#I want this 'Reaver' to dissolve at points and show us the REAL him

[snowfianna]

Who's he trying to fool besides himself?

The closer we get to a new fable, the more I wish to see his trauma in action.

Also this is the BEST Reaver I've ever drawn without ref and I just really really wanted to share it - I might finish it, who knows?

[cosmic-navel-gazin]

I just now realized that both Adam and Raziel are the small boys of their own duo. And by small I mean the other two are just insanely tall. This is just the second half of Part 4 of these ramblings that had to be split in two. Also, I really want Kain’s pants.

In which I chronicle my Legacy of Kain journey and bridge it with your boy Adam Warlock, and Thanos too for a bit! (Part 4.5 of many, not many SPOILERS for Soul Reaver 1 and 2)

Part 1

Part 1.5

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

I ended Part 4 talking about how both Raziel and Adam can’t stay dead for long.

 In Adam’s case, whenever he is killed / is mortally wonded / just needs a bit of solitude and peace and quiet, this gross ass cocoon forms around him and keeps him safe (similar to the one that gave him birth).

He stays there dissolving and reforming, metamorphosing for an uncertain amount of time (could be an instant, could be years), and coming out a little bit changed every time.

He’s had other methods of resurrection but this is the main “normal” one.

And I want to follow that with a bit of a tangent on how this “undying business” translates into gameplay with Raziel. I think the devs made it into a very interesting mechanic in my opinion, present in both Soul Reaver 1 and 2.

 Basically, if you lose all your health, you are transported to the Spiritual Realm  - a more spooky and eerie version of the Material Realm, where architecture bends, passages open and everything gains a bluish tint. I let myself be killed here as an example:

If you get killed while in the Spectral Realm, you are transported back to the last checkpoint (in Soul Reaver 1, you would be transported to the bottom of the Abyss and have to make your way up to where you were killed). Another example:

In Soul Reaver 2, even the checkpoints have an in-lore explanation, which I think is awesome, Raziel says:

"These ancient obelisks were mysteriously attuned to my spiritual essence. By simply touching the symbol, I could safely preserve an imprint of my soul, and thus create a milestone to which I could return when weary, and from which I could resume my journey."

You can also just shift to the Spiritual Realm whenever you please without having to die. Useful to gain access to previously inaccessible places:

Yey stairs!

Here's a few examples of this mechanic in Soul Reaver 1 I found online:

But, even though you can go spiritual at will, to return to the Material Realm you need to be at specific marked points, and be at full health (done by consuming a few wandering souls):

I don't know if it is technically impressive or not for the PS1, Dreamcast and PS2 to pull this off, but I personally marvel at it every time. And I think it's an interesting way to represent immortality through gameplay, not just storywise.

I do wonder now how you would translate Adam’s resurrections into gameplay if Marvel had a game where he’s playable. I think some notes and ideas could be taken from Soul Reaver. Maybe while his body is being recreated in his cocoon, you take control of his soul, hanging out on Mistress Death’s domain, since he’s no stranger to that place. I don’t know, I guess I just want an excuse to see him and Death interact more:

Anyway... oh yeah! I spent so much time gushing all over the soul devouring mechanic in Soul Reaver 1 in my first post, that I forgot to show how it looks in Soul Reaver 2 in both Realms:

I'll be honest, I think I prefer the green flame look from the first game (probably because that was my first exposure to it), but I do like the Spiritual Realm version of the souls here with the little skulls flying about.

Ok, back to that scene between Raziel and Kain I started talking about in Part 4 when they’re at The Ruined Aerie .

I mentioned in Part 3, how it started to look like we might get a similar development for them to that of Thanos and Adam, in the sense of them going from sworn enemies to friends. And the tone of this meeting shows a nice little change in their relationship in that direction (yey! because I'm a huge unrepentant sucker for this kind of thing).

Whereas before their encounters were wholly antagonistic from Raziel's part, now it is much more ammicable. It's not sudenly smiles and hugs or anything, quite the opposite. Raziel does say that he will try and kill Kain if he even suspects that doing so will make things better. But it is noticeably different.  Instead of it being all like "face me and die monster!", like usual, we get this exchange:

Raziel:

"Oh no. Every time you turn up something monumental and terrible happens. I don't think I have the stomach for it."

Kain: (laughs softly):

"No drama this time, Raziel."

Nice.

In the last couple of scenes Raziel even openly defends Kain when talking to others, which would be unthinkable during Soul Reaver 1. Our greatest enemy in the previous game is now an ally of sorts, or the closest we have to that. And our previous benefactor, The Elder God, who rescued me form the Abyss and tasked me with destroying Kain and the vampire race, may not be as benevolant as he showed. 

Just awesome stuff here with your allies turning into foes and vice-versa the more we dig into this land's History. In fact, I'll just throw this out there, but the whole seemingly betrayal of Raziel, of Kain ripping his wings and throwing him into the Abyss...

I'm beginning to think that it may have been a necessary evil in Kain’s attempt to restore Nosgoth, and not so much a fit of jealousy as it was shown. But I'll reserve judgement. It kinda depends on when exactly did Kain stumble upon Moebius' secret lair and peered into the future. Like, if he knew that Raziel had to burn and become a wraith to help create the paradoxes. So for now it's just a random thought.

But yeah maybe Raziel's starting to see that Kain has been as much of a pawn as he is. Both forced to play out some part in a grand scheme, and both forced down a path of bad decision after bad decision. Just how Adam and Thanos get closer as they realise they’re more alike than they care to admit, especially in their flaws and shortcomings, and that each is the only person the other can really relate to on a deeper level.

I mean don't get me wrong, Kain is undeniably monstruous, but he seems to be genuinly trying to fix things and the raw deal he was given in life. So maybe we can get something like Thanos’ “redemption” years for Kain by the end of this cosmic drama:

Would like to see Kain getting out of this wiser (and Raziel too). Things seem to be pointing that way at least.

So once we do manage to travel to the distant past as we intended, to the big Vampire Purge Era (because Raziel wants to talk with this ancient vampire who supposedly knows about the Soul Reaver Sword, and is the only person who might tell me the whole truth), Soul Reaver 2 takes advantage of me and impales me through the heart:

I'll elaborate. On the next post. Where things will get very real again.

See you until then.

[zippdementia]

Part 16 Alignment May Vary: The Drowned Tower

Welcome to the continuing adventures of the Tomb of Haggemoth, a DnD 3.5 adventure converted to 5th edition, and with some extra material thrown in that’s meant to build up to a second campaign, the well known Red Hand of Doom.

The first night that the group spends with former soldiers Xavier, Biggs, Fritz, and Samuel is rife with difficulty. Abenthy tends to those wounded in the shipwreck in a harrowing fifteen minutes of roleplaying, during which he tries to keep one man from losing a leg while another screams in agony from a fever that won’t abate. The remaining crew, pushed to their limits, debate killing the screaming man to end his suffering, while Abenthy tries to buy more time. Eventually his healing powers prevail and he collapses into an exhausted rest. In the end, only one life is lost of those who escaped the ship: Igor, the man who was native to Friezorazov and who had become a drunk in Ottoman’s Dock after being run out of his native land. Igor took an injury to the head while escaping and dies as they reach the island. Karinna keeps an amulet he had around his neck, sensing it was magical, not knowing it was something he had stolen from the giant’s tribute, all those years ago.

The day after brings more confrontation: Clem wants to set to building a raft so they can all leave the island as soon as possible. Others believe they can stay on this island and survive until they can craft a more seaworthy vessel. Still others ask why they are considering leaving at all, as the island seems to have enough food and water to provide for a small village. The group is split on what to do, though they all agree they must get back to their quest as soon as possible. Zennatos will succumb to the curse at some point, after all.

They do not solve the problem right now. Instead, the three companions go hunting (a clear need is food, so why not focus on that?), and on the trip they come to a bluff overlooking the sea. Here they spot a familiar ship sailing into a cave far beneath them, a ship with a Red Hand painted on its sails. Then a branch snaps behind them: three Ratzotto pirates—identifiable by their grungy appearance, their tell-tale curved cutlasses, and the tattoos on their necks—emerge from the woods and attack!

It’s fun, as a player, to take on the same enemies at different times, as a measure of your own growth in ability. The last time they fought these pirates, they won, but not without taking some massive hits. It was a long, drawn out fight. This time, they wipe the floor with them. One they even capture, and after tying him up, Abenthy casts Zone of Truth on him....

Abenthy knelt next to the large man and cuffed him the rest of the way awake. “Tell me,” he ordered. “Tell me what you were doing here.”

The man smiled and responded, “We are here because HE has found someone he wants to put through the ritual, the ritual in the tower. He says the girl is perfect for the ritual, that she has powers like him.” The pirate’s eyes went wide and his mouth drooped in an “O” of shock as the words that came out of his mouth were not the lies he had planned, but rather the bald truth.

“Show us where,” Abenthy growled. “Show us where and you can have your life.”

“Yes! Untie me and I will stab you in the back first chance I get!” The man shook his head in confusion as the truth was forced out of him by the spell. “I want you to go fuck yourselves!” he added.

The sentiment was, after all, also the truth.

Eventually the party disposes of their prisoner and find on his body a scrawled message in runic. Karinna uses her Comprehend Languages spell and reads a curious doublet:

These phrases will get you through the traps. Commit the words to memory, destroy this message.

The Tide Rises.

Embrace the Cold Sea!

The note is signed at the bottom: TARGARYEN.

Dungeon Analysis: The Drowned Tower

By nightfall, the group has traced the footsteps of the pirates back to their tower. It is a ruined, sunken thing with only its top still visible above ground:

Within the dense swamp, hundreds of feet of thick mud splits apart revealing the stone roof and battlements of the Drowned Tower. Half of the roof is still covered in mud. A deep pit likely once held fires that could be seen far out over the coral sea. A broken staircase leads down into the buried tower while part of the stone roof has broken away revealing rotted wooden support beams and shadows of the room below.

This tower is taken with little change from an adventurer’s league dungeon, from the Elemental Evil season. I wanted a short dungeon, something water themed, to tie in with the pirates. This dungeon comes with a fun end boss that suggested a good fate for Targaryen, filling in for me the gap of what had happened to him since his “death” aboard the Red Hand of Doom ship many sessions ago. The hook I replaced with “rescue Jade (Targaryen’s sister) from whatever Targaryen is planning (the players rightly assume Jade is the “girl” the pirate referred to). The dungeon actually ended up taking two sessions to get through, so I won’t go through each and every moment. I will touch on some of the major events, though, and finish next time with the boss fight.

The basic premise of the tower is that it is buried in mud and still slowly sinking. With the increased activity at the tower, the speed of its sinking has increased so that the players are made to feel like it could collapse in on itself at any moment. There’s no real mechanic to govern this, but it does create a cool atmosphere.

Of course, the writing on the Adventurer’s League modules is always rushed and so there are confusions here about how some of the dungeon works. One of the more egregious examples are the glyphs protecting two of the rooms, bypassable by saying the passwords above. One is hidden under water, without a very good indication of how a player is supposed to detect it without making a random, cautionairy perception check. The other is protecting a door which I can’t tell if it is open or not. The read-aloud text says it is open... but the room description says it is closed. I just picked closed because otherwise the glyph trap is pointless.

Otherwise, I like it because it has really well self-contained encounters, several of which operate more like traps than combat experiences. If not handled intelligently/cleverly, these encounters can lead to a total party kill pretty quickly. I like this, because it breaks the mold of “walk into room, fight enemies, roll dice until one side is dead.” Having enemies much more powerful than the players can face but which have their own restrictions on attacking and moving makes things more exciting.

The more normal encounters are against a combination of reavers (fishmen pirates) and fathomers (fishmen pirates who can turn into water serpents), both enemies from the elemental evil campaign. It makes for a cool thematic touch to our campaign, as in our story the Ratzotto pirates were comandeered by the demon pirate Testain Reeves after the events of the Moon Sea from which only Karrina escaped. Tagaryen still had possession of the Jade Statue when Reeves claimed his soul, and the combination of dark powers has been transforming the pirates into monstrous versions of themselves, and Targaryen, as the players will discover, is no exception...

The Black Pudding

What is possibly the Tower’s hardest challenge is probably never seen by most parties. In what seems an odd design choice, there is a door guarded (see above) by a glyph, but which is also CLEARLY not the way to go forward. The reward for going through the door is the possibility of finding some treasure (monetary, not magical) and to fight these guys.

That looks painful. This is one of those rooms which operates like a trap. Once discovered, the Black Oozes will follow the party around, trying to trap them in a room or force them to blunder into another trap. They are not to be trifled with, either. Black Ooze hits like a truck, with acidic weapon and armor destroying damage that makes the party less effective at surviving the next hit and dealing out damage of their own. And being unintelligent Oozes, it is not inconcievable that they will sit on an unconcious player’s face, forcing critical failures on their death saves until the player dissolves into a spongy mass of bone and muscle.

Our group encounters them when they flee other terrors in the tower and go looking for healing items and powerful weapons to help them get further. They find an old library and begin to poke around, disturbing the current denizens of the room. Tywin at this point is level 5, and that means he gets a potential of five attacks each turn: an extra attack each time he uses the attack action, a bonus action with his off hand, and if he uses one of his abilities, an addition attack action (and subsequent attack). And in DnD 5e there is no such thing as full round action, meaning he can move in between any and all of these attacks. His strategy, then, has been to take point, moving to the nearest enemy and cleaving them, then moving on if he takes them down and has movement left. If his first attack doesn’t take them down, he plants his feet and goes at them until they drop.

And that is the absolute worst strategy to use against a Black Ooze. But of course, Tywin doesn’t know that. So he rushes in, slashing, and immediately splits the Ooze into multiple Oozes. He realizes his error and pulls back... but he underestimates how fast the Oozes can move (he pulls back 15 feet, and they can move 20). They are on him in seconds, pulling him down into their acidic depths, enveloping him in a corrosive slime that quickly sends him into unconsciousness. Worse, he pulled back to the doorway, meaning that the Oozes are now blocking the way out for Karrina and Abenthy.

Karrina, though, is slippery as heck. She disengages and darts past the Oozes, dragging Twyin’s body with her, force feeding him a potion, and then escaping with him even as the Ooze latches onto his legs, burning him so badly he falls again unconscious. 

This leaves Abenthy trapped in the ruined library with four or five split Oozes. Thinking fast, he climbs a nearby bookshelf, then starts bashing a hole in the decrepit roof. Just as the Ooze is beginning to climb the shelf, he bursts through into the light of dusk and escapes the tower.

The encounter forces them to take a long rest. During the middle of the night, Abenthy (on guard) sees a bright light erupt from the tower and then quickly fade. It leaves him feeling concerned for the fate of Jade, but there is nothing to do except let Tywin’s wounds heal and then tackle the tower again in the morning.

The next day, they come up with an intriguing solution to the Ooze (which has coalesced and is filling the lower hallways, blocking the way back into the depths of the tower). They find a room filled with zombies (incidentally, Karrina recognizes them as islanders from back in her adventures in the Moon Sea, taken prisoner aboard the Red Hand ship), and Abenthy shepherds them into the Ooze using his Turn Undead ability. While it is busy gorging itself, the party slips past without incident, though the tower is looking the worse for wear today:

Perhaps it is magic that held this tower up so long, magic now finally fading, or perhaps it is simply that time has caught up with the tower, or maybe whatever ritual Targaryen planned here upset the delicate balance of the tower—in any case, today as you walk the ruined halls, the smell of damp earth is more pungent and around you echoes the slight sound of trickling mud and shifting earth. Every so often, a thin stream of mud falls from the ceiling as the tower settles even deeper into the earth. You can almost feel the weight of hundreds of tons of rock and dirt pressing around you, like a great hand gripping your chest. The tower does not have much longer to stand. Soon its stone shall return to the stone of the earth and anyone left in here when that happens will be buried forever.

Splash

One of the more interesting encounters comes from a room where two Reavers are walking around carrying giant flasks that look to be glowing slightly and filled with liquid. The party is quick to snipe them as soon as they enter the room, Karrina scoring a critical on one of the pirates and killing him instantly while Abenthy is locked in mortal combat with him. His flask drops and...

The flask falls to the ground with a crash, shattering on impact. The liquid inside sprays out in an oddly contained manner, as if it is a single pool of water spreading through the air, rather than many droplets scattering everywhere. The pool settles on top of Abenthy like a blanket, the stone and mud floor suddenly sinking underneath him with a slurping sound. Abenthy tries to cry out, but his mouth fills with liquid and he cannot breathe! 

The other reaver, seeing this, curses and throws his own flask into a well of water in the middle of the room. He chuckles evilly as the well begins to bubble and ripple, and turns to run. Out of the pool comes hands, many hands, and they reach quickly across the room to grab Twyin, pulling him closer to the water’s edge..

These are Water Weirds, and they are an unusual enemy. Very powerful at this level—with powerful attacks and the ability (and intention) to drown players whom they manage to get a hold of—they are limited by their confinement to water. This means that in this room they make a trap. They have a fifteen foot reach, meaning their attacks of opportunity are pretty vicious. 

Tywin and Abenthy barely manage to break free and flee the room with Karrina, slamming the door behind them. They can hear the cries of the remaining Reaver through the door until they are abruptly cut off. Without anyone else to attack, the weirds turned on their captor.

This is the fight that convinces them to go looking for treasure upstairs, leading to the disastrous encounter with the Ooze. The next day, the players return and this time they use a clever combination of disengaging, dashing, and dodging to tactically move their way across the room. Even so, Twyin trips just before the stairs leading down and out of the room and is grabbed again. Only a mighty strength roll lets him burst free and escape with the others. It is a close call, and Tywin wonders how many lives he has left to spend as he descends into the darkened final floor of the tower.

Next time, Old Debts.