May the 4th be with you!
Asked each player to plan a few minutes to discuss their day and and how they get to the door that I will inevitably snatch them away from.
Feel yourself being pulled apart, but rebuilt from pieces you don’t recognize, you’re separated, sliced up and shuffled back together like a stack made of similar but not the same collections of cards.
You have a feeling of being uncomfortably small and gloriously enormous. for the briefest moment, you can feel the current of time across parallel strings, pulled taught and vibrating. one snaps! Bam.
Through Doors
Characters enter through a random door in the Smouldering Corpse Bar (page 38) in the Hive Ward. make it entertaining. try to be embarrassing. plow out of the kitchen and knock over a satyr maid with a platter of dishes. pop into a bathroom with someone shitting. stuck in a pantry.
Each can feel an insurmountable pull, a sort of need that can hardly be explained. Converge at an empty table without thinking about it. A Thri-kreen bar made comes over and psychicly (with mandibles moving) asks if they want some Bub (cheap booze).
The bar – Barkis is behind the patchwork metal counter, a Drow, Ogre, a few humans, a mouse like Mustival Guardinel and dwarf looking being that is literally on fire and a barrier (goat like centaur celestial) woman with exquisite hair sit around the bar. Angel and Demon are talking about the Blood War at a table next to them. On the other side a mindflayer, a glowing cosmic dragonborn and a macabre looking pale skinned man with lank dirty white hair and a drab dirty clothes (herald of the dust remnant) are having a lively conversation.
Move on From Here
Either A) the group moves on into the Hive Ward. Describe close, claustrophobic haphazard architecture, rust and blades everywhere. Slags and Grease Pit are close by. include some encounters.
or B) The inciting incident happens there at the bar.
A big monster bursts through the door. A 8-foot devil (Orthon, MotM 205) and his pack of Shadar-Kai (Shadow dancer and several Shadow Mastiffs (Shadow Mastiff Alpha and 2 Shadow Mastiff (moderate to high difficulty) of some kind busts through the door after a few minutes of RPGing, surrounded by some minions and yells, “IT’S THEM, GET EM!” Patrons of the bar leap up and get in the way of the Devil and the Shadowfell elf. The Mastiffs start charging, dodging in between the patrons. The Orthon mentally talks to the group.
I love a good hunt, it has been so long since I had to put some effort in. hehehe. This will be fun.
A blue plasmoid that smells of raspberry and a Warforged made of wood and concrete bust through a back door and yells, “this way, quick” Go hide in the Grease Pit, we will meet you there” You all feel an attraction, a connection to the Plasmoid. do some RP. Get some food. Blue doesn’t understand why they can’t see the mark, he sees it. the same that he has. Won’t explain more until they get back to the hideout.
Chase ensues ending with a fight with the shadow hounds.
Jhell O and Brick find them again in the Grease Pit. They are wounded. Wants to get them to the Undersigil, hideout of a new philosophy called the Cosmomancy takes confused that they can’t see the glowing symbol etched upon their souls.
Resisting Arrest
Follow the Harmonium Officers encounter, including fighting them off or being arrested.
Run the Farrow encounter, but she will state that Accittaz of the Cosmomancers needs to see them first, but, that she may have someone that they should talk to after. Time to go to Undersigil.
first do the brain rat thing.
then do the death cake thing.
lost in a sewer for a bit, Farrow seems to forget her wway for a few moments, Three sahuagin emerge from a wide pipe. “Polluters!” shouts one of them, addressing the characters.
find their way Undersigil, a tight, dirty, bladed ghetto. A Torch Boy offers to light their way for a copper. make it to the:
Pit of Blades – Home of the Cosmomancers
If one can locate the correct seedy alley in Nowhere, one may be unlucky enough to find the entry to the Pit of Blades, but one probably shouldn’t. It is a den of lost souls, where the unaligned Free League members meet frequently, because misery likes company.
Farrow has the group take a seat and wait a few minutes.
The bartender is an Arakocra warrior with a burnt right side of his face disfiguring his white bald eagle like features and an eye patch named Ateth.
The angry bar made is a female bugbear wearing a dirty green dress and apron with her bushy main of hair pulled back named Daxie, using a gruff voice and short statements, calls everyone hun.
Many human patrons, a few orcs, a duegar and sviftneblin, a minotaur and a table of Kobolds around a tiny white dragon led by Kliky. Depressed looking Fairy named Tori Oaksprite and misses his friends on the fairy network.
There is also a male kenku rogue Looper named Kruearru that knows the way out of the loop to travel back and forth in time whom sits at a table with two shifters in neutral form and a Drow female warrior missing an arm (with a ghostly arm replacing it) named Ellmyra.
Lost soul male Saytr named Mal with a haunted and dreadful look up on his face. looks lost, face darting back and forth. A lost soul asks the party to escort them to the home of their deity—who no one’s ever heard of. When he speaks the name, they don’t hear it, so much as feel the buzz and break of reality for a heartbeat.
the other patrons in the hidden room begin to whisper as the pcs enter.
Talk to Accittaz. discusses the Cosmomancers whole thing. Balance is important, reality is placed upon the most tenuous of points, and should any comsic alignment take power, the scale will tip and all of reality will tumble into the nothingness below.
You have the mark. Your destiny is set. Just like our friend Jhell, Brick and a few others throughout the Cage, you have been brought here against your will. and truly we don’t know why, but, we know its important and aligns with our mission, our goal, the very philosophy by which we believe that reality functions.
Those others are wrong.
The Bleak Cabal thinks there is no great truth, but, balance is the truth.
The universe will only crumble if balance is broken, unlike the beliefs of the sad misguided Doomguard.
The fraternity of order would push the scales past the limit if they had their way, same goes for the Hands of Havoc and their nonsense.
But Accittaz is not here to tell them what to do. It is up to them to find out what has brought them here, he merely believes, knows that their arrival heralds the faction moving to a greater station in the Sigil.
Jhell O and Brick want the same thing, they were brought from another place and dropped here. they have not found their purpose yet, but the Scales have been good to them. If asked what they suggest:
Jhell thinks that a something must be written in the Hall of Information wtihin the Clerk’s Ward.
Brick recons that with so many coming and going, the Great Bazaar in the Market ward may present someone that knows something, or at least be entertaining while they look for answers. He says another member also mentioned that the Bank of Abbathor may be holding the answers in some vault, but, he hasn’t seen that particular Astral elf (Elsaphor female neutral rogue).
Farrow suggests that they go talk to her contact, whom is well connected and quite powerful.
Time to go take a spin at Fortune’s Wheel.