Manhattan Knights Final

Welcome to the continuing story of Three Storm Knights in the game of Torg Eternity, the backgrounds of the heroes can be found HERE, and the very first post in the Series can be found HERE. More information about the game can be found HERE.

Act 6 FINAL:

ASIDE: I have already hinted that the Living Lands portion of my game went a little off kilter… this game was run during early January and originally I was only supposed to run for two weeks, then one of the players would run his own game for two weeks, and we’d trade back and forth. But the players loved my game so much that we kind of went a little wild in the Living Lands and I didn’t plot or plan as far ahead as I should have. To be fully honest even over the course of the next 20 games (which is where we are as I write this blog) I don’t plan too far ahead because it is nearly impossible to figure out which way my players will take something).

As you are about to see over these next few paragraphs, things go a little crazy.

Recap:

We ended last week with the characters realizing they had access to gene therapy and they switched around some of the details on their character sheets. The biggest change was reducing Carlisle from a 70-year-old man back to his early 30s. They decanted their clone of the King of the Cat-people and have loaded him into the back of another electric truck and are headed back to Cat Mountain.

Arrival:

The group arrives at the ravine before the great castle, and the bridge extends across before they even have a chance to wonder how they will contact the castle for help. Driving across the bridge and pulling up to the main doors the Storm Knights can feel a shift in the air, almost like the whole place is energized, alive. They aim the truck toward the stairway at the front doors but one of the paws of the castle lifts, revealing a ramp down into a parking garage beneath the castle.

They take the ramp and they disembark; an elevator is waiting for them. The King, called Primus Rex by the scientists in the Dome, takes the lead. He has mostly been quiet on the trip across the grasslands and as they have gotten closer to the Keep, he has grown more… regal. His memories seem to be surfacing, whether some racial memories or of the king whose blood they cloned is unknown.

Welcome Home:

The elevator speeds up the floors and then opens into the throne/control room of the keep. Joxor has changed in their absence, after they cured his blindness the old man was able to find his wardrobe and the threadbare robes have been replaced with splendid garments, including a long cloak that looks like it is made out of shimmering fish scales. He almost looks younger, and he is definitely stronger. As the king steps from the lift, Joxor is rendered speechless.

Something like recognition flickers across the clone’s face, while his memories might be lacking, he can recognize his own people. He embraces the older man, calls him Seneschal, and then paces the room. His fingers touching screens which immediately brighten. More systems are already activating in his presence.

Joxor takes the king’s arm and leads him to the central chair in the room. As the king takes the throne, lights and power throb through the room and systems throughout the keep kick over for the first time in over a century.

Joxor: Yes, it’s a miracle, finally! Thank you, my king. We are finally in a position where the castle can come to life and grow strong again.

Resurrecting the Keep:

The Storm Knights fade to the back ground, staying out of the way while Joxor begins to teach the king about who he is and who their people were. There is a LOT of exposition about the history of the Cat-People and their religion and culture.

The religion revolves around spirits that exist all around them but can’t interact with the physical world and Priest and Paladins who can both commune with these spirits and also channel them into their bodies thus allowing the spirits to interact with the world. Hours of education later they also learn that magic and technology are practically the same to the world of the Cat-People.

Finally, the king moves into the alcove that was turned into a shrine to the original king. HE touches the urn full of ashes and fingers the bloody cuts on the armor. And it is the final piece in the puzzle. The spiritual and magical energy within him makes the final connections and racial memories flood into the clone-king and he finally has a personality of his own.

Primus: “I am whole again. We shall raise my Paladins and wake my people. We owe much to these people who have brought me from the Abyss. Raise our people up and start looking into how we can leave this plane [of existence].”

Raising the People and then the Castle:

Within another hour, the castle is alive with the voices of the woken people. Slightly more had survived than Joxor originally thought, and they run the gamut from small children to hardened warriors.

Kimiko has somehow found another hanger-on, this time in the form of a teenage cat-girl who thinks that Kimiko’s power armor and electric katana are so “cool.” The teen girl will not be dissuaded from following her. Not even when the Storm Knights finally get to the point of asking about just HOW exactly do the cat-folk intend to leave the Living Land. Especially as their reality was destroyed.

Joxor explains that the castle has far ranging scrying abilities and that they can open portals to anywhere within the world. To illustrate the point, he brings them to some screen where he shows them an aerial view of the Castle they are currently in. He then changes the view to show them the Dome, then he pulls back showing them all of Manhattan and parts of New York State, currently being wracked by more thunderstorms.

Joxor continues, “While we could go anywhere on your world, or send you anywhere you’d wish to do, we could also look between worlds, into the space wherein our spirits exist and then from there we could travel to any world that would support us. Possibly even into another reality.”

The Storm Knights start thinking…

[Players also start thinking… and oops I might have gifted them with too much.]

Sasha telepathically links the knights and they begin to plot [in and OUT of game]. After a few moments of conference, they stop wondering about where in the world they could jump to. Kimiko asks to see Long Island.

Joxor moves his hand and Manhattan slides to the side and we see Long Island, snarled in the middle of a massive Change Storm, one that has been raging for over a week. One that continues to fuel the lashing rains that have been hammering Manhattan for just as long.

They zoom in and see that the Change battle is between the Living Lands and a NEW Cosm… the entire eastern half of Long Island is massive sand dunes dominated with a massive black pyramid, very similar to the Luxor in Vegas. Obelisks and lesser pyramids and buildings surround this main black feature. Marching from the pyramids are skeletal robots who are endlessly marching forward to fight against Baruk Kaah and his edeinos warriors. The robots are out numbered but they keep getting repaired and cycled back to the front.

[Yes I was crazy enough to also throw Necrons into my game… things went out of hand.]

Left Turn:

[At this point I expected my Players to start planning how they would gather allies and attack the rear of Baruks forces… but instead of right they went left.]

The storm knights do start to plan how they can use this war to their advantage. Already it has helped them by moving so many of Tusk’s army from Manhattan. This allowing them to run around and free so many slaves. Thinking about the freed slaves brought them back to their half-finished mission. Their original Prime Mission was to save a bunch of storm knights from captivity. They managed to save 2 of the 4 survivors, but those last 2 survivors where on Long Island. It also didn’t sit well the knights having the mission reduced in priority to tertiary.

Carlisle: “Zoom us in on Baruk’s camp and slowly pan across.”

The camp is massive, containing thousands of warriors from several different camps, but the middle of the camp is dominated by large tents, including one massive open sided pavilion. Hundreds of warriors mill about the outer edge of the pavilion but the collection of “men” in the centre is what the Storm Knights are after.

Baruk Kaah:

The Saar of Saars is the most massive Edeinos they have ever seen. He stands near ten feet tall, a foot taller than Tusk, who stands out as the second largest Edeinos ever but also in the fact that his body is fully armored in bones and tusks (hence his name.)

Tusk has created a massive map on the floor and is trying to explain tactics to Baruk. [So not to drop out of the story, but one of the things that makes Tusk unique and dangerous is the fact that he exists at a higher Social Axiom than the Living Lands normally allows. He uses more tactics, he keeps his men healthy and trained, he listens to humans and others equally.] Besides these two giants arguing over the makeshift map there are several other Edeinos warlords, and a handful of humans. Two of which are in tattered uniforms similar to what Texas and Longshot were wearing when the knights liberated them from Tusk’s camp.

The Knights react to sitting the two doctors. They want to save them now! They start to ask how the portals work; can the cat’s send them directly to this tent? Everyone starts talking at once. [I’m a little surprised, I had planned on the PC’s seeing the lost knights and maybe planning to get allies, after all they were invited to meet with the White Tail Tribe, a very powerful clan of Edeinos who might be the equal of Tusk… but they don’t want to take weeks of game time to gather allies and save these men. They want to save them NOW!]

Teleport versus Portal, important distinction.

The storm knights ask again how the teleport system works. How close can they get to the tent? Joxor tells them that if they work it properly, they can get within an inch of a spot, but it requires a lot of math and faith.

This then prompts one of the characters [this was crazy time so I lost track of the finer details] to ask, “If we could teleport to there… couldn’t we teleport something from there to here?” And this is where I explained that it was actually portals, that what would happen is that they would open a door here AND there and hold it long enough for them to jump through, and then hold it for a little while until either it got too dangerous or the enemy started jumping through to the castle.

“So we can open a portal to that tent, jump out and take back our guys and rush back…”

[Oops… that might have been the wrong answer. I realized I had basically made this too easy for them, and I had just erased a BUNCH of my story. Oh well. It happens.]

Big DAMN Heroes!

The group pools a bunch of cards and resources and rolls awesome dice to get the portal ON target and get it lined up. The rolls are awesome and things are going WAY to well. I decide to give in and let this happen even better. The King stands up.

“You have brought me back from the dead, you have brought my people back from the brink. You are true friends. I will retrieve these men for you, I am quicker and stronger than any of you. Be ready to defend my return.”

The portal opens and the argument in the tent comes to a crash as a near 7-foot-tall cat-man bounds out of a shimmering gate in the air. Baruk is incredulous that anyone would dare risk his anger. Worse, the assembled warlords all blame each other for the appearance of a magic gate. They lay into each other and a general melee ensues.

Primus scoops up each doctor, one under each arm, neither of them have any clue what is going on, but their lives have been hell for months and they just go limp.

Maybe an Ally?

Tusk recovers his wits first and points to the gate, yelling for soldiers to step through. Greymane emerges from the crowds to the sides of the tent, a grenade launcher hanging loose in his hands. He looks at the gate, despite the mirrored surface of the gate his eyes look directly into Sasha’s. He nods, turns from the gate and raises the launcher and causally shots a grenade between Tusk and Baruk. “Fuck you guys, I quit.”

As the grenade explodes and all the edeinos scatter, Greymane flips the bird to Baruk and then to the portal and then wanders off screen. An albino edeinos swoops in on the wounded Tusk and heals him, Tusk takes charge of the bedlam, but Primus has already returned to the castle as the portal is closed by Joxor.

The Albino Edeinos then ends the scrying and the storm knights don’t get to watch the clean-up. But by then they don’t care because they are meeting Dr. Connors and Sinclair.

Winding Down:

We then spend a little time having Dr. Connors explain about the Necrons and how much he has learned about their technology. We also have a general sharing of information that brings the Doctors up-to-date with the Storm Knights and the changes to Manhattan, and the Delphi Mission therein.

We then get some gifts from the Cat-People, a few relics and items for the storm knights to take with them. We are left wondering if the cat-folk will stay or if they will open a portal and travel through the astral plane to find a new home. The storm knights take their new equipment and wonder about what they will find if they go visit Whitetail. Then again, they don’t know if they need to return the Doctors to the HQ or if they should just absorb them into the team.

End of Act 6

We stopped the game night at that point and then I realized that most of what I wanted to do with Whitetail was have them fight against the Army in Long Island. But with the magic and the craziness of the Storm Knights, Baruk is going to end the war in a very one-sided (though costly) way.

I kind of lost my way at the end of this Act. One of my players suggested that maybe we either do a time jump or perhaps move to another Cosm with other characters.

SO… next week will be an Introduction Blog to a new Cosm, Aysle. The short version is Aysle is TORG’s version of DnD… only not. So next week, new Cosm, New Heroes, same crazy players!