Connective Tissue (City of Seven Seraphs in Your Game: Anchors)

Ashborn Dryad – Artist: Kii Weatherton

“The Seraphs are Stone. The Stone is bedrock to our Garden. Earth is the foundation of all things, even here. From it comes all Growth. And if the Growth is found bountiful and pure, then Stone must surely rejoice. And if it bears Taint and reeks of foul Flaw then Stone will cry out for its first lover. It welcomes the Flame. Fire to cleanse away the failure and rot. And Stone will sing in the ashes to welcome a new beginning… and Stone will try again.”

– Chiera, Flame Keeper of the Ashborn

As a planar metropolis the City of Seven Seraphs is a possible way-point for most societies able to reach it via magic, artifice or other mystical means. However, the City also has a unique relationship with worlds of the Prime Plane….

City of Seven Seraphs in Your Game: Anchors

The quasi-real nature of the City was a boon in many ways, allowing for impressive feats of mystical augmentation and shadow-conjurative effects that sustain foodstuffs, construction and other necessities.  These phenomena could be drawn on with a relative reliability. However, the nature of its instability proved a difficulty for those wishing to settle the site of the Ether Vortex and adjoining shadow-conjunction. Reflected architecture would vanish and fade, while constructed buildings erupted or dissolved under the forces of the Etherstorm. The answer came from the Church of Parity, the now dead religion of the Fade who first settled the area.

They commanded that seven great statues be created to form a ring around the nascent settlement. Additionally they called for seven sets of seven replicas to be crafted of each great statue. And they charged each of the groups that would become to be the modern Parities to partner a member with an opposite group, Light and Dark. These pairs in turn were required to pair again each member with another pair of differing Parities, a total of six. These groups each carried a set of seven statuettes on pilgrimages to the most stable, sacred places of the Prime Plane. Seven sets of six wings carried to seven spaces by six souls. The Church claimed this geometry of magic would anchor the City to the Prime Worlds. And it did. Each set securing the City’s reality and hidden in the greatest places in the mortal realms.

In time the Parities would discover that more sets of statuettes expanded the stability of the City allowing it to grow. Always created seven by seven, always carried six by six. But whatever mysteries beyond this were most likely lost when Aphos commanded the Grand Consumption…

Anchors in Your Game

The City of Seven Seraphs first sent its Wardens out in the Prime Worlds ages ago. Wardens are sent still. Any campaign setting might find itself visited by these statue-bearing pilgrims. Any Great City, might already bare a hidden set of Seraph stones. In this way an essential link can be formed between any setting and the City of Seven Seraphs.

A party may discover an ancient statuette only to find themselves beset by strangers from beyond wishing them return it to its hiding place. Wanderers from the City may be encountered in sites of great mystery, arcane power or historical stability scouting to place an anchor-set. Strange survivors may deputize adventurers to act as replacements for the fallen in their Circle charging them to take a strange statuette into a dungeon and leave it there.

Of course City-native groups of Warden player-characters might also be interesting to a game group. The requirements of the Anchor placement mean a diverse party of six different Parity allegiances in addition to the races, classes and alignments that make up a standard party. Warden groups can be focused on world hoping adventures, re-visit long forgotten campaign settings, or engage high stakes intrigue within the City.

The possibilities of anchors to drive adventures in your games are literally endless. But that is far from the only way the City of Seven Seraphs can bring the Planes home to you…

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