Tag: Matthew Keevil

Another day, another session, and as our heroes are left with some time on their hands awaiting their audience with the Brave Sultana during their time in Dis they’ve decided on personal quests to undertake in the meantime. The first was that of our resident Thief, Eldon Tosscobble, to procure a hamper of the finest delicacies in the land, the quests of halflings being somewhat less expansive yet infinitely more pleasing to the palate than those of other folk. A peacock-feathered elf in the Avenue of Spices, a famed covered market of the parish, fulfilled his desires but would accept only memories in payment. 

“A painful memory, if you please, there’s quite the market for them at the moment.”

“The face of my estranged father, over his shoulder as he leaves for the last time.”

“And what makes this memory especially potent?”

The answers Eldon gave will provide fertile fuel for a later adventure, but for now we move on. Next came the deed of the Cleric, Siggrun Ironshod, who in making some enquiries found that the parish of Hollow Steel once housed a temple dedicated to his lord Havok, god of bloody conquest, that has since fallen into disrepair, and worse, become desecrated by demons of fire and metal who are using it as a workshop for Hell’s armies, corrupting the once sacred forge. While scouting the area Sir Gideon the Paladin was nearly strangled to death on the rooftops by a chain devil but fortunately it was stunned by the stern Fighter Ragnar with a blast from an octopus-folk radium sceptre he had acquired in earlier adventures and finished off with a bit of swordwork backed by righteous anger.

With Eldon doing the breaking-and entering, the party uncovered documents indicating that this was no mere ordinary temple, but that its forge was blessed by Havok himself in the making of weapons of war and that no enemy of the Bloody God could stand its heat when it was blessed by one of his anointed. Disguising Siggrun as a chain devil and equipping him with a magic item held by Eldon, The Chains of the Drowned Man, which permitted the wearer to move ethereally, Ragnar and Sir Gideon formed the distraction, charging into the fray to smite the demonic hordes whilst Siggrun used the disguise to get close enough to the forge to reconsecrate it. After getting stuck halfway through the wall and having to convince a surprised ( and fortunately rather dim) fire imp that yes, chain devils can in fact do that, he managed to extricate himself and begin the rite, filling the temple with a ruby-red light and the sounds of distant battle that drove the demons shrieking from its halls… at this point, the Inevitable who had been overseeing the temple’s orderly decline into obscurity took exception.

“Excessive divine magic detected, initiating countermeasures.” It intoned dolefully as it shattered Siggrun’s spells one after another. “The restoration of this site violates entropic pattern ordnances, desist immediately.”

One by one the party’s blades crashed and clattered uselessly against the entity’s body of actualised Law, failing to do more than scrape against its axiomatic hardness. “The Forge,” Siggrun declared “There must be a way to harness its power against this invader.” And so he searched, and so it was true. The proper prayer intoned, the weapons of the heroes reflected Havok’s light, carving armour of pure order into shingles with the chaos found in the midst of conquest.

Of Ragnar and Sir Gideon’s own quests, we shall have to wait and see.

So my first game involving the Planarch Codex went rather swimmingly, we started off with the Indigo Galleon intro adventure but by the time our group sorted out the situation with the dread captain Hobart, the octopus-men and the Imperial soldiers I was left with nothing much to do with the abandoned dwarven mine part of the adventure, but they still knew it existed and wanted to investigate anyway… time to drop in Dis!

So rather than the escapee pirates the adventure originally calls for, they find the place filled with the curious inhabitants of the Ravenous City, a diverse bunch indeed and much more fun to describe than regular old pirates. A pair of sibling elf/shoggoth hybrids were particularly noteworthy. Fortunately, the party paladin had taken as part of his quest to investigate the mine the power to transcend language and after a few bloody misunderstandings were able to ascertain that the people of Dis were not actively hostile, despite their monstrous countenances. Rather they were just in the process of looting the abandoned mine before it was fully consumed by Dis and became part of the Sultana’s realm and subject to her laws (of which prohibition against looting is one).

As the villagers they had just saved from almost certain poultry, nay, calimari, still used the mine as a shelter when the octopus-folk got irate, the party was needless to say a bit put out at the idea of it being swallowed off the map by a hellish multiplanar urban organism and set out to bring their complaint before the Sultana. So, after perusing the impromtu mining/looting/thrift store operation that the Dissians had opened up (and joining in on the action themselves, getting into a few fights for claim-jumping, most of which ended in fisticuffs rather than blades), they sallied forth through the portal at the very bottom of the complex and met with one of the Sultana’s mysterious Road Wardens who agreed to carry their petition and would meet them in three days to be brought before the Sultana to make their case.

I have to say, I absolutely love the Planarch Codex and Dis in particular, I’ve been throwing in bits of everything from Perdido Street Station to Imajica and Planescape: Torment and it all works, the world building is going swimmingly and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next. This DW game has been the best game I’ve ever GM’d by a country mile, both I and the players are having a blast with it.