Desert of Desolation XVI

Sir Blanque - swordsman and handsome, dashing noble half mer-person
Marion - stabby stabby dagger specialist; Nihrain who currently carries the Runestaff
Destiny - Menastrai sorceress covertly raised on Melnibone
Bomilcar - Weeping Waste nomad from a chieftain's family

Campaign narrative

The crystal cathedral in which the characters now find themselves has six side chapels, each of which holds another hologram depicting a different place/time of some sort. They know that they need to find six miniature holograms of minarets to complete the main artwork in the centre of the cathedral, so it looks as though it's time for six side quests. It doesn't really matter which is first, but after taking a look at them all, they realise that each has what looks like a teleport station set into the floor underneath the hologram that represents what is presumaby its destination. It doesn't really matter which one they take first, since they'll need to follow them all.

They decide on one that leads to something that looks like an enormous ancient temple of some sort. Stepping through the portal, they realise that this place is indeed cyclopean in scale, but it becomes more and more decayed and ruined the further away one moves from the gateway:

The building is at the top right of the map as you look at it.

Eventually the ruins open out onto a nightmare scene. A swirling black sky decentres whole constellations as a maelstrom wails towards an impossible island beyond the end of a looping peninsula. The island is placed at the entrance to what can only be described as the funnel of an abyss of chaos, but impossibly it just hovers there, seemingly impervious to the howling all around it. The far left point of the peninsula is constantly reforming as chunks of it break off, hurtling towards the floating isle before being sucked away. The island holds an altar on which sits a minaret. But how to get to it?

This is where the Runestaff plays its part. It needs an environment like our own in order to survive, and is capable of creating a bubble of reality around itself that can shelter the party. They use this property of the relic to reach the end of the peninsula, and Marion shadow teleports across to grab the minaret. The island immediately starts to fall apart, but she makes it back across safely.

In the meantime, Destiny is mesmerised by the multiple possibilities presented by the chaotic abyss, so much so that Sir Blanque physically has to restrain her from throwing herself into the sky just to see what happens. Eventually she calms down, realising that being ripped apart by the forces of chaos might not be such a good idea after all. Even if she were to survive, who knows where she could end up, and that could put a bit of a crimp in her desire to find Mournblade.

The groups returns, battered and buffeted, and teleports back with the minaret. They place it in its receptacle to replace its part of the main central hologram in the crystal cathedral.

Umpire's comments

It's just as well that the players had the Runestaff, because the timewinds and distance distortion portions of the looping peninsula are not funny. Cate as Destiny was determined to see what would happen if she threw herself into the seething funnel, and it took quite a lot of persuasion to stop her doing it just for the sake of it - obviously the chaos was having quite an effect on her Melnibonean heritage. Afterwards, she even rolled against her Power to see what would have happened, and got a critical success. Playing that out in person would have taken a bit of imaginaion, to put it mildly.