The Ashes to Ashes Cube (a 360 card Play report)

I met a glogger from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose :dmthink:,
And :screiming: lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Locheil Locheil, Best To Ever Do It:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

→ Here ← is a 360 card Magic: the Gathering cube based on the setting of Qal Ashen and the associated domain game, Ashes to Ashes.

The primer explains the project from a mechanical angle. In this post, I'd like to gush about the game that inspired it, as well as tell a few stories from the past three years of gaming.

* * *

Our story begins in Udāharaṇa, the example town for the example PC in the Ashes to Ashes official rules document. It is also a kaiju-foot-shaped crater—has been for a dozen or so years—and its ruler (the tragic Exemplos) is still MIA. Three wily PCs quickly identify the monster-infested ruin beyond the Wall is free real estate, and mount an expedition.

Our characters are:

• Executioner Ishbi, skeletal necromancer and merciless Crow (with a ken of volition, how very disco)
• Innin the Pious, a snakekin behemoth, humble and unassuming (immense serpentine length and girth aside)
• Ashur tel-Ashur, rotless scion of a long line of Ashurs (the most common name in the city: a John Johnson, in short)
• Aravind the Leopard, another rotless grey fox and renowned adventurer (he spends the rest of this adventure getting sat on by giant monsters)

The Udāharaṇan Concordat is off! with levied soldiers and a horde of laboring dead in tow. They drive off the mutated hounds and buzzards, burn the cursed orchard, and do combat with a gargantuan sealthing in the desert, (with an ultraviolent cameo from KILLING-STAR and Gormless the Grim, two other PCs whose paths have intersected with the Concordat's by coincidence) with the ingenuity and efficiency of trained civic engineers slash arsonists.

Most importantly, they discover heretical objects in the fort, and a portal to the Moon in the basement. The Moon, for those who have never played in one of Locheil's games, is the domain of the Queen of the Gods (evil), a race of spaceman elves (morally dubious), and giant psychic owls (flying thru the portal to attack our heroes). The owl shoots fear lasers at Innin, sits on Aravind, is stabbed by Ashur, and is raised as a flying undead mount by Ishbi.

* * *

Let us return to the City, and to an earlier time, to the Baroness Trigonometras: a mild-mannered mathematician by day, and the terrifying vigilante The Hyaena by night. 

The whole of Qal Ashen is a layered necropolis, where the tombs of basically every recent historical figure rest in varying-quantities-of-peace just beneath the City-which-is-God. So when tomb-robbers crack a particularly ancient and valuable tomb, the Hyaena is dutybound to hunt them down.

She slips after them with spells and guile, sneaking up on and eliminating the robbers, but not before the tomb's curses cause their leader, ne'er-do-well Pirigkura, to explode into leopards. The beast is put down, the tomb re-sealed, and the body of Pirigkura displayed in the district square, as a warning to the Ashenite criminal element.

* * *

But sealing the tomb in such a public fashion only invites more attention. The next scoundrel to try their luck is Saddik the Gargoyle, whose goons follow her into the tomb for the promise of treasure. They quickly come face-to-skull with the Third Monarch, who defends their own tomb as a fearsome shade. Thankfully, the Third is a lousy guard, more concerned with their undying love of the hunt, and the goons are allowed a magnanimous head start in a high stakes game of hide and seek.

Saddik and the goons ride beyond the Wall, to Udāharaṇa, to lay low for a while. Unfortunately for her, the Third is a very good hunter, and two more PCs join the Hunt:

• Castellan Iskandar, the grim Gravebound who oversees the Wall's ongoing reconstruction
• Lord-Illuminator Belatsunat, a Sacred One of the Royal House, who returned from the afterlife with a terrifying demonic aspect (and no hand, oops)

The huntees are chased into the basement, to the portal to the moon. Saddik and the Third grapple and cross swords hundreds of miles above the earth, and Saddik, realizing she is outmatched, decides to take her chances with the moonmen and falls to the moon.

* * *

Let us return to the city, at roughly the same time, where Dragonfly Etekam, a rambunctious and abrasive snakekin rotless, is scooped up by his uncle Innin the Pious and Executioner Ishbi (remember them?) in a zombie-owl-riding scouting mission of the odious moon. The aforementioned psychic owls cause a bit of turbulence as the trio flies over the massive crumbling city that is the moon.

The snakekin find themselves in a literal, physical struggle against their own fates as Ishbi dives into the throneroom of the Queen of the Gods, the God of Time, and instant summons a 60-slot rock—the stone of oput, which marks the pact between Time and Death—and drops it on her fucking head.

The moon explodes in a lethal psychic wave of terror. 

* * *

Let us return to the city Udāharaṇa!!! where the moonbombers have fled, and where a fullscale lunar invasion is now underway. The City-which-is-God mobilizes in response under the kenning guidance of Grand General Ninlil, who has assembled KILLING-STAR, Gormless, Ashur, Anath, and many more: a dozen-odd PCs have been mobilized to face divine horrors from space.

What follows is the Battle of Udāharaṇa, the first battle of the last war between humanity and the Cruel Nine.

(And in the background, a certain sneaky Gargoyle fortnite parachutes into the desert.)

* * *

This is, in my opinion, the magic of Ashes to Ashes. The size and vivacity of the playerbase means characters were/are always flowing in and out of each other's stories, popping in for cameos, etc. The lowliest thief could bump into the grand general on a dungeon crawl, changing both of their lives forever... or they could pass like ships in the night.

All of the stories are connected, in some way. The confrontation with the lunar army introduces Two Tailed Ashur to his lunar heritage and he becomes a spy for the enemy. He is hunted by Bailor the Catcher and assisted by Dragonfly Etekam, who goes on to found his own extramural outpost, where Saddik the Gargoyle and Garza (just garza) join him in forming a somewhat bumbling criminal empire, and Garza traveled with Assur-nin-Pal, who fell to the bottom of the ocean...

 

Play reports are not my strong suit. This cube is my best attempt to capture that specific elfgaming magic in a way that (if i may be so bold) I think only a niche custom Magic: the Gathering set can.

 

Anyway, here's a draftmancer file. let me know if its any good and post your decklists in the comments