I wrote this some time ago as a way to keep the solo gamebook's rudimentary plot somewhat meaningful and sensible. I point out that it was written before the glowing green stones of the Purple Planet were in my mind; must have been some in-community synchronicity happening or something. I give it to you now, all word dumped and vomited, since I found it in my hard drive. I had written it to include in a standard DCC-playable multiplayer module, but if you're reading this, and you've read that, then you may have surmised something quite like it already. The next project calls, and I do not believe I will return to this forlorn place anytime soon, and so here it is for a few minutes' diversion. It's how I mix scifi and fantasy tropes into a thing that is more fun, and since DCC is permissive this way that's why I like it. This may represent the most cohesive world building I ever did and you get a glimpse here of Thrend, which has always hung there for exploring behind my eyeballs just in front of my imagination zone.
SPOILERS BELOW - THIS MAY ALTER YOUR EXPERIENCE OF MY GAMEBOOK IF YOU READ ANY FURTHER
A few hundred years ago, a pair of wizards fought a
ceaseless series of battles over honor, or spellbooks, or the musty inner
workings of the Mage’s Guild Ball. A
minor offense was given and for this legions of men and women and hosts of
man-like creatures died and were forgotten.
Halthrag was one, a petty a vainglorious servant of Sezrekan whose reach
often exceeded his grasp. During the
last great battle between these blustering sorcerers (the other Wizard’s name
and story are now long forgotten), the lesser known of them had nearly won all
– he had not only marshaled legions of lizardmen and uruks, but had won over
trow and a towering Cyclops to his cause, Avrogamt by name. This nigh-unstoppable monster had decimated
the Threndian kingdom from North to South with his great stone and pyronite
club before he marched upon Halthrag’s Keep.
Stalwart though they were, Halthrag’s guardsmen were losing quite badly
and were nearly beaten already when a flock of barrow harpies crashed into the wizard’s
tower, splitting it wide and delivering the astral form of Halthrag’s nemesis
by way of a flickering obsidian orb.
All at once, Halthrag was killed and his soul sent into the
inky blackness of the Forbidden Zone, Avrogamt laid waste to the guard, and the
captain of the guard Malkenruth despaired.
Knowing that they would all soon perish without supernatural aid (which
they no longer possessed now that their lord was gone), Malkenruth beseeched
the golden idol that the men and women of the guard worshipped from their
distant homeland. Unexpectedly, his
prayer was heard. The idol’s master – a
powerful Old One in its own right – diverted a passing cargo spaceship with
telluric and magnetic forces, crashing the thing in a fiery blue streak that
rocked the whole Peninsula
of K.
The immediate result was that the top of the High Tower
that contained the body of Halthrag and his gloating and astrally-traveling
nemesis was obliterated. A
vorpally-polarized hole opened in reality that cracked the obsidian orb and
Halthrag’s enemy fled to the ethereal, now disconnected and untethered from his
body. Coincidentally, Avrogamt was
knocked to his knees and quickly dispatched by the remaining human guardsmen. The lizardkind and uruk troops of Halthrag’s
enemy were blinded, shaken, and broken.
Malkenruth and his brethren let out a great cry! The tide was turned! But their victory was shallow and
short-lived, for the cargo of the small ship that destroyed the tower was
scattered about the keep and the surrounding lands. Malkenruth and his peers sickened
immediately, and the great swaths of forest around the keep blanched and grew
surly. The river that flowed beneath the
keep swallowed a great deal of the twinkling poison from debris that littered
the cliffside, and the story tainted the folklore of the Threndian people for
generations. All children were taught to
avoid the glittering blue rocks that sometimes turned up in spadefuls of dirt
or at the bottoms of squig-holes.
A millennia, an aeon, an age later. Halthrag Keep lies nearby to the lantern-jawed
minor city of Marbourg. The blasted forests and fields nearby have
mostly recovered and farmlands rarely yield sickened crops or mutated
livestock. Some curious apprentice
sorcerer takes it upon herself to enter into the long-avoided keep of the dead
wizard Halthrag, taking with her a malicious imp named Spellvexit – her
familiar spirit. He is her companion but
lusts after her soul, and he smiles and plots against her. Inadvertently, she awakens the pilot of the diverted
craft who (until now) has lain dormant in the wreckage of its otherworldly ship
in a hibernation capsule at the bottom of a crater in the eastern yard of the
keep. Her body is annihilated and the
pilot sets out to return to the heavens to complete its original mission, the
details of which are not important. But
it needs the glittering, glowing blue rocks that tumbled all over the Keep and
the surrounding countryside to power its gravitic reactors in order to escape
Aereth’s atmosphere. So it sets the life
support systems of the ship and the flying quad-rotor drones inside to find the
glowing blue Space Rocks it needs. The
drones and the pilot can sense the life forces that ebb and flow around the
keep, and more powerful life forces are usually set upon immediately and turned
into servitors to collect the fuel and bits of metal the pilot needs to repair
the ship and embark. It can sense
Marbourg, but the limited range of the drones and the state of the corpses in
the keep limit the range of its operations. Further, the Xenon-poor atmosphere
of Aereth saps the pilot of strength, even though Aereth’s gravity is somewhat
less than that of its home planetoid.
Coincidentally, the Arm of Vendel Re’Yune – disembodied
sorcerer – has settled upon the High Tower of Halthrag’s Keep in a
dimensionally parallel (but proximate) causality. At night, at this time of year, the
resounding temporal echo of the blast that destroyed the obsidian sphere nearby
to the portal to the Forbidden Zone allows Vendel Re’Yune to manifest in an
extra-dimensional space where the High
Tower once existed. He senses that the technology the spacecraft
pilot uses could unlock him from his inter-reality torture. In dreams, he has contacted the repugnant
leader of a troop of were-creature bandits that stalk this area – the Jackals –
and implanted the need to find the glowing blue rocks within and around the
keep. Re’Yune hopes to use the rocks as
leverage to bargain for technological aid from the pilot, or to somehow
overpower it and bend its craft to his will.
It may be that the gravitic reactors can reverse the molecular and
quantum entanglement that keeps him alive and entombed. The drones of the pilot sense their
intrusions and do everything they can to turn the Jackals back, including animating
corpses to attack the bandits when possible and striking them with ion beams as
a last resort.
The pilot merely wants to return to space, and has no
understanding of the primitive morality or motivations that guides the
carbon-based life on Aereth.
Further, unknown to either faction, a vicious Manticore has
taken up residence within the dungeon of the Eastern Gatehouse; a tunnel into
the north cliff face opened up after the spacecraft was dug out by the
reanimated corpses the pilot roused. The
Manticore is ill and reeling from an encounter with a sorcerer to the south
(near Helleborine), one who opened up the heavens and blasted the area he and
his mate hunted with a manifestation of Yog Sothoth. His crude band of hobgoblin followers were
liquefied, and his mate was rent into a whiff of plasma. He is shaken and weakened, and hibernates
without being detected by the pilot’s drones.
If awakened from his slumber he will kill every human within miles and then move on to
Marbourg. No great matter to the pilot
(or Vendel Re’Yune) but the hapless citizens of Marbourg would probably suffer
high numbers of casualties.
Even further, the cult of Malkenruth’s ancestors has
recently sent missionaries into this area who have been led to the keep by
dreams and portents. They seek out the
Golden Idol of the Shining God but are somehow always driven off or killed when
they do gain surreptitious entry into the keep - usually from the difficult
northeastern scramble over the rubble of the destroyed outer wall there.
Lastly, the weird extradimensional energies that course
through the area owing to its history and ley-line placement naturally mean
that all sorts of strange demiplanar openings wink open and closed in the keep
on a regular basis. Beings from other planes
and versions of Aereth pop in and out without understanding why they come and
go, and the place is a favorite of fey-beings and Elves. The King of Elfland and his allies have come
to loose agreements with Sezrekan, Hecate, and other patron entities that the
place is formally off limits, but this does not keep stray moon elf and dvergar
tribes from wandering through and taking captives for sale or trade.
Sadly, after recovering from a spate of Zombie Fever, the
citizens of Marbourg have left behind a brutal winter and are mostly unaware
that travelers to and fro are at high risk for being brutalized by the Jackal
gang, the pilot’s drones and zombies, elvish marauders, and other stray
extradimensional wanderers that are generally confused and anxious to return to
their nearest parallel universes of origin.
