Mage Campaign Story
(09/22/00) Thrown together by bizarre shared dreams about the end of the world, Cui, Kaitlen, Malakai, and Vivaine discovered an immense Nephandi labyrinth and decided to explore it for the key to our nightmares' meaning. Within it we encountered Al-Ashwad, the first Nephandi, and his right-hand man Tsunogako.
(10/06/00) We escaped from the labyrinth with seven books. After being unable to find a translator, we were approached by a trio of Japanese businesspeople who expressed an interest in one of the weirder books and refused to take no for an answer. We had to fight them off to keep the book out of their hands, and discovered they had supernatural powers of their own. After that incident (and when a large number of supernaturals began looking for us), we decided to enter the Umbra and try to translate the books at the River of Languages. We managed to translate two of them, one of which was the Book of Nod. Yup.
(10/13/00) Discovering we didn't know how we were going to get out of the Umbra, we asked for help at Lord Huo's Court of Elemental Fire and were deposited in Japan in the midst of a gathering of shapeshifters just before they were torn apart by various Nephandi. We would have died, too, but the Japanese businesspeople (who turned out to be kuei-jin) rescued us and convinced us to enter a partnership with them. Despite a rough start (Vivaine refused to eat human flesh, and Cui impregnated one of them) we became allies, and later ventured into the 1000 Hells to gather more information.
(10/21/00) In the 1000 Hells, Vivaine was attacked by spirits and completely incapacitated, Malakai got a bunch of derangements and Kaitlen got tons of Jhor after running into the Yama Kings, and Cui sacrificed himself to the wrath of Tsunogako so the rest of us could escape. (He later returned as a kuei-jin.) However, we did determine that the events the Book of Nod described were taking place in Los Angeles, and went there to try to stop Al-Ashwad from destroying the world.
(10/26/00) After wasting the better part of a month dicking around in Los Angeles, we decided that our best course of action would be to blow up an opera house that we thought was the center of some evil activities. All of us were arrested for arson and were due to be stuck in prison when Gehenna arrived (don't you hate it when that happens?), but Kaitlen orchestrated a jailbreak. After that, Porthos and nine archmagi came to town and asked us to help them stop Al-Ashwad. Our combined powers proved to be pitiful compared to his, though, and just as all existence was about to cease we found ourselves transported back 7,000 years by a powerful talisman to ancient Babylon, where we had to find Al-Ashwad and stop him before he got too powerful.
(11/05/00) Malakai became a Babylonian priest to gather information, and we soon discovered Al-Ashwad's whereabouts. However, he was 12 at the time, and his mother proved to be very resistant to our attempts to capture him. After she tried to kill us with her own evil magic, Malakai immolated her with an enormous fireball. The stress brought on Al-Ashwad's Awakening, and he vowed that he would have his revenge on us no matter how long it took him. With that, Cui ripped his heart out--but his Avatar escaped. Oops. We soon found ourselves transported ahead in time again.
(01/05/01) While wandering through the forests of 1022 AD Transylvania, we came across Sododaan, an Akashic Brother who had been sent from China due to reports of “dark forces” gathering in the west. Not knowing what else to do, we decided to follow him to his destination. After traveling through a mountain range with some very strange caves and reaching a town of settled-down gypsies, Sododaan announced that we had arrived. The townspeople were very concered about “dark things coming down from the mountains” and in particular, one person whom they called “the Master.” That night at the town inn, the Master (a Tzimisce vampire) came to us and requested our presence in his home. He took us to a cave in the mountains and offered us his hospitality for the night. The following day, we looked around his house, discovered that his furniture was alive, freaked out, and asked for permission to leave. The Master told us about a huge conflict brewing between the Tzimisce and the Tremere and told us we could have our freedom after delivering a message to one of his allies on the front lines. So we delivered the message (fighting our way through some ghouls to get there) to his ally, who turned out to be his “older sister,” who had the apperance of a 12-year-old girl but was actually 10,000 years old. She offered us riches and, more importantly, information on Al-Ashwad’s whereabouts, if we aided the Tzimisce by infiltrating House Tremere and helping bring about their downfall. We agreed. The Mistress got us into Ceoris by creating an enormous vozhd which attacked the castle but avoided us, allowing us to kill it spectacularly and gain the trust of the Tremere.
(01/12/01) Inside Ceoris, we met Tremere and his fellow mages and were given full run of the stronghold. Kaitlen, Malakai, and Sododan went to the library to research Al-Ashwad and found out that House Tremere had been battling him for hundreds of years, but still hadn’t been able to defeat him. This led to a rather large argument about whether we should continue working for the Tzimisce or switch sides to help House Tremere, but we decided to stick to our original plan. Meanwhile, Vivaine and Cui explored the lower levels and found a secret passage. They gathered the rest of us and we descended into the bowels of Ceoris. On the lowest level, we found several rooms containing various disgusting things, such as swarms of gnats that ate Kaitlen, Sododaan, and Vivaine’s skins and a bird/wolf thing that awakened Cui’s demon nature and caused him to ditch us. After stumbling upon a room containing some kind of screaming fat monstrosity, an obese vampire and her gargoyle minions were alerted to our presence. Some well-placed fast-talk allowed us to escape after a stern talking-to. Curious about the events in the cellar, we decided to speak to some of the lower-level members of House Tremere to see if they knew what was going on. Kaitlen and Sododaan spoke with Aeoli, a confused Hermetic who had been dropped off at Ceoris by his somewhat insane mentor and had been a guest for the past year. He knew nothing, and freaked out when we told him we were looking for Al-Ashwad. We were then summoned by Tremere and told that all guests would have to leave Ceoris as the Tremere prepared for a major ritual. After convincing Aeoli to join us (thinking his knowledge of the layout of Ceoris would come in handy), we reported our findings to the Tzimisce and asked what else we had to do for the information about Al-Ashwad. She essentially laughed in our faces, turned into a beautiful woman (her true form), took Cui with her (he had been blood bonded to her earlier, while attempting to get rid of his demon sight!), and sent in a bunch of ghouls to kill us. We fought our way through the ghouls and returned to Ceoris to warn the Tremere. Despite our earlier screw-ups, they accepted our help. A major battle ensued in which Cui commanded the Mistress’ legions of ghouls, we fought them off with fire, and Tremere killed the Mistress. Tremere thanked us for our help. With Cui freed from his blood bond and some new information about Al-Ashwad, we discussed what to do next.
(01/26/01) We parted ways with the Tremere but stayed in touch with them. We perfected a ritual to stop the aging process and spent 300 years improving our knowledge, hiding from Al-Ashwad, and hoping to become powerful enough to face him eventually. In the early 1400s we got word that an enormous meeting of vampires called the Convention of Thorns was taking place in Paris. Curious, we decided to go to Paris and sneak into the Convention. On the road to Paris, we met a very strange vampire who called himself Troy (“Like the city, only smaller”). He took a liking to Cui and Sododaan and asked us to follow him to Paris, which we did. Strangely enough, Troy was able to travel in the daytime and never seemed to have to feed. When we reached the city, Troy helped us to look more like vampires, and we spent about a week preparing for the convention. Toward the end of that time, we thought we saw Al-Ashwad hanging around the place we were staying, which made us nervous to say the least. When the day of the convention came, we showed up at the meeting place just in time to see a number of elder vampires took the floor to debate the formation of a new organization—the Camarilla. One of them was Al-Ashwad, posing as a Lasombra named Adrian who was staunchly pro-Camarilla. Realizing that the formation of the Camarilla might very well be part of his plan to destroy the world, we decided to argue against it. Aeoli, Cui, Kaitlen, and Malakai jumped into the discussion and tried to convince a room full of Antediluvians and Methuselahs that adopting the Masquerade would make them weak and susceptible to domination by their elders, their childer, and the humans. Several people agreed with us, including Atrius, the leader of the Tremere, who spoke to us after the Convention and said we had raised grave doubts in his mind about the entire plan. Three days later, the clans voted. The Camarilla was formed indeed, but the Tremere voted against it and joined the Sabbat. Al-Ashwad did not seem at all happy about that. After the Convention, Troy said a few interesting things about Al-Ashwad that made us decide to follow him for the time being, after spending another night in our lodgings in Paris. The next morning, we awoke to find that the room next to us was on fire. Rushing in to extinguish it, we found a mirror standing in the center, completely unburned, with Al-Ashwad’s image inside it, smiling at us. We all looked in the mirror; Aeoli and Sododaan were offered power, riches, and enlightenment in exchange for double-crossing us, while the rest of us saw images of ourselves being tortured by Al-Ashwad. With that, we were all sucked into the mirror—and Al-Ashwad’s mind. We saw his anguish over the murder of his mother at our hands, and the deaths of 17 of his lovers over the years (at the hands of his Avatar!). The thought of our utter destruction was the only thing that gave him pleasure. We also learned that he had elevated his Avatar (which appeared as an angel with sharp teeth and claws) to godlike status, and that it had encouraged him to destroy the world. With that, we were thrown out of his mind and back into the real world.
(02/10/01) Unsure of what else to do, we followed Troy around Europe for a few more years, until he reached Spain and was mysteriously accepted into the royal family. He offered us positions at court, which we took. We decided that we wanted to wait things out until Columbus’ voyage to the New World, thinking Al-Ashwad might try to interfere with it. Unfortunately, due to our ageless appearance, we had to find a way to make things look less suspicious. Malakai and Sododan tried to train “replacements” at court whom they could later replace, with varying degrees of success; Sododaan’s replacement was a bit of a fool, and Malakai’s adopted son Pip was Embraced by Clan Lasombra along the way. Vivaine tried to insert herself into the royal family by seducing the prince, but he refused to marry her and she ended up bearing his bastard child. The child, Diana, became a mage who at age 16 was more powerful than anyone else in our cabal. Aeoli and Kaitlen decided to take on students in the melee arts, pose as husband and wife, and invent two “children” who would actually be themselves when they entered court. But along the way, Aeoli and Kaitlen fell in love, got married, and had a child, Sebastian, who was a mage of fairly average ability. After about 60 years of this, Columbus came to the court, gained support for his voyage, and began to plan. The six mages, Diana, Sebastian, Pip, and Troy all signed up to join the voyage. After several months at sea, we came at last to the New World and began to explore the island on which we had landed.
(02/23/01) Knowing there was nothing on the island, we convinced Columbus to keep moving until he reached Mexico, where we came to shore at the height of the Aztec civilization. Once there, we learned that a large religious festival involving lots of human sacrifice would be taking place in two weeks. Curious, we left Columbus to his own devices and walked to the capital city of Tenochtitlan to find out what was going on. Along the way, Kaitlen learned that she was pregnant with Aeoli’s child (a daughter they would later call Eleanor) and discovered the tenth sphere, Void, which allowed her (among other things) to sense Nephandic activity. With that power, she learned that the city was a regular beacon of the stuff...and that Al-Ashwad had set himself up as king, and modified the Aztec rituals to add to his power. We also learned that under the conditions of the ritual, we would be able to destroy Al-Ashwad’s Avatar right then and there. After much debate, we decided the time had come to gilgul Al-Ashwad and thus stop him once and for all, and we bravely (and somewhat foolishly) rushed forth into the middle of the ritual. The only thing that saved us was the well-timed intervention of the forces of destiny, which blessed us with power enough to battle Al-Ashwad face to face. Malakai caused a solar eclipse, Aeoli dominated the royal guards into killing themselves, Cui assumed a 30-foot-tall demon form, Sododaan teleported the royal mages into the center of the earth, Vivaine summoned a killer umbral bunny rabbit mount and forced Al-Ashwad to feel the pain he had inflicted on others, and Kaitlen stepped outside reality (and nearly Ascended) to tweak the forces of probability favorably in our direction. Soon it was down to us versus Al-Ashwad and his evil demon Avatar. Things were looking bleak until Troy appeared out of nowhere to incapacitate Al-Ashwad, permitting Malakai to do the honors of the gilgul rite. With that, Troy revealed that he was actually Malkav himself. He congratulated us, but found it funny that we thought we had any control over what had taken place. Their mission accomplished, the Dabu Six rode off into the sunset for a much needed vacation, and (we hope) lived happily ever after.
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