New OOC
I'm trying to tailor the game to your interests, so please let me know if you can still play or if I should remove you. I hope everyone can still play. Here's what I tried to do:
The goal is to attain the Cuirass of Hope, adjudicating whether it is the ultimate weapon for battling the fire elementals. If you're able to slay the fire elementals and bring their black fire (it takes some rules elements to change their colour, something of a Craft skill but infused with song, given the sonorous odes to Apollo resound even now in the halls of the place of the dead, the temple). The fire elementals are servants of Apollo and their death forces them into a form which makes their black fire able to bend like wildfire.
The city is such that the Parthenon and the black fire upon its altar are able to end the riots by heeding the goals of the thieves commanded by Jil, whose goals, dousing the fire in the central lake, will ease the riots Rodney King style. Already you're surrounded by smashed windows and loud screams, but the gods will speak words to settle the furor, even using charm spells on small animals to allow Artemis to witness the combat directly, contacting other cities by beacon if the riots don't settle down fast enough. The spires rise into the distance, overtaking communal views, with turrets on some of the buildings fielding a windowed glance at a cupola that was Turkish in origin but supposedly also where there is housed a history of "black fire." And it's connected to the library with the Gilded Halls, where preludes toward interpersonal love are printed at the local printer, for the tech level is such that fliers are churned out, many of which litter the streets even now.
The sloping streets offer tides in heavy rains of Dionysian dolphin song, which is supposedly on several graffiti selections throughout the city, obviously painted with brushes rather than aerosol. The city sits in a nest of smoug, with Golgotha's acid rain (1d4 + 2 in 3 bursts, WILL save halves) hurting the dolphins but also allowing for the paint to become magical glyphs that those who imbibe hallucinatory drugs comme Delphi maintain. The black fire is supposedly able to enrich those glyphs to create real items, kind of a STR 5 check to break them and get the constituent magical energy, essentially if you take the materials to Skie's Treasury, you are able to get items that sing the song of the gods in a noble manner.
The magical tunnels are able to be collapsed, which is what some of the gods want to do, to keep the riots in the city as low key as is possible. But your mission is to deliver the fire to the pictures, sing it to the dolphins, and maybe see about the clean-up of the city before bringing the fire to Skie's Treasury to have new weapons for slaying the creatures in the countryside (it'll take one hour of horse travel to get there, and there are plenty of horses in the mix) and Skie knows secrets about how to get the items even more powerful at cities patroled by the shadow, which is soon to be Baden's Bluff if you don't act quickly. In other words, the items, like the Cuirass of Hope, are able to do slashing damage to vulnerable astirax to re-arrange Artemis's board, for she scries as an interlocutor without being explicitly on one side or the other, Greek or Dark. You might be attracting the attention of Izrador if you travel, so be aware.
