[Actual Play] Everway : Long Road Home

[DaveB]

When the children of a hundred Spheres all started to be stillborn, lots of people were concerned.

When the greatest heroes of the age announced a plan to solve the problem, and invited you, you were curious.

When they requested volunteers for a quest - through the Uncharted Gate, across hundreds of unknown Spheres into the depths of the multiverse, you stepped forward.

This you could handle.

When you woke up on some nameless sphere, your body aged as though six years have passed, clutching the artefact you were sent to retrieve and missing the memories of everything that happened since you left home. THAT gave you pause.

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"Long Road Home" is my second Actual Play thread for RPG.net Open (the first is the A|State campaign <a href="http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=112323&page=1&pp=10">"Eye of the Needle"</a>). It's about six travellers who have had their memories erased upon reaching the object of their decade-long quest, and must now find a way through hundreds of fantasy worlds, connected by a system of gateways and astral paths, back to their homeworlds which desperately need the artefact they've won. Every gate they go through brings a flashback of ann event that happened in the outbound journey, revealing more of the backstory. They're lost, without a guide, in an unfamiliar part of the universe. Retracing their steps, unravelling the mystery of their missing years and running into people that met them on their way out (many of whom have unresolved issues with them), they have to learn again how to act like a team, rely on one another and somehow survive the journey back. And they appear to have started a war. And one them appears to be married. And there's this small boy that they seem to have picked up along the way. And one of them is turning into living metal. And...

You get the idea.

The game has an unusual dramatic device, in that every Gateway the characters go through brings a flashback - which are handed out in the form of (very) short stories that I write in between sessions. These all fit together to form - by the end of the campaign - a novella's worth of text. It's like the movie Memento - the flashbacks are our equivalent of the black and white sections of that film.

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Everway is the game Wizards of the Coast made before D&D - a diceless, narrative-based (it calls itself "visionary", in the sense of "concerned with imagery" not "superior") roleplaying game of high fantasy with a New Age feel to it, set on infinite Spheres - fantasy worlds of every stripe, linked by Gateways. When I first ran it a year ago, I took considerable liberities with it's campaign setting. As a sequel to that first campaign (called "Realmforge"), Long Road Home inherits most of those liberties. They will be explained and pointed out when they happen.

LRH is designed as an emotional campaign - the relations within and without the core six characters is like a soap opera or the characters of a long-running continuity show like Angel or Deep Space Nine and are the focus of the game. Combat is not especially important. It's high-powered (as Everway tends to be - the game is like a rules-light stab at the tropes Exalted covered a few years later, where characters are assumed to be heroes of mythic stature), and often plays as a sort of Fantasy superheroes game. In vision, it's meant to be like the Epic arc-driven cartoons of my youth - Mysterious Cities of Gold, Pirates of Dark Water, Ulysses 31 - crossed with fantasy action movies from Sinbad to Hero.

It's Everway. It's pretty much unique as rpgs go out of the box, and I've put my own mad stamp on it.

Anyway, that's the blurb. I'll post more later, going into the previous campaign, the design of this one, the characters and then the game sessions so far (three at time of writing).

[Sammael99]

WAAAAAAAAAAAAY Cool !

I really like Everway even though I've never played it (yet), I utterly love Spherewalker.

Additionally, the concept you describe sounds utterly cool !

Looking forward to this !

[DaveB]

It is one of my undying regrets that I have never seen a copy of the fabled supplement for Everway. I didn't know Spherewalker's Handbook *existed* until after I'd finished Realmforge.

[Nisarg]

This sounds absolutely excellent, if very complex.

I advise you to have a mix of a very fixed over-plot of where they'd been, while at the same time keeping the adventures themselves very open (and not force the pcs to go in specific directions or have to get specific results).

I say that because if you don't have a very good idea of what in general happened in that lost decade, things could get complicated very fast for you.
On the other hand if you make discovering the next piece of the "puzzle" dependant on one specific clue or pc action, you will end up having to railroad.

Nisarg

[DaveB]

This sounds absolutely excellent, if very complex.

I advise you to have a mix of a very fixed over-plot of where they'd been, while at the same time keeping the adventures themselves very open (and not force the pcs to go in specific directions or have to get specific results).

I say that because if you don't have a very good idea of what in general happened in that lost decade, things could get complicated very fast for you.
On the other hand if you make discovering the next piece of the "puzzle" dependant on one specific clue or pc action, you will end up having to railroad.

Nisarg

I do - the pre-plot is on my hard drive in the form of a Timeline in Excel format, which charts out the outbound route (which they have already slipped off in the three sessions we've had) and rough notes. Each character's main arc has "beats" written into it, and the progression mapped out. Above and beyond those, the outbound trip is divided in my notes into "seasons", like a TV show, with big events that mark season shifts and story arcs within a season. It's like plotting a novel.

The actual game sessions are so loose as to be nigh-freeform. I have my long notes on all the worlds in the network (I created 275 Spheres for this campaign), which I flesh out whenever I set a flashback on one or when the characters get within five Gates of it (as the average speed of the campaign is two Gates / three worlds per session). I have plot ideas, sure, but only very very light ones. The focus of the game on internal party relationships and the time it takes to read flashbacks means I have ample breathing room for improv.

The previous campaign was set up this way, too - I created this style of campaign as a way to STOP myself from railroading. All of my narrator-fu goes into the flashbacks, leaving the vistas wide and open for the players in "up-time". It's a way of turning one of my bad GM habits into a virtue.

Flashbacks happen every gate regardless of what they're doing. In between sessions I take requests for the next session or two's flashbacks (in the form of things they want to know about, not specific events they have thought up and want inserted). For example: Chris, who plays Valour, might say "Valour was thinking about what might have happened with X a lot this session", and so one of his flashbacks the week after addresses that issue, even if obliquely. GIves the gang a bit more creative control.

[DaveB]

CONTEXT - THE PREVIOUS CAMPAIGN

Realmforge was adapted from a campaign I'd had in my mind since about 1996. Adapted because I'd already gutted all but the central device of that campaign for a game of Exalted.

I told my players to go away and create six characters for Everway, but to do so in an odd way - they were to provide the rough personalities of their character, their appearance, stats and abilities but NOTHING else. No name, no background. Those, I would provide.

The characters woke up in a wizard's tower, in the wilderness of a fog-bound Sphere, the wizard dead (murdered) and themselves having had their memories erased. They were dressed in servant's clothes, but evidence in the Tower suggested otherwise - clothes that fit them, and a stash of equipment, were found in a locked room. Setting out to try to get help, they stumbled across a Gate and began their adventures.

It had a flashback system much as I've described for Long Road Home, with the exception being that the flashbacks occured when the characters slept, not when they went through Gates. The characters started with a map of all of the spheres (an A2 poster I made, with lots of dots and lines on it marking the routes), and quickly started to plan journeys.

The bad guy for the Campaign was Legion, an armour-clad amalgamation of all of them (like in the Red Dwarf episode) that their past selves had created. He also had copies of their memories stored within them. It quickly became apparant that their previous selves were not nice people - in fact, they were the supervillains of the spheres, and had been bent on universe-domination when their plan went wrong and they fled to a world where they were double-crossed and mind-wiped.

The setting included all of the worlds from the Everway player's guide, along with 75 more (for a total of 150) that I made up. The setting is twisted - the main change from the published game, and one which carries over to LRH, is that there's only one Realm per Sphere (I use the terms interchangably), and the average number of Gates is three. This is purely to make creating a network easier.

At the end of the campaign, the characters succeeded in getting into the Realmforge - a not-Sphere "in" the Moon accessed by tracing a complicated path in the Everways, "drawing" a symbol into the Astral paths by moving through worlds in a specific way. Realmforge has a wish-granting engine inside, and can control Astral Paths and Gateways.

The characters (and their endings) were:

FAVOURED SON - Demigod son of the Goddess of Chaos and Destruction, Favoured was cursed to live in interesting times. The universe believed him to be the hero of an epic story, and warped chance and fate around him to provide a suitable backdrop. If he entered a bar, a fight would start. If he walked past a dark alley, someone would be being kidnapped down it. If he had to get somewhere before something happened, he would arrive always "in the nick of time", no sooner and no later. Anyone he slept with suffered a hideous death. Ninjas would occassionally attack him for no reason. The only "up" side to being him was his nigh-on invunerability. Favoured regenerated any wound he took instantly unless his body was utterly obliterated. In the backstory, Favoured was waging a private war against his mother-goddess. In the end of the campaign, he took up this quest again and struck a massive blow against her by turning himself into a god to rival her. Thanks to his virality and regenerative force, he became the God of Life.

ASCENDING STAR OF THE MORNING (aka EXILE) - once the high mage of a Sphere called Crystal, Exile was granted immortality by it's centerpiece, a giant magical gem with life-giving properties. When a civil war caused the death of his wife, he smashed said gem, turning his entire world and all it's inhabitants to dust. That was a thousand years ago. In the meantime, Exile has been researching how to bring his people back - studying the undead in particular and becoming Pharoah of an Egyptian-styled Sphere where the Undead are treated as nobility. He needed the Realmforge to restore his world, but also needed the souls of all of his people (long since reincarnated) - he'd tried to collect them over the course of centuries by means of a casket that sucked them in when their more recent host died, rather than go around tracking hundreds of people down and murdering them, but his Wife's soul ended up in Shadow, another PC - and besides, she'd died before he destroyed the Sphere. In the end of the campaign, he got his wish and restored his realm (minus his wife), marrying Shadow and settling back down to the home life he'd been an evil overlord for a millenia in order to recover.

SHADOW - A Vampire, and Exile's bodyguard. Shadow was in love with Exile but eventually discovered he only kept her around because she was needed for the opening of the Realmforge portol. She therefore betrayed him to the others, causing the party's amnesiac downfall. In the end, she wished for "a happy ending" and was turned human, marrying Exile and settling down on Crystal.

AURA - An illusionist and thief, Aura was the daughter of the Baron of a world called Dragonmount. Her parents were killed by her uncle and she ran away, becoming first a street thief and then a circus performer, where she met Vagabond and Rockarm, her partners in crime. She was hired - then enslaved - by the others in order to recover the items they needed to get to Realmforge, but she released Legion by infecting him with her resentment at her treatment, which caused him to rebel. In the end of the campaign, Aura (who had killed her uncle by now) wished for good luck to follow her and her family, recieved immortality from the Crystal on Exile's homeworld and went home, becoming Baroness.

FIRE PLUME - A Shapeshifter (she could turn into any bird, but her matt red hair always carried as a "tell", hence her name) from the sphere of Shift, Fire Plume's home was invaded by the war between Gaunt's people and another sphere, and she was forced to flee in a refugee column which was captured and enslaved. Seperated from her daughter, Sparrow, and sold (after several intermediaries) to Aura, she went mad with grief and a long period of being forced to remain in bird form. Aura tried to restore her to sanity, but the methods were harsh and Fire Plume hated her - when the oppertunity came to get revenge and sell Aura out to the others, she jumped at it. At the end of the campaign, she rescued her daughter, used the Realmforge to move her homeworld in the Gate network to save it from it's neighbour's conflict and - wanting to prevent anything like that happening to anyone else - followed Favoured into Godhood, becoming the Goddess of Hope and Lost Causes.

GAUNT - A tree-man (he was a humanoid plant. Seriously), Gaunt was cast out of his homeworld and branded with the symbol of a pheonix for attempting the heresy of creating new intelligent life. His people had been at war with another world (using Fire Plume's home as a battleground) for centuries, and he wanted to stop it. Secretly, he was the other Demigod of the Goddess of Chaos and Destruction - fitting the Destruction part. He masterminded the attemmpt at getting Realmforge, intending to destroy all of the Everways, ending all war with a single stroke. In the end of the campaign, he wished "to fit in" and became human, retiring quietly as a farmer on the empty world that lay beyond Crystal.

NPCS that need explaining

STRABO - The Dragon of Dragonmount, enemy and - later - ally of the character party, Strabo is resident on Aura's homeworld and has odd, secret goals that were never explained in the campaign. He will be important in Long Road Home.

VAGABOND - A Goblin, and one of Aura's gang of thieves (he had an odd relationship to Aura based on his loving her from afar), Vagabond was killed in the later stages of the campaign and - as Favoured's first act upon apotheosis - ressurrected as a Human. He had many on-off affairs with Aura, and went back to wandering the worlds.

ROCKARM - Circus strongman, and Vagabond's best friend. Rockarm was instrumental in the victory at the end of the campaign, and recieved his own wish to "be smart" - his brainpower expanding to as superhuman levels as his Incredible Hulk-like body. He became a scholar on the university-world of Collegium.

[DaveB]

THE THEORY OF SEQUEL DESIGN

So. Best campaign I ever ran, was Realmforge. How to do the same thing, but different?

Happily, noone could use Realmforge again. The artefacts needed for entry had been left inside, and Gods are barred from entering, so it would be essentially a nonissue in any sequel.

We knew we wanted the memory flashbacks again (they had been the highlight of the game, in players' feedback). We knew we didn't want to go the "you're the bad guys!" route again. I knew that my biggest regret from the previous campaign was giving them the realm map at the start - it kind of took the mystery out. We knew we wanted a "second generation" feel.

So, the idea was mooted to do a linear quest rather than the round-trip of the previous campaign. The realm map (which would be bigger! yes, BIGGER! Mwuh-mwuh-ha!) would be kept secret from the players, who'd have to figure out their route through investigation, luck and clues in the flashbacks.

I had the idea after remembering the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's plot of having a group of teenaged characters wake up in adult bodies, having missed their early twenties. This gave more control over their character's backstories than in the previous game - the first part of their backgrounds would be written by them, so they could create "proper" characters - and still gave me ample room for crafting a backstory. From there, I leapt to the "Journey home" structure of the campaign, and the rest flowed easily.

As for the characters themselves, it was odd - originally, everyone was mooting true "next generation" pcs that would literally be the children of previous ones. People were intending to play, at one stage or another, the son of a Sphere Lord that had turned up as an NPC in the old game, Aura and Vagabond's son, Aura and Strabo's son, Gaunt's daughter, Shadow and Exile's twin children... the list went on.

In the end, though, these dropped off - the final character party features only two such characters (the NPC's son and the child of Aura, Vagabond AND Strabo, the latter being a case of "why do one character concept when you can easily do two?") Andy (he who played Exile, and lover of weird characters - he managed to play a Simil in A|State for a while) decided he was going to play a true child - 12 years old in "up" time. THAT neccessitated writing a complete background for him, as the other characters picked him up during the missing backplot. So he was created like the pcs for the first campaign, while the others stuck to the "written up to late teens" method.

Here's the document that I sent out to the gang, two and a half months ago:

“This here is to get yous all thinking, and to put necessary limits on yo “creativity” before you get disappointed when I don’t turn out to want a particular character.

RULES

You remember (hopefully) Everway’s system – 5 Stats plus Powers make up a character, with 2-4 being the normal human range for a stat and 3-8 being player character range. The stats are the four elements plus “magic”, which is a holding area for people to design “mage” characters. Because we have 5 players, we’ll do this round-ways – each of you pick one of the stats, which you’re allowed to have above 6. The others of you have a max of 6 in the stats that aren’t your specialty. This will enforce character niches. However, as I don’t want this to be a rerun, Chris cannot pick Fire. Emma cannot pick Water. Renaud cannot pick Earth, Andrea cannot pick Fire and Andy cannot pick Magic or Air. So there.

Powers are costed according to whether they are Major (meaning they alter the character’s ability to act on situations to the point I have to account for it in plot), Frequent (will happen in every session) or Versatile (do many things). Especially hard powers may be “twice Major” or “twice Frequent” or “twice Versatile” – being unkillable is Major, being utterly unharmable is twice Major. Being able to shapeshift into different birds is versatile, being a total freeform polymorph is both twice major and twice versatile (and in fact is frequent as well, making it the only 5 point power I can think of). Costs can be lowered by restrictions and drawbacks.

Examples drawn from what you guys have already thrown around…

Having wings that allow the character to fly is 2 points (major & frequent)

Having the ability to make those wings vanish when you’re not using them is a 0 point power

Being Immune to Magic is 2 points (major and frequent)

Being immune to cast spells is 1 point (major, but doesn’t actually happen that often in Everway)

Being immune to cast spells cast by those younger than you when you’re aged 15 is 0 points (so unlikely that I’d probably have to deliberately plot to show that you even have the power)

Having telekinesis to the extent that memory-Exile had, flying and all, is 3 points (Major, Versatile and Frequent)

Characters will be created with 20 points. Flashbacks will probably feature powers you don’t have – because the “experience” has been lost. The xp system will work different to Everway 1s – a decreasing curve. You will get one xp at the end of game sessions 1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21 and so on.


Right. The campaign background…

Everway 2 is intended to be a straight journey rather than the old game’s round trip around the core worlds. The campaign is based around the idea of five people being selected for a heroic quest into uncharted spheres, and losing their memories of the entire quest (but not their lives before it) as they get the thing they were questing for. So we’re going to see a group of teenagers and young adults leave Crystal through the Unknown Gate, and then cut immediately to those characters five or six years older, holding the artefact of plot and wondering how they’re going to get home. The memory flashbacks will be of the outbound journey, so for the majority of the campaign you’ll be retracing your own steps and dealing with events that you’ve set in motion and then forgotten about. Because of the way gates work time-lag wise, you’ll be “reappearing” on worlds after a gap of one or two months at the start of the game and several years (maybe even decades) towards the campaign’s conclusion. Cool, huh?

The worlds in Everway 2 are more numerous (200 to Everway 1’s 120, and unlike Everway 1 the majority of them will be featured – because Everway 2 is a linear journey with the opportunity for side quests, it’s sphere map is laid out as a long strip rather than a big square block) and more... fantastical… than Everway 1’s. Odd worlds where the laws of reality are different (the equivalents of Slate, Shift and Firesky) are the norms, while places that could be dropped into other games as parts of their world (like Overguard, Market and Broken Axe) are now the exception. The worlds lack the unifying force of the Empire and are older than in Everway 1 – The nearer to the end of the quest (and therefore the start of the campaign), the more the universe’s bones start showing through. On average, the first worlds you see IC will be more fundamental and prototypical than the ones nearer to the end.

So, for characters I need a group of five people who would have been picked by the previous character party as their successors – five people who form a cohesive team (in the memory flashbacks at least - many of you won’t have met before leaving on the quest) and whose skills complement one another. Because many of the worlds in Everway 2 are uninhabited, and even then the nature of the journey makes Reoccurring NPCs impossible unless they travel with you or make very precise side trips, the party must be able to interact with one another the majority of the time and stick together – Lone Wolves will be rendered unable to catch up to the others by the nature of the game, so if your character decides to go through a different gate to the others, that’s it – we’ll never see them again. The only way to play catch-ups is for the rest of the party to be able to wait for the wanderer.

Ah, cmon, it’ll be FUN.”

Since writing that, by the way, the number of Spheres increased to 275 (and I continue to add more as they occur to me). We added an extra player (Rafe, who posts to RPG.net VERY occassionally as LuxVeritas) and both he and Andy rejected having a "high stat" in favour of spending lots of points on powers. Noone wanted Magic. Andrea took Earth, Renaud Water, Emma FIre and Chris Air.

The campaign planning now shifted gears and ramped up. I constructed the realm map by getting two A1 sheets, taping them side-on to form a long rectangle, drawing 275 dots, assigning them names from my printouts of my "Realms" file and drawing connecting lines a plenty - Crystal in the top-right of the map, the world where they would wake up in the bottom left.

While the players refined their characters through consectutive rounds of consultation with me and brainstorming, I plotted "interesting" routes through my realm map. Halfway through this, I ran a "taster" session with three of the players (the others were down south at some function), rationalising it as not everyone waking up in the exact same place and using it to both check the roleplaying of those three characters and to make sure I still had my "Everway Mojo" after a years absence.

After all six characters were finished, I settled on a final route and began the backstory timeline. Writing 24 Flashbacks for the first session (four each), and in doing so setting out the broad character arcs, I noted down appearance changes between "then" and "now", equipment lists for their just-woke-up selves, and made a bag-full of player handouts, reproducing every document and piece of paper the characters had in their pockets and packs upon waking up as physical documents I could hand people.

Then, I slept the long, deserving sleep of the insanely over-devoted. We were at last, exactly ten months and twenty days after Realmforge finished, ready to begin.

[DaveB]

CHARACTERS

Each player was told only that a council would be called on Crystal to address some crisis, and that their characters would have to be nominated by their worlds to go.

Oh, and spot the common theme if you can. The answer will be in a post later on. It was absolutely not intentional on my part - the characters just ended up that way.





ECHO

Emma played Aura in Realmforge, and Alexis in A|State. She picked Fire as her character niche, and created what at first glance is the stereotypical leather-clad female ninja, but has got so much more going on. After playing a relatively simple power last Everway campaign, Emma warned me that Echo would be rather more... complex. And she is.

Echo is an inhabitant of Wall, a sphere from Realmforge that was vaugely hostile and chinese-themed. The child of humble serfs, she manifested an odd power at an early age and was taken away by the Beaurocrats of Wall's Emperor, never to see her family again. Her talent - the ability to create a second, insubstantial copy of herself, control both bodies independently and switch which one is "real" at a thought (and without any visible sign of having done so) - proved of great interest to the Emperor's servants, who raised the girl as an assassin. Her power offered perfect alibis (she could have one of herself at a very public party while the other her was killing the host upstairs, for instance) and - by creating a copy, moving it away, switching bodies and then cancelling the illusion that was once the original - a slow form of teleportation. It's also very, very difficult to keep her imprisoned. Succeeding in all but two of her missions (both failures were attempts to kill Aura - thwarted by that ex-PC's Realmforge-given good luck), she was sent by the Emperor when he was asked to send a representitive for inclusion on a dangerous quest. At best, she is an extremely capable fighter. At worst, she is considered expendable by her masters.

Echo is psychologically twisted by her upbringing. Shown no kindness for most of her short life, living a silent life of servitude except when ordered to go out and kill, her various taboos and compulsions have become ingrained. She's servile, insists on putting the rest of the party above herself (even - *especially* - when dangerous to herself), never complains and is quiet to the point of silent when not being directly addressed. Even when she *is* directly addressed, she's tortured by making small talk, and normally backs out of conversation as quickly as she can. She doesn't know exactly how her powers work - and has no desire to explore it, believing she would have been taught if she needed to know - but in her years of service has noted one strangeness. Her ethereal copy can pass through solid objects, even living beings, but it's own reflection is solid to it. When trapped between two mirrors, she must either abandon the copy or pass out - her mind tries to inhabit the reflections as it inhabits the copy, to her best reasoning. For this reason, she has a mild phobia of reflective surfaces, and is uncomfortable around large mirrors, still standing water and so on.

Emma requested that her character arc be one of growth - she wanted Echo to be slowly freed by long time away from Wall and the reinforcing influences found there, the weight of years spent with the party (some of whom are extremely easy-going) eventually breaking her conditioning. From the flashbacks so far, this took about a third of the backplot. past-Echo, once "freed", was especially good friends with Talisman and always concious of her rebellion (and what awaited her at home). It is now apparant that she fell in love and - seeing a chance to ensure she never went back to the way she was (a prospect she regarded with horror) - married and quit the party, staying behind on a Sphere some way away and rejoining the party only recently after helping free the others from imprisonment.

In the three sessions played, Echo HAS, obviously, gone back to the way she was. Her visions of "improper behaviour" make her feel horrified and ashamed, and if anything she has become more rigid in insisting on her Place as an effort to both punish herself and make sure she never "falls" again. The others, meanwhile, much prefer the happier, socialised Echo from their memories and are trying to get her to accept the changes in herself - Talisman especially, who declares himself heartbroken every time he wakes from a vision and sees his best friend as was treating herself like a slave.

And, as they move nearer and nearer to the world she stayed behind on, the prospect of being reunited with Echo's husband looms. This cannot end well.

(Echo looks like Zhang Ziyi, the actress from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero.)





MIRAGE

Rafe is new to playing Everway, and handed in a character he'd created back in the days when we both bought our copies of the game from a publisher's clearance house (for £2.50, making it the most bang-for-buck game I have ever owned) Mirage is suprisingly similar to Fire Plume - the character played in Realmforge by the player of that earlier campaign who isn't taking part in Long Road Home - though once you dig past "female shapeshifter" they're quite different.

Mirage was turned into a changeling rather than being born as one. She grew up on the desert world of Archways (from the book), until she was captured in a slave-raid when she was sixteen. Bought by a magician who offered her her freedom in exchange for being experimented upon, she recieved multiple transfusions of blood from natives of Shift and was barraged by spells. The new Mirage was immediately employed by her benefactor as his agent, a relationship which shifted over the years from Master-Servant to reasonably good friends. When that magician was called upon to attend the quest, he sent her instead, saying that her powers and broad skills (she is an accomplished swordswoman, among other things) would be of more use.

Mirage's tragedy is that her body does not reset after she shapeshifts - whichever form she takes is, in effect, her "real" one for the purposes of magic, and she must visualise each form to take it. This means that her "default" form changes slowly over time, and is no longer recognisable as the original girl as her self-image is subtly different to reality and errors in memory are made physical. In her darker moments, she considers herself to not be a "real" person, only a flawed copy of a flawed copy of a flawed copy and so on. Her aging has effectivly stopped and she can get "lost" in nonhuman forms if she takes them for too long - she became a tree out of curiosity once in the past and lost all sense of time, which coupled with her nonaging means she's no longer sure of how old she really is. Her Tell is in her eyes - one blue and one green, no matter what form she takes.

Rafe decreed Mirage's Fate card to be the Priestess, and requested a character arc based around the realisation (or not) of some kind of rooted sense of understanding herself for the character. In the flashbacks so far, Mirage is revealed as being the ever-protean core of the party, changing subtly depending on who she's paired up with for each flashback - party girl for Talisman, loyal follower for Fathom, big sister for Echo and so on. There are insinuations that she had a disastrous romantic entanglement with Talisman early on, which he broke off and deeply hurt her in the process. Years of steady development and self-realisation (when someone has been hurt, or affected by things beyond their control, Mirage is the one to comfort them - she especially counsels Valour through his changes) culminated in a year-long period when Echo had married and left and the rest of the characters had been imprisoned by their enemies, leaving Mirage to wage a one-woman war on their captors alone, eventually becoming a hard-bitten resistance fighter and inciting a revolution in the process.

In the three sessions played so far, Mirage has been working hard to understand what's happened to them and where they are going. She's the leader in efforts to piece together some kind of route from their recollections, and uses her powers frequently to benefit the group without reward (she often turns into load-bearing animals for long overland treks). Faced with her returned memories of Talisman's rejection and her reaction to it, she has grabbed onto slivers of suggestion that she and Valour were more than friends - reinforced by one of his own memories - and is now "with" the Bird-man diplomat.





VALOUR

Chris played Favoured Son in Realmforge, and Conrad in A|State. Having played swashbuckling heroes in several games, he decided to take almost the exact opposite tactic, and selected Air as his niche. Faced with the quest, and the abilities of those other party members he knew of, Chris designed his character to be the one thing the party needed above all else on their long trip.

Valour is a diplomat.

The son of Lord Blessed, ruler of a Sphere called Skystone, Valour differs from "baseline" human in the same way as all the natives of his world - Skystone is a Sphere of large, floating "islands" in an infinite sky, with no solid ground, and the inhabitants have large falcon-like wings emerging from their backs. Blessed (named, in the second session of Realmforge, after Brian Blessed and his character in Flash Gordon) is a loud, rude, hard-drinking man. Valour took after his mother. Polite, friendly, highly intelligent and good with people, Valour became known as a peace-maker and a negotiator of several high-profile treaties between his homeworld and neighbours that Blessed had managed to antagonise.

Aside from his wings, and the gift of flight that they give, Valour can fire the edge-feathers of his wings off as sharp-tipped barbs. It's a last resort, as it impairs his ability to fly, but it's useful. His most potent power, though, is a secret - he's a fraud. While he's highly intelligent (a genius by human standards), Valour's famed negotiating skills don't come from his keen mind or his perceptive sight. They come from his ability to read the surface thoughts of all but exceptional individuals, thereby allowing him to shamelessly cheat at the bargaining table. Aside from that (and the occassional patch of guilt that it creates), Valour was engaged to marry as befits his status - his fiancee took his offer to break off the engagement when he left on the quest, so he begins our story heartbroken.

Valour's part in the flashbacks is one of tragic misunderstanding and metamorphosis. A bit of a snob, Valour was not used to associating with people of as low station as Echo and Mirage, and was guilty of mistreating Echo before she started to rebel. While his skills got them through dozens of worlds in the early years, his breakup caused an odd, tragic, situation wherin he would try to prevent his comrades from forming emotional attachments to the people they met. When it became clear Echo was about to leave with a man she met on the journey, he became insufferable, only realising his folly after she left and he was imprisoned for a year. He made his peace with her after she came back, though. The most disturbing change, however, has been physical - Valour's hair has all fallen out, his wing-edges have turned into metal and - he was horrified to discover - when the bad guys of the campaign try to assimilate him, metal blades burst out of his skin and remove the physical contact before breaking off themselves. It seems that there is something *inside* him.

Modern-day Valour has been resoundingly ashamed of his own past actions (and has apologised to everyone in advance, in case he turns out to have done even more), and alarmed at the change in his appearance to the point of obsession. The fear of changing into something unknown is large in his mind, and he clings to the comfort past-Mirage gave him in a vision like a liferaft - spilling over into the present with their new relationship.

(Chris says Valour should be played by Rupert Everett with animatronic wings. I'll take his word for it).





TALISMAN

Renaud played Gaunt in Realmforge and Jemmy in A|State. To Long Road Home, he brings Talisman, the only character to be related to a previous player character. Talisman is the son of Aura and Vagabond, the union having been arranged by Strabo to create a half-dragon, half-human emissary (Dragons can't mate with humans. Strabo had to use Vagabond as a proxie). His powers are those of his mother, "overpowered" and twisted by his Draconic heritage, plus a grab-bag of minor Dragon-like tricks. And, of course, the power for which he was named: Aura's wish in the Realmforge for good luck to follow her and her line applies to him.

Talisman is constantly surrounded by a shifting aura of what he terms Colours (with a capital C) - flashes and wisps of effervescent colour, floating around him. Aura could control hers and create real-to-the-senses illusions. Talisman's part-Dragon nature means that that such fine control is impossible - if he creates an object it looks false, made up of planes of light ("like bad CGI", says Renaud), but that same nature means that his Colours are tactile - they're solid forcefields, not ethereal fancies. Like a Dragon, his Soul is contained within a Pearl attached to his body (over his breastbone). He can also sense when people are sneaking up on him, and has the most amazing luck.

Talisman's alien appearance (he seems slightly "off", even to people who have seen Spherewalkers of all different shapes and sizes) and explicit purpose in being created as part of the not-yet-revealed schemes of a machiavellian Wyrm isolated him from his "peers" among the children of the old character party - Exile in particular banned him from associating with his and Shadow's children, for fear of what Strabo was up to. Vagabond had a major falling out with Aura over what Strabo had done and left, never to come back. Aura's immortality meant he would never inherit the throne of Dragonmount. He found himself idle with nothing to do except wait for Strabo to give him his marching orders. So he became a playboy, the epitome of the idle second son, drinking, gambling and wenching his way through his late teens, nursing his lonliness. When the mission was formed, Exile wanted one of his old comrade's children to go. Talisman was the last choice, after everyone else refused. Seeing his oppertunity to get as far away from all of "Them" (as he calls the last campaign's "heroes", he jumped at the chance. Worryingly, Strabo supported the notion.

Talisman's tragedy is one of parentage - he considers himself to be Aura and Strabo's son, and defines himself as a mixture of those two beings, with the rest of his personality just a reaction to the pressures acting upon him. What's obvious to every single player (not character. Player.) and will become obvious to thread-readers, is that he is nothing of the sort. Talisman is the very spitting image, in looks and most importantly in personality, of Vagabond. He DOES take after his father - he just thinks of the wrong being as his father. Sarcastic, hard-drinking, carousing and above all else bitter, Talisman provides most of the motivating force for the party, gets them moving, points out when things are going to go wrong for them and seems determined to enjoy his freedom while it lasts.

In the flashbacks, Talisman fulfils several roles once he settles down and lets people past his bitter, twisted exterior. He makes a surprisingly good second-in-command to Fathom (his Niche is Water, and Talisman is extremely perceptive, though he does his best to hide it with layers of misunderstanding and flippant comment) and becomes the best of friends with Echo, who he describes as the only woman he respects enough as a friend to not sleep with, after initially bullying her. Something appears to have happened to him about the mid-point of the backstory. Later-Talisman seems tired, resigned to some fate and unwilling to joke around any more. The Talisman of early flashbacks is a swashbuckler, using his powers in clever, tricksy ways. The Talisman of later flashbacks is a tank, encasing himself in titanic suits of Colour armour and brutally putting down enemies. There are hints that he found something out about his purpose, hints which disturb his present self greatly.

Modern-day Talisman has gone back to his old habits, though he has already started to let the protective layers of lies, drink and bullshit slip a little, and his use of powers is more in key with his later flashbacks. He constantly counsels the others to stop and smell the roses - to blindly rush back to Crystal would be folly, he argues, as they're not sure if they need to do something out here first. He is disturbed by the hints about Strabo's purpose for him, and angered by the signs that Favoured and Fire Plume are interfering with the party (as you'll see in the session writeups) - Fire Plume especially, he refers to as "that mad bitch". The flashbacks are hitting him hard, though - especially when he can see that he managed honest-to-gods friendships with people that now seem incapable of it. Like Echo.

(Talisman - like Vagabond - resembles Johnney Depp)





FATHOM

Andrea played Shadow in Realmforge and Syndil in A|State. She picked Earth as her niche, and created a character as far from Syndil as possible. Fathom was the last character to be created for Everway (the campaign, in fact, shows the scars of the character Andrea briefly considered and rejected just before settling on this one), and is enshrined in my notebooks as "Mermaid: Warrior Princess." (then again, Talisman is recorded on that same page as "Jack Sparrow becomes Green Lantern").

Hailing from the underwater world of Pearl of the Waves, Fathom is adapted for life underwater - the skin between her fingers can fold out to webbing, her eyes have an inner eyelid and she has gills running down her neck and upper back. She can move about on land perfectly well, but has to get wet at least once a day. She is Hydrokinetic - she can control water, moving it about telekinetically, freezing and boiling it at will. The daughter of the monarch of her Realm, Fathom grew up in a utilitarian culture based on strength, and volunteered to represent her world in the party.

Fathom is the most alien of the group bar Talisman - her turqoise skin marks her as different, and her mannerisms are far more alien than (for example) Valour's. Extremely pragmatic, concerned with the most effective way to do things, she is described as "precise", "careful", "controlled" and other such adjectives. Her speech is subtly odd - she never uses contractions, and always speaks evenly after long pauses. Everything she says and does is prethought and preplanned. Nothing is impulsive. In an party as random as this one, these qualities are desperately needed as a grounding influence, and Fathom usually ends up being the voice of common sense. She is also massivly strong, and nearly impossible to kill - Fathom's endurance is superhuman, and she is held back by the others (if she were on her own, she could march across worlds in half the time). She is, however, afraid of fire - it is not a natural element in her homeland, and she was burnt as a child when she tried to touch the first flame she saw.

In our flashbacks, Fathom is quickly elected leader of the party (an election held at Valour's insistance), a role which she is increasingly wearied by as the years move on. The others rely on her over-much, as a mother-figure, as the one who figures out how to get them out of any scrape they've gotten themselves into, as the one who tells them what to do when they're being indescisive. Frequently called "Princess" in the flashbacks (technically true, but she's the only one that the party keeps on referring to by her honourific), she finds herself taking more and more "breaks" from the main mission, lingering on worlds without any true reason simply because the weight of responsibility is too much. The party's reason for picking up Soul has not yet been revealed, but it appears to have been at her insistance. Coupled with her feelings of being put upon are the occassions in the backstory when Desert Worlds had to be crossed - occassions which Fathom dreads deep in her soul.

Modern-day Fathom is already feeling the weight of the worlds. Soul - freed of his sense of responsibility by his amnesia and acting like the pre-teen he is, deliquency and all - has somehow become her responsibility, and she increasingly resents the amount of time she spends running around after the ungrateful brat and keeping him from destroying worlds by accident. The others see her calm, careful, self-assured poise and assume that because Valour or Echo are having near-breakdowns from their visions, they need them more. While Fathom suffers silently in the background, wrestling with her unwanted authority as party leader.


(Fathom looks like no actress I know - Andrea is an accomplished character artist, and I hope to scan and post her pictures of the characters as soon as I can afford my RPG.net membership. For some reason, though, Fathom has a Russian accent.)




THE BALANCING INNOCENCE OF THE GLORIOUS SOUL ("SOUL" for short)

Andy played Exile in Realmforge and both the Simil and Marius in A|State. His character for Long Road Home was created without a background, as the party picked him up at some point along the way. He therefore has no memories of his past life at all.

Andy's design was for a character who was physically a human child (Soul as is is roughly twelve), and who embodied the power of a Pheonix. Pheonixes in Everway symbolise the cycle of life and reincarnation for the Spheres they are found on, and are somehow linked to those cycles. I have gone further and fleshed the beings out in my own Everway-verse, establishing them as Psychopomps - Pheonixes move Souls from world to world, preventing them from pooling in any one Sphere, by absorbing the Souls of dying people they are near and releasing them when they immolate themselves and reincarnate. Andy picked a slew of Pheonix-like powers - Soul explodes in a burst of fire and comes back to life whenever killed, can absorb the souls of undead or dying people around him (releasing them when he reincarnates), is pyrokinetic (in that he can cause objects and living things to spontaneously combust, not become a living flamethrower), is immune to magic cast by anyone younger than him (pity he's 12, really), can go ethereal for short periods of time, can sense Death and Birth and (gasp) has oracular visions - Soul doesn't get flashbacks, he gets confusing masses of imagry, metaphor and occasional clarity of things happening in the present and future.

Soul doesn't appear in all of the flashbacks (he only joined halfway through the backstory), and his actual true nature remains mysterious. At the end of Session 3, Mirage had a vision implying that Soul was a Pheonix that - for whatever reason - had evicted a young boy's soul from his body and taken it over, making him an alien spirit puppeteering a human body. He is connected to the villain of the campaign in some way, and seems fated to die at it's hands. In the flashbacks he IS seen in, Soul is a quiet, serious child, obviously laboring under some great quest that has become attached to that of the others.

Modern-day Soul, though, has none of that sense of responsibility. Carefree, impulsive and occassionally dangerous, he gets into trouble constantly, badgers the others to be allowed to follow his whims and throws tantrums. He is also - worryingly - the only one who can carry the Artefact that they think is the one they've been after all this time. It's hugely destructive powers are not exactly safe in the hands of an amoral young boy who constantly wants to activate it to see what will happen.





AN EXPLANATORY NOTE ON NAMES

Those that haven't read Everway might be going "huh?" at all the names of people and places within the gameworld(s). It's really very simple.

Everway has a kind of alternate creation myth - in classic christian mythology, mankind was united until the Tower of Babel, where it was divided into different nations by the curse of losing it's unified language. Different languages created factions, etc. In Everway, there's a similar prehistorical cataclysm, but instead of dividing the people linguistically it did so physically, creating the many Spheres. No matter where you go, everyone in Everway speaks the same language ("The Tongue"), though Dragons have their own Tongue which humans occassionally learn.

This was done to avoid the "we're on a different world to last week. How do we buy supplies?" issue, but has an odd effect - take a typical English name. Hell, let's take mine. "David". Good, middle class, third most popular boy's name in Britain. It's also Hewbrew (IIRC) for "Beloved One". Most names in our world translate in one language or another into normal words. With only one language, everyone in Everway is just named by those normal words. While I'm David Brookshaw, my Everway-NPC equivalent would be Beloved Streambank. Not a good name, you'll agree - but you can hopefully see where the weird names are coming from.

[Rhyme]

Weary travellers we; who, upon reaching our hallowed destination,
fell foul of some ignoble machination and promptly forgot our noble goal.

Still, *Pours himself a healthy measure of wine* there are certain advantages to be found in the periples of an odyssey,
- A sort of Grand Tour, you might say - which work a little way to amending the troubles that we could encounter.
Of course, not everyone shares my enlightened opinions... not that it matters a jot. Not for the most part, anyway.
"Since you said yourself that my unhappiness robs me of substance." Some arguments are just plain lost, Tal.
My companions believe that we are wasting precious times, sir, that there are people depending on us.
I can't rightly remember whether they ever really did, I like to think that a number of likely lads have taken up the cause.
I'm drunk, sir; I don't care much for your name, your ear will suffice.

It's amazing how low an opinion you build of Gods and Heroes when you speak to them a while, isn't it.
I mean, spend a decade or so in service to your own ends and the world hails you the walker reborn.
Hypocritical scoundrels did little more than accumulate power. Don't get me started on the god-thing.
I hate talking about the god-thing.
Anyway, you can understand why I'm hardly keen to return to oh-so-smug's council to be hailed as the next hypocrit.
Although I must admit they've a long tradition all worked out - you've got to give them that, Tal, the pathetic curs.
Tal's my name, sir; errant barronet, essentially. It's sort of like an errant knight but with less horse and more wine.
Don't mind if I do.

Right, so we've got you all fired up for the show, have we? Positively vibrant with shallow expectancy?
Oodles of popcorn on the side and some buxom maiden to force it past your teeth?
They've told you the names and the shames of every little tick to parade before your adoring eyes?
Well bite down on that tongue you limey sod, there's a while yet and she'd best pace herself if she's going to last it...
There'll be plenty of time for that later, deary. Call for it even, if you can wait.

In truth, sir, the entirety of this farcical chase can be summed up in a few simple words: "We don't know"
Or at least, we're not sure.
If Kitten's right and no little brat has fouled the linen of our humble homes since before we left...
Well, it's quite possible there's little point in it. I know enough about rulership to recognise a dying population.
Not to mention the fact that we're not even sure if we can make it back. It's a long way in uncertain waters.
Oh, they're a fine-enough (if motley) crew now, but when the scurvey sets in and the rats come to play...
... well, we'll see.

Talisman, sir, yours to attend.

[Seanchai]

Everway! Huzzah!

Seanchai

[Pierce Inverarity]

Awesome campaigns, Dave. Yu0 = roXX0r.

[DaveB]

PRELUDE: CRYSTAL -> ENDLESS -> ?

All over the Known Worlds, calamities are befalling the inhabitants. One of the islands of Skystone rose higher and higher, eventually vanishing entirely. Visitors to Pearl of the Waves are no longer protected by bubbles of air, and the realm is paralysed by a lack of trade due to all visitors drowning. On Boneguard, the dead rise, die again and rise again in a mockery of the natural cycle. Coupled with this, children are being stillborn in notably higher numbers - the number of live births is dropping rapidly.

Something, somewhere, has gone horribly wrong, and a council has been called on Crystal to try to address the problem. Our characters - some of them volunteers, some draftees - meet each other for the first time, introduced to one another by Exile. Exile, Rockarm and Strabo have put their heads together and think they've figured the shape of it.

Souls, Exile explains, move down Everways inbetween incarnations, and appear to do so in sequence, flowing from some unknown origin. A person who dies in Dragonmount, for example, may have their next life in Windfall or Wall. Something is disrupting this, and he believes it is linked to the other, more widescale problem. The changes witnessed in the Realms are the result of the Usurper forces in each growing more powerful. Perhaps this is being caused by the lack of Souls, or perhaps (he says, clearly not liking this one), the lack of Souls is because Crystal's own Usurper force is similiarly unbalanced.

All souls - all energy - flows out of Crystal to the rest of the known Worlds, but it doesn't start there. There is another gate on Crystal apart from the one to Overguard, which leads to an uninhabited Sphere called Endless - an infinite plain of grassland, no large animals and no people. It is to there that Gaunt retired to live his life in seclusion. Three years ago, however, Gaunt vanished - the only sign of his passing a caern of rocks he erected to mark the position of an uncharted Gate he had discovered. He left a note saying only "gone for a walk", and no one else has ever been through it.

According to old legends on Crystal (due to it's long period of being all destroyed-like), life originated on a single perfect world that was made up of all of the Forces, but was destroyed and transformed into the many Spheres when one of the Forces vanished (or, perhaps, the Force vanished because the world shattered). According to Strabo, the Dragons tell tales of a Sphere right at the centre of the Everway network, the last remnant of that original world, upon which the lost Force can be found. It is from here that the Walker set out on his long walk, creating the Everways and populating the spheres as he went.

There are two further corroborations - they have summoned Julius and The Lady (the Gods formerly known as Favoured Son and Fire Plume). Julius confirms both stories.

The plan, then, which the five of them have been asked to apply themselves to, is this - go through the uncharted gate. Find the oldest Sphere. Retrieve the Lost Force of creation. Bring it back. Then the greatest minds of the age will try to figure out how to use it to reduce the grip of the Usurper Forces (which are there because it isn't) on the worlds. That, they hope, will sort it.

They don't know how many worlds lie between there and here. They don't know if those worlds are inhabited (though they probably are). They don't know what might be between them and their goal, or even if their goal is possible. The Lady just says "it has a chance", and as she's the Goddess of Hope, that's good enough for Exile.

After asking if anyone wants to drop out - this is a volunteer mission - Exile leaves them all alone to get to know one another. They leave at first light.

Everyone stares at one another.

Everyone stares at one another some more.

Mirage tries to break the ice.

Everyone stares at one another.

Valour has the idea of asking what everyone is good at. The response is variously honest (Mirage), brief and to the point (Echo) or pure 100% bullshit (Talisman).

Everyone stares at one another.

Mirage isn't giving up, and attempts a circular question thing - everyone has to reveal one thing about themselves, and so on. After learning that Echo's favourite colour is purple and that Valour is allergic to eggs, she gives up.

The conversation finally dies, and all quietly retire to their beds. Not such an auspicious beginning, really.

And that's the last thing any of them remember.

[DaveB]

EQUIPMENT LISTS AND CHANGED APPEARANCES


ECHO
Appearance: Other than being in her mid-twenties rather than her late teens, Echo has grown her hair extremely long – most of her hair is shoulder-length (except that she’s wearing it pinned up), but there’s a single long, thick ponytail that hangs down to the back of her knees. To the perceptive (Water 5+), she gives the impression of having gone “soft” recently – her face is fuller and her muscles less pronounced. Those good at fine detail who have the opportunity may notice that her tongue has been pierced, but has healed shut recently.

Clothes: Echo wakes up wearing an outfit that she can at least recognise the purpose of – it’s designed to allow her to move, and seems designed for “adventuring”. Lightweight knee-length boots, thin leather trousers laced down the outside seam and a wool tunic that’s baggy (being apparently several sizes too big) but belted. She’s wearing two bandoliers that, together with the belt, bind her clothes to her, and her sleeves are apparently detachable. She has a backsack (literally – it’s nearly shapeless, and hooked onto one of her bandoliers at the top and her belt at the bottom). Underneath all that, she’s wearing a ring on a thin neckchain – the band is set with some kind of blue agate in a wave pattern.

Stuff: Echo seems to be going for “the more weapons wins”. Attached to her other bandolier and hanging straight down (so the backpack overhangs it’s lowest point) is a curved, katana-like sword, engraved with a blue geometric pattern on the blade. The sword’s attached to her with the curve out, so that she can draw it without taking the scabbard off. The front of her bandoliers are covered in holsters for throwing knives – ten in total. She has a pair of twinned, “Riddick” backwards curved outward-edged knives that are slung upside down behind her back and concealed by her clothes and the backpack. On her left hip, she has a collapsible staff and a weird holster (like a cross between a belt pouch and a CD case) containing shuriken. On her left hip, she has a Chakram and a blissfully normal utility hunting-knife that still bears the signs of having been used to eat with. She has a long dagger attached to each boot, and her hairdo turns out to be supported by two stilettos used as hairpins. Inside the backpack, though, it’s a different story – Echo has a bedroll, several changes of underwear, a second tunic and a thick, dark grey, wool poncho that is presumably used to keep the rain off, but also a smaller drawstring bag containing jewellery and makeup. She has one other change of clothing – a plain, but expensive, dark-blue silk dress. Sandals of the same colour are also present. Her belt pouches contain gloves, a firestarter, a bag of marbles, dice and a couple of notes of paper money from a world called “Stonebridge”.


VALOUR
Appearance: Valour has vastly changed. His body is tougher, and has lost even the tiny amount of flab he had pre-quest. He is completely hairless (not even eyebrows), and has lost his lower left premolar – the tooth appears to have been knocked out, but the gap is inside his cheek so isn’t readily apparent. The outmost five feathers on his wings – given the layering effect, this makes it the outmost inch when his wings are folded up and the outmost foot when he spreads them – are made of metal, and quite sharp. He has numerous scars – several dozen nicks and small line-scars on his arms and chest, a scar over where one of his eyebrows should be and a large, nasty looking scar running from about four inches to the left of his bellybutton to the base of his sternum. He has pierced his ears, and the eyebrow that isn’t scarred has a flat stud of metal coming out of it. On closer inspection, though, this proves to not actually be a stud – it won’t come out, like it’s been implanted into his skin. He has a tattoo of a snake on his right forearm. At some point in the past, his nose has been broken.

Clothes: Valour is wearing baggy cotton trousers and large, steel-toed, boots. His belt is festooned with pouches and he has a thin bandolier (empty of pouches) that has an attachment on his back (between his wings) where a bow could be slung. His left arm has a gold band around the bicep, and he is wearing hard leather Vambraces embossed with a silver dagger-symbol.

Stuff: Valour has a long, thin scimitar strapped to his hip, and a quiver on the other hip that is empty. His pouches contain the same currency as Echo’s, three small rubies, an eating knife, a tankard, a wineskin (empty), a tinderbox, a small, circular palm-held mirror. He has no backpack, and no changes of clothing that can be seen. His bow is also missing, despite having a place to wear it and an (empty) quiver.


MIRAGE
Appearance: It’s Mirage. Whaddya want? (upon first appearing, her appearance appears to have ‘shifted’ due to false body-image about as much as it would in several years, but she soon corrects for that).

Clothes: Mirage is wearing an almost identical base costume to Echo, without all the weaponry and without being tied down by a lot of straps - thin leather trousers laced down the outside seam and a wool tunic that’s baggy (though nowhere near as baggy as Echo’s – they appear to be identical, and Mirage is bigger) but belted. Her boots buckle instead of lace up, and are ankle-length. Her backpack has no bandolier to attach to, so it has straps attached to hang from her shoulders. Like Echo’s outfit, Mirage’s sleeves are attached to the tunic by laces at the shoulders and can be removed. Her belt is covered in stuffed pouches.

Stuff: Mirage has no weapons other than a hunting knife, but has the most possessions – her backpack bulges with the clothing inside. Changes of her main clothing and rain-ponchos aside, she has trousers of varying size (including a spare pair of what Valour’s wearing), three dresses ranging from “homespun peasant” to “tasteful frock” to “provocative”, a bag of jewellery and makeup, two bedrolls, a small feather pillow (the feathers of which look like Valour’s down) a headscarf, sandals, soft leather slipper-shoes that could probably fit a variety of foot size, linen shirts (which look like they’ve been stolen from Valour and Talisman) and a tiara. Hanging from the bottom of her backpack is one of the party’s two cooking kits – a set of pans, tripods, etc for camp cooking that nest into one another. Her belt pouches include a sparker, a snuffbox (empty), dice, five (fake) sapphires, a Fate Deck and a folded up “Wanted” poster in her name.


TALISMAN
Appearance: Talisman appears to have grown a rather sinister goatee beard, which comes to a point about an inch below his chin. The rest of his hair is straggly, like it’s recovering from having been cut very short. He has a large gold hoop earring in his left ear, and a tattoo of a snake on his right forearm. His skin seems darker than it used to be, though that might be a trick of perception. He has an impressive, jagged scar on his left leg (hidden by his clothes) that looks like a crocodile bit him, another that looks he got hit in the mouth (it runs from his lip almost to the corner of his chin). His belly-button has been pierced.

Clothes: Talisman is wearing a long, sleeveless leather jacket (that comes down to his knees) over the top of an embroidered blood red wool jacket (with gold edging, and big buckles) that’s just as long but has sleeves (the ends of which turn up, pirate-style), over a shirt which was once very expensive white linen. All his kit has seen better centuries – it looks like he hasn’t changed his shirt in weeks, and the rest of his clothing shows signs of repair and neglect. Under his clothes, he’s wearing a long neck chain festooned with tiny feathers, lizard’s feet, rabbit’s ears and other lucky charms. His left wrist bears a bracelet made of some kind of green stone chips, his right hand a huge plain gold signet ring. He is wearing a pair of tight leather trousers that buckle, and big solid boots with piratical turn-down tops. His belt buckle is a full two square inches and gold-plated, in the shape of a frowning face. He is wearing Vambraces, one of which has a miniature crossbow built onto it. He has the same backpack as much of the rest of the party.

Stuff: Talisman has a wide scimitar at his left hip, and a nice big bowie knife at his right. He has a wrist crossbow built onto one Vambrace (triggered by a cord attached to a leather loop around his index and middle fingers) and on inspection, his left Vambrace has a hidden knife-blade that springs out with the correct flexing. His belt pouches include ammo for his wristbow (twenty short bolts), a full pouch of pipeweed, a long clay pipe, a sparker, a pair of suede gloves, dice, a Fate Deck, a nine-men’s morris board made of cloth, plus clay counters, a hip flask (half full of fortified red wine), a waterskin (full of water). Within his backpack he has a bedroll, spare underclothes, a leather headband, a roll of paper money from a world called “Bastion”, a comfy-looking cloak, a shaving kit, a tankard, a dried pouch of Kaff, half an apple wrapped in thin fabric and a spare pair of trousers. He also has a curved metal plate that looks like it should be strapped on under his clothes, doing up like a bra over and under his shoulders and covering his Pearl. It has been massively dented. At the very bottom of his pack, scrunched up and apparently forgotten about, is a betting slip from a world called Service. Hanging from the outside of his pack is the other camp-stove.


FATHOM
Appearance: Fathom’s hair is a little longer, the beads and shells have been replaced over the years. Her tattoos and scarifications have been added to – her left forearm has a large raised geometric design on it, her right a tattoo of a snake, and her face now has a pointed red V design over the bridge of her nose, the sides of her eyes have been coloured in so it looks like she has a band of colour running across her eyes (inspection reveals that the eyelids have indeed been done. Ouch), while her belly has been tattooed like a coloured-in version of her arm scars. She’s if anything more muscular than before, but her skin colour has lightened slightly. There are stress-lines of premature aging at the corners of her eyes. Her fingernails have been cut short, and her palms are calloused.

Clothing: Fathom is wearing base clothes that match her picture in design, but have apparently been hand-made to replace the ones she started with – the materials aren’t quite right, and even these ones look scuffed, repaired and well-worn. She has a large necklace of various shells, teeth (some of which look rather long), beads, stones and so forth, and more of the same materials hang from her wrists – these items of jewellery look likewise hand-made. She is wearing a ring on her left index finger that is set with three black pearls.

Stuff: Most obviously, Fathom has a large two-handed broadsword in a back holster. The holster also has a quiver built into it containing two Javelins. Fathom’s belt pouches contain several papers (see handouts), her sword-hilt bottle thing, three waterskins (one of which is half-full, the other two empty), a sparker, a tankard, a set of bolas, a hunting knife, a long dagger that appears to have been carved (by her) from the tooth of some huge reptile. Over her back, she has a large backpack of a different design to the others (it’s straps have a belt that join them across her chest, and it appears to be quicker to take off than the other type). Fathom appears to have been declared “packhorse” of the group – her backpack has two compartments, the upper of which contains several packets of dried fruit, three apples, a large hunk of cured meat, a loaf of (stale) bread and a bag of jerky. Mmm. Jerky. She also has five (empty) spare waterskins. The lower compartment contains a bedroll, a lightweight, wraparound cloak with hood that has sand on it, a plain grey dress with a corset, a spare pair of trousers, a tunic like Echo and Mirage are wearing and a couple of cotton shirts that look baggy on her. Carefully wrapped up in silk and then put in a small metal box is a shell that she recognises as being from her original kit – it’s from Pearl of the Waves.


SOUL

Clothing: Soul is wearing leather shoes, a set of wool trousers and a shirt that looks like it was originally Echo’s but has been modified to fit him. He’s wearing a jacket of different fabrics (it looks like is was originally soft cotton, but has been patched and repaired so many times it resembles a rag-quilt) and a thick wool poncho (like Echo and Mirages’, but he’s wearing his). Around his neck, he has a pendant in the shape of a golden feather.

Stuff: Soul’s belt pouches contain dice, a sparker, a waterskin (empty), a delicate bronze broach, three candles and and a cople of notes of money from “Stonewall”. He has a hunting knife like several of the others, and a set of Bolas like Fathom’s. Soul’s backpack is smaller than the others’, and contains his own bedroll, a set of leather trousers in his size, several spare shirts (one of them carefully folded and still undamaged), a cloak, a waistcoat, a thin light red robe that makes him feel uncomfortable, a pair of sandals and his own eating utensils. He also has a Hoyi pear, with a bite taken out of it, several large pieces of cloth and a sewing kit.


The Papers that people started with were as such...


THIS LETTER ARRIVED FOR YOU FROM REFLECTING AIR OF WISDOM. I HOPE IT PROVES USEFUL, AND HOPE THAT YOU FIND YOUR WAY BACK TO WATERWALL IN SAFETY.

BE WELL, MY FRIENDS. KEEP HER SAFE.

P.
Princess Fathom,

The scholars have at last returned progress in the matter of your quest through our Young Kingdoms, which I am pleased to set down for you now.

The Old Kingdoms are a tangled web of ancient worlds, long since abandoned by Humanity. The Astral Pathways between their gates have degraded with time until the majority are only usable in one direction. There is some evidence that, pre-historically, this degradation was deliberately and knowingly accelerated. For what purpose, we cannot guess, though a reaction to invasion seems likely.

The nature of the End is different for each of the spheres within this region – the inhabitants of Empty Throne, City of Brass and Guardian’s Grave appear to have simply abandoned their great city-realms and migrated into the wider network of spheres. Void, Writhen, Broken and Jagged appear to have been actively damaged by some terrible force. The inhabitants of Doorway, Amber, Solitary and Blackglass seem to have been undone by their own artifice, the source of their own apocalypse. Persistent rumour among travellers places several well –hidden Dragon-occupied Spheres among this region, an assumption that, given the Dragon’s former status as the foremost children of the Spheres (which I am sure I need not lecture your party on) should not surprise. Indeed, most of what we know about the Old Kingdoms comes from the tales of explorers searching for the fabled Dragon’s Graveyard, which must surely be somewhere within.

Your question of which of these worlds was the oldest surprised us – having never considered the endeavour of putting comparative dates to them – but an application of logic and – dare I say it – taking the “wider viewpoint” reveals several curiosities.

Firstly, the Old Kingdoms can be grouped by type – as I have already laid out – but those types seem to cluster. The more damaged (and therefore, we might suppose, the older) worlds are on average reached after those which are simply abandoned, which are reached after those which are still inhabited. Except for Empty Throne.

Empty Throne is what we might call an “abandoned” sphere, having suffered no damage that we have heard tales of to it’s essential fabric. It is the terminus of many one-way Astral Paths, which appear to have once been used for Spherewalking in both directions until the inhabitants of Empty Throne “blocked” them with artefacts of uncertain construction. The motive for this is again unclear – why would anyone actively work towards preventing themselves from travelling out, but allow people to travel in? There is only one Gate that can be used to exit, which leads to the abandoned sphere of Empty Gaze – an island-world that, according to hieroglyphs on Empty Throne, was once a colony of the latter. Empty Throne also matches your “warriors of the Sunset” – from their temples, the people of that world worshipped the Sun. As have and do many cultures, but the coincidence is perhaps affirming.

Search that world, my lady. I wager that it is there you will find your goal. The best route to take on the journey in is also, curiously, the only one which can be used to travel back out into the Young Kingdoms.

In the Realm of Stonebridge, ask for the Ostracised Gate, which may be found within the citadel of sighs.

In the Solitary Realm, watch for what the natives do not see. That unseen during the day leads to the Realm of Ivy, and should be discounted.

In the Sphere of Amber, follow the North Star for three days. Your next Gate lies in the shadow of the broken mountain.

In the Jagged World, take the crooked river to the Sea.

On the Island of Empty Gaze, go where no God watches.

I hope you will visit us again, and pray to the Gods of Knowledge, Peace, Life and Hope that your search bears fruit.

Scholar-general Reflecting Air of Wisdom, Chief Librarian of Birthright.
THE BEARERS OF THIS LETTER, BEING THE PRINCESS FATHOM, THE LORD VALOUR, THE LORD TALISMAN, THE LADY MIRAGE AND THEIR RETINUE, HAVE BEEN AWARDED

THE FREEDOM OF THE CITY OF WATERWALL

FOR SERVICES PROVIDED TO OUR FAIR SPHERE

LET THEM BE WELCOMED, HARBOURED AND TREATED AS THE ROYALTY THEY ARE WITHIN OUR HEARTS. ANY SERVICE DONE THEM WILL BE REWARDED THREEFOLD BY US, ANY ASSISTANCE GIVEN IN THEIR QUEST WILL BE TREATED AS ASSISTANCE GIVEN TO US, ANY WRONG DONE TO THEM IS A WRONG DONE TO OUR PEOPLE, ANY ATTACK ON THEM IS AN ATTACK ON OUR OWN PERSON, AND WE HEARBY SWEAR TO VISIT OUR MOST TERRIBLE VENGENCE ON THOSE THAT GAINSAY THESE WORDS, AND OUR MOST GENEROUS REWARD ON THOSE THAT UPHOLD THEM.

WANTED!

The spy, saboteur and agent of stasis

MIRAGE

For crimes against the Unity of Entelechy, partly consisting of, but not limited to;

Sedition, Terrorism, Ethical Turpitude, Unlicensed Use of Release, Trading in Favours, Identity Theft, Theft, Grand Theft, Arson, Murder, Murder of a Brother of Change, Impersonation of a Brother of Change, Speaking Ill of the Voice, Mental Crime, Passing Illegal Currency, Refusing Progress, Hoarding of Resources, Crimes against Public Hygiene, Hoarding of Personal Resources, Collaboration, Conspiracy, High Treason, Denial, Blasphemy, Consorting with nonHumans and Maldeism.

300 SHARE REWARD!

This most terrible criminal is a mistress of disguise, but the vigilant may know her by her gaze – stained the colour of confessor’s robes by The Voice such that His people may know His enemy for her true self.

I hereby make a signed wager with the wanderer known as “Talisman” – the terms being that if he returns from his journey having discovered the Oldest Sphere, and brings proof of this great wonder, I, Barrow, owner and proprietor of the Hundredweight Inn, in the City of the Hollow on the world of Service, will gladly provide him with one hundred barrels of ale free of charge, with which he may toast his victorious return.

[DaveB]

Everway! Huzzah!

Seanchai

I am the champion of the obscure roleplaying game.

Good to see enthusiasm. There _are_ still people who love this game.

[Quendalon]

Great, great stuff. I love Everway. I may have to steal vast quantities of stuff from your game setup if I ever get another shot at running Everway.

To what extent do you pre-plot the details of the backstory? Do you have everything already planned out, do you just know the high points and fill in the rest as you go, or is it all pulled out of the air at a moment's notice?

- Eric

[DaveB]

SESSION ONE

STONEWANDER -> EMPTY THRONE -> EMPTY GAZE -> JAGGED

SPHERE ONE - STONEWANDER

We begin with an initial vision each:

SOUL ONE

In the beginning.

It’s a good place to start, don’t you think?

Yes, as it happens, this story IS quite long.

No, it’s not as long as that.

Anyway. In the beginning, the Gods created the world. Singular and solitary (no, not Solitary – that’s A world, not THE world), it was built from the perfect forces of the universe and regulated from the Realmforge. The Dragons were it’s people, and they worshipped the Gods. Eventually, this all collapsed – the story of how depending on who’s doing the telling - and so did the world. It shattered, splintered and cracked, turning into a million worlds –plural – each made up of different amounts of the forces. One force was missing, not to be found in any world, so the peoples (who had now appeared) linked it’s loss to the catastrophe.

The Dragons went to war against the Gods and lost. Much as they might try to tell people otherwise, they are no longer important to our story. The Walker walked out on His spiral path from the home of the humans, creating the Everways as He went.

The problem arose when people started to move from their home world – once of those nearest to where the centre of the original had been, in so far as an immeasurable thing can be said to have distance – to others. Specifically, when they were born or died. Souls, you see, need to reincarnate for people to be born. Yes, they could move down Everways, but the splintered nature of humanity meant that something was needed to actively maintain that transmigration. Something had to be put in place for when things went wrong, that could carry human souls to their next birth and take care of any dead ends in the Everways.

The Walker saw this need, and took a bird. He gave it some of His breath – some of His soul – and the bird caught fire, burning with the power the Walker had bestowed upon it. No longer a creature of flesh and blood, it became a servant of the Walker, watching over and guarding the souls of a sphere. The first soul to move in the footsteps of the Walker and incarnate on a particular sphere was similarly transformed. And so, each world survives, their births and deaths watched over by these servants of the Walker. Beings that can travel through the space between worlds without an Astral Path, that die and re-embody over and over again, and in so dying provide the pulse of life for their appointed Sphere.

How do they do this? Well, that’s a mystery. Some say there is one for each Sphere. Others that they move – that each of these beings absorbs Souls, takes them within itself by being in the vicinity of their death, moves to another Sphere and then dies, releasing the Souls it has transported in the process. Invisible, they are there when humans are born, and there when they die. When they show themselves, they are as magnificent winged beasts, burning with the fire of Him.

I see you’ve figured me out already.

Who am I? That’s not important. What’s important is this – these beings, in their innumerable forms, are vital to the continuation of life on the Spheres.

And one by one, quietly, without fuss…

…They are going missing.

Where are they going?

Ah – now that’s a good question, but not as good a question as...

Why?

ECHO ONE

You’re at an ornate, open window (there’s no glass, just a gossamer curtain that is tied aside right now anyway), looking out over a fantastic, impossible city. Gleaming domes and minarets of Gold, towers of terracotta-red brick and smaller buildings of plastered white cram for space, vying to look the most magnificent in the morning sun. The sky is entirely cloudless, and in the middle distance you can see a high, thin aqueduct distributing water to what looks like a wide step-pyramid, the many levels covered in a lush garden with miniature waterfalls running through it.

You lean on the (gold) windowframe, sliding one arm up and resting your head against the cool metal. Eyes half-closed, you listen to the hubbub of the crowd, massing in the streets a vertigo-inducing distance below.

“They’re late.” Says Mirage from somewhere behind you. You sigh at the intrusion, briefly glance down (your outfit turns out to be much like a sparring costume- belted top, trousers and bare feet - but appears to be made of the same semi-transparent material as the curtain, with tighter, briefer clothes underneath) and turn to her. She turns out to be wearing roughly the same. Only flashier.

“Indeed. Where is the Princess?” You inquire, slightly more sarcastically than you (present-day you) are used to.

Mirage grins conspiratorially. “Taking the longest bath of her life. And this is a woman from an underwater Sphere.”

You march over to your kit – laid out neatly next to Mirage’s dumped pile of clothes and oddments – and start to inspect it, shaking sand out of your clothes (which seem sun-bleached, torn and otherwise wrecked) and making sure your large collection of weapons – including the Katana your present-day self woke up with, but not including anything else – are all clean. In the background, Mirage is jabbering something about how it’s not really Fathom’s fault and how three desert worlds in a row has been an ordeal for her, but you’re not really listening.

Your chores are interrupted by Talisman, who sweeps into the room with light and shadow playing around him in a facsimile sandstorm, swirls of gold and red unrolling across the floor. Valour stalks in behind him. Both men are wearing desert robes. Mirage greets them with a cheery smile and hello, you give them a brisk nod. Mirage sashays away to fetch Fathom and you are darkly amused to see Talisman eying her rear before realising that you’re watching him watching her and redirecting his gaze to a particularly gaudy statue of a Hippocampus, crossing his arms and retracting his Colours in a show of business-like behaviour.

Mirage comes back in, trailed by Fathom who is doing the tie up on a long robe, her hair still wet. Valour and Talisman look grim.

“What is it?” She asks. They look at one another, Talisman drawing breath as though to speak and then thinking better of it.

“What?” She demands.

Valour finally looks down, then levels his eyes to her.

“We found the old man that Bright spoke of…” He says, still deadly serious. “… and it is true. His name is Scarab, and he is from Boneguard. He fell through a gate in the desert on his homeworld some forty years ago, during the reign of Exile. And he’s not alone. For centuries people from Boneguard, Calender Rock, Eagle Camp and Broken Axe have been stumbling into one-way gates that exit in this region of the Spheres. They’ve set up a township on a world a few gates away that they call Wanderlost.”

She frowns, the dot-tattoos shifting, and asks “But that is GOOD news. We have people predisposed to helping us that have had longer than us to map out these territories. We should go there at once.”

Talisman sighs deeply, causing Fathom to turn and snap at him.

“WHAT? What is it?”

“There are two Spheres between here and Wanderlost” Says Valour. “One called Effigy, named for the inhabitants’ fondness for statues. Before that, though, is one…” He sighs, and looks up at Fathom again. “One called The Burning Lands. It’s…”

Talisman interrupts, sending a flash of red in front of Valour’s face to cut him off. “...It’s a trackless, endless wasteland. A six-week journey through a Sphere where the Sun never sets, and where there are no clouds to shield from it. There is no natural water or vegetation anywhere on the Sphere.”

“…Oh.”
TALISMAN ONE

You’re on board a ship (which somehow seems a natural place for you to be), a large sailing ship cutting through the waves of some nameless ocean, undisturbed by waves. Dotted around the sea, like emeralds dropped onto a cloth, are many dozens of islands, stretching from the near-distance to the horizon.

You make your way to the prow, where Fathom is stood like a real-life version of the Ship’s mermaid mascot. She has her eyes closed and is pulling the spray from the bow-wave up onto herself.

“My lady”, you say formally, making a long bow and angling your Colours behind you to make contrails in the wind. “Is it bracing enough for you up here?”

“Wonderful” She says. “It is not often we stay for long on a water world”

“I have…”

“…Business to discuss. Yes, I guessed. What can I do for you?”

“It’s the cuckoo.”

“Excuse me?” She blinks, and the spray falls back down to normal as she turns to you.

“The cuckoo that has entered our nest.”

“You mean Soul.”

“Precisely. Exactly, yes. You have hit, as it were, the nail upon the head. The child. I don’t trust him.”

“May I ask why not?”

“Fathom… “ you look around, and sit down, back against the ship’s rail. “Let me tell you something. There are gaps in my knowledge. I was not a good studious child, preferring to get drunk and use the gift my mother nearly paid her life to give me in order to win at cards.”

She raises an eyebrow

“I do not know what it is like to be a diplomat” Your Colours briefly turn into a pair of glowing Valour-like wings, “Or an assassin. Or a bodyguard. Or” You nod towards her “a leader. I have no way of knowing such things. I know the decisions you have to make as the captain of our merry band, the hand on our tiller, the conductor to our brass band and so on. I understand why you think we need to take the boy with us, even.”

She starts to form a question, and you plough on to your finish. “I may not know everything, but powerful creatures infusing humans with their essence? THAT I know about, Princess. We can’t trust the child.”

“But the Lady said…”

“I know what she said, savvy? I don’t give a monkeybird’s melon what she said. Before she was The Lady and the self-imposed patroness of our no-longer-quite-so-short jaunt… and where in blazes has she been for the last couple of years? Asleep? We could have done with a few hands a few times back there. Anyway... before all that, she was my mother’s slave. She hated our family. And don’t get me started on Julius. Gods, Princess. Never trust Gods. They’ll bend you backwards and have you until next year if you let them.”

“What a delightful turn of phrase”

“And one which I happen to know is factually true. Long story.”

“Which I will be fascinated to hear. Eventually. Is that it?”

“I know you’re going to let the boy come along anyway. I know you’re going to because I don’t see as you have any other choice other than throwing him overboard, and by the time we get to the next world he’ll have become part of the group. I just wanted to tell you that, in a few years time, when it all blows up in our faces and something irreversibly horrible happens to us all as a result of having him along, I shall turn to you and say ‘I told you so’ and you shall say ‘yes you did’ and then we’ll get on with digging ourselves out of it. Alright?”

“Alright.”VALOUR ONE

You’re in some kind of cabin, wooden walls, two hammocks and a simple desk and stool. The floor pitches and rolls with some kind of motion – wherever you are, you’re on the move, but it doesn’t feel like being on board a ship. For a start, you cannot taste salt in the air. It’s more like being on a wagon, but the room is so large as to make that unlikely.

You’re sitting alone, hands firmly clasped onto a tall drinking horn of some amber liquid. A bowl of red, spherical fruits is in the corner of the table, and there is a stack of scrolls and papers covering most of the rest of it. The light in the room comes from a lantern, swinging lazily with the motion of whatever you’re in, hanging from the centre of the ceiling.

“Any luck?”

Talisman has entered. His Colours are muted, brushing against your boots like a light breeze. He smiles grimly, and you get the sense of something not being said, a topic being avoided.

“Nothing more than we already found.” You say, “The librarians on Birthright said that they’d keep looking for us, and would send word ahead if they found anything else. I’m just going over all these half-tales of the Old Kingdoms.”

“You think there’s something in it?” He says, climbing into one of the hammocks.

“Think about it. Here we are in a wide spread of worlds – ancient civilisations, the origins of most of the Gods. All of these people, every last world, say that they migrated here from somewhere nearby. They call themselves the Young kingdoms, but are older than… Well, they make Overguard look like a colony.”

Talisman nods.

“And every now and again, there’s a gate to somewhere else. A shift – like walking over a border. The worlds on the transition are just as old, but built on the ruins of things even older than them. And the further you go…”

“The Old Kingdoms” He says it like he’s quoting from something.

“The Old Kingdoms. Over a dozen worlds, all tangled up in a mass of one-way gates, hidden portals and the occasional gate to the outside. Every one of them devoid of human life, ruined, Post-Apocalyptic. If it’s anywhere”, you say with certainty, “it’s somewhere in there. The trick is to find it. And to navigate through it.”

“When we get to the gate” he says “we’ll ask around. There has to be a way through that maze.”

You clench your fists, and he cranes his neck to observe you. Slowly, you flatten your palms out.

“Don’t want to think about it either, huh?” He says.

“No.” You say with finality. “I don’t.”

He looks down at his boots. When he speaks, it’s in a low, serious voice, what you have come to think of as Talisman’s True Voice – when all the swagger, and the gusto is stripped away, and he becomes the friend you have travelled with for so many years.

“We’re going to have to go on, Valour. We’re going to have to. It is not what we would choose – not what… Not what we HAVE chosen. Both of us have faced this decision before – myself on Maw, you even before we came on this quest. The women have all been offered it one by one – Echo in the Ancient Empire, Fathom on Deep Green, Mirage on Shift. They’ve all turned it down.”

“Until now.” You say, with heartfelt bitterness.

“Until now. We’ve been travelling for… I don’t know how long. Years – maybe four or five at the least. It was not to last. Eventually, the comfort of being…” He frowns, sadly. “It is too tempting.”

“And so she’s leaving.” You finish. “The Companions are finally divided. She’s leaving. It’s… it’s over.”

“My friend,” he says, as though revealing a great truth. “Nothing is ever over.”FATHOM ONEThe gate opens, and you emerge into a glorious, clear sky.

It’s clear because you’re above the clouds – the alien beauty of the cloud tops lies some distance below you.

For a split-second you hang in the air, propelled by the force of your egress from the Astral Path. And then you begin to fall. Somewhere – sounding impossibly distant – Valour cries out in alarm.

Easy for him, you think to yourself. He’s got wings.

Echo screams as she plummets, the rags of Mirage’s clothing whip past you in the rushing wind as the changeling instinctively changes into a bird. Talisman’s Colours flash madly about him as he tumbles through the air.

The cloud tops are nearer now.

Valour is diving as fast as he can, but his wings are hindering him, doing what they are supposed to and providing lift. Lift that means he can’t catch up with you, or with Echo.

Talisman’s Colours form into large sheets of transparent light. They’re not very solid, but they’re solid enough, and he’s slowing himself down. He reaches out his hand towards Echo below him, separated by an increasing gulf of air. She reaches her hand up to his, echoes, dispels her original body, echoes again, and again, and again, the fraction of a second each takes to begin falling meaning she strobes up towards him until she’s grabbed his arm and they’re falling together.

That doesn’t help you.

Above you, Mirage and Valour have caught up with Echo and Talisman, taking one each and using the extra weight to try to catch up with you – Mirage changing into a human again. You force yourself to calm, and close your eyes as you plummet into the clouds.

The water in the cloud makes dew on your skin, and you have an idea. Reaching out with your mind, you drag as much of it towards you as you can. At first, it feels like you’re falling in mist. Then in rain. Then in a waterfall. Desperate – certain that you are nearly at the bottom of the cloud, you make the water below you harden into snow, the semisolidity of it slowing you. Your improvised blizzard falls with you, and you emerge out of the bottom of the cloud surrounded by a halo of whirling snow, ice and rain. You pull it in, make it liquid – you’re now falling in a bubble of water, like a portable waterfall from and to nowhere.

Above you, but much closer now, the others fall in tandem. Talisman flings his arm out towards you, and planes of Colour appear around you as you fall. They provide the fixed surface you need, and you direct your miniature waterspout towards it, turning it to ice as it meets the Colour to add greater strength.

You’re now sliding down in a vast spiral, corkscrewing down in an effort to slow yourself. The others hit your waterslide behind you and Talisman goes pale with the concentration, forming more framework ahead of you all that you then fill in with ice. After a few seconds, you begin to get the hang of collapsing the “slide” behind the group and pulling the water back to the front – the spiral makes it easier, as the distance between the front and back of the slide is less than it’s length.

After a few minutes of this, Mirage begins to whoop, the exhilaration overtaking the terror. You make the slide rough where you are and more smooth where they are, allowing the group to come together.

“Fun as this is, “ shouts Mirage above the wind, teeth chattering from the cold (she is, after all, naked, and protected from the elements only by Valour’s wings which the birdman has wrapped around her), “Where in the seven stars of skystone is it going?”

Talisman looks over the lip of the slide and moves his hands as though at the reins of an out-of-control cart. The framework suddenly veers off to the left, and you struggle to get the ice formed in time ahead of you all. Talisman seems to be watching for something, then drops his hands like a conductor. The framework suddenly turns into a funnel ahead of you, dropping into a vertical drop, and you shoot out of the end of it back into the open air.

Talisman is laughing now, Mirage too. Echo is wild-eyed, Valour grim. Talisman points himself as though diving into a pool of water, hands in front of him in an exaggeration of grace.

He dives into the Gate that he must have seen from the track, the Astral Path opening up beneath you like a flower. One by one, you fall into it and are safe.MIRAGE ONE

You’re standing on a balcony, jutting out from a large structure made of a sandy-yellow stone, as though your parapet were emerging from the side of a castle. To your left and right, the construction wraps around and away, eventually meeting itself and forming a large ring of about 4 miles across. Below the ring, below this balcony, the stone subtly transitions into flesh of the same colour – the change so smooth you cannot tell where organic matter ends and masonry begins.

“To hear the natives of this strange world tell it,” says Valour from behind you, “they don’t. The creature was summoned here by accident – they tried to ritually alter the Usurper force of their world, to make themselves a world of trade and resource. But all they really wanted to do was consume…”

You look down at the Maw.

“…And so their city became a thing that feeds.” You finish. “I heard the same explanation. And I thought you promised Fathom to not do that any more?”

“My apologies. You have been… thinking very loudly lately. When I walked in, you were quiet in your mind for the first time in weeks, and I wondered what had changed. I intruded without realising it. I’ll try harder in future.”

You shrug. “No harm done.”

“Are you sure of that?” He says, carefully.

“I was only idly wondering about what happens to the things it eats.” You say, lightly. “Do you think there’s another world where things come out the other end, as it were?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know.”

“So?”

You leave the balcony, re-entering the apartments you have been rented (for a considerable fee) by the native government.

“I’m fine. I’m not obsessing about what happened, and I don’t have any hard feelings towards Talisman because of it. I see no reason to go on about it. If he doesn’t want to talk about it it’s his problem.”

“If it’s his problem, then it’s the group’s problem. You know that.”

“Yes. Companions of the Lost Force together. ‘Upon you, no oath is laid except that of comradeship’ and all the rest of it. Fathom rarely discusses anything else these days. Anyone could be forgiven for thinking she’s having a hard time sticking to it.”

He grimaces, crosses his arms and folds his wings in an oddly comic gesture.

“About Talisman, then?”

“Are we STILL on about that? Tell him it wasn’t his fault what happened. And that I am beginning to find his protestations of simple friendship to be somewhat insulting. There’s only so many times one can be told that although we’re very good friends he doesn’t feel that way at all, not really, and if he did he wouldn’t do anything for the good of the mission, and so on, before one starts to wonder if maybe there’s something repulsive about oneself.”

“Have you considered the idea that maybe…”

You grit your teeth “You are not about to suggest what you seem to be about to suggest, feather-brain. To do so would be to invite yourself for a plucking. And I could use a new down-stuffed pillow.”

He shakes his head in disgust. “You’re as bad as one another”

You watch him stomp out onto the balcony, spring into the air and soar away.

ECHO, VALOUR and MIRAGE wake up at the meeting-point of eight gigantic vaulted hallways, somewhere deep underground on some unknown Sphere, everything choked with an inch of dust. A shaft of light came down on them from the ceiling. They immediately notice their changed appearances – Valour with horror – and deduce that their memories have been erased. Going through their packs reveals clues, but nothing concrete.

Valour flies up to the ceiling, and discovers that the light comes out of a shaft too narrow for him to fly up. Mirage shifts to a bird and tries it herself, finding a room with a movable mirror mechanism that sends the light down. This seems to be part of a series of light-shafts parallel to the hallways below. She experiments with moving it, making the junction across from where the other two were light up, then moves it back.

Flying down, they regroup and decide to move. Following their own footprints (well, Echo’s and Mirage’s anyway – Valour seems to have flown), they discover more junctions and - in one of the hallways - a Gate-point, entirely unmarked. After a bit of thought, they trigger it and go through, experiencing a second Vision each.

Somewhere else on the hallway-world, TALISMAN, FATHOM and SOUL wake up, in a similar junction-point. Fathom demands to know who Soul is, but the child doesn't know - and Talisman is a good enough judge of lies to tell that he's telling the truth. They too investigate the light source - Talisman rocketting ceiling-wards on a disk of Colour - and just as similarly abandon it.

There are no footprints around them (though there is a circular "crop circle" in the dust that is soon joined by another when Talisman touches his disk down), so they wander for a few hours through the hallways. In the distance, they spot a brief flash of light (which is caused, unbeknown to them, by Mirage moving the mirror) and head towards it.

Halfway there, though, they find something else.

A vast chamber, vaulted like the hallways, brightly lit by multiple beams of light reflecting from mirror to mirror. This is apparantly the light source for the entire Sphere - the centre of the room is dominated by a dias (almost the size of a house), topped with a piller which is in turn topped with a large bronze dish. Something sitting on the dish, that they can't see from the floor, is making all the light.

Naturally, Talisman creates another disk and lifts them all up to have a look. The source of all the light is a glowing glass ball, so bright it's hard to look directly at. Fathom reaches out, and it gives her a shock like static electricity. Talisman tries to pick it up with his Colours, but they slide right through it. Soul reaches out and picks it up - the light immediately goes out. To Talisman's protests that he "broke it", Soul shakes the thing speculativly, each shake producing a flash of light and a "thrrrrum" noise. As he excitedly shakes the ball, it's glow becomes steadier and steadier and the noise gets louder, until Fathom worriedly tells him to stop. He puts it away in his pack, and they leave the now-dark chamber to it's isolation. They make their way through the now pitch-black hallways, Talisman lighting the way with his Colours, until they reach the spot that the other three woke up in. Following their footsteps, they themselves come across the Gateway and head on through.

[DaveB]

SPHERE TWO - EMPTY THRONE

MIRAGE TWO

You tumble out of the Everway, drawing your sword and looking around you.

“Great… Something of…” You mumble to yourself.

The World is broken.

At some point, aeons ago, this was a palatial city-world – gleaming marble and grassy lawns, flags proudly flapping in the wind and ornamental fountains bubbling. It would have been a good place to live.

Something – some unknown ancient force – has smashed the world. It has shattered, like a mirror smashed into shards, the jagged pieces drifting slightly with the centuries, opening up cracks in between them. Through the cracks…

…You don’t want to look at what’s through the cracks.

“Mirage!” cries Talisman, his Colours making harsh shapes of black and deep purple. “Don’t just stand there! They were right behind us, and…” He looks towards the gate you just exited “…and they’re coming through any minute now.”

“In retrospect” You say to him “This was not one of my better plans.”

The group – including the child – gets a hurry on, getting as far away from your point of entry as possible.

“It worked didn’t it? We’re past the blockade.”

“Yes, but that gate was one way. So we’re still going to have to run their blockade on the way OUT”

“Details, details…” He trails off. “VALOUR! ECHO! FATHOM! HERE THEY COME!”

Everyone draws weapons and turns to face the gate. It spirals into visible life, and a score of the creatures pour out – they were once men, but have now been warped, the flesh of them stretched like blown glass, forming spindly appendages, long gaping maws, great barbed claws and other attributes. The colour and texture of the skin hasn’t changed, only the shape. You get a nasty impression of something that has been made wrong, like metal that has been poured into a faulty mould. One creature’s face features great spikes that correspond to where it’s eyes used to be, and the spine has a wide band of white running along it where the thing’s eyeball got stretched along with the rest of it’s face.

The creatures charge, and you defend yourselves.

Fathom weighs in with a mighty-looking broadsword, Echo darts forward and back, echoing constantly to appear and vanish all over the battlefield, throwing knives and blowing darts as she goes but mostly drawing their attention for the rest of you to exploit. Valour fires arrows from on high. Talisman roars, extends his hand and projects a wide beam of tiny shards of Colour at the enemy, shredding one of the creatures to pieces. The fight is hard, and though your comrades all try bravely the last weeks of pursuit have taken it out of them. The creatures grab the child and – whooping – carry him off, throwing him to the ground. You can only watch as they stab him again and again, ripping him to pieces.

You all take cover.

The creatures stop stabbing the corpse and turn to advance on the rest of you.

The body begins to glow.

The creatures confer among themselves, clicking to one another.

The light coming from the boy’s many wounds turns red. A heat haze begins to show over the body.

“EVERYONE DOWN” shouts Fathom, taking cover behind a fountain.

The boy explodes, a spherical blast on fire, heat, noise and light emanating from his body. The concussion knocks the piece of world he’s on into another, which slowly rotates and hits another, and so on – the careful drifting apart being suddenly disrupted, like lily pads in a pond that has just had a brick thrown into it.

When his piece of world rotates back into view, the boy is sitting up, checking his torn clothes (full of stab-cuts) with dismay.ECHO TWO

You’re sitting on a small bed in what looks like an inn, combing your hair. As far as you can tell, you just got up. From out through the tiny window you can the hubbub of a busy street, and smell the unique combination of spices, animal dung and refuse that says “City” to you.

Tying your hair back, you get up. Pausing at the door, you glance back at the rolled-up piece of long cloth that you know contains your various weapons. Turning back to the door you pause again, walk briskly over to the weaponry, find a needle-knife and shove it through your hair like a hair pin then push the remaining arsenal (which includes the katana) under the bed with a foot. Feeling strangely guilty, you exit the room. You pause in the corridor, open the door next to your own and slip inside. This one is larger, having two single beds, and by the faint scent of saltwater it’s one occupied by Fathom and Mirage. Crossing the floor to Mirage’s pack, you dig through her supply of clothes until you find a dress that’s roughly your size. Shrugging your own clothes off, you quickly change, dig through her things again to find a belt (it’s rather large for you), rummage again to find some earrings. Rummage again to find some earrings that aren’t overly ostentatious, check your hair and finally leave again.

This time, you actually manage to get to the bar.

Mirage looks up as you descend the stairs into the drinking area – which turns out to be more of a Kaffe than a pub – and smiles down into her mug. Feeling distinctly like you’ve been caught doing something embarrassing, you slide into the other seat at her table.

“You look…” she shakes her head and flicks her eyebrows “... different. And no weapons, either.”

You turn in your seat, attracting the attention of the waitress, and turn back to see Mirage has spotted your “hairpin”.

“Well.” She says, conciliatorily, “at least you tried to go unarmed. Making the effort is more important than succeeding. I bet they won’t even notice.”

“You’re mocking me.” You say, feeling suddenly foolish.

“Not at all. It’s... how shall I say? It’s good to see you making that effort. My only question is who is that effort for?”

You blush, and busy yourself with the returning waitress, your money and your Kaff. Eventually, you manage to think of a witty retort.

“Well, I don’t have your experience in these matters.” Mirage raises both eyebrows in surprise, and you stammer apologetically “I didn’t mean it like that – I just meant, you know, you’ve…”

“I know what you meant.”

You sigh into your Kaff

”Damn it, I feel ridiculous. He’s not even here, is he?”

Mirage nods knowingly. “He’s gone out. All the menfolk have, along with Fathom. They’ve gone to see a Sage a few miles further up the road who has a map of this region of the Spheres.”

“Well, at least I’ll have time to change again.”

“’Indeed’. And Echo…” She leans forward “… the reason you feel ridiculous is that you look ridiculous. The dress is far too big, you’re obviously uncomfortable… It’s all” she waves her hand, indicating the whole of you “..false. If he likes you, he likes you weaponry and all. And he does like you.”

You are lost for a few seconds, Mirage looking increasingly worried.

“Echo?” She says, breaking you out of your reverie.

“He does?”
Mirage rolls her eyes, and starts to laugh.VALOUR TWO

“How long do you think we’ve been climbing for?” Asks Mirage, forcing you out of your reverie.

You’re all standing on a wide (about twenty metres wide) staircase of long, flat stairs – each step wide enough to lie down on comfortably and about a hand-span deep. The stairs, wall and ceiling are made of the same uniform reddish stone, and the only illumination is the impossibly bright light coming from up the stairs – looking where you’re going is like looking into the sun. In contrast, the light swiftly fades behind you, as though you were on the very edge of it, such that after only a short distance the stairs below you are completely pitch-black.

You scratch a wing idly, removing a stray feather.

“About four hours, I think, though it’s hard to tell.”

She looks up, shielding her eyes with a hand

“Have you noticed how, ever since we left the gate at the bottom, the light always stops fifteen steps behind us? Like it’s just moving with us?”

“I have noticed that, yes.”

“And have you noticed that there doesn’t seem to be anything else in this world?”

“That, too, I have noticed.”

“And how we’ve been slogging it up these stairs for four or five hours and have nothing to show for it?”

“Yes”, you say through gritted teeth, “I had noticed that as well.”

Mirage fidgets. Fathom just sits on the next step up, drinking from a water bottle. Echo and Talisman are sat on the step up from Fathom – Echo is reading a book, Talisman is flipping through a fate deck.

“So.” Asks Mirage, “How long do you think it’ll take?”

“Legend in the Thousand Sands has it that this stair goes to Heaven, or at the very least a blissful world where the inhabitants live in a perpetual state of grace, living their lives out in contentment and joy. Explorers have been trying it for years – about half of them never come back, the others run out of supplies and turn back, or give up. The longest anyone has climbed the stair without then vanishing from all history is twelve days.

“Twelve DAYS?”

“Twelve days”. You say, grimly. “It’s almost certain that there is a gate at the top. It’s just that the top is a very, very long way away.”

“What are we going to do then?”

“Pace ourselves, rest often... And keep on climbing.”


The first group arrives in a shallow reflecting pool in a ruined city, between two statues of warring gods.

Making camp in the nearby plaza, and looking for the others (of whom there is no sign), they _mostly_ share their visions with one another (covering things like details of Spheres, but not any emotional content). Taking the chance to take stock of their possessions, Valour offers Mirage his sword Not in an honour way - in a "I don't know how to use this" way. Then, after a long night camping out, roasting pigeons that Mirage catches and telling one another things (Valour decided to take a chance and reveal his telepathy to them - Echo asking that he not use it on her), they go exploring, Echo leaving a copy of herself at the Gateway.

The city – which they figure out from repeated hyroglyphics was called EMPTY THRONE – is laid out in a regular pattern, with plazas containing the end-points of one way gates (marked with metal hoops), wide canals, ziggurats at the cardinal directions and a vast palace complex at the centre. Deciding to explore this, they move through it's deserted hallways until the reach the throneroom, a vast chamber built around the Throne itself, which is seemingly grown out of the floor. Unable to resist the subtle exhortations of her soul, Mirage sits on it.

The entire city then begins to shake with an earthquake, becoming even more ruined than it already was. The quake stops shortly after Mirage gets off the throne, but the damage is done. They decide, with uncommon unity, that further experimentation would be a bad thing.

Once the shaking settles down, odd things began to happen – visions of the past, like ghosts only not, appeared to “play” at random intervals, showing some kind of rebellion or civil war. These are abrupt and quite frightening - in th eblink of an eye, a square is suddenly full of an angry mob disembowelling soldiers, a scene that assaults the senses and then vanishes again just as fast. That the events portrayed actually happened is proven when a “soldier” fires it’s crossbow through them and the quarrel-tip – several millennia old – is found in the spot it hit.

Having exhausted patience and found no sign of the others, they decide to go back to the other world, which Valour suggests they call STONEWANDER. But the gate proves to be in use – someone is coming through from the other side, preventing them from using it in the opposite direction.

Following one “ghost” up a ziggurat shows that these people worshipped the sun, and did so by ritual sacrifice. Exploring that Temple of the Sun results in them finding a mural showing the development of the Realm – according to this, they had found another gate to an island-world and colonised it, only to have it rebel.

As they leave the Temple, one of the "in" gates in the plazas flashes into life, and disgorges ten of the twisted creatures Mirage had seen in her vision. They spot Valour and Mirage (who is in the form of a Skystone dweller for ease of exploration) and the four of them that have "wings" fly off towards them.

The copy of Echo back at the camp is caught by suprise as the gate from Stonewander opens.

FATHOM TWO

You’re underground, somewhere, in a cavern that has had a town built into it. Wooden buildings – some no more advanced than the tree-houses you’ve seen on some worlds (and why would they be? You think. It’s not like they need to keep the rain out) piled on top of one another with a complex system of ladders, ropes, walkways and platforms making up the three-dimensional “street”. In the distance, you can just see the cave open into a tunnel to another cavern, wooden boards set up in the tunnel to make a main street and the lights of more buildings beyond. Giant globes, filled with a greenish-yellow light that you suspect is given off by some kind of fungus inside, are tethered to the buildings at infrequent intervals to provide light, supplemented by a thousand candles, lanterns, braziers and torches. Careful not to touch any of the flames, you make your way into a large, low wooden building – some kind of community space, like your father’s hall back on Pearl of the Waves. Except not underwater.

The space is packed with people, long tables set up and piled with food. Everyone is in a jubilant mood, the pale-skinned inhabitants of this strange subterranean world all grins and laughs.

“Princess!” calls Talisman in greeting. The half-dragon rogue is seated, a plate piled high before him. Echo is sat next to him, looking very much like she’d prefer to be elsewhere. You stroll over and sit opposite him, one of the natives putting a earthenware cup in front of you.

“Now this is the sort of treatment I enjoy” he says, waving a piece of bread at the celebration. “Why, from the way they’re treating us you’d think we’d…”

“…Killed the monster that was coming up from the lower town and eating their children.” You finish. “I am simply pleased that we came out of it intact.”

You look around, finding Mirage in the crowd, dancing with several of the larger males.

“And truthfully,” you confide, “It is good to find somewhere we would be welcome on the return journey. I have the feeling that they will be all too rare.”

Echo scowls

“You disagree, Echo?” You say. The girl shakes her head, not wanting to comment, and you are about to shrug and continue talking when Talisman leans back in his chair and sends a beam of light down onto her. Echo starts, realises what’s happening and glares at him. Holding a hand up, silently telling Talisman to stop it, you decide to have this out.

“What is it child?”

“Forgive me, princess.” She says. “It is not my place to pass comment.” Talisman rolls his eyes theatrically, and cuts off the spotlight.

“Echo, how many times must I tell you that we are all equals in this quest?”

She toys with her food. “At least once more, Princess.”

You take a calming breath and put your cup down.

“Echo. What. Do. You. Think.”

“I think… “ she says slowly “that you are making a mistake in thinking of this place as a waypoint.”