aprilmarch

In which I continue to play Lichdom. (See the first post to learn more about the game.)

King of Hearts
The Archivist is awaken by the sound of his lair being bombed. His wards, ancient and formidable, hold on - but the assault is so powerful and relentless that even such wards will break after some time, especially now that his magical power is drained by his ill-fated attempt to bargain with Death.

Ichabod soon appears (in  somewhat ridiculous light blue silk pajamas) to inform that he knows who is responsible for the bombing - he can tell by the sound of the airplanes. It's a small but highly belicose country, which for the last few centuries has always been at odds with Ichabod's country. The Archivist isn't sure if Ichabod can be trusted, but this is simple to resolve: all it takes is the coordinates of the enemy country's capital.

Shortly afterwards, the Archivist and Ichabod appear out of thin air in front of a startled president and several startled generals, who had been up to then pouring over battle maps and pizza boxes. Ichabod's knowledge proved true: they were indeed responsible for the bombing. Apparently they had heard of the Archivist's sacrifice in the warzone, despite whatever provisions Ichabod had taken to mantain that secret, and they had deemed it unacceptable that a wizard would deal with the dark arts so openly. The president refused to call off the attack on the lair, even if the Archivist killed everyone in that room, for it would be a honorable martyr's death for him.

Ichabod laughed them off as zealots - he was clearly too trusting that the Archivist's power would stand with him. But the Archivist was open to negociation. He asked if there was anything, anything at all, that he could do to have the attack called off. The president had him swear not to open congress with demons. That was easily done; there were much more avenues to search. But, still reluctant, the president asked the Archivist to abandon whoever had brought him into sin.

It took a moment for the Archivist to connect the dots - he had been for too long too removed from human affairs. But he knew this country and Ichabod's were always at war. He realized that the president merely wanted Ichabod's secrets. He didn't know Ichabod was responsible, but it was a fairly solid guess. Or maybe he even knew - who can tell what his spies had seen that day in the warzone.

The Archivist was a bit reluctant to abandon who had been a useful ally, and took no joy on Ichabod's terrified expression as the guards carried them to who knows where. But when he returned to his lair, it was silent. The attacks had been on the cusp of breaking their wards, but they remained intact and he could attend to them in the morning easily.

Eight of Hearts
Once again alone in his lair, the Archivist took his time to lick his wounds. Without Ichabod, he needed something new to be his tether to the mundane world. He could no longer expect himself to be forgotten.

The religious fervor of the president inspired him. He knew that it was common that, whenever a religion took power, other smaller religions would grow in its shadow to oppose it. If the two countries had been at war for so long, then it was almost certain that Ichabod's compatriots would have developed such a belief.

His travels to investigate this suspicion were grueling, as he had no interest or ability in talking or spying. But they were fruitful. While Ichabod's country had a state religion that was actually the same as their enemy's, except for a few tenets of little importance, there were people who thought opposing an enemy state was more important than fitting in, who followed a religion based on devil worship and the gathering of power. And it turned out that, amongst this cult, his name was already whispered about, for his actions were known.

Finding out about this cult had been difficult, but becoming its leader had been as easy as dropping his disguise.

It took him only a few months to suss out which cult members had real magic power and then teaching them simple spells through which they could communicate. It was very simple, and the cult, despite being composed of many people, was nowhere as useful as Ichabod had been, but it was good enough for his needs.

I've not been around here for quite some time (this is quite the understatement), mostly because I've been around on Tumblr, where my shitposts of a very similar quality have the potential to reach, in optimal conditions, upwards of fourteen people (!). However, I've decided to bring anything more substantial that I create here, since I think a bloggier platform is better for this kind of thing, usually easier to read on and marginally less likely to nuke my archives in their entirety.

And the next thing I want to do is tear through the limits of morality in a quest for eternal life.

Yes, I'm going to play the solo RPG Lichdom.



Lichdom is a game in which you play as a powerful mage trying to become a lich. It uses a deck of cards in conjunction with dice rolls to generate a story. Some cards just generate prompts with no mechanical weight, but most of them set of crises that have a very solid chance of crushing my lil wizard to smithereens.

For the time being, I'm going to describe the world I've created for the game. Lichdom has very detailed tools for creating a world, and I'm not using them at all. (Already I'm being kind of a hypocrite, since I hate it when actual plays of an RPG ignore part of their rules, since I usually follow them when I'm curious about how the game works.) Partly this is because I came up with a world in my mind already while thinking about the game, and partly because I don't want my game to take place in the sword-and-sorcery style setting the game strongly alludes to. Although this is a lie: the prompts are generic enough that I could use them to create a world in any setting I want, and the prompts in the actual game are about as generic, so the only actual reason for not using them is that I don't wanna.

I wanted a world with high magic but modern technology, but the setting kind of needs to have a kind of attrition that we don't get in a world with a United Nations (although, well, *vague gesture towards everything*) so I'm playing in a kind of para-apocalyptic setting; the world feels the same as ours, but unbeknownst to most people an apocalyptic catastrophe has already begun and is unlikely to be stopped.

So here's what I came up with:

Thousands of years ago, it was the Age of Gods. Great powerful beings lived among the population - well, not really among them, more like above them - and mortals could beseech them for power and favours. Humankind gathered under the auspices of the good gods of civilization and knowledge, while evil gods of destruction prowled the edges of humankind's domain. This was all well and good for a few thousand years, until a group of great warriors killed a god of pain and suffering. While this event first brought joy to people due to the weakening of the dangerous evil gods, it also caused two important pieces of information to come to light. First, even though the god of pain and suffering was dead, both still existed in the world. Second, human beings can kill a god.

It took some time for people to figure out what it mean, but it soon led to a period known as the Godslayings, the twilight of the Age of Gods. Humanity first slayed all the evil gods, then all the neutral gods, then turned themselves to the good gods. Soon enough every god of the old world was either dead, enslaved or MIA. Humankind studied the scraps of their power that were left behind and learned to harness it for its own ends. Thus began the Age of Magic.

The Age of Magic was a prosperous time for most of humankind, with humans capable of harnessing the powers of the gods but unhindered by their dictates. Even for the lowliest peasants who could not study magic, this was a better world. A new kind of elite would soon appear in this world, though: the Great Wizards, those who were both specially talented at magic and specially driven to study it. In a world without gods, their power had no rival other than each other. Some of them waged wars so dreadful that the devastation left in their wake would cast the petty demands of the gods in a good light. But although the Great Wizards had no enemies other than themselves, that would prove to be enough; after a thousand years of fights, almost all of them had perished at the hands of another. Only those rare few that didn not seek power above all, for themselves or at the behest of a mudane patron, have survived to the end of this age.

For this age is about to end, although the people don't know it yet. Few Great Wizards remain; the other wizards have forgotten most of their craft and can bring very little power to bear; and modern technology arrives as a great equalizer to all realms. In a few years, a great war will erupt, nuclear bombs will be fired, and the Age of Magic will come to its end in fire and pain, sending humankind down the Age of Ruins. But even this will be of small concern to our character, The Archivist, one of the last surviving Great Wizards.

The Archivist, whose birth name is long, forgotten, appears almost like a shade, a human shape wrapped in a burial shroud. Only a close inspection can reveal that the burial shroud is actually a delicately weaved suit, in a very deep dark blue, inlaid with gold. His face appears cloaked in shadow - actually an enchanted face mask. His pronouns are he/him, though mostly out of tradition, since he barely seems himself as human any more. Under his shroud - which he only takes off to eat and sleep - he's a gnarled old husk of a person. He uses magic to float around because his legs barely respond to him any more.

Like all surviving Great Wizards, he had no interest in power by itself: he wanted to attain and study all spells. That was made difficult by the fact that other Great Wizards would not willingly part with their signature spells. That was fine with the Archivist: he would start by studying those spells that were readily available to him, and he would collect rarer tomes as it becamse possible. Since he was not involved in great wizarding wars and his spell-hogging peers were, he was actually able to grow his collection quite a bit simply by being the first in the scene, or the only Great Wizard in the scene.

He set up his lair - pardon, his Archives - in a location called The Blight's Eye. Once the capital of a great empire, they betrayed the Goddess of Fertility so that she could be killed, one of the last gods to fall during the Godslayings. As she bled to death, she called out a great curse: as far as her voice would carry, no living thing would grow. The city had to be abandoned, and the once lush forest that surrounded it would eventually turn into a barren land, worse than a desert, since even in a desert plants and animals grow. But this was a boon for the Archives: the curse would stop many of the things that could damage books and tomes. As for food, the Archivist simply casts a spell that faithfully reproduces an entire meal from nothing.

The Archivist lived as a hermit in his lair, leaving only once every few decades when news came to him that new tomes might be aquired - usually when a wizard had died, or a great wizarding school had gone under and was liquidating its stock. He cared little for the outside world other than these small incursions. But even someone as distracted and withdrawn as him was bound to eventually notice that the world had changed. Fewer and fewer Great Wizards remained; everywhere he went to, tensions were high and war was on the horizon, if it hadn't already erupted.

The decision to become a lich came easily. So few Great Wizards remained to challenge his notion. His great powers slowed his aging, and his lair in the Blight's Eye stopped any disease from taking hold, but he could still be slain by spell or bullet or even bad luck. An eternal body would solve these issues, remove the daily distractions of food and sleep, and make it much easier for him to avoid contaminating his archives. He was nothing if not pragmatic, and lichdom was, simply, the most attractive way forward. Sadly, it had always been such a taboo subject that even he had no idea of where a tome about the practice might lie. But time would be on his side.

Thus begins his quest.