Roll 2 Dodge: Prismpunk

Zerovirus wrote:Alright, planned story. This thing's LOOOOOONG- and even then I'm sure I forgot something. If there's an issue I haven't made clear, ask- I'll either tell you that I haven't planned that out yet, or I'll try to remember the plans I made for it.

So, let's start from where we left off- the Golem Tournament.

The golem tournament's culprits were the guys from the Myriad Weave- I forgot their names, but their plan was to sabotage the thing that Tiamat had hidden under his Iron Throne. The thing in question was the... well, it had several names. Heaven Forge, Soul Engine, Heaven Network Primary Node... etc.

The Heaven Network still existed, back from when Silas Marnahwey tried to construct it. Its purpose was to suck souls from a nearby area of effect in. Sounds pretty evil, right? The intended purpose from my standpoint was to make you suspicious of Tiamat. Why would he need SOULS as power, when he's already so powerful? Is he feeding his Spiritlash for some reason? Secondary plot developments and sidequests would push you towards a confrontation with the Emperor of Vosalsvrax, at which point the truth would be revealed.

As it turns out, Tiamat WAS working for a greater good. The Myriad Weave (whose organization purpose is to resist the Heaven Network in general through terrorism and assassination) didn't understand the Heaven Network in its full depth. The Heaven Network is not an engine where fuel is consumed; it is a turbine where the flow remains constant. Souls placed in the Network are preserved, which prevents the Gravekeeper from getting his hands on them.

Tiamat Venthor's real goal is to prevent the souls from destruction in the afterlife; after all, the afterlife used to be a paradise before the Gravekeeper showed up. In addition, to use the turbine metaphor, the amount of power that souls produced through faith- their collective Faithpool- could be tapped without destroying the soul itself. Tiamat hopes that by showing the deceased souls the potential for a true heaven, he could gain their respect and trust and thus gain power over time.

And in due time, he would have more souls than the Gravekeeper himself, if he expanded the Heaven Network over the entire planet and denied the Gravekeeper every soul. He could then break into the Absolute Zone and defeat the Gravekeeper in single combat, and in doing so return the afterlife to its natural state.

But if you will remember, the Gravekeeper said that he was compelled to uphold his work despite his own distaste for it. It turns out that the Gravekeeper is not the final evil of this world either; there is a great power outside of our universe that desires to consume it and end the existence that we know.

This Great Power- The EverNaught, The Perfect Undoing, The True Righteous Emptiness- Entropy- has consumed universes for beyond the concept of time. It latches onto universes, and drains them dry; in a multiverse where the number of existing universes is finite, it will reach the universe of Prismpunk at some point.

The Gravekeeper, in fact, is not a solitary entity. In another universe- I would call it 'a universe that existed eons ago' except that time has no meaning in the multiverse- Entropy descended into a contained universe and was detected by its inhabitants.

The inhabitants recognized its nature- its world-devouring nature- and vowed to fight back. Where once they were fragmented, now they united and fought the living elemental entities that swarmed over their lands; nebulous gaps in existence were hunted down and crushed by science and magic.

But it was not enough. They lost the war- how could anything defeat a primal thing beyond existence? All you could do was prick it, so that it drew back in a reflex. Its body was not in that universe- most of the form of Entropy dwelled in the between-universe space, and nothing could touch it there. And so, that universe collapsed in on itself as the last bit of vitality was drained from it, despite all of their efforts.

But the spirit of the people did not die, even as their bodies turned to dust.

They bound together- their souls amalgamated into one unified being- a being with all the magical potential and prowess of the entire collective civilization of this universe. He was born from the grave of an entire race, and he was the last keeper of their existence. He was the last testimonial to the universe's existence.

He had no name- he was formed from all beings and all names. He eventually titled himself the Gravekeeper, and he departed to another universe, this one pristine and untouched by Entropy. He inserted himself at the dawn of time, and guided the people of it. He seeded the Prism. He taught men the first magic. And it was he, at the dawn of time, who wove the magical net that would become an afterlife- and it too was he, when the race of humans had learned to use magic and to channel the power of the soul, who turned the afterlife into a nightmarish hell, a soul grinder, nothing more than a funnel of pure energy for the Gravekeeper to absorb.

The power was necessary for the Gravekeeper; through all the millennia of waiting and working, he had never once lost hope. His race had never once tasted any afterlife; death was a true end for them, and the Gravekeeper did not see an afterlife as a right. He intended on waging war with Entropy once more, some day, when Entropy descended upon the universe that he now resided in.

Unfortunately, while he didn't see the afterlife as a right, Tiamat Venthor did. Or more accurately, Tiven did.

What?

Don't tell me you didn't see it coming. The name was OBVIOUS. Ti-Ven. Tiamat Venthor.

At some point in the story, Tiven- perhaps due to his own chronomantic magic going wrong- is thrown back into the past. Three hundred years or so, to be exact. Seeing an opportunity to make a change, remembering his own stint into the Absolute Zone, and realizing that Tiamat Venthor did not exist at that time led him to understand that he must BECOME Tiamat Venthor.

So he did. He started toying with his Spiritlash, and eventually configured it to interface with the last Heaven Network node, buried under a small city named Nirvana. After defeating Emperor Vosalsvik in single battle, he made Nirvana his capital for obvious reasons.

But was he alone in this endeavor? Nope. Alchione, for whatever reason and with whatever method, went back with him. She grew into the Radiant Queen.

Alc-Hione. Halcia Hioneus.

Alchione's secret to surviving the three hundred years was slightly different. She divested her mind from her body, and with it her soul; her soul was hidden in an underground chamber, tied to a spirit-tree. If you will recall, Alchione alchemized a blood-red seed at the Alchemy Forge- in fact, she alchemized it by combining a fytevomantically prepared seed- and a drop of her own blood. That was the seed, though it required a few more enchantments for it to truly become a spirit-seed.

The system of spirit-trees is such that, upon death, the soul is unaffected, as it resides within the tree itself. The tree's roots are generally connected to life-pods which grow new bodies for the soul to inhabit; Halcia Hioneus generally went through such a body every four or five years.

What all this means for your characters?

Well, after the tournament, Venthor will deploy you to the border to protect your outpost. After you fight off an attack led by Sanja, you will be ordered to ATTACK while pretending that you are merely retaliating to an invasion- something that you most decidedly did NOT sign up for. You are instructed to attack and plant a mysteriously encoded magic device in enemy territory, then retreat and make it seem as if you have been pushed back.

The magic device is another node of the Heaven Network. Tiamat is pulling out all the stops to spread the area of effect of the Heaven Network everywhere. However, you don't know that. Depending on how you react, I planned to force you to do greater and greater atrocities against Raitala in order to expand the Heaven Network Effect, expecting that you'll snap and rebel against Venthor eventually.

When that happens, you will be drawn into direct combat with Venthor himself in some way as a boss-battle. I'm not sure how that'd happen- but I'm confident in my DMing abilities to make it happen.

After the battle- whether you win or lose doesn't matter at all- Venthor spills the beans about the Heaven Network and his plan against the Gravekeeper.

From there you have a choice- go with the plan, or leave Venthor to his own conspiracies?

It doesn't matter, in the end- because if you refuse to help Tiamat, the Gravekeeper shows up in person to collect the debt on Venthor's existence, at that point. You've drained too much of his power in combat, and the time-dilation effect was weakened to the point of alerting the Gravekeeper that Tiamat has been WAY OVERDUE on his spiritual payment.

And thus you're sort of forcibly dragged into the conflict even if you don't want to be. Of course, that's if you don't help; if you join with Tiamat's plans, eventually he and your party will attack the Gravekeeper by breaking into the Absolute Zone.

In the end, the effect is the same. You and Tiamat take on the Gravekeeper.

Once the Gravekeeper is defeated, he reveals everything to you.

And then what else can you do but take that which has and will destroy entire planes of existence, to fight for your own survival and prosperity? What can you do but challenge the inevitable, and prove to it that the total sum of the human spirit is far greater than any natural limit that can be imposed upon it?

And upon that note, Prismpunk would have ended.

I probably wouldn't try to DM the battle. There's no way I could write about a war on that scale of magnitude- I couldn't even get close. I planned Prismpunk to end at the point when you- and the unified souls of every living thing that has ever existed on the face of the planet- launch out to challenge the greatest limit, the unsurpassable boundary- and, perhaps, to surpass it.

Every character and NPC would be there. Every single being you've encountered, ever, be they alive, dead, from the past, from the future, what have you- they would all be there. This is the symbolic culmination of all the human souls uniting in an afterlife that transcends life and death, in order to defeat a common enemy.

Kelgadaza would be there. Torly Sarmo would be there. Rein De Detun. Silas Marnahwey. Vornimund Dorgoth. Jelt, Konau, and Luka. Sanja, Melbin Luvidda, Roltam Nisstrad, Saneferu, Sholo Nabite, Kohu of the Everthrive Tree, Enoti the Singularity, Quantum Emperor Vosalsvik, Rageheir Cibrok, Sythril Virdo, Zeirkio, Ralt Pamodian the Hidden Knight, Togoko Arune, Metiphol the Precise and Mortisha the Black- as well as dozens of other NPCs that don't even exist as concepts in my mind, but would undoubtedly be conjured up from the depths of creativity when the story called for them...

I don't know if you'd be satisfied with the ending- I suspect that many would have demanded that I continue on and write the final fight. But the thing is, I don't know if I want the ending to be so concrete. There is no given that you would win this final fight, and I don't know if I want there to be a final outcome to this. What shall you do once you defeat Entropy and achieve perfect multiuniversal Eudaimonia, then?

And so that was my plot summary. Hopefully it answered a lot of questions. There's some loose ends I didn't tie up in there, such as exactly what the Guild of Mentia Exalt was doing, what the Inkhearts' agenda is, what Oranen Ispil was doing, who Saneferu truly was, and what the Abstraction Soldiers were.

To be honest, I don't know the answers to all of them. I didn't know much about what the Guild was doing other than it was pretty bad- maybe it was just generic 'take over the world' stuff. I didn't get to flesh all that out well. I will tell you what I did flesh out, though.

Oranen Ispil was gifted with perfect knowledge of the Inkhearts' Agenda, which basically amounted to 'make the heaven network work more efficiently, by killing populations that live nearby if necessary'. Though we know that at the least this isn't too immoral, seeing as each Heaven Node is a paradise for its inhabitant souls, the Inkhearts wouldn't have cared whether it was moral or not, and thus were not informed of this qualification which made the entire setup moral. Thus, Oranen was horrified- his mind literally broke as a result of his injuries combined with this revelation, and, knowing that Tiven was the same being as Tiamat Venthor, flew off to Nirvana to try and stop all this somehow. Chances are that he'd have shown up in the Golem Tournament in some capacity or other as a spanner in the works.

The inkhearts were created in the future, and later sent to the past; chances are that your party, if you looked hard enough, might have found inkheart reproduction chambers in the bottom of the castle. The Inkhearts were the primary tool that Venthor used to pave his way to domination, three hundred years in the past.

As for the Abstraction Soldiers, they were seven beings that embodied primal concepts. They were created by and served Tiven as well; Tiven's father, Saneferu, was the Abstraction Of Diligence. He wasn't actually Tiven's father in biological terms- he's closer to a construct of magical power given physical form- but he did adopt the child when he found it laying on a road one night. Tiven's biological origin would never be made clear- in fact, I didn't have anything planned for it at all. Tiven was just an orphan who happened to be in the right place at the right time.

The Seven Abstraction Soldiers were:

Saneferu of Diligence
Clesulard of Temperance
Deinarce of Charity
Lotithern of Patience
Taesworet of Kindness
Veturion of Humility
Kiseidia of Chastity

The purpose of the seven were twofold; First, to serve Tiven in all things, and Second, to find a way from which humanity might be freed from the yoke of death and to fight the ever-present spectre of death at all cost and at all times.

Of the seven, only five remain. Taesworet was slain in combat trying to defend a healers' manse, in the old Arcanum War, and Veturion was bound as a magical elemental to a golem and forced to slave for Vornimund Dorgoth's technocracy.

Saneferu was the only one fleshed out into an actual character. He wielded a Singing Blade (which he polymorphed into a spear to avoid detection). More details below, in the Singing Swords section.

The Eternal Pandora was just a really really big magic power source. I didn't really flesh out its origin too much, but it was used to power a floating city whose economy was similar to that of an MMORPG, not any real-life economic model. Rein De Detun's true soul was bound to this city in some way or other. This floating city was known as Haystria, though most commoners thought Haystria was some far-off nation across the ocean, not a floating island-city.

On the topic of Vornimund... While Tiven's empire seemed like a dominating, expanding regime of evil, on the inside the empire was actually rather near-utopian and futuristic, as I have tried to show. In contrast, while Vornimund seemed like a herald of democracy and technology, in the end all he wanted to do was conquer as much land for himself as possible. He was actually preparing an invasion of Vosalsvrax, in the name of 'liberating' its inhabitants; for that purpose, he was exploring the Sykrusei Ocean, which is the entry point of the first crystal that landed on the forming planet. The ocean's round edges actually form a deep impact crater, and Vosalsvrax hoped to be able to mine out the core crystal itself to weaponize it.

Also, Dasikalu and Vinnotari- the two wielders of the Singing Swords- were in fact slaved to the swords, which had no desire but to cause chaos. At some point, if I ever ran out of ideas, I would throw them in as basically random encounters; they have no great meaning or history, and they have no plans or goals. All they do is destroy all that they encounter, making them a good 'filler' battle.

Below are some copy-pasted things from my old Plotlist.txt file:

The Foursight of Silas
A strange diadem with four different-colored gems atop and complicated prism circuitry interconnecting each, the Foursight binds itself to its wearer by psychically linking to its wearer's brain and injecting extra data into the ocular systems of the brain. The Foursight allows one to see the Absolute Zone with the True Crystal, ultraviolet with an Amythyst, infrared with a Ruby, and read Concept Magic enchantments with a Diamond. Its creator, Silas Marnahwey, said that all four combined, along with normal vision, created the Primordial Visionform, using all four Sights at once as well as his natural range of vision to expand his view of the spectrum. The Foursight was buried with its creator, but some say that the grave has been robbed and that Silas' prized artifact now is in the hands of some lord of the black market. Even now, his granddaughter, Miarisa Marnahwey, offers a prize of twenty thousand clips to those who will retrieve her heirloom for her.

In reality, the Foursight that Silas wore in his grave had already been switched out; indeed, Silas was slain by a Mage who had mastered Material and Concept magic alike, who cloaked his movements with an invisibility rune. Silas only realized his Foursight was not showing his opponent's usage of Concepts until he found himself slain by the concept of Severance, and his prized circlet was taken by his foe. A fake was buried with the great mage.

The foe turns out to have been Primal Bane Zaegmal Nildail, who killed Silas simply out of boredom, as he traveled the lands in vitriol. A slaying of no purpose or premeditation ended the greatest Material Mage and Tinkerer of his age, the only mage ever to use Material Magic to create an item that could detect Concept Magic.

Singing Swords:
The Seven Singing Swords were forged by a dark nation of the past, the Empire of Vosalsvrax, in an attempt to engineer superhuman mage-soldiers that could be created for cheap. The prototype weapons were imbued with Concept Magic, namely the Concepts of Intelligence, Assistance, and Bloodlust, and built with Psychoconcepts that allowed connections between the wielder's mind and the weapon itself. The design was supposed to make the wielder much more powerful in combat, with the blade really being able to wield itself- but instead, different things happened. Some of the wielders dominated their sword's intellect, forcing the blade to exceed its own boundaries and damaging the blade permanently- three of the seven blades were broken in this way, their energizing gems shattered and their edges shorn to dust. Two of the seven blades dominated their owners, binding their wielders' flesh to their own metallic form, and burning up their wielders' souls to force them into the Absolute Zone, where the blades could channel magic with no harm by using their holders as fuel instead. Thus, abominations of steel and flesh were made- metal bound with the arm eternally, the meat only a conduit or container for the true mind inside the sword, a malevolent hate that seeks to destroy all in its bloodlust. Seeing these failures, Vosalsvrax discontinued production of the prototype weapons, and the last two swords were locked in a vault- until one of the blades was stolen by an unknown entity who promptly vanished. His identity is unknown, though it is said that he has suffered no adverse effects from his Singing Sword.

The two Twisted Singers, being wielded by their own Singing Swords, are:
Dasikalu the Iron Reaver
Vinnotari of Unbounded Chaos

In actuality, it turns out that the stealer of the blade was Saneferu, as an Abstraction Soldier, before he settled down; the truth of the matter is that true unity with the blade comes only by friendship, not by one side overpowering the other, a concept that the Vosalsvrax Empire never understood. Saneferu enjoys a mutually beneficial relationship based on respect with his blade, named Astral Cause, and has since upgraded his weapon to become metamorphic, able to shift from one shape to another; he has managed to avoid detection by keeping the Singing Sword in Spearform at all times, so that none would suspect its true identity. One of Saneferu's promises to his blade was that he would rescue its mate, a female-minded Singing Sword still locked in the vaults of Vosalsvrax, but all his attempts to break into the vault once more have failed due to increased security.

Radiant Silvergun
An ancient weapon, forged by an ancient civilization. Found inside a stone egg in a circular pit dozens of miles wide, the undecipherable script of the people that created its resting place was ignored, and the weapon was taken by the would-be graverobbers. Later archaeological reports found that the language, when translated, informed one that this weapon would bring about the end of the world if removed, and that none were to ever move it again from its ceremonial tomb. So far, though, there hasn't been any apocalypse, though the Silvergun is feared because of its reputation as a doombringer. The gun itself seems to grant its owner preternatural ability to perceive projectiles, almost as if it imparted Megethomantic and Kinetimantic detection abilities; the weapon's main mode of assault is continued repeater blast, thousands of tiny bolts firing so quickly they appear to be almost a laser.

The prophecy turns out to simply have been a mistake of translation; the difficulty was that 'the end of the world' could also mean 'the end of civilization'. Indeed, the Silvergun was critical in the end of civilization, but only because the war fought between opposing factions of that civilization over the weapon ended that civilization. Ironically, the war was precipitated by the prophecy, both sides seeking to possess the weapon that would end all things.

The Inkhearts:
Strange, otherworldly organs that, when implanted through a magical surgery, slowly replaces one's blood with a strange compound, undecipherable to science, that imbues a man with negative thoughts, cynicism, and eventual psychoticism thanks to the Inkheart having its own consciousness, resulting in the host eventually becoming schizophrenic. The inkhearts eventually take over the circulatory system, using the loop of inkblood as a runic circuit-circle that can be modified by growing different veins and arteries. Eventually, the circulatory system, being sustained by the Inkheart, divests itself of its fleshy body and becomes its own entity. When the circulatory system of a host is damaged, the Inkheart will act to protect its dominion; if a host and inkheart reach agreement (usually seen as two schizophrenic personalities agreeing on one task), they can reach great power, as the inkblood bursts in crystallized strands out of the host's body to act as willing appendages. The Inkhearts were a great secret kept by the Vosalsvrax Empire as a last-minute trump-card, and was used in their attempt to create supreme zealots, ultimate magical soldiers that would destroy all before them.