Question because one voter is really not enough. Do you think rebooting the quests (kroak too come to think of it) and making them nation-styles quest since the beginning would be more popular?
The Forbidden Lands: Realm of the Giants part 0
You eat the fruits of the tree of knowledge. Sweet it feels in your mouth, like honey on your lips then bitter it goes down your throat. You swallow them pulp and seeds both and cry for you know the serpent spoke true and the fruits are of your flesh and the knowledge they impart was yours in the beginning. Yet you continue and devour seven times seven fruits each bearing seven seeds and you understand things who would have needed long arduous work to understand without revelation.
Ghyran is not merely life just as Azyr is not just a starry expanse and Aqshy only fire alone and without elements. The land is ruled by the seasons, who are the same across all the land except at the corner of the Realm of Jade. In Spring people rejoice for life comes out from the darkness and begins again leaving them to celebrate the rebirth of all things. In summer heat incites them to violence and war is fought for a season for it good some roots be watered in blood. In autumn people learn for life and death are brought to equality and one can become wise if they spy the waxing and waning of both. In winter, they mourn for it is just there is a time to rest and it is just your own sadness be shared with all the land you created.
There are places where the seasons don't flow, places fixed in time and emotion. In these places, great gates are open to the others Realms, following rules of symbolism and occult proximity you understand are more important than mere physics. To the East where spring is eternal, the Realm of Amber rules and great beasts roam the land. As you are not in Ghur proper they live in harmony with one another and are powerful symbols of nature. To the South where the summer sun is fixed in the sky, the Realm of Ruby rules and elementals tread the sands in many caravans. To the West where autumn clad the trees in gold and light, the Realm of Amethyst rules and the shades of the departed linger in lands where everything is symbol. To the North where winter covers everything in snow, the Realm of Jet rules and gods hang from the trees seeking knowledge and purification. In the Center where the stars are fixed in a perpetual equinox, the Realm of Ivory rules and dark-skinned elves worship in sacred glades a vision of nature that never was.
You see glimpses of these places too. Tribes who dance with fairies when the moon is full and whose sorceresses learned at the feet of the queens of the Fair Folk. Laughing sprite and ever-children hidden in the forest while a great stag with a masked face shed its skin to become starlight. A caravan of priests wander among dying trees, observing how death become new life while some create glades where there is no death. And of course, there is the land where the moving temple stops and will remain for a time.
You know and only realize you know when the transition is achieved. You know the temple is broken on the middle and the tree and his roots and on the roof, accessible only to birds and the most able climber. You know about the great halls below, open to all ways. The great room with the altar, the idols with their unmoving stare and the fountain of light and the deep well. You know of the land itself, of the great giants who are the only "intelligent" life, of the silent cities and the deserts and the great battlefield to the south where it still rages wreathed in storm against its imprisonment. You know that and more. For you know too of the great bridge going to the temple and the castle of shadows. You know what transpired here and find it just it is dead and abandoned like the rest and the ashes of its queen scattered to the four winds.
This land where you will make your domain, for the moving temple would not bulge before the appointed time is full of life but it is grass and trees and animals. What intelligent life there is you will have to bring forth yourself but that's in your powers. The choice left to you is whether to claim the great shrine where supplicants begged for the promise of resurrection or the castle of dreams long ruined where the shades of sacrifices still whisper about their deserved doom.
The Forbidden Lands Realm of the Giants : Establishment
You don't know how this shrine was built but the craftsmanship involved is impressive even to your divine eyes. For the temple look like it was hewed from a mountain but that's evidently not the case because it stands on its lonesome in a vast open plain. The architects have, by art and magic, built their sanctuary to imitate the forms of nature to the point where their towers look like smaller peaks rather than anything built like mortals. They have opened great windows to bathe the empty rooms in light, they have dug great connected pools where silver waters mingle like the Jade Wind was said to blow over the World that Was. It is a shrine to nature, to the elements and even if life is present only on this secret garden under the shadow of your tree, it is present and honored in the rooms below by images of stones representing giant animals and high trees.
So, when you claim it as your own, you are only adding to the work of craftsmen long past. You sing a song of power, a song of growth and of remembrance. And what springs from your song is both known and unknown befitting your new state. For the tree who so long fed on your flesh grows to the size of a mountain under your song until one who looks at the temple would see its bulk double the structure in size and the shadow of its branches obfuscate the sun. Yet by your will the leaves glow with their own light of silver, gold and green while the root cling to the temple and dig deep into the earth feeding on sacred ground.
As if to answer your song, plants creep and rise from the ground to meet the roots and totally encircle the structure making the stone bear plants as the soil would bear crops. Serpents and insects slither through the slabs to sing chittering melodies to what will come next. The Serpent who calls itself your son change with and grow with the tree until he's large as a great dragon with wings colored like a bird of paradise. He flies through one of the great openings and from the halls below he fishes two humanoid skeletons he plants in the garden ground. From them you see two small trees made of light emerge, bearing no leaves but bright as a full moon.
That and many other things seem right, even the serpent's growth. For you remember trees as tall as mountains and more, encompassing whole worlds between their branches. Yn Endri Eternos the Oak of Ages was but a figuration and, like this one, a representation of the symbol of the Great Tree of Old. Ygg's Steed, the Crown of the World, the Tree of Life whose crown is the the universe's. You remember them and you remember it is good such trees have an eagle at the crown and a serpent at the root. Good or ill, you don't remember that.
The time is now for you to plant your own seeds too. But which ones. On which people will you rule.
[] The Seed of Isha: Elves will emerge in the coming spring to serve and worship you.
[] The Seed of Loren: Spirits of trees and dryads and all growing things will grow to serve you
[] The Seed of Ariel: Fae creatures, wisps and boggarts and spirits of unbound nature will dance for you and fill your ranks.
Adhoc vote count started by ganonso on Apr 2, 2017 at 5:36 PM, finished with 89 posts and 7 votes.
[X] The Seed of Ariel: Fae creatures, wisps and boggarts and spirits of unbound nature will dance for you and fill your ranks.
[X] The Seed of Ariel: Fae creatures, wisps and boggarts and spirits of unbound nature will dance for you and fill your ranks. Number of voters: 3 veekie, Aigloss, Dirk93
[X] The Seed of Loren: Spirits of trees and dryads and all growing things will grow to serve you Number of voters: 3 JbeJ275, EVA-Saiyajin, Varano
[X] The Seed of Isha: Elves will emerge in the coming spring to serve and worship you. Number of voters: 1 King Arthur
Exactly what it says. I'll attribute the sides to each face of a coin and flip it. If I loved one of the options more than the others I would break the tie myself but that's not the case there.
Exactly what it says. I'll attribute the sides to each face of a coin and flip it. If I loved one of the options more than the others I would break the tie myself but that's not the case there.
Establishment part 2
When autumn becomes winter, you have already made a great miracle.
You send your power like a wave and it reaches all the temple from the great extant catacombs to the peak of the great tree who is of no living species but of your own flesh and blood. It grows with the plants, creeps along the vines ladders hanging from your abode, falls like rain through the open windows. It pools on the ground becoming like river and by your song it gathers and is shaped like sentient beings. Tall lords and proud ladies in mantles of twilights dance for an instant on the temples stones then they break. Skin and clothing and horn and mantle of light break down in hundreds of sprites and wisps, winged humanoids with mischevious expression and winged motes of light born upon the wind. While winter comes, they keep you company, flying to you side and trying to amuse you by jests and japes and ballets.
When the chill of winter comes, they are breathtaking to behold, flying in patterns through the high temple now overgrown with ever green vines. Their dances weave webs of ice and starlight across the ancient stones while they sing softly old melodies predating the Realm of Jade. As you cry for the World That Was when hearing them, giving yourself to Winter's embrace but not succumbing like you did in a way, to sleep beneath the stones or in the great trees, the littlest of your children collect your tears with the leaves of the great tree and flying drop them on trees and herbs and snow as a present and a blessing. Seeds for the spring they say when they come back. Seeds for the coming spring or the next winter for when you sow tears and blood who knows what the harvest will bring. They hum and whistle even as they coax new brethren from the discarded scales and feathers of your draconic son.
Some of them leave the grove and the temple but most stay and say their farewells and their hope to see you again. Overpowered by sadness you cannot ask them what they mean before they fly in groups of five to twenty and weave great cocoons from themselves. Some they stick to the great tree, some to the sacred pools down your garden, some to the slabs of the stones, some even on your own skin and you accept them without pain or disgust. Winter passes and for a moment you have no company but your son who speaks in riddles.
Then spring comes and when you feel in your bones you have nothing in common with what you were when you awoke in autumn you burst into song. Perhaps by the light of your voice or perhaps by simple happenstance your music mingles with the melting snow and creeping vines. The great tree, who remained green with leaves during winter, opens pale and bountiful flowers and petals fall upon you like a crown, making you continue singing with a voice loud enough to fill all your new home with thoughts of reborn life and growing power.
When your children break their cocoons, and awake to the light, your voice is the song they hear to greet them into the world they are meant to protect.
They are much less numerous than the wisps you seeded. Three hundred where their brothers-parents stood in thousands and thousands, yet they are bigger and their forms are manifold. Some are children with wooden masks for faces, others creep from cracks in the ground covered in the dust of lost knowledge. Those born from you look like elf-lords of old but youth shines in their eyes and they have kept wings of butterfly. Those sprung from the trees look like spirits of forsaken home and they declare they hear their siblings born amidst the sacred waters sing to them. Some look like dragons with two legs, some like giants maimed by past regret and some are shaped for work long and arduous.
All of them who are not by your side hurry to it. Some fly, some creep, most climb with the agility of ones born to it, all gather to ask you to come down and be enthroned among the sacred idols, to come down and see your domain spread even outside the walls of the temple. You agree for your heart is now full with desire to know what you have wrought and so they show you.
They show you the six great pools of light where with each turning of the moon and each impulsion of your divine will new wisps will be born to fill the numbers of your court. One far from all light is called Darkness. One at the peak of the Tree, nested among the branches, is called Beauty. One to the east in a grove of chestnuts is called Wildness. One to the north built from sacred stones is called Nature. One to the west in intact halls is called Service. The last to the south is called Violence. Each is surrounded by trees of pale silver and gold marking them as hallowed by your song.
As for the land, outside for some miles it is covered by trees and flowers of every sort forming a natural grove to protect your abode. You feel in your soul each tree and flower is both memory and secret symbol and wonder what will be their fruits. But before you can decide, you are confronted with your first decisions. From where will you reign.
You could occupy the vast central space of the temple cementing your status as a high queen. There will be a personal cost for the room offers no sort of intimacy and while you are not far from the great tree, you are not at a site of power within it either. Still there each of your children could see you. The second option is to occupy the secret garden which would be more magically potent but more isolated from the throng of your children.
[] Settle in the central room
[] Settle in the secret garden
Established: Kingdom of the Fae
Gained 50 Beasts
Gained 50 Darklings
Gained 50 Elementals
Gained 50 Fairest
Gained 50 Ogres
Gained 50 Wizened
Gained 3 possible councilors in each stat.
Shrine of Worship begins with first line defense: Sacred Grove
Shrine of Worship begins with the Six Birthing Pools (Access to all Seemings)
Adhoc vote count started by ganonso on Apr 4, 2017 at 9:25 PM, finished with 104 posts and 7 votes.
[X] Settle in the central room
I want to be an active god that is close to our children and the affairs of our creations, and on a meta level I'd like more interaction rather than less.