Season 3, Session 15 - Caffeine and Cosmic Theory

The morning after the battle with Chegdrok, peace finally returns to the Crown’s Heirloom Inn. Orilia shares her rare stash of coffee—an exotic luxury in Everbrook—and her crew joins the heroes for a quiet breakfast. Meanwhile, Zedhryx Trevelle, having recovered from his disappearance, calls another strategy meeting to resume the discussion cut short by Azuth’s unexpected intervention. This time, the group gathers aboard Orilia’s ship, where Zed presents theories drawn from his forbidden tome, The Dissident’s Guide to the Secret History of Faerûn.

• Act I – Coffee and Company
  • Scene: Morning calm in the aftermath of chaos.
  • Action: Orilia brewed her prized imported coffee for the party—a rare treat in Everbrook. Her crew mingled with the heroes, trading stories and laughter before the next round of trouble began.
  • Action: Zedhryx arrived late but focused, carrying a satchel overflowing with notes, charts, and cryptic annotations. He announced a second meeting to make up for the “Azuth Incident.”
• Act II – Aboard the shrike ship
  • Scene: The conference on Orilia’s ship.
  • Action: The party gathered on the shrike ship’s deck, and Zed reveals his book again, flipping through the pages and loose-leaf additions to the tome.
  • Action: He outlined several “opportunities for investigation,” presented as historical mysteries rather than temporal exploitation.
• Act III – Mysteries of Netheril
  • Scene: Zedhryx’s lecture and the tangled history of high magic.
  • Action: Zed discussed the legendary arcanist Ioulaum, whose disappearance many scholars blame for Karsus’s Folly—the downfall of High Netheril. He speculated that Ioulaum’s vanishing may have driven Karsus to his desperate act of apotheosis.
  • Action: He explained that Ioulaum’s great “Longevity Spell” supposedly granted an additional year of life for each life it claimed—an ethically horrifying but potent invention. Some sources suggest the spell could still exist, perhaps sealed or fragmented.
  • Action: The discussion turned to the Nether Scrolls—the legendary platinum manuscripts said to contain the fundamental laws of magic. Zed described them as the original blueprint of all arcane theory, predating even Netheril itself. He emphasized that each scroll reshapes the reader’s understanding of magic, often permanently, and that together they could rewrite the Weave as mortals perceive it. Where the surviving fragments might lie, however, remains an open question.
  • Action: From there, Zed segued to Jeriah Chronos, the arcanist credited with inventing structured time magic. He explained that Jeriah’s early experiments in temporal anchoring became the foundation of Netheril’s chronomancy—techniques later pushed beyond safe limits by reckless arcanists seeking to alter history. Zed pauses and clears his throat after this is said.
  • Action: Zed’s notes also detailed Ioulaum’s later fate—his transformation into an Alhoon, a lich-like mind flayer. Unlike many historians, Zed found this claim credible, supported by several fragmented Netherese accounts. However, he was far less confident about later rumors that Ioulaum eventually became an Elder Brain, dismissing those tales as myth or extrapolation gone wrong.
  • Action: According to Zed’s research, Ioulaum’s final apprentice, Tabra, was the last human to serve him. She interrupted the illithid ritual that was transforming her master, believing the mindflayers were attempting to kill him. In truth, they were completing the process that would make him immortal.
  • Action: In her desperate attempt to save him, Tabra unleashed Ioulaum’s own longevity spell upon the gathered mindflayers, annihilating them and halting the ritual midway. Her interference saved Ioulaum’s life—but also corrupted the ritual, accelerating his metamorphosis into something neither lich nor man.
  • Action: Zed concluded that Tabra later destroyed every known copy of the Longevity Spell to prevent its misuse. Even so, he admitted that his sources contradicted one another and that the precise order of events—and Ioulaum’s current form—remained uncertain.
• Act IV – The Fall of the Gods
  • Scene: Karsus, Mystryl, and the limits of magic.
  • Action: Zed turned next to the subject of Heavy Magic—the mysterious "solid form of magic" once used for both artistic display and reality-altering enchantments. He cited the famed Museum of Heavy Magic in Eileanar, a three-story gallery built by Karsus himself. The museum’s exhibits were made of living illusion, overwhelming the senses with fully immersive “spell art” scenes from Netheril’s history. Repeat exposure was said to change them by passing fragments of Heavy Magic to their bloodlines.
  • Action: From there he shifted to Mythallars—vast crystalline spheres, each more than a hundred feet across, that shone like captive suns. First devised by Ioulaum, these engines drew raw power from the Weave, allowing arcanists to craft magic items without draining their life force. Their invention ushered in Netheril’s golden age and made the floating enclaves possible, but warned that touching one was fatal and that entire cities had been lost when their mythallars destabilized.
  • Action: He explained that magic is accessed through “layers” of the Weave, but after Mystra’s Ban, spellcasting was restricted to the ninth layer. Before the ban, the limit was only theoretical—Karsus’s infamous spell, Karsus’s Avatar, reached the twelfth layer in an attempt to steal Mystryl’s divinity and save his people from the phaerimm.
  • Action: The discussion turned to the Crown of Karsus—the keystone focus through which his twelfth-layer spell was cast. Zed mused aloud that, should Karsus somehow be deprived of the crown, the catastrophe might never occur.
• Act V – Theory and Opportunity
  • Scene: The meeting winds down.
  • Action: Zed admitted uncertainty about the order of these historical events, confessing that his material was cobbled together from many sources. Still, he emphasized the potential to “observe or even assist history”—phrased carefully, to avoid mentioning exploitation.
  • Action: The group agreed that any attempt to uncover the truth would require more information, safer ground, and perhaps a divine buffer against temporal backlash.
• Act VI – Resonance and Return
  • Scene: Evening on the bridge of the shrike ship.
  • Action: Later, Draphi Oturo, Nissa, Fazzo, and Orilia gathered on the bridge of Orilia’s ship to assist Draphi in tuning her crystalline wheel flower instrument.
  • Action: Draphi explained that proper resonance might enable her to open a passage back to Vahl’Avindha, the land they used to be trapped in, if only the tones could align perfectly.
  • Action: The party members each try to add their own parts to Draphi's attunement tune, with varying degrees of success.

• Orilia’s rare coffee brightens the morning after Chegdrok’s defeat.
• Zedhryx’s presentation aboard the shrike ship covers the tangled mysteries of Netheril’s fall.
• Lore revealed about Ioulaum, Tabra, the longevity Spell, and the myth of Karsus’s Avatar.
• Discussions on nether scrolls, mythallars, heavy magic, and the forbidden layers of the Weave.
• Draphi’s musical experiment to reopen the path to Vahl’Ahvindha begins to take shape.

• World Impact: Zedhryx’s research reframes Netheril’s collapse as an open mystery rather than a closed tragedy—its pieces scattered across the current age.
• Field Observation: The overlapping accounts of Ioulaum, Tabra, and Karsus hint that history itself may be unstable or cyclical in nature, especially within fractured timelines.
• Future Potential: The party now has leads on several powerful artifacts and historic figures, any of which could alter their understanding—or their fate—in Faerûn's past and future alike.