#‘when you die i’m going to buy your vacuum sealed corpse pieces and put it on a pedestal in my office’

[hypertechnica]

star trek as a concept is completely sexless. it is utterly devoid of sex. not one drop of convincing sexual tension has ever graced the screen on any star trek show. the weird unintentionally homoerotic psychosexual mind game shit on the other hand,

[zippdementia]

Part 85 Alignment May Vary: An End to Demons

At the end of last session, the PCs managed to put together the pieces of Alyss’ memory to discover she was not the queen of some ancient Satanic city, but rather a noble’s daughter, kidnapped and turned to the worship of Asmodeus. Furthermore, she bore Asmodeus’ child, Karina, who was a major Player Character in our campaign before she reached the hallowed halls of NPCdom.

Now the PCs are whisked back to the present, where they find themselves in the stone hallway again, the “behind the scenes” area of this layer of the Abyss and Esheballa’s game. And indeed, they have a game to finish.

(The artwork below is by Ryan Durney, from his Mirrors of the Abyss module. It’s one of my favorite of his pieces! For the full module, go here.)

Breaking the Rules

With the PCs at this point is Hecate, pulled from her destruction at the hands of the pit fiend moments before she could be crushed by its baleful wrath, and also Alyss. Puck is gone, but Alyss explains that he is “with her now,” the last bit of Asmodeus contained within her, safe in her restored mind until she can bring it to where it needs to go: Esheballa’s inner sanctum, where she keeps the “trophies” of the defeated Demon Lords and Devil invaders, who died during the Blood War’s destructive finale.

Alyss tells the PCs she will reach the sanctum and open a portal so they can join her there but that she needs two things: First, Daymos needs to go with her, as she needs his power to open the portal and also to travel the Abyss unnoticed, as he is now a demon. Second, she needs the PCs to keep playing Esheballa’s game for a little longer, so she doesn’t get suspicious and discover Alyss’ plan.

What is Alyss’ plan? To revive Asmodeus within Esheballa’s sanctum, bringing back her "husband” and the true lord of the devils.

The only other thing Alyss gives the players is a card from Abbraxus, meant for Imoaza. It has a curious riddle on it, telling her that in order to forge a weapon capable of defeating a god or goddess like Esheballa. It reads:

To the Snake Lady:

You will not be able to defeat Esheballa without the power of the realms combined. Solve my riddle and forge the greatest weapon in creation. It was meant for the one whose life you cut. Now its power will be yours to claim. Four realms will come together to craft this blade:

The Eternal Fire of Hell

The Cutting Darkness of the Abyss

The Power of an Elemental God

The Forbidden Knowledge of the Far Realms

Without this weapon, you shall perish and Esheballa shall make a trophy of your skins and a prisoner of your souls. Even with the weapon, your chances may be slight, but darkness flees from even the slightest light.

The PCs jump back into the game after this, doing one more room of Esheballa’s “Mirrors of the Abyss.” Esheballa herself is overjoyed to have her playthings back. 

“Ah, there you are!” Esheballa’s girlish voice emanates from mirrors all around the group. Then her voice darkens and lowers: “I thought you had tried to cheat your way out of my game.” Then a high pitched giggle again. “Or that you’d died, hee hee! Well, I’m glad you are back. There’s so much more fun to show you.”

The next room is a favorite room of mine from Ryan Durney’s crazed campaign, a room where the PCs are forced to split up and each tackle a different puzzle or challenge in a hallway of mirrors. Imoaza and Hecate end up in one hall, Milosh in another, and Ruz in a third.

Ruz has played Esheballa’s game and survived it before and he remembers this mirror puzzle. It was here that he and a fellow traveler met the horrible “Bloody Mary.” Mary was the architect of many of Esheballa’s magical mirrors, but when she tried to escape the realm, Esheballa took offense and punished her horribly, by putting her through the “grater” and then keeping her alive, suffering eternally from her wounds while trapped in the very mirrors she helped construct. Now Esheballa uses her as a monster against those who cannot solve her riddles.

For Ruz, this means solving the steps of a complicated ritual. Fortunately, he has the experience of past failure on his side and is able to avoid the mistakes his old companion made and complete the puzzle. As he exits the mirror hallway, he turns and sees Bloody Mary in one of the mirrors. Something about the look the horrendous apparition gives him makes him think that she knows what he and his companions are about to do. She nods solemnly as if in support, and disappears.

Presently Imoaza, Hecate, and Milosh join him. Milosh looks the worse for wear, but Imoaza and Hecate seem alrite, except for a trickle of blood running down her shoulder. The group doesn’t share their experiences, but I will, briefly.

Imoaza and Hecate end up facing a puzzle involving a sphere of annihilation which requires the proper sacrifice to pass. This is actually a pretty fun little mechanic, where sacrifices let Imoaza roll a d20 to change the effects of the sphere, supposedly turning it eventually into a portal that will let her and Hecate leave this hall. But the trick is that the sphere is never good, and really the goal is have it disappear and reveal the true exit. But this still requires sacrifice.

Milosh, meanwhile, is given a choice in his hallway: face a horrendous monster or set it on one of his fellows. Milosh has been changing ever since entering the abyss and especially since losing Carrick. He is losing his amicable, naive nature and reverting to something more primal inside of him. An old personality is emerging. And that personality wants to live. It sics the monster on Imoaza and Hecate.

This ends up being a boon for the snake relatives, as when they are attacked by the huge, deformed fox creature that Milosh sends at them, Imoaza uses powerful magic to blast it backwards into the sphere of annihilation. The sacrifice is accepted and the sphere disappears! 

An End to Demons

Passing through the mirror trap buys Alyss and Daymos enough time to open a way to Esheballa’s inner sanctum. The PCs leap through the portal that appears for them at the end of the mirror hallway and end up somewhere completely different, a great emptiness that is spanned by a massive bridge leading to the hollowed out corpse of the mighty Demogorgon, defeated during the Blood War and left here to house Esheballa’s most sacred treasures: the conquests of the Blood War.

Note, for this section, I’ve left the module Ryan Durney designed behind, but I want to say that it was a really unique dungeon, and one of the only ones I’ve ever read that really felt like an abyssal adventure. Ryan’s attention to detail really brought Esheballa and her realm to life. It is a deathtrap of a dungeon in the vein of Tomb of Horrors, maybe even deadlier, but also an experience lined with melancholy and moral dilemma. Very interesting stuff! Overall, the Planes in Dungeons & Dragons don’t get enough attention. They have been left as sandbox arenas for innovative DMs to play around in and let their imaginations run wild. But that’s also a lot of pressure on a DM. You have to create a compelling story, pick from myriads of monster lists and obstacles what the players are going to encounter, and somehow make the whole experience feel different enough from a standard game as to make it memorably part of a planar experience. Mirrors of the Abyss is one of the only modules released for 5th Edition that I feel does that, and the only one that does it for the Abyss.

That said, Mirrors could take up many more sessions if I play it straight through, and it is time for us to return to our main storyline. The players enter Demogorgon and make their way into one of his skulls, where Esheballa has built a museum of sorts. Here are paintings all over the walls, each containing the soul of a dead Demon Lord. One painting contains the soul of Asmodeus.

Basically, my head canon here is that in the final days of the Blood War, Asmodeus took some of his highest ranking devils and a huge army and invaded the Abyss. Every single Demon Lord died that day and the power of the Abyss was sealed away by Asmodeus’ power. But using this power drained Asmodeus of his life force and while he could not truly die, the Devils that accompanied him were killed and Asmodeus’ body destroyed. Damaged, his soul fled back to Hell, where one of his disciples, Alyss, found it and nurtured it into a semblance of health. It became Puck. Not strong enough to reveal who he truly was, and with his power only sustained by Alyss’ fervent belief in him, Puck could do naught but watch as Hell was left to the squabbling of those Devil Kings and Queens who had stayed behind from the front lines, turning hell into a capitalistic mecca in the process and more corrupt than ever before.

Meanwhile, The Blood War ended, but the Abyss survived. Dreadfully wounded, its ability to touch the world and open portals to draw poor souls into it was lost. The Demon Lords, from Lolth to Demogorgon, were destroyed. And into this vacuum of power stepped Esheballa. She was a very old goddess of fertility, whose worship had long ago corrupted into lust and blood and then eventually into dust and forgotten rituals. Now she claimed the Abyss for her own playground, feeding on what soul stuff of the dead Demon Lords she could siphon, trapping the rest in paintings to adorn her new sanctum, the hollowed out shell of Demogorgon. She kept a piece of Hellfire, kept alive here in a magical furnace. 

Into this furnace Milosh now places his broken gun arm and the spider mechanical creature that Abbraxus gave him, which is actually one of the old mechas of hell, designed to be able to forge using Hellfire. Milosh also feeds the fire a few special items he’s picked up around Esheballa’s realm, most notably the crown taken from the battle with the Lich. Flames flare up and the spider bot begins working at blinding speed, until it forges a new gun arm for Milosh, a gunarm filled with the powers of the Abyss but also the ability to turn those powers against demons: the Abyss Breaker.

The Abyss Breaker (requires Attunement)

As a bonus action, can transform from a hand into a drill or into a cannon.

As a hand, has no special stats (but it sure looks cool!)

As a drill, it cannot be used to wield a weapon or manipulate objects like a hand could. It can act as a +1 adamantine spear (user has proficiency) and can be used to help break through rocks and other materials. It can also be fired like a grappling hook as an attack action, with a range of 20/60 feet and can deal damage in this manner or be used to grip surfaces or objects (attack roll versus the object's AC to hit and grip an object). If it strikes, an immediate bonus action can be used to pull the user to the object or creature, after which point the target is no longer considered hooked.

As a cannon, it acts like a +3 heavy crossbow, dealing force damage instead of piercing. It can also cast the following spells, once per day per spell as an action:

Cloud of Daggers (PHB 222), Delayed Blast Fireball (PHB 231), Destructive Wave (PHB 231), Vitae Devourandem (a spell created by Ryan Durney which drains a target of their life and feeds it to the user)

The following spell can be used twice a day:

Modified Magic Missile (PHB 257): casts five darts for 1d4+1 force damage each. When a dart hits a target, that target is pushed 1d4-1 squares away in a direction determined by the roll of another d4. 1 - away to the left, 2 - away to the right, 3 - straight back, 4 - knocked prone in place.

Also, the wielder of the cannon can approach the body of a recently slain spellcaster (must have died within the last five minutes) and can store one spell that the spellcaster knew inside of it, to be used at any time. Once this spell is used once, it is gone. Multiple spells can be stored in this manner, up to 6. To store more than 6, one of the other spells must be discarded. The same spell can be stored multiple times, if taken from different spellcasters. This ability cannot be used on the same spellcaster multiple times.

Once per day, when the wielder of the cannon is a target of a spell, they may make an Arcana (Int) check equal to the spellcaster's DC. If successful, the spell is stored inside the cannon as per the ability above. On failure, nothing happens. This has no effect on the spell currently being cast.

And our fun with this weapon-maker isn’t over yet! 

Imoaza thinks back to Abbraxus’ riddle and puts the following items in the fire:

The Necronomicon

The Rod of Storms

Her Drosselgreymeyer Scythe

There is a terrific flare of heat and light and when the spider bot finished its work this time, the Eternal flame of Hell that feeds this furnace does the impossible: it goes out. Emerging from the flame is a shockingly familiar sword. It announces itself as “Blackrazor.” Only this is Blackrazor before it became the sword they all know. It is the original source of Blackrazor and the power of all of the Abyssal weapons that Imoaza and her Yuan Ti tribe have wielded for ages, including Drosselgreyer. We name it Blackrazor “Alpha.” How the sword’s origins begin here, aeons after the sword has already had a history, is a mystery yet to be solved.

“It’s gonna be timey-wimey stuff,” one of the players said. They probably aren’t wrong. “We are gonna go back and give birth to ourselves or something, aren’t we?” another asks. I’m not so sure about that.

The scene wraps up with a big battle. Alyss, Daymos, and Puck arrive and head to the painting of Asmodeus, and begin to form a new body for him, pulling his essence out of the painting where Esheballa had trapped him after the Blood War. But Esheballa also arrives and takes on the form of one of the demon lords she had previously defeated, the Demon Queen of Witches, named Rangda. The stats are taken from a Kobold Press publication (their Tome of Beasts and Creature Codex have gotten mention before, but they deserve mention again as the best third-party monster manuals for fifth edition).

The fight against Esheballa in Rangda’s form is a pretty fantastic one. Imoaza is immediately polymorphed into a serpent by Rangda but that doesn’t stop her from latching on to Rangda’s leg and dealing... well... about 3 damage a turn. But it’s something.

This leaves Hecate, Milosh, and Ruze to deal damage to Esheballa. Milosh has his Abyss Breaker, and Hecate has her gun arm, and Ruze has powerful magics, but it is a very close fight nonetheless. Hecate is nearly killed, and Milosh is about to face a deadly barrage when Ruze’s chaotic wild magic unintentionally turns the tide. Ruze is a Wild Magic sorcerer, and every once in a while he unleashes a random burst of magic. It can be dangerous, turning his powers on his allies... it can be pointless, like giving him a feathery beard or turning his skin blue... but it can also be powerful, like in this case, when it boosts the power of his magic and deals a devastating final blow to Rangda’s form. Esheballa is ejected... but the goddess is far from done with the group. Destroying Rangda’s form was simply like removing a bit of armor from Esheballa. Her true essence stands tall, ready to smite these poor mortals who dared to challenge her.

Only, this whole battle was just a distraction, meant to buy Daymos and Alyss time to channel Asmodeus back into Puck. That process completes now and Asmodeus returns to life. As he does, the power that was keeping the Abyss at bay is sucked back into him and the Demon Lords also are reborn, emerging from the paintings around Esheballa and pulling her, whom they consider a traitor and a rival, into their midst to tear her apart.

Asmodeus says the Blood War is about to begin again, and it is time for everyone to return to their homes, he with his new queen. Then, as Asmodeus draws Alyss in close for a passionate kiss., the PCs are sucked into a portal he creates and the world swirls into color around them.

They next open their eyes to see a canopy of leaf studded trees stretching above them. And that is for next time: Back to the Future.