Last week, the party got baited into an ambush.
Most of the PCs start by questioning Alex Fuller, the last survivor of the cult of Apollo, while Valrel checks the next room, where the great bronze idol of Fuller's god dances and dances around a wine-filled swimming pool. She decides, inexplicably, to take a swim - and is then bodyslammed by the Zontanamancer's golden hunter-ragdoll.
Unfortunately, she is now stuck under hundreds of pounds of gold. Fortunately, she doesn't need to breathe, and the plodding mind of the ragdoll takes a hot minute to realize hey, I don't think I'm actually killing this person right now.
Long enough, in fact, for the other PCs to go "huh, where's Valrel", find her in the pool, and huck a steel cable in with her. She ties it to the ragdoll, the party above ties the other end to the dancing Apollo, and on his next turn the ragdoll whips across the room, snaps the wire, punches through the wall, and smears itself down two blocks of city street.
The PCs scatter - a couple run off to make sure the ragdoll's deanimated, Moon Dan makes sure Alex doesn't notice the party had looted his temple, and Joe decides to think about that "EXTREMELY CURSED" book...
Surely C-something the Morally Dubious Skull knows something about EXTREME CURSES, right? Sure, he says. Just give me a body first...
The PCs reunite at Toka's shack - best not to cause too much collateral damage - staple C-something to the body of a dead Apollonian, and toss him the book.
"Well?" they ask.
C-something nods sagely. "Locusts."
"Can you do something about it?"
"Probably."
"Probably?"
"Probably."
C-something surrounds the book in salt, says a couple words, and the salt circle shifts, twists into words in some dead language, and flashes pure white. Then he picks it up, snaps it open to a conveniently ribbon-marked page, and Isn't instantly consumed by a swarm of locusts.
Instead, he presents the party with
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| from the Splendor solis |
[...] rubedo, the red stage. It is at this point, the point of the first gate's opening, that the stone takes on the wonder of its fourth facet, the Solar facet, chrysopoeia.
De re Cauda Pavonis
To approach the final stage of the Great Work demands care. Take up a flask of the black metal of ibn Yazid, that the people of that place call lam yamasa because it is not heated nor cooled (and, they say, only comes from those places where the motionless Fields of Asphodel intrude on the living world) and set it to boil. Place the miraculous stone within and it will take on the aspect of the peacock's tail.
One becomes two. The stone will open and reveal its heart - be wary, as the heartlight strikes like fire. Each hour of the day you a mote from those with a connection to the Fields of Asphodel or to the land of Dream must be put into the heart, and this fire will catch them.
Two becomes three. When this is done, the fire of the heartlight is quelled but it is more vital that you keep your eyes from it. Bring forward the body of glass, and let it gaze upon the heartlight. Only then may you open your eyes.
Out of the third comes the one as the fourth. The heartlight burns in the head of the homunculus. It breathes and stares - it must be kept alive, with food and drink. When you would pass to the hereafter you will, instead, be caught into the homunculus, and live again.
 |
| from the Ampitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae |
C...ool. Sure. OK.
While a couple of the PCs do some considering, the rest make a realization. They have the philosopher's stone? Which turns any material into gold? Why haven't we been doing this the whole time? A couple schemes and a few minutes later, the PCs all put a celebratory ∞ in the money section of their character sheet.
The considerers lay out their understanding - the land of Dream is obviously the Gardens of Ynn. That makes the Field of Asphodel the lawful Astral Plane. I've never heard of a "black metal of ibn Yazid", but it sounds pretty distinctive so I guess we could just to the Astral Plane and... poke around?
How do we get to the plane of Law.
Actually, not that difficult - Containment Center CATERPILLAR has a "Contact Room" that leads to the Astral Plane, and since Joe Normal remains in good standing with OSIRIS, the door is actually there when he goes to look for it.
He creeps in, hiding Valrel as a bat and the Finance Optimizer as a 2D projection under his coat, and opens the door to a blank white expanse, the Pyramid hovering overhead.
Joe asks if he could, maybe, get a description of the list of unacceptable questions, then cringes, expecting another punishment. unacceptable questions are questions related to the physical integrity of the Pyramid or surrounding objects.
The physical integrity. Of the Pyramid. The black, metallic Pyramid.
Oh boy.
Analysis
Incidentally - an error. The Vampire Head's hand is not going to "1,000,000% escape" - they buried it in a steel box after bending all of its fingers backwards until they broke and tying them to the back of the hand with cables. It's stayin' in the box.
The Pyramid is, fully and without shame, just the Board from the game Control. When I first started posting about Libra, seven years ago, (seven years ago. bizarre) this was the point. A bare minimum mashup that could fit SCPoid and V:tMoid and Esoteric Enterprisesoid and so forth gaming - it slotted in perfectly next to "literally just Delta Green" and "literally just GRU Division "P"" and "literally just the Gardens of Ynn". Usually I try to be a bit more artful, but eh. I have settings aplenty, I don't have to take them all seriously.
I am inordinately happy with my alchemy puzzle. Deep on my list of campaigns is a faux-Italian mercenary game, and I was considering alchemical recipes like this as a core of the magic system - especially ones with inefficient instructions. To make an ever-burning fire you must follow these four steps - but actually, if you experiment, step 3 is completely unnecessary and using different gems in step 2 creates different kinds of fire. That kind of thing.
Having literally infinite money will have... an effect on the game - though it was always, really, part of the plan. The players are hyped to get their FFLs, buy expensive cars, stop living in basements, and see how much societal damage they can do.
