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The Cloud

Many consider it tragic that Mother Scalehearth's sickening outfit was lost to time and space.

Title The Cloud
Age 5 years
Leadership Mother Scalehearth
Location Canal District, Kalashport
Status Defunct

Overview

The Cloud was a secret subfaction of the Church of the Dragon dedicated to the goal of resurrecting the Elemental Guardian and re-establishing the pre-war Guardian Spring society. Though somewhat noble in intention, the Cloud fundamentally misunderstood the damage their goals would have caused to both Kalashport and the Maple Tree Network. That and the nefarious techniques they employed to accomplish their goals made them the main antagonist faction of the Faction Campaign.

Operations and Goals

The Cloud's main goal was to collect all four of the Elemental Guardian's chromatic scales to use them to power a ritual to bring back the dead god. They attempted to do this by distracting and weakening other factions, allowing them to find the scales covertly. To acheive this, they employed several spies throughout the city searching for leads.

The Cloud was run by the Church of the Dragon head cleric, Mother Scalehearth. Most members of the Church were not aware of its existence, and the Cloud was not comprised of only Church members. The Cloud included several people of elemental descent that Scalehearth recruited, including Eleanor. The Cloud's base of operations was the tomb chamber of the Elemental Guardian, located underneath the Guardian Tree in the catacombs. While accessible through the catacombs itself, the Cloud set up an invisible portal behind the Church to use to go in and out.

Allies and Enemies

The Cloud was created from the Church of the Dragon, but they were separate entities that did not overlap. Besides a brief contract with the The Stack, it had no allies and no explicit enemies. The Cloud's relationship with the party was complex, as the Cloud saw itself leveraging the party to meet its goals while the party was dedicated to tracking down and destroying the Cloud. Scalehearth made a last-ditch attempt to make allies with the party but they refused. Norm Riesling had a personal grudge with Mother Scalehearth for her trying to manipulate Yancy.

History

250 years before the Faction Campaign, the Elven Dynasty invaded Guardian Spring for its natural resouces. Knowing the war was lost, Guardian Spring's protective deity, the Elemental Guardian, gave the remainder of its life to create the Maple Tree Network for its people to escape to the Feywild through. After the war, the Dynasty went to great lengths to conceal what happened to Guardian Spring and its god, and over time Kalashport nearly completely forgot about all of it. The Church of the Dragon maintained a modest group of people who still believed in the legends of pre-war Kalashport. One of their goals was to explore the dangerous catacombs underneath the Canal District to find more information about what happened. Five years before the Faction Campaign, Mother Scalehearth, the head cleric of the Church, explored deep enough into the Catacombs to find an ancient tome that chronicled details of Guardian Spring society. Deeper still, she found the tomb and remains of the Elemental Guardian. Knowing that this information could be dangerous if exposed, she kept the public-facing Church of the Dragon in the dark, and founded the Cloud.

Scalehearth found the body of the Elemental Guardian, but she lacked the full story of what happened, thinking that the god was killed in battle by the Elven Dynasty. She, as an elemental descendant, decided that she was destined to resurrect the Elemental Guardian and restore the Guardian Spring society, and she recruited others who shared her ambition. The tome she found described four elemental dragon scales that when put together could conjure the power of gods - potentially even facilitating the resurrection of the dead Elemental Guardian. Coincidentally, the Church already posessed one of them, but the remaining three were left to be found, so The Cloud began to draft ways to find the other three. They decided that destracting the city factions by causing a faction war would be their best chance at tracking them down. They carried out kidnappings in Midtown to antagonize the Police Department and the Curds against each other, but a war never broke out as SCHN and the party defeated Lt. Bighammer before she could invade Downtown.

Their initial plan defeated, the Cloud hired Rycan to find a way to fix the maple tree portals, thinking the red scale was in Evening City. Rycan and the party fixed the portals and also found the red scale and brought it back to Kalashport. The Cloud stole the red scale and Rycan's research from his lab. Meanwhile, Eleanor, one of the more recent Cloud recruits, found that the Halibut family owned the white dragon scale at their estate in Highland Heights. It was heavily protected, so Eleanor made a deal with Abigail Halibut that the Cloud could take the scale if they killed her husband, Richard. Norm Riesling had been missing at this point, so Scalehearth decided to find him and frame him for both the scale's disappearance and the murder. The party intervened, however, and defeated Eleanor and took the scale after the handoff. Eleanor told the party about Scalehearth's plans. Realizing the resurrection could destroy the city, the party resolved to find the last scale before Scalehearth could.

The Cloud's spies gathered that several people, including Manchego and Tess Mystique, were heavily interested in a secret treasure located underneath Downtown. Making the guess that the treasure was the last scale, they hired the Stack to locate it before anyone else could. This also failed, as the party managed to turn the Stack against the Cloud and they took the green scale for themsleves. With all four scales found, the Cloud held two and the party held two. Scalehearth wrote to the party to combine their efforts, threatening to cast the resurrection at half-power if they refuse.

The Cloud then waited a few days for the party's response. Unbeknownst to either Scalehearth or the party however, Norm Riesling was preparing a battalion of KSC soldiers to raid the Cloud hideout in retaliation for what happened in Highland Heights. He and his soldiers tracked down the hideout and stormed the chamber. Knowing the soldiers would overpower her clerics, Scalehearth made a last-ditch effort to cast the resurrection in the middle of battle. It backfired and reacted with the roots of the Guardian Tree to create an explosive rift, killing nearly all the clerics and soldiers and plunging Scalehearth and Norm into the Dream Realm. Meanwhile, the party noticed the effects of the botched resurrection on the surface, as the corrupted Dream Realm was allowing the Feywild and the Material Realm to collide with each other. Thinking that something went wrong, they immediately went to the Cloud's hideout and entered the rift. The party found that a corrupted copy of the Elemental Guardian was summoned inside the Maple Tree Network, critically damaging the Dream Realm. They initiated battle with the corrupted deity. During battle, Norm regained consciousness and immediately killed Mother Scalehearth. The party defeated the corrupted Elemental Guardian and fixed the Dream Realm. The Cloud was gone.

Known Members

Trivia