Finally got my mod-mess to a point that world's don't crash after the first 50 years of worldgen, so I sent out a disciple to poke around and do my bidding. To summarize this world, a big mountain range splits most of the world in half from north to south, and there is a body of land bordering two seas south of this range, along the equator. Three civilizations of dwarves (2 vanilla, 1 grey dwarf) on either side of the mountains have fallen by the year 552 and humanity has been pushed to the brink of extinction, overrun by elves, goblins and orcs. Two elf civs dominate east and west with their war elephants and treants, while barely under half of the world's 16000 civilized creatures are Orcs. Dark elves, Saurians, and Naga vie for power in the southwest, while High elves have overthrown their Goblin adversaries and maintain an uneasy peace with their one-time allies of the woodland flavor. The last human civilization is held out in the tomb of its first master, an Old One who was slain defending the capital by an enormous tree monster before it was overthrown and pillaged by elves, the inhabitants mercilessly devoured by the pointed-ear hellspawn. Most of this civilization seems to live in exile in a kobold cave located on a volcanic island to the west, while the current master of the civ shares a tomb with a nomadic dark elf group (which includes the exiled Dark Queen of that civ, incidentally, who was replced by two consecutive minotaurs within the span of one year). My shadowmancer disciple's objective is to clear the world's five dwarf fortresses of their megabeast denizens while becoming a lord of this human civilization and reclaiming empty hamlets in their name. Perhaps humanity will become restored, given time.
The journey began in a high
elf hamlet in the temperate east and Felini was belittled and insulted by the mercenaries who had recently reclaimed the village when he asked them to join him. Felini asked peasants for directions and found a well-travelled ranger to tell him about the surrounding area and local troubles. He then set out for the High Elf capital in Summerguilds. There he met the High Queen, Iki Birdbean, and joined up with her well-travelled grandson, Emora Quenchlamped. He desired three artifacts lost in a forest retreat to the north, which had been destroyed by a Bronze Collossus a couple of years previous. Two other high elves were recruited for the excursion. We searched the entire breadth of the abandoned enclave, even going so far as to hunt along the tree-tops, but no such luck. perhaps the rumors are dated, or the artifacts are truly lost.
We did run into a spouse of a starving monster on the way back, however, and slew him as he arrived on his doorstep. His wife and brother-husband rushed out angrily, and in the ensuing melee my companions were battered roundly. Felini feels a special need to protect Emora since he is well connected, has many relatives and seems to count as an important character in the grand scheme of things, and at one point he was cornered and being strangled by one horror while the other rained blows with its claws upon his body. Felini was desperate and had dropped his sword several feet away, so he channeled his inner shadowmancy and assumed his shadow form. Like a prop on a theater set folding away, Felini seemed to drop away, his armor and clothes piling where he stood, while the faint shadow that he cast in the dying twilight illumination rose from the ground and grew bolder, darker. He was a Shadow (with a capital S). I put on some punk (Black Veil Brides) and Felini grabbed each horror with his shadow claws and flung them into the air, preparing to aid his allies in executing them.
Then he saw the peculiar way in which Emora, Quecha, and Kifino were looking at him, and realized what a miscalculation he had made. Obviously, in such a situation, fighting creatures of the night, they could only assume one thing upon seeing their acquaintance disappear and become replaced by an unnatural abomination: he was now their enemy.
Felini rolled away from a blow from Kifino and recovered his sword from the ground, he proceeded to sidestep Quecha and Emora and dispatch both night creatures before rushing off into the forest. Some time later he returned (mysteriously healed of all his wounds) and invented a tale about finding himself in the middle of the forest far away after he confronted a shadow abomination that had appeared out of nowhere, and his companions seemed to accept his bizarre tale.
They recovered some goods from the cave, including a rare, ancient, tome of the planes that one monster had been using instead of a mortar to grind up victims. Felini led the elves around the surrounding countryside to explore the human and high elven ruins that remained from the goblin wars. They recovered some useful equipment including a partial set of bronze armor for Filino, which he supplemented with some armor made from the bones of a wolf. Now geared up like a greek hoplite with a wolf's skull upon his head, Felini pointed out some ancient human Pyramids lying upon the plain. Since no one seemed to be using them, and since human-sized gear was hard to come by, Felini asked his companions to wait outside as he entered the tomb. The path to treasure was short, and Felini recovered some fine silk garments to wear, but as he climbed the stairs he was confronted by an angry mummy, a curse, and a fight for his life. Eventually Felini prevailed despite the occasional critical failure. He is a demigod, after all, and thankfully the only reanimation targets in the room were the mummy's own body parts as Felini hacked them off with his mithril sword and the tip of his gold-banded enchanted iron spear. When the creature hacked off his arm with its bronze carving knife, Felini was able to assume his shadow form without worrying about his companions.
Felini left with one more treasure, having dumped the mummy's remains back in its sarcophagus (out of respect, of course) , a cobalt helmet encrusted with many fine gems and artistic scenes in opal and sapphire, and crowned by a single Tear of the Mountain, an extremely valuable and rare magical gemstone.
After exploring several tiny hamlets, the party returned, well equipped and well explored, to the High Elf capital of Summerguilds. Felini presented the high queen with several gifts recovered from abroad and was granted permission to take a fine steel double-bladed polearm, a versatile weapon in the hands of a spearman and characteristic of the High Elf infantryelf. After a night of sleeping and feasting, the party made ready to set off West in search of the riches far from this war-torn land.
On the way, the party recruited two more high elf bowelves from the expeditionary force that had settled a hamlet to the west. These belonged to the much smaller sister civilization of Felini's travelling companions, whose high queen ruled from a hamlet nearby.
The company of five passed a shrine in the middle of a forest of great redwood trees and poplars, and decided to investigate. Ruined pillars jutted from around a small ampitheater-shaped hillock, and sneaking over the crest, Felini spied a great hairy Rove Beetle, a feared titan of the forests which belched toxic fumes from its abdomen. This creature had terrorized many of those who did not make peace with nature, and Felini resolved to slay this beast himself and reap the glory that this feat would shower upon him.
Directing his melee-oriented companions to stand some distance back, Felini crept around the other side of the ampitheater-shaped hillock where the creature was standing in inscrutable contemplation of the years, accompanied by his bow-wielding companions. Directing them to stand some distance back, Felini drew his polearm and shield and stealthily approached the creature. It noticed him sooner than he would have liked as he darted between pillars, and he charged boldly forward, poised to strike.
A volley of mithril bodkin arrows battered harmlessly off the being's hairy exoskeleton and a swipe of the creature's foreleg flung the shield from Felini's hand and his arm was pounded into a bloody pulp, while a stab of its leg punctured a lung and a tail swipe connected with Felini's head and fractured his skull. Clouds of toxic green gas issued from the beast's abdomen and Felini was glad that his powered allowed him to breath of the stuff of shadows as his skin blistered and flashed with pain. Stars exploded behind his eyes and adrenaline coursed through his body as the creature annihilated his left leg with another strike and gripped his other arm in its mandibles and shook him around wildly, flinging his body, sans his left arm, into a pillar. Most of his bones fractured, spraying blood from the bloody stumps of his limbs and other wounds, Felini was horrified, but not yet dismayed. He was a shadowmancer, after all. He assumed shadow form and drew his iron and silver spears, hastily donning bits of armor as the creature approached. Now he would put this force of nature in its place!
A single blow flung Felini out of the shrine's premises, shattering the shadow substance of most of his body. Felini had forgotten that in shadow form he weighed next-to-nothing, and his limp body tumbled wildly like an uneven wheel along the ground, leaving a trail of disconnected shadow limbs inside of their armor pieces until Felini slammed into the base of a grand Redwood tree, utterly defeated and left with only his left arm, ready be reabsorbed by primordial shadow should he suffer so much as the touch of a feather. And now the titan was plowing towards him.
Felini dragged his body as fast as he could using his single arm, and somehow he lost the monster as he dodged between trees. He wandered around for a couple minutes until his body regained its material form, complete with all of his old limbs nad hastily returned to the shrine, fearing what might happen to his companions. He arrived to see that they had blatantly disobeyed his orders and were engaged in combat with the monster, the archers ineffectually raining arrows down upon its adamant carapace while Quecha had lost a hand and had her tailbone broken while Kifino was kneeling on his shattered leg, shielding Quecha with his spear readied and defiant as the titan bore down on him.
There was no time to lose. Butt naked, Felini sprinted to where his elven polearm lay as the titan barreled into kifino and fractured his spear arm. Turning now and weaving between pillars to intervene, Felini leapt over the crest of the shrine as the titan swatted the shield from Kifino's now shattered hand. He swung for the soft tissue on the beast's neck but some twist of the strings of fate seemed to turn his blade away at the last moment, and it met only steely chitin.
That was Felini's last chance. He could not sustain any more hits from this beast since he could only summon his shadow form once each day. Shadow is a finite resource, after all, and the world had to be recharged with a full day of light and shadow for such powers to be drawn upon. Felini prepared to meet his fate fighting and hoped for a swift death, wishing that he had some god to pray to and wishing he knew the identity of his divine parent. His thoughts were interrupted, however by a flash of movement to his right. Looking around, he saw Kifino yelling, arm outstretched and leaping through the air. The elf was enraged, and tumbling onto the creature's drove his nails and fist into the soft tissue behind its neck.
The monster did not die and go limp. It did not pkunge into wild death throes. It drove a limb into Kifino's spine and shattered his tailbone, and then it's head came off in a shower of ichor. It was over, and Kifino lay, paralyzed from the waist down, basking in glory and hemolymph.
The company dragged itself to a nearby abandoned village and spent the night there, licking its unspeakable, irrecoverable wounds.
They set back out again at first light, returning to the shrine and picking through the treasures that were to be had. They then set out on a northwestern heading and met an antman hunter in the woods, whom they persuaded to join on their travels with the promise of seeing the wild places of the world. Near sunset they came to the old Dark Fortress of Fiendmaligned, once the seat of a great demon and his goblin legions. It lay on the border of a terrifying forest full of undead animals, from which the frosty blue blood of frost giants snowed from the sky and mysterious clouds inflicted unspeakable scourges upon innocent mortals. The party explored the tower, its old garrison and throne room where a demon lord once directed campaigns of terror upon nearby communities. In the dungeons they found a series of chambers leading deep underground, but such an aura of foreboding came from those depths that Felini dared not venture further.
They camped for the night and set out again across the vast unpeopled wilds that separated east and west, skirting around the evil wasteland in the fertile foothills of the world-dividing mountains. Several camps were set up along the way and various creatures both fantastic and Mundane were encountered. Fights were had with crawling gingko trees and wax men, trollkin, dire wolves, giant mastodons, dingoes, wolves, xen, and wendigoes.
Four days later the company finally arrived in a small dark elf frontier town. The archon was amenable and shared many local troubles and geographical information. He directed Felini to a saurian hunter who was widely travelled and Felini learned much of the ways of things as they happen in the west. The Archon's hall was a veritable den of thieves, with snatchers, thieves, mercenaries, and criminals lounging around among piles of plundered goods and artifacts. Felini traded some goods found at the shrine in exchange for a demented athame since he recognized the need to diversify his magical knowledge, and he had only three tools necessary to learn the magical arts. Now he could begin hos training. Quecha was in a terrible state and becoming increasingly depressed despaired of her condition. The party decided to leave her safely in the Archon's residence and recruited two mercenaries: a dark-elf raised saurian swordsman clad in the dark elves' exotic materials, and an "undying" lasher: some sort of product of a lost underground civilization's weapons research program that smelled really bad. With this party Felini intended to make contact with the Naga, Saurians, and Fae of this land before moving for the liberation of humanity from the elven yoke and cleaning the profaned dwarf holds of the north.
But first there was the matter of the bone-chilling horror going on in the tower to the north-east. The archon complained of disturbing goings-on in those parts, and Felini was concerned that whatever enterprise was being undertaken down there could threaten the restoration of humanity and dwarfkind. So Felini took his party up northeast and approached the tower's entrance. Suddenly an ungodly moaning issued from the doors and Felini, who knew a thing or two, expected to be faced with the walking dead. But instead something more horrific emerged: hundreds (yes hundreds) of flying undead heads with long, ghastly teeth and an insatiable appetite for flesh. Felini despaired at the sight, but as battle was joined, he realized something: despite their numbers and ghastly appearance, the beasts lacked the ability to grasp and strike with weapons or hold the party down, and their biting attacks could not match the company's moderate armor protection. Felini laughed as his company steadily hacked down the spiralling swarm of hungry heads, stepping with difficulty over an enormous mountain of body parts that were gathering at the tower's front doorstep. Swatting the nuisances asid, Felini opened the door to the tower and saw an Abomination Summoner nonchalantly reading a book. He didn't even look up. Felini greeted him and then demanded that he yield. The summoner was cross at that and declined, so Felini hit him over the head with the shaft of his polearm, and the Abomination Summoner began to weep and ran out the door. Eventually Felini and his companions finished the bloody business and built a pyre for the corpses, turning their eyes northward.
EDIT: Playing adventure mode after getting cursed by a mummy is actually pretty fun: as a demigod you can have high skills while still getting into really dangerous situations once in a while, like missing what should be an easy blow, or falling from the top of a redwood tree into a pack of hungry wolves.
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Topic: What's going on in your adventure? (Read 2134914 times)