Chimpman wrote:We know that back in Shimmering Lands time the process for creating Soulforged was perfected and widely used. That being the process of extracting a dwarven soul from its body (as an Elder's way of extending their own life) and placing it into a new body made of stone. Denwarf (Dranwyrf back then) himself went through the process at one point and has survived through the ages to come back and help his people at various points in time.
However, we know something else about Denwarf... eventually he went crazy. What if the bodies of the Soulforged allowed more than just the dwarven soul to get inside. What if Other Things could get inside too. That might be why the creation of Soulforged bodies fell out of fashion after the Shimmering Lands collapsed. Denwarf could be an anomaly... probably protected to some extent by Kagyar so that he could complete the tasks his immortal patron had set for him, but other Soulforged would have become corrupted by the Outer Beings and would have been destroyed by their peers.
So what might sit beneath Dengar? Could it be remnants of Denwarf's original Estate... remnants that include the apparatus and knowledge required to create a Soulforged body? If so, some unscrupulous dwarves might want to gain such knowledge, either to create their own Soulforged bodies, or to create an army of Soulforged warriors (filled with who knows what). Either way, should such knowledge come back into use, Bad Things(TM) are sure to happen.
RobJN wrote:Hmm. This sounds a bit like a certain process performed at a certain facility, but with a body made mostly of flesh, rather than stone.... And we've seen just the beginning of what happens when a presence other than the intended one takes up residence inside the shell...
I'm opening this topic to bounce some ideas around, mainly with John, but I don't want to limit it to just our ramblings. This is a portion of Mystara's history that is a bit of a blind spot for me, and I would like to learn more about the cultures that formed in the wake of the Great Rain of Fire, but also those that predated it, and left ruins beneath ruins beneath ruins.Chimpman wrote:It does doesn't it!Oh! This idea may be just what I was looking for a while back when I wanted to tie in some BC 2300 villains with Thorn's Mystara. Could the World Mountain/Balck Sands area be a facility housing Shrikes and Sirens? If it is, then perhaps this is where the dwarves pry loose the secrets of creating the Soulforged in the first place. This could be the set for my first Shimmering Lands based adventure!
Blackmoor did a healthy bit of exploring as that Empire grew, fought wars and planted colonies all along the Lands to the West. What became of those colonies? How much of that lore is canon, and what have other Mystaraphiles written about the lands and peoples that might have grown up around (or been there because of) Imperial Blackmoor expansion and trade before the planet shifted on its axis? How much of that was left when the lands stabilized and the ice receded?
I'd like to take this opportunity to dig into some of the possible activities of the Last Daughters of the First Kingdom, to further seed their legends and legacies throughout what would become the Known World. And if I can help John write a few adventures in the process, well, that's just peachy
