My Fireborn Players are Doomed

[StarFyre]

And it amuses me greatly. Those of you who may remember my comments on this board previously about my Fireborn game, where I was asking what I should have happen to Rosar, the poor mage who became a GMPC (Game Master Player Character) rejoice, this is the same game, two or so years later.

And full of yet more awesome adventures of daring do and destruction.

So, the players decided that they wanted to wake the world up, by going around the world and opening node-points and ley lines. And they've been doing this, and, for the most part, haven't caused (much) trouble.

Until they got to North America, and decided to wake a point on the Cahokia Mounds. Now, their method of "waking" these points is to just shove vast quantities of Karma (positive magic energy) through these node-points, until the flow becomes unrestricted. While doing this in Cahokia, they set off a magnitude 8.7 (or 8.8, I forget which) earthquake that shook the central plains.

For timeline - this was just after the harvest was mostly in, so around late October, 2008 (in-game time). Now, considering that a large number of midwestern towns and areas are actually undermined...

The Mississippi River ran backwards, East St. Louis was destroyed, Chicago and Gary were mostly flooded, many towns and most of the road network in the area was destroyed, especially bridges. New riverbeds were created, new lakes formed, and, effectively, most of the geography of the central part of the United States was recreated, in one terrifying night and day of destruction.

Apparently, destruction on this scale wasn't satisfying enough for my players. I think we're into December/January now, and there's been some other things happening, like Rosar's little brother Keth being declared the Once and Future King (yeah, you heard me, a little 10 year old (or so) Atlantean child declared to be King Arthur reborn) and having the protection of one of the only True Dragons (a dragon that went to sleep on a Karmic upwelling, and so never vanished when Karma did, but instead slipped into hibernation that lasted until he was woken. As such, he has the old, huge dragon-form of the Mythic Era, instead of being a human-with-a-dragon-soul).

They found some spell-trapped Titans in Siberia, forcefully recruited some poor military man, ran into a creature they (think) to be another immortal from the Mythic Era (from that oh-so-interesting area around Wallachia), and snuffed a crude mob-boss in Turkey.

There's any number of small little things that happening during those adventures, but those're nothing compared to what happens next.

First off, the party is split -- while two of them dealt with the mob-boss in Turkey, two others, plus Rosar, went on the Magic Viking Boat That Can Go Anywhere and went on a trip under the Atlantic Ocean, deep into the Marina Trench. They were tracking a news story that a massive oil tanker had just vanished around that point, no wreckage or oil spill to be found.

So they go down. Mind -- Rosar is primarily a mage, though he's very good at physical combat (he's 50+ years old, looks 20, and will probably live to be over 400, considering that his father is 500+ at this point and still spry and young-looking). Of the other two on the boat, there's the captain/owner of the ship, who's a water-dragon with Coldspawn (ability to handle very low temperatures with no problem, as well as to cause ice to form around her when she wishes) and who's primarily a hand to hand fighter/dodge-monkey who can't cast spells. The other person is another mage, lightning-based dragon with the ability to cast spells but no real physical combat abilities.

They get down to the Marina Trench and look around - Rosar is astral traveling to try and find whatever caused this. Marcus, the dragon-who-is-mage, is looking around with "funky vision" active ("funky vision" being the term we use to refer to spectral sight/karma vision/whatever).

I'm intending on throwing them at a Kraken, woken by the resurgence of karma. While not taint-based (evil) by nature, a Kraken is a neutral beast, uncaring about anyone but itself and when it's next meal will come.

The Kraken is north of the point they descended to the trench. I hint at that when I describe the area they get to, saying that some of the area looks a bit disturbed to the north. Marcus' player asks what the south looks like...

So I tell him. There's a familiar black-oily substance scattered about, trailing off to the south. They've come across this Black Goo before -- it's an almost tarry substance that can affect any realm, and that comes out of a realm that can't be reached by standard travel-methods like going to the spiritrealm, etc.

What's actually happened here, offscreen, is that there are actually two Krakens -- the non-evil one to the north, that actually caused the problems, and the tainted/consumed Kraken to the south, that's... really just acting as an anchor point for the Black Goo to enter the realms through. These two Krakens fought, and both are injured right now.

They decide to follow the trail of Black Goo, instead of the trail of disturbed landscape. I guess I can't blame them -- they already know Black Goo is bad news, and likely to cause even more problems if they leave it be, but they don't know how to do anything about it.

Around this point, Rosar snaps out of his meditation, shaking and drained. He'd been 'caught' by the Black Goo and managed to fight his way free, at the cost of his entire current Karma pool, making him, effectively, useless for anything about to happen.

Seeing this, the others decide to say screw it and rise to the surface... but on the way up, about a mile above the Marina Trench, Marcus decides to go down into the hull of the viking boat, which is bronze, by the way, and rap on the hull, to see if he can get an answer or whatever. This wakes up the (previously disturbed by Rosar) Black Goo-Kraken.

Immediately, tentacles of Black Goo rise up out of the Trench and try to grab the ship, which is encased in a sphere-barrier to protect the passengers from detrimental effects of inhospitable environments. Learning quickly, the tentacles decide to create a net above the ship, and catch it that way.

Marcus decides to cast spells at it. His first spell is Disintegrate, attempting to blast a hole through the forming net for them to break through. The tentacles resist. His next spell is Avatar - which summons a giant, glowing manifestation of energy to fight. The tentacles grab it and pop its head off, like a kid with a daisy. His third spell is Coruscating Bolt -- a magic that is a combination of fire, lightning, and light. Underwater.

The lightning energy splits off first, racing through the water and electrifying it all around them... and then the electricity hits the Black Goo.

In a chain reaction the players never expected, the Black Goo actually acts as a massive amplifier for elemental/magical energy. The electricity is amplified hundreds of thousands of times by the the sheer amount of Black Goo around them, and sheets out into the ocean around them, electrifying the water. A few seconds later, the bolt of magical fire strikes the Black Goo. Now, we're miles below the surface of the ocean, and the pressures here are enormous, so while the water becomes super-heated in the path of the bolt, it doesn't flash to steam.

Until the fire hits the tentacles. At this point, I have to start measuring the temperatures in Kelvins, not Celsius and especially not Fahrenheit. Even this deep in the ocean, the water flashes to steam, in a rapidly expanding bubble of force, a wave of heat ripping through the water. As the heat reaches the surface, the water flashes to steam faster, sending a shock-wave outwards and, in the process, sending tons of salt and minerals into the atmosphere with the violence of what's happening.

The whole event takes less than an hour, and results in most of the Atlantic Ocean flashing to steam, raising global temperatures by ten to fifteen degrees, and creating a gigantic thunderstorm over the giant ditch that once was the Ocean. This wall of superheated steam hits Africa at temperatures far exceeding the flashpoints of grass and wood, lighting the savannas and forests of Africa on fire all up and down the coast. On the other side, in South America, the damage isn't quite so terrible, because it's a wetter environment, but there are still raging fires racing towards the interior of the continent. Europe, though better off for the most part, is experiencing very unnatural weather for winter (though, uh, that takes a bit of a backseat to the Atlantic Ocean vanishing before their eyes). The United States has some small problems on the east coast, but they'll (mostly) live.

Meanwhile, the rocks of the ocean floor are superheated. And now it's raining. Though that rain instantly flashes back to steam as it hits. And the other oceans are rushing in to re-equalize. And, the leading edges of those waves are flashing to steam AND force-cooling the rocks, which cracks them open.

Anyone recall the ancient Siberian Traps? If not, go look up that ancient catastrophe. That's pretty much what's happening in the Marina Trench right now, in-game. All up and down that line, hundreds of tons of lava are starting to spill out, sending plumes of ash and gas into the atmosphere, to mix with the ash from the fires and the world devouring storm that's beginning to move off the Atlantic Ocean and cover other parts of the world.

So, with a giant "oops", our wonderful players regroup and head off to Antarctica, to investigate sitings of a "white city in the cliffs".

Well, they find the white city, since there's so many mages/mage-related people in the party. It turns out to be covered by a mostly-eroded spell (that they spend a day reweaving, because they've never seen a spell like it before, and there's enough of a pattern left that it's not too difficult for three people, working together to fix) that seems to acknowledge dragons as acceptable.

So, they enter. The city is kept at a relatively comfortable temperature, but is entirely, disturbingly, white. The city itself is surrounded by a wall about three to four stories high and six feet thick at the gate. There are no mortar lines in the stone, anywhere. The buildings themselves tend to be rather large, getting larger towards the center of the city, but have nothing other than stone in them - stone ledges for sleeping, stone counters, etc. Anything that would have been perishable, like doors, tapestries, etc, are gone without a trace. There is no dust or debris in the buildings, no wild animals roaming around.

The streets are not straight, and there is no direct path to the walled fortress at the heart of the city. There is a space of more than a building-width between the first buildings and the outer walls, and another space of a building-width between the last buildings and the wall around the fortress, which then has another space between that wall and anything else.

In the city are several green parks, apparently thriving - accompanying these parks are insects, but even though there are trees, insects, flowers, etc, the buildings around those parks still have no debris inside them, and while some wild-grown trees now spread their branches over the streets, no leaves or debris is visible on the streets.

These streets, by the way, aren't totally blank. They actually have repeating patterns "carved" (more like, impressed in them, since there are no grooves or chisel-marks anywhere) into them, on a block-length of about ten feet per pattern, and every street has a slightly different pattern. At crossroads, these patterns give way to a swirling pattern, no two crossroads identical.

In the fortress, the party discovers an artificial node - a giant blue crystal sphere that looks like a perfect star sapphire resting on a pedestal. There are twelve major laylines running into this node (there should only be maybe two or three, if this was natural), and innumerable minor lines feeding into it as well. The node itself is awake and active, but the lines are mostly closed.

Needless to say, the party decides to blast this one open as well, shattering the shields set around the node and sending another huge wave of karma out into the world, the largest one yet. Now, up to this point, every time they've done something like this, there's been a "reaction", from the earthquake from Cahokia to a small shockwave of magic that made a few relics activate. But this time... nothing.

Or so they've seen.

See, that giant storm? It's now magically charged as well. And Mother Earth is waking up and becoming sentient. And Mother Earth isn't happy. There are elemental spirits all over the world, and most of them are insane due to pollution and the like. Mother Earth is definitely not happy.

My players are doooooomed. Mostly because the human race is doomed >.> Because of my players. Geezus.

[Shard]

AWESOME.

hehehe. Man. That must be one brutal campaign. When my friends and I were still playing call of cthulhu we botched one single roll which would have saved or destroyed everything... And thankfully, we all wanted to *continue playing*, so we rerolled and had a major *WHEW THAT WAS TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT EHHHHH, NADINE!?* moment (bryan was playing Nadine, bryan usually rolled very, very well... lol)

[StarFyre]

Brutal? Yes and no.

Since the premise of the game is "You are ancient and mighty dragons reborn in the modern era." and since the game has been going on for about two to three years now, the characters themselves are practically epic-level. So, while the characters can, for the most part, wiggle their way out of (nearly) anything, the world around them isn't quite so lucky.

What happens when you get epic level characters? The GM starts throwing around epic level baddies.

Like Mother Earth, apparently.

...

So, what's the falling damage of a planet? =P

[Kitsuneko]

Hee hee, that sounds AMAZING. I'm going to be playing my first game of DnD soon; my brother suggested starting a game for the whole family. We got our 50-year-old parents to agree, so hilarity shall surely ensue.

[Shard]

>_>


yer fifty year old parents are only EIGHT YEARS OLDER THAN ME dammit!!

BRANDISHES +1 CANE OF DESTRUCTION!

[StarFyre]

<.< My parents are a little over a decade older than Shard. ... My only brother is a decade younger than Shard 0.o;;

I FEEL OLD.

Kitsu: Good luck with that game! I haven't played in a game for so long, I doubt I would be comfortable putting myself back in that roll, seeing as I'm so used to playing god and messing with other people =P

[Shard]

I've recently been trying to piece together the Half Life characters as D&D types, but it's really difficult because I don't actually own the whole set of anything other than first ed AD&D... o.o I think I confused the crap out of myself when I had my PGB "core rulebook 1" which ... is 2nd ed? I don't even freaking know, the last time I actually played D&D was in high school...

[StarFyre]

I'd honestly try to get hold of either D&D 3.5 or D&D 4 books, to be honest. They make a bit more sense, and have a better system than the old books did. Of course, I'd really, really go check which of the two you like better, because they are incredibly different, like night and day. (I, personally, think 4 is stupid, but there are a lot of people that really like it, so *shrugs*)

[Shard]

Yeah I know. Right now my only real source of 3.5 info (which I prefer over 4 just purely because they didn't release everything they were working on at once, I think), is a generator online... most of it makes little sense to me but hey, lol it's not like I'm going to PLAY with anyone, I just want to put characters together, it's an addiction

[Graeth]

The human race IS doomed, no matter where you go...