Post by doublejig2 on Jan 3, 2024 10:11:19 GMT -6
Tales from Beŏne
Sun of Asps
Corrosive legend both perverse and hard to attain assures the reviled arch mage’s abhorrent pedigree. In life this would-be lich had been a cruel and cunning man of typical, grim Gldarran stock, yet of ferocious intellect. That much is recorded in musty grimoire. It is written also that his lethal proclivity was so vicious that no contemporary dared to countermand him or his blasphemous inquiries. So, unchallenged, vile depravity congealed with his inevitable saturnine descent.
Aging, and with many tired thoughts to serve, he watched his old never idle hands wither. So, entrapped like Le Guin’s wretched necromancer, Cob, to embrace the exacting gravity of his own mortal pronouncements, grimly he proceeded. In first curiosity, then greed, then fear, and finally in labyrinthine terror, this appalling prodigy read deeply from forbidden elder scrolls. Armed (and alarmed), he was powerful when alive. Yet he faced with amplified foreboding as regards an ill-perceived, odious monotony—concerning the apparent, banal, inexorable staleness of death’s final repose. His eldritch choices bound him ever more severely to an unfathomable, deleterious senescence of horror and with more than an inkling for the worst.
He knew the unholy lays to Robert E. Howards’ immortal, dark Stygian, Akivasha, and the ruinous dance of Anne Rice’s Queen Akasha, and the freakish, murderous recital of the dark muse of KE Wagner’s wretched Opyros. How he yearned from such sordid stories for his own bitter success on some dire darker passage.
For if it is said that utter servile abjection is all undeath can ever be, then this Gldarran wizard of stingingly poisonous artifice took unprecedented steps to ensure his profitable journey upon such a road. With blood curdling optics and pseudonym, he would secure as properly as possible his coterminous identity postmortem. Continuance, this quaesitum he murderously craved, and for his battered, blasted footservants too. Thus, with wizen, maniacal, and meticulous method, he defended his future obsidian nuptials.
Oh, he knew the tales of d**nation. More than knowing, feelings of unholy anamnesis gripped his soul. He knew too of the passings of the planets and stars and of unthinkable exchanges in “color solid symbolism, where reside in points of junctions the fundamental conditions of the sensible world, and especially in the junctions of time, space, and number.” Verily, if true that two great cosmic wheels turn, one fast and one slow, then, with consummate chilling acumen and seeking devolution in leaden nemesis, so too he now addressed these Elysian cycles.
Dread consumed him. Yet with grave torschlusspanik he feasted then upon the icy covetousness of defeated sages, midnight pundits, and grim masters of the subterranean prehensile realms. He thereby acquired eons of stacked observation, which informed his hellish calibration to act. The frozen alienness of the aberrant races chastised his last remaining temerities. Advert with roiled knowledge as power—well timed yet never a “good” time for this act —so too did infamy mark his choices. When he completed the last abominable, pythonidaen un-rite, he defiled even his own base successes.
Rumored of basalt architecture, the unholy tomb is simple enough. The moldering cerements and phylactery are sunk in a gloomy vault, perhaps near the River Styx. Existentially, a macabre menagerie grates this rank hollow cavity. The enslaved (his former servants) are but vacuous empty clots collectively poisoned and compressed. There they keep. Insane with madness directed at the still living, their gaping consequence is bitter, its horizon computed, frigid, negative, and ravenous. Wraith, shadow, wight, and ghast, they are the night tubes. Fiendishly wan, the wretched lich so pronounces a soul-ruined, accursed Sun of Asps, enslaved with the others onto Orcus and the cold march of time…
An yll wynde that blowth no man to good, men say – John Heyward
GM to name a lich. The lich just described is perhaps no realm shatterer like legendary Vecna, who is first described by Brian Blume in Eldritch Wizardry as two artifacts of great and grand horror, i.e., the hand and eye of Vecna. Nor, is it the demi-lich, Acererac, from TSR’s S1 Tomb of Horrors, who was once "a human magic-user/cleric of surpassing evil." Nor, is it fetid Asperdies, who is found rendered in TSR’s D1: Descent Into the Depths of the Earth. Last, while also inhabiting a pitch black chamber, it is unlike rotten but illustrated Asperdies, who lets his 600 magic mouths do the talking. No, our abject Sun of Asps speaks in archaic language only of hideous mourning and biting abject hatred.
Or, to keep one anonymous. Here, [and still as terrifying as it was in high school] let there be just the hideous, eye-popping, unnamed lich entry as delivered straight up in the AD&D Monster Manual 1e. As accursed revenant, this nameless lich reasserts his traditional cruelty and eldritch sorcery at the gametable.
Sun of Asps (lich) Lvl18, 89hits, armor -3,1d10,
incantations
1st sigil: charm person, affect fires, magic missile, magic mouth, push,
2nd sigil: audible glamor, darkness 15’ radius, invisibility, pyrotechnics, .shatter,
3rd sigil: explosive runes, fireball, haste, lightning bolt, slow,
4th sigil: confusion, dimension door, extension, fear, polymorph other,
5th sigil: cloud kill, cone of cold, monster summoning,
6th sigil: death spell, disintegrate,
7th sigil: reverse gravity, phase door.
Staff of Magic, +3 rotting cloak of protection
Sun of Asps
Corrosive legend both perverse and hard to attain assures the reviled arch mage’s abhorrent pedigree. In life this would-be lich had been a cruel and cunning man of typical, grim Gldarran stock, yet of ferocious intellect. That much is recorded in musty grimoire. It is written also that his lethal proclivity was so vicious that no contemporary dared to countermand him or his blasphemous inquiries. So, unchallenged, vile depravity congealed with his inevitable saturnine descent.
Aging, and with many tired thoughts to serve, he watched his old never idle hands wither. So, entrapped like Le Guin’s wretched necromancer, Cob, to embrace the exacting gravity of his own mortal pronouncements, grimly he proceeded. In first curiosity, then greed, then fear, and finally in labyrinthine terror, this appalling prodigy read deeply from forbidden elder scrolls. Armed (and alarmed), he was powerful when alive. Yet he faced with amplified foreboding as regards an ill-perceived, odious monotony—concerning the apparent, banal, inexorable staleness of death’s final repose. His eldritch choices bound him ever more severely to an unfathomable, deleterious senescence of horror and with more than an inkling for the worst.
He knew the unholy lays to Robert E. Howards’ immortal, dark Stygian, Akivasha, and the ruinous dance of Anne Rice’s Queen Akasha, and the freakish, murderous recital of the dark muse of KE Wagner’s wretched Opyros. How he yearned from such sordid stories for his own bitter success on some dire darker passage.
For if it is said that utter servile abjection is all undeath can ever be, then this Gldarran wizard of stingingly poisonous artifice took unprecedented steps to ensure his profitable journey upon such a road. With blood curdling optics and pseudonym, he would secure as properly as possible his coterminous identity postmortem. Continuance, this quaesitum he murderously craved, and for his battered, blasted footservants too. Thus, with wizen, maniacal, and meticulous method, he defended his future obsidian nuptials.
Oh, he knew the tales of d**nation. More than knowing, feelings of unholy anamnesis gripped his soul. He knew too of the passings of the planets and stars and of unthinkable exchanges in “color solid symbolism, where reside in points of junctions the fundamental conditions of the sensible world, and especially in the junctions of time, space, and number.” Verily, if true that two great cosmic wheels turn, one fast and one slow, then, with consummate chilling acumen and seeking devolution in leaden nemesis, so too he now addressed these Elysian cycles.
Dread consumed him. Yet with grave torschlusspanik he feasted then upon the icy covetousness of defeated sages, midnight pundits, and grim masters of the subterranean prehensile realms. He thereby acquired eons of stacked observation, which informed his hellish calibration to act. The frozen alienness of the aberrant races chastised his last remaining temerities. Advert with roiled knowledge as power—well timed yet never a “good” time for this act —so too did infamy mark his choices. When he completed the last abominable, pythonidaen un-rite, he defiled even his own base successes.
Rumored of basalt architecture, the unholy tomb is simple enough. The moldering cerements and phylactery are sunk in a gloomy vault, perhaps near the River Styx. Existentially, a macabre menagerie grates this rank hollow cavity. The enslaved (his former servants) are but vacuous empty clots collectively poisoned and compressed. There they keep. Insane with madness directed at the still living, their gaping consequence is bitter, its horizon computed, frigid, negative, and ravenous. Wraith, shadow, wight, and ghast, they are the night tubes. Fiendishly wan, the wretched lich so pronounces a soul-ruined, accursed Sun of Asps, enslaved with the others onto Orcus and the cold march of time…
An yll wynde that blowth no man to good, men say – John Heyward
GM to name a lich. The lich just described is perhaps no realm shatterer like legendary Vecna, who is first described by Brian Blume in Eldritch Wizardry as two artifacts of great and grand horror, i.e., the hand and eye of Vecna. Nor, is it the demi-lich, Acererac, from TSR’s S1 Tomb of Horrors, who was once "a human magic-user/cleric of surpassing evil." Nor, is it fetid Asperdies, who is found rendered in TSR’s D1: Descent Into the Depths of the Earth. Last, while also inhabiting a pitch black chamber, it is unlike rotten but illustrated Asperdies, who lets his 600 magic mouths do the talking. No, our abject Sun of Asps speaks in archaic language only of hideous mourning and biting abject hatred.
Or, to keep one anonymous. Here, [and still as terrifying as it was in high school] let there be just the hideous, eye-popping, unnamed lich entry as delivered straight up in the AD&D Monster Manual 1e. As accursed revenant, this nameless lich reasserts his traditional cruelty and eldritch sorcery at the gametable.
Sun of Asps (lich) Lvl18, 89hits, armor -3,1d10,
incantations
1st sigil: charm person, affect fires, magic missile, magic mouth, push,
2nd sigil: audible glamor, darkness 15’ radius, invisibility, pyrotechnics, .shatter,
3rd sigil: explosive runes, fireball, haste, lightning bolt, slow,
4th sigil: confusion, dimension door, extension, fear, polymorph other,
5th sigil: cloud kill, cone of cold, monster summoning,
6th sigil: death spell, disintegrate,
7th sigil: reverse gravity, phase door.
Staff of Magic, +3 rotting cloak of protection
