(3) Legend of the Elder Souls (Inactive)

Game Master mdt

You likely have about 500 gp, although it's in nuggets, not gold pieces, and another 300 gp in various coinage.

Hopefully it's reasonable to assume that Lina isn't carrying all the money or things in the tavern will likely get awkward.

Not really. Even if that's the case 'hey, our friend who shouldn't really be trusted alone got lured into a building with shiny things. She's got our money, so we'll hold off on ordering until they come back.'

Hoping they come back. :P

I carry all the money that isn't spare change, and yeah, 500 gp is what I've been writing down as our standard "traveling purse"

Mm I really do like the idea of purchasing this weird clock.

So, are you saying the bar team doesn't have any money to spend, Lina?

I think she is saying you can buy beer but not rounds for the entire bar, since you only have spare change and not the bulk of our wealth : )

Robbie came home today! He's a bit fussier here than the hospital. I've forgotten how difficult one handed typing is with a sleeping baby in the other arm.

Yey! Congratulations on making it home : )

Congrats!

I know Luna's kind of preoccupied, but we also seem to have lost Lina and Kong?

I think maybe we need to discuss OOC what to do next? Is there enough interest in continuing with 4 or not? And if so, how to split the party up for the lost characters?

So, I'm not sure if this will be longwinded or not. But since you asked...

To preface, I'm totally interested in continuing. I like the world and the concept. I like learning about everything going on. I like that it's a deep, explorable world.

I don't like feeling like every decision is 'pick a door, one is trapped, you don't know which, and trying to find out may be its own trap.' It's not like everything is out to kill us, but my character has become ridiculously paranoid (which is fair; he did kind of fail to save a town, and likely caused their deaths through a lack of information to begin with).

I've sort of had a hard time recovering from that, honestly. Neri was interesting when I made him, but now he's got all this... baggage that's hard to RP around. Mostly it's the fact that he's likely smarter than me and aware that most of the world wants him and his friends dead and that they don't even have a good reason to want them dead.

Unless Kong PM'd you, Id on't think he's lost, though. It's been a few days, so it's hard to know given that he just had a baby deposited on his doorstep.

Regardless, that's sort of where I'm at. I'm having a really hard time making calls when it feels like those calls will likely turn out badly and close another door we can only barely poke our heads into. :(

Ah, I forgot about the new Baby. :) That would explain the lack of posting.

On the doorway thing, it's hard to give information on the world when you spend most of the time behind your wall or in the caves. :) You've been gaining information steadily since you got into the world. I think anyway.

I too am interested in continuing the exploration of this strange and wondrous (and dangerous) world.

I'm not sure about Lina - but our conversation with the clockmaker has been going pretty much in circles. Mostly because that was our goal - stalling :P

But maybe it is simply time to bid her farewell, promise to come back later in the day for the clock, and then head out to see the town?

I'm still here, though not getting much sleep currently. I love the idea of the world and want to continue. I think what slows me down a bit is we have too many choices and no one wants to make a bad decision so it takes forever to make any decision. Kong is like to start getting reckless just to get things moving.

My prooblem with getting reckless now is that we're in a place we can't afford to be reckless even more. :(

I feel kind of similar to Neri: I'm regretting making a character with lots of social skills given that basically every social situation seems to give me anxiety. Plus I'm already not a naturally social person, so going out of my way to make small talk with people to try to get more intel is hard. I think I actually mostly want Johnny to stay home and make a robot army to protect them, haha.

I think part of the problem is also that sandbox requires either one of two things.

A) The GM railroading you fairly hard (which kind of negates the whole purpose of Sandboxing).

B) An alpha personality in the group to push the group along in some direction.

The problem with A is that it really isn't sandboxing if the GM is going 'here's the tracks, stay on it, over here, hey idiots, right here, rocks fall if you don't go here'.

The problem with B is that Alpha personalities can keep the game moving, but they can also rub people the wrong way without necessarily meaning to.

Part of the issue I think is everyone is tip toeing so hard not to be bossy that nothing ever gets decided without 2-3 weeks of wrangling in OOC, which slows the game down tremendously (see the last month of posts).

Oh I think that mainly is because no-one wants to be the person that accidentally another village. It's a high-stake game and it makes sense that no-one wants to be the one to send it all crumbling down. But that's exactly what has already been said so ... .P

GM Needs a direction from the players, do you want to regroup or what? Maybe split up and let the people not posting go off in one group and the posting players in the other?

I'm thinking we could rejoin as a large group. That way, if they pop back, they do have something to do : )

---

The bar group probably saw us slipping into the clock-workshop, while the clock group does not know where the bar patrons are - all on account of us sneaking away first.

That would mean that if they finish up their ale and pick us up that would probably the easiest way to rejoin.

Another thing we can do is simply have the clock group head outside and loiter a bit but ... might look suspicions if there are nothing worth loitering around!

I don't recall - were there market stands and such around the street? That's a decent excuse : )

Quick anecdote time:

While looking at a similar dilemma in a game I played a few weeks ago my friend had a brilliant idea. His "subtle signal" was to create a gigantic glowing beacon with his magical spear utilizing the logic "no-one is going to think we are that stupid!".

So - that's an option :P

Hi, guys. To all my games: sorry I've been such a butt lately.

Basically, I was away from the internet for a while, but before and after that, I've been writing so much for work that PbP just felt like a chore. And I've come to realize that while I love my job, right now it's just not leaving me the time and creative energy I need forPbP, so, while I've sort of been sliding down that slope for a while, I figured I should actually tell all my games that I've gotta drop out.

Sorry to disappoint and potentially leave a bunch of people hanging at the end there, and I hope I was generally fun.

-Thunderbeard

Generally fun is an accurate assessment. You were always 'such a butt' though. :P

I was pulled away from paizo completely, I tried to give a heads up but I know I was woefully lacking in it.

I am really sorry about vanishing and I'm far from ready to do a complete return and so I'll be dropping most my games including this one.

I'm sorry for the trouble and not being able to stay in but I hope you have continued to enjoy the campaign.

Sorry to lose you both. Like the other losses, Lina and Luna will be heading back to Hell Village.

Sorry to see you both go. But good luck in your other endeavours and maybe we see eachother sometime in the future : )

Sorry to see you two go. Good luck and hopefully everything will work out for you.

So that puts us down to four: Liisa, Johnny, Neri and Kong. Where shall we head to now in town. Just a general wander to get the lay of the land? Inn for lodgings? Docks for transport to the other side of the ocean?

My vote is docks. We wanted to see about possibly getting transport across the sea, so at least getting a feel for that area/looking at what kinds of ships they have would be a good first step, even if we don't actually inquire about passage. Maybe also look for a tavern there to have dinner tonight and see if we can't get some sailing stories out of people.

I'm thinking somewhere to sleep. But that could be almost anywhere in the city - so the docks are fine by me : )

I'd like to actually buy the clock (regardless of it's worth) while Luna is 'still around'. I feel like that's at least a plot thread we were meant to take up.

Otherwise, finding a place to stay is definitely high on the list. Asking the clockmaker where she'd recommend after we buy it might work pretty well, and having a place to stay means we have a place to meet up.

FYI to all my games :

I live in Texas (Austin), and one of the options Harvey has is to wander up and over Austin and laze around and drop a couple of feet of water on us. So if I don't post this week it's because we lost power, internet, or both. Should be fine for anything else, we live on a hill so if we have water flooding our living room, the entire Mississippi river valley is under 80 ft of water from New Orleans to St. Louis. :) So we'd have a lot more problems than flooding at that point.

Good luck with the weather then : )

I'm currently going through a lot of mentally exhausting stuff. I'm trying to keep my head above water enough to keep up with posting in my threads. If I slip, please point it out to me and I'll try to do better.

Let's hope things work out as well as they can : )

As much as I hate to say this, I'm having a lot of trouble getting motivated as the GM in this game. It's been tottering along for awhile, and we've had so much turn over, that it's hard to keep it going. I like this game setting, and I'll run it again, but I'm thinking it's not a good game for PbP as losing players puts plot holes in it by it's nature. Every time I have to re-recruit, it causes issues.

Would you guys be ok with the GM basically wrapping up the campaign with a vignette in game and OOC Q&A to explain what was going on?

I'm 100% against you doing something you don't want to do. I've been having at least a little trouble with the game ever since I caused the split. It became -really- difficult to play Neri when he was constantly blaming himself for everything that's gone wrong, from most of the village dying to the other group dying to the world knowing the 'demons' were back making it basically impossible to gather information. It puts a real damper on playing, knowing -everything- is your fault. :(

Regardless of that, it's been a fun struggle. There was lots of interesting story, interesting mechanics, and plenty of intrigue to try to puzzle out. The fact I was apparently 'always wrong' about anything you didn't expressly tell us as the DM was a little unfun, but whatevers. If you ever reopened the game on the boards, I'd totally be all for it, jumping in as a new character (definitely not Neri), because I still enjoyed the game.

One question: Do you think the game would have gone much better if we hadn't worried about dying so much? Like as Mud says 'what's the worst that can happen, character creation?' Or did you like that we were constantly trying to figure out every little edge we could use to stay alive (but ultimately slowing the game to a crawl, since we didn't even know how to find out what we didn't know)?

Also... I feel like I didn't adequately say this in the last post: I'm sorry I screwed up your game so bad, Kitty.

You didn't screw it up Neri. The game goes on how it goes on.

I do think everyone overcompensated after the table split, and I think the new guys took their lead from that.

As to the other team getting the whole town, I can't argue that the breaks went against this table on that front, but part of that was everyone being a bit too careful of their own hide. Actions have consequences, they weren't wrong actions, they weren't right actions, they were just actions. Some had better results than others (the other table never even ran into the lizard folk at all, for example).

I agree with Neri's first and main point - if you don't feel like it let's call it a day.

I also agree with the assessment that it seems as if there are a bit too many too big plot-holes/oddities from player swapping. It's one of these thing I've encountered before (like Kingmaker!) where it becomes really hard to have something coherent after a while. As sad as it seems, it is probably one of the problems with trying to run more tied-together campaigns in such a volatile medium as pbp. (Though I'd note I've played plenty of IRL campaigns plagued with similar issues!)

Though I also really want to say that it has been a fun ride, even if a bit bumpy sometimes : )

And I'm very interesting in picking your mind in that Q&A!

Mataknowledge about the game.

Eo, the Eldar God, was actually an Angel who refused to take either the side of God or Lucifer during the rebellion. Instead, he left creation rather than pick a side. He was not the only one.

Eo tried to emulate his maker, by making his own world, but lacked the power. Instead, he had to steal the power of creation from Creation, siphoning power off from it. This is how Angels survive, by absorbing the very essence of Creation. This is manifested as Entropy within Creation, the slow drain that heralds the death of Creation unimaginable years in the future.

It is easier to steal the power in Human Souls than it is to steal raw material. Eo, being one of the original angels, could steal raw power and bits of creation (such as stealing land and air from a planet that was breaking up). But creating life was beyond him, so he stole plants, animals, and other creatures to populate his new world.

He then stole souls from the dead, and invested them with some of his own power, to create children. These children were the Old Gods. Originally, they were all fairly gray, with competing notions of good, evil, law, and chaos. But then a group of them rebelled against Eo, and killed him to steal his power. Others refused to help, and others fought against it. In the end, the death of Eo shattered the reality in this small pocket world. Alignments were created, and became part of the Reality (Good, evil, law, chaos).

The Old Gods (then the New Gods), went back to Creation and began stealing souls where they could without getting caught. Those souls were called Elder Souls, because they came from the Elder Creation, and were each nearly as powerful as one of the New Gods. The new gods found a way to split a single soul into a hundred Lesser Souls, and each Lesser Soul into a hundred Least Souls. Least Souls were too ephemeral to survive the powers in Creation, only in the lesser Creation that is Shalevarn.

The Lesser Souls were eventually called Avatars, imbued with extra power by the New Gods. The world developed, and eventually humans spread across the surface, their numbers limited only by how many souls the New Gods could steal.

Eventually, though, something happened. The original Creator vanished, as did the original Rebeller, leaving Heaven and Hell uncontrolled. The vast network of angels and demons began to fall part with nothing guiding them. Eventually the angels and demons began to devolve into creatures only concerned with harvesting human souls, which continued to be created without end. The black and white creatures harvesting the souls of the dead that the PCs saw were degenerate angels and demons, pulling souls back to Heaven and Hell, putting them into storage for the day when the Creator or Lucifer returned.

Not all Angels and Demons devolved, some left, going away from Creation to the Lesser Creations, created by the original Angels who neither rebelled nor obeyed. But the Angels and Demons needed the energy of Creation to survive, so they ate any Lesser Creations as they went, forcing themselves to eat only enough to survive. Any lesser creation that rivaled them, they killed and ate.

But the war against the New Gods, when the Usurpers arrived, weakened them tremendously, to the point they could no longer leave the lesser creation of Shalevarn, and so the Three, desperate for a way out, tried to find the secrets of the New Gods, and how they managed to sneak to Creation and steal power.

So, how did you intend for our interactions with the old gods to change? Were we supposed to change them, or they supposed to change us?

I kind of wondering how you assigned classes and alignments as well. It seems you had some randomization going on there.

Nope,
All the gods were pre-assigned alignments and such. The difference is what qualities the Old Gods were looking for in Avatars. They intended to Merge with their new Avatars, the last bit of stolen Pre-Rebellion Creation they had within them from Eo, and the newly created Elder Soul, combined would create a New God.

Your alignments were based on what you said they were, and had to be within one step (and forced to change in some places, like Paladin).

Each God was the God of a specific Base Class. The Usurpers used Hybrid Classes and Psychic Classes instead.

Each God was preassigned a favored weapon, favored class, animal companion, and domains.

Old Gods

Thank you very much for the game. I enjoyed the setting very much and the story. I'd love to adventure in it again.

I will say that playing in both threads caused some confusion on my part. After a few months I had trouble remembering what happened in each thread.

Sterling was a jerk, no doubts about that. He did seem to disappear though, don't know if you ever heard from him again.

One question I have is about the tavern. You mentioned a woman that came in every so often with real food. I was wondering who she was and what her role was.

Also, what did Kong's house do? Paul's could scry above ground and make magic items. Harry made metal goods, Neri could scry below ground and make metal and gems. Did you have a list for all the houses like the old gods list?

Kong's made potions and his people could 'leave' because they had physical bodies. So if we told them to go chop down trees, they would. And I kinda feel like their unnatural aura would keep animals away.

Harry's gem was also necessary for upgrading/changing basically anything that required building. He was literally the builder.

I'd figured out pretty early that the classes were alphabetical. You'd mentioned that the martial classes just happened to wind up pretty much all evil, was that intended?

Had you intended for us to 'swap gems'? Had you had mechanics to punish or encourage that?

Was it intended for Kinsalia and Alventhin to both have the same animal?

For the bard and sorcerer?

Interesting!

I was kind of pondering how/if domain swaps was possible, on account of Liisa's archetype being able to pick Rune and all - and if you had something fun planned for that one?

Also - how did our shrines tie in to all this? Simply an old stronghold with too much ambient defences for our enemies to bother with or something more?

Curses, relatively close to finding my shrine! Assuming we didn't second guess ourselves and end up backing away from an ocean voyage, which may very well have happened.

Hmm, so my second choice was a cleric. I may have done better with that/just taking on a healing role.

Interesting that the thief was LE. Was he trying to talk Luna into doing evil-ish things?

Since the inquisitor's animal was a shark, how would that have worked while on land? Just no animal companions? I think if we had had one and gotten high enough of a power, there should have been a sharknado.

What were other people's shrines in the world that weren't mentioned?

What pieces of information would have been useful for our characters blending in?

Very interesting world. Thanks for sharing mdt!

The woman in the tavern was one of the original Avatars. Every shrine eventually would have had an original Avatar whose spirit showed up. Because they were Avatars in life, their souls were strong enough to exist outside the shrine, so she could bring in real food by going and hunting real animals.

Once you were powerful enough (mythic 5) you could have re-incarnated the original Avatars into a physical body, and had a Follower.

Kong's house was also the waypoint for any souls that pledged to you, upon death, their spirits would show up in Kong's house, to either be assigned to a Shrine, or to be reincarnated (or destroyed, as Kong chose).

I didn't write down what all the Shrines did, it was all fairly intuitive (traveler had travelers visiting, house of the dead had spirits, etc).

As to the martial classes, not intentional, just the way it worked out. There's a fair bit of limitation on the classes unfortunately. Monk has to be lawful, paladin lawful good, anti-paladin chaotic evil, druid neutral, etc. When you put those out, you end up with a lot of evil slots open and not as many good.

The intention was, regarding swapping gems, for it to be painful, and it set you back some, so it was one of those 'if you can't work with them, you pay a price'.

And no, I'll need to fix that, everyone should have had a different animal. Each animal had special abilities, but you needed to hit Mythic 3 to get them. Luna rejected hers and lost out on a lot of benefits.

The shrines you first found were the final strongholds, and the main ones, of the Old Gods. All the shrines formed a network that spread your influence, the more you had, the more power you could draw on, and the more dominion you had over the world.

Switching around domains would have been difficult, the domains were spread evenly around the gods, for you to shift one, you'd have had to shift multiple gods domains to rebalance, or things would have gotten out of whack (which was pretty much the case with the Usurpers, they couldn't keep all the domains active, which is part of the reason they couldn't completely kill off the Old Gods).

The thief had a code he lived by, but it was him first, everyone else second, which is LE. Luna and he got along mostly ok, because Luna was kind of selfish too, as a character (not a player). That was actually probably the most solid gem/character fit, and one of the reasons why he didn't talk to her much, no need to intervene if things are going your way.

Yes, no animal while on land, but the shark could have appeared in any body of water, even a pond or river.

Everyone had a shrine in the Rebel City. Luna had another shrine in the Silk lands, Kong had a boneyard in the desert beyond the Silk Mountains. Lina had a mountain top monastery in the Silk Lands.

not really anything you could do to blend in, you were always going to stick out in some way. Your avatar nature made you hard to hide. Other than Luna, who could have walked around any town without being noticed (thanks to her powers). It didnt' come up though, because she was always with someone else. Toward the end, it did come up, in that she was able to hide the other 2 with her so that nobody noticed that they scatted off the street in a hurry (she added her dex and mythic rank to Liisa and Lina's bluff checks to look casual about going in the clock shop).

Neat on that last one.

I think Mikrasa's alignment was a huge surprise. Her and Alventhin would have been the best 'natural' fits for Phoebe (the person I was wanting as a cohort). Alventhin was off the table, leaving Mikrasa as the one she'd have taken and tried to 'power up'. The idea for that was that she'd have picked up either the broken staff or broken hammer to use as a weapon in case she ran into something violent (which would have likely bound her before she ever decided on a relief).

I'd even picked out a bunch of songs to 'play in her head' as she looked at the reliefs. Oh well!

Which gems do you feel would have been the most ideal ones for each player?

Also, If you plan on starting up something else and you're interested in me joining, let me know. :) I'm always interested in at least looking at a kittyface game. :)