Liriel-Anneth Mutant Concept Test

LIRIEL-ANNETH The Zalvenesh find very few large or powerful artifacts, but they occasionally pull genuine wonders from the sea. One such artifact now provides a cautionary tale to all of the coastal peoples. The Zalvenesh once had a city. The port of Liriel- Anneth was neither a very large city, nor a place of wonders. The Shogunate built it of plain local stone, with no Essence devices. Liriel-Anneth also showed the damage inflicted by centuries of residents with minimal skill at masonry. Still, it was their city, where their chiefs gathered to honor their gods and where ships from far lands dropped anchor. Ninety years ago, a Zalvenesh diver found a large, intact artifact several dozen miles offshore. The strangely shaped mass of metal and crystal was the size of a small hut. A team of divers pulled it to the surface using dozens of large, air-filled bladders. They brought it to Liriel-Anneth. The Guild kept a scavenger-savant in residence. She pronounced the device intact and probably functional; at least, the three sockets in the device still held Essence- producing hearthstones. Still, it seemed to need extra Essence to start it up. The scavenger thought it looked somewhat like drawings she had seen of one of the Old Realm’s greatest wonders, a reality engine—a device to fix reality and repel the Wyld. She and a God-Blooded priest finally managed to start it up. The scavenger was almost right. The divers found an experimental device meant to turn reality malleable over a wide area, duplicating the power of an unshaped raksha and then congeal reality again into a new form: not a reality engine, but a reality-altering engine. Perhaps the ancient Lawgivers intended it for exotic entertainments. Perhaps it was a weapon. The Liriel-Anneth device might have suffered damage the scavenger lord could not detect. Certainly, the power- ful device was never meant for operation by mere mortals. Whatever the reason, the activated device covered the entire city with a warped and terrible dream. During the day, shadows blanket an area three miles wide—the entire city of Liriel-Anneth and then some. On the brightest sunny days, the region stays only as light as early twilight, and the interiors of buildings never become brighter than nights of the full moon. The Liriel-Anneth mechanism also created dozens of intelligent and hungry golden-bodied serpents, each of them as thick as a man’s leg and 15 feet long. Several hundred people of Liriel-Anneth could not escape in time and suffered a terrible transformation. They come out only at night, for even the dimmed daylight of the city causes them pain. They are completely insane and worship these serpents as their gods. These wretches attempt to capture any intruders and feed them to the serpents. The inhabitants of the cursed town also feed on captives that the serpents seem slow to devour. The inhabitants of Liriel-Anneth have the eyes and skins of serpents and can see in the dark as well as cats. Fortunately, these twisted mortals never stray beyond the reach of the Liriel-Anneth mechanism. The golden serpents cannot leave the city, since they would fade to nothingness the instant they ventured beyond the device’s area of affect. The Zalvenesh and other inhabitants of the Northwest coast avoid Liriel-Anneth. Sailors have been known to let their leaking boats sink, so they die in the freezing waters, rather than land near the cursed town.