#RPGaDay2024 Day 30 – Trap

Day 29 of #RPGaDay2024. T-Minus two days! This post is the next-to-last post of the themes from the alternative prompt challenge list by Skala Wyzwania. For more information on RPG a Day, see David Chapman’s Autocratik blog post for 2024.

The RPG challenge theme for today is Trap. Rolling a 1d10 for the quest. The result is 4: Invent and item.

The Great Engine: The Wyrm Trap

The Great Engine of the downed techno-magic skyship, the Great Reaver, was before them. Long ago, dragons left the world. The stories of the Order of the Sleeping Wyrms told how dragons had left the world in the age of mortals only to return when needed. But the Curse Bearer told her the truth. Invaders from another dimension, another world, had created these engines to power their skyship. Engines that trapped the might of dragons and made powerful their conquest across the reality.

A wyrm trap is an artifact created to harness dragons’ life force, magic, and primal ties to reality. It uses that energy to power great reality-warping skyships that could travel across realities. Despite myriad realities, dimensions, and worlds, no two dragons are alike in any of the countless reflections of creation. In all their creative and destructive majesty, they embody the creative forces that gave birth to reality.

In time immemorial, a race of tinkers in a far-off distant world had built machines that ravaged their world, and they sought to create an artifact powerful enough to recreate their world. They tapped into the power of dragons to do so and made the ships, their servants of flesh and steel and the disembodied minds that came to be known as the Aye Eyes, to control the might of their creation. The ships were sent out with these Wurm Traps as their source of power to harness the life force of the dragons.

While this endeavor occurred, the ship’s creators and their world died, and the fleet continued its quest with no end in sight. Some ships disappeared in countless realities, and others conquered whole universes, but gradually, they absorbed the dragons, stripping the worlds of their power and fracturing reality. Now, only the Great Engine in the runs of the ship deep within Ravall. In it pulse the powers of the dragons that remain, trapped inside the core, as this world, like many others before, slowly dies and fades away.

In the final gambit, the players are in place. See you tomorrow for the final post!

2024 has been a celebration of all the beautiful things tabletop role-playing games bring to our lives and the positive elements of the community. Thanks to everyone who has read the posts this year.