NOTE: The purpose of this document is to inform DMs intending to run a Therran Campaign during the reign of the Deceiver what exactly is going on. The information should not be read by players who are participating in a campaign taking place in Therra that involves the war against the Deceiver. Players in my original campaign may read this information, as it is all known to their player characters.
In ancient times the gods created the world. In doing so, they created something that was so far beyond what any of them could create individually that it overwhelmed them and they took to fighting and quarreling over which god should rule over which piece of the world and which should refashion parts of it to fit his or her desire. As conflict raged, the immense battles threatened to destroy the world...the very thing the gods were quarreling to possess. And so, recognizing the folly of annihilating that which they warred over, the God of Cleverness proposed a solution. The gods would construct a magical hall and within it they would lay themselves to sleep and so remove them from direct interaction with the world of their creation, at the same time removing the temptations that such a world instilled into them. Within the hall, the gods would sleep and dream, and in their godly dreams they could roam the landscape of the world they had created without causing it harm. Indeed, the dreams of the gods were powerful enough, as it turned out, that they could grant spells to their priests and perform divine miracles and even direct their worshippers to further their own ends.
And all the gods judged this a good plan. They constructed the Hall of Slumber and gave to the mortal races seven gems of power which would act as keys to open the doors to the Hall of Slumber, should a great need arise and the gods need to be called forth. Then, one-by-one, the gods filed into the Hall, giving the honour of being the last to enter to the God of Cleverness, whose idea the slumber was. But the God of Cleverness had other plans, and as the last god before him filed in and lay to sleep, he revealed the deception deep within his heart and he closed the doors to the hall before him and refused to enter.
With the gods safely asleep and entrapped within the Hall of Slumber, the god, now known as the Deceiver, quickly attacked the mortals and took the seven gems that could re-open the doors and release the other gods. For a time he wore these gems on an iron crown to taunt the mortals, but when one mortal hero, Amorany, came close to siezing a gem from his very brow, the Deceiver came forth from his iron fortress of Mordasht for the last time and, in the sight of many mortals, crushed each of the seven gems to liquid and then into nothingness. In doing so, the Deceiver believed he had destroyed the only means by which the doors to Slumber could be opened and the gods released. Now, as the only divine being to dwell on Therra, the Deceiver erected a mystical barrier between Therra and the planes, so that other planar beings could not threaten his plans. Then, gathering fell armies, he proceeded to wage war on mortal kind, knowing that without the intervention of the gods, time was on his side and eventually he would control all of Therra for himself.
Fortunately, the Deceiver had been, himself, deceived. Whether by act of whimsy or by some inkling of the deception to come, Flupnir, the god of trickery, had stolen one of the seven gems of power that could open the doors to Slumber. In its place he had given to a mortal an exquisite copy, exquisite enough to fool even a god. And so it was that only six of the seven gems were destroyed. And what of the seventh?
Within slumber, Flupnir now realized that his priesthood held the last remaining gem of power. However, Flupnir was worried that the Deceiver was too wary and too powerful and the mortal forces too weak to reveal the existence of the gem to anyone. After all, if the Deceiver had so easily wrested the gems from the hands of mortalkind, what would stop him from doing the same with the final gem? So Flupnir directed his priesthood to hide the gem on a remote island that had been the home of the trickster god when he dwelt on Therra. There, guarded by trickster magic and held within Flupnir's own demented tower, the gem lay in refuge.
But of course, Flupnir knew at some point in time the gem might have to be used. Could the Deceiver somehow be defeated without the gem? Flupnir didn't know. Could the gods somehow be awakened without the gem? Again, he didn't know. But he was patient enough to find out. Nevertheless, the day might come when the Deceiver had ultimate victory within his grasp and the gem of power would be the only hope to defeat him. And so Flupnir made a plan. He designed a mechanism by which only when the Deceiver had gained so much power and controlled so much of Therra that he was on the verge of victory would the gem be locatable. And even then, the effort required to locate and gain the gem would in and of itself prove so formidable that it would serve as a test to make sure those who finally ended up wielding the gem were puissant and clever enough to have a chance of bearing the gem all the way to the Hall of Slumber, for if the Deceiver ever got his hands on the last gem, then Therra would be doomed.
When the Morakki invaded Western Jerranq, ostensibly to save Jerranq from the Deceiver, they decided to avenge themselves on the Westerners who had humiliated them in their ancient past and so they ruled the West as overlords. While the Morakki Emperor returned to the East to rule the Morakki homelands, he left twelve governors (called mandarins) in his wake. For a time these governors served the Emperor loyally, but as time went on they became more and more distant and removed from the throne at Xydlont. In addition, they resented the heavy taxes and tribute the Emperor expected to flow from the rich lands of the West. And so the mandarins started to preach revolt. The Flupnir priesthood took advantage of this discontent amongst the mandarins to enact their god's grand plan.
It was known amongst the mandarins that none of them individually could withstand the power of the Emperor and that only united could they hope to prevail. But the area ruled by the mandarins was vast, and it would be logistically impossible for the mandarinates to know precisely where to unite their forces to meet the onslaught of the Emperor. And so, when some magicians offered to build the mandarins magical towers, one for each of them, that would allow teleportation between them, the mandarins did not balk but gladly took the magicians up on their offer. These towers, said the magicians, would allow the mandarins to communicate with each other almost instantaneously. In addition, whole armies could be transported through the towers, meaning the mandarins could mass their combined armies quickly to the defense of any single mandarinate that came under attack by the Emperor. Finally, the magicians offered to weave great spells of concealment around these towers, so that the Emperor could not divine their existence and take countermeasures to thwart the newfound mobility of the mandarin forces.
Of course, these magicians were actually the priests of Flupnir, enacting his grand scheme. Twelve towers were built, one in each mandarinate, and indeed the Emperor did march against his governors and the towers were used to a limited extent. But the Deceiver chose to attack amidst the fighting Morakki and his attack united the Morakki against a common foe. When the war was over, the Emperor returned to the East and abandoned all claims to the West. The mandarins, weakned by the war and now weakened by severed ties with their homeland, suddenly found themselves confronted by uprisings amongst the Westerners. The twelve towers were useless against the Deceiver and were useless against the uprisings, and so the mandarins were defeated and pulled down and Western kingdoms built on their stead and the towers, well concealed by the wiles of Flupnir, fell into disuse and were forgotten for centuries.
But Flupnir knew that the towers would take on importance again. The towers were useless to the mandarins in their battle against the Deceiver because the towers were all within the mandarin lands and so were effectively all behind the front lines. While somewhat useful for moving up supplies and reserve troops, they were not significant enough to merit much weight to the battle. But, Flupnir knew that there would come a time when the Deceiver had conquered most of the free lands and eventually the border between lands dominated by the Deceiver and lands held by the free folk would lie between the towers. Then, Flupnir knew, the towers would take on immense strategic significance, for what better way to defeat a foe than to teleport an army from deep within your own lands to a location deep within his lands? And indeed, by the time the Deceiver was in such a position, he would be preparing for a final battle to overwhelm the last vestiges of freedom.
And so, the agents of Flupnir, when exactly what the god foresaw came to pass and the Deceiver held some towers and the free folk held others, went into action. First, they subtly allowed the forces of the Deceiver to learn about one of the towers. From there, these forces began to explore the magical links between the towers and evil began to colonize others of the towers. In this manner, Flupnir was using the forces of evil to provide the test necessary to determine which free folk would be worthy to wield the gem of power. Once the forces of evil had colonized some of the towers, agents of Flupnir would then choose a group of goodly heroes and would subtly draw them to one of the towers located in the free lands. The Flupnirans would then expect the goodly heroes to explore the towers and eventually find their way to the towers dominated by the forces of evil. A battle would ensue and if the goodly heroes were worth their mettle, they would prevail.
Within the final tower (the first one colonized by the forces of evil) would be a clue to the location of the gem of power. The goodly heroes would be given another clue early in their career which, when matched with the clue in the final tower, would reveal the location of the gem of power. The heroes would then have to travel to the island that served as Flupnir's home, make its way into and through Flupnir's tower, and finally would prove themselves worthy to bear the gem. In this way, Flupnir believed that any group of goodly heroes capable enough to locate all of the towers, defeat the denizens lairing within, defeat the evil resident in the final tower, figure out the riddle of the clues, locate and travel to his hidden island, find a way to enter his tower, and then actually make it through his tower was certainly the most worthy group of candidates on the face of Therra to take the gem and make a run for the Hall of Slumber.
In the actual Therran Campaign, the priesthood of Flupnir did not choose the PCs as their hero group. Instead, an agent of Flupnir was fleeing an attack by a Maug (which was hunting the agent as it knew the agent was involved in anti-Deceiver activity and bore something of immense importance, but did not know exactly what it was) on the Isle of Onlor and, just before he died, happened to slip the first clue to the location of the gem of power, a scrap of leather with scratchings on it, into the hands of a PC. It was fortunate for the Flupnirans that the scrap of leather found its way into the hands of a group of goodly intentioned and capable heroes. Was it fate that inadvertantly caused the scrap of leather to fall into the very hands it was designed for? Or was it Flupnir working in his inscrutible fashion? No one can say.
So it was that the PCs took the scrap of leather and fled Onlor in the wake of the Maug and agents of the Deceiver. They fled to Jerranq and discovered the first of the twelve towers. Hesitantly at first, they began to explore the towers, sometimes under the covert guidance of Flupniran agents, and eventually battled the evil denizens taking up residence in many of the towers. After many years and many adventures, the PCs made it to the final tower, and there battled a powerful cambion demon who was preparing to use the tower to launch the first assault of the armies of the Deceiver against the free lands. With the cambion defeated, the PCs found that the scrap of leather, when placed beneath a set of stained glass windows set into the final tower, formed a pattern. Cutting out the pattern, they found the whole formed a jigsaw puzzle. Re-assembling the jigsaw puzzle, they found it formed a map of an island with the initials "L" and "I".
The party quickly determined that "L" and "I" stood for the Lost Isle, a place of mystery known to exist far across the Eastern Seas. The party travelled the breadth of Jerranq, through Morakki lands, and gained a ship to sail into the unknown waters east of Vingariku. There, a giant serpent servant of Flupnir took their ship to the Lost Isle.
Upon the Lost Isle, the PCs made their way to the Tower of Flupnir. There they passed through all sorts of riddles, demented guardians, and other obstacles before finally making their way to an ancient chamber where the first high priest of Flupnir, ancient beyond words, guarded the gem of power. The priest explained Flupnir's grand plan to the party and bestowed upon them the final gem of power and entreated them to take it to the Hall of Slumber and release the gods in order to end the reign of the Deceiver.
It should be noted that while the party knew that the scrap of leather contained something of immense import (why else would a Maug brazenly attack Algol City on the Isle of Onlor unless it were?), until they actually received the gem of power from the high priest on the Lost Isle, they did not know what awaited them at the end of their long quest. True, they had hints and inklings that it might somehow be a gem of power (perhaps an eighth one was made and never spoken about, or perhaps a new one had been somehow crafted), but they never knew for sure until they arrived at the end of the quest.
Or should I say the beginning of their next quest...for once they had the gem, the most dangerous part of their duties remained...to bear the gem into the heart of the lands of the Deceiver and place it upon the doors to the Hall of Slumber.