Quest Brainstorm - Mattiverse

Mattiverse Next - Session 1

thunderclap winds pick up around you. blue sky gives way to grey. newborn clouds dance in rings around a clear blue circle of light. a beam of light: white. hot. painful. you avert your eyes and are blinded. heat washes over you. it is followed, shortly after, by a pulse of force, almost like a heartbeat, but you are already destroyed. grey clouds spin and darken, taking form as a many-pronged vortex. a dancer: skirt billowing. legs kicking, arms reaching. reaching and lighting fires. fires that join each vortex, becoming salamanders taking flight into starry night, seven long limbed acrobats, each quickly learning to dance. thunderclap You are drawn into the storm. Lightning arcs around you. The genesis of thunder shatters your bones. You become nothing but your screams which become the raging storm which becomes the tines of the forking cyclone. You dance with the salamanders and the djinn. The winds howl around you, and your world becomes a hundred foot circle of peace in the maelstrom, lit only by the filtered light of fire and lightning. thunderclap you are the heart of the storm. you are the rod that captures the lightning. you are the lance that rules the world.

Mattiverse Next - Session 4

It was not long after the newly raised gods retreated behind their veil that their brood took to mischief and the wars against the darkness were replaced with the wars of the green. The men established their cities, the gildenfolk dug their burrows, and our people rode free and unchallenged across the plains of the midlands under the reign of the Wolfen-Khans, who ruled from their fortress where the grass ended and the mountains began. A fortress of stone and iron at the far end of our great, green sea.

And so Hadrian, called the Ubrekt, bastard son of the bastard son of War and Strife, came to make his Seat on the Stormchalice, at the furthest edges of our realm. He made war with a people called the Pon, then ruled by Natashial's daughter, whose name has been erased from history.

The war went disastrously for the Pon. Though they defended their colony well, the Ubrekt raised a fleet and set about an invasion of the capital of Phon. At that battle, Hadrian the Ubrekt saw his son slain, and in return made brutal war until Natashial's daughter met her end at his hand.

When Hadrian again marched against the Pon, whose sigil was the Gar fish, the Wolfen-Khan gave their aid. The Pon, now ruled by a council, made clever war but Hadrian made better war.

The power of the old gods was such that even a dram of that blood has the strength of armies. A generation of our kind raised to lullabies of mournful howling.

And so the Wolfen-Khan made exchange with the Naga for the secret of star-iron, called the usurper ore. And so set her people to scour the Cragbon until she had enough of the stuff to have made a great lance, which she took into battle against Hadrian the Ubrekt and slew him.

For reasons unknown, the power of the Ubrekt did not pass on to the Wolfen-Khan, however, but to the lance itself. It took in his power, but so too did it take in his personality. Conqueror. Lawbringer. Sovereign. The Wolfen-Khan fell under its sway.

The Ubrekt slain, his people made peace and elevated the child Hadrian II to the Seat. Quarrelsome and vain, he brought his folk once more into a war with the Pon. Our people, having launched a campaign against Servitors, did not honor their alliance and the empire of the Pon came to an end. Their monuments were toppled, their people enslaved, and their language forgotten.

For the Ubrekt, there is no peace but in ruination.

While our two peoples were celebrating their victories, discord also grew. Both leaders grew into tyrants, and both came to similar and interconnected ends. When Hadrian II was inevitably assassinated by his inner circle, a civil war resulted. The Wolfen-Khan, ambitious and no less tyrannical under the influence of the Lance, made war on both sides, seeking to annihilate forever the troublesome kingdom. This only served to drive the two sides together, and thus began our final war.

Sword against Lance. The Manticore versus the Wolf.

And so she who was to be the last Wolfen-Khan made indiscriminate war against the Ubrekti people. Cities razed, slaughter and ruination followed wherever she rode. The war was costly for our people, too, soon the costs became too high to bear.

The circle of druids came together against the Wolfen-Khan and overthrew her. Her cursed lance was broken into seven parts, each entrusted to a different elder druid to hide or protect.

Sadly, the breaking of the great lance was also the breaking of our dogs of war. The war quickly turned against us, and the young Ubrekti republic visited against our villages and campsites the death we had once handed out to them.

In the end, our people were defeated utterly, though not totally annihilated. The Ubrekti tore down the great fortress and carted the stone back to their capital to erect a great structure. The Concord of the Highways was struck, and the survivors of our old way of life assimilated into the expansive Ubrekti-Republic.

Somewhere, sunken deep in the Cragmore, is the Wolfen-Stone. A lost reminder of who we were and an ever-present reminder of who we are. Masters of war. Masters of peace.

Every generation we decide anew the destiny of our people.

• The emaciated druids continue their dancing. They no longer look sublime, but tortured. They are thin now, and bony. Tears stream down their face. Once beautiful hair is stringy and matted, falling out in clumps. Around midnight, the druids begin to chant eerily in a language none of you understand/ Their chanting fills the camp. You wake up with a feeling of dread.he nonsense fills your ears and, though you still do not understand the language, you reckon the meaning.
• DEATH IS COMING / DEATH IS COMING / DEATH IS COMING
• The earth begins to tremble. The confused masses of dogmoot murmur and look around anxiously. Some begin to break and panic, hiding and running. Nightmare: A pillar of flame erupts near your location, and assumes the form of a coal black stallion, with a mane of fire.
• You run.
• You flee in a panic, every halfling for themselves.
• Behind you are the sounds of slaughter and the laments of the damned.
• You lose track of your brothers. The smell of soot and ash fills your nose and mouth.
• You run until you collapse in exhaustion.
• You seem to have run for miles.
• You are alone. In the distance, you see the Cragbon light up the night's sky with its inferno.
• You collapse into an exhausted pile of restless, dreamless sleep. This was no dream, though you wish it were.
• When you awaken, still exhausted. Five dogs sit, each staring at you blankly.
• A Mastiff. A Greyhound. A Sheepdog. A Hound. A Fox Terrier.
• [Religion / Arcana Checks]
• As you stand up and approach the dogs, they bolt! Each goes in a different direction!!
• [Q]: "Who do you follow?"
• You are separated from the others and run until you no longer can. Then, on the edge of collapse, you catch up with the dog you followed and end up asleep next to it.

Mattiverse Next - Session 7

• Beldon busies himself with bringing the fallen members back up, while Bobwhite uses a mage hand to investigate the curtain.
  • Behind it is a large altar. A sword, large enough to be unwieldy for anyone smaller than an Ogre, lays across it. In its middle, there is a brazier set aflame, with a silvery rod in the middle.
  • Bobwhite extracts it. The group is immediately beset by a voice like squirming spiders in their heads:
• It introduces itself as the Master of Hounds‎‎, and thanks them for turning its prison into its lair. In return, it offers safe passage.
  • The Rindherders are not into this development, but given their state, decide taking it up on that offer is the better idea than pressing further into the dungeon. They got what they came for, and it is time to leave.
• As promised, they are able to leave the cave. In the twilight, they are stopped short by none other than Gerom and his band of assholes.
  • He wants the wand. His connection to it, and how he tracked the halfling boys down, are unclear. He offers up that it's simply one of the gifts "Ma" has given him--she loves all her brood, but loves him just a little bit more.
  • Everyone but Bobwhite notes that he is saying "Ma" in a different way than they did growing up. From him, it sounds more like "Maw". Bobwhite is too busy causing mischief with his mage hand.
  • He also says that he doesn't really want things to get violent, but that that is the difference between them leaving with just the wand, or leaving with everything they own.
• It goes against every fiber of Bobwhite's being to do so, but he capitulates. With a stroke of fast thinking, though, he decides Gerom doesn't know which piece of the Lance they have--he gives up Good Luck, rather than the one they have just picked up, reasoning that the unknown might provide more opportunity than the known.

Mattiverse Next - Session 11

• Some monologuing happens:
  • He mentions his High Priest, who summoned him here.
  • He mentions a Spider Queen, who sounds fabulous.
  • He says they should join up.
• The party then finishes off the phisrazu and his tone changes
  • "Kneel before me!" he says, as he then casts a suggestion that splashes spectacularly against the field of scrappy luck that has evidently enveloped the party and fails utterly.
  • He refers to himself as a raklupis, as in "Feel the wrath of the cult of Raklupis!!", which were his words before turning into an even more massive, even uglier dog-demon thing than the phisarazu.

Mattiverse Next - Session 12

Before the Ubrekti-Halfling war, the Halfling economy was fairly robust. Nomads are raiders and traders both by nature, and much halfling tribal wealth came from the position as intermediaries between the various human kingdoms of the Far West, the Elven lands of the Costal North, and the Dwarven and Gnomish lands of the far East. It is likely that the legendary halfling fortress (thought to be in the Crogbon) was based on one (or several) real locations where halflings would store their wealth and protect passages into their "Midland Empire." Halflings war was a skirmish and retreat model, as holding territory long term was not their jam.

The first halfling and Ubrekti warriors clashed during the Third Ponic War. As Ubrekt and the Dogriders warred in the wake of that conflict, halflings had an early advantage against the heavy infantry and light infantry based army of the time. Dogriders could easily harass the slow moving Ubrekti legions and retreat suffering minimal damage themselves. The early phase of the war was basically this stalemate: the halflings could not successfully assail the fortresses the Ubrekti built around the Stormchalice ("Our Lake") while the legions of the Ubrekti were hopeless against the dogriders, even as the dogriders themselves were outnumbered. Hadrian began to invest heavily in importing Petaran and Odessan horses and developing light and heavy cavalry wings to support the legions. The developing Ubrekti light cavalry wasn't terrific or anything, but it was enough to protect Legion flanks and supply lines and to give chase to the dogriders. Heavy Cavalry developed more slowly, but the overall trend of mixed unit tactics developed by Hadrian (The demigod or his descendants depending on the historian) over the course of his war with the Halflings not only - inevitably - carried the day, but also was the same basic model used by the successor Ubrekti Republic to expand across almost all of the mainland.