Skip to main content

Miniature Sun

Stolen power core • Held in Scarlet's Secret Chest

Overview​

The Miniature Sun is a sphere of raw energy that sat at the heart of the furnace in the Spaceport Factory of the Eldoran capital. The party went to the factory to blow the furnace up. In Session 63 Bru stole the sun instead. As of Session 63 it is sealed in Scarlet's Leomund's Secret Chest, and nobody has decided what to do with it.

Properties​

  • The furnace. When the party scouted it in Session 60, the furnace looked like a contained power plant. It was a tower about 100 feet high with walls several feet thick. Stasis magic worked inside to stabilise it, a layer of insulation on the outside held in the heat, and a huge iron door with a complex lock led in. The party judged that breaching the containment would set off a chain reaction, which is why the furnace became a target.
  • The sun. Inside the chamber (Session 63), under an egg-shaped casing, was a throbbing, spherical sun. The DM put its radius at about the length of a school bus. The heat is ferocious even through the protective suit the "entropy mechanic" who works inside has to wear. Touching the sun is like touching magma: Bru took 3d8 fire damage reaching in to shrink it a second time.
  • The casing blocks radio signals as well as heat. Because of this, the party's bomb inside the furnace was rigged to go off from the shock of the outer bomb, not by remote.

The Theft (Session 63)​

Bru went in under the cover name "Drew", with Colonel Sanders–style facial hair, and relieved Tuni, the worker then inside the furnace. He flew to the top of the chamber on winged boots and planted the bomb meant for the inside. Then he changed the plan. He cast Reduce on the sun, which the DM ruled shrank it to about a tenth of its size (roughly two feet, by Bru's reckoning), and pulled it into a Rope Trick pocket.

He climbed out and told the foreman that the sun had got "really, really big" and then "really, really small" and was gone. The foreman called it a collapse. Captain Steel, interrupted in his office, only said "Go away." Bru then took the foreman out for a drink of brown (Persuasion 18). Later Captain Steel came out, called Olivia an idiot, tore the furnace door open one-handed to find the sun gone, and flew off. Outside he spotted Bru, who escaped with Misty Step.

Scarlet's Secret Chest​

Reduce lasts only a minute, so the sun grew back inside the Rope Trick, which lasts an hour. When Bru rejoined the others, the party first thought of moving the sun into the pocket village. They dropped the idea because two extradimensional spaces might blow each other up. Scarlet offered her Leomund's Secret Chest instead, a spell she had long waited to use. At the table it was described as storage on the Ethereal Plane that lasts until dispelled.

The DM kept the rule the party had used before: anything that fits through the container's opening can grow back to full size inside. Bru climbed the rope, shrank the sun again by touch, put the end of the rope into the chest and dispelled the Rope Trick, and the sun dropped in.

What Next​

The players noted that they had "stolen a central component of their rocket factory" and floated turning the sun into a power source for cars or rocket ships ("no weapons"), or letting it loose on a target. Nothing has been decided. It stays in the chest "for a rainy day".

Session History​

  • Session 59 — The party's inside man, Bon Bonnery, speaks in code of a key that must be found inside and a furnace that would "ignite this city", and the party sees the warded furnace at the end of the factory line.
  • Session 60 — Scouting from the ceiling, the party finds that the furnace is a contained power plant held stable by stasis magic, and plans a bomb to breach it.
  • Session 63 — Inside the furnace Bru finds a sun whose radius is about a school bus long. He shrinks it with Reduce, smuggles it out in a Rope Trick, and Scarlet seals it in her Leomund's Secret Chest.