Session 8: Ups and Downs

Only the ignorant look upon the night sky and marvel at the beauty of the stars, for between them lie the great gulfs of the cosmos, the gaping chasms of terror some call the Dark Tapestry. Over the centuries many inquisitive minds have made a study of this abstruse topic. Their most common fate is madness. Indeed, the guest registers of asylums around the Inner Sea are considered incomplete without at least one former expert of astrological studies. Some of these rambling lunatics lost their sanity by merely reading (or perhaps comprehending) the contents of forbidden manuscripts and codices on the subject, texts whose very titles evoke mysteries best left veiled. Others had their minds torn from them through the performance of ill-advised rituals found within such moldering pages. But a lifetime of madness seems merciful when compared to the doom of those reckless enough to take the most dangerous step: to seek contact with the dreadful alien beings who call the endless void their home, the fabled Dominion of the Black.

There are theories and crumbs of understanding about the Dominion of the Black, fitfully gleaned by those mad and undaunted scholars. Much of this information was inferred from missives of alien origin, drafted by intelligences so utterly inscrutable that translations made by terrestrial academics are at best only shadowy reflections of their original sources. Moreover, the scholarly minds that put pen to paper on the subject were more often than not precariously teetering on the precipice of hopeless lunacy at the time of composition. As a result, every “fact” asserted about the Dominion must be treated in the end as an inherently mutable thing, a tentative hypothesis awaiting the collection of more data. Of course, the collection of such data is fraught with peril, and warrants a cautionary tale.

These mysteries of the stars are often best left alone. This has also only fuel the Numerian Kellid’s paranoia of the technology that that is spread throughout the country.