[OOC] Worlds of Fire

[Totem]

Originally Posted by Totem

The eventual success is fairly overwhelming; the Dark One moves in at the critical moment, the Blazen are pulled out and back into the Corridor. Their universe is still fairly unstable, but after a bit of observation the Powers That Be declare that it is collapsing quickly and won't produce anything that could pose a threat before it burns itself out entirely.

Returning from an observation post, the players are present when an emergency is declared: the Amber Watchtower, one of the numerous Harbours that surrounded the Front Line, has just vanished, entirely...

Worlds of Fire 2, which someone else is more than welcome to adapt to their own ends, was based around the effort to restore the Amber Watchtower. In the prologue, the players join the team sent to investigate:

The Ballard of Years (A Gungnir class warship) is deployed with the players and several other teams. After a chance to introduce new players and so forth they receive a quick briefing on what the Amber Watchtower is and what the situation is (no contact, scanning is having trouble picking things up, etc).

They arrive to find the planet devastated; it is in the middle of a nuclear winter, and has clearly been that way for years, despite contact being lost mere hours before. It takes a bit of reasoning, but everyone agrees that history must have been altered. There is no sign of the Watchtower or the Halo, both of which had been under construction at least for over a century.

Equipping teams with environmental suits, the players get sent down to the surface to investigate.

The scene that greets the players when they arrive is one of devastation. Surface temperature is just below freezing, and the lighting is mostly provided by a grav-globe and the team's own lights. They need to search around for any signs of what happened. This can be physical signs (search, scrounge, observation, PER), magic (History, etc), psi (psychometry), hardware (computer components, mechanisms, etc). There is something to find for everyone to find.

Regardless of the results the players encounter a large creature that proceeds to attack them. This is a Whey'doh (imagine a spider-wasp with an eight metre wingspan, a plethora of cyborg upgrades, and a habit of compulsive desecration), which is elderly, wounded, and badly equipped. Taking it out is easier than fighting a normal Whey'doh, but is still tricky. Defeating it reasonably intact will provide a greater degree of information about what has been going on.

This campaign covers several acts, each one focusing on a different era of the Amber Watchtower's history, where history has been changed. In each case the changes push further back (or forward, I never quite decided) in time, forcing the players to keep moving in order to counter these changes which produce progressively worse scenarios each time.

The Prologue introduces the world that the Amber Watchtower was built on, and the state that it has been reduced to following an attack by the Whey'doh which it should have been able to hold off. With this discovery, and the linked discovery that time travel is only possible back to six points in the planet's history, the players are sent back to investigate and deal with the situation.

The situation has come about because of a Time Wyrm, an abstract lifeform, one of the Pantheon of Discord. Previously this, the last of its kind, was held prisoner by Fate. When Fate was reinstated following the Blazen war the first thing that it did was to unleash a few 'pets' to repay the mortals and the Powers That Be who had dared to imprison it. Discovering this, and working out what to do about it, means resolving the changes to history in each era, before moving onto the bigger issue.