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!
Over the last two weeks, we have been looking back at the very first roleplaying campaign which featured the Twin Worlds. We have briefly encountered the protagonists of the story - Faelar, Gabrief, Mephiston, and later, Val'Sham and Anthony - as well as some crucial secondary characters who would go on to become important to the Twin Worlds' developing mythos. These included Ainiel, Mort/Eriman Calandor, Erly
tria, and the Thelalorn Hethner, as well as the villainous Koradrane Quinom.
In the last installment, the protagonists had just defeated a great wolf defending the second of the Seven Archways leading to the pocket world where they could find the only tool capable of awakening the Trienorn, allowing them to put an end to the machinations of the Lady of Souls. Crossing the Second Archway led the wyldervay to a very different world compared to Enu. Sisteri, as it was called, was a strange place of calm and stasis, dominated in the distance by a monstrous volcano. The wyldervay, near a shallow bay, discovered a half-submerged city of unknown provenance, and within it, they found skeletal remains of men and women who had seemingly died there. Some had long since been encased in coral growths, others lay where they had fallen, bearing signs of carnivorous slaughter. The city was eerily silent and peaceful, despite this, and it was dominated by a single great Tree standing in the central plaza.
The wyldervay, mystified, searched the city to try and learn more about its history, as well as to discover the location of the Third Archway. Meanwhile, they were grappling with two pressing issues. Val'Sham's resurrection as an undead disturbed both him and Mephiston, who felt responsible for the horror his new friend had become in the process. And Faelar grappled with the consequences of overusing his magical fire, which he could feel burning within him, burning away his mortality. During these explorations, he discussed this privately with Mephiston, revealing he was afraid of what the fire was turning him into, and that he could not risk using it again. Already its power and scope had grown, and Faelar knew he could do things with it that he could never do before. He feared that one more use of his fire would burn away what was left of his mortality, though he did not know what he would become.
Mephiston suspected Faelar's fire was turning him into a god, though he could not be sure. He also believed Faelar's fire could restore Val'Sham to life, but did not wish to ask his friend to do so. Their considerations were derailed as, little by little, the history of the mysterious city came to light, awing them.
The city, they discovered, was called Nithisis. It was ancient, predating all known history, founded by a man called Erenthir in the youth of the world. Erenthir had been granted the greatest of all gifts, immortality, by a trickster god called Arthiphel. Such immortality, bestowed through the Waters - an elixir only Erenthir knew how to brew, using the dew of the Tree of Life standing in the city's center - was granted to those he selected to join him in Nithisis, the City of Immortals. But Arthiphel had apparently tired of his game, and in his last appearance, he had wiped the city clean, sinking it into the sea, summoning the creatures of the ocean to devour the flesh of the Immortals, leaving them forever alive but locked within their bones, unable to move or act, for even Arthiphel did not know how to revoke their immortality. The wyldervay, experimentally, restored the flesh of a woman's skeleton, but found her mind had fled, and her body remained immortal and vacant.
There were clues that Arthiphel's deed was, perhaps, caused by a curse on one of the Immortals, Alderil the Gray, who bore a mark that would bring down lethal misfortune upon all who befriended him. This shook Val'Sham and Anthony, who both bore a similar mark.
Furthermore, the wyldervay learned that Erenthir had not escaped the doom of Nithisis: but Arthiphel, perhaps fearing him more than any other Immortal, had cast him into the Maw of Fire, the great volcano that dominated Sisteri. Deep in the magma chamber lay Erenthir's indestructible bones, beyond the reach of any who sought the secret of the elixir of immortality - but not the location of the Third Archway, which appar
ently was also in the same chamber. Whether Arthiphel had known this or not was unclear.
But in their exploration, the wyldervay also came across caches of strange herbs which Mephiston realized could be the ingredients of the Waters of Immortality. Mephiston believed the Waters could restore Val'Sham, perhaps restore the mind of the unknown woman, and heal a strange ailment he had recently begun to suffer, seemingly associated with the curse that had made him mortal and amnesiac. So he sought to prepare the Waters, collecting dew and lymph from the Tree of Life and mixing the elixir with the herbs they had found.
It was then that Faelar knew his time had come. He instinctively realized that Mephiston's potion was incomplete, and knew his fire would provide the necessary catalyst... at the cost of the last of his mortality. But he could not let his friends suffer, and so he reached out, unseen and unnoticed, and sacrificed his mortal existence by flooding the nascent Waters with the very fire of life itself.
This act had many consequences. Faelar, as Mephiston had surmised, had achieved a strange form of godhood, utterly unlike the godhood of the deities of this cosmos. The potion did indeed restore Val'Sham's life, but also transformed him into a being of ice. Mephiston's ailment was eliminated, and he reacquired the golden-skinned, light-winged appearance of his original form. Anthony surreptitiously drank the last of the Waters in search of power, and became a being of shadow. The unknown woman was fed the Waters, and they restored her mind to a certain extent, although she retained holes in her memories. She called herself Mirilè, and discovered that drinking the Waters a second time had expanded her being further, making her a deity as well.
Shortly after, the woman whom Faelar had thought to be Death in Enu approached them, drawn to the birth of a god. It was then that the wyldervay learned the truth. She was the Lady of Souls, and she was not a malevolent being. She claimed to have made the Twin Worlds, and that the Trienorn - mages from outside reality - had usurped the power of the divine. Their theft had catalyzed the creation of the Reflection, and the harm the Twin Worlds had suffered since then. At the end of an Age, they had pooled their power and entered their slumber in order to force the Lady to sleep in turn; but now, she had awakened, and if they were brought back from their slumber, the war would begin anew.
The wyldervay could hear the truth in her words, and resolved to help her. She charged them with finding a copy of the ancient ritual the Trienorn had used to become gods, take the power the Trienorn had stolen, and release it back into the cosmos. This would bring an end to the Reflection, as well. The wyldervay agreed, and with her help, were able to create a hollow within the magma chamber of the Maw of Fire, insulating the Third Archway and the bones of Erenthir. They restored Erenthir's flesh, bringing him back to life, and prepared to cross the Third Archway. It was then that they realized Faelar would not be joining them: his ascension required him to understand what he had become, and so he left with the Lady of Souls, alongside Mirilè, to learn what both had become.
The wyldervay prepared to cross the Third Archway, but in Sisteri they had laid the foundations of what would later become the pantheon of the Ilelorn, as well as the Immortals of Nithisis, the true history of the feud between the Lady of Souls and the Trienorn, and what would become the final iconography of Mephiston, Val'Sham and Gabrief.
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