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A Sword Without a Hilt: A Song of Ice and Fire/D&D 3.5 Crossover

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you know i really want to capture an umbrehulk at some point becouse confusing gaze is a very fun ability to be able to get into the forges system
 
As much as I like feeding Best Snek the people we want permanently dead...

I also want to have an alternative that permanently destroys souls. Like our own Brass Mint but being less horrifying and with less of an echo of tortured souls ringing through it.
 
Rovos said:
what date did we guy's come to the stepstones again? becouse i feel like we need to make that a holliday
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We arrived a month before the New Year. Damphair's sacrifice took place on the 6th day of the Year after it. We had a celebration declared last year about it, which lasted a week.

We are about to do the same this year.
 
Tomcost said:
As much as I like feeding Best Snek the people we want permanently dead...

I also want to have an alternative that permanently destroys souls. Like our own Brass Mint but being less horrifying and with less of an echo of tortured souls ringing through it.
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Step 1: Write in into the Imperial Law an Emperor-only clause for judging Soul-destruction worthy offenses.
Step 2: Turn the Imperial Deity on.
Step 3: Abuse the shit out if it being powered by obedience to the laws of the Empire.
Step 4: ???????
Step 5: You get to soul-kill whenever you want to without a need to stuff the poor snek full
 
lockingbane said:
..... Is it bad that I have a great desire to make a flesh forged sea monster for nirvana designed solely to spawn rapidly and hunt him down?

Maybe add in an easy way to exterminate them to be safe but make the equivalent of owlbears in pathfinder for him.

Something that will be freaking everywhere for him and have him have to constantly deal with them.

Maybe something that eats ships (or at least makes holes in them?)
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Not necessarily a bad idea but worried that could start a Tyranid or even "grey goo" scenario, no matter how many safeguards they can still fail if there is an error in its replication (essentially evolution).
 
Negentropy said:
Not necessarily a bad idea but worried that could start a Tyranid or even "grey goo" scenario, no matter how many safeguards they can still fail if there is an error in its replication (essentially evolution).
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Hmmm, maybe make a magic virus keyed towards greyjoy making all infected immediately hate him? (Him being infected and having some serious self hatred would be kind of funny in a way)
 
lockingbane said:
Hmmm, maybe make a magic virus keyed towards greyjoy making all infected immediately hate him? (Him being infected and having some serious self hatred would be kind of funny in a way)
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And then it mutates and wipes out all Human life.

If we want him dead, we can just kill him the old fashioned way without resorting to magical bio-weapons. (Un)Fortunately, we don't actually have any IC knowledge of Euron's shenanigans in Nirvana, at least not beyond the barebones rumor of a potentially Planetosi pirate sailing and raiding there. Until he attracts our attention, we have no practical reason to plot his demise.
 
Goldfish said:
And then it mutates and wipes out all Human life.

If we want him dead, we can just kill him the old fashioned way without resorting to magical bio-weapons. (Un)Fortunately, we don't actually have any IC knowledge of Euron's shenanigans in Nirvana, at least not beyond the barebones rumor of a potentially Planetosi pirate sailing and raiding there. Until he attracts our attention, we have no practical reason to plot his demise.
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Yeah, Euron's gonna Euron for a while. At the moment we don't really have the attention to spare to go on a major extraplanar hunt, and going after Euron deserves as much planning as going after the Golden Company did, if not more.
 
Goldfish said:
And then it mutates and wipes out all Human life.

If we want him dead, we can just kill him the old fashioned way without resorting to magical bio-weapons. (Un)Fortunately, we don't actually have any IC knowledge of Euron's shenanigans in Nirvana, at least not beyond the barebones rumor of a potentially Planetosi pirate sailing and raiding there. Until he attracts our attention, we have no practical reason to plot his demise.
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Yeah I guess. I just am unsure how we could face him on the seas when he has magic and has likely prepared against dragonfire and more.

This is probably because my DMs in the past have rarely if ever done sea battles (outside of maybe being long distance artillery on the shore on advancing monsters or pirates) so I am unsure of how to really combat it beyond "Throw everything and hope that kills it" or "Start summoning/raised undead and bury them in bodies" or (if there are enough druids and mages) "Welp, time to turn/be turned into sea monsters".
 
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Omake: A Final Letter
  • Threadmarks
    • A Final Letter​

    OOC: To be read in the voice of the Narrator of Darkest Dungeon for a better effect

    To the local Inquisitorial Office in Pentos,

    I dearly hope that circumstances allow this letter to reach any of you, for that it would mean that everything went as planned. Otherwise, the consequences could be dire, and your intervention would be needed with more haste. The purpose of this writing is ultimately to report a crime that will have happened in this city, a final act of desperation by a hopeless fellow who could not escape his own mind, the feeble thing.

    Yet for all I could write about the act in question, the nature of your profession demands a more rigorous approach than vague testimonies that arrived in a mysterious letter one fateful night. Allow me to introduce myself for what will hopefully be the only time I need to do so: my name is Caelor Fernos, a scholar of some repute and traveler of many roads, and lately, the Spheres. I inherited a small fortune as a child by virtue of becoming an orphan at the age of ten. The bitterness of that event was channeled through a desire to understand, predict, and learn, as if a common child of mortal descent could even hope to have even the barest hint of control over his own life, and that of others. How foolish I was, yet I don't repent from my life choices.

    My travels have taken me through diverse places, from the dwellings of the Lazhareen people in the Far East to the disgustingly hot places where the ebon-skinned Summer Islanders have chosen to live. I've studied and talked with people whose cultures range from the savage Dothraki to the rough folk of the Iron Islands to the West. The fundamental question I was desperately searching an answer for was simple; Why? A million answers was what I got, each more nonsensical than the last. Creation should have a meaning, a simple answer to all that there is, yet vague legends of Horse deities mating with the world or elder terrors caring from below the deepest oceans was all I got. My searches got me nothing but an unending stream of frustration that washed upon my psyche. I desperately tried to delve into more esoteric matters, even managed to teach myself a few modest tricks that are useful for increasing the quality of life of any person, yet there were of no real use to me or my goals.

    As I was about to plunge into despair, the news from the realm of the Dragon King and his advances in the esoteric fields reached me. Hope revitalized me as I traveled to the chain of islands used to be little less than smuggling dens some years ago. There I found lore pertaining to the greater order of Creation, of the fundamental order of the cosmos and the birth and death of souls. About how ultimately the actions of every thinking being marked the afterlife they would get. Mortal minds can easily get overwhelmed by the talk of other planes of existence, where the very essence of themselves shall go to fight for the values they uphold in life, each action but a drop of water in an unending sea, but that nevertheless made ripples, and then waves to reach a higher goal. It was with newfound purpose that I crossed the boundaries to the realms of the Endless Sky. There, I caught the eye of a bored member of the minor nobility among the Djinn, which was trying to entertain himself by playing philanthropist among less fortunate species. I had to swallow my pride, that pitiful thing that we have as a defensive mechanism against the verbal onslaughts of others, as my host treated me as little more than a curiosity, an oddity coming from a strange realm with a strange culture. Nevertheless, it was enough to assuage my needs for more information, and my expanding lore was increased even further, as each question answered begot a hundred more, each making the already bottomless pit of my search even emptier. From his part, I amused him with the tales of my travels. Not in an intellectual sense, but rather with the kind of amusement one would find in the odd circus animal that is different from the rest or the pet that knows how to perform a particularly interesting pirouette. It was enlightening to notice how mortals and immortals alike fall into the same thought patterns to refrain from considering other beings as equal, and thus deserving of the same rights as them, believing themselves above the rest.

    Yet there was a subject that always provoked elusive answers and hollow sentences, the responses that would suffice for a kid not really interested in discovering the truth. Yet as I pressed further, my host became uncomfortable, but could no longer hide how ignorant he thought that I was. The ideal model of how the spheres of being should interact with each other, how the souls would flow to their afterlives to empower their ideals and fight for them was broken. In fact, it had been broken since time immemorial, where only the very first beings who had by chance survived since the beginning of Creation knew about how it was supposed to work. The Upper Planes lay broken, a wide variety of catastrophes having engulfed each of them, and as such the natural state of the Spheres was one where souls got lost or only found their way to the Lower Planes. Disbelief was my first answer, as I scrambled to deny everything like a fanatic who had just had their dogmas challenged. No thinking being would want to believe that, and my host, in what was ultimately exasperation at my insistence, decided to simply show me.

    I was not prepared. And in a thousand lifetimes I would have not been. The Planes lay broken, Heaven a barren wasteland, the last remnants of its hierarchy under the control of the hosts of Hell, a menacing maw of void constantly looming on the horizon, threatening to swallow it all. The fields of Nirvana lay broken, trampled and bloodied with the fluids of a thousand different species, as horrors from beyond reality itself defile the very earth to bring forth their unknowable goals upon our realms. Elysium itself lays broken, a million pieces, some huge as entire continents drifting towards an endless void, some haphazardly joined together in magical bindings in a futile attempt to prevent the inevitable, as they slowly but steadily drift towards oblivion, if they are lucky, or towards the festering wound of the Pit itself.

    As my weak mind tried and failed to apprehend the truth, the final piece of the puzzle fell upon me. The Djinn's face showed no sign of sadness; it tried to show empathy, but a glint in his eye betrayed him. He was feeling the faint smugness a mentor experiences when teaching his apprentice. I might have been an educated man back on Planetos, but here I was feeding the ego of a being so ancient and wealthy that he didn't have anything else to do, yet he didn't even try to close the gaping maw of nothingness above Mount Celestia as we watched it from afar, hidden with the most potent glamors he could pay for. That's when the realization dawned on me; this was the eternal state of affairs for the ageless beings, the collapse of the Spheres was the norm, and even themselves were busying themselves with frivolous tasks and petty disputes for power, all while everything that exists slowly plunges into oblivion. But, why would they decide to not care? Because they can't do anything about it.

    The Blood war keeps raging, the Pit and Baator fighting an eternal conflict to scavenge the greater trickle of souls that is available to them, all the while from Abaddon the Daemons gorge in a banquet of souls. Whole economies dedicated to the trade of the very essences of beings, reduced to be little more than cattle to forces so much above them, just like we treat our livestock, and it in turn treats grass. Yet they scramble for ephemeral victories and short-sighted disputes, for in their eternal lives all that they have would matter nothing once everything is consumed. We are each a drop in an ocean, being drained slowly and relentlessly from all there is, so that while we believe we are doing something at the surface, the whole of Creation is being drained from the bottom.

    [The writing grows messier from now on]

    The corpse of the beggar lies interred in my modest manse's garden, a proper burial was all I could give given the haste with which I decided to carry this ordeal. Merren was his name, and I can assure you that he was perfectly unconscious when the Cacodaemon came from the ritual circle. Just now it lies hidden in the basement, a stone door blocking the pest's exit. The wound the Daemon has given me has already healed, yet the affliction it has passed on me runs in my veins. Even now the wretched thing keeps trying to convince me to let it free, in its many and desperate pathetic attempts through the link he has formed with my mind. I've endured the whispers the cold breeze of the North carries on those dark rainy days. It promises sweet oblivion, a poisoned chalice of dullness, if only you manage to take others unto Oblivion with you. A lowly denizen of Abaddon is a simply beast besides that.

    Yet I was the one to convince it to do my bidding. By the time this letter arrives to you, I would be dead beyond death, the Daemon being enclosed so much time that it had to consume my soul to prevent starvation. But as the remnants of my soul lie scattered across the Spheres, I go with a clear conscience. For that I know that when the final hours of all that is have come, the last rays of light have been swallowed and the last speck of dust floating in the never-ending emptiness of Creation is finally consumed by the Void…

    … I will not be there to see it.


    [Inquisitorial Report]

    The agent who first read this letter and led the hasty investigation has requested to be discharged from his position. A dose of Memory Moss and a letter written to his future self was the only thing required to erase the day he desired to forget. Divination proved the veracity of his letter as his now uninformed self read it.

    The mansion was breached, the cacodaemon found in a hunger-driven frenzy and killed during the process. All of Caelor's assets have been seized for later liquidation for the Inquisition. Protocols to test the knowledge of the true state of the Spheres through divination are being devised, with some preliminary tests ongoing to detect future threat vectors.
     
    Last edited:
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    • lockingbane said:
    Yeah I guess. I just am unsure how we could face him on the seas when he has magic and has likely prepared against dragonfire and more.

    This is probably because my DMs in the past have rarely if ever done sea battles (outside of maybe being long distance artillery on the shore on advancing monsters or pirates) so I am unsure of how to really combat it beyond "Throw everything and hope that kills it" or "Start summoning/raised undead and bury them in bodies" or (if there are enough druids and mages) "Welp, time to turn/be turned into sea monsters".
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    There are all sorts of spells which are meant to be used on the open sea, or which are especially devastating when used on/in water. If we actually decided to move against Euron while he was at sea, we wouldn't be lacking for options.

    And nothing says we would have to attack him at sea. The Silence will have to dock fairly regularly, during which time it, its crew, and Euron are even more vulnerable.
     
    Tomcost said:
    A Final Letter​

    OOC: To be read in the voice of the Narrator of Darkest Dungeon for a better effect

    To the local Inquisitorial Office in Pentos,

    I dearly hope that circumstances allow this letter to reach any of you, for that it would mean that everything went as planned. Otherwise, the consequences could be dire, and your intervention would be needed with more haste. The purpose of writing is ultimately to report a crime that will have happened in this city, a final act of desperation by a hopeless fellow who could not escape his own mind, the feeble thing.

    Yet for all I could write about the act in question, the nature of your profession demands a more rigorous approach than vague testimonies that arrived in a mysterious letter one fateful night. Allow me to introduce myself for what will hopefully be the only time I need to do so: my name is Caelor Fernos, a scholar of some repute and traveler of many roads, and lately, the Spheres. I inherited a small fortune as a child by virtue of becoming an orphan at the age of ten. The bitterness of that event was channeled through a desire to understand, predict, and learn, as if a common child of mortal descent could even hope to have even the barest hint of control over his own life, and that of others. How foolish I was, yet I don't repent from my life choices.

    My travels have taken me through diverse places, from the dwellings of the Lazhareen people in the Far East to the disgustingly hot places where the ebon-skinned Summer Islanders have chosen to live. I've studied and talked with people whose cultures range from the savage Dothraki to the rough folk of the Iron Islands to the West. The fundamental question I was desperately searching an answer for was simple; Why? A million answers was what I got, each more nonsensical than the last. Creation should have a meaning, a simple answer to all that there is, yet vague legends of Horse deities mating with the world or elder terrors caring from below the deepest oceans was all I got. My searches got me nothing but an unending stream of frustration that washed upon my psyche. I desperately tried to delve into more esoteric matters, even managed to teach myself a few modest tricks that are useful for increasing the quality of life of any person, yet there were of no real use to me or my goals.

    As I was about to plunge into despair, the news from the realm of the Dragon King and his advances in the esoteric fields reached me. Hope revitalized me as I traveled to the chain of islands used to be little less than smuggling dens some years ago. There I found lore pertaining to the greater order of Creation, of the fundamental order of the cosmos and the birth and death of souls. About how ultimately the actions of every thinking being marked the afterlife they would get. Mortal minds can easily get overwhelmed by the talk of other planes of existence, where the very essence of themselves shall go to fight for the values they uphold in life, each action but a drop of water in an unending sea, but that nevertheless made ripples, and then waves to reach a higher goal. It was with newfound purpose that I crossed the boundaries to the realms of the Endless Sky. There, I caught the eye of a bored member of the minor nobility among the Djinn, which was trying to entertain himself by playing philanthropist among less fortunate species. I had to swallow my pride, that pitiful thing that we have as a defensive mechanism against the verbal onslaughts of others, as my host treated me as little more than a curiosity, an oddity coming from a strange realm with a strange culture. Nevertheless, it was enough to assuage my needs for more information, and my expanding lore was increased even further, as each question answered begot a hundred more, each making the already bottomless pit of my search even emptier. From his part, I amused him with the tales of my travels. Not in an intellectual sense, but rather with the kind of amusement one would find in the odd circus animal that is different from the rest or the pet that knows how to perform a particularly interesting pirouette. It was enlightening to notice how mortals and immortals alike fall into the same thought patterns to refrain from considering other beings as equal, and thus deserving of the same rights as them, believing themselves above the rest.

    Yet there was a subject that always provoked elusive answers and hollow sentences, the responses that would suffice for a kid not really interested in discovering the truth. Yet as I pressed further, my host became uncomfortable, but could no longer hide how ignorant he thought that I was. The ideal model of how the spheres of being should interact with each other, how the souls would flow to their afterlives to empower their ideals and fight for them was broken. In fact, it had been broken since time immemorial, where only the very first beings who had by chance survived since the beginning of Creation knew about how it was supposed to work. The Upper Planes lay broken, a wide variety of catastrophes having engulfed each of them, and as such the natural state of the Spheres was one where souls got lost or only found their way to the Lower Planes. Disbelief was my first answer, as I scrambled to deny everything like a fanatic who had just had their dogmas challenged. No thinking being would want to believe that, and my host, in what was ultimately exasperation at my insistence, decided to simply show me.

    I was not prepared. And in a thousand lifetimes I would have not been. The Planes lied broken, Heaven a barren wasteland, the last remnants of its hierarchy under the control of the hosts of Hell, a menacing maw of void constantly looming on the horizon, threatening to swallow it all. The fields of Nirvana lay broken, trampled and bloodied with the fluids of a thousand different species, as horrors from beyond reality itself defile the very earth to bring forth their unknowable goals upon our realms. Elysium itself lays broken, a million pieces, some huge as entire continents drifting towards an endless void, some haphazardly joined together in magical bindings in a futile attempt to prevent the inevitable, as they slowly but steadily drift towards oblivion, if they are lucky, or towards the festering wound of the Pit itself.

    As my weak mind tried and failed to apprehend the truth, the final piece of the puzzle fell upon me. The Djinn's face showed no sign of sadness; it tried to show empathy, but a glint in his eye betrayed him. He was feeling the faint smugness a mentor experiences when teaching his apprentice. I might have been an educated man back on Planetos, but here I was feeding the ego of a being so ancient and wealthy that he didn't have anything else to do, yet he didn't even try to close the gaping maw of nothingness above Mount Celestia as we watched it from afar, hidden with the most potent glamors he could pay for. That's when the realization dawned on me; this was the eternal state of affairs for the ageless beings, the collapse of the Spheres was the norm, and even themselves were busying themselves with frivolous tasks and petty disputes for power, all while everything that exists slowly plunges into oblivion. But, why would they decide to not care? Because they can't do anything about it.

    The Blood war keeps raging, the Pit and Baator fighting an eternal conflict to scavenge the greater trickle of souls that is available to them, all the while from Abaddon the Daemons gorge in a banquet of souls. Whole economies dedicated to the trade of the very essences of beings, reduced to be little more than cattle to forces so much above them, just like we treat our livestock, and it in turn treats grass. Yet they scramble for ephemeral victories and short-sighted disputes, for in their eternal lives all that they have would matter nothing once everything is consumed. We are each a drop in an ocean, being drained slowly and relentlessly from all there is, so that while we believe we are doing something at the surface, the whole of Creation is being drained from the bottom.

    [The writing grows messier from now on]

    The corpse of the beggar lies interred in my modest manse's garden, a proper burial was all I could give given the haste with which I decide to carry this ordeal. Merren was his name, and I can assure you that he was perfectly unconscious when the Cacodaemon came from the ritual circle. Just now it lies hidden in the basement, a stone door blocking the pest's exit. The wound the Daemon has given me has already healed, yet the affliction it has passed on me runs in my veins. Even now the wretched thing keeps trying to convince me to let it free, in its many and desperate pathetic attempts through the link he has formed with my mind. I've endured the whispers the cold breeze of the North carries on those dark rainy days. It promises sweet oblivion, a poisoned chalice of dullness, if only you manage to take others unto Oblivion with you. A lowly denizen of Abaddon is a simply beast besides that.

    Yet I was the one to convince it to do my bidding. By the time this letter arrives to you, I would be dead beyond death, the Daemon being enclosed so much time that it had to consume my soul to prevent starvation. But as the remnants of my soul lie scattered across the Spheres, I go with a clear conscience. For that I know that when the final hours of all that is have come, the last rays of light have been swallowed and the last speck of dust floating in the never-ending emptiness of Creation is finally consumed by the Void…

    … I will not be there to see it.


    [Inquisitorial Report]

    The agent who first read this letter and led the hasty investigation has requested to be discharged from his position. A dose of Memory Moss and a letter written to his future self was the only thing required to erase the day he desired to forget. Divination proved the veracity of his letter as his now uninformed self read it.

    The mansion was breached, the cacodaemon found in a hunger-driven frenzy and killed during the process. All of Caelor's assets have been seized for later liquidation for the Inquisition. Protocols to test the knowledge of the true state of the Spheres through divination are being devised, with some preliminary tests ongoing to detect future threat vectors.
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    Click to shrink...
    Whew...damn, talk about not being able to handle the truth. :o

    Very neatly written, dude, and that ending was just perfect. Sad and disturbing, but an easily believable outcome nonetheless.
     
    Goldfish said:
    Whew...damn, talk about not being able to handle the truth. :o

    Very neatly written, dude, and that ending was just perfect. Sad and disturbing, but an easily believable outcome nonetheless.
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    Thank you. I started writing this some time ago when I was thinking about how random people might end up knowing about the truth, yet I was never in the mood to finish it. Then I watched some playthroughs of Darkest Dungeon, and I couldn't hold myself back. I had to make something that renders homage to the hopeless nature of Lovecraftian horror, even if we hopefully cling to the opposite.
     
    Yeah, we are definetly going to have to pull a World Tree at some point... Maybe grow the base in purgatory and have it grow to branch out in the heavens, binding them to branches?

    It will likely need to exist simultaneously in several planes at once, possibly acting as the central bit in the "Wheel of the Spheres". Make it the axis around which all the spheres rotate and revolve around while all being linked to it... It will require guardians, beings of such power that they cannot only not be slain but facing them is equivalent of not just death but of non existence....

    It will likely have to be a group effort of every god we can get our hands on or convince to help if only out of self preservation to not only make a world tree but also to form the guardians which shall act as insurance to prevent any and all from ever meddling with the tree which will bind the planes and ensure they remain in their proper alignments.



    Of course this is just me idly thinking and considering ideas on how the hell we are going to fix the big gaping hole in the heavens. If any of it gives anyone ideas on this issue then I will consider it a success. Otherwise... Meh
     
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