Posted: Tue Feb 07, 2006 7:02 pm
A few more details on the original concept; most of this is going to be vague, since I haven't thought about any of this in years.
Now, the Halo isn't particularly malevolent, unlike most artifacts the Guardians seal away; the big problem with the Halo is that it's fundamentally flawed. Its transubstantiations are imperfect and impermanent. The concept, as a note, takes a fair amount of inspiration from Lovecraft's novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (as well as The Resurrected, an excellent film adaptation).
Incorporeal spirits who pass through the Halo become soulless, animate flesh. In 3.5 terminology, they'd be "living constructs." I had a name for them, but I can't remember it now. The carnatis, or something like that.
Anyway, a carnatis would look essentially normal at first (though a distorted spirit might be accordingly deformed when incarnate). Its metabolism is unbalanced, however, and to maintain itself, it must consume a steady supply of raw flesh. If the carnatis ever misses a daily meal of meat, it degenerates a little bit -- and the amount of flesh it must consume to keep its body stable is forevermore raised. It's a setup that can essentially be maintained indefinitely, but a single lapse leads to an escalating spiral of rot. And once you dissolve, that's it; you're gone. That's your soul dripping down the gutter.
That's the "dissolving leper" -- a few of the Guardians are in fact carnatis, and this fellow is one of them shambling toward the end of his days. In the backstory, in his previous life he'd been a fisherman or some other young, married native of Mordentshire. He drowned a number of years earlier, but somehow ended up with the Guardians post mortem. He's been forbidden from returning to his former life. When, several years later, he's well along the path toward degeneration (this need for flesh is another reason why this enclave of Guardians work behind the facade of cloistered hog farmers, as a note) when he hears that his widow -- whom he still loves dearly -- is going to be remarried. So he maneuvers himself in a desperate attempt to see her and present her with his wedding ring, a final token of his love. His emotional anguish is the final straw that pushes him into a final meltdown.
As for flesh to spirit, it works essentially the same way. Any corporeal creature that passes through becomes an incorporeal spirit. This simplest way to handle this is to simply apply the ghost template -- even to soulless creatures like constructs. However, any physical flaws the subject possesses (including scars, lost hit points, etc.) are also reflected into the subject's spirit. If you pass through the Ring as an upstanding and moral, yet physically damaged person, you emerge as a distorted, possibly even monstrous spirit -- both in terms of your spectral appearance and your personality.
And as with the carnatis, you can only last so long before your spirit breaks up and fades away.
If you pass through the Halo again, however, it transforms you back into whatever you started as (in 3.X terms, just remove the appropriate template), perhaps a little worse for wear. So the Transubstantial Halo does have tantalizing potential, if used in the short term.
In a nutshell, the adventure's plot went something like as follows. Note that I never worked too much on any of this, so any details not given probably don't exist, and not all of the bugs have been worked out.
* Adventure kicks off as the PCs encounter the "dissolving leper" in the marketplace, who presents the newlywed widow with a ring immediately before dissolving.
* The PCs investigate, as do the Weathermay-Foxgrove twins. (Note, however, that when I was tinkering with this concept, the twins were still at their book-editing, investigatin-a-few-local-hauntings phase, and thus would have acted as assistants to the PCs.)
* The PCs investigation reveals the likely identity of the dissolved leper, and the robed monks he was with aren't difficult to track either. This leads the PCs to the local Guardians enclave, which is within a day's walk of town. (Why here? Because the pull of the House on Gryphon Hill keeps the area largely clear of spirits. This is also why the carnatis among them don't go back to being spirits before they fully degenerate -- going back to being spirits means going back to the House.)
* I recall that the investigation potentially also led to a red-herring, full-daylight investigation of Gryphon Hill, which would prove to be eerie, filled with cold spots and strange creaks, but relatively quiet -- perhaps even disappointingly empty after all of its buildup in local folklore.
* The PCs head out to the enclave to figure out how/why these monks are bringing people back from the dead -- and poorly. Unfortunately, Godefroy has also caught wind of the affair through his own sources. Unbeknownst to the living, he dispatches a swarm of spectral undead to seek out and destroy those who would dare intrude on his authority over the spirit realm.
* The PCs explore the enclave, which is built over a network of natural caverns. Those tunnels are where the PCs would encounter the basilisks in my monster handout. After some potential initial tussling, however, the PCs would figure out that the Guardians aren't evil and are in fact trying to prevent the Halo from being used. (The carnatis among them are ex-ghosts who slipped through their defenses. Once incarnated, the Guardians allowed them to stay -- provided they were decent folk -- rather than banish them back to undeath.)
* Just as the PCs and the Guardians are patching things up, the enclave is swarmed by Godefroy's ghostly horde, who attack from all directions. It's a losing battle, and many of the Guardians are killed. Those who remain elect to retreat -- through the Halo, into the Other Side, where the invaders won't care about them. Presumably, the PCs do the same.
* The PCs are now ghosts. (Yes, this was, in a sense, another "PCs wake up as monsters" module.) They flee with the few Guardians who made it, planning to regroup. However, first they must evade Godefroy's forces, as well as the defenses the Guardians themselves have set up (most walls are ethereally sealed with the basilisks' blood, and the basilisks themselves now pose a greater threat. (The Near Ethereal version of the Guardians' caverns are littered with "petrified" ghosts.)
* The PCs get away, but are then affected by the pull of the House. (Recall that Godefroy has the ability to grant leave to specific spirits, freeing them from the pull, which is why his spectral attackers aren't having any problems.)
* Ah, but there is a problem. When Godefroy gives a spirit permission to leave, there's nothing forcing it to return. When the spirits he sent discover the Halo (and likely witness the PCs pass through it), they experiment with it themselves and convert themselves into carnatis. They are now completely beyond Godefroy's control. They grab the Halo for themselves and abscond with it.
* The PCs are now stuck in the Near Ethereal (the "Other Side'), in quickly dissipating incorporeal bodies. The next act of the adventure takes place entirely on the Other Side.
* The PCs are drawn to the House on Gryphon Hill, where they find it crammed full of tortured spirits, as described in the 3.X Ravenloft books. They encounter Godefroy, who tries to beat them into submission. However, his bullying is interrupted by the appearance of his spectral wife and daughter, who torment him as per the norm.
* Godefroy strikes a deal with the PCs. He will grant them leave from the House, freeing them, and in return they will seek out the Halo, recover it, use it to restore themselves, and bring it back to him. Why does he want it? 1) Not for himself -- he wants to restore his wife and daughter to life. 2) He is repentant for his crimes against them (and obviously eager to escape their vengeance). If the PCs test Godefroy's veracity, they can discover that sentence 1 is perfectly true and heartfelt. (Sentence 2 is a total lie, but Godefroy can phrase his motivations countless ways to give them a noble shine.)
* The PCs, now ghosts, must explore Near Ethereal Mordentshire and its environs, track down the Halo, pick off the carnatis, and restore themselves. They may encounter the Weathermay-Foxgrove twins -- this time possibly falling afoul of their well-meaning attempts to dispel a haunting. (The PCs can't communicate with the living, so the twins just see them as unquiet spirits.)
* Anyway, the PCs do eventually turn the tables on the carnatis and restore themselves. They bring the Halo to Godefroy. When Godefroy's wife and daughter reappear, the PCs must somehow steer them through the Halo (Godefroy is helpless against them). Godefroy's wife and daughter are restored to life (as carnatis), seemingly freed from their part in his darklord's curse. (Neither remembers anything past their deaths.)
However, as soon as Godefroy's kin are restored, he lashes out at his wife with his cane, striking her down and killing her all over again. In death, the carnatis dissolves into a pool of ichor. Within moments, all that's left of the soul of Godefroy's wife is seeping through the floorboards. He then turns on his daughter, who the PCs presumably defend. Godefroy never wanted to save his family -- he wants them permanently destroyed.
As the PCs battle Godefroy, however, pools of ichor bubble up through the floorboards around Godefroy's feet. His wife's spirit is far from destroyed -- she's now a malevolent, seemingly corporeal pool of animate blood and slime, which assumes a form vaguely reminiscent of her living form as she extends tendrils through Godefroy's incorporeal flesh, flowing through his very veins as his screeches in indescribable, as-yet-unmatched agony.
As Godefroy is dragged down through the floorboards, he hangs on long enough to extract a promise from the heroes: Tend to his daughter. So long as she lives, Godefroy will grant the PCs their freedom, and will not seek revenge. So long as she lives...
And that's it. As the adventure ends, Godefroy's made his nightly torments even worse, and he knows that within a human lifespan they'll grow doubly so. The PCs get a non-interference pact with Godefroy, and a seemingly innocent little girl to raise -- one who must be fed her daily ration of raw flesh. The PCs can do what they want with the Halo -- Godefroy in no position to stop them from taking it with them as they leave -- though it's likely that the Guardians will want it back.
Now, the Halo isn't particularly malevolent, unlike most artifacts the Guardians seal away; the big problem with the Halo is that it's fundamentally flawed. Its transubstantiations are imperfect and impermanent. The concept, as a note, takes a fair amount of inspiration from Lovecraft's novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (as well as The Resurrected, an excellent film adaptation).
Incorporeal spirits who pass through the Halo become soulless, animate flesh. In 3.5 terminology, they'd be "living constructs." I had a name for them, but I can't remember it now. The carnatis, or something like that.
Anyway, a carnatis would look essentially normal at first (though a distorted spirit might be accordingly deformed when incarnate). Its metabolism is unbalanced, however, and to maintain itself, it must consume a steady supply of raw flesh. If the carnatis ever misses a daily meal of meat, it degenerates a little bit -- and the amount of flesh it must consume to keep its body stable is forevermore raised. It's a setup that can essentially be maintained indefinitely, but a single lapse leads to an escalating spiral of rot. And once you dissolve, that's it; you're gone. That's your soul dripping down the gutter.
That's the "dissolving leper" -- a few of the Guardians are in fact carnatis, and this fellow is one of them shambling toward the end of his days. In the backstory, in his previous life he'd been a fisherman or some other young, married native of Mordentshire. He drowned a number of years earlier, but somehow ended up with the Guardians post mortem. He's been forbidden from returning to his former life. When, several years later, he's well along the path toward degeneration (this need for flesh is another reason why this enclave of Guardians work behind the facade of cloistered hog farmers, as a note) when he hears that his widow -- whom he still loves dearly -- is going to be remarried. So he maneuvers himself in a desperate attempt to see her and present her with his wedding ring, a final token of his love. His emotional anguish is the final straw that pushes him into a final meltdown.
As for flesh to spirit, it works essentially the same way. Any corporeal creature that passes through becomes an incorporeal spirit. This simplest way to handle this is to simply apply the ghost template -- even to soulless creatures like constructs. However, any physical flaws the subject possesses (including scars, lost hit points, etc.) are also reflected into the subject's spirit. If you pass through the Ring as an upstanding and moral, yet physically damaged person, you emerge as a distorted, possibly even monstrous spirit -- both in terms of your spectral appearance and your personality.
And as with the carnatis, you can only last so long before your spirit breaks up and fades away.
If you pass through the Halo again, however, it transforms you back into whatever you started as (in 3.X terms, just remove the appropriate template), perhaps a little worse for wear. So the Transubstantial Halo does have tantalizing potential, if used in the short term.
In a nutshell, the adventure's plot went something like as follows. Note that I never worked too much on any of this, so any details not given probably don't exist, and not all of the bugs have been worked out.
* Adventure kicks off as the PCs encounter the "dissolving leper" in the marketplace, who presents the newlywed widow with a ring immediately before dissolving.
* The PCs investigate, as do the Weathermay-Foxgrove twins. (Note, however, that when I was tinkering with this concept, the twins were still at their book-editing, investigatin-a-few-local-hauntings phase, and thus would have acted as assistants to the PCs.)
* The PCs investigation reveals the likely identity of the dissolved leper, and the robed monks he was with aren't difficult to track either. This leads the PCs to the local Guardians enclave, which is within a day's walk of town. (Why here? Because the pull of the House on Gryphon Hill keeps the area largely clear of spirits. This is also why the carnatis among them don't go back to being spirits before they fully degenerate -- going back to being spirits means going back to the House.)
* I recall that the investigation potentially also led to a red-herring, full-daylight investigation of Gryphon Hill, which would prove to be eerie, filled with cold spots and strange creaks, but relatively quiet -- perhaps even disappointingly empty after all of its buildup in local folklore.
* The PCs head out to the enclave to figure out how/why these monks are bringing people back from the dead -- and poorly. Unfortunately, Godefroy has also caught wind of the affair through his own sources. Unbeknownst to the living, he dispatches a swarm of spectral undead to seek out and destroy those who would dare intrude on his authority over the spirit realm.
* The PCs explore the enclave, which is built over a network of natural caverns. Those tunnels are where the PCs would encounter the basilisks in my monster handout. After some potential initial tussling, however, the PCs would figure out that the Guardians aren't evil and are in fact trying to prevent the Halo from being used. (The carnatis among them are ex-ghosts who slipped through their defenses. Once incarnated, the Guardians allowed them to stay -- provided they were decent folk -- rather than banish them back to undeath.)
* Just as the PCs and the Guardians are patching things up, the enclave is swarmed by Godefroy's ghostly horde, who attack from all directions. It's a losing battle, and many of the Guardians are killed. Those who remain elect to retreat -- through the Halo, into the Other Side, where the invaders won't care about them. Presumably, the PCs do the same.
* The PCs are now ghosts. (Yes, this was, in a sense, another "PCs wake up as monsters" module.) They flee with the few Guardians who made it, planning to regroup. However, first they must evade Godefroy's forces, as well as the defenses the Guardians themselves have set up (most walls are ethereally sealed with the basilisks' blood, and the basilisks themselves now pose a greater threat. (The Near Ethereal version of the Guardians' caverns are littered with "petrified" ghosts.)
* The PCs get away, but are then affected by the pull of the House. (Recall that Godefroy has the ability to grant leave to specific spirits, freeing them from the pull, which is why his spectral attackers aren't having any problems.)
* Ah, but there is a problem. When Godefroy gives a spirit permission to leave, there's nothing forcing it to return. When the spirits he sent discover the Halo (and likely witness the PCs pass through it), they experiment with it themselves and convert themselves into carnatis. They are now completely beyond Godefroy's control. They grab the Halo for themselves and abscond with it.
* The PCs are now stuck in the Near Ethereal (the "Other Side'), in quickly dissipating incorporeal bodies. The next act of the adventure takes place entirely on the Other Side.
* The PCs are drawn to the House on Gryphon Hill, where they find it crammed full of tortured spirits, as described in the 3.X Ravenloft books. They encounter Godefroy, who tries to beat them into submission. However, his bullying is interrupted by the appearance of his spectral wife and daughter, who torment him as per the norm.
* Godefroy strikes a deal with the PCs. He will grant them leave from the House, freeing them, and in return they will seek out the Halo, recover it, use it to restore themselves, and bring it back to him. Why does he want it? 1) Not for himself -- he wants to restore his wife and daughter to life. 2) He is repentant for his crimes against them (and obviously eager to escape their vengeance). If the PCs test Godefroy's veracity, they can discover that sentence 1 is perfectly true and heartfelt. (Sentence 2 is a total lie, but Godefroy can phrase his motivations countless ways to give them a noble shine.)
* The PCs, now ghosts, must explore Near Ethereal Mordentshire and its environs, track down the Halo, pick off the carnatis, and restore themselves. They may encounter the Weathermay-Foxgrove twins -- this time possibly falling afoul of their well-meaning attempts to dispel a haunting. (The PCs can't communicate with the living, so the twins just see them as unquiet spirits.)
* Anyway, the PCs do eventually turn the tables on the carnatis and restore themselves. They bring the Halo to Godefroy. When Godefroy's wife and daughter reappear, the PCs must somehow steer them through the Halo (Godefroy is helpless against them). Godefroy's wife and daughter are restored to life (as carnatis), seemingly freed from their part in his darklord's curse. (Neither remembers anything past their deaths.)
However, as soon as Godefroy's kin are restored, he lashes out at his wife with his cane, striking her down and killing her all over again. In death, the carnatis dissolves into a pool of ichor. Within moments, all that's left of the soul of Godefroy's wife is seeping through the floorboards. He then turns on his daughter, who the PCs presumably defend. Godefroy never wanted to save his family -- he wants them permanently destroyed.
As the PCs battle Godefroy, however, pools of ichor bubble up through the floorboards around Godefroy's feet. His wife's spirit is far from destroyed -- she's now a malevolent, seemingly corporeal pool of animate blood and slime, which assumes a form vaguely reminiscent of her living form as she extends tendrils through Godefroy's incorporeal flesh, flowing through his very veins as his screeches in indescribable, as-yet-unmatched agony.
As Godefroy is dragged down through the floorboards, he hangs on long enough to extract a promise from the heroes: Tend to his daughter. So long as she lives, Godefroy will grant the PCs their freedom, and will not seek revenge. So long as she lives...
And that's it. As the adventure ends, Godefroy's made his nightly torments even worse, and he knows that within a human lifespan they'll grow doubly so. The PCs get a non-interference pact with Godefroy, and a seemingly innocent little girl to raise -- one who must be fed her daily ration of raw flesh. The PCs can do what they want with the Halo -- Godefroy in no position to stop them from taking it with them as they leave -- though it's likely that the Guardians will want it back.
Thank you John. I wish I had this outline when I played around with the Halo, but I do have some things to use against my players 
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). The heroes follow them. The monk-in-chief is also coming with the heroes for a time, in order to teach them how to use the power of “manifest”. “Otherwise”, he said, “you are absolutely invisible and unable to affect anything in the prime material world.” 
). Or they could meet good old Jules W (who is able to see ghosts). Jules could help the PCs verbalize their quest to the twins or VR (quite cool as they suspected Jules to be the darklord until last session