Episode 21: City of Scrap

DM/GM Intro It started as a simple dungeon run…

But it has turned into a quest about the past, present, and future of Ain.  When our adventurers found a relic of chaos magic called the Secret Keeper’s Amulet, it didn’t take them long to realize how powerful it was.  It allows them to communicate with you, the watchers of the time stream, and allows you to send them forces of good and evil to influence their fates.

It also began a journey to uncover the lost history of Ain, from a time before the great War of Ideas known as the Aureate Age. The amulet connects them to a group of Heroes of that time, who gave up their lives to become the Wardens, giant protectors who have stood guard over the realms for generations.

But lately, those Wardens have gone missing.  With the help of a group of wizards known as The Natural Order, Siv, Fahima, James, Uggo, and Lily been tracking down and rescuing those Wardens.  First, the Storm Warden, trapped in a floating castle in the sky, and then, most recently, the Inferno Warden, held captive at the bottom of the sea.

To get there, our team had to persuade band of pirates to give up their ship, and trust a member of the Natural Order named Claudiette to protect them with her magic as they sank it, plummeting down to the ocean floor inside its broken hull.

What they found there was a terrifying sight, indeed.  The Inferno Warden, held captive by a colossal, tentacled Kraken, next to an enormous bubble, under which piles of bodies were being attended by slaves.  Undeterred, our team sallied forth, discovering that the slaves included Lily’s own mother and sisters, who had been kidnapped from the shores of Bingle, and that their oppressors were a group of hideous hybrid monsters under the command of one Yan Mo, a Dragonborn warrior and self-styled leader of the deep.

With courage and cunning, the team systematically took down each of the threats, while raining damage on the Kraken.  The amulet leant its power to the fight as well, even as James strangely refused its gifts. With the Kraken fielding a barrage of magic from Fahima, James, and Lily, and its oppressor, Yan Mo, suffering the combined assaults of Uggo and Siv, the gargantuan cephalopod finally dislodged from the Inferno Warden in an attempt to retreat and nurse its multiple severed tentacles.    

But the Warden, fueled by fire and rage, would not let it get away.  In one massive action, it grabbed the center of the beast and ripped it in twain, leaving bits of its gooey innards floating and swirling in the rapidly boiling water.  Then it reached down and dislodged the enormous bubble of air, lifting it and everyone inside it up and through the briney deep.

As the team rocketed through the water inside the dislodged bubble, they once again felt the amulet flash and pull them into the mind of a Warden to live out a hidden memory of the past. The second time they’ve experienced such a vision.

In this vision, they stood and watched as a grand library burned, its volumes going up in smoke, all lost to history.  All, save one, which was rescued from the fire by Uggo, inside the Inferno Warden himself, Nicolas Kiln. Then, another flash, and the team was transported into another unlocked memory.  This time, the team witnessed the birth of a child. The blue elf daughter of Fahima’s champion, Myrasis Bloo, christened... Osyra