- Location
- Argentina
Will we see these rolls after everything has been dealt with?
Finding the Spark (Pathfinder 1E Quest)
- Thread starter DragonParadox
- Start date
- Fantasy
-
- Tags
- pathfinder
Will we see these rolls after everything has been dealt with?
Sure, if I remember to post them. If I don't you guys feel free to remind me.
TheOmnimercurial
Dragon Bard
- Location
- UK
[X] Yes, they named you kin and did you no harm, frightening as they are you do not think they are your foes
- Location
- CT
[X] Yes, they named you kin and did you no harm, frightening as they are you do not think they are your foes
The Azlanti city state the Dark Folk are descended from got into some messed up shit, especially when the fled from the side effects of the Starfall, and picked up a bunch of shadow themed demigods as god kings upon moving down. That said, there's too much missing from their historical record to avoid further cultural degeneration, if things don't change.
The Azlanti city state the Dark Folk are descended from got into some messed up shit, especially when the fled from the side effects of the Starfall, and picked up a bunch of shadow themed demigods as god kings upon moving down. That said, there's too much missing from their historical record to avoid further cultural degeneration, if things don't change.
Update will be tomorrow, this is going to be pretty big... and the end of the arc.
Goldfish
Friendly Spider-Fish Abomination
- Location
- Formerly of the Far Realm
That's ominous.
- Location
- Russia
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I hope it'l be end of the arc, not of the quest 😅That's ominous.
Arc 1 Post 48: Key of the Mind
Key of the Mind
The Season of Still Stone
"Step back..." That is as far as you get before Mina practically wrenches you back three steps and Cob makes his feelings on trusting spooks just as clear. But just as you are about to argue with them Gorok hisses at the back of his throat, deep and sonorous as he had never made before. What it might mean you do not know, but he does not take his eyes off the wraith.
"The dead have spoken and the living have answered, by blood and still water, by breath and bitter air, his peril and his chance, and none of ours."
"The Hells its none of ours, we are in this together!" Mina shouts, actually shouts for the first time since you have met her. For a moment you hesitate in your resolve.
"Together means trust, if one is not bound, not chained in mind," Gorok presses. "Do you think he is bound in mind as Cob was?"
"I am myself," you proclaim at once and loudly, but as the echoes of the tomb come back upon your ears you cannot help but wonder who that is.
As you step closer to the specter and it closer to you something glints in its charred hands, a silvery crescent delicate as a dream. Not mist, not light, but something in between, a dream made solid held in a nightmare's grasp. Cold, the thing is cold as you have never felt it before, to be in its presence is almost to forget that warmth has any power in the world. Again you almost step back, almost refuse, but you had come here seeking treasures, seeking answers, here they were both together.
Thus you stand as upon your brow is placed the arc of silver... moonlight, some part of you whispers, like a dreamer slowly waking. It melts into your forehead leaving nary a trace and yet... It's humming, song without sound behind your eyes, spiraling upwards and onwards until you could feel the three other flames in the chamber; one crackling like laughter fit to break its mounds, one slow and purposeful like the witch-lights of the deep tunnels and one that shone as light though a many-colored crystal
Gained Band of Clarity
Description: This crescent of barely solid moonlight merges with the head of the bearer, opening their mind to the song of the world, that they might know the hearts of those nearest to them. Once they were as common as lanterns on a dark street in the hands of those blessed by the moon above, but the world was changed, the sky blackened and all were extinguished... all but one it seems.
Ability: Can cast Detect Thoughts 3/Day
"...the deepest shadows guard best the light..."
As the specter vanishes and draws back its darkness seems to expand wider and deeper until you are inside a cylinder of unrelieved blackness, only the sense of your companions'... of your friends' minds keeping you from panicking. Come to think of it, that might not be the wisest thing you have ever done, to trust this thing with your only lifeline to the outside world.
User Data Input confirmed
Last Date of Access: T-10973 Solar Cycles
Data Corruption: 61.661%
Scan...
Cause of Degradation: Lack of Maintenance
Scan...
Cause of Degradation: %^W^Int... Imp... Error... Error
Emergency Shunt
User is Advised that the Contents of this Data Base have been breached by a Class 3 Hazard, Lower Dimensional Memetic Worm, Shutdown bypassed due to priority Order Sixteen Alpha: No shut down is to be incurred when hardware degradation is so extreme as would preclude a restart without technician. User is advised of the presence of 1 (one) message in System from Mirror Collector Base Tranquility. Play:
Y/N
[] Play the urgent message
[] Do not play the Urgent message
For a moment you are left blinking in bemusement bemusement at the words blooming in your mind. Though you can make sense of what each of them means individually the whole escapes you, even with the information poured right into your brain. No touching the glowing runes until yet... Alas, the next thing to flash through your mind's eye feels like some kind of admonishment about changing bodies. How in all the far pits of Orv does someone change their body? you wonder, head spinning.
User blood patterns recorded at 73% Deviation from common Azlanti patterns. Recommendation: Medical regeneration to baseline. Extended use of recreational body mods has an adverse effect on the mind and and body, as well as one's social bonds with other members of the High Realm
The luminous shapes, not writing you realize, for what does this place need for writing when they can speak into the mind, but markers for the hand to... input information reshape in front of you as another message plays.
Lack of mental compatibility detected, Base Data Collection accessed. Warning: Data Corruption amplifying. Only three options may be chosen before shutdown of terminal.
Choose Three
[] Final Message from the Imperial Palace, instructions of His Imperial Majesty
[] Geography of the High Realm
[] Brief History of the High Realm
[] Theurgy Primmer for Novices
[] Military Outpost Coordinates
[] Disaster Relief Shelter Coordinates
[] Axis Synchronized Conjuration Coordinates of the Imperial Postal Service
[] Locations of naval ships... error... Location of Active distress beacons
[] REDACTED Error REDACTED Current Files
Arc One Complete
OOC: Well you definitely found... something alright, something a lot of people will kill for. Choose wisely.
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Pathfinder already has a lot of cosmic stuff in it and a lot of magi-tech. They call Azlanti the most advanced human polity that ever was, but what does that mean?
- Location
- Argentina
Goldfish
Friendly Spider-Fish Abomination
- Location
- Formerly of the Far Realm
Holy shit, I wasn't expecting that! At first I thought we might have an Androffan/Numerian connection here, with the band being a piece of recovered tech enchanted into a hybrid item.
But upon further reading, it's more like we've stumbled across a piece of very important Azlanti magi-tech, something that just took the complexity of the enchantment to the logical extreme, complete with a magic OS. To ape Clarke's well-known phrasing, sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. After all, the Azlanti and Thassilonian cousins were very advanced magically, able to crank out artifacts and all kinds of crazy enchanted stuff. It's not really a stretch that they would have this sort of system in place.
Just goes to show how much was lost after Earthfall virtually erased civilization on Golarion, so much so that it's taken 10,000+ years to even recover as much as it has.
- Location
- St. Petersburg
I suppose this is where we can find more of the same, but less likely to be immediately useful. Would like to visit distress beacons. Call it an FTL reflex.
Goldfish
Friendly Spider-Fish Abomination
- Location
- Formerly of the Far Realm
Very neat twist here, @DragonParadox. 🤓
Definitely want to play the urgent message. Choosing the other three is hard.
[] Final Message from the Imperial Palace, instructions of His Imperial Majesty
Potentially interesting, but I'm not sure how this one would benefit us. I guess it could have critical information, though it seems likely to be less applicable than a lot of the other options.
[] Geography of the High Realm
Another interesting one, but geography has changed a lot in the last 10,000 years, especially the continent of Azlant. Earthfall flat out destroyed that, reducing it to a bunch of small, scattered islands.
[] Brief History of the High Realm
Another potentially interesting one, maybe very interesting, but also probably not as relevant to our current situation as some of the other options.
[] Theurgy Primer for Novices
I think this one might be a bit of a trap. At first I was leaning toward it, but after thinking about it a bit, I'm going to pass. Kori is an Oracle with a solid path already set in front of him. We don't need to multi-class or look for prestige classes, and that's what I'm afraid this information does, provide the knowledge necessary to go that route. Or it might be spell formulae, which we can't really do much with, since we aren't a prepared caster.
[] Military Outpost Coordinates
This is tempting! Really, really tempting. There is no telling what goodies we could salvage from these places, assuming we could ever reach one. Unfortunately, the location of military outposts were probably relatively well known by many Azlanti at the time of Earthfall. Those are likely to be among the first places that were looted by survivors in the aftermath, assuming surviving military personnel didn't clean any stockpiled materials out before evacuating themselves.
[X] Disaster Relief Shelter Coordinates
Unlike the military outpost option, I think this is more likely to bare fruit. Yes, the intact shelters were probably also picked clean, but between there being more of them, the shelters themselves probably being fairly well hardened against destructive forces, and the potential for magical preservation, there could be more than one of them waiting somewhere, undiscovered after all this time.
[X] Axis Synchronized Conjuration Coordinates of the Imperial Postal Service
I'm making a lot of assumptions on this one, more than the others for sure, but I feel like this has a lot of potential. Not immediately, but for later. With Axis involved, even tangentially, there is a good chance these coordinates are not for a place on the Material Plane. Using Axis as a reference point for conjuration coordinates makes me think we might learn how to eventually Plane Shift to a specialized Demiplane that the Azlanti used as a transport hub for their postal service. We won't be getting access to Plane Shift for a long while, unless we get really lucky, but once we do, having a Demiplane all to ourselves would make for a fantastic base of operations and hidey hole. Who know what neat stuff might still be there, too?
[] Locations of naval ships... error... Location of Active distress beacons
Another tempting option, especially with the distress beacons. Unfortunately, any Azlanti naval assets are probably at the bottom of the ocean. Deep sea Golarion is scarier and more difficult to survive in than deep in the Darklands. Not that I would expect any of the ships to be even remotely intact. 10,000 years is a long time, after all, and even if something survived Earthfall itself, the intervening years gives too much time for scavengers to pick over them or hostile wildlife to destroy them, either in battle or just because. Not gonna hold out much hope for getting good results from the distress beacons, either. If they're still active, we probably aren't the first people that will have found them.
Also, I'm assuming "naval ships" is referring to a wet navy rather than anything space-based. IIRC, Azlant wasn't known to do anything in space, doing their exploration off Golarion using magical teleportation and portals/Gates. If they did, they might have noticed the meteor the Aboleth's crashed into Golarion to trigger Earthfall (which later became the Starstone).
[X] REDACTED Error REDACTED Current Files
As @Tomcost said...mystery box...
Jokes aside, the REDACTED is very tempting. Redacted means the message title was actively obscured rather than corrupted by time, so whatever is in here is likely really important. Of course, it could be the previous user's recipe for their prize winning Dragon Chili, but I'll err on the side of hope here.
Definitely want to play the urgent message. Choosing the other three is hard.
[] Final Message from the Imperial Palace, instructions of His Imperial Majesty
Potentially interesting, but I'm not sure how this one would benefit us. I guess it could have critical information, though it seems likely to be less applicable than a lot of the other options.
[] Geography of the High Realm
Another interesting one, but geography has changed a lot in the last 10,000 years, especially the continent of Azlant. Earthfall flat out destroyed that, reducing it to a bunch of small, scattered islands.
[] Brief History of the High Realm
Another potentially interesting one, maybe very interesting, but also probably not as relevant to our current situation as some of the other options.
[] Theurgy Primer for Novices
I think this one might be a bit of a trap. At first I was leaning toward it, but after thinking about it a bit, I'm going to pass. Kori is an Oracle with a solid path already set in front of him. We don't need to multi-class or look for prestige classes, and that's what I'm afraid this information does, provide the knowledge necessary to go that route. Or it might be spell formulae, which we can't really do much with, since we aren't a prepared caster.
[] Military Outpost Coordinates
This is tempting! Really, really tempting. There is no telling what goodies we could salvage from these places, assuming we could ever reach one. Unfortunately, the location of military outposts were probably relatively well known by many Azlanti at the time of Earthfall. Those are likely to be among the first places that were looted by survivors in the aftermath, assuming surviving military personnel didn't clean any stockpiled materials out before evacuating themselves.
[X] Disaster Relief Shelter Coordinates
Unlike the military outpost option, I think this is more likely to bare fruit. Yes, the intact shelters were probably also picked clean, but between there being more of them, the shelters themselves probably being fairly well hardened against destructive forces, and the potential for magical preservation, there could be more than one of them waiting somewhere, undiscovered after all this time.
[X] Axis Synchronized Conjuration Coordinates of the Imperial Postal Service
I'm making a lot of assumptions on this one, more than the others for sure, but I feel like this has a lot of potential. Not immediately, but for later. With Axis involved, even tangentially, there is a good chance these coordinates are not for a place on the Material Plane. Using Axis as a reference point for conjuration coordinates makes me think we might learn how to eventually Plane Shift to a specialized Demiplane that the Azlanti used as a transport hub for their postal service. We won't be getting access to Plane Shift for a long while, unless we get really lucky, but once we do, having a Demiplane all to ourselves would make for a fantastic base of operations and hidey hole. Who know what neat stuff might still be there, too?
[] Locations of naval ships... error... Location of Active distress beacons
Another tempting option, especially with the distress beacons. Unfortunately, any Azlanti naval assets are probably at the bottom of the ocean. Deep sea Golarion is scarier and more difficult to survive in than deep in the Darklands. Not that I would expect any of the ships to be even remotely intact. 10,000 years is a long time, after all, and even if something survived Earthfall itself, the intervening years gives too much time for scavengers to pick over them or hostile wildlife to destroy them, either in battle or just because. Not gonna hold out much hope for getting good results from the distress beacons, either. If they're still active, we probably aren't the first people that will have found them.
Also, I'm assuming "naval ships" is referring to a wet navy rather than anything space-based. IIRC, Azlant wasn't known to do anything in space, doing their exploration off Golarion using magical teleportation and portals/Gates. If they did, they might have noticed the meteor the Aboleth's crashed into Golarion to trigger Earthfall (which later became the Starstone).
[X] REDACTED Error REDACTED Current Files
As @Tomcost said...mystery box...
Jokes aside, the REDACTED is very tempting. Redacted means the message title was actively obscured rather than corrupted by time, so whatever is in here is likely really important. Of course, it could be the previous user's recipe for their prize winning Dragon Chili, but I'll err on the side of hope here.
- Location
- Argentina
Your assessment is great, but I would like to mention other things:
[] Final Message from the Imperial Palace, instructions of His Imperial Majesty
This is not immediately useful, and probably never will, yet will put in context the end of Azlant and is actuall the flavor option to take for a "Make Azlant great again" focus. I will pass on this one, as there are more important things to pick, but a motivational speech would actually drive us forward as a character. Maybe.
[] Geography of the High Realm
[] Brief History of the High Realm
These options are likely to net us a passive bonus to undercovering Azlanti stuff in the future. I am more tempted to pick history, as there are likely secrets that we will only access by knowing stuff that Azlanti once knew.
[] Theurgy Primmer for Novices
I wonder if Theurgy is the class, or just something related to casting in general...
[] Military Outpost Coordinates
Same comments as Goldfish. Plus, not so interested in combat prowess at all.
[] Disaster Relief Shelter Coordinates
Same comments as Goldfish. This is the most likely things to net us something usable.
[] Axis Synchronized Conjuration Coordinates of the Imperial Postal Service
Anything related to administrative offices holds a wealth of knowledge that is at the same time inconmensurably vast, incredibly detailed, very difficult to process and make use of, and mostly useless. Being chaotically aligned ourselves, I don't think that we would like Axis too much.
[] Locations of naval ships... error... Location of Active distress beacons
If the distress beacon is intact, then there is a chance that whatever is left is still there to be looted.
[] REDACTED Error REDACTED Current Files
Again, mostly what Goldfish said.
With this in mind, I am going to vote the following:
[X] Play the urgent message
Probably relevant to our immediate situation.
[X] Brief History of the High Realm
The most relevant option to help access other Azlanti places
[X] Disaster Relief Shelter Coordinates
Most basic yet more likely to be intact loot.
[X] REDACTED Error REDACTED Current Files
The secret itself is likely to be worth more than anything we know of.
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Viserys? Is that you?
/sarcasm/
[X] Play the urgent message
[X] Brief History of the High Realm
[X] Disaster Relief Shelter Coordinates
[X] REDACTED Error REDACTED Current Files
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No... but there might be some Easter eggs.