Eberron Recap, Episode 2: Red Queen’s Race

(Note: this session was a huuuuuuuuuuuge infodump. It was fun, and informative, but it doesn’t make for a snappy read so I’m going to be brief.)

The previous session ended with the party beginning its descent to level 12, the bottom of Cyrran Shelter #3. There was, I forgot to add, a repeat encounter with some shadows. They did not pose a serious threat but during the fight we learned that Guard, who had been happily immune to any and all threats on his home level (that’s level 6, yo) was susceptible to stat damage just like the rest of us anywhere else. Good to know. We proceed the rest of the way without incident and come to level 12, where we face a classic fork in the path. Left or right? One way houses the Red Queen, Guard tells us, and the other is home to the Living Document… whatever the hell that means. We choose left.

Success! We enter a large room with a dias on the far end. On the dias stands a humanoid figure composed completely of gently swirling paper. Sadly, the Living Document’s predisposition is to treat visitors as hostile, and so it unleashes an enchantment that leaves several people befuddled, listless, and incoherent… okay, more than usual. The rest of the group manages to maintain its composure and talk to the thing, rather than pay it back in kind. They keep a fight from breaking out, but the Living Document demands that we show our marks. Our what now? A brief frisking of ourselves later, it turns out that all of us except the Kalashtari have small tattoo-looking marks somewhere on our bodies. These being displayed to the Living Document, it explains that it is prepared to answer any three questions that any markbearer asks it. As an added bonus, unlike the stereotypically adversarial stance of, say, a djinni in granting wishes, the Document is happy to explain when a question is pointless and/or unanswerable without it costing a question. So why even have limitations? “Because that’s the way it is.” Dammit.

Funnily enough, while three questions doesn’t sound like much, we actually know soooooo little about our situation that we don’t even use all of our questions in one sitting. Nevertheless, the picture does get clearer. In no particular order:

• We were set aside 16,000 years ago by the nation of Cyre. The shelters were scattered across the world as a means of preserving vital resources. By resources, mostly that means “capable combatants, valuable hostages, those who have breedable talents, and large caches of weapons.”
• Cyre built the five shelters from the bottom up, working through the Underdark, so that no other nation was aware of them. They apparently knew that a cataclysm was coming and expected to retrieve the shelters’ contents afterwards.
• Given the 16 millenia that passed, that plan didn’t seem to work out.
• The “marks” that are on most of us are something called “dragonmarks,” and they denote that we held some sort of status in society at the time. Each of our marks is different, and now that we know about them we realize that we can affect minor magical abilities by focusing on our mark.
• We get a run-down of general geography, i.e. we were shown the inside cover of the Eberron book although a lot of the names are different now.
• The wand that we recovered from level 6 (see last session) is one of five siblings, one in each Cyrran Shelter, that together are the key to something called the Warforge. Given that Guard has self-identified as a “Warforged,” we get what that does. Oh hell…that’s two pieces of information people would kill for (the other being the existence of the Shelter’s themselves.
• We get the access codes for any and all secured areas of the Shelter. This grants us, among other things, nearly limitless food and all of the finest non-magical weapons imaginable.
• We learn the locations of the other remaining living folk in this Shelter.

Our questions wind down, as we realize that we just don’t know enough to ask meaningful questions. We proceed to the Red Queen’s side of the level, where we get easy access to her communication setup - basically we can scry for short distances outside, and have a rudimentary database to peruse. A scan of the area confirms that we are under the Frostfell, where the conditions are hot, humid, and rainy.

…

What?

Oh fine, it’s a nightmare of cold and ice, happy? We know of a sled up in the equipment areas, but we don’t know that we have a means of moving the damned thing. We make our way back up the Shelter, freeing the other survivors along the way. One is a human fighter, while the other seems willing to be called Kalashtari but doesn’t seem to fit quite right. In any event, he seems psionically atuned. Ye Olde Narrator hasn’t dabbled in psionics since the days where you rolled percentile dice on every character to see if they had psionics, so I don’t have much to say on this subject. Besides, I think I’m a chicken; bawwwwwwk! We reach the top of Cyrran Shelter #3 and beging to assess what it will take to cross the icy wastes.

Next time: Baby, It’s Cold Outside