Welcome to our Campaign Coffee. This series of posts, which will be interspersed with regular Monday Coffee posts, aims to look back at roleplaying game campaigns that have shaped the Cosmoneiron into its current state. We will discuss the plots and characters, but also how they influenced the development of the Twin Worlds. I hope you enjoy these. Happy Monday!
This seems like a good time to start a new ongoing series of posts within our Monday Coffee dates. We have talked in the past of how roleplaying games have influenced the creation and development of the Twin Worlds, and how roleplaying campaigns played with different groups of players have led to significant world building in different areas of the cosmos.
We could start nowhere but at the beginning, with the first campaign which featured the Twin Worlds. It was originally called "Crown of Secret Fates" (I was much younger then!) and it wasn't actually set in the Twin Worlds at all. Rather, the Twin Worlds came to be as part of this campaign, when I needed the characters to visit an entirely different universe - and leave their mark there.
For those among you who are RPG-minded, this was a Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 campaign with a Planescape setting. This may not tell you much if you aren't familiar with the game, but essentially it means the characters were used to hopping through dimensions, and their adventures tended to be bizarre and larger-than-life, often with philosophical undertones.
Initially, the campaign only had two players. They decided they wanted to create characters that would be embodiments of goodness, a paladin called Gabrief (heir to a bloodline imbued with the power of dragons) and a cleric of a god of the sun, called Mephiston Rightbringer. Their backstories were intricate, but don't need to be discussed here: they mostly played out in the part of the campaign that didn't revolve around the Twin Worlds. Of importance to the story, however, is that the cleric character was found to be the amnesiac, depowered spirit of a chief servant of the god of the sun, yearning to return to his status. To round up the party, a non-player character was added as well: Faelar, a winged elf-like ranger who also hailed from a bloodline that wielded a mysterious fire.
During their adventures before entering the Twin Worlds, the characters were also joined by recurring characters - three in particular, called Erlytria, Irievyre and Ainiel. Erlytria was a blonde wizardess who fell in love with Mephiston. Irievyre was a daughter of a world where nothing died, and came to be beloved by Gabrief. Ainiel was Faelar's ex-girlfriend who had broken off the engagement due to a prophecy, only to find out at the last moment that said prophecy actually applied to Faelar as well.
Shortly after these events, the three friends (plus Ainiel) were cast into the Twin Worlds by a mysterious being encountered at a crossroads. The Twin Worlds were a bewildering place for them: just as they entered, they were attacked by a fire dragon, and upon defeating it, they met with a golden-skinned demigod called Hethner, who welcomed them. He told them the world was ruled by his brethren, the Thelalorn, and granted them hospitality for their service in taking out the dragon he would otherwise had to kill himself.
The Thelalorn had, according to Hethner, always ruled the world as benevolent demigods, shadowed in a parallel world by malevolent entities known as the Iranorn. These two worlds were joined by the Reflection, a metaphysical law with many ramifications, chief among them the fact that every sentient being in one world was bound to another sentient being in the other. If one died, so would the other (albeit not immediately, and always in a way that could have happened - no sudden inexplicable deaths, in other words). But the four friends were anomalies: they had no Reflection, coming from another universe. They were both more free and more bound than everyone else, since no one knew the full ramifications of how their actions could affect the Reflection. Hethner called them the wyldervay ("without Reflection" in his language), and the group would be known by that name thereafter.
His hospitality had another goal, too. A situation was brewing in the city of Bradal, where people were dying of drowning while nowhere near the water, and Hethner needed help investigating. Gabrief, Mephiston, Faelar and Ainiel were asked to investigate, in exchange for help returning home. They agreed, and began by providing succor to escapees from the city who sought to avoid a grisly death. Then, in Bradal, their exploration led them to the city sewers, where they encountered monstrous undead which threatened to overwhelm them. In desperation, Faelar destroyed an object of great power, causing a collapse of the ceiling and the destruction of the undead, although Ainiel and Faelar both disappeared, presumed dead or cast adrift across the Planes.
Continuing, Gabrief and Mephiston encountered a manic sorcerer called Koradrane Quinom, a kenolater who had twisted the ranger who was the self-appointed defender of Bradal. It had been Quinom's experiments with a buried portal that had caused the deaths. They defeated the sorcerer, but were unable to kill him when he escaped. His defeat caused the destruction of the portal, ending the deaths. Returning to Hethner, the two companions were granted land holdings and promised Hethner would look into their return home.
These land holdings would become the beginning of the kingdom of Brightland. It was also here that Mephiston encountered Jiaham Three-Fingers, a local village chief who would soon become Mephiston's second-in-command (and later, Regent under the name Jiaham the Righteous).
In just a few adventures, the story had set the seeds for the Ledhrorn (the collective name for Thelalorn and Iranorn), the Reflection (and the subsequent War of Saints), Koradrane Quinom (and his eventual importance to the overall mythos), the founding of Brightland, and the future destiny of the four wyldervay. Look for more posts in the Codex about these topics, and for Part 2 of this retrospective, coming soon!
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