The heroes have awakened from a magical dream created by Merrix d’Cannith’s eldritch machine… All but Mickey Bishop! To save the warlock, they track down the fragments of an ancient artifact that have been gathered together at Morgrave University by an old acquaintance. But when they arrive at the university, they find that they are not the only ones who are seeking the relic.
Player Characters: Balkris, The Baron, Reckoner, R. Sativus, Sane, Timber
I.
The Rabble had gathered together in the Cogs Carnival, a tavern frequented by warforged where Reckoner had once worked as a bouncer before he first met Balkris at the Clifftop Adventurers Guild. It was here that the heroes met an old acquaintance of Reckoner’s, an ancient druid named Theodore Codswallop, the Baron of the Woods accompanied by his owl familiar, Wholio. “The Baron,” as he liked to be called, appeared to be cursed because he was seemingly trapped in the form of a bear. R. Sativus had seen many elder druids from the Eldeen Reaches who suffered from a similar affliction because they had gone feral after spending too much time in their animal form.
The heroes had gathered together to discuss recent events. After shaking off the effects of Merrix d’Cannith’s Delirium Machine, the Rabble had used the knowledge they had inadvertently gained from their dream visions to steal evidence from the prosecution in the trial against Big Mondo. The Boromar mob boss was acquitted and became indebted to the heroes. All was well… except for Mickey Bishop who remained trapped in his dream. Remarkably, the changeling that had taken on Mickey’s persona seemed to age rapidly and then become young again before their very eyes, indicating that he was trapped in a limbo within his dreams which spanned years or perhaps even decades.
As the cycles of aging worsened, Mickey occasionally cried out in his sleep. His cryptic mutterings indicated a psychic connection that allowed Mickey to see the source of his tormented dreams, the Delirium Machine, and its location. The Delirium Machine was hidden somewhere in the city of Sharn, deep inside the bowels of a secret laboratory operated by Merrix d’Cannith.
If the Delirium Machine who possess Mickey’s mind so utterly, who knew what danger it might hold for the countless souls living in the City of Towers?
The Rabble learned that the only way to free Mickey from the power of Merrix’s eldritch machine was to enter the realm of dreams to awaken him, or find the pieces of the Delirium Stone, the original artifact whose magic powers gave the inspiration for Merrix’s terrifying invention. The Delirium Machine had the power to control people’s minds through their dreams, and it could only be countered by the power of the Delirium Stone.
It was then that the heroes discovered that the lump of black stone carried by Sane – a family heirloom passed down through her mother’s side of the family whose history dates all the way back to the War of the Mark – was in fact a fragment of the Delirium Stone!
With the help of Sane’s family heirloom, R. Sativus successfully divined the location of the remaining pieces of the Delirium Stone. They had been gathered together in the Department of Acquired Cultures at Morgrave University.
The party prepared to set out and recover the pieces of the artifact so that they might save Mickey and possibly the rest of the city from the influence Merrix’s invention. But who would watch over Mickey Bishop in their absence? It was then that Jebediah Givens came to care for the comatose Mickey in the Rabble’s junkyard base in the Cogs. He felt indebted to Mickey for helping him when he was down on his luck. Jebediah was startled to hear Mickey crying out in his unconscious state as if he was being stabbed by numerous assailants. The visions that the heroes had seen gave them insight into possible futures. Could Mickey be seeing a vision of his own grisly death? The Rabble knew that they had no time to waste.
II.
R. Sativus divined that the pieces of the Delirium Stone had been gathered together at Morgrave University’s Department of Acquired Cultures. While Balkris was busy convincing the university guard that he and his companions were special lecturers, the Baron climbed up a tree to get a better view of the university grounds. He saw several men and a bugbear breaking into a window on the upper story of a tower. They were breaking into the Department of Acquired Cultures!
Wholio the owl flew to the window to get a better look. Inside the tower, the Baron saw through his owl familiar’s eyes that a tense standoff was taking place between the burglars and a university professor. Upon hearing the Baron’s description, the heroes realized that it was Professor Cinderveil! As the Baron listened to the conversation between the burglars and the professor, the party rushed through the university grounds and headed up to Cinderveil’s tower.
“Hand over the Delirium Stone, Professor. We know that you have been gathering together the pieces and that you plan to betray Baron Merrix by countering the power of the Delirium Machine. Give us the stone and we will make your death swift and painless,” said the leader of the burglars.
“It is Merrix that has betrayed the tenets of the Traveler, the Sovereign of Change!” Cinderveil answered. “He has been so obsessed with bringing technological advancement that he never stopped to wonder if he should. Now he seeks to establish a new world order in which humans and warforged become one and all are perfectly obedient. He desires a new world that is so perfect that there will be no more change! Don’t you see? He will doom us all! He will… yeeeaaaarrrrggghhhh!”
Cinderveil was stabbed by the burglars whose weapons were laced with a deadly poison. The professor was mortally wounded, and his assailants were closing in to finish the job when suddenly the light from the window grew dim. The darkness caused the everburning lanterns to light up in the corners of the room. The burglars turned around and faced the window in time to see a giant flying whale carrying a band of adventurers bursting through the wall!
The Baron had taken on the form of a whale and was enchanted with the power of flight by R. Sativus. The members of the Rabble rode upon the whale’s back and inside the whale’s mouth. Several of the burglars were immediately crushed by the whale and the rest were quickly subdued.
However, the poison that afflicted Professor Cinderveil swiftly worked through his veins. Sensing his end drawing near, Cinderveil confessed his true motives for poisoning the adventurers and nearly framing them for murder. He wanted to set them on a course to confront Merrix d’Cannith, who desired to see the evolution of humanity through technological advancement. Merrix’s vision of the future was a world ruled by human cyborgs with warforged enhancements. They would be the perfect citizens and perfectly obedient to the new order established by a united House Cannith under Merrix’s reign. With his final breath, Cinderveil implored the Rabble to stop Merrix before it was too late.
In the tower of Morgrave University, the heroes found the fragments of the Delirium Stone gathered together by Professor Cinderveil. They also discovered the holy symbol of the Traveler made of scorpion chittin which had first led them to Cinderveil several months ago. But as they left the dead professor and his ruined tower, flying away on the back of the Baron in his whale form, they sensed something approaching them.
Suddenly, they heard the shrill voice of Merrix d’Cannith ringing through the sky.
“Curse you rabble! I want what is mind. I want those pieces of the Delirium Stone.”
Then a hideous eye appeared in the air in front of them. R. Sativus felt the power of her enchantment of flight failing in the eye’s presence, and the heroes began to fall.
III.
Timber, being trained in the ways of the monk, deftly descended and landed on the ground, but the others plummeted when the Baron could no longer fly. Miraculously, a nearby magewright enchanted the Baron with a spell of feather fall, preventing the whale from crushing the students and passersby on the university grounds. R. Sativus did likewise for herself, while Sane fortuitously fell onto a passing air elemental. Reckoner hit the pavement hard but his tough warforged body withstood the fall. Balkris was less fortunate and fell hundreds of feet toward the base of the towers, vanishing from sight.
But a few moments later, Balkris reappeared on a skycoach piloted by an ogre driver whose passenger, an unlucky Aereni tourist, had broken Balkris’ fall. The nobleman looked disheveled and irritated, but had survived the deadly fall.
As Balkris came back to Morgrave University, he found his companions locked in a fierce battle with a terrible creature sent by Merrix d’Cannith – a Beholder fused with strange metal plates, like those seen on Scab the Goblin. Its many eyes fired deadly rays of magic at the heroes, forcing the Baron to revert to his true form and turning Reckoner into stone.
Worse still, the power of the Delirium Machine was activated from afar, and an enormous beam of dark energy engulfed the university grounds, transforming it into a nightmare landscape.
IV.
It seemed to the heroes that they were shrunken to the size of rats as the trees on the university lawn turned into broken toy blocks and crude dolls with their stuffing falling out. They appeared to be inside a ruined orphanage in the midst of children’s toys. Was this a vision from Merrix’s own childhood in the Silvermist Poorhouse?
In truth, this was a vision from Timber’s past. The shifter monk had grown up in an orphanage not until the one that Merrix had lived it. He recalled being a small child and looking up at the grownups in the orphanage with fear and awe. Now he felt that long-forgotten terror rising up within him, but he martialed his courage and fought on.
Meanwhile, Reckoner found himself in a nightmare of his own while he was slowly turning to stone. He dreamt that he was on the front lines of the last war, leading a squadron of Karrnathi warforged. Yet these were no ordinary warforged but those twisted into hideous forms by the powers of Mabar, the plane of entropy, channeled by Karrnath’s infamous necro-artificers. Reckoner had seen undead warforged like these during the Last War, and now he had joined their ranks in his nightmare vision.
Yet the cruelest part of his vision was the order he was carrying out. Reckoner and his unit had been commanded to destroy a group of Karrnathi soldiers defending the city of Rekkenmark. And they were led by Reckoner’s former commander, Raylan Givens. But it seemed that Reckoner’s memories of the war and recent event began to blend together. For the commander he faced now was a Karrnathi zombie whose brain had been removed from his skull cavity.
“Staaaaand… doooown… Reeckooonneeer,” said the undead Rayland Givens.
Just as Reckoner raised his warhammer against his former commander, he awoke from his vision as his body was freed from its petrified state. He saw that his companions had defeated the Beholder whose smoking ruin laid upon the university lawn. All that was left of it were two magic rings that had been fitted onto the Beholder’s eyestalks to empower it. The heroes had survived the battle, but Timber and Reckoner had not emerged unscathed, for they had seen terrible visions inspired by their worst nightmares.
V.
In the days that followed, the Rabble assembled the fragments of the Delirium Stone and used its power to awaken Mickey Stone, freeing him from his endless dreams and warding him against the influence of the Delirium Machine. Mickey Bishop had seen much during the years that he imagined had passed while he was trapped in his dreams.
Mickey had found the location of Merrix’s secret laboratory. It was a Creation Forge, a mighty eldritch machine built by the artificers of House Cannith to mass produce their magical products, including the warforged. The Creation Forges had been outlawed at the Treaty of Thronehold that had officially brought an end to the Last War. The revelation that a Baron of House Cannith was secretly operating an illegal Creation Forge in the depths of Sharn had the potential to be a huge scandal.
That was not all that Mickey had seen in his dreams. He also foresaw his own death at the hands of warforged agents of the Lord of Blades in retribution for the destruction of their fellow warforged by Mickey Bishop aboard the Portent King. Mickey evaded his assassins time and time again, but in each iteration of his nightmare, he was brutally murdered by the warforged.
Now that he was awake, Mickey knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the warforged were coming for him.
Searching for Secrets, It Was a Dark and Sooty Night
Treasure
– Ring of Evasion
– Ring of Free Action