of the themes in place. Do you have any specific suggestions for how to modify what I've got? Thanks! My suggestion to anyone who wants more than a black-vs-white game, where alignment is more complex is to remember think hard about the motivations of NPCs in the campaign. Then there are several ways to mix things up. Give the bad guys a "good" motivation. Then have them try to accomplish it by any means necessary. The scoundrel NPC wants to save his sister, but how far will he go and who will he betray to do it? Perhaps the new management in Arcanix isn't as bad as it sounds: maybe they want to destroy the dangerous failed experiments before someone in Droaam finds a use for them. But destroying Fernia's Chosen conflicts with the desires of the PC and the NPC love interest. And since you seem to be interested in mine: I'm not really sure what will happen with Seraph's Heart, a.k.a. Shanaar. Assuming that the PCs take note of it, but don't get caught up in it immediately (as I'm hoping), I think events will unfold this way: Shanaar is revived by the Royal Eyes. The original Seraph's Heart design was not permanent, nor meant to be. It simply allowed a channeled archon to share more of it's power with the host, and provided protection to them both. During the Mourning, Shanaar became trapped in the Plains of Glass, where the ongoing magical corruption kept him alive, but immobile, and twisted the magic of the armor. Worse, the hound archon whose channelling was enhanced by the armor was unable to remain "invisible and seamlessly merged" within Shanaar's body as the magic was twisted. They bled together. Shanaar, Myrthresimes, and the armor have become one. The new being, called The Seraph, retains most of the knowledge of both Shanaar and Myrthresimes, albeit in a changed way. The minds of outsiders and mortals are quite alien to one another, and the union of the two will likely prove itself to be unstable. It remains as loyal to Aundair as was the paladin, but the Shavarath-born mindset of the archon seems unable to view the world from a peacetime viewpoint. The Seraph retains human emotion, and considers recovery of the others from the Seraph's Heart program to be a moral imperative. But ultimately, it is unable to accept Aundair's currently neutral stance: only total victory is acceptable to it. The kicker here is that The Seraph is a lawful good being (and will remain so, not taking any actions it doesn't have to) with the interests of Aundair at heart. Its tactics and powers will reflect this, as time and again it accept surrender from it's foes and refuses to take unfair advantage of them. The real question will be "can it accomplish what 100 years of war could not"? If it can, perhaps aiding it would be wise for Aundairan interests. Or is The Seraph starting something that it cannot finish?
naturax 12-05-07, 10:29 AM	What about Xoriat? I like the idea that the Gatekeepers are keeping Xoriat away and conventional magic can't access that plane, only the Cults of the Dragon Below can with their clerics. I have a reservation, however: see below. How he did it isn't the hard part. A mage powerful enough to head a project of this type could easily know of and contact Sheshka. The real question is: why did he think this was a good idea? He's obviously a odd guy, who has qualms about killing off failed experiments, but not against performing them on unwilling subjects in the first place. So he has a screw loose in the first place. Hmm. Tinkering with living creatures to create new forms of life + insanity + associates with medusa + knowledgeable of the planes = daelkyr influence. Just screams it. Yep. This guy delved too deeply into lore about modifying living creatures and was touched by the mind of a daelkyr. He didn't go nuts, exactly, but he started doing erratic things. Like calling up a medusa queen and saying "Hey, would you mind storing some of my unused super-weapons?" In fact, it might be that the experiments worked fine, but in his new mindset, he just could bear to see them put in danger. I know the project could easily go this way, and the mage could easily be taking pages from Mordain's book, but I like your theme of the project being a Good one. Why not have the mage try to create a project that would be used to save Aundair, and then become attached to the humanity of the subjects and decide to not use them as tools of war? Maybe sending them off to Droaam in the middle of the war while being heavily scrutinized by the Minister of Magic (the Queen's brother who heads up Arcanix) to be kept by the Queen of Stone was just the best the mage could do. Now I'm definitely going to say that the Queen of Stone is a tool of the Daelkyr lord who's deal is stone: the one that created basilisks and cockatrices and stuff (I mean c'mon, a stone chicken? That's the work of the Daelkyr right there) and I even go so far in my game to say that medusas are aberrations too (I mean, c'mon, reptile people with snakes for hair? You get the idea). As for the Queen of Stone...who says she kept her side of the bargain and isn't using the Chosen for her own ends? The blurb on her in the ECS does say that she "plot her own bid for power". Maybe the Chosen are part of the Daughters arsenal by now. I like this twist. There's no reason for the Queen of Stone not to use the situation to her advantage. I've already established that the NPC's sister is currently petrified (which is why the NPC saw a vision of her when he was petrified) but there could be other members of the Chosen project who the Queen of Stone is tinkering with. Maybe the PC will be able to receive information and rumours about strange new creatures serving the Queen of Stone? Why would they end up in the arsenal of the Daughters if the Queen of Stone is vying for her own power? Perhaps the new management in Arcanix isn't as bad as it sounds: maybe they want to destroy the dangerous failed experiments before someone in Droaam finds a use for them. But destroying Fernia's Chosen conflicts with the desires of the PC and the NPC love interest. I like that angle a lot. I should probably come up with descriptions of them so that the players can hear about them/run into them/thwart them. Any good sources in any of the Eberron books for the type? And since you seem to be interested in mine... I really appreciate you sharing your ideas with me! Although I'm not going to be able to use the Mournland, I really like what you've done and it's helping me out a lot with my plot ideas. So thanks again!