magic-user

“And lo!---the fourteen gates of Pesh were sundered and disjoined.  And a great Nothing rippled across the plains, swallowing them in utter blackness, and carving the deep abysses that lay there now, where once the Marshals of Law marched against the multitudes of Chaos.  Only their echoes remain---forlorn and lost, beyond the edge of time.”--- “The Fall of Aaqa” in The Fables of BurdockContinued from Part 1: Setting the Stage.On the Destruction of GatesPlayer characters often seem to need to destroy gates and portals, prior to Something Wicked This Way Coming, in one form or another.  This brings up an interesting query, namely, how is a gate destroyed?  A number of possible means to destroy gates immediately leap to mind, including:hit it with lightning bolts, fireballs, ice storms, cones of cold and whatever other attack spells are availabledisintegrate itshatter itdestroy the gate’s grounding frame/location/henge, for without its moorings, the gate cannot exist and dissipates into wisps of nothingopen a second gate within the first gate (the Babylon 5 solution)destroy all of the portals leading to/from the gate (the Morgaine solution)Some or even most of these methods may not be available to most PCs, however, while others offer little to no hope for the characters to continue on in their current setting (C. J. Cherryh’s Morgaine regularly travels from world to world, closing each gatebehind her---never able to return to her home or to travel back from whence she came).  I recommend that you make the methods of destruction for each gateunique, but also remain flexible to allow player ingenuity to provide inspiration.  That way you can roll on the table below once the gate has ... read more!