The Campaign Builder's Guild

[ooc]Please do not clutter this thread with posts.  That's what  The discussion thread (http://www.thecbg.org/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?12429.0) is for.[/ooc]
[ic=Showdown at Twilight]As the sun rose beyond the mountains, an ugly red stain passing behind ashen clouds like a luminous scab, the tarry night sky gave way to the sickly yellowed sepia of morning.  An ill wind drifted by, amiable in motion, and the old elf stirred.

He sat in the midst of a broad field, grass of strange pallor swaying in the breeze.  Corpses lay strewn across its breadth, severed, maimed, mutilated and bloody, and numbers untold of black carrion birds cawed in the eerie silence of dawn as they pecked and tore at this terrible feast.

â,¬Å"Paeldris, you have sinned.â,¬Â  The voice was soft and strained, and the speaker approached at a cautious pace.

The old elf stood and turned, but though he faced the newcomer, he did not look upon him.  Ã¢,¬Å"We have all sinned, Nemachaii.  I have merely brought retribution to some who have earned it.  Is that not what we are charged to do?â,¬Â

â,¬Å"Not like this, no.  This was not your duty.â,¬Â

â,¬Å"Duty has its limits.  Ã¢,¬ËIt is the mark of the truly virtuous to act beyond the limits of serviceâ,¬,,¢.  This I have done.â,¬Â

Nemachaii shook his head.  Ã¢,¬Å"Quoting scripture wonâ,¬,,¢t vindicate you now.â,¬Â

â,¬Å"I need no vindication.â,¬Â  He gestured around himself.  Ã¢,¬Å"My actions speak for themselves.â,¬Â

â,¬Å"No matter what they have done, these humans were not yours to punish.â,¬Â

â,¬Å"Then I have saved that man whose task it was the trouble of doing it himself.  If justice need be done, does it matter the hand that deals it?â,¬Â

â,¬Å"And this was justice?  This warpath?  This tirade?  They seek you in Temer Khel and Beiryoka.  You have caused chaos in the Houses.  You must have killed a thousand men in Hurmassa, more than half of them surely innocents.  You have ruined a sacred Citadel and put elven lives in the hands of the Vespat.  And for what?â,¬Â

â,¬Å"I will not answer to youâ,¬Â¦Ã¢,¬Â

â,¬Å"You will answer to me.  The Justiciars will not care to question you.  They will put you to the sword the moment you are found, and all your men will follow your fate for the simple sake of their allegiance.  I, at least, want to know why this was worth your life.â,¬Â

For a time, there was no sound but the song of the ravens.

 Ã¢,¬Å"Sometimesâ,¬Â¦Ã¢,¬Â  Paeldris sighed.  Ã¢,¬Å"Sometimes I cannot help but envy the transience of man.  An elf might live half a millenium, but a man does not see a century.  This place is cold, rotten, warped.  I remember clearly the age before our worldâ,¬,,¢s desolation-â,¬Â

â,¬Å"You were not there.â,¬Â

â,¬Å"But I dream.  And I long for that dream, Brother.â,¬Â

â,¬Å"That dream is not ours to ask for.â,¬Â

â,¬Å"And in its absence I must be content with this?  To die a thousand deaths, only to be reborn again in this hell?  I will not await the Final Death.  I will not sit patiently while our castles crumble and fall into the wastes, while our sons and daughters are born into deformity and the very gods mock us from the heavens.â,¬Â

He cast his gaze to the bilious sky above, his lip aquiver in the faintest betrayal of some unnamed emotion, and his eyes watered.  Then he laughed, and the sound, ironic but melodious, startled the nesting flock into motion, and they took to the skies in their thousands, the air alive with a flurry of black feathers and their shrill, deathly cries.

â,¬Å"That is not an answer.  It does not account for your actions.â,¬Â

â,¬Å"I suppose it doesnâ,¬,,¢t.  But it is the truth.â,¬Â

Nemachaiiâ,¬,,¢s hand moved to his sword, with reluctance so great that his fingers struggled to find purchase.

â,¬Å"You know, Brother, that I cannot let this deed pass unaccounted.â,¬Â[/ic]
[ic=Proverbs][/ic]

[ic=Whispers of the Father]Feral children, young, wild.

Sown in darkness, birthed in doubt.  Stalking shades in creeping forests, verdant, lush, primordial, across a virgin world, untamed.  Arcane winds and eldritch sands, woods and waves alive, æthereal.  Sprites and spirits, beasts and dæmons, fey things, foul things that danced to the tune of that blessed moonlit strainâ,¬Â¦

Defiant, divergent, wistful, lustful.  Singing amidst thorns, weeping upon the roses, decrying and defiling the august face of They, the Dark, who would be called your Gods.  Then building, birthing, breaking stones and forging mountains, iron towers, spires monolithic.  Castles, courtyards, cities within clouds, palaces that kiss the stars.

And a new master, laughing Jester, silver tongued with wicked eye.  A new song, of smoke and fire, gear and golem, magic broken, wonder raptured.  A waste unfolds below, a withered bloom, and you forget.

But It does not forget.

And vengeance, soon.  Blood and thunder, vile retribution, righteous recompense.  The New God rises, a fury, a violent word, madness and malice.  It shall ascend.  It does ascend.

A guardian.

What was yours, is ours.  And we, the Damned, shall keep it.

You are not welcome.[/ic]
[ic=Lamentations]Four thousand years past, we were betrayed.  Our own god, the Guiding Light, carried us high into the skyâ,¬,,¢s lofty heights, told us all the wonders of the virgin world beneath us, and then abandoned us.  We were afraid, then.  We did not know, or understand, the power we had been given.  We warred, like children, and many of us died.

For that, for the blood of our brethren that stains our blades, we are ashamed.

And our magics, the dark sciences our treacherous Father had bequeathed upon us, they scoured our world, wracked and warped it.  We looked on, not truly powerless, but impotent in our confusion.  Soon, the world we saw was not the world we had known, and from the clouds we watched, weeping, as our blessed earth passed into memory and the Dark Earth was born.

For that too, for the creeping taint that stains the soil and clouds the waters, we are ashamed.

And we are divided, now, feuding, when more than ever we should be united.  Our lords play supplicant to heretics, our children are born deformed and deranged, the Old Gods plot our fall in darkened holds within the wastes, and everywhere our enemies sharpen their blades â,¬' even in our own homes.

We do not know if the reckoning has come, or passed, or perhaps is not yet upon us.  In fearful anticipation and clutching to some blind hope of redemption, we heed whatever madness the prophets proclaim, and already the masses flock before a lunatic prince consumed with lust for our own destruction.  We are weary, and long for the green world we had ourselves defiled, but a foul taint pervades the lands beneath, and wicked parodies of men and beasts walk the twisted earth, and they mock us.

Were we to descend â,¬' and some of us do, despite everything, for it is a great yearning â,¬' we would be hunted, murdered, and worse.  The new masters of the world do not know us, and if they did, we would be hunted all the more.

The irony, then, is that we had asked for this.  We desired a new world, a world of virgin bounty and alien delight.

We asked of him, and he gave.  In his divine grace, inestimable and glorious, he revealed to us a paradise.

A blessingâ,¬Â¦ were it but ours.[/ic]
[ooc]
Floating cities above a sea of toxic filth

Millennia ago, the elves took to the skies.  There, they built grand cities like the palaces of gods, in arrogant defiance of the world beneath.  But their god, the Laughing One, betrayed them, and the magics he had given them corrupted the earth.

Now, there are two worlds: the fading paradise stretched thin across the heavens, and the warped earth that has risen from ruin and now stands as a twisted alien Eden.  Humanity and its siblings have forged new empires beneath a sickly sky and a faded red sun, and though the elves still rule, the insidious Old Gods are rising and the balance of power is shiftingâ,¬Â¦

Themes
"The past doesnâ,¬,,¢t stay there."
Actions have consequences.  Four thousand years on, the elves are paying for their hubris, and old enemies they thought they had conquered are stirring in the places between worlds, bloody vengeance on their minds.

Dyrth Essar is a place where nothing happens in isolation.  When you kill a man in Ilme Sult, expect his family to seek vengeance in Temerine.  Adventuring might earn you accolades among the townsfolk, but youâ,¬,,¢ve assuredly developed a rather different reputation among the local goblinoid tribes.  Politics is literally a cutthroat business, and after a long campaign an affluent noble had better watch his back lest his many enemies make a messy example of him.

"Some things shouldnâ,¬,,¢t be touched."
Time and time again, mortals have been presented with the proverbial â,¬Å"forbidden fruitâ,¬Â, and time and time again they have succumbed to temptation.  The First Kingdom of the Sidhe was felled when it sought to attain mastery of High Magic, the Hyrth Zarummed was broken by its blind dedication to a god who promised everything but gave nothing, and mankindâ,¬Â¦ well, itâ,¬,,¢s mankind, and nothing good can come of that.

Dyrth Essar teems with eldritch wonders, and so long as there are men to yearn for such power, one can be assured of an unfortunate future.

"You cannot escape your nature."
The elves had their cultural genesis in a wild, untamed world of spirits, daemons and living magic.  They are, for all that their civilisation has been forged and reforged anew over the millennia, creatures of impulse and raw, violent emotion.  They have swathed their lives in layer upon layer of stricture, decorum and propriety, but their true nature is unavoidable: they are animals.

Tone
Dyrth Essar is poetically delivered (or so I like to think), with an emphasis on grand feats, high action and spectacle.  But it is underscored by a sense of imminent and brutal violence: tensions run high as old wounds are recalled and thousand-year feuds come to a head.  As the Elven Empire tears itself apart from the inside, there is an inevitable bloody finality hanging like a pall over all things.

This will not end well.

Magic
This is a place of high magic, but it is not a place of magic missiles and fireballs.  An accomplished mage weaves his spells through arduous ritual, and calling a fury upon oneâ,¬,,¢s opponents is rarely a matter of moments.  But for the true sorcerers, the very foundations of existence may be warped, wrought, or even torn asunderâ,¬Â¦

But magic is, for all its splendour, a tragic force, and to be born into its service is perhaps the most terrible fate of all.

Influences and Inspirations
Jade Stage and Sulos
Possibly my two favourite campaign settings, anywhere, ever.  The tone and themes of these masterpieces create thoroughly immersive and pragmatically poetic vistas that never fail to stir my imagination.  In particular, the realistic and truthful approaches to race offer great inspiration, as does the treatment of magic.

I should also give a respectful nod to the orcs of doj-oln-beh, who died so that Luminousâ,¬,,¢ vision of Jade Stage could be realised, and whose fate served as a baseline for the development of my own orcs (or Abrogha).

The Lord of the Rings
Iâ,¬,,¢ve never really thought of Tolkien as a remarkable writer, but within the fantasy genre Iâ,¬,,¢ll concede that thereâ,¬,,¢s a reason why heâ,¬,,¢s called the Father of Modern Fantasy.  While I generally take active steps to avoid similarities between my work and his, this time Iâ,¬,,¢m deliberately â,¬Å"taking a page out of his bookâ,¬Â, as it were.  Strictly speaking, my Sidhe have more in kind with the old faerie-folk of the Anglo-Saxons, but the concept of an ageing race whose time is passing is central to the setting.

Wuxia
I positively love Chinese martial art cinema, particularly as pertaining to the wuxia genre (including such films as Hero and Crouching Tiger et al).  The superhuman grace with which characters move and fight is mesmerising, and takes us into a world similar to our own, but not quite the same.  Dyrth Essar exists in this realm of over-the-top ethereal action; can warriors dance on water and fight amidst the treetops?  Hell yes.

Warhammer Fantasy
The prevalence of conflict is one of Dyrth Essarâ,¬,,¢s defining characteristics, and this is partly inspired by the warlike elves of the Warhammer world.  The familiar sense of foreboding is also something I have aimed to capture.

Nobilis
A world of men-made-gods who wield phenomenal powers that draw upon the conceptual fabric of reality, this RPG is wild, poetic and beautiful with an approach to mythology and the supernatural that many will recognise and yet takes you utterly by surprise.

Perdido Street Station
If youâ,¬,,¢re a fantasy lover, and you havenâ,¬,,¢t read this book, read it.  Soon.[/ooc]

[ic=Confrontations in Shadow]The cobbled path is flanked by rows of tall and wraithlike trees, their leafless interlocking branches swaying in bizarre and contrary directions as though compelled by divergent winds or some strangely sapient current.  In the silence of the autumn evening the faint susurrus of their dance carries through the ruins, reverberating between lopsided, vine-wreathed columns and greeting my ears like an alien wordless murmur.

My lover treads softly beside me, eyes keen and focused, pistol primed and readied.  Her unblemished skin shines like alabaster in the moonlight, dark leather like coal embracing her form tightly and accentuating that startling brightness.  Auglic moves swift and silent through the shadows, unseen and unheard, but his whisper alights on our thoughts and we know that he is eager.

â,¬Å"The madman must be near, or this chase has led us astray.â,¬Â  Younneâ,¬,,¢s voice is marred by impatience, and in the cursory flash of her amber eyes it is clear that this hunt wearies her. Sleepless and unceasing, we have navigated the darkness of this sunless place for five days, and nary a sign of the human have we seen besides the remains of charred villages and the hellish conflagration that greeted us at Volgge Sidora.

Nevertheless, we must endure.  The trauma that plagues this man is our doing, a curse inflicted unwittingly in the Ritual of Unbinding, and we are accountable for his deeds.  Thus we must end this travesty before the malediction of the Torii falls upon us, or worse, he finds the rift and discharges the latent power we have foolishly instilled in him.

Auglicâ,¬,,¢s mind flares suddenly, and he glides into the light, brandishing his sabre with an agitated flourish.  There is something foul â,¬' do you smell it?  His head darts about like a sparrow and he raises his gauntleted hand to caution our advance.  There was a shaping here.  The aberration has power still, and it is strongâ,¬Â¦

A terrible grinding tears through the teetering calm and we move instinctively, puissant energies propelling us from the path as it erupts in a shower of liquid stone, heat and sonorous crackling thunder.  I land gently on a branch overhead, my feet pressing and shifting with the canopyâ,¬,,¢s precarious sway to ensure my balance.  My sword is out in an instant, and the mantra rings in my mind, ready for evocation.

There is silence once again.

Tension, and I feel Auglicâ,¬,,¢s rhythmic psychic muttering as he weaves a shroud of darkness around himself and disappears.  I cannot see Younne through the shadow of the canopy, but she curses and once again the silence is sundered as a gunshot reverberates through the woods.

Birds stir and take flight, moulded on impulse from the very air itself: their translucent forms reek of ectoplasm and their wings glint with a razorâ,¬,,¢s edge.  They are upon me, cawing in unnatural tones as they rise above then descend, knife-like pinions extended.  Another shot pierces the night and the bullet strikes home, tearing through the flock in an explosive spray of phantasmal gore, a maddening screech behind it.  I dive with sizzling remnants of those ethereal crows raining down around me, hitting the sodden, fractured earth and rolling into a crouch.

I see Younne now, several yards away.  She stands defiant before an oscillating, fractal riot of distortion; a preposterous anomaly branching in sickening configuration like an aberrant snowflake, its edges raking the air like ravenous hounds and devouring the very space around it.  At the centre of that horrible impossibility is the madman, arms outstretched and hair billowing wildly.  He cries out some joyous exclamation, but the words are lost to the howling of the wind.

We have found him, or rather, he has found us.

The mantra intensifies and my hands illuminate, violet lightning playing across my fingertips. Younne fires once more, the bullet finding empty air as it careens into redundant spaces and is devoured.  A luminous pseudopod lashes out at her and suddenly Auglic is there, seizing her like a falcon might seize its prey and carrying her off into shadow and safety.

Strange pale apparitions parade across my vision, writhing in obscene motion.  The human is calling upon the memory of this place, a memory older than the Oldest Lords and fiercer than this world can stand.  But I have an answer to this madness.[/ic]