#divinity: time

Adventure: Doors To Yesterday, Windows to Tomorrow

We Study History as one might the wreck of a great ship, studying its flotsam, checking it against the manifests, extrapolating events from the damage we observe to fragments of hull. The great advantage of our search is that our wreck is set to occur at some point in the indefinite future, and with our hands on the tiller we may steer this vessel away from its inevitable fate. 

-Aderix, mage of the Circle of Navigators

Setup: To their fellow citygoers, the mages of the Circle of Navigators seem your typical lodge of wizards, gathering to discuss mystic business in secret, perhaps only as a pretense to socialize. They are not grand magi of myth or even powers within the city’s own elite, but there is still something uncanny about these dabblers that gives them a unique purpose. 

That something is a secret held among the members of the circle, concerning a great doom that will befall their city and render it a desolate ruin. Whatever this calamity was, it was so great as to spend fractures spiderwebbing out through the firmament, both forward and backwards through time. Together trough the study of these faultlines, the Navigators hope to track the origin of whatever ruin will befall their home, and have managed to open two fragile gateways capable of letting them step into the distant past and far future. 

The fist gateway leads to the plain upon which the city was founded, millenia in the past before habitation of any kind came to the land. The plain is inhospitable, in the depths of a drought that sees the presently temperate region as a virtual desert, buffeted by constant windstorms and cyclones that threaten to blow the very hills away. 

The second gateway leads to the city’s future, an ossified husk of a settlement that bears little resemblance to its current layout, inhabited only by creeping monsters and mad, desperate scavengers who have little idea of the outside world and have gone so far as to forget the city’s name. 

Untangling this temporal knot will require the party to explore the vast wilderness of the past, aid the Navigator’s research in the present, and delve the crumbling ruins of the future, a gauntlet of the party’s wits, strength and skills if ever there was one. 

Adventure Hooks: 

The Navigators have lost their leader, A mage by the name of Wesley by-Greenbend, boldest and bravest of their number, and mastermind behind their opening of the temporal gates. Wesley loved his city, and was the hardest to push the Circle to act in its defense, recruiting  many of them personally for their wisdom and abilities. He was also, coincidentally, a friend and correspondent of one of the partymembers, and before his disappearance sent them a letter requesting that they come to the city and see about meeting some of his friends. The Circle Beleives that in his haste, Wesley opened one of the portals himself, marooning himself somewhere in either the past or future, though which, they circle cannot say. 

The Circle first became aware of the looming disaster by way of the invisible fissures it created through time. Imperceptible and harmless to most, the first members of the Navigators charted them by observing how their fellow citygoers would gain or lose minute stretches of time. These fractures were a curiosity at first, but are at risk of reacting violently to the Circle’s meddling, to the point that when the party first enters town, they encounter a rampaging monster let loose from the time-stream, currently being engaged by the local gaurds and a member of the circle who just so happens to be on hand.  

Though many of the Circle of Navigators will help the party through their adventures in time, few may be as essential as Jinnella Palm, a young practitioner tapped by Wesley thanks to her skills at Chronomancy. Having only dabbled in time manipulation before joining the Circle, Ms. Palm’s expertise has only grown in exposure to the temporal anomaly, facilitating her invention of a charm that allows for the party to communicate with the Navigators across the time barrier without the need to ritually open a portal. Should they undertake a few optional missions, Jinnella will be able to perfect her charm and enable constant two-way communication across the millennia. 

Deity: Khronos, outer-god of ruin and the endless hunger of time.

“Ruins, by their nature need something to be remnants of, but this structure seems to have appeared out of nowhere sometime in the distant past, already derelict.  The oral histories of the locals and records of neighboring kingdoms confirm that one day ( though the date is hard to pinpoint) that the structure appeared in the wastes. A curiosity I mean to get to the bottom of or else my name isn’t ..... “

-Fragment of a journal found in the possession of a fossilized skeleton, ruin entrance.

Setup: Time has many aspects, the turn of seasons, the chronicle of years, the flow of one moment into another, and all these aspects have their master in the outer-god Khronos; the Last survivor of an exiled pantheon who was cast out into the maelstrom of the multiverse to make his way among desolate, empty places. Though he once ruled as king of the gods, patron of grain, wealth, and history, the current Khronos now rules over the merciless progression of time that slowly grinds all creatures and kings and nations to dust.  

Made wretched by his fall from grace, Khronos has shed his godly majesty and become sick with the memories of collapsed timelines, impossible futures, and pasts that never were,   a half feral thing driven only by pain, paranoia, and hunger:  To gain clarity and solidity, the vagrant god seeks to devour embodied archetypes of history: chronicles, oracles, relics of ages past.  Each meal provides the titan with a fleeting lucidity to make plans, enact schemes, and send visions to his cultists, before the madness of infinity once again drowns his mind. 

Greatest among the father of ruin’s hungers is his unquenchable desire for the flesh of  his fellow gods, a vice he is often too weak or too mad to actively pursue. Should a god die however, the scent of rotting divinity brings Khronos through the eons like a shark drawn to blood, heralded by long secreted cults that arise when they sense a neighboring faith waning. Such a feast gives Khronos years of clarity, enough time for him to martial his forces and attempt to organize another deicide before he slips back into temporal-madness. 

Khronos’s temples appear in abandoned places, far removed from the tide of history, whether in established ruins or manifesting wholecloth out of nowhere. In these ever-crumbling structures the outergod and his minions sift through the flotsam of forgotten ages, hiding as best they can from  any divinity that would disapprove of the vagrant deity’s meddling with the time stream.  

Adventure Hooks:

In attempting to prevent the rise of a tyrant with godly aspirations, the party may inadvertently draw the father of ruin to their realm. Imagine their surprise when moments after the supposedly final battle with a villain on the verge of ascension, the walls of reality crack open revealing an emaciated ancient who falls upon their foe’s fallen body and begins to tare into it with rotting teeth. 

While most divine beings detest Khronos,  the vagrant master of time is sometimes sought out as a means of granting final death to an immortal deemed too dangers to allow to continue. Such opportunities are few and far between, as the titan is prone to snapping libraries and demigods as appetizers before the main feast. Seeking out the fallen king is a danger in and of itself, and likely involves a trip to the deepest level of the underworld or some hellish prison plane. 

Khronos does not cultivate his own cult, instead inspiring prophesy with terrible visions and having them do most of his legwork. His worship arises spontaneously from those who gaze too deeply into the entropic maw of time, or those who dwell in quiet, ruined places that have been abandoned longer than they were ever occupied. His cult is particularly strong among survivors of terrible disasters, ghouls, gnolls, and harpies. Often these cults give themselves away to the outside world when they develop a habit of kidnapping and ritually devouring learned people. 

Titles: Lord of Seasons, father of ruins, fallen titan, the vulture god, lord of dust, 

Signs:  persistent feelings of deja-vu, prophetic dreams, unseasonable sandstorms, objects decaying into dust, rather than rotting, structural instability Symbols: A rusted sickle, a broken hourglass, a gnawed, yellow bone. 

Art source 1