I often write boxed text for new in-game events and locations. I find it easier to think through the sights, smells, and other sensations during GM prep and write them out, rather than improv’ing when I’m trying to write a game. Here’s one such moment.
The party arrives in the town of Lowmere, a seaside town that seems unaffected by the blight in the surrounding lands. It turns out they’ve been using a rough-but-workable technique to siphon aether from the sea into the land–so the party decides to do it right.
Mages and soldiers from Helgard can help design and build a larger, more efficient, longer-lasting magic circle. They will discuss:
- Materials. Technically anything should work, though enchanted materials will increase its efficiency. It’s possible to do upgrades later.
- Safety Switches. A carefully-constructed circle will channel a tremendous amount of aether. It may be hard to predict what it will do. Placing a few “switches”–pieces of circle that can be easily removed, allowing it to wind down safely. It could potentially leave it open to sabotage, though.
- Engineering. How do you want to test this out? What’s the desired result?
Construction begins
The first milestone is actually getting the circle working, requiring Intelligence (Arcana) checks from the party to help design it.
As the general shape of the circle is drawn, you feel the air around Lowmere begin to crackle with magic. The hair on the back of your neck stands up.
The ambient aether you’ve encountered before swirls lazily like smoke in a breeze, disorienting and making you drunk, here you sense a torrent of aether, like a rushing river, its steep banks pointing it all in the same direction. You feel sharply awake and slightly on-edge, as if the air around you is filled with potential and the slightest shift might set it in motion.
Final activation
As the circle is completed, it is turned on at full power.
As the magic circle is complete, the tension in the air becomes more palpable. You can feel it along your skin, a constant sense that something is about to happen. A low hum echoes out across the plains, barely perceptible, but enough that you can tell something is different.
Small pebbles and dry leaves begin to float just a few inches off the ground in some places–spinning, swirling, as if the world itself is in a rolling boil around you.
Immediate effects
- Once the circle is active, any spell cast is treated as being cast with a spell slot 1 level higher.
- On a short rest, you can restore 1d4 levels of spell slots.
- Despite it being the winter, the plants stand up a little taller. New buds begin to form in a few places.
- Some of the gray patches on the farmland further out from Lowmere begins to gain a little more color. Nearby, you had seen some clumps of dead, rotting plants; they seem to have finally rotted off and whatever grayish substance was covering them seems to be gone. With the debris gone, small scrubby weeds begin to grow in their place.
On the border
- While some of the blight has receded, about 10 miles out, you begin to see some of the gray soil and clumps of rotting plant matter again, as if the magic circle’s range is limited.
- Detect magic will reveal a noticeable flow of aether from the magic circle, but whatever is draining the aether out of the land seems to be ramping up to absorb it. An Intelligence (Arcana) check will reveal it seems to be coming from the south, but you can’t place it.
After a week or two
- On return to Lowmere, some of the townsfolk complain that they are pulling in a strange amount of dead fish from the sea, and the sound has picked up a pungent smell of brackish, stagant water. A strange, grayish algae has begun growing on the surface in some areas, and the reedy grass around it has begun catching the blight.
- Detect magic will reveal that the water around Lowmere has been drained of aether. An Intelligence (Arcana) check will reveal that the magic circle has been pulling aether from the water faster than the ocean currents can move it around.
- If the PCs refuse to shut down the magic circle, Haldir will do it on behalf of the citizens, breaking the lines around the center (on the coast & on the road).
- If the party builds a teleporation circle in Lowmere (to teleport engineers from Helgard, etc.), it will degrade to uselessness as the magic circle begins breaking down its aether to attempt to counter the draining pull to the south.
- Some engineers will be stranded, while a small group of others will begin the journey back to Helgard via Turo.