The fight between the divine army and the meager forces of Nildazi continues on the streets of New Ornos. Hundreds of dead peasants and tens of dead soldiers litter the iron streets. Through the carnage, a lone figure walks unmolested. It wears a green cloak, thick and felt. It grasps a staff of gnarled yew wood, the tapping sound from its use as a walking stick lost to the fighting. If anyone had had a spare moment to look, they would see a trail of moss and white flowers growing seamlessly from the earth, following a trail led by the green figure. They might also have noticed that under the hood there was not a man as suggested, but merely a bone-dry skeleton.
The Friends on top of the blasted Spiked Keep have little time to gather their strength. Before Balthazar has made it back to the roof Monkey and Friend have already plunged through the doorway, determined to stop Voghtairi. As Siriel, Icoriol and Balthazar contemplate what to do, the ground shakes. The sound of erupting earth and distant screams floods the air. Hundreds of yards to the north, Icoriol spots a giant create, as big as the spiked keep, made entirely of thick writhing vines, approaching the town. He also notices a newcomer to the rooftop - a skeleton clad in green. The Green Lich.
The Friends had seen the Green Lich in the ruins of Canos. There it thought little of them until they killed it’s warden and stole it’s Deck of Red Things. They haven’t seen him since, and they won’t learn any of this until after the game has concluded, but he has been busy.
The Green Lich mostly keeps to itself, it has a domain in a ruined city to the west of Orthos, and it’s machinations, though lethal to natural life that encounter them, don’t actively seek out living beings to destroy. The Green Lich has one priority in Orthos - preventing the opening of The Red Realm. The lich is old enough to remember what happened the last time the door was opened, and is the only one who remembers. It has been working to seal away every last vestige of the realms touch on the earth. And it succeeded, but it left a plan in place. With mighty magic and the sacrifice of souls, The Green Lich wrought a powerful desolation on the land once known as Sorokē. Sleeping there was a great beast made of vines, kept dormant and alive by natural energy focused through a single item linked to The Red Realm - The Deck of Red Things. If the realm were to ever open again, the beast would rise and destroy it. Or at least delay it enough for The Green Lich to find a way to reverse it’s influence.
But then The Friends stole The Deck of Red Things, and before the lich could notice, the vine titan withered and died. After The Friends left, The Green Lich found partnership in an elf named Valosol (himself lured to this plane by his former pupil (pet?) Talari Alar). The two made a deal. For Valosol: The Llamontca Wode to be sacrificed and given to the Faewyld. For The Green Lich: Valosols cooperation in another Desolation spell. After many weeks (which The Friends spent pursuing the vampire Cortier) the spell was complete, and Encathra was sacrificed to rear another beast. The Green Lich stayed in Orthos, cultivating it’s beast, following growing traces of plane-warping magic until it was able to pin point the location - the opening of The Red Door. At once it made it’s way to Nildazi.
That beast now assaults Nildazi from the front, engulfing everything with a torrent of plant matter. The Lich watches its beast from the rooftop, almost ignoring The Friends of Orthos. Icoriol asks what the lich is doing.
“The Realm cannot be allowed to open again. Nildazi shall be sacrificed, covered in decaying vines, to keep the door from ever being found. But it does not have the power to close it. I am not your enemy. Neither will I hesitate to seal you inside. If there is hope, you must act quickly.”
With grim resolution, The Friends nod, and enter the door.
It feels like getting pulled apart, stretching thin as if between two panes of glass, and then being deposited roughly at the bottom of a well. When The Friends stand up again, their fronts are stained red, like they are covered in red rust. Around them is what looks to be a huge dome of frosted glass. Within the dome, the ground is a soft, red, squishy material. Spiked protrusions of this flab-like substance create a waist-high blanket of alien grass. 50 feet away, up against the edge of the dome, Voghtairi stands clutching a staff made of the same red substance.
“30 years I’ve waited. When my grandfather and his men stole Nildazi from the sorcerer baron Domure, they searched through his magical compartments, unearthing all kinds of sorcerous things. But only I found the door. Now I am finally here, and you have come to spoil it all.”
Voghtairi turns around, showing that his eyes have started to glow with a soft red light.
“The time for parley is over. This is the only way to save Orthos from the dragon and bring the rest of the world to her heel.” He brandishes his staff. “Precious few have ever been able to enter the realm without going mad. You join those people. And you shall never leave.”
Voghtairi is almost out of spells, but The Red Realm has given him new tricks. He is able to summon bits of the earth to fight for him, and has some nasty Red Realm abilities. The Red Realm is out of this earth, so has all kinds of cool rule-bending abilities like stealing actions or altering stats. In The Red Realm almost everything opens Red Festering Wounds, which deal 1 point of damage automatically at the start of a turn, and take an action to close, except the effect can stack. In the end, I think Friend ended up with something around 10 wounds. The protective sphere that lets people stay in the realm without going mad instantly / dying from evil acid attacks (The Red Realm is basically Hellstar Remina) is also a part of the fight. It slowly gets bigger, and Voghtairi can spend some legendary actions doing it, but if the realm is attacked it shrinks. The real key to the fight is that the realm must be shrunk so the door can be closed, but Voghtairi proves to be a major problem to that end.
In the midst of the fight, when hope is diminishing, Monkey brandishes his stolen Deck of Red Things. He draws two cards. The first bares the resemblance of a knight, and as the card vnaishes into red dust, the ground churns. Pulled forth is the shape of a person clad in blood red plate armor. Red-rust dust falls from the joints as it moves, but despite its countenance, it serves The Friends of Orthos. The second bares the foreboding image of a blood red moon. This is the single most powerful and most dangerous card of The Deck of Red Things. With a force unrecognizable, and almost lethal to his human mind, Monkey bares now the ability to call on the realms powers of madness to reshape reality. To call upon his deepest desire. Three wishes are his. But he must be careful, for as he gets to change the reality of The Earth Plane, so too does the realm get to exact it’s influence.
In desperation, he uses the first wish to heal his allies, and though it gives them each another red festering wound, it does seal their mundane wounds, giving them the vitality needed to keep fighting.
From a design perspective, this is a way to somewhat limit the power of the wish. I hate hate HATE when RPGs do this “you can have this thing, but not really tee-hee” thing with abilities, like giving a character wings that lets them fly for 1 hour a day. So I didn’t want to limit the wish. But I’m a hack FOE storygamer wannabe so I didn’t want the wishes to short circuit the conflicts we’d built up to. So I didn’t give it limits, but I did give it consequences. (More about this in the Ruby Crown Postmortem, coming soon)
Voghtairi, though, has overestimated himself. Originally when I had the idea for The Red Door and the Red Realm, Voghtairi was going to open the door and go mad and die. I really like the idea that The Red Realm is truly impenetrable, and a mere glimpse is enough to kill you, let alone geting anywhere near getting inside. It’s meant to be real underground malevolent stuff. But in the 11th hour I realise how horribly anti-climactic that would have been. In a game with more wriggle room and better pacing it could have been alright for Voghtairi to just die, because the challenge of closing the door could have been cool in itself, but I wanted a Voghtairi showdown. You only get so many cool villain showdowns. Anyway, instead of Voghtairi dying, The Realm was influencing him as he was trying to influence it. As he took more damage, the realm shot out beams of light and gained control of him. Eventually Voghtairi died and was just puppeted by the Red Realm, giving him a boost to his attacks and making the expansion of the realm more vigorous. If it had gotten away from The Friends the realm would have started to expand into the earth plane, which very could have meant The End of the World, though we would have had to play that out to see. Probably another campaign.
But it didn’t, and Voghtairi died, and The Friends caught on about shrinking the realm. With at least one unconscious Friend, they exited the red door and managed to seal it shut.
They re-emerge into Nildazi in time to see the vine beast closing around the keep. With only slightly more time than needed, The Friends escape Nildazi, leaving it to be sealed and dessicated. Hopefully, no one will ever be able to get close to The Red Door again.
The lucky soldiers that escaped the vine beasts wrath have gathered themselves in the mountain pass. The Friends meet up with them and survey their next options. Sanarm is still headed for Solemnity, but The Friends are utterly drained. They weight their options - rest here and delay their approach by a week, or face the dragon. They do not deliberate long. Balthazar gathers his army and they begin the long march home.
The Friends, very smartly, retreived Voghtairi’s body from The Red Realm before it could eat him. If they hadn’t, this would have happend.
In the realm now sealed, Voghtairis corpse is overtaken and eaten by the meandering biology of the plane. But it can’t get rid of him. In truth, The Red Realm does not feast on organic matter, it rejects it. Seals it in a tomb of red flesh and ejects it from its body. There have been few such individuals over the infinite timespan of the realms existance, and fewer still that carried with them items of strong enough power to be changed, but not erased, by the realm. The Queen, The Mage, The Count, The Knight, The Last. And now, The Sorcerer.