At Hilde's Hargraves Greencake mine, the party learns that Greencake's nuclear energy is arcane energy. Jovie's ghost warns them that spells can release exponential arcane energy from refined Greencake, but still gives them the doubly refined Greencake Ishild wants. Back in Hollin, Ishild says he'll resolve the Omnipotent Ajana Paradox, by killing Ajana with the Greencake and the True Name.
The party sailed for Hilde with Captain Burns on his ship, Dervish. After a month, they arrived at Highpyre, the Inkeri barbarians' capital on Hilde. From Highpyre they followed the coast west about fifty miles, a day's sailing, until they spotted the mine. There, they saw northern-light-like flux lines coming down from the sky to the earth, which converged near but not at the mine. On an Arcana check they deduced:
The "flux lines" are the planet's ley lines converging at the planet's arcane north pole.
There was a little discussion about how the planet's arcane north pole was separate from the planet's geographic north pole. They went to the mine entrance:
The mine entrance is a classic abandoned mine entrance in the side of a mountain. It's crudely boarded up, and someone has drawn cartoonish skulls-and-crossbones on the boards, and scrawled "stay out" on them.
An old track, kind of like a railroad track, comes out of the mine entrance. It splits up and goes to several places around the mine entrance, and near the end of each branch of the track, there are giant hills of white salt.
Haden suggested that the ley lines might infuse the salt. He licked the salt, and found that it tasted like normal table salt, except just a little metallic.
They looked through the boards, and saw a rickety old mine shaft elevator in it. There was a little discussion about whether they would have to go down one at a time, but I clarified that it was a big industrial type elevator. For instance, the big hills of salt they saw would have come up in it. So, they could all go down together.
Inside the elevator:
A control with a long lever moves the elevator up and down, to either a first level or a second level.
They opted to go to the first level. There:
You're in a salt mine. There are tunnels neatly carved through the salt, with mine cart tracks everywhere there's a tunnel. The salt has a just barely discernable green tint.
Hargraves Greencake mine, level 1
They went north from the elevator A to B.
A salt cathedral. Just like all the tunnels in the mine, it's carved out of the green salt. There's a chandelier hanging from the ceiling, carved out of salt, and there are three little alcove chapels at the north end, in the classic Hollin style.
They asked what the three chapels were. I said the middle one (D) was a chapel to Ajana:
A small alcove chapel with a little table with a figurine on it, all carved out of the salt.
The figure is similar to the androgynous Ajana you've seen in other chapels.
The west chapel (C) has a slender figurine they hadn't seen before:
A small alcove chapel with a little table with a figurine on it, all carved out of the salt.
The figure is a slender man with long flowing robes and with a headdress that fans out from the back of his head.
And the east chapel (D) had a sleeping figurine, similar to the one they'd seen in the vampire Moonwell Temple of Night, but couldn't identify:
A small alcove chapel with a little table with a figurine on it, all carved out of the salt.
The figurine is a sleeping figure.
Virgil rolled Religion at the chapel to Ajana, a 16, and gained some enlightenment beyond what he'd learned at the previous chapels to Ajana:
Saying the True Name of Ajana gives power over Ajana's creation.
Virgil also prayed at the chapel, with Dan saying (my notes):
Virgil prays, starting to believe maybe. Ajana of the great Wuji, bless our group as we seek the Greencake and help guide us to find the refined Greencake. And then while we're at it, help me to figure out your god damn name or fuck you.
Virgil is frustrated because there's something he's aware of, inside he wants it. But he's frustrated, because he wants to believe and he's starting to believe, but he can't figure out the nameless name. So, he is attracted and frustrated because he knows he's ignorant.
After Virgil asked Ajana to "help guide us to find the refined Greencake," I just reminded them that the elevator A went down to a second level.
Elgis also gave each of the statues a little whisky, as an offering. I believe there was some discussion of whether the three figurines could be picked up, rotated, manipulated, but I said the salt floor, salt altars, and salt figurines were all carved out of the salt as one piece.
They went back to the elevator and went down to the second basement level.
Hargraves Greencake mine, level 2
They exited the elevator at A, then went north toward the four-way intersection between B and C. They found a few dead bodies on the way, in the north-south hallway. Rob wasn't at the game, but they had Barnaby do a Medicine check on the bodies, and he estimated they had been dead for thirty or forty years. I also said the bodies were giving off a just slightly noticeable green aura, and Haden said, "I wonder if we're dying from radiation poisoning right now."
I believe they asked if they perceived anything here, and I said the smell of salt here was more metallic on this level, and the metallic smell increased as they approached B and C. When they got to the four way intersection, they asked if B or C smelled more metallic, and I said C. They went into C:
This room has twenty-one industrial-looking machines with tubs inside them. The tubs spin.
They also found a few more bodies in this room, two male and one female. They asked if anything distinguished one from the others - was one likely to be the boss - but they failed their Insight rolls to know. I believe they searched the pockets but just found a few incidentals like pencils.
They rolled Arcana here and discovered:
arcana / nature check
As they were examining the machines, four green ghosts came in and attacked them. They fought the ghosts, learning through different attacks that their resistances and immunities were. Barnaby used Turn Undead and Sear Undead on them, driving two of them off. The remaining two possessed two of the bodies there, which exploded with a green dust when the party defeated them, damaging them.
Elgis had taken the most damage and had been reduced to two hits, but Barnaby healed him with Cure Wounds.
They went to B. There they found:
This room has twenty-one furnaces with boilers on top. If you look inside the boilers you can see some salt and water.
They did a Nature check and deduced:
Nature check
The quoted text there is (a tweak of) Google Gemini's summary of real-life fractional crystallization.
I believe there was some brief talk of maybe restarting the furnaces and centrifuges and refining some Greencake, but I don't think they pursued the idea. (And I was thinking, the amount of time and effort to make 20M gp worth of doubly refined Greencake would be prohibitive.)
Instead, they went to the elevator D and went down to the third level:
This level is just one room, a laboratory and library. There's another ghost here, bent over some books. She looks up and notices you and introduces herself as Jovie.
They asked Jovie what she was reading, and she said "the spontaneous release of arcane nuclear energy." True to form, Virgil asked if she was hot, and I rolled 11 on a 3d6 for her Charisma - average. Jovie told them:
34 years ago, I was a researcher working with Krohn, the emperor of Blackwells. Greencake is a green salt that contains arcane energy. It's usually used for summoning, but some other spells also require it as a material spell component.
Krohn and I figured out that the arcane energy that summoners normally get from Greencake is chemical energy. But Greencake actually contains hugely more energy than that - arcane nuclear energy.
Krohn and I hypothesized that if you refined Greencake, and collected a critical mass of it together, it would spontaneously release this nuclear energy. Krohn gave me this Greencake mine to collect and refine Greencake to test this hypothesis.
One day my workers and I accidentally collected too much refined Greencake together in one place - doubly refined Greencake - testing the hypothesis inadvertently. There was indeed a spontaneous release of arcane nuclear energy, and arcane radiation killed my workers and me instantly. However, we soon rose again as ghosts.
The others throughout the mine were also poisoned by the radiation. They died over the next few weeks and also became ghosts.
They asked Jovie if Ishild might be trying to kill everyone this way. She didn't know Ishild, but she said she had four chests that each contained 5M gp worth of Greencake - together, the amount Ishild wanted. Always an agent of chaos, Kiltak suggested they could use it to destroy Hollin, and Jovie told them:
In her own accident, the energy release petered out in a few minutes. But Jovie has discovered that a spell that used Greencake properly could create a "runaway" release of an exponential amount of arcane energy.
Of course, the spell would have to somehow consume all of that energy, or there would be an unimaginable catastrophe.
Haden asked who Jovie worked for, and she said Krohn, the emperor of Blackwells. But they failed their History roll to know anything about Krohn.
Mike said that Kiltak really was for "nuking" Hollin with the Greencake, or maybe blowing up the Phyla House Moonwell.
Mike also suggested that Ishild wanted the Greencake to kill something. Fayne suggested Ishild wanted it to "summon some crazy evil thing," and Christian posited that Ishild was trying to summon Ajana.
They took the four chests of Greencake, left the mine, and sailed home. Back in Hollin, the decided to bury the Greencake chests outside of Hollin pirate style, and Haden felt he could find the chests again using Fairie Fire, so the decided not to make a map or mark the spot.
They were on the fence about actually giving Ishild the Greencake, and they decided to ask Kasskar about Ishild and Greencake first. They went to his room at the Mooncalf.
They asked Kasskar straight-up why a lich would want Greencake. Kasskar told them a little bit about Ishild's history and the history of the Hollin Grimoire. He said Ishild had originally lived in the Mooncalf room next to his, but Kasskar and his party drove him out. He said the Hollin Grimoire, Ishild's current lair, originally belonged to the Hollin Oracle. The Oracle used the Grimoire's pit and Greencake for summoning spirits from other planes, and these spirits were the source of their oracular abilities.
Kasskar said the Oracle had summoned the spirit Deva from a plane of non-existence, to answer his questions about Hereward, an Elysian-Fields-like restful plane. Later, his party used the Grimoire's summoning pit to summon Lahar, a personification of Death, and Kasskar even claimed to have killed Lahar.
They asked how much Greencake it took to summon Lahar, and Kasskar said a box of Greencake about the size of a cigar box. They asked if they'd used normal Greencake or refined Greencake, and Kasskar said they'd used normal Greencake. The party thought that Lahar sounded god-like, and if Ishild required more Greencake a cigar box - doubly refined Greencake no less - he must be summoning a god.
They asked Kasskar if Ishild was interested in deities. Kasskar wasn't aware that Ishild was interested in deities, but said that Ishild was obsessed with math.
Mike suggested they just ask Ishild directly why he wanted the Greencake, and they went to Ishild's lair, the Hollin Grimoire.
Ishild welcomed Haden warmly and called him "my good man." He asked if they'd found the Greencake, and they said they'd found a "chunk" of it by sailing north to the "source." Ishild was very pleased and promised to reward them with great riches.
Kiltak asked directly what Ishild wanted the Greencake for.
Ishild asked Kiltak if he knew the Barber Paradox - does the barber who shaves everyone who doesn't shave himself, shave himself? He said that the answer had to be both yes and no: if he doesn't shave himself, well, he shaves everyone who doesn't shave themselves, so he does shave himself. If he does shave himself, well, he doesn't shave people who shave themselves, so he doesn't shave himself. It was a self-contradiction.
Kiltak bluntly asked what this had to do with Greencake. Ishild continued, explaining that the Barber Paradox was a reductio ad absurdum proof: the contradiction proves that some assumption that leads to the contradiction is false. In the case of the Barber Paradox, that would be the assumption that "the barber who shaves everyone who doesn't shave himself" exists.
But Ishild said that it's passive to just accept the contradiction as proof that the assumption is wrong. If you were more proactive, you would instead take the contradiction as a personal directive to ensure the assumption is false - to ensure that such a barber doesn't exist. So naturally, he and his minions have been systematically killing every barber in Hollin.
Kiltak demanded more angrily that Ishild come to the point. Ishild asked, have you ever heard of the Omnipotent Ajana Paradox - can Ajana create a rock that Ajana can't lift?
Ishild said in this case, the contradiction is a reductio ad absurdum proof that an omnipotent Ajana can't exist. But again, Ishild said he wouldn't passively accept the proof. Instead he would ensure that Ajana didn't exist, by summoning Ajana to the Grimoire with Greencake and the True Name and killing Ajana there.
Mike asked the other players if they wanted to help Ishild kill Ajana.
Virgil asked Ishild if Ajana actually existed, claiming that Ajana had "always spited me." Ishild said that if Ajana didn't exist, the summoning wouldn't consume the Greencake's energy and it would be released on Hollin. Virgil again suggested that Ajana didn't exist, saying "Are we ourselves not an illusion?" Ishild said, "Some say, I think therefore I am, although I don't necessarily believe that." Virgil/Dan seemed satisfied with that.
Elgis asked what great riches Ishild would give them. Ishild said he'd given one of his helpers immortality, but Christian said they might not want Ishild's brand of immortality, and Elgis said explicitly he didn't want to be undead. Ishild countered that he was a god himself, controlled vast geopolitical resources, and had given one of his other helpers control of the Caliphate.
Ishild also mentioned that through another helper, Beale the Goldenpiper, he had the fairy assassination spell Word Without Warning. Attacking with Word Without Warning would automatically kill "anything" if the user's attack had (in game terms) advantage on the victim. Ishild suggested that perhaps a rogue like Virgil might be able to get advantage on Ajana and try it.
They decided to give Ishild the Greencake. For now they gave him the first 5M gold pieces worth, saying they didn't yet have the rest but could get it. Elgis asked Ishild to give them 10M gold pieces to help secure the rest, and Ishild said he didn't have that much cash on hand, but it was doable. They decided to give Ishild the Greencake.
Ishild asked if they'd found the True Name of God. We recapped the party's progress finding it: they'd gone to the Steam Reasoning hall with Annie to research "true statements that can never be proven true"; men trying to protect the Name had attacked them there; and the party thought they would find more about the men at the Penance Chapel.
Haden gave Ishild the solution to the Two Guards Riddle, which they'd solved with the steam reasoning machinery in Game 12. Ishild was thrilled. He said his arm and voice were sore from continually beating and screaming at Modalye Grellen, and he could stop now that they had the solution. However, he said someone at the Brock House monument also wanted to solve the riddle, and asked the party to confirm their solution on the Brock House problem. They agreed.
The party went to Brock House monument in the City of the Dead.
Brock House monument, ground floor
They'd been there once in Game 6, when they'd accessed the Cisterns and then Hobnail Prison through the monument's fountain. They'd explored rooms 1-5 then, and notably, Kiltak had put Holbein Brock's skeleton back in its casket in room 5.
They asked if the place was abandoned or if anyone was around. I said it was abandoned and looked like it hadn't been maintained for a long time, but there were a few street urchins around who scattered when they appeared.
They looked in room 6:
This chapel is similar to the chapel in memory of Holbein Brock in (4), but a little inspection suggests this chapel was for the private use of the Brock family.
On and near some of the chairs here, the party finds a pile of beige dust.
They'd learned the story of Holbein Brock in room 4 in Game 6, but we went over it again. They'd also seen a previous "pile of beige dust" in Game 6, with a fingernail in it. I think they asked if the pile of dust was big enough to have been a person, and I said yes. They asked if it was ash, and I said no, it wasn't "ash ash," but it did have a consistency kind of like ash. They speculated that maybe it was a vampire that had been exposed to sunlight.
They looked in 7.
This appears to be a modest workroom for the "funerary cult" that would have e.g. prayed for Holbein's welfare in the afterlife and maintained the monument. It looks like it hasn't been used in a long time.
They went down the stairs to the monument's first basement.
Brock House monument, first basement
The stairs here, (1), went both up and down to another basement.
In (2), they saw:
A large (90' diameter) rotunda. There is a tall (15 feet) statue of a man in a crown and other royal regalia here. Around the circumference of the room, six long banners drape from the ceiling to the floor. All are the same, showing the same coat of arms.
Haden rolled History to see who the man was. He rolled 23 and knew that the man was Marin Brock, the first Brock king of Hollin. They went to (3), and saw:
Two caskets sit side by side in the center of this room. Four elaborately carved oak posts support a canopy over the caskets, similar to a four-poster bed. Effigies of a crowned man and crowned woman lay on their backs on the caskets' lids - the man is the same as the statue in the rotunda (2). Spent prayer candles surround the caskets on the floor.
There is an iron plaque on the east wall of this room, and an iron plaque on the west wall.
They read the plaque on the east wall:
Holbein Brock's son Quentin married King Sturgis's daughter Allison in 2941. Allison ascended the throne when Sturgis died in 2953.
They asked what the current year was. I stumbled at the table and couldn't come up with it, but the current year in the game is 3925. They read the plaque on the west wall:
Allison died in 2963, and Allison and Quentin's son Marin succeeded her. Although Marin inherited Allison's throne, Hollin's noble houses were paternal, so Marin inherited Quentin's name and house. So when Marin Brock became king, Brock House became the royal house.
They wanted Barnaby to Speak With Dead with Marin, and Kiltak took the lid off of Marin's casket, while the rest of the party stood safely back. Mike asked if there were any items in the casket, and I said yes:
Marin Brock's tabard
A tabard (tunic) emblazoned with Maren Brock's royal coat of arms - four quarters with the Brock House symbol, the Whitman House symbol, a symbol of Gradska, and a symbol of Ajana.
The tabard gives:
Kiltak claimed Marin's tabard.
Speak with Dead let them ask Marin 5 questions, and they asked:
Although Marin's corpse gave weak answers, I'll note that the Speak With Dead spell says his corpse "knows only what it knew in life" and "doesn't comprehend anything that has happened since it died."