Hook:
Why is the sun still there?
077- 260504 - Stargazing
Date:
446 PC, Ashfall 24
Waning gibbous moon; half moon expected Ashfall 27
Players:
Ragnum
Draylor
Die-Anna
Raven
Loot:
item 1 [claimed by]
item 2 [claimed by]
After Actions:
Ragnum's report to Steve.
Flying to the Sunken City recently, I noticed the curvature of the horizon and it started bothering me. If we're inside a pocket dimension on the Astral Plane, where exactly is the light coming from? I know enough cosmology to ask the question but I spent most of my life underground, so I brought the problem to Draylor, who has a better handle on the natural world than I do. Die-Anna, Raven, and I joined him for the trip. We requisitioned a set of telescopes and sextants from Sarna and organized a field trip to the Renflo Hills.
We ran astronomical and cartographic measurements over the course of the evening. We calculated the curvature of the chunk of earth in this panel, it came out roughly consistent with the world we came from, which makes a certain amount of sense; if a large portion of a planet gets pulled into the Astral, it doesn't suddenly go flat. The more interesting result was the stars. They looked almost right, but not quite. Not what you'd expect from our entry point into the Rift. We were turning that over without much progress when we got lucky.
We found a buried silver shield embossed with Selûne's symbol half-submerged in the hillside. That led us to look closer, and we found a small cave in that revealed a temple dome hidden beneath one of the hills. Inside, there was a silver altar at the center, surrounded by 4 columns set with lapis stone, and the dome's interior was magicked to resemble constellations. On the ground, we notice a series of small holes in a grid pattern. We were puzzled over this until we found several other silver shields and a set of rods, roughly three feet tall, that fit the holes in the floor.
It took us some time, but with trial and error, we were able to work out that we were meant to use them to direct moonlight onto the altar. Once the light hit it, the altar opened. Inside was the book, and we were shown the vision.
The vision covered the weeks immediately following the Collapse. No sun, no moon, no stars. Just darkness. The followers of Selûne, scattered across the newly formed Rift, coordinated their prayers in a way that drew the goddess's attention. She answered by creating the illusion of astronomical bodies: a sun to mark the days, a moon to track the months, stars to navigate by. Given everything we know about what happened to the societies that fell into the Rift after the Collapse, the extent of the disruption is easy to underestimate. But the absence of any day-night cycle, no way to mark time, would have broken what remained of civil society within weeks, not even leaving the scattered remnants of civilization we have found. Selûne's intervention bought everyone here a chance.
As we were sitting with that thought, we discovered we were not alone in the temple. Two invisible, large, cat-like creatures had been drawn in by the moonlight and were stalking us through the room. We handled them without much difficulty and took their pellets for study. I haven't encountered this species before but they may be distant relatives of the displacer beast we encountered near the northern forest.
The temple itself is a remarkable site. The illusionary constellation work on the dome interior is genuinely beautiful. I've provided coordinates.
Unresolved Threads:
item 1
item 2