Thursday, May 21, 2020

The fifth clan

One Balinor plot explored the caverns on the other side of the map from Mylandiel: south of Rastignac. This plot was another MacGuffin hunt, to the Red Rock Bellows; which Balinor's party left for home, by way of the Belfry of Thirith. Monsters were fought along the way. So far, so basic.

What springs out is that some of the "monsters" are elvish servitors of Atzanteotl. Not heretics either: these hadn't even heard of the elves' patron, Rafiel. Based on what I've seen from this DM, he was introducing the Schattenalfen from the Hollow World. But.

The City is already short a 100,000 headcount. The desert waste, since it became Lost Souls, is a formidable barrier to the Core; who knows what's down there, besides the dead. Further, the Starpoint Woods / Salandia Reaches cavern, right beneath Alfheim and stuffed with elvish placenames, is guarded by a castle... to the west. The lake downstream has a village on it, and there's the town Jeredor just eight miles UPstream; why fortify the clearly-placid space between. And then there's the module claiming that the Shadow Elves have tunnels as far as Thyatis. Sure, we can scoff at the "bad design". But.

Why not just go for it. Leave the Starpoint cavern as-is; shifted eastward, perhaps (it doesn't need to be directly under Alfheim city). It keeps its tower, castle, and towns. But these are not righteous towns. The cavern belongs to the Anasazi Elves, that offshoot before the four clans came to Aengmor. Their base is still further upstream, of both Gilfyn and Delnador. Maybe they're hooked into the Hollow World of the red sun, but that doesn't matter.

I bet a good portion of the enormities which the surface races impute upon the elves of Rafiel have nothing to do with Rafiel, but instead are the work of the feathered serpent.

It follows further that Rastignac could belong to either sort of elf. It all depends on which tunnel got carved out first, the north one or the south one.

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