The Way Forward

Dear officers of the Tower of Krasha, I need to speak to you regarding the recent events. As you know, my uncle and your former employer, Verroak Krasha, has fallen in battle to the vengeful loa, Lehba. Although I have arrived just in time to banish the spirit, we were left with an abrupt void of power. According to the rules of succession my uncle has established himself, as his closest living adult relative, the leadership and ownership of the Tower of Krasha falls to me, Orkan Krasha, son of Tarakan, brother to Verroak. I want to address some concerns.

Guild Stories: The Father of Understanding

It began so very simply. A courier delivering our supplies to a man who lives out of the way in Eastvale went missing with his supplies. Thinking little of it, Hellbourne led a small group to investigate. After a small but heated exchange with a peasant, we found our man. A former warlock who decided to abandon his magic after an accident corrupted his hand, he now lived out of the way with a wife and children. He needed regular supplies from the Tower of Krasha to keep his corrupted arm in check. With a little help from Calaara’s time magic, we followed the courier’s trail back to his landing spot, which is where we found footprints, mixed with murloc prints.
Following the prints, we were saddened to find the courier dead and half-eaten by… zombie murlocs. We dispatched those murlocs with ease, but considering a presence of a ghoul among them, it was a strange occurrence. Furthermore, the courier’s package was taken by someone else onto the Stone Cairne Island.
We naturally followed the trail onto the island where we finished off more zombies assaulting a mysterious high arakkoa. Calling himself Kora Narash, he gave us a dire warning – the Tower of Krasha is in danger, and Lehba, the loa Verroak angered, has returned. If that wasn’t enough, the sky above Icecrown has been shattered and the Lich King is no more. Without its master’s command, the restless Scourge will become an even greater threat to this world…

Guild Stories: The Infiltrators

Hello, my still faithful (I hope) blog readers. Since we’ve started the guild, I’ve been writing up summaries of our stories there on the guild Discord, but I never published them out to the public. I figured people would be interested in hearing what happened to Krasha since, so I’m sharing the Discord summaries here.

OOC

Krasha arrived in the base one day to inform us somebody has stolen from him. It must have been an expert thief, since they managed to slot in right between security shift changes and remained unseen by anyone, including some of the expert security personnel, such as aldrachi warriors Krasha employs. The group arrived on Krasha home base and immediately went after a strange human who was isolated in the mess hall. The human had an odd appearance, his face twitching and moving in various unnatural ways, and he smelled oddly, like a reptile of some kind. After a thorough interrogation, he was proven to be a shapeshifting saurok of some kind, rapidly regenerating its health and breaking out of polymorphism by tearing its flesh apart.

As the Krasha officers would later explain, all threads pointed to “the Cancer”. A former officer of Krasha’s who left after buying his own freedom. A saurok who has taken control of a mogu flesh-shaping device, a corporius, he has apparently created a new breed of sauroks, shapeshifters who rapidly regenerate all wounds. This “Cancer” must be tracked down and dealt with, but Krasha wants him alive.

After tracking down all the strange “humans” in his home base, Krasha ordered us to infiltrate them in turn and sent us a fungarian to help us with it. The fungarian charged in at a lone saurok scout and once both have been slain, the cloud of spores from the fungarian’s body possessed the saurok and used it to infiltrate the saurok base in the old troll ruins.

However, what we found at the troll ruins was stranger than we all anticipated. The sauroks are conspiring with Bwonsamdi and another troll loa, Lehba, who used to own Krasha’s island base and wants it back. However, after we killed the ubersaurok priest, Bwonsamdi says the sauroks failed and washes his hands off of his involvement and leaves us to our own devices.

One of the biggest mysteries was how is the Cancer creating new sauroks when his original machine is still in Krasha’s possession and remains untampered with. Balerok found a mention of what appeared to be another corporius inside a small Titan facility in the Storm Peaks and sent us on a mission to retrieve it or learn what happened to it. After freeing a small arcane entity called a factotum (dubbed Rosie by Teann), we learned the Cancer was there. After an ambush by another Lesser Evil, Blood-Thane Utarefson, we opened the pulpit for the corporius only to find it gone. Rosie joined us to recover the device.

Now knowing everything that happened, we await more trails that could lead us to the Cancer, as he remains still at large at this moment.

After an evening of scouting, we found out the sauroks were planning on replacing a “human king” with a puppet of their own. Although we did not have the numbers to deal with them at the time, we learned a few things and retreated.
We also met a curious troll, Ati’bon, who claimed to be older than Medivh and to have always lived in the Black Morass. Ati’bon was nowhere to be found the next week.

The week after that, we finally left to dispatch the sauroks. Our attempts at subterfuge have failed as the guards changed their password, and later Teann couldn’t pull herself into the shape of the old troll. After a few clashes, we defeated the small detachment of sauroks left at the tree and arrived within it to find the Cancer himself, hard at work at creating new life. He quickly deduced we work for Krasha and hard negotiations began.

It took some convincing, but we met an understanding where the Cancer made a demand: he must be made Krasha’s equal in the Lesser Evils, not his subordinate, and in exchange, he will share the blood of Anzu he somehow acquired to make Krasha part-demigod. Although we had to wake the boss up (with Balerok’s help) Krasha agreed and we led Ughul to Krasha’s home base for further negotiations.

In the end, we spared the life of one terrible person so that he can make another terrible person into a god. All around, a “success”.

Raelia’s Penance

It was an early evening on the Lehba Island. Sun has already set thanks to Anzulekk’s twin world, hanging in the sky right on the horizon. Despite that, it still wasn’t too dark. With his office awash in the twilight, Menrim was preparing to leave for his quarters when the doors opened. It was Raelia Sunspear, his felblood elf assistant. She was still calm and somewhat happy, not knowing what Verroak would soon want of her.

“Raelia,” Menrim said to welcome her, “I see you’re back from the mainland.” She spent most of the day commanding the Ivarindian peasants who were building the village where they would live together with the refugees Anzulekk would invite to flee from Azeroth’s certain and urgent doom.

“Yes. If you do not mind, I will just leave the documents and go back to my quarters.” She calmly walked to her desk, but before she could do what she planned, Menrim interrupted her.

“Actually,” he said, “boss wanted to talk to you.”

She sneered snidely. “What does the old coot want this time? Ran out of bird seed?”

Menrim wasn’t laughing at her jokes. He does not often joke, and he got tired of the bird jokes as well. “You’ll have to talk to him.”

“Fine,” she said putting down her paper stack, “I’ll go to his study right away.”

“Not his study,” Menrim said, pointing through the window. “He’s waiting for you at the world tree. Come.” He came out from behind the desk and grabbed his bag, putting it across his shoulder.

She chuckled. “You’ll be escorting me? My knight in shining armor. Only without the armor…” She looked across Menrim’s leonine centauric lower body. “But you got the horse parts alright.” They exchanged concerned looks after that last remark. “Not what I meant.”

“I know,” the tol’vir responded and came over to the door, waving to the felblood. “Come.”

Character Profiles: Ughul the Cancer

Name: Ughul of Ihgaluk, known as the Cancer
Race: Saurok
Gender: male
Age: 51
Class: Shaman (elemental)
Professions: flesh-shaping
Religion: none, philosophical nihilist
Alignment (per D&D): Neutral Evil
Traits (per CK2): genius, scholar, diligent, patient, proud, deceitful, ambitious, arbitrary, cynical, leper, scarred

Maiden Voyage of the ASJ Apexis

There it was, at long last, our first ship completed. I know people doubted my reasons for building it. Like, yeah, I know we have rifts that transport us to planets in an instant, but transport is only one thing a ship can be used for. One thing is defense. Pirates did not find us yet, but when they do, having a ship throwing arcane fire at them will be invaluable. Also, transport. Yes, I know what I just said, but our orders can sometimes be pretty big, and other than using half of my porters to push a giant box, we can now use the ship to move the whole thing more easily. Sure, it costs quite a bit, but I figure the opportunities it gives us outweigh the costs. For the past few weeks, we’ve been building the ship and preparing everything it needed.

Binding a Gelugon – RP Thread

Binding a Gelugon – Thread on the RP forum

A Titanic Task

Who says only Titans can move and shape lands? Well, people who don’t know much, or who are dogmatically following some silly beliefs. For your information, ethereals can move lands. As I learned some time ago, they sometimes locate worlds shattered by the Burning Legion (or Old Gods, or other nasties – yes, there are more) and take whole chunks of those worlds, snap some magic technology to them and relocate those chunks elsewhere for easy harvest by their ethereal and grav crews. A lot of the minerals or items you may have purchased or otherwise acquired from ethereals come from these. So when I learned about an ethereal in deep debt who was willing to part with his land-moving devices, I was quick to jump on the occasion.

Broadening the Horizons

We had a bit of a lull in our off-world activity. I mean, at least when it comes to actively going out and looking for stuff. We’re still selling off-world a lot and maintaining all our contacts out there, but ever since my crew got busy with their research they stopped going out. I never thought I’d complain about my employees actually working, but here I am. Well, it’s not bad. It’s good that they’re doing their actual occupation, it’s just that they never seem to do it when I want them to. I’m getting away from the topic I wanted to talk about. What I wanted to say is, after they’ve been here most of the time I realized how much I only heard about from them and never seen in person. So I decided to change it. I went for a trip to see some of those worlds.

Character Profiles: Frlngath the Unbroken

Name: Born Theramas Dawnrunner, as a Faceless One is known as Frlngath the Unbroken.
Race: Faceless One (formerly High Elf)
Gender: male
Age: Over 6,000
Class: Priest (shadow)
Professions: enchanting, inscription
Religion: Formerly Holy Light and Old God worship, currently apostatic
Alignment (per D&D): Chaotic Neutral
Traits (per CK2): quick, mystic, chaste, diligent, humble, envious, deceitful, zealous, cruel, lunatic