Revelations & Relations

ARCANE SPECIALIST · ASURAN

Essence, Items and Death Lore

• Arcane magic: the world’s wider magical current has failed, but power remains inside artefacts, coloured gems, extraplanar beings, active portals, demiplanes, wards and ancient constructs.
• Magic items: an item’s old gold-piece valuation describes the amount and complexity of magic it can sustain rather than its usefulness as currency. The red gem’s present capacity is roughly 4,000 gp.
• Gem applications: divine essence inside a gem can be shaped towards weapons, armour, divine effects, arcane effects, jewellery or other classes of magic item. Attuning first to a bearer and then to an item type should make later changes easier.
• Changing a gem: gem power is malleable, but each alteration can consume part of its finite essence. Creating a new function may be easier than removing an existing one. Entering a gem repeatedly becomes progressively harder and causes severe fatigue.
• Known stones: the red gem holds Thardar’s essence, thirteen recorded charges and a dwarven-door sense using about half its current capacity. The orange gem is linked to invisibility. The lime-green disease gem from the rat-ogre laboratory is separate from the green bow gem. Two grey stones are exhausted.
• Alchemy and extraction: acid can free a gem-set item without shattering it. Blood-elemental essence is an exceptionally powerful enchanting and alchemical ingredient; even the imperfect sample was provisionally valued at 73,000 gp.
• Arcane mechanisms: blood can temporarily animate constructs, restore dormant wards and supply power to old portal machinery. Gem sockets can govern or energise planar gates.
• Death gods and souls: death gods and their avatars normally guide souls onward. Semuanyae’s absence left a dead priest stranded, while the Negative Material Plane and wraith encounters show that death-energy can drain age, life and physical substance without every affected being becoming undead.

• The decline did not erase magic; it broke or drained the system that once distributed it, leaving isolated reservoirs.
• Different gems may contain different divine essences and may be capable of many applications, but it is not yet proved that every coloured gem contains a god-fragment.
• Attunement should reduce danger and resistance, not make experimentation safe or prevent a gem from being exhausted.
• Planar leakage may be keeping ancient wards, portals and creatures active after ordinary spellcasting failed.

Who created the gems, whether spent essence can be restored, whether divine and arcane attunements can safely coexist within one gem, and whether the remnants could restart magic across the wider world.

DIVINE SPECIALIST · KARL

Prayer, Gods and Avatars

• Dangerous prayer: the familiar gods do not answer normally. Calling blindly for divine aid can attract older or hungrier powers, as the Celestial Watcher warned.
• Limited divine effects remain: Karl has produced revealing light, opposed wraiths, cured the infected water-passage creature and learned protection against evil despite the general divine silence.
• Prayer circles: several worshippers praying to the same power can enter a divine-linked gem more safely than one person forcing entry alone.
• Thardar: correct invocation of the god whose essence lies within the red gem allowed the party to be accepted into it and enabled Karl’s attunement.
• Avatars: avatars can retain limited agency and grant lesser powers even when severed from their gods. Information is among the easiest gifts an avatar can still provide.
• Funerary rites: reconstructed observance and reverence helped release Semuanyae’s dead priest even though the missing death god did not arrive to escort him.
• Separate chronologies: Laogzed entered hibernation 142 years ago, whereas the public decline of divine contact occurred later. One god’s disappearance cannot automatically date every other god’s loss.

• Prayer directed through a known avatar, mark or divine essence is safer and more precise than calling directly into the silence.
• Faith, correct identity and purpose affect whether stored divine power accepts or rejects a petitioner.
• The continued success of minor divine acts suggests that access has narrowed rather than disappeared absolutely.

Whether any full god can still answer, what now hears unaimed prayer, and whether avatar-granted power ultimately consumes a finite reserve.

NATURE & PLANAR OBSERVER · TOBY

Creatures, Tracks and Other Worlds

• Primordial environments: prehistoric water, impossible swamp life and ancient nature shrines show that preserved pieces of older worlds survive beside or beneath the present one.
• Corrupted nature: disease can taint a shrine, its blessing and the creatures around it. Cleansing the physical infestation can also break the supernatural corruption.
• Extraplanar creatures: elementals belong to other planes and should not normally remain trapped on the Prime Material Plane. The blood elementals were displaced beings, not stores of inert material.
• Negative portal: the temple portal opened through the Negative Material Plane, a route lethally hostile to ordinary living travellers. The living blood elemental nevertheless passed through after the avatar restored the gate.
• Dragon-ogre tracks: the creature reached the excavation entrance but did not descend. Its purpose, allegiance and present location remain unknown.
• Survival evidence: tracks, drag marks, cargo and camp conditions can distinguish what the barbarians did from what their constructs or larger companions probably did.

• The primeval swamp and its water may be a preserved planar overlap rather than an ordinary cavern ecosystem.
• The dragon-ogre may have guarded, delivered or observed the expedition, but the tracks alone do not establish a relationship.
• The blood elemental’s successful passage does not prove the Negative Material Plane was its home; the portal may have been only part of its route.

Kev was absent during part of Day 22 and the other players controlled Toby. Knowledge checks made through Toby in that session are recorded as party knowledge with Toby’s speciality noted, not treated as private decisions made by the character.

MARKED WITNESS · HALEN

Marks, Thresholds and the Body

• Divine marks: Halen already bore Jergal’s mark when Laogzed’s avatar placed a second mark beside it. Asuran also bears the Mark of Jergal.
• Duration: Laogzed’s mark was not assigned a fixed expiry in the archive; it could remain with Halen for months.
• Calling through a mark: a mark provides a direct, limited link to an avatar. In desperate need its bearer may call for aid, although the nature and cost of the response cannot be predicted.
• Death threshold: stepping onto the temple stair gave Halen a vision of ushering souls into the next life, directly connecting the place, his marks and the work normally performed by death powers.
• Negative energy: wraith attacks aged and weakened him physically. Contact with death-energy can alter a living body without immediately killing or transforming it into undead.
• Suspended champions: Laogzed’s champions and snake-priest were held at the edge of death. They were neither properly alive nor undead and could not awaken normally after magic failed.
• Sacrifice and response: Halen’s ritual consumption helped complete the offering that awakened the diminished avatar and made communication possible.

• Collecting or carrying several death-god marks may improve access to their avatars, but may also create competing claims or obligations.
• The stair’s vision suggests Halen could be recognised as an usher or intermediary, but it does not prove that he has become a servant of any death god.
• A mark is an invitation or channel, not proof of loyalty, protection or friendship.

What either mark will demand, whether they can be refused or removed, and what happens if Halen invokes two avatars whose purposes conflict.

SHARED REVELATION

The Present State of Magic

• Arcane casters gradually lost the power for greater workings and eventually the ability to learn new spells. Divine contact weakened into avatar-mediated lesser powers before falling silent.
• Potions, charges and lesser enchantments failed before most permanent items. Exceptionally powerful artefacts and isolated magical systems survived.
• Magic can still be stored, redirected or consumed. Known vessels include divine gems, elemental essence, blood sacrifice, avatars, constructs, wards, portals and demiplanes.
• Old systems can reactivate when supplied with the right essence even though the world no longer provides sufficient ambient power.
• Time and distance behave unpredictably around the Library and demiplanes; Days 15–21 passed strangely during the party’s successful Library visit.

Magic behaves less like a vanished substance than a broken network. The general current is gone or inaccessible, while sealed reservoirs and planar connections still hold usable power. Every surviving use draws on a source, consumes a reserve, opens a link or attracts an intelligence.

Whether these reservoirs are symptoms of the world’s decline, pieces of a repair, or bait left by the powers now listening.

SHARED REVELATION

The Current World Order

• The old temples: established faiths have lost reliable contact with their gods. Priests, souls and sacred sites have been left without the divine order that once sustained them.
• The Order: a hidden organisation preserves magical training, knowledge and practical networks. Its watchtowers, agents and the Library route form part of a concealed counterculture.
• Barbarian powers: related but not necessarily unified warbands raid surviving centres, excavate ancient sites and use inherited rites, blood and constructs they only partly understand.
• New religions: violent cults and appetite-driven worship arose after the old gods receded. Gut Ripper’s expedition shows that these groups can reactivate forgotten divine machinery.
• Witch hunters and law: belief in gods and magic has been outlawed in many lands. Open magical practice is therefore politically dangerous as well as technically difficult.
• Isolated society: cities fractured, trade diminished and much of the population withdrew into rural settlements. Travellers and annual fayres now carry much of the commerce, news and recruitment between communities.
• Restless dead: regions have been abandoned because ordinary people lack clerics and magical weapons capable of opposing incorporeal undead.
• Older powers remain: Utabo, the unidentified titan, Ghaunadaur’s avatar, Laogzed’s avatar and the Celestial Watcher prove that the present human order is not the only power structure still operating.

• The barbarian invasions, sealed towers, divine silence and collapse of magic overlap, but no common author or single cause has been proved.
• Those controlling surviving magical reservoirs may become the new centres of political and religious power.
• The Order’s preservation policy and the cults’ sacrificial methods represent opposing answers to the same scarcity.

THE DRAGON-OGRE

A Threat Still Outside

The party identified the tracks as those of a dragon-ogre: a four-legged creature combining an ogre’s strength with draconic armour and abilities. The survival evidence showed that it came only as far as the excavation entrance and did not descend into the tunnel.

Nothing established where it went, whether it was watching the excavation, or what relationship it had with Gut Ripper’s expedition.

THE SNAKE PRIEST

A Memory One Generation Removed

The aged reptilian priest was estimated to be roughly ninety years old—born shortly after magic disappeared. His teachers or parents could therefore have remembered the magical age directly and passed down the temple’s location and rites.

His notes helped lead the expedition to Laogzed’s shrine. He used blood-elemental power to animate the temple’s old constructs temporarily and may also have used it to extend his own life.

He placed himself among Laogzed’s preserved champions. He was not dead or undead, but held at the final edge of life in suspended animation.

BLOOD ELEMENTALS

Two Barrels, Two Different Fates

Blood elementals come from a rarely discussed demiplane of blood and should not normally remain on the Prime Material Plane. One specimen was already dead and beginning to decay; the other remained alive in magically induced suspended animation.

The dead specimen yielded a poorly extracted sample provisionally valued at 73,000 gp because of its extreme rarity and usefulness in alchemy and enchantment. The living specimen was treated as a magical creature to preserve and was returned through the opened portal.

The party fed the dead remains to the avatar, restored enough power to open the portal and returned the living elemental through it.

THE NEGATIVE PORTAL

A Door Without Enough Power

Planar knowledge identified the temple portal as opening onto the Negative Material Plane—a place no living being should enter. Its mechanism moved and the portal flickered, but the shrine lacked enough energy to open it fully.

Blood from the slain barbarians was drawn along the floor and stairway into the shrine. Further sacrifice progressively awakened the avatar’s eyes and heads and restored enough power for the portal mechanism to respond.

Why a blood elemental could safely use this route, whether the portal reached its true home, and what remained beyond the threshold were not established.

LAOGZED’S CHAMPIONS

Waiting Between Life and Death

The green forms fixed to the walls were ancient champions of Laogzed. Like the snake priest, they were preserved at the brink of death rather than made undead. In an age of working magic they were intended to awaken when the faith required something consumed or destroyed.

Their failure to awaken normally supports the wider pattern: old divine structures still retain purpose, but lack the magical power needed to fulfil it.

MARKS AND AVATARS

Limited Links Still Work

Halen learned that a divine mark could serve as a limited direct link to an avatar. In a moment of desperate need, touching or invoking the mark might call whatever aid that avatar could still provide. The exact form of aid could not be predicted.

Halen already carried the Mark of Jergal, a mark also borne by Asuran. Laogzed’s avatar recognised Halen’s existing mark and placed its own beside it. The new mark could remain with Halen for months. Together, the marks demonstrate that diminished divine intermediaries can still establish personal links even while their gods remain unreachable.

What such contact costs, how much freedom the avatar retains, and whether accepting a mark changes the bearer beyond access to aid remain unknown.

PLANAR LEAKAGE

Magic Crossing the Boundaries

A recently discharged lightning ward should not have remained active for a century if it were only an ordinary spell. The party’s working explanation was that some magic still enters the world through links to other planes.

The unnatural cold beneath the excavation, surviving portals, demiplanes and stranded elementals all fit that explanation, but do not yet prove a single mechanism.

The exact source of the cold, the plane connected to the remaining carved symbols, and whether planar leakage can restore or merely imitate lost magic remain unknown.

Allies and Friends

• The Order: allies, guides and custodians of surviving magical knowledge. The Order warned the party that barbarians lay ahead and provided a guide who led them by a circuitous route back to the surface. Its principle of preserving magic directly shaped the decision not to exploit the living blood elemental.
• Gerlik: friendly rail-cart pilot and recurring practical ally in the dwarven tunnels.
• Troglodytes of Semuanyae: initially dangerous, later connected to the rites and memory of their lost death god. Relations improved through the party’s actions at the shrine and ziggurat.
• Sebastian: an Order member discovered in werefox form beneath a ruined cabin. His condition and future remain unresolved, but he is not treated as an enemy.

Uneasy or Transactional

• Ratmen: fought beneath the Safehold, then spared by Halen after surrender. Their wider clan’s attitude remains unknown.
• Remorhaz: permitted the rail-cart to pass after responding to Karl’s unexplained words; this was passage, not friendship.
• Celestial Watcher: delivered a warning rather than aid. Its allegiance and limits are unknown.
• Avatar of Laogzed: accepted the party’s offering, demanded ritual consumption and then offered a boon. The party chose knowledge about the missing god rather than a physical gift. The exchange was dangerous and transactional, not an alliance.
• Living blood elemental: no communication or lasting relationship was established. The party nevertheless treated it as a magical being to preserve and devised a plan to return it through the reopened portal rather than harvest it.
• Avatar of Ghaunadaur: expelled the party from the Library and left Asuran a symbol. The meaning of that act remains uncertain.

Hostile Powers

• Barbarian warbands: recurring enemies tied to the fall of the Safehold and later northern excavations.
• Gut Ripper’s followers: hostile worshippers using blood, sacrifice and Laogzed’s hidden shrine.
• Beastman warband and druid: fought the party in the marsh and called the Purple Worm against them.
• Drow handlers: used a chained basilisk in an ambush; both handlers were killed.
• The black-armoured crusader commander: leader of the opening assault and still an unresolved enemy.