Revelation for RPGs: I Can See Clearly Now
In Revelation for RPGs 1 I talked about setting the stage and planting clues. In Revelation for RPGs 2 I talked about using written artifacts (like letters) to reveal secrets of your world, and in Revelation for RPGs 3 I talked about ways to use the people in your world to enrich your world while guiding your players. In this article I’ll talk about how geography and a magical vision helped the players understand the nature of the land and its sickness.
* * *
Over the course of a few months (in game time) it has become apparent that the land is not well. The land has been spitting forth repulsive monsters (usually out of pools of slime), plants are not doing well even in the druid forest, and through some connection as yet unlearned, the rulers of the land seem to also be ailing. Recently the group has learned some things about events around the time of the Cataclysm, when a famous bard went to the Caverns of Laryn to soothe the land, a hero went to Cardior to do something, and a companion named Garrett came into possession of a disease-causing dagger called Weeping Wounds. What Garrett had done with that dagger was not yet clear.
The group (for other reasons) seeks a divination from a cleric and receives this response: “Agondre festers at Agondre’s heart”. Members of the group curse the apparent low bandwidth of divine messages.
At about this point the group starts putting together some geographical clues:
- The Gastreyr is a region of rich farmland.
- To its north is the hill country of Thoracis, a place renowned for its armor. On its far border lies the city of Cardior. All roads lead to Cardior, it is said.
- Bordering Thoracis are the duchies of Lescap and Tergia. (We don’t have a lot of relevant information about them.)
- To the east of both there is a long range of tall mountains running north-south. Beyond the mountains is the large, flat plain of Alaria.
- To the west of Thoracis is the duchy of Taelyn, which is known for its weapons. To its west is a sea, and Taelyn’s coastline is jagged with many inlets. (Out of character, the GM compared it to Greece’s coastline.)
- The Caverns of Laryn are rumored (according to Seamus) to be north of Cardior somewhere. We have also heard of the Lake of Optalis far to the north, from which it is, supposedly, possible to see the whole land. Somewhere to the west of Laryn and Optalis lies the Gorge of Fire.
This player’s conception of all that, with many gaps and likely some errors, was approximately as follows. (Our GM has never seen this drawing before.)
At one point early in the game, when the GM named a few of these places, another player asked him: “did you get these names out of an anatomy textbook?” The GM changed the subject.
Drawn out like that, the geography of the land kind of resembles the upper half of a dragon.
* * *
We had a pretty good idea of what this meant at that time, but it was the group’s next adventure, after leaving Oakhame, that confirmed it. The group encountered a (former?) wizard, Theodocius, who was investigating magical control and, particularly, golems. Things had gone wrong for him and his chief creation, the metagolem, turned against him. When we found him he had become victim to his own work and he begged us to kill him.
Theodocius had kept a journal, and from it we learned that he had intentionally set up shop in a particular location because he felt the power lines, specifically of control, were strongest there. He set up in the midst of the spine of mountains.
After we found Theodocius’s notes, one character wrote:
Theodocius made an amazing discovery about the world. He was cryptic, and it took me a little while to figure out what he was talking about, but…wow.
We know the land itself is sick. What we didn’t know before is that the land is the body. Specifically, the body of a dragon. Rampant. Just like in all the ancient Agondre statues that keep showing up around us. It’s not just ancient art gone wild.
Cardior is the center of the empire, which is another way to say that it’s the heart of Agondre. Literally. (All roads lead there.) There is a place to the far northwest called the Gorge of Fire, which would seem to correspond to a similar part of a draconic body. The lake of Optalis, from which legend says you can see a great distance, is about where an eye would be. The plains to the east, over the mountains, are large and flat, and magical flight is particularly potent. (I want to go there someday!) The mountains themselves seem to form a backbone. My former home, the Gastreyr, is particularly suited to tasty food. (And here I thought we were just good cooks. Mom would be so disappointed if she knew.) And there are other correspondences as well.
An RPG is an interactive story. We tend to think of this as, mainly, players reacting to the GM (whether that be actions of characters or characteristics of the world), but reaction goes both ways. The GM was aware of what the players were discussing, and what one was writing in an in-character journal. I don’t know if he adjusted the timing of the revelation from Theodocius to build on our own speculations, but he could well have. Remember that as an RPG storyteller you can react to your players just as they can react to you.
* * *
Using this theory we, like Theodocius, began to make predictions about the land. Meanwhile, one character tried to work out the implications:
[…] 6. There is obviously a strong connection between dragons — or a dragon — and the land.
7. Three possibilities:
a. The land is linked in some way to a dead dragon, source unknown.
b. The land is linked to a live dragon, whereabouts unknown.
c. The land is a live dragon, metaphysical implications unknown.[…] Hypothesis 1: an evil dragon is linked to the land (enslaved to the land?) against its will, but either the control is weakening or the dragon itself is sick.
If the dragon is sick, the only way to cure the land might be to cure the dragon. If the dragon is evil and a slave, this could be difficult to accomplish.
Hypothesis 2: the dragon dying would be very bad.
Hypothesis 3 (alternative to 1): the dragon is willing and non-evil but has been afflicted by an evil influence, probably something seeking to control it.
Soon after that journal entry came another revelation.
* * *
The group had rescued an elf from Dorl Tavyani and next escorted her home. The elves were aloof and mysterious, not of the land but travelers from afar, but one of them was the father of our group’s half-elf druid and so we were welcome there. Elves also, we learned, know a lot but are not always forthcoming.
On the group’s first night in the land of the elves we had a most surprising adventure:
Last night we found ourselves in a strange place with no idea how we had gotten there. We were deep beneath the earth, in a passage that only went one direction. Everything was lit by a reddish glow, and we felt the throb of an enormous heartbeat. We went the only way we could, and found ourselves in a huge cavern — that contained a massive, writhing dragon in a pool of slime. We could only see the top half of the dragon, and the ooze was clearly causing it pain, but it didn’t move out of the pool for some reason. It had wings; why didn’t it fly out? Or walk out? Maybe it was in too much pain.
It was clawing and biting at itself, and breathing great blasts of flame down its body that burned everything in the room, including us. And then creatures — hideous, unnatural creatures of every sort — began to emerge from the pool and attack us.
Soon we were being swarmed by monsters. […] I lobbed fireballs at things coming out of the pool, and at the pool itself, but I couldn’t keep up with what was coming out. And the dragon kept sending forth blasts of flame. I tried to tell the dragon — which surely must be the dragon of Agondre! — that we were here to help, but it ignored me. I could see no way to heal it, no way to lure it out of the pool, and no way to stop the attack on it.
The group was overwhelmed, falling one by one. They woke from the dream to be met by the leader of the elves, who told the group that they needed to see.
Yes, we did see. We didn’t know what to do about it yet, but we now understood the nature of the living land.
We were now about halfway through the four-year campaign.
* * *
Dreams can be passive revelation, like prophecies or visions. The power of this dream was that it was highly interactive. That dream occupied one whole game session. We weren’t just told about a dream; we lived it. That made it real, and also set some things in place that would be used later.
It wasn’t just the land that was changing; people were changing too, sometimes in big ways. In the next article I’ll talk about transformations, a theme that ran throughout the game.
