Spoiler: Chapter Thirteen: The Nicene Mead
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November 1114

An urgent telegram arrives one afternoon. It is from the Immaterium and their message is brief.

Their destination is a ship called the Nicene Mead.
They are given its last known coordinates and heading.
Their target is an overweight man in his mid-thirties with long brown hair and a matching beard.
This is of the highest priority; should they succeed they will be paid triple, failure is non-negotiable.
Other assets are to be disposed of or redistributed as Valentine sees fit.

Details are scant, and Valentine surmises that they are only being chosen because the mission is so urgent and they are the only group in range. Feur warns them that not only are they still recovering from their wounds, but the moon has not yet cycled and his mana is almost depleted. Valentine shrugs, and tells him that she can’t turn down the money, and he has taken an oath to provide whatever services he can offer, and the Tribunal monk decides to quietly keep his disapproval to himself.

Everyone, including Sonya, is surprised when the half-angel insists that the girl come along to chronicle their exploits and keep a tally of their gains and expenses.

Valentine arranges the rental of the swiftest boat in town, a large racing sailboat that is charitably called a yacht. Quincy scoffs at the pretentious title, but does his best to steer it, being the only one in the group with the slightest clue how to navigate.

Feur sits at the bow, chanting from the scroll of ages in a ritual of synchronicity, so that their path and that of their target will just so happen to intersect.

As evening turns to night, they find a trail of their quarry, an oil slick on the water, shimmering with a multitude of colors both strange and vibrant. They follow it until they come into sight of the
Nicine Mead, drifting in the water, and Sonya notes how strange it is that oil is emerging from what appears to be a sail-powered vessel, and that it is even visible at all with no sunlight to refract.

Though apparently adrift, the ship’s deck is well guarded, with eight individuals wearing neat, almost military, uniforms and armed with both rifles and binoculars.

The group decides to swing close, under the protection of Kim’s mana shield, and for Krystal to transport herself onboard and secure the ship’s helm.

The plan goes well, but when they pull their smaller vessel aside the larger frigate, Quincy notices that the hull is strange. Large patches of what appears to be rust have spread over the wooden planks, and in some places have begun to eat it away, and the large leathery barnacles that cling to the side gnash at them with strange predatory teeth. As he investigates, Aurora spots a ladder hanging from the ship’s side and impulsively leaps upward and begins to climb.

The “rusted” wood collapses under her, and though she is nimbly able to clamber over the railing of the larger ship, the ladder is done for. The rest of the group begins to panic, while Feur merely sighs and moves his hands in a circular pattern, rewinding history and restoring the ladder the pristine condition it had been in several days before.
The invaders quickly clamber upward to a fierce battle on the deck, and though several are shot, they easily win. Aurora is able to heal their wounds, her ministrations aided by her enchanted knife and jeweled torque.

Quincy is reluctant to take part in the battle, and takes on a withdrawn demeanor. Valentine puts her hand on her shoulder and attempts to explain that Anani’s death wasn’t his fault, and even if it was, they have a mission to accomplish, but he tells her that isn’t it at all and moves along.

The ship appears to be on a party cruise, as there are numerous brightly colored streamers and signs about the deck, and the guards bear the insignia of the Immaterium itself, leading Valentine to conclude that some sort of mutiny or culling is underway.

The entire group senses that something is very wrong here. They notice that patches of the deck are somehow distorted, and the angles are all wrong. The closest analogy they can put to words is that it resembles a photograph that has been blown up too far, becoming blurry and pixelated at the same time.

Quincy can hear sounds below deck, odd disquieting tones that resemble the noise of an engine; though again this ship appears to be entirely driven by the wind. They stop and speculate that maybe the ship sailed through some sort of Vortex.

It then dawns on Kim that the bloodstains on the deck, freshly spilled by their own hands, have neat right angles to them, and spell out odd runes in an alphabet that she has never seen before, and
she posits that the crew, or perhaps even the ship itself, has become possessed by spirits of order.

They move to capture the helm, and find a horrific sight. The crew has all been impaled by long shafts of metal that stretch across the room, creating an odd web of steel bars that fills the bridge and renders the ship inoperable. Sonya points out that this is an impossible attack, as the metal rods stretch from wall to wall, meaning it would have been impossible to actually wield them as weapons in here, and that they must have been launched from the outside by some sort of massive ballista. But an investigation of the structure reveals no holes, and when Aurora carefully begins to cut away the impaled flesh to free the corpses, she makes a startling discovery; the wounds were inflicted from the inside out; somehow these men burst from the inside giving birth to massive metal rods. This reinforces Kim’s idea, as many spirits of order are also elementals of metal.

When asked how long ago this happened, Feur tells the group that he is unsure, time is warped here. Different parts of the ship are moving at different speeds; in some places, it appears to be a few hours, in others a few weeks, but he can average it out to about four days.

His energy nearly depleted, Feur volunteers to stay on deck and monitor the situation, and to warn them of any temporal disturbances. When asked if he is ok being left alone, Feur waves them off, and says it won’t be the first time he has acted as a watch. If anyone notices his pun, they are not in a mood to laugh.

The stairs which lead below decks show the signs of a massacre, blood stains the walls in bizarre patterns, and bodies are strewn about everywhere. Numerous bullet holes and slashes mar the wood.

In the cramped passageway, the group comes to a crude barricade made of smashed furniture and shipping crates, along with more than a few wine barrels. Manning it is another guard patrol, although they are significantly worse for wear than those above.

Upon seeing the interlopers, the guardians let loose a volley and shout something about not letting them infect the Godhead. The mercenaries jump into cover and come up with a plan, which they execute with brutal precision. Kim uses the staff of Noboru to protect herself from bullets, Krystal tosses a smoke bomb into the hallway, and then Quincy lobs a grenade over the barrier. Then Kim moves out to smash the barricade with the infinite chain, while Krystal slips into the Hellscape behind them and slits their throats as they try and flee. Sonya drains the life force from those who lay dying using the Bloodstone Pendant, and there are no survivors.

They move down the hallway past many doors, until they see a shadowy creature scurry across the hallway behind them. It has the rough size, shape, and movement of an ape, but is too alien and angular, and something about it makes them think of a cockroach. They decide to go back and search for it, but see no sign. Instead, they find numerous quarters. Most are empty, some contain signs of a struggle. The odd alien patches are distorted space are everywhere.

A few of the rooms have odd orange growths in the corners. The material is semi-transparent, and humanoid figures can be seen inside. Kim tries to shatter them, but finds that though they look crystalline, they have a fibrous consistency. When she uses her magic to analyze the material, she finds that it most closely resembles human earwax and pulls away in disgust.

Aurora uses her magic to sense the people within, and finds that their bodies have been badly mutated, and are undergoing some sort of chrysalis. If they are freed, they will likely turn to soup and spill out upon the floor. She also detects a weak angelic presence within each of them, and wonders if they are not the Imperial Templar which she has heard so many tales of. She doesn’t have the strength to save them all, but she can save one. She asks her companions to cut him down and scrape away the cocoon, and just as he is about to be free, she calls upon the breath of life to restore the horrible genetic damage he has undergone.

Her plan works, though the timing is close, the occupant nearly suffocates. He is a scrawny man who looks older than he is, a sailor and a friar for the Immaterium named Brother Josephus. He explains that this ship is a pleasure cruise for the Immaterium’s highest donors; rich nobles and merchants and the like. He is part of the crew, and though he is pleasant and grateful for his rescue, he doesn’t know anything about what is going on with the ship, and is shocked to learn of the apparent mutiny. When told about the toothed barnacles, he laughs and says that sometimes after scraping the hull it feels like they have bit you, but there is no such thing.

They send him up to wait with Feur, but before he leaves, Kim asks if he knows what a Godhead is. He tells them that the gods wear many masks to deal with humans; avatars and incarnations. But the Godhead is the raw truth behind them. For example, Ares, Morrigan, and Thor are all separate gods of war, but they are all a part of the Godhead that is War itself, the same but separate. When asked if there was a Godhead on the boat, Josephus shrugs and tells them the Godheads are everywhere and nowhere all at once.

As they press on, they find the stairs to the lower decks guarded by a quarter of security personnel, dressed in fine suits and wearing concealed handguns. These are clearly of a higher caliber than those above, and use more advanced tactics to suppress the invaders. Still, they are unarmored and only four in number, and three of them are quickly dispatched, but then the fourth opens his mouth and lets out an odd inhuman tone that seems to be some sort of alarm, and immediately three exact duplicates of his slain comrades appear out of nowhere. They seem just as surprised to be here, but lose no time joining the battle.

This sequence repeats itself several times. Kim tries erecting a ward to stop summoning, but it does nothing. If Feur had been with them, he could have told her as much, for he would recognize that these people are pulling in their past or future selves from branching timelines.

As our heroes risk being overwhelmed, Sonya reads a spell from Anani’s book, blanketing the room in unnatural quiet, stopping the tone that they use to summon reinforcements. In the aftermath,

Aurora treats their wounds while her bewildered companions search and stack the identical corpses.

As they press on, Quincy pulls Sonya aside and asks “How much of you is really you?”

Sonya responds, telling him that now is not the time, but he presses her.

“I can see Anani in you, even if you have the others fooled.”

“It comes and it goes; it’s mostly me, I think, but in the dark of the night she talks to me, and when we are in danger it’s mostly her.”

“Was she ever really Anani? Or was she something else just wearing her like a skin?”

“I honestly don’t know. Neither of us does.”

The lower level is more warped, patches of unreality spreading across its surfaces like paint, and even clouds of strange distortions float through the air.

They pass storerooms containing lots of exotic foods and multitudes of drinks, and in the center of each is a massive block of ice, the light passing through it casting strange shadows that seem to move with a life of their own.

Beyond is a sickbay, where dead and unconscious men rest. Aurora examines them and finds many suffered from horrific wounds, but they have survived and are healing well. But, upon closer examination, the new tissue has taken on a fractal pattern. Muscle fibers, blood vessels, nerve endings, and even teeth are all growing in an endlessly repeating pattern, duplicating themselves in miniature over and over until they grow too small for her to detect, but she has no reason to believe they stop there.

Across the hall is the ship’s chapel, and within is a choir endlessly chanting with inhuman voices. Quincy realizes that this is the source of the strange tones that fill the ship with the sounds of alien machinery, and considers simply dropping a grenade into the mass to be done with them.

Beyond, in the rectory, they find the ship’s chaplain. He is covered in bandages, including a heavy bloodstained cloth that hides his eyes, and he holds a wine-filled chalice in one hand and a ceremonial knife in the other, and he gesticulates with them wildly as he speaks in tongues. Valentine can tell that he is both deeply intoxicated and also in the middle of a mental breakdown as a result of some unknowable trauma.

Kim is able to communicate with him in a long-dead language. She tells him that they have come on behalf of the Immaterium, and the old priest says that they must have heard of what befell the trip through whispers carried on the wings of the cherubim, and now they have sent thugs to cut their losses. But it matters not to him, for the father explains that he has beheld the Final Orthodoxy; that none of them are real, that this world is merely a pantomime for Cronus’ reminiscence. For Cronus was cast down long ago, and ceded this world to his son, the Lord of Thunder and the King of the Sky whose name he dare not speak.

Kim asks if this Sky God is on this boat with them, and the priest laughs drunkenly and says no, for his domain is the present, and the ship and all who dwell within are merely a record of the ancient past. But, like a phonograph that has been played too many times, it is starting to wear away, and this ship has sailed through one of those holes.

After Kim relates his message, Quincy tells her that if the priest really thinks his life has no meaning, he should kill himself. In response, the priest says that he has lived and died many times, all to no effect, one more death would merely be temporary pain and inconvenience that will change nothing, but if Quincy is so eager to see him die, he has but to pull the trigger.

Quincy declines.

The group grows confused and despondent as they ponder his words, all except for Sonya, who gives them an inspiring speech explaining that what he says changes nothing, for if it is true it merely shows that they have ultimate freedom, to live life as they will and to find their own meaning, to choose their own ultimate purpose free of demanding gods.

They move on with renewed determination, and find the gates of the main ballroom guarded by a massive figure clad in steel. He stands seven feet tall, with a flowing golden cloak and an ornate two-handed sword, and a helm in the visage of a snarling lion. Her companions inform Aurora that this is a Templar.

Valentine moves forward and asks if he can speak. The knight nods, but when Valentine does not follow up with anything but pleasantries, he moves to attack. Kim rushes to protect the half-angel, and though the manages to deflect the massive sword, she is surprised to find that the lion’s face that is carved into the steel of his mask is alive, and takes a ferocious bite out of her throat.

As Kim falls to the ground, Aurora rushes to save her life, while Krystal attempts to get the Lion Knight’s attention. Sonya tries to use the bloodstone pendant to siphon their opponent’s life force into

Kim, but finds this task difficult, as the warrior is neither wholly alive nor wholly machine, but somewhere in between.

With steady fingers, Quincy loads the enchanted bullets he took from Valen’s assassins and fires several shots into the hulking warrior’s center of mass. They do the trick, but each shot blows away a chunk of metal, which then takes on a life of its own, flapping about on razor-sharp metal wings, forming an exaggerated V shape like a child’s drawing of a bird. These metal creatures swarm about the companions and cut into their flesh, and they are unperturbed by damage, for they have no real anatomy to disrupt.

Valentine calls for the group to run, and they burst into the ballroom ahead, slamming the heavy oaken doors behind them.

Though they are bloody and aching, and a sense of something terrible having just happened to them, none of them can quite remember what it was. They enter the ballroom disoriented and with a sense of dread, but no precise recollection of exactly how they got here. But their task is firmly in their mind, and soon they spot their target, a portly man with wild brown tresses, dressed in forest green robes and adorned in golden laurels. He jokes heartily and drinks with both hands, surrounded by a throng of laughing partygoers.

The ballroom is immense, and the companions half-jokingly suggest that it might be bigger on the inside than on the outside. It is lavishly decorated, the guests well dressed and heavily perfumed, piles of gifts are stacked around the room haphazardly, and the tables are weighed down with what must be several tons of food, and full bars line each of the walls.

Valentine cleans herself off and moves to mingle with the guests. She finds them all heavily intoxicated, but with a strange sense of panic hiding just beneath a jolly veneer. She approaches one ditzy young socialite and begins to make small talk, and though her target is afraid of being overheard, she explains that the man is none other than Dionysus, god of wine, who has been secretly blessing them with his presence, and legend says that if you can get him drunk enough, he will grant any wish.

Valentine slips away and passes the message surreptitiously on to her companions, and Kim wonders if that might not be what is wrong with the ship, if the universe is reacting to the presence of such a powerful spirit of chaos, or perhaps his own magic is having unintended side effects, as is often the case with wyrd.

Regardless of the cause, they need to strike. Sonya reads a spell with casts a darkened pall over the room, and then the crack of Quincy’s rifle sounds out. The man who is said to be a god looks down and sees the blood spearing across his robes, but he does not die, nor does he attack. But the guards in the room do.

A battle breaks out, and suddenly each of the companions realizes they are much more intoxicated than they thought, even those who barely touched what the party had to offer.

Kim immediately uses the staff of Noboru. Rather than directing its power, she just pumps as much energy out as possible, rendering everyone and everything in the room invulnerable to bullets.

Dionysus’ guards soon take note, and resort to using knives and clubs. This also means that Quincy will be of no further use in this fight, and his target remains alive to work his wonders.

The alcohol, combined with the darkness and the screaming crowd leads to pandemonium. The warriors stagger about drunkenly, and Krystal swings the Black Flame Blade with reckless abandon, doing more damage to her companions than to her enemies, and she soon finds herself fighting alone.

The battle would have been lost, if an alien will had not taken over Sonya and directed her broken body to use the Bloodstone Pendant to its fullest effect, healing her wounded companions and slaying the beleaguered defenders. Then Krystal moves forward, and impales her target who, with his last breath, forgives her.

A moment later Feur makes his appearance, having been drawn by the escaping partygoers. Some of them made it to the deck and piled into the smaller boat, others were lost in the unreality that now composes most of the Nicene Mead. He looks around and says that he didn’t know there would have been a party or he would have come along and brought the punch. Kim groans.

As her companions bind their wounds, Krystal begins to dig through the presents, stuffing jewels and expensive bottles of alcohol into her pack. As she rips open the gaily wrapped boxes, she sees one addressed to Valentine from Lady Abasinia, and shakes it. It begins to tick, and she tosses it to Valentine, who has the good sense to know what a ticking package means and tosses it aside and shouts out a warning to Kim, who summons up a circle of protection just as the bomb goes off, redirecting the energy downward and blowing a gaping hole in the bottom of the boat.

Water rushes in, and they rapidly move to leave. But, once they are on deck, the discover that their “yacht” is nowhere to be found, and worse, a pod of Tritons, fishlike hengeyokai, have been attracted to the sinking ship. Quincy knows that their kind is often eager to loot shipwrecks, but for a war party to engage this quickly means that they are intent upon taking captives, although what use they would have for them beneath the waves is anyone’s guess.

There are about two dozen raiders, armed with spears and clinging to the sides of a massive megalodon shark. They are led by several priests, and flanked by trained manta-ray-like monsters called jenny hanivers.

The water is already ankle-deep, and they are weary and badly wounded, but the mercenaries brace themselves for a battle they almost certainly cannot win, when Valentine steps forward.

In a bold speech, she asks the merpeople if they do not see the blood on her clothes and the weapons they bear, if they do not realize that this ship is already lost, and that her crew has laid claim to it, and that they are responsible for the disaster that befell it.

At first, the scavengers do not seem to take her meaning and circle in, but then they notice the strange disfigurements of the crew and of the marine life, of the unnatural warping of the deck and the space that surrounds it, and the odds runes and impossible shapes that are stained into it. Their eldest shamans raises a webbed hand in some version of the ward of the evil eye, and in a croaking voice pronounces the ship unclean.

As the invaders swim away, the humans realize that they have only delayed the inevitable, as the ship is going down, and they won’t be able to survive long adrift, for they are all weighted down by treasure and gear, and none of them is a particularly strong swimmer to begin with.

Just as things look most bleak, a massive squamous body rises in the midst, and they cling to the sides of Bertha, the mosasaur who has been following them like a lost dog since they departed from Plum Tree.

They awake on a beach the next morning, all of them sore, water-logged, and powerfully hung over. All of them, that is, except for Quincy, who is relaxing and fishing in the early morning light, a veteran of much harder drinking than this.

They make their way up the coast, only stopping in Plum Tree long enough for Sonya to say goodbye to her aunt Uriah, and for Quincy to make his own farewells as he leaves his pet sea monster.

They discretely board the train to Golgotha, Valentine has no intention of paying back her benefactors for the cost of a missing sailboat.

A fortnight later they meet up with Father Gennaro. The old evangelist tells them that he didn’t think they would get any further work after they botched up the whole Wulfenkine fiasco, but they must have done something to impress Deacon Zoltan, for their reward comes straight from the top. He hands over sacks of gold, platinum, and jewels, and proclaims it to be more than he takes in in a year.

Quincy and Krystal are eager to hit the casinos and to show Aurora and Sonya what passes for a good time in the city of human vice. At the same time, Valentine goes to touch base with Pops, Zara, Jeremy, and Harijan and to look put out feelers for their next job.

Kim goes to seek out Abasinia and demands an explanation for the bomb. Abasinia has no idea what she is talking about, and assures Kim that the mystery has quite a simple explanation; one of their enemies, likely Trade Prince Valen, employed a seer who has access to the same magic that Feur does, and simply decided to place a booby trap in their path when they would be at their most vulnerable.

When Kim tells her about the horrors that she beheld on the boat, and what the deranged chaplain said, Abasinia scoffs and tells her that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

She uses an analogy that Kim can understand; when geological activity releases poisonous gas beneath a lake until it reaches a critical mass, at which point it bursts forth as a killing cloud, smothering everything in the area before harmlessly dispersing. Whatever was on that ship was simply something unorthodox welling up from the depths of the Astral Sea, quickly passing through our existence, before disappearing into the void. It was a singular event, infinitely unlikely to happen again in her future, and Kim should put it out of her mind.


First, I want to say that its hard to do weird cosmic horror without resorting to the usual tentacles and things man was not meant to know. I tried to do something unique with it, but I think it might have just come across as an incoherent mess.

So, what is happening here is that this was a party cruise for the Immaterium's wealthy donors, and Dionysus, God of Revelry, who was sympathetic to their cause and not one to follow rules, even divine compacts, would sometimes manifest an avatar to onboard. The ship then sailed through a vortex of unreality (this is come unrelated weirdness, but I might connect it to the villain of my next campaign The Machine) that infected ship and its crew. The Immaterium, fearing what would happen to the cosmos if the avatar itself got infected and somehow transmitted it to the god itself when it discorporeated, sent the PCs, their only agent in the region, to kill the avatar at any cost to prevent an unlikely catastrophe.

Unfortunately, I am not sure how much of that came across. The PCs came up with a lot of good theories, but failed to put the whole thing together. The bit with the drunken priest and the final orthodoxy was a major clue as to the story line of this campaign, but the PCs were too busy looking for specific answers to really notice it.

Some good RP from Johnny, although I am not quite sure OOC what Quincy is going through.

I had planned an epic final battle against the merfolk raiders, with Bertha the Mosasaur and their Megalodon warbeast doing a kaiju battle as the back drop, but the PCs were very badly beaten up from the Dionysus fight (his aura of inebriation required an intelligence check each turn to avoid acting randomly, and this party pretty much all chose intelligence as their dump stat, especially Krystal)
so they may not have survived, but then a legendary success on Valentine's intimidation check averted the whole thing; the vagaries of dice and all that.

No real OOC drama this session to speak of. Aurora's player, let's call her Patty for the time being, actually read both the previous campaign journal and the entire rulebook, and seems to be taking to the game well, although I feel I was a bit rushed and tired so I didn't give her the proper acclimation time that I should have.


This weekend we run a catch-up session, two short missions, one of which tied up a lot of loose ends and dropped some big revelations, and know we are all going on vacation. So expect to short updates in quick succession, and then a bit of a break before we start on the campaign's final act.

Cheers!