Caius Porthmeus (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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faderiftooc2025-06-23 11:22 pm
sumptus) wrote in faderiftooc2025-06-23 11:22 pm
Entry tags:
PLAYER PLOT: TEMPLE OF LEAVES
WHO: Anyone! Everyone!
WHERE: Temple of Zazikel, in the Grand Necropolis, Nevarra
WHEN: June 28 or July 5 depending how this week goes
WHAT: A group of Riftwatch agents take a field trip back into the Temple of Zazikel, to do a more thorough examination of the Gate now that they're not distracted by half the team disappearing.
Little do they know their presence and the thinness of the Veil in that location have drawn the attention of a warped Spirit of Freedom, who will build upon the temple's chaotic, labyrinthine nature to create a series of personalized physical and emotional obstacles the team has to overcome to escape, to teach them the value of freedom achieved through struggle.
This plot is open to as many characters as you feel like and sign-ups are not required! The team will know ahead of time that the Necropolis, Temple, and Gate are unpredictable, so while the main purpose is research, it makes sense to send scouts, fighters, and even diplomats to liaise with Mourn Watch.
PHASE 1: RESEARCH
Re-entering the temple will go relatively smoothly, if spookily. The team will have time to run some tests on the Gate and brainstorm ideas for things like preventing future Gates, closing this Gate, or otherwise disrupting Corypheus's plans. A crystal post will go up alongside the log for this purpose, so characters do not have to physically enter the temple to participate in the IC discussion.
Y'all don't need to plan for this piece, we'll just wing it. But if the IC discussion generates any specific experiments or theories characters want to test (beyond what's already been observed about the other Gates), we'll submit a question to the mods about it after the crystal post.
PHASE 2: ESCAPE
Leaving is the hard part! And the part I wanted to give you all some time to brainstorm. This spirit wants to help your character free themselves from their emotional shackles, whether that's a source of guilt in their past or a personality trait that's hampering their personal development -- and it's using the environment to do that.
That means you'll have a grab bag of cave horrors to choose from, drawing inspiration from media like House of Leaves, The Descent, and As Above, So Below. Specifically:
WHERE: Temple of Zazikel, in the Grand Necropolis, Nevarra
WHEN: June 28 or July 5 depending how this week goes
WHAT: A group of Riftwatch agents take a field trip back into the Temple of Zazikel, to do a more thorough examination of the Gate now that they're not distracted by half the team disappearing.
Little do they know their presence and the thinness of the Veil in that location have drawn the attention of a warped Spirit of Freedom, who will build upon the temple's chaotic, labyrinthine nature to create a series of personalized physical and emotional obstacles the team has to overcome to escape, to teach them the value of freedom achieved through struggle.
This plot is open to as many characters as you feel like and sign-ups are not required! The team will know ahead of time that the Necropolis, Temple, and Gate are unpredictable, so while the main purpose is research, it makes sense to send scouts, fighters, and even diplomats to liaise with Mourn Watch.
PHASE 1: RESEARCH
Re-entering the temple will go relatively smoothly, if spookily. The team will have time to run some tests on the Gate and brainstorm ideas for things like preventing future Gates, closing this Gate, or otherwise disrupting Corypheus's plans. A crystal post will go up alongside the log for this purpose, so characters do not have to physically enter the temple to participate in the IC discussion.
Y'all don't need to plan for this piece, we'll just wing it. But if the IC discussion generates any specific experiments or theories characters want to test (beyond what's already been observed about the other Gates), we'll submit a question to the mods about it after the crystal post.
PHASE 2: ESCAPE
Leaving is the hard part! And the part I wanted to give you all some time to brainstorm. This spirit wants to help your character free themselves from their emotional shackles, whether that's a source of guilt in their past or a personality trait that's hampering their personal development -- and it's using the environment to do that.
That means you'll have a grab bag of cave horrors to choose from, drawing inspiration from media like House of Leaves, The Descent, and As Above, So Below. Specifically:
- Real caves are bad actually: escape requires traversing a mix of man-made tunnels and natural caves rife with all the horror potential inherent to those environments. Whether your light comes from torches, lamps, magical devices, or a nearby mage, any of them can fail and leave you in the dark. Tight squeezes, claustrophobia, cave-ins, sheer drops, well-like vertical passages, rapidly flooding chambers, insects, deepstalkers, slipping into pits of sand or mud, whatever sounds terrible in a RL cave is fair game.
- Impossible spaces: These tunnels don't make sense tho. Spaces are bigger inside than outside, staircases are one story or suddenly grow to fifty in front of your eyes depending on how emotionally close or distant you're feeling from your coworkers. Maze-like corridors twist and turn to separate groups and become more panic-inducing the more you panic. Calming down may help you navigate out, but fear and aggression breed their like, too; if you're afraid of what else might be in here, you may begin to hear monstrous footsteps in the dark. (They may be your own.)
- Responsive design: The temple is responding to your character's issues in more specific, pointed ways too. For example:
- A character with a fear of commitment may have to crawl through a tunnel full of grasping hands.
- A character who's struggling to let go of their grief over the death of a child may have to fight off a clingy child-sized mummy.
- A character who is bad at accepting help from others gets stuck in a collapsing tunnel, and a character who tends to save their own skin has to go back into said collapsing tunnel to help them through it.
- A character with trust issues gets temporarily blinded and has to rely on a character who hates taking responsibility for things to guide them through an underwater tunnel system.
- Several of characters who don't trust each other have to form an arm-chain to lower someone into/across a seemingly-bottomless chasm full of deepstalkers.
- Set dressing: in case the message wasn't clear enough, either the spirit or the lack of oxygen may also cause your character to see, hear, smell, or feel manifestations related to the issues the spirit is trying to help them overcome. These can range from subtle (the scent of candle wax from the Chantry where you stole alms), personal (the unmistakable laughter of a parent down the hall), mundane (the couch that used to sit in your uncle's foyer), or dramatic (a vision of your dead sibling actively drowning under the water of the tunnel you're traversing). Other characters can share and interact with these hallucinations (or not) at your discretion, but none of it is real enough to be removed from the temple.
Questions? Come at me.
Questions