Session 007

General Summary

Jamie's Notes 2025-03-01

Day 8, Notos 44, Year 352

• Akito goes to find the apprentices at Cirina's insistence.
• Met a dude heading south, he'd killed all the mermaids.
• Carinus who kept heading north.
• Finds four rooms with sigils on them.
• Knife: Filled with magical darkness.
• Apparently used by people who were assassins.
• Vasia can see. Magical darkness tailored. Shades of gray for her.
• Three beds in the room.
• Strange looking fighting style on the wall. Bits of a manual on how to do that kind of combat.
• Writing in Aklo (Torvian), cryptic markings. Identifiers of unsolved deaths of powerful people.
• Beneath each face, has an age/location.
• Last date was 40 years ago. In Mesan. Death allowed them to swing into full imperial elven-ethnofascist state.
• Targets: Places where involved in interplanar travel/ability to open pathways to other planes. Divine intervention, but not for divine creature. Research had gone into that. Then someone would die and throw the area into chaos.
• Didn't prevent all research into planar travel. Plenty of people travel.
• Theory: Perhaps related to structures that protect the planes/prevent confluence?
• Footlockers Neesja checks: 40g total, not black/light absorbing material/shift to match shadows clothes. 3 of them.
• Ponpiketes says the assassins last went to Alauket, the dragon place.
• Scroll: Apprentices hold up there.
• Cirina slips in after the apprentices leave for dinner with the others.
• Neesja follows.
• Efficient spell working information. Nothing revolutionary.
• Shows variety of arcane devices/engines. Pretty famous arcanotech engines.
• Flying ships, flying city existed before but gone missing. Bookshelves, bare. Dusty.
• Shield: Lots of filigree, images of armed/armored figures fighting humanoid insects. Angels, devils, mortals, fighting against insectoid creatures.
• Reference to Qlippoth .
• Athetisi Kidemonas
• Ponpiketes says where the Harlequins fought, they protected.
• Harlequin/Theatre Mask: Four beds, fancier looking, walls engraved and painted, beautiful, masked and identically unified, blue and white striped uniforms.
• Harlequin D’Arcane. Weirdos who show up before something bad happens.
• Society: Historical accusations they were responsible. Attacks against them, they are able to escape. Several acts of violence/distrust against hidden groups.
• 200 years ago.
• Sideways connection. Golden Dawn came to popularity around the same time. Anti-cult cult. Heroes of the people.
• Footlockers Neesja checks: outfits, emblem of laughing mask, personal journal, well made daggers, small bag containing week's worth of rations/desiccated. Multi-piece tent carried by wagon.
• 8 uniforms, masks, 40gp, 4 personal journals.
• Ponpiketes says they just got old and didn't have replacements.
• Frozen Forest: About 500 years ago, used something, extradimensional pocket reality.
• Radjic in the kitchens.
• Kitchen is cooking stuff on its own.
• Maybe some ambrosia type stuff there?
• Kinda mid.
• Confluence going to happen eventually. Used to be 5 of them. Going to happen in 6 days.
• Last 350 years, happening more and more as things weaken.
• Sina Al'Torif's guards are likely coming to kill Ponpiketes.
• Ponpiketes needs to keep the tattoos on his body in check, stay alive, to basically keep the wards in place to keep Verex-That-Was.
• Map on the table. Gems seem to mark various locations where the
• Alauket. Dragon place.
• Home of the gods, Theopos. - still kinda glowing.
• Varian capital of Alexandria
• Ponaia, rumoured to be near the Drakfell wood. A dragon apparently there. A year ago, mysterious blast, destroyed a village.
• One in Gatsa Bay, 10 miles from where Akito lived. - still kinda glowing.
• Out in the bay. A year ago, hit by the worst storms in its history.
• Gems likely found in Torivan tombs, duke-and up.
• Yvraine knows of a tomb.
• Duke Harkesh.
• Lots of traps, no one has made it to the interior.
• Really much of a bastard.
• Golden Dawn turned.
• Parasitic groups infiltrate organizations and corrupt their message/meaning/mission.
• Akito's theory, saw the Golden Dawn armor, figured the symbol was quite Rovagug related.
• Fianese law; the only people who could investigate the death of Sina would be the mayor or the prince.
• Take Yvraine's deathglider back to Arra.

Evan's Recap

Ponpiketes and Planar Problems - Notos 44 (2/22/25)

Deep within the caves and tunnels of Mons Pouthena, our protagonists met with the ancient cyclops Ponpiketes and Remzi’s assistants - Yvraine and Khafre - finding a situation they were presumably entirely unprepared for as instead of a monster or ghost, they met a beleaguered man attempting to puzzle out what’s been happening with the intraplanar weave.

After introductions were made, the party set about exploring, finding a series of bedrooms with gorgeous engraving, depictions of events that have not made the transition into any history book. Depictions of ancient, secretive orders, whose names have only survived in myth.

The Harlequin D’Arcane, a group that were considered heralds of intraplanar doom for their actions in stopping rifts and tears from opening; the Athetisi Kidemonas, armored warriors who fought against the Qlippoth and other extraversal threats; and a black room of faces and a strange fighting style, once used by a rumored-even-in-myth group of assassins, their targets a specialist branch of interplanar research; and the group that kept the mountain itself, their name lost to time, specialists of artifice and arcane engineering.

Further, the group learned of Verex-That-Was’s prison in the Wastes, and the Heartward that keeps him contains; most of the nodes of which - Ponaia, Alaukan, and Alexandria - have gone dark, indicating disaster. The remaining two, in Gatsa and Theopos, fade quickly. However, Ponpiketes did not ask for assistance with these; he asked our heroes to assist in checking on Verex’s crypt.

They also learned that at some point in the past, the Golden Dawn had been an ally to the Athetisi orders before falling away and being a major proponent in the purges of cults and secret societies that happened two hundred years ago.

Justice Sina Al'Torif, it seems, was not the one to trick the Golden Dawn, though someone in the past certainly did, slipping in signs and goals of the Rough Beast into the cult’s teachings. Her goals, however, seem to have been made clear: have her men break down the ward on Saminos, and then use the Interplanar Conflux, the Eclipse, to break down the walls of Verex’s prison and let her master shamble free into the world once again.

Without time to head into the Wastes and return before the Eclipse, our heroes reluctantly agreed to take the most rapid form of transportation back: An ancient Torvian glider, recently rediscovered, launched through the same mechanisms that Ponpiketes uses to throw boulders at ridiculous speeds.

Assuming they survive the trip, it will allow our heroes to make it back to Arra in a single day, leaving them with three days to discover the specifics of Sina’s plans and put a stop to them, before the planes intermingle and the world changes irrevocably.