[OOC] Worlds of Fire

[Totem]

Quick note: in the original version of this plan there would have been two attempts to get to see the Dark One (aka Patrick Wolf's actual self). The first of these ended in failure because of the Dark One's presence. The second was a success after the Fundamentals gave someone (nominally one of the players) a Presence in Time, making them partly immortal and able to resist the overwhelming presence.

In the event that the players choose to go back to the Dungeon World first they get briefed on the following details:

Since they escaped from that universe it has been surrounded by a nearly impenetrable barrier; all attempts to enter that world meet with failures ranging from the merely painful up to two fatalities. The only time that this barrier has weakened at all has been when the players have been jumping between worlds nearby. The Bane of Asgard has been refitted to make a slow approach through the Void; if the barrier is lowered it will continue, otherwise it will be able to withdraw safely.

On the approach the players can watch as they approach the Dungeon World. The barrier does indeed drop to allow them inside and the Bane passes through.

There is an abrupt discontinuity.

The next thing that the players are aware of is the Bane, now badly damaged and running fast away from the Dungeon World. Some of them are injured, at least one of them is in a totally different part of the ship...

Once they've recovered they make their way back to the Western Harbour and discover that they were off the grid for at least six hours and that no record exists, either in their memories or in the ship's records, of what happened during the time that was missing. They can extrapolate some things; the damage indicates a prolonged fight since the shields were penetrated multiple times and many areas of the ship have been damaged and repaired. Fuel consumption and dust marks on the landing craft indicate that three landing vehicles were deployed carrying marines. Ammunition expenditure indicates that whilst the ship took a pounding, there was a sufficient ground based fight for all of the players to be running low on ammo, if not to have run out altogether.

Onwards: Following their encounter with the Fundamentals...

The approach to the Dungeon World is as before. The principle difference is that when the Bane enters the Dungeon World there is no discontinuity; instead any players with Presence in Time very abruptly take a quite significant weight upon them. Everything in the ship shudders and then settles down as the Bane enters the atmosphere of the planet.

It quickly becomes obvious that this isn't where they were the first time that they turned up; the landscape is the same, but now the world is populated and, significantly, there is actually a sky rather than just blankness. What is visible in the sky isn't inspiring of hope; shapes, some faint and others very definite, fill the sky, moving seemingly at random. A double helix made of light twists across above the Bane, whilst regular shapes flow over and around each other. The disturbing aspect of this is that whilst these shapes are clearly regular ones, none of them have angles within them that add up to 360° as they should.

The players are able to land on an island that seems to have been marked out for them; it is marked with the Sign and surrounded by several circles of Signs making it a target.

As they land the cloud from before moves in, surrounding the island but not encroaching on it. In one place it settles down to the ground and a Human walks out of it.

This is one of the incarnations of Patrick Wolf; this is the only way that the Dark One can speak to the players.

The Dark One wants to escape; this world bridges the Corridor, forming a link between the Past and the Present. When the Past ended to create the Present they tried to escape their own destruction in the process. Some of them were lost, some of them escaped. And some of them settled down in a universe that was very hot; the Blazen are the descendants of the Angels who settled and adapted to their circumstances.

The Dark One offers a deal: if provided with access to the Blazen, it could draw them back into the Past. The power of the Blazen though is such that it would not be able to do this directly; it would require a conduit to operate through in order to achieve this.

Ultimately, if the players cannot work anything out, the Dark One suggests using a mutual enemy; Chu'dam is still held in storage and if released onto a world on the Front Line would create an aggressive minority which the Blazen would use as a path in themselves. The Dark One could then use this link to get through and pull the Blazen out.

[Totem]

Chu'dam is a world-jumper, and somewhat pragmatic, and so will object to being used in this manner, especially since it is likely that it will be dragged along with the Blazen back into the Past. It therefore isn't possible to simply break open the container and release Chu'dam.

The players must prepare the way. This requires: scouting out the area and finding a suitable group to unleash Chu'dam onto; preparing the group to accept Chu'dam's presense (mentally and socially); binding Chu'dam to them; unleashing Chu'dam. A close watch must then be kept for the presence of the Blazen. Once the Blazen are spotted, the Dark One can be called in to deal with the situation.


The eventual choice of world for this was still to be made. That it needed to be somewhere with an overwhelming monoculture isn't in doubt, which disallows most modern or contemporary settings. The thought was therefore to aim for a Human Hive/ Technocracy/ Theocracy setting where there would be a very definite culture that the players would have to infiltrate and manipulate in order to find a place to safely unleash Chu'dam. This means it would probably be unfamiliar and players relying on anything that would make them stand out would be at an absolute disadvantage.

Going about this would have been potentially tricky, probably long-winded, and could easily have resulted in the entire culture turning against the players very violently if they were discovered. It would probably have been nice, and potentially very successful, but... Wow, it would have been awkward to run if it went wrong.



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...

[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.