Recap - 2026-10-08

The Rigus Problem

Angelus arrived at his house in Rigus last session only to find Dreri there, sans Grebo.

Angelus, you traveled to Rigus by way of a portal from Sigil. It dropped you out into the Great Pass where you had a near miss with a passing group of goblins who were on their way to the city. You managed to talk your way out of trouble, and even joined their party and travelled with them to the city. You tried to teach them how to play one of your favorite card games along the way, but they just kept eating the cards.
Upon arrival to the city, the brutality of the city’s architecture rose around you. The iron walls of the city blocked all view into the city itself, but you passed through an enormous gate, following the crowds of new recruits.
You were interrogated as your purpose, given a large inch-thick white badge on a heavy chain to wear while in the city, and then followed the directions to your house. You noticed everyone had a badge like yours, though they were in all different colors.
You had to hike up through three of the city’s eight hexagonal districts before you found your house, coughing through the everpresent smoke from hundreds of campfires, and shielding your ears from the ringing of metal on metal as the recruits around you endlessly practiced their fighting drills.
It was a squat building with thick stone walls, no windows other than some wooden slats, and a single dust-choked plant tucked into a stone garden in front of it.
When you walked in the door, you saw Dreri sitting at a stone table in what you assumed to be the kitchen. She looked up as you entered and smiled thinly.
“So this vacation home of yours is a little bit crap, if I can say. We’ve got a problem. I left to check what counts for a marketplace in this city to see if I could get some food. When I came back, I found this note.” She handed it to you.

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Dreri told Angelus that Grebo had taken his place in the draft for the Eternal War.
She insisted that they needed to go rescue him. She would stay and investigate how to get to Rigus, and Angelus would go fetch his adventuring buddies and come back to rescue Grebo.

Tag & Idris

Tag killed Idris, stabbing her through the heart. The soul-drinking dagger drew her soul, but the energy was diverted, flowing into the brooch, which healed itself fully.
Tag covered it up: medicine check plus the cake of healing/frosting closed the wound, Prestidigitation cleaned the blood, tucked her in bed. Sneaked out unseen.
Later, touching the brooch’s gem, Tag heard a voice: Leoquin, an angel bonded to Idris for centuries. He sensed her death, and asked Tag if he had killed her. Tag denied it, but Leoquin saw through the deception.

“Forgive me. Manners first, after all this time. I am called Leoquin. I am an angel, and I have known Idris for centuries.”
Centuries ago, your world was a battlefield no one owned. Celestials and fiends rampaged across it, and mortals beneath their boots simply endured it. Then came a generation too proud to endure. They looked at the carnage and decided: we will arbitrate.
Two halves of one order. The Penumbra Cadre reached upward, to the mountain. The Lower Cadre reached downward, to the pit. Each mortal bound themselves to a single counterpart , one to one, forever. Our masters could touch the planes only through these conduits, and the conduits metered what flowed through by what mortal flesh could bear. They stood between armies older than their sun and said: you may strike only as hard as we permit. It was wildly arrogant.
Have you heard this tale before? Any of it?
“Then came the night everything ended. She came to our bond shaking. The Lower Cadre had found a way to invert the connection: seize the immortal end of the conduit, make the angel the servant of the fiend’s choosing.
Through our own pacts. They enacted it that very night, before I could be warned.
One of my brethren, the strongest among us, was seized. Wielded against the mountain itself. A hostage’s knife held to Heaven’s throat. And the fiends believed Heaven would bargain for him.
They did not understand what they had taken. Heaven does not negotiate.
Heaven reacts.”

“We fell upon the order. All of them. Sword, bow, axe, and fire. We told ourselves the pacts were built on the lives of the followers, and the followers were complicit, and so they burned. We slew every man, woman, and elder of both Cadres alike, and we called it justice.
One we spared. Idris. Because she had warned us. She stood alone in the ash and buried her friends and her family with her own hands, and we called sparing her an act of grace.
Idris told me once she counted the days of that grace. She stopped counting at ten thousand.”
“The children of the order watched from wherever they hid while celestials…radiant, righteous, weeping while we did it…murdered everyone they loved. And those children listened to Idris tell them exactly whose light had scorched the bodies. So grew a new order, built on the graves of the old one, holding onto the name to both honor the memory of those they lost and to mock the very celestials they once had a bond to. Hating fiends for the treachery and celestials for the fire.
Hating both. Rightfully.
That hatred runs in the veins of your organization still. I sense some of them in you. I believe you are descended from the survivors. Whether you knew it or not.”
“As payment, and as inheritance, I offer you a choice.
I have grown used to having this bond. If you choose to bind yourself to me, I would become your patron. As many levels of what you are, carved away and replaced with the warlock’s craft. It carries more power than what I offer otherwise, and I will not pretend otherwise. But I will be bound to you in ways that will alter your soul, and this will not end until you or I cease to exist. You will be wound with me, and made in my likeness. You have heard what happened to the last mortals who bound themselves to my kind. You are descended from people who watched that bargain burn. I do not recommend it. I will not hide that it exists.

Tag took the bond. He respec’d as a Celestial warlock. Mechanics: alignment forcibly shifted Lawful Good; powers contingent on Leoquin’s judgment of his actions; highest stat respecced to Charisma; brooch becomes his spellcasting focus and communication channel (touch to speak); retains stats, proficiencies, and tool training.
Immediate narrative effects: ranger abilities faded, people perceive him differently, and he paused before pocketing dropped coins.
Tag visited the tabaxi shopkeeper at Sea of Opportunity. She noticed something that had been missing in him was now filled. Tag gave her a piece of jewelry he had stolen, a sign of affection for Sea but also to show that he was changing his ways. She kept an item as a memento of the friendship.
As Tag arrived back at Chirper’s, he tried to call Cath to him, but failed. His beastmaster powers had been traded, and Cath was no longer accessible to him.

Party Reunion at Chirper’s

Josiah and Chibro discussed what to do with Thorin’s body (stored in the stable after Thom banned it from the inn); Hankin studied temple blueprints and holy texts; Parth the tumbleweed relaxed in a pot.
Chibro recounted Thorin’s death: going catatonic after the Dodecahedron was shown, throwing himself under a cart, dying words prophesying the planes falling.
The party debated who to alert about “Her” and the planar collapse threat before departing.
Josiah decided to go to the Society of Sensation (Civic Fest Hall, bustling at 10 PM). He was escorted past a robed attendant to Checker, and discovers that he disassembles into a regular modron with one eye when relaxing and his checkered suit is only a sensation modification suit. Reported the planar threat; Checker reasoned that the end of sensation is non-productive, and took the report to the higher-ups, promising a response “in time.”
Chibro and the rest of the party went to the Great Foundry. Confronted Saren Grav (woken from bed). Chibro confessed his Hands of Havoc infiltration and surrendered the Dodecahedron. Saren refused to touch it. He called for it to be sealed in an Athar-built geared containment device for delivery to Lorthaldel Strang; official Doomguard meeting called for tomorrow morning; full written testimony taken; a Dustman sent to collect Thorin’s body.
Saren shared the rumor that the Crawling City is gone. Small apparently feels somewhat liable, and was contacted by angry yugoloths now living on another plane. Per legend, if the city has fallen, the Blood War ends with one side unleashed to rampage across the planes.

Angelus’s Favor

Before the portal, Angelus spent his secret-question favor with Shemeshka.
After an hour of Angelus gambling and drinking, Shemeshka descended the stairs, sang to the crowd, and joined him in a private booth.
Her answer: the only way out of Acheron is death. Die heroically, or serve as pallbearer for the honored dead in the Procession of the Dead. Her loophole hint: in war-culture places like Rigus, the letter of the law outweighs reality. A stamp certifying a (possibly fabricated) heroic death would suffice to let the group join the procession out.
Angelus then tried to touch her hand, and her arcane-flux defense blasted him 20 force damage into the slot machines (coins everywhere). She told him he’s welcome back anytime. His money will always spend.

Through to Rigus & Into Trouble

Portal key to Rigus: thinking of a military experience (Josiah: his town’s raid; Tag: an order military operation; Chibro: His town being overrun; Angelus: Dreri fighting).
Dropped into the Great Pass, a 3-hour winding march to Rigus through hobgoblin columns.
Each given a identification slate. Chibro, Hankin and Tag got white slates. Josiah got a green slate.
Angelus impersonated a Major General (stolen coat, scrawled epaulettes) with successful deception/intimidation rolls. Got a red slate, despite the guards’ confused whispering.
On the third ring, another red-slate officer challenged Chibro and Tag as suspicious “bodyguards,” demanding to have them drawn and quartered. Angelus’s “we’re undercover” ploy failed. The officer rejected subterfuge outright (“Acheron is a place of honor, not espionage”) and invoked regulations to sentence the entire group to be shipped to the front with the next platoon.
They were marched past Angelus’s house (Dreri giving an incredulous look from the doorway).
The Acheron portal: an enormous feline eye within an arch of bones, accessed via the massive octagonal elevator with about 100 other soldiers ready for battle.
The party emerged onto a rusted iron plane stitched with trenches, craters, and smokeless fires beneath drifting black-iron cubes grinding against each other. They have joined the Endless War.

Song of the Session

Paradise by Within Temptation

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Next Session: Sigil - 2026-10-22

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