The Origin Thread

[Caput]

They called it The World. It didn't really need any other name, it was so big. There wasn't much else, either. There were other planes, but they were either different ways of looking at The World, totaly inhospitable, of no concern to mortals, utterly unfathomable or several of those things at once. As far as an ordinary person was concerned, The World meant everything.
These last few years, The World has been a dead place. The ordinary creatures are dead too, for the most part. Ash obscures the sun and falls from the sky, forming vast black deserts and turning the oceans into toxic soup.
Even the planes that reflect the world have changed. The feywild is Frozen solid and the Shadowfell has become a place of darkness and silence, where even a minute feels like months of futile dispair.

There is one hope: In Sellendelline's Shelter, once a temple to Erathis, the goddess of civilisation, now the last known settlement of humanoids in existance, a 14 year old girl known as Secret hears the whispers Vecna. Her god commands her to seek an object known as The Primordial Key, and promises that the world can be even more lush, safe and bountiful than it ever was, if the people of The Shelter can get it.
Secret is weak: Her visions of the future make it difficult for her to percieve the present, she constantly hallucinates a mixture of symbolic riddles and nonsense and she has had to maim herself to strengthen her connection with her master, sacrificing a hand and an eye so she could save the world. She can no longer tell if she's awake or dreaming and she's badly undernourished. She makes a poor champion and serves an unreliable deity, but she is the only one left who can hear a god.

The Key is in The Underdark, the only place in the world where life still thrives. It's globe spanning network of caves filled with the worst The World could throw at a person. Secret needs help to cope even at home. To survive in the underdark she'll need the help of the most powerful people in The Shelter. There can only be a few, because she predicts that there will be little sustinance for others and that a large group will be unable to avoid engagements that cannot be won.

The strongest and luckiest have survived and come to The Shelter from all over the world after their homes suffocated, burned or sank into the ocean. Traditional enemies like gnomes and kobolds live and work side by side, as do the famous heros and villains of the days when the world was full of life. There's even a ghoul called Abraham, who has sewn his mouth shut with wire and a devil, Pharrammurinion, who insists on being chained to the alter of Asmodeus, lest he give in to his treacherous nature and slay his friends in the night.

You will lead Secret and protect her in the most dangerous place in the universe. You will claim the pirmordial key or damn all life on the surface to destruction.






The Last Adventurers is a play by post 4E D&D campaign which will start on this forum as soon as everybody who wants to play has a character. Characters can be of any alignment and disposition, as long as reasonable people might want them on the team. They start out at 11th level. Please provide some kind of explanation of what they did when the world was alive, why they're awesome enough to be considered a paragon and how they came to find Sellendelline's shelter.

I'm using a few variant rules relating to magic items. You get your enhancement bonuses naturally as you level (item abilities that refer to the item's enhancement bonus use the printed bonus for that level, not your own innate bonus), you can find special powers in place of magic items sometimes, there are no vanilla +X items and items that normally give you an enhancement bonus don't any more. You'll also have to make your own magic items but the Disenchant ritual has no material cost.

Enhancement bonuses by level are as follows: +1 attack and damage at levels 2, 7, 12, 17, 22 and 27.
+1 to all defences at levels 4, 9, 14, 19, 24 and 29.

I'll be making the books available somehow soon. If you have any questions, ask me either here or in chat.

EDIT for clarity: You can still play a divinely powered class, but you'll almost certainly be the only person with power from your deity. The gods are thought to have died, been weakened or abandoned the world almost completely, but some still have limited influence.

EDIT 2: I forgot some things. Firstly, your starting gear is standard for 11th level characters. That means you can pick up to one 12th level magic item, one 11th level magic item and one 10th level magic item and any non-magical equipment and adventuring gear you like. You also get 5,000 gp to spend on rituals, potions, ritual components, other magic items and that kind of thing. In this campaign, you halve any left over gold and you may not begin play with any residuum.

Secondly, the ritual Hand of Fate is banned. It's boring, people abuse it and you've got Secret for that stuff anyway. By the standard rules, all invokers know it and can cast it for free, so if anybody wants to be one of those, talk to me. We'll pick a different ritual for you that suits your character or their god.

Thirdly, feel free to be creative with your character's story! The surface world before the disaster was extremely diverse and is deliberately not explained in much detail. If you want to be a pseudo-Japanese emperor who ruled half the world, go for it. If you'd rather be a celebrity chef who's cooking demonstrations were sold in the form of illusion gems, I won't stop you, although you'll obviously need a good reason why you're so powerful.

EDIT 3: Fixed the spelling on my own made up names. I'm a genius, me

EDIT 4: We're going to use the rules for character backgrounds in PHB 2. A background gives you a skill, a language or a bonus to a skill depending on what you've done in the past. DO NOT use the backgrounds from the player's guides to settings. They are far more powerful.

EDIT 5: I let Xaer swap his level 12 starting item and some gold for a level 13 starting item. If you want to do the same, ask me. I'll probably say yes, depending on the item. I've also had a change of heart about how innate enhancement bonuses work. If an item refers to it's own bonus, use it's printed bonus, not your own.

[Namillus]

I do believe I'm in on this; Last Cleric of Erathis, perhaps...

The Sheet!

[Fragmaster01]

Here comes a thingy, a Wizard of Doom(tm). Descriptive spew isn't done yet, but here's the statty stuff:
http://www.dndonlinegames.com/profiler/view.php?id=9534

[Xaer QwickBlade]

Its not a game without me, so I guess im in. I dont have info for now but I will be playing either a warlock, ranger, or druid I guess.

[Fragmaster01]

And there you have it: Football is not a real sport, because Xaer isn't playing it at the moment.

[Caput]

OK. Good stuff. I've got one other person on board, who will be a shaman and there's a possibility of a fifth, who would play an I-don't-know-what. So far we have a melee leader with a bit of striker in him, a ranged leader and a controller. That's a squishy party. As a general rule it's a good idea to get all the different roles in, but either way I expect you'll need a defender.

Stan, talk to me. I'll send you what info you need.

[Namillus]

I can sub for a Defender in a pinch - a couple of endurance powers and so forth - but... It's really not ideal, heh.

[Xaer QwickBlade]

At the moment I am Leaning LongTooth Warlock(fey contract)

hp regen ftw!

Xaer has spoken.

[Caput]

Excellent. I shall pester the potential defender. You guys need a melee warrior who won't die if the bad guys focus on him.

[Luthien]

Here I am! And here she is! http://www.myth-weavers.com/sheetview.php?sheetid=190153

[Caput]

Hooray. The fifth player has dropped out, so everyone is here. The forum will be going up very very soon.

[Wurdak]

Dropping in to say hi as I will be joining soon. Heard you guys need some badass defender so got a Minotaur Fighter lined up. He's more about high HP, lots of surges and damage resistance rather than really high AC. Will post him later on.

[Caput]

Excellent. Nice to have you on board!

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