Wednesday, November 19, 2014

A World a Week (or so): Rooqa in Retrospect

The setting was diminishing-magic-meets-the-bronze-age sort of thing. While iron was known about very few smiths knew how to make fire hot enough. The creatures that still had magics or knew of materials that could heat up hot enough to fashion iron (trolls, elves, and dwarves) were poisoned by its touch. The Player-Characters started out as hires on a barge that was pulled in from Ulthar, a port along the Oronxic coastal lands down the Rift River. 

It was along this river that Mundaners, or the Daner, were beginning to populate the lands where magic was diminishing rapidly and taking with them the fantasy species that lived there. The Daners in this case were humans, boons (a smart version of a baboon), otgan (otter-people), and tuskers (roughly neanderthals).  The two settlements of Tripod City and Gled Onlarth were less than forty years-old. The region of Forestia was one of the last pockets of magic still left.

As the Characters found reason to work their way into Forestia towards the lair of an evil sorcerer, a "Knad Ek" in the "The High Language," which only Wizards knew, the charms and trinkets on their persons reactivated once in touch with magic again. Things went into pretty typical high fantasy for these sessions. Bronze swords with inscriptions became intelligent. Necklaces taught the wearer various spells at certain levels. Except for the "races," or Kindred as I call them, the group could've been from any popular fantasy novel written after the LotR series.

I can't remember specifically, but I think the sorcerer's name was Nirtudu. He lived in the last Wizards' Guild Citadel in existence, now called Def Nell. He was trying to bring the celestial worlds back closer to earth, figuring that this would bring the magic back. What he didn't know was that the sun, moon, and stars had grown in size and needed to be moving away from the Earth. The earth itself had folded over on itself and become a sphere instead of flat plane to compensate for its own growth. His scheme was to harpoon the sun with the Giant's Spear and drag it closer. The Spear was something more akin to Cthulhu than an actual artifact. 

Before things could get really messy, the PCs, all except one, battled valiantly to stop Nirtudu. Helios, the sun god, appeared and sent Nirtudu to the surface of the sun, where its energies consumed him. The PC that had sided with the mad wizard was sent to Mars, where plenty of magic still existed, but the alien environment required all of that person's capabilities to stay alive. Then there was the question of the native martians...

From '93 until '96, things were fairly stationary enough to keep a pretty stable gaming group, especially towards the end of it. The single player that had made it all the way through the campaign was on his fourth PC. I had become comfortable with running changing players, as well as their Characters, through story lines that I was keeping going to see where the plots ended up. Michael, a real Prince fan, played one of the better Wizards that I've ever seen. 

No comments:

Post a Comment