Sounds really epic and heroic, At, I think I would've liked that game. And I like those names, especially Naurkil. It really sounds flavorful, and I'll steal it some day.
Now my turn... Though it's all a bit complicated, I'll do my best to be brief and explain it so that it still sounds logical.
The OthergroundPrehistoryIt's a strange world, nowadays. About half a century ago, they came - the Asghiyari, a malicious race that sought only to turn the beautiful creation of the gods into something twisted, to corrupt all life, not just men, but flora and fauna all alike.
The world, as created by the gods, was flat like a coin: tall mountains hardly existed, and at the edge was a ravine into nothingness. Long ago, the gods created an immortal race, the Asghiyari, to inhabit that world. The Asghiyari at first were content with what the gods had given them, but when they became jealous of the magic of the deities, most noteably that of the god of divine magic known as Timrultaen, they started to beg the gods to receive magic too.
In the end, the gods agreed, but instead of giving them arcane magic (the omnipotent magic of the gods), they gave them less potent divine magic, through a portal established through the god Timrultaen, who had always been the distributor of magic among the gods, but now also of magic among Asghiyari.
In gratitude, the Asghiyari erected monumental temples to the gods, where they prayed in return for magic. One temple was more magnificent than all the others, and here, some Asghiyari plotted to highjack the source of all magic which Timrultaen guarded, through the very portal which Timrultaen had opened to supply them with magic.
They succeeded. All magic was stolen from the gods, sucking empty the very fibre of their divine essence, making them but powerless shadows of their former self. Timrultaen himself suffered most horribly: he was drawn from the divine plains and cast into the mortal world, and within his own body was left only a small part of all magic.
But united, the gods were still powerful, even while the Asghiyari were still struggling to contain the overwhelming power they had stolen. With their last, fading powers, the gods drowned all the world and banished the Asghiyari from it. But such now was the power of those usurper Asghiyari that, though many drowned, those with the power could escape the flooding and escape into outer space. There, they created the stars through their divine magic, first the star Vilasmaira, but throughout the ages, they created and populated numerous stars throughout the heavens. At their head was a mighty queen, whose name was the longest of all Ashgiyari, and already every Asghiyari have to us mortals names too long to remember.
Centuries past, and the weakened gods made new races to inhabit the world, but these races were flawed, mortal, weak, compared to their older creation. These races though, were meant to protect the world against the Asghiyari, should they come back. History began, and the men, elves, dwarves, orcs and others built their own societies. Some races were more flawed then others and turned evil: they went to live in the Underground, huge tunnel systems, and an endless war was waged between the good surface and evil underground dwellers, called the First Elevation Wars. Drow came to be, spawned from an elven army that ventured into the underground to battle evil duergar, but cursed by Haremana, the goddess of duergar, when the duergar themselves were exterminated. Haremana told her new drow people to settle in the deepest layers of the Underground, where only the evil mind flayers or Illithid dared dwell. One druid, named Daroes, ended all these conflicts largely by placing the Seals of Daroes at
every passage from the surface to the underground. All seemed well, until a few decades later.
From the stars came huge, alien space vessels, driven by magic, unknown to all mortal men save the weak variant of druids and shamans, drawn from nature, which still harboured some of the old magic the gods imbued in it during world creation. The Asghiyari had returned, and what little hope the gods had put into the mortal races to defend the world against the vile race was quickly wiped out, for from their enormous spaceships the Asghiyari dropped massive mountains, which crashed into the world heedless of cities, oceans or civilisations. The resulting destruction, earthquakes and tsunami’s destroyed most of mortal civilization instantly, and with it any resistance.
Quickly, the reason for the mountains became clear: with massive magical power, an enormous cluster of beehive-like structures was hung from huge chains to the bottom of the world: the chains were fastened to the bases of these mountains, and the Otherground was born. It was the beginning of hell for mortal men: the Otherground was a massive prison complex, in which the Asghiyari meant to imprison all living beings, flora and fauna of the world, and mutate them there through magical experimentation. Men were turned into monsters, forests were wiped out or turned into terrible places, and the world slowly turned into a hell. Of all life on earth, only drow and illithids were saved, for they agreed to serve the Asghiyari, and became their chief armies and agents in the world: Illithids were even granted limited magic by the Asghiyari to lead the mutation process, while most Asghiyari themselves returned to the stars, operating the Otherground from afar. The Otherground itself was a prison world with naught but mutation cells and torture rooms, where beings as diverse as dogs and dragons were held, with at the lowest levels gates for spaceships to come and go.
The campaignWhen I started this campaign as DM, one of my players said: I’ll play a young drow boy, S’zordrin, with magical abilities, who has been experimented upon and imprisoned in the Otherground for as long as he can remember: he knows nothing beyond that. The other said: I’ll be Umarg Imlet, the relatively good-natured drow guard working in the Otherground to guard S’zordrin’s cell, who in secret has befriended the little S’zordrin and taught him most of what he knew, and gave him the name S’zordrin. His history was one in which he had fought on the surface in a so-called band of drow raiders. His father, a soldier, had died, his mother Arvina had often gone to the temple of Haremana in secret. Furthermore, some elf named Faerod had once given him the sword of another S’zordrin, his grandfather, in a dream.
I immediately decided in secret that the two were half-brothers. The mystery surrounding S’zordrin’s past gave me plenty of room to work with, and I decided that S’zordrin was in fact the son of Timrultaen, the god of magic, and Arvina, Umarg’s mother. Timrultaen had, after becoming mortal and after the creation of the mortal races, taken the form of a man, though his aging still progressed very slowly. Thousands of years of history past and when the Asghiyari came, Timrultaen sought a plan to protect his last bit of magic from falling into the evil race’s hands, cause if that would happen, there would never be a possibility of retrieving the source of magic. He had to get a descendant, because he was getting old and feeble, and only a child of the god of magic could try to take back the source of magic the Asghiyari had taken. Arvina, a relatively good-natured drow woman, was the most obvious choice when he met her, for as drow she would not be threatened as the other races were, and Arvina was a good drow. And as such, in secret, Arvina and Timrultaen got a son, whom they named Arvitaen. Arvina in the end entrusted only S’zordrin, her father, with this information, because her father had always been the root of goodness in their family, as he had been present during the elven campaign when Haremana cursed the elves, and he was then befriended with Faerod, who escaped the curse. Before Arvitaen’s birth however, the evil mother of Arvina had learned of the secret, and betrayed them. Arvitaen came upon this world and was immediately ceased by agents of the Asghiyari, taken to the Otherground, and there a learned illithid was appointed to device a means of drawing the last bits of magic from Arvitaen and storing it.
Timrultaen meanwhile had fled back to the surface with Haranzephir, the nephew of Umarg, who Timrultaen trusted but in fact had been the one to inform the grandmother of the birth of Arvitaen, and was sort of her spy, but more a coward than a malicious guy. Timrultaen knew his plan had failed, unless he could find and free Arvitaen, but that was impossible.
Nine years passed, and the campaign now actually began. Somewhere in the complex where Arvitaen was imprisoned there was a security disturbance, and the entire prison managed to break free: a dramatic start of a campaign with Arvitaen and Umarg fleeing the Otherground through the Underground to the surface along with all kinds of mutants, a dragon, giants and more. Along the way, they were pursued for the first time by a bounty hunter named Vlamir Karidian, a powerful demonoid drow who, with his whip and spiked chain, quickly became the relentless pursuer and arch enemy of the escaped Arvitaen.
They bypassed the Seals of Daroes near the entrance of an old dwarven kingdom, and came to the surface, where by accident, they happened upon an archaeological excavation led by drow. They investigated and found buried under the ground an ancient temple of huge proportions: they didn’t know then anything about the ancient history of the Asghiyari, and that this was actually one of the old temples of them dedicated to the gods. Here they found a very shiny stone, a stone of magic, a part of the essence of magic which had been torn from Timrultaen during the great theft of magic by the Asghiyari, and had been left behind when the Asghiyari fled the great flood. Now, the Asghiyari had send the drow to excavate the temple and search this stone, to gather all magic once and for all. There were more such stones scattered across the world. After another confrontation with Vlamir in the underground temple, the players fled with the sunstone and, along with a group of human refugees, arrived at one of the few remaining kingdoms of the world, that of Emir Galyen, the ancient elven forest kingdom.
In Emir Galyen, Arvitaen and Umarg found shelter for ten years, and Arvitaen grew up. Umarg joined the elven armed forces and rose to the rank of captain, while falling in love with a young elven priestess, while Arvitaen was honoured by the queen to become one of her personal guards, and indeed, before long the two had fallen in love. Meanwhile, another player joined the group: a character named Kallian, a druid of the order of Daroes who by chance met the other players and joined them.
Inevitably though, Emir Galyen was doomed while Arvitaen stayed within its walls. Vlamir Karidian found out about where he was, gathered an army of massive size, surrounded the kingdom and advanced on its great two-towered citadel city, Emir Palyd. Here, one of the most memorable scenes were played out, as Arvitaen, Umarg and Kallian led the defence of one part of the city wall against mutated monsters emerging from siege towers, even as a massive thunderstorm gathered above the city. In the end, the city was breached elsewhere and they fled to the last line of defence, the Tower of War, where they attempted to flee along with the remaining population through an underground escape tunnel, which was sapped though by the drow. Then, they were forced ever further up the huge tower, fighting off the advancing invaders. Then, the general of the elven army, an NPC character I was very fond of and who was Umarg’s best friend, sacrificed himself, fell down the tower through a window but halted the advance of the enemy for some time.
Up the stairs they went again, until they reached the small platform on the roof: the queen, the PCs, and a handful of elven warriors, trapped. It was here that a vision that had been introduced earlier in the game by the elven high priest came to be: the dark clouds swept apart and a fierce light suddenly shone in between them, in mid air. From them came two flying people: a woman and a man, and they called out the name: Arvitaen! Of course, Arvitaen only knew himself by the name Szordrin back then, but in the end, when Vlamir Karidian was almost killing them (the demondrow had wings), Arvitaen, Umarg and the queen were picked up by the pair, while Kallian transformed into a big eagle. They then fled into the fierce light, chased by Vlamir, whom in desperate defence Kallian managed to slay, and he fell down into the depths. Then, when they reached the light, suddenly all was quiet.
They were in a cosy room with a warm fire, and a very old, sickly looking man was sitting in a chair: Timrultaen. He had finally found Arvitaen in Emir Galyen when the big siege started, sent his best friends out to collect them through teleportation, and now had finally found his son. This was the scene in which Timrultaen filled in all the information about Szordrin actually being Arvitaen, being his son, the son of a god, the only one able to save the world, and Umarg being his halfbrother. But the teleportation and fly spells had physically exhausted Timrultaen, who was at the very end of his energies, and quickly thereafter succumbed into a long coma. It was a strange meeting.
Haranzephir then also met the PCs and told them where to go next, but at the same time, betrayed them, and was later caught, and convinced to break his ties with the enemy. In essence, now they had to collect a map which the Asghiyari had of the locations of all the remaining stones of magic inside a mountain fortress (in every (artificial) mountain there was obviously a fortress). They did so, and while at the fortress, they encountered the body of Vlamir, who was being prepared for resurrection, so they had to do some nasty things to prevent it. Having obtained the map, they could now start gathering all the stones. Once the stones of magic would be gathered, Arvitaen only had to find the place where the Asghiyari stored their main source of magic, unite with it and the stones, and he would become the almighty god of magic his father once was, and as such he could destroy the evil Asghiyari.
To make a long story short: they gathered many stones, one in a deep jungle with another dark temple full of Yuan-ti and a huge animated stone scorpion statue, its location only known by a strange prophetess up high above the clouds, who told Umarg also of the nature of his old vision of Faerod (who was the friend of Umargs grandfather Szordrin, and had been sent by Szordrin to tell Faerod to keep an eye out on Arvitaen in the dream) and they were the guests of a rather dangerous efreet at his palace full of riches in the desert, who sought to kill them. Then, they took another stone which lay at the bottom of an ocean, etc.
There was one stone though, which was in a box with a riddle, part of the answer of which only Arvina knew, but Arvina had been imprisoned in the Otherground after Arvitaen’s birth. They possessed the box, taken in the Underground, but now were forced once again into the Otherground. There, Kallian encountered the evil druid who had petrified Daroes, the good archdruid who had often helped the players in the past, and in what was essentially a botanical garden full of mutated, flesh-eating, poisonous plants, they defeated the insane man. They moved on, reached Arvina, found out that Faerod himself had been captured in the Otherground too and freed him too. They gained the last part of the answer to the riddle, got the stone, and, possessing them all now, went down the magic elevator to the lowest level of the Otherground, where they captured one of the magical spaceships and left for Vilasmaira, as there, where the Asghiyari capitol was, the map showed them the Ashiyari kept their magic source.
The adventure on Vilasmaira was epic. With the stones in possession, powerful magical artifacts, Arvitaen had become a strong wizard, Kallian by now was the new archdruid having taken by staff of Daroes the evil druid had seized, and Umarg was simply an awesome fighter, the trio was quite unstoppable, but still, of course, the greater part had to be done through subterfuge. The encounter with the Asghiyari queen was the final battle, for she kept the source of magic in her throne room, and while Arvitaen had to spend a lot of turns fully dedicated to uniting with the source of magic, Kallian and Umarg had to protect him against the powerful magics of that terrible, long-named Asghiyari queen.
Once those turns were over though, and Arvitaen was united with the essence of magic, he became the god of magic, and could simply vanquish the queen with a word. Epilogue. They left Vilasmaira, destroyed it and all the Otherground, freed the imprisoned souls, returned to the surface world, travelled back to Timrultaen’s hut, where Arvitaen had to say goodbye to the queen his love, as well as to his father and companions and the world, ascended to the world of gods, where he restored the pantheon’s strengths. Kallian became head of the universal order of druids, restored the unmaintained seals of Daroes, and worked all his life to return the mutated nature of the planet back to normal. Umarg returned to Emir Galyen, became general of the army there, did much to restore order in a still chaotic world, and married the young priestess whom he had once, long ago, gotten to love. The queen: she never married, but a few months after Arvitaen’s departure, her belly grew big and she gave birth to a son, whom she named S'zordrin, who became the first of the elven kings to carry divine blood in his veins.
The end.
