Thassilon
Everything on this page was handed to the party directly, after the battle, in answer to a question somebody asked in passing about a room full of carved gold coins.
What it was
Thassilon was an empire on this continent tens of thousands of years ago. Its magic was built on the seven virtues.
A group broke away from that. They called themselves the Runelords, and they built their magic on the seven vices instead — the seven deadly sins. Wrath, greed, gluttony, and the rest.
There were seven of them. Each ruled his own nation. Each was immensely powerful. And each powered much of his magic off a metaphysical emotional state — not as a metaphor, and not as a moral failing, but as fuel.
A Runelord of wrath did not simply rage. Wrath was the engine his magic ran on, and he needed his subjects to feel it.
Earthfall
Ten thousand years ago, a massive meteor struck the continent of Thassilon.
It destroyed it outright and put it under the ocean. A cloud covered the whole planet for a thousand years. Dwarves and humans were driven underground; the elves left through portals and did not come back for a very long time. What survived, survived in caves, and spent a millennium barely subsisting.
The coastline moved. Where Sandpoint stands now was probably the middle of a continent. Thassilon proper was somewhere out under the water to the west.
This is common knowledge in Varisia. Most people in Sandpoint could tell you the story. Almost nobody thinks about what it means.
The two ruins
This is the part the party has and has not finished thinking about.
| Ruin | Where | Dedicated to |
|---|---|---|
| The catacombs under the glassworks | Directly beneath Sandpoint | Wrath |
| The catacombs under Thistletop | Four miles north-east | Greed |
Same masonry. Thalanadil recognised it on sight — the cut stone under Thistletop is the stonework under the glassworks. Same builders.
Different sins. Wrath under our feet. Greed four miles up the coast. And each has a well in it of the same strange kind — the one under Sandpoint had something thin come out of it, and the one under Thistletop is ringed with carved gold coins.
When Thalanadil pointed out that two of them being that close together seemed odd, the answer was:
"You guys don't know what areas they were. And to a certain extent the landscape has changed quite a bit due to Earthfall. So you could be sitting on what used to be a border. You don't know."
A border. Between two of them.
What is left of it
Thassilonian stonework is too large and too durable to clear away, so everything built since has been built among it, by people who cannot read it.
- The Old Light — the ruined lighthouse on the cliff at Sandpoint. The town is named after it and has no idea what it is
- The catacombs under the glassworks and under Thistletop
- The Irespan — a broken bridge of impossible scale that runs out over Magnimar's harbour, with a whole district built underneath it
What we can read of it
Very little, and we should be honest about that.
Brodert Quink's field guide covers perhaps five thousand words of a language that had hundreds of thousands. Forty years of one man's work, everything he could recover in a lifetime. Thalanadil translated six or seven runes out of forty on the Thistletop wall using it, and several of the ones he could not read are not in the book at all.
Comprehend languages does not help. As the DM put it: "It's not really a language. This is not somebody writing in a book."
Quink can read more than seven of them, and has refused to say which until he has stood in front of the wall himself.
The Sihedron
A seven-pointed star — one point per sin. It is the mark of the whole system.
It is worth noting every single time it turns up.
It is currently inscribed on the inside of a circlet that Flightless has been wearing since before any of this began. The metal is red-gold, it is Thassilonian, it is warm to the touch, and it faintly hums.
Nobody has ever asked why.