#high level

Plancescape: The Palace Moon

Hovering beyond the reach of mortals and beneath the notice of gods, this eerily tranquil wasteland awaits those who would explore its mysteries and discover the fate of a vanished pantheon.

Gods die, this is known, as their fossilized bodies are sometimes found floating in the astral sea or interred in great monuments hidden throughout the cosmos. Sometimes they are slain by other gods, or die as part of their own mythology, or shift and reoccur as new deities as the people who they are pledged to go through ideological changes.

This does not explain the absence of the gods that built the palace moon, a demiplane hanging just outside the material realm in much the same way that a regular moon might orbit a celestial body. In its time it was a hanging garden, a lush green paradise where one might lounge in mountain sized castles and observe the goings on of the material plane, basking in riches and radiance and all the splendor their divine might could conjure. Today the moon is a dust-riven wasteland, with its halls and city sized gardens smothered under colorless particulate with those remaining edifices exposed to the air slowly being worn away by time. It is a land ripe for exploration, as the relics of divinity lay scattered among the towering pagodas and basilicas covered with petrified ivory, amounting to not only the treasures of unknown gods but to the flotsam of various celestial courts and clergies born to serve the now absent divinities. It is for this reason that both scholarsandterrible warlords choose to make the Palace moon their home, sifting through the rubble of the dead world in the hopes of finding some fossilized trace of the ineffable.

Hooks:

• The a powerful druid who’s influence once kept the region stable has gone missing investigating strange omens from a set of ancient megaliths contained within the foundations of an overgrown temple. As tensions between the region’s factions escalate, those who would seek peace reach out to the party to find her and bring her back. After delving the dangerous ruins (and having to overcome some of the druid’s on defenses along with the local critters) they discover her journal. In attempting to stabilize the ruin, the druid activated some kind of portal and pulled something through, after which the party can deduce that whatever it is she summoned dragged her back with it before the portal closed. Their only hope of rescuing the peacekeeper is to retrace her steps, activate the portal and plunge through themselves, surviving the lunar wasteland and get her back, all before war breaks out at home. 
• In the light of the full moon, the silver inlaid skull of a particular aasimar possesses the power to teleport those holding it to a graveyard on the moon, the spirit of it’s departed owner desperate to return to the land from which it was banished. A fortune hunting thief has purchased this skull from an occultist, and has been using it to loot the graves of the celestial court and turn a tidy profit. The players might find a few of these objects in the local magic shops, with a chance to trace them back to their source.
  
• Seeking visions of the divine, a group of mystics cast their mind out to the aether and were cursed with visions of the lunar tomb palace. Extracting from this foreboding omen that the true gods of their world were dead, and all others were merely invading presences, they set about forming a heretical order and stirring up no end of trouble, even after their deaths. These followers of the Lunatic’s Canto can be responsible for all manner of blasphemous crimes across the realm, eventually drawing the party into one of their moon mad rituals the way that cultist are wont to do.
  

Further Adventures:

• It’s up to you whether the palace moon is one of the ACTUAL moons of your campaign world,  or whether it exists in a parallel space to one of those satellites, the way olympus as unreachable home of the gods existed parallel to the quite scalable mountain in the Grecian countryside. If it’s the latter, then the Palace Moon may only be accessible by specialized rituals and at particular times of the year, then the palace is accessible to anyone with a strong enough teleport spell, making it a great “ staring you in the face since level 1″ twist to where the villian has their lair.
  
• Not to play into the old “ That Wizard came from the Moon” meme, but the moon really is an underexploited place for weird monsters to come from, ranging from old classics like mooncalf , or stranger aberrations that have taken up residence on the moon’s marble halls (thanks @thirdtofifthand@dm-tuz). Let your party enjoy a bit of flash-gordon weirdness, you know you want to! Plus it’s also a good home for angels and other godly beings to hang out that’s not so distant as the afterlife.
  
• The vanished pantheon of the Palace moon is a great way to explain “ Silent gods” in your campaign world, regions that are cut off from the divine while others are in communion with their gods and have a LOT to say about that fact. Likewise, a partymember with Aasimar heritage may be descended from one of the celestial courts that dwelt on the palace moon, escaping to the world below after their masters left.
  

Adventure: The Doomsday Book

“If you don’t like how it’s done, do it yourself” is very bad advice for someone with a god complex

Setup:In life, the mage Varner of Boltzford was fascinated with the complexity of the world, the seemingly infinite inter-connectivity of all things in a web so complex that one mortal mind could never understand all of it. In death fascination transformed into obsession, as Varner was driven to extend his existence to perfect what he saw as the art of the gods: Genesis, the act of bringing life out of nothingness.

Decades of experiments with astral constructs and transmutation eventually led Varner into the a philosophical and theological haze of “ontology” and “ideal forms”, along with a lot of other prattle that allowed him to convince himself that the things he could create things so beautiful they could redefine beauty, so perfect they could improve on perfection, and so real that they made other things less real by comparison.

He created the Renascent Tome, an artifact that ate up the matter of the existent world to produce things that adhred to Varner’s vision of perfection, small things at first that were mere pretty trinkets, through which he learned that the more he wanted form his creation the more he had to feed it

It was shortly after the lich turned an entire town and its surrounding valley into dust that Varner fell victim to the bane of so many promising omnicidal visionaries: meddling adventurers. The heroes did what heroes did best and though they made a proper mess out of the perfectionist’s plans they were unable to keep hold of his Tome, which slipped through their grasp to cause problems in the wider world to this day, diminished in power but no less a threat.

Hooks: 

• Varner went through a number of research facilities/evil lairs in his time before he was felled by heroes, and any one of them could be a resting place for his tome. Such lairs are often dumping grounds for the lich’s escaped or failed experiments: creatures and constructs so beautiful they sear or corrode things around them, eerily stagnant wilderness, the soulless progeny of attempted “master races”.  Such oddities would draw all sorts of adventurers, or at least the collectors and conservationists looking to study these anomalies.
  
• A foolish and famehungry apprentice found the Renascent Tome at his local book fair being sold  ( at a discount no less) by an unwitting salvager. After discovering its ability to transmute things into idealized forms, he began using the book to mend broken objects and “heal” local livestock ( no matter the fact that things the book abzorbs are effectively disintegrated with a new thing made in their place). Tales of his wondrous talents reached the ear of the ailing local countess, who requested the apprentice bathe her in the books healing light and restore her to the glory she once possessed.  Now her lands are ruled by a nightmarish “perfected” tyrant, and patrolled by her inhumanly “idealized” soldiers. The thing that took the countess’s place brings the captive apprentice out from his cell every week or so to illuminate her increasingly crystalline castle, each interaction getting crueler and more alien.
  
• Cultists of an outergod dedicated to ego destroying perfection have come to see Varner’s work as a holy relic of their faith, allowing them to perform miracles that they could have never dreamed of otherwise. They seek it always, putting a target on the party’s back should they come into possession of the Renascent Tome. When pushed to extremes, these same cultists will unleash the relic’s power without any heed for who or what it consumes, gleefully sacrificing themselves to become the foundation of the world it will create.
  

Item stats: The Renascent Tome

artifact

Dormant: while dormant the tome serves as a +1 arcane spellcasting focus.

A creature attuned to the Renascent tome gains the 2nd level wizard school feature: Minor Conjuration, save that the items created always have a +1 magical bonus to any rolls they were intended to make. Conjuration wizards treat both the focus and the items conjured as if they were a +2 bonus instead.

When this feature is activated, the book’s pages glow and begin siphoning in dust and small unattended objects from its surroundings. The effect is otherwise harmless.

Awakened:When awakened, the Renascent tome gains 10 charges, which may be used to cast the following spells: Discorperating light (1 charge as tasha’s caustic brew, but dealing radiant damage) Conjure Barrage ( 3 charges) or Fabricate (4 charges). Items created by the fabricate spell are of exquisite quality and retain the +1 magical bonus from the minor conjuration feature.  The tome regains 1d6+4 charges at dawn. When the last charge is spent, roll a d20, on a 1 the tome consumes itself in a blast of siphoning radiance. All creatures in a 20ft radius must make a save vs the bearer’s spell save dc ( or int+proff if they are not a caster) or suffer the effects of a successful gravity sinkhole spell

Exalted: The bonus the focus provides grows to +3 and the tome gains 10 extra charges.   The spells that it can cast now include disintegrate ( 6 charges), mirage arcane ( 7 charges) and blade of disaster (9 charges). Spells can still be cast if the item lacks the prerequisite charges, but this increases the number rolled on the no charge roll to go up by 1 per missing charge. 

Curse: Once exalted, Each spell cast from the book now also requires an extra 1d4 charges. If the no charge roll occurs, in addition to triggering a gravity sinkhole, the Tome begins to act as a sphere of annihilation from that moment onwards. 

Further Adventures:

• Removing the curse from the Renascent Tome requires access to Varner’s research notes, requiring the party to either seek out a source of great knowledge of attempt to seek the imprisoned lich himself.
  

• Varner has had a lot of time to think after he was imprisoned, and has concluded that the current material world is too corrupt and messy for any of his perfect creations to truly take root. Though his reemergence into the land of the living will bring with it a tide of new horrific experiments and dangerous objects released upon the world, his ultimate goal is to find a nice enough place to use as raw material for the eden he’s going to build. Given that he’s spent long enough as a lich that many of his own feelings have begun to atrophy, he’ll reach out to those closest to him ( like the meddling adventuring party that woke him up) to see what they think of as ideal. Say, the starting town of the campaign or wherever the heroes have decided to make their home.
  

• Should the Renascent tome fulfill its purpose it’s safe to say that the party will have very little chance of undoing what its done, muchless surviving the process should they have been caught within its mile wide blast radius. However, with the slightest bit of divine intervention from whatever spirits are watching over their adventures, the party might just be able to turn that slim chance into a fighting one. They find themselves trapped inside the grotesque Perfection of Varner’s world, a grotesque parody of a place familiar to them with all the personality and imperfection scrubbed away.  At its center is the Tome, its own less than perfect existence protected by an enchantment Varner made to protect his magnum opus from devouring itself in an act of sentimental self sabotage. The perfect world is contained inside the book while the book is contained within the world, this paradox, if inverted, might allow the party to reverse the flow of the Tome’s reality devouring magic, deconstructing the demiplane it’s constructed and reassembling the world that was in mostly the right order. All that’s required is to brave the maze of hyper-real nostalga and face off against a perfected Varner, alive again after a near century of lichdom, ignorant of any of his previous failings, but master of his domain.
  

Watch the new trailer for my debut comic series HIGH LEVEL, in stores February 20th on DC/Vertigo! Headphones recommended, because it has a killer original score by Steven Alexander RyanofThe Black Queen.Pre-order/subscribe to High Level now at your local comic shop or online at highlevelcomic.com. Pre-orders mean a lot for the future of the series, and we have a big story to tell!

Written/created by me with stunning artwork by Barnaby Bagenda and Romulo Fajardo Jr, High Level is a post-post-apocalyptic punk sci-fi adventure set hundreds of years after the end of the world. I’ve been developing it for over a year, and the first issue is the beginning of a huge sci-fi story that’s going to go to some wild places. I hope you’ll all come along for the ride! Even if comics aren’t your thing, if you like 80s/90s sci-fi (like Blade Runner, Star Wars, Mad Max, Aeon Flux, The Matrix, Akira, Total Recall) you might dig this book. It reads cinematically and has gorgeous visuals.

For more news and previews, follow High LevelonInstagram,Twitter, and Facebook.

A new 80s/Struzen-inspired promo poster I designed for my upcoming debut comic series High Level, in stores February 20th 2019! 

You can now pre-order the digital edition of the first issue (or subscribe to the series) from DCorComiXology, or the print edition from your local comic book shop or from online retailers like Midtown ComicsandFirst Legacy Comics (they’ll send it right to your door every month, at a discounted price).

Pre-orders impact the future of the series, so any and all help spreading the word would mean the world to me! I’ve been developing this series for over a year now, and I really hope you enjoy reading it as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it.

To see more previews and news, follow the official High Level profiles on InstagramandTwitter.

The project that’s been consuming me for the past year and a half is my debut comic book, HIGH LEVEL, a sci-fi adventure series launching February 2019 on DC-Vertigo. Here are the first (unlettered) pages from issue 1 that we debuted Friday at New York Comic Con. I’m insanely proud of how gorgeous this book is shaping up to be - our creative team is bringing so much depth and detail to the expansive world we’re creating.

High Level is a labor of love for me. It’s an epic, socially conscious post-post-apocalyptic saga crafted in the spirit of all of my favorite science fiction from the 80s and 90s. Written by me, pencils by Barnaby Bagenda, colors by Romulo Fajardo Jr, lettering by Nate Piekos, covers by Guillame Ospital. Edited by Andy Khouri and Maggie Howell.

For more art, previews, and news, follow High LevelonInstagramandTwitter.

This weekend at the SDCC DC/Vertigo panel, we unveiled the first concept art for my upcoming comic series HIGH LEVEL. These sketches show some of the process we’ve gone through developing the look of Thirteen, High Level’s protagonist. Artist Barnaby Bagenda has been bringing my vision of High Level’s world and characters to life in ways I never expected, and I’m teeming with excitement to show you more as the book evolves. To see more of this concept art and new previews in the future, follow the new official High Level Instagram account. I also posted more about the character development process on my Patreon.

High Level now has an official release of February 2019! If you have a local comic shop you frequent, please let them know you’re interested in this book - it helps a lot!

I’ll be at San Diego Comic Con this weekend, appearing at my first-ever SDCC panel Friday July 20th at 6pm to discuss my upcoming original series HIGH LEVEL, coming to DC/Vertigo in Spring of 2019!

High Level is created/written by me with artwork by the incredible team of Barnaby BagendaandRomulo Fajardo, Jr. (whose work you should check out in the excellent OMEGA MEN series), and covers by Guillaume Ospital. Guillaume created the cover image you see above, and I designed the logo.

I don’t want to say too much about the plot yet because there are a lot of mysteries and twists and it’s going to go to some unexpected places. Here’s the official description, which doesn’t give too much away:

Hundreds of years after the end of the world, a new human society has rebuilt itself from scratch. The 1% of the population who control all of the wealth and power on Earth have long since hidden themselves away behind the walls of a mysterious silver city: High Level.

Our story begins far away from there, in an outland community where High Level is spoken of only in myths and rumor. There we’ll join a self-interested smuggler called Thirteen on a sprawling sci-fi adventure across a new continent of mystery and danger, as she’s tasked with delivering a child messiah to the fabled metropolis at the top of the world, from which no one has ever returned.

Many more details to come as we get closer to release!