Café de Nuit

During the GC, when earth shook, it spoke words that one of Ivana's servant heard.

The servant wanted to tell Ivana but when he entered the room he saw Ivan cry. Ivana told her to come back later. As the story goes, Ivan killed the servant so there were no witness of him being weak.

IMC, Ivana will soon ask the PCs to enquire with the DS. Link IMC with Antunia Papiècu (rescuing a Har Akir savant) and Touch of Death adventure (guided with said savant, to find more info on the DS while Ivana keeps the savant's wife and child as hostages in Levkarest, to make sure the savant is cooperating) with other desert side quest to be added.

I'm reading with attention the desert domains rewrite on the boards as I plan to take the best of all desert domains to fuse into just one domain. If we go in the desert IMC, it will be only once. But it will be awesome.

So at one point, lvana will ask the priest to cast Speak with the dead on the servant's corpse, to find out what he/she heardfrom the DS.

I was at first going for vengeful messages from the mad souls trapped inside... like :

... approaching the end ...No mercy.... advent is near ... retaliation....soon....no forgiveness... and so on.

Ideas?

Some questions for you to consider when deciding what the voices said and how they are reported:

1) What implications does your fusion of the various desert domains bring for the deathstone, its history, and the various ancient captured souls within?

2) How monolithic or undifferentiated were the souls? Which, if any, particular voices (individuals or groups) rose above the others? How much did the different souls (and therefore different voices) react to and interact with each other?

3) What was the identity of the killed servant? How might their biases affect what was recalled and reported? Which of the voices from Question #2 might they have paid attention to more, if applicable?

Idle thoughts...

Instead of the DS being a unique thing which fell into Ivana's grubby paws, it's actually only a small part of a whole. From reading LotB, the DS was meant to be filled and then buried in a pyramid. Tweak this slightly in that it was meant to be filled and then _built into_ a pyramid.

The local priests and pharaohs of the time worked out that Death Stones could be used to permanently contain not just undead, but also criminals, blasphemers, political enemies, etc and fairly soon it became a fairly common punishment to be 'given to the stone'. So Death Stones became a standard fixture in major cities.

The stones were meant to be taken to the pyramid to be 'emptied' on a regular basis, and a new 'empty' stone taken back to the city. However the kingdom fell (more than likely angering the gods with Death Stone games) and the secret was lost. But one partially filled stone was recovered by explorers and ended up in Borca.

So somewhere out in the wastes of the desert is a jet black pyramid, built entirely out of Death Stone and filled with countless souls.