Archived GM Notes: This page is unsealed GM-notes pertaining to PRPG2. It is not canonical to PRPG2. It may contain contradictions (even with itself), and preliminary ideas that were merely written down as I thought of them, for later consideration. The absence of something mentioned here from the canon does not necessarily mean that the party "missed" it, it could have been mooted for other reasons or simply discarded by me.
Really, the disclaimer applies extra hard to this page.
UNSEALED after review.
EL knows that the crystal forest is made of changelings, but does not know that the curse of en-Netsusep has specifically left them without _will_. See Curse of En-Netsusep
Eldritch Lore wishes to destroy the Dread Pantheon. The DP have encased Equus in a bubble to quarantine residual changelings after the death of En-Netsusep, preventing anyone from getting out except through the DD, where the DP can watch.
ESS Harmony, ESS Galaxy, ESS Cosmos, ESS Guardian
The Great Eye is a large Equus-orbiting spacecraft, ESS Harmony, secretly built in the final days of the Golden Age as one of four (each carrying one of the Equestrian Princesses) intended to evacuate the planet and reestablish Pony-Changeling civilization elsewhere after the first attack by the Shadow of En-Netsusep. It is currently in a nearly polar and approximately circular orbit of 10115 km altitude. The ship is propelled by ethereal impellers, a form of reactionless drive, and powered by trans-dimensional heat exchange between the elemental planes of Fire and Water. It is equipped with an upgraded directed energy weapon based on the Sagittarius weapon on the Luna dam, but this was never fired at En-Netsusep because the Harmony's changeling Queen was connected to the prime Hivemind, and was affected by En-Netsusep's attack before coming over the horizon. The ships include terraforming facilities, based on astronomical and kinetic magic, as well as dimensional portals.
In desperation at the possibility of extinction, the four spacecraft were each equipped with a huge monocrystaline scrying orb, the largest ones ever made - the publicly revealed purpose was that these were sensors to allow the planets at the destination systems to be examined from afar for their suitability for colonization. But secretly, they were to be used to Retrodivine the arrival of the ships at distant planets, thereby causing a transversable wormhole to appear to suck the ship through to its destination. This was only to be used in the event of En-Netsusep's return before the ships had time to escape the system via accelerating to near-lightspeed with their reactionless drives, as retrodivination was considered so risky, even performed by a changeling queen.
When En-Netsusep did return, the Guardian fired on, and wounded, him, but was destroyed by his counter-attack; Luna and Celestia wished to stay and fight him (believing, correctly, that there was a chance of victory - albeit not a large one given the relative changeling-dependence of the ships and the fact that En-Netsusep was about to deploy his anti-changeling virus). However, the changeling queens of the Cosmos and Galaxy kidnapped their respective princesses and escaped the system by retro-divination. As their safe arrival had thus already been determined, En-Netsusep was powerless to stop them.
Hedging their bets, the Changelings on ESS Cosmos took a "slow" track, electing to arrive millions of years in the future at a nearby possibly-habitable exoplanet, hoping that the Dread Pantheon would have lost interest by then and that they could keep the ship running that long (running it as a sleeper ship, with occasional century-long rounds of pony-breeding to avoid accumulated genetic damage); the ESS Galaxy took a "fast" track to a very distant star with the best-identified exoplanets, hoping that En-Netsusep wouldn't look that far away. I leave it ambiguous if either or both retrodivination-travel attempts were successful.
Since the sequester of Equus, the transdimensional heat engine doesn't work. Thus, the Harmony is not capable of using its ethereal impellers, its anti-magion accelerator, scrying augmentation facilities, or other systems. (Its emergency power ran out within months.) However, if it _were_ powered, the AMA could pierce the bubble around Equus (coincidentally cutting off New Equestria's water portal.) This would then allow the transdimensional portals to be reopened, allowing heat to flow to the Plane of Water from the Plane of Fire via the great heat engines of the Harmony, and powering both future uses of that weapon and its other faculties.
Of course, the Dread Pantheon would notice the collapse of the bubble pretty quickly, and probably respond in force. However, EL has determined a way to use a sufficiently large scrying orb to partition the Dread Dimensions from Equus permanently. ?? how??
"Ultima ratio deorum" VLTIMA RATIO DEORVM - inscription on doors to scrying control room.
If the Harmony was TS's ship maybe it had facilties to use the EoH somehow?
It seems impractical to actually destroy the DP, so EL's proposed solution should really be to seal off Equus forever from them. Once Equine space-time and DD spacetime are disconnected from each other,... but how can you have a paradox? universes definitionally have nothing in common about which a contradictory future could be divined. You could create a device that deterministically changes state when any intrusions occur and then retrodivine it to be in the "none detected" state in the distant future. It would make sense that they'd have tried to make a "Dread Dimensions Early Warning Network" after the Shadow of EN appeared... the question of why they didn't do this themselves arises, of course. Could be that EL is just a better or less risk-averse diviner.
EL's plan: 1. Use the crystal forest to charge the Harmony. 2. Use the AMA to collapse the wormholes leading to the DD. 3. Retrodivine the early warning network ("Wormhole canary") as having continuously existed in working order and having not detected anything as of some distant future date. Future-Divination having been eliminated from Equus (thereby lowering the energy of this retrodivination in the near-future phase) the only other thing that will cause paradox-waves will be wormholes opening. This still will require the use of the Harmony's massive crystal ball. 4. Rule the isolated Equus forever as princess, using the EoH to fix the planet.
Current stage: She's rendevoused with the Harmony and is assessing the damage, and making preliminary repairs/remote control modifications. After a few days to a few weeks, she will undock and reenter to get more stuff (and also announce her princesshood in hopes of getting more material support for her plans.)
Big decision for the party: Sacrifice the crystal forest to power the Harmony and forever protect Equus from the DD, or fix the changelings by using the EoH on the crystal forest.
Does EL realize there is No Place for Her There?
Princess Nova
- Twi wasn't able to purify the EoM because her friends were dead and purifying it requires an act of friendship. The other elements would have been purified by the virtue of their bearers in time, but, again, they were dead and no longer able to exercise virtue.
- some kind of pre-draconquus creature to complain about ancient history in the element of laughter I am Horkos, last of the Uncorrupted. You have freed me from my imprisonment here.
My kind was young before this world was formed of stardust. For a thousand centuries after, our kind alone existed to contemplate the arrow of time. And when other forms of life appeared, we protected them, as we had taken this world as our ward.
But then the Usurper came... my father, in his naive magnanimity, gave her free reign on our world, even when she perverted the chthonic law by creating your kind. This unbalanced Order and Chaos.
You are things that should not have been. The designs of a capricious divinity.
It was too late I realized that this unbalance had begun to corrupt my kind, turning them to unbridled chaos... even my own father. I hid myself out of the world for centuries. When I returned, even the Sun was changed.
Once my anger blazed such that I would have destroyed any of your kind whom I chanced upon. But now, only I am spared from the corruption that overtook my people...
--> Maybe that artifact is imprisoning him
Father -> "You call him Discord, or at least, you did once."
Origin of the Elements of Harmony
In the mists of prehistory (circa 30,000 BE), Equus escaped the Oblation of Worlds because En-Mequnan, the Signifer of En-Netsusep (and his young daughter), was fond of the planet and, in particular, of the adorable little ponies she had surreptitiously created there in (cuter) imitation of the Shadhavar whose worship her father had (in his vanity) accepted. When she learned that Equus' star system was demanded as a sacrifice to the Fount of Primordial Chaos, En-Mequnan stole the Sign of En-Netsusep (the sign she carried in the cosmic procession, that whole Signifer bit above) and ran away, taking also Equus itself. She created the magical sun and moon around Equus to sustain the planet, which was now a rogue planet, and shattered the Sign of En-Netsusep, without which he could not approach the Fount of Primordial Chaos in the Oblation. (The Fount is so powerfully chaotic that its presence is incompatible with any form of life; it isn't really alive or sentient itself, at least observably. Thus, the Sign was strongly Harmonious, in order to hold back the chaos to an extent sufficient that En-Netsusep could pitch stellar objects into it, sort of like an approach suit for firefighters. Note that this religion was made up by the Dread Pantheon; the Found never gave any explicit indication that this should be done, it just seems necessary to them.)
En-Netsusep would come to believe that his daughter had been corrupted by continuous exposure to the Sign.
The six shattered fragments of the Sign would later be known to Ponies as the Elements of Harmony.
En-Netsusep, believing himself rejected as High Priest of the Fount of Primordial Chaos, went into voluntary exile in the Dread Dimensions with his extended family.
After thousands of years, En-Mequnan eventually lost interest in Equus and left to explore other dimensions, occasionally returning to check on it. She has been gone since the defeat of King Sombra, convinced that her favorite alicorn ponies had things well in hoof and did not need her help anymore.
The EoH are sentient, individually, although their intelligence and psychology is almost incomprehensible to ponies (and humans). When, after long aeons, ponies first made contact with the Dread Dimensions. Even after figuring out that they were En-Mequnan's creations, the pantheon proceeded with extreme caution and patience borne of immortality. En-Netsusep, desirous of rapprochement with his daughter, and perhaps the return of the Sign, remained indecisive. Then, in the early Golden Age, a group of ponies showed up in the company of a Changeling. The Changelings, antithetical to En-Netsusep and the Pantheon, were an alarming development, and this called for prompt (relatively prompt) action, the Catastrophe. En-Netsusep was very unhappy to discover that his estranged daughter was nowhere to be found, the world was overrun with Changelings (far more offensive to him than ponies ever had been), and that his Sign was shattered - and being used as a weapon against him.
En-Netsusep was confronted by the Elements of Harmony, and he called them to himself, Twisting the elements and stripping their bearers of them (and mortally psychic-wounding them, and making them untouchable to Changelings.) However, like fragments of a magnet, the Twisted fragments of the Sign almost immediately blew apart, killing En-Netsusep, whereupon his corpse fell into the sea not very far from the hole into which he entered Equus from the DD. Twilight was able to contact her apprentice Star Cluster before succumbing. The Elements were scattered over Equus, mostly near the Dusts.
Aftermath of the Catastrophe
With the death of En-Netsusep, and decimation of the changelings, the Dread Pantheon (lead provisionally by En-Hefeshet, Mace-bearer of En-Netsusep, and God of Blunt Objects and Justice) decided against further direct action, believing that Equus and the residual changelings would die a natural death. The EoH could be recovered later. They did encase Equus in an invisible bubble to ensure no Changelings could escape into the wider universe except possibly via the Dread Dimensions where they could be observe.
Consequences of the Bubble
- Certain forms of teleportation no longer work. It is also not possible to access other planes of existence, except through the hole En-Netsusep made to access Equus.
Put the Everwood Cathedra of Star Scroll in somewhere.