The Campaign Builder's Guild

It's an old story, told countless times in countless ways by every generation. Just beneath, behind, and beyond the surface of our reality is Something Else. It's everywhere and nowhere. It's just around the corner. It's standing right behind you. Every culture since the dawn of history has its stories about It. They caught glimpses of It, sometimes, in dreams and waking visions, or at twilight, out of the corners of their eyes. The mad see too much of It, but if they can understand a little of It, focus It, we sometimes call them geniuses and magicians. All of this has always been true, It has always leaked through, a little. But then, something changed. Someone opened Pandora's Box.



It has many names.



Faerie, Eden, Arcadia, The Dreamtime, The Spirit Worlds, The Elsewheres, The Wild True Yonder, The Beyond, The Bardos, The Astral Planes, The ImagiNations, Heaven & Hell, The Sephiroth & Qlippoth, The Super Sargasso Sea, The World Tree, The Shadowlands, Narnia, Neverland, Oz, AZ, Kaos, Fluxus, Mythos, The Madlands, The Mirror Maze, The Wyrdworlds, The Underworld, The Supernal Realms, The Invisible Kingdoms, The Animus, Psyspace, Pandora... The list goes on and on. But perhaps the most apt description is this: our world, our Reality is the Finite, It is the Infinite.

It is both a time and a place and a person, and It is many of each, and It is none of them, for their meanings distort and meld and finally disintegrate completely the deeper one ventures into It.



In 1777 AD, on the planet Earth, in a country called Bavaria, a man named Adam Weishaupt founded a group he named the Illuminati, and on that very night, he had a very vivid dream. He was standing on the roof of his childhood home, looking at the stars, and then the sky opened up, and from beyond it came a being, though he could not say what it was, for its form changed constantly. It flew down to him and whispered a great secret in his ear, the most beautiful and terrible truth any mortal has ever learned. When Weishaupt woke, he remembered some of the secret. Enough to make a breakthrough on the physical and metaphysical experiments he had been carrying out since long before he joined the Freemasons and created the Illuminati. He now believed he could not only unite the principles of science, magic, and religion, but that he could open a door between this world and the Other, a real and physical portal which would allow bodily travel into the Beyond. He immediately went to work.



However, to accomplish what he sought to do, Weishaupt needed very particular physical conditions. Specifically, those beneath the Aurora Borealis at the North Pole. The energetic excitation of the air combined with the extreme and constant cold and dark removing any "background noise" created a very thin spot in space and time. Shortly after forming the order, Weishaupt chartered a ship to sail to the North Pole, captained by one James Cook. Though he was a military captain, Weishaupt and his followers had pulled strings to hire him, because he was arguably the best captain sailing the seas, and had already crossed the arctic circle, though on the Southern side. However, the two men's personalities clashed almost instantly. But the two of them and the crew (plus six of Weishaupt's fellow Illuminati and several expert Arctic explorers), reached the Arctic safely, managing to avoid both pirates and mutiny. They began the long trek inland, through the barren but beautiful wasteland, a desolate plain of intricate ice sculptures being constantly carved by the howling wind. They waited for the right conditions for weeks, and their food and fuel began to run out. Several men had died on the journey, and in the bitter and unending cold and darkness, the crew began to come undone. Cook decided to depart, but Weishaupt and the Illuminati refused, and would not be swayed. Cook and his men left them there beneath the Aurora, returned to the ship, and waited.



Just as the twenty-four hour ultimatum Cook had given Weishaupt ran out... something happened. Exactly what it was, neither Weishaupt nor Cook the crew nor anyone or anything else could say, nor would they ever be able to. But the Aurora suddenly flared, and its motions became ever quicker and stranger. Then at some point, something shifted, twisted, and broke open... and everything changed.



Weishaupt had succeeded and exceeded his wildest dreams. He had pierced the veil, broken through to the Other Side, torn a hole in reality. But it was a raw, ragged wound. And from it flowed the divine life-blood. Ectoplasm. Mana. Numina. Nectar of the Gods. Molten Mind. The Living Liquid Looking-Glass. The Clay of Creation. Prima Materia. It has many names. It is a solid, a liquid, a gas, and a plasma, and it is none of these. It is an extremely psychoreactive substance, responding to the minds of whoever is nearby. But it has a mind of its own. Indeed, some say that is what it is: pure, raw manifested Mind.



It spilled out through the sky, collecting around the "edges" of the opening and dripping down to the ground and up and out into the sky, forming into bizarre creatures which walked or crawled or flew or hopped or slithered away over the ice and snow. Ectoplasm can take any form, and its raw state is truly indescribable, but stuck on and in the border between realities, unbound, it looked a little like a Mobius Strip, a Klein Bottle, a Tesseract and a fractal Wormhole having having an orgiastic battle with a million mutated mythologies in the middle of a mercurial funhouse mirror maze, all melted and melded together into a seething sea of madness pouring into and out of a monstrous, ever-morphing maw. But though it was completely chaotic, it was unmistakably a portal, a passage, a doorway opening into Otherness, the Mysterium Tremendum. Weishaupt and the other Illuminati were quickly drawn upwards, flying and falling into the swirling vortex in the sky, and Captain Cook and the crew saw it all and departed post haste. But though they did not enter, none of them were unchanged, nor was the world. The voyage home was an interesting one, to say the least.



It is 1842, a generation later. The world is a very different place.

There are more Doors, many more.

And they open both ways.

The physical world is small and hard and sharp and dirty. It's full of flesh and blood, fire and ice, bricks and bones, sticks and stones. The conditions within Time (that is, within the material world) are too harsh for spirits to survive for long unprotected. The majority of unbodied spirits exist in the upper atmosphere, on other planets, or in the void between them. Here, the ambient radiation is much harsher, but spirits are much less bothered by waves and energies than by particles with mass. They can usually "ride" or "surf" low frequency vibrations, including wave-form light and other radiation. But to live for long in the world of matter, and especially to live near life, they need material bodies. Spirits are insubstantial and invisible to most people, but they can inhabit material beings, either animating a form, or taking it from (or sharing it with) another living spirit.



There are a wide variety of potential vessels. Essentially anything can theoretically be inhabited by a spirit. The trouble for a refugee from the Other Side is that most things already are. Corpses of the dead are popular choices for this reason. The living can be wholly or partially controlled, though more or less equal partnerships do exist. Spirits can also animate plants, objects and other substances such as smoke, fire, and water. They can be very useful when inhabiting a complex technological device, since they can control all its components with great precision and power. Spirits of the richer and more well-connected variety also often have bodies built (and/or grown) for them before they arrive. Finally, a Spirit may simply form a body out of ectoplasm. Such bodies are very difficult to damage, but they eventually drain away into the environment unless the ectoplasm is replenished. Ectoplasmic bodies are the most pliable, but many spirits can even transform solids.







When the Doors began opening, spirits started streaming out into the Universe. They had always been slipping through the cracks now and again, but now they came in droves. First a trickle, then a flood. As plants, animals, and objects were possessed, they started misbehaving, talking, and sometimes mutating wildly and uncontrollably. People were shunted out of their bodies, or suddenly melded with alien minds. The dead began to get up out of their graves and walk around, though only some of them were trying to eat living people and/or drink their blood. There were lots of often monstrous and occasionally beautiful mutations in all of those cases as well. As you might expect, this caused quite a bit of commotion and raised a lot of ruckus. A war was never officially declared, but there was a great deal of violence caused directly and indirectly by all of this, not to mention the other odd effects of ectoplasm and the Doors themselves, and of course all that came of the practice of Magic.



Although there are magical traditions in every culture in the world, in the 18th Century, much of the "civilized" world was at the tail end of a brutal and bloody repression and persecution of such practices. They were also engaged in conquering, killing, enslaving and generally oppressing people around the world who communicated regularly with the Spirit World. But of course, these practices still existed, as they always have and always will. And when the Doors began to open, the proverbial tables turned rather dramatically. The native nations, generally speaking, had long-standing relationships with various spirits and deities and some understanding of their world, though their particular perspectives naturally all differed, as did the details of their mythologies. But in general, the indigenous groups of the world were suddenly able to harness a very potent source of power.



Followers of western religions have their angels, but they are more often of the Ezekiel variety (many floating, fractal, interlocking wheels studded with eyes and wreathed in shining flames, for example) than winged men with harps and halos. Compared to the aboriginal Australians, say, the Catholic Church was much slower and less willing to accept that these beings were real (though the Inquisition kicked up another notch when the possessions started, and is still going strong to this day). This was even more true of the Empiricist Materialists. Though there were exceptions, of course (the Illuminati foremost among them), most citizens of the "Civilized" nations didn't want to accept what was happening. But it all kept happening. It didn't go away, and in fact, it got much, much worse. Or better, depending on your perspective.

I like the fabulist story-style with the integration of the surrealist pictures.
It reminds me a great deal of Age of Fable: http://www.apolitical.info/webgame/

Quote from: Light Dragon
I like the fabulist story-style with the integration of the surrealist pictures.
It reminds me a great deal of Age of Fable: http://www.apolitical.info/webgame/

Thank you! That looks very interesting! The painting is a Magritte, right?

Indeed it is; I think the rest of the works that Age of Fable has in his game, however, are commissioned for him by friends who donated their art, or the art is public domain.

Did you write the story first, then find your pictures, or did the pictures come first?

I love Magritte. A lot of it seems to be old 80s fantasy art too, or at least the character portraits do. Not that that's a bad thing.

Sort of both at once. I had the seed of an idea, and started looking for inspirational images, and they helped it evolve. I found the work of Moebius particularly inspiring, as you may have noticed. I have a lot more words and pictures to share, too, which I can post as soon as I get it all into a presentable format, but if you have any questions about the setting, I'd be happy to answer them.

I suppose one question that asks itself; what sort of adventures do you expect players to have in this world? How would the typical adventure go down in this world as compared to... in Exalted or traditional DnD? Is this a rolling game, a card playing game? or a telling game? Is this a traditional battle game? or an intrigue game?