Spire Sessions 4: The Day of Crimson Ash

"On the Darkest day 

 May we hold to temperance

 To quell their vengeance."

 -official motto of the Eclipse Paladins

"Bleed 'em dry--it's what they deserve!"

-unofficial motto of the Eclipse Paladins

Twice a century at most, the day of the Harvest Equinox in the third season of every year is not just a day of celebration and mourning. Sometimes, the full 24 hours of sunlight are...diluted. The moon gets in the way. And for an entire day, the city of Spire is bathed in the dim light of a solar eclipse.

On equinox days like this, the agents of the Crimson Vigil either fall back to their boltholes and hide or go out into the streets prepared to die and die fighting. It's a day when even they are filled with fear. A day when the Eclipse Paladins arrive to cull their ranks in a great conflagration.

The Day of Crimson Ash has arrived. You are not ready.

Jason Nguyen

The Eclipse Paladins

The Solar Basilica is a place built on old secrets, all of them meant to preserve a fragile order. Wheels within wheels turn there. Even the solar paladins, the church's greatest enforcers, hold secrets within their ranks.

The secret we are discussing today was created shortly after the Crimson Vigil's first major act of public attack on the aelfir ruling class. The vigilites made their way into the chapel in the University of Divine Magic, defaced it, and held the place for an entire three days. Even the black guard, once called in, were defeated. It ultimately fell upon the paladins. They failed too.

In response, the upper echelons of paladin clergy combed religious texts for an excuse to mobilize a specialized team against the Vigil. They found one in the form of an apocryphal (and quite taboo) religious ceremony held in the old days of the aelfir, a form of flagellation-as-inquisition in which the high clerics of local churches were mobilized to kill all sinners in their villages on the day of a equinox eclipse. Thus was the Day of Crimson Ash secretly reinstated, and the Eclipse Paladins formed.

Structure

The Paladins are split into four divisions: Wands, Coins, Cups, and Swords. Each division has jurisdiction over different missions and tasks which must be completed in the twenty-four-hour eclipse period. There are only ever fourteen members of each division, making the paladins' membership 56 total. They are small in number, but incredibly dangerous.

There is no official leader of the Eclipse Paladins--they themselves often claim to answer to Brother Harvest and Brother Harvest alone, and most people are too afraid to dispute that. All of them are so well-trained that they need no leaders. That said, the King of each division holds the highest authority over the members.

Equinox eclipses are so few and far-between that membership of the Eclipse Paladins is almost entirely dynastic. Members are born of paladins, are raised paladins, and die paladins. The initiation of outsiders to the group only occurs when a paladin family line has been totally eliminated; even then, new initiates are put through a grueling training process. The singular goal of the Eclipse Paladin is so critical to them that failing to destroy their targeted chapters of the Vigil before the eclipse ends is considered something deeply shameful, deserving of the greatest punishment.

All Eclipse Paladins are identifiable by their armor and masks. Each one looks unique, but they always bear the insignia of their divisions and the same black and gold colors.

The Four Divisions

• The Wand Division is comprised of master detectives. They are all manhunters, trained to find people and places and, more likely than not, burn them to the ground. Though lightly armed and armored, they're the division least concerned with maintaining a semblance of honor; most of them fight dirty and they have no qualms with carrying guns. The real threat the Wands pose, though, is still their incredible tracking skills. The current King of Wands is a former Hellionite who is said to be capable of ascertaining entire histories from spent bullet casings--the Vigil is taking more care than usual (usual being none) to clean up the scenes of their various attacks lest they find their scent.
• The Coin Division is deceptively dangerous. The Coins are thieves, plain and simple: their job is to assess Vigil bases and storage sites, learn their layouts, and rob them blind. They force cells to fight in wars of attrition that they cannot possible win. More than a few Vigil cells have died simply because they tried to wait out the eclipse in safehouses only to find their food storage empty. In times of need, the Coin division even recruits new members from Spire's large population of Incarnadines, forcing them into service in exchange for paying off divine debts. 
• The Chalice Division have no equipment to aid them in combat and most of them possess no spellcasting skills. That's because they have no need for such things--all a Chalice needs to destroy a vigilite is their tongue. The Chalices are interrogators, soldiers who conduct conquest in a deceptively diplomatic fashion. They are psychologists and analysts, finding every single mental weak spot a person has through the gaze of their cold, unfeeling eyes and then using those weak spots to destroy their victims' minds. When a Chalice apprehends someone, they are escorted to one of several black rooms underneath the Solar Basilica. If they return, it is as shadows of their former selves. Many Chalice have actually given themselves lobotomies, attempting to remove what little empathy they feel to focus on their work.
• The Sword Division is tactical. Found some dirty vigilites that just need to drop dead? The Swords will go in and massacre them. There is no subterfuge to the Swords, no deception or cheap tricks, just blades handled with expert skill. Only blades, though--the Swords are devoted to a fanatical interpretation of Brother Harvest, one who doesn't allow them to seek power in modern industry, so most of them don't use guns. They've got a twisted sense of honor, too. The King of Swords, an ex-Warrior Poet, refuses to personally engage in any clandestine assassinations and wields a massive executioner sword to represent that.

GM Notes

The Eclipse Paladins and the Day of Crimson Ash are all about giving the campaign a recognizable group of recurring villains and an excuse to bring the Ministry of Our Hidden Mistress and the Crimson Vigil closer together. If the party chooses to help the Vigil on the Day of Crimson Ash rather than abandoning them to their grisly fates, the end result will likely be a unification of the two groups. With the whole concept that the drow worshiped a triple goddess prior to the aelfir occupation, I quite like the concept of alliance, as it brings drow religion one step closer to reunification. Perhaps, in future stories, the newly combined Vigil/Ministry could convince the Church of Our Glorious Lady to join in...

I'd like for the Paladins themselves to run the gamut from truly dangerous foes to basic mooks. There are 56 of these guys, so I'm gonna flesh out three or four of them and then leave the rest as blank slates until my players do something to make them relevant. I also designed each division around dealing stress to a specific resistance: the Wands hurt Shadow, the Coins hurt Silver, the Chalices hurt Mind, and the Swords hurt Blood. Obviously, it's never going to be that strict in actual gameplay, but those are their primary avenues for harming the players. Eventually, the players will likely cotton on that this is how they work, which will hopefully make for a nice "oh that's fucking cool" moment.

The Eclipse Paladins' appearances will, I hope, instantly increase the tension of any given session. When one shows up, players should expect to be incessantly tracked, robbed, relentlessly interrogated, or just beaten to death. They are A Problem that has to be solved in order to keep playing. I've been playing quite a bit of Kingdom Death: Monster lately, and I think the Nemesis Showdowns there are good blueprints for how I'd like Eclipse Paladin fights to go: messy and brutal, where anyone can die in an instant. Lastly, yes, the four divisions are all named after and based on the suits of the Minor Arcana--that's also why there's only 14 members in each. I consciously chose not to add any Major Arcana members, solely because I don't want to have players fight a Joker.

With regards to campaign structure, the Day of Crimson Ash is, of course, a single day, twenty-four hours. I plan to have this storyline unfold in something resembling real time: when 24 hours work of sessions (so, 6-8 sessions) have gone buy, the day will be over, and Spire will have forever changed. While my earlier post on the Wilted Man was about creating a very compressed storyline--a year or so within 6ish sessions--this one is the opposite, a decompressed campaign. 

A Day of Crimson Ash storyline also provides GMs with an opportunity to flesh out the Crimson Vigil a bit more, make them feel like more of a footnote. Who leads what factions? What do their members usually look like? These are questions I'd like to answer. It's also an excuse to port the critically cool Red Saints from Heart over to Spire. Seriously, imagine how cool it'd be to fight alongside a four-armed flesh giant with a crown made of fire.

Additional Notes

• That the Eclipse Paladins are super badass and cool does not make them any less monstrous, nor does it make them any less fallible. Every member should have weaknesses--the King of Swords isn't willing to stab people in the back, the Chalices aren't always prepared to get punched so hard it breaks their masks, etc. I particularly like the idea that some members being hopelessly addicted to Blues, which makes them temporarily realize how genocidal their cause is.
• Also, every Eclipse Paladin ought to feel different. Different voices, different characteristics, and, most importantly, different designs. Their looks are all variations on a theme, not strict uniforms. They can still have unique masks and markers to make them distinct: kill notches somewhere on their armor, unique builds, all of that.
• The Day of Crimson Ash storyline will likely take place primarily downspire since that's where the Crimson Vigil is most situated. Get ready to spend a lot of time in the slums.
• Shit, I should probably categorize the Eclipse Paladins, huh. They're a Category 2: the threat they pose is specifically to the Vigil and their associates.
• Who in the upper echelons of the Solar Basilica is keeping the Eclipse Paladins running? Why do they do it? I don't know! It's definitely someone high up, so the ministers would need to be very good at what they do to find them and put an end to their machinations. And lbr, there might not even be a deep reason for it--probably just an aelfir who got their lunch money stolen by a vigilite once.

Thanks for reading this. Before I go, I want to mention a couple things:

1. Writer's block's been hitting me hard, so the frequency of these posts might decrease to every two weeks instead of one week. I know, I know, this is always how it starts.
2. I'll have a report on how playtests of the Possession Junkie extra advance turned out in a month or two when we actually start playing. Hoping it goes well, but I'm also me so it might not.
3. I might be diversifying my writing here to include my musings on other TTRPGs and, possibly, other forms of media real soon. I'm almost certain I'm gonna write about Kingdom Death: Monster--started a campaign with friends on Tabletop Sim recently and I'm just blown away by how much fun it is and how well it balances simple roleplaying with getting savagely mutilated by incredible fucked up body horror abominations.
4. I honestly don't know what the next post is gonna be. I had an idea I really liked, but it turns out something very similar already exists in the Heart rulebook. It's likely I'll just move on to my next villain idea.
5. Speaking of, I got my hands on the Heart rulebook last month. I love it--no surprise there--and will likely expand Spire Sessions to include Heart content.