Riddles of the Face in the Mountain

The players in my Pathfinder game came across the Face in the Mountain earlier tonight, an ancient being from before the time that magic was split into arcane and divine. It answered one question from each of them, replying in riddles. I know that most of my players didn’t write down the riddles, so this is more for them than anything else.

 

Questions are in bold, the answers are below them.

 

Gwydion Haalwya: Where is the nearest God in the Box?

One day a small light asked Ummon,
Where may I find myself?
Ummon said, Look within.
He looked within himself
And saw.

 

Doctor Vecca: What is Skeeve Redeye currently scheming?

The water runs with bloody eyes
The book, the key, the pawn
He walks among the cypress there
The first, the third, and gone

 

Kurth: Do you know Youser Machieff?

Small men walk on small things below
Small as ants, though some still fly
With wings too broad for their shoulders
They fly, and crash, and die

 

Doctor Clyde Wilson: How may I cure my ancestral disease?

The man in gold came with a gift
But the swordsman knew no gift was free
He sailed beyond the bitter sea
Now flies as ash upon the breeze
The flowers grow in that shade
You will see them on your knees

 

Django: How may I better myself and my ability to kill people?

When the world began
The one who walked the burning earth
Made seven swords to kill the gods
When a small world ended men who knew
Made seven spears to pierce the sky
At the next dawn a man who thought he knew pain
Razed seven cities to the ground
All seven, now, unbound

 

Michael Ramos: “What will be my greatest obstacle in this mission?”

The soldier’s son walks streets of gold
The child of lore has left the fold
The crows that follow are the crows that see
Daggers in the wake as you bend the knee

Sanctrian

I have a massive post about my trip to PAX East last weekend that I’ve been writing up in what little spare time I’ve had recently. This is not that post. This is, instead, intended for my Pathfinder players.

This is a visual representation of some of the stuff found when the players went through the scrolls and books of Youser Macheiff, author, traveling scribe and possible druid, currently tied to a chair after being abducted from the Watershed Royal inn. Click on the image to see the full sized version, as usual.

The New Party

The Pathfinder game started last Saturday. It went well, though it was a little slow at first. I had the brilliant idea of having the characters start separate from each other in several different groups, which turned out to not work so well, but as soon as everyone met up and introduced themselves things started rolling (best introduction: Gwydion Haalwya siccing his summoned dog on the first person through the door of the inn. There were good reasons for it at the time).

Now, the first adventure hasn’t quite wrapped up yet–there’s still some interesting stuff that I want to cover when we play on Saturday–but I am going to introduce you to my first impressions of the characters. Some of them wrote backstories together so they could start the game knowing each other, which made things easier.

 

First up: the minigroup I’ve been calling the Holy Trio, consisting of the half-orc inquisitor Kurth, the human paladin Michael and the halfling rogue Doctor Vecca.

Kurth is played by Peter, who last game was Sh’vass, an elven cleric with a strength of four, and I think the ability to actually carry shit may have gone to his head. His equipment includes a scimitar, a shield, a repeating crossbow, a boar spear and a handheld battering ram. He seems to be the leader of this little group, if only by virtue of being the shoutiest.

Michael is basically Marcus Bighammer again, except with a bow instead of a hammer. He is wholly devoted to shooting motherfuckers with arrows, and he does it very well.

Doctor Vecca has, thus far, not done much damage, mostly due to poor rolls.  I get the feeling that he doesn’t like being in the wilderness, where there aren’t any prosthetic limbs or other weird tech to tinker with. He’s an aspiring artificer turned to theft due to desperation after being kicked out of Veras. He rides around with the inquisitor and the paladin because they need his skills sometimes and let him take most of the treasure.

 

The next little group is the bro team of the half-elf summoner Gwydion Haalwya and the human alchemist Doctor Clyde Wilson.

Gwydion is crazy charming, tall and handsome, and tends to get caught up in what’s happening (inside joke for my players: “DOG!). He’s a summoner, which is an interesting class in Pathfinder that’s gimmick is a sort of symbiotic relationship with an outsider called an eidelon. Gwydion’s eidelon is a catlike creature called Inoreppep, though he can evolve it into something else as he gains levels if he wants. I still think he should try the double jousting thing (Gwydion carries a lance while riding the eidelon, which also has a lance), despite how difficult/ineffective it might be.

Doctor Wilson, meanwhile, is just crazy. He’s a mad scientist experimenting on himself and those around him, trying desperately to find a cure to an ancestral disease that he knows will kill him someday. It’s hard to feel sorry for him, though, because he’s also kind of an asshole, what with all the racism and selfishness and property damage.

 

The remaining three characters started singly, without any specific backstory to connect them. They are the human fighter Eva, the half-orc barbarian Django, and the Silent Magus, who doesn’t really have a name.

Eva is a very small woman with a very large axe and blue-dyed hair, and who is apparently entirely comprised of muscle. Her light load carrying capacity is actually more than she herself weighs, which I thought was impressive. She spent the first session dealing massive damage to damn near everything and getting a little freaked out by the alchemist and summoner (especially the inexplicable appearance of the Attack Corgis and the Bloody Skeletons).

Django is a half-orc, though he looks more human than orc thanks to surgical experiments performed on him by the people who brought him up. He’s also a barbarian with a scythe, which seems to suggest an enraged farmer. Aside from the scythe, he’s pretty well equipped and reasonable. His player doesn’t quite know how Rage works yet, which was a problem, but he acquitted himself fairly well nonetheless.

The Silent Magus is a frost elf who doesn’t say much. He’s a magus, another non-core class, which is basically a guy with a sword in one hand and a spell in the other. He seems to be taking an Eastern theme with his equipment, wielding a nine-ring broadsword and wearing armor that I can’t pronounce. It’s interesting RPing with him, as the character doesn’t say anything when he can help it. Sam, the player, spends a lot of time describing what he’s doing rather than talking–“I nod,” or “I glance at the door significantly,” that sort of thing.

 

And that makes eight. It’s a low-magic party, which is going to be very interesting: no dedicated caster means no access to the highest level spells, which makes enemy wizards and sorcerers more of a threat. Which is as it should be, I feel. This Saturday we’ll finish up the mystery of the village of Carstan, and I’ll post a summary of the first adventure shortly after that. Stay tuned to this channel.

The New Game

A vote was held last week on what we wanted to play next quarter. The decision was that everyone wanted to play a new D&D-style campaign set in the same world as the old one. So, while it looks like we’re not going to be revisiting the adventures of our former party of characters, we do have an interesting collection of new ones to see through this crazy land of mine. We’re playing Pathfinder instead of D&D this time, since after a cursory review of the books it seems that Pathfinder is pretty much D&D 3.5 except with most of the annoying little problems fixed.

Before we begin playing, however, we need to figure out where in the world the game is going to be set. I asked my players, and the response I got most often was either “I don’t care” or “I don’t know enough about the world to choose a place.” This post is devoted to fixing that latter problem.

The following is addressed to the players.

The World:

On the continent of Lorin

The Illarym Empire: You guys know this place. You trekked all over it during the last campaign, from the northern border to Tahmoor. Big, corrupt, imperialistic and religious. The original Illarym people, the desert tribes who banded together and began expanding to form the Empire, bear the distinction of being one of very few peoples to avoid being conquered and enslaved by the elves of the Zancharian Empire, long ago.

The Shattered Lands: To the north of the Empire. Formerly the kingdoms of Old Maltin, Talidor and Vos Desperante, before the elves came across the mountains and threw down those thrones a thousand years ago. Now a land of broken soldiers, warlords, ghosts and old magic. Main exports are refugees, plagues and counterfeit money. You guys spent a lot of time here last campaign, mostly hunting down the various bandit lords and murderers who’d pissed off the Empire enough to earn a bounty.

The Protectorate of the Blood: To the north of the Shattered Lands. Brutal and haughty, claiming dominion over all the world but receiving respect only from those within arm’s reach. Widely regarded as part of the Shattered Lands by most outsiders, though not by those who actually live in the Shattered Lands.

The Sunset Jungles: To the south of both the Empire and the Kingdom of Merdallan. Brightly colored vegetation, lots of poisonous stuff, tigers and mad tattooed elves.

Verdan: To the west of the Empire, home of steampunk and magic. Plays host to both the Monks of the Ascension and the city of Veras, both of which were founded by and are mostly comprised of outsiders to the island. The natives are rumored to be cannibals. You guys went there last campaign, but not for long.

Arun: Island/continent to the southwest of the Empire. Land of insane cultists, time-ninjas, machine-gods and centuries-old blood feuds. Main architectural and clothing style is sort of Chinese, with an emphasis on masks and poisoned needles. Weird place. This is where that assassin guy who Strider shot through the head on the pirate’s airship was from.

The Kingdom of Merdallan: To the east, and sworn enemy of, the Illarym Empire, thanks in large part to the Kingdom’s former status as a slave-state of the Zancharian Empire a thousand years ago. This is a land of dark forests and old castles and old nobility, with heavily-armored knights in the north and skilled duelists in the south. This Kingdom has fought several wars with the Illarym, and while they haven’t always come out on top, at the very least they’ve never been conquered. Currently, Merdallan is a kingdom without an actual king, the royal line having been exterminated in a bloody failed coup almost a century ago. The Chamber of Nobles keeps the peace, for the most part, but the entire place is a powder-keg waiting to erupt into civil war. Why it hasn’t already remains a mystery.

The Merchant’s Water: To the east of the Kingdom, the Merchant’s Water is a collection of four (or so) major city-states situated on a couple of major islands. Ships laden with wealth greater than empires’ sail across the dark waters here, sticking tight to their established routes and keeping a wary eye on the unexplored islands and the depths below. Bitter trade wars are fought in silence every day, black magic is practiced by islander shamans and merchant princes alike, and gold can buy damn near everything. The major city-states are Buron-on-the-Water, Arypso of the Golden Towers, Lomar (home of the Craftsmen’s Guild assassins) and the exotic Tyb. Much of the Water remains unexplored and unmapped, with old Zancharian ruins littering the islands seemingly at random.

Ver Arcana: A city situated to the north of the Kingdom, in land that the Merdallans only recently stopped trying to claim is theirs. Ver Arcana is a university town, built around the University Arcana, where students are trained in the mystical arts in an attempt to better understand the fabric of reality.

Elsinier: Home of the frost elves and, in their eyes at least, the last bastion of true Elfkind. The frost elves, unlike their jungle cousins, remained true to their ideals when the Zancharian Empire fell during Old Jack’s War. They believe that they are the superior race, that all other races were made by the gods to serve them, and cannot understand why no one else takes them seriously. They spend most of their time building palaces out of ice and magic, conspiring against each other and fighting the various barbarian tribes that perpetually raid the edges of their land.

 

Other Lands:

The Dead Continent: Formerly Zanchar, seat of the High Elves and homeland of an empire that stretched across the known world. The entire continent was blasted to dust and glass during Old Jack’s War, about which little is known. Now home mostly to necromancers and things too foul to find a place anywhere else.

Deslocke: This continent is to the north of Zanchar. Not much is known about it.

I was thinking about starting the new campaign in the Merchant’s Water, but if anyone else has any preference feel free to chime in. I’ll take a vote and we can decide where to start playing when we come back to school in a week.

In the meantime, some art. Click to embiggen.