D&D Adventures 6: Solar
Conjured animals attack villagers in an area. They don’t attack to kill, but they do injure. Party is called to help and they track the animals to some ruins. Curiously, they find a very powerful nexus of temporal energies in the heart of the ruins and in the middle of it, a sphinx.
Old and withered, it seems to be barely alive. In a state of obviously arduous concentration, the sphinx speaks to the party in short phrases, revealing that he sent the animals hoping for brave and just adventurers to find it. It’s apparently using its powers to move time back in the proximity around it but it’s so far from its own time that the creature can no longer hold. In fact, it thanks the party, tells them everything depends on them and dies. The temporal energy is unleashed and somehow comes with a vision of the time the sphinx originates from.
The party sees a dark future taking places countless years from their time, where Baatezu and Tanar’ri consumed all methods, all posibilities against each other in the Blood War and ended up using only the most efficient tricks, their philosophical differences being consumed by their ambition to defeat each other, both becoming simply evil. A singular force that crushes all good in the universe, shaping it in its foul image, then consumes its own self, leaving void in its wake.
Some believe the first part to be Asmodeus’ plan, but that he failed to foresee the second part. Others say this was a plot of the creatures of Far Realms, revenge of the Obyrith or simply the inevitable fate of the universe. However, a prophecy exist, one that speaks of the Twenty Fifth Solar, that this Solar can stop the void if it wields the Light again.
The last survivors of the universe are unlikely allies: The Sphinx, an Inevitable construct and none other than undead lord of demons, Orcus himself, find out about the prophecy, moments before their fall. Orcus breaks his staff, granting its power to the sphinx, who stretches its powers well beyond its limits travel back in time and deliver one last message.
The party comes to. The “vision” was so vivid that they have no doubt it was real. There is nothing around but a tome written in a language they don’t know.
Will the party take this seriously? Will they ignore it? Will they share it? Should they share it? What’s the 25th Solar? Where are they? What does “wielding the light again” mean?
The way I imagined it, it is the very first Solar. She heard stories that Asmodeous was a fallen angel and tried to appeal to his good side, only to discover that fallen angel or not, there was no good side to be appealed. No one knows or remembers what really happened. The very few ancient beings with a faint idea may tell a story about tricking the Solar into killing another, while others may talk about how Asmodeous showed the hypocricy of the “good” god the Solar served. There is a particularly interesting rumor that Zariel was actually somehow their spawn. Whatever the true story is, the solar lost all faith and disappeared.
She is now living “a normal life” in Sigil, under the Lady’s protection. In fact, it is said that she is one of the few that conversed with the mysterious patron of the city of doors maybe not as equals but as friends, at least as much as it’s possible of that with the Lady of Pain.
The party will not see how events really turn out as it all happens in far, far future. But they might find solace in the fact that they saved the universe from utter destruction. Will they be handsomely rewarded or will their meddling draw the ire of higher powers?
While it sounds like an epic adventure and it surely can be, this adventure has the potential for any level. There is something very “planescape-y” about a group of completely clueless newbies finding themselves in the middle of a universe-shaking prophecy that might get them to clash with the pride of good entities who would never believe them and might even blame them for doomsaying or discussing philosophy with powerful devils or demons. It can be a series of epic clashes or almost exclusively a roleplay campaign that barely requires “high levels.”
