The Worldwound tore reality apart at the dawn of the Age of Lost Omens, murdering the nation of Sarkoris and unleashing a ravenous demonic horde upon the world. Only the quick action of several other nations of knights, barbarians, and heroes stemmed the demon army and contained it within lost Sarkoris, and for the next century, crusade after crusade tried to defeat the demons only to fail time and time again. Their greatest success, the line of magical artifacts known as wardstones that stand sentinel along the Worldwound's border, barely manages to contain the demons. So when one of the wardstones is sabotaged, a city falls and the demons within surge out in a massive assault like none before. Even before the Fifth Crusade has begun a city has fallen and some of the crusaders' greatest defenders and heroes are slain. Can anyone rise up against the demon host to prevent the armies of Deskari, the demon lord of the Locust Host, from swallowing the world?



DMs: Adam Hansen
Campaign Journals

It might be useful were you to know just how unusual a childhood my sister and I had.  To us, it was all we knew, so strangeness was something we simply took in stride.  All the way to my earliest memories, my parents provided education and experience for us, trying to ensure that we could grow up as advantaged and balanced as they could arrange.  We were drilled, for instance, in the extensive and convoluted mire that is Avistani nobility.  I am able to recite no less than three generations of relationships for current nobles above the rank of landholder, and the history to same depth in the case that titles have passed outside of blood relation.  While our parents were clear that formality and playing-the-game was something we must be able to do, we were not required to always speak and address rigidly.

    This brings me to my aunt and uncle.  Actually, not my real aunt, she's a series of stories for another day.  No, in this case I refer to Ezzy and Izzy, two of my blood-aunt's... misadventurer friends.  They were around from time to time while we were growing up, but "around" is a relative term with those two.  Izzy played a mean - if completely unfair - game of hide & seek, and while Ezzy was a warmer man, even when he was visiting he would often wander off to putter with magic he was experimenting on.  I think I was about five when Brenlofwyn told me that Ezzy wasn't literally in Father's pocket when I couldn't see him.  Ezzy was a traveler, often taking sabbaticals from royal-abducting and other geo-political... crafting.  You never knew when he might show up with a giant wolf, or giant giant, or both, or vanish for a month without explanation.  As such, you'd think that it would have been him that took me into the Starstone Citadel, but it wasn't... it was Izzy.

    If there is a more paranoid and cautious person on Golarion, I have not met them, which makes sense, I suppose.  It didn't seem strange to us that aunt Izzy spent most of her time invisible, and that her compromise to ensure nobody in the household bumped into her was to simply float unseen at the ceiling.  That was just her.  Imagine my surprise when on one bright sunny summer morning she appeared before me, fully visible, and specifically seeking me out.  She had a look of deep concern, but that might have just been her face in general.  I addressed her by her formal titles, referencing her rank at the Arcanamirium in Absalom, mostly to see if I could get a reaction.  None of auntie Lofwyr's friends have much stomach for formality.  Well, Izzy seemed preoccupied, but she asked simply if I would be interested in participating in an - how did she phrase it?  Experidventure, I believe.  Well, I did what any eleven-year-old of noble upbringing and stature would do... I thoughtfully sorted through the list of words I knew that meant "yes", and chose the right one for the moment.  I believe "yippee" was the winning candidate, understandably.

    So it was that I learned aunt Izzy had been spending a considerable time researching a rather epic spell.  She had already laid the groundwork for our adventure, covertly placing a series of containing runes around our target.  I believe I may have failed to convey to you just how... undetectable... Izzy was when she put her mind to it.  Suffice it to say, she had managed to spend days floating invisibly and unseen in one of the busiest courtyards in the world, casting magic beyond the reach of nearly every other being, ever.  Nobody ever noticed her, or her works.

    She teleported us - excuse me, she would be most upset were I not to with due accuracy inform that the variant she used was greater teleport, and it is entirely possible that she is proximate right now, listening to this story from a vantage point you cannot penetrate.  Such as right in front of you.  Did I mention "most upset"?  But I digress.  Izzy magically relocated us to a massive clearing within a nondescript jungle.  Now, when I say "clearing", that implies that the local plant life had been cleared, which is certainly true, but misleading.  You might assume that someone had cut down the trees and vines and undergrowth, or perhaps burned them away.  That wasn't the case.  Izzy told me - distractedly - that she had negotiated with a grove of druids to temporarily relocate the natural occupants of the area for a time sufficient for her plan.

    That was when she told me her plan.  I don't wish to suggest that this was the first time I had asked, but it was certainly the first time she took notice of my curiosity and told me what we were doing here, in the middle of Upper Nowhere, Irrelevantland.  She told me that she had need to know if it was possible for her to cause it to come to pass that she would be within the Starstone Citadel, and more importantly if it was possible for her to do so without being alone.  Now, I had known this woman for most of my life, and so it was that I knew there was more to her than the quiet, hidden person that she (rarely) allowed the world to see.  There was a specific point of tenderness to her that nobody quite understood, but we all knew about.  Thus, despite being rather young, I marshaled my mental armies and outmaneuvered the ignorance, and so came to realize that this whole scenario must be about... him.

    I don't have to explain or justify Izzy's choice of companions, so you will simply have to accept that when I tell you that the friend closest to her heart in all the world was a goblin.  Yes, yes, I know, goblins are feral, evil, violent, uncontrollable tornadoes of unpleasantness.  This one wasn't like that, almost as if when he was born, he read the description on his egg and chose to be none of the things that are actually goblin.  Well, except being green.  He kept that part.  That and the lifespan orders of magnitude shorter than hers.

    Do you see where this was going yet?  Well, I did.  I was the guinea pig, with her trying to learn if she could, when the time came, smuggle him into the Starstone Citadel, and make him into an immortal god.  No, I'm not kidding.  These are the people my formative years were embroiled with.

    There isn't much more to tell in this tale.  Izzy explained to me that while many, many people had tried and failed to enter the Citadel, she had a theory that there was a better way, one she planned to use to get us in.  She told me that the Citadel had plenty of means to defend itself, ways to keep hopefuls from entering from the outside, and her trick was going to be... not being noticed by any of them.  Well, I asked how she planned to do such a thing from out here in this denuded field (not that I knew that word at the time), and she told me that she had researched a spell that instead of moving us into the Starstone Citadel, would move the Citadel from its resting place in Absalom to around us, without us moving at all.  Again, no, I'm not kidding.  She had created some weird wards to manage the temporary relocation, and some spells to maintain the illusion for the Absalomi tourists that the main attraction was still present.

    I can't tell you if Izzy ever repeated the spells with Url.  I can't tell you if she did it again, or before our trip, with Brenlofwyn.  She was inscrutable that way.  But what I can tell you is that my aunt and I spent a lazy afternoon many years ago, wandering the halls of the Starstone Citadel.  And that, is how I spent one day of one of my summer vacations.