Story 2/21/2021

The session started off with the group freshly leveled to 15! After resting for the evening, they set off into the Ruins of Augalire, attempting to complete the ritual which would grant them the ability to change planes. Upon reaching the outskirts of the city, they found ruins that showed the city was once well polished and ornate, but was now cleanly picked over and being forgotten in the sands of time. From their knowledge of history, they knew that the city didn't fall in a single battle/incident, but it was a streak of seemingly unlucky events that were extremely mismanaged over the course of a couple decades, eventually leading to the city being abandoned.

Once they got into the city proper, a spectral image of Ecrozahr appeared in front of them. It seemed to know them and had Ecrozahr's memory, but it was different from when they encountered him via his memories in the tome. He thanked them for gathering his artifacts, a feat that nobody had come close to before that point. He went on to explain that since they were about to start travelling planes, they would need to know how the planes of reality worked.

They were as follows:

**The Planes of Existence**

* The Mortal Plane: Life
	+ All life lives here. Mortal beliefs greatly influence immortal powers.
* Shadowfell: Death
	+ Mortal souls go here upon death, and are usually sent to either the Astral Plane or The Nine Hells.
* Feywild: Birth
	+ Magic and nature intertwined, raw components of each and the building blocks of Mortal life.
* Astral: Afterlife
	+ Infinite number of sub-planes and realities, building blocks of all reality contained within sub-elements.
* The Nine Hells: Punishment
	+ Former domain of "He Who Was", turned into a hellish prison for Asmodeus.
* Elemental: Materials
	+ 4 core areas (Air/Water/Earth/Fire), building blocks of all non-living things.
* Ethereal: Nothingness
	+ When other planes expand, they take from the Ethereal Plane, it's the raw materials to make other planes.

He went on to detail what the planar magic via his Artifacts could do.

**Planar Changing via Ecrozahr's Artifacts:**

* Must leave something very important to you in the Mortal Plane, or you can be blocked from re-entering
* Can only Plane change once per day (round trip)
* Must always come back to Mortal Plane, then go to another Plane
* Plane change allows creation of branches, but not merging
* Cannot travel to Ethereal Plane

He also explained that branching was a planar magic, that involved creating a sub-slice of the Mortal Plane. Only the Mortal Plane could be branched, and only very powerful beings could merge the branch back into reality via the following rules.

**Branching Rules:**

* Branches are a planar art
* Branches are only created on the Mortal Plane
* They are temporary duplications of parts of the Mortal Plane, at any point in time
* Branches can be merged back in by anyone being worshipped (typically gods)
* The gods are effectively on a priority ladder, and gods above other gods can override/supersede their branches
* The more worshipers and/or the more powerful the god, the higher they are on the ladder
	+ The reason merging works, is because mortals have to accept that it works (ie: accept the changes to their reality, Matrix style)
	+ Mortals subconsciously trust the gods they worship, so gods with more worshipers have more mortals that accept the changes, and thus allow the branch to merge
	+ In general, gods don't mess with merging too often since it can have tough ripple effects (like destroying Augalire), and if the most worshipped god tried to merge something bad, multiple gods could team up against them, and no god has ever held 51% of the worshipping power

He went on to confess 2 more very important things. The first was that Desmond was a pupil of his, and was a hot headed perfectionist who went off the rails, and eventually attacked and overthrew Ecrozahr (thus Desmond was more powerful). Second, was that Augalire used to be a rich and powerful city (his hometown even), bigger than Miradore in it's day. All of Ecrozahr's branching work to try and recover his artifacts created a terrible ripple effect, and eventually it led to Augalire being destroyed, which convinced Ecrozahr to stop trying to recover his artifacts, and wait for someone else to do it without branching.

As the group was digesting all of this information, they decided to perform the ritual to gain planar changing abilities. They all put a drop of blood or life force into the urn, and Beorn went first with the ritual. When he completed it, nothing happened for a few moments. Then suddenly, 4 copies of Ecrozahr appeared. He said that only the most powerful beings should be sent to stop Desmond. If they could defeat him, then they deserved it, if he could defeat them, then he deserved it.

After a hard fought battle which included Ecrozahr warping the planes to deal additional damage to everyone, as well as Lunashe turning one of the Ecrozahr copies into a complete dud, Ecrozahr was defeated. He apologized to the group for the trick about the ritual (which didn't grant them planar magic, it actually brought him back), and he took his pipe, and re-bound the objects together. He said that the objects now granted the planar change ability, and as long as the group each had a piece they could change planes.

On his body, the group found 30,000g worth of precious gems. They also now had the ability to change planes, and Beorn's first instinct was to go to his 'birth', and find out why he was the way he was....

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