Commentary On Plane Hoping In The Stormbringer rpg - The Second Entropy Configuration, Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique, and The Pan Tangians

 Last night we our group got together for beers and to talk about Stormbringer and the Rogue Mistress campaign was brought up. And this also brought to the fore front Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique. The events here take place after our experiences at the Inne Between Worlds. 

We had already served aboard the Rogue Mistress by this time and our wizard patron wanted an Entropy congifuration. Why?! We weren't sure but the pay was good and so we were off. This takes place after my uncle's passing. We three DM 's were still working from his notes. 

Nineteen Ninety one saw our crew of retrobates back on Zothique as we faced off against a crew of Pan Tangians headed by a Chaos priest. There's a part of Zothique called the 'wastes of time' that my uncle made up and it's filled with the wreckage of scale ships. Why it was filled with this wreckage we never found out but we did find out it was a demon haunted place of horror. Skeletal crews still were at the helm of some of those ships. And the Pan Tangians were dressed in desert gear and light weight demon armor. We were after a brand new used entropy configuration for a scale ship we were working on. The entropy configuration powers a scale ship's drive systems. And why is it called a 'scale ship'? Well according  to the scale ship entry on Moorcock Multiverse Wiki; "Those who utilize Scale Ships are not reliant upon the Moonbeam Roads, and can travel anywhere in the Multiverse they are capable of navigating to. Scale ships utilize an IT (Intercontinua-Travelling) drive to manipulate mass. Folding/Contracting the ship's mass allows its passengers to "scale down", falling through the scales towards realities of ever higher density." "Unfolding/Dissipating the ship's mass allows it to scale up, rapidly ascending towards realities of ever lower density. Experienced pilots, such as The Rose Von Bek, can skim their ships across the billowing fractals of the Ether like a stone across water." DM Steve & DM Barry took over my uncle's game after this point and had his notes 

We made it into the wreckage of a scale ship & then found out the hardway that it was haunted by a small hoard of Chaos demons. And we also heard that the Pan Tangians had also found out the hard way as well. They lost one of thier number to said demons. The closer we got to one ship's wreckage the worse it got! We found a number of sun bleached corpses and these were actually the former crew of the scale ship that we were exploring. 
And when they animated not one of us was surprised. What were surprised about was that one or two of the skeleton warriors could hurl spells at our PC's!  What we were surprised about was the fact that these skeleton warriors also attacked the Pan Tangians as well! We were inbetween a hard place and Hell itself! 
Our party began to look around for some solution when we came across another scale ship. This scale ship had a huge number of glyphs of Law & we decided to go inside. Inside the interior was an unsusual set up almost entirely biological in nature. We went to remove the 'Entropy Configuration' and heard the following, "Oh if you do that you'll kill me! However you'll make a lovely meal" and that's when the phantoms came out! The guardians of Law or the ship's immune system were more then happy to feed on us. Needless to say that we were able grab the configuration and then leave quickly. The 'ship' lay dying but what it actually was was a minor noble lord of Law. Our theory is/was that the scale ships were part of some great battle at the 'end of time'. 

To this day we have no idea what happened to that group of Pan Tangian reveavers. Our wizard patron who sent us to Zothique wanted his entropy configuration. The 'wizard' wasn't actually a wizard but Balo the Jester of Chaos in disguise. What he actually got was the 'heart of a minor lord of Law'. This artifact would cause us no end of problems later on. And this is one of the reasons why we had to aquire our own scale ship coming up. 

One of the the things that set my uncle's Stormbringer rpg campaigns apart was his frequent use of the 'plane hopping' motif. And this was normal in his view because of the mythic & epic nature of the Stormbringer rpg line of products. We as a party couldn't go jaunting out into the planes per say unless it was through the use of some artifact or patron. So our games never got out of hand per say. Sure we journeyed across the planes but it was through artifacts and sorcery. Or through the machinations of some wizard or powerful patron. We're talking about using a combination of third edition Avalon Hill Rune Quest and Fifth edition Stormbringer rpg systems. Scheduling and timing is going to be the key to getting this off the ground.