(from Blog, Jvstin Style)
Our fourth IRE, is a slightly obscure, but important anniversary in history.
On December 14th, 1287, the Zuider Zee sea wall in what is now the Netherlands collapsed. killing 50,000 people. It is the most massive such flood in the history of Holland; the Zuider Zee is one of the most massive projects in the history of engineering.
Thus, this disaster is the theme of this week’s IRE.
I like keeping the components man-made and semi-natural. After reading a thread on the Forge about using DitV for a Valedemar series, I’m quite interested in combining them.
Underneath the palace is (essentially) a heartstone, a device that ties Valedemar together magically. (Think of it as an artificial node, formed by dragging ley lines to the palace). It concentrates power, feeds the vrondi, and does other nifty magical stuff.
Set around the time of the Arrows trilogy, mages have been absent for hundreds of years. The power in the heartstone is building up and going unstable. The PCs are the first new generation of mages, and have to decide what to do. Dismantle the system that powers truth spells? Try some kind of an emergency hearthstone creation/transfer? Repair it? Import an expert on heartstones? If they delay, energy discharges in remote nodes, strange spikes of power interfering in their magics, and a shuddering palace will focus them on the problem.