2020/02/09: Return to Hallownest Report
General Summary
Downtime. Knight returned to New Hallownest and reunited with Rodger. The Snail Shaman and other lesser Soul magic users have discovered that Soul magic works a little differently in Renedge, and is somewhat stronger. They're still trying to figure out why.
It also seems that Knight is the source of the Void part of Void-augmented SOUL magic, and may be able to grant power to warlocks in the future. (“Void brand!”)
Eclipse, the shapeshifting intelligent magic sword the party found in the tower under the ancient evil plant in their last adventure, has been granted to Sir Bertrand of the Temple of Ranthiel. (Eclipse is a shapeshifting bronze intelligent weapon designed to "DESTROY". Basically a supercharged Black Blade of Disaster. Ego 200, likes balance, wants to destroy what “needs to be destroyed.”) He’ll probably be helping us against the Asura at some point.
While in New Hallownest, Knight and Rodger discovered that masks and pale ore in New Hallownest are starting to crack and break down. It seems that they are "fading dreams", as the gods and "dreamers" that were maintaining them (and Hallownest itself) are no longer present. This reached a crisis point about a week into downtime.
Knight and Rodger journeyed to Old Hallownest to try to find a solution to the degrading pale ore. Looking for sources of dreaming stability, they located the corpse of a betrayed bug lady that Knight had previously found beneath the Birthplace. Since she seemed to have had Void influence in the past, Knight tried to put Void into her and see if it would revive her. She took in far more than her body should have allowed, and then started sucking it in on her own. Knight cut off the flow before anything dramatic could happen.
She reached for Rodger at one point during this, so we thought she might be reaching for dimensional stability (or a soul). So we put her in a dimensionally stable box Rodger made with his forcefields. Reality outside the box immediately started to rapidly degrade, and it didn’t revert when we pulled her back out. We decided Hallownest was largely a lost cause at this point, so we went to explore the rest and see if there was anything left to salvage. Only Kingdom’s Edge and the area around the Dirtmouth bench were still largely stable, but Kingdom’s Edge seemed to be… moving elsewhere. We retrieved the bench and the poor abandoned lumaflies from the nearby lamp, took one last look around, and used the Nightmare Nail and Dream Nail to return home.
There was a brief traveling period where we went through a weird bright place, and someone said something like “There goes another one.” Then we found ourselves in the dimensionally weird fungus area near New Hallownest, which Knight was able to casually navigate thanks to the Torq of the Maze Runner.
When we got back to New Hallownest, we found that a week had passed, and the mask situation had gone badly downhill. Barely any masks were still intact enough to wear. Fortunately, building off findings from before we’d left, they’d discovered that with sufficient healing, most bugs retained their personalities and selves without the masks, though there was a distinct loss of focus. Those thought to be at more risk of losing themselves were given priority for mask repairs and patchwork replacements. They made it through without us.
Fortunately, upon later analysis, it turns out that we only lost about 10% of the Pale Ore, and the degradation stopped when we returned with the Black Queen.
Old Hallownest is gone.
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Report Date
14 Sep 2022
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